Boris Fishman - Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

“I want you to go upstairs, get your family, and drive out of here,” he said. “We’re in the outer ring now — it’s going to keep getting worse before it gets better. You have an hour to outdrive it. I’m not asking only for you.”

She told him yes, even though she didn’t know whether she was telling the truth. It was so difficult to tell the truth; it didn’t line up neatly with love.

She felt his face with her hand. He closed his eyes against it. When he opened them, he was looking at her through the grid of her fingers. He reached up, closed her hand with his, and returned it to her side. Then he stepped out of her car and stood in the falling snow until she walked out on the passenger side and clicked the alarm, which rang as if it were supposed to say something for them as well. He smiled the forestlike smile, the wrinkles at his eyes marked by neither love nor hostility, rather the baleful amusement she saw there sometimes. But before he walked away, the amusement was replaced by something that did resemble love. He nodded slightly, and in that small motion, Maya felt a greatness of love. She almost cried out for him. Then Marion flicked up the sheepskin collar of his jacket, hiked up his shoulders, and strode away. She watched him go.

From the balcony of Room 31, wearing nothing but a shirt, a pack of cigarettes crumpled on the table next to him, Alex watched also.

+

Room 31 was blacked out, the heavy shades drawn in full. Max was asleep on the rollaway in the alcove; the bedding on the queen was a mess. The room was heady with the papery aroma of hotel coffee, so stale that Maya’s eyes burned with new fatigue at the scent of it. She had not slept properly in three nights. How much longer could she endure? She stood looking at her son for a long minute, so that if he awoke, he would have been frightened, a spectral shape in the room. Carefully, Maya parted the shades and slid open the heavy balcony door. Alex did not turn around. He gazed ahead, his hand shivering as he brought the filter of a smoked-down cigarette to his lips. He dragged on it before she could speak, burned himself, winced, but continued to hold the cigarette as smoke trickled through his teeth.

She called for him, and he turned around. Little red flashes ran through his eyes, and underneath there were gray pouches of puffy, blown-up skin. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out, and he turned around to face the street once again. You could feel the coldness of his skin without touching him. A half-drunk cup of coffee waited next to the cigarettes, and next to it the coffeepot, nearly full.

She went back inside, upset the bed by pulling off the blanket, returned outside, and draped it over his shoulders. He shuddered at her touch. She put her arms on his shoulders.

“You got caught,” he said.

“I wanted to be caught,” she said.

He leaned forward to be free of her touch. “What kind of person are you?”

“Please look at me.”

“You are the last thing I want to look at,” he said.

“We will have to look at each other for two thousand miles. Please look at me.”

“I don’t want to know,” he said.

“Please don’t say that,” she said. “Please stop saying that. I want you to know. I need you to know. I can’t live any longer pretending we don’t know what we know.” She lowered herself next to him and encircled his waist with her arms. “I came back, Alex. But not because you’ve been sitting here killing yourself. Killing me.”

“People don’t change,” he said.

“I need you to fail trying,” she said. “For fifty years or so. Then you can stop. We will do it together.”

“Together,” he said derisively.

“Stop that,” she said. “Stop it. Please.”

“What do you want?” he said to the street.

“I want to go, Alex. I’m ready to go.”

Alex stared at the snowflakes settling on the railing of the balcony. In less than a week they had gone from their living room to the balcony of this motel in a lost Western town, staring at weather they had not seen since their childhoods in Russia. He had been right, too right — disorder awaited just outside the walls of your home, walls eternally in need of shoring up and defense. However, his wife wanted the disorder — that was equally inarguable. What does a person do when his life comes to this kind of dissent, when it takes back the promise it’s made? He didn’t know. Simply, he didn’t know. Alex stood up unsteadily, stared at the coffeepot as if about to bus it, then decided to leave it outside, snowflakes melting with a hiss on the still-warm glass of the pot. When they stepped inside, Max, as apparently fond of beds outside New Jersey as unfond of them there, farted and clutched the pillow more tightly.

+

They were sliding down an artery to the county road when Maya saw the sign: the Last Gasp Rodeo & Pancake Breakfast at the Adelaide Fairgrounds, down an artery off the artery. Maya looked at Alex, who had no objection left in him. “Just for a minute,” she said. She turned to the backseat, from where Max looked up with slit eyes. He had been rushed through a breakfast of cereal and juice from a vending machine. “One last stop before we go,” Maya said. And then she asked Marion’s forgiveness for not leaving when she promised she would.

The detour required backing up — the road was too slick with snow to reverse; Alex would have to turn around in poor visibility without sagging into the irrigation ditch off to the side; the driving lanes were so narrow — so there was a long moment of Alex sitting silently after he had slid to a stop and put on his hazards. But then he lowered the window, stared carefully in both directions, jerked the vehicle forward, back, and forward again, and soon they were negotiating the ruts of the washboard road that led to the back side of the Adelaide Fairgrounds.

She had imagined rodeo as a nighttime activity, with massive generator-powered lights flooding a field — that’s what she had found online — but the Last Gasp was a morning event. A cement mixer was turning batter in a corner of the parking lot for the pancake breakfast.

“Come with me, Maxie?” she said to the backseat.

“But it’s snowing,” Max said.

“Please come with me,” Maya said.

“What’s going to happen?” Max said.

“The cowboys play with the animals,” Maya said. “Do you remember how you played with those deer?” Max looked at her questioningly. “I’m not mad at you about that anymore,” she said. “You don’t know why you liked it — but you liked it. Well, the cowboys like riding horses. And bulls. It’s fun for them.”

The arena smelled powerfully of cow dung and something greasy like motor oil. Cold air gusted off the packed earth. Maya held Max’s hand tightly. A loud, grating bell went off and in past the bleachers she heard pounding hooves, the earth rippling slightly beneath her. The entire place — past the entry booth, a small hangar for the pancake breakfast, and beyond it, a partly covered arena surrounded by gym bleachers — vibrated with an air of unfamiliar ceremony. The ticket window held a potato-nosed ancient rubbing his hands in front of a space heater.

“Rodeo association is running a special for the last event of the season,” he said, showing them a mouth of false, sterling-white teeth. “Beautiful ladies get in for free. And future rodeo stars get in for free. So your total is zero.”

Maya huffed out a helpless smile.

The upper bleachers were empty, but the rows near the dirt were full, cameras bathing the astringent air with flashes of silver. She was reassured by the seeming indifference of the crowd to the storm gathering outside. A moan of bovine protest issued from somewhere in the arena, but it was halfhearted, the animal going through some ritual. The loud bell went off again, and now they could see. The lock slipped from the chute gate and the dirt was crowded by a blur of animals, the bell shrilling again before Maya could understand what had happened. The scoreboard said 3.0 seconds. A man was on the dirt — he wore a cowboy hat, a Western shirt with two frilled pockets at the chest, and sneakers — his arms around the neck of a collapsed steer, its eyes wide in stunned, peaceable terror. The cowboy let go, scrambled up on his feet, smiled shyly, and raised his arms toward the stands. “A tenth-second shy of venue record!” the announcer called out. Feet stomped the bleachers and cameras whirred.