Buddy had told me about his old man riding for five bucks a show on the Northwestern rodeo circuit during the depression. In 1934 he couldn’t make the mortgage payments for seven months on an eight-hundred-acre spread outside of Billings, and a farm corporation out of Chicago bought it up at twenty dollars an acre. They knocked the two-story wooden home flat with an earth grader, bulldozed it up in a broken pile of boards, burned it and pushed it in a steaming heap into the Yellowstone River. Mr. Riordan pulled his children and wife around in a homemade tin trailer on the back of a Ford pickup through Wyoming, Utah, and California, working lettuce, topping carrots and onions, and picking apples at three cents a crate.
He took a job in Idaho on a horse farm by the Clearwater, breaking and training Appaloosas for a man who provided rough stock on the rodeo circuit. In a year and a half of stinting, eating welfare potatoes and listening to the wind crack off the mountain and blow through the newspaper plugged in the trailer’s sides, he put away four hundred dollars in the People’s Bank of Missoula. It all went down on the ranch in the Bitterroots. He had no idea of how he could make the first mortgage payment. But nevertheless it went down, and he pulled the tin trailer up to the house, stomped down the chicken-wire fence with his boot, let the kids out of the trailer door into a yard full of pigweed and cow flop, and said: “This is it. We’re going to do it right here.”
He stayed two days at the house and then left Mrs. Riordan to clean, scrub, and boil an entire ranch to cleanliness while he followed the circuit through Oregon and Washington and Alberta. He worked as a pickup man and hazer, then rode bulls and broncs for prize money. In Portland he drew a sorrel that had a reputation as an easy rocker, but when the sorrel came out of the chute, he slammed sideways into the gate and then started sunfishing. Mr. Riordan stayed on for six seconds, and then he was twisted sideways on the horse’s back with his left hand wound in the leather. The pickup men couldn’t get the bucking strap off. The leather pinched Mr. Riordan’s hand into a shriveled monkey’s paw, and the bones snapped apart like twigs.
His rodeo career ended six months later at Calgary. He had won forty dollars that afternoon in the calf roping and had enough money for his trip back to Montana and the entry fee in another event. So that night under the lights he entered the bulldogging competition and drew a mucus-eyed, blood-flecked black bull with alabaster horns that had already taken out two riders and ground a clown into a board fence. The rope dropped, and Mr. Riordan bent low over the quarter horse and raced even with the bull toward the far end of the arena, the judge’s clock ticking inside of him with his own heartbeat and the blood rushing in his head as he leaned out of the saddle, waiting for that right second to come down on the horns with both hands, the weight perfectly balanced, the thighs already flexed like iron for the sudden brake against the earth and the violent twist of the bull’s neck against his chest. But he misjudged his distance and pushed the quarter horse too hard. When he left the saddle, one arm went out over the bull’s face, the other hand grabbed a horn as though he wanted to do a gymnastic pushup, and his body folded into the horns just as the bull sat on all four legs and brought his head up. He was impaled through the lung in a way that could be equaled only by a medieval executioner. The blood roared from his nose and mouth while he was twisted and whipped like a rag doll on the boss of the horns and the pickup men and clowns tried to pull him free. The bull dipped once, knocking him into the sawdust and horseshit, then trampled over him in a shower of torn sod.
Buddy said he should have been dead three times during his first week in the hospital, and the surgeon who cut out part of his lung told Mrs. Riordan that even if he lived, he would probably be an invalid the rest of his life. But four months later he got off the train in Missoula (thirty pounds lighter and as pale as milk, Mrs. Riordan said) with a walking cane, a tan western suit on, a gold watch in his vest, and an eight-hundred-dollar cashier’s check from the Rodeo Cowboys’ Association. While he was on the circuit through all those dusty shitkicker depression towns, he had put his money together with a rider named Casey Tibbs, who at that time saw the profit to be made in buying rough stock and trained horses for Hollywood films.
I had the heater on in the truck as we bounced along the corrugated road toward the main house, where I planned to let Mr. Riordan off, but the cold seemed to gather and swell in all the plastic and metal of the cab, and even the windshield looked blue against the cold sky. The grass along the irrigation ditch was dry and stiff in the wind, or a momentary sear brown when a gust out of the canyon blew it flat against the ground. Flurries of snow were starting to whirl out of the gray sun and click in broken crystals against the glass. It was a good day for pine logs burning and snapping and bursting into resinous flames in a stone hearth, with mulled buttered rum in flagons and tin plates full of venison stew and French bread.
“It’s early this year,” Mr. Riordan said.
“Sir?” I said, because I had thought he was still asleep.
“It’s early for snow.” His eyes were squinted at the canyon behind his house. “The deer will be down early this year. As soon as a snow pack forms on that first rise, they’ll move down to feed along the drainage just the other side of my fence. The grouse move down about the same time.” He straightened himself in the seat and opened the window slightly to let the wind blow into his face. “Where are you going?”
“To your house.”
“Let yourself off at the cabin and I’ll take the truck home.”
“I can walk across the field.”
“Son, just do what I tell you. Besides, Buddy is probably wondering where we’ve been.” His breath was heavy with whiskey.
I backed the truck around in the center of the road and drove back to the Y fork that divided off toward Buddy’s cabin. I could see Buddy on the front porch in a red wool shirt and a pair of corduroys with a white coffee cup in his hand.
“I don’t guess there’s a need to take up our conversation with him, is there?” Mr. Riordan said.
I didn’t want to answer him or even acknowledge his presumption. But he was still drunk, his gray eyes staring as flatly at me as though he were looking down a rifle barrel.
“No, sir, I don’t guess there is,” I said.
I got out of the truck, and he slipped behind the wheel, clanked the transmission into first with the clutch partially depressed, the gears shearing into one another like broken Coke bottles, then popped the pedal loose and bounced forward across the field toward his house. I heard him shift into second, and the transmission whined as though there were a file caught in it.
Buddy walked toward me off the porch with his cup of coffee in his hand. His face was pinched in the wind.
“What happened to the old man?” he said.
“He got the sun in his eyes.”
“I don’t believe it. The old man really drunk? He don’t get drunk.”
“He had some bad stuff working in him back there in the restaurant.”
“What?”
“He wants to believe in his friends.”
“What are you talking about, man?”
“All those shit-hog people who call themselves neighbors.”
“You smell like you put your head in the jug, too.”
“Tell me how you live around these bastards. They treat your old man like sheep dip.”
“What set you off?”
We closed the cabin door behind us, and I felt the sudden warmth of the room in my face and hands.
“I really don’t understand it,” I said. “Your father’s a decent man, and he puts up with a gyppo logger giggling on a cigar like a gargoyle, and these guys in the restaurant acted like somebody held up a bed pan to their nostrils when we walked in.”