My Crescent Moon (A Collection of Short Stories). Joseph Dylan

      For the riders, the arena served as a place to learn and then display their skills with the bulls, and the bucking broncos in the saddle bronc competition. That first year in Cody Billie learned to ride in Cody, the boy developing his technique for staying on his mount. His technique wasn’t unique: Spurting out of the gate, he’d rock back spurring the creature above it’s shoulders as it reared up, keeping the spurs dug in its hide, rocking one arm in the air as he hung on with his other; in the The trick to it, he found, was keeping one’s center of gravity within that circumscribed by the animal’s, This as they danced and whipped through their routine on the creature. All in a sinuous movement – all but choreographed – the rider matched the beast move for move for the interminable eight seconds they’d spend risking their life. It reminded Billy what the seismograph must have looked like during the San Francisco earthquake. Each ride taught him something new about cowboying that first year. At the same time, he hoped that his mount would jump and bound and leap from side to side in the most exacting way it could, as much a show of nature as a thunderstorm, rather than just bucking like an old and jaded mount that plugged a straight course, hopping rather than bursting through the air. And most of their mounts did; most of their mounts threw them off before the requisite eight seconds. Some nights, Randy would beat Billy in points; on other nights, Billy would surpass Randy. Both good riders, they were evenly matched.

      Importantly that first year, he perfected his dismount whether being wrestled from his mount by the second rider, or him how to fall when ignominiously thrown from his mount. Learning to fall from the creature he rode he reluctantly relinquished his hand from the surcingle, while preparing himself to be jettisoned from his mount. The rodeo clowns distracted the inflamed beast he romped and kicked – surely injuring them if they connected – showed him how to quickly get out of their way as they stomped past, their anger surpassed only by the excitement of the crowd. With each ride an education, it was a battle of strength and a matter of endurance. In short, that first year in Cody showed them both how to be a complete rodeo riders.

      Along the railings of the rodeo ring, thirty and forty year old former rodeo riders, crippled by their same dreams, watched on. Each time Billy had a good ride, they would cheer him. Looking like the accident victims of a car crash, they appeared as if they were in line to see their attorney. Billy always paused when he saw them gazing at him.

      Most nights when they went to Maggie’s, the should have just gone home for a well deserved rest. Most nights, though, they mustered enough testosterone to leave with two rodeo groupies. It was in August of that year, that Randy picked up a skinny one with coltish legs who had a mouth on her. “You know what you call a homeless person in Cody?” Randy asked her. “A cowboy without a girlfriend.” She laughed. Seeing he had a receptive audience, Randy proceeded on. “You know what constitutes foreplay for a cowboy?” he asked her. No, she told him. “Get in the pickup, bitch.” She laughed even harder. Randy didn’t return to the trailer that night.

      At least five times a week, they went rodeoing. Many a time after a bad night and he’d been thrown, Billy woke feeling as though he’d been in some vehicular catastrophe where he’d been thrown from the automobile. When one of the cowboys did take a bad fall, there was Doctor John, himself an old rodeo rider who now worked in the emergency room, would attend the broke down rider, lying on the flood lit rodeo arena. If it was something that Dr. John Desmond couldn’t handle, he’d send the rider off to the emergency room at West Park Hospital. Taking a bad tumble from a bull, being kicked by a tempestuous bronco, sent Desmond racing over to where the cowboy staggered towards the riders’s section of the stadium to check him out. Only once that year was Desmond put to the test and that was when a journeyman rider was thrown from a bull. Stomped once by the bull, he fractured three ribs and collapsed a lung.

      Later, as Randy watched the ambulance haul the rider, Chris Morton, away, he said to Billy, “I hate to see anybody hurt, but if it had to be someone, I’m glad it was that arrogant prick. He never sat well with me.” Billy just nodded. As amateur rodeo rider, none of the contestants had medical insurance. If they got their professional cards, they’d be allotted medical insurance which they duly needed. Morton, the injured rider, spent one night in the ICU and a week in the hospital, with a chest tube inserted into the right flank to reinflate the lung, possessing a hospital and doctors’s to pay with insufficient funds. The hospital had not the sentimentality to forgive the bill writ large in medical fees for the very rodeo riders that provided entertainment for many tourists coming through town to watch. Billy wondered how he would pay for such a misadventure if it occurred to him. Not long before the end of that first season, Billy wandered just how long he would last on the rodeo circuit. That was all he truly wanted to do in life, but he knew the odds were stacked against him. Now with all his accumulated injuries, he felt like a professional football player trying to convince his body that one more down was just one more collision. One more collision that might not be that bad.

      One night, just before Labor Day and the last competition at the rodeo grounds, he asked Randy, “What would you do if you couldn’t rodeo anymore. I mean like not no more.”

      “Besides fucking women?”

      “Besides fucking women.”

      I guess I’d keep doing construction. College is not in the works for me. What else you gonna do. What about you?”

      Billy spit on the ground. Randy spat on the ground in turn. For Randy, though, the expectoration was chew, a habit he had picked up from some of the other riders. Billy refused to even try a chew – It was not the Navajo way. They were standing outside their trailer, frying hamburgers. “I have no idea. Probably the same. Probably construction. All I want is to keep on riding.”

      “Me, too.” They touched Budweiser cans.

      But what Billy truly wished for was to succeed on the professional rodeo circuit. And he needed the points for that. Beginning his senior year at the high school in Gallup, his father died of stomach cancer. None of the poisons to kill the cancer at the medical center in Alburquerque worked for him, they just seemed to make the cancer fester, eating away that much faster. Before he expired this he told his son: “Follow your stars; be happy; never leave The Blessing Way.” It was, though, a matter of time before his father relented and wished his son luck on the rodeo circuit. With his father’s blessing that he became a rodeo cowboy, and moved to Cody. He told the story for the first time to Randy.

      “Man, that sounds tough. What do you think he’d say if he could see you now?”

      “Got no idea,” said Randy. With that he put one grilled hamburger patty on Randy’s bun, and then put one on his own.

      “Ever think you’ll get married?” inquired Billie.

      “Not so long as I can pick up a stray in Maggie’s.”

      “Same here. My parents didn’t have a good marriage, and it would take someone looking like Bridget Bardot to get me to tie the knot.”

      “See, you’re not saying it will never happen?” said Randy.

      “I ain’t saying it’s impossible. I’m just saying it’s about as likely as being hit by a bolt of lightning,”

      When the rodeo season ended, they stayed on doing construction on the Meteetsee highway. When they closed down for the winter, the two of them picked up jobs constructing houses in Red Lodge, an old mining town in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana that was trying to remake itself into a ski resort.

      Finally, having bulked up during the winter lifting heavy tools and building supplies in freezing weather, they were fit when the second season began on Memorial Day. Nothing had changed, except for some new faces of cowboys, who like they were, had come to Cody to rodeo enough to join the professional riders. But the livestock had hardly changed. The unbroken broncos and bulls stamping on the dirt and manure, their muzzles foaming, looking blankly at the riders and the crowd in the stands, who looked back at them with the same blank expression. This as all the cowboys looked on with expectant faces, hoping that their expressions