My Crescent Moon (A Collection of Short Stories). Joseph Dylan
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he rode the bucking broncos beginning the summer after his sophomore year. It was while he was in high school, that he dreamed about riding bulls, too, but the horse to him was a far nobler creature. In his memory, they would always be his favorite for their casual grace and beguiling beauty. Not only was Billy a good rider, he was an exceptional one. Trophy after trophy won in rodeo competitions attested to his own special prowess with rodeo horses. To further confirm this fact were all the rodeo belt buckles he won at the rodeos he entered, collecting them and lovingly placing them in his dresser drawer back in his room in the house that Billy’s family kept next to the traditional hogan. Because he was so good, the officials on the rodeo grounds saved the most savage, tortuous broncos for Billy to ride. But Billy did not make it through rodeo while he was in high school completely unscathed. While riding an unbroken Appaloosa gelding, dark as midnight with a large white star on his right flank, called Night Train, one evening in Window Rock, Billy – who was left-handed – tore the biceps in that arm while trying, without success, to outlast the beast in all its rippling and ripping contortions. Holding on to the saddle, he felt the rent of tendons and muscle fibers as they tore, shredding from the bone, as Night Train took him through its hellish dance, moving first to the right, then the left, jumping up on his hindquarters only to jerk his head down in attempting to displace Billy from the saddle. Never relinquishing his hold, Billie made it through his ride, all eight seconds of it. Bone doctors at Gallup Indian Medical Center, examined him. Telling him that he had a “three piece fracture” of his left humerus, they said he would never rodeo again. Telling him that unlike the bone, the muscle fibers would never really heal, they informed him that his rodeo days were a thing of the past. All they could do was put his arm in a sling and let the arm heal on its home, while prescribing the appropriate physical therapy. All they gave him for the pain was ibuprofen. To kill the pain, Billy, who was not one to imbibe, took a few shots of his father’s Jim Beam. Billy knew his rodeo season was over, but he didn’t believe that his rodeo career was at an end. The gods had given him a right arm as well. He had just completed his junior year at high school. For him, the unwelcome news that he would never have the same solid strength in his left arm attended him like the death of a close friend. But he would have the last word. Almost from the moment he felt the rent in his muscles and tendons while he was holding onto Night Train, he realized the injury would be permanent.
But he swore that he’d make all the doctors who attended him look like fools, he plowed ahead with his rehabilitation. All fall, winter, and spring, he worked out in the gym of the high school, mainly to gather strength in both arms. Gradually the muscles were gained some strength in his left arm, but it truly never was the same. He would never ride the rodeo with his left hand in the future So much for his ordination into rodeo cowboying. When the sling came off, he had limited range of motion in the left arm, but what plagued him more was its palsied weakness, a disability that improved month by month, but never completely went away. So he forced himself to ride right-handed. Though left-handed, he was ambidextrous in many ways: he wrote with his left hand, but he threw with his right. Not nearly as difficult as he feared it would be, he transitioned to riding with his right hand holding on to the surcingle. By next season, he was riding the rodeo again, this time, his right hand holding onto the beast by his right hand. Fortunately, he did not have to ride Night Train.
When Billy graduated from high school, he migrated to Cody, Wyoming as if on a mission. All those who truly loved to ride, all those who possessed dreams of riding professionally, dreamed of Cody sooner or later. Nowhere else was there a town that catering to a rodeo every night during the summer. Since riding the amateur rodeos, which accorded points for rodeoing, Cody was a Mecca for amateur cowboys dreaming of becoming a professional rodeo cowboy. To Billy, it was like called up to the major league after languishing on the farm team in baseball. Billy knew he must pursue gainful employment, but he didn’t want to just ride broncos on the weekends drifting from town to town, from rodeo ground to rodeo ground. Furthermore, he wanted to compete against the best, at least the best of the amateur cowboys. He needed a job that would afford him the time to work the Cody rodeo weeknights and as well as weekends.
Billy arrived In Cody just after Memorial Day. Within a week he secured work doing construction resurfacing the highway between Meteetsee and Cody. He found the job on a tip from one of the riders at the rodeo. An hour away from Cody, Meteetsee was no more than a hamlet and the highway leading to it, with its holes and bumps, as discomfiting as the sight of the scrofulous complexion of a high school wrestler. There on the highway, pouring asphalt, he would work from eight in the morning, take an hour for lunch, then work until five. That would give him a couple of hours before the rodeo in Cody. Finding an old, corroded Airstream trailer (that was curiously drafty given its name) to rent with another rodeo rider, one that was more hovel than home to them, they shared rides to the rodeo grounds in Cody.
Randy Hope was his roommate’s name. Randy, who, like Billy, just graduated from high school in Billings. In a dim light, as if in a chiaroscuro, their profiles were nearly identical. They were exactly the same height, being short in stature, both exactly five-eight. Bandy-legged, while being bow-legged, they were proportioned like high school tailbacks, with wide, muscled torsos and long, gangly, heavily-muscled arms. The one distinction between the two was that Hope was blonde, while Billie shone darkly in the amber essence of his Navajo blood. Despite the difference of their backgrounds they became friends. Randy never treated Billy like he was in anyway different than any of the other riders, all of whom had white skin, except for one Hispanic from New Mexico. Neither of them spoke much, but when Randy told a story, Billy would interfere with him, finishing the tail, and vice-versa. Like two brothers, they had a way of communicating to each other like a middle-aged couple. The trailer that old Man Morrison (or so the cowboys at the Cody rodeo called him) rented them, was once a rodeo rider. On principle, he preferred “rodeo bums” because they took him back to his glory days in the rodeo ring. The trailer squatted on the eastern outskirts of the city. Old man Morrison rode the rodeo for about a decade. He rode it long enough to be crippled up by it. He walked with a limp in both legs, listing more to starboard. It was the leg he broke the worst. Standing with the stoop a good decade or two older than Morrison could claim, he showed the two of them the date of his date of birth clear on his driver’s license. Morrison was just fifty-seven, but gazing at the man, he appeared to be in his late sixties or early seventies. The trailer sat down the lane from the ranch-style home that Morrison lived in with his wife. Though neither of them rode anymore, they still kept two horses in a pasture next to their house. Retired, he had worked construction while enjoying the rodeo life, until it ended with his marriage to Susan. The woman was skinny, to the point of being bony, looking much younger than Morrison, and with that cheerful but plain face she looked like an old school marm with a stack of papers to grade in the kitchen. She often baked cookies for Randall and Billy, or, without being asked, washed their clothes, which were filthy with macadam and horse deng.
It was during the day that Billy and Randy toiled away doing construction or paving the highway from Meteetsee to Cody that he earned his money to live to support their lifestyles as rodeo cowboys at night. So, almost every night, no matter how exhausted from the construction work, the two put on their rodeoing clothes, replete with old cowboy boots and spurs, and Stetson cowboy hats, and drove over to the fairgrounds to find out which horse they had drawn for the night. Then they sought out to find out any tendencies or peculiarities the animal might have, having time for a quick belt, or a chew, or a cigarette, whatever each rodeo rider had as if performing a sacrament before the true confirmation came. At first, he endured the insults of the other cowboys because he was an Indian; but when they saw he came to ride, when they saw how well he rode, the insults faded away. Billy, with his quiet, but affable ways, his willingness to help his fellow competitors; his lack of arrogance, became one of the more popular riders in Cody. Toiling all day to live out his dreams at night under the stars and moon in the sulfurous miasma of the rodeo ring, scarcely dampened his dreams. But the dreams came with a price. The broncos and bulls beat and battered their bodies as if they were welterweight pugilists, other athletes who grew old before their time. There was no old timers competition for retired rodeo riders. There was only whisky and Vicodin, sparingly doled out by John Desmond, the official rodeo doctor, who attended the competitions to counter the pain they each felt. Whisky, which was even more effective at assuaging the lingering discomforts of the rodeo grounds was their mainstay, and each night they