Round One

By six-thirty on Thursday night the Sierra Vista Arena is a living thing.

Eighteen thousand people. Pyro rigs on the catwalks. A sound system that makes your sternum hum. Somewhere above you, a man with a voice like a car commercial is shouting about the greatest show on dirt, and the crowd screams back at him like they mean it.

Down in the pens, it's quieter. It's always quieter where the animals are.

You and Nita go down the line with clipboards. Every bull that bucks tonight gets eyes, hands and a walk. Temperature on anything that looks off. Feet. Eyes. Gut sounds. A signature at the bottom of the sheet that says fit to buck, and that signature is yours or Dabney's, and it means something.

You save forty-one for last.

Roanne has him haltered already. She doesn't look at you when you climb in. She just turns him and walks him, down and back, without being asked.

Short. Still short. The left hind lands like it's stepping on a nail.

You put your hand on the stifle. Warmer than this morning.

"I trotted him at two," you tell Nita, quiet. "Flexed the left hind for sixty seconds. He was lame for the first eight strides after."

"You told Dabney?"

"I wrote it up."

"He read it?"

You don't answer, because Dabney is coming down the alley in his bow tie with a coffee in one hand, and he already has that patient face on. The face he used in lectures when a student said something confident and wrong.

"Well, Ava?" he says.

"I want him scratched tonight. I want an ultrasound in the morning and a lameness workup before he goes anywhere near a chute."

Dabney sets his coffee on a post and climbs into the pen with a grunt. He runs his hand down the leg, the same path yours took. He watches Roanne walk the bull. He's quiet for a long time.

"He's been like this since he was a yearling," he says finally. "OCD lesion in that stifle, I'd bet my pension. It's old, it's stable, and he has bucked on it two hundred times. You'd scratch the best bull in the world on a nine-year-old finding."

"It's warmer than it was this morning."

"It's December, and the barn doors have been open all day." He climbs out. Takes the clipboard from Nita, gently. Signs. "I'll take this one, Ava. My name, my responsibility. Go check Thiago's bull, would you? He drew this one tonight, and he's a nervous rider."

You stand there with your mouth open.

Roanne looks at the signature. Then she looks at you, and there's something in her face like an apology she isn't allowed to make.

Thiago Moura is twenty-five, from a town in Goiás you can't pronounce, and he crosses himself three times before he climbs into the chute. He's number two in the world standings, behind Heath. He's also unreasonably good-looking, all cheekbones and white teeth, and when he sees you watching from the vet bay rail he flashes you a thumbs-up like you're old friends.

"He's sweet," Nita says beside you. "Wrong, but sweet."

"Wrong about what?"

"About thinking that bull likes him."

Black Psalm fills the chute like a black storm cloud. He stands for the rope, patient as a milk cow. Then Thiago nods, the gate swings, and seventeen hundred pounds of animal explodes into the light.

The crowd comes up out of its seats.

Psalm bucks like he's trying to throw his own spine off. Head down, hind end straight up, a spin to the left so fast the dirt sprays in a ring. Thiago is with him, one second, two, three, his free arm high, his body snapping like a flag.

Four. Five.

On the sixth jump, Psalm lands heavy on the left hind, and you see it.

Not the crowd. The crowd sees a bull drop his shoulder. You see the hind end go soft for a fraction of a second, the leg not quite taking the weight, the whole animal shifting to save it. Thiago's balance goes with it. He comes off over the shoulder at 6.1 seconds and hits the dirt rolling, and Ez is there in his painted face, slapping Psalm's nose, drawing him off, and the bull trots away toward the out-gate as if nothing happened.

As if.

You're already moving. Down the alley, around the back, to the out-gate pens where the bulls come off the dirt.

Psalm comes through the gate at a walk. Short on the left hind. Shorter than before. He stops in the catch pen and cocks the leg and stands there with his head low, blowing.

Roanne gets there a second after you. She doesn't say anything. She puts her forehead against the bull's neck, and her shoulders shake once, and then she straightens and leads him away.

"Doc." Wylie Atchley is leaning on the fence behind you, smoking where nobody is allowed to smoke. "You look like somebody shot your dog."

"He's lame."

"He's tired. He just threw the number two rider in the world on his head." Wylie taps ash. "You write that up if it makes you feel better. Purcell signed him. He bucks on nine."

You go back to the vet bay because there's nowhere else to go. You do your job. A bronc with a cut lip. A bull with a twisted horn wrap. A rider's horse in the warm-up arena who's colicky and turns out to be just mad.

Through it all, the crowd roars and moans and roars above you like weather.

Around nine-thirty, the announcer's voice goes up an octave.

"And now, ladies and gentlemen, the man you came to see. Three-time world champion, riding his final finals. Out of chute four on Rattlesnake Sunday: Heeeeath Jessup!"

The building shakes.

You tell yourself you won't look. You look.

There's a monitor bolted above the vet bay door showing the arena feed, and there he is in chute four, settling onto a red brindle bull, wrapping the rope around his gloved hand, tight, tighter. His face is calm. Not the grin. Just calm, the way he used to look when he was nineteen and climbing onto something nobody else would touch.

He nods.

The gate opens and Rattlesnake Sunday goes straight up, and Heath goes up with him like they're one animal.

Eight seconds. You count them without meaning to. Your lips move on every one.

When the whistle blows he bails off clean and lands on his feet and throws his hat into the air, and the score flashes on the big screen, 89.5, and eighteen thousand people lose their minds.

Then he picks his hat out of the dirt, and he turns, and the camera follows him, and he looks straight past the chutes, across the arena, toward the tunnel by the east stands where the vet bay is.

He tips his hat.

To you. On live television.

Nita, beside you, says, "Oh, no."

You leave at midnight. You walk across the parking lot to the hotel in the cold desert dark with your hands jammed in your coat pockets, and you take the elevator to sixteen, and you let yourself into 1608 and sit down on the bed in your boots.

Your notepad is in your lap. L hind short. Stifle warm. Signed by PD over my objection. You underline objection until the pen tears the paper.

Then your phone buzzes on the bedspread.

A number you don't know. Not a Las Vegas area code. Oklahoma. 405.

You look at it for a long time before you open it.

It's me.