He sat in a corner booth at Yee-haw’s, watching another idiot give himself whiplash on the mechanical bull. The idiot’s cowboy hat fell off as he flew from the bull amidst cheers and groans. That crowd would cheer, the man in the corner booth thought, pulling the brim of his own hat down over his grey eyes. Yuppie city folk wearing dollar-store plastic cowboy hats and belt-buckles half-hidden by their sagging beer guts, playing rodeo and boasting to anyone who would listen about the bruises they’d gotten falling off the mechanical bull. Pathetic. Somehow even more pathetic than the kids from his high school who’d gone the other way: The sons of farmers and farriers, wearing their baseball caps sideways and their pants halfway down their buttocks, listening to rap and – worse yet – rapping. He’d despised them for it. But here he was, thirty-six years old and citified. Working at an auto shop and spending his Friday nights in a country-themed bar. In the end, he’d become one of them.
His waitress appeared with a fresh bottle of Pabst. She was a Friday-night regular, like him, but on the other side of the bill, a pretty latte-colored girl with kinky black curls. She jerked her head towards the mechanical bull, and the idiots.
“Ain’t none of ‘em stayed on the full fifteen seconds yet?” she asked.
Instead of answering, he asked his own question.
“Why do you talk that way?”
She winked and dropped the drawl she’d been perfecting in the three months he’d lived in New York.
“Acting, Jackie-boy,” she said. “If you want to be a great actor, you gotta be able to change characters like a woman changes faces. This is a country bar. It’s the perfect place to practice a country character.”
He found he liked her natural voice better. A voice nothing like the “country” voice she practiced each Friday or the voice of a native New Yorker. A nice Midwestern sort of voice. He nodded at the mechanical bull.
“I can do it,” he said.
“Never seen you try,” she retorted.
He stood up, tipped his hat at her, said, “Ma’am,” and strode over to the ring of idiots around the mechanical bull. They whooped drunkenly as he neared – regulars all, who knew he’d never done the bull before. They made way before him, all except the paunchy man who’d been about to get on; he muttered angrily about it being his fucking turn, but the others pushed him out of the way.
“Howdy,” Jack said. The others repeated it, laughing. It sounded much less affected coming from his mouth than from their. Even though he’d never said it before and planned never to say it again. It was the difference between his cowboy hat of felt and theirs of plastic.
He swung a leg over the bull and waited for it to start. It felt hard and lifeless between his legs. Nothing like a live bull, quivering the gate, heaving and sweating when it launched explosively into the arena. He gripped the machine tighter.
Suddenly it lurched. He clung to it with one hand and his legs, half-expecting to be thrown off, but after the initial buck it settled into a rocking motion far tamer than any real bull. Too easy. Almost predictable, the way it moved, like a merry-go-round, not like the last bull he’d ridden in rodeo. That monster had busted out of the gate, throwing up dust and gravel, jolted him and thrown him off in less than two seconds, and broken his nose. And almost broke his back.
But none of these city slickers had ever been bull riding. As far as they knew, this was the real deal. When the machine stopped and he dismounted, unscathed, they let up a cheer like he’d won the Kentucky Derby without the horse’s help. Stupid, he thought, he’d hardly even done any work, but he couldn’t help smiling sheepishly at his waitress as the crowd bombarded him with backslapping and offers of free beers. He slunk out of its midst and sat back in his booth.
“I’ll be,” the waitress said.
He grinned, a little less sheepishly.
“How’d you do it?” she asked.
“Less alcohol,” he said. “It’s easy to fall off a bull when you’re blind drunk.”
“No, really,” she said.
He took a draught of the Pabst.
“I was in rodeo for near ten years.”
“Get out! You mean it?”
“Yeah.”
“I never knew that,” she said.
He shrugged.
“I don’t go round bragging about it.”
She grinned suddenly. She had an awful nice grin, he thought. Warm and friendly. Genuine.
“You from out west?” she asked, donning her western twang again.
He shook his head and said, “I will not answer questions asked in that voice.”
“Well, okay.” She dropped the accent. “Are you, though?”
“Does it sound like I am? There’s farmland in Michigan and Ohio. I don’t have to be from out west.”
“Michigan boy, huh,” she said, smiling. “That’s where I’m from."
“How’d you guess Michigan?”
“It’s just how you talk.” She lifted her tray from his table. “Are you gonna want another drink?”
“No, thanks. Just the bill.”
“’Kay. That’s gonna be fifteen fifty-three tonight then.”
A math whiz on top of everything, he thought. He sipped his Pabst as he watched her walk away. He wondered where in Michigan she was from. Not the farmland. That was him.
But more importantly, I like how he strongly identifies himself with ...well, being from the farmland.
Gender:
Points: 91980
Reviews: 1735