God of the Rodeo (29 page)

Not that there was anything special about the neck, or the hairline or blue T-shirt that framed those two inches of skin. It was, simply, Chris’s. After months and months of waiting, the runner-up buckle had worked—or hadn’t made a bit of difference. But Buckkey’s only child was here.

The father saw nothing else. Not his wife, who sat on a picnic bench facing him as he walked up the slight hill. Not the other trusties with their families at the dozen little pavilions with their tables and green roofs set on concrete slabs. He saw nothing else and said nothing at all, didn’t call his son’s name and wished, in fact, that the seventeen-year-old boy would never turn around, that he, Buckkey, could, that he could return immediately to his job while his son returned home, that there would be no chance of things getting worse than they already were.

Their relationship scarcely existed. Over sixteen years Buckkey had stayed bound with his wife, his mother, the rest of his family. His youngest sister had used the wedding invitation he had designed.
But with his son he merely hoped for change, afraid, when they spoke on the phone, to say much more than “I love you,” afraid even to say that, afraid that if he asked Chris about school or gave anything that sounded like advice the boy would go mute and hand the phone back to his mother. She had practically forced Chris to talk in the first place. The boy’s life was lurching out of control, Buckkey felt, and he worried Chris would wind up living the way he himself had between the end of high school and Angolano direction except wildness. “And if I hadn’t come to Angola,” he told me, “I’d be dead.” Lately Chris had bought a used truck, been pulled over going 90 in a 50 zone. His mother had pleaded with Buckkey to say something, pleaded that she was losing control, already had none, that Chris needed his father’s discipline in any way Buckkey could give it. Buckkey couldn’t bring himself to intervene. He felt he couldn’t fix anything, couldn’t risk everything.

On the tabletop, with his feet on the bench, Chris sat hunched over and didn’t turn fully until his father stood at his shoulder. The blond hair was Buckkey’s, but the face was closer to his mother’s—the openness across his forehead, the softness of his jaw. Buckkey noted the difference from himself: It brought the same surprise and relief every time.

“Hey, Chris.”

“Hey, Dad,” the boy mumbled. He stood.

“Damn!” Buckkey said.

“What?”

“I can’t even reach up that far to hug you anymore.” It was a way of requesting permission. Chris granted it in silence. So the father wrapped his arms around the boy’s shoulders, slapped once, and let go.

“I see you’re getting a lot of use out of that buckle I sent you,” Buckkey tried to joke, for Chris was not wearing it.

“I’m not a cowboy.”

“I’m not much of one, either. Your mother saw me out there. She can testify to that.” He smiled at his wife.

“She can tell you to quit that rodeo before you get killed,” Emily said. She looked, already, drained by Buckkey’s efforts to talk with their son, futility sapping color from her own blue irises—deeper blue, Buckkey usually thought, than anyone’s he knew.

“You want to play some basketball?” Chris asked.

“All right.”

Buckkey did not want to: it was what they always did. They stepped down toward the road, toward the court. A little girl in overalls and a gold LSU cap flew past them, up past their picnic table, arms pumping and legs churning as the incline got steeper near the trees at the crest of the hill. Her father chased and caught her, lifted her into the air.

“You can’t go up there, Denise,” the father said.

“Yes, I can. I can because I want to.”

“Come on and play down here with me.” He tickled her.

“But why can’t I?”

“There’s adult things on that hill.”

Buckkey couldn’t look at his son. If he were Chris, he wouldn’t come more than twice a year, either.

The court was a patch of dirt with a steel backboard. Two jagged, sun-baked clefts, channeled by rainwater, ran outward at angles from the pole. Buckkey and Chris’s one-on-one game was constricted by those gullies—trying to dribble over them usually meant losing the ball. Chris backed his way straight to the basket. In past years it had been his father who did this, Buckkey letting go of all restraint, all hesitance during their games, his wish for Chris’s love turning inside out. He’d muscled the boy for rebounds, shouldered him aside for lay-ups. When Chris, trying to free himself for a jump shot, had dribbled off a rift and out of bounds, there had been no second chances.
If the boy managed to keep the score close Buckkey started blocking shots, stealing the ball, forcing him toward the clefts, to remind him who was stronger, in control, a father, to remind him he had no chance of winning.

Taller now, heavier, Chris leaned in. Buckkey set his legs, but the boy bent his father backward. Two-one, seven-four, eleven-seven, fourteen-eight, Chris pushed his lead wider, pried the game open as though with a wedge. Both players sweating through their shirts, they spoke only to mutter the score.

“Lasseigne!” The guard’s yell saved them.

The food truck was here. On the road leading to Angola, Chris and his mother had stopped to order groceries at the store behind the gas station. There was a system, determined by the prison, for the park visitors. They turned in their lists at the register, were allowed to touch nothing themselves.

“I’ll do the barbecue,” Chris said.

Buckkey, picking up the sack of charcoal, glanced at him sidelong—the offer was a first.
You will? he
almost teased, but caught himself. “All right. That would be good.”

Emily, loose blue turtleneck doing what it could to help her depleted eyes, short hair working to lighten her face, started on dessert. It had to be constructed at the park, from prepackaged and sealed ingredients, so no one could slip contraband into the filling of a pie. Emily sliced horizontally, twice, across a pound cake, then spread vanilla pudding and cream cheese on each layer. She fit the cake back together, dabbing the excess from the sides, scalloping white icing on top with the back of a spoon.

She had been eighteen when she married Buckkey. She had seen him for the first time water-skiing on the canal that ran behind his town, the town next to hers. He could ski on his hands, on his knees, on his butt with his legs in the air. Back on his feet he spun and swooped so his elbow almost scraped the water, and then he tipped
the other way, rooster tail of spray as perfect as something painted before he righted himself and spun and spun and spun.

She couldn’t ski at all, and months later, when he showed up at her job to ask for a date, she remembered him. She told him to call her at home that Friday night at six, that they would leave at seven. He forgot to call. “Oh, I’m ready anyway,” she said when he appeared at the door, and he told her, “You know, you’re just like a little paper doll—you just throw something on and you’re ready to go.” That had become her name between them, Paper Doll. It still was. Never Emily. Only Paper Doll.

It was the late seventies; he took her to a disco. “He was a good-looking guy and he could dance,” she recalled, her voice as resigned as his wrinkles. On the floor he held both her hands, crossed them and turned her and pulled her toward him. Then he lifted her arm, guiding her away, guiding so she began to spin. She just kept going.

And found herself two years later with a drug-abusing husband and an infant boy and soon a barrage of headlines:
SHERIFF’S
OFFICE INVESTIGATING
MAN’S
DEATH…
MURDER
TRIAL
SLATED…
DEFENDANT
TESTIFIES
COMPANION
KILLED
STATION
ATTENDANT…
HENDERSON
MAN
GETS
LIFE
IN
PRISON
.

But they had been back together since his first year at Angola. When she and I had spoken about the crime, she was quiet about the innocence he still maintained, saying only, “I couldn’t just leave him alone there” and “The Buckkey you know now is the real one.” She recalled his crying over a dog they’d had to give up because the owner of the first house they rented wouldn’t allow pets. His mother, a red-haired woman sitting with us that afternoon at the gas station restaurant they’d chosen, told me, “He didn’t commit that murder. It’s still like a dream. I’ll never believe it.”

Paper Doll let that go. “I’ll always love him,” she said.

“What kind of job you think I should get when I graduate?” Chris asked abruptly, forking the chicken on the barbecue pit. He prodded and flipped the pieces far too often.

“I don’t know.” Buckkey kept himself quiet, made himself wait. “I know your mother told you that I
suggested
you join an Armed Force.”

“Yeah. But I can’t leave Mom, can I?”

Buckkey absorbed the blow. The breeze had shifted; smoke billowed into his face. He didn’t move, just let the cloud sting his eyes. “Well, what do
you
think?” he asked.

“I might want to-”

“You know,” Buckkey cut in, edging away from the smoke, “if you did join you get to travel. You get to go all over the world. They put you through school and—”

“Be all you can be.”

“Well, sometimes the ads say it best.”

“I got enough school.”

A year after his own graduation, Buckkey had signed up for the Air Force. He’d told me with his typical mix of self-deprecation and pride that he’d passed the test to get in, then another after boot camp to qualify for air traffic control training. He’d left with a dishonorable discharge when marijuana was found in his locker.

“I might want to learn to weld, though,” Chris said. “I might want to go to trade school for that.”

“Really?” It was not good news.

“I might want to.”

“Give me that for a second.” Buckkey took the fork, took over with the chicken. It gave him something to keep himself in check. Because all he knew about welding he’d learned in Angola, and the thought of his son in a welder’s mask made him feel Chris’s life would be crushed. “There’s a lot more money you could make with an education.”

“I told you I’m not-”

“And a lot easier and a lot cleaner jobs.”

“I’m not—”

“It’s just nothing. That’s all welding is. Nothing. Over and over,
back and forth with that little torch. Over and over and over, nothing, your whole life. Can you handle that?”

“I want to build things.”

It made Buckkey stop. He heard his son describe watching some work done at his uncle’s body and fender shop. It made Buckkey remember the feeling of joining surfaces together, of gliding the flame, of keeping his hand steady, knowing just which hydrogen rod to use for just which thickness of metal, leaving a uniform bead and a connection that could take any pressure. It made him think of the feeders he had invented.

“Well, I guess you know already it’s not the best-paying job in the world,” he said, as they sat down to eat.

“I just feel like it could be a good trade.”

“It could be. You’re right, Chris. It could be. As long as it’s what you want.”

“It might be.”

“ ’Cause you don’t want to burn your life on something you don’t want.”

“I know.”

“ ’Cause your life would be burnt.”

“That’s why I might want to weld.”

“Well, that’s the right reason.” Buckkey went on battling his own uneasiness, his own hope that Chris would enter the military, earn a degree, and leave the Navy or Army or Air Force in a way entirely different from Buckkey’s exit. “You do something ’cause you enjoy it.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

“All right.”

“That’s just what I’ve been thinking,” Chris said.

It was, Buckkey knew as the pudding and cream cheese pie disappeared, and as the guard walked by to give Paper Doll and all the other visitors their passes to turn in at the gate, the best talk he could remember having with his son. They scraped the chicken bones into
one of the blue barrels, fifty-gallon plastic drums that had held the prison’s cleaning fluid. As they turned back toward the table Buckkey reached up and clung on. It didn’t matter that Chris was taller. It didn’t matter that he was heavier and stronger. Like a basketball center with arms that long, Buckkey wrapped him in, loosened his hold only slightly to kiss the boy on the side of his neck, then clutched again. Chris couldn’t have gotten free had he tried. “Please,” Buckkey groaned into the boy’s neck. “Please. Please. Please. Please. Please.”

“All right, Dad. It’s all right.” The boy’s voice was half comforting, half crazed by his father’s vise. Buckkey released him. Chris looked around for the basketball, found it on the grass, started shooting. Mr. Jimmy drove up before the bus arrived that would take the visitors to the gate.