Bare Canvas, Broken Rodeo

*This one started with the idea of obligation turning into something unspoken. The rodeo setting felt right for the dry, dusty atmosphere I wanted, no romance, just two people who happen to fit for one night. Thanks for reading, and for letting the awkward poses stay on the page.*

I woke up on the couch my cousin left me when he moved to Phoenix, with a mouth like a saddle and a text message that said, in all caps, YOU OWE ME.

That was Rod, obviously. Rod never texts in lowercase. He also never texts at a reasonable hour, which is how I ended up squinting at my phone at 8:15 on a Saturday morning, six months after moving to this town, still half drunk from the poker night his old buddies dragged me to the night before.

The text said: RODEO GROUNDS. BOOTH 44. ASK FOR JANELLE. WEAR SOMETHING YOU CAN MOVE IN. DON'T ASK QUESTIONS.

So naturally I asked questions. I called him twice. No answer either time, because Rod is the kind of guy who sends a text like that and then goes dark like he's entering witness protection.

I brushed my teeth, put on a clean shirt, and drove out to the fairgrounds with the windows down because my head was killing me and the truck smelled like somebody's spilled beer, which it was, because it was mine.

Here's what you need to know about me. My name is Finn Owens, I'm 28, I work at a distribution warehouse on the east side of town, and I moved here six months ago specifically to have a quiet life. My last relationship ended two years of dating with a mutual, boring, adult breakup, and I decided after that that complications were for other people. Warehouse job, small apartment, cheap gym membership. That was the plan.

The plan did not include the rodeo.

The Mid-State Rodeo & Livestock Exposition runs every year over a long weekend at the county fairgrounds, and let me tell you, on a Saturday morning that place is alive in a way that a man with a hangover does not appreciate. Announcer testing the speakers. Somebody's rooster going off. Trailer engines, kids yelling, the whole circus warming up. I parked in a dirt lot that cost five bucks and walked in past the ticket booth, where a woman in a cowboy hat looked me up and down and said I looked like I lost a fight.

"Thanks," I said. "I lost it to a keg."

The midway was already half set up, string lights sagging between poles over rows of game stalls and food trailers, everything waiting for the sun to go down and the crowd to show up. Booth 44 was in the vendor row near the livestock barns, which meant I got to walk the whole length of it, past a guy selling belts and a lady selling jams, before I found it.

And when I found it, I stopped, because it did not look like the other booths.

The neighbors had folding tables and card signs. This one had actual walls, framed prints hanging on white panels, a little gallery sitting right there in the dust. Western stuff, but not the cliché kind. A print of a bull rider done in big flat blocks of color, the bull orange, the rider teal. A rodeo queen rendered in what looked like cut paper. A horse made entirely out of text, little words I couldn't read from a distance forming the shape of it. It was good. Like, genuinely good, and I say that as a guy whose art knowledge ends at "I know what I like."

Behind the table stood a woman with black hair pulled back in a knot, Japanese American, I'd learn, third generation in this county, which made her more local than half the cowboys, a pencil behind her ear, and a clipboard already raised like she'd been waiting all morning to aim it at me.

"You're late," she said.

"I was told not to ask questions," I said. "Nobody told me when to be here."

"That's a you problem. Finn, right? Rod's cousin."

"That's me."

"Janelle Takahashi. I'm 27, I've lived here basically my whole life, and I have been waiting on this favor for three years, so let's not waste any more of it." She came around the table and stuck out her hand, and her grip was firmer than mine. "You want coffee? I have a thermos and it's not terrible."

"I want coffee so badly it's embarrassing," I said.

She poured me a cup into a paper one, and I leaned against her table and took a long pull while she watched me like a person sizing up lumber.

"So," I said. "Rod says I owe you a favor. Which is news to me, because Rod and I barely talk, and I've lived here six months, and you and I have never met. So I'm kinda confused about the math."

"The math is simple. Three years ago your cousin borrowed a lens from me. A really nice one, a 70 to 200 that I saved up for. He took it to some event, dropped it, cracked the front element, and then paid me back in excuses instead of money. He promised me a favor, a real one, whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it." She sipped her own coffee. "Then last month he told me he was moving to Phoenix, and he said, and I quote, my cousin Finn can cover it, he's good for it."

"He said that without asking me?"

"He said that without asking you," she confirmed, and she had the decency to look a little amused about it. "I texted him, he gave me your number, and here we are. Welcome to debt."

I stared at her. "Okay. Fine. What do you need? I've got a truck. I can haul stuff. I can run your register all weekend. I can build you walls. Whatever the booth needs."

"It doesn't need any of that."

"What does it need?"

Janelle set her cup down, pulled the pencil from behind her ear, and tapped it against the clipboard like she was about to pitch something to investors.

"Here's the situation. I do a series every year for the rodeo. I sell prints, it pays my rent for a few months, and every year I try something new. This year I'm doing a series on the rodeo rider himself. The body of it. What the sport does to a person. And I need a model."

"Okay," I said slowly. "There are actual cowboys forty feet from here. Real ones. With hats that look earned."

"Cowboys won't sit still, and the ones who will charge money I don't have. And you're built like the drawing in my head, which I'll admit I did before I knew you existed, which is a fun coincidence and not creepy, I checked." She flipped the clipboard around and showed me a page of quick sketches. Bare torsos, arms up, arms out, one figure with a rope coiled in one hand. They were loose, but even loose, they were clearly somebody with shoulders like mine. "I need you to sit for me. Shirtless, holding a lasso. A few hours today, maybe a couple tomorrow. That's the favor."

I laughed. I want that on record, I laughed, because the alternative was standing there in silence.

"You want me to take my shirt off in your booth."

"In the barn," she said. "I rented a stall in the livestock barn for the weekend. Lighting's good in there, hay bales for a set, and it's private enough. I'm not running a peep show on the midway."

"Holding a lasso."

"Holding a lasso. I'll teach you to coil it so it doesn't look like you're holding a dead snake. It's not hard, you'll pick it up in ten minutes."

"Janelle, I work in a warehouse. I'm the least artistic person you've ever met. I have a hangover. And I moved to this town to be left alone."

"And you're here because your cousin sold you like a bond," she said, not unkindly. "Look, I get it. It's weird. It's a weird ask. But I've been planning this series for a year, I've got a wall reserved at the expo hall, and the favor is the favor. Rod promised it, he passed it to you, and if you want out, you can call him and negotiate. He's in Phoenix. It's 7 a.m. there, so good luck."

I drank my coffee. Somewhere behind us a bull bellowed in its trailer, real theatrical, like it had views on the matter.

"Can I think about it for an hour?"

"You can think about it while you help me carry panels into the barn," she said. "Movement helps thinking. It's science."

"Whose science?"

"Mine. I'm a professional." She was already handing me a stack of framed prints, and I noticed she'd also slipped the sketch page off the clipboard and tucked it into her back pocket, like the deal was already closed and she was just being polite about it.

* * *

So that's how I ended up carrying a small art gallery through a livestock barn at nine in the morning, hungover, following a woman I'd known for twenty minutes, trying to figure out at exactly what point in my life I'd lost control of the plot.

Somewhere around stall six it occurred to me I hadn't actually said yes yet.

By stall nine I'd talked myself into it, mostly because the alternative was calling Rod and listening to him laugh in that way he does before he says something worse. So I set the last stack of frames down on a hay bale and said, "Fine. I'll do it. Shirtless, lasso, a few hours. That's the whole deal, right?"

"That's it," Janelle said, and she stuck out her hand like we'd just closed on a car. Her grip was stronger than I expected. "Good. Now help me with the backdrop."

The stall she'd rented was bigger than I figured, maybe twelve by fourteen, with a canvas backdrop hung from a pipe frame and two work lights on stands pointed at a platform of stacked hay bales. It was already hot in there. The barn held heat like a thermos, and by ten in the morning it had to be ninety degrees, easy.

"This is stifling," I said.

"Welcome to my studio. Take your shirt off."

"Just like that?"

"You want a countdown? A drumroll?" She was already fiddling with the work light, angling it. "Shirt off, get up on the bales, hold the rope. I'll do the rest."

So I pulled my shirt over my head, and I want to tell you it was no big deal, but it kinda was. I don't know how artists feel about their own bodies, but I know how warehouse guys feel, which is that we're just containers for forklift injuries. I folded the shirt and set it on a bale and stood there with my arms kind of half crossed, and Janelle looked at me the way you look at a rental truck, checking it over.

"Arms down," she said. "Stop flexing."

"I'm not flexing."

"You're absolutely flexing. Relax. You're not auditioning, you're just existing." She pointed at the bale platform. "Up. Feet here. Rope in your left hand, coiled, and don't look at me, look off to the left like something's happening over there."

I climbed up. The hay scratched through my jeans. She'd shown me the coil earlier, ten minutes like she promised, and my hand remembered it mostly right. The canvas was close behind me and the air in the barn was thick enough to chew, and the work light made everything on my side of the pipe frame very bright and everything on her side very dark.

Then she started drawing, and something interesting happened, which is that I stopped mattering. I don't mean she ignored me. I mean the discomfort went away because she wasn't looking at me anymore, she was looking at a problem. Her pencil moved in these short little strokes, and her eyes went back and forth between me and the page maybe twice a minute, and the rest of the time she stared at the paper like it owed her money.

Outside, the rodeo was waking up. Speakers got tested, somebody hollered about gates, a horse whinnied. Inside the stall it was just pencil sounds and the work light humming.

"Can I talk?" I asked after a while.

"You can. Just don't move the shoulder. The shoulder is doing all the work in this pose, so leave it alone."

"So how'd you learn to draw like that? You're what, 27?"

"27, yeah. And you learn by drawing constantly since you were, well, since forever, and by being nosy about bodies." She didn't look up. "People think drawing is about hands. It's mostly about looking. I look at people on the bus, at the feed store, everywhere. I've got a whole sketchbook of just backs."

"Backs?"

"Backs are honest. Faces lie. Backs just say what they're doing." She turned the page. "Hold still, I'm doing your other arm."

We went like that for maybe forty minutes. She'd work, then call an adjustment, then work. My calves were killing me from standing on the hay in a half twist, and sweat was running down my ribs, and at some point she said "break" like a drill sergeant and I climbed down and sat on a bale and drank half a bottle of water.

That's when she brought over the sketchbook. Not the clipboard, an actual bound book, softcover, dog-eared, thick with graphite. "This is from the last couple nights, when I was planning the series," she said, sitting down next to me, closer than she needed to. "You can look. Just don't drool on it."

I turned pages. Women's backs, mostly, shoulders and spines and the little dimples above the waistband of jeans, drawn fast but drawn exactly. A pair of