Elevator Rodeo

The mare came out of the chute with explosive speed.

I knew that horse. White blaze across her hips, mean look in her eye, a reputation two counties wide. I'd drawn her last season and lasted four seconds. Tam drew her in the qualifier and rode her like she was a rocking chair.

Eight seconds. The buzzer went off. The crowd made that sound crowds make when they forget to breathe and then get to breathe again.

Tam hit the dirt, rolled, came up grinning. She waved her hat once. Modest about it. That was somehow worse.

"That's my competition," I said to nobody.

Kenny the judge climbed the fence rail and squinted at the replay board. I didn't need the replay. I'd watched her spurring strokes, watched her free hand stay up like it was nailed there. Eighty-nine would be low. That ride was a ninety-one, maybe ninety-two.

Which put her ahead of me by three points going into tomorrow's final. Three points. The prize was a year of feed contracts for the winning ranch. Dad had the invoices taped to the refrigerator at home. I'd seen them every morning since March.

So yeah. Rivalry. At twenty-six I'd only heard other people describe it and always figured it was mostly complaining with better posture. Turns out it lives in your chest and hums.

Tam walked past the chutes with her rope coiled over one shoulder. She's twenty-four, lean, dark hair hacked off short under her hat, and she moves like someone who decided at some point that she wasn't going to apologize for taking up space. She started rodeoing late. Everybody knows the story. She was twenty-one when she got on her first bronc, which in this sport is roughly like taking up piano at fifty.

Three years later she was out-riding half the circuit.

"Nice ride," I said. Because my mother raised me right and I hate it.

"Thanks." She looked at me a beat longer than politeness required. "You're up in the second section, right?"

"Right."

"Good luck." And she kept walking. No smirk. That was the worst part. She meant it.

I made my eight on the second horse and nobody gave me a standing ovation, and I don't want to talk about it.

Between rounds I went back to the horse barn to check on Dad's bay, who objected to the announcer's music and was letting the whole barn know. On the tack shelf beside the stall, wedged upright between a spare cinch and a coffee can full of hardware, was a book.

Spiral bound. Cover soft with age. HOLY TRINITY LADIES' AUXILIARY FAVORITE RECIPES, 1974.

I have no idea why I picked it up. I did though.

Somebody had found it in the old grain office, apparently, because there was a strip of masking tape on the front that said STAFF QUARTERS in pencil. The pages smelled like dust and, faintly, like a church basement. Green bean casserole. Funeral potatoes. Something called Tuna Wiggle, which I hope was a joke.

There were handwritten notes in the margins. That's what got me. Little pencil scrawl next to the printed recipes, decades old.

Too sweet. Cut sugar by half.

Bernice, you lie, this needs a FULL cup.

Burned it again. Sorry God.

I laughed out loud in an empty barn. A horse two stalls down nickered like I'd startled it.

Footsteps on the gravel outside, and then Tam came through the doorway carrying two paper plates of fair food. She stopped when she saw me holding the book.

"Where'd you find that?"

"Tack shelf." I held it up. "There's a note in here that just says, quote, sorry God."

"Oh, I've read that one!" She came over and set a plate down on the rail. One of them was for me, apparently. She'd gotten me a funnel cake I hadn't asked for. "The lemon meringue one has a whole argument in the margins. Two different handwritings. Goes on for three recipes."

"Down the page like an argument on the internet."

"Exactly like that." She flipped to it. Sure enough, four lines of pencil in cramped cursive, then four lines in rounder print rebutting them. "One of these women is my hero."

"Which one?"

"The one who wrote 'it sets in the pan, Nancy, trust the pan.'"

I laughed again. It felt strange, laughing with the person currently holding three points over my head. We stood there turning pages. She pointed out a recipe for something called Slush Punch that required two bottles of ginger ale and, judging by the note, caused a church schism in 1979.

"She's aggressive about the sherbet," Tam said.

"There's a whole paragraph."

"Good for her."

I looked at her sideways. She was smiling down at the book, and for about four seconds it was easy to forget we were competitors. Then the loudspeaker crackled overhead and said the word finals and the hum in my chest came back.

"Well," I said. "Back to it."

"Yeah." She closed the book and tucked it under her arm. "Miss Oleta's. I leave it places and it keeps turning up." She nodded at the barn door. "See you at the board."

---

The board posted the qualifier standings at seven. Tam first, ninety-one point five. Me second, eighty-eight and a half. Cody the announcer read the names off with his usual showman's roll. He's twenty-seven, used to ride bulls until a shoulder went bad, and now he does the mic work in a voice like a late-night radio host. He added a line about how tomorrow's final would be, quote, one for the ledger.

Backstage by the stock trailers, Tam and I ended up at the same water jug. Small lots. Not a lot of room to avoid each other.

"You cut your rein hand loose early on that second horse," she said. Pouring water. Not looking at me. "Cost you a point and a half."

"There's a judge's card that says otherwise."

"Kenny scores generosity. He'll mark you up for style."

"He marked you up plenty."

"He should have. I rode clean." She said it without heat, which made it worse somehow. "You've got the fastest spurring cadence I've seen all season. You also throw your center forward on the third jump of every ride. Every single one. Ask your dad, he'll have it on video."

I put my cup down harder than the cup deserved.

"Look. You started three years ago. That's great. Inspirational poster stuff. But this isn't a camp, and the contracts go to somebody's ranch that actually needs them. So I'm not going to be friendly about it."

"Who asked you to be friendly?" She capped the jug. "I want the contracts too. My program runs on entry fees and goodwill. But I'm not going to pretend you don't ride well just because we're after the same check."

"I don't need you to rate my riding."

"Then don't ask questions by the water jug."

"Whatever," I said. Mature. Elite athlete behavior.

She shouldered her rope bag and walked off toward the staff quarters, past the floodlights and the stock trailers, and I stood there feeling like I'd lost an argument and a funnel cake privilege simultaneously.

---

The staff quarters are temporary trailers and converted rooms around the base of an old grain silo the fairgrounds never tore down. Somebody with more ambition than sense converted it decades ago. There's a freight elevator inside, big enough for a horse if the horse apologizes, running from the prep floor at ground level up to the viewing deck near the top.

I was headed up to watch the last events from the deck. So was Tam. We got in the same cage because there was no polite way not to.

She pressed the button. The cage shuddered, clanked, rose about eight feet.

Then everything went dark for half a second. The floodlights outside, the arena lights, all of it. The whole fairgrounds swallowed and spat back out. The elevator stopped like it had hit a wall.

The emergency light over the door came on. Yellow. Unflattering.

"Okay," Tam said.

"Okay," I said.

She pressed the button again. Nothing. She pressed the call button on the panel. A buzzer went somewhere and nobody answered it, which is how you know a fairgrounds is run by volunteers.

"Power surge," she said. "Whole grid, probably. The generator takes a minute."

"Great."

We stood there. The cage creaked in that way old steel creaks when it's just settling and you wish it wouldn't. The emergency light hummed.

I counted the seconds. Got to about forty before I couldn't stand it.

"So the Slush Punch," I said. "You think the sherbet lady won?"

"Never any doubt." Tam leaned against the rail, arms crossed. The yellow light made the whole cage look like it was an old photograph. "Nancy caved. The handwriting gets smaller after that. You can tell."

"You can tell."

"People tell you everything in margins. Just not to your face."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing, and the elevator sat there between floors with both of us in it, and outside, distantly, the loudspeaker was still announcing events to an arena we could no longer see.

The generator took longer than a minute. We established that around minute four.

Tam sat down on the floor of the cage, cross-legged, like this was a waiting room and not a steel box hanging in a grain silo. After a while I sat too. My boots were wet from the mud behind the trailers and I didn't care anymore.

"Your dad's place," she said. "How many head?"

"Two hundred and change. Why?"

"Just filling silence."

"You don't have to fill it. Silence is fine."

"It's not, though. It's the worst thing there is." She looked at the yellow light like it owed her money. "Silence is where you figure out how much trouble you're actually in."

I laughed. First time all day. It came out rusty.

"Okay," I said. "Your program. How'd a sleep technician end up in rodeo?"

"Church cookbook."

"What?"

"Sort of. I was twenty-one. First year of transition, living in a rental in town, working nights at the sleep lab watching strangers breathe. I had a lot of daylight hours and no idea what to do with them." She pulled a knee up. "A lady at my church, Miss Oleta, ran the rodeo bible camp. Needed an extra hand hauling barrels. I said sure because I couldn't think of a reason fast enough."

"And that turned into this."