Last Call at the Rodeo

Heath backed the stock trailer through the chute gate at a quarter past ten and killed the engine for the last time that season. The Silver Creek Rodeo was done. Tomorrow at dawn they were blowing up the old bridge over the river, and half the town had come out tonight just to say they'd seen it one more time.

"Sixty-two years old and still the best backer-upper in the county," he told himself, climbing down from the cab. His knees disagreed. His knees had been disagreeing since he turned fifty-five, but a man didn't have to listen to his knees.

He'd hauled cattle for these folks off and on for thirty years, but before that he was a rodeo hand in his early twenties, until his back went after a stomping in 'eighty-four. It was a fair trade, most days. His knees sure thought so.

The lot was mostly empty now. A few Airstreams glowed under string lights where the competitors were already drinking. The chutes stood dark and quiet. And over by the river, past the livestock pens, somebody had pitched a big white tent, and somebody else was crouched under a lamp arguing with one of the Brandt boys about a piece of junk.

Heath wandered over, the way a man does when there's nothing left to load.

The junk was a diving bell. He'd seen it sitting behind the fair barns his whole life, a big rusted dome the size of a hot tub, half sunk in weeds. Kids used to dare each other to climb inside it. He had, twice, at twenty-two, and both times he'd felt like the whole thing might tip over and bury him.

The woman crouched beside it was not from around here. City coat, city boots, a flashlight in one hand and a little leather notebook in the other. She was maybe in her mid-fifties, gray coming in at her temples, and she had the flattest, coolest look he'd ever seen on a person.

"I'm telling you, lady, it's worth maybe two hundred in scrap," said the Brandt boy, whose name Heath could never remember. Melvin? Al? Something short.

"It is not worth two hundred in scrap," the woman said. "It's a Galeazzi pattern bell, early twentieth century, and the copper rivets are original. That alone is more than scrap."

"So what's it worth?"

"Three to five thousand, cleaned up. Possibly more if the provenance turns up."

"Prove-what?"

"Where it came from. Its history." She didn't even look up. Heath liked that immediately.

Al leaned closer. "What if I told you my granddad used it to fish bodies out of the reservoir?"

"I would tell you to put that in writing and notarize it, because provenance is everything." She finally stood up, brushed her knees off, and looked at Al like he was a fly on her clipboard. "And I would tell you that you are making it up, because your granddad sold scrap off this lot for forty years and never once mentioned owning a diving bell."

Heath laughed out loud. Both of them turned.

"You know something, old-timer?" Al said.

"I know this bell's been sitting there since before your daddy could walk," Heath said. "And I know your granddad. He'd have sold his own teeth if the price was right. If he had a diving bell, he'd have sold it in 1985."

"Thank you," the woman said. "That is actually useful testimony."

She had an accent. Not heavy, but there, something Scandinavian riding under the words. Heath tipped his hat.

"Heath Moline. I drive stock for this outfit."

"Inga Sorensen. I appraise things." She shook his hand with a grip that a man twice her size might have. "And tomorrow this whole lot goes under the auction gavel before the bridge comes down, so I am working against a clock."

"Auction? Since when?"

"Since the county sold the grounds. You did not know?"

"Well, hell. Nobody tells me anything." He looked at the bell again, really looked at it this time, now that it had a price tag. It was a big ugly thing, copper gone green, the viewing port clouded over. "So how in the world were you planning to move that? It weighs, what, better than half a ton?"

"Eight hundred and forty pounds, if the pattern holds true," Inga said. "And I was planning to hire the crew that is coming at six in the morning. Which is cutting it extremely close, because the auction opens at eight and the bridge comes down at dawn."

"Dawn is five forty."

"So you did read the flyers." The corner of her mouth moved. It was the smallest smile he'd ever seen, and he found himself wanting a bigger one.

Al had wandered off, probably to go tell somebody a diving bell was worth five grand. Good. More room.

"Tell you what," Heath said. "Six a.m. crew, my backside. I've got a truck with a lift gate right over there, a come-along, chains, and thirty years of hauling dumb heavy things around this county. I can walk that thing up onto some skids and winch it aboard tonight in about twenty minutes."

Inga looked at him the way she'd looked at the bell. Measuring. He'd seen ranch wives look at horses like that. He'd seen bankers look at land like that. He had never once been the thing being looked at, and he found he did not mind one bit.

"You would do that," she said. It wasn't quite a question.

"I'd show off, is what I'd do. The doing comes free with the showing off."

"And what does showing off cost me?"

"Nothing but your time. Maybe you tell me what a diving bell even does. I've known that thing forty years and I never once knew."

"It lowers a man underwater with air trapped inside the dome. Like a cup pushed upside down into a sink full of water. The water cannot get in because the air will not let it." She said it like she was reading off a placard, but her eyes never left his face. "It is a very old, very stubborn idea. I have always liked it."

Heath laughed. "Stubborn idea, huh. Sounds like somebody I know."

"You have known me for four minutes."

"And you already won an argument against a Brandt. That's a four-minute record around here."

She closed her notebook. "Very well, Mr. Moline. Show off."

So he did.

First he backed the flatbed around so the lift gate faced the bell, and he did it in one smooth move, no three-point adjustment, because there was an audience now and an audience mattered. Then he kicked the weeds back from the base and got down on his knees to look at how she sat in the dirt.

"Careful, the rivets," Inga said, crouched beside him with her lamp.

"I know, I know. Copper's soft as your grandma's spoons." He peered under the lip. "Skids won't fit under her sitting like that. We need to walk her up onto that pallet, one rock at a time."

"You have done this before."

"Ma'am, I have moved every outhouse, silo cap, and horse trough in three counties." He fetched the come-along and a couple of six-by blocks from the truck box. "Now, you put your pretty lamp right there and tell me if she starts to lean, because my knees don't hear so good anymore."

"My lamp is not pretty. It is a rated industrial light."

"Sure it is."

She snorted. Actually snorted. Heath counted that as a personal victory and got his shoulder under the low edge of the bell.

It took them the better part of an hour. Rock it up, slide a block in, rock it down, slide the other block. Inga worked right beside him the whole time, no fuss, hands where he told her to put them, calling out the lean like a spotter on a barn raising. Somewhere in the middle of it she'd taken off her city coat and tied her hair back, and Heath was man enough to admit he watched her do it instead of watching the bell.

"Left side is floating," she said. "Slide it now!"

He slid it. The bell settled square on the pallet with a solid thump, and he sat back on his heels, breathing hard, grinning like an idiot.

"Well?" he said. "That deserves some kind of applause."

"You winched the last two feet with the come-along. That was the smart part. The shoulder part was unnecessary."

"The shoulder part was the show, Ms. Sorensen. The winch was just insurance."

"Call me Inga." She stood and offered him a hand up, which he took, because a smart man takes a hand when it's offered. Her palm was warm and her grip was still that same hard grip. "You have good form for sixty-two."

"You checked my age?"

"You told Al's cousin loud enough for the whole lot, right before you threatened to sue the county about the bridge." She tilted her head. "Fifty-four, to be clear. Since we are trading."

"Since we're trading. Divorced? Widowed? Secretly married?"

"None. Allergic to the institution. You?"

"Married once at thirty, lasted four years, she liked the city and I liked this county, and neither of us was wrong." He nodded at the bell, now sitting pretty on the pallet. "So. You want her on the truck tonight or at dawn?"

"Tonight. If she is on the truck tonight, I sleep."

Heath got to his feet, cracked his back, and grabbed the come-along off the tailgate. "Then let's put your bell aboard, Inga. And then you can buy me a beer from one of those Airstreams, because I've earned it and you know it."

"We will see about the beer," she said, but she was smiling. It was a bigger one this time.

It took another twenty minutes to walk the bell up the ramps and strap her down, and by the time Heath dropped the tailgate and ratchetted the last chain, his shirt was stuck to his back and Inga had the look of a woman who'd won something.

"There," he said, giving the chain two hard tugs. "She ain't going nowhere till dawn."

"Unless the bridge falls on us first."

"Bridge is a mile downstream. You worry a lot for an appraiser."

"I appraise things for a living. Everything is worth less than people think. Of course I worry." She looked at the strapping, then at him. "Now. The beer you extorted from me!"

"Whiskey," Heath said. "Beer's for ball games. Come on, my trailer's the blue Airstream, third row."

"You live here?"

"Three weeks a year I do. Rest of the time she sits in my yard in town and my neighbor curses her." He led the way past the chutes, past the pens where the last few steers stood dozing, and unzipped the trailer door. "Fair warning, it smells like a man lives here alone and has made peace with it."

It did. But it was clean enough, and there was a little two-burner stove and a table bolted to the wall and a bottle of rye with two inches gone out of it. He dug a second cup out of the cabinet, one with a pheasant on it, and poured them both.

"To the bell," he said.

"To the bell. And to the bridge, I suppose."

"To the bridge. Poor old girl." He knocked his cup against hers and drank. "So talk. Circus performer. You said something out there and then Al started hollering and I lost it."

Inga settled onto the bench across the table like she'd been sitting in rodeo trailers all her life. "The bell came out of the Krause Grand Circus. Out of Ohio originally, though the man who owned it toured everywhere."

"Krause Grand. That rings a bell." He winced. "Lord. Didn't even mean that."

She laughed, a real one, and it did something to the room. "Yes, very funny. The performer's name was Emil Vasko. He did a diving act. He would climb a tower, sixty feet sometimes, and dive into a tank, and at the bottom of the tank sat the bell. He would swim inside it and stand up and wave through the little port while the band played. Very famous in his day. Nineteen-teens, twenties."

"That's the act? He hides in a pot at the bottom of a pool?"

"He fills a tank at the bottom of a pool and the crowd cannot see him until he is suddenly there, inside, alive, waving. Think about it. Nineteen-twenty, people had never seen anything underwater except fish and drowned men. A man standing dry inside the water, waving at you, smiling. It was magic. It was the most popular ticket in eleven states." She turned her cup on the table. "And I have his bell in your parking lot."

"So how did a circus bell end up at a rodeo grounds in Montana?"

"The circus wintered here one year, would you believe. Nineteen-twenty-six, the papers say. And the owner fell behind on his debts, and he sold equipment all over this valley to make payroll. The bell went to a well driller in town who used it for actual work, which appraisers find horrifying, and then his widow sold it to the fair board, and the fair board put it by the river and forgot about it." She spread her hands. "Forty years of boys like you climbing inside it."

"Two of those boys were me." He leaned back. "I was twenty-two and Melvin's older brother dared me, and I crawled in with a flashlight and it was the best fort in the world. Told everybody I was Emil somebody. Had a whole speech."

"You knew the name even then?"

"Old-timers talked about it. Vasko. I thought they were making him up." He shook his head. "So this thing I played in as a dumb kid is worth three to five thousand."

"Cleaned up. Possibly more to the right buyer, someone who collects circus material. There are perhaps six of these bells left in the country that I know of." She took a sip. "And tomorrow it goes to a stranger at eight in the morning."

"That's the job, huh."

"That is the job. I find things, I say what they are, and then they go away and I drive to the next town. Twenty-nine years of it." She looked at him over the cup. "Your turn. Al's cousin told me you rode in the last show, years ago. That seems a strange thing to carry around at a rodeo that is ending tonight."

"Ah, hell, it's not much of a story."

"It is the only story you have offered me all night besides outhouses. Tell it."

He laughed and turned his cup around. "All right. Nineteen eighty-eight. I was twenty-four, I'd been a hand around here three summers, and the fair board decided the old rodeo was done, had been losing money for years. So they threw one last show. Final performance, September, cold enough you could see your breath." He could see it now, could see the frost on the chute rails. "And the bronc riding was short that night, two boys scratched, and the pick-up