the rodeo clown's dare

I've been coming up to The Gull's Cry for ten years, mostly in summer, and I never once noticed how ugly it gets in January. The cedar siding goes grey, the stone chimney looks like a broken tooth, and the whole lake out front is a slab of white nothing. Stacey said the slam would be cozy. Cozy is not the word I'd use for a place where the wind sounds like it's filing a grievance.

I'm Hamish, by the way. Fifty-eight years old, event coordinator at the Lakeside Pines Lodge down the highway, and as of fourteen months ago a divorced man. Colleen left me after twenty-eight years of marriage, and I've been running events for retirees ever since, which is about as stimulating as watching paint dry in a room with no windows.

Stacey's the one who owns this cottage. Thirty-seven, sharp as a tack, runs a decent chili. She called me in November and said, "Hamish, I need a professional for this off-season thing. You owe me for the ten summers of free dock coffee." And she's right, I do owe her, so here I am, hauling folding chairs across a frozen lawn like an idiot.

The swan pedal boat is what got me, though. It sits near the shore, half-buried in driftwood, and the ice has crusted over the whole thing. A big white bird frozen mid-swim, beak open, going nowhere until spring. I stood there a minute too long looking at it, and I thought, well, there you go, Hamish. There's your life in one dumb boat.

"Stop bonding with the swan and come hold this door!" Stacey shouted from the porch, so I did.

* * *

Drake showed up an hour later, and I heard him before I saw him. A diesel truck with a trailer behind it rattled up the frozen driveway as if it disapproved of the road. The trailer was stuffed with clown gear. Barrels, a foam horn, a painted sign, bags of who knows what.

He got out of the cab and I swear my stomach did something complicated.

Drake Whitehead. Rodeo clown. My ex-boyfriend from thirty years ago, back when I was twenty-eight and working the circuit between jobs. Drake is trans, and he was the first man I ever knew who said so out loud, in a bunkhouse where nobody said anything out loud, like he was reading me the weather. He was just Drake to me, and the only one who ever was. We split amicably when I took the lodge job, which sounds mature and was, actually, but it doesn't mean I ever stopped thinking about him on random Tuesdays.

"Hamish Spence," he said, walking up with his hands in his pockets. "You got old."

"You got stupid-looking," I said. "What is that hat?"

"It's a hat, Hamish. It's winter." He grinned, and I forgot how good his grin was. Fifty-three years old and the grin still worked. "Good to see you."

We shook hands, and nobody tells you what it is like to shake hands with somebody you used to sleep with. The handshake doesn't want to end. We both noticed. Neither of us said anything about it, we just sort of let it go one finger at a time.

"Stacey inside?" he asked.

"Inside. Bring the barrels, clown."

"Bring the barrels, he says. Thirty years and he's still giving orders."

I liked that too much. I picked up a barrel.

* * *

Setup took most of the afternoon. Stacey had the fireplace going, and the big room of the cottage filled up with rows of chairs, a mic stand, and a folding table for the coffee. The slam was Saturday night, and this was Thursday, which gave us two days to make a closed-for-winter fishing cottage look like a venue.

Drake was the headliner. A rodeo clown who writes poetry, and apparently he's good at it, because Stacey wouldn't shut up about him.

"You've seen his stuff?" she asked me while we sorted chairs.

"Nope."

"He's got a poem about a bull named Delores that made me cry, Hamish. A bull. Named Delores."

"Wonderful. I'll bring a tissue."

She threw a chair cushion at me. Fair.

Drake worked circles around both of us, hauling gear, running cable for the space heater, whistling the whole time. Around four o'clock he dug into one of his trailer bags and pulled out a stack of old rodeo programs, the cheap glossy kind with staples rusting through them.

"Look what I found in my mom's attic," he said, fanning them out on the coffee table. "Nineteen ninety-something. The Swift Current circuit. God, look at the font."

"You kept garbage for thirty years?"

"I kept memories, Hamish. You kept a filing cabinet." He flipped one open and read a line from an ad for a feed store in a dramatic voice. Stacey laughed so hard she had to sit down.

Then he held one out to me.

"Your turn," he said. "Pick a page. Read it like you mean it."

"I'm not reading anything."

"It's an ad for horse dewormer. Come on. One line. For old times."

"No!"

"You used to do bits, Hamish. You were funny. I remember funny."

I set the program down on the table like it was something that could bite me. "I did bits when I was twenty-three, Drake. I'm done with performing."

He looked at me a second, and then he picked the program back up and shrugged. "All right. But the offer stands. All weekend."

"It'll stand all weekend and expire unused."

"We'll see," he said, and went back to whistling.

I didn't love the sound of that. I didn't love how much I didn't love it, either.

Stacey caught my eye across the room and smiled into her coffee like she knew something, which I decided to ignore, because what else was there to do with it?

Friday morning came with snow, the light kind that doesn't stick to anything but makes everything look like a postcard anyway. I was scraping ice off the porch steps when Stacey came out with two mugs of coffee, which was suspicious behavior for a woman who makes you pay for her chili.

"Sit down, Hamish. I have a proposal."

"I don't like proposals before eight a.m."

"Tough." She handed me a mug and sat on the top step. "Here it is. You read one poem at the slam tomorrow night. One. Anything, doesn't have to be good, doesn't have to be yours even, read off a cereal box for all I care. And if you do, I donate two hundred bucks to the animal rescue in town."

I nearly spilled my coffee. "What? Where did that come from?"

"Old business. I sponsor them every winter anyway, but I figured you'd move faster for a cause than for me. You've dodged me for ten years, Hamish, you're not reading at my slam for free coffee, we both know that."

She had me there and she knew she had me there. Ten summers of free dock coffee, that's a debt I've been ignoring for ten years. "Two hundred bucks, real money?"

"Real money. The dogs and cats of the district thank you in advance."

"Stacey, I haven't been on a stage since before Drake and I split. That's thirty years, Stacey."

"So you've said." She sipped her coffee like someone who had already won. "One poem, Hamish. Think about the puppies."

I thought about the puppies. Damn her. "Fine. One poem. But if I make a fool of myself, you're paying for my therapy too."

"Deal. I'll even make chili for it."

"There's a limit to what even a rescue is worth, Stacey."

* * *

Drake came out of the trailer around noon and caught me stacking firewood, and he had that smirk on, the one I remembered from a hundred campfires.

"So I hear you're reading tomorrow night."

"Stacey has a big mouth."

"Stacey has a generous heart and you have a debt, that's what I hear. Two hundred bucks to the dog shelter if Hamish Spence graces a stage." He leaned on the woodpile. "Well. I'll be judging, you know."

"You'll be what now?"

"Judging. Stacey roped me in. Three judges, scorecards, the whole circus. And now the headliner gets to score his ex-boyfriend. This is the best weekend of my life, Hamish, and it hasn't even started."

"You're enjoying this way too much."

"I've been enjoying things about you for thirty years and too much is the correct amount." He picked up a log and split it one-handed, showing off, and I hated that I noticed the shoulders doing it. "So what are you reading? You writing something?"

"I don't write things, Drake. I file permits and book bands that nobody dances to."

"Sure. We'll see what comes out of you by tomorrow night."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true." He stacked the split log and walked off whistling, and I stood there holding firewood and wondering what exactly was coming out of me by tomorrow night, and why the question made my ears hot at fifty-eight years old.

* * *

Saturday night came faster than I wanted it to. The big room filled up with maybe thirty people, locals mostly, a few who'd driven in from town, everyone stamped with snow. Stacey ran the chili out in crock pots and the fireplace threw enough heat to make the front two rows drowsy. Drake worked the crowd before it started, foam nose on for thirty seconds at a time just to keep people off balance, and the crowd loved him, and I stood at the coffee table pretending to be busy.

Then the lights dropped and he took the mic.

His headliner piece was about a bull named Delores, and Stacey was right, it was about a bull and it was funny and then it wasn't. It was about a bull that didn't buck. Fourteen seasons of bucking and then one afternoon in Swift Current the gate opens and Delores just stands there, breathing, looking at the crowd like she'd figured something out the rest of them hadn't. And the crowd went quiet, and the clowns came out, and Drake was in the ring in the paint and the baggy pants, and he told it in that gravel voice, and when he got to the part where the bull finally walks out of the ring on her own, slow, past the clowns, past the chutes, out the gate into the dark, the whole room went dead silent. I had goosebumps on my arms. A woman near me sniffled.

And I stood there at the folding table with my heart doing something I didn't have a name for, because I remembered him writing that. Not that poem, but that way. Nights on the circuit, sitting on tailgates, him muttering lines under his breath while I pretended to be asleep in the truck. Thirty years and the man still had it, whatever it was, and watching him own that room I felt the old pull in my chest, the one from when we were both young and broke and I thought he hung the moon.

He finished. The room came up loud. Stacey was wiping her eyes, not even hiding it.

And then Drake looked straight at me over the crowd, mic still hot, and grinned that grin.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "next up, a man I've been trying to get on a stage since the nineties. Hamish Spence, get up here."

I froze with the coffee pot in my hand. Thirty pairs of eyes turned. Stacey was already writing her two hundred dollar check.

Damn her. Damn both of them.

My legs walked me up there. I don't remember deciding. Stacey pressed the check, made out to the animal rescue, into my shirt pocket on the way past like a trainer slipping a jockey a leg up, and Drake handed me the mic with a bow so deep it was sarcasm.

"Two hundred dollars," I said into the mic. "Courtesy of Stacey, for the dog shelter. And a poem I wrote on a frozen dock this morning, so lower your expectations."

I read it. The swan boat one. It was four lines longer than it should have been and it rhymed in two places where it didn't want to, and the crowd was polite the way crowds are polite to a man who was holding a coffee pot twenty minutes ago. Stacey clapped the loudest. Drake scored me a seven. He held the card up over his head like a figure skating judge and mouthed the word generous.

* * *

By eleven the room was empty and the crock pots were scraped down to chili shrapnel. Stacey zipped her parka and did the math out loud.

"Three hundred and forty raised, two hundred of it from the check you earned, you beautiful idiot. I'm going home before the road ices. Drake, your trailer's plugged in, yes? Hamish, don't burn my cottage down."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

"And bank the fire, both of you." She pointed at us with a car key. "I know exactly nothing about what's happening here and I intend to keep it that way. Goodnight!"

The door banged. Her headlights swept the window