“Hubba hubba,” said Beth, leaning into him. “I guess they weren’t fooling about a three-day party. I think it might take me three days to get this second drink out of my blood.”
Later they dined on barbecued meat and fowl and fish, all grilled in halved fifty-five-gallon drums in which beds of mesquite and oak smoked fragrantly. Bottles of wine were carried in and placed amidst the platters, all open, with the white wine in damp clay canisters to keep it cool. The wineglasses stood in decorative inverted pyramids, but one of these was suddenly demolished by a man who fell over backward into it, his absinthe glass still half full and held out so as not to spill one precious drop.
The wedding party sat on a dais above the celebrants. Photographers shot pictures, and Bradley threw bones to the dogs, then at the photogs. Two of the Inmate roadies were dancing on the old wooden bar top and kicking unattended goblets into the air, glass slivers shooting through the lights like tiny comets. Hood ate ravenously. Beth spoke in fluent French, stood and told a joke in Italian, then sat back down embarrassed. After dinner and toasts, James McMurtry and the Heartless Bastards took up arms onstage and their first portentous notes issued forth from the amplifiers like the disturbance in advance of a hurricane.
Hood bought a dance with Erin with a crisp Ben and they did a swing to a song about a guy with an Airstream trailer and Holstein cow. Erin told him they were honeymooning in Moorea but that wouldn’t be for a couple of weeks because of some L.A. gigs that the label had added late, and Bradley had some things to do. After the dance, Erin kissed his cheek and put her hands on his shoulders and looked directly into Hood’s eyes.
“You’re important to him and to me, too,” she said. “Watch over him, Charlie. He needs you more than you know.”
Bradley came up behind her. “I need you more than I know,” he said, taking one of Erin ’s hands off Hood’s shoulder and kissing it gallantly.
“Thanks for coming, Charlie,” said Bradley. “It means something to me. It would have meant something to my mother, too. Our futures go together, whether she’s with us or not.”
“Congratulations to both of you,” said Hood. And for a moment his hope for them was stronger than his dread.
Near midnight the crowd surged outside where the rodeo arena was now bathed in the floodlights. The bulls shuffled and snorted in the pen adjacent. There was a black bull in the chute and it stomped and snorted and threw its haunches against the rails, and Hood could hear the crack of wood. When the stands were full, a cowboy climbed onto the animal. The crowd was yelling loud when the black bull exploded into the arena and the kid rode its fury up and down, casually enmeshed in the circling chaos of the animal until he was suddenly flung from it and he landed and rolled and made the wall. There were five more bulls and five more riders. Hood watched them through an absinthe glow, transfixed and grinning.
Then Bradley sprung down from his seat and walked toward the chute. Erin turned and ran from the arena. Bradley stripped off his tuxedo jacket and flung it to his little brother, Jordan, who ran to keep up with him and appeared to be instructing him. Bradley climbed atop the chute, and the crowd roared into the night, and he lowered himself onto the dappled gray-and-white beast. Hood could see the shine of Bradley’s patent leather shoes against the great flank of the bull and he watched Bradley take the rope as a cowboy instructed, and the cowboy spoke fast to Bradley, and little Jordan was speaking, too, and Bradley listened with lessening patience, then he shrugged and nodded to the gateman. A gray-white bolt shot to the middle of the arena and went into midair without seeming to have jumped. It landed and Bradley, with his one hand high and his other locked to the rope, crashed hard to the bull’s back. The animal twisted and launched itself into the air again and this time Bradley was thrown high. The crowd went silent as Bradley sailed. Hood watched the bull watch him. Bradley gauged his speed and his height correctly and he landed on his feet and pitched forward and bowed. The crowd burst into cheers. He bowed again, then heard the thunder behind him and scrambled over the wall inches ahead of the slashing black horns. The audience mobbed him, and two men began bashing each other with chairs out in the bar area, and another ran for the pond with a bottle of vodka upturned in his mouth, and a great Dane on its hind legs lapped the pink punch from the glass maiden’s bowl, and two of the saloon girls danced burlesque on the bar top, waving their bras overhead like pennants.
“One more teensy little absinthe?” asked Beth.
“I don’t see why not.”
Beth threw herself into the bar crowd, and Hood found the coffee station and got a triple shot of espresso. Erin and McMurtry were onstage with the Inmates and the Heartless Bastards and two of Los Straitjackets, singing a not quite synchronized duet that advanced like an armored column.
Hood and Beth danced a song that became two more, then a slow one that Erin had written. They leaned into each other, bodies warm and hearts flush. Beth guided Hood off the floor and collected her goblet and aimed him around the rodeo arena and up the sloping barnyard to the tent city. There she delivered him to a unit up near the brushy hillside, set apart and unoccupied and welcoming. He turned on the lantern and held open the door for her. She stepped past him into the tent, clicking the lantern off on her way by.
36
Two days later, Hood sat in his replacement Yukon behind the Pace building and watched through the dark windows. There was a tall container of coffee on the console, and on the seat beside him were a bag of tacos and a package of cookies. He looked out at the rear of the building-warehouse, freight dock, loading ramp. There were pallets stacked along one wall and a motor home along another, the yard lights dull against the filthy windshield. A few minutes later he drove around the block and parked on the street out front, fifty yards away from the entrance.
Again the shift began at five o’clock. He watched the men park their old vehicles in the employee lot out front and wait to be let into the manufacturing floor. They carried plastic bags and beverage containers like his own, and some smoked. They looked relaxed and they talked and laughed quietly. The old ones reminded him of his father before his mind had betrayed him, back when he was easy and content with who he was and what he had made of his life and the working was never bad but never quite so good as being finished for the day.
He watched and thought about Beth Petty and the wedding and after. They’d made it halfway through the second day of dancing, eating and drinking before running out of energy. Someone had gotten the bulls drunk and let them loose and they had terrorized the dance and bar tents briefly, then wobbled off to lie in the shade of the hillside oaks or graze the barnyard or stand knee-deep in the pond, drinking and peeing. Bradley and several other drunken young men had gotten ATVs from the barn and attempted a roundup. It failed, with minor injuries to two men and one ATV that ran off the dock and sank out of sight in the pond. The bulls were unharmed and barely noticed the men. Hood had driven home with Beth conked out against the window, asleep and snoring at times, her hair dangling wildly, her knit dress somewhat stretched and lightly smudged, sapphires intact and atwinkle in the afternoon light, a wedding-gift absinthe goblet wrapped in wedding napkins peeking from the top of her purse. Hood smiled. She had part of his heart now and that was good.