One thing I miss about growing up in a rural setting in the seventies was the sense of community spirit. We lived in the Interlake area of Manitoba and every twenty miles or so was a town of about eight hundred people with a school, grocery store, barbershop, and eleven churches.
Every town had a summer event where locals could display their baking or gardening prowess, there would be an open pit barbeque with the best beef and beans on the planet, a baseball tournament could be had, and of course, the good old prairie beer garden, where good citizens could get sloshed on piss warm flat draft for the princely sum of twenty five cents per plastic cup.
Our big showcase was the Teulon Rodeo and Tractor Pull, held the first weekend of every July. Locals poured in from miles around to find out who made the best pickled onions and to see who had the fastest horses and biggest tractors and to watch drunken farmhands pummel each other in the aforementioned beer gardens. I remember this super bad ass girl named Kim. Tougher than a two dollar steak and built like a brick school house. She drove a really cool candy apple red 1972 Dodge Charger with Thrush mufflers that did their level best to tame the 400 Magnum under the hood, and she didn’t take shit from anybody. She could hold her own in a fight with any man, and everyone called her Stomper. That summer she sported a cast on her right arm from when she was swapping out the headers on her car with one of those old bumper jacks and the thing fell on her, snapping her ulna. The previous week I witnessed her knock two belligerent, boozed up long haul truckers unconscious with that cast.
At any rate, my buddies Jamie, Mike, and I were busy watching the barrel racing event when over the public address system it was announced that the bull riding contest was up next and that any new entrants were to report to the center booth to sign up within ten minutes. Now, you had to be eighteen to enter this competition, and the three of us were only fourteen at the time, but we thought, what the Hell, let’s lie about our ages and see what happens.
So off to the booth we went, where we were greeted by a fifty something lady with a bad perm and a face that looked like five miles of bad road.
“What the Hell do you little buggers want?”, she barked, her voice hoarse and scratchy from years of chain smoking Rothman’s cigarettes and gulping down copious amounts of cheap rye.
“Three for the bull riding, ma’am!”, was my response.
She stared down at us over her glasses and scanned our tiny trio of terror. She knew damn well we weren’t eighteen.
“Ten bucks each! Go to the pit and my husband Herb will give you a number and tell you what bull you get! Now get the Hell outta here!”.
Jamie was first. The bull they gave him was “Buttercup”, a gentle soul with the bucking ability of a rowboat in a gentle breeze. Mike was up next, and his bull was well over twenty years old, blind in one eye, couldn’t see out of the other, hips ravaged by arthritis, and deaf as a post. The poor old beast could barely muster the strength to walk, much less buck someone off. Man, this was going to be easy.
Now it was my turn. I recall this big fat guy about fifty five walking up to me chomping on a spit soaked cigar stub. He wore these brown dress slacks, pointy cowboy boots, and sported a filthy white polyester shirt buttoned over his massive beer gut tighter than a mosquito’s ass stretched across a rain barrel.
He tied a leather glove to my right hand and slapped a number on my back and chuckled, “Looks like you drew the short straw today, kid!”, and proceeded to help me on top of my bull, Bonesmasher. I slid my gloved hand under the taut rope on his back and waited with trepidation for the chute to open. A deathly silence fell upon the crowd as it was announced that some fool was about to ride this notorious killer of mortals. The thing snorted fire and shit lightning out it’s ass and actually had rows of stick figure men, in groups of five with a line through each branded on it’s side, each one representing others that had fallen before me.
My heart raced as the big metal gate opened, and then……nothing.
As in nothing.
Bonesmasher just stood there, chomping on some grass he’d plucked from the ditch. Calm as a country lake. As peaceful as a spring breeze.
That was until old Herb jammed him in the ass with a 20,000 volt cattle prod.
The next thing I know I’m thirty six feet in the air and I’m thinking, “Boy, the hardware store could sure use a new roof” before being shot to the ground like a reverse bungy cord walloping my face into dry mud and wet cowshit. A monstrous hoof struck my head, cracking it like a Christmas walnut.
Then the worst of my fears had been realized. My hand was trapped under the rope and Bonesmasher was dragging me like a ragdoll. He charged at the terrified rodeo clowns, smashed through the fence, and proceeded to gore, mutilate, and generally terrorize the good townsfolk all the while dragging me and stomping on me along the way.
But Bonesmasher’s next move proved to be a critical error. He could have raced into the trees and disappeared forever with me in tow, he could have run acoss the ditch into the wheatfields, never to be seen again, but no. Bonesmasher chose to run through, yes, the beer gardens.
The very same beer gardens Stomper was arm wrestling any man foolish enough to bet five bucks.
The mighty Bonesmasher charged in, tables and chairs were tossed about, his thick horns laying waste to even the fragile wooden latrines. Men and women scattered as shards of broken glass and lumber flew everywhere. All this with battered and beaten me in tow.
Then suddenly, as quickly as it had all began, it was over. You see, Bonesmasher’s fatal mistake that day was to jostle Stomper’s left arm, causing her to spill her beer. She rose up, grabbed the terrified bull by it’s right ear, and a well placed blow to the forehead with that plaster cast sent poor old Bonesmasher to the ground faster than shit through a tall goose.
I awoke the next day in a hospital bed. I was pretty lucky. I had escaped relatively unscathed, except for the five compound fractures in my right arm where it got caught under the rope. My Dad was furious and told me that if he didn’t need me to drive tractor that summer he would have broken my other arm right then and there.
I think it also worth mentioning that my Mum won second place for her banana bread. Apparently she would have won first but from what I understand that scheming bitch Irene Fergusson paid the judges off.
THE END
