Someone yelled, “Ride ’em, cowboy,” and though Festus didn’t understand the words, he understood the sentiment and jabbed Nop in the flanks, just like a real cowboy. Festus was in good humor for a change.
Nop’s tongue was out a yard and he was stumble-footed with exhaustion.
The TV camera had caught it all and hoped to use some of it. The cameraman thought the Buckaroos were “cute as a bug’s ear.” He hoped the monkey would wave his hat again or maybe fire his cap pistols like a real little cowboy. Just a little more footage.
When the monkey leaned forward and fired both pistols, one beside each of Nop’s furry ears, the cameraman got footage.
Billy’s Temptation is just another joint on the Strip. Friday and Saturday night draws leisure suits, darling little outfits and boozy foreplay. Other times Billy’s Temptation inclines slightly to Leather—not Gay Leather, Ex-con Leather. Conversations along the bar have resulted in class-five felonies and a few class-four.
Billy’s is Doug Whitenaur’s hangout. He enjoys the status of a regular.
Sunday afternoons, in the back room, they set up a big-screen video projection system. The fans gather in the overstuffed booths or at the napkin-sized tables, lift a few, watch the game.
The bar is perfectly good wood, bleached white. The stools are covered with plump black Naugahyde. Everybody overtips. The waitresses wear black mesh blouses over black brassieres.
Johnnie Walker Black—that’s a favorite. Chivas—that’s another. A few sports order CogNac and that’s how they pronounce it. Billy’s Temptation is a sleaze joint and Doug Whitenaur can’t get enough of it. He’ll be here Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights—weekend days too, except when he’s off to a dog trial.
Tyler Whitenaur wouldn’t have been caught dead in a place like this. Which is not the least of its attractions.
Doug Whitenaur’s inheritance takes care of him—he can buy most of the things that are for sale; but his wealth is cumbersome too, like a thick cocoon drawn tight around the skin: too warm, often itchy, terribly dull. He avoids most of the frequent Whitenaur family gatherings, and those he can’t duck, he arrives late and leaves early. The uncles and cousins ask him about the stockdogs—such a source of family pride while Tyler Whitenaur was alive. Their questions make him squirm. Yes, he was still running the dogs. No, not so many as his father had. Actually, he’d won all the trials his father had. Except the Bluegrass. Right—he hadn’t won the Bluegrass. True, Tyler Whitenaur had won the Bluegrass three times. You could say that was quite an accomplishment, yes. Doug meant to win the Bluegrass this year. After that, maybe he’d give up the dogs altogether and he’d turn to his kinsmen and say, “Since you’re so damn concerned about the dogs, maybe you’d like to start running them yourself,” and he’d make some excuse and quit the family table with its too curious, too empathetic questions and hurry to Billy’s where he could loosen his tie and set both elbows on the bleached bar: “Johnnie Black, water back, for God’s sake make that a double.”
Doug Whitenaur wanted to be free. Free like the players who made the whispered deals, head to head, along the bar. Outlaw-free. Free like his pals Hack and Sandy.
Sandy had taken up weightlifting in prison and stayed with it afterward. He was short but didn’t seem so because of his massive neck and deltoids. Sandy read Playboy magazine and took that authority’s advice on consumer goods, autos, fashions and sex mores.
Sandy’s hair was that color. His eyes were green. Though he wasn’t particularly handsome, he was convinced otherwise and such was his confidence he had considerable success with the mousy secretarial sorts who came in on Friday night to sample low-life thrills. Sandy’s teeth were capped and he flashed them. His partner, Hack, was ten years older—near forty—with dead black hair combed over one side of his face and a pool-hall complexion. Hack was tall and ate antacid tablets like candy. Hack had a mean streak. He never talked much. Would jab his finger at Sandy and say, “He does the talking. I carry the mail.”
Doug Whitenaur saw Hack and Sandy as graceful predators swimming through a sea filled with fat, slow tuna. Doug didn’t wish to be one of the tuna.
Doug admired them. He bought them drinks. He never invited them to his home and wouldn’t think of lending them his car.
Sandy had done time for grand theft auto. Cops don’t frequently prosecute for grand theft auto but they were willing to make an exception in Sandy’s case. Sandy had been arrested several times for procuring but nothing came of it. Hack took a fall for assault. Too much prosperity ruined him. He’d been making collections for a loan shark and doing pretty well for himself. Hack, a buddy and a couple girlfriends took off one weekend for the track, Hack in the back seat drinking and munching Turns. Just outside of Louisville, the driver got in an argument, mocked Hack, laughed at him, something.… Hack climbed over the back seat and commenced working him over with a whiskey bottle. When the car hit the abutment, they all went to the hospital—Hack, subsequently, to jail.
Doug Whitenaur sent drinks to the booth where the two were watching NBA finals on the big screen.
Not a big crowd today and Doug knew most everybody. He sucked on his Johnnie Walker and was about as happy as he ever got. The Bluegrass was coming up next month and Lewis Burkholder didn’t have a dog to run against him. Tough titty, Lewis. Although having Burkholder’s dog stolen was just a drunken notion, and nobody had been more surprised than Doug when Grady Gumm took him up on it, it had worked out pretty good (and humiliated Lewis Burkholder in the bargain). Doug took full credit for the theft. He was becoming, he thought, “streetwise.”
Sandy wore a light blue shirt, trousers of the same color and a corduroy jacket. All his lapels were extreme. He lifted his Gucci loafer from the seat so Doug could sit.
Hack was engrossed in the game. He had money riding on the Lakers. The flesh was tight on Hack’s pale cheekbones and his knuckles were the size of half dollars. They formed a thick continuous ridge across the back of his hand. Absently, he picked at the label of his beer bottle.
Sandy’s fingernails were extremely long, almost as long as a woman’s. Sandy did no manual labor. Manual labor wasn’t his bag. “How you makin’ it, Mr. D?”
Sandy owned a blue TR-7. The right front fender was primer brown. Sandy liked to brag his car was a classic but it wasn’t. He admired Doug Whitenaur’s De Lorean because Playboy admired it and the sportscar gained status in his mind when its maker, John De Lorean, was indicted on cocaine charges.
“Funny thing happened to me the other day,” Doug said. “Cops gave my house a toss.”
“They what?”
Hack looked away from his game. “You?” Hack never cared so much for Doug as Sandy did. Most of the time Hack didn’t know if he liked Sandy either.
“Yep. Cop name of Nelson. Sergeant Nelson.”
“Stocky dude with big teeth?” Sandy pointed at his own fine choppers.
“That’s him. I’d closed this joint the night before and Marge came home with me …”
“That pig.”
“So what else is new?” Doug’s contempt for the woman was deeper than Sandy’s. “Like I was trying to say, it was eleven o’clock in the morning when Nelson comes banging on my door and I was in a real fog, you know how it is.”
Hack grunted. “I heard about Nelson. He’s put a few players away.”
“Ah, he’s nothing. Soon as he left my house, I got on the horn to my lawyers and they climbed on the chief of police and he personally hung Nelson out to dry.” Doug smiled a wicked smile. “That clown didn’t even have a warrant.”
“I didn’t know you was that way, Mr. D,” Sandy said. “I always thought you were a civilian.” His look was curious.
“Think what you like,” Doug said and was glad to say it. After a moment he asked if anyone wanted another drink. Sandy yes. Hack no. Doug was having such a fine time. Good whiskey, good company—conversation to pass the time—what more could a man want? Doug decided to break one o
f his self-imposed rules. He decided to let one of his lives leak into the other. “You know anything about dogs?”
Sandy said, “I had a dog once. Pretty little Collie dog. When it got run over, I cried for three days. ’Course,” he excused himself, “I was just a dumb kid.”
“Good dog’s worth money,” Doug said.
Sandy shook his head. “Not to somebody who can keep a De Lorean,” he said. “You can’t get more’n twenty, say half a yard, for a dog. There’s a creep downtown buys them, a white truck, he …”
“Five K,” Doug said quietly.
“Five thousand dollars? One dog? Come on, Mr. D. You and me go back, how long?”
They’d known each other for six months.
“The department store downtown. I heard that was you, Mr. D.”
Doug Whitenaur went cold. His money was nobody’s business but his own. He felt like someone—a stranger—had put greasy hands on him. “Grandad sold out to a chain years ago,” he snapped.
Sandy ignored the signals. “Still, you ain’t exactly hurtin’, are you? Maybe you got a little extra dinero you want to put out on the street? You and me and Hack, maybe we could get something going …”
Hack interrupted. “I’ll take that drink now. I’ll take a Kahlua and cream. For my stomach. The Lakers are down nine, Sandy. There goes five hundred dollars.” He popped a Turns. “Sandy, I think we better take that Toledo deal. I think we better get on it.”
Sandy made a face. “Man, I dunno.…”
They spoke right through Doug Whitenaur who wore the expression he thought a deaf man might wear.
“Sandy, if you don’t want to back me up, I can get somebody else.”
Doug stood and said he’d get Hack’s drink, so excuse him. Some details of their life fascinated him. Many details he didn’t want to know. What if he said to Hack, “Hack, I’ll go along to Toledo,” wouldn’t Hack be surprised?
Standing at the bar of Billy’s Temptation, creasing a ten-dollar bill, Doug Whitenaur felt his belly lurch, like a dropped elevator. Because he knew, in that instant, how close he was to full membership in Hack and Sandy’s dangerous world. He was a predator too. The thought filled him with joy, though no joy, not a smidge, showed on his hardening countenance.
The TV stayed with the Lakers while the fans filed out of the stadium and Billy’s patrons were calling for fresh drinks and settling wagers. When Doug returned to the booth, Sandy was staring off into space and Hack was watching himself rub his flattened knuckles. Doug was feeling pretty good. “Lighten up, can’t you?” he said. For comic relief, he told them the full story of Lewis Burkholder’s dog, putting a bold face on his own part in the theft. “Five thousand dollars Burkholder was offered for that dog. Isn’t that a kick?”
Sandy listened because he didn’t want to think about Toledo. Hack scootched around in the booth watching “Wide World of Sports.”
Doug described Burkholder’s arrival at his house with his son-in-law and Sergeant Nelson. He made them all seem like fools.
Hack said, “That’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it? Look, dummy, on the tube! Isn’t that a Border Collie with the monkey on his back?”
Doug Whitenaur got up like someone had jerked all his strings. He went over directly in front of the screen where nobody could see through him. Softly he said, “I don’t believe this.” Then he smacked his palm and said, much louder, “I don’t believe this at all.”
VIDEO: Nop and the monkey begin their outrun toward the stubborn calf.
AUDIO: Crowd noises. Announcer (Voiceover): “But you know what they say about the best laid plans. Though the Littlest Buckaroos have rounded up hundreds of calves without incident, here in Sioux Falls, something happened.”
VIDEO: T. T. Raines. The harsh sungun washes out his features. He’s pasty faced but his eyes glint like hard coal. A super I.D.s him: T. T. Raines—Buckaroo’s Trainer.
AUDIO: Announcer: “How long did it take to train the act?”
T. T. Raines: Long pause. “Couple years …”
VIDEO: Calf squares off against Nop.
AUDIO: Crowd laughter, hoots and cheers. Announcer (VO): “The dog was having a little trouble with this calf, but nothing he hadn’t handled before.…”
VIDEO: Zoom to Nop’s face. His eyes are fixed in the Border Collie stare, his tongue hangs out. There’s foam at the corner of his mouth. The monkey is rubbernecking, quite uninterested, until the calf charges and Nop leaps sideways to avoid him. The monkey tears at Nop’s ruff, terrified.
AUDIO: “But no animal, no matter how carefully trained, is entirely predictable. …”
VIDEO: The dog nips the calf and turns it. The calf trots directly toward the camera. The monkey waves his cowboy hat and swats the dog. Dust puff on the dog’s flank. The calf weaves but the dog stays right behind it, hunkered down. The monkey draws cap pistols and fires them simultaneously. The dog goes into the air like a VTO aircraft.
INSTANT REPLAY: In slow motion, the monkey sets the pistols beside the dog’s ears and tugs the triggers. Smoke from the exploding caps. The dog half turns and sinks back on its haunches. He leaps straight into the air, twisting to snap at his tormentor. The monkey, saddle and stirrups, slide around to the dog’s belly. When the dog hits earth, he’s running for the far side of the arena. The monkey bounces along underneath, hindering him, making him buck. One swipe of his teeth severs the girth strap, and rider and saddle are dumped in the middle of the arena. The dog accelerates.
AUDIO: The audience is roaring with laughter and cheering. The laughter stops when the dog nears the bull-proof barrier. Everyone realizes that a bull-proof barrier is not necessarily a dog-proof barrier.
Though the barrier was six feet tall, Nop sailed clean over it. Left and right, people were falling off their seats and Nop went through that crowd like Israelites parting the Red Sea. Up, up the tiers. The camera zooming in and out of focus as it tracked the black-and-white streak. At the top of the coliseum he hurled himself down the aisle behind the very last row of seats, and people came out of their seats like cheese peeling away before the knife.
Pistols drawn, security guards race up the aisles. Nop dodges. Cornered, he jumps for a security man and twists by when the man raises his arms to guard his face. A cowboy lunges at him, misses and loses his Stetson. The hat sails away over row after row. Camera focuses on the cowboy, his outrage, his dismay.
Nop can’t find an exit. Since he hasn’t bitten anyone, his pursuers are emboldened, pulling at his fur, clutching for his neck, snatching at one flying leg. Nop disappears under three men, like a football pileup, but squirts out of the pile, unrecovered.
T. T. Raines and Good Ol’ Red wait in arena center, bellowing for the dog.
No luck in the stands, so Nop forces his failing legs down the wide aisle, full-tilt, feet speeding to keep up with his body.
Men beyond the bull-proof barrier, security men.
Once more Nop launches himself over the barrier, out, out, far above the packed earth of the arena. The camera zooms in to catch him, midflight, his tail arched over his back like a drag chute.
He hits, goes to his belly, spots an opening between Red and T.T.
T. T. Raines makes a heroic dive, wraps arms around Nop and clamps him fast. T.T.’s throat is right next to Nop’s foaming jaws but Nop must not bite man, must not bite!
The camera zooms back as the security men close in.
AUDIO: Announcer (VO): “Nobody hurt. (Chuckle) Except hurt pride.”
VIDEO: The camera shows us the cowboy climbing down the rows of seats to recover his hat. People are laughing at him. He’s burned up.
In the arena so many security men surround Nop, you can’t see the dog at all.
AUDIO: Announcer (VO): “Even the monkey got off with just scratches. The end of the Littlest Buckaroos. Kind of sad, isn’t it? We’ll be right back. Stay tuned for a look at spring training.”
VIDEO: Cut to commercial for a razor blade that gives a “macho sha
ve.”
Doug Whitenaur’s words chased each other out of his mouth, tumbling. “Him, that’s him. That’s the dog I was tellin’ you about. Lewis Burkholder’s Nop dog. Two times that dog beat my imported bitch. Five thousand dollars that dog’s worth and it’s in a rodeo. A rodeo, for God’s sake.”
Sandy said, “Mr. D. You may have a very great knowledge of these kind of dogs but how can you be sure that dog’s the five-thousand-dollar dog, huh?”
Hack swiveled his head like watching the ball at a tennis match.
“Because he beat me! That’s how! Five thousand dollars. If you want to own a dog that’ll run against that Nop dog, that’s what it’ll cost you. Did you see those brown patches behind his ears?”
Hack grinned. “That dog ain’t worth five cents. Not five cents. Dog runs loose like that they gas it. That dog might have bit somebody.”
“Aw, Hack,” Sandy said. “Who’s gonna hurt a dog like that?” He tossed off his drink and his ice cubes clinked against his teeth. “A valuable dog like that?”
Hack gave him the ha, ha. Hack couldn’t stand sentimentalists. “Maybe they don’t know that dog’s worth five large. Maybe they think that dog’s worth nothing.” The drink stirrers were little plastic devils. Hack picked his teeth with the tip of the devil’s tail.
Doug Whitenaur’s jaws wobbled. Dogs—he knew about dogs. Hack’s doubt was making him small. “I say that’s Nop. That’s the same dog Lewis Burkholder ran against me in Maryland. Five thousand dollars is what that dog’s worth.”
Hack was awfully bored with the discussion. He wanted to get at Sandy again. They had to decide the Toledo business. The job called for two men. “So buy the dog,” Hack said.
“What?”
Hack’s mouth curled and rolled like he wanted to spit. “You say the dog’s worth five thousand dollars. Fine. I believe you. ‘Deed I do. You think the rodeo’s gonna keep that dog after what he done? They’ll sell him for peanuts. The cops already tossed your place and came up empty. Do you think they’ll come back and toss you again?”