Home Grown (Country Cowboy Chronicles #4)

1. Perry

Perry

The kid in chute three is going to be sick, and I don’t blame him one bit.

I know the look. Barely eighteen-years-old, green as spring hay, knuckles gone white on the rail, staring down at seventeen hundred pounds of bull like the animal has informed him he’s gonna lose.

First pro rodeo. You can spot the rookies from the parking lot. New rope, stiff chaps, boots without a single good story worn into them yet.

I climb up beside him on the back of the chute, no hurry, and hook my elbows over the top rail like we’ve got all night.

“You’re Dell’s boy,” I say. “Cody, right?”

He nods. Can’t find his voice. His bull, a black brindle called Roadhouse, shifts under him and the kid’s whole body locks up.

“Don’t grip the rail,” I tell him. “That grip’ll cost you when you need the hand. Breathe out. All the way out. He can feel you holding your breath. Makes him mean.”

“You Perry Sterling?”

“Last I checked.”

His eyes go wide as a heifer’s. “My daddy’s got your poster.”

“Your daddy has questionable taste.”

I walk him through it. Chin down, free arm up, spurs turned out. Ride the front end and let the back end buck itself out.

“Eight seconds” I tell him. “That’s all you need.”

That’s the whole religion out here. Eight seconds between a man and everything he drove twelve hundred miles to reach. A buckle. A check. The roar of a town that won’t remember his name next week.

Roadhouse settles a hair. So does the kid.

“There,” I say. “He’s not trying to kill you. He’s trying to win. Same as you. Respect that and you’ll be fine.”

“What if I’m not fine?”

“Then you land soft, you tip your hat, and you climb the fence and do it again next weekend.” I clap his shoulder. “Nobody good ever came off a bull clean the first time. I ate dirt in Abilene so hard my mama felt it back in South Carolina.”

He laughs a shaky laugh but at least he’s more relaxed.

I pull a single Pringles out of the red can I keep in my back pocket. “You want one?” I offer the kid.

He nods.

“Open up, buddy.”

He opens his mouth and I toss the potato chip in. He chews and I can tell when the salt rush hits him. He straightens his shoulders.

“You got this,” I tell him, the same way my best friend Kendrick been telling me for years. He was the one who discovered the secret of Pringles right before a run.

He calls them my emotional-support snack.

The gate man looks at me. I look at the kid.

“Nod when you’re ready,” I say. “Not a second before.”

Cody breathes out. All the way out. Then he nods.

The gate swings and Roadhouse blows out of there like a thundercloud grew hooves. The kid stays on him, hanging half off the side, but he stays.

Four seconds. Six. The buzzer goes and Cody comes off in a heap and pops up covered in arena mud with both fists over his head.

I whoop loud enough to lose my voice. Then I pop an emotional- support Pringles in my mouth and head over to my chute.

“You gonna adopt that one too?”

Kendrick leans on the fence beside me, hat tipped back, chewing a straw down to nothing. Best friend I’ve had since we were knee-high to a fence post, and the only man on this circuit who travels three hundred days a year for the privilege of telling me I’m an idiot.

“He’s got heart,” I say.

“He’s got a concussion.”

“That too.”

Kendrick and I grew up on the same red-dirt road outside Langston, South Carolina.

His people have wrangled horses for generations.

Mine, the Sterlings, have owned and run Jubilee Hill Farm even longer than that. The farm is big enough to get lost on and old enough to have its own ghosts.

We talking ancestors who came over on ships and survived the Middle Passage, the cotton fields, and every damn thing since.

Three Sterling boys. Herc the oldest, born serious. Axe in the middle, born wild. And me.

I never did settle what I was born. Fun, I guess. The baby. The one who could talk a teacher out of a detention and a girl out of a bad mood, and, twelve years back, talk himself right out of Langston and onto the circuit before the ink dried on the diploma.

Kendrick came with me. Said somebody had to keep me alive. He’s mostly right.

“Draw sheet’s up,” he says. “You want the good news or the bad news.”

“Same news, knowing my luck.”

“You drew Diesel.”

I grin before I can help it. Diesel is two thousand pounds of grudge with a brand on his hip. He’s thrown his last four riders and sent one of them home in a sling. Nobody’s covered him all season. Whoever does will mark high enough to move the standings.

“That’s the good news and the bad news,” I say.

“That’s the whole newspaper.”

My phone buzzes in my vest pocket. I dig it out. Mama.

I pin it to my ear, eyes still on the chutes. “Vivian Sterling. To what do I owe the honor.”

“Are you about to ride?” My mother’s voice comes warm and sharp at once, same as ever.

“Half hour out.”

“Then I’ll be quick. Your brother’s getting married.”

“Which one? Hard to keep track since they both lost their minds this year.”

“Axe. Sienna said yes out on the mud track, if you can believe it. Ring and all, both of them filthy to the eyebrows.” I hear her smile and her excitement. No one thought anyone could ever tame Axe.

He’s the brother who put mud-dogging on the map for our county. Shoot, our entire state. If he’s not dirty, he’s not happy.

I hold up a hand at Kendrick. Got to let Mama finish her news.

“And Herc’s fighting Sasha over a guest list for their wedding. I swear all I wanted was one son to settle down and now I got two. Speaking of which…”

“I won’t be making that three anytime soon, Ma, so stop while you’re ahead.”

Her chuckle puts a smile on my face.

“The whole family’s gone and grown without me.”

“Somebody had to.” She lets a beat pass. “You coming home for it?”

There it is. The question under the question.

“Wouldn’t miss it, Mama.”

“That’s not what I asked. I asked are you coming home.”

I watch as Cody gets slapped on the back by three men who’ll buy his beer tonight. The arena lights are calling me. The old restlessness turns over in me like an engine that won’t quite quit.

“Season’s not done,” I say. “I’m sitting third in the standings. I win here and Amarillo, I’m riding for a world title come December. First Sterling to ever do it.”

I don’t say the rest of it out loud. First thing I’d ever have done that my daddy didn’t do first, and better.

“Then I’ll come home,” I say. “I promise.”

Mama’s quiet a second. My daddy’s been gone twenty-four years and she still lets a silence sit like he might be the one to fill it.

“You’ve been promising to come home since you were nineteen,” she says. No heat in it. Just true. “One of these days, baby, home’s going to quit waiting up.”

“I was just there a few months ago. I’ll be back when the season is done. Besides, home’s got you in it. I always return.”

“Don’t you charm me, Pericles.” But her voice softens. “Ride safe. Call me after.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

We hang up. I stand there a minute with the phone warm in my hand.

Then I do the thing I never let the boys catch me at. I reach into my back jeans pocket — the one that doesn’t hold the Pringles can — and check that it’s still there.

A paperback, spine soft and white, folded open to the page I left off. Louis L’Amour. The one where a drifter with no name and no people buys a worn-out ranch nobody else will touch, and stays, and makes it his.

Four times I’ve read it. My favorite. I’d sooner get stomped flat than let a soul on this circuit know I read to relax.

A bull rider who reads Westerns in truck stops at two in the morning. That doesn’t fit the poster. So I keep the book in my back pocket and my mouth shut, and I let everybody have the Perry they paid to see.

I slide it back. Squared away.

“Sterling.” The chute boss waves me over. “You’re up. Diesel’s loaded.”

I roll my shoulders to wake up my blood. Then I crack my knuckles twice to make sure my fingers are loose.

I climb the chute and lower onto Diesel. He shifts under me and the planks knock together. I wrap my rope once, twice, pound my fist shut over the tail. Kendrick’s up on the rail above me, and every joke has gone out of his face now. He puts a Pringle chip in my mouth.

I chew the salty flavor into my veins.

“You got him?” he asks.

“I got him.”

I tug my hat down and find my seat, chin down, free hand cocked. Somewhere behind me a whole grandstand chants a name, and the name is mine, and for one clean second the world is exactly the size I want it.

I could ride him in my sleep. That’s the thought I climb on with.

I nod.

The gate swings.

Diesel comes out sideways. He’s not a bull that runs. He’s a bull that argues.

The first jump snaps my spine to a rod. The second throws my hips back and I ride the throw, chin tucked, spurs high, free arm carving air.

The roar drops away underwater. There’s the bull and the count ticking in my ribs and nothing else God made. Three seconds gone, and I’ve got him. Four, and I’m sure of it.

He spins left, plants, reverses.

The reverse is the whole trap.

My weight commits one way and his goes the other, and for half a breath I’m a passenger on nothing but air.

Five seconds in, my riding hand jams deep in the wrap. I know it before I understand it, that ugly hitch of a hand that won’t turn loose.

Six, and Diesel drops his front end, fires his hind legs at the lights, and I pitch over his shoulder with my arm still knotted to the meanest animal in three counties.

The dirt comes up hard.

I land on my side. My ribs fold like a bad hand of cards. A hoof catches the outside of my knee and grinds down, and something in there gives with a sound I’ve got no name for.

A man screams my name. It isn’t me. My air left when the ground arrived.

Then hands on my vest. I hear Kendrick’s voice saying, “I got you.”

The bullfighters run Diesel off to go be somebody else’s problem. A medic drops beside me and presses two fingers under my jaw and asks a question I can hear and can’t answer.

I look up at the arena lights smearing into halos.

Twelve years I’ve been telling my mother I’ll come home when the season’s done.

Turns out the season’s done.