Uncertain Ground by Carolyn Osborn Page A

has to tell him. Otherwise he’d wear a derby hat and a bathing suit to a football game. Wouldn’t you, Marion?”
    Everyone laughed, even Marion who evidently didn’t like it but was used to being teased.
    We drove across the causeway to a dusty little arena outside Texas City, arrived between events, and found a small crowd scattered over sagging gray bleachers. The Galveston group laughed at the sight of these people gazing so intently toward the empty space in front of them. They laughed at everything. We climbed on the bleachers and found seats. Emmett sat apart again, his elbows on his knees, his hat on hishead. We were all steadily drinking beer from big paper cups.
    “Oh, my God!” Roby exclaimed when the barrel races began. “What are they going to do now?”
    “They ride around the barrels in figure eights. Girls do it. They ride for time.”
    “Have you ever—?” Roby asked.
    I looked over at Emmett wondering if he was thinking of Doris Lacey. He was staring blankly toward the arena. He wasn’t missing anybody.
    I shook my head in answer to Roby. “Emmett’s the one that rides, remember?”
    “Yeah. What does he ride?”
    “Saddle broncs.”
    “And falls off.”
    “Sometimes.” I almost felt sorry for Emmett although he wasn’t really paying attention to any of them. Every once in a while Jane would take his cup and refill it with beer when she was refilling hers. Roby had stowed a cooler full of cans in his car’s trunk.
    “What a lot of dust!” Marion, sitting by Roby’s far side, coughed.
    It was a scruffy little rodeo. There was no band, no real announcer, just a man with a mike, and not many people watching. The bleachers were so full of splinters they must have been sitting out in the rain for years. Where did they get the stock? I turned to ask Emmett. Where had he gone? He’d promised me he wouldn’t ride, had complained he was still too sore.
    I stood up and stared toward the pens where the horses and bulls were kept. Yes. There was Emmett in his green plaid shirt, his straw hat which, like his winter Stetson, had been steamed and shaped according to his instructions. Shaping a hat was a ritual performed in the store every time he bought a new one. He took better care of his hats than he did of himself.
    Jane eased over next to me. “He’s going to ride, isn’t he?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe he’s just looking at the stock. He’s still pretty sore from riding last weekend.” I sat back down. It looked as if he was going to ride after all, and if he’d decided to, there was no way I could stop him.
    He was the third one out of the gate.
    “My God, what is he doing to the horse?” Roby asked.
    “Spurring him. It’s part of it. They have to rowel the horses to make them buck.”
    He clung to a small dun-colored quarter horse that was doubled up under him. The number 251 showed black against a square of white on back of his shirt. The dun jolted up, then down, and up again. Emmett lasted one minute, forty seconds according to the man with the mike. “Too bad, Buddy,” he added in the off-hand way rodeo announcers generally did.
    Emmett lay sprawled in the dirt. I hoped he was conscious.
    Marion said, “Is he going to get up?”
    Roby looked at him with his mouth open mocking him. “Of course, he is! For God’s sake, Marion!”
    Leslie handed me another cup of beer. “You want to save this for Emmett? I bet he’s really going to be sore now.”
    I was furious at him for hurting himself again, for being such a willing fool.
    “No,” I said, “I don’t want to reward him.”
    “Here,” said Jane in her lazy voice, “give it to me. I’ll save it for the boy.”
    The two of them spent the rest of the night getting drunk together, first hilariously—Jane wore Emmett’s hat at this stage—then sadly. She sat in the back seat on Emmett’s lap and cried while Roby drove us all back to Galveston.
    He seemed to be sober when we all knew he wasn’t. He drove almost