Bus Rider, Bull Rider

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence. – Mahatma Gandhi

Grace Shady was a care attendant at the assisted living facility who carried a treaty card from the Blackfeet reserve. 

I was born in Browning, Montana, she would say, and show her co-workers her card.

How did you get here, Reyes asked her?

I drove, she said.

Reyes thought that was very funny. Grace, he’d say, you are the most literal-minded person I have ever met. 

How did you get here, Grace asked Reyes.

Bus, he said. I ride the bus. 

Reyes was divorced from his second wife. He’d had a truck, an old Dodge. When he and the wife had separated, she took the Dodge, and the dog. He kept the lease on the apartment and they split the three-hundred dollars and thirty-five cents they had in their bank account with him keeping the odd penny.

I understand, he would say, if he was asked how he felt about it. I understand that the dog had to go with her. Someone has to feed it. But I miss that Dodge. Now I ride the bus.

Grace, Reyes said, will you give me a ride home after work tonight?

I work until eight she said. You’ll be waiting for two hours.

I don’t mind, he said.

Maybe not tonight, she said. The bus will be your friend tonight.

When he got home Reyes turned on the TV and muted the sound and watched cable news without paying any real attention until he fell asleep on the couch. When he woke up the next day the sun was shining brightly and the news cycle had repeated and was on the same story it had been on when he first turned on the TV.

At the facility he walked up to Grace and asked her: Have you ever seen a joust?

Grace thought about it before she replied.

No, she said. I have not. But I have heard about them.

Really, Reyes said? Who told you?

The sisters, Grace said. 

Ah, Reyes said.

The sisters were two Filipina sisters who worked in housekeeping. They had started coming to the jousts. All Reyes knew about them was that they shared a one-bedroom apartment and sent money back to family in the Philippines. They took every extra shift they could get. They had come to him a few days previous and said they had wanted a man named Smith to be put into the jousts. 

He is eighty years old, they said, and he said wants both of us to have sex with him at the same time. We laughed and said no. He’s not the first to ask. You know how these old men can be. The next time he offered us twenty dollars each. We just said no. You know that no one here has any money, because everything is paid for. Who has money? Enough already, old man. The next time he saw us he said we had to do it or he would tell management that we had stolen from him. He told us that if we were going to be bitches about it, we could pay him and this is how he would make sure of it. We reminded him that he had no money and he told us that he would be believed and we would not. He did complain to management. They did not believe him, because of course, the clients have no cash on them. But he did do what he said he’d do. So, put him into the jousts. 

Grace, Reyes said, give me a ride home and I will tell you about the jousts.

After work he met Grace and she drove him home in her truck. A dream catcher hung from the rear-view mirror.

This is a nice truck, Grace, Reyes said, I didn’t know anyone here made enough money to drive anything so nice. 

My son bought it for me, Grace said. Isn’t he the best son ever?

He is, Reyes agreed.

When they go to the parking lot of Reyes’s building Grace stopped the truck but left it running. She took her cell phone out of her purse and showed a picture on it to Reyes.

This is my son, she said. 

The boy had long braids and wore an immaculate black Stetson, blue jeans and tan boots and was smiling broadly. Reyes thought him one of those men whose strength is in their tendons, not their muscles, and that he looked as lean and strong as a new tow-rope.

He is a handsome young man, Reyes said. What does he do that he bought his mother a truck?

Well, Grace said, he gave me this truck when he bought a new one. It used to be his. He is a professional rodeo cowboy now, she said, a bull rider. He’s won in Cheyenne twice. This year he’ll be in the NRA finals in Las Vegas. I am going.   

She showed him another picture, this one of her son on the back of a wildly lunging bull, its hips way up in the air and it’s chin almost touching the ground. A great frothy spray of saliva had spun from the bull’s mouth with the centrifugal force generated by its animal strength. Her son, tied to the bull with rope by one hand, wore a helmet with a wire mask and what looked like a bullet-proof vest on his chest and held his other hand way above his head.

It looks dangerous, Reyes said. Is that why it pays well?

It is dangerous, Grace said. My son says he will probably die doing it some day. He says he doesn’t care. He told me that when he gave me the truck. He said the bulls will tell him when it’s time to quit. He says he never wants to do anything else, anyways. 

Will they give you time off, Reyes asked?

If they don’t, I will quit, Grace said. I’ve done it before, at other places. You can always get a job in another one of these places. Even here, they will probably take me back. Who else will they get?

Reyes nodded.

Tell me Reyes, she said, now that I have driven you home, what are these jousts?

You tell me first, Reyes said, which one of these old bastards treats you the worst?

Mr. Kroger, she said. He’s called me every name you can call a black or Asian person, but never an indigenous person. Every single name. It’s because he doesn’t know yet. You should hear what he says to Isaiah. You should have heard what he said to his son’s wife, who is Korean, but you can’t anymore because they don’t come anymore. Kroger is the worst person I have ever met in this place, and some of them are pretty bad.

#

Reyes’s method for arranging “jousts” was this: He’d find two men among the elderly patients who populated the assisted care facility who were being given Risperdal to control aggression associated with dementia. Old men in wheelchairs. Old men who were trouble to the staff. Then he would withhold their medication for a few days. Wednesday night after supper the two men would be wheeled down to the basement to joust. Each man would be placed in a wheelchair and secured at the waist with duct tape so they would not fall out easily, then given a hammer. Armed in this fashion, the senile men would be pushed as fast as possible towards each other by he and another porter he’d recruited, a much younger man named Isaiah. Isaiah had come from Liberia. He said in Liberia he’d seen dead people in the streets, and rats as big as dogs. He said that both were facts, and that the one fact could not exist without the other. 

There are lots of dead people in Liberia, Isaiah said. Lots. No one in Liberia gets so old as they do here. These men, he said, referring to the jousters, they better hope the rats don’t come here. You can’t even scare those rats off with a gun. They aren’t afraid of anything in this life or the next. They are what comes next. They will rule when we are gone. They are only waiting. 

When the old men, deprived of their minds, were in position and the joust began Reyes would shout at them: Swing those hammers you old motherfuckers, Reyes would shout. Swing, swing, swing.

Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t, but was more fun when they did. At first, it would only be Reyes and Isaiah and the men they’d co-opted as jousters. But Reyes extended an invitation to watch to others he felt could be trusted, and soon the basement was filled. There would be twenty people or more. Bets would be made. Money would change hands. Old men would bleed form their arms and thighs where their skin would crack in a shape like a hammer head or a hammer claw and they would curse and urinate on themselves but they could hardly be heard above the noise of their caretakers cheering.

#

What happens if someone dies from this, Grace asked?

No one has died so far, Reyes said. Besides, it’s an assisted care facility. Who stays here a year? Almost no one. They die all the time. We’ve decided that if someone does die, we’ll say it was from a fall. It happens.

Kroger, Grace said, and again, Kroger. 

Reyes thanked her for the ride. 

You have a wonderful son, he said, and she smiled.

Reyes thought for a moment that the man in the picture was not her son, could not be her son, but then there was the truck, so he thought it must be as she said. 

#

Reyes duct-taped Mr. Kroger into his seat and placed the hammer into his hand. He had to fold Kroger’s fingers over it to grip it, the man would not grasp it usefully on his own.

You see that man over there, he said to Kroger, pointing towards Smith across from them where Isaiah held the handles of the wheelchair Smith was in. That man says he’s going to kill you, Kroger. He says he’s going to beat you to death with a hammer. He says you deserve it. What are you going to do?

Kroger could not make any response at all. 

He’s the guy that shit in your diapers, Kroger, Reyes said. 

The assembled staff roared with laughter.. 

Kroger looked up at Reyes, red-eyed and confused, but for the briefest of moments he seemed to recover some kind of clarity, and was able to manifest some sort of intent. He swung his hammer at Reyes, weakly, but with malice. Reyes stepped back easily enough and at the end of the arc of the swing Kroger dropped the hammer.

I’ll kill you, you thieving son-of-a-bitch, Kroger hissed. 

The words were clear and a yellowish spittle flew from his lips when he said it. 

The staff roared louder than they had when Reyes had joked about Smith shitting in Kroger’s diapers. 

I believe you really mean that, you old pant-shitter, said Reyes, and he picked up the hammer and placed it in Kroger’s hand. Kroger, now returned to lost thoughts, held the hammer loosely and did not speak again.

Reyes did not know what Isaiah said to Smith to raise his ire. Smith held his hammer tight and spoke animatedly and glowered at he and Kroger, but Reyes was not a lip-reader and had no idea what the old man was saying.

They counted to three and each took three large and carefully practiced steps and sent Kroger and Smith rolling towards each other. Ideally each man would pass on the other’s left, and hopefully someone would swing. Wheelchairs are hard to keep straight and in the past some jousters had collided head on, or veered so wide that no contact was possible and they’d have to retrieve the jousters and try again. Because some of the staff attending in the basement are on duty there is only so much time for jousting before someone who might stop it notices the missing porters, aides, and housekeepers, so a good joust is not a guaranteed thing. But this time Kroger and Smith passed with in an inch of each other on their left sides as intended. Kroger, having found a thought again, remembered that he was left-handed and passed the hammer from right to left accordingly and backhanded Smith across the jaw with his hammer making a sound both soft and sharp at the same time, not unlike an egg being dropped on the floor. He dropped his hammer at the terminus of the blow and spun to a stop. Smith, whose head lolled to his right like a broken toy’s, also spun to a stop facing the other way, and the crowd roared and roared and Reyes thought shit, we’re going to be heard this time for sure and Kroger was searching around for his hammer and could not figure out why he could not get out of his wheelchair while the folded-up Smith hung his head over his lap with a spectacular string of blood and saliva stretching from his mouth to the floor. His face, different from what it had been minutes before, bore some strange rictus of expression and it could not be said for sure if he was laughing or crying. There was, in the air, the smell of feces.

Reyes looked over to Grace and the sisters. Grace had covered her mouth with her hand to hid her smile, and the sisters jumped up and down in each other’s arms. Isaiah was walking in a circle around the room high-fiving the watchers.  

Reyes looked at Grace and her joy and wanted to walk over to her and thank her for coming and for giving him Kroger because he thought he should thank her, that it was the right thing to do, but there wasn’t time and the crowd had started to mill around Kroger and Smith with their cellphones, taking pictures.

 We’ll be busted for sure Reyes thought, but they weren’t.

#

A few days after Kroger had smashed Smith’s face with a claw-hammer in the joust Reyes came to Grace.

Would you like to go out sometime, Reyes asked her? 

Grace thought before she answered. 

I am not saying yes, she said, but I am not saying no. I will think about it. 

Good enough, Reyes said. Let me know.

#

Sometimes someone would ask him: What do you do when you aren’t working?

Watch the news, Reyes would say. Politics, finance. I like stuff like that.

Sometimes someone would ask him: What is your dream job?

Hah, Reyes would say. There is no such thing. All jobs are jobs, or they’d be called fun. If someone talks to you about a job and tries to launder it as a purpose, they lie. We should only play. Anything other than play is subjugation.

Sometimes someone would ask him, at the jousts: Should we be doing this?

Should we be paid minimum wage, he would ask them in return, the absolute minimum allowed by law?

Of course not, his questioner would respond. We deserve more.

Oh no, Reyes would say. You are wrong. We should work for minimums, and they should swing the hammer. There will come a day when we will work for nothing, almost all of us, and we will be slaves in fact and not just in practice. Even then, in that last age of man, which will last in perpetuity, they still must swing the hammer. Do not be sentimental. They owe us.