CW: violence, death or dying, blood, bodily fluids, bodily harm.

We hear you laughing as you speed by on the interstate. In spite of what you might think of us, we are a proud town. We don’t need your understanding. We don’t explain. You couldn’t handle the answers.

Our roadside spite-shrines. The apocalyptic dioramas of our Creationist Museum. The glossolalia and gunfire at our drive-in revivals. The coyote skin pelts and skull-trees outside our double-wide doors. The burning effigies hanging from the overpass every Saturday night. You would do well to believe us when we show you who we are.

Why so many churches? For reasons that should be self-evident, every business that hasn’t shut down is also technically a church, every paycheck a prayer to an empty heaven.

What’s with all the motels? We have no attractions, no industries. Most of the year, they do good business because so many of us are fighting on any given night, and need a place to stay. We don’t believe in divorce. We bury our differences. When they can’t be resolved, we have a big dry riverbed just outside town.

A man who thought himself wise once said, “White men have ever made poor slaves.” The rich man laughs at this wisdom, for he knows you only need chains that look like weapons. Unemployment here never dips below forty percent. Our Mayor (unofficially but unequivocally elected in a biennial trial by ordeal, twelve years running) feeds us steaming platters of red meat, and none wonder where it came from until we try to sit down to eat it.

A deal with the state forces us to house all kinds of subhuman trash on supervised parole in the Gulch tenements, but they mostly stay out of sight. We don’t lock our doors at night. We dream of being robbed. We sleep in shifts, someone always watching with a cocked shotgun at the boarded-up windows of our mobile estates.

You might conclude from all this that we are broken and bitter, with nothing to offer the world. And fifty-one weeks out of the year, you might have a point.

But one summer solstice weekend, all the motels are full, the streets lined with RVs and horse trailers, the gutters clogged with minotaur shit. The weekend of the Rodeo, we welcome the world and celebrate who we truly are.

The Rodeo is a sacred anachronism. A church that answers prayers. Almost none of us can still afford horses. All the old ranches are subdivided into stucco shoeboxes and maximum-security apartment complexes. Our empty corrals are overgrown with alien weeds, rusty domestic trucks up on cinderblocks, dead satellite dishes, collapsed above-ground pools and broken trampolines that couldn’t keep our kids from fleeing to the city.

Damn right we cling to the old ways: frontier self-reliance, saddle-sore swagger and the right to terminal satisfaction. The best riders from all over the West come to compete in our shitsplat town because we are the last real old-time Rodeo on the circuit. If you can win here, you’ll never have to prove a goddamned thing to anyone ever again.

Thursday night, I wait in my Ford pickup after the bars are closed. No home to go to. Killed a bottle of mezcal and most of a case of Tecate, but I still can’t sleep. Tonight, while all the out-of-towners drink and pay off our gaping financial deficit, the most pivotal event of the Rodeo—of our year—is taking place. In a secret location, the aldermen are choosing our new Queen.

We cherish our flowers of young womanhood as only a town whose leading cause of death is Violence at the Hands of Spouse can. Our typical local girl knows our peculiar courting rituals by her first blood. She whets her appetite with flatland men and we suffer these dalliances, for we know how awfully hard our women are to satisfy, and how dangerous when vexed. One cannot scold the weather, and so we lament under our breath that even our best and brightest lacks the upper-body strength to bury her mistakes deep enough in the arroyo, that our storm drains are choked with all-too-identifiable corpses when flood season comes.

This is not a pageant. Look around. What about this place would lead you to believe we prize anything so weak and deceitful as beauty?

Our Queen isn’t the prettiest girl in town, nor the most promising student. She is our purity and our strength. Not even we could go so far as to describe our offspring as conventionally attractive, and not even the most biased, backwards tests we can devise would make them look smart. The pool of our once-heroic qualities has long since gone stagnant, but the best of us somehow finds its way, every year, into one worthy vessel we can proudly lift on our shoulders.

She is not just a symbol, but the rawboned incarnation of our core values. Every year the competition is fierce. After passing the medical and purity inspections, our candidates must slaughter a hog, ride and rope a steer, shoot a moving target, spit for distance and accuracy, and deliver the traditional speech, What Our Town Means to Me.

The athletic tests are empty spectacle, but the speech is what separates the gold from the brass, just as the virginity test winnowed wheat from chaff. The words are always the same, but it is in the straining, swollen silences between words when the girl fights to set fire to the boilerplate gibberish she has been forced to commit to memory, that we learn to love her, for it is in her struggle to convince us of what no being of flesh and bone could ever understand or accept, that she proves herself.

You wouldn’t know it to look at us, but we contain multitudes. We write heartbreaking poetry every night, only to crumple it up and eat it like sick dogs eat grass. We would sooner unfurl our intestines in public than share these pearls of naked grief, but when our Queen chokes out our draconian creed amid hot snotty tears, we are reborn.

Unless a perfect delivery of the words delivers a clear winner, the judges may only choose three finalists. The rest is for the bulls to decide.

The judges are harsh but fair, and blindfolded so as to be completely impartial. All of our judges have established their unimpeachable nature by submitting to have their eyes put out if they are caught cheating. Some barroom cynics insist they do it just for the money, but the office of Rodeo judge is next to clergy in our town, and wields far more power. Anyway, it’s not as if there’s ever much to look at.

The Queen’s duties are many and exacting, from the Spring Hair Harvest and the insemination of our Town Cow to the Xmas King of The Mountain battle and the arbitration of civil and criminal disputes outside the jurisdiction of our Sheriff. At the climax of her reign, the Queen stands for our town at the County Fair the following summer, and though only one of ours has ever won the beauty pageant there, she went on to be second runner-up for the statewide competition and might have won if she hadn’t gotten knocked up, might have been Miss America.

Like you, we were all created equal; but since work and the world left us behind, we are nothing without a title. We proudly waste the only wealth we have in empty vice and idle violence, but bow and scrape before cardboard royalty as if to a burning church. It takes money to make money, but pain is legal tender in these parts. Tonight, anyone can get rich.

I waste these pearls of wisdom on myself as I drink my last beer and wait for the roustabouts. I hear the horns echoing through the streets declaring a split decision and snort a packet of meth I’ve been saving. Just before eleven, the big stake-bed truck comes down Wintergarden, its spotlight sweeping the parked cars and storefronts where vagrants like to camp out.

I climb out of my pickup and go to the curb. I won’t make them beat me, won’t give them an excuse.

Looking around, I have to hang my head. Once, the clowns were trusties from the nearest prison, but the state was too precious about what kind of condition they came back in. Rootless, reckless men nobody will miss are our principal export. Time was, the clowns had to be flushed into the street. Flatland homeless from the city were coddled, fed on scraps and staked out on the corners every Rodeo weekend, for fear one of us would have to volunteer.

Now, there’s nothing but locals. Just on this block, three other candidates hop the fence and run out of the Stor-Ur-Self across the street. Two of them already bear the face tattoos of veteran clowns.

The roustabouts hood each of us in the traditional burlap sack with a clown’s face stenciled on it. All you can see is light or dark, stillness or motion. I keep count of the men who climb aboard. By the time the stake truck has made its circuit, there’s at least a baker’s dozen of us.

When there were only a handful of candidates for the three slots, tradition made this a mostly harmless ritual. But hard times have left so many men no one wants, that we compete fiercely for the job because of the pension it offers. Old Rodeo clowns are sacred cows in our town, and need never panhandle outside Lou’s Liquor World, dig in a dumpster, ride the snake or dance and burn themselves for drinks at the Shotgun Shack. We honor the veterans who serve in our war. The chosen ones will get medical attention, but like the spectators who inevitably get trampled or dragged behind monster trucks this high holiday weekend, the rest will have to endure the tender mercies of the wildcat paramedics conducting meatball surgery in motor homes in the parking lot.

The truck backs into the arena’s service entrance, and the tailgate is lowered. One man is so drunk, he keeps singing “El Paso” even after he trips and falls on me. The roustabouts are young honky-tonk trash, Rodeo washouts, aged-out orphans the Army wouldn’t take off our hands. A moon-faced goon helps us down off the truck and gently elbows us towards the gate. As each of us passes, he whispers, “Daddy?”

We march into the arena, blindly swinging the sawed-off baseball bats pressed into our hands. The recording of last year’s National Anthem squawks out of the loudspeakers. Our previous Queen struggles to hit that high note. A bunch of rookies stop, hands on hearts, unaware that the music covers up the sound of the bulls entering the arena.

A few cheers and shouts come from the stands. The breeders and some big-time speculators in bull-semen. The money that changes hands after the bulls have demonstrated their aggressive prowess dwarfs any of the purses the riders will vie for tomorrow. There used to be one bull, and the clowns competed to keep its attention. It was a dance, and the bull selected his favorites. But with so many vying to be clowns and so much money in the stud market, they now throw in three bulls.

The modern Rodeos stress the humane treatment of the bucking bulls, arguing that they are treated as athletes in their own right.

Bullshit.

We walk the walk. Our bulls have their own event. They are bred with all the care and worship we cannot give our children. Each is a perfect specimen in every way that we are not. This isn’t about us competing to be clowns. It’s about them competing to be the god of our town, and three flint-hard girls competing to be his Queen.

This year’s odds-on favorite is Nimrod, a two-thousand-pound, four-year-old Plummer-lineage Brahman crossed with a red heifer from stock bred by evangelical Christians in Israel to fulfill a prophecy of the apocalypse. Nimrod made the weekly newsletter when he gored his owner at the 4H show. Recovering from a punctured lung and groin in the urgent care clinic, unmanned at fifteen by the nearest thing the boy would ever have to a child, the kid bawled his eyes out for Nimrod’s life to be spared.

The bulls make this event the most dramatic and entertaining part of our Rodeo, and it is almost a shame that only the bull-breeders and the inner circle get to see it.

They come stampeding in, each with a blindfolded girl strapped into a saddle on their bulging backs. This weekend, these beasts will buck and trample the finest riders in the sport, reducing them to crippled husks; but they prance tonight like show ponies, gently bearing the flowers of our young womanhood as if they instinctually have a sensitivity we lack.

The other clowns blunder into each other. The music dies away and what sounds like a dozen bulls comes thundering among us. These disinherited sodbusters and flatlanders from the city never catch on to how the game is played. While they’re still poleaxed, I throw an elbow into one’s throat and shoot the fat end of my bat into his kidney, swing wild at another’s head.

Someone screams high and hard—not just in pitch, but in altitude, his voice seeming to loft up into the moth-crazed sky above the floodlights. A thin cheer comes from the bleachers and the box seats. They shout his name.

Nimrod snorts and prances ’round the ring with the howling man gored on his horns. The girl on his back squeals as he takes off after another one, and my heart almost stops.

The amateurs are being routed. They dart and dodge and clash blindly. Some try to fight the bulls. Hitting them with the bats just makes them madder. One tries to climb the wrong fence and gets electrocuted. Jolted back into the dirt, he gets trampled. Another one gets gored, then slammed into the fence and dangles from it until he starts to smolder, and a roustabout pokes him loose with a cattle prod.

The rookies cartwheel and cut capers for the crowd even as they’re mowed down. They think this is an audition. The veteran clowns know the score. Run for your life, hooting and shouting for the barricades at the foot of the boxes, finding them by muscle memory or echolocation. I follow them, always keeping one between me and the nearest bull. The cheering is louder and closer, just above my head. Close enough for me to recognize half the voices.

For the first time in I don’t know how long, I feel peace. I am home. I know every sound, every smell. I got thrown off a bronco and broke my collarbone here. I remember it more vividly than the home I used to have, before I fucked it all up.

I run until I hit a barricade with my shoulder. My arm goes numb and I drop my bat. I trip on a tangle of legs and fall in the lap of a wheezing man. A bull crashes into the barricade, grunts and paws the ground, charges off.

“Get up, pard,” a man says, lifting me up and pressing my bat into my hands. I jab him in the breadbasket and crack the bat over his head. I stand as he sinks, taking his weapon out of his spasming hands.

Bang the steel bars of the outer wall and run. Two bulls converge on the good Samaritan, lock horns and battle as they trample him to jelly. The girls riding them shout, “Who’s Horny?”—our unofficial school slogan—and the crowd, such as it is, goes wild.

Half the candidates eliminated and at least one of the vets. Just stay on your feet, play it safe and let the rest take themselves out. Now you can relax.

The Mayor bellows over the PA that the bulls are tied between Nimrod and Hell Awaits. Using the cheers as a polestar, I cross the arena, thumping anyone I run into and clapping my hands to draw the bulls. Two come thundering up and I roll on my shoulder and dive when a horn rips the shirt and half the skin off my back. Feeling the deeper, softer dirt of the arena’s center under my feet, I bounce up and run in circles. A bull charges from my left. I throw dirt in his face and spin like a toreador, clapping and swinging my hips and calling for Nimrod.

I can’t hear anything else moving on two legs. Snorting, pawing the earth, shaking the dying man still impaled on his horns, Nimrod comes for me.

The ground throbs like an approaching train. I cartwheel out of the way at the last second, then break for the barricade under the VIP box. I hit it with both bulls hot on my heels. A rough, callused hand reaches out to shove me back down. I grab it and tug it off balance, climbing up as I throw the man down to be trampled.

I jump from the barricade just as they throw the switch. The jolt sends me ass over teakettle back into the arena. I call for Nimrod even as I feel the ground tremble, even as his horns loft me into the air. I get so close I can smell her hairspray, her perfume. My heart hammers its way out of my chest. I can’t feel my left arm. I try to tell her—

I’ve never been in an airplane, but tonight, I know what it’s like to fly.

Air horns blow. Sirens blare. I made it. The rest of the bulls retreat into the chutes, but the roustabouts cull Nimrod, keeping him at bay with cattle prods so they can assist their new Queen as she dismounts.

I get up and walk off the shock, wobbling but unbroken. My heart is pounding triple-time. My broken ribs grate together like knives. I’m so goddamned proud I almost forget to take the box cutter out of my boot.

Almost.

I don’t need to see the ceremony. The Mayor kneels before the new Queen as she is crowned by her predecessor. Nimrod is yoked and led to the box. The new-crowned Queen, in turn, crowns her champion. He paws and snorts, but he bows meekly to accept her touch. She is truly our Queen, and he knows it. She will be symbolically married to the bull this weekend. She will propagate his seed, and the cycle of the year will begin anew.

Nobody looks at the battered clown wobbling across the arena. The whole world dials down to the girl and the bull as she places her hand on the platter of bony expanse between his fiery eyes.

Nobody notices me until I’ve come up behind Nimrod. Just like I did it in ag class in high school and 4H, and summers on the Mayor’s stud farm. The blade extrudes and I gently stroke Nimrod’s flank, take the turgid purse of his testicles in one hand and slash it, then draw out the testes and sever them.

Nimrod springs like a one-ton flea. Bucking and thrashing, blood sluicing out of his empty sac. I roll away and fling the testes into the stands just as the roustabouts come down on me like a six-fingered fist.

Someone comes over and kicks me a few times, then spits tobacco on my mask. Someone else kneels over me to rip it off. I try to smile for our Mayor, his droopy face jigsawed with the scars of past elections, nary a splinter of the handsome young buck who never learned how to use a condom.

The last one to get their licks in, the only one who hurts me, is our Queen. Her wounded expression scars me far more deeply, but I know someday she’ll understand what I tried to do for her. But now, she has to be dragged away before she breaks her foot on my face.

“Why!” she screams in a venomous wail. “Why do you have to wreck everything, Mom?”