Cry Macho

by N. Richard Nash

Genres: Media Tie-In; Westerns; Thrillers

Synopsis

Now a major motion picture directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, a riveting novel of an aging rodeo star's last ride.

Mike's best years are behind him. There was a time when he was the best rider in the circuit, but a divorce and years of hard living have worn his body down. After an accident, his career comes to an abrupt end, but his boss gives him one last job: he must cross the border into Mexico, kidnap his boss’s son, Rafo, from his boss’s ex-wife, to be used as leverage in their ongoing divorce. Mike arrives to find the boy has already run away, and his plan is immediately exposed to the local police. When he finds Rafo living on the streets of Mexico city, supporting himself though petty crime and winnings from the occasional cockfight, Mike convinces the boy to come back to Texas. Still running from the law, the two set out on a journey northward that forges an unlikely friendship and forces both to reckon with the choices they’ve made in pursuit of being “macho.” Originally published in 1976, N. Richard Nash's novel of friendship and the search for identity is now being adapted for the big screen.

Release date: September 14, 2021

Publisher: Penguin Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

He was not yet within sight of the ravine when Mike heard the first shot. Somebody had once told him—was it Howard?—that when the Mexican police shoot, the first shot is a boast, the second a bullet. But these were not Mexico City police, they were national patrolmen and the first shot was no boast. The slug cracked through the rear window of the truck and through the upholstery of the right-hand seat. If Rafo had been in it, he’d be dead. But they weren’t shooting at the kid, it was Mike they wanted. Yet, they had charges against the boy as well, and since this was their last chance at him . . .

He let up slightly on the accelerator so he could slam it again and surge into overdrive. He was maintaining his distance from the patrol car, but it wasn’t good enough. If he made it to the ravine, he’d have to slow down and he’d lose too much of his lead.

A second shot. Almost like the first—through the rear window, through the seat. At Rafo.

He’s only eleven years old, you bastards, stop shooting at the boy!

The boy who wasn’t there. What a turn the trick had taken, so perverse. Everything since his first meeting with the kid, everything perverse.

Two shots, almost together. Closer to Mike this time. So it wasn’t the boy they were going for. Get the gringo. Plug him before he makes the border, splatter him down the ravine.

The ravine mightn’t be there. Maybe he was remembering it all wrong—the Mexican road was unfamiliar. He knew the arroyo only on the Texas side; the terrain on this side looked different. The main difference, he knew, was in him: he felt that Mexico was a place he could too easily be caught in, found. And in Texas he could get lost . . . if that was what he wanted.

A shot. Another. Each one, closer.

If he could only be sure the kid would be all right. No certainty of that, especially if Mike himself didn’t get away. Whatever happened to Rafo, he’d never know. Never know whether the boy would get anywhere safely, what road he’d take, what home he would finally choose. Mexico City or Janasco? Go to Marta, Mike found himself saying, as if the boy were an arm’s length away; go to the sweet town of Janasco—it was rainbow’s end, it was paradise.

If it was paradise, why hadn’t Mike himself chosen it? Paradise, he recalled as the shots were getting closer, was where you went after death, the exclusive abode of the departed. And he was not yet eligible.

 

1

Three months earlier . . .

---

•   •   •

His arm hurt like hell and the phone was ringing. Let them ring, the impatient sons of bitches, he’d be no good to anybody until he got rid of the pain.

He put the compress back into the tin basin of hot water, wrung it out and applied it again. The water was cooling down and he debated whether to toss it out and start over or put some liniment on the arm. He decided against the liniment—it would stink and they’d smell it and ask questions. In the earlier days he could bathe in the stuff and if he came in reeking it wouldn’t matter. But now they would take a whiff and give him sympathy and considerate glances. Then, behind his back, they’d lift their eyebrows and make bets on how soon a wild horse would break his neck.

The phone stopped ringing and he had only the ache to make him angry. He wondered if he should take a pill. No, he didn’t dare. It would slow him down all afternoon or, worse, throw him off the rhythm of some bronc or other and, a hundred feet across the arena, he’d be on his butt. Besides, the pill didn’t do any good. He had taken one last night and, against doctor’s orders, a second one, but instead of killing the pain they had given him bad dreams.

He’d have to find another doctor. Somebody who’d give him a powerful injection and presto, the pain would be gone. Tennis elbow—what a ridiculous label to put on an ache like this. Mike resented it. It sounded too fancy, too phony for a man like himself. It certainly gave no hint of this murderous torture, from the shoulder to the fingertips in every muscle, nerve, bone. Yes, he’d have to see another doctor, but he dreaded that the new one might call it exactly what Mike suspected it to be—arthritis—and he didn’t think he could stand that word. It meant middle age and there was no such thing as a middle-aged rodeo star.

The pangs were getting worse, sharp seizures now, clutching the whole arm, stabbing, paralyzing it. He opened the little box and looked at the tiny triangular yellow pills—but, without taking one, shut the box again.

That thing last night, that miserable nameless thing. He knew the pills had done it because the search persisted until they wore off. Two hours after he had gone to bed he got up again and, strangely reluctant to turn the lights on, wandered around in the dark. There was something missing, whatever it was, something he suspected he had lost. He had rooted in the darkness at first as if an absence of light had nothing to do with finding anything. Then he turned the lights on, every blazing light in the apartment, and hunted everywhere—and as he became less certain what he was ferreting around for, he became more fixed on finding it. Finally, searching systematically, closet by closet and drawer by drawer, wondering who had robbed him of what, and how he might recover it, he realized he was dead tired. It was daylight when the urgency of the search diminished, and he knew he’d been doing a weird thing. He went to bed again but couldn’t sleep because the pain wouldn’t stop.

Now the phone was ringing again. He shouted at the clanging instrument. Shut up! When did I ever miss a show? I’ll be in and riding—any wildcock horse you’ve got!—and the crowds’ll get their guns off yelling Milo, Mike Milo! Quit it—I’m coming in!

Where else would he spend the afternoon? Not here in the apartment, certainly; the place depressed him. He had furnished it all wrong—he had been in a nightmare when he did it, he was a zombie. When it was just completed Donna had come visiting and, taking one look at the living room, had called it ruttishly masculine. From that time on he was embarrassed by the steer horns on the wall, by the horseshoe bookends, the rodeo posters, the trophies in the glass case. Yet he never changed anything—it was like a penance for a period in his life he hadn’t yet fully paid for.

What he disliked most about the apartment was that it had never given him a quite place to read in. Not that he was a fervent reader anymore; those days were over—it was a comic inconsistency, the cowboy with his nose in a book, like wearing horn-rimmed spectacles while breaking a bronc. But sometimes he got a hunger, an emptiness . . . and the place wouldn’t let him read. It hadn’t anything to do with the fact that he didn’t have the right chair or the right light or that the bookshelves were too high on the walls. It was something hostile in the room, something that forbade him to sit in a chair and think . . . or simply to remember. The apartment barely allowed him to worry the single thought: nightmare or not, what had ever driven him to decorate his home this way? What man was in his mind when he did it?

The pain, moving, now had centered in his forearm; all the aches had congregated there. He massaged it with his left hand, kneading it a little, but with no relief, so he struck his fist against the muscle, he pounded, pummeled it, raging. Should he take the pill? About to do so, deciding against it, unable to make up his mind, he threw the pillbox across the room and started beating on his arm again. The basin fell and the water spilled. His breath was coming too fast for him to keep up with it. The phone continued ringing and he kept trying to hurt his arm so it would stop hurting and he didn’t know whether he could cope with the two hurts at once.

Then the phone stopped. The room was still. He could stand neither pain now, and he could barely stand the stillness.

---

•   •   •

If he drove with his left hand on the wheel and allowed his right arm to hang limp, the ache was now barely perceptible. There was a worse nuisance: the noise of the car. It was a sports car, a Porsche convertible. When it was new he had admired its boasting roar, but recently the rumble had changed to a racket. Well, it had a right—it was now nearly six years old and, it seemed to Mike, an old sports car was a contradiction in terms.

As he turned into Galveston Street and joined the heavier traffic bound for the stadium, Mike saw him. Howard Polk, also driving a convertible, a new one, a big custom-built Mercedes, specially designed and painted. It was unusually burnished, both copper and gray, like a fresh bullet. But Mike guessed it had been matched not to a bullet but to the color of the owner’s hair, the vain bastard.

It was disturbing to see Polk. The man never came to a Sunday matinee, he was a night person. He’d have stayed away from the evening shows too, Mike realized, if he didn’t own them all; he was an Easterner as if by baptism and was caustic about cowboys, the rodeo and Texas.

Polk’s presence today meant a nuisance. Somebody had called him—the chute boss, perhaps, or Andy the doorman—and told him Mike hadn’t appeared. The owner would be cold-angry and ready for battle. Someday, Mike thought, I’ll get him hot enough to hit me and then . . . Mike clenched the fist of his bad arm and it hurt with a spiteful pleasure.

Howard’s car was zigzagging through traffic, outstripping him. Clearly, he had no notion Mike was behind him; he didn’t look in his rearview mirror—let the others watch him. The next minute, Howard’s car made the turn into the stadium alley as Mike was stopped by the traffic light directly outside the arena.

The crowds were crossing from the parking lot. They always seemed happier on Sunday, and louder. The hawkers were louder too—programs, balloons, hot dogs—almost drowning out the taped music of folk-rock-country and the loudspeakers over it, telling the audience the show was about to begin.

The huge overriding banner—Polk’s Cow Stadium, in shiny psychedelic silks—snapped in the wind. It forced the eye from the parking lot to the two entry arcades between which hung the enormous poster photograph of Mike, a full shot on a rearing bronc, with the hat aloft and the plastic grin of the witless cowboy.

He had trained himself never to notice the picture. It had been taken before he came here, during his last year of competition. It had been a terrible year—he had won little money and no prizes. Twice he’d been hurt—a fractured leg, then a broken kneecap. Every horse was beginning to look like disaster, the drives between arena towns seemed to be taking longer, each motel room meant a little more sleeplessness than the one before, and a little more bourbon. The fear and the night sweats.

Then he had heard from the Macmillan Brothers. They owned a stadium too large in a town too small. The major cities were drawing the major rodeos and whatever attractions the Macmillans could entice came so irregularly that they couldn’t build an audience. The arena was dying. Carly, the oldest of the brothers, had the idea to establish a resident rodeo company. Although it had been tried elsewhere without dizzying success, Carly thought he could make it work.

Eighteen months after Mike became a salaried rider in the resident rodeo, the company collapsed and the stadium was a prey to its mortgage holder.

The mortgage holder was Polk.

For Howard Polk, the New York-tailored, Ivy-educated tenderfoot, to take over the management of a rodeo was worse than arrogance; it was stupidity. Everybody said so. He didn’t even know the words. He said bronco instead of bronc, rigging instead of riggin’, and he called the cattle pens paddocks. But within two years, the resident company was giving performances not only on weekends but every night except Monday.

That Howard was able to make a success of the rodeo should have endeared him to the men, but they hated him. Only Clyde, his straw boss and toady, defended him. “Thanks to Polk, we got more horses and less horseshit.”

That was it. He swept away the lies the cowboys told themselves, he cleaned house of illusion. They wanted to think of themselves as cowboy heroes, competing in the big time, National Finals contenders. But Howard jeered at them: if they really wanted the big time, they’d do the competitive circuit; since they were still here, securely under salary, they hadn’t the talent or the guts for the killing competition. No, they were not cowboy heroes—Howard made a needling point of it—they were actors. The men felt naked. Changing a Texas rodeo into a Broadway theater was like tearing away their spurred boots and giving them dancing shoes.

It started with the sign-in. Hardly a month after Polk took over the stadium, he told the men that the habit of lateness had to stop. The cowpunchers, like extras in a musical, would have to sign an attendance ledger at half hour. The men fumed and cursed, they spat tobacco juice behind his back. And complied.

But Mike Milo didn’t raise one finger of objection; he simply never signed the ledger. It surprised him that Howard didn’t call him to account for it, but he knew that sooner or later the thin-lipped man would have his retaliation.

It came in the form of a salary cut. Everybody got it, a twenty-five percent slash, take it or go. Nobody went. The cut bothered Mike, but the thought of going back into competition bothered him more; he too stayed. He thought Howard wanted him to leave; to the owner he was a wayward horse, unevenly broken. Neither man, however, jarred the equilibrium: Howard didn’t fire him and Mike accepted the cut. And each of them took it as a sign of the other’s weakness.

Howard was a puzzle to Mike. Sometimes he thought of him as a dilettante, playing the rodeo like a parlor game. Then he saw him as a driven and dangerous man, fanatic to make a success where all odds foretold failure, clinging desperately to a handhold on some runaway wealth. The latter view was probably more accurate; there had been rumors of a divorced wife who had somehow swindled him out of a considerable fortune. A vindictive woman, somewhere in Mexico, violent.

The worst part of Mike’s bafflement was that he didn’t know how he really felt about his boss. Just as he’d start respecting Polk—his imagination, his competence—he’d find himself repelled by him. He even distrusted Howard’s honesty, for the man used frankness to cut people down; his honesty was a vice.

One of their earliest skirmishes was over nothing, over a word. Howard was a word man, insolent about his facility with language, mouth proud. But even learning the new words didn’t seem to give him a clue to the real language of the cowboys. He’d enter a conversation—they’d be talking about something simple, the weight of a catch rope—and the men would look vacantly at him as if they didn’t understand anything he said. He knew there was a secret to the cowboys’ jargon, but he was humiliatingly out of it.

Mike could have let him in. The secret of the men’s lingo was one word. It might be spoken or it might be tacit, but it was always there: cock. Even if the cowpunchers weren’t talking about women, not even thinking about them, it was the password of their communion. A bad horse was a dirt-fucker, a good one was a sweetcock even if it was a mare; a bottle of sour mash didn’t go to a man’s head or his stomach, it went to his wangdang; and for a hangover a cup of black coffee was a jockstrap. Behind the word was an unspoken pact: they gave one another credit for prowess. It was a credit they didn’t give Howard. Without it, he had no open sesame to their language.

Rankling because they excluded him from their secret speech, Howard invented his own. He coined a vocabulary of nicknames. He gave the men labels they didn’t understand and made them answer to their misnomers, no matter how patronizing or insulting they were. Clyde, for example, he called Greedge, a shortening of Egregious Ass. Old Andy, the doorman, who moved too slowly for Howard’s taste and was the essence of Decrepitude, he called Deak. And it delighted him, as it annoyed Mike, that the men, even when they learned the meanings of the made-up names, started using them among themselves.

One day Mike gave Howard his comeuppance. The man was always treating him as an illiterate, the way he treated the others. So far, he hadn’t found a nickname for Milo, and the cowboy knew that if it came, it would be galling. When Howard did find the name, Mike was ready for him.

There had been an accident on the field. Two bulls out instead of one, both bent toward one rider, a stupid boy named Grundy. The clowns and pickup men were having a rough time of it. Mike flipped his chute gate and rode out between the bulls, bronc riding and bullwhacking at the same time. For the horse to have run between the two bulls was all luck and no headwork but it looked as if the trick had been adroitly maneuvered.

When Mike came back under the stands, Howard said, “I finally found a name for you, Milo. I think I’ll call you Jenny. For ingenuous.” Then, thinking Mike didn’t know the word, “Because you were clever.”

“You mean Gene for ingenious, don’t you?” Mike said.

Howard flushed. It was an error he couldn’t have made in a million years, but he’d made it. Then he smiled. His eyes weren’t meant for smiling, they were like frozen danger, and Mike regretted having snatched the little moment away from the man. Howard would fire him.

But he didn’t because that afternoon Mike came up with the Ride-Out. That’s the way it went on the program—The Ride-Out, A Special Event.

The rodeo hadn’t been making the grade, not quite. What the show needed was one galvanizing episode, a heartstopper. Mike wondered—aloud, in Howard’s presence—what would happen if a cowboy were to mount a bucking bronc and completely ride him out, to a finish. They’d been using competition rules until that time—riding a bareback horse for eight seconds and a saddle bronc for ten. What if they got a good bucking bronc, not too wild an animal of course—a dink, in fact—and rode him until the man bucked off or the horse rode quiet?

The Ride-Out was an immediate success. It was novel, it got into the papers, it brought the crowds. The special event was put at the end of the show and the audiences went out screaming. Mike was back to being a star again.

Recently, however, to jack up the front of the program, Howard had introduced an additional Ride-Out, right after the Grand Entry. And more recently, for added excitement, Polk had started to add fresh bucking stock for Mike to ride. And not one of the new broncs was a dink.

---

•   •   •

Thinking about Howard, he didn’t notice that the traffic light had changed. A truck honked behind him. He jammed his foot down on the gas pedal, almost collided with the car ahead of him, circled it and turned into the stadium alley.

Howard’s car was parked halfway down the narrow street at the entrance to the tackroom. Mike pulled up behind the Mercedes and, as he crossed the alleyway, he could see Howard through the window, arguing with Andy. Not really an argument, more like a leathering, as the boys called it, and the old man’s face was twitching.

Mike never liked going through the lounge; he disliked Andy’s smell, the rancid odor of chewing tobacco and the stink of senility. He was always bothered by the pathetic sight of the old man’s quaky grandeur, how he lorded over his attendance ledger, his locker keys, his mailboxes. No grandeur at all now—Andy, tongue-lashed, was cowering.

Mike opened the door and went in. He didn’t rush, didn’t seem to notice Howard was there. Walking past his employer, he went round the end of the counter, reached to the board, picked his key, the last remaining one, pulled the mail out of his pigeonhole. Not many letters, a few. He stood there quietly, as if nobody were present, perusing his mail. Advertisements, a circular letter, a few postcards he flipped over and glanced at, then all into the wastebasket by the archway. At last, stubbornly taking his time, he bothered to notice the doorman.

“Hi, Andy.”

“You’re late,” Howard said.

“Late for what?” he asked quietly.

Howard pointed toward the loudspeaker box. The Grand Entry music—“The Eyes of Texas” played like a march—was blaring.

“Grand Entry’s almost over,” Howard said quietly. “You’re not in it.”

“Never have been.”

“In this company, everybody’s supposed to be.”

Mike was about to speak but Howard cut in quickly, “We’ll skip that.”

His waiver threw Mike off balance. Clearly Polk had come for the open purpose of challenging him. Why had he turned away?

Howard pointed to the attendance ledger. “Sign in,” he said.

“I never do.”

“You don’t?” asked Howard, with elaborate surprise.

The son of a bitch, Mike thought, he’s pretending he never knew it; he leaves such matters to his manager and the doorman.

Howard was pursuing it. “Is that true, Andy?” He sounded shocked. “You let members of the company go through without signing in?”

The old man’s mouth trembled a little and a small drool of tobacco juice dribbled down toward his chin. “Mr. Polk,” he said with a touch of entreaty, and he couldn’t finish the sentence. The old man looked from Howard to Milo. The latter was expressionless and still. Then Andy moved the attendance ledger just a few inches in Milo’s direction, picked up the pencil and handed it to the man. Andy’s feeble hand shook.

Mike thought: Howard couldn’t have staged it better. Damn you, old man, stop shaking.

Andy said, “Please, Mike.” His voice shook as much as his hand.

Mike knew exactly what Howard was thinking. What are you going to do now, bronc buster? Shove the old man into a tighter corner? Have you got the guts to beat on his old head a little? I have, have you?

Mike took the pencil and scrawled his name in the book. He turned and walked toward the tackroom.

As he cut the corner past the iron rail, he had a quick glimpse of Andy. The old man had his hand over his mouth, stifling a giggle, a moist little pleasure that he had scored a victory over the gullible cowboy. The wet cackle, hidden and sneaky, was disgusting to Mike. To think that he had demeaned himself for this old kiss-ass who was now laughing at him. And what had he gotten for it? Not gratitude but contempt. From a mean old, hideous old, smelly old man who had suckered a fool. Howard would call it sentimentality. Weakness. And maybe Howard was right.

Roiled, he walked into the tackroom, down the aisle of lockers, swinging his right arm more vigorously than usual to hide that it hurt. As he looked along the row of lockers, he realized there was no necessity to hide anything—nobody was there. The Grand Entry was just finishing, the punchers were already out in the alleyway by the chutes, getting ready to enter the arena, and all Mike was looking at was paraphernalia—racks, hooks, pegs for bull ropes, buck reins, halters, saddles, a clutter deeply comforting to him, not really a clutter at all, come to think of it, for everything was always easy to find, not a rowel ever got lost.

Mike’s locker was at the end of the tackroom, the closest one to the field. It was the only double-doored closet in the room, twice the size of the others,