EXCERPT (from Chapter One)

Hell, and the Route Out

Except for two boys hyped up about tonight's rodeo, the bleachers at Five Corners stood empty. Those kids in their dirty coveralls and straw cowboy hats - maybe nine or ten years old, they were already talking in the hard way of their fathers, son-of-a-bitchin' this and goddamnin' that. I even saw one of them spit Copenhagen into a Coke can. They leaped the seats as if they were the backs of broncos, and I knew what was on their minds: winning a silver buckle, taking home the big-haired rodeo queen, though they weren't sure what exactly it was you did with a girl once you got her there. It's a way of life they were indoctrinated into straight off the baby bottle. Forget about the long-legged cranes that migrated through the sandhills; the university, where they could expand their minds; the highway leading out of town to brighter lights - this was as good as it got - Friday night rodeo, good times, and Bud Light. Even without my mama's horoscope book I could read their futures: Knock up a pretty girl in high school, but a double-wide trailer on time, work for NAPA Auto Parts, watch ESPN, and call it a life.

Me, I needed a map to tell which town I was in. I stood there smoking a cigarette before I started grooming the collies. I felt like ten miles of bad road, and I was looking down thirty miles of it, once again wondering how in the sweet Jesus I got to where I was. We were that far from anywhere, Dalton Afterhart and me. Tonight he would play his one famous song, and the crowd would go wild because a ten-year-old his was really something out here in Nowhere Special, Nebraska. Everyone would buy him a beer, lay down ten bucks for his CD, and have him autograph the jewel case. I'd collect the money, and then Dalton would buckle his nasty spider monkeys into custom-mad saddles on my border collies and he'd turn them loose in the arena. So where the hell was Dalton?

"Hey there, Mary Madigan."

I looked up to see Belmont Monty, the rodeo announcer, coming my way. He wasn't satisfied with calling me Maddy like everyone else; he had to say my whole name, every syllable coming out of his mouth like music. Monty was eighty years old, wizened as a golden raisin, and dressed in his natty Western-cut corduroy suit. I had no idea what his real name was. He'd acquired the Belmont nickname from his horse racing days, when he was a big-deal jockey and well known at the track. Then he had a wreck ar drugged a horse or started taking drugs himself, or whatever else it is people do to fall so far from grace that they end up working here. "Hey to you, too, Monty. Looking so sharp there I might have to kiss you."