Diamond Dan, world champion rodeo bull, weighs 1,800 pounds and smells like the prairie after rain. He swings his black onyx head slowly from side to side in a holding pen, eyes glowing ruby red, horns polished, the tips glittering.
Diamond Dan is legend.
Cory Custer, hard-luck rodeo cowboy, weighs 155 pounds and reeks of saloon sawdust and spilled whiskey. He stares at Diamond Dan while methodically working dry rosin into his riding rope, the warmth from his hands heating the resin, making it tacky, increasing the chance he’ll be able to hold on for 8 seconds after the beast crashes out of its pen.
I used to visit Cory often, but I stopped a while back, too worried by his always-bloodshot eyes, too bored by the endless talk of how he was going to conquer “that bull.” Still, a sense of responsibility for Cory tugged at me, like when you find an abandoned puppy out among the tumbleweeds and sagebrush, wet and shivering, and you scoop it into your pickup, and drive to a friend’s ranch where, forever after, you pull up and the dog comes running all sideways, tongue flopping, tail helicoptering. You’re his Savior, so you feel obliged to say good boy and scratch behind his ears, no matter what a sloppy, drooling mess he’s become.
Cory was five-years old when I found him, six days after the Piper Cub his parents owned slammed into the side of Lonesome Mountain in the Blue Moon Wilderness on the way to a cattle auction near Bozeman. I cut short my annual elk hunt to join the search when I heard about the plane going down on my walkie talkie. No cell phones then. The crash killed his parents, leaving Cory with a broken jaw, a fear of flying, which he had so loved, and a lost feeling I don’t think he ever shook.
So, when I was passing through Pocatello and heard he was back for the rodeo, back to ride that abomination of a bull that possessed him, I figured to go watch and catch up after. Cory gave a helluva ride that day, but we never did get the chance to talk.
A gateman cranks hard on the faded leather belt wrapped ’round Diamond Dan’s back, riling him up. The gate swings wide and the bull explodes from the narrow chute, the cowboy an annoyance on his back. Diamond Dan spins left and his hind legs lift. The cowboy leans back, his head nearly touching the bull’s hindquarters.
One second.
After Cory, suddenly orphaned, left the hospital, I drove him to the Two Bar Ranch outside of Grace, Idaho, where he was raised by his Uncle Everett, Aunt Betsy, and their twins, boys 10 years older than Cory. I’d spent a summer stringing barbed wire and other odd jobs for them in younger days, and knew they were good, hardworking folk.
The boys treated Cory like a new pet. On a trip to the War Bonnet Round Up in Idaho Falls when he was 8, they entered Cory in the mutton bustin’ competition, where kids from 5- to 9-years old are plunked atop sheep to race. Cory took to it like a lamb to clover.
As he grew, the boys, young men now, roughhoused with him, showed him how to fight, how to man up, shoe a horse. And how to ride a bull. Cory screamed the first time a bull lifted all four legs off the ground with him on its back. His cousins laughed, thinking it was just a fearful rookie’s reaction. But those fractions of a second sparked a forgotten joy in Cory, the closest he’d come to flying since the wreck.
About the same time, Sally Tallman’s mother ran off with the Pocatello Dairy Queen manager, her family’s version of a plane wreck. I was friends with her dad, Phil Tallman, from a summer we spent working on a wildfire crew together. Phil was a champion bronc buster in his day, but traded his chaps for a microphone a few decades ago after a fractured femur ended his riding days. His honey and gravel voice become a familiar one announcing the biggest events on the rodeo circuit.
The job paid well, but meant he spent more than half the year on the road, so he left Sally with family and friends for long stretches in small towns across southern Idaho and northern Utah, including with me and my wife one summer. Growing into her teens, Sally was all Wrangler jeans and Stetson hat, as skilled with a rope as she was handy with a griddle. She tolerated school, was smart but held no desire for university or the big city. She longed for a ranch of her own where she could put her long legs and strong hands to raising stock and a family.
Diamond Dan kicks his rear legs high over his head. He pushes hard off the arena’s packed dirt floor, the momentum pulling nearly two tons of bull into the air. His forelegs rise level with his heavily muscled rear quarters, ignoring gravity. On his back, the cowboy swings his right arm for balance, lets the motion pull him upright.
Two seconds.
The first time Sally noticed Cory was before her senior year in high school, hanging out with friends at makeshift rodeos on Idaho’s backroads on Saturday afternoons. She didn’t know it, but Cory searched for her in the stands each weekend. He was shy as cowboys come, though, and averted her eyes when they wandered his way.
Sally joked later that she looked right over Cory at first, being more than 6 inches taller. But one blistering hot July day at a ranch outside of Bancroft, the air brown with dust, she watched Cory hang onto one of the meanest bulls this side of the Snake River. He dismounted with a flourish, saluted her with a wave of his hat.
Cory won $300 that day, more money than he’d ever held.
“Nice ride there, cowboy,” Sally said, when he walked past.
“Thanks,” he mumbled, looking down at his boot tips. The old broken jaw hadn’t set right, giving his speech an awkward rhythm he found embarrassing.
Sally laughed, put her hand under his chin and lifted it so he was looking into her blue eyes.
“I’m up here,” she chided.
The money Cory won in Bancroft whet his taste for serious bull riding. He joined the Pro Rodeo Circuit, dreamt of big money. Some of us tried to talk him out of it, told him success was a longshot—rodeo cowboys were lucky to make enough for booze, travel and hospital bills. He heard none of it.
And Sally’s dad didn’t want her falling for a rodeo cowboy; Phil Tallman was living proof of the strain the lifestyle puts on marriage, on family. Sally didn’t listen.
Diamond Dan snorts, snaps his head and lets fly a loop of spittle, which catches on a horn. The rider’s lungs burn as the bull’s infernal breath sears the very oxygen from the air. Like a well-versed gambler, the bull recognizes this cowboy from a small tell—the left knee grinds harder into the bull’s shoulder blade than the right one.
Three seconds.
Cory lost his shyness around Sally. He told her about the plane crash, and what few others knew, that his father had been drinking heavily before strapping Cory into a seat in the baggage area and piloting the flight. And that his mother had lived for three days in the wreckage, comforting him with stories of King Arthur and Paul Bunyan and John Henry.
Sally was patient with Cory, watched him chaw his wild oats by rodeoing. And for a couple of years, Cory enjoyed some small success, the way younger, reckless cowboys sometimes do. In only his second year as a pro, he made good money, though never top tier.
Sally loved her cowboy, trusted his skill, never entertained fear or jealousy.
“You’re my lucky rabbit’s foot,” Cory told her after winning $15,000 at the Wyoming State Fair. He asked her to marry, made a downpayment on a shotgun shack on 40 godforsaken acres, bought a secondhand Ford pickup, and switched to Heinekens from Bud, to Makers Mark from Old Crow. Drinking helped ease the hurts rodeoing inflicted, made the stories funnier. He was a quiet drunk, never mean or violent, would just pass out on the couch or on the recliner they kept on the front porch.
He rebuilt the pickup’s engine and drove tens of thousands of miles every year chasing rodeos across the West. For a year or two, Sally rode with him to each one, but she grew bored and, besides, they needed more money that Cory was bringing home. She waitressed at a friend’s diner in the mornings, cared for a neighbor’s horses in the afternoons, and in the evenings tackled every chore from patching the roof to replacing worn-out plumbing
But after the casino opened, the neon lights beckoned like an aurora across the scrubland. Slots, poker, roulette—she played them all, lost mostly, winning just often enough to keep her going back. Cory never complained or asked her to stop. He understood all too well the thrill of chasing victory, and its cost.
All four of the beast’s cloven hooves briefly touch down and coil like a steel spring before releasing the pent-up energy and propelling Diamond Dan ever higher. The bull’s muscles uncoil, and the cowboy tightens his legs. Locked in battle, bull and rider are deaf to the roar of the crowd.
Four seconds.
Cory sported a nose shield that day, a padded strip of aluminum that brought me memories of a Viking helmet he wore one Halloween when he was eight or nine. It made Sally recall the Abilene rodeo seven months ago, when the bull’s diamond horns kissed Cory between the eyes for 75 stitches.
Over the last ten years, no cowboy has stayed astride Diamond Dan for the 8 seconds required for a cash payout. The mystery of the big bull’s origins sparked conversations in small bars from Walla Walla to Big Bend. Some claimed he was grown in a secret lab by the CIA. Others swore he was a spawn of the devil, born in the labyrinth of an African diamond mine, with real gems on the tips of his horns.
The Pocatello Round Up marked Cory’s thirteenth attempt to best the beast. The arena pulsed rodeo. A country band twanged away … kids wearing miniature cowboy hats and boots shouted and raced through the stands … manure and hay perfumed the air. Through it all, Phil Tallman delivered a steady patter of play-by-play and sales pitches.
“Don’t forget to register the young ‘uns for tomorrow’s mutton bustin’ competition! … Enjoy the beer pardners, but let a friend drive you home!”
Finally, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the event you’ve all been waiting for!” All eyes turned to the bull pens.
Midair, the bull’s front and hind legs draw together, then whip apart. The laws of physics bend as Diamond Dan rotates, the cowboy now riding a living spit. A dozen times the bull has felt this cowboy on his back, a dozen times he’s spun him off.
Five seconds.
Newcomer Jim Bob Calloway rode first, on a bull named Kalispell. He landed hard on his backside inside three seconds, jumped to his feet as the clowns chased away the bull and waved his hat at the whooping crowd, a wide, sheepish grin masking disappointment.
“He’ll be back!” Tallman said. “Give him a hand.”
Next up, veteran rider John Gooch easily hit the 8-second mark. But the beat-up, old bull he rode, Blues Brother, had seen wilder days and scored low for difficulty, leaving others a chance to pass Gooch on the leader board. And on it went, through the posse of riders.
“Are you ready for one more?” Tallman asked to a chorus of hoots and hollers. Cory gave a quick look up, raised his right arm to signal ready, and squeezed the rope with his left.
“You got this, Cory!” Sally, now 7 years his bride, shouted above the din, a few seats away from mine. How badly they needed a win. Not just for money, though they could sorely use it. Sally needed her man back, needed his attention on herself, not on a bull.
The night’s five-figure purse would pay off her current gambling debt, catch up on the three months due on the mortgage, and let her get the crib, playpen, and diaper genie out of layaway for the little wrangler she can finally feel bucking in her belly. After Cory saw the ultrasound, he swore he’d stop rodeoing—after he managed to build a nest egg for his boy; what he meant was after he beat Diamond Dan.
Diamond Dan feels the rider shift, feels the knuckles under the rope press down, the thigh muscles press the knees higher and harder on the heart girth than the bull has ever felt. He points his jaw skyward.
Six seconds.
Cory had spent hours watching video of Diamond Dan and other bulls, from Durango to Dallas, Boise to Bakersfield. He studied the bull’s moves when drunk, sober, and somewhere in between. For three years, he had talked of little else. Tired of the endless patter, which grew more animated with every shot of whiskey, family and friends rarely invited the couple over anymore. Like I said, it’s a big reason why I stopped checking in on them.
After the last failed ride, Cory swore to Sally he spotted something on the video in the bull’s signature move, the Rotisserie Twirl. Just before Diamond Dan begins the twirl, Cory told Sally, a twitch would pulse along a muscle that runs from his neck to his hind legs. No other bull he’s watched does that.
What, he wondered, might happen if he messed with that muscle, stopped whatever signal it was sending? For the past six months he banged on bulls’ backs at auctions, studied carcasses at the slaughterhouse, rode every rodeo bull within 300 miles. He started running every morning, performed endless squats to strengthen his already thick legs.
He believed he’d cracked the secret that would tie his name to Diamond Dan’s.
As the bull spun that night, Sally watched its back and saw the shudder Cory had sworn would be there.
“Here it comes, Cory!” she hollered, her words lost in the din.
For the first time, Diamond Dan feels what humans would call doubt. He rises higher, emits a bellow that quiets the arena. The cowboy searches for a familiar face below, catches her eye, smiles for the first time in months.
Seven seconds.
Rodeo was never been about the money for Cory. It was about testing himself, man against beast. He once told me how, in the mountains after the plane crash, in those days before I found him, he listened to the wolves circling closer, felt the presence of bears. He said he stayed calm by promising his dying mother they’d make it out alive. When she finally stopped answering, he threw rocks in a blind rage at the gathering predators. He said he killed one, but truth is, I didn’t see any bodies around, beyond his parents. I think Cory was building a mythology around himself even then, like city kids become super heroes, or ranch kids think they’re Pecos Bill or Annie Oakley.
No one ever agreed on just what happened in Pocatello that day. Diamond Dan and his rider rose high above the open-air arena, climbed through the crisp, late October sky until they were out of sight.
Sally gasped.
Bob Tallman, never at a loss for words, said simply, “Will ya look at that.”
All the mutton busters smiled.
Cowboy and bull sailed over the livestock pens, above the interstate, toward the sun. Cory lay flattened against Diamond Dan’s withers, knees tight around the bull’s girth, leather chaps snapping in the wind.
The sun sparkles off the bull’s horns, catching the eye of a young girl in an airliner on its way to Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City. It’s the last siting of Diamond Dan and the rider he couldn’t shake. The cowboy’s hat flies off, rides the wind and, a few weeks later, flutters to the ground outside a Pocatello hospital where his namesake is born.
Eight seconds.
Tom Walsh, East Coast native, had the time of his life covering the rodeo for the Idaho State Journal in 1993. And that’s no bull.