Three weeks later, opening night of the rodeo packed the grandstands. The lights came on as I walked toward the announcer’s booth, and I was only going up to shake the new fellow’s hand, and there were two men from the stock contractor standing at the bottom of the stairs waiting on me with a clipboard and no expression at all.
Nobody had the sheets.
People think announcing a county rodeo is talking. It is not. It is the draw sheets, and the draw sheets are the whole night. Which horse goes in which chute, and in what order, and which of those animals cannot follow which other one out of the alley without a wreck. Old Number 14 will not load behind the gray. That is not a preference. That is a broken arm.
Twenty-four years I built that order by hand the Thursday before, sitting with the stock contractor at a card table, and I typed it up and I kept every one of them.
Then there is the timed-event side. Which kids are running, which are doubling up because a family drove four hundred miles and one of them has to ride two events, and which mutton buster is four years old and has a hearing aid so you say his name twice and you say it slow.
The new man had a voice on him like a train. I will not take that away from him. He had never seen a chute sheet in his life.
My binders were in the truck. They have been in my truck since the day I set the microphone down, because a man does not know what to do with twenty-four years of paper and it seemed wrong to burn it.
In the front of the first one, taped inside the cover, is a card from Dub Hendricks who had the microphone before me from 1968 to 2001 and who handed it over on a Tuesday without any ceremony whatsoever.
Kid — nobody up here is the show. The show is a fourteen-year-old girl from Kaycee who has one run in front of her whole family. Your job is to say her name right and get out of the way. Keep the sheets. The sheets are the only part of this that matters.
We ran the performance eleven minutes late and I called it from a folding chair beside the booth while the new man ran the microphone, and I fed him names and he said them, and by the third go-round he was saying them without me.
The event manager did not apologize that night. She apologized in October, at the awards banquet, in front of the ranching families, and she did it properly and she used the word wrong about herself, which is more than most people manage.
There are two chairs in that booth now. He announces and I do the sheets, and that is a fair division because his voice is better than mine ever was and I am not too proud to say it.
We are teaching a girl from Glenrock, nineteen, works the ticket gate. She writes the order out on Thursdays at the card table.
She will have the microphone in ten years. She will have the sheets sooner, and that is the part I care about.