Educational Experience

Part II--Chapter 12

You're about to meet a very important new character who is a character in more ways than one. And who will loom large in the love troubles to come. So after a rather odd prelude, I give you Hugh Vaughn, AKA Lord Stanford, whose Downton Abbey upbringing and lofty pedigree will give you a giggle or two...

Everybody reacts the same way.

Let me backtrack. See, the babies needed to exercise those legs all the time now. You couldn’t keep them down. If they couldn’t walk they wanted to stand on your lap and bounce around. So I took them and Wyatt over to the 4H show, thinking the kids’d get a real kick out of all the animals.

And we had a couple of prize bulls out strutting around in a corral for all the cattlemen to wish over—they had pimp names, a lot of our bulls, by the way. Like the ones you see in the PBR. One was just called White Lightning, a big old blonde, Bodacious looking son of a gun—do you know Bodacious? That bucking bull that damned near killed every rider that got on him?

Yeah, he learned this “trick” that made them retire him early. He’d whip the rider forward and then bring his head up real fast to smash his face on that real hard spot between his horns. That’s right, he did that deliberately and audiences ate it up. You could feel the tension rise whenever someone was riding that sucker. People holding their breaths waiting for him to deliver the coup de grace.

There’s a whole bunch of riders who had to have serious cosmetic surgery after an encounter with Bad Ass Bodacious. They finally retired him because I mean, if he only did it once in a while, that’d be cool. But he was doing it every trip, and there had to be potential insurance or even legal issues.

He’s still the second best bull on the top bulls list, though. I don’t even wanna know what the top bull must’ve done to get past Bo.

White Lightning is bad ass, but he isn’t a bone crusher. In fact, once he’d slammed a rider to the dirt, he actually sort of tried not to step on him or anything. Bull fighters—the “clowns” who run interference ‘til the rider gets a safe distance after a ride—really liked him for that. They called him a gentle giant when they announced him in the arena.

But then we also have Skrilla Killa--that is a pimp name fo’ shizzle. Somebody got a whole list of names from one of those pimp name generators online, and he was the first one they named.

He’s a sik mutha, too, Killa. All rippling, rock hard muscle, under that shiny chocolate brown coat and so ginormous he barely fits in a bucking chute. Nobody could ride his crazy ass. I’m serious. He went two whole seasons without letting anybody make the whole eight seconds. So the head dudes at the ranch put him out to stud right quick.

And that was the part that cracked Wyatt and everyone up. The stud thing.

I mean, when I told her that we were in the bull semen business, she sort of missed a step,  stared at me, and said, “That’s a thing?”

Which made me laugh because she didn’t use that kind of slang as a rule. So I set Tyler on the top rail of the corral fence and let him go all nuts over the bulls—still holding onto him of course--while I tried to explain where a whole lot of her money would be coming from if she every finally settled down and took me seriously.

“It’s more than a thing,” I said. “It’s big business. Huge business.”

She looked at the two bulls and said, “That’s the life, huh? Chasing lady bulls all day.”

Here it comes. The moment when everybody freaks out:

I said, “Well, you know...there’s...no lady bulls involved a lot of the time.”