Leading the Parade

Abstract

mythologies embedded in the West exert their own ironies and displacements, their own refusals and contingencies. In the short story that follows, have set out to play with the master narrative of the much-mythologized Calgary Stampede, The Show on Earth, and its most dangerous sport, the Chuckwagon Races. This liminal story rides at the edge of this frontier and its narration, beyond the action of the real races, real danger, and real mythology as it might be encountered in the body of a woman whose family has been in racing for generations. This is a fiction, but the Chucks, for all their carefully orchestrated competition and spectatorship, are not. They gesture toward potential transgressions and confrontations that are deliciously ironic and yet perversely real in their dangerous enactment. ********** On Friday morning at nine, the official opening of the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth (or so they like to think and so it is called), Tulip, the undisputed matriarch of the Pane family, will assume the honorary and honored position of Parade Marshall and ride at the head of the string of cars and balloons and horses and floats and marching bands that signify the opening of the Calgary Stampede's ten days of drink and debauchery. This is not an imaginary event, but materially predictable, a hyperbolic re-imagining of the ranching era that lasted in southern Alberta only about thirty years, and is good and dead now, but that continues to repeat its own memorial, as regularly as any carnivale or yearly religious bloodletting, lottery, or harvest. parade furls its droopy tail always and undeviatingly on the same day, the first Friday of July after Canada Day. Stampede itself follows the parade, until the Monday ten days later, sodden with sunrise Ceasars and midnight corn dogs, nursing their blistered feet and denim-chafed thighs, bankers return to their counting houses and secretaries to their computers and lovelorn urban cowboys gas up their suburban assault vehicles and take down their portable gun racks, although the I love Alberta beef bumper stickers flag freeway traffic for the rest of the year. red and white Stampede pennants along the main thoroughfares of Calgary ripple for a few weeks longer, their edges shredding in the western wind. By August they are tattered and slatternly, although the day when tickets for next year's Stampede go on sale will reawaken one more summer lineup fuelled by nostalgia about the dust and mud of the infield, the blood on the cowboys' hands, the all-night line dancing. Tulip Pane, it is important to know, is not a tall woman, five foot two even with the heeled boots that she wears only for Stampede. She struggles into them at that time of year, but would rather be wearing her more comfortable Nikes. Faster, better grip, rubber sole. She prefers too her threadbare sweats, her GMC truck, and her Palm Pilot, but they aren't part of her mythopoeic image, and so she doesn't mention them, won't be caught dead using them until after the Stampede is over. No point upsetting the chuckwagon. She will be, in fact, driving a chuckwagon at the head of this world-famous but commercially impelled parade, her bony ass perched on the hard and narrow driver's bench. Discomfort should not be necessary, but it is noble. As Parade Marshall, an honor usually reserved for politicians and hockey stars and opera singers, she has the right to ride in a red convertible, but Tulip knows how that abdication could play out. journalists would start their calculations and add years to her age. If she were to sit on a stuffed leatherette seat with a driver aiming the nose of the rag top forward, they'd begin to predict the end of the Pane family as champion wagon racers of the west. Tulip Pane knows that a chuckwagon is a synecdoche. And don't kid yourself, as she would say, she knows what a synecdoche is too, although she'll deny that knowledge vehemently, refuse to admit her own grasp of metaphor. …