A Rodeo Veteran Takes Bull By The Horns Jimmy Lee Walker Makes His Comeback In A Young Man's Game.

WOODSTOWN — Jalapeno was on their minds, down in the clown van parked on the grassy swale behind the rodeo arena, down the gravel path from the rising sounds of bellowing Brahma bulls and the geared-up announcer's voice and the fiddle and banjo music that washed down from the Cowtown arena where the south wind ruffled the Stars and Stripes under the black sky on Rodeo Night, when the funny clowns and the bullfighting clowns getting dressed down in the van would face all the other 42 bulls and the fiercest bull, the one that moves like lightning, Jalapeno.

Jalapeno was on their minds, and so was peril.

They did not speak of this before the rodeo boss arrived.

Jimmy Lee Walker, the oldest bullfighter, got there last, at almost 7:30. By then, the grassy parking lot beyond the van was nearly filled and gaunt men wearing big buckles, and boys with hat brims wider than their sloped shoulders, and limping cowboys and women who loved them had gone up to the stadium. Jimmy Lee, in his tight jeans and his polished boots, his tailored gray shirt and crisp white hat, came to the old red Ford van, where three women stood by the open side door.

"Girls, girls, girls," Walker sighed wistfully. He climbed into the passenger's seat, unbuttoned his cuffs and began reading the schedule for the evening, a Saturday night in early August. There, below the bareback riding and the calf roping, the saddle bronc riding and the steer wrestling, under the first bull-riding event, was Jalapeno, Number 117.

Walker read this and said little.

T.J. Hawkins, the funny clown, an 18-year veteran at Cowtown Rodeo, was making the noise. It started when, the first to arrive, he backed his van into his usual spot, backed over a huge inflated inner tube and flattened it.

Ed Workman, the other bullfighter, stringbean tall and just 22, got there next. When Walker arrived, the kid talked to him about women. Walker said little.

The rodeo's traditional Grand Entry was still minutes away when the boss, Grant Harris, in heavy chaps with "Dodge Trucks" in big letters, rode down

from the arena on his big quarterhorse called Spook to give instructions to the clowns.

T.J. Hawkins, already in his clown makeup and his baggy cutoff jeans, looked up at the boss, smiled a clown smile and remarked on Bull Number 117.

"I'm scared of him," Hawkins sang in the musical language of deep West Virginia, the grin still on his face.

"If you're scared, stay out of the goddamn arena," the boss said, wheeling his horse around.