Rafo and Howard

Rafo and Howard Polk’s estranged father-son relationship is shaped by a painful contradiction: Rafo condemns his father as a liar who abandoned him, but still wants to see him and invests the journey north with the hope of finally receiving the attention he was promised. Howard’s absence is not simply a fact of family history; it is a wound Rafo repeatedly tests against the possibility that this time his father might keep his word.

Promises and Estrangement

Rafo tells Mike Milo that Howard has not seen him for five years and did not even ask after him. On his birthday, he says, Howard spent nothing on a present. When Mike explains that Howard will pay to have him brought north, Rafo rejects the claim as absurd: the father who has neglected him would hardly pay a great deal for his return. Mike produces his employment card to prove that he works for Howard, but the card confirms the arrangement without answering Rafo’s deeper question about what the arrangement means. Payment may establish that Howard wants Rafo brought to him; it does not establish that he wants a loving relationship with his son.

The distrust has accumulated through smaller betrayals as well as the central, unfulfilled promise of the rodeo. Rafo remembers Howard promising to return by Saturday and arriving the following Tuesday, and promising to bring him a Texas sheriff’s badge that never came. After leaving Rafo’s mother, Howard promised to take him north to the rodeo, a promise Rafo cherished above the others. In Rafo’s understanding, promises are the heart of a relationship: he cannot comprehend how an adult can make one and then forget it. His bitter reflection that adulthood may mean “forgetting the promise” turns Howard’s personal failure into a judgment on grown-ups more generally.

The Rodeo as an Unfulfilled Promise

The rodeo promise has particular force because Rafo loves animals and horses. He learned to ride before he learned to read, and the first time he went to the racetrack he ran onto the field in excitement and had to be restrained. Howard’s promise therefore offered more than a trip. It seemed to promise a shared world—horses, action, and a father who would bring his son into the life he loved. When Mike tells him that Howard still has a rodeo, Rafo responds with a bitter memory of being told he would be taken there as a child and never being taken. Even as he agrees to go north, he lays down a condition: if he dislikes it there, he will leave and come back. His agreement is guarded, not reconciled.

Rafo’s picture of the father he might meet is more vivid than what he knows of Howard’s actual interests. He imagines a rodeo man who will wake him, eat breakfast with him, take him to the grounds, introduce him as the owner’s son, and let him learn to rope, handle bulls, and ride broncs. In that imagined life, the rodeo becomes a setting for recognition as much as adventure: Howard would show him off, give him access to horses, and make him a companion. Rafo also imagines a life without schoolroom chalk and blackboards. The dream is thus a child’s answer to the expectation of ordinary schooling, but it rests on the hope that Howard will be the attentive father the promise implied.

Idealization and Reality

Rafo’s feelings are divided between hostility and longing. He remembers Howard as handsome, clean, and pale, with light-colored eyes, hair, suits, and fingernails. The details make his father seem almost sacred to him: attractive and compelling, yet unreachable. Rafo compares that combination to a holy fire on a mountain, a force one may approach but must not touch. The image captures why resentment has not extinguished attachment. Howard is the promise-breaker, but he remains the person whose approval and presence Rafo wants.

The narrative sharply contrasts this idealized father with the man Mike believes Rafo is likely to encounter. Howard, as the story presents him, cannot ride a horse and dislikes the smell of a bull; he has little affection for the rodeo and still less for his son. Rafo may be hoping for an embrace, Mike realizes, but is more likely to receive a cold, appraising, disapproving smile. Mike fears that any gesture of affection from Rafo could leave him heartbroken. He expects Howard to send the boy to an expensive, strict boarding school, keeping him there while lawyers argue over money. This forecast is not a reunion scene or a confirmed outcome; it is Mike’s assessment of the likely collision between Rafo’s fantasy and Howard’s conduct.

Hope, Mediation, and the Unsettled Bond

Mike’s position complicates the relationship. He tells Rafo that Howard has hired him and offers proof, helping persuade the boy to travel north. Yet Mike knows that Howard previously refused a telephone call and suspects that Rafo is being brought back as leverage in a dispute with his mother rather than out of paternal love. He considers telling Rafo that he may be bartered in a legal struggle, but remains silent when the boy insists that the journey’s expenses are small and says to call his father. The boy’s suggestion exposes how much hope survives beneath his defiance: even after describing years of neglect, Rafo still treats Howard as someone who might provide for him.

The relationship consequently remains unresolved at the point shown. Rafo accepts the journey conditionally, with his distrust intact and his expectations still fed by the rodeo promise. Howard’s payment initiates their reunion, but the evidence does not show that it repairs the years of absence or fulfills Rafo’s imagined welcome. Instead, the father-son bond is carried forward as a tension between what Howard has done, what Rafo fears he will do again, and what Rafo cannot quite stop hoping he might do.