I stared at her. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Nope.” She ate the last bite of cottage cheese and swallowed, her eyes glittering with anticipation. “How hard can it be?”
The weekend had been blessed with three memorable spring evenings where you could smell the grass in the pastureland, and the sagebrush and cottonwoods gasped back to life after holding their breath since October. The cool of the evening was just starting to creep down from the mountains, but it was still T-shirt weather, if long-sleeve T-shirt weather.
We argued as we climbed into the Bullet. “How’s your dog does not constitute a relationship question.”
She ruffled the beast’s ears as he laid his head on the center console and sniffed for the styrofoam containers Cady set at her feet. “It’s a relationship; it may not be your only relationship, but it’s a relationship.”
I lodged the to-go iced tea and the coffee into the holder on the dash, fired up the motor, and pulled the three-quarter ton down into gear and onto the vacant street to follow the Cheyenne Nation in Lola, his ’59 Baltic blue Thunderbird convertible. “You’re cheating already.”
“Look, the other two cowboys didn’t ask, so it’s two to one. I wouldn’t complain if I was you.” She pulled her coffee from the holder. “Hey, I didn’t throw you for a loop with all that wedding talk back there, did I?”
“Do I get a point from this conversation?”
“No.”
Heading toward the fairgrounds at the north edge of town, we had only driven a short distance before my truck radio crackled.
Static. “Boss, it’s unit two.”
Cady, always quicker on the draw, this time grabbed the mic from my dash. “Unit two, this is unit one. How’s the pow-wow?”
Static. “Hi, Cady. The natives are restless, at least one of them is.”
She keyed the mic. “Did somebody really steal the divorce horse, or was Tommy just high and forgot where he put it?”
Static. “No, he seems pretty straight to me, and the horse is missing.”
“We’re on our way.”
Static. “Roger that.”
I glanced at her. “Three to one.”
Cars and trucks were parked on the side of the road for a quarter of a mile to escape the dollar fee that Rotary collected like they were the Cosa Nostra. A thickset cowboy ambled up to my window.
“Chip.”
“Walt.” He looked past me and smiled at my daughter, who was making a display with her engagement ring. “Hey, Cady.” The smile faded as he stuck a palm out to me. “Gimme two dollars.”
“I’m on a call.”
He repeated. “Gimme two dollars.”
“It’s official.”
“Gimme two dollars.”
“The sign says a dollar.”
Chip looked at the Bear as the vintage T-Bird made a beeline for the VIP parking area by the grandstands and then back at me. “He said you’d pay.” He took the money and smiled at Cady. “Nice rock. I heard you were getting married?”
She fluttered her eyelashes at him, and it seemed to me she’d dated him at one point, too. “I am.”
“Congratulations.”
As we pulled in beside Henry, I cried foul. “That was a blatant use of a prop.”
She twirled the enormous diamond on her finger. “What, this little ol’ thing?” She opened the door and slid out. “Three-two.”
The roar of the crowd intimated that the Indian Relay Races had already begun, a single rider, three-horse free-for-all that involved the three horses, one for each leg of the relay, a rider in traditional dress of loincloth and moccasins who leapt from one mount to the other, and muggers, the name given to the unfortunate individuals who had to hold on to the half-wild horses in the exchange. This was an old native practice that made the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association look like a lady’s afternoon tea.
I stretched my legs and followed Henry as he led us through the tunnels that met with the main, lateral walkway. We took a left through the throngs toward the paddocks, down a set of steps to ground level.
Ken Thorpe, another of the Rotary mafia, was leaning against the gate but turned and looked at us as we arrived. “Hey, Walt.”
“I’m not giving you a dollar.”
He looked a little confused. “Okay.”
“Tommy Jefferson, New Grass team, had a horse stolen?”
“Yep, but he’s riding on a spare.”
We all crowded at the gate in time to see the riders making the near turn, bareback and crouched into the manes of their horses. The men were painted and so were their mounts. One of the beauties of the sport was the pageantry-some of the riders in full warbonnets, some in shaman headdresses; the riders and their ponies resplendent in team colors, the designs reflecting the lines, spots, handprints, and lightning bolts that are recorded in the old Indian ledger drawings.
Henry pointed. “That’s Tommy in the green.”
Sporting the three vertical stripes of the New Grass team, Tommy was hard-charging in second coming up on the last leg of the second part of the relay. It was possible that the young man was simply pacing himself, but it didn’t look like it: it looked like the ride of his life.
We watched as they cannoned by, the fine dust of the fairgrounds settling on our hats and shoulders as we all jockeyed to see the riders transfer onto the last horse in the race. It was at this exchange where the majority of wrecks occurred.
The lead rider, a lanky fellow from the Coleville Reservation in eastern Washington, always a powerhouse, vaulted from his mount as one of his muggers grabbed that horse’s reigns while another held the last horse steady. The Spokane Indian misjudged the distance, or maybe it was the horse making a tiny surge to see what was leaping onto its back, but the rider managed to grab hold of the mane on the Appaloosa and launched skyward before settling into a rocket trajectory past the grandstand, the poor man bouncing off the horse’s rump but still hanging on.
The crowd of close to four thousand went crazy, but by that time Tommy Jefferson, New Grass team of the Crow Nation, had leapt from his own mount. His mugger attempted to hold the chestnut steady, but the horse was now circling him with Tommy holding on to the mane, one ankle draped over the horse’s spine.
The mugger, not knowing what to do, did the only sensible thing and let go., The only one that knew what it was supposed to be doing was the horse, who reared and blasted down the straightaway with Tommy hanging off the side, the rest of the field fumbling with their own transfers and losing in their attempts to catch up.
“Oh, no.” The Bear, of course, was the first to see the danger.
At the far end of the grandstand were the chutes for the roping and bull-dogging events-massive, metal gates, reinforced with what looked like highway guardrails. Tommy was headed straight toward them.
The chestnut, in its attempt to catch up with the Appaloosa, had set a course that would give it the best advantage but would also carry it and its rider next to the metal barrier. We could see that the horse would likely make it, but Tommy, most assuredly, would not.
Pogo-hopping on one foot, the young man was scrambling to get both legs up, but with only about a hundred feet to go, it looked like he only had maybe two hops left.
He wasn’t going to make it.
It was so evident that he wasn’t going to make it that I reached for Cady’s hand in an attempt to distract her from what appeared to be Jefferson’s imminent death. Her hand was already reaching behind her for mine, and I felt her grip as Tommy post-holed one miraculous stamp on the ground and barely slithered past the abutment, his calf grazing the steel fence.
The crowd, which I thought might’ve exhausted itself, went ballistic. All four thousand were standing as Tommy rounded the far corner and actually appeared to be gaining on the Coleville rider, the rest of the field a far third.
Through the back straight, I could see the warbonnet of the Spokane Indian traveling across the ground as if by magic, levitated above the infield and the far railing at close to forty miles an hour. But there was a vengeance that followed him, a Crow centaur who rounded the far corner and blew into the straight like an arrow. You could see Tommy’s head tucked into the horse’s mane, allowing them the most aerodynamic advantage, or maybe it was the whispering of the Indian’s voice that carried them along like Crow chain-lightning.