Billy was headed for Las Vegas to play big-time poker, his last blast before heading back to Petersburg for the salmon and halibut seasons. He makes enough money in the four tough months of fishing to take off and travel the other eight. His two long-time loves broke up over his off-season restlessness and his months gone at sea. Seemed to actually understand their point of view and had remained good friends. And there we were in the front seat, Mia sound asleep in the back, and I wanted someone to hold me close, so I slid across and snuggled in tight and said, ‘Hold me.’
He did, and it was tender and truly sweet, but without a trace of that wild carnal edge you would have to cross if you want to get so close together you can’t tell each other apart.
I pushed it. I said, ‘I want to get closer. I want you to love who I am.’ Love doesn’t do much for the powers of explanation, but since Love has never asked for one itself, that seems fair enough.
Billy was kind. He squeezed me a little bit closer and explained that he’d promised a certain woman not to play around, a promise he intended to honor despite what he was thoughtful enough to call a ‘delectable temptation like you.’ Me! But not so delectable the temptation couldn’t be declined.
Shit. Why are the ones who are too good to be true always being true to someone else?
Billy let us off in downtown Reno. He wasn’t even stopping to play cards since the action he wanted was in Vegas. He gave me a fifty- dollar bill, saying he wanted to treat me to a long bath and a night of safe rest, though I was absolutely free to piss it away gambling. A real gentleman.
I haven’t decided what to do with the fifty. I’m writing this in a Winchell’s donut shop while I think it over. Mia is still asleep. Poor little girl, she shouldn’t have to go through this. She’s exhausted.
I’ll let her sleep until she’s done dreaming and wakes herself. It’s no problem to carry an imaginary daughter around. They’re light.
What we Crazy Janes with imaginary daughters call ‘inside jokes.’ Hee-hee.
Gonna laugh them blues away.
Eli Boyd, a semiretired ranch hand who worked his own twenty acres up near Hope Mountain when he wasn’t working on somebody else’s spread – which was too goddamn often as far as Eli was concerned – drove the old Ford flatbed at a steady fifty miles per hour and just as steadily told Daniel jokes, tales, yarns, and no-shit true stories of the Old West, back when a man could ride two days to hump the schoolmarm and never cut another human track along the way. Daniel listened, from Aura Wreckers in Sun City to the I-40 junction. One story in particular seized his imagination.
Eli began, ‘Cowboys are known fools for drinking up their wages, and I was doing my part till something happened that stopped me cold. Ain’t a pretty story, but by God it not only saved me money on liquor, but all the expensive craziness that goes with it: dancing girls, bar repairs, bail, court costs, and them goddamn hospital bills.
‘Happened in Colorado high country up outa Durango, musta been ’round fifty-five, fifty-six, somewhere in there. I was working for the Randall boys then, and me and one of their cousins was moving some horses up to summer pasture. We got ’em up to the line shack ’bout nightfall and put ’em in this little ol’ barn the Randalls’ great-great-granddaddy had built. Then me and Jamie – that was this cousin’s name, just a kid really, nineteen or twenty – we went over to the line shack and grubbed up and shot the shit for a while before we hit the rack, pretty tuckered from being in the saddle since dawn.
‘Jamie was a strange kid, a bit on the jumpy side and not real overwhelming in the smarts department. Stark fact of it is, Jamie may have been an in-breed somewhere in the Randall line. Folks ’round Durango used to claim the only virgin Randall women were the ones who could run faster than their brothers.
‘For all Jamie’s dumbness, he was good with horses. It was like he’d drawn what little brains he had all together and brought it down real hard on one thing, and that thing was horses. That kid loved horses. And he was good with ’em.
‘So we’re sacked out and sawing logs when these high, shrill whinnies out in the barn snap us awake. We both jump pronto in our boots and grab our shooting guns.
‘“Wolf?”’ I whisper to him as we head for the door.
‘“I don’t know,” Jamie says, and his voice is real thin and tight.
‘We’re just gettin’ to the barn when these two young buckskin mares come bolting into the corral and I could see right away in the moonlight that their legs was chewed all to hell. I knew then what had happened; feller I used to ride trail with in the Junipers had seen it hisself when he was a young poke. The barn rats had gotten into some fermented silage and gone full-berserk frenzied, rampaging through the stalls eating the horses’ legs from right above the hoof clean up to the knee – left it that flat, stringy, bluish-white color like you get when you skin out a deer. The horses looked like they all had white stockings, not much blood at all. Sweet fucking Jesus, it was ghostly!
‘But what really froze my blood was them rats squealing, so high-pitched it could shatter your skull like cheap glass or at least leave you deaf from all the needle holes in your eardrums. The squeals from the trampled rats sounded different than the shrieks of those that only wanted to eat on some warm flesh.
‘I mean to say my jaw’s down around my knees,’ cause even though I’d heard of it, seeing it is something entirely different. Actually, being stunned stupid is about the best thing to do in that situation unless you feel like discharging a firearm against a herd of crazed rats in a dark barn full of insane horses. None for me, thanks; no sir. Let nature take its twisty course. I wanted to make sure Jamie saw the wisdom in letting it be. I didn’t like what I saw. Jamie’s eyeballs had rolled damn near ’round backwards in the sockets, same sickly white as them horses’ legs, and stone blank, just like those Cuban what-cha-call’ems – them zoombies. Gone, know what I mean?
‘And all of sudden Jamie screams, “The horsies! The horsies!” Like a little kid. He runs for the barn.
‘“Don’t, Jamie!” I yell. “Don’t shoot, it’ll spook ’em worse.” Damn if he doesn’t toss his gun away. But just before he goes in he stops and yanks out an old rusty icepick some hunter left stuck in a corral post.
‘Now you notice I ain’t running to stop him nor help him. It’s right there in Article Twenty-two of the Code of the West: “If some fucking in-breed wants to run into a bedlam of barn rats on a drunken feeding spree, that’s his business.”