Cowboy Villain Damsel Duel

by Ginger Scott

  I angle my head to the side, a sort of understood gesture translating to “dreamland.” She raises one brow and scoots forward, folding her hands together on top of the desk, poised for my great big secret. I’m going to give her full disclosure.

  “I’m building an empire.”

  And for the first time since I started meeting with her, that faint smile and expression that always looks like it’s one step ahead slips and becomes worried.

  23

  Cowboy

  Another Friday. Another pep rally in the books.

  There’s this wings place out on the expressway, headed to Gary. It’s a little out of our way for a team dinner, a lot out of our way, actually. But the owner is the uncle of some kid on our line. He serves us beer. Not a lot of it, so things don’t get crazy out of hand, but enough to make us feel bold.

  Daring.

  Probably just stupid.

  I’m pretty sure Bobby, the owner, is being stupid, but he says he takes care of the cops in that area real nice so they look the other way for certain things. Whatever that means. All I know is we come here before every homecoming game. Kickoff is always an hour later, and school is always out a little earlier, which means we have a solid six or seven hours to digest the dumb shit we drink.

  I have been nursing my cold one for almost half an hour. It’s not even cold anymore.

  “Where you at, man?” Sugar fits his long legs under the opposite side of the picnic table I’ve claimed as my own little spot for the afternoon. He doesn’t drink much at all, not even at parties, so he comes here for the comradery and the food. And maybe the girls.

  His on-again, off-again girlfriend is keeping her eye on him from the pool table in the corner.

  “What’s the status with you and Shay?” I ask.

  “I dunno, man. I never know.” He looks her direction and blows her a kiss, then returns to facing me with a shrug. Guess we’re on right now.

  We both laugh about it, and I take another drink then push the mug toward my friend. He holds up his hand and waves it off.

  “Nah, you know I don’t like to mess with the machine before a game.” He taps the side of his head. He does focus more than any of us. He’s gonna be a great college player.

  “It’s homecoming, Sug. They literally match us against the worst team in our division for that game so it’s a guarantee.”

  “Ain’t nothin’ a guarantee.” His face is serious, and his message a little sobering. I’m sure he doesn’t mean for that to be about anything other than football, but for me it is. I glance away and chew on his words.

  “I think I’m gonna head back. See my mom before the game.” I pat the table while I stand and hold my hand out for my friend to take. We shake in our special way and as he stands I pull him in for a short bro hug.

  “See you at five.” He points at me as he walks backward toward Shay. She’s swaying to the music while she rolls the eight-ball from hand-to-hand.

  “Don’t let her make you late!” I tease.

  He winks and rushes over to his girl. Sonny’s here. I could probably stay, finish my beer, and spend the next two hours doing the same thing Sugar is, but I’m not feeling much like my normal self today. In fact, last night was the first in the last three weeks that I couldn’t remember my dream. I’m not sure I had one.

  I get in my car and pull out a piece of gum from the pack in the center console. I’m not drunk, but all I need is some pissed-off Indiana highway cop to pull me over and smell a hint of Bobby’s brew on my breath. Between the gum and the basket of hot-ass wings I had, the beer stink should be gone. And I don’t speed—not in Indiana.

  I’m over the border in fifteen minutes and at our house in ten more. My dad’s car is gone. He’ll probably go right to the game from work. Mom won’t go at all. She doesn’t like the cold, so usually after the temperatures break, she quits showing up. I don’t think she much likes seeing me get hit. Probably doesn’t like sitting next to my dad and hearing his running commentary, either.

  The house is dark and quiet when I step inside, the heat on a little higher than normal. Mom must be in her craft room, reading. It’s the coldest room in the house.

  I don’t bother to announce that I’m home. It’s not as if she’ll come running down the steps to greet me. And it’s all right. I’m over being mad that she lost the joy behind her eyes. It’s not her fault. I’ve lost the joy behind mine, too. Sometimes things just slip away without you even noticing.

  I toss my book bag on the counter and make my way up the stairs, leaving my shoes at the bottom. My dad went on and on about having the carpets cleaned this morning. Last thing I need to do is get mud on the steps. He’ll lose his shit and go on for an hour about how much things cost. Unless I have a shitty game. If that happens, then that’s all we’ll hear about for a week, all the way until I play another one.

  The reading light from her room casts a faint glow through the cracked doorway. I hold my hand on the jam and knock lightly on the center of the door. She jumps anyway from the break in the quiet, dropping her book.

  “Sorry. I was trying to be quiet,” I say, smiling at this woman who has been so quiet but so brave on my behalf without telling anyone. I bend down to pick her book up for her and she grabs my hand in hers when I hand it back.

  “I’m glad you came home before tonight,” she says. Her smile is connected today, our eyes meeting and someone home behind hers.

  I nod. “Sure,” I say, taking a seat on the small sofa that folds into a bed. We have it for the holidays, when her sister and brother-in-law come to visit. They bring their kids, three girls. My mom lights up.

  “Whatcha reading?” I glance at the book in her hand. She flips it over to show me the cover.

  “The Flame and the Flower,” I read out loud. There’s a woman in red on the cover. She reminds me a little bit of my tutor.

  “I like stories about strong women,” my mom says, bringing my attention from the book to her face. I consider her words and how they match my initial thoughts when I saw the cover, and how they define my mom.

  “Me, too.” I stare at her for a few quiet seconds until she blushes. I think she gets the underlying compliment.

  The soft smile on my mom’s lips dips after time, and she draws a line with her finger under her right eye. “The bruising looks better. Maybe just a little green now.”

  I squint and bunch that side of my face, testing whether I can feel the soreness anymore. It’s there, but faint.

  “It’s fine,” I say, giving her a closed-mouth smile in an effort to coax hers back. It doesn’t. Her gaze traces my face for a while, finally landing on the center of my chest.

  “It’s not fine.”

  She’s right; it’s not. But it just . . . is. I guess that’s the truth of it all. I don’t even feel anger toward my father. I don’t feel anything. No motivation to please him, no remorse for letting him down. I’m not even afraid of him. I could walk away from this game, which would kill his soul, and feel nothing. The only reason I don’t is there’s some strange code of morality in my core that doesn’t believe in quitting.

  I finish what I start. I’m not even sure who taught me that, but it’s a principle I hold on to. I have four games left, eight if we make it all the way to state in the playoffs. I can see this through for eight games.

  “Thanks for writing to Ashford . . . in North Dakota.” Her gaze returns to mine at my words. She nods.

  “They’re interested in you playing there, if you want.” Her smile is only one-sided, and it’s only there because of her happiness for me, not because she wants me to stay with this game.

  I shake my head and lean back, folding my hands together over my head.

  “I don’t know,” I breathe out. “I think I’m done.”

  Saying that out loud does something to my chest. There’s a cracking, deep in my bones, and it’s as if a million ghosts are released all at once. I was drowning in that obligation, and acknowledging it does somethin
g massive. I laugh quietly at the realization.

  “Yeah,” I say, dropping my chin and squaring my eyes with my mom’s. “I’m pretty sure this is it.”

  Her forced smile shifts to a real one, and it grows.

  “You know, you can still go to school at Ashford without the football. We have money saved. I have money saved.” There’s a sparkle in her eyes when she divulges this bit of information.

  My dad has always given her an allowance. When I was little, she was a stay-at-home mom with a teaching degree. She only worked in a classroom for a few years before she had me, and the desire to go back was never there. I’ve heard them argue in the past about her going to work, and the twisted part is she actually wants to. My dad is the one who always tells her she isn’t ready. He’s the one who makes her feel as if this room is the only place for her.

  “I couldn’t take your money,” I say, standing and moving toward her chair. I kneel down and take her hand, holding the back of her palm to my face. Her eyes go to our touch.

  “You have whiskers now. You’re becoming a man,” she says, a faint hiccup of a cry breaking up her voice. “And you can take my money. That’s what it’s there for. It’s the only thing worth spending it on. You.”

  A tear slips free and trails down her cheek. I catch it with my thumb and cherish this brief moment when we are both more present for each other than I think we have ever been.

  It’s the last vision I remember seeing, the last truly crisp picture burnt into my mind. A snapshot taken in the flashes of light that come faster and faster, strobing and jarring my pulse to race.

  “Kellen! Can you hear me? Kellen!”

  The blinking lights slow and become a steady beam of brightness. My head throbs, and my body tries to flail, movement proving impossible. I jerk, feeling pressure at my back, something tethered at my wrists and ankles. I can’t open my mouth fully, and every effort to scream causes me to choke.

  “Get Esher! He’s waking up! He’s awake!” There’s a man in a blue mask, his face distorted from my blurry eyes. He comes in and out of the brightness. Other voices are shouting. One booms over everything else. It’s deep, and familiar.

  “Kellen! Son!” The voice lures me to try harder, to fight against what feels like an entire team holding me down. Is that what this is? Was mom a dream? Am I playing the game, and did I get hurt?

  Oh, my God! Am I paralyzed?

  My head wobbles against hands forcing it to remain still. They don’t understand, I need to see! I have to see if my arms and my legs are moving. I have to know if I’m still whole, if my team is here. Where’s Coach? Where’s Sugar?

  “Ahhh,” I moan. It’s the only sound I can get through whatever is blocking my windpipe. I feel like I’m going to vomit, so maybe someone rung my head.

  I’m scared.

  No. I’m terrified!

  I continue to fight, to pull and tug, convincing myself more with every strain of my body that I am moving, that this game, it didn’t ruin me. And then a slow burn travels through my veins, almost like an eraser washing its way down my arms, up my chest, through my neck to my eyes. They close automatically just before the man in blue pushes a mask over my face. They have to shut. I can’t keep them open.

  “Kellen! I’m right here, son. I’m right here.”

  The voice. It’s Jim.

  24

  Damsel

  I don’t know where Cowboy is. I’ve looked everywhere—school, the range, downtown. Everywhere I went that wasn’t school looked as if all people in the world had been eradicated.

  Gone.

  I couldn’t find his horse, and the lodge or house or barn-thing he pointed out the last time I visited his dream was empty. It looked as if nobody had lived there in years. I need Cowboy right now. This isn’t something I can talk about to anyone else, and I really don’t want to analyze it with Dr. Esher. I don’t know who else made it into the study, either. I’ve only ever seen the three of us. It’s kept pretty private for a reason, I imagine. I wonder how many dreams I would show up in if I knew more Morpheus participants.

  Neither of the guys are at school. I’m used to one of them being gone, but Cowboy, he should be here. He has a huge game tonight. It’s homecoming. He’ll come off like a god.

  I, on the other hand, have been kicked off the planning committee for the dance tomorrow night. I suppose that’s what happens when instead of building balloon arches in the gym, you make a trek to the Badlands to bury a dead gangster.

  It’s fine. I’ve never once had a date to this dance anyhow. And if I won’t be busying myself handing out punch and star-shaped cookies, I’ll probably skip it all together. Maybe I’ll set up shop outside the entrance and sell half-price chocolate bars to undercut them.

  I wish I knew how I brought the bullet back with me the first time. I tried to repeat the process, hiding the envelope with my next hit in our school library over here, on this side. It’s nowhere to be found. I’ve been walking the stacks in our school library for almost an hour, checking between every single reference book. The rows look exactly the same in both worlds, and I know I tucked it in the inside flap of the anthology of Popular Mechanics. I’ve pulled every single anthology this library owns down from the shelf, and I’ve shaken them all—thoroughly. The envelope, it just isn’t here.

  I’m going to have to go back.

  Something nags at the back of my mind, though. This strange sensation that I haven’t looked deep enough keeps making me question where I put it and look through more rows. I’m at the very end, the farthest corner in the back of the library where old computers are stored, and where one of the florescent lights flickers and nobody bothers to change it. It’s darker back here. It seems like the kind of place I would hide something.

  When I find him sitting with his back to the wall, body wedged between two stacks of boxes, I realize how right my instincts are. He’s holding the envelope between his hands, balancing it from corner to corner between his fingers. The sharp edge of the yellow envelope cuts into the pad of his thumb when he moves it, and he flinches as he jerks his hand away to inspect his thumb. A small bead of red forms and he sucks it away.

  “You looking for something?” He bites his thumb as he looks up to me, dark eyes somehow blacker from wherever he’s been.

  “You aren’t sleeping enough,” I say, masking the crazy pattering in my chest from nerves.

  He chuckles lightly, letting his thumb fall away with a sucking sound. He looks at the paper cut, then moves his gaze to me again.

  “You gotta be careful with envelopes like these. They’ll hurt you.” He tosses the heavy document on the ground, the photo spilling out through the open top as it slides toward me. It’s a copy of his student ID picture blown up. It looks nothing like him now, but I don’t need it to in order to know who it was. That’s not how this works, I guess.

  The envelope was waiting for me in the middle of the empty road. It’s the first thing I saw last night. It’s the only thing I saw—the envelope, and its contents. Oh, and the Popular Mechanics anthology that apparently isn’t worth shit.

  Someone wants me to kill him. Clearly, I don’t have to, but my fear is I never went looking for Gustavio. I simply found him. I was at the diner, and then he was. The rest was instinctual, self-defense before he shot me. What happens if I show up at the diner in my dream and things just . . . happen?

  “If you’re looking for the money that was in there, I kept it.” He winks at me and pats the pocket of his hoodie. It’s fat with cash.

  “You don’t understand,” I begin.

  “Sure I do. You’ve made something of yourself over there, too. Good for you. I’m proud of you. That was always the point, wasn’t it? Find your purpose or some shit?” His voice is cruel, almost dripping with genuine disdain. It’s as if something evil has taken root inside him and is slowly killing off everything that was good.

  “I didn’t make anything of myself. So far, the things that happen in my dream just sor
t of . . . happen.” That’s partly true, and he immediately calls me on the rest.

  “So, you don’t mean to show up in my space? It just . . . happens?” His dark eyes bore into me. I don’t know how to answer that because I’m not really sure. I think I’m in control, sometimes, or I seem to be, but the first time I found him in a dream was unexpected. I’ve been looking for him ever since, so it’s hard to say whether I still would have found him without trying.

  “Am I your first job?” His head falls to the side, his hair tumbling over his forehead in waves, and a cool smile creeps its way into his cheeks. His laughter is quiet at first, some shaking at his chest, but as it grows, he tilts his head back and shuts his eyes. The full smile that stretches from cheek to cheek is both sad and beautiful. It’s a bit madness, too.

  “I’m not, am I?” He stands, sliding his back up the wall for balance, and drops his hands into the pocket of his hoodie, protecting the money. There was at least ten grand in the envelope. The money isn’t the reason I tried to bring the envelope back here. I wanted the evidence so I could warn him, or find a workaround.

  “You’ve gotten good at this, haven’t you?” He leans his head forward, almost as if he’s readying himself to leap at me and bite.

  “I have.” I steady myself on my legs, wishing away the jitters that make me feel I could collapse at any second. If I had to run right now, I would not be able to.

  He pushes away from the wall and moves closer, snaking around my body where I stand. The flickering light makes it hard for me to focus on anything other than my fear.

  “Damsel, the assassin. We all have our roles, I see. Tell me, you get one of those little photo sets for Cowboy?” He nods at the floor, where his picture and envelope remain.

  I wait for him to step behind me and round to my left before I look him in the eye. Finding strength in the deepest pit of my stomach, I breathe in through my nose, long and slow, barely parting my lips as I lean toward him, shrinking the distance between us to inches. “I only take out bad guys,” I whisper. My eyes hover on his face as I bite the tip of my tongue. I stare at him until he once again breaks into laughter.