Such Rough Splendor

by Cinda Richards

  Amelia studied him closely as he continued to explain the workings of a rodeo, finding his determination that she understand this athletic insanity somewhat endearing. Lord, he was handsome today. She loved looking at him and being with him. He worked so hard, and he still took the time to go see Bobby. He was so physically strong—and long-legged—and knowledgeable—and funny. He was kind. He was even pleasant when he wasn’t doing his best to annoy her. And he smelled so good!

  “Are you listening to me?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’m listening,” she said, stretching the truth a bit.

  “Okay. Now, with calf roping—that’s my best thing—you’ve got to have a good horse.” He raised his eyebrows, looking at her expectantly.

  “Willard,” she guessed, and he beamed at her.

  “And with steer wrestling,” he went on, “you’ve got to have a good hazer to keep the steer running straight.”

  She hesitated. “Pop?” she tried, guessing again.

  “Who in this world ever said Tennessee women were dumb?” he wondered, grinning and ruffling her hair.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” she said.

  “Anyway,” Mac went on, “the calf comes out, Willard runs like hell to catch it, I rope it and tie up his legs, and—”

  “Pop’s legs or Willard’s?” she asked because she couldn’t resist being obtuse.

  Mac reached out, grabbing her again, much as he had during the belt-buckle incident, this time threatening her with his big fist. She laughed up at him, looking too long into his expressive hazel eyes. This time he let her see it. She wasn’t his compañera now. He wanted her, hadn’t stopped wanting her. Her breath caught, her knees weakening from the rise of her own desire, a desire so intense it threatened to overwhelm her.

  Oh, Lord! she thought in a panic. All he had to do was look at her! Good old Amelia. The most obliging woman he’s ever met.

  “You look so pretty, honey,” he whispered, his fist going into a lover’s hand, his rough fingertips trailing along her cheek. They were surrounded by rowdy cowboys, and his voice was soft and low and only for her. “Amelia,” he whispered, his mouth coming closer.

  Just this once, she thought, lifting her mouth upward, knowing perfectly well that she should be sitting quietly somewhere with Rita—or better still, she should be back home in Tennessee. She leaned into him, and she could feel the cold, hard metal press of his lucky belt buckle.

  “It’s not true what I told you,” Mac said, still whispering.

  “What?” she murmured, unable to tear her eyes away from his.

  “It’s not anything you did, honey. That first day—when I took you to my mother’s house—I made it sound like you were after me, like you were doing something I didn’t want you to do. That wasn’t true. I wanted you so bad. You’re a beautiful lady. It’s not anything you do. All you have to do is stand there looking… so sweet… and pretty… and I…” His mouth was only a fraction of an inch from hers.

  Someone was calling him. Again.

  “Mac!” the man yelled.

  “What!” Mac yelled in return, not taking his eyes from Amelia’s face.

  “Mac!”

  “Damm it, Ernie, what?” Mac let go of her to give his attention to yet another cowboy, one Amelia recognized from her trip to Cowboy Heaven. Ernie had one jaw stuffed with chewing tobacco, and he spat with great ceremony before he spoke, making Amelia instinctively curl her unprotected toes in the wake of the splatter.

  “I just wanted to see what you got here, Mac,” Ernie said, frankly staring at Amelia and then at her breasts. Mac put his hand protectively on her shoulder.

  “What do you want, Ernie?”

  “I just wanted to see if this was Miss Amelia. You remember me, don’t you, ma’am—Ernie Watson? The Ernie Watson. Best damn rodeo clown in the business when I’m sober. And best damn all around cowboy in the Southwest—got the belt buckle to prove it.”

  Amelia glanced at Mac, trying not to grin at his don’t-you-dare-try-to-read-it look. She held out her hand, and Ernie pumped it vigorously.

  “God, she smells good,” he said to Mac. “Don’t she smell good?”

  “How she smells is none of your business,” Mac said, causing a few heads to turn in their direction. Amelia gave a soft sigh, knowing this was all part of some cowboy ritual. She had been through it at Cowboy Heaven when she kept getting invitations to dance. Mac had announced to the crowd in general—and Ernie in particular—that if he’d wanted her dancing with every rounder in the place, he would have waited in the damn truck! There was a sharp decline in her prospective dance partners after that. The setting of territorial boundaries, she supposed.

  “Aw, I know that,” Ernie reassured him. “I didn’t mean nothing. I was kind of hoping I could ride a ways with you after this is over. Salena, she’s mad at me again. Left a while ago and took the truck with her.” He gave a sheepish grin and a small shrug. “What do you say?”

  “Okay,” Mac said. “But I’m not hunting for you, Ernie. If you’re going with me, you be here when I’m ready to go.”

  Ernie was clearly wounded to the quick at the suggestion that he might be unreliable. “Now, when have you ever had to look for me?” he wanted to know.

  “You want me to start naming?”

  Ernie spat and grinned. “No, I reckon not. Thanks, Mac. You know, it sure is nice to see Amelia again,” he added nostalgically.

  Or at least parts of Amelia, Amelia thought, since Ernie was looking at her breasts again. He tipped his cowboy hat in her direction, but he didn’t go away.

  “I’ll go find Rita,” Amelia said in self-defense. “Nice to see you again too, Ernie.”

  “Amelia,” Mac said as she turned to go. “Root for me and Willard—don’t root for the cow.”

  “I’ll try to remember that, Mac,” she said dryly, giving him a small wave and picking her way through the crowd and the mudholes to where Rita had unfolded two yard chairs. Amelia sat down beside her, completely lost in thought. She had no defenses against Mac McDade. None. The man could make her crazy with lust in the middle of a rodeo. She was a thousand miles away from home—no, more than that—and she felt like Alice in Wonderland. Everything was wrong—her feelings, her emotions, the land, and the people around her—all wrong.

  She glanced at Rita. “What?” she asked because of a small crease between Rita’s eyebrows—the same one that had appeared when Amelia had been so heavy-handed in refusing Pop’s invitation to stay with the McDades.

  “Kind of worried about Mac,” Rita said, looking through the wire fence at a group of square dancers on horseback.

  “Why? Because of Marlene?”

  “No, because Ernie Watson’s here, and he’s the only clown Mac trusts not to let him get hooked.”

  Amelia thought for a moment. “Rita, I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means Mac’ll be bull riding. It means I’m afraid he’ll get hurt because his legs are paining him so bad he can’t get out of the way fast enough. It means maybe Ernie’s sober—and maybe he ain’t.”

  Amelia had a vague notion about what a rodeo clown did, but none of it seemed to fit Ernie Watson. “I thought Mac was roping a calf.”

  “He is. But if Ernie’s here, he rides the bulls.”

  The square dancers finished, and the rodeo announcer thanked them heartily over the loudspeaker. Amelia sat frowning. Bullriding. That’s just great.

  “Mac needs the money,” Rita said. “He’s got to pay off that lawyer that helped him get to see Adam.”

  Amelia didn’t comment, looking up at the vast New Mexico sky Mac was so proud of. The sun was hot, and the sky was a brilliant blue. She could smell food cooking at the concession stand—frying beef and popcorn—and that all entwined with the strong essence of horse and cow. She rummaged in her purse for her sunglasses and couldn’t find them. The first event was team roping. A calf came running out, and one cowboy roped the head, then the other one roped the back legs. Then the
y stretched the calf out—all as quickly as possible.

  “Pop and Mac are going to show off for you,” Rita said, and Amelia smiled. She was openly impressed by the McDade showing, her smile widening at the banter with the rodeo announcer when the calf was roped.

  “How come you and Mac doing so good today?” the loudspeaker blared.

  Pop stood up in the stirrups to answer him.

  “Pop says Mac’s girl’s watching him, folks. That right, Mac? You showing off?”

  Mac grinned good-naturedly and declined to answer.

  “Tell us who’s got the hardest job, Mac. Pop ropes the head, and you rope the heels—”

  “I do,” Amelia heard Mac say. “But I couldn’t do it if Pop didn’t nail the front,” he added loudly as Pop hit him with his hat.

  “This is where you heard it first, folks—McDade father and son team ropers—out of Chimayo. Give ’ em a hand.”

  The next event was calf roping, and Amelia remembered to applaud for Mac and Willard rather than for the bawling calf. She marveled at the speed with which Mac roped the calf’s head and dismounted on Willard’s right side, running down the length of rope that was around the calf’s neck while the Wonder Horse kept it taut.

  “Hurry, cowboy!” the loudspeaker admonished as Mac flung the calf on its side. “You wanna make it to that pay window!”

  But Mac already had the calf tied and his hands in the air.

  “Nine point seven—not bad, cowboy. Is that calf going to stay tied, folks? He’s crying about it, but it ain’t going to do him no good. Nine point seven for Mac McDade—what’s your girl going to say to that, cowboy? Give the cowboy a hand.”

  Amelia watched the wild-bronc riding—with saddles and without—wishing she’d paid more attention to which events Mac had entered.

  “He ain’t in this one,” Rita said as if she could read minds, and Amelia relaxed a bit, watching as riders hit the ground so hard they bounced, watching as they limped or had to be carried away in pain. But one cowboy dismounted his bucking bronc without the help of the pickup men, nailing the ground in a perfect two-footed landing with all the expertise of an Olympic gymnast, arms flung wide. And he punctuated it all with a huge projectile of tobacco spit. It was the spitting as much as anything that Amelia applauded. It was such a fine, arrogant touch.

  The crowd of spectators was growing around the wire fence, spreading out more blankets and unfolding more aluminum chairs. Amelia glanced at Rita, who gave a wan smile while she nervously rubbed her left thumb. They both sighed. Amelia was beginning to feel like a visitor to Rome, like a spectator in the coliseum who had come with one of the gladiators. She squinted in the sunlight, searching the crowd of cowboys around the chutes. She couldn’t see Mac, and she guessed he was somewhere behind the chutes with the others who stretched their muscles and worried over chaps and ropes and saddles while they waited for their number to be called. She could see, however, the eighteen hundred pounds of outraged beef standing on its back legs while its cowboy attendants tried to poke it down on all fours. Her dismay increased as she realized that not only was a man climbing onto its back, but he was also methodically wrapping his gloved hand with the end of the rope that went around the bull. She understood the words suddenly, the idle conversation she’d been hearing on the McDade front porch among Pop and his cronies, and among the cowboys who milled around the table when Mac paid his entry fees. Hooked. Hung up. That was Ernie’s job, to keep them from being gored, to untie them if they had to come off the bull on the side opposite their wrapped hand and couldn’t get loose. She began to understand, too, the reasons for rodeoing. It was far more than just the athletic competition. It was the danger, and it was the camaraderie of other cowboys. It was the respect that had to be earned, and it was the unabashed hero-worship from the young cowboys and the open adoration from the women in the crowd—women like the rodeo groupies who still waved and called Mac’s name, and women like her and Rita. And then, then, Amelia thought, it was the money for things like lawyers.

  Ernie Watson was superb at his job of rodeo clown. He wore a baggy football jersey now that said MANIAC on the front and an equally baggy pair of cut-off jeans he kept up with Day-Glo orange suspenders. He had on clown makeup that whitened his raggedy mustache, and he wore multicolored bandannas pinned all around his waist. His hat reminded her of a caricature of a Tennessee mountaineer’s hat, and his navy-blue and green striped rugby socks disappeared up under the wrapped padding he had on his knees. He kept singing the theme from “Rawhide” until he had most of the crowd and the cowboys singing with him. Amelia could see why Mac trusted him. He was always there, drawing a vindictive bull away from a stumbling cowboy, patting the bull on the head to make it spin and give the rider more points.

  Mac was the fifth rider, and Amelia watched grimly as he wrapped his gloved hand with the rawhide rope. This is crazy, she kept thinking. He’s not much of a rodeo rider now—he’d said that himself. She stood up when Mac gave a short nod that signaled them to open the gate, seeing the words on his lips, Let me have him.

  “I’m going to the concession stand,” she said hurriedly to Rita, not giving her the time to talk her out of it. Amelia all but ran through the crowd, determined to get away from the wire fence. If Mac was fool enough to do something that would get him maimed or killed, she was not about to sit there and watch him do it. She bought a soft drink at the concession stand, her heart nearly stopping at the long “oooh” sound the crowd suddenly made. She dropped her drink cup, and the man at the counter graciously gave her another. When the crowd finally broke into a round of applause, Amelia realized she had been holding her breath.

  “Here you are,” Mac said, taking her nearly untouched soft drink out of her hand and draining the cup. Her eyes searched him for some kind of injury, but he seemed to be all in one piece.

  She was torn between wanting to give him a fierce hug and wanting to punch him in the nose for worrying her so. God, but he was born to rodeoing. It would never even occur to him that she was horrified. He kept looking at her, but he didn’t say anything. Finally, when she couldn’t stand it any longer, she threw her arms around his middle, hugging him hard.

  “Whoa!” Mac said, laughing because she nearly toppled him. “Amelia, what are you doing?”

  “Oh, shut up!” she snapped at him. How dare he not realize how much he’d frightened her! She released him then, stalking away from him and leaving him holding her empty drink cup.

  The rodeo lasted three more hours. The sun was going down, and the evening was cool enough to make her shiver. And Mac kept looking at her as if he thought she’d lost her mind. He dragged her along with him to pack up Willard and the other horse, keeping her with him while he collected his prize money. All in all, he seemed quite pleased with his cash—and completely oblivious to the fact that he could have been dead instead. Amelia kept thinking of Rita, understanding Rita, who knew exactly why Amelia hadn’t been able to watch Mac on the back of the wild bull and who was kind enough not to mention it.

  Mac gave her his denim jacket again as they walked through the parked cars and trucks to “Louise.”

  “I… guess your lucky shirt worked,” she offered because she felt she ought to say something.

  “Guess so,” Mac agreed, looking over her head and around the grounds. “I don’t see Ernie.”

  Amelia saw him. She nodded in “Louise’s” direction. Two long legs and two muddy feet stuck out the window on the passenger side. She’d know those navy-blue and green rugby socks anywhere.

  Mac swore. “He’s drunk already.” He opened the door on the driver’s side, pulling Ernie toward him until his feet dropped out of the window, and then shoving him in the other direction until he had him sitting up and leaning against the far door. Amelia was invited to sit in the middle, and she did—much against her better judgment. Drunk or not, it took Ernie only a few seconds to realize that Amelia’s soft contours were much preferred to those of a hard metal door. Mac started
the truck, the radio putting forth its usual din of country-western music, and Ernie cuddled her into his arms, nuzzling sleepily into her neck. He was pressing her hard into Mac’s side, but she managed to get one of his arms peeled away. The other one promptly took its place.

  “Mmmmm,” Ernie said into her ear, breathing his whiskey breath all over her and squeezing her tightly. Mac was trying to help her get loose and drive at the same time, and the resulting zigzagging of the truck caused the horses to stamp nervously in the rocking trailer. By the time they were on the paved road that led to the main highway, Ernie had found her knee, sliding his hand up her bare leg and under her skirt. Amelia gave a squawk of protest, and Mac slammed on the brakes, stopping in the middle of the road, completely ignoring the cars and trucks that followed them. He got out of the truck, holding the door open wide while horns honked in both directions.

  “Amelia, get out!” he said, grabbing her wrist.

  “Me!” she cried in disbelief. Ernie was the one who ought to be tossed out on the side of the road.

  “Hurry up!” Mac yelled at her, dragging her out as the car behind them decided to pass, bumping along on the shoulder and giving a rather blue appraisal of the situation in general. “You drive,” Mac said. “I’ll sit in the middle.”

  “I’ve never driven a truck with a trailer!” Amelia cried.

  “I’ll tell you what to do—now, come on!” He was already in the truck, and she couldn’t stand there in the road. She climbed in with him, sitting for a moment behind the wheel and taking a long, deep breath.

  “Hurry, honey,” Mac said. “You don’t want to get us killed, do you?”

  “I don’t know what makes you think my driving is going to keep us from it,” she said worriedly, giving another long sigh as she started the truck.

  “Wait,” Mac said just as she was about to let out the clutch. He held Ernie up with one hand, and with the other he caressed her cheek with the backs of his rough fingers. “Amelia, thanks.”