Under a Painted Sky

by Stacey Lee

  “Unlikely,” West grumbles. “What happens if we lose?”

  “You take us to the next trading post where we can get our own horse,” Andy says, dipping her chin at me.

  West spits. “Fort Kearny? That’s three weeks of playing nursemaid.”

  Three weeks? I mask my delight by boring my eyes into the tiny cleft in his chin.

  “And if we win?” asks Cay.

  “What do you want?” I ask.

  West dips his eyes at me. “Don’t look like you have much to offer.”

  I cock back my tongue for a snappy response, but Andy steps in. “Neither does a stick, but that don’t stop it from being useful if you got imagination,” she says evenly. “And if you don’t, we got a ring.”

  “What kind of ring?” asks Cay.

  Andy pulls one of the rings out of her bag. “A heavy one.”

  Cay rocks forward on his feet to appraise it, then whistles. West makes a sucking sound with his tongue and finds a piece of sky to glare at.

  “Not afraid, are you?” I challenge him.

  He snorts and rakes his gaze over me.

  Cay drags West over to Peety, who’s a few yards off, combing Skinny’s tail. Whatever Cay says makes Peety laugh and West kick the dirt. After a moment, they rejoin us.

  “We accept,” says Cay. “If you win, we’ll take you to Fort Kearny, but you have to cook for us. Plus, I want some Frenchie lessons.”

  “And I want Chinese lessons,” Peety chimes in. West mutters something to Peety, who shrugs.

  Cay continues. “If you lose, ya gotta sing ‘Yankee Doodle,’ unshucked. And we’ll take the ring.”

  Not exactly what I expected, but it’s a shot. I wait a few seconds before replying, so as not to appear too eager. Since I don’t know what unshucked means, I add, “Only if you do it, too—sing, unshucked—if you lose.” I figure, if they agree to it, it can’t be so bad.

  “All of you,” adds Andy, looking at Peety.

  “No hay problema.”

  Cay curls his mouth into a lopsided grin. “With pleasure.”

  I straighten my back and step up to Cay, close enough that I could tug one of his curls. “I’ll need your hat.”

  11

  CAY DOESN’T PROTEST, SO I LIFT OFF HIS TOPPER. Then I work free the snake jaw and rehat his head.

  I plop down beside Andy. She takes out a needle and thread from her saddlebag as well as the sack of chokecherries. I get to work unlatching my violin case. Inside is the Lady Tin-Yin, a member of the family for four generations.

  The cousins peer down at us, both holding their elbows.

  “Last time I checked, fish prefer the harmonica to the violin,” drawls West.

  “Yeah, and they’d take a good mutton over chokecherries any day of the week,” Cay says around a smile. “I want the jawbone back after you lose.”

  They swagger off, laughing. They’re so confident of victory, they think they can take their time. I eye the chokecherries, doubts creeping in. “Maybe this wasn’t my best idea.”

  Andy threads a berry with her needle. “Don’t worry, this ain’t the bait, long as that ain’t the pole.” She nods toward my violin.

  “Not in a blue fog.” From my violin case, I remove the spool I keep in case of a broken string. “Catgut is the strongest fishing line I know of.” Not to mention the most dear.

  I unwind the string and attach the snake jaw to one end, careful not to stick my fingers. By the time I finish, Andy has threaded several more chokecherries, which she ties along the catgut.

  “Isaac taught me this trick. These make good bobbers,” she says.

  I find a flexible branch for the pole, and Andy cuts up slivers of bacon for the bait. We hurry the contraption down to the river.

  “I ain’t got no patience, so you holds the pole while I run down the good spots,” she says. “You do know how to fish, right?”

  “Sure.” I don’t disclose that Father usually handled the actual fish. A pang of sadness hits me again but I suck it up before we reach the boys.

  We hear them talking behind some cattails.

  “Gentlemen . . . ” I draw out the word, thinking I have time to play with their heads. Then I realize that Cay and West are shirtless, stripping leaves off their branches. When West carves a point on a branch with three slashes of his knife, I forget what I was going to say.

  “Good luck,” I squeak out, dashing off after Andy.

  She scrutinizes rocks and underwater plants where fish like to hide. A jumble of mossy stones peeking through the surface of the water catches her attention. She points toward them and I cast my line, then she scampers off to scout out other likely spots.

  Downstream, Cay and West wade into the water.

  “Over there!” Cay drags himself to a fallen tree that breaks the river’s flow.

  My catgut drags on something, and I pull up. Springing onto my toes, I make out the silhouette of a fish.

  “Yes!” I cry, hauling it in just as a breathless Andy returns to my side.

  “Rápido, amigos, the boy caught something,” yells Peety, standing on a rock to oversee the action.

  But it is just a pawpaw leaf.

  “No,” I wail, untangling the leaf.

  The boys laugh.

  “We’re just waiting on the right one,” Andy hollers back.

  West pulls back his spear, poised to strike. Cay holds his stomach with one hand, still laughing. “Hey, Sammy, how ya say ‘loser’ in French?”

  “Chinito,” Peety yells at me. “You gonna let that ugly bum boss you?”

  “Pick a side, vaquero, and stick on it,” yells Cay.

  “Follow me,” says Andy, trotting back toward the boys and pointing again at the river. “That brown mess.”

  I recast just short of a tangle of brown plants so my line doesn’t snag. Come on, fish!

  Now Cay jabs his spear into the water. He curses. “That was just to scare ya. Next time, my arrow’s going in.”

  “You’re catching fish, not sparrows,” yells Peety.

  “Girls never leave my mind, even when I’m fishing. That’s why I’m such a crack hunter.”

  “Pervert, you mean,” says West.

  A shadow ventures out of the tangle and hovers over my bait, weighing whether the salty intruder is friend or feast. I glance at West, who is focusing on a spot. He is close, too.

  “Chum the water,” Andy says, tossing a handful of bacon at my line.

  The pretend worms float for half a second before fish lips poke at them from below. I feel a tug. The second tug comes a lifetime later, and I jerk my wrist up.

  The fish fights now, which means I hooked it, but I don’t want my line to break. So I wait until it stops resisting before I reel in. Instead of giving up, my prey fights harder. If my line snaps, I lose.

  “You gonna have to get wet,” says Andy, already pulling off my right boot.

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes,” she barks, yanking off the other one.

  With a farewell grumble, I step into the river. The icy water laps at my calves, but I grit my teeth and forge ahead. The fish leads me into the brown tangle, slimy and probably full of disgusting leeches. I glance back at Andy, revulsion pulling my face in different directions. Still clutching one of my boots, she gestures with it, go on already.

  Just thinking about the leeches trips me and I find myself up to my chin in slippery brown strings. I bite my tongue to keep from screaming. Everyone must be watching my spectacle. I choke my pole with a death grip and pick myself back up.

  Soon, a catfish the size of Texas blows me a cold-blooded kiss.

  “Hallelujah!” Andy hollers.

  Cay hollers, too, as West holds up his prize, a flounder still flapping at the end of his spear.

  I stick my finger up my catfi
sh’s gill so I don’t lose it and try to stop thinking about wet cow nostrils. The fish slaps my arm with its tail.

  Peety tilts his brown face from the boys to Andy and me, his chin wedged between his thumb and index finger as he decides which of us caught our fish first. Andy raises her clasped hands toward heaven, her eyes squeezed shut.

  Then the vaquero looks back at the boys. “Chinito wins by half a nose!”

  12

  DESPITE MY DISGUST AT THE FLAPPING THING AT the end of my arm, I can’t wipe the grin off my face when Andy and I parade by the boys toward our campfire.

  “Un perdant,” I tell Cay.

  “What?”

  “The word you asked for in French. ‘Loser.’ It’s a good one to start with, don’t you think?”

  “Un perdant,” repeats Andy. “Slides off the licker.”

  After the flounder and the catfish are getting to know each other in our pot of simmering water, Andy and I park on a patch under the canopy of a pawpaw, me in my two dry shirts. It’s showtime.

  Peety starts pulling off his trousers right beside us, sending our eyebrows soaring. He wears red long underwear. Andy’s face explodes with hilarity though she slaps a hand over her mouth before any sound escapes. With a flick of his wrist, the vaquero shakes out his fancy jacket and hangs it on a branch. The rear flap on the seat of his long underwear sags a bit.

  “He could carry parcels in there,” Andy says out of the side of her mouth, and now I have to cover my face as well.

  Then Peety peels off the long underwear and folds them into a neat pile, sweeping away the last vestiges of my composure.

  “Unshucked,” I choke out, planting my face in my lap. I can’t hide like this. Boys don’t hide in the presence of naked male bodies, but I can’t help myself.

  Something almost knocks my topper off. West and Cay just threw their trousers at us, and now stand naked as two zucchinis wearing hats.

  “Well, that’s one mystery solved,” says Andy, who manages to face them straight on while an invisible harness pulls my face back into my knees. “But now I wanna know, if they don’t wear unders, how they stop the chafing?”

  “Stop whispering,” says Cay. “This is some serious singing we’re about to do.”

  Andy elbows me. “C’mon, pull it together. They’s just bodies.”

  I force myself to look up. The three fine specimens of the male anatomy line up. The cousins, a shade under six feet each, bookend the huskier vaquero, like two bolts of cotton twill with a shorter bolt of broadcloth between them. The bolt on the left might gain another inch if it stopped slouching.

  The boys belt out the lyrics to “Yankee Doodle.”

  “Looks like we have three full moons tonight,” I observe.

  “And one of them coffee-colored.”

  When Andy says this, I know I’m going to have to fight down another laughing attack. I cough, spit, and hold my breath in. It never works. The floodgates burst, and all my fifteen-year-old giggles come snorting out while Andy whacks me. By the word macaroni, I’m teary-eyed, and her handprint is stamped on my back.

  As I swear to myself I will never again wager without knowing what the terms mean, to my horror, the doodlers lumber toward us, their faces twisted with evil intent.

  “No one laughs at this mountain of muscle and lives to tell,” says Cay.

  West flicks a mosquito off his arm. “The babies need their bath.”

  “Water’s warm, chicos.”

  Truth be told, the sight was not so horrible, but never mind. Andy and I jump to our feet. Since we’re boys, we cannot scream or faint, those being the things that a female does when naked men pursue her. So we do the next best thing.

  We scoop up their clothes and race to the water. You might think being unclothed would put you at a disadvantage, but those boys run like cheetahs after a pair of bunnies. They catch up as we reach the shoreline.

  Too late for them, though.

  “It’s a cold night to be unshucked,” I tell the closest, Cay, as we dangle our bundles over the water.

  The wind goes out of their sails.

  “Hand them over and we’ll leave you nippers alone,” grumbles West.

  Andy pretends to drop her bundle, and the boys all gasp. “Swear it on a stack of Bibles.”

  The boys shield their privates with one hand and hold up the other.

  • • •

  After Andy says a proper grace this time, we feast like kings, though we have to eat out of the pot with two spoons. Using the vegetables from Cay’s sack, Andy turns out fish stew with chokecherry relish, no onions. At her request, I put the onions into one of the boys’ saddlebags so she won’t have to see them.

  “My brother taught me this recipe,” Andy says proudly. “It’s called Snap Stew.”

  After we lick every fish bone clean, Cay wipes his mouth with his bandanna and announces, “Now ain’t you glad we brung the nippers along?” He turns his gaze on West, who has the grace to flush at being called out.

  I weigh the snake jaw in my palm. So, Snake, you did me a good turn after all, though one lucky turn does not a lucky person make. I tuck the bone back into Cay’s hatband, then replace the catgut in my violin case.

  Lady Tin-Yin’s polished maple shell gleams under the sun’s final rays. An Italian built the instrument, but Father gave her the Chinese name, which means “violin from heaven.” She is the most precious thing I’ve ever owned, and now the only thing I own besides my boots. I lightly pluck the G, thinking again of Father, whose philosophy followed the open strings. G for grace. My throat constricts at the sound of the lone note floating up to heaven.

  Next, the D-string, D for discipline, the note of empowerment. That one always comes out a bit cranky, like it doesn’t want to wake up. Then the A-string, A for acceptance of the way God chose to outfit us, skin color and all. And E, not for excellence, but for exquisite, the standard by which I play.

  When I come out of my thoughts, everyone is watching me.

  “You gonna saw for us?” asks Peety.

  Andy nods at me.

  Discipline, I think, sniffing up any mistiness on my face.

  Two flat boulders form a step under the shade of a junior-sized dogwood. I plant my bottom on the higher boulder and rosin the bow. I start rolling up my left sleeves, but the sight of my reedy arm makes me roll them back down. Definitely not manly.

  Blowing off the excess powder from the rosin, I run the bow over each string and wind the pegs as necessary. Then I play the D-flat scale, my favorite. Sounds good, so I get to my feet. My audience falls silent.

  My showmanship only comes out when I hold the violin—with Lady Tin-Yin in my arms, I don’t care who watches. A peace comes over me, something I call my violin calm. I become someone else, someone quite entertaining, I like to think.

  I compose myself with a deep breath. I put the wood to my chin, and launch into Paganini’s Caprice no. 24.

  When Father first showed me the sheet music, I told him I couldn’t do it.

  “You’re right,” he said, chopping vegetables with his cleaver.

  “What?”

  “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right. Have a pea shoot.”

  By the end of the week, I had mastered it.

  The piece features crisscrossing strings, which look more difficult than they really are. I work in several triple stops, three strings played at once. Mr. Trask, a clarinetist himself, brought tangerines just to hear me play those triple stops. I would’ve played them anyway, but I think he brought those rare treasures to show me what he thought of my playing.

  When I finish, no one claps. They all stare at me. Andy swipes her sleeve over her eyes and turns her face away from the boys.

  “Ain’t never heard a fiddle like that,” says Cay, his jaw slack.

  Peety’s head bob
s up and down. “You got some skills.”

  West glares at his boots.

  Time to lighten things up. This one’s for you, Father, because banjo was your first love. Then I tear into “Oh! Susanna,” which no one can hear without dancing, especially Cay, who does a polka.

  Our spirits are high as we ready for sleep. We arrange ourselves like cigars again in the same order as last night.

  We hear another howl tonight—this one not a chorus of yips but a single lone cry. A wolf. Wolves grow twice as big as coyotes, and can take down large animals like moose. I sit up and shiver. The howl repeats, this time closer.

  “Holy moly,” says Andy.

  West rolls over on his side, away from me. “They don’t bother people. Probably crying over his sweetheart.”

  “It’s the bears and the mountain lions we worry over,” says Cay, who’s still sitting up, looking out into the dark.

  “What we do about those?” asks Andy.

  “You gotta learn a few cowboy tricks,” he replies. “Sharpshooting. Roping. We’d show you, but you ain’t worthy.” He tilts his face toward us. The firelight makes his teeth gleam.

  Andy snorts and elbows me.

  Peety starts to snore, and then the rest of them tumble off.

  Andy turns toward me, and whispers sleepily, “I’m happy they’s gonna bring us to the fort,” she says. “You’s in good hands.”

  “Me? You, too, right?”

  “Yeah, me, too.” Her breath gradually deepens.

  I lie awake longer. What would I do if she did leave? Would I be able to pull off a boy act of one? Probably not if I cried. Then the curtains would fall for sure.

  No sooner do I get Andy out of my mind when Yorkshire’s lecherous winking eye moves in, along with bank robbers and lawmen and Father. Oh, how you must have suffered.

  My grief shadows me into sleep, but then shakes me awake several times during the night. Father in a bonfire, or a prairie blaze, always holding his hands out for me. I cannot pull him free because I am always too late.