Ride, Cowboy, Ride!

by Baxter Black

  Pica presented a small beribboned sack containing a lipstick-like dispenser on a necklace chain to each member of the royal company as they stood poised in a line on the stage.

  Pica was shorter than all but one of the royalty. Each one gave her a thin smile or a fake one, shook her hand, and said “thank you.” Even though the queens seemed to loom over her like a mountainous skyline of hats and hair, every eye in the audience remained glued to Pica’s skin-tight, ultra-low-rise Calvin Klein jeans, bare back, and loosely tied halter top.

  Contempla was the last in line. Pica looked up at her and said with a self-conscious laugh, “I hope I’m, like, doing this right. It’s really cool to be here.”

  Contempla was taken aback for a fraction of a second. An expression of disbelief flashed before she could catch herself.

  Pica saw it immediately and stepped back, but Contempla’s face was frozen in a smile again. Pica swiveled, turned on her high-voltage smile, and strolled down the runway. Cameras chattered like freezing dentures.

  She kicked on the high beams and lit up the room.

  There was a very short and tentative applause, leaving so much tension in the banquet that it was a wonder that oxygen masks didn’t drop from the overhead. An uncomfortable silence reigned until suddenly the photographer from the Fence Post said, “My, oh, my!”

  Caught by surprise the crowd giggled, then relaxed.

  “Thank you . . .” Loretta looked through her half-glasses at the paper she held for a name. “Thank you, OVER THE TOP SPORTS! Now, our next sponsor . . .”

  File slipped Pica out the back before the banquet ended. She returned to the hotel and changed into her Twenty X jeans, a long-sleeve button shirt, a bronc riding buckle she had won, and sensible Justin Ropers, a type of flat-heeled plain boots. She was on duty at the booth by six o’clock.

  The fallout from Pica D’TroiT’s appearance was mixed. The queen committee wrote letters to the PRCA and OVER THE TOP SPORTS complaining of inappropriate dress and behavior, lack of respect for tradition, and ignorance of rodeo etiquette. Mean letters to the editor appeared in the Greeley Tribune.

  All four papers that covered the event ran variations of the same runway picture. The Fence Post ran a full page of photographs: one group shot of the queens and three views of Pica on the runway. The Denver Post had her on both the society page and the sports page. This did not please the queen committee.

  Contempla listened to the disgruntled, disapproving, carping comments that ensued the next few days, but something puzzled her. In her brief moment of intimacy with Pica, she got the distinct impression that the outrageously dressed ingenue was clueless about the riot she was causing. Her innocence did not seem feigned.

  Contempla had noticed one other thing when she had glanced down past Pica’s black pearl choker and melons: a belt buckle inscribed “Pica D’TroiT, Champion, Saddle Bronc Riding.” It was new.

  CHAPTER 20

  August 5,

  The Republican River at

  the Willa Cather State Historical Site

  The first time Cooney saw Pica’s picture on a LIP LASTER poster it was a jolt. His mind immediately replayed the Technicolor visual of her face looking down over the bucking chute in Tucson and blasting him with a smile and crossed eyes.

  The poster had been tacked on a wall behind the grandstands at the Livingston Round-Up during Fourth of July rodeo. Matter of fact, posters were everywhere that week—in Red Lodge, Montana; Cody, Wyoming; Molalla and St. Paul, Oregon. Since then the posters had begun appearing at all the rodeos, in western stores, magazines. In some Pica posed alone and in some with Straight.

  Because of the publicity campaign obligations for LIP LASTER, Straight was now flying directly into about half of the rodeos returning from media appearances. Pica was often with him.

  It appeared to Cooney that all the media effort was working. Many cowboys and rodeo spectators wore the brightly colored hard-plastic LIP LASTER dispensers hanging around their necks on breakaway chains, and Straight saw Pica almost weekly at some promotional event or in the LIP LASTER booth. It was common for Straight and Pica to be seen together in photos and on posters, even in person at events. After two months it was beginning to wear on Cooney.

  Straight was sensitive to Cooney’s feelings. He tried not to even mention her name unless Cooney brought it up. Then, when he did, Straight stuck to the facts: “Yes, it was fun, yes, we ate together, yes, she’s still on tryout ’til the finals. No, she didn’t . . . ask about you, that is.”

  Long drives, long waits, and long nights were all opportunities for Cooney’s mind to imagine, think, relive, wish, and worry. He was having trouble sleeping. He was usually traveling solo. He had plans to hook up with Straight at the next rodeo.

  Somewhere between Sidney, Iowa (August 3–6) and Dodge City, Kansas (August 3–7) on Highway 281 south of Hastings, Nebraska, his mind swimming with piranhas, Cooney caught a fleeting thought of something Lick Davis had told him. It was that night after the wild cow chase and several tequilas. He tried to remember it, then tried to forget it, but it gave him no peace. He decided to call Lick.

  Cooney pulled off the highway onto a dirt road. Several cows were grazing in the adjoining pasture. Signs designating the Republican River and Willa Cather State Historical Site were visible from the spot he chose to park.

  He shut off the engine, looked up the number, and punched it in. The receptionist answered, “Posthole Poetry Company, may I help you?”

  Lick wasn’t at home, but the receptionist had just talked to him in a motel in Cortez, Colorado, where he was entertaining that night. She gave Cooney the number.

  “Yes?” answered Lick in a businesslike manner.

  “Lick Davis?” asked Cooney.

  “It’s him,” said Lick.

  “This is Cooney Bedlam.”

  “By gosh!” said Lick with obvious pleasure. “What a treat to hear from you. I wanted to visit with you more after the speech in Pincher Creek, but I was signin’ books and visitin,’ you know how it is. I looked for you after, but it was pretty late, and you had left. Anyway, where are you now?”

  “I’m on the road. Actually I’ve just pulled off road. I’m in Nebraska on the way to Dodge City. Me and Straight are both up tonight. He’s flyin’ in from St. Louis, I think. He’s been busy doing promotions for LIP LASTER.”

  “Yeah,” said Lick, “I see his picture everywhere! But I wonder if it’s takin’ away from his riding . . . I know there’s plenty of time left in the season, but he keeps slipping in the standings. But you! You’re on a roll! What are you, second or third in the bull riding and in the top ten in saddle bronc? Man, yer hot!”

  “Yeah, that’s about right,” said Cooney. Cooney was actually sixth in saddle bronc, third in bulls, and sixth in all around. Straight was thirteenth in the saddle bronc.

  “So, how’s your poetry writing?” asked Lick.

  “I’m writing some, but . . . I’m more writing sad love song stuff. I can’t sing or play, but these sad love poems keep boiling up, and I write and lay awake at night. The words keep coming, and I have to write them down. It’s drivin’ me crazy. I get about three or four hours of sleep a night. I’ve started smoking, drinkin’ a little more . . . I just can’t get this girl out of my mind.

  “And I’m jealous, and she doesn’t even know me! I’m losing it.”

  Lick Davis listened to this agonized confession. He remembered unrequited loves from his own life. It was easy to be philosophical now that he was happily married and aged, but old loves are like healed-over wounds. They no longer hurt, but they leave scars as reminders of life’s skirmishes on the battlefield of human feelings.

  Lick Davis was veteran himself, with several broken purple hearts earned in the love wars. But the man on the other end of the phone was still on the front lines in heart-to-heart
combat. It was obvious he was wounded.

  “Is it that same girl you alluded to when you were down here at my place?” asked Lick respectfully.

  “The same. The very one,” Cooney answered.

  “Did you have a fight?”

  “No.”

  “Are you still together?” asked Lick.

  “No. I mean we’ve never been together.”

  “What!” said Lick. “Well, how can you be . . . jealous, or possessive. If you’ve never, ya know, she was never yours in the first place?”

  “That’s just it,” said Cooney. “I want to take her out, get to know her better . . .”

  “Well, why don’t you just ask her out?” said Lick.

  “I’ve somehow managed to turn her off. I mean, she kinda came on to me, once . . . Or I think she was, but since then, it seems when I’ve had a chance to meet her or make contact, something comes up, and I make a complete fool of myself.”

  “Like what?” asked Lick.

  “Like sending her a suggestive e-mail before I hardly met her,” said Cooney.

  “That works with some girls,” said Lick.

  “Then I threw up on her boots,” said Cooney.

  “Well, I’ve never seen that work with a girl,” said Lick, trying to keep from laughing out loud.

  “This last time she caught me sloppy drunk and unconscious with her brother’s ex-wife. I was at Pincher Creek, yeah, when you were there. That’s why I didn’t get back to see you. But see, I never connected that was her hometown. I wound up . . .” Cooney rambled on through his tragic tale.

  Lick began laughing. By the time Cooney finished with the paramedics and Straight’s sisters catching him in the kitchen the next day in his underwear, Lick was bent over and wheezing with delight.

  “Cooney,” said Lick, gasping and trying to regain control, “if I was you I’d try and tell her the story . . . or just shoot yourself!

  “I learned a long time ago that we make mistakes . . . all of us. Unforgivable mistakes. We don’t do them on purpose; it just happens. When I was sixteen and just driving I followed a cute girl all over town in my car. It was me and some other guys. We were cool, we had a car, typical high school studs. She finally pulled over. She had another girlfriend in the passenger side. I jumped out, sauntered over to her car, my buddies right behind me. She rolled her window down. I noticed some strange handles on the steering column. “Cool wheels,” I said. “How’d you girls like to go to the dance?” just as I noticed she had no legs.

  Lick went on: “I have two friends, brothers. One of ’em’s wife had cancer and was not expected to live. I wrote a sincere letter of condolence to the couple, assuring them they were both believers, that they would be together again someday. I sent the note off and said a prayer for them. Three days later I get an e-mail saying that she had died. Problem was, I had mixed up the wives. I’d sent a letter to the wrong couple!”

  “What did you do?” asked Cooney.

  “What could I do? I called them both, apologized, not that the other wife had died, but that I had got it wrong. By the time I had explained the whole chronological screw-up and asked the nonwidower brother to forward the letter on to his brother, we, all three of us, well, four counting the surviving wife, were laughing and crying together.

  “See, sometimes you mess up, despite good intentions, ya just mess up. It’s the cowboy’s greatest excuse and the only one that works.”

  “I don’t know,” said Cooney. “I don’t think she’ll even speak to me.”

  “Do you ever see her?” asked Lick.

  “Everyday, it seems. On some poster or magazine. She’s the LIP LASTER girl, for cryin’ out loud!” said Cooney.

  “You mean the one who’s on all the posters with Straight?” exclaimed Lick.

  “The self-same, dyed-in-the-wool, twenty-four-carat, steel-jacketed, double-barreled, smile-like-a-refrigerator-openin’-in-a-cave-at-20,000-leagues-under-the-sea, luscious, lovely, now-appearing-nightly-in-my-dreams LIP LASTER girl!” reeled off Cooney in a burst of pent-up prose.

  “My gosh,” sighed Lick. “I kinda figured she and Straight had somethin’ goin’, you know, have more than a professional relationship.” Then he realized he might have misspoken and followed weakly with, “But I’m sure they’re not, ’specially since he’s got to know that you’ve got a crush on her.”

  Cooney let the silence settle.

  “Yer in limbo, my fine friend,” said Lick. “Love is like a crawfish trap: easy to fall into and hard to find your way out of. Bein’ the love advisor that I am, I am torn because it strikes me that your state of constant agitation is related to your stellar performance in the arena.

  “Would you give up your chance at rodeo stardom and poetry prestige for a long shot at a gorgeous Canadian gosling you hardly know?”

  “Faster’n you can spell propitiation,” said Cooney.

  Dear reader, we are back to square one. At that fine line between adoration and stalking. It is a story old as Samson and Delilah, Romeo and Juliet, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Winston Churchill and the British citizenry.

  Lick Davis, cowboy counselor at large, has alluded that Cooney’s excellent performance in the rodeo arena might be related to his state of constant agitation. It is well accepted that songwriters, novelists, and poets write their best love ballads when their love life is in the potty. Tragedy, heartache, pain, and suffering bring out the unself-conscious cries to be helped, to have peace of mind, and to be loved back.

  Is Cooney’s search for perfection in front of a roaring rodeo crowd merely a plea for adulation to fill the space between his ears since he cannot fill the void between his ventricles?

  Could it be that the only way to keep the love-hungry bug off his back is to feed the thrill-hungry bug in his belly?

  To shed the tormenting she-fox of love, he rides like the hounds of hell.

  It was as if Cooney had just admitted he was going to jump off a cliff and hope for a miracle on the way down.

  “If that is the case, my young amigo,” spoke Lick, “you are beyond my help. Call me along the way when you pass through those clearings when you can see daylight. Adios.”

  “Goodbye,” said Cooney.

  Cooney snapped his cell phone closed and sank back into the pickup seat.

  His mind began to whirl:

  I fell in with a roper, but she threw me for a loop.

  I tried to pigeon hole her, but she up and flew the coop.

  I thought I had her figgered, but what happened don’t add up.

  I thought that I was tougher, but she whipped me like a pup.

  Love is like a jagged cracker all crumbled in the soup,

  And even Humpty Dumpty has admitted he’s been duped.

  Can a fancy-dancy lipster ever fall for Bronco Bill,

  Or is she bound to sort him like a baleen seines a krill? . . .

  Cooney placed his palms flat against his temples and pressed. “Stop it! Stop it!” he screamed at himself.

  Cooney opened his briefcase and looked at the Baggie that Lipo Conrad, better known as Star Child behind the chutes, had given him a week earlier. Lipo was a New Age bull rider who meditated, practiced yoga, and did incantations. He claimed Indian ancestry, though he still looked like the same stereotypical blond beach boy who had written “Surf the World” under “ambitions” in his Santa Monica high school annual.

  Lipo had noticed Cooney’s agitated state and had given him some of his magic elixir. Cooney had been afraid to try the Star Child Stress Potion, but on this hot afternoon he had reached a desperate point. He had never tried any illegal drugs, not even marijuana.

  Cooney took a pinch of the dried, leafy mix from the Baggie, rolled a smoke with the cigarette papers Star Child had been gracious enough to include, a
nd inhaled deeply. Tensely he awaited some reaction. After two minutes: nothing. He took another long drag and blew out the smoke. Then another . . . he felt a tiny buzz in the back of his head. He lay back against the seat and looked languidly out the open window on the driver’s side.

  Another long drag; the rolled paper crumbled in his fingers. A small pinch of the leaves fell into his palm. He looked at them bovinely, then popped the remains into his mouth.

  As he chewed he dully took in the scenery. Where was he? Was he a Republican? If not, did he have the right to be on their river? One of the cows began to levitate. He drooled in amazement. In the basement of his brain, where the fuse box became a Hydra, a connection was made.

  Many times he’d been out checking cows for his grandpa, following a fresh cow track, and then suddenly it would disappear! The levitation explained it all. It was a life-changing experience.

  Then the Republican sign began to rock like a boat. Three doctors—he guessed they were doctors—were rowing the boat toward the other sign. They were after Willy’s catheter. Cooney knew what a catheter was; he’d had surgery before. Only he was not aware that catheters were kept in a historical site. Just his luck to park beside it. Now they were going to park it in him!

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” he said as he clumsily got the door open and fell to the dirt. “They’re coming! They’re coming!” Cooney crawled on his belly under the barbed-wire fence into the cow pasture. They can’t get me here, he thought with relief.

  He sat up, sort of. The field was full of cows. He had to think a minute what they were. But one said, “I’m a cow. Be not afraid. Cows do not eat bronc riders.”

  “But,” he said, “I am not a bronc rider. I am a lion creeping through the savannah to come and milk you. I am a snake on the lawn looking for a croquet ball. I am a catheter in a field of urethrae. I am a mosquito sneaking up on a pork chop.”