Better Luck Next Time

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  I couldn’t have it getting back to Margaret that I was refusing such an innocent request. “All right. Put your foot on the spoke of the wheel there, like I did, and hop on up.” I leaned over and offered her my hand. Thanks to the looseness of her dress I guess I hadn’t realized how slight she was, because when she hopped and I pulled I almost threw her clear over the stagecoach instead of into the driver’s box. She landed more or less on top of me.

  “Sorry about that,” I said after I scraped her off and settled her on the seat beside me. “You’re lighter than I thought you’d be considering how big your head is.”

  “I have a lot of hair,” she said. “Also I’ve lost weight lately. Not on purpose.”

  Ah. The Heartbreak Diet. Food on the table, but no appetite for it. Lots of our ladies came to us looking famished from it. In my early days on the ranch I confess I begrudged them the luxury of pushing a full plate away when so many people were going hungry. But it didn’t take me so very long to come to understand that our ladies’ brand of anguish counted, too. No fair saying their suffering wasn’t genuine just because they had money in the bank and a bed to sleep in. Pain is pain.

  I dug around in my pocket and handed Emily another bandana.

  “I won’t need that. I’m done with crying,” she said.

  “It’s to keep dust out of your nose and mouth,” I said. “Come to think of it, you need a hat. Did the salesman talk you into one to go with those boots?” I wasn’t excited about handing over mine once the sun started scrambling her brains. Also, once she went inside to fetch her own hat she might decide she didn’t want to come along after all. Then she would be Margaret’s problem.

  “No,” she said. “How far are we going?”

  “About four miles.”

  “Is that all? I won’t need a hat for that.”

  “The sun is fierce this time of day,” I said. “Tell you what. You wear my hat. It should fit. I’ve got an awful big head, too.”

  “I couldn’t take your hat,” she said. “What will happen to you?”

  “Me? I’m like an old piece of leather already. Please, take it. Margaret will have my hide if I let you get sunburned on my watch.”

  “Well, in that case.”

  My hat was a little sweaty, so I tucked yet another bandana inside before I put it on her head. It fit nicely. Then I showed her how to tie the other bandana over her nose and mouth, bandit-style, against the dust the horses were about to kick up.

  “Thanks,” she said, knotting it in place. “So the new guest is coming in an airplane? How exciting! I’ve never been on an airplane. Have you?”

  “About as often as you’ve ridden a stagecoach, ma’am.” I picked up the reins and squinted off toward the road. The sun was so bright that I could still see the afterimage of the ranch house projected on the back of my eyelids when I closed my eyes against the glare. While I had them shut Emily touched my elbow and I jumped.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you again,” she said. “I should have said your name instead. Ward. Like an orphan in a Victorian novel. Taken in by a relative.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Like that.”

  Chapter Two

  I believe Emily had a crush on Nina from the beginning. I could hardly blame her. I was pretty dazzled by Nina, too.

  “Is she some kind of gold digger?” Emily asked before either of us laid eyes on her. “I’ve heard of women burying three husbands over the course of a lifetime, but a woman anywhere close to my age who’s divorced three! None of my friends have gotten divorced even once.”

  As promised, Emily hadn’t said a mumbling word on the way out, just raked the surroundings with those eyes of hers and furrowed her brow a few times. The stagecoach traveled at a blistering speed of six miles an hour, tops, so she had plenty of time to take everything in. Once we arrived and I had the horses settled, she turned her headlamps on me and let loose with, “So who’s this Nina?”

  When I’d asked Sam more or less the same question, he’d resettled his cowboy hat on his head, squinted, and said, “Nina? She’s a stem-winder.” Nina had been just shy of twenty when she arrived with the first octet of pre-divorcées come to wait out their six weeks at the Flying Leap, and had repeated some years later. I gathered Max and Margaret were fond of her or she wouldn’t have been welcomed back. Let me tell you, it was a job of work, juggling the comings and goings of our guests. My hat goes off to Margaret there. It was easier for everybody involved if our guests arrived more or less in batches. Over the years, however, between choreographing all the comings and goings and not-going-through-with-its and managing a wait list about as long as your arm, our ladies’ six weeks spent with us weren’t always in perfect sync.

  To help herself keep things straight when she did the booking and, eventually, to thin the herd, Margaret kept score on past guests in a secret ledger locked in her desk drawer. Fight-picker, drunk by lunchtime, mean to staff, loudmouth, idiot, or, worst of all, bore. I once passed Margaret on the telephone at her desk as she finished recommending alternate accommodations to someone so memorably unpleasant she hadn’t had to check her notes. “Nancy Casper from Denver,” she’d said when I raised an eyebrow. “Life is too short to put up with that piece again.”

  “I haven’t met Nina yet,” I said. “Sam says she’s a stem-winder.”

  “What’s a stem-winder?” Emily asked.

  “That’s what I asked Sam,” I said. “He couldn’t really explain it to me very well, aside from saying, ‘That’s what Nina is. A stem-winder.’ I gather it’s some fancy modern watch that keeps better time than most. Or something.”

  Emily nodded. After some consideration, she added, “Maybe she’s an actress. Some Hollywood people marry four or five times and nobody bats an eyelash. They say pretending to be in love when you’re making a movie can make two people fall in love for real. I’m not so sure I believe that’s possible. But then, of course, I’m not an actress.”

  I parked the stagecoach a fair distance from the runway so the horses wouldn’t spook, set the brake and looped the reins around the driver’s knob, then went to the stagecoach boot for the nosebags I’d stocked with grain back at the stable.

  A gangly kid I’d noticed sitting on an upturned bucket outside one of the hangars trotted over to offer his assistance. Boys like him were thick on the ground around the train station and the big hotels in town, angling for tips for helping wealthy tourists with their luggage. I admired the kid’s initiative for seeking out new markets and gave him a nickel for his efforts, a considerable percentage of what I kept back for myself from the pay I sent home to Tennessee.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “It’s a tip.”

  He pointed to the buffalo on the coin. “What I mean is, what do you think this is?”

  “Oh, that,” I said. “That’s a buffalo.”

  “I know what a buffalo is,” he said. “This is a nickel.”

  “So?”

  “So, I guess that bellowing I just heard came from your pocket when you pinched this nickel so hard it woke the buffalo up.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” I said.

  The kid sighed, but helped me with the nosebags anyway.

  Emily, who’d waved me away when I offered to hand her down from the stagecoach roof, had managed to descend on her own without breaking her neck or exposing her drawers to God and everybody. She returned my hat to me and arranged herself in the stagecoach’s shadow.

  I put my hat on and scanned the horizon for some sign of Nina’s plane.

  “It must be fun to pretend you’re something you’re not and get paid to do it,” Emily said. I must have looked baffled, so she added, “Actresses.”

  “Ah.” I nodded and turned in a slow circle, searching the sky in every direction. Guests came to us from all over, and I realized I didn’t have the least idea where Nina was heading in from. We’d had a maharaja all the way from India once, one of our infrequent male visitors. We weren’t reall
y set up for male guests, but he said he’d always dreamed of being a cowboy and so was happy enough to be quartered in one side of the bunkhouse while Sam and I doubled up temporarily in the other. A courtly, dapper man, our maharaja, who’d called himself Mr. Smith when he’d engaged his accommodations. Once he’d relaxed enough to reveal his true identity, I said I thought a maharaja could have as many wives as he wanted so I didn’t see the point in divorcing one he didn’t get along with. He answered in an accent that would have done our friend Shakespeare proud: “And I thought everyone where you come from went barefoot and played that shrunken version of a sitar you hillbillies call a banjo.” Still, a nice man. As fellow southerners—him of Asia and Sam and me of the United States—he made us promise we’d drop by for a visit if either of us ever found ourselves in his neck of the woods.

  “How about you?” Emily asked abruptly.

  “How about me?”

  “Are you an actor?”

  “An actor? Me?”

  “I thought you might be. Since you’re familiar with Shakespeare’s plays.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Also every hero in the Western serials looks more or less like you. Men who are too handsome to get hired for real jobs seem to gravitate to the motion pictures.” That hung in the air between us for a bit before she said, “That came out wrong.”

  “You don’t have to explain,” I said. “There are worse things on earth than being told you’re too handsome.” At least she hadn’t suggested I was too pretty to be smart.

  A tiny dot in the blue-white distance gradually got bigger as its horsefly buzz grew into a puttering roar.

  “Look!” I said, happy for the opportunity to change the subject. “That must be Nina’s plane.”

  A double-cockpit biplane with an orange undercarriage and silver wings swept past, touched down, and taxied to a hangar at the opposite end of the runway, the jouncing figure of the pilot in back and his smaller passenger bobbling along up front. I gave the gangly boy another of my precious nickels to mind the horses while we went over to collect Nina. He pulled a face and said, “Oh, goody. Maybe the buffalo on this one will fall in love with the other one and they’ll start minting nickels. Before you know it I’ll be rich.”

  As Emily and I approached we saw the pilot grab the airplane’s upper wing, cantilever himself to standing and step out onto the lower one. He bent over Nina briefly, then looked to have grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and pitched her out on the far side of the plane. He jumped down after. I broke into a run.

  By the time I was within a hundred yards of the plane the pilot had come around the airplane’s nose, spotted me, grinned boyishly, and waved. He was a slim drink of water, jaunty, six feet if he was an inch, with a pale, smooth face teetering between impish and angelic. The kind of pretty young man Miss Pam called “a fine-looking boy” until he was fifty. Or so I thought until he removed his goggles and aviator’s cap, shook out silvery-blond hair, and resolved himself into a grimy-faced female with a figure eight of clean white flesh around her eyes. “Ahoy there, cowboy!” she shouted, though I was hardly more than an arm’s length away from her by then. “Are you here for me?”

  “Yes!” I shouted back, the way you catch yourself whispering responses to somebody who’s lost their voice. I decided it was her packaging that had made me mistake Nina for a boy at first. She wore a roomy white shirt, none too clean, with a man’s necktie loosely knotted at her throat. A parachutist’s backpack strapped between her trouser legs and over the shoulders of her leather jacket, and a gun belt canted across her hips.

  She shed the parachute and jacket as she shouted, “Where’s my buddy Sam? Don’t break my heart and say he’s left the ranch.”

  “He took a carload of ladies into town,” I said.

  “What’s that?” she asked, cupping a hand behind her ear. I found out later it always took a while for her hearing to recover after hours of wind roaring past in the open cockpit.

  “Reno!” I hollered. “Carload of ladies! Back later!”

  “Carload of ladies? Sam’s made of sterner stuff than I am! Do you have anything to drink?”

  “I have water in the stagecoach!”

  “Say again?”

  “I have water!”

  “Water! That’s what I thought you said! I didn’t ask for a bath, cowboy, I asked for a drink! Though God knows I could use both! Give me a hand with this duffel, would you? It weighs more than I do!”

  “Oh,” Emily scraped, when she caught up to me and got a load of Nina. “If that’s what a stem-winder is, I want to be one, too.”

  Chapter Three

  By the time Nina and Emily exited the Mixmaster, heads together, they were giggling like schoolgirls. “Oh, no,” Emily said. “I really couldn’t. Not in a million years.”

  “Of course you could,” Nina said, tucking Emily’s hand into the crook of her elbow as they started for the house. “You drove here by yourself, all the way from San Francisco, didn’t you? You’re very brave, I think.”

  “More like very desperate,” Emily said.

  “There’s nothing like a nip of desperation to make a person brave,” Nina said. “Alcohol also helps.”

  “Oh, I don’t drink.”

  Nina patted Emily’s hand. “You don’t drink yet.”

  Margaret emerged on the ranch house porch. Nina let go of her new friend to run up the steps and throw herself into Margaret’s arms as if she were a soldier just home from the wars.

  Yes, the ranch house had a porch. Oh, I see, you don’t have a photograph of it and you were picturing something low-slung and adobe. No, no, the main house at the Flying Leap was a gabled clapboard Victorian with gingerbread trim and a porch that wrapped around three sides. The dream house of some miner born poor back East who’d suddenly found himself flush with cash. A six-bedroom, high-desert white elephant, picturesque but not the best match for Reno’s extremes of climate. You saw a lot of this sort of thing around Nevada back then, the residue of the newly and briefly rich, rambling mansions dropped into a landscape that looked like the surface of the moon. It was a good fit for our transient customers, though, who cared about picturesque and weren’t around long enough to be ground down by the impracticalities of the place. Max and Margaret had oil heat installed for winter and ceiling fans for summer. They lived in a first-floor bedroom behind the kitchen and so didn’t suffer so much from the fluctuations in temperature. Sam and I slept in a detached two-room bunkhouse by the barn the set designer had built for us out of gray-weathered wood he’d scavenged from some collapsing miners’ shacks over in Spanish Springs.

  Nina had asked to be put up in Scorpion, the little bedroom tucked under the attic eaves. That room was tiny, hot in summer and drafty in winter; the stairs to it were many; and it was quite a hike from the bathroom facilities on the second floor. But it was a single, the only one inside the ranch house, and it had the best views of the distant mountains, the Sierra Nevada range. The room stood empty much of the year, called into service only when the Flying Leap was overfull or a beloved repeat customer asked to have it. Margaret believed privacy was the last thing our ladies needed, you see. Too easy when sleeping solo to spiral into a funk when the lights went out and the bad thoughts crowded in. “It’s like stabling a goat with a thoroughbred to keep the horse from kicking its stall to pieces,” Margaret explained.

  “How do you tell the thoroughbred from the goat?” I asked.

  “Easy,” she said. “Everybody’s both.”

  Nina’s choice of bedroom meant I had to lug her enormous duffel up three flights of stairs. That bag was impressively heavy. When I’d first hefted it at the airport I’d exclaimed, “What do you have in here? Bricks?”

  “The canned remains of every man who’s ever underestimated me,” she’d said, and winked. “So watch yourself, Handsome.” As I manhandled that duffel up those flights of stairs, I decided the shifting lumps inside it must in fact be books. In the 1930s, calling novels the
canned remains of men really wasn’t far off base as metaphors went.

  By the time I was back downstairs, Emily had vanished. Nina and Margaret were still entangled in their reunion, so I lingered, taking my time about hanging Nina’s jacket up in the closet under the stairs. In the daylight hours the back of the hallway was dim enough to make it hard to notice anybody standing there, and the acoustics were excellent if you left the closet door open and stood in front of it. My mother, God rest her soul, always said you never really knew another person until you’d walked a mile in their shoes or overheard a fair amount of their conversations without them knowing. So in the interest of providing better client service, I chose to listen in.

  “You know, you don’t have to keep getting married just to visit me,” Margaret said.

  “That’s not the only reason,” Nina replied. “I want to see Sam, too. That other cowboy said he’d gone to Reno for the afternoon.”

  “Yes. He should be back soon.”

  “Reno, ugh. Sodom for amateurs. Gomorrah for photographers.” From the shadows I watched Nina standing in the bright frame of the doorway, loosening the knot in her necktie and slipping it over her head, exposing the strand of gumball-sized pearls she wore underneath. Her pearls were like Doorknockers’ emeralds. Even when wearing nothing else, a pricey piece of jewelry kept those rich girls from feeling absolutely naked when they absolutely were. But I’m getting ahead of my story.

  “Listen, Margaret, I know I asked for Scorpion, but I’ve decided I want Coyote, same as last time.”

  “Coyote is a double.”

  “Yes. I remember that.”

  “And I remember you saying hell would have to freeze over before you would agree to have a roommate again.”

  Nina teased apart the necktie’s noose and studiously wrapped its length around her wrist. Then she tucked her chin and shot a glance at Margaret from under her lashes. “When I said that, I hadn’t met Emily. She’s not one of those old bags you always stuck me with. They kept giving me tips on marriage. I know how to get married. I’ve done it three times already.”