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“You can do that?” said Fletcher, and even though he was surprised, he wasn’t.

  “Our cameras have a few more features than yours.”

  After finishing their corn dogs, they threw their sticks and yellow-stained napkins into the tilted pyramid of detritus that rose from the trashcan, and Tandy took his arm and bumped his slim hip with the big cushion of her own.

  “My goodness, I had no idea what a talented horseman you were!”

  Fletcher felt loopy with pleasure, as if champagne were his venous fluid.

  “Neither did I—and believe me, I was scared stiff when I found myself on that horse.” He stroked his mustache thoughtfully (he was tickled to have a mustache to stroke, thoughtfully or not). “But then again, I’m not just Fletcher right now—I’m Hip Galloway, too.”

  “Try your luck!” invited a carnie standing inside a booth canopied with stuffed plush animals. “Try your luck and win the lady’s heart!”

  They walked past a stand that advertised Ice Cold Treats!

  “How exactly does that work, anyway, Tandy?”

  “How does what work?” She had stopped, her concentration focused on the blue slush floating in a sno-cone machine.

  “How do I . . . how do I—as Hip—fit so smoothly in all this? I mean Stretch and Curly—they’re the other two Desperadoes—act like I’ve been with them for years. And Grazi—that’s my horse—well, it’s like I’d been riding her all my life. How’d you pull off something like that?”

  “Obviously, I can’t exactly explain the mechanics,” said Tandy as a flicker of disappointment passed over her face, realizing they weren’t going to stop to sample any of the icy blue slush. “In simple terms, there’s a time and space continuum that is beyond human understanding. And while some of your scientists have grasped the physics of physical motion, you haven’t seemed to be able to understand those same laws can be applied to the mind. Thought has forward and backward motion; your fantasy can be multiplied and grafted into others’ realities, your—”

  “Mommy, there’s that cowboy that was in the show!” A little girl in her own cowboy hat pointed her giant lollipop at Fletcher.

  Fletcher smiled and lifted his hat in greeting. “Afternoon, cowgirl.”

  “Mommy—he called me ‘Cowgirl’!” said the little girl, giggling.

  “Well, however you did it,” said Fletcher squeezing Tandy’s arm, “thank you. I can’t remember when I had more fun.”

  “And that is what it’s all about, isn’t it, Fletcher?” asked Tandy, and they walked into the music of the calliope, or else it was the music of her voice.

  Good cheer was not the prevailing mood at Josie’s, a smoky bar on the edge of town that Tandala had zamooshed them to.

  They stood in front of a curved banquette, whose upper cushion was worn and split, revealing the yellowed and mealy foam rubber underneath the brown vinyl. The Formica table held clusters of beer bottles and a Bakelite ashtray, scabby with burn marks and heaped with cigarette butts.

  Tandy had introduced herself to Stretch and Curly as “the Daring Desperadoes’ biggest fan,” to which Stretch had said, with no show of politesse, “then how come we ain’t seen you before? I mean, you’re pretty hard to miss, Miss.”

  Tandy smiled her gummy smile, as if she had just been on the receiving end of a compliment instead of sarcasm.

  “Well, I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing you before today. But one performance—that’s all it took. All it took for me to become your biggest fan.”

  “Gosh,” said Curly. “Can I buy you a beer?”

  “I thought you would never ask,” she said, and as she and Fletcher joined them in the booth, Stretch rolled his eyes and Curly beamed.

  “And where are you from?” asked Curly. “I detect an accent hinting of the tropics.”

  “Aw, geez,” said Stretch. “Here it comes.”

  Curly slid away from Stretch and closer to Tandy.

  “I myself think island-bred people have a certain joie de vivre that we landlubbers can’t grasp.”

  “The blow hole’s been officially opened,” said Stretch, rising. “Which means you can find me in the poolroom.”

  Baskets of hamburgers and onion rings and another round of beer were ordered, and Fletcher settled back, happy to listen to the little wiry cowboy woo the soft curvy Jamaican.

  “Your hair,” he said, holding a beaded cornrow. “Your hair is such a delightful amalgam of braids and jewelry.”

  Curly took off his Stetson, revealing his sweaty bald pate underneath.

  “Do not despair the lack of my own hair,” he said, “for baldness bespeaks of a noble soul . . . and teeming virility.”

  The more Curly drank, the more florid he became, and seeing that Tandala didn’t seem to have a problem with him, Fletcher decided he didn’t either and settled back in the booth, eager to think back to the afternoon and what it had been like to be a Daring Desperado.

  How did I do that? he wondered. How did I know how to do a somersault off the front of a horse? How’d I know how to rope a calf? How’d we know how to do a Spanish Walk? On Grazi’s back—once the initial shock had worn off—he had been transformed; he was the easygoing, affable, yet highly skilled cowboy of his boyhood fantasies; he was Hip Galloway. He choreographed Grazi with the slightest pressure of his knee or his ankle—hell, hardly any pressure at all—and felt as if he and the horse were a team that had played together all its life.

  His mind shifted for a moment back to his old life, wondering what the people at Mid Summit American Life were doing. Thumbing his mustache, he suppressed a cackle, imagining what Marv Gates or Cindy Dahlberg would think of the former actuary who had traded in his Robert Hall suits for cowboy gear and answered to the name of Hip!

  “What’s so funny?” asked Tandala as she dabbed her napkin in water and rubbed at a ketchup stain that had joined the mustard one already on her cowgirl shirt.

  “Everything,” said Fletcher, full of a child’s happiness, a happiness as bright and promising as a box of new crayons. “Say, where’s Curly?”

  “He’s visiting the little cowboy’s room,” said Tandy, her head wobbling as she nodded toward the hallway.

  “Why, Tandala, I do believe you’re a little tipsy.”

  “I do believe you’re right.” She offered him a wide, slightly uneven smile. “This is something I’m definitely bringing back with me.” Her forehead pulsed light as she stared at the beer bottle in front of her.

  “What, you don’t have liquor in outer space?”

  “No,” said Tandy, opening wide her large liquid brown eyes as if she couldn’t believe it herself. “We have many ways to emotionally transport ourselves, but none that transport us so . . . lightly.”

  “Keep drinking and the transport gets a little heavier,” said Fletcher as Curly slid into the booth, with three bottles of beer.

  “One for Hip,” he said, “one for the Island Temptress, and one for me. Cheers.”

  Fletcher and Tandy obliged him by clinking bottles.

  “Dang, I ain’t had this much fun since the Texas days.” Curly’s features were outlined by the deep wrinkles his smile caused. “Hip, tell the lovely Tandala-whose-name-sounds-like-a-tropical-breeze here about the Texas days.”

  Fletcher sucked on his beer bottle because he didn’t know what else to do.

  “Curly,” said Tandy, and Fletcher saw that simply by addressing the old cowboy, Tandy could cause a little quiver of his shoulders. “Why don’t you tell me? I’m dying to hear all about the Texas days—and you’re such a good storyteller.” She looked at Fletcher. “No offense, Hip.”

  Fletcher put his bottle down. “None taken.”

  “Well, I don’t like to monopolize a conversation,” said Curly, drawing himself close to Tandala. “But I do like to oblige a lady’s wishes.”

  A woman who’d stuffed her many curves and rolls into a silver tube top stood at the jukebox, punching in numbers. Fletcher had never listened to country-western music
and couldn’t identify the singer taunting someone about not being woman enough to take her man.

  “Well, it’s like this,” Curly was saying, stretching his thin, hard-muscled arm across the back of the banquette until his hand dangled next to Tandy’s right shoulder. “We were all young—well, I was younger; Stretch and Hip here were youngsters—and we were all hands on a ranch belonging to Jake Arnett.”

  He paused for a moment and repeated. “Jake Arnett.”

  Tandy picked up her cue. “Sorry, mon, am I supposed to know who this Jake Arnett fellow is?”

  Curly’s quick laugh was a burst that sounded like “Teeee” followed by “Ha!”

  “He’d like to think so! Hell, Jake Arnett probably thinks the only people that ain’t heard of him are Martians or something!”

  Fletcher and Tandy’s faces remained neutral, but under the table Fletcher’s knee pressed against the alien’s. Curly held his bottle of beer a half-inch from his lips, muttering something unintelligible.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Tandy.

  Curly took a long swig of beer that sent his Adam’s apple surfing up and down his windpipe.

  “You’d really be begging my pardon if I said out loud what I just said to myself.” Curly set his bottle on the table with a little more force than necessary. “Suffice it to say, don’t ever mention the name Jake Arnett to Stretch or most especially the name ‘Jake Jr.’”

  He looked meaningfully at Fletcher before glancing across the room and into the poolroom, and it was when he saw Stretch there that he felt it safe to continue.

  “Arnett was one of the richest sombitches in Texas and the ranch was more or less a hobby farm to him, a place where he could practice being a cowboy and throw all sorts of barbeques and fund-raisers for all the hoi polloi from Dallas and Houston and Washington—that’s D is for dumb and C is for corrupt, Washington!

  “But even though he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day, he needed hands that were, and so about a half-dozen of us worked there, tending his herd of cattle, keeping up the ranch maintenance and such. The pay wasn’t all that good, considering how rich Arnett was, but we had a good cook and the bunkhouse was warm, and besides, that’s where Hip and Stretch and I met, and we got on right off the bat, didn’t we, Hip?”

  Fletcher nodded. “Like peas in a pod.”

  “Let me tell you, as hard as we worked in the day, we were always up for hijinks at night.”

  “Hijinks?” asked Tandala.

  “Well, mostly—we would figure out tricks and such, horse tricks and rope tricks.”

  “That’s right,” said Fletcher. “We’d take the horses out and try the craziest stuff.”

  An alarm rang in him: How’d I know that?

  “See, I was fortunate to see Will Rogers as a boy—in person once, and then all his movies—I declare, that fellow could get on and off a horse in ways you could never imagine—and what I learnt from him, I taught Stretch and Hip here.” The smile of fond remembrance softened the crags and gullies of the cowboy’s face.

  “Now I remember . . .” Curly’s voice was like a lullaby, only it wasn’t sleep Fletcher fell into but a dream, only the dream went way past the story Curly narrated. As he felt himself rushing back into the warm air of time past, he wondered vaguely, I wonder if I’ll be back before last call.

  7

  “That’s it! That’s it, Stretch!” cried the older cowboy, slapping his thigh with his hand.

  Why, Curly’s got hair, thought Fletcher, and while there wasn’t a lot of it, it was curly. Well, wavy, but nobody calls a cowboy “Wavy.” It was his last conscious thought as Fletcher, and when he shouted, “Ride her, Stretch, ride her!” he was twenty-one-year-old Hip Galloway and had never been anybody but.

  After executing a handstand on the back of a gray dappled paint, a younger version of the tall, slim cowboy that was Stretch laughed as he kicked his legs back and then forward until he was sitting on the saddle.

  “Yee-haw!” he hollered. “Did you see that, Hip?”

  “I saw it and I still can’t believe it,” said Hip. “How’d a stumblebum like you do something like that?”

  “Stumblebum,” said Stretch with a laugh. “If you were half the stumblebum I was, you might be able to do this.”

  He crouched on the saddle and quickly rose into a standing position. His horse cantered in a circle as if she were inside a corral, which she was not, and Stretch stood on the horse as if his boots were fastened to the saddle, which they were not.

  It was a sweet Sunday morning in May, and the three cowboys, riding back to the ranch from church, had stopped alongside the creek. Here, away from the prying eyes of the other hands, the two younger cowboys practiced the tricks that Curly showed them. That church was a part of their regular Sunday habit would surprise people who knew them later, but at that time Stretch was a pious fellow who might have been a man of the cloth himself had the lure of horses and the open range not been so strong. But it was, and he figured God wouldn’t make him love the life of a cowboy so much if He hadn’t intended Stretch to be a cowboy, and so it was with an open heart and calloused hands that the young man joyfully accepted his lot in life, leaving the family’s barely sustainable turkey farm in Oklahoma (eternally grateful to his older brother Lucas who had taken over its operation so he didn’t have to) to do a cowboy’s work.

  The Arnett place was the first ranch he had worked on, and it was fancier than the ones he had imagined, equipped with indoor toilets and showers. Even better than the plumbing was the name given him by Curly, who upon seeing the young rangy cowboy enter the bunkhouse had greeted him with “Howdy, Stretch.”

  “Don’t matter what name you come in with,” said Hip, “if it don’t sound like a cowboy’s name, Curly here’ll give you one. He’s kinda like a branding iron, only it don’t hurt none—less of course you don’t like the name he gives you.”

  Stretch immediately loved his; he felt his new name fit him like his old soft Levis, fit him better than his real name—Stephen—ever did.

  “What’s Hip stand for?” asked Stretch.

  “Kid gets so excited about things,” explained Curly. “It’s like he’s ready to break out in a cheer all the time.”

  Hip’s smile was sheepish. “You know, like ‘Yippee-ki-yay’ or ‘Hip hip hooray’ or something of that nature.”

  Pudge rolled his eyes and The Mexican muttered something in Spanish, at which time Lefty stood up and said, “All in favor of getting drunk, follow me.”

  The bunkhouse was suddenly empty by half of the nicknamed cowboys.

  “It’s not that they ain’t friendly,” said Hip, after the three other hands had left.

  “Yeah, it is,” said Curly.

  It didn’t matter; Stretch only needed the friendship he forged with Hip and Curly, a friendship he especially valued when he learned that Curly was a veteran of countless rodeos.

  “Can you teach me some tricks?” he asked casually, although he was willing to get on his knees and beg if need be.

  “Why, surely,” said Curly. “I’m already schooling Hip.”

  He wasn’t sure how much his friends appreciated the Sunday service he hauled them to (Hip did seem to nap quite a bit, but at least he didn’t snore and Curly always enthusiastically lent his high, wavering tenor to the hymn singing), but Stretch understood that in any group of people, even a trio of friends, a leader was likely to emerge, and he was that leader. He was the idea man, and if occasionally his ideas were not ones the others would have embraced on their own, Hip and Curly followed along anyway. Church was tolerable to his friends because of what happened afterward in the rodeo lessons; in fact, the three often enjoyed themselves so much that they were late for the noon meal, an impropriety that Dash, the moody cook, took personally.

  “I slave all morning making my five-alarm chili—at your request, Curly—and you bums don’t even have the courtesy to show up on time?”

  But on this particular Sunday morning that smelled of
rich black earth and the first wildflowers to burst through it, Stretch suggested that they all take a break and help themselves to the coffee that Curly, a ten-cups-a-day man, always brought along.

  As the horses nibbled on the tender green grass, Curly filled three tin cups from his coffee thermos and the men sat on the weather-beaten picnic table that still bore the carved intentions (CV—Marry Me?) of Jake Arnett’s grandfather, the man who had long ago built the table and set it by the creek as a place to court his wife-to-be.

  “You feelin’ all right, Stretch?” asked Hip of his friend who normally didn’t have time for coffee, wanting to practice tricks right away.

  “All right but for this arrow in my heart.”

  “What?” said Hip, alarmed.

  “I knew it!” said Curly, slapping his knobby knee. “I seen the way you looked at her!”

  “Who?” said Hip, who had fallen asleep during the hymn “Come Ye Disconsolate” and didn’t wake up until “Blessed Assurance.” “What are you two talking about?”

  “While you were sawing Zs,” said Curly, “Stretch here was enjoying a certain view from a couple pews ahead of us.”

  “Wasn’t she pretty?” asked Stretch. “Did you see her pretty little ballerina neck?”

  “Oh, brother,” said Curly.

  “Was she,” said Hip, trying to remember what he’d seen when he’d been conscious, “was she that brown-haired gal sitting up near the pastor’s wife?”

  She was, and Stretch’s prayers that whole week were, Please let me see her again, God. The next Sunday, the Lord let Stretch know that He had heard his supplications loud and clear.

  After the service, to the organist’s perky rendition of “Abide with Me,” Stretch was heading with the other congregants toward the door when he felt an arm on his sleeve. He had been rehearsing the charming and witty repartee with which he was going to introduce himself to the brown-haired gal with the ballerina neck, but to see her now, to feel her small pretty hand on his arm discombobulated him so much that all charming and witty repartee was rendered mute.

  It turned out she had plenty of words for both of them.