Mayor of the Universe Read online

  Fletcher’s thumb moved back and forth over his mustache.

  “We stuck together, Tandy. We stayed for a while with Curly’s sister outside of San Antonio—nicest lady—she was born with an extra toe on each foot—and she was married to an oilman who’d died in a rig accident and left her a wealthy woman. Anyway, she lent us the money to buy three horses, and we ultimately found ourselves on the rodeo circuit.”

  Fletcher sighed, his memories a warm bath he could have floated in forever.

  “I sure did enjoy being a cowboy, and I—”

  But he did not complete his thought, for in a wind that would have decimated the desert tumbleweeds he was suddenly blown into a bathroom with fluttering florescent lighting. Coming in for a landing, as it were, he braced the edge of the sink, feeling the wind of motion on his back. When he had steadied himself, he raised his head.

  Every time he looked in a mirror, it was a sweet surprise for Fletcher to see Hip. Just as the twenty-one-year-old Hip had looked much younger than Fletcher had at that age (he shuddered to remember the pressed chinos and V-neck sweater over a shirt and tie that had been his uniform in the swinging sixties), Hip in his midthirties still had youth’s hope and excitement animating his features.

  And the mustache doesn’t hurt, thought Fletcher, petting it affectionately with his thumb, as if it were a small furry animal that had come to hibernate under the shelter of his nose.

  He posed in front of the mirror with his arms in half-circles at his sides, ready to draw; he turned and looked at himself over his shoulder; he cocked his head to the left and then to the right and wished he had a hand mirror to check out his back view, when Stretch burst through the swinging door.

  “Jesus Christ, Hip, come on! The doctor’s waiting to talk to us!”

  Stretch’s urgent plea answered one question for Fletcher, Oh, so this is a hospital, but it raised more, Why are we in a hospital? and most important, Whose doctor is waiting to talk to us?

  “As heart attacks go, this one’s fairly mild,” said the woman whose badge identified her as Dr. Sayers. “We’ll keep him a day or two and monitor his vitals, but on the whole the prognosis looks pretty good.”

  Hip felt a little funny, as if the soles of his boots were made of gelatin.

  “So he’ll live?”

  Dr. Sayers offered a smile composed of teeth so small Hip wondered if her baby teeth had ever fallen out.

  “Yes, he’ll live. For how long, I don’t know. Could be a week, could be fifty years. But it might behoove him,” she raised an eyebrow as she looked at Stretch—“it might behoove you all—to stay out of bar fights.”

  Live Field Complaint

  To Charmat

  From: Tandala

  I am reminded far too often why Earth is such an underachiever. I cannot walk down a street, sit at a lunch counter or on a park bench without men whistling at me or yelling ugly things about my anatomy. Just minutes ago, a man in a mud-clotted pickup pulls up next to the curb and offers me money to suck something of his that I was not the least bit interested in sucking. I ignore his question, which he persists in asking, as if my not hearing him was the problem, until finally he calls me a “black whore” before gunning his engine and charging off. To earn this sort of treatment, I am doing nothing but being present in this world. It appears that to be a woman—especially ones whose bodies are round and curvy—and to have skin darker than many is to invite bad behavior.

  P.S. Believe me, I’d rather be sending you a Johnny Cash and June Carter duet or hot fudge sundaes with extra pecans.

  In his hospital bed, Curly looked smaller and older than when Hip had last seen him at Josie’s. His skin was pallid and his bald pate, usually covered with a cowboy hat, now wore a film of sweat. His black eye didn’t help his appearance any either.

  “Curly,” said Stretch, settling his lanky frame into a chair next to the hospital bed. “You look like hell.”

  “You wouldn’t win no beauty pageants neither,” said Curly, and it was true, Stretch’s face bore a bruise on his cheekbone and a swollen lip. “Now cut the compliments and get me out of here, will ya?”

  “Uh, we will,” said Hip, watching the jagged range of lines on the monitor above Curly’s bed and feeling his stomach lurch any time he saw an irregular peak. “Only it won’t be until the day after tomorrow.”

  “The day after tomorrow?” said Curly, sounding like an old shut-in disappointed at the mailman’s pronouncement as to when the Sears and Roebuck catalog might be delivered.

  “I wish they’d keep you a whole week,” said Stretch. “Give me seven less days to worry about you.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me!” said Curly, and as Hip heard a renewed vigor in his voice, he also saw one of the peaks of the range on the heart monitor jump.

  “Settle down, Curly, and don’t let Stretch aggravate you. You know he’s only kidding.”

  “Yeah,” said Stretch. “I wish they’d keep you here two weeks.”

  Hip shot him a look but Stretch merely rolled his eyes and then turned his attention to the nurse entering the room.

  “The doctor wants Mr. Briggs to get some rest now,” she said, charging toward Curly with thermometer in hand. “You can see him tomorrow.”

  “All right,” said Stretch, needing no further coaxing. “Let’s hit the road, Hip, and let this bum get his rest.”

  “See you tomorrow,” said Hip, squeezing Curly’s shoulder again.

  “Hey, bring me the book in the trailer, will ya? The one next to my bed, the Irwin Shaw, not the—” the old cowboy’s request was lost as he was forced to accept the thermometer the nurse not so delicately shoved into his mouth.

  In the lobby, Hip and Stretch stood to the side as the automatic door opened to let a family tethered by balloons squeeze by.

  In their celebratory mood (Must be a new baby, Hip thought) no one noticed them but a little boy. As his mother pulled him along, he stared in wonder at the two cowboys and Hip smiled, ready to tip his hat, but Stretch mimed pulling a gun out of his holster and pointing at the little boy whispered, “Bang.”

  The boy’s face crumpled in a wail.

  “Geez, Stretch, what the—” began Hip, but Stretch grabbed his arm, pushing him out the door and into the parking lot.

  “What is your problem?” asked Hip, wiggling out of Stretch’s grasp.

  “Next time Curly has a heart attack,” said Stretch, letting go of him with a hard little push, “you be the guy who watches him fall to the floor, okay? You be the guy who calls the ambulance. You be the guy sitting outside the emergency room wondering if he’s going to live or die.”

  “Hey,” said Hip, unwilling to hold the burden of blame Stretch shoved at him. “Why don’t you try being the guy who doesn’t start the fight? Why don’t you try being the guy who doesn’t make a fool of himself hitting on Tandy? Maybe that’s what upset Curly so much in the first place—”

  “—Hip, I would shut my mouth right now if I were you,” warned Stretch, his hands curling into fists.

  “Well, you ain’t,” said Hip, tired of Stretch trying to be in charge of everything, including Hip’s own anger. “So if you wanna get more jollies by hitting me, just try.”

  Like two bulls, the cowboys stood facing one another, pawing the ground with their hooves, snorting air out of their noses. Then the lanky cowboy dismissed the other with an ugly laugh and turned away, loping toward his pickup.

  The engine roared to life, and Hip watched as Stretch careened around a line of parked cars, causing a nurse who had just gotten off work to grab her white cap with one hand and shake the fist of the other. He flew by Hip but just as he reached the driveway, he laid on the horn and summoned him with a sharp wave of his hand.

  “I’m only stopping because I’d rather drink with an asshole than drink alone,” he said, stepping on the gas as Hip jumped into the front seat.

  “To the end of the Daring Desperadoes,” said Stretch, raising his glass.


  They had stopped at the first bar Stretch saw, sharing a serious gloom in the air with patrons who were all over the age of retirement and who nursed their drinks slowly, fully aware that a Social Security income didn’t allow for unlimited boilermakers.

  “What?” said Hip when the shock began to thaw. “What’s that supposed to mean?

  “Aw, Hip, you knew this day was coming.”

  “Come on, Stretch, we’ve had fights before! Sure, Curly never collapsed with a heart attack, but—”

  “Hell, Hip, it ain’t about Curly’s heart—it’s about mine.” He scratched his throat with his knuckles. “It just ain’t in it anymore.”

  Hip stared at him, his tongue working in his mouth to produce the saliva he needed for speech.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Hip. You know we’ve barely been making it—shit, the Gilroy Fair just canceled us!”

  There was enough saliva in Hip’s mouth to form two words.

  “They did?”

  Dumping the contents of his glass down his throat, Stretch banged the glass on the bar for a refill.

  “I just heard yesterday—that’s probably why I was in such a foul mood at Josie’s. They decided to go with that brother-sister act out of Laredo.” A drop of his voice in a glass of milk would have curdled it. “Seems we don’t ‘appeal to the crowd’ the way those young punks do.”

  “Stretch—it’s just one show. We’ve got other shows—there’s Oklahoma and then the jamboree in Yuma and what about Cowboys for Kids?”

  “Damn it—I’m through, Hip! I’m so tired.”

  “Tired of what?”

  “Tired of everything! Tired of wondering, Are the horses fed? How’re we going to get to the next gig? What is the next gig? Are we going to get paid what we agreed on, or are we gonna get swindled? Did Hip pick up the jackets at the dry cleaners? Did he find the trailer hitch? Am I gonna have to break the news to Curly that he’s gonna have to drop the Roman riding because he’s getting too old?

  “Don’t get me wrong, Hip I loved being a rodeo cowboy. Had more fun than’s legal. We had a good ride, but that ride’s over!”

  Hip watched Stretch’s throat expand and contract as he guzzled down his drink and watched as his friend stormed out of the bar, leaving in his wake a half-dozen trembling old men—and the tab.

  Live Field Report/Sense-O-Gram

  To: Charmat

  From: Tandala

  The sun shines through yellowing blinds of this town’s library, making stripes of light across my legs, and I am browsing through the Science Fiction section. From what I’ve read, they really—except maybe for Isaac Asimov—have no clue.

  An elderly patron pages through The Oxford Book of English Verse, sighing every now and then.

  Two eleven-year-old kids sit hunched, their thin little shoulders vibrating with the laughter they can’t unleash in the quiet of the library. When they leave, I pick up that which has entertained them, something called Mad Magazine.

  Oh, the riotous delight, Charmat! My civics receptors tell me Alfred E. Neuman is not the president of this country, but he should be! And I nominate Dave Berg for Cartoonist Laureate!

  In the past few years, amid the cancellations and lack of bookings that led to the breakup of the Daring Desperadoes, one date had remained that even Stretch felt duty-bound to keep. It was the Cowboys for Kids fund-raiser, an event spearheaded by Curly’s sister, Rita. Not having kids of her own, Rita enjoyed sponsoring any number of charities that helped children and gave lavishly of her time and her dead oilman husband’s money. The biggest event was the one that brought orphaned children and deep-pocketed Texans to her property for an all-day party. The Daring Desperadoes had been a part of Cowboys for Kids since its inception a dozen years earlier, and even Stretch was not about to disappoint Miss Rita.

  “Remember, it’s in two weeks,” they had told Stretch the day Curly was released from the hospital. He had promised to be there, even as he reminded them the Daring Desperadoes were a thing of the past.

  “Even if I weren’t ready to see the group end,” Stretch had said as the men gathered at a diner for their final breakfast together, “look at Curly here. He’s in no condition to get back on a horse.”

  Curly continued dousing his eggs with hot sauce before setting the bottle down on the table. He waved a fly away, wiped a fork with his napkin, and poked the napkin into his shirt collar. Only when this business was completed did he look Stretch in the eye and in a voice that sizzled like the bacon on the grill behind the counter, said, “Listen here, you sombitch, the only thing my doctor told me I had to stop doing was smoking. So don’t you worry about my condition—I’ll be jumping off horses when you’re watching soap operas in diapers.”

  A nervous giggle erupted out of Hip—he was used to Stretch giving him and Curly the what-for but not vice versa.

  “It’s fine you got your own reasons for quitting the group,” said the older cowboy, “but I’ll thank you to leave me out of your lame excuses.”

  With that, Curly jabbed a forkful of eggs and shoved them into his mouth, a trail of red dripping out of the corner of his mouth like blood.

  “Okay, then,” said Stretch, petulant as a scolded boy. “Geez.”

  The men ate their last breakfast together in a silence broken only by the clatter of silverware and gulps of coffee, and it was only after Stretch had pushed aside his plate and patted his mouth with his napkin that he spoke.

  “All right, then,” he said. “I guess I’ll be seeing you two in San Antonio.”

  He stood up and offered his hand, which Hip shook. Curly did, too, only he didn’t let go.

  “You owe three and a quarter, Stretch,” he said, picking up with his free hand the bill left by the waitress. “Matter of fact, better make it three-seventy-five with the tip.”

  His ears below his hat burning red, Stretch dug into the pocket of his jeans for his share of the tab, and only then did Curly let go of his hand so that Stretch could count it out.

  9

  The morning of Cowboys for Kids dawned pink and pretty, and Curly, sitting on his sister’s porch watching the sunrise, wondered if he had been a fool to believe Stretch would come. It was true that in rating Stretch’s personality there may be more marks in the debit column than in the assets, but historically he’d been a man of his word. Anytime Rita’s phone rang, he’d look at his sister hopefully; anytime the postman brought out the mail, he’d watch her sift through it, but there was never word from Stretch.

  “You all right?’” said Hip, nudging open the screen door with his elbow, his hands holding two mugs of coffee.

  “Sure,” said Curly, blinking back the tears that had filled his eyes as he’d watched the day begin in the east. Ever since his heart trouble, he’d become the biggest baby—a goldarn sunrise bringing him to near blubbering!

  Hip handed Curly his coffee and sat down in the rocker next to his.

  “I s’pose you didn’t get no late-night call or telegram from Stretch this morning,” said Hip and when Curly shook his head, he added, a little tease his voice, “If he knew who was coming, I know he’d show.”

  Blowing on his coffee to cool it, Curly squinted his eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Hip shrugged. “I might have invited Penny.”

  “Yaow!” said Curly as he jostled his cup and coffee splashed on the knee of his jeans.

  “Kind of a dumb thing to do, huh?” said Hip. “Although I checked with Miss Rita to make sure it was all right.”

  “No, no, it’s a great idea,” said Curly, rubbing at his knee with his handkerchief. “What’d she say—Penny, I mean?”

  “Well, she was surprised to hear my voice, as you can imagine. But she knew all about this party and its good cause and all—she said she’s good friends with the Ewings, who go every year—”

  “—that’s rich people for you,” said Curly. “It’s a pretty tight circle. So is she coming?”

  “Well, she sounded pleased to
get the invitation, but she said she’d have to check her and Jake’s schedule.”

  “Don’t tell me you invited that weasel, too.”

  “I didn’t . . . but I reckon she made the assumption that I did.”

  The grounds of Rita’s ranch were swarming with kids swimming in the pool, kids chasing each other around the lawn, kids heckling the clowns and magicians, and kids snitching slices of watermelon off the picnic tables. Although the invitation had suggested a cowboy-casual dress code, the gentry of Texas was easily identifiable from the orphanage’s directors and staff by the diamonds and five-thousand-dollar watches tucked under their embroidered collars and cuffs. One of the subtly fancy couples was Penny and Jake Arnett Jr.

  “She’s still pretty, isn’t she?” Hip asked Curly as the two walked to the horse barn. “Although I barely recognized her with that blonde hair.”

  “Couldn’t miss that snake Arnett, though,” said Curly. “He’s still got that same old smirk.”

  “But he never used to wear pinky rings,” said Hip. “Jeepers, he was wearing more jewelry than Liberace!”

  This tickled Curly, but his laughter ended abruptly as Stretch stepped out of the barn door they were just about to walk into.

  “I knew you’d make it!” said Hip, hopping around his old friend like a puppy.

  “Did you bring your horse?” asked Curly, his voice gruff to disguise the catch in his throat.

  Stretch pointed backwards into the barn with his thumb.

  “She’s in there with her old pals.”