Mayor of the Universe Read online

“Just like we are!” said Hip.

  “Well, how in the Sam Hill did you get here without us seeing you?” said Curly, still gruff and maddeningly close to tears.

  “Took the back road,” said Stretch. “Didn’t want to drive by all the fat cats on the front lawn. And . . . did I hear you correctly? That two of them fat cats are Penny and Jake Arnett Jr.?”

  Hip and Curly exchanged sheepish looks.

  “Yeah,” Hip said finally. “I hope you’re not sore.”

  “Why should I be sore?” said Stretch with an elaborate shrug of his shoulders. “That’s all water under an old, old bridge.” He pulled at the embroidered cuff of his cowboy shirt and then the other, and centering his Stetson on his head, he looked at two-thirds of the Daring Desperadoes and smiled. “So how’re we gonna dazzle ’em today?”

  It didn’t take much to dazzle the crowd who were seated in the bleachers Rita had set up by the corral; the kids oohed and ahhed at the mere sight of cowboys on horses and the adults were happy to share in their delight. There were tricks performed—you couldn’t get the Daring Desperadoes on horseback without throwing in a Suicide Drop or two—but the hit of the Cowboys for Kids event was letting the kids be cowboys, giving them rides on horses and showing them how to twirl a rope.

  It was why, Hip was certain, that the burned-out Desperado that was Stretch agreed to come back. Getting a scared little kid onto the saddle and feeling him tremble, first from fear and eventually from glee, was a big treat for the cowboys, reminding them of why they themselves got up on a horse in the first place. It made everything new for a while—the excitement, the awe, and the pure love they felt for the beautiful beasts that so graciously offered their backs for human pleasure and purpose.

  “We’re going so fast!” said the little girl who was in the saddle with Hip now.

  “Too fast?” asked Hip.

  “No, let’s go faster!” said the girl, the words bouncing on her laugher.

  “When I grow up,” said a redheaded boy riding with Curly, “I’m gonna get me a horse and be a cowboy.”

  “You don’t say,” said Curly, one of his arms a sash across the boy’s scrawny chest.

  “Yeah. I’m gonna get me a horse and I’m gonna name it Bullet ’cause it’s gonna be as fast as one!”

  “That’s pretty fast,” said Curly, and as he tightened his grip on the boy, he signaled his horse to rear up and walk on his hind legs, which caused the spectators to applaud and the little boy to cry out.

  “You all right?” asked Curly, when Jigs was back on all fours.

  The boy’s head bobbed in a spasmodic nod, and when the ride was over and a worker from the orphanage helped him down, ready to load up another child, he looked up at Curly.

  “Thanks,” he said, solemnly. “That was the most fun I ever ever ever had in my whole life. Ever.”

  After every child who had wanted a ride had a ride, a dance band assembled on a small stage began to play “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

  “You gonna at least say hello to her?” Curly asked Stretch as they walked the horses back to the barn.

  “Who?”

  “Oh come on, now. You know who. Penny.”

  “If I happen to run into her, I will.” He said his words in a tone as aloof and bored as a French waiter, but Curly couldn’t help noticing how Stretch’s hand on the lead rope trembled.

  Live Field Report/Sense-O-Gram

  To: Charmat

  From: Tandala

  Two things: first, the game of tag, played with a group of kids under the age of ten. The giddiness when you dodge a hand about to touch you is positively rhapsodic. Best played at dusk, for an element of spookiness.

  Second thing: garlic. They say it’s life’s elixir. Whether it’s insomnia, anxiety, gout, dipsomania, fear of flying, indigestion, high blood pressure, low libido, or melancholia—your life’s never the same when garlic comes to call!

  I send you several bulbs forthwith in the hopes that they’ll clear up your fear of alienation. Ha! By the way—you’re It!

  Having marveled, as he did every time he used one of Miss Rita’s bathrooms, at the plush towels that felt more like velvet than terry cloth, Hip was walking down a back hallway when he heard a yelp and the sounds of a scuffle. That the noise was coming from the guest bedroom that he himself occupied surprised and irritated him, and he yanked the door open, ready to yell at the kids who were wrestling around—uninvited—in his room.

  Two figures were on the bed, but they weren’t kids, and they weren’t wrestling, at least not in the conventional sense.

  “Get off me!” said a young woman, trying valiantly to push off the bejeweled figure that was Jake Arnett Jr.

  “What the—” began Hip.

  “—help me!” cried the woman, and reflexively acting, Hip raced to the bed—his bed—and pulled the young woman out of the cage of Jake Arnett’s arms.

  The woman, whom Hip recognized as an orphanage employee, rushed to the door buttoning her shirt, and Jake scrambled off the bed, swinging wildly, in the direction of Hip’s face.

  “What the hell did you do to her?” said Hip, grabbing Jake’s wrist before it made contact with his jaw.

  “Nothing she didn’t want! Now, let go of me!”

  “My pleasure!” said Hip, giving Jake a powerful push.

  The man fell to the bed but bounced back up, his arms swinging.

  Hip stepped easily out of the range of both flailing arms but stumbled against the nightstand, and Jake was able to land a weak punch that glanced Hip’s jaw. Had it not been for the pinky ring that broke Hip’s skin, it wouldn’t have hurt much at all.

  “Hey!” Hip feeling blood on his jawline. “What’d you do that for?”

  “Same reason I did this,” said Jake, but Hip had regained his balance and not only blocked his opponent’s next punch but was able to land a solid one of his own directly to Jake’s midsection.

  Arnett folded over like a broken chair.

  Hip had a hundred things he could have said to the groaning man on the floor hugging his arms to his chest, but instead he pressed the toe of his cowboy boot into Jake’s side—less than a kick but more than a nudge—before stepping over him.

  The sun had ambled across the Western sky and was waving its good-bye to daylight. The band was playing “Crazy,” the shouts and squeals of playing children providing a sporadic downbeat. Curly nodded to his sister Rita who was deep in conversation with a mayor, a three-star general, and the owner of a cosmetic company whose slogan was “Release Your Inner Tigress!” The heart that had given him trouble just weeks ago felt sure and strong, and watching his light, easy walk no one would suspect that arthritis had begun to seep into his knees and shoulders. Curly felt so goldarned good that it took him a moment to recognize, amid all the sounds of a good party, the cry for help.

  Like a dog, he cocked his head, and locating the sound he raced toward it.

  “Oh my God,” a woman was screaming, “we thought all the kids were out of the pool! Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”

  Well, shut your damn mouth and get him! thought Curly.

  There was a rush of people now, alerted by the woman’s keening, but Curly got to the pool first and dove in, toward the shadow at the bottom.

  He wrapped his arm around the small body and pulled it through the water. When he burst through it, he flung himself and his cargo over the edge. His hands covered the entirety of the redheaded boy’s chest, and when he pushed down, he prayed he wouldn’t crush any bones. A crowd gathered around him, voices shouting for a doctor, and Curly pumped and pumped and pumped again, and the little boy turned his head and vomited a gush of water. Curly was glad there was already a whiff of piss from all the kids who had used the pool for their own toilet, because he wasn’t sure he hadn’t wet his own pants.

  The boy struggled to his side and threw up again, and the crowd around him and Curly burst into applause.

  “If I had to pinpoint a time,” said Curly later, �
�it would be then. When I heard all that applause, I thought, ‘Hey, they’re clapping for me and my son.’”

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” asked Rita, as they sat inside the director’s office of the Little Angels orphanage. It was a week after the near-drowning, a week after Curly had decided to adopt the little boy.

  “More than anything,” said Curly. “Me and Clint belong together, don’t we?”

  The scrawny little boy who sat on his hands nodded his head with such vigor that Rita worried he might get a brain bleed. She had asked Curly this question dozens of times—she didn’t want to be a nag but she had to make sure a man in his midfifties understood the responsibilities of taking on a child—and his response was always a firm, “I’m supposed to be his dad, Rita.”

  Certainly his sister’s decades’ long support of the orphanage went a long way in greasing the wheels of adoption, and the day Curly took pen to the documents that made his paternity legal, he kissed not just his new son but his sister and the orphanage’s director.

  It had been one of Curly’s rituals since he brought the boy home to sing him to sleep. The boy was so busy in the day learning how to be a cowboy himself that he was bushed by bedtime, and even as he struggled to stay awake, it usually took only one or two songs before his eyes fluttered shut one last time.

  That night Hip had come in to add his voice to “Home on the Range,” and the little boy—suddenly a music critic—had raised an eyebrow when Hip tried to reach a note he had no business trying to reach.

  “Just a little frog in my throat,” said Hip, making a big show of swallowing. “There. All gone.”

  “Where seldom is heard, a discouraging word,

  And the skies are not cloudy all day.”

  The little cowboy fell asleep during the second verse of “Red River Valley,” and the big cowboys each got a beer out of the fridge and adjourned to Rita’s porch. It was there that Hip told Curly he was leaving on Saturday, right after the ceremony.

  “I was afraid this day was going to come,” said Curly, scraping at the corner of the bottle’s label with his thumbnail. “Who’s gonna help me with the boy?”

  Along with occasionally joining him in the bedtime sing-a-longs, Hip was helping Curly teach Clint how to ride.

  “You don’t need any help,” said Hip. “This fathering stuff seems to come pretty natural to you.”

  A yip of a laugh escaped out of Curly’s mouth.

  “It does, don’t it? Hip, I can’t explain it, but I just knew that I was supposed to be this boy’s daddy.”

  Deciding to play devil’s advocate, Hip asked, “But what would you have done if Stretch had said, ‘I made a mistake, let’s keep the act going’?”

  Curly tipped his hat back with one hand and with the other, palmed his bald pate.

  “I would have said, ‘Thanks but no thanks, Stretch,’” he said, with both resolve and surprise in his voice. “I would have said, ‘That time came and went, and now’s the time for me and the boy.’”

  “I never figured you for a daddy,” said Hip.

  “Can’t say that I did either. But Alice—you remember me talking about Alice, don’t you, Hip?”

  “’Course I do.”

  “I might not have told you exactly everything. Remember me telling you about how Alice died—you know, that awful accident in the horse barn?”

  Hip grimaced.

  “Well, what she had told me earlier that morning, before she fell off the portapotty steps, was that she was pregnant with our child.”

  Hip inhaled a short gust of breath.

  “And you know what I had said to my Alice? I said, ‘I ain’t ready for no baby. Get rid of it.’ Now I don’t know if she ever would have—she pretty much made up her own mind about everything.” Curly shrugged and drew his mouth up so that his lower lip nearly touched the tip of his nose. “And it’s funny—even after she died, I can’t say I really grieved the death of our baby right then. I guess it sort of built up through the years, the feelings of all I really lost.” Curly’s voice trailed off like a wisp of smoke in the wind. “And then this young scamp comes along.”

  Both men pondered the darkening landscape for a long moment.

  “And something just clicked, Hip. Like a safecracker fiddling with the combination.” He patted the left side of his chest. “‘Click.’ This door opened.”

  Live Field Report/Sense-O-Gram

  To: Charmat

  From: Tandy

  This is what a little boy’s faith feels like. Weightless, but stronger than steel. Hold on to it when you get too close to a black hole.

  “You know I ain’t much of a church man,” Curly said, “but if Rita thinks a baptism is a good idea, who’s it gonna hurt, really?”

  “Remember how Stretch would drag us to Sunday services all those years ago?”

  Curly nodded, and looking into the mirror, he drew his hand over his chin to make sure there weren’t any errant whiskers he’d missed shaving.

  “Remember how right away when he saw Penny sitting in the pew next to her aunt, he knew she was the one? Geez, you think they’ll get back together, Curly?”

  The older cowboy adjusted his bolo tie and admired its medallion, one Rita had a silversmith make up, one that had the initials C & C engraved in it, with the date of Clint’s adoption.

  “I don’t know. Just yesterday Stretch said that if he were in his right mind, he’d forget all about Penny.”

  “Yeah, but he ain’t in his right mind. He’s driving all the way up to the Arnetts’ to go with her to that meeting, you know.”

  Although the sweet brown-haired gal of his youth was now a platinum blonde with a drinking problem, a volcano of sparks flew at the Cowboys for Kids event when Penny had accepted Stretch’s invitation to dance and their hands touched. Although Stretch could smell the whiskey on her, he assumed she was wobbly on her feet for the same shy and excited reasons he was, and it took more will than Stretch thought he possessed to keep himself from plastering himself to her body, to keep his lips off her lovely ballerina neck. Still, they kept a decorous distance apart while dancing, and Stretch was forever grateful to the couple who jostled them, giving them an excuse to press themselves together, so close they could feel each other’s heartbeat.

  Stretch was in a state he hadn’t visited in years—bliss—and he wondered how he might signal the band to play the same song all night and into the next day.

  “Oh, Stretch,” said Penny, her head against his chest. “Why did you ever leave me?”

  “I wish I could tell you a good reason,” he said, leading her around the orphanage director dancing with the premier cowboy boot manufacturer who, oddly, was wearing loafers. “But there ain’t none.”

  The song was nearly over and Stretch mourned the upcoming final notes, not wanting to let go of Penny.

  “Come on, we’re going home!”

  One second Stretch’s arms were around everything he ever wanted in life, and the next they were empty.

  “Hey!” he said to Jake Arnett Jr.

  “Come on!” said Jake, pulling Penny by the hand. “We’re leaving!”

  Penny’s face, looking back at Stretch, was filled with the emotions that had worked as poison on Stretch for all their years apart: regret and apology and helplessness and a slow seething anger.

  Minutes later, Hip showed up and explained why there was a Band-Aid on his jaw.

  “Well, let’s find that girl!” said Stretch. “Let’s get her to press charges against that Arnett bastard!”

  But the young woman, whose goodwill aim had been only to help raise money for the orphanage, quietly said the incident was over as far as she was concerned and there need not be another word said.

  “Sometimes I’m sad I’m a man,” said Hip.

  “I know,” said Curly. “We are most definitely part of a shameful lot.”

  The baptismal ceremony was simple, with Curly and Clint standing before the preacher in Miss Rita’s parlor.
>
  “How’re you doing, sweetheart?” Stretch whispered to Penny.

  “Okay,” said Penny. She’d wished she could say “Great!” or “Never better!” but the fact was, it had been five days since she’d had a drink, and as much as she’d like to focus on what was happening in front of her, the larger part of her brain was fixed on Miss Rita’s liquor cabinet in the next room, and the lineup of bottles it held.

  One minute at a time, she said, modifying the saying to better suit her. Concentrate on the good! You’re finally divorcing your no-good, philandering, mean-spirited, poor excuse for a husband! So let’s raise a glass—of Tab—to that!

  Miss Rita’s cook had baked a lemon meringue pie and a chocolate cake for refreshments after the baptismal ceremony, and everyone gathered around her dining room table, trying to keep the mood light. As far as Hip was concerned, it was like playing badminton with a medicine ball, so he kept quiet.

  “Clinton,” said the preacher, “how’s it feel to have a daddy like old Curly here?”

  “It feels good,” said the boy.

  After one piece of chocolate cake and one and a half pieces of the lemon meringue pie, Hip put down his fork, realizing that the only thing he’d get by delaying his departure was a bellyache.

  “Well,” he said, pushing himself away from the table. “I guess it’s time for me to hit the road.”

  Both Curly and Stretch jumped a little, the way people will when a loud noise goes off.

  “We’ll walk you out,” said Stretch, his voice sounding a little higher than usual.

  Hip hugged both Rita and Penny, thinking he wouldn’t mind staying in their soft yet fierce embraces for, oh, maybe always, but then Stretch, his voice restored to its natural baritone, said, “Hey, Hip, let go of my woman,” and everyone laughed, and the three big cowboys and one little one walked toward the door.

  “Son,” said Curly, clamping his hand on the little boy’s shoulder. “Say your good-byes to Uncle Hip here.”

  “But I—” he began, but from the look on his father’s face, he understood that he was not to argue, and he turned to Hip.