Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(44)



Like the Gypsies, He was a wanderer and had chosen to rely on whatever pickings He could get. Romy, a wanderer, also, was doing the same essentially. Relying on whatever pickings she could get.

In weather that was doubtlessly like the Holy Land’s, what with Texas’s kicked-up dust clogging her nostrils and smarting her eyes and scouring her skin, she and Glen straddled the corral’s top rail.

“Hot as a Billy goat in a pepper patch,” he bemoaned.

“Hot enough the hens are laying hard-broiled eggs,” Jock quipped, perched on the railing on the other side of her.

They were watching Skinny Henry grip the flat braided rope in an attempt to stay astride the brawny bull about to buck from the chute. The dry, heated wind blasted her ringlets, billowing below the sun-bleached red handkerchief, knotted at her nape.

Sally, accompanied by her pistol-packing father, Sam, also perched atop the corral’s railing, across from Romy and Glen. Where Sally was willowy, her father was rangy. Plagued with arthritis, he had moved like a puppet with all its joints hinged when he had delivered a bottle of tequila into Duke’s hands an hour before.

It was obvious even to the most unknowledgeable that the old man wanted Duke for a son-in-law.

But what did Sally want? Romy was having a hard time reading the horsewoman. She was both a composite of the old world and the new one. Charging determinedly as Duke was into the future, she was what he might need.

But, more importantly, what did Duke want?

Well, this Christmas Day dinner might well unfold that for him.

“So, what do you think, Romy?” Glen asked, his Adam’s apple climbing up and down the flimsy ladder that was his throat.

“Me thinks Skinny Henry is in for the ride of his life.”

As she was. Hiding out from the Nazis’ long-reaching tentacles – hopelessly yearning for her Irish ancestral land and her Irish Traveller clan – and all the while fecklessly locked in a duel to her death with Big Guy there, manning the chute gate that festive afternoon.

Well, locked in a duel to the death with both Duke and Moe, if they had their way -- to see her on her way.

One could never have too many friends – or foes.

“Naw,” Glen bemoaned, with his nasal Chicagoan accent. “I’m not asking what you think about Skinny Henry’s upcoming ride – I mean, what do you think about Graciela?”

Graciela was the plump sister of Sally’s ranch foreman. “Does, she make ye happy, Glen?” Romy fudged.

He stalled, fiddling with his coil of rope. “Well,” he said, at last, “a bird in the hand is – ”

“ – is going to crap on ye. Think about what ye really be wanting, Glen Thornton. If ye want it badly enough, it will come to ye.” And speaking of crap, what a load of crap that advice was. “Ye can count on that.”

She swung one leg back over the railing, prepared to jump. “Meanwhile I have to check on our scrawny turkey Duke shot.”

Beneath his floppy tan hat, Glen’s mouth waved a loopy grin. “Better the scrawny turkey than you.” All the ranch hands sensed the red-hot tension that electrified a room when she and Duke were in it together. Like her, they might be illiterate, but they were not stupid.

At that moment, the bull launched from the chute, and Sally, cupping her hands over her mouth, yelled, “Ride ‘em cowboy!”

Beside Romy, Glen shouted, “Yeeeee-HAW!”

She chuckled, shaking her head, at a loss with this peculiar Texas lingo, and twisted her torso back onto the railing to watch Skinny Henry duel it out with the bull. However, a lash of wind-driven sand stung her eyes. With both her fists, she went to rub the sand away, and another gust of wind caught her off balance.

This time, unlike the day before on the stool, she was unable to right herself, and, arms flailing, she toppled backwards into the corral. Her shoulders and spine took the brunt of the fall. Her breath exploded against her ribcage.

First, she heard the clanging of the metal gate and, next, Jock’s warning yell. She struggled into a hunkered position on her knees, her palms braced in the dirt for support. On the opposite side of the corral, an already thrown Skinny Henry sprawled, as dazed as she.

Next, her gaze encountered the bull’s fuming red one. Dust sprayed from its pawing hooves. Its enraged snorts competed with the ranch hands’ frantic shouts. She sprang upright.

Diverted by her stance, the bull flipped its hind end around and charged toward her. Its razor-sharp horns aimed for her midsection. With but a tick of the heartbeat to spare, she dodged, latching hold of one lethal horn. Her arms felt yanked from their sockets. Violently, the bull swung its head. Saddle oxfords digging in, she fought to keep from being dragged under.

In the dusty haze kicked up, she saw Glen cast his lariat at the bull’s tossing head. At that same moment, she was shoveled sidewise by what had to be a German Panzer tank. Over and over she was rolled. A cedar post halted abruptly her tumbling. Simultaneously, violent, excruciating pain reverberated through every single bone in her body.

Beset with brilliant sparks of purple light, her vision gradually cleared, and she stared up into eyes as stunned as she felt. An eternity seemed to pass. She could feel Duke’s powerful heart beat slamming against the small mound of one breast. Feel his huge frame weighting her minuscule one, his mighty arms encompassing her.

Painstakingly, as if her features would hold the answer to world peace or life on other planets, his puzzled gaze searched her face – her glazed eyes, her dust-coated lips, her quivering chin – and returned to her eyes.

Parris Afton Bonds's Books