A DOZEN OR MORE three-hundred-year-old black oaks spread over the top of the south side hill of our farm with a two-acre pasture on top and our house sat on the edge and overlooked a small twenty-acre valley bottom with Reese Creek and across it at the far side and then there was a similar hill of Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir to complete the farms north edge as a cross section of a small valley running from our house south to north.

One afternoon after school when I was 15, I walked out through the oaks to find my Grandfather, a man in his mid-eighties, sitting on a bucket turned upside down, underneath an oak and about a hundred yards from the barn. It was his son’s farm, my Uncle, who owned a business in town and twenty miles away.  My grandfather had used his own money, to build a lambing shed, then chicken coops, then a substantial barn, and then again, a half-acre garden down by Reese Creek, that was irrigated by a pump and sprinkler. With sheep and chickens and a couple steers, and the garden we had a complete working subsistence farm. Before he came it was just living in the country. He came there at 79 years old and had it began producing in one year. The tractor was the most important tool.  My Uncle kept the tractor in top mechanical shape as he was a mechanic. My grandfather and the Ford 9N tractor had turned the place into a producing farm selling wool, hay, lambs, eggs chickens, and vegetables. I was a part of all of this.

Every day in his sweat stained straw cowboy hat he was on his son’s Ford tractor to the garden, the sheep shed, the garden by the creek, and when I went looking for him my radar was always set for the Ford tractor.

The tractor was like the 20 mule teams he used to own when he was a successful farmer on the Great Plains. He had started as a cowboy breaking horses for a living. He was at the door of change from horse drawn everything to tractors, and power from oil that began to feed the world, shortly before, banks and the great depression ended all that for him.

For our little subsistence farm, the tractor plowed, the tractor fertilized, the tractor planted, the tractor cut hay, the tractor raked hay, and the tractor bailed hay, the tractor hauled hay, the tractor mixed cement, the tractor toted injured animals.

I found him sitting on a five gallon bucket his hat on his knee and embarrassment on his face. A look I’d never seen before from the most affable man I’d ever known.

“Oh Jimmy,” he sighed, “You have to do something for me.”

He allowed that he had left the tractor out of gear and did not set the brake while he got off to do some chore, and the 9N had inadvertently rolled down the hill—and it was not a gentle hill, but instead it was about a 70 percent slope. With an almost straight drop the tractor got going at such a high rate of speed that when it hit the bottom it actually bounced over a fence just like a bounding deer at the bottom of the hill; and while airborne, it hit the pasture and  bounded over another small hill by the apple trees, and rolled out into the fresh green pasture upright with all four wheels on the ground; beside the still slough where bull frogs were letting go in their slow and late afternoon jug-a-rums as they form spring to fall.

By his narrative, I was now looking down wide eyed over the hill and out to where, yes in the green pasture—there the tractor was sitting motionless in the sun.

“I’d like you to go down there,” he said, pointing at the tractor but looking away, “and if there is nothing wrong with it, drive that tractor back up here, and never, never-tell-my-son-that-this-ever-happened.”

I went over the top of this steep hill side, amazed and laughing and imagining again the trajectory and the perfect angle of descent that kept the 9N from turning over, and fully expected something vital to the machine being broken as his narrative told of a very loud noise when it hit the bottom of the hill, before it leapt the fence.

Hell yes, I was wishing I’d seen it happen, but when I got to it, I could not see anything broken. I touched the button starter next to the gear shift that was still in neutral of course, it fired up like it was new, and I drove it back up the 100-year-old road bed that was at one time the road from Medford to Prospect, that now let us take a long gentle slope slowly up and down to our house and farm. He was of course relieved, and I never told my uncle of the driverless Ford Tractor’s wild ride until about 10 years after the old man had died.

Another afternoon when I was 17, I found him on the concrete floor of the barn having fallen and broken his hip while tending an animal, I gently got him in the carry-all I attached to the back of the tractor and very slowly got him to the house, before dark where I called our Doctor at the time who drove a fast 16 miles out to examine him. He thought his hip was broken, and then we waited for an ambulance to come twenty miles from town. They operated on him the next day and pinned his hip and told him he’d likely never walk again.

Before he left the hospital, he told me that this was bullshit and he’d be walking on a plane to fly back to Kansas. He was determined not to die in Oregon as he thought his son might bury him here and not beside his wife in Kansas. The notion of family and death and after life being was lost on his son. So being buried in a place, an actual piece of earth with a direct address that he last saw at his wife’s funeral was all in the old man’s heart and he was unbending against a wind of utility and my Uncle’s notion of frugalness. The Kansas prairie was a part of all his stories and memories, which was part of everyday banter, and the Oregon farm for almost ten years had been like an extended vacation, he wanted to rest in the midst of a landscape in the Flint Hills not far from the location of the sod house he was born in. His farm on Grouse Creek that was taken away in the depression, his father’s farm that his sister lived on until her eighties, the two small towns he’d done commerce in, the wagon roads that were now paved, as boy seeing it unfettered with no fences, seeing Indians, and living among his Norwegian relatives, and taking to the cowboy life as a young man and the memory of horse drawn everything giving way to automobiles, the laughter the children, his wife, his Beechnut tobacco chew, the good dogs in his life, the tragedy of all the deaths before him; his father and mother and father-in-law and several still born children and a one year old child, all in the same cemetery—all would come to an end and he’d be there and he was very comfortable with this notion. He mended, in a hospital bed in our living room for a time, started out on a walker, then crutches and to two canes and then to one.

That next fall I and a neighbor killed three nice blacktail bucks across the creek beyond the garden where I knew they could be waylaid, and I drove them back draped over the tractor up the old Prospect road past our house where my grandfather was standing on the back patio watching us return and he raised one of his canes and brandished it in the air approvingly, as we drove past.

The next spring, I accompanied him to the airport and saw him walk with one cane up onto a Boeing 727, and as he got to the door, he turned around and waved his Stetson hat down at me on the tarmac, and then he slowly turned around in his cowboy boots and entered the jet to be caught up in the air, and I never saw him again.

James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California next to the Sacramento River. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs—the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major. He started writing poetry and short stories in college on the GI Bill, after college he continued and gave occasional readings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. Mr. Kelly worked as an environmental writer for the Forest Service in Oregon and Southeast Alaska where he retired in 2012. Born in Kansas, Mr. Kelly was a long-time resident of Southern Oregon where he grew up. In the past four years Silver Birch Press (Los Angeles, California), Cargo Literary, (Prince Edward Island, Canada), Fiction Attic, Rock and Sling (Spokane, Washington), Edify (Helena, Alabama), Flash Fiction (San Francisco), Rue Scribe (New Mexico), True Chili (New Mexico), The RawArt Review (Endicott City, Maryland) and The Purpled Nail (New Mexico), have all featured one or more of his stories or poems. Most recently, And the Fire We Talked About, a collection of short stories, will be published by Uncollected Press/RawArt Review in 2020 and is Mr. Kelly’s first book of fiction.

“I do believe if a man could go back in time, he’d fight to stay there.” Grandpa Jones rarely opined on anything except the weather, so when he finished watching yet another John Wayne movie ⸺one of the fifty old timey movie collections that Walmart sold in tin cans ⸺we all exchanged surprised, self-congratulatory grins. Happiness for less than twenty bucks.

“Why do you say that?” Harrison asked before we could make a hasty exit. He was the youngest of us at seventeen. Jackson was twenty, and me, Monroe, I was twenty-one. Grandpa was old enough to remember dial phones and forty-five records.

“It’s hard to believe that Kentucky was once considered the ‘west’ but it’s true. People didn’t know they’d have to hack their way through five hundred miles of thick forest to get to the real west, and another two hundred miles across the prairie to the desert. Imagine seeing that open space! Not parks or endangered animal preserves, but real open, empty space. To see America like the Garden of Eden. It sure didn’t take long for it to fill up with folks intent on making it a breadbasket. Then Eisenhower decided we should have highways like he’d seen in Germany, and we got car culture. People could move so quickly. Away from family, friends, and communities. All in the name of opportunity.”

We regretted “Mr. Polite” Harrison’s question. Grandpa was going to give us one of his long, long, long answers if we didn’t cut him short, so when Harrison gave me his ‘rescue me’ signal, I interrupted. “Sure must have been something alright. Hey, what say we take advantage of the break in the snowfall, Harry, and go to Mickey Dee’s?”

“I’m game!” Harrison scrambled to his feet, pulling on his hoodie as he headed for the door. “C’mon, Jack, don’t you want to go?”

I had my keys in hand, and was reaching for the wool coat Mom got me for Christmas. Jack didn’t stir. “Naw, you guys go on.” He looked to me like he was content to stay on the floor, leaning against the sofa in front of the T.V. Harry went to the car, but I had to find my wallet, so I was within ear shot when Jackson said, “I sort of went back in time, Grandpa. I think you might be right.”

I hadn’t noticed it, but Jackson’s voice had deepened since he finished boot camp at Great Lakes. We were all so anxious to open presents last night, nobody said much of anything but wow! and thanks! I wanted him to come to Mickey Dee’s partly to catch up since he’d decided to join the Navy instead of following me to UK. I felt a little betrayed that he’d gone his own way and here he was doing it again.

I heard Harry honk the horn. “You bring back enough for everybody,” I told him as I handed him two twenties.

“What’re you gonna do?”

“Jack’s fixin’ to tell one of his salty sea ditties.”

“I want to hear…”

“I’ll tell you later.”

I went to the back door and busied myself in the kitchen so I could listen in. “I got two weeks leave after graduation, but northern Illinois looks so much like Kentucky, I decided I’d take my time getting to corpsman training school in San Diego,” I heard Jackson say.

“Oh, your pilot must have flown low…”

“No, I took the train. Caught the Southwest Chief to Los Angeles and then the Starlight down to San Diego. Just like you did, Grandpa. Man, what trip!”

I’d forgotten Grandpa was in the Navy, too. And the day Jack and I found that old duffle bag in the garage that had all of Grandpa’s crap in it. Bell bottoms, a pea-coat, snake guards ⸺as if there were snakes aboard ship ⸺for his boots, and his sailor’s hat. Dixie cup, he called it. Everything smelled of moth balls, but Jack didn’t care. He put on the hat and coat, and said it must have been quite an adventure to go to sea. What did I expect from a guy who actually read Moby Dick? I called him Ishmael until he punched me in the arm so hard I almost cried.

“I’ve got another Christmas present for you, Grandpa” Jackson said. He came towards the kitchen and I yanked open Mom’s china cabinet and took out four of her everyday white plates. “Back so soon?”

“No, I sent Harry on an errand. You know how he wanted to drive my Bel Aire. This way I don’t have to cringe…”

He reached up to the top of the cabinet and brought down a box wrapped in silver paper and a red ribbon. “Got this special for Gramps.”

“What is it?” I whispered.   

“A model.”

He took the box to the living room, and I heard Grandpa say, “You didn’t have to do that, Jack, but I’m glad you did. Lookie here, Monroe. It’s a replica of the Southwest Chief.”

There was no sense pretending I wasn’t there, so I came out and admired the tin engine. “Yeah, that’s cool.” Grandpa shoved it into my hand. For my money, it had ‘MADE IN CHINA’ look, but the tag read Souvenir of New Mexico, twenty-five dollars. I handed the trinket back to Jack and resisted the temptation to tell hi he got ripped off. What do I know about trains?    

“Rode the Chief in 1965.Could have spent my whole life going back and forth across the country in it. Then my baby-girl marries a Bluegrass fella and twenty-five years and six hours later here I am.”

Ingrate, I thought. Because of him, I had to give up my room and move in with Harry, which meant I had to get an apartment that screwed my college budget to hell. Jack didn’t take it that way, though. He gave Grandpa a pat on the shoulder.

In any case, he and Jack were sharing something I wasn’t a part of. It was silly, but I was jealous. No, I felt cramped inside a small Kentucky box. I got to see great basketball games, and once I went to the Kentucky Derby, but it was as though my whole life could be summed up in one phrase: Go Big Blue! Their big blue was the Pacific Ocean. And the fifty-one years between them was crossed in a choo-choo train.

“You know,” Jack said, “I think that must be what heaven is like. Like riding through endless emptiness, but safe because you’re not alone. Like that Mohave night sky when it’s just you and God looking at the stars.”  

Grandpa put on one of those faces I’d seen on my English Lit teacher when she read poetry.  “My father said much the same thing about his trip west. He and my Uncle Leland left on top of a train, not in one, though. Times was so hard in the Depression, lots of folks had to leave big families. They sure did hate leavin’ home. It’s a hard thing, leavin’ home. Some can do it, and some can’t and still be happy. Green trees and pastures sure ain’t my favorite color. I’m partial to red and rust, yellow and sand. God, how I wish I could have seen the buffalo roam. What a sight that must have been!” I knew I wasn’t a part of the conversation then. I half expected them to burst into a chorus of Home of the Range, and decided to wait for Harry in the kitchen.

I didn’t wait long. The three of us piled into Jack’s Toyota, and met Mom and Dad at the hospital. It was too late for good-byes by the time we got there. Harry must have thought he didn’t need a seat-belt in that big boat of a car. A rear-end collision sent his head through the windshield. Jack told me it was merciful they’d bandaged his face too. He’s a medic, so he’d know, I guessed.

 We all went to the chapel and cried, except Grandpa. He just sat there with his arm around Mom’s shoulder, staring at the altar. And beyond it into space.  Strange that the whoops! baby was the first to go. A joyful accidental birth had ended in a tragic accidental death. We’d never have another merry Christmas, I remember thinking. I suppose I was crying for the future, too.

Then again, people think about all kinds of weird stuff in a crisis. I believe it protects them from reality. Like the reality of seeing dried blood on white leather upholstery. Like the reality of hearing an insurance adjustor saying I was lucky I carried comprehensive on a vintage Chevy. I almost slugged the guy but my arms weighed a thousand pounds. “You were smart to itemize every customization,” he said. Yeah. Smart. The twenty-four-grand from the General Insurance Company paid for Harry’s funeral and a used Ford pick-up to get me to school.

I gave up my apartment and moved back home. It was closer to my job at Hitachi, and my paying rent helped my parents with the hospital bill. “I’ll be next,” Grandpa announced on Valentine’s Day, and told us Jack had invited him to San Diego. Jack worked at the Naval Hospital and there was adult center on base. “Jack says I can work on the vet’s registry with the other guys. They’re trying to reconnect people who served on the decommissioned ships, especially us ‘Nam guys,” Grandpa explained. It sounded to me more like senior day-care, but there was excitement in his newscast.

I thought my parents would object, but they seemed relieved when Jack mailed his air-fare. I thought about Grandpa’s Dad and his Uncle Leland leaving home during the Depression. Grandpa was one less wound to care for while they tended their own.

As for me, as the days wore on, I felt less and less like a UK Wildcat and more and more like a caged cat. I stopped going to keggers on the week-ends and worked overtime instead. Jack was Jack, but Harry had been my biggest fan. Come to think of it, I’d been Harry’s biggest fan. I’d promised we’d rent a two-bedroom as soon as he turned eighteen. What could be better than to have a roommate I’d known all his life?

What would have been his high-school senior year passed quickly. As usual, my parents fed the needy at St. James’ Church on Christmas Day, but by May they couldn’t bear the graduation hoopla at the high school. They maxed out their credit cards and booked a cruise to Aruba ⸺to salvage their sanity, they said.  “Will you be okay by yourself for a week?”

“Sure, I’ve saved enough to get my truck painted. And my friend, Chewy? His brother owns a body shop in Lexington. We’re going to put a primer on it, and Chewy’s brother gonna paint it amber orange. I got big plans.”

And a lot of memories. I’d already started a box to put them in. Like the March Madness ticket stubs Harry and I kept, and the Algebra for Dummies book we ignored. I was supposed to tutor him. Then there was Grandpa’s tin train engine he forgot. Jack reminded me to send it at least a dozen times, but I never got around to it. Too busy with summer school so I could graduate mid-term. Too this. Too that. The paint job could wait. Maybe Grandpa couldn’t. I don’t know why, but by the time I dropped the parents off at the airport, getting that little tin toy to him became the only thing that mattered. It was time to saddle up, Pilgrim.

I loaded the box in my truck, along with my clothes, and put the engine on the dash, drove Hwy 65 South, and turned right onto Hwy 40. “You don’t even need a map,” Jack had told me about his driving the Toyota back to San Diego. “You just keep on going West until you run out of road.” Yep, now it was just me and ol’ Duke Wayne lookin’ for God in a place called Nostalgia where never is heard a discouraging word.

Jenean McBrearty is a graduate of San Diego State University, and taught Sociology and Political Science for over twenty-five years. Favorite song? My Heroes Have Always Been Mathmeticians, thus her dream studying engineering. She lives in Kentucky and writes full time. Her works are available at Lulu.com and Amazon.

Cindy Swenson, who fed the crew, was afraid of the black widows in the basement of the bunkhouse on the high mountain range. “Scorpions I can live with,” she told Simon. “Big enough they’re hard to miss. Spiders hide in the spaces between things, and sneak up on you.”

Three years older than the student cowboys, Simon didn’t exactly fear the little bastards, but understood they had enough poison to make a man sick for days or even weeks. If for no other purpose than impressing Cindy, he might have gone after them.

He did nothing at first, though, because the younger four were mesmerized. Students at the vo-tech high school down in the valley, they were up there because their instructor, Mr. Keppelbaum, had persuaded the ranch manager to take them on as “interns.”

They were managing 300 cattle, mostly brown-and-white Herefords, spread out over the Circle T’s government-leased summer range. The Inyo-Whites were built of the same massive granite blocks as the Sierra Nevada across the Owens Valley, but were bulky rather than jagged, having been spared glacial etching.

The terrain was sparse grazing, more sagebrush and dwarf juniper than grass; keeping track of the cattle’s browsing peregrinations demanded attention. Almost all the cows had nursing calves in tow. The bulls, their season’s work accomplished, wandered even more widely, sometimes a half day’s ride apart.

Merrick, the wrangler who supervised the student cowboys – Keppelbaum came up only one day a week – won the kids’ attention the first day with advice on scorpions. “Turn each boot upside down before you put it on, and thwack it hard against the bench,” he told them as they gathered in the basement locker room. “They like to curl up overnight someplace cozy like down in the toe.” And sure enough, someone dislodged a scorpion that very morning, to be quickly dispatched with the heel of the same boot.

Merrick was a rangy, clean-shaven veteran with short-cropped grizzled hair. His roan mare knew the mountain so well that he could focus on the cattle. He quickly saw that Simon knew what he was doing, and so dispatched him after breakfast most mornings on his own: “Ride down Crooked Creek to where it joins Wyman, and eyeball the cattle down there. Be sure nobody’s limping or looking logy. Count ‘em; should be 22. And watch for catamount sign.”

A mountain lion had taken a two-year-old heifer a week earlier over on the Lazy J allotment just to the north, and might be on the hunt again any day. Merrick carried a .30-30 rifle in a scabbard slung over his saddle horn.

The kids under his tutelage rode well enough, but were teen-agers. Once they became aware of the basement’s arachnid decoration, every one of them contrived a smartphone selfie alongside a female spider on its web, the telltale red hourglass prominent on its belly. They emailed the photos to girlfriends, who presumably shivered with delight at such bravery.

Simon might have done that himself, but his first two years at State U had been a grind that left him little time for amorous pursuits; he had no girlfriend to impress. Having grown up on a ranch back in the Dakotas, he was fully qualified for this summer job, and keeping track of meandering cattle on a range with cold clean air and magnificent vistas was welcome work.

Merrick evidently understood the kids’ fascination with the spiders, and was indulgent when one of them decided to mark each website with crimson spray paint, a blotch the size of a silver dollar. The basement soon looked as though there’d been an epidemic of giant measles.

Which got Cindy’s attention. Her job involved daily trips to the basement pantry and longer forays once or twice a week to do laundry. The morning after the painting party, the red spots made her aware of two webs between the open ceiling rafters of the pantry, and another above the laundry tubs. Her ultimatum: Either the spiders went or she did.

As blonde and buxom as you’d expect of a Swede, she drove up daily to look after the vo-tech cowboy kids, which meant Simon and Merrick ate a lot better than the cowboy grub they would have made themselves. Her daytime presence was for Simon compensation for spending his evenings with a distinctly juvenile crew of bunkmates.

“Spiders? Burn ‘em,” Merrick advised. “Tell Cindy to bring one of those hand-held propane torches from a hardware store.”

“Got it,” Cindy whispered to Simon next morning. “Hang around after breakfast.”

Having a conspiratorial secret with a handsome young woman was a new experience. They waited until the kids had saddled up and headed out with Merrick, and went downstairs together. Simon screwed the torch assembly onto the tank, and Cindy brought it to life with a match.

The paint blotches made the job easy. They started in the pantry, went on to the laundry tubs and then the rest of the way around the basement. All it took was a quick blast of flame. After each spider had been turned into an ashball, Simon incinerated the web, and let the flame play briefly on the space between the wall or rafter to which the webs had been appended. “Just in case there are babies back there,” he told her.

“My hero!” she said, and gave him a kiss on the cheek that might have been a promise of something more. “I’ll hide the tank in a cardboard box in the pantry in case any more turn up.”

The cowboy kids seemed unaware that their black widow pets had disappeared. The red paint blotches were still there, and they all had photographic evidence, so no one bothered inspecting for new webs or captured prey.

Two days later, though, soon after the kids had gone off with Merrick, another showed up. In the half-enclosed bathroom, an old-fashioned cast-iron sink was bolted to the wall, a porcelain-coated white shell with deep hollows underneath. The spider must have been dozing in those depths – “maybe digesting its latest kill,” Merrick said later – when the paint-balling and torching went on.

Simon had done a few chores nearby, and came back to use the toilet. There was a new gossamer web, two handspans wide, stretching the whole space from under the sink to the concrete floor. He buckled his jeans, flushed and closed the toilet and sat down again to admire the widow’s handiwork. It was elaborately, geometrically patterned, and must have been entirely woven in the hour since everyone had set out to work.

As he sat there, a scorpion appeared, scuttling along on the floor, obviously unaware of the danger ahead. It had just barged into the web when he heard footsteps on the stair.

“Cindy!” he whispered. “Come look at this! Don’t be scared!”

The urgency in his voice made her cautious, but she edged over. “Is it safe?”

“We’re okay. The scorpion’s not. Here, have a seat, and stay quiet. Let’s see what happens next.” He gave her the toilet seat and squatted down on his haunches.

The scorpion thrashed around, trying to free itself but succeeding only in becoming hopelessly enmeshed.

Then suddenly the spider appeared, racing down her web. Simon had only a moment to wonder why spiderwebs were sticky to the prey but not to the predator when she paused a few inches above the scorpion, dancing a little jig.

The scorpion thrashed again. “He’s trying to aim his tail at her,” Simon whispered. “That’s where his stinger is.”

Cindy was obviously fascinated, past fear. “He’s out of luck,” she whispered back.

Sure enough, in another moment the scorpion was immobilized in silk. The spider danced a bit more, then pounced onto the head with what was obviously a decisive poisoned bite. Then just as quickly as she had come down, she raced back up her web and disappeared into the hollow underside of the sink, leaving the scorpion in death throes.

“Got your smartphone, Cindy?”

“Right. Wait here.”

Cindy had hardly gotten back when the spider reappeared. This time, instead of dancing down the web, she lowered herself down on a new single strand that she was apparently spinning as she came.

Click!

“Great shot, Cindy!”

The black widow landed on the scorpion’s head, and deployed two forelegs in long, sweeping arcs, cutting the dead creature free from the web that had been its undoing.

Click! Click!

In what seemed only moments, the widow had the body free of her snare. She then planted her legs firmly on the scorpion’s corpse, and began ascending the single strand she had come down on, hauling her prize back up. Simon was reminded of an ancient comic strip he’d seen whose top-hatted character Jiggs sat with steelworkers on I-beams being hoisted aloft.

Click! “Do you suppose she reels that thread back into her belly?” Cindy asked.

“Beats me. But it’s the strongest stuff in the world, I’ve read.”

“You read up and tell me later. However it works, that’s a handsome little freight elevator.” Click!

In another moment, both spider and scorpion disappeared into the hollows under the sink.

“Okay, I’ve got to get to work, Cindy. We’ll leave her enjoy the meal.”

“No way! I’ll go get the burner.”

“Wait! How about a little scientific inquiry? Don’t you want to know how long that meal lasts?”

“Not particularly.”

“Days, at least. Maybe weeks. We could keep an eye on it.”

“I’d just as soon torch it now.”

Simon persisted. He wanted to know if a male would show up, having somehow evaded the flames that wiped out the others. He wanted to learn how to identify spider egg sacs and see if the feasting widow laid any. He wanted to be on watch when she emerged to weave a new web to catch another scorpion.

“All that?” she asked.

“Learning about arachnid life. You could help.”

“Sounds too sophisticated for this country girl. Will watching help your college study?”

“Yes,” he lied.“

“And then you’ll torch it?”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

He hesitated. “There’s a rhythm to these critters’ lives. I want to learn it. Then yes.”

“Okay,” she relented. “And thank you for calling me. I wouldn’t have missed it.” She leaned over, apparently to offer another kiss on the cheek.

Seeing it coming, Simon turned to catch it on his lips.

She let the kiss linger a moment, gossamer-light, then pulled back. “How’s about we catch a movie in town one of these nights?”

Amazing what webs spiders spin, he thought. “You’re on.”

Retired after four decades’ prizewinning print and broadcast journalism in Hartford CT, I received my MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University in 2013. I have since published more than four dozen short stories and non-fiction pieces, but have two novellas and a novel still looking for publishers.

(Inspired by the song “Long Black Veil” by Johnny Cash)

Icy wind howled off the bare gray hills that surrounded the small town, and it rushed furiously into the streets, shaking walls as the crowd shuffled into an old building. People spilled out, down the steps and into the dusty clay street. Children ran through the crowd and peeked through the windows, and everyone spoke quietly.

“Mr. Brown, how many witnesses will you be calling?” The Judge asked, inside.

“Three, your honor.” Replied the Prosecutor.

Cold iron cuffs were cutting into my skin. The Judge sat to my right in the center of the room, and I gazed quietly across the crowd that stared back at me. The faces were a collection of my neighbors and colleagues, and friends that I had grown up with in our little town. At the other end of the dark room I made out the face of my childhood friend Cody, standing with his wife and daughter. Cody peered at the prosecutor and Jen watched me with sad eyes as she clutched her sleeping child. They were the only faces I saw that hadn’t convicted me yet.

“Shut the damn door so we can speak over this wind.” The Judge says.

The howling becomes muted. Every few minutes the building is rocked again by an angry burst of wind, but the old walls are firm and hold the gusts outside. The crowd shuffles into their final positions and settle in. Sitting across from my defense in the front of the crowd is a broad-shouldered man with stern dark eyes that the Judge called Mr. Brown. He sat calmly next to three men I recognized as regulars at only saloon in the little town, and they appeared to have been washed and properly dressed for this occasion. Mr. Brown walked to the center of the courtroom and called up his first witness. A hunched man rose and stumbled to the front. His nose is swollen and deeply crimson, his skin cracked and dusty. His wild white hair shoots in all directions, and if he hadn’t been washed for court you might’ve smelled his stale odor from any corner of the room. Mr. Brown glanced down at his notes and began.

“Sir, were you at the saloon on the night in question?”

“Yes.”

“Did you witness the murder?”

“Oh yes, yes sir. I saw it. I saw a man get killed alright, and I saw another man run off.” He peeks at me.

“Where did you see this happen?”

“Well I was drinking, and I went to piss outside in the mud. Right when I walked out, I saw clear as anything the man getting killed, right there in the street, under the moonlight and in front of God and all of us.”

“He was killed in the street. And was the street well-lit?”

“Yes sir.”

“And you saw who killed him?”

“Yes sir.”

“Is that man here now?”

“That’s him alright.” The bum points at me.

“I saw him clear; I saw his dark hair and the red knife in his hand, and when he saw us, he ran and cut through the alleys, but I know it was him.”

The crowd swayed angrily and excitedly. I saw Jen bury her face in Cody’s shoulder, and Cody’s eyes searched mine for a reaction, but I only sat there quietly, watching through the windows as the howling wind came from those dark distant hills. My defense rose to cross-examine the red-nosed witness. He clutched at a loose bunch of papers and looked around, avoiding eye contact with me. He had a wiry build and wore a patchy gray suit that lay loosely over his frame and several times he had to ask for my name while fidgeting with his papers.

“Were you drinking?” He asked the witness, then:

“Had you seen my client before that night?”

“How could you tell that it was my client?” He stammered through his questions.

The crowd was angry now. Every stammered question damned me further. I could see faces frowning and whispering to their neighbors- pointing at me. I looked for Jen, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“I’ll call up my second witness.” said Mr. Brown.

After the second he called his third witness. All three agreed that I was the saloon-street slayer. Mr. Brown retired his case, and my little friend in the loose suit tried and tried and then eventually retired his case too, and soon it was just me and the Judge and the howling wind and the frowning faces.

“Son.” Said the Judge, “Now it’s your time. Can you think of something, anything, to save yourself? Where were you that night, son?”

I looked back at the Judge and met his tired eyes for a moment. Then I looked for the only eyes in the room that matter at all. Jen stood silently, shaking. Terror and shame and fear look back at me through her dark brown eyes. She stands with her husband, my friend, and looks away. I saw Cody and I lowered my head with shame, but not the shame of a murderer. I shake my head to the Judge, who also shakes his head sadly.

The next morning a sheriff leads me silently at sunrise through the cold streets under the gray hills, and we arrive at a scaffold that has a single thick rope that sways gently in the cool morning breeze. It’s heavy, and coarse on my neck. In the street, clay and dust settle quietly and from my perch standing on a trap door I watch as another crowd of faces starts to grow. This time, the faces are somber and tired. I look for Jen, but I only see Cody. Bright orange light shines from behind the dark gray hills and I look up at the clear morning sky that was swept clean of clouds the night before. I breathe deep, cold breaths. I look back at the faces for Jen. The sheriff pulls a lever and the trap door opens.

Anthony Harper is a new writer who recently left the United States Navy, after serving four years. Originally from Baltimore Maryland, he now resides in sunny Pensacola Florida with his dog Maggie Lamar-Jackson Harper.

Henry Dunn sank the posthole diggers into the ground. Hard, dry soil crunched beneath steel. He worked the handles, lifted, and released the soil next to the freshly dug hole.

A worn hat shielded his face from the sun as he carried the posthole diggers back to the buckboard. Drops of sweat streamed down his face as he lifted another post from the wagon bed.

Henry’s horse shifted in the tackle and stomped its hoof, letting out a gust of air. Henry scanned the country, keen to his animal’s unease. He moved toward the buckboard’s bench seat where his Spencer Carbine was stowed and watched as four riders came from the west.

A cloud of dust sprayed out before him as the riders pulled reign. Henry watched the men size up his horse and wagon with steely eyes, ignoring the sweat-soaked man in front of them.

“Frank,” Henry said, keeping his arm close to the hidden Spenser.

Frank McCord nodded. His sharp angular face was one Henry knew well. “Henry,” he said.

Henry eyed their horses, lathered and thin, saddlebags bulging at their sides. “Looks like you boys rode a piece.”

“You know how it is, Henry. It’s a big country.”

Henry motioned toward the canteen hanging from the side of the buckboard. “Have a drink.”

“Whisky,” said one of the men.

“Don’t be rude, Dusky,” Frank said, with a sharp crack to his voice. He turned back to Henry and said, “Don’t mind him, Henry. He just forgot his manners.” Frank motioned to the other men. “This is Waylon Fritz. That’s Sancho. The rude one is Dusky Jones.

“Boys,” Frank went on, “this is Henry Dunn.”

The men stared down at Henry, their eyes telling him what they thought of a man with no six-gun on his hip.


“I heard you was out here, Henry.” Frank shook his head and spat. “You a homesteader now? A sodbuster?” He smiled at his own joke. One of the other men laughed. Henry didn’t mark which one.

“Never known you to leave New Mexico, Frank. What brought you this way?”

“New Mexico got too small for me, Henry. Heard you was out this way, figured it was time for a reunion.”

Henry didn’t like the familiar glint in Frank’s eye.

“Where’s your stock?” said Dusky Jones. “All you got is that old horse?”

Henry didn’t answer, keeping his eyes on Frank.

Dusky grunted.

“How about you invite us to supper,” said Frank. “Do some catching up.”

“I don’t have much to offer.”

“Whatever you have,” said Frank, “I’m sure is fine.”

“I got the rest of these posts to sink,” Henry said.

“That’s fine, too” said Frank, pulling his reigns and starting his horse. “We’ll head on over. Don’t be too long.”

The men filed past Henry, following Frank McCord. Wary men, their eyes constantly searching. Back shooters afraid of getting back shot. Once they were gone, Henry went back to planting his posts.

Henry drove the buckboard back to the cabin, an adobe structure held together with packed mud and prayers. Tired eyes fell on the four horses turned out in his corral, then to the three men lounging within the scant shade slowly taking hold at the front of the cabin.

Dusky and Waylon sat on their haunches, their backs pressed against the wall. Sancho stood next to them. The Mexican’s head was tilted so the sombrero he wore covered his weather-beaten face. When Henry came near, Sancho stood up and vanished inside the cabin.

Henry moved the Spenser from the floor of the buckboard to his lap as he pulled the buckboard into the yard. Sancho stepped back out of the cabin and took his place against the wall. Henry came down from the wagon, Spenser in hand, and set about unhitching the horse from the buckboard.

“You sure you don’t have any whiskey,” Dusky called out.

Henry closed the corral gate and turned to the men lined against the wall. They were men from another time in his life. They were strangers, but he knew them. Knew they would kill with the least provocation. Kill for the sake of killing.

“I don’t drink whiskey,” said Henry.

Henry moved forward and Dusky Jones stood up from his place at the wall.

Dusky said, “You’re a rude, gut-licking dog. And a liar.”

Henry’s hand tightened on the carbine.

Frank McCord’s voice broke from out of the cabin. “Come in here, Henry.”

“We’ll have us a talk later,” Dusky said. “Just me and you.”

Henry didn’t answer. He stepped past the three men and went into the cabin.

He found Frank McCord sitting in one of the two chairs Henry owned, a cigarette in one hand, the other on the table next to a Smith and Wesson. The bulging saddlebags Henry had taken of note of were piled against the wall behind him.

Frank raised his eyes at Henry, light falling across him from the bare windows and doorway. He smiled, flicked ashes to the floor, and said, “Quite a spread, Henry. You’ve come up in the world.”

Henry leaned the Spencer against the wall and poured water from a pitcher into the wash bowl.

“It suits me,” he said, cleaning the dirt off his face.

“Henry Dunn, a dirt rancher,” said Frank. “I never would have believed it.”

Frank laughed. Henry dried his face and hands. He turned to Frank, looked him over. The lines in Frank’s face had grown deeper and the gray at his temples had spread since he’d last seen him.

“How long has it been, Henry?”

“A long time.”

Henry took a box of matches from the edge of the stove, stuck some kindling inside the belly, and struck a flame.

“Let’s see,” said Frank. “I heard you did five years down in Huntsville – how long you been out now?”

“Two years.”

Henry set a kettle of beans he’d left soaking in a pot onto the eye of the stove.

“Two years,” Frank repeated, “and not a word from you.”

“You aren’t exactly an easy man to find, Frank.”

“I found you easy enough.”

Henry shrugged.

“Things are different now, Frank. I’m a different man.”

Frank’s eyes narrowed. He took a drag from his cigarette, exhaled, and let the butt drop to the floor.

“I’d wager you aren’t so different,” said Frank.

Henry crossed the room to the chest at the foot of his bed. He opened the lid and reached inside. A heavy thud on the table brought Henry’s eyes back up.

“If you’re looking for this,” Frank said, nodding to Henry’s Colt Peacemaker, “the boys already found it.”

Henry came up with a clean shirt in his hand. He stripped off the work shirt and slid into the clean one.

Frank’s laughed filled the cabin.

Henry closed the trunk and dropped the soiled shirt into a corner. He crossed the room and took the chair opposite of Frank. He said, “Looks like you took up with some competent company since we parted.”

“Competent enough,” said Frank. He smiled again. “I told you, you haven’t changed much. That brain of yours, always working. What’s the angle, Henry? I know you’re not out here fencing in a dirt farm. You’re working something.”

“I’m different now, Frank. That five years inside changed me. I made a promise to myself. I’m not ever going back in there. Ever.”

“Maybe you want to hear what I have to say before you make up your mind.”

“I don’t want to hear it. You and your boys can stay the night. After that, I’d be obliged if you rode on.”

“There’s fifty-thousand dollars in those saddlebags. More where that come from. A lot more. I got a line on a silver mine down in Juarez. Every month there’s a payroll delivery.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it worked out. What do you need me for?”

“I need men I can trust, Henry. We were partners once. Ride with me again and we’ll be rich in a year. You can buy any ranch you want, if that’s what suits you.”

Henry shook his head. “I’m not going back to having bullets thrown at me and keeping company with killers. That’s how you get locked up. Or tied to the hanging end of a rope.”

A shadow drifted across Frank’s face erasing his smile. He stood up, holstered his Smith and Wesson and slipped Henry’s Colt into his belt. He stood at the cabin door with his arm braced against the frame and stared out at the empty country.

“We’re staying here until I say we move on.”

“That’s the way it is,” said Henry.

“That’s the way it is.” Frank nodded toward the stove. “Don’t let those beans burn. The boys get ornery when the grub isn’t up to their standards.”

The sun went down with all of them except Sancho inside the cabin. An oil lamp hung above the table breathed shadows over the four men cramped inside the tight space.

Frank McCord occupied one chair and Dusky Jones sat in the other, lazily shuffling through a deck of playing cards. He eyed Henry, who was on the narrow bed shoved against the wall. Waylon stood fidgeting in the doorway.

“Why do you only have two chairs,” Waylon said, breaking a long silence. “Can’t even have a good card game with two chairs.”

Waylon regarded Henry with dark, deep set eyes, then turned to Frank.

“Why don’t I ride to town, fetch a couple bottles of whiskey and bring back a chair.”

“Nobody’s riding anywhere,” said Frank. “Quit your belly aching.”

Waylon put his back against the doorframe, his eyes planted on Henry.

“Why does he get the bed?”

“That rights reserved for the leader of this gang.” Frank stood up, picked the two pistols off the table, holstered his, and shoved Henry’s into his belt, and stepped toward the cot. Henry stood up and took a place in the corner of the cabin. Frank laid down, stretched out his legs, crossed one boot over the other, and set his hat low over his eyes.

“Take the chair, Waylon,” said Frank. “Play your cards.”

Henry fell asleep against the wall with his head on his knees. He looked up to see Sancho standing in the doorway, a Springfield rifle held in both hands.

“Rider coming.”

Frank McCord sprang up from the bed. Dusky and Waylon shifted at the table where they had slept with their heads down.

“Alone?” Frank asked Sancho.

“Si,” said Sancho.

“How far out?” Frank crossed the cabin to the stove and picked up Henry’s Spencer.

“Couple miles,” said Sancho.

Franked worked the Spencer’s lever. Shells landed with a dull thud against the table and rolled metallically. He tossed the Spenser across the room to Henry.

Frank turned to Waylon and Dusky. “You two stay here.”

Henry followed Frank out into the yard, Sancho behind them.

“Saddle up the horses,” said Frank. He stared out across the country where small cloud of dust disturbed the blues and grays of the early morning horizon.

Sancho climbed into the saddle, bringing his horse around to face Henry.

“He means you, gringo,” he said, and put heels to his horse’s flanks.

“Where’s he going?” said Henry.

“Don’t worry about him,” said Frank. “Saddle the horses.”

Half an hour later Henry and Frank were within closing distance of the rider.

“You know him?” said Frank.

“Burl Aberdine,” Henry said. “The sheriff.”

Frank leaned over the saddle and spat. “Get rid of him.”

Henry searched the edge of the country for Sancho.

“He’s out there,” said Frank. “Trust on that.”

Henry tapped the butt of his Spencer and said, “What’s the point of this?”

Frank kept his eyes on the approaching lawman. “It might seem peculiar for you to be unarmed. You just remember that Mexican’s out there, and he’s a hell of a sharpshooter with that Springfield. Maybe better than you were.”

Henry walked his horse forward a few steps to meet the sheriff.

He said, “What brings you out this way, Sheriff?”

Aberdine leaned to the side and spat a long stream of tobacco. He looked past Henry to Frank.

“Who’s your friend, Henry?”

“Bob Woolard. Hired him on to help with the ranch.”

“Bob Woolard,” Aberdine repeated. “Friend of yours from Huntsville?”

“That’s right.”

Aberdine leaned over and spat again. He brought his eyes back to Henry.

“Got word of a Comanche making trouble,” said Aberdine. “Indian named Hachi. You run into him, I advise you to ride the other way.”

“Thought the army licked the Comanche out here,” said Frank.

Aberdine considered the man wearing the heavy pistols before he answered. “I reckon not.”

Aberdine spat another stream of tobacco. “Got other homesteads to warn.”

The sheriff put his horse to a walking pace and rode on.

Henry said, “Hachi’s a bad one.”

“Good. Bad Indians keep folks away. You did good Henry. Keep doing good.”

Dusky and Waylon were sitting in the ribbon of shade painted in front of the cabin as Henry and Frank McCord rode in.

“Well?” asked Dusky.

Frank ignored him. He handed Henry his bridle reigns and walked to the water barrel at the side of the cabin. Dusky trailed after him.

“Well?” Dusky demanded.

Frank cupped his hands in the water and washed his face as Henry led the horses into the corral.

Dusky put a hand on Frank’s shoulder. He said, “Answer me, you –,”

Frank reared and slapped Dusky with the back of his hand. The force of the blow sent Dusky to the ground. He came quickly to his feet, hand on the butt of his pistol. He froze with Frank’s Smith and Wesson inches from his face.

“I talk when I’m ready to talk,” said Frank. “Take your hand off that pistol before I decide to split the take three ways instead of four.”

“Sure,” said Dusky. He raised his hand away from his pistol. “I was just felling anxious, Frank. You boys riding off, leaving me and Waylon sitting here all alone.”

They turned, hearing Sancho ride up. Frank holstered his pistol and Dusky took a few steps away, rubbing his face.

“I followed him far enough south to know he wasn’t doubling back on us,” Sancho said from the saddle.

Henry listened from the corral. He reached a hand under his horse to unbuckle the saddle strap when Frank called out to him.

“Leave them saddled.” Frank snapped. “We might need to ride.”

Henry came out of the corral and stepped across the yard toward the cabin. Frank stopped him at the door.

“You can set that Spencer down.”

Henry turned to Frank. “You scared I might use it as a club?”

“Best not to take chances.”

“What do we need him for anyway, Frank,” said Dusky.

“He might prove handy if that lawman decides to double back.”

“Or the Comanche,” said Henry. He set the Spencer down next to the door and stepped inside the cabin. He sat at the table with his back to the door. His eyes fell on the Spencer’s .50 caliber bullets Frank had left scattered across the table and swept a couple of the shells into his palm.

He heard Waylon outside. “I thought the Comanche were all dead.”

Frank McCord’s boots thudded into the cabin. Henry slipped the shells into his pocket as Frank came around the table, saying to Waylon, “Don’t waste your time worrying about one renegade off the reservation.”

Frank glanced at the shells on the table. He picked one of them up, examining it like an artifact.

“What if it that posse shows up here?” said Dusky. “What if that Comanche comes around here, or that lawman comes back?”

Frank tossed the shell into the air and caught it.

“Henry will deal with the lawman,” said Frank. “If the Indian comes around, we’ll deal with him.” He tossed the shell and caught it again. “Maybe he’ll take Henry as a peace offering.”

“I didn’t sign up to deal with no Comanche,” Dusky said.

Henry felt the weight of the bullets in his pocket, knowing two bullets were not enough.

“You signed on to do what I tell you,” said Frank. “If any of you want out –.” He didn’t bother finishing the last part as he caught the shell again.

“Sancho!” Frank called out and took a step toward the cabin door.

“Si,” Sancho answered from the yard.

“Go watch the trail to the west. You see a posse, that lawman, or an Indian, you come back here and get me.”

“Si.”

Henry turned in his chair, watching Sancho ride out, wondering how to get rid of three men with two bullets.

Sancho chose a spot where he could watch the western trail without being seen against the skyline. The valley stretched out below him like a worn blanket as he scanned the country with an old pair of field glasses.

Sancho like being alone. Scouting was a job that suited him. He didn’t eat much, he didn’t drink much, and he had little use for conversation. Sancho didn’t care much for Texas, or Texans for that matter, and preferred the mesas and arroyos of New Mexico. But when money was involved, Sancho adjusted his temperament. Money was one thing Sancho did care about, and he cared about it a great deal.

The horse grazing behind him bellowed. Sancho lowered the field glasses. The feeling of being watched tickled the nape of his neck like a senorita’s lithe fingers. He searched again, his dark eyes hovering over the sparse mesquite bushes dotting the valley.

Sancho didn’t like it. He went to the horse, put the field glasses in his saddlebag, and slid his Springfield from its boot. Turning, he came face to face with a Comanche.

Suddenly, Sancho felt weak. A warm wetness spilled down his crotch and legs. He dropped the Springfield and looked down at the red gash across his belly. At the blue-gray entrails spilling out. At the knife in the Comanche’s hand.

Sancho fell, the world going black. His ears were filled with the piercing screech of the Comanche’s war cry.

“Three kings,” Waylon said, setting his cards on the table.

“That’s five hands in a row,” Dusky Jones said. “No man wins five hands in a row without cheating.”

“I don’t like it,” Frank said from his place at the door.

“What don’t you like?” said Henry, from the bed.

Frank turned his eyes on Henry for a moment, then went back to gazing out on the country. The sun had begun to slip into the west and a thin pink ribbon had formed against the horizon.

“You boys go check on Sancho. He should have checked in by now.”

“We got a game going here, Frank,” Dusky protested, his eyes leveled at Waylon.

Frank exploded. “I don’t give a damn what you got!” In an instant, he was beside the table with a hand on the walnut grip of his holstered Smith and Wesson. “Go check on Sancho before I take both your futures.”

“We’ll ride out there,” said Dusky. “But I’m awful tired of being bossed around, Frank.”

“If you want your shares, you’ll do what I tell you, when I tell you. Now, go.”

Frank watched them mount and ride off.

“You seem nervous, Frank,” said Henry.

“There’s a lot of money in those bags. More waiting for me in Juarez. Nothing’s going to get in the way of that.”

Frank cut his eyes back to the doorway.

“You won’t see him until it’s too late, Frank.”

“Who?”

“The Comanche.”

Frank spit out the doorway, his eyes searching. “I never seen an Indian I couldn’t beat.”

“You won’t see this one either. That’s my point.”

Frank stepped toward Henry.

“It’ll take more than a boogieman to scare me off. I suggest you sit there and shut up. Hope I don’t notice you more than I need to.”

“All right, Frank.”

“You’re a sad case, you know that, Henry? You used to be something. You had money. Women. Now, look at you. It makes me sick to see you like this. I got half a mind to put you out of your misery right here and now.”

“You don’t want to do that, Frank.”

“Why not?”

“If Hachi is as bad as I say he is, you’ll want more than a couple of saddle-tramps backing you up.”

“You just keep talking, Henry Dunn.”

Waylon was only half listening to Dusky. His attention was focused on the country ahead, and what might be out there.

“We been taking orders long enough,” said Dusky. “The last job was it for me. Fifty-thousand split two ways. That’s twenty-five thousand dollars for each of us, Waylon.”

Waylon pulled his horse to a stop.

“What is it?” Dusky said. He followed Waylon’s gaze toward the sky. Several buzzards circled lazily in the late day sun.

Waylon pulled his pistol. Dusky loosened his own, peering up at the dark shapes hovering low in the sky.

“You smell it?” Waylon asked. “Smells like an injin.”

They sat for a minute. Searching.

“Sancho wouldn’t let no injin sneak up on him,” said Dusky.

“We gone far enough. Let’s head back.”

Dusky turned in his saddle. “I never thought you was yellow.”

“I’m going back,” Waylon said. “I seen enough.”

Waylon pulled his horse around. The rifle shot almost knocked him out of the saddle. He dropped his pistol and held on to the saddle horn as his horse bolted in a cloud of dust.

Dusky fell in behind Waylon. He drew his pistol and fired. Hot lead whizzed and whined past him.

Dusky overtook Waylon. Waylon’s face was pale. Blood dripped from the corner of his mouth. Dusky put his pistol barrel to the head of Waylon’s horse and fired. Waylon’s horse somersaulted and crashed to the dirt, spilling its rider in a cloud of dust, as Dusky raced away.

Frank McCord heard the staccato beats of a galloping horse. He exchanged looks with Henry and they both went to the door. Beneath soft, white moonlight, they saw Dusky Jones, his horse lathered and slick with sweat.

Dusky slid out of the saddle and went to the rain barrel without glancing at the two men. They watched Dusky dunk his head in the water and come up for air, breathing heavily.

Frank said, “Where’s Sancho?” His eyes cut back to the encroaching darkness of the prairie. “And Waylon?”

Dusky stood with his hands on the rim of the rain barrel, looking into its depths, as if the answers were just below the surface.

“Dead.”

“Dead,” Frank repeated.

“That’s right,” said Dusky. “Comanche got ‘em.”

“And you got away,” said Frank.

“He come out of nowhere. Got Waylon with the first shot.

“That’s fine,” said Frank. “That’s just fine.”

“What’d you want me to do,” Dusky demanded, “hand my scalp over to him? I did what any man would do.”

“Hard to believe anyone got the drop on Sancho,” said Frank.

“You can ride out there and look for yourself if you don’t believe me. Just follow the buzzards.”

“Leaves a bigger share for you.”

“Go to hell.”

Frank went for his gun. Dusky got a hand on the butt of his pistol before Frank cut him down. Dusky fell dead in the yard as the sound of Frank’s shot echoed into the night.

Frank turned the smoking barrel of his pistol on Henry. “Get that horse in the corral.”

Henry stepped around Dusky and led the worn-out horse into the corral. He shut the gate, turned to Frank, and said, “That horse is about dead, Frank. I don’t think he was lying.”

Frank waved his pistol toward the cabin’s doorway. “Sit down where I can watch you.”

Henry went into the cabin and sat down. He tried not to look at the Spencer leaned against the door. He’d never get it loaded before Frank cut him down.

Frank reached a hand into his vest pocket and placed a half-smoked cigarette between his lips and lit it with a match. His eyes were black slits.

“Go on,” he said, without looking at Henry. “Try for it.” Frank shook out his match.

A shot shattered the silence. The lantern fell from its hook and flames shot up from the table.

Frank flattened himself against the wall and Henry tore the blanket from the bed, quickly smothering the flames. Another shot slammed into the adobe. Splinters pelted Henry’s face. He threw the table down and barricaded the door. His hand went for the Spencer.

“Touch that rifle and I’ll spill your brains out all over this floor.”

“Damn you, Frank,” said Henry. “That Comanche will kill the both of us!”

“He might,” said Frank.

“I don’t care about your money. You can ride off a rich man. I’m more worried about my scalp!”

Silence grew between them. Frank’s face was pale in the moonlight breaking through the windows. Outside, they heard the horses racing out toward the prairie.

Frank reached out the window with his pistol and fired two quick shots into the night.

“Give me a pistol,” Henry said after Frank flattened himself back against the wall.

Frank looked down at Henry for a long moment. Finally, he drew Henry’s Colt from his belt and handed it down to him. Before letting go, Frank said, “I won’t think twice about blowing your brains out.”

“I never doubted you would.”

Time passed slowly inside the cabin. Both men on edge, poised to act on the slightest sound or shift of air. Anything that could mark the passing of the Comanche.

The war cry came in the morning, rising above the pounding hooves. Henry peered over the edge of the table and Frank stole a look out of the window. Hachi passed the side of the cabin and streaked across the yard. Frank emptied his pistol at the Comanche, a small target shielded by the body of his horse.

Frank fell back against the wall, ejecting spent shells.

Henry said, “We need to draw him out.”

“How we do that?” said Frank.

“One of us makes a run for it and the other draws a bead with this.” Henry held up the Spenser. “There’s two rounds.”

“Sure,” said Frank. “You get me out there and you get to walk away with fifty-thousand.”

“I don’t care about your money,” Henry said. “It’s the only way to draw him out.”

Frank took the Spencer.

“Fine,” he said. “But you’re the one going out there.”

“You better be as good a shot as you used to be.”

Frank holstered his pistol and checked the round in the Spencer.

Henry crouched behind the table and put his hands on the edge, readying himself. Frank took position in the window and clicked the hammer back on the Spencer.

“Go,” said Frank.

Henry jumped through the doorway. He ran for the sliver of cover the corral offered and tucked himself behind a post. A distant shot broke the silence. Henry ran again and threw himself flat against the dirt. Another shot rang out. He glanced back at the cabin. Frank was in the window, waiting for his chance. Henry forced himself up as a bullet pelted into the dirt near his feat. He leaped over the corral and ran out onto the empty plain.

The galloping of a horse and the piercing cry of a Comanche rose from behind him. Henry turned, still running. The Comanche barreled down on top of him, mouth wide, screaming his war cry with arms stretched out, a Winchester in hand.

Now, Frank, now!

The Spencer’s shot echoed from the cabin and the Comanche tumbled from his horse. Henry stopped his run and turned to see the warrior writing on the ground, breathing heavily. The Comanche, twisted, pushed himself up with a grunt. Henry drew his Colt and thumbed back the hammer. The Comanche raised his head, dark eyes like lances stabbing into Henry’s quivering guts, then fell to the ground dead.

Henry breathed the breath of a man who’d just escaped certain death. He walked toward the cabin on wobbly legs and faced Frank, who stood in the doorway aiming the Spencer at Henry’s chest.

Henry nodded and took another step.

Frank squeezed the trigger and the Spencer clicked dry. Henry took a bullet from his shirt pocket and tossed it onto the ground between them. Sunlight bounced off the brass casing.

Frank dropped the Spencer and went for his pistol. Henry fanned the Colt’s hammer and Frank slumped against the doorframe, sinking slowly to his knees. Henry stuck his pistol into his belt and slipped past Frank, clinging to the doorframe, life bleeding out of him. His eyes followed Henry to the saddlebags, watched as he gathered them up, and went out again.

“You – said – didn’t care –,”

“I didn’t, Frank,” said Henry. “But I can’t let fifty-thousand dollars go to waste.”

Donald D. Shore settled in Huntsville, Al after years of traveling the country to see what else is out there. From the deserts of New Mexico to the wild forests of the North West, he found there to be a story hidden within every shadow. He spends his time carving out those stories and searching for more.

Out on the prairie a young man slouched over the neck of his horse as his blood oozed down onto the saddle. In the distance a train rattled. He wasn’t going to make it to the station much less Doc Brown’s house, and he needed to be stitched up bad.

In the dust up ahead, the train finally slid to a stop. One passenger stepped down off the iron step and onto the wooden platform. The only person in the low dry building squinted at her through the ticket seller bars and their eyes locked for a moment. He knew her, Doc Brown’s wife, but he didn’t say hello. He was never going to forgive the doc for helping his wife and infant son out of this world.

Up above and across the ridge a horse and buggy kicked up dust as it made its way through the sun baked land toward the station.

The woman on the platform put a hand to her eyes shielding the yellow just in time to see the blood-soaked horse trotting toward the station. The air swelled with urgency.

“Man coming this way Hud,” she said to her husband. “Looks to be hurt awful bad.”

The doc turned to see the horse trotting toward him, and it was all he could do to get the man into his wagon. Who knew whether he would survive the hour ride to Doc’s house? He had lost a lot of blood.

Three days later as he lay propped up in bed, he was able to speak a few words and Doc was certain he would survive. Doc’s wife had cleaned up his horse and brought in his belongings. Inside his saddle bag was an unposted letter. Doc assured him he was going to make it and when Doc Brown’s wife asked him if he wanted the letter mailed, he said yes.

The letter arrived four weeks later in Boston. It was a hot day. A woman was mending a small boy’s shirt while sitting on the front porch when the mail arrived.

“Daniel’s coming home!” Katherine shouted after opening the letter. She picked up the young boy just as her mother walked out the front door. “He’s coming home, Mama!”

Three days after Doc Brown’s wife posted the letter, the young man died. Doc always did overestimate his talents. No one had saved the address or knew where he had come from. They buried him in the cemetery back of the church.

Where the prairie met the sky.

Jan Darrow is a graduate of the University of Michigan and currently lives in Michigan with her husband and daughter. She grew up in the wild rural Midwest and connected with the natural world at an early age.

Winnie Bullock stood at the edge of the creek, watching it swirl into a pool next to a large boulder. She tightened the drawstring on her hat to guard against the gusts of late spring wind and then stooped to pick up a piece of quartz, its silver mica glittering with moisture.

Since her brother Chase had died after a logging accident, it fell to her to help her father work the homestead while Mother and her two younger sisters stayed in Boise, where they earned a small income by singing and reciting poetry in the parlors of wealthy patrons. Today her father had gone into town for supplies and wasn’t expected back until nightfall.

When she heard a faint drumming sound grow louder, she looked up to see a rider coming toward her, his galloping horse lifting him skyward and thudding him back to earth in an undulating rhythm. His long hair streamed backward from beneath his battered Stetson as if the speed at which he rode was forcing a part of him to fly off toward the clouds scattered along the shadowy horizon to the east.

“Hello! Hello! Is your husband around?” he called.

The light in the young woman’s eyes faded as she reflected on the danger a man could bring to a woman alone in the desert. Even before her recent high school graduation, she’d seen the ruined farm girls hustling outside the bars in Boise. She raised her arm and threw the rock she’d been admiring into the creek, its splash startling the trout where they’d rested, the steel ridge-lines of their backs roiling, the soft rainbows of their sides exposed.

“He’s not here,” she lied, trying to head the intruder off. “You must be at the wrong place—maybe you need to check the miners’ campsite over to the east a couple of miles.”

The rider’s horse stumbled against a limb of dried greasewood on the ledge above the creek as he reined in, its hooves knocking loose the pungent scent of resin. Winnie’s fingers traced the worn grooves of the rifle stock she’d been cradling in her arm, her forefinger sliding down into the oval shell of the trigger guard, its sleek steel contrasting with the wood. She slid her fingers further, caressing the trigger, its curve a perfect comma waiting for the right phrase to complete the sentence. Ignoring her move, the rider began to dismount.

“My father will know you’ve been through here,” Winnie choked out, and then cringed at how she’d made it plain that no one at all was around to come to her aid. The smell of the scarred greasewood slid further into the air, stinging her nostrils. She dropped down onto the boulder, raising the rifle to her shoulder in what she hoped appeared as a natural, reflexive action. “What is it that you want?”

“Well now, who’d think I’d be finding a little prairie flower like you when I’m just after a cup of coffee?” the rider asked, sliding his hand onto the leather holster where his rifle rode alongside the saddle.

He doesn’t think I can take him down, Winnie thought. Her mind flashed back to the last Boise Citizen she’d read, a story about another drifter, a good-for-nothing rapist attacking a young woman who’d been traveling to Mountain Home to join her fiancé. Some of the local busybodies had even claimed the assault was her own fault for riding out alone—like a ripe plum ready for the picking.

“I’m clear out of coffee, Mister,” Winnie said, and then she whispered, “and I’m nobody’s flower.”

“Say, you won’t need that rifle anyways,” he commented as he drew a letter from his saddlebag. “You’d be from Boise, I’ll bet. Douglas Bullock is your father and you’re working that spread a little piece further on. Right?”

“What do you want with us?”

“You are Edwina Ann Bullock then?”

“Yes,” Winnie admitted.

“This letter is for you. It’s called a subpoena and it’s from Judge LeFevre. It says you’ll have to testify about your brother Chase when called upon to do so.”

Winnie’s face went red as she eyed the man. “I know what a subpoena is, but Chase died last winter. He got hurt on a log run from Idaho City.”

“The authorities don’t figure his fall was any accident, Miss Bullock. Andrew Brady, the new prosecutor up in Boise County, he’s put a man in jail. He’s planning a trial for murder. You take this paper now and I’ll be on my way.”

“What about my father? Don’t you have one for him?” Winnie asked, after she read her name on the envelope. But all she heard in reply was a little creaking sound from the saddle as the man mounted, flicked the reins, and turned his horse back toward town. He raised one hand, tipped his hat, and nodded goodbye so casually she wondered if he could even imagine what an uproar his message would cause.

* * *

Without the rider, the plain sank back into its usual inertia, a wide vista featuring nothing to interrupt the vacant miles. The Bullocks were the first to set up housekeeping although, but the whole forty miles of desert between the Boise and Mountain Home would be irrigated after a new dam at Arrowrock went in. It’d been approved in 1910 so that sometime soon—Winnie hoped—developers would dig the irrigation canal that would make the desert bear crops. Nevertheless, Winnie would have to stay on the homestead, unless some kind of miracle came along, until the high desert turned into a profitable farm.

As the subpoena said, Winnie’s real name was Edwina. When she’d been in the third grade at Longfellow School, two of the older girls made up a rhyme about it and spread their derision around the school. Winnie’s older brother Chase had been the first to call her the name she went by now. When she was little and Mother’s voice had risen to a sour note, she’d call, “Edwina Ann, come right now!” When that happened Chase would hold her back a second and say, “Little Miss Winnie, I’ll give you a pinny to make Mama smile!” Sometimes he even slipped a penny into her hand before he let her go.

Later he’d tell her that she was the Bullock family’s winner—Winnie the winner; she’d make them all proud one day. Nevertheless, Edwina longed to experience her mother’s warmth and approval, to feel her eyes on her sturdy eldest daughter the same way she gazed at willowy figures of Mandy and Claire. She’d tell them, “Someday you’ll both be beautiful brides and bring us all a fortune.” Sometimes she’d nod at Edwina, and say, “You too, dear.”

All the young Edwina had to compare with beautiful was ugly. She’d learned how an ugly insult could blunt your dreams and shove your own words down your throat. You’d swallow them, even words like Hello, because of the giggles and whispers that warned you how certain girls were not your friends. So you didn’t ask questions like, Will you sit by me in gym class? or, Do you like my braids this way?

The easy breeze that had swept her along throughout her early childhood died the first day of the maypole dance rehearsals one April. She’d been chosen as the top third grade girl with the most time to spare from her lessons so she could practice with the older girls. She’d fill in so there’d be someone on the sixteenth ribbon to make up the perfect number for winding around the pole.

“Girls,” Mrs. Englund announced, “This is Edwina. She’ll be blue, on ribbon four, behind Roseanne and in front of Celia.”

“Edwina!” Celia asked, wrinkling her nose.

“What an odd name,” Roseanne giggled and then said, “Eddie, she’s an Eddie.”

“Eddie Weena,” Celia added. “Weena, Weena!” They began chanting in low voices, “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie! Weena, Weena, Weena! Never had a Freddy! Never will!” The girls savored the rhyme in their mouths as if it were a bubbly soda, or a caramel apple, sweet and sour, chewy and juicy, conjured up by their cleverness—and it was theirs. It belonged to them. And Edwina belonged to them as well, a toy. And after the teachers heard them and told them to stop, they’d whisper as she walked by or tried to find a seat in choir. She would pretend not to hear the Eddie, Eddie, Eddie that echoed in her mind. Never had a Freddy, never, never …

For years Edwina yearned for a way to be accepted into the fold by popular girls, to stop the snickering that accompanied her backside as she walked across the playground. She saw how they clustered and patted each other’s hair; their laughter and pleasure withheld from her, an unreachable ring on a daily merry-go-round. In her sorrow she cast about, looking for a way to ease the loneliness that she felt walking to school alone, walking home alone.

Late one afternoon while she sat half-hidden under the lilac tree in the yard writing in her diary, Chase came by and spotted her. “Hey Winnie-pinny, come out, come out wherever you are.” His words reminded her of a line from their long ago hide and seek games. When he’d entered sixth grade, he’d given up tag and other games, claiming to be too grown up for kiddy play. His casual reference to the fun times they’d had in the past brought tears to Winnie’s eyes.

If I could just be Winnie, they’d stop teasing me, she thought, but she had no idea how to make such a marvelous change happen. School would soon be out for the summer and if Chase could help her now, maybe when she started fourth grade in the fall the hateful Edwina rhyme would’ve simply disappeared.

“. . . making fun of me at school,” she finally blurted out.

Chase frowned and slid down next to her, inching himself under the lilac branches, the two of them side by side, just the way they used huddle together. “And who would this be making fun of you?” he asked.

“Celia Phipps and Roseanne Busker started it. When we practiced for the maypole. They rhymed my name—Weena, Weena, and Eddie like a boy’s … and … I … I can’t even say the rest.”

“They’re the worst girls in my class for making fun of people. Celia ought to wear a gold crown the way she bosses everyone around. And she’ll deny everything if you tell.”

“Maybe you could talk to her?”

Chase looked away and whispered, “Celie Phipps, liar’s lips.” Then he said, “Yes, I will. Tomorrow.”

* * *

Casting her memories aside, Winnie realized the rider was, like Chase, long gone. She ran back to the tent house, hoping to read the subpoena and the letter that came with it before her father quit work for the day. The idea that Chase had come to harm from another person opened a huge gap between the way she’d mourned her brother and the import of this new investigation. When she opened the summons, she saw that the prosecution had charged a Gordon Phipps. She wondered if the accused was related to Celia and if so, how.

“A man caught up with me over by Standley Creek today,” Winnie said when Father came in. She paused to sweep her hair from her eyes before turning to pour the hot water into the tea pot. “I didn’t have much warning without Striker to bark at him.” She looked to the Border collie on the floor as he raised his head and perked his ears on hearing his name. Most of the time Winnie and Striker stuck together, but he’d had a run-in with a coyote the night before and she’d left him tied up for the afternoon so the torn skin above his eye would start to heal.

“You’ve let your hair fall clear onto your cheeks, Winnie. Tighten the knot!” Father said. “Now you’ve spilled the water too.” He’d insisted that Winnie wear black or gray and tie her hair back since she’d finished high school—not that her navy blues and browns hadn’t been drab enough without the lacy collars and cuffs the other girls wore. With Chase dead. she’d be in black for a whole year. Mourning or not, decency in the eyes of the Lord demanded that a grown woman look and act plainspoken, according to her father, a sometime Free Methodist preacher.

Winnie mopped the table with a cloth, managing to push the legal papers out of the way before they were damaged. “This is what he brought,” she said, nodding toward them.

“These are from Boise County? What could they want with us?”

“You remember where Chase got hurt,” Winnie answered, as she poured the tea. She crossed over and sat in the rocking chair so she could watch her father’s back while he read. She patted her leg to signal Striker to come closer and the dog whimpered a little as he came, as if he knew the soreness of the hurt she felt. His leg bones clunked against the floor boards as he settled. Her father turned and thrust the legal pages in her face. “Why is this subpoena for you, Winnie? What do you know that you haven’t told your mother and me?”

“I’ll be riding in an autobus from Boise to Idaho City with some other people next Wednesday. As it says in the letter, the prosecutor is calling witnesses together for a pretrial investigation.”

“We’ll see about that. If this Andrew Brady knew his business as a prosecutor, he’d call on Chase’s father and leave the women in the family alone.”

Winnie turned her head so he wouldn’t see the tears filling her eyes. Perhaps she’d been called to testify because she was the one who cared for Chase all those months of sickness after he fell from the log wagon. But then a shudder ran through her as she remembered how she’d sat at Chase’s bedside asking herself, Why, why? Maybe she should have been asking, How? How could this have happened?

What if Chase had been pushed? They’d never gotten any details about his fall. Loggers died when trees fell the wrong way, not when they were moving logs down a road. The sheriff had met Mother and Father and shown them the shady curve marked with a wooden stake. And a Boise Citizen article reported what supposedly happened, but Chase hadn’t been a careless man. I’ll go to Boise on my own, she thought. Father will never seek out the truth because he’ll be fighting the very men he needs to listen to.

* * *

On Wednesday morning, when she usually started the fire and put on coffee before waking her father, she dressed silently. She opened her letter box, took out the silver dollars Chase had given her, and slipped them into her purse before she eased out of the tent house. At least she’d have the money with her in case something unexpected happened. Late the night before, she’d slipped out and pegged her horse, Sassy, away from the others so their nickering wouldn’t wake Father. She was in the saddle well before sunup.

Father’s angry words echoed in her mind as she rode. “What haven’t you told your mother and me?” he’d asked. Her cheeks flushed as she remembered how his question had burned in her ears. As if she knew of some secret wrongdoing that had led to Chase’s death. While Sassy carried her along the way to meet with Andrew Brady, she whispered the lines she’d say to Father later, “I thought you needed your rest, Sir, and besides, I managed perfectly well.”

As her emotions faded, Winnie watched the ground squirrels scampering through the sagebrush in the half-light spreading from the mountaintops. The little busybodies relayed ahead of her horse, calling their pip, pip, pip warnings to others who might be in danger. Riding through the vacant miles, she could hardly imagine the promised irrigation water someday turning the arid land into fertile fields. The hungry little guys would just be vermin then, their tunnels dug up and colonies killed off. People did what they had to do. She knew she’d lie if the prosecutor asked about the money Chase had saved from his wages, keeping his stash secret from the family. Even from her until the very last.

* * *

Winnie stabled her horse near the city hall where a new autobus waited, a vehicle resembling a long metal wagon that would hold thirteen, counting the driver. Canvas curtains hung along the open windows to protect the passengers if it rained or, as was more likely today, they suffered from the dust. A small crowd of people stood waiting and a tall young woman in a tailored suit came up to Winnie.

“You must be Edwina,” she said.

Winnie shook her head and looked down at her hands.

“Ida Swift, with the Boise Citizen.”

“I won’t be saying much, but thank you anyway. Chase wouldn’t want his name spread around in the news.”

“And why not?”

“Well, he can’t speak for himself now, can he? Seeing as how he’s over in the Pioneer Cemetery.”

Ida made a tch tch noise with her mouth and added an mmm, mmm. The reporter leaned forward and turned her face up at an angle so she could see into Winnie’s eyes. “I remember when your brother graduated high school, my dear. Such a bright future!”

“I suppose I should be getting into the autobus now.”

“Was your brother three or four years older than you?”

“You know, I used to believe we’d all have time to make our way in the world, but Chase never really had a chance, did he?” Winnie asked, surprised at herself for going on about him to the newspaper columnist. Then, just as the first rays of sunlight burst through the maple trees and dappled the red skin of the autobus, the driver started the engine.

“Wouldn’t you even like to know what will happen when we get there?”
Winnie felt the smoothness of the door handle and when she stepped onto the autobus, she slid across the cool leather of the seat, shifting as far as possible away from Ida, who’d followed her.

“I’ve covered a lot of crime stories, Edwina. I was right there when they convicted Governor Stuenenberg’s killer and I covered the family’s relief that justice would prevail. That’s worth a whole lot more than any of my society columns you may have read. And a copy clerk writes most of them for me anyway. I can help you find some peace when Gordon Phipps hears his sentence and the world knows what he did. Think of your mother and father.”

“I never thought Chase would be touched by such evil as to be killed, and I don’t want any part of making headlines for your paper!” Winnie took out her little compact mirror and lip balm and applied the salve to her lips where the sun had burned them rough. When she finished, she snapped her bag shut, and pursed her lips as if to seal them. Ida turned away, looking for someone new to interview.

The vehicle they rode in soon passed through town and stopped at the end of Warm Springs Avenue. A young man, a little dusty from the quarry, climbed into the seat across the aisle from Ida. Winnie’s eyes opened wide when she saw who he was—Robert MacAulay, Chase’s best friend from high school. She shrank back into her seat so that Ida’s large hat hid her from view and listened as the reporter sounded him out.

“I think Andrew Brady brought these charges against Gordon to get his name in the paper,” Robert said. “The whole Republican Party is upset that a Democratic governor is in the state house.”

“I’ll be sure and print that opinion if you’ll own up to it. You know, Andrew Brady passed law at Harvard and he’s the blood nephew of our last governor.”

‘I don’t care who he’s related to, and the Hawleys don’t own anyone. What I said wouldn’t be any different than what a lot of Chase’s friends are saying, so go ahead, quote me.”

“Why would Brady risk bringing a weak case to trial?”

“Miss Swift, he hasn’t done it yet. He hasn’t even heard what we all have to say.”

“I hear he has a witness against Phipps.”

Macaulay appeared reluctant to say more, and as they wound up the canyon the engine whined ever louder until the driver stopped and poured cool water on it. Winnie watched the silver willow leaves shift in the breeze along the creek and then leaned out to listen to the water grumbling down its rocky bed. Another hour and they’d be in Idaho City.

* * *

When the autobus stopped in front of a saloon, Winnie couldn’t resist commenting to no one in particular, “It’s 1911 and they still hold court in a tavern?”

“Well, yes.” Robert Macauley said. “Say, I didn’t see you on the up ride here, Winnie,” he added with a smile. “Were you hiding out then?” He grasped her elbow to help her inside the Miner’s Exchange. A long, polished bar where liquor was served at night, stretched across the room.

“That’s where the judge sits during trials,” Macaulay whispered. Winnie tried to hide her surprise that a bar could double for a place where justice was supposed to prevail. What a place for a trial! The witnesses all sat down and then a warden sent them, one at a time, over to Andrew Brady’s office, across the street and up over the liquor store. “There’s nowhere else for us to wait,” Robert explained.

“Do you believe this Gordon Phipps pushed Chase off the logs?” Winnie asked.

“Didn’t you know … he’s Celia’s older brother, that girl you had trouble with back in grade school.” Robert paused, rubbing the coin he held between his thumb and forefinger, squeezing it, as if it might fly into the air or drop to the floor of its own accord. “I’ll be telling the prosecutor what a good person Chase was, Winnie, but you might be prepared to learn a few things. Chase got a taste of freedom up here in the mountains.”

* * *

Andrew Brady sat behind a small desk that might have been built for someone’s grandfather. His long legs stretched across the doorway and he moved them abruptly, causing Winnie to trip a little as she crossed the threshold from the landing and stepped in. Her purse, the one she’d beaded so carefully by hand, flew across the room and smacked against the log wall.

“You’re obliged to tell me the whole truth here, Edwina Bullock,” Brady said as he stood, retrieved the purse and picked up a Bible from his desk. “Hold your hand on this book and swear to it. Do you so promise?”

“Yes sir.”

Winnie took a deep breath as he sat back down. She looked hard at the man who held her more or less hostage and saw a tense face with hooded eyes. She wanted him to let her and all of the Bullocks go free, leaving Chase’s reputation as a good son and brother unharmed. To just forget the whole charade. And yet, if Phipps had caused Chase’s death, she’d cheer to see him convicted. It felt as if her whole being depended on Andrew Brady and she groaned to think that she and Chase were only steps on the ladder of his plans to rise above them.

“Mr. Brady,” she said. “Why am I here?”

“You ever hear Chase Bullock talk about Gordon Phipps?”

“Sir?”

“You nursed the deceased through his illness, isn’t that right? Did he ever tell you about the accident or why he and Phipps were riding on the logs?”

“No sir.”

Brady came out from behind the desk and kneeled beside her chair. “You mustn’t lie to me, Edwina. Its Winnie isn’t it? Did you know your brother drank with the other loggers of a Saturday night? Did you know he fought in the street out here after midnight when the bars closed? Your brother was a roustabout, wasn’t he? You know how they are. What did he tell you about Gordon Phipps?”

Winnie’s breath struggled in her throat forcing a rude gulp from her lips. The men she’d known had never thrust themselves so near her face and she smelled the lavender aroma of the soap he’d used in his bath. A narrow ray of light from the window striped across his cheek as he leaned ever closer, and she felt his breath as he whispered, “Tell me.”

Something shifted inside her and she began to feel terribly small, as if the chair had grown around her and she might be lost in it forever. He raised his hand to her chin ready to pull the words out of her mouth that would condemn Gordon Phipps, words that would also prove Chase had been a wayward son. A silent moment passed and then Winnie heard a howling sound filling the tiny room and bouncing from the rafters. She wondered where the shrieking came from, and the next thing she knew, Brady leaned over her, a cup of water in his hand. “You were upset at me and then you blacked out,” he said. “Here, drink this.”

Winnie gulped a few swallow and handed the glass back to him. They looked at each other cautiously, as if a new uproar might flare up between them at any moment.

“I’ll let you go for now, Miss Bullock, but the law requires you to report what you know about Chase and Gordon Phipps. Write to me at the address here on my card—Mr. Andrew Brady, P. A., Boise County Courthouse, Idaho City, Idaho.” He pressed the card into her hand, opened the office door, and led her down the outdoor steps. He handed her gently over to the warden who’d been waiting. “She may need a bit of looking after,” he said.

Ida Swift stood in the doorway of the bar. Dropping her officious manner, she wrapped an arm around Winnie’s shoulders and led her along the wooden walkway to an outside bench.

”I never imagined Chase would’ve sheltered you so completely. He really didn’t tell you anything about this Gordon Phipps that Brady is after?”

“No, he didn’t. But when we were in grade school, Chase protected me against Gordon’s little sister Celia. She’d been a ringleader in teasing me about my name. I guess Chase and Gordon may’ve never been friends after that, but all the time I took care of him after he fell—he said nothing to me about drinking or fighting. Maybe something wicked really did happen.”

Ida held her peace, but reached into her bag, drew out a large linen handkerchief, and dabbed at the moisture on Winnie’s forehead. Then she stood and walked to the end of the boardwalk. Winnie clasped her hands over her chest, took a deep breath, and followed her. “Do you understand now?” she asked.

A Lazuli bunting landed in the grass in front of them and began pecking for fallen berries from a nearby chokecherry bush. It searched restlessly, the eyes darting as fast as its beak.

“I used to believe that families like yours, where the fathers rule, kept private counsel and when trouble came along the women always knew more than they were telling.”

“What would you know about my father?”

“Birds seem so free, don’t they, flying wherever they take a notion, but lots of them starve in the winter. Or freeze … others know to fly south.”

* * *

It was late when the autobus returned to Boise and a crowd had gathered on the lawn outside city hall. People milled around asking questions, as if the riders had attended a holiday celebration. The whole Bullock family, scrubbed and polished, came forward to meet Winnie, Mandy and Claire dressed in frilly jumpers and their Sunday shoes. Ida Swift kept her hand firmly on Winnie’s back and said, “This young lady needs rest and quiet.”

Mr. Bullock grunted and opened his mouth, but no words came out.

“You needn’t worry—she hasn’t told me or anyone else a thing we didn’t already know.”

“That’s good.”

“You see how these people are acting?” Ida said. “Plenty will be published about Chase in the newspapers tomorrow and for weeks to come if there is a trial. You should give Edwina permission to tell her side of her brother’s story.”

“No! Never!”

“She knows where to find me.”

Father raised his arm and flung his hand forward as if to shoo the reporter away.

Ida put her mouth to Winnie’s ear and whispered, “The old goat.”

All the emotion of the day, the tears and fears, the grief over Chase’s fate and the worry over what Father would think or say about her actions—all of it flared up in Winnie’s mind and her heart beat a little faster as first one giggle and then another escaped from her compressed lips. Soon she and Ida were bent over, their howls of laughter erupting into the crowd and drawing everyone’s attention. Douglas Bullock allowed a smile to come over his face as he nodded to the onlookers as if to say—How foolish and unpredictable these women can be.

* * *

Winnie tossed and turned as she tried to sleep that night in her old room at the Bullock home. The events of the day crowded into her dreams. Andrew Bullock loomed over her one minute and in the next Ida Swift and Robert MacAulay peppered her with questions she couldn’t answer. She even seemed to see Chase and Gordon Phipps riding on the logs, to see Chase being pushed from behind, over and over, by some invisible force, his hands gripping the chains holding the logs, his grip breaking open. Several times she startled awake and had to remember why she was back in her old room and not in her little alcove in the tent house on the homestead.

The sun poured in from the window when she woke up late the next morning. She lay in bed thinking about the claim, the backbreaking work, the boredom of following a draft horse for days on end, of guiding the chain as it yanked sagebrush from the earth, and yes, even about the harsh beauty of the desert.

She imagined Ida, in her neatly tailored, cream-colored suit, standing near the field, shaking her finger at Father. Ida Swift would never have let herself be pushed into such a backbreaking attempt. She’d force everyone involved to think about the how and the why of such a setup. Most importantly, in the end, she’d make up her own mind. There wouldn’t be any miracle to free Winnie from working the homestead; she’d have to save herself.

Winnie knew she would miss the cactus flowers and the sage sparrows, not to mention the company of a faithful dog like Striker. But someone else would have to clear brush and break ground. Maybe Mother would find a lodger to stay in Chase’s room so they could afford to hire a young man to take her place. Maybe the irrigation canal would never be built and all their efforts would go for nothing anyway.

After she’d bathed, Winnie put on her high school graduation dress, checked to make sure the silver dollars were still in her purse, and headed downstairs. When she passed an open window, she caught a whiff of lavender scent flowing in on a gentle puff of air. Her hand flew to her cheek as she remembered Andrew Brady’s face inches from her own, a trail of lavender sweetened with orange and spiced with clove from his cologne floating in the air between them. She wouldn’t write to him until she’d learned more about what happened that day, the day Chase fell from the logging wagon. Downstairs she found her mother was washing up the breakfast dishes. “I’ll be going to see Ida Swift today,” Winnie said.

“Your father’s already gone to the claim and your horse is still in the stable downtown.”

“I’m going to ask her if she can take me on as a copy clerk. I’d like to learn more about the newspaper business.”

“You might ask her if she has a room for you as well! You know what your father will say when you tell him.”

—————————————————————————–

Margaret Koger grew up on a ranch in Idaho after rural electricity came along and before the family could afford a well due to a dry sandy outcropping. Her dad traded used tires for her first pony. She writes from this background with cowboys and their constituents.

The drama started as we were riding on the train around the amusement park. Two cowboys ran into our car whooping and hollering and firing their guns, Skinny Cowboy and Fat Cowboy. “This is a hold-up,” Skinny Cowboy said. Fat Cowboy had a bushy beard. He took off his hat and smirked at my family. My heart pounded… would this be how my life ended? At the time, I didn’t know the guns were cap guns. It was not clear to me that the Happy Mountain Western Show WAS NOT REAL as I was six years old.

Another shot rang out. Skinny Cowboy looked to the car behind us and sneered. “The law is here.” Oh, great, I thought, Law Man is coming to save us. Right next to me, Fat Cowboy guffawed and pointed his gun at the car entrance. He’ll get what’s coming to him another time,” said Skinny Cowboy. “Let’s get out of here.” Just as they exited, Law Man strode into the car, his sheriff’s badge shining on his shirt. He peered out the window, just in time to see Skinny Cowboy and Fat Cowboy running away while waving their hats dismissively at him. Fat Cowboy fired off a shot and Law Man ducked. And then the outlaws were beyond the view from the train.

“You’re safe now. I’ll get them two,” said Law Man. “Now, remember kids, there’s a lesson to learn from those bad men. Doing wrong is easy and can seem fun. But it never pays in the end and it hurts your family too. Doing right takes hard work but when you make something doing it the right way, it’s your own and you can take pride in that.” With that, Law Man tipped his hat and jaunted down the aisle and into the next train car.

From my parents’ expression I knew I was supposed to feel better; that Law Man had saved us, and everything was going to be okay now. Inside, there was no comfort. My heart was still racing. I knew something was wrong but couldn’t place it. Years later I realized the problem of this little social play. The sheriff arrived too late. The bad men were still out there. Being good didn’t insulate anyone. The bad guys had a good time and the sheriff was a moralizing, trite, impotent asshole. I couldn’t protect my sister from the bad men. And worst of all, my parents went along with this little charade. They’d already learned the lesson their elders taught them; that we must accept all the injustices of an absurd world where down is up and where right is wrong, and to play along and be a good boy or girl and respect the very system that gives nothing and takes everything.

The sheriff was right about one thing though—that there is pride in honest work. Perhaps it is a fool’s pride to care in a careless world. In good drama, there’s the fool who tells the truth. Call me a fool then. Bad men can destroy with ease as they laugh about it. I’d rather create something than tear it all down. Maybe there’s less laughter for the good person who works hard—and perhaps that’s because it’s more difficult to laugh when exhausted from working so strenuously and then having the world pile on unappreciatively because in a corrupt place corruption is put on a pedestal and goodness is either ignored as valueless or stamped out because it’s a threat. Instead of laughter, the good person simply smiles… and it’s a little bit of a sick smile because it’s tough to hold it there with all the tiredness and pain but it’s a deep grin that can be felt from the inside out. Bad people seem like they are having lots of fun but they’re afraid because deep down they know that, having done nothing, they are empty. Good people who work hard, might get their asses kicked all the time, but earn the right to truly feel accomplished.

Kevin Del Principe is a writer and film director. The son of a snowplow truck driver and a school nurse, Kevin grew up outside of Buffalo. He now makes his home in Memphis. I Animal is Kevin’s debut novel. He directed and co-wrote the feature film UP ON THE GLASS. https://kevindelprincipe.com/

Benito stuck the pointed tip of his boot into the arena’s sand and then dragged it in a semi-circle around him. He studied the groove he had made in the ground. It was deep and still, not silting, as though cut into clay. Benito swore under his breath and spat into the furrow. The sand was too heavy. The performers’ boots were going to get stuck, tripping them up and sending them tumbling, especially if some idiot with a garden hose came out and sprinkled the bullring down before the start of the program to ‘keep the dust down’. He cocked his knee and studied the boot. Two small gray pebbles, the kind that sliced into skin and bit into knees, shredding clothing and spirits, were lodged in the tight gap between the rubber sole and the stiff leather upper. While signing the contract, Benito had begged the fair committee not to skimp on the sand this year, the way they had the year before. It needed to be fine, like salt. It was much more slippery that way, but at least it didn’t reach up and grab the performers around the ankles the way this kind of slop did.

“Everything else is secondary,” he’d told them. “Food, lodging – even the ‘extras’. But see to the sand,” he’d said.

They’d laughed and told him he was getting old. There was a time when about the only things that mattered to the great skirt-chaser and cow dodger, Benito Sanchez, were the bunk arrangements and getting a bellyful of the local cuisine and vintages.

“Up yours,” he’d retorted, which had only made them laugh harder.

Benito slipped a thumb into the wide, decorative waistband all of the feria’s cow dodgers and jumpers wore. He’d put the thing on just twenty minutes earlier, and already it was digging into his flesh and hampering his breathing. Benito likened the damn thing to a girdle. On the other hand, just like a girdle, it hid some of his belly, especially when his spinning flung open his embroidered jacket. The waistband was horribly uncomfortable, but he was just going to have to live with it for a few hours.

Benito heard someone call to him, using the French version of his name.

“Hey, Benôit! Why aren’t you out running with the bulls?

“Benito followed the voice to the grandstand where a technician was putting the finishing touches on the sound system. The man was on one knee, near a microphone, taping its connecting wires down to the grandstand’s wide, wooden planks. He stopped working long enough to yank off his béret and used it to wipe the back of his neck. Then he reached for a tall glass that stood sweating on one of the amplifiers and took a long sip of its milky yellow contents.

“Want a drink?” the man asked, lifting his glass of pastis.

“No, thanks,” Benito responded. He did want a drink. His teeth felt like hot irons branding the inside of his mouth. He could almost feel the coolness of the anise-flavored liquor dousing them, but he would wait until after the performance. Maybe he was getting old.

“So, about the bulls?” the man asked.

Before the dodging and jumping program began, the fair committee ran the bulls around the perimeter of the village, and then completed the traditional run by driving them down the hill into the arena.

Benito stepped over toward the stage and stuck out his hand. The guy’s face was familiar from the year before. Benito shook the man’s hand, trying to recall his name.

“Nah,” Benito responded. “Too fat and too old,” is what he said. Too smart was what he was thinking.

The truth, of course, was something else. Some of the other performers like the young and enthusiastic jumper, Xavier, ran with the crowd that day, but Benito didn’t want to participate. It wasn’t that he was afraid of getting hurt. He was more worried that, while running around the village, all his abandoned hopes and dreams would rush past him. The city of Lefort, as its name suggests, was a fortified town built on a prominent hill. From that hill, he could see for miles; on a clear day, there was a spectacular view of the Pyrenean Mountains. An observation point, facing south, had been erected near the village gates. It was a wide, cement podium in the shape of a semi-circle. The tiled mosaic embedded into it depicted the vast countryside spread out before the observer, rendered in soft pastels. The highest mountain peaks were identified, and the approximate locations of cities in southwestern France and northeastern Spain were charted. Torn from his beloved homeland at an early age, the observation point only served to remind Benito of how far he had strayed from the things that truly identified him.

“Somebody always gets trampled,” the man said.

Benito shrugged and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He offered one to the man, who took it, and then pulled out his lighter and lit both. “They know that’s the risk,” Benito said. “But that’s also why people stand around watching them,” he added.

“Maybe,” the man acknowledged.

“Sure it is. Why do you think people come down here if it’s not to see one of us get gored? Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

“Of course I have,” the man answered. “And it sure does bring in the crowds. Why do you think we invited you all back? You and your sorry bunch of animals.”

Benito pulled on his cigarette and listened to the man laugh. What could he say? Like most of the other cow jumping and dodging groups, Benito’s feria campera worked with its own animals. Many of the cows and bulls were old and haggard; others were young and gaunt. The animals’ entrances into the arena were almost always greeted by shrills and whistles. Benito was the first one to admit that these bovines were not the massive animals of his native land’s corrida, but the feria campera was a small minstrel show compared to that. This was a friendlier, French version of the corrida, one which was traditional in the Landes region on the Atlantic coast. In it, the young toreros who “fought” the bull only performed passes with a cape. They never used picadors, and none of the animals were hurt or put to death. The major part of the show involved performers like Benito who dodged the charging cow or bull by spinning away from it at the last minute and others who, in an impressive display of dexterity, actually jumped over it either in an open-armed swan dive or a forward somersault or with both feet straight out in front of them. Benito had noticed that, no matter how skinny the animal was, people in the arena usually stopped hooting and hollering once one of the cows charged the jumper or dodger.

The cow they used in the dodging event, Cecilia, was a running sack of skin and bones. But Benito knew Cecilia came from a ranch which specialized in raising animals for the Landaise fairs. Despite being thin and relatively short, she was restive and agile and particularly bad-tempered once she got up a head of steam. For all of her hangdog looks, it didn’t take much to make her mad enough to stick one of her sawed-off, tarred-over horns into someone’s ribcage.

But mostly she played the game by the rules.

For Benito and the other members of his group, that was the advantage of working with the same animals. After a while, they seemed to understand what was expected of them. Cecilia, especially, could usually be counted on to run in a straight line and at a steady speed – at least for the first few dodging attempts. It was up to Benito and the other members of the feria to recognize when Cecilia was getting past her limits of patience and tolerance and retire her to her box. The hardest part for all of the handlers and jumpers was training a new animal, usually younger than the others and more easily confused by the noise and movement around the arena. These were often the animals involved in accidents up in the village during the traditional Pamplona-style run. Whenever the Red Cross staffers administering first aid to the injured person complained about the animal to Xavier, who was in charge of external relations, he usually shrugged and replied, ‘just being a bull’. He often justified his laid-back attitude by reminding people the same principle held true inside the arena as well.

Benito heard the tinny sounds of a trumpet meaning the procession of bulls, cows, crowd, jumpers, dodgers and musicians was making its way down from the village to the riverside arena. Benito nodded to the technician and scooted behind the bandstand and into the shade. He wasn’t in the mood to face his public – not just yet. This was his first performance this year, and he had heard it was being billed as a ‘comeback’. The last time Benito had performed was almost exactly one year before in this very same village. But he hadn’t announced his retirement, either, and as he stood there under the bandstand, he wondered who had.

While Benito was lost in thought, Xavier, the bull jumper, appeared at his side, grinning like the proverbial cat that ate the canary.

“Got my date all set up,” Xavier announced.

Benito flicked the rest of his cigarette into the high, dry grass. “You are really disgusting,” he said.

Xavier turned, stuck out his butt, and wiggled his hips. “You’re just jealous.”

“Hardly,” Benito replied.

Xavier had certainly livened things up since he joined the feria. Thin and quick-footed, he was an excellent jumper – especially for someone not raised in the local tradition. Xavier, who went by the stage name, ‘Javier’, was a city boy who worked as a computer engineer in Toulouse during the week, and, unlike Benito, hadn’t grown up around horses and cows, much less corridas and feria camperas. Xavier had discovered the Landaise leap-over by accident on a late weekday afternoon visit to the village, five years earlier, as the arena was being set up. On the weekend, the riverside was a favorite destination for picnickers and extended amilies out for a post-dinner stroll. At sundown, it turned into a known pick-up spot for gay men, which was exactly what Xavier was doing there that evening.

When he signed on with Benito’s group, Xavier told them, “I’m a city-dweller and a gay man, and I don’t want to hear a word about it, since I’ll be out-jumping all of you before you know it. Okay? And I’m not Spanish, either. My family never fled from poverty or persecution. I’m Belgian and the only thing my family was running from when it came to the southwestern part of France two generations ago was the rain.”

Benito would never admit it to anyone, especially not to Xavier, but he was jealous of the way the young jumper lived his double life with such apparent ease. Benito’s lived his own Janus-faced existence with such lumbering difficulty it only recently occurred to him that any forward momentum he might have gathered over the years had stopped, maybe a long time before, without him even noticing it. At the feria, Benito was cast into the role of the fearless, macho womanizer who ate too much and drank even more, but only he truly knew the bloodless man who got up the next morning in the suburban home he shared with his wife and three kids to go off to a numbing day’s work stocking shelves at the local supermarket.

Before he left his home in the Basque region on Sunday morning to drive the 250 kilometers to Lefort, Benito made sure he said absolutely nothing to his wife, Cristina, about the talk he’d had with the store supervisor on Saturday.

“It’s early retirement or nothing,” his supervisor had told him. “Either way, you’re out. You’re too old and too slow. Whether you like it or not, supermarkets are a quick business. Turning stock over is everything and we need to keep up. You’re dragging us down.”

The union steward just smirked at him. Only a few days earlier, Benito had torn up his union card and had called the man a “prissy-faced ass-kisser”. So, there would be no one from the worker’s union putting any pressure on the head management to save Benito’s job, much less his dignity. He was forty-eight years old, and had little experience and less education. Who would ever hire him? Cristina would have to go back to work, and the thought bothered Benito. She was trained as a beautician, and had worked for the first ten years of their marriage in a corner barbershop catering to a local, Spanish-speaking clientele. It was Cristina who had introduced Benito to Jordi, the feria’s manager and bull-fighting master, who was a regular at the shop.

Cristina was popular at the barbershop. The local men liked having a pretty, platinum blond rub their temples and trim their beards. Benito was sure their rough-hewn hands were all over her smooth skin, and who could blame them? In their place, he would do the same thing. Whenever Benito picked Cristina up from work, he would park down the street and wait until she came out. He didn’t want to have to watch, helpless, through the large, plate-glass window while a customer was feeling up his wife.

“What’s eating you?” Xavier asked him.

“Nothing.”

“Liar. Where’s the old ‘feria fever’? Fired up? Burning!” Xavier swiveled his thin hips. “Burning!”

“More like burned out,” Benito admitted.

“Maybe it’s time to pass the reins, hey, hombre?” Xavier said, referring to Benito’s son Felipe.

“Oh, God,” Benito grunted. “Don’t remind me. Takes more after you than he does me.””Now, now.””Sometimes I wonder if he is really my son. He doesn’t even look like me.”

“He looks like Christine.”

“Acts like her, too.” Benito added. “Know what I found him doing a couple of days ago when he was supposed to be practicing his passes?”

Xavier shook his head.

“Drawing. Sketching scenes of the corral.”

“That’s right. He does draw. I remember that now. He’s shown me some of his sketches. I think they’re pretty good.”

Benito lit another cigarette. “I’m not saying they’re bad. You’re right. They are pretty good. But it’s not what he’s supposed to be doing out there. He’s supposed to be practicing his verónicas. Then he wonders why he keeps on taking a set of horns to the balls. The kid is never going to learn.”

“How old is he?”

“Thirteen.”

“Give him time.”

“I was a novice at twelve. So were all of my brothers.”

“Maybe he’s just not cut out for it.”

“He will be – once I’m done with him.”

“Ah, that’s what it is, isn’t it? No son of the great cow dodger and former bull jumper Benito Sanchez – “

“I only started dodging and jumping once we came to France. We don’t jump over bulls in Spain,” Benito stated in a clear, deep voice. “And we certainly don’t ‘dodge’ them. I was learning to be a matador when the economic situation in Spain forced us to leave. Over the course of one year, we moved from Madrid to Barcelona and finally to Perpignan before my father found steady work. And it’s only once I started working in Bayonne that I started this silly sport of avoiding bulls!”

“Better than killing them.”

Benito was still thinking about his son. “No one is asking him to kill the bull. If I wanted him to kill bulls, I would have sent him to the bullfighting school in Madrid. All I’m asking him to do is to make the passes without getting himself impaled.”

“He doesn’t have your stature.”

“Exactly.”

“What I mean is he’s too small. Teach him to dodge. Or I’ll teach him to jump. He shouldn’t be out there with a cape doing passes.”

“He’ll do as I tell him.”

Benito sucked on his cigarette. Xavier knew the gesture well enough to know it meant the subject was no longer open for discussion.

“What’s the program today? The usual?” Xavier asked.

Benito exhaled, coughed, and then puffed on the cigarette again. “Not exactly,” he began. “After we parade around a little bit with the others for the paseo, we’ll do our dodging and jumping. Dodging, jumping, and then dodging again. Then Felipe and another novice torero will try to keep from getting their balls skewered in front of a thousand people. Then a couple of guys from Madrid are going to do a kind of rejón, but don’t worry. They’ll be sticking their lances into a stuffed bull’s head mounted on wheels th at one of their guy’s will push around. Then some señorita is going to give a riding demonstration. Dressage.”

“Big program.”

“And there’s one more thing.”

Xavier looked worried. “What’s that?”

“Another person will be dodging today. A young woman.”

“A woman! Benôit, I got into this business because it was full of men.”
Benito laughed and flicked his cigarette away.

“What’s she like?”

“Haven’t seen her yet.”

Xavier turned serious. “I’m not taking a horn for her, Benôit. I’d take a horn for you, but not for some little girl out here trying to prove something.”

Benito cocked his head and stared at his friend. “We’re all out here trying to prove something, Javier.”

Xavier looked away.

“Besides, she’s supposed to be good. Jordi’s seen her,” Benito said, referring to the master bullfighter. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t have invited her.”

Xavier nodded, but continued to stare off towards the arena.

“And, hombre,” Benito continued, “you can leave the macho business up to me. That’s my department.”

Xavier laughed a little distractedly and stared over Benito’s shoulder.

“What are you looking at? Or let me guess.”

“That guy down there watering the arena. He’s got a nice –”

“Watering the arena!”

Benito stepped around his friend and towards the end of the grandstand to where he had a clear view of the arena.

“Burro!” Benito screamed at the man. “What an ass!”

Benito stuck both thumbs into his waistband and stretched it away from him, and then took a deep breath. “That’s all we need.”

“Relax, Benôit.”

“He’s turning it into wet cement! I can’t spin in that.”

“Relax, hombre. Sure you can. I just hope that little girl can, too.”

“Are you referring to me?”

Xavier and Benito exchanged glances before looking over their shoulders. A pretty young woman with long, straight chestnut-colored hair stood behind them. Thin and fit, she was dressed in the traditional short, sequined jacket, and tight, high-waisted trousers and wide cummerbund.

The young woman stuck out her hand towards Benito. “I’m Julie Jourdain. I’ll be dodging with you today.”

“Benito Sanchez. Con mucho gusto.“

Benito took her hand, and lifted it to his lips.

Julie smirked, but allowed him to kiss her hand before pulling it away. She then extended it to Xavier who took it, and then made an exaggerated show of bending over it, before kissing the back of his own hand.

“Oops,” he joked.

“Just what I expected from you,” the young woman said.

Xavier grinned. “My reputation precedes me.”

“Follows you is more like it.”

Benito grinned.


The crowd was slowly filing into the bleachers. A five-piece band from the Armagnac region was settling into the section reserved for it, playing a cascade of false notes, and stumbling past feet and knees. The tuba player had lost his béret and appeared apple-faced in the sun. His tuba was wrapped around his thick middle like a sleepy brass cobra. Both trumpet players had stripped down to their boxer shorts and were standing on the bleacher seats, singing and dancing something that looked like the Twist. The trombone player had removed the mouthpiece of his instrument and was spitting through it onto the drummer, who had laid his drum on his knees and seemed to have fallen asleep on it.

Benito considered the band members for a moment. “It’s almost time for the paseo. Somehow, I don’t think the band is ready.”

“Too much wine with lunch,” Julie remarked.

“Too much wine with breakfast!” Xavier retorted. “Those guys were already drunk when they showed up.”

Benito looked out over the arena. He felt a bitterness leak into his stomach, and could taste its acidity on his tongue. He was tired. Worse, he was disgusted. Over the 35 years he had been involved in bull fighting and cow dodging, he had never once had the desire to walk away from the arena. But he did that day. And he might have walked away, too, if the emcee had waited just one more instant before announcing the program, or if Benito hadn’t turned around to see his son, Felipe, dressed in his novice torero suit standing behind him, pale and shivering in the summer sun.

Benito and Xavier placed the bright-eyed Julia between them and entered the arena, followed by the two novice toreros, Felipe and a young Spanish sensation named Mauricio whose tall, classic good looks and regal bearing had already earned him much praise in bull-fighting circles.

Benito scanned the arena. He knew all three of the handlers, and trusted every one of them. Robert, an old friend, was coordinating the work on the ropes. He was the one who saved the dodgers and jumpers from injury by yanking on the rope attached to the animal’s horns at just the right moment, pulling the animal’s head away from a man’s spleen. Robert stood off to the left of the performers and fed the line connected to the rushing animal through heavily taped hands. By keeping the rope taut, Robert guided the animal along the performer’s left side so the dodger could spin out to his right, avoiding both the cow and the rope. But if Robert slipped or was pulled off of his feet by the animal or if he somehow misjudged the amount of rope to release, the cow was basically free to charge as she pleased and the dodger’s best plan was probably to turn tail and run straight behind him. Benito didn’t like to have to run away like that, and he certainly didn’t want to have to run today: the sand was too sticky and thick and he was far too out of shape. Plus, it always made the audience laugh.

Facing the performers was Serge, another friend of Benito’s. Serge was the one who held the animal on a short lead until the dodgers and jumpers were ready on their marks near the rear of the arena. But the heat and dust and noise all combined to make the animal so confused and furious that the terrible task of hanging onto it while the performers readied themselves was dicey at best. Serge protected himself from the angry animal by slipping behind one of four wooden palenques placed around the edge of the arena. Each was about the size and shape of the bottom half of a door, and there was just enough room between it and an outer chain-link fence for Serge to squeeze behind it. The cow or bull, tethered close by the hemp rope Serge struggled to hang onto, often rammed into the wooden apparatus in a feral effort to get at the handler. Benito had even seen a cow get her head stuck between the metal fencing of the arena and the wooden protection while trying to gouge Serge. If Serge let go of the animal too early, before the performer was ready, the dodgers or jumpers scrambled to safety behind one of the other three wooden palenques or climbed up and over the arena’s chain-link fence.

Finally, Benito turned to look behind him and studied Francisco, trying to gauge the state of the third handler’s sobriety. Francisco was the one who released the animals from their holding boxes beneath the grandstand and then rallied them back inside. Once the performer was in the arena, Francisco was the handler closest to him. While everyone in the arena, performers and handlers alike, always came to the aid of a downed jumper or dodger, Francisco was usually the one to reach them first. Like a rodeo clown, he helped the jumper to his feet all while trying to divert the animal’s attention away from him.

Francisco had the broken bones and scars to prove that he had, over the years, taken his share of horns and hooves, and more than a few of those in Benito’s place. That afternoon in the arena Benito noticed how poorly Francisco had aged since the previous jumping season. He remembered how often in the past year, while he had been away from dodging, he had heard that Francisco had stumbled sour-drunk into an arena. But Benito figured that if, like ‘Cisco, he had spent most of his life saving people who were too stubborn, clumsy or proud to save themselves, he’d probably be a stumbling drunk, too. Francisco had described his job once as ”throwing himself in front of a half-ton of meat and muscle for a lot of people who were usually not worth the trouble”. Benito hoped Francisco didn’t think he was one of them.

Francisco touched the beak of his béret in greeting to Benito, who was relieved to think that maybe the handler wasn’t all that drunk after all.

Benito, Xavier and Julie agreed Benito would begin their round of performances with several dodging attempts, after which Xavier would perform three or four different jump-overs. Then Julie would try at least two dodging attempts, and maybe a third, after which she and Benito would perform a tandem dodge to close out their part of the feria.

– The Cow Dodger –

“Hep!” Benito called out. “Hep!”

Serge worked the rope around Cecilia’s horns, pulling a short lead up and over the palenque, and then eyeballed the tautness of the rope between the cow and Robert.

“Hep!”

Benito could feel his heels sinking into the mixture of wet sand and pebbles. He had gained too much weight over the past year. His bulk was driving him right down through a layer of quicksand to the sun-baked earth beneath the arena. If Serge didn’t release Cecilia soon, Benito would be planted there like an asparagus when she charged him.

“Hep!” he called out again.

Serge released the cow. She ran towards Benito, but her eyes wandered and her head bobbed so that, all in all, her charge was pretty pathetic. Benito, noticing her distraction, waited until the last possible moment before twisting from her path. He thrust his belly out and to the right, but he felt his feet stick in the muck and noticed a slight pull behind his right knee. Benito heard a few boos and whistles and at least one “Olé” that sounded sincere. The veteran dodger looked behind him, and saw that Francisco had stepped out from the wooden brace, but Cecilia trotted on her lead, from the back of the arena towards Robert, who reeled her in like a trout. Serge stepped out from behind his palenque and taunted the cow, until she chased him back behind the palenque. While Cecilia butted against the wooden structure, Serge reached over the top and grabbed the rope, and then disappeared again.

Benito’s second attempt was rather like the first, except Cecilia charged him a little more earnestly, fixing him a moment and dropping her head.

By the third attempt, Cecilia had focused her attention entirely on Benito, who had enough experience to know the cow had started to equate whatever pain and discomfort she might be feeling with his presence. He dodged her, but after she had passed him, she tried to turn back for a second try. Only Robert’s expert handling of the ropes and Francisco’s intervention enabled Benito to scramble away towards the performer’s entrance to the arena.

A woman in the audience with a throaty, alto voice shouted “Olé!” and there was some appreciative applause. But Benito’s attention remained focused on Cecilia, who bucked and kicked and chased first Robert and then Serge behind their palenques. Benito figured he could try one more dodge before Cecilia became too unruly for Serge and Robert to handle.

Benito signaled to the emcee that this would be his final attempt and then raked the sand with his in-step, trying to even out the trench he had dug during his first three dodges. The top layer of soil had begun to dry. Benito scraped some of the drier sand into the depression his feet had made and then mixed it with some of the heavier, wetter sand, so thick it seemed like mortar. Part of him wanted to quit there, with three respectable dodges, so he could end on a good note his first time back in the arena after a year’s absence. His dodging that day had not been particularly brilliant, but there hadn’t been an incident, either. He had been lucky three times; his fourth attempt might not be so lucky.

Benito held both arms straight in front of him like a platform diver preparing to plunge.

“Hep!” He called out. “Hep!”

Serge had disappeared behind the wooden partition.

Benito slammed his arms to his side, smacking them against the tight cotton of his trousers, trying to rouse the cow towards him.
“Hep!”

Cecilia jumped and swirled like a whirling Dervish. She slammed the length of her body against the wooden palenque protecting Serge. Benito watched as Serge fought to hang onto the rope tied to the cow’s horns, his arm cocked around the edge of the palenque and turning purple with the strain.

“Hep! Hep!” Benito called out again, trying to get the handler to release the cow.

Then Benito realized Serge had somehow gotten the rope wrapped around his wrist. He watched Cecilia pull away from the wooden partition. It shook from a blow from behind. If Cecilia pulled any further, Serge would have to leave his hiding place and let himself be dragged by the cow in order to save his hand. If the cow then charged Benito, the dodger would have both man and beast barreling down towards him. He’d seen it happen before. Benito stretched both arms out in front of him and remained quiet.

Then Benito noticed that the spotting rope between the cow and Robert splayed like a rubber band. This meant Serge had been able to disentangle his hand from the rope, but had released the cow before Robert had been able to tighten up the slack on the line. The cow was nearly as good as free unless Robert was able to gather up the rope more quickly than the cow, charging towards Benito, could spool it out. For Benito, the rope was transformed from a life-line into a hangman’s cord: if the cow changed direction at the last minute and Benito spun into her, he’d get caught in the rope. If the cow turned back around to gouge him with a horn, the rope would wind around him and pull him to the ground.

Benito focused on Cecilia. The cow whipped around to face him, dropped her head and charged. Benito became so intent on her that the rest of the arena became a blur, a kaleidoscope of color spinning like a top before his eyes. The cries of the crowd swirled into white noise and for several seconds Benito was only really aware of the sound of Cecilia’s hooves striking the hard sand as she raced towards him. In the periphery of his vision, Benito saw Robert wheeling hand over hand, trying to tighten the line of rope. Behind the cow, Serge stepped out from the palenque, rubbing his bruised hand with the other. Both men seemed to move in slow motion. Benito registered the wild-eyed look of worry on both of their faces.

Benito took a deep breath. He had no choice but to spin to his right, otherwise he would get caught in the rope. He knew that and somehow knew the cow knew it as well. His other choice was to run as fast as he could behind him toward Francisco’s palenque. It would be a kindness toward Robert, whose hands were probably scorched beneath the tape and whose naked fingers were being cut to shreds by the rope speeding through his grip. But the audience would laugh and be pleased, and not understand the generosity behind Benito’s gesture. Benito stayed on his mark.

Long afterwards, he would admit Cecilia’s charge had been clouded by her fury. She attacked him straight on, though she ran towards him with uncharacteristic speed. Benito thrust his hips forward and began his spin to the right. In the milky air he thought he heard someone call out, Hep! Hep! from somewhere over his left shoulder, but the shout was so liquid and slow it barely broke the surface of his consciousness. Still, he saw Cecilia’s head drift ever so slightly away from the axis of her backbone in the direction of the shout. As he spun, Benito’s jacket flared in fine flamenco fashion, away from his body, and he felt Cecilia’s left horn flirt with the fabric. But she missed him.

He remembered his fall afterwards in the same way he witnessed the movements of Robert and Serge: in slow motion. The toe of the boot of his right foot dug into the unforgiving soil, and Benito fell to the ground like a piece of timber. He looked up in time to see the muscles in Cecilia’s forequarters contract as she shifted her weight forward and started to charge back towards him. He barrel-rolled away from her and covered his head with his hands. He knew he needed to get up and get away from the cow but he wasn’t as quick as he used to be. He couldn’t just pop up onto his feet the way Xavier could, all sinew and springing muscle.

Benito thought of his son, Felipe, the novice torero. He wondered if Felipe were watching him, rejoicing in his fall and the trampling that would no doubt follow. Benito smiled at the thought of his son turning vengeful, but had to admit to himself that Felipe was probably quivering with horror at the sight of his downed father, rather than thinking it was just what the lousy son-of-a-bitch deserved.

Benito heard Cecilia thunder by and then felt the ground shudder as she stopped, turning. He heard her exhale through wet nostrils. His back tingled in the horrible anticipation of her hoof stomping him. Then he heard a voice; then a second, and a third. Francisco. Robert. Xavier.

“Hep, girl! Hep!”

“Come and get me, Ceci. Come on!”

The ground rumbled one more time as Cecilia sprinted away from Benito and into the dark refuge of her box. Benito stood, and dusted himself off, before acknowledging a diluted ovation from the crowd. Then, with a sweeping gesture of his arm, Benito indicated the handlers and Xavier, all still inside the arena, each one laughing like a madman. Benito hazarded a glance back towards the arena entrance. Julie had her hands on her hips, and was shaking her head. Mauricio stood firmly on both feet and applauded. Felipe gripped the gate in front of him and looked down at his feet. To Benito, his son seemed pallid and trembling.

– The Landaise Leap-Over –

Benito rested his forearms on the top edge of the palenque closest to the grandstand. He watched Xavier embark on an impromptu paseo around the arena. The young jumper played to the crowd. He blew kisses, made eye contact, and bowed. The crowd loved it. Members of the audience blew kisses back, threw flowers, and screamed encouragement. By the time Xavier returned to the safety of the palenque, there was high color in his cheeks and his forehead glistened.

“You’re quite a showman, Javier,” Benito commented. His voice was viscous.

Xavier noticed the strange tone, but refrained from responding. “Ready,” he told Francisco instead.

Francisco acknowledged the young jumper by taking a step towards the holding boxes. As he walked past Benito, Francisco patted the veteran dodger on the shoulder. “He learned that from you,” the handler told him.

Benito frowned. “No, he didn’t learn that from me. I’m not like that.”

Xavier leveled his gaze at the dodger. “You used to be.”

The cocoa-colored cow that raced from the holding box was edgy and quick. She stormed into the center of the arena and stopped, and then swiveled her head from one side to the other and back again. Her skin rippled over her flanks. She seemed to consider her situation, and then realize she was trapped. In response, she charged Robert and Serge time and again as they worked to set the rope. Each time, they dove behind the protection of the palenques. Finally, Serge anchored the cow long enough for Xavier to take his mark.

Benito stepped behind the young jumper, a good ten paces back and several paces to Xavier’s right. Francisco took up his post behind Benito, but to his left so that each man had a clear line of vision to the cow. By standing there, Benito and Francisco diverted the cow’s attention away from the jumper, forcing the cow to run in a straight line through the jumper’s mark and beyond it, giving Xavier the time to perform his jump, recover and race off to safety. Their presence also encouraged the cow to keep her head down as she charged so she wouldn’t rear up and into the body of the airborne jumper. And, finally, Benito and Francisco helped to confuse the cow if Xavier abandoned the attempt. Benito knew Xavier well enough to know that the young man would only do so if the cow’s charge was erratic or if the animal attacked him from an angle. In that case, Xavier would run to the palenque to his right, while Benito and Francisco both ran back to Francisco’s palenque, but approached it from different sides so that the three men formed a starburst pattern. Usually, the cow could not decide which man to chase after, and so all three eluded her.

Xavier prepared his first attempt.

“Hep!” he called to Serge, who released the cow. Benito watched from behind as Xavier timed his jump. Benito saw the young jumper’s knees flex and then propel him up into a forward somersault and over the charging cow.

“Run!” Francisco screamed.

Benito turned and saw that Francisco had already taken several steps back towards his palenque. When Benito turned back towards the center of the arena, he saw the cow bearing down on him. Benito placed both of his hands under his belly, lifted, and sprinted for the palenque. He squeezed behind the wooden structure just as the cow rammed into it. Francisco slid into a crouched position next to Benito and cackled.

“Next time, hombre, you need to leave that sack of potatoes at home.”

Benito pulled his hands away from his stomach. He heard first Robert, then Serge call to the cow and knew they were drawing the animal back towards the top of the arena. A minute later, Xavier was by Benito’s side, his face creased into laugh lines. He patted Benito’s belly.

“You need to be a little quicker than that, my friend.”

Xavier and Francisco stood and looked out past the palenque, but Benito remained crouched behind it. He thought of what his boss at the supermarket had told him the day before. You’re too old and too slow.

Benito’s right knee felt stiff. He had to grab the top board of the palenque to pull himself into a standing position. Once he did, he saw that Xavier and Francisco were on their marks. Both turned to look back at him. Benito shook his head. He wouldn’t spot Xavier as he had for the first leap-over. He’d run into the arena if he had to, if Xavier fell or abandoned the attempt. And, once Xavier had jumped, Benito would step out from behind the palenque to play his part in keeping the cow from turning back on the jumper, but he wouldn’t spot Xavier from behind. He couldn’t outrun the charging cow.

Benito winced as he watched Xavier remove the red bandana he wore around his neck and tie his legs together at the knees. Even though Xavier had admitted to Benito that the jump looked much more difficult than it actually was – Xavier said he kept his legs together when he jumped, anyway – Benito reached down and rubbed his own, aching joint, and decided he would only step from behind the palenque if Xavier missed his landing and fell to the mucky arena floor. But Xavier didn’t miss the landing, or any other part of his jump. The crowd cheered, and Benito heard the brassy-voiced woman scream, Olé! Even the five-piece band woke from its slumber and played a sleepy refrain. Xavier rested at the opposite palenque while the three handlers worked the cow back into position.

“You all right?” Francisco asked Benito as he slid behind the palenque.

For his third and final jump, the young jumper removed his béret, and flung it, upside down, to the arena floor. Then he stepped into the béret, and worked its borders up and around his shoes, trapping his feet inside. Finally, he tightened the red bandana around his knees.

Benito turned to Francisco. “Knee’s acting up.”

“Stay back here, then.”

“I’ll be out there if you need me.”

Francisco slapped him on the shoulder. “I don’t think we’ll need you.”

Had Francisco said a similar thing to Benito even one year earlier, Benito would have punched the handler’s lights out. Instead, Benito bit his tongue hard enough to draw blood.
Xavier executed a perfect jump and exulted to the crowd’s standing ovation.

-The Double Dodge-

“Want me to do the double dodge for you?” Xavier asked Benito while they watched Julie choose her mark for her first dodge attempt.

“I’m fine.”

“Benôit, don’t be a macho –”

“I said I’m fine.”

“It’s the first feria of the season. There will be plenty of others.”

Benito glared at Xavier. “Basta! Enough said about it!”

Xavier sighed and shook his head. “I’ll spot for her then. Stay here.”

Francisco released Cecilia from her holding box. She bucked out sideways in such a fit of rage that she stumbled and fell, charged Francisco, and then tried to get back into her holding box. Wet sand sprayed from Robert’s heels as he clung to the rope. Cecilia dragged him several feet.

“Uh-oh,” Xavier mumbled.

“Maybe I should have let Julie dodge first,” Benito said.

Xavier raised one eyebrow. “That would have been odd.”

“Why?”

“Starting out with a newcomer.”

“Maybe. But Cecilia was calmer.”

Xavier nodded, and the two men exchanged glances. Benito well knew what his young colleague was thinking: there was nothing that riled Cecilia more than contact with cloth. Benito’s near miss had excited her.

“I should spot the girl.”

“Woman, you mean” Xavier said. “She’s a grown woman. Stay here.”

“Cecilia will be coming after me.”

“All the more reason,” Xavier responded.

In the center of the arena, Julie took up her stance, arms stretched out in front of her. Xavier stood at the spotter’s usual distance, some ten paces behind her and to the young woman’s left. Xavier would make a move to his left just before the cow reached the young dodger hoping the animal would charge him, giving Julie a wider margin of error. Benito stepped around the wooden structure, but remained standing near it.

“Hep!” Julie called out.

Benito saw Xavier smile. The young woman’s voice, sweet as dulce con leche, could barely be heard above the din of the crowd. Serge released Cecilia but, instead of charging Julie, the cow veered straight towards Benito, who waddled the few steps to the palenque, and then stuffed himself behind it. Cecilia threw her full weight into the structure while Benito cowered just one thickness of wood away. The crowd roared with laughter. Some people applauded, others whistled. Julie, puzzled, remained on her mark with her arms stretched in front of her. Robert and Serge had trouble enticing Cecilia back to the top of the arena.

Xavier joined Benito. “You win.”

Benito pulled himself into a standing position. “What did I win?”

“The right to spot Julie. Otherwise, there is no way that old cow is going to come anywhere near her.”

Benito glanced over at Cecilia. Serge had clamped the cow’s head close to the palenque, so that her right horn was nearly touching it. But the cow’s left eye found Benito and fixed its gaze on him.

Benito extricated himself from his hiding place. He limped forward. “Maybe we could do the double dodge.”

“First?”

Benito nodded.

“That’s not fair, Benôit. Julie hasn’t even gotten a warm-up run. She should have at least one dodge attempt on her own. You know that. And she’s supposed to dodge twice before the two of you dodge together. Plus, Cecilia just made her look like an idiot.”

“I’m the one who looks like an idiot.”

“You could leave the arena.”

Benito straightened his shoulders. In all of his years of cow dodging and bull fighting, he had never once fled the arena.

“I can dodge,” he stated.

“But you can’t run, so you shouldn’t spot.”

“I’ll stand behind you and Francisco.”

“And then what? Limp to the holding box and hide behind the door?”

“If I have to.”

“And look like an idiot.”

Benito clenched his teeth.

“Why don’t you go take a leak before the double dodge, eh?”

“Are you afraid I’m going to pee in my pants?”

“Just some advice someone gave me a long time ago.”

Benito frowned as he remembered his first conversation with Xavier.

Xavier’s had retied his red bandana around his neck, and Benito found he was unable to take his eyes off it. Benito thought of the way Xavier jumped, with his knees bound together, and felt the red cloth tied for an instant, tourniquet-like, around his own, aching knee.

“Good advice,” Benito said, before leaving the arena.

Julie made three good dodges. Benito listened from beneath the grandstand as the emcee commented on each one. During the crowd’s ovation for the first attempt, Benito leaned against an iron girder and urinated. During the second ovation, he lit a cigarette, half of which, during the third ovation, he ground into the dirt. By the time the emcee announced the double dodge event, Benito had limped to the performer’s entrance.

Benito stepped into the arena and motioned to the band. The drummer, still half asleep, banged out a somnolent tune. Benito nodded his approval, then spread both arms wide, and lifted his chin. He took a small step with his right leg and, as he hopped forward with the left leg, threw his arms into the air.

“Olé!” shouted the woman in a resonant alto.

Benito turned towards the sound of the voice, and took another dramatic step.

“Olé!” she shouted again, and was joined by several other spectators.

Benito turned to a different section of the bleachers, repeated his triumphant gesture, and, in that way, threw himself forward on his bad leg.

“Olé!”

Benito observed with satisfaction once he reached the dodger’s marks that Xavier did not dare to comment on the veteran dodger’s grand entrance. Instead, Xavier quietly took his place near Francisco at the rear of the arena. While Benito positioned himself behind the young woman, he thought of how a good matador always stared down a bull. As a novice bullfighter, he had been taught to stare an animal into subjugation, to overpower it with his eyes long before he plunged the picador into the animal’s neck. Now he was also coming to learn that sometimes the subjugation goes the other way. Benito planted his left foot on the arena floor and rested his right foot on the sand. Then he lowered his gaze, and prayed for Julie’s safety.

He noticed Julie’s right foot was slightly behind the left and wondered where she had learned that dodger’s trick. Evidently, the girl had grown up around the arena. He tried to recall her family name. Durand? Dupont? Something French. In any case, it wasn’t a name he knew. It wasn’t the name of any of his amigos, none of his friends from the Basque country or the Landes region. Besides, she was too old to be the daughter of a compañero, although Benito supposed it was possible she was the niece of someone he knew. His gaze slid up her calves. Beneath the brushed cotton of her pants, her muscles were tense. Maybe she was from one of the families that raised horses in the area. Benito settled his gaze on the backs of the young woman’s thighs, and decided that Julie had that long-legged look of a woman rancher.

“Hep!”

Benito was relatively convinced that the girl didn’t have a drop of good, Spanish blood in her. She didn’t look anything like most of his countrywomen who were generally dark, short and sturdy. In fact, Benito decided, she was built just like a young filly: tall and slender, with her buttocks perched up high and shaped like crescent moons. Benito saw that her buttocks were smooth and seamless, and wondered if Julie were naked beneath her dodger’s attire. He stretched his arms in front of him and let his hands float in the air near her narrow hips. He fantasized for a moment about grasping those hips and turning them towards him. Suddenly, as if by magic, the hips did turn. Benito watched them swivel and felt his excitement mount. When he lifted his head to stare into the young woman’s eyes, though, his gaze fell on an infuriated Cecilia charging towards him.

He didn’t have time to dodge – he barely had time to get his thoughts out of the way. Cecilia rammed a blunted horn into Benito’s left side as he tried to escape by pivoting on his bad leg. He gasped once, more out of surprise than lack of breath, and then staggered a step. A sour taste rose into his mouth and, as he fell, he found himself trying to identify it. He heard voices, stampeding hooves and trampling feet in the noise swirling around him, but like the eye of the storm, he was calm. The sand was warm against his cheek. He felt comfortable even, almost sleepy, and relieved to have his weight off of his bad leg. He closed his eyes.

“Benito!” Francisco called. He pulled on the dodger’s arm. “Levántate, hombre.”

Benito rolled onto his back.

“Benôit!”

Benito opened his eyes and saw Xavier kneeling next to him.

“Can you get up?”

“Imbécil,” Benito muttered. “Of course I can get up.”

The veteran dodger struggled to his feet. The arena was quiet, and Benito knew that silence meant the spectators were caught between satisfaction and self-loathing. They had secretly been hoping someone would get hurt, and now that someone had, they found hated their own desires.

Benito began to brush himself off. Julie and Francisco both stood a respectful distance away, but Xavier grabbed the dodger’s elbow.

“C’mon, I’ll help you to the gate.”

Benito yanked his arm from the young jumper’s grasp.

“Leave him, hombre,” Francisco said.

Benito lifted his chin, but stood his ground. He shooed Xavier away.

“You’re not going to try another dodge, are you?”

“Javier! Leave him,” Francisco insisted. He motioned to the grandstand.

The crowd cried out when the emcee announced that Benito would attempt another dodge. Benito felt the torrid air sear his lungs as the announcer explained the dodger’s creed: no matter how hurt or suffering, no dodger with a sense of pride ever ends a performance on such a note.

Cecilia, Benito noticed, had calmed down. He knew her well enough to know that her rage was spent, and that she was tired. Benito raised his arms, but not directly in front of him, the way a dodger did, but off to the side, more like a dancer. He lifted his chin, but lowered his gaze and caught Cecilia in a stare-down.

“Olé!” he shouted.

The crowd burst into applause.

Cecilia charged him, quick and head-on. Benito raised his arms over his head, and pirouetted away from the animal. A thousand strands of pain threaded through his knee as he spun so that Benito had to bite his lower lip to keep from crying out. Cecilia ran past him, past Xavier and Francisco and directly into her holding box. Benito remained facing the rear of the arena and watched the expert hand of Francisco release the cow, and gather up the ropes. His face bathed in sweat, Benito turned to the crowd and bowed.

-Los toreros-

Benito pressed a coin into the flower vendor’s hand, and selected a single red rose, its young petals only slightly parted. When Mauricio strode by, hat in hand, to acknowledge the audience’s applause, Benito tossed the rose at the young torero.

“Muy bueno, hijito,” he said. “Good job, son. Good job.”

Benito turned his back to the arena to light a cigarette as his own son, Felipe, began his paseo. Benito took a long drag, and then exhaled slowly, savoring the smoke. He saw Xavier making his way back from the woods surrounding the arena. He watched as the young jumper smoothed down his hair, straightened his jacket, and tucked his shirt more neatly into his pants.

“That was quick.”

Xavier grinned. “Those kinds of rendezvous are always quick.”

“You’re going to get sick someday. You should be more careful.”

Xavier patted Benito’s belly, then reached up and snatched Benito’s cigarette from the dodger’s mouth and threw it to the ground. “So should you.”

The two men stared at each other for a moment, before turning their attention back to the arena.

“How was Mauricio?”

“Perfect,” Benito answered. “He shall be a grand torero one day.”

Benito’s gaze followed Felipe as he finished his paseo. The boy walked to where his father and Xavier were standing, and waited for his father’s blessing. Benito was a good head taller than his son, who stood before him, looking down. Benito reached over the arena’s fence and lifted the boy’s chin, but quickly released it when he recognized the fear in the adolescent’s eyes. The veteran dodger shifted all of his weight to his left leg, and spat on the ground.

He waited while Xavier shook the boy’s hand.

“Good luck, Philippe,” Xavier said.

Benito reached back over the arena’s fence and smacked his son’s skull so hard with the flat of his hand that tears rose into the boy’s eyes. Then he sent his son off with a flick of his hand.

“You can be such an asshole,” Xavier whispered.

“Mind your own business, maricón.”

“Go ahead, call me queer. I still don’t know how you can treat your son that way.”

“What would you know about raising a son?”

“More than you think. I’m someone’s son. Remember?”

Benito looked at Xavier out of the corner of his eye. “So, it’s your father’s fault that you’re a pansy?”

“Maybe not,” Xavier admitted. “But it’s his fault I hate his guts.”

Benito threw his chin into the air. “It’s not important if Felipe hates me. The only important thing is for him to learn courage and persistence. He needs to learn to never, ever give up. He needs to know how to stare a bull in the eyes and not back down.”

Xavier sniggered.

“Go ahead and laugh, mujer. You with your quick sex in the woods, what would you know about courage? You jump men, cows. What’s the difference to you?”

“Need I remind you that you avoid them?”

“I hold my ground until the last possible moment. I defy them to hurt me. And when they do, I get up and defy them again.”

“I thought we were talking about Philippe.”

“Felipe is my son and he will do as I tell him.”

Benito and Xavier heard the crowd burst into laughter. When they looked into the arena, they saw that Jordi had had Francisco release a torete, a small, young bull, for Philippe to fight.

“At least Jordi has some compassion for him,” Xavier remarked.

“Jordi mocks my name with such an animal,” Benito muttered. “Jordi himself has larger horns!”

The two men tumbled into silence as Felipe began his passes. It was obvious to Benito from the start that his son couldn’t handle the situation. He mumbled in disgust as Felipe backpedaled whenever the bull charged or chased. He noted that the boy held his crimson cape high and close to his hips, despite Jordi’s repeated shouts of, A bajo! A bajo’, admonishing the novice torero to keep the cape down and away from his body.

Benito was certain everyone saw that, the first time the boy went down, it was simply because Felipe had tripped over his own two feet. Jordi and Mauricio dashed from behind the palenques to distract the bull away from the young torero, but not before the animal had butted the boy several times in the groin. Benito saw how the boy’s face flushed, the same way it did when Benito disciplined him. Was it Benito’s imagination or did he detect a slight tremor in the boy’s legs?

The speed with which Jordi reached Felipe the second time the young man went down surprised even Benito. The veteran dodger watched as Jordi put himself between the young bull and the novice torero, but not before the bull had caught the adolescent again with his horns, driving the boy once again to the ground. Benito found Jordi much more attentive towards Felipe than the master bullfighter had been towards the other torero, Mauricio. As Jordi helped Felipe to his feet, Benito thought he detected a slight resemblance between the two that he had never before noticed. Both were rather fair-haired and fair-skinned, whereas Benito was dark-haired and had olive-colored skin. He also thought they had very similar builds. And there was something about the eyes, Benito thought. Finally, Felipe was fine-featured in a way that he, Benito, was not.

Benito could tell from the way the boy went down the third time that Felipe was exhausted, beaten. Benito imagined how his wife, Cristina, would yell at him once they had returned home and she found her son black and blue with bruises, his delicate skin cut and bleeding. Jordi escorted the young torero to a palenque, then bent close and spoke to the boy. Benito noticed that Felipe listened to his trainer, but looked over at his father. Meanwhile, Francisco corralled the young bull back into the holding box. Benito watched all of the proceedings without displaying the slightest bit of interest. He heard the crowd’s weak applause as Felipe circled the arena, taking his bows. Several spectators threw flowers and the throaty-voiced woman managed a mild, charitable, “Olé”.

“Are you okay?” Xavier asked the boy.

Felipe nodded. Benito looked away. To him, Felipe was as sallow and soft as a church candle. Benito was ashamed to think the boy had Sanchez blood.

“Papa,” Felipe said, “Jordi thinks I should stop.”

Benito studied his young son. “Is Jordi your father?”

He shot a menacing glance at the master bullfighter.

“Papa!”

Xavier spoke up. “Benôit, can’t you see the kid is –”

“Stay out of this!”

Benito focused his attention on his son. The cow dodger spread the fingers of his right hand and lowered them onto the boy’s head. By gripping his son’s skull, Benito forced the boy to pivot on his shaky legs.

“Do you see the people there in the bleachers? Pick one. Anyone.” Benito turned the boy’s head back so they were face-to-face. “Now, tell me if you think you will be able to go up to them after the feria and look them in the eyes.”

Felipe tried to lower his head, but Benito grasped the boy’s soft skull with fierceness, and forced the boy to look at him. To Benito, the boy’s red eyes, the tears welling near the lids, were like a matador’s cape: they infuriated him.

Xavier again interceded. “Benôit, the boy has had enough. Can’t you see that?”

Benito continued to stare at his son. “In the Sanchez family, we have a saying. Only when a man can look a beast in the eyes, is he ready to look another man in the eyes.”

Xavier rolled his eyes. “Another macho –”

Benito turned his attention to the young jumper for an instant, before turning back to his son. “What would you know about looking a man in the eyes?” he snarled.

Xavier shook his head and stomped away.

“Benito,” Jordi said, walking up to them, “the boy is hurt.”

“I’m hurt,” Benito stated. “That didn’t stop me!”

Jordi frowned. “But he could get seriously injured, Benito.”

“Life is full of injuries, isn’t it, Jordi?”

“He’s just a boy.”

“Then it’s time he became a man.”

Benito turned the boy away from him and with a hard push between the tender shoulder blades, shoved his son back into the arena.

Andrea Dejean is an American-born writer permanently based in southwestern France. She is a keen observer (though often a less willing participant) and writes because it is how she tries to make sense of what she sees in the hopes of better understanding the behavior of those around her.