Western Swing (33 page)

“Sixty years ago, at least.”

Sixty? I hadn't realized Thorne was quite that old. A sixty-year-old man might be a first even for me.

A shine came into Thorne's right eye. He licked his bottom lip. “I thought of something.”

“Uh-oh. I can tell what you thought by the gleam in your eyes.”

“You thought of it too?”

“Naked swimming foreplay, am I right? Then man-on-top-gets-a-sunburn?”

Thorne laughed. “Hell, no. I've played that game plenty of times.” He took the bottle back. “I want you and me to make love on a galloping horse.”

“Horse.” My voice squeaked. “I don't like horses. They can't stand me. Whatever makes you want to get laid on a horse?”

“I saw it in a movie once. Looked exciting.”

“Wars are exciting, but I'd rather not be in one.”

Thorne's look was defensive and slightly hurt. “We don't have to. You just asked what I always wanted to do and I told you.”

“Wait a minute, let me think.” I reached for the bottle, but he hadn't had his turn yet, so I waited while Thorne drank, then handed it to me.

I took a big burning slug of Ten High. Thorne's proposition shouldn't have come as such a surprise. Every cowboy wants to bring his horse in on a three-way hump. They're like bikers with Harleys and golf pros on the eighteenth green. Just a couple weeks ago Loren had suggested we borrow a horse from the VanHorns and make it on the run. And Loren's not even a cowboy. He's just a regular pervert.

It was a matter of self-worth and pride. Both as a singer and a wife-girlfriend, I've always considered my calling to be fulfiller of fantasies. I mean, I'm desirable, dammit. Men dream of someday meeting a woman like me and I find a lot of pleasure in making dreams come true. I'd never said no to a kinky position yet, and with Mickey Thunder as my first teacher, that's a pretty dramatic claim. But
on a horse
—
a running-over-the-prairie horse?
Jesus. I hate horses.

By then, Laredo and Suzy Q had hopped almost around the pond to where the lonesome cow stood, chewing and blinking. Thorne would want to commit this act on Laredo, of course. Suzy Q lacked the pizzaz. Laredo was tall and brown with mean eyes. I wondered if the woman in Thorne's movie faced forward or back. Either way would be insecure and I can't stand insecurity, especially when I'm fucking.

Thorne straightened his legs on the blanket, then crossed his right ankle over the left boot heel. He didn't say a word or even glance my way, but his eyes had that tired, vulnerable look again. By not trying to push me into guilt sex, he was making me feel guiltier than ever. My whole idea had been to hang around for a few days, giving him a pleasure jolt he could look back on in his old age. I couldn't very well deny his first wish.

I threw down more Ten High. “Bareback or in the saddle?”

Thorne grinned. “Bareback.”

• • •

When she was eleven or twelve, Connie used to buy
Seventeen
magazine every month. I remember a column in it called “My Most Embarrassing Moment,” in which girls would confess true-life social blunders like thinking a big date was on Saturday when it was really on Friday, or taking the school bus two hundred miles to a band concert and finding nothing but a salami sandwich in your piccolo case. Most of the I-coulda-died situations didn't strike me as all that awful. Nothing comparable to a heavy flow on white slacks or telling Mama you're getting another divorce. Loren says the most embarrassing thing that can happen to a man is for his wife to commit suicide.

Horrible thought. Anyway, if
Seventeen
ever asks my opinion, I'll claim mounting a horse naked as my most embarrassing moment. People who give human characteristics to animals are total idiots in my book, but, I swear, Laredo laughed his ass off.

Thorne mounted first. He sat way up there, brown as old Tony Lamas on his face and wrists, a kind of blank newsprint color everywhere else. His belly sagged some and there was extra flesh on his lower back. He held his right hand across to the left side. “Hop up.”

Without stirrups, “hop” wasn't the proper word. Finally—after a scene from a bad Polish joke—I sat astride Laredo's upper spine, facing Thorne and hanging on for dear life.

“Don't squeeze so tight,” he said.

“I can't help it.”

“That's not a saddle horn.”

He nudged Laredo and stared off at a slow walk. “Put your hands on my hips,” Thorne said.

“I can't let go.”

“You've got to let go or you'll never get it in.”

“Let's just ride a minute, try some foreplay. I think I'm pretty dry down there.”

Thorne kicked Laredo into a trot which caused a sensation like riding a giant bowling ball down steps.
Bang, bang. Bang.

“This won't be smooth unless we go faster,” he said.

“Stop.”

Thorne pulled Laredo to a halt. He tried to pry my fingers loose, without much luck.

“Your hair looks pretty in the wind,” Thorne said.

“Is it over? Did you get off?”

Laredo stood on top of a little knoll thing with me facing east and Thorne west. I know that horse was amused.

Thorne gave up on my fingers. “Tell you what, let's stick it in at a dead stop, then go from there.”

“Stick what in?”

“Put both hands on my legs and raise yourself up. Then lower yourself on to me.”

“Like this?”

“You've got to let go first.”

I heard a
thunk
and Laredo reared up on his hind legs, slamming me into Thorne. We hung there for what seemed hours as Laredo kicked in the Heigh-ho, Silver position. When he came down, I banged back on his neck, then I flew—over the ears and past his evil eyes. I felt a momentary altitude gain before my hip and lower back smashed into a rock and my head came down hard. Laredo's back hooves flashed by inches before my eyes.

A rock whizzed through the air over my head and I turned to see Darlene at the base of the knoll.

“I'm pregnant,”
she screamed and let fly another rock. This one caught Laredo in the neck, causing another six seconds of bucking bronco. Thorne stayed with him, though I don't know how. I'm not sure if he'd seen Darlene yet.

“Can't you hear me?”
she yelled.
“I'm going to have a baby.”

I said, “No, you're not.”

She heaved a rock at me, missed by eight feet. Then she whirled and ran.

• • •

Thorne leaned forward, soothing Laredo, whose nostrils flared and blew. The horse stood stiff-legged, shivering. I think he was braced for another rock.

“You okay?” Thorne asked.

“I don't know.”

“Any bones broke?”

I lay back on the dirt to check my body parts. My toes moved so I figured my spine wasn't snapped. My hip hurt like hell. With my fingers, I touched the beginnings of a goose egg on the back of my head. “No, I don't think anything's permanently broken.”

“You're all right, then.” Thorne guided Laredo over to where I lay. He held his right hand out. “Hop up.”

I didn't move. “Thorne, you've got to talk to Darlene.”

“I know it.”

“She's sick. All these bizarre claims are cries for attention. You can't ignore her anymore.”

Thorne took his hand back and sat up. “You a child psychologist?”

“No, but I raised two girls.”

“One hates you and the other lives with your old boyfriend.”

I was surprised he remembered that. “Yeah, but they're happy—enough anyway. They don't do bizarre things like Darlene.”

“Either one ever catch you fucking on a horse?”

“Good point.”

“Hop up.”

“I'd rather die.”

• • •

A hundred yards away we found tire tracks leading back to the pond and Suzy Q and nothing else. No blanket and picnic leavings, no saddles, no clothes, worst of all, no shoes.

Thorne said, “Damn her.”

I shuffled past Laredo and into the pond. About knee deep, I turned around and sat down, spreading my feet straight. The cool mud soothed my aching butt—some. My feet stung. I wanted to cry, but my head hurt too much.

Thorne was off Laredo, checking his lower legs. “Think all the bucking bruised a hoof,” he said. “We'll have to ride double on Suzy Q going back.”

I leaned back until my head lump was in the water. “You'll ride Suzy Q. I'm going to stay here and die.”

Thorne walked to the water's edge. “No use being dramatic, Lana Sue. Come on.” He held out his right hand again.

I sat up. The water trailed off my hair and down my back. “Thorne, I'm serious. You'll never get me on a horse again.”

“Walk, then.” He turned away.

“My feet are shreds already. I can't walk.”

Thorne came back to the water. His penis had shrunk to the size of a broiled Vienna sausage. “Lana Sue, you're not being tough. The first rule of getting bucked off is you gotta climb right back on.”

“You want tough, bring Janey back.”

“I don't want Janey. I want you.”

“And speaking of tough, who tried to hack his arm off yesterday? Was that tough?”

I hurt him on that one. Thorne's whole face sank. He gave up and turned old.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm just real upset and in a lot of pain. I had no right to say that.”

“Yes, you did.”

“No, I didn't.”

Thorne went around the pond to untie Suzy Q's hobble. I leaned back with my bump in the water, studying the sky, then sat up and watched him get the horses ready for the ride to the ranch house. Thorne wouldn't look at me. In fact, he looked everywhere else but at me. After checking bits and belts, he stood between the horses with both sets of reins in his good hand, then he mounted Suzy Q. He held her reins in his left hand and led Laredo with his right. The three of them came over to where I sat in the pond.

Thorne's eyes focused up on the horizon behind me and to my right. “I'll send someone in a truck with some clothes.”

I said the only thing I knew that would save the old guy. At the moment, I felt so low, maybe I even meant it. Hell, I never know when I mean it. I said, “I love you, Thorne.”

He didn't move for a long time. I guess he was considering saying, “I love you too,” but the cowboy finally got the best of him and he just blinked a couple of times and led off toward the ravine. As the horses reached the edge of the clearing, I called out, “Thorne.”

He stopped with his back to me.

“When you send someone with the clothes, don't send E.T. He thinks I'm naked most of the time anyway.”

Thorne looked back and smiled.

• • •

Thorne was right, of course. Men are almost always right when they tell me things about myself—not that it does either of us any good. It's just that “tough” had never been one of my goals. Roxanne is tough. My sister, Dessie, is tough. They'd both have bounced up off the rocks and jumped back on Laredo. Roxanne would be flying across the prairie, right now, head back, laughing, soaring into the orgasm of a lifetime. Dessie would have gone after Darlene and either seduced her or beat the living crap out of her. I was the only one who would squat on her ass in the mud at the edge of a stagnant tank in the middle of the goddamn desert and feel sorry for herself.

But I had excuses. People are supposed to be upset three days after their marriage breaks up. I missed my cabin and my creek and my cats. Darlene and E.T. weren't my problems. I admire versatility, but making it on horseback just isn't me. Maybe I wasn't as exciting and open as I'd hoped. Maybe I was getting too old to strike out into the unknown whenever the known turned dull.

I missed Loren. In fact I missed everyone I'd ever loved—Cassie, Connie, Mickey, Ron, even stupid old Ace. Buggie, whom I loved secondhand and had never even met. Mama. Daddy. How could I have gotten so entangled with so many lives and wound up naked and alone? What a screw. Belly deep in mud, aching all over, the tears finally came.

• • •

Maria found me there a couple of hours later. She was so short, I could barely see the top of her head as the truck bounced over the wagon track from the homesteader cabin. I was real glad to see her. Two hours is about my mope limit, and, as the sun began its slide toward Utah, my depression was rapidly changing to cold boredom.

She parked by our picnic sagebrush. Where the day before Maria had been calmly efficient about providing me a wardrobe, today she was mostly amused.

“Fate will have you wear Janey's pants,” Maria laughed—more of a smirk than a laugh. Her smile showed gleaming teeth and part of her top gum.

I tried to stand, but my hip stiffened into a spot weld. “You bring towels?”

“Of course.” Maria walked down to the water's edge. “Do you always lose your clothes?”‘

I pulled my feet under me and raised myself out of the muddy water. My hip creaked. It was bruised the same dead banana color as Darlene's lips. We finally had something in common.

“I never lost more than a sock in a dryer until I met your boss.”

“My father says if you lose your shirt more than once, you'll get a reputation.”

“I've got a reputation, thank you.”

Maria wrapped me in a couple of towels. Then she slid under my arm and helped me stagger toward the truck. I was more stiff than in any pain, except for my feet.

“Did you bring shoes?” I asked.

She reached into the truck bed for a pair of bright yellow hightop sneakers with skull-and-crossbone patches on the sides.

“These're E.T.'s,” I said.

“No one else has close to your size foot.”

“Then he knows about the latest escapade.”

“Everyone knows. Darlene went out in the daytime and Thorne rode into the barn naked. It caused talk.”