felt himself grinning foolishly. But he recovered. “I wouldn’t say that. But when I was traveling around, I was more used to gals. Lord! I reckon those rodeo ladies have all settled down and are making homes now! That was ten years ago . . . It’s why I’m so careful to try and do what Mike wants, if I can barely scrape up the money. I wouldn’ta left the homestead if my father hadn’t been so set in his ways . . . He ran just about enough beef to feed us, and made his money cuttin’ off the timber . . . Now it’s all gone, and it’s taken a hell of a lot of water and topsoil with it.”
“So you’re giving Mike a voice in how you run the ranch, even if he’s only ten.”
He nodded. The waitress came and took away their plates, and they ordered coffee. Vera Mae looked at him over the rim of her cup. “You’re a good father.”
“Well, they’re good kids . . . I guess you’re kind of curious about what kind of a man it is that’ll go to a rodeo, and his wife only buried two months.”
She looked down at her plate. Her hair was beautifully brushed, and the part went right down the middle, straight as if it had been drawn with a ruler. Doing up June’s hair every morning had been an awful chore at first, and he’d been half-scared to send her to school when Easter vacation ended. Hadn’t sent her, in fact, but the teacher thought that was on account of her mother. But finally he had decided he was being silly, and when she came home that night, she hadn’t mentioned it, so the teacher or the other kids hadn’t said anything.
He’d like to tell Vera Mae about it. She wouldn’t either laugh or get all wet up around the eyes, like almost any other woman he’d ever known. And she’d understand how he couldn’t even let Dot, down at the ranger station, know about his trouble over a little thing like hair.
She said, “Penny.”
“I was thinking I like the way you do your hair.”
“Why, cowboy!”
When he looked up, she was as red in the face as he’d gotten when Duke gave him the note. It gave him kind of a good feeling to be able to do that to her, but it was cruel to keep it up. He said, “You and Duke and Turk pretty close?”
She said, “Thanks . . . Well, Duke and me. Turk’s a nice fellow to talk to, but all of a sudden he goes off and you don’t see him for a year. Yes, last winter, I stayed in with Duke and his wife. They have a place in the San Fernando.”
He said, “Oh,” very carefully, because she was kind of uncomfortable, the way she could read what he was thinking.
Even so she read him this time. “No,” she said. “I’m divorced . . . I’ll tell you about it sometime—and—and unspoke for.”
The waitress was coming over with the check. He said, “All right.”
All in a rush the rest of it came out. “And I don’t pick up suckers like that fat Dutcher unless things are awful rough.”
The waitress gave him the check, but Vera Mae got it faster than anything he’d ever seen. “I asked you to dinner. And I meant it.”
He shrugged. God knows, if he knew anything, Lonnie was a boy knew when not to argue with women. “It’s better than borrowing from your friends. Duke or Turk.”
Her eyes came clear open. “You see that?” she said. He had to bend forward to hear her. “Well—if you see that—I can tell you the rest. Kenny—my husband—went to prison. He cut a man.”
“You got no call to be telling all this.”
“I know that . . . I was going to divorce him anyway. So I went ahead with it. He was no good, Lon. And they caught him at it, he got two to ten years for mayhem. I heard he’s in Arabia now, skinning cat . . . And I’ll tell you the rest. I married him because he was the best bronc rider I’d ever seen.”
“I couldn’t stay on a rodeo bucker ten seconds,” Lon said bravely, and got his reward; she started laughing again. She said, “Thanks, sister,” to the waitress for the change, and left a tip and stood up. “Walk me out to the fairgrounds to look at my horse.”
But outside he hesitated, and she said, “I told the chambermaid we wouldn’t be back till about eleven; to sit with the kids till then. Let’s walk, it isn’t far out to the fairgrounds.”
“My pickup is at the hotel.”
“No, let’s walk.” She took his arm, and they turned right. The street was crowded, with the usual rodeo night crowd of any Western town; the shopkeepers and the clerks in the department stores and banks and utility companies, the foremen in the millwork plant had all put on plaid shirts and saddle pants or levis; some of the men and women wore high-heeled boots, but most of the tight breeches ended disappointingly in low heels and laces.
Mixed up with the crowd were millworkers in their Sunday best and others in overalls and denim jackets, going up for the night shift. There were farmers and ranchers from around the countryside, there were a couple of dozen professional rodeo riders following the circuit, and there were some pickpockets and short-con workers—who also followed the circuit.
There was a merry-go-round set up at a wide corner, and kids whooped and yelled and dodged around underfoot, their faces smeared with chili and hot-dog mustard.
Lonnie nodded at one brat who had nearly collided with the solid rear end of a state policeman. “That kid’s only about seven. Ought to be in bed.”
Vera Mae laughed. “Stop being a professional father. You’re a young man out with a girl.”
“Well—” They had passed the lighted streets, were in the dark belt between town and the fairgrounds. The sidewalks ended, and he had to feel for the paving rather than watch it. He put his arm around Vera Mae’s shoulders.
“That’s better,” she said. “I’d think I was losing my grip if you didn’t try and cop a feel now and then.”
“Don’t talk so rough,” Lonnie said. “You can’t scare me. I heard all the words once, even if I don’t know what they mean.”
There was a light in each of the barns at the fairground, and a couple of patient watchmen walking the rounds, sniffing for fire. The smell of cows and horses came out of the first buildings they passed, and also a small whiff of, pig. “Whoosh,” Vera Mae said. “Why do pigs smell so much like pigs? You seen the twin palominos?”
“June went right to them,” Lonnie said. “Just like Mike found the soil conservation exhibit.” But they turned in at the fairground building anyway.
In a front stall a cream-colored mare stood drowsing, but she shook off her tiredness when she saw she had visitors, and threw her head back proudly, her silver mane rippling. And she had something to be proud of: twin colts, as rare as human twins, and both of them a paler gold than hers, but with a dark skin promising they’d be the true palomino when they grew older, a color by definition the “shade of a newly minted gold piece.”
A blue ribbon fastened to the front of the stall said, “Special Award, Palomino Mare with Twin Colts,” but neither of them laughed at her as the two youngsters waded through the deep straw and began to nurse, pushing each other back and forth until each got a nipple.
“Golly,”
