If Wishes Were Horses (41 page)

“What I want to do and what I should do might be two different things,” she said, giving a little impatient jerk of her body that was becoming a lot harder and firmer from all her riding.

Averting his eyes from her body, he grinned sadly. “It’s that way a lot, isn’t it?”

She looked at him a long minute, before going off, presumably to say no to the buyer, as she came back with Little Gus in tow, and happily, too. Johnny was happy that she didn’t sell the red gelding, too, so much so that it startled him.

“We need to get home,” she said.

After her barrel racing rides, she was always anxious to return home to Lattie Kate. Johnny didn’t know how much of this was due to mother-worries and how much was due to her still nursing. He didn’t see a need to probe into such an intimate detail.

A thousand times during these weeks, Johnny thought of ranchers he had worked for in Texas and New Mexico and how they would be happy to have him come work for them now. He also considered going on down and renting the farm with the rock house and beginning his own place.

Yet he stayed at the Rivers farm, keeping himself steady by thinking each evening that maybe he would leave the next day, or the day after that.

He came in the barn and found Etta sitting on the stacked hay. “You got a letter,” she said.

She wore a sleeveless dress, one she often wore while working around the house. It was of some thin, flower-sprigged fabric that flowed over her body, showing all the curves. Her hair was pulled up off her neck. The strands that escaped in an unruly manner at her temples and nape were damp with sweat, as was the skin beneath her blue eyes. She looked tired, as if she’d just had to sit down.

Johnny, feeling the humming he always felt in her presence, tossed aside the halter he carried and took the envelope from her. He didn’t often get mail and was curious.

“I think it’s from Harry Flagg,” Etta said. She remained sitting there.

There was no return address, but Johnny, too, recognized Harry’s scrawl. “Yeah, looks like it.”

Removing his hat, he tossed it on the hay and wiped a sleeve over his forehead. He opened the envelope. It was a little hard to read, feeling Etta’s eyes on him. The letter was from Harry, who began with, “Hello, you son-of-a-buck,” and Johnny thought fondly of the big man’s voice.

Johnny read it, then said, “Harry wants to know if we can take on another six head for him. If we can, he wants me to come out to Sayre and get them next week and bring them back and get them ready for fall racing. He says he has a good barrel racing prospect for you.”

He looked at her. Her blue eyes were studying him.

“What do you think? Want to take them on?”

She blinked and looked down at her bare leg that she stretched languidly. He looked at her leg, too, at the skin so pale and sleek, and his eye traveled up to where the dress collapsed between her thighs.

“We have the room now,” she said, “but do you want to take on trainin’ them?”

Johnny’s gaze returned to hers. He had difficulty thinking much about horses in that instant. He felt his heartbeat in his groin.

“I don’t know. It’d take a couple of months, but it’d mean boardin’ money for you, and Harry is reliable to pay."

He noticed the hollow of her neck shone with perspiration. With heat.

“What does he say about the barrel horse?” she asked.

“Oh . . . just that he has one he thinks you’ll want to look at.’’

She sighed a sort of dispirited sigh, put her hands on her thighs in an unconscious gesture and moved the fabric of her dress. “It’s too hot to be thinkin’ about horses right now,” she said.

Her dispiritedness pricked at him. “Yeah,” he said absently, folding Harry’s letter and stuffing it back in the envelope.

For an instant he had felt anticipation at taking on new horses for Harry, but now he didn’t think he wanted to do it. But he recognized that he could just be in a low moment and the next moment he might pick up and change his mind. He wished he would get himself straightened out.

He was brought up short by Etta getting to her feet. She seemed about to say something, but then she was just looking at him. Her eyes pinned him, and he felt like a buck caught in headlights.

The next instant she was coming to him with parted lips, and he was taking her into his arms. He saw her lids slowly shut over her blue eyes, as she wrapped her hands behind his neck and brought his head down to her.

Supreme relief was the first emotion that flashed through him. At last he had her against him.

She was hot and damp, smelled of sweat and sunshine and Ivory soap. Her lips were sweet as honey, seductive, and trembling. Her entire body started trembling against him, and Johnny felt as if he were dropping down into her. He tried to resist, tried breaking away, but smoky desire closed around him.

He kissed her lips and then down her neck to the silky swell of her breasts at the neckline of her dress. He savored the smoothness of her skin and the salty taste of her. He opened his eyes and looked at her skin, saw the delicate fabric of the dress against it and the way the dress was pushed out by her breasts, which were heaving up and down. Her breath was hot in his ear, calling his name over and over in a breathless whisper that about drove him senseless.

“Johnny . . . oh, Johnny . . . please . . ."

He thought of the prickly bales of hay only a foot away, of his hard, narrow bunk covered in a worn flannel blanket, of Etta’s bed that he had seen only in his imagination but pictured with soft white sheets and plump feather pillows against which to lay her down and kiss her until she cried and took him into her.

Then Latrice entered his thoughts, and Obie’s caution about getting Etta pregnant came to haunt him. It was as if the cooling breeze of hard sanity swept over his back.

He placed his hands on either side of Etta’s flushed cheeks and pulled her from him.

“Etta . . ." He saw tears squeezed from her closed eyelids. “Etta, is this what you want?”

Her eyes flew open. They looked confused, glazed and shimmering with heat.

“Etta, all I got is a bunk in there, and this isn’t the way I want it to be. Where will we go from here? Sneakin’ around?”

Thinking that she would do this made him angry, and he gave her head a little shake. “Do you want to marry me?”

“Yes,” she said breathlessly, desperately. “I’ll marry you, if you’ll stay here.”

He noticed she said, “I will,” not “I want to.” He thought of it and felt the sense of being closed in a box.

With a shake of his head, he dropped his hands and turned from her. He heard her say something, but couldn’t quite make it out over the anger and confusion roaring in his head.

Then he heard her walking away out of the barn.

Drawing back, he struck out at a bale of hay, which sent pain reverberating up his arm. He welcomed the pain. It was better than the ache inside him. He looked around for something else to hit, but there just didn’t seem to be anything.

With heavy footsteps, Johnny went into his room and sat on his bunk, raking his hands over and over through his hair, calling himself all kinds of a fool for not accepting what Etta had offered him.

Disappointment sliced through him. She wanted him, and maybe she even loved him, but she would not give up this hunk of land and house for him.

The way Johnny looked at it, he wanted no part of being second fiddle to a piece of land and collection of buildings.

Feeling in something of a wild and distracted state, Johnny washed his hands and face, put back on his dusty, sweat-stained hat, got into his truck and drove over to Beetle’s roadhouse, where he proceeded to toss back drinks in the refreshing coolness of air-conditioning, and to convince himself that he did not need to get married.

Just when he was about to get drunk, he looked up and saw an old man drunk at the bar.

After a minute of gazing at the miserable sight, Johnny put down his drink, took up his hat, and left.

He drove over to Obie’s cottage. Obie was picking tomatoes. Johnny helped himself to making them each cold glasses of tea from Obie’s refrigerator, took them out and sat with Obie beneath a big hackberry tree. It was a lot cooler there than in the house.

“I’m thinkin’ I need to head on down the road,” he said to Obie.

“And what are you runnin’ from, son?”

Johnny shook his head at that and shrugged. “You know, I’ve never in my life really had to make a decision more weighty than whether to have a hamburger or steak for supper or stay in my truck or a rented room. My mother dyin’ started me off on the rodeo circuit, and Uncle Sam chose me for the army and sent me to have my knee ripped apart.”

“You can’t decide whether or not to marry Miz Etta?”

Johnny waved a fly from his glass, drank the remainder of the tea and threw the ice into the grass. “I gotta take a lot I may not be able to live up to, if I marry her.”

“Well, most anybody does that when they join up with another person, Obie said wryly. “I had to take on my wife’s mother, and that wasn’t easy, I’ll tell you.”

Johnny chuckled.

“What about Little Gus?” Obie asked, his voice growing serious again. “What will Miz Etta do about him if you leave?”

“I’ve pretty well finished all I can do with Gus,” Johnny answered. “Etta’s fully capable of doin’ anything she wants with him now.”

“You do know, John, if you leave, you’re likely to cause Miz Etta to lose a lot of boarders. And there’s other things. She’s come to rely on you, boy.” Obie’s attitude was definitely critical.

“I know that, Obie.” All of it was a weighty burden, something he did not take lightly, and it hurt that the older man would think he did.

Then Obie nodded in a sympathetic way and said, “Life’s a puzzle, son. It’s meant to be a challenge, not a burden, but I guess sometimes the two come so close together it’s hard to tell the difference.”

After a long minute of silence, Obie said, “What you need, son, is to go fishin’.”

“I don’t like fishin’,” Johnny said.

Still, he went along with Obie because it was something he could see to do, and afterward he went back and fed the horses in the same manner of doing something because it was there to do.

The next morning Etta did not come out to ride Little Gus as she had been doing. Uncertain of what to expect, yet pushed by a certain perversity to see Etta, and a craving for Latrice’s coffee and biscuits, Johnny joined Obie in going up to the house for breakfast. He sat down at the table with the three people he had been having meals with for months and spoke of the weather and baseball and that Nathan Lee was riding good enough for his father to buy him his own horse.

Etta did not say anything directly to him, and he didn’t say anything directly to her. He watched her cross the room and bring back the coffee pot and refill his cup. He felt her eyes on him. He looked at her, then quickly away, saying, "Thank you."

He drank his coffee and watched Etta bring Lattie Kate into the room and sit with her at the table. He noticed Etta’s skin, although darker, was as smooth as the baby’s. Then he left to begin his day that stretched before him with dust and heat and vague inward questions he didn’t understand and couldn’t answer in any case.

Friday afternoon, Johnny was mending a fence when Leon Thibodeaux drove up. He came to the back door these days. Johnny watched him go inside, and fifteen minutes later, he came out with Etta, and the two drove off together.

Curious and trying not to be, Johnny went up to the house to ask for a glass of tea and to find out exactly why Etta was going off with Thibodeaux. He didn’t have to ask.

Latrice handed him the cold glass of tea and told him as fast as she could talk, “Mr. Leon took her over to Fred Grandy’s office to meet with a man from Oklahoma City. Some big-shot builder. It’s the same man who inquired about some land back right when the place first went on the market. He wants twenty acres up by the highway. He’s gonna chop it up and build houses on two-acre sections. I tell you, if he buys that land, Walter Fudge is gonna come runnin’ and pay whatever Etta wants him to."

Johnny agreed with Latrice on this. “How much is this builder goin’ to pay for the land?” he asked.

“Maybe twice the goin’ rate per acre, since he just wants a chunk. Mr. Leon said the man was not set on exactly how many acres he wanted. Maybe twenty acres, but maybe more like forty.”

A couple of hours later, Johnny was out back of the barn, trimming hooves, when Etta came looking for him. She stepped out of the barn, and he saw by the excitement on her face that she had sold land and sold at a good price.

For several seconds she just looked at him, as if so happy she couldn’t bring all her words out.

Then she said, “Oh, Johnny, I sold forty acres. Forty acres for as much as sixty, and right while we were signing the papers a man called about the east section, and he wants to buy it. Can you imagine? He called while I was right there signin’ papers to sell the forty acres.”

“I guess you got an angel workin’ for you,” Johnny said, giving her the smile required. “I’m real happy for you."

She gazed at him and bit her bottom lip. He thought for an instant that she might be going to press him to stay and say that she wanted to marry him. He had a little panic, hoping for this and afraid of it, too.

She said, “Should we count on you for supper?”

“No,” he said with a shake of his head as he gathered his farrier tools. “Not tonight. I gotta run over to town and see a fella.”

“You just go on, Johnny.”

Startled, he looked up to see her eyes shooting fire.

“Don’t let us keep you here. We’ll be fine, so you don’t need to put yourself out by stayin’ around at all.”

She whirled and walked off through the barn, and Johnny stood there, watching her silhouette.

Within days Etta sold forty acres to the builder from Oklahoma City as well as a half section to a fanner to the east. When word of this reached Walter Fudge, he got into a panic and bought all the rest of the land that Etta intended to sell, paying the going rate per acre with no quibbling.