Lesbian Cowboys (11 page)

She groaned and squeezed her eyes shut as I stuck my hand in her girly panties and grabbed a fistful of fur.

I slipped a finger inside her snatch and she trembled. I took my other hand from around her neck and pulled her fancy panties and her pants down to the knees. Lazily, I turned my finger about in her pussy. She clamped her thighs together and groaned, trembling.

“So, missy, you gonna do as I say, or am I gonna leave you out here with your ass and your big hairy pussy naked for the other girls to find and laugh at? Hell. You're so furry down here I wouldn't be surprised if they just shaved you and made a hat out of your pelt. You can wear this silly outfit as much as you like then, 'cause after that nobody's gonna
let
you dress like a cowboy.”

Yes'm, this filly wasn't going nowhere without my say-so. I stepped back to look at my handiwork. “I could leave you right now, couldn't I? That would show you. Don't believe me? Listen. I've got some work to do down by Tinker's Bridge. Should be no more than an hour. I'll be back then. Of course, if some of the girls find you before...”

She shook her head desperately and I laughed. I knew what
a blow it would be to her pride to be found like that. “Maybe I should just see if I can find me a pencil and write up a little sign. How about ‘free apples'?”

She shook her head desperately, imploringly, and I couldn't help but laugh my ass off.

I began to shuck off my boots and my jeans. “You know what to do, girl. On your knees, now. Git!” She did as she was told. I stepped up to her now in nothing but my hat and shirt. With one expert motion I popped the apple out of her mouth. Her fine red lipstick was running down her mouth with drool.

“Chrissy! No! Not out here. Not out in the open. Someone might...”

“Let ‘em. You don't want people to see? You'd best finish me off then before they come. I ain't got nothing to be ashamed of. I'm just watering my horse, is all.”

I grabbed her head in both hands, leaned back a little, and pulled her face into my cunt. She must have let go of something inside her then, because she fell into a desperate panic to bring me off, like her very life depended on it. And boy, did that work! I just let her roll her tongue up and down in there, working me into a quiet frenzy.

“You've been needing this a long time, missy, and if I didn't know any better, I'd say it was the very reason—all kind of subconscious-like—you squeezed your big ass into these fancy duds.”

But she didn't have much to say. She was chowing down on fresh pussy, pushing her tongue up there as far as it would go, serving my lips with hers as eager as a trout to swim upstream and wiggling twice as hard. She was mine, all right, dying to serve and please me, and she did it right well.

And when I was good and done for the time being, and ready to collapse on the ground and just look up at the puffy clouds
go by and think about nothing but how beautiful it all was, I looked down into those big blue eyes of hers and said, “Now, little lady. Do we have an understanding? You can wear that riding outfit any time you like, but just you remember. If you do, you're not the one doing the riding. You hear?”

She did.

 

 

 

 

 

W
hile the candles still glowed on the cake presented by our cook, Ma said, “Edith, It's a fine thing you've proved you're tough, and that you can ride, but now it's time for you to be a lady.”

But my favorite aunt nudged me. “If you'd been born a few years sooner, Edie, you'd have been a rodeo champ right up there with Tad Lucas.” Our cook Lucille—Lucy to me—gave me a wink. Now I know that was far from true, but it sure was nice to hear, especially from tough Aunt Dottie, and the grin on Lucille's face was like that pure white icing.

“Now you stop that talk, Dorothy! She's Edith now, and she is gonna be the next queen of the Snake River Stampede.”

I doubted that too. Even Eileen Hooker, the first Miss Idaho, and a woman who later caught Darryl Zanuck's eye, fell short at the Stampede contest that same year. And I really didn't want to be the queen, though I'm sure it would have made Ma, who at the age of fifty-five was still one of the prettiest women around, proud.

“You make a wish and blow out them candles,” Ma said. I knew my only wish, that my two big brothers would come home from World War II for my birthday, was unrealistic. I blew the eighteen candles out and hoped for the best.

In town, I took it for granted that Matthew Douglas would fill my dance card. We had been predestined—or so our folks told us from the time we were three—to be together. Matthew was going to inherit a nice, small range just down the road apiece. Ma and Pa taught me every angle of the ranch business, and my book smarts with numbers seemed like proof positive that they had made the right choice.

Ever since I had turned sixteen, Matthew and I went to the nearest movie house, about an hour in his jalopy from my house, nearly every week. The way Matthew and I took to fighting during those drives as time wore on just seemed to convince my folks they were right in pushing us two together. It convinced me it wouldn't work, but just like Ma taught me, I put on the airs.

At the dance, after a fight I don't recall the reason for, we split ways and I sat off to the side fuming, while he took up with Rebecca Carlson. Rebecca, with her curly red tresses, bright green eyes, snowy white skin, and hourglass figure, was the girl who should have been Queen of the Stampede.

I stared at the two as they stood in a little too close. I felt frustrated and mad. I felt twinges in my waist work down my legs. I became desperately uncomfortable as I watched the two sway in time to the music

 

I suppose it's a story unto itself that on one particularly sunny and happy day not long after the dance, we received two telegrams at the ranch. One from an island in the South Seas, one from France. One from the Army, one from the Navy.

It was the one and only time I saw tears flow from my pa's
eyes. Ma didn't cry for days. She sat, hands folded on her lap, one foot slowly pushing that spot on the floorboards where it creaked, slowly tipping the same rocker she'd nursed all three of us kids in back and forth. She stared out across the hard-packed earth in front of the house toward the empty corral where us three kids had learned to ride, and later broke horses. The growing realization that she'd never see either of her boys in that corral seemed to just suck all the life out of her small body.

Life did go on, as it did for so many during those times, but you don't think of the many when something like this happens. You spiral in tight and think of yourself, and those you love. You find things to focus on.

It was a ten-day drive to the railhead to deliver the cattle each year, a trip that every man in the family had taken. Pa had never missed a one since he rode with his pappy. Despite the fact that we had one of the best foremen for a hundred miles around, Pa always insisted on going and taking care of the transaction with that wily old sharp named Chuck. Oh, the stories he told about “brain-wrangling” Chuck.

But this year, with his boys still fresh in the ground, his heart broken, and his will bent like a willow switch, I knew he'd never be able to make it, even if he didn't know it himself.

 

Lucille was thirty-five years old, part Blackfoot, and hard as a railroad spike. She could ride with the best on the ranch. She understood horses in a way that the men on the ranch, even our foreman Earl, didn't.

Despite her hard edge, she was a handsome woman, and just about every ranch hand that came and went tried to woo her. Every year she had to join the drive down to the railhead to feed the crew and tend to their wounds. “Edie, the only way I can keep them on their side of the camp but not rile 'em against
me is to let 'em know I ain't interested. Not just in them, but in nobody.”

I only got part of this when she said it.

 

“Pa, Ma ain't right since Harry Junior and Frank died. You gotta stay with her this year.” This was the damnedest argument an eighteen-year-old girl might make to her father, one of the toughest ranchers there ever was, about his wife, who was as tough as him. We didn't get sentimental back then. Hard winter, drive through it. Hoof-and-mouth run rampant, start over. Lose a leg, get another. Hop.

The fact that he bought my argument—that he let his little girl represent the family on the drive—just showed how beat he was. It broke my heart. At first I thought the way Earl so easily accepted me riding along was because of all the hardships the family had taken. Strange, but he seemed almost relieved to have me along.

It was said that Earl once had a small ranch of his own in Montana. Mostly, this was just camp talk, because Earl never said one way or the other. He'd seemed almost to invite me along, so I was surprised when he shouted at me nearly day and night during the drive.

He had me wrangling strays. Every dirty job, he set me to it, and I did them all. Every wrong move of mine, no matter how small, made him snap like a startled rattler. He rode me harder than a fresh Pony Express mount. Earl was famously tough on the hands when they screwed up; I'd seen it plenty of times. Many were the hands that didn't make the grade, and they went on to other ranches. But he was equally loyal and kind when the hands did good.

But it seemed I could do no good.

I was convinced that Earl was just showing that a woman
couldn't handle something like this ride and was exerting his control while Pa mended his spirit. Maybe Earl just needed to teach me a lesson.

But the one person in this world I never saw Earl shout at was Lucille. Some said it was because she was a good cook and a better healer—worth her weight in gold on the trail. Others said it was because he was sweet on her. A few even quietly supposed they were secret lovers. One or two said he was just plain scared of her.

Seven days into the ride, Earl still shouted orders at me like I was the worst horse wrangler there had ever been. Even the hardest, most senior hand on the drive took him aside and tried to tell him to take it easy on me, that I'd been through enough.

And he came down on my defender as hard as he was coming down on me. The hands stopped trying to tell him how to treat me. Little by little, I could tell they were now wrestling for his place. I think everyone assumed that once we got back, Earl would be out a job after beating down the spirit of Harry Senior's little girl.

 

I'd been in a saddle since before I could remember. Though at eighteen I weighed barely a hundred pounds soaking wet, I'd broken horses since before my breasts grew and my hips spread. I learned how sometimes a horse, on the verge of breaking, will simply surrender peaceably, while others will squish that final bit of energy into one last, furious fight. The first one who did that tossed me like a feather, but I didn't land like one. It took all my will not to burst into tears, and as Lucy tended my hurt knee and back, she whispered, “You know, Edie, there's better ways to come to terms with a horse.”

I'd wrangled with the ways of the horse from the outlook of the rider. Scissoring my tiny legs and clenching my knuckles
white in the mane, rocking my body in time with the horse, I'd try to anticipate where she'd take me next.

Now I was starting to see the same fight from the mustang's side.

My ass was sore from being in the saddle eight days steady, and all I wanted was sleep. But after dinner, as the sun cut low in the sky, I quietly rode back in the direction we came from, not intending to stop for good until I was back at the ranch. Let Earl finish the drive like I figured he must want. He'd proven his point. I'd sooner run than buck.

The hands had spoken of a pond just west of where we had passed earlier that day, and I set out to find it. All I wanted was to wash off the thick trail dust and the sweat. I wanted to be entombed in enough water that my dammed tears would wash clean without being observed even by the critters before I continued back to the ranch, my tail between my legs. I wanted my big, soft bed and maybe a sweet pat on the head from my folks.

The sounds of birds and squirrels chattered through the stand of trees that shielded the pond. I reached it as the sun was beginning to set. It was particularly beautiful, but I thought it felt a lot like that day that the two telegrams had come. I had this feeling of surrender, of broken will. I was not just coming to terms, but embracing the very idea that I should run away, something I'd hated since I was a girl. I pulled my shirt from the top of my jeans, unbuttoned it, and tossed it on a rock. I kicked my boots off and pulled my jeans down to my ankles.

“Sometimes a lady just needs a nice bath.”

I crossed my arms over my bra and panties and turned around. “Lucy?”

“Hi, Edie. Or should I say Edith now?”

I let my arms relax. “Edie's fine.” Lucy's presence couldn't be
more welcome. “Shouldn't you be back at the camp?”

“I think we must of had the same idea.” Lucy stripped away her shirt and jeans, and I watched as her skin emerged. I wasn't sure if I should go on, but Lucy's tall strong body was nude within a moment. I suddenly felt safer and removed my underwear. I joined Lucy in the water.

It was chilly, and somehow comforting. I gasped when my upper body disappeared into the softly lapping waves. We exchanged a bar of Ivory soap from my bedroll, and eventually we began to play like kids, splashing each other's faces.

“Lucy?”

“Hmm?”

“What's it like—to be with a man?”

Lucy just shrugged. “Well, it's okay, I guess.”