Sylvie's Cowboy (4 page)

Whistling all the while, he shed his work
shirt and then his sweat-stained undershirt. He wrapped a handful
of ice cubes into his undershirt. He slipped his outer shirt back
on, hefted the ice-filled undershirt, and opened the kitchen
door.

He stepped out onto the porch and bashed the
undershirt against the concrete stoop in rhythm with the tune he
was whistling.
Voilá
!
Crushed
ice.

In her new bedroom, Sylvie was staring at the
walls and muttering to herself, “Why not just bury them all at once
instead of keeping pieces of them in the house? It looks like
Druids have been sacrificing in here.” She looked heavenward and
addressed the Higher Power: “This is not what I meant when I asked
to be smothered in fur!”

In the kitchen, Walt scooped crushed ice from
his undershirt and dribbled it into the green class. He tossed the
wet undershirt into the sink.

In the bedroom, Sylvie was controlling the
urge to cry.

In the kitchen, Walt held the green glass up
to the light and decided it would do.

When Walt arrived in the bedroom and
presented the green glass to Sylvie, she had regained her composure
with a stalwart effort.

“I could just take them down and give them a
decent burial,” she suggested. “Then I can redo the room the way I
want it—in Laura Ashley or Ralph Lauren, maybe.”

“Yeah. Knock yourself out, Mrs. Audubon,”
said Walt. He gestured to her drink. “We’re all out of little
umbrellas. Listen, I gotta go run some errands in town. You just
settle in. Help yourself to anything you want in the kitchen.”

After he left the room, Sylvie sipped the
Alka-Seltzer/squash concoction from the green glass. She made a
sour face. “Oh, great,” she said. “Neither one of us can cook.” And
she continued sipping the drink and surveying the room with little
hope for the future.

At the Palm Beach Polo Club, it was just
another day in paradise for the rich, the filthy rich, and the
ridiculously rich. Leslye Larrimore and a helmeted polo player
walked across the perfectly green, perfectly groomed polo
field—which was a neat trick for Leslye since she was dressed in
haute couture as usual, right down to her six-inch heels. The polo
player was Daniel Stern, wearing knee-high black riding boots,
carrying in his hand the Ostrich-skin dress boots out of which he
had changed.

“So, Sylvie’s Ferrari is a total loss, and
the insurance company swears the policy was canceled at the
customer’s request,” said Dan. “Sounds like we’ve got a
poltergeist.”

“Just like the one that wire transferred half
the money out of our King’s Cay account in the Bahamas yesterday,”
Leslye responded.

“Right.”

They arrived at a bus-long horse trailer
surrounded by a string of eight grazing polo ponies. Dan stashed
his Ostrich boots in the trailer. He inspected his mounts and gear
as they talked. “Maybe Harry’s ghost is making l-o-o-o-o-ng
distance phone calls. ‘H. P. phone home,’ eh?”

“It’s not funny,” said Leslye.

“It’s a computer glitch with the insurance
company. And with the bank. You’ll get them both corrected. Relax.
Take another pill.”

Leslye subsided a little. She withdrew an
envelope from her purse and offered it to him. “You’re right,” she
said. “Mistakes happen. We’ll get it corrected. I don’t know why
I’m overreacting. Too much caffeine, probably. Here’s what I really
came to show you.”

Dan retrieved his riding helmet from the
trailer and wedged it under an elbow while he opened the document.
It was an attractive brochure featuring colorful drawings of a
high-rise building called Pace Tower. “Very nice,” he said. “Good
work, Les. Looks like a million dollars—or maybe a hundred
million.”

Leslye smiled. “I’ve got a Japanese
conglomerate interested. Ichi-Nobuko. They want to sign preliminary
acquisition agreements next week. We’re talking a ten million cash
deposit to hold in our escrow account.”

“Ten mil. Nice,” said Dan. “Just about pay
off the rest of the crooked bureaucrats.”

Leslye snatched the brochure and stuffed it
back into her purse. “Watch your mouth! Everything’s a joke to you,
isn’t it!”

“Calm down. There’s nobody here but us
ponies.” He put one arm on her shoulder to soothe and direct her,
and he led a saddled pony with the other hand as they walked across
the field toward the grandstands.

…

A little over an hour west of the Palm Beach
Polo Club was a different world, a world of wildlife and wild
country, of farms and ranches and small towns, and horses that
would mostly not play polo.

Outside his barn, Walt McGurk had saddled two
horses while the mismatched dogs, Butch and Maude, played nearby.
Sylvie approached from the house. She wore high, flat-heeled,
glossy black riding boots, silk shirt, and jodhpurs. Under her arm
were a riding helmet and leather crop.

“How long will this take?” she asked.

“What do you care? You’re unemployed.”

“I am not unemployed. I am at leisure. There
is a vast difference.”

Walt looked her up and down, unimpressed.
“Honey, with Harry’s money you were at leisure. Without it, you’re
unemployed. Either way, we’ll be back by supper. Course, if it’s an
imposition, you don’t have to go at all.”

Sylvie plopped her helmet atop her head. “I
think one should be familiar with one’s assets. I did not ask to be
a partner in this ... this enterprise, but partner I am, and I
intend to take an active role in making it profitable. Leg up,
please.”

Walt boosted her into the saddle. He gestured
to her helmet. “What’s that for?” He swung into his saddle and
brought his horse close alongside hers.

“So I won’t crack my skull if I fall,” she
said.

“You fall a lot?”

“Never!”

Walt removed Sylvie’s helmet over her squeal
of protest and tossed it into the tack shed a few feet away. He
sidled his horse close to the shed door, took an old straw cowboy
hat from a nail on the shed wall, then leaned over and smushed it
onto her head.

“Reckon you’re more likely to get sunstroke
than a concussion. And when it rains, this’ll keep the water outta
yer collar, too.”

He led the way. They walked their horses out
of the ranch yard and onto a narrow trail through trees and
brush.

Walt turned in his saddle. “Next time we get
to town, we’ll do somethin’ about them boots, too. Hold your reins
in one hand.”

“I’m used to riding English,” Sylvie
protested.

“Fine for you, but this ain’t an English
horse. This here’s a Florida Cracker horse, and he knows his
bidniss. He don’t need you to confuse him.”

Sylvie complied, moving her reins to one hand
with elaborate gestures.

Walt increased their pace from a walk to a
trot. Recalling a steep dip in the trail ahead, he though it
chivalrous to warn Sylvie. If she kept bouncing loosely in her
saddle, she’d part company with her horse when the cayuse did a
quick-step into the six-foot ditch and back up again. Walt shouted
over his shoulder, “Ride yer stirrups!”

“What?” she said.

The earth dropped away, Sylvie’s horse
bounced down into the ditch, and Sylvie tumbled arse-over-teakettle
into the grass.

She was standing up, rubbing her backside,
when Walt rode back to her, leading her horse.

“Thought you said you never fall off,” he
deadpanned.

“And I thought if you didn’t want to
ride
English, you’d at least try to
speak
it,”
she said.

Walt dismounted and gave her a leg up onto
her horse. “All I said was, ‘ride yer stirrups.’ You apparently
took that to mean somethin’ acrobatic.”

Sylvie looked daggers at him as he mounted
his own horse. “Why don’t I go first for a while?” she
suggested.

“Suit yerself. Just stay on the trail, right
on through there.”

Sylvie started off. The trail wound through
pines, vines, spiky palmetto, and moss-draped live oaks. She pushed
a low-hanging, limber branch forward and let it go as she passed
it. She smiled at the resulting thump and “Oof!” behind her.

Half a day later, Sylvie, the horses, and the
dogs rested beside a lazy creek while Walt prepared lunch with his
all-purpose knife.

“So, how do you like your ranch so far, City
Mouse?” he asked.

“It’s bigger than I thought,” she said. “And
smaller, in a way. I expected more ... I don’t know ... corn as
high as an elephant’s eye, amber waves of grain, I don’t know.”

“This ain’t Kansas, Dorothy.”

Sylvie gave him a look. He concentrated on
his lunch preparations.

Sylvie said, “I haven’t seen many cows.”

Walt chuckled. “Beef ain’t the money maker it
once was. All your friends in the hoi polloi are eatin’ raw fish
instead of steak nowadays. We got a few head of cattle in
partnership at a dairy up at Okeechobee, and we’ve kept one cranky
old bull whose sorta a pet, but I’m doing better with horses. Been
marketin’ to rodeos, polo clubs, Ocala breeders—”

“Polo clubs!” Sylvie interrupted. “How far is
it from here to Palm Beach? Wouldn’t it boost our profits if I
could get us some buyers?”

Walt tossed her an old coffee can from his
saddle bags. “Boost lunch if you could get us some water from the
creek. To answer your first question, it’s ‘bout 80 miles from here
to Palm Beach. Take you a good hour to get there if you had a fast
car, which you don’t.” He continued with his lunch chores.

Sylvie rose, holding the disgusting coffee
can at arm’s length, and walked toward the creek. “We’d split the
profits fifty-fifty if I sold some horses, right?” she asked.

Walt stood as Sylvie neared the creek bank,
and as he came up from the ground he palmed his pistol from his
boot. He leveled it in Sylvie’s direction as she leaned over the
water. “I’ll regret this,” he muttered, “but I did promise Harry
I’d take care of you.”

“What?” said Sylvie.

Ka-boom! Walt fired.

Sylvie jerked around, stunned, deafened, and
terrified. She stared at him as he walked toward her, still holding
the smoking pistol. Two feet away, Walt stooped and lifted from the
grass the headless, writing body of a deadly copperhead. Sylvie
gaped at the snake. Then she fainted.

Walt was cooking over a campfire when Sylvie
awoke and found herself laid out on saddle blankets. Maude licked
Sylvie’s face. Sylvie looked around, orienting herself, then spoke
to Walt. “You killed it?”

“Deader’n dirt. He would’ve done the same for
you, I reckon,” he said, stirring his culinary creation.

Vaguely, Sylvie murmured, “I don’t approve of
killing.”

“Maybe I shoulda hung back and let y’all
discuss it.” He dished up a bowl of chili from the pot over the
fire. He brought it to her. “Here. Help ya get yer feet back under
ya.”

He went back to the fireside, served himself,
and dug into his chili. Sylvie stared at him, food untouched in her
hand. She said, “Did you ever ... have you ever killed a person ...
a human being?”

He looked at her and at the chili in her
bowl. “Not with my cookin’,” he said.

He went back to eating.

Sylvie collected herself and took a bite. She
survived. She took another.

The ladies in the stands at the Palm Beach
polo grounds looked like Sax Fifth Avenue models dressed for a
photo shoot at Tara. Every woman in the place, with the possible
exception of one illegal immigrant who was cleaning the bathrooms,
looked like a million bucks. Okay, five million, if you added the
value of their jewelry to the cost of their ensembles, mani-pedis,
facelifts, tummy tucks, hairstyles, and stunning wide-brimmed
hats.

Leslye Larrimore and Sylvie Pace were no
exceptions. Both ladies glowed in the sunshine and basked in the
admiration of envious fellow spectators. Sylvie, newly
impoverished, had been forced to wear a dress one or two people had
seen before, but she was counting on their discretion. How gauche
it would be to announce to the competition that one of the belles
was too slight in the bankroll to be premiering a new frock at the
day’s match!

Blending with, and even outclassing some of,
the polo spectators, Sylvie and Leslye surveyed the players as they
took the field for warm-ups.

Leslye spoke confidentially near Sylvie’s
ear, “So, how are you really, after two weeks of the working-class
culture?”

“I’ll make it,” Sylvie replied with chipper
tone and perky smile. “Coming here helps. Seeing you. Friends.”

“And how’s the cowboy? Bad as you
expected?”

“Worse. Les, you cannot believe it, but less
than two hours from here is another planet, where Visigoths rule
and I’m forced to sleep beneath the remains of their kills.” Sylvie
pointed at one of the players on the field. “There’s Dan. You know,
I wonder if he wouldn’t be in the market for a new horse.”

Suddenly Sylvie’s eye was drawn to one of the
players taking the field for the opposing team. She inhaled sharply
and grabbed Leslye’s arm. “Great Caesar’s ghost,” Sylvie whispered,
“would you look at that!”

“What?” Leslye craned her neck to follow
Sylvie’s gaze to the end of the field and the opposing team.

“There! Number three for the other side. It’s
him, isn’t it?” Sylvie shook Leslye’s arm for emphasis.

“I don’t think so,” said Leslye, carefully
removing Sylvie’s fingers from her arm. “It just looks like
him.”

“No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t look like him at
all. I’ve never seen him look like that, but it is him. That lying
son of a gun! He never told me he played, and he certainly never
said anything about coming here!”

“Well, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised,”
said Leslye. “I have always suspected the man was capable of
anything. Any. Thing.”