The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1) (16 page)

“Waal,” he drawled, “if you’re gonna stick with the recurve, I guess it’s up to me to help you with it, specially since it was me that sold it to ye.”

So, in between sporadic customers—I was somehow hurt when he greeted them all by crying out, “There he is!”—who came in to get their compounds restrung, for new sights, or to marvel at the newest broadheads, such as the Guillotine, that could slice the head off a turkey from thirty paces, Crookneck showed me how to tune my bow.  It was way too blustery to shoot outside, so he set up a target across the room.  He explained what significance an arrow’s stiffness had to its performance, taught me how to alter my arrow’s flight by experimenting with field points of different weights.

The lesson lasted nearly eight years.  In between boyfriends, classes, and jobs, Crookneck taught me the art of archery.  He altered my stance, breathing, anchor point, and release, telling me to let the string roll off my fingers “like a wheel rolling off a cliff.”

And that’s always what I tried to do.

“Bullseye!” Gina shouted.

~  ~  ~

On Friday night, convinced that Alikki was slowly regaining her health, I decided to get up the next morning and go to the rodeo Cal had halfheartedly assigned me to write about.  I woke up just after dawn, went out and fed Alikki, then curried and visited with her for a while.  It was drizzly out, so I made sure she had water and plenty of hay, then shut her in her stall.  After a long shower, I dressed, made breakfast, took my thyroid pill, and reread a chapter of
The Equine Breeding Manual
.  When I glanced up at the clock, I saw that it was getting late, so I grabbed my hat and rushed out the door, nearly knocking down Jack Stafford in the process.

“Shit, Jack!” I said, as I nearly fell over sideways to keep from colliding with him.  “What the hell?”

“You didn’t call,” he said.  It was starting to rain a little harder now and Jack looked like a wet puppy that someone had left on my porch.

“I don’t have time for this right now, Jack.  I have to go somewhere.”  I brushed past him on my way to the truck

“I’ll just wait here.”

“No you won’t.”

He fell into step beside me.  “Then I’ll come with,” he said.

I stopped and faced him angrily, intending to tell him that I was ill, insane, depressed, married, pregnant, or all of the above—anything to get rid of him.  But then I saw that he hadn’t shaved for several days and his hair and clothes were disheveled.  Jack is a neat freak, so something must have really been eating at him.

“What the hell,” I said.  “Get in.”

“I don’t want to leave my cameras in the car.”

“Fine.  Bring them.”

I noticed that a road crew had pulled the ditches, bringing up the red dirt from the sides of the road and smoothing it back out in the center, eliminating the ruts.  I thought I could feel Jack’s eyes on me as I drove, but when I glanced over I saw that he was wrapped up in the scenery.  What he was able to see in the scrub oak, pine, and miles of poison ivy vines only he knew: only if he took a photograph of it would anyone else know, but by then he would have forgotten all about it.  It made me crazy.

I didn’t speak until we got out on the highway.  “What are you doing here?”

He pulled his attention away from a billboard advising forest owners to thin out their pines to prevent certain diseases, and looked at me as if he had just noticed I was there.  “I came to see you,” he said.  “Where are we going?”

“We’re going to a rodeo,” I told him.  “And I didn’t want you to come here.”

“I’ve missed you.”

“We both need to get on with our lives.  I thought you
had
been getting on.  Is the job all right?”

“Actually, that’s what I came to talk about.  I’m thinking about going to the Middle East.”

I almost swerved the truck off the road.  “You what?” I asked.

“Iraq,” he said.  “But tell me what you’ve been doing for the last year.”

“Iraq is not a place—” I began, but he cut me off.

“We’ll talk about that later,” he said.  “When we have some time and trust each other again.  But right now I really want to know how you’ve been doing.  You look thin and there’s obviously a bandage of some kind under that hat.”

One of the last things I wanted to do was to tell Jack about my life, but the
very
last was to talk about Iraq, so as the windshield wipers did their disappearing act, I brought him up to date on everything I had been doing for the last year, giving him an abbreviated verbal tour of my job with
The Courier
, my illness, my father’s abdication, and my horse.  As far as my head went, I simply told him that I had tripped over some vines in the woods and fallen against a rock.  I deliberately left out any mention of Gina or the goat story. 

It would be easy to see Jack as too naïve, too boyish, too innocent.  He does have these qualities in abundance, but he also has the gift of listening, of giving people the assurance that he not only hears but is interested in what they are saying.  It is this that makes him totally charming.  It’s not fake; it is only his own life that he finds boring.  Another thing about Jack is that he is fairly tall and well built—slightly taller than Donny but not as muscled.  He has cleanly chiseled features and thick black hair.  It is hard for anyone not to like him; hard for any woman not to want to jump his bones at first sight.  His old, familiar manner got me to relax so comfortably that I was pulling into the Jasper County Agricultural Center before I realized I had been schmoozing about Clarence Meekins, Benny Benedict, and Linda C as if they were mutual friends.

The Ag Center consists of a covered arena surrounded by parking areas and stables.  Horse trailers of all descriptions and makes were parked in the lot or attached to hookups at one end of the stables.  And there were lots and lots of horses, more horses than people, it seemed.  Some were being ridden, others being walked on the grass and allowed to graze.  A few, in full saddle, were tethered to chain-link fences or support poles.  Most were Quarterhorses, but I saw a sprinking of Arabians and Saddlebreds as well.

We got out of the car and headed toward the arena where I heard a voice over the loudspeaker announcing the next rider.  The rain had let up for the moment but it was still wet and drippy.  I saw two preteen girls riding together across the wet grass of the grounds and was jealous of their ease and grace.  Grizzled cowboys led their mounts toward the arena.  Groups of men, women, and horses stood around waiting for their turns in the ring.  Almost everyone I saw was wearing cowboy gear, which was not really strange for a rodeo, but many of them also wore pistols on their belts.  Two pistols.

Jack, as always, had slung a camera bag over his shoulder and was studying his surroundings with interest.  From inside the arena came the sound of galloping hooves, followed a few seconds later by the crack of a pistol.  I flinched and scooted behind an iron pillar as a puff of smoke rose up lazily inside the ring.  An instant later another pistol shot rang out, then another.  Seeing that I was the only one cowering behind something, I peeked out of my hiding place and looked into the ring.  A stocky woman dressed like Annie Oakley was galloping toward us, shooting at what looked like balloons attached to the end of sticks.  She fired off five more shots in rapid succession and spurred her horse to the end of the arena.  People applauded.  I stood back up as the announcer blared genially, “That was Teresa Gentilly of Pine Bluff, Arkansas riding Spiffy.  Her time was a fast eighteen point six six seconds, but she missed the number four balloon and that’ll cost her a five-second penalty.  But she takes the lead with a raw score of twenty-three point six six.  The next contestant is from right here in Jasper County. . .”

The pleasant voice of the announcer continued its work while Jack and I looked around.  In the arena, a cadre of children dressed in frontier clothing fanned out to replace the balloons that had been broken with new ones.  It reminded me of a professional tennis match where, after every point or every netted serve, ballboys and ballgirls ran out on the court, scooped up errant tennis balls, and ran pell mell back to their fixed places on the sidelines. 

Below the announcer’s booth, a half dozen competitors studied sheets that a natty cowboy in a black hat was posting on the wall.  I made my way over and saw that it was an order of go, listing the competitors, their mounts, what class they were in, and the approximate times they were to go into the ring.

Jack had disappeared.  I waited until the cowboy who had posted the sheets was free, then introduced myself.  The man appeared to be in his late forties with an infectious smile and a lot of teeth.  Without his hat, he was about as tall as I am; about the same weight, too.  He told me that his name was Panhandle Slim, that he was one of the organizers of the event.

“You say you’re from
The Courier
?” he asked.

“Yeah.  My editor asked me to cover this event, but he thought it was a rodeo.”

“Haw haw,” he laughed.  “This is a twenty-first century rodeo,” he said.  “We call it cowboy-mounted shooting.  And your editor isn’t the only one who doesn’t know what we do.  Gee, I’m glad you’re here.  Did you bring a camera?”

“Actually, I did better than that,” I remembered.  “I brought a photographer.”  I waved my arm in the general direction of the bleachers.  “He’s out there somewhere, doing his thing.”

“Great, maybe we’ll be able—”

A new round of gunshots buried his words in their sound, and I looked into the arena and saw another woman, this one dressed in more traditional cowgirl attire—like Dale Evans—riding the course.  I turned to Panhandle Slim.  “Could you tell me what I’m looking at?” I asked.

Outside the arena, the sky was a bleary gray and rain was beginning to come down again.  Horses and riders were having to negotiate patches of brown mud to get into the ring.  A light wind had also appeared, wafting mist and a few droplets of rain in our direction.

“Come on over here and we can be comfortable and watch at the same time.”  Slim led me to a set of dilapidated wooden bleachers about six rows high and running the length of the arena.  “Watch your step,” he cautioned.  “A lot of these boards haven’t been replaced in a while.”  We sat down in the third row.  Slim pointed into the arena and, between gunshots, explained the rules of cowboy-mounted shooting.

“Here, lookit,” he began.  “This next rider’s name is Pearl.  She’s a beginning rider but she wanted to see what this sport was all about.”  I looked where he indicated and saw a woman in her sixties on a paint horse entering the arena.  She had one pistol in her hand and another in her belt.  “Okay, she’s ready to make her run.  When she passes that laser timing mechanism she’ll start the timer.  There she goes!  Go on, Pearl!”  Panhandle Slim took off his hat and waved it, revealing a healthy head of hair that I suspected owed its unusual brown-red hue to a popular men’s hair-coloring system.  Maybe more than one.

Pearl chose to let her horse walk the course, which allowed her to get close to each balloon, level her pistol, and shoot it.  “The pistols are filled with blanks,” Slim explained.  “But each blank has enough black powder in it to break a balloon from anywhere inwards of twenty feet.  The first five balloons are spaced out, so you have to ride a kind of zigzag course to get to them all.  There at the end, Pearl has to ride around that barrel, holster her first pistol, take out her second pistol, shoot those next five balloons in a straight line, then race to the finish line.”

Race was a kind word for Pearl’s riding, but she managed to break every balloon and finish the course without getting bucked off.  I applauded when she had finished.

I stayed and talked to Panhandle Slim for another fifteen minutes or so and by the end of that time, I felt I understood and appreciated the rules of this new sport—including the required authentic cowboy getup.  In fact, it was similar to horsebow archery, which I had already planned to take up.  Slim told me he was a local horse trainer who had just switched to cowboy-mounted shooting from endurance riding.  He gave me his cell phone number and told me he’d be glad to answer any questions I might think of later.  Then he went off with several other shooters to discuss the lineup for the next round.

As the day progressed, I learned who the best riders were and where they were from, I learned the pistol of choice, and I learned that many of the winners would get cash prizes.  I was writing some of this down on my yellow legal pad, glancing at each rider as they entered the ring and ran the course.  It was getting after noon when I saw a young woman on a gray horse enter the ring.  She was having trouble holding back the huge gelding but finally got the go-ahead from the ring steward and shot forward so fast that she lost her hat, revealing strawberry-blonde pigtails flying.  She missed almost half the balloons but she and her horse were clearly having the time of their lives.  Her raw score was somewhere in the middle of her group, but she giggled and joked as she handed her pistols to the ammunition suppliers to reload.   There was something familiar about this girl, I realized.  Was it her hair?  Her voice?  She dismounted and was greeted by a handsome young man who—all smiles—gave her a hug and a kiss.  All I noticed about him at first was that he was one of the only men at the event not dressed in cowboy gear.  Then I did a doubletake and realized that the girl’s boyfriend was our very own Mark Patterson, Cub Reporter
.