Good Time Girl (10 page)

T
HEY CHANGED PLACES
at the halfway point, the two hitchhiking cowboys stretching out in the back of the truck to catch a little shut-eye, while Tom and Roxanne shifted to the front seat. Rooster, as usual, unfolded himself along the back seat to sleep, unable to stomach the close confines of the camper top. They rolled into Canon City, Colorado, just in time for the afternoon rodeo. Barely.

Tom took first place on the back of a high-rolling bronc named White Lightning, which was enough to nudge him one step up in the standings. Rooster pulled down second, squeezed out of first by the extra two points won by Clay Madison. They packed up as soon as their events were over, pushing hard to make the two and a half hour drive to Elizabeth in time for the evening performance.

Tom drew a respectable ride in his second rodeo of the day, pulling down third on a dun-colored pile driver that hit the ground stiff-legged, snapping Tom’s teeth together and sending a jolt up his spine with each buck. Rooster drew the Widow Maker. The animal was a particularly bad-tempered two thousand pound Brahman with a reputation for going after downed cowboys. He was dangerous in the chutes, too, and had been known to rear up and fall over backward on top of the cowboys who tried to ride him. If a cowboy could stick, he’d be sure to pull down a top score. But not many had been able to stick. In the three years the Widow Maker had been on the circuit, two cowboys had died from the injuries he’d inflicted. Countless others wore scars inflicted by his hooves and horns.

Knowing all this, Roxanne paled when she heard the name of the bull Rooster had drawn. Rooster rubbed his hands together and cackled with glee; a ride to the horn on the Widow Maker would earn him a guaranteed first place, and put him ahead of Clay Madison. The crowd roared and stamped their approval when the pairing was announced over the loudspeaker, anticipating a good show in their favorite event.

Bull riding was the most popular event at the rodeo because—in Roxanne’s opinion, anyway—it was the bloodiest, most dangerous event, with the most potential for the “wrecks” so beloved by the fans and the camera crews from ESPN and the Nashville Network. As a general rule, it drew the smallest, most compact cowboys as competitors. The late great Lane Frost, who’d been killed by a bull named Taking Care of Business, hadn’t been much bigger than a jockey. Ty Murray, the All-Around Cowboy for three years running, was only five feet six inches tall—and that was only, some said, if you measured him with his boots on.

“It all has to do with gravity,” Rooster explained earnestly as Roxanne pinned his number on his back and tried to pretend she wasn’t the least bit concerned about his safety during the upcoming ride. “A man’s center of gravity is in his chest, see? And the closer the center of gravity is to the bull, the easier it is to stay on. That’s why you ain’t gonna see any six-footers like Tom at the bull ridin’ finals. Gravity will do ’em in every time.”

It was gravity that did Rooster in at the Elizabeth rodeo. Gravity and a bull named Widow Maker. The animal came out of the chute like a rocket shot off the launching pad at NASA. Its massive body rose straight into the air, twisting as it toppled the cowboy on its back into the dust and rolled over on him.

Roxanne surged to her feet with the rest of the crowd, her hands pressed to her mouth to stifle the scream that rose to her lips. Paralyzed, unable to move, she watched the bullfighters rush in, standing between the downed cowboy and the enraged bull, distracting him before he could do any more damage, driving him out of the arena and into the pens behind it. And then Tom was vaulting over the fence from behind the chutes, beating the paramedics to his fallen friend. Roxanne shook off the paralysis that gripped her and raced down the grandstand steps, fighting her way through the milling crowd, ignoring the shout of the security guard as she ran through the gate that led to the staging area.

Rooster was laid out on an examining table in the medical tent when she got there, his eyes closed, his lips white and compressed, his fingers clutching the rounded edges of the table in a white-knuckled grip while the medics worked over him. His flak jacket had already been removed and lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. The right leg of his chaps had been unbuckled and folded back, the leg of his jeans split and torn open to mid-thigh. One medic poked and prodded his exposed leg, while another took care of checking vital signs. Roxanne approached the head of the table, out of the way of the medical personnel, and reached out, touching Rooster’s white, drawn face with a gentle hand.

“Rooster?”

His eyes fluttered open. “Hey, Roxy.” He managed a smile for her. “Tom,” he said, looking up at the man who stood behind her. “How bad is it, pard?”

“Not too bad,” Tom said. “Doesn’t look like anything’s broken.” He glanced at the medic poking at Rooster’s leg for confirmation.

“Nope, nothing broken,” the medic said cheerfully. “Nothing bleeding, either, ’cept for a few scrapes. The knee’s already swelled up like a balloon though, and it’s gonna be badly bruised. Could be just a sprain.” He shrugged. “Could be torn ligaments. I can’t say for sure without X rays. You’re gonna have to take him over to the hospital in town to find that out.”

“No hospital,” said Rooster. “No time. I gotta ride tomorrow in Fort Collins.”

“Rooster!” Roxanne was appalled. “You have to go to the hospital. That bull rolled right over on top of you. All two thousand pounds of him. You might have internal bleeding.”

The medic who’d been checking vital signs looked up at that. “Doubt it,” he said as he released the blood pressure cuff from around Rooster’s arm. “Pressure’s normal. If he was bleeding inside it’d be way down.”

“There’s still his knee,” Roxanne insisted. “He needs to get it X-rayed.”

“I ain’t goin’ to no hospital, so just get that thought right out of your head.” Rooster struggled to sit up, shifting to swing his legs over the side of the table. His face paled a bit and the breath hissed out from between his teeth but he managed to stay upright without swaying. “Hell, this ain’t nothin’. I just twisted the damned thing, is all. I’ve done worse trippin’ over my own feet on the dance floor. ’Sides, there ain’t a bull rider in the world who don’t have bad knees. It comes with the territory. Just slap some ice on it,” he said to the medic, “and give me a coupl’a pain pills and I’ll be good as new.”

“Good as new! You can’t even stand up.” Roxanne parked herself in front of him, preventing him from doing just that, and jammed her hands on her hips. “With the condition that knee’s in, I doubt you could even crawl.” Her voice rose with her agitation, her New England accent becoming crisper and sharper with each syllable. “So just how the
hell
do you think you’re going to be in any condition to ride tomorrow?”

Rooster grinned. “Hotter than a firecracker,” he said admiringly.

Roxanne folded her arms across her chest, refusing to be charmed.

Rooster sighed. “I don’t hafta walk to be able to ride, Roxy.” He looked to the man standing behind her for confirmation. “Tell her, Tom.”

Roxanne whirled around. “Yes, tell him, Tom,” she said. “Make him go to the hospital.”

“Rooster knows what he’s doing,” Tom said. “If he says he doesn’t need to go to the hospital, he doesn’t need to go. And I’m not about to try and make him.”

“Oh, for crying out loud! What is it with you guys?” Roxanne’s fulminating glare took in not only Rooster and Tom, but all the other battered and bruised cowboys being tended to in the medical tent. “It’s that stupid cowboy tradition, isn’t it? It wouldn’t be manly to admit you’re hurt, would it? No, of course not! You could have six bleeding wounds, two broken ankles and a concussion, but you’d still have to suck it in and cowboy up, just to prove you have real try. God forbid, any of you should admit you’re hurt or in pain. The world as we know it might come to an end.”

“Tom rode once with a broken collarbone,” Rooster said when she paused for breath. “At the Mesquite Rodeo, wasn’t it, Tom?”

Tom nodded.

“Did you have a concussion that day, too? Or was it just the collarbone?”

“Just the collarbone,” Tom said, his lips quirking up at the outraged expression on Roxanne’s face. “The concussion was at the Bowie Rodeo a year ago last May.”

“That’s right, I remember now.” Rooster nodded. “It was just the collarbone that day in Mesquite,” he said to Roxanne. “He had to have the bone reset after the last go-round, but it sure was a pretty ride.”

“Idiots!” She threw her hands up in exasperation. “You’re all idiots. Morons. I wash my hands of you. You can all kill yourselves for all I care,” she said, and stomped out of the medical tent with the cowboys’ delighted laughter following behind her.

S
HE DIDN’T WASH HER HANDS
of them, though. Instead, she read the final chapters of Harry Potter to them by flashlight, keeping Tom awake during the long nighttime drive to Fort Collins, keeping Rooster’s mind off the throbbing pain in his knee. The next day at the rodeo arena, when his knee had turned ten shades of purple and swollen to the size of a cantaloupe, despite the constant icing, she was right there at his side, offering pain pills and sympathy, ready to help him hobble over to the chutes if that’s what he wanted.

It was Tom who convinced him to turn out. “You drew a piss-poor bull, anyway, a real dink, so you probably wouldn’t place no matter how good you rode,” he said. “And, hell, any cowboy who’s ranked in the top ten can afford to take one goddamned day off to rest up.”

Rooster insisted on riding in Casper, though. There was good money to be had there, and he’d drawn a decent ride. And young Clay Madison was steadily advancing in the ranks behind him.

During the long frantic Fourth of July weekend, they did Riverton and Hot Springs, Worland and Cody, Billings and Bighorn, and half a dozen other small towns in quick succession, three rodeos a day sometimes, when scheduling and distance made it possible. Somewhere along the way, Roxanne took over the domestic duties for what had become their little family. Mostly out of self-defense against widening thighs and clogged arteries.

“I refuse to eat another greasy hamburger at another greasy truck stop,” she said, her arms folded over her chest in a way that her traveling companions knew meant she’d come to the end of her rope—and theirs. “From now on, we eat normal food, like normal people. Vegetables,” she elaborated, when they just looked at her. “Fresh fruit. Salads. Whole-wheat bread.”

“I had a salad last night with my dinner,” Tom said, just to aggravate her. “Vegetables, too.”

“Wilted iceberg lettuce with gloppy pink dressing is not a salad.” She sniffed disdainfully. “And canned green beans cooked in bacon grease do not qualify as a vegetable in my book.”

She took the truck the next day while they were competing and found a Wal-Mart. When it was time to stop for dinner, she demanded they bypass the easy-off, easy-on, fast-food joints and truck stops, directing them, instead, to pull over at the next rest area.

“There’s a camp stove in the back of the truck,” she said, wrapping the sleeves of one of Tom’s shirts around her waist like an apron to protect her last clean pair of pants.

She’d been reduced to wearing a pair of her pre-Roxy khaki slacks. They were conservatively cut, of course, with a pleated front and a cuffed hem. Paired with one of her snug little tank tops and her red boots, with a bandana threaded through the belt loops instead of her shiny alligator belt with the gold buckle, she thought she’d achieved a sort of funky urban-cowgirl-meets-Connecticut-Yankee kind of chic. At least, nobody’d laughed when they’d seen her coming.

“The propane tank is in the back seat next to the cooler,” she continued, ordering them to fetch and carry as easily as she did her students. “Utensils and paper plates are in the bag with the groceries. By the time you’ve washed up, I’ll have some veggie sticks ready for you to munch on.”

A half an hour later they were dining on skinless, boneless grilled chicken breasts, a green salad with fat-free dressing, and whole-wheat rolls. Rooster grumbled and rolled his eyes when she put the grilled chicken in front of him—“I generally like my chicken fried,” he said—but he ate every morsel and asked for seconds.

“Since you were such good boys and cleaned your plates—” she pulled another container out of her magic bag of foodstuffs “—you get dessert.” She placed an aluminum tray of frosted brownies between them on the picnic table. “I stopped at a bakery on the way back from the Wal-Mart,” she said, delighted with their reaction to her surprise.

It was later, as they were loading the camp stove and supplies back into the truck that she mentioned the laundry. “I didn’t get a chance to stop by a Laundromat today. But I will tomorrow while you’re competing. If you’ll give me your things, I’ll wash them at the same time I do mine.”

“You want my skivvies?” Rooster said, scandalized.

It was Roxanne’s turn to roll her eyes. “I’ve seen men’s underwear before, Rooster. I’ve got three brothers.”

“Yeah, well, you ain’t seen mine before.”

She put her hands on her hips. “You aren’t going to have time to do any of your own laundry in the foreseeable future,” she said. “And if you don’t do any laundry, then you’ll have to wear what you’ve been wearing for the last two days. And if that happens, you’re riding in the back of the truck until you do have time to do it because you’re already beginning to smell like one of those bulls you ride.” She smiled sweetly. “But it’s up to you, of course.”

Tom, who wasn’t shy about his skivvies and knew a good thing when he saw it, handed over his dirty laundry without a fuss.

T
HEY STAYED AT A MOTEL
after the last rodeo of the weekend in Miles City to ensure a full night’s sleep before tackling the nine-hour drive to the one billed as the
Daddy of ’em All
—Frontier Days in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Amazingly enough, cowboys considered the
Daddy of ’em All
to be a vacation of sorts. The event lasted for ten days, with a rodeo in the same fairground arena every day. As there was no traveling from venue to venue, the cowboys got to bed down in the same place for a while, be it in a motel or a camper parked on the fairgrounds, and eat food that didn’t come from a greasy-spoon truck stop. Those who had families they rarely saw could have them come to Cheyenne and be assured they’d have long stretches of uninterrupted time to spend together between the eight-second rides. There was top-name country-western entertainment nearly every day after the rodeo, and all the usual fairground attractions, plus Indian Dancing exhibitions, art shows and a special performance by the United States Air Force Thunderbirds.