Handful of Sky (2 page)

But even John’s wife hadn’t been able to keep him from fulfilling his promise. Walter had seen the same
determination in his brother’s eyes he now saw hidden deep in Shallie’s, so deep that she probably didn’t even know its strength. But she would, Walter had thought that morning, if she’s bound on this course she’s chosen for herself. She’ll have to draw deeply on every inner resource she possesses.

So, he’d made his voice sound jovial and carefree and he’d said: “Hell, you don’t need me anymore. You’ve been doing most of the work now for the past two years. You can run a rodeo as well as I can any day.”

Then it was Shallie’s turn for a display of false bravado. She swung into the cab of the truck and gave her uncle a jaunty wave as Hoskins headed the truck loaded with bucking horses, bulls, and steers east toward the Texas Panhandle.

*  *  *

The truck lurched as Hoskins applied a lead foot to the brake. Shallie was thrown forward, her head banging against the windshield. From the trailer behind them came startled neighs as the horses were thrown against each other.

“Could you use a gentler touch on the brakes?” Shallie fought to keep the annoyance out of her voice. The one thing guaranteed to bring her to anger more quickly than any other was the slightest hint of mistreatment of an animal. “I’m responsible for the safety of that stock.”

“Why are
you
responsible? They ain’t your horses.”
Hoskins’s surly statement managed to both challenge Shallie’s authority and completely change the subject from his erratic driving.

“Actually they are half mine.” Shallie’s statement came out tight and stilted. She knew that she had to establish herself, and that with employees like Hoskins it was a tricky process, but nervous tension goaded her into a hasty response. “My father left his half of the Double L to me in his will. But that’s not what’s important. Part of your job is to make sure that all of Double L’s stock is treated well. If you can’t or won’t do that, maybe this isn’t the job for you.”

“Does that mean you’re firing me?” Hoskins asked with a smirk.

Shallie knew she’d made a mistake. She wasn’t prepared to back up her threat. Without her uncle, they would be desperately shorthanded. She needed all the help she could get, even if it had to come from a reptile like Wade Hoskins.

“Ma’am?” Hoskins prodded her when she didn’t answer. “Or maybe you’d be happier if I called you sir?”

He was testing her, exploring her limits. Knowing that she couldn’t produce today’s rodeo without his help, Hoskins felt free to use any means he could to assuage the affront to his pride which a female superior represented.

“Shallie’s always been fine in the past. Why don’t we just stick with that?”

“All right,
Shallie.
” Hoskins pronounced her name with a drawn-out slur which hinted at an intimacy that made her shudder.

The remainder of the long drive passed in a grim silence punctuated by an occasional lurch when Hoskins tromped on the brake or accelerator pedal to express his continuing protest against the “boss woman.”

B
y the time they reached
their destination, a tumbleweed-blown town, a tight band of tension was squeezing Shallie’s forehead. They drove through the High Plains town to the small arena on its outskirts. The sun had taken the bite out of the late spring air. Shallie shrugged off her jacket and mittens.

A few rows of wooden bleachers surrounded a freshly plowed area. They pulled the truck to a halt at the end of the arena, where the bucking chutes for the horses and bulls had been constructed. A homemade sign reading “Not Responsible for Accidents” was posted above the rickety wooden chutes. Another truck bearing the Double L logo pulled in behind them. Shallie jumped out and went to the back to check on the horses. They neighed gently at the approach of the familiar figure who was always so generous with chunks of apple and carrot and scoops of sweet, molasses-laced grain.

Shallie was relieved to find all the horses fit and frisky-looking, as if they were itching to be turned loose in the soft dirt of the arena where they could buck and snort to their hearts’ content. At least she never had to worry about her rapport with the horses. That had been a source of joy for her ever since her father sat her on her first pony. If only humans could be as amenable, she thought, searching for Hoskins and Pecos Cahill. Hoskins had already reached her other hired hand, the driver of the truck containing a load of calves and steers for the roping events. Shallie was certain that Hoskins was wasting no time in relating to his shorter, plumper counterpart all the indignities he had suffered at the hands of the boss woman. Cahill looked her way. When she caught him staring, he turned back guiltily.

Feeling alone and isolated, Shallie headed for the area behind the chutes where the rodeo cowboys rigged up for their events. She was intercepted by a tall, thin man carrying a clipboard. His face was stretched long with worry.

“Shallie, thank God you’re here. Where’s your uncle? I need to consult with him about which horses have been drawn for the bareback.”

“He’s not here, Mr. Eckles,” Shallie told the rodeo committeeman who had hired the Double L to put on his town’s annual rodeo. “I’ll be producing this show.”

“You?” Eckles looked at her in disbelief.

“Yes,
me,”
Shallie sighed. “Is there something wrong with that?”

“Not a thing.” Mr. Eckles smiled and Shallie realized how defensive she’d become during her years in rodeo, having learned through experience that it was a world where women are generally regarded first as potential conquests. If they wanted to be thought of as anything else, they had to fight for that recognition. It was a struggle Shallie sometimes wearied of.

“Here’s a list of the horses that were drawn and their riders,” the committeeman said, handing her a sheet of paper. “Think you can have them up by starting time? We’ve already got some spectators filling up those stands.”

Shallie glanced up. The stands were indeed beginning to fill up. A teenage couple sauntered in, both wearing identical floral-print Western shirts and tall straw hats. They were followed by a slim woman holding a baby in one arm and leading a three-year-old with the other. Both children wore tiny pairs of leather boots. Her husband sashayed in after her, twirling a toothpick between two back molars.

A covey of potbellied old men in white shirts and suspenders had congregated close to the trucks and were talking and pointing toward the deceptively docile-looking horses. Shallie had overheard enough old-timers’ talk to know that they were commenting on what a sorry-looking lot of horseflesh they used in rodeos nowadays.
Then they’d trade tales about the “really rank” horses that had bucked and snorted across the prairies and later the arenas of their youth. And how if these drugstore cowboys thought they were so hot they should have tried to “fork down into the saddle on the back of one
them
boogers.”

Shallie nodded a hasty good-bye to the rodeo committeeman and ran as fast as her boots would allow across the spongy earth of the arena. She scrambled up the metal gates leading to the catwalk that ran behind the chute and overlooked a dusty sea of denim and leather churned up by a dozen bareback riders preparing for their event.

In the center of the chaos of cowboys rifling through the canvas duffel bags containing their gear, helping one another to pin contestant numbers onto the backs of shirts, and testing their rigging, was one cowboy limbering up. He was seated on the dusty ground, his legs angled out from him. As he bent his long torso forward, the muscles of his shoulders swelled and strained against the tight cloth of his yoke-back shirt in a way that caused her breath to catch. He stretched still more, grabbing a polished boot with both his hands and pulling himself down even farther to limber the powerful muscles in his thighs. Shallie couldn’t see the cowboy’s face but noticed a knot of scar tissue at the base of the middle finger on his right hand.

Shallie watched the almost ritualized movements
with satisfaction. This was the one single moment she liked best. There was something about the quiet intensity of the contestants as they prepared for their few seconds in the arena that made her feel she knew what the director of a ballet, the producer of a play, went through in those final backstage moments before the curtain went up. Being a rodeo contractor wasn’t so terribly different. Without her and the stock she provided, this drama between man and beast couldn’t be played out.

As she turned from the scene a knot of tension tightened her nerves. Hoskins and Cahill were stretched out in a patch of shade beneath the bleachers, finishing off both a cigarette and their dissection of her.

“Wade, Pecos,” she called, capturing their unwilling attention. “Get those broncs unloaded. We’re here to put on a rodeo.” Her tone held no room for argument. The pair lethargically dragged themselves up and moved toward the horse trailer.

Shallie had to work twice as hard as her hired hands to compensate for their deliberately sluggish pace. Her anger seemed to fuel the determination that had driven her for the past two years: She
would
be taken seriously in the world of rodeo. She wasn’t going to be defeated by a couple of Neanderthals like Hoskins and Cahill just because they had trouble taking orders from a woman. Working from the list Mr. Eckles had given her, Shallie separated out the broncs that were slated for the first go-round.

“Hoskins,” she called out as she drove the fractious horses from the truck down to the bucking chutes, “get the gate on six.” With an exaggerated slowness, the beer-bellied hand crawled up on the catwalk and manned the sliding metal gate that partitioned off the last enclosure. Shallie drove a snorting dun-colored bronc down the metal-sided aisle. Pecos stood above the chutes on the catwalk yelling until the dun reached the end, then Wade lowered the gate to trap him. The air filled with the sound of steel gates clanging, horses snorting, rough cries, and dust as they repeated the same procedure until each of the six chute divisions held a bareback horse raring to be turned loose.

By the time Shallie had gotten the bareback broncs sorted out and ready for the first event, the stands were filled. Nervousness hung in the air as thick as ozone behind the chutes. She looked into the contestants’ faces and saw nothing there except iron concentration as they set their minds to the task at hand. The public-address system crackled to life and the rodeo announcer began his spiel.

“Welcome, folks, to our thirty-eighth annual Rodeo and Cowboy Reunion. As you know, the rodeo is held each year at this time to give all our local hands a chance to show their stuff and pick up a little of that prize money. This year, for the fifth year in a row, stock is being furnished by the Double L Rodeo Contracting Company out of Mountain View, New Mexico. Walt Larkin and his crew
have always done a real fine job for us and we’re pleased to have ’em back with us. Take a bow, Walt, wherever you are.”

Shallie glanced up at the wooden box built over the bucking chutes, which held the announcer and a few officials. Mr. Eckles was whispering in the announcer’s ear. The announcer, a florid man in a maroon double-knit Western suit and string tie, covered his microphone and pointed down to where Shallie stood. She saw disbelief crease the man’s chubby face.

“Heh-heh, folks, excuse me,” the announcer chuckled over the PA. “Appears I’ve made a mistake. Walt’s niece, Shallie Larkin, will be producing this year’s rodeo. Let’s wish the little lady the best of luck.”

Because you think I’ll need it,
Shallie fumed as she turned on a smile she didn’t feel in response to a thin smattering of polite applause. On a couple of the older, male faces in the crowd, she read open resentment.
They’re mad,
Shallie realized. Mad that a “little lady” was trying to invade their cozy, masculine world. Well, she thought determinedly, it would take more than a few sour stares to chase her away.

“Now, let’s welcome the Cavalcade Riding Academy,” the announcer continued over the scratchy PA. A troupe of flamboyantly costumed equestrians thundered into the arena, executing a series of intricate maneuvers on horseback. The announcer broke in.

“It gives me great pleasure to introduce this year’s rodeo queen from Coalla County, Miss Bridgie Sue Gates.” A heavily made-up young woman wearing a kelly-green pants suit with a white hat and white boots galloped full tilt into the arena, carrying an American flag unfurled behind her.

“Ladies and gentlemen, our National Anthem.”

Those words signaled a halt for Shallie, and suddenly the banging of steel gates and the shouts of her helpers stopped. As a vintage recording of the “Star Spangled Banner” blared over the loudspeaker, hats were whipped from foreheads that the sun rarely touched, and heads were lowered.

Shallie too lowered her head, but it was to sneak a surreptitious glance at the list of horses and riders to double-check that each one had been loaded in the right chute. She went down the list: Zeus, Mercury, Vulcan, and the others. She knew each of them like an old friend and had named them accordingly. Zeus, a dun-colored gelding, was the strongest horse in the string; Mercury, the fleetest; Vulcan, the most explosive. She’d taken the names from mythology, feeling they fit the animals’ innate nobility better than the standard, hackneyed rodeo names—Rocket, Midnight, Widowmaker. Once people accepted the novelty of the names, she was often asked why she hadn’t used the most obvious name of all—Pegasus, the mythical winged horse. But
Shallie was saving that name, keeping it in reserve for a truly special horse. There could only be one horse fit to be christened Pegasus and she hadn’t seen that animal yet.

Before the final chords of the National Anthem had scratched into silence, Shallie was hurrying the bareback riders along.

“Come on, gentlemen,” Shallie called down to the cowboys, repeating the words she’d heard her uncle use so many times, “let’s ride some horses.”

The cowboys swung up onto the catwalk carrying their leather riggings. With some help from her, they set the riggings on the back slope of the horses’ withers. Shallie watched one cowboy, a fresh-faced boy no more than sixteen, wearing bright red chaps. After he and a buddy had gotten his rigging cinched down tight on the horse he’d drawn, he grabbed hold of the railing and squatted, bouncing up and down to loosen the muscles in his legs, which were drawing tight with fear.