LITMIR.BIZ

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the stands they ran ahead of him, looking for the car, discussing what they were going to do in the tub. Mike was going to put a matchstick on a cake of soap and sail it for a boat, and June was going to put her head under water and blow bubbles.

      Lon felt like singing. It had come off all right. He had found out what he wanted to know; they weren’t afraid of horses, buckers meant no more to them now than—before. He could stay on the homestead, and stick to what he knew best. And besides—nobody from home had seen him at the rodeo; he’d gotten away with it. Everything was just fine, for the first time in a long time.

      CHAPTER II

      IT WAS a good bar for dudes, Vera Mae thought. Copper-metal walls made everybody look healthy and sunburned. They made old Duke down the bar look dark as a saddle, and what they did to Turk, leaning next to Duke, was almost to make him disappear in the gloom, just a hat and a shirt with no face in between.

      She told the mark, “You see that fellow down there with the white hat on? We call him Turk. Want to know why?”

      For all the fat crowding his eyes half-shut, his lips were thin and cruel. He said, “Shoot, pahdneh. Want another dose of this snake-pizen?”

      She nodded. She no longer wanted to tell him about Turk. But she had to go on talking. He hadn’t bought her dinner yet. He hadn’t been steered past the store where there was the silver bracelet that could be taken back for half-price tomorrow. He hadn’t— “He’s an Indian,” she said. “Osage, I think. Anyways, he’s from Oklahoma. And one time, in Santa Fe, they didn’t want to serve him a drink.”

      The bartender put another old-fashioned in front of her, and the lop-ear said, “ ’Cause he was drunk?”

      “No. It’s against the law to sell drinks to Indians.”

      “Sure,” the thin lips said helpfully, “it makes ’em go crazy. Firewater.”

      Oh God. And it wasn’t six-thirty yet. Vera Mae figured, I can con him and ditch him by nine-thirty—well, ten—but then how about the rest of the evening? Sit in a hotel room. Get drunk and pass out. I gotta cut down on drinking, I’ll be an old bag before I’m thirty— “So the bartender says, ‘Pardon me, but are you an Indian?’ and Turk—his real name’s Dick Lacekin—says, ‘No, I’m a Turk. I got my union card in the cigarette blender’s union right here some place.’ And with that the bartender—he was almost a blond—rears back and starts spouting something that musta been Turkish.”

      Under the bar a fat hand had come to rest on her saddle pants, halfway up from the knee. She dropped her own hand over it, to keep him interested and restrained both, and felt the coolness and size of the diamond in his ring. A fat mark. “So Turk just looks at him, while the rest of us get ready for fireworks, and Turk says, ‘I can tell from your accent you’re from North Turkey. Well, damn you, suh, when you speak to a South Turk, call him cunnel,’ and he walks out.”

      The lop-ear thought this over. “So he didn’t get his drink.”

      “That’s right, Daddy,” Vera Mae said. “I gotta go to the john.” Behind her, Fat Eyes was chuckling. That was the way to handle him, maybe. Just use a half-dirty word now and then, so he’d know she was his kind. Well, better luck tomorrow. They were working their way up north, she and Duke and a dozen of the other boys and gals. She stopped by Duke. “Hey, if you’re going to the committee office, put me down for steer-stopping, will you?”

      Duke said, “The prize ain’t worth gettin’ dusty for.”

      “That’s why there won’t be many out. That’s why I’m liable to get some money.”

      Turk said, “It’s a long an’ weary world, friends.”

      “G’wan, Indian, you’re drunk.”

      Coming out of the ladies’ room she was facing the lobby of the hotel instead of the bar. She had to stop and think, and then she remembered you turned right for the bar; the rest rooms did double duty, you could get to them from bar or lobby either, only from the bar—

      She was feeling her drinks more than she’d thought, and she crossed the lobby to the coffee shop, and drank a cup black and hot enough to scorch the roof of her mouth. She’d better hurry, the mark would be getting impatient, but why hurry; what else was there for him to do in this jerkwater town? The local gals, in their white blouses and dark blue slacks or black skirts, would not care to be seen with him, and they wouldn’t know what to do with him if they got him.

      But she knew.

      Sorry for yourself, Vera Mae? ’Cause you got no call to. You bought just what you’ve got, and you like it. Got a horse, standing pretty out at the fairgrounds eating and his feed bill paid. Got a saddle and a rope, a real linen rope, good boots, clothes—and you’ve got some of the swellest friends anybody ever had. Duke, Turk—all cowboys.

      She couldn’t remember the time when that wasn’t what she wanted. The other girls had thought she was crazy because she’d always swap a Greta Garbo or a Ginger Rogers picture for a Gene Autry or a Bill Boyd, and she’d gone around talking with a German accent for weeks after seeing Marlene Dietrich in “Destry Rides Again.”

      First, she’d hung around the riding academies on the edge of Griffith Park, and sometimes if you kidded them, the men’d let you ride free on weekdays, when there weren’t many customers and the plugs—only she thought they were wonderful, real cow ponies—were in danger of going Monday-morning lame. From there it had been just a step to being taken to the Rancho or the Palace Barn for dancing, and it was after one of those dances that one of the fellows had taken her back to the barn, and a bale of hay. From then on, she could ride all she wanted to. Good horses, too, out in the Valley, in Reseda and Northridge, where they’d have parties in the tackrooms, and hardly anybody ever went into the house at all unless it was to powder her nose.

      Swell people, guys and gals who rode double for Republic and Universal and Tim McCoy or just rode, as henchies and posses in pictures, or maybe were wranglers or took care of the stock for the actors. She was only sixteen, but they took her right into the gang, and she almost got a Guild card herself, only her folks found out how little she’d been to school, and raised hell . . .

      She came out of the coffee shop, and moved slowly toward the bar. She looked down. Her boots needed a shine; there was a stand over in the corner by the barbershop. Only, how long would a mark wait, nursing a drink at a bar?

      She’d gone back to school, then, and only seen her friends on Friday and Saturday nights, and daytimes Saturday and Sunday, and it was one Saturday night when they’d all gone down to Pico to hear a fellow that used to be at the Rancho play the guitar that she met Kenny and they went down to Tijuana the next day and got married.

      Vera Mae, snap out of it, people will stare at you, standing in the middle of a lobby this way, not knowing which way to turn. Get back in the bar, and go to work.

      Then she saw the rancher she’d been talking to out in the grandstand come out of the restaurant. He was carrying a tray, his run-over boots wobbling some on the carpeted floor. Taking dinner up to his kids . . .

      Lonnie Verdoux.

      She walked over and punched the elevator button for him, and all at once she knew that Fat Stuff was going to have a long, lonely wait in the bar.

      CHAPTER III

      THE TRAY was too heavy, and the plates were too hot. The gray-haired lady in the hotel restaurant had been real pleased to be fixing a supper for two little children to eat in their hotel room. She’d put a plate of pickles and celery and olives on from the regular dinner, saying the hotel could spare them, and she’d put all the hot food in fancy plates that had boiling water under them, and the result was, Lon didn’t know could he make it to the elevator and press the button and get in and close the door and—

      A voice said, “Let me help you, cowboy,” and there was the gal called Vera Mae, punching the button for him and

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