Sometimes It Goes the Other Way
Jack pointed the pickup south, heard no discouraging word from Ennis, and kept on going ‘til dark while the silence solidified like a cab-full of wet cement. Orange and green neon of a package store painted a garish path across wet pavement to a motel on the other side, and Ennis said, this’ll do. In a blink, they were behind closed doors, passing a bottle of Dickel Brothers and testing the load limits of the sway-backed bed. Two, maybe three, blinks and they were too spent to move out of the mess they’d made, sheened in sweat, panting like hounds on a hot day, and Jack reached for his smokes asking Ennis if he’d knocked that bug out a his ass. Ennis took the cigarette from Jack, answered slow, paying out words like a skein of yarn, said it sure was a shame what happened to JFK, Kennedy had it all, the whole ball a wax, looks, smarts, women, money, power, and none of it was any good to him against a bullet out a the blue. If somebody like the President could be struck down like that, what did it matter what Ennis del Mar did with his life?
“Matters to me, friend,” Jack said real quick. “Come on, Ennis. If none of it matters, what’s to stop you ‘n’ me ranchin’ up together?”
“Money might stop us.”
Jack smoked hard on it, eyes roaming, snagged by a glint of light, focusing on his belt buckle. “There’s always the state sport a Wyomin’. Could rodeo ‘til we scrape up a stake.”
“How you figure that? You got a think, Jack. Neither a us got a horse. Hell, we ain’t even got the entry fee if we want a keep eatin’ for a while yet.”
Jack gentled Ennis down some, lips to his ear, told him they didn’t need no pony to ride bulls, and if Ennis didn’t cotton to that, he could work with the stock, there was always work for somebody willin to muck out stalls, they could live cheap, bunk together, save up. If Ennis didn’t share Jack’s sunny outlook, he didn’t let on. Rodeo was as good a place to be as any, he reckoned, and Jack knew his way around the circuit, wouldn’t be like they was goin to Siberia, and the notion of puttin more distance between him and Alma appealed to him. “Got a tell you,” he said. “Alma seen us.”
Jack didn’t ask what she saw, just said it was time to fish or cut bait ‘cause the rodeo season was windin down, and after that prospects were limited. Ennis said, sure enough, and with a road laid out for him, took the governor off his throttle, blazed new trails into Jack and into uncharted territory less tangible. Which is how they come to end up in Childress, Texas.
To be continued.