“Apple martini,” a middle-aged woman said. “Where’s all the good-lookin’ cowboys? I was told they were six to every woman over here.”
Her light-brown hair sported blond highlights straight from a bottle. She wore a slinky little gold-sequined top that didn’t have enough material in it to sag a clothesline and tight-fitting jeans. Her boots had sharp toes and walking heels and they didn’t come cheap. Eel seldom got put on a sales rack. The best makeup in the world couldn’t fill in the crow’s-feet or the lines around her mouth, but the dim lights in the Honky Tonk were kind. She might pass for forty after four beers. After six she could probably convince a cowboy that she was thirty-five. It would take a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Black Label to make her twenty-nine.
“Got to give ’em time to wash the dirt from behind their ears and brush the hay off their boots. This is hay season. They work until it’s all in. They’ll be along in a little while and you can take your pick. Got bikers until they get here.” Sharlene motioned toward a table of Amos’s friends. “And those Harleys they rode in on cost more than a custom-ordered pickup truck, darlin’.”
The woman rolled her eyes dramatically. “Those old geezers couldn’t keep up with me.”
Sharlene frowned. Amos could out-two-step and outdrink any of the young cowboys. “Be careful. Those old fellows know more about how to treat a woman than the young bucks can learn in a decade.”
“Maybe I got a mind to teach the cowboy, rather than them teach me. Grab ’em young and raise them up to suit me.” The woman smiled.
Sharlene set the martini on the bar. “If you are interested in quantity rather than quality, then take a look at the door. Those three all look teachable.”
The woman wet her lips and stood up straight. “Yum, yum!”
Sharlene leaned on the bar and watched the woman paint an imaginary red laser dot on the prettiest blond cowboy’s belt buckle and head that way with an extra wiggle under her tight jeans and a smile on her face.
Toby Keith had a song on the new jukebox called “I Love This Bar,” and it described the Honky Tonk along with every other beer joint in Texas and Oklahoma. He said that it had lookers, hookers, all-nighters, preppies, and bikers among other things. Well, the lookers had just walked through the doors and the pseudo-hooker was marking her territory. Bikers would be Amos and his crew of retired businessmen who rode up from Dallas a couple of times a week to drink and dance. Preppies came from all four directions to listen to what they called vintage country music and learn to two-step in their loafers with tassels and pleated dress slacks.
Since it was Monday night the new jukebox had been turned off and the old one took center stage. Three songs for a quarter just like in Ruby’s first days had become the Tonk’s trademark. When the last bar owner, Larissa Morley, came to Mingus, she’d been instrumental in putting the news out on the internet that there was a quaint little beer joint just over the border separating Erath and Palo Pinto Counties. It didn’t take long for the word to spread and for Luther to have to count customers to make sure they stayed under the maximum quota for their space.
“Trip to Heaven” by Freddie Hart was playing when the woman stuck her fingers through the young cowboy’s belt loops and led him to the dance floor. Freddie sang about not needing wings to fly and said that he just took a trip to heaven and he didn’t even have to die. If that greenhorn got drunk enough to let her pick him up that night, he’d think he took a trip to heaven, got rejected at the door by Saint Peter, and been sent straight to hell come morning time. He’d have a hellacious hangover and a nasty taste in his mouth when he figured out the sweet young thing he’d gotten lucky with was as old as his mother.
A blushing sting crawled up Sharlene’s neck. What did Holt Jackson think when she passed out cold as a mother-in-law’s kiss in his pickup truck? And if he hadn’t been a gentleman, where would their business relationship be? Lord, what a tangled mess!
The music changed to a slow Alan Jackson song, and the middle-aged woman kept her cowboy on the dance floor for another round.
“What are you smiling about?” Tessa asked.
“Chigger,” Sharlene said.
“Yep,” Tessa agreed.
“What’s a chigger?” a blonde woman asked from a barstool right in front of them. She’d been nursing a beer for the past half hour and brushing off every man who approached her.
Tessa leaned on the bar and explained above the noise of the jukebox and the bootheels on the floor as the dancers did different versions of a fancy two-step. “A few years ago a woman used to come into the Tonk every weekend. Her nickname was Chigger.”
“Was she a hooker?” the girl whispered behind her hand.
Sharlene laughed. “No. Hookers charge and Chigger said sex was too much fun to make a dollar on. She said she could put an itch on a man just like a real chigger, and only a weekend in bed with her could make the itch disappear.”
“What happened to her?” the woman asked.
“She got married, had a baby girl, and is expecting another baby by Christmas. She’s happy as a kitten with its nose in a bowl of warm milk. You’d never guess that she used to try to put the make on every good-lookin’ cowboy who walked through the doors. The Honky Tonk charm worked for her,” Sharlene said.
“I heard about that charm. That’s why I’m here. I heard that more people have met and gotten married out of this beer joint in the last three years than on those internet dating services,” she said. “I’m Loralou, by the way.”
Tessa motioned toward the packed dance floor with a bar rag. “Don’t see anything you like yet, Loralou?”
Loralou shook her head. “Chigger woman got the one I might have liked.”
Tessa patted her hand. “Don’t give up, darlin’. See that big old bouncer back there?”
Loralou glanced at Luther standing in front of the door with his arms across his chest. He was as big as the broad side of a barn. His hair was cropped short and his round face serious. She shivered. “Don’t tell me that he’s interested in me, please. Just looking at him makes me want to run home and hide under the bed.”
Tessa laughed. “He’s harmless unless some idiot starts something in here. What I was about to tell you is that he belongs to me. You get a Chigger itch for a big man, you just remember that you got to go through me to get at him. The rest of the peacocks in here are free territory. You don’t like the way that Chigger woman is trying to superglue her boobs to that cowboy, you go out there and tap her on the shoulder. She creates a problem, Luther sends her out the door and lets the next one in.”
Loralou shook her head. “I’m shy.”
“Shy don’t cut shit in the Tonk. We got charm, darlin’, but you got to make your own miracles. You like the cowboy, then you make a move,” Tessa said.
“Hey, could I get a bucket of Coors, Tessa? Merle just whipped me and now I got to buy a round for all the boys,” Amos said.
A black leather do-rag covered up his bald head with a gray rim showing around the edges. His black vest covered a T-shirt, and black leather chaps covered the front and sides of his jeans. When he went to work the next morning in one of the biggest oil companies in Dallas, he’d be dressed in a three-piece custom-made Italian suit and few people would believe that he rode Harleys a couple of days a week. He’d been Ruby Lee’s best friend and possibly her lover for many years.
Tessa crammed six longneck bottles of Coors into a galvanized milk bucket, shoveled two scoops of ice on top, and handed the bucket to Amos. Sharlene filled an order for three quarts of Miller. When they looked down the bar, Loralou tossed back the rest of her drink, took a deep breath, and plowed right out into the middle of the dance floor. She tapped the Chigger woman on the shoulder and stood back.
The cowboy smiled at Loralou and wrapped his arms around her.
The Chigger woman headed for the bar. “Give me one of them lo
ngneck bottles of Coors. I need some beer on my breath.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sharlene said.
“Damn young cowboys ain’t got a lick of sense. Don’t even appreciate the taste of a good apple martini. I was going to throw him back to the pack anyway before that Sunday school teacher tapped me on the shoulder. I wonder if her preacher knows where she is tonight. If he does, he’s on his knees at the altar praying for her wanton soul. I bet she don’t even know how to two-step,” she said.
“That so?” Sharlene asked. From where she was standing, it looked like Loralou had a real good handle on two-stepping, and the way the cowboy was looking at her, Sharlene wouldn’t be surprised if the Honky Tonk charm had just pierced her heart.
The woman fluffed back her hair and pulled a tube of bright-red lipstick from her hip pocket. She used the long mirror behind the bar to apply a fresh coat and did a lip pop to even it out. A quick smile at her reflection said she thought everything looked wonderful. “There’s got to be a happy medium. Woman with class like me don’t want a man with a foot in the grave and the other on a piece of boiled okra. But them young ones, fun as it would be to break them in, just don’t see a good thing even when it’s lookin’ them in the eye.”
Sharlene set a cold beer in front of her and made change for the bill she laid on the bar. “Guess you are right.”
She downed half the beer, made a face, and pushed it back. “Well, here goes. I’m going hunting again.”
“Good luck,” Sharlene said.
“So when is a cowboy going to claim a barstool and the charm going to work for you?” Tessa asked.
“Never. Three times, remember. A genie only gives three wishes when he floats up out of the lamp. Larissa, Cathy, and Daisy got the wishes. I got the Honky Tonk. Wishes are over for the bartenders. Only the customers get the luck of the draw these days.”
Honky Tonk Christmas
Available now from Sourcebooks Casablanca
About the Author
Carolyn Brown has published more than 100 books, and they have reached an excess of seven million readers. She is a New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly bestselling author, and also a #1 Washington Post, and #1 Amazon bestselling author. Her books have been translated into nineteen foreign languages. She credits her eclectic family for her humor and writing ideas. She was born in Texas but grew up in southern Oklahoma where she and her husband, Charles, a retired English teacher, make their home. They have three grown children and enough grandchildren to keep them young.
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