Cowboy Courage

by Carolyn Brown

  He stood up, thinking she’d drop his hand, but she didn’t. Sparks flittered around the porch like fireflies on a summer night. Sure, Waylon had been attracted to Shiloh since the first time he laid eyes on her, but this tingly feeling was something he’d never felt before.

  She led him into the foyer, where the men were gathered over toward one end. Abby Joy was sitting about halfway up the stairs, and Cooper had begun to run his hand up her leg, searching for the garter. When he found the blue satin and white lace thing, he slipped it slowly down to her ankle. Whoops and hollers filled the room from the guys who were gathered up in a corner with their hands up. They were putting on quite a show for the lady who was filming, but then the garter wouldn’t stretch far enough to go over Abby Joy’s combat boot. The noise died down slightly as Cooper slowly untied the strings, pulled her boot off, and then slowly removed the garter from her foot. It got loud again when Cooper turned around backward and threw it over his shoulder. Several of the young unmarried men did their best to catch it, but it flew right past them and floated down to settle onto the top of Waylon’s black cowboy hat.

  “Guess you’re next in line, buddy.” Cooper laughed.

  There was no doubt that Cooper was talking to him, and all the guys around him were laughing and pointing. He brought his hands out of his pockets and held them up to show that he had nothing. “Can’t be me,” Waylon said. “Which one of y’all is hiding it and teasing me?”

  Shiloh reached up, removed Waylon’s hat, and showed him the garter, lying there in the creases. He wanted to pick the thing up and toss it to one of the other guys, but he was mesmerized by her beautiful blue eyes, which were staring right into his.

  “Fate says that you’re next,” she said.

  “Not damn likely,” he drawled.

  She picked up the garter and handed him back his hat. “Give me your arm. The photographer will want a picture of you and Cooper, since you caught the garter.”

  He held out his arm and she stretched the blue lace garter up past his elbow. Then she held up his arm like he’d just won the trophy at a wrestling tournament. “The winner and the next groom in the canyon is Waylon Stephens!”

  He played along, more to get to be near Shiloh than anything else. There was no way he’d be the next married man in the area. The only woman he was vaguely interested in was Shiloh, and he’d never knock her out of getting her share of Ezra Malloy’s ranch. Maybe after she’d secured the deed, he’d ask her for a date, but not before. She’d never forgive herself—or him—if she lost her part of the ranch, and besides, as pretty as she was, she was way out of his league.

  “And now the bouquet,” Abby Joy said. “All you ladies get your hands up and”— she turned around backward—“here it comes.” She let it fly, and it landed smack in Bonnie’s hands.

  “Someone take this thing from me, right now. I can’t get married or leave the ranch. It would cost me a hundred dollars and a bottle of Kentucky bourbon.” Bonnie tried to hand it off to the other girls, but none of them would touch it.

  After the photographer took a few pictures, Waylon took a few steps back and disappeared outside again into the shadows on the porch. He’d prove them all wrong about being the next man to get married, but Bonnie wouldn’t. Shiloh was going to own that ranch. Bonnie might as well face it.

  * * *

  The hinges on the gate into the old cemetery creaked as Shiloh opened it. She crossed over to the place where the father she had never known was buried and sat down on a concrete bench in front of his grave. A full moon lit up the lettering on her father’s gray tombstone. Ezra Malloy had died less than three months ago on the first day of the year. It seemed like it had been a lot longer since she and her two sisters had sat through his graveside service. She remembered looking over at her soldier sister and thinking that she had some balls, wearing camouflage and combat boots to a funeral. Then she’d glanced to her other side to see the younger sister. She was dressed in jeans and a biker jacket and had a little diamond stud in the side of her nose. Her blond hair was limp, and what wasn’t stringing down to her shoulder had a thin braid complete with beads that hung down one side of her face. In her skintight jeans and biker books, she looked like she’d dropped right out of either a hippie colony or motorcycle convention.

  Shiloh had given Sister Hippie a week at the most before she’d go running back to whatever strange world she’d come from, and Sister Soldier less than a month before she was bored to death. Shiloh was going to be the last one standing at the end of a year, by damn, and nothing or no one was going to sweet-talk her off that ranch. The only thing she ever owned was the Chevy SUV that she drove. She wanted that ranch—first, to prove to the father she never knew that she could learn the business. The second reason had to do with her being so competitive. She was determined to show her two half-sisters that she couldn’t be run off. They’d both eyed her that first day like she would be the weakling of the trio. Neither of them looked like they could possibly be her sister, but she’d been wrong. Not only were they sisters, but they’d also become best friends by spring.

  Shiloh brushed a dead leaf from the skirt of the bright red satin dress she’d worn to her older sister’s wedding that evening. The canyon was alive with wildflowers of every color and description, but the night was chilly, so she’d worn a long sweater over her dress for her walk from the house to the cemetery.

  “Well, Ezra,” Shiloh addressed the tombstone in her Arkansas accent, “it’s down to me and Bonnie now. Bet you didn’t think any of us would stick it out for this long, did you? And since she was a soldier, I imagine you figured she’d be the one to last the longest. Guess what? You were wrong. She could have gotten married, and Cooper could’ve moved in with her here. That way she would have kept her share, but she told me she didn’t need or want it anymore, that it was like an albatross around her neck—like you were controlling her with your rules.” She whispered as she pulled her sweater tighter across her chest, “I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive you for throwing all three of us away because we weren’t boys. I guess your punishment is that you died a lonely old man.”

  “I thought I might find you here.” Her younger sister, Bonnie, sat down beside her.

  “Damn, woman!” Shiloh shivered. “You scared the bejesus out of me.”

  “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Bonnie asked. Other than her blue eyes, she didn’t look a thing like Shiloh. Tonight she wore her biker jacket over a pretty red bridesmaid dress.

  “It’s bad when you startle me like that, but good to think I might be a saint for a few seconds,” Shiloh answered.

  Bonnie shivered. “The way that north wind is whipping down the canyon, it’s hard to believe that it’s March and that spring is only a few days from now. I’ve got something to say to our father, and then I’m going home where it’s warm. Did you walk? I didn’t see your van when I parked.”

  “I did,” Shiloh replied, but she didn’t tell her sister that she needed a chance to think about how Waylon’s nearness had been affecting her all that evening. When she’d taken his hand in hers, there had definitely been electricity flowing between them. “What have you got to say to Ezra?”

  Bonnie glared at the tombstone. “Are you smiling, Ezra, because Abby Joy has left the ranch? I bet you’re hopin’ that Rusty winds up with it, but I’d be willin’ to bet a jar of your moonshine that you thought your soldier daughter would outlast me and Shiloh. If you had let us get to know each other, then you’d have realized that she might be tough as nails on the outside, but she’s got a heart of gold. So there, you won this one, but not really, because she’s happy now.”

  “Look at us out here in a damned old graveyard talkin’ to a dead man that didn’t give a hoot about any of us. Paid our mothers off to go away and take us worthless girls with them,” Shiloh said. “He can’t hear us and would probably laugh in our faces if he could.”

  “And wearing our pretty dresses as if he can see us in them,” Bon
nie said. “I wish I didn’t give a damn about him, but”—she laid the wedding bouquet in front of his tombstone—“here’s something for you to think about. Abby Joy has found happiness and you never did.”

  “We really should get over the way we feel about him,” Shiloh said.

  “Maybe someday, but not anytime soon. He shouldn’t have thrown us all away, and he for sure as hell should have been there to walk Abby Joy down the aisle.”

  “He’s dead,” Shiloh reminded her. “He couldn’t have walked with her anyway.”

  “I know that, but…”—Bonnie stammered—“damn it, you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I do know what you mean. I used to imagine that my father was a Navy SEAL or some other hero-type guy.”

  “When did you find out that you were wrong?” Bonnie asked.

  “I was a teenager. I waited until Mama and her sister, my aunt Audrey, were about half lit one night and asked her about him. The truth shattered my pretty little bubble,” Shiloh said.

  “I knew from the time I can remember exactly who and what Ezra was. Mama just wouldn’t tell me where he lived,” Bonnie told her. “Good thing that she didn’t. I might be doin’ time in prison right now instead of visitin’ his grave in the prettiest dress I’ve ever owned.”

  “Do you ever wish that the cemetery was on the back side of the ranch so we didn’t have to look at it every time we leave or come back to the place?” Shiloh asked.

  “Oh, hell, yeah, but I keep reminding myself that he probably hates to see us coming and going, and knowing that we’re still here makes him want to claw his way up out of that grave and change his will,” Bonnie answered.

  Shiloh giggled and started to say something. Then the noise of screeching tires and the sound of metal hitting something really hard made both of them drop to a squatting position and cover their heads. The laughter had stopped and nothing but Shiloh and her sister’s heavy breathing could be heard in the heavy silence.

  “What in the hell was that?” Bonnie whispered.

  “Someone just wrecked out on the highway,” Shiloh said. “We’d better go see if we need to help.”

  The two of them stood up and ran toward the place where Bonnie had left her truck. “Get in.” Bonnie hiked her dress up and ran around the back of her truck as she yelled, “And call 911.”

  Chapter Two

  Waylon was the last one to leave that evening. He helped get the piano back into the house and all the chairs loaded into a cattle trailer to go back to the church before he got into his truck and drove away. He turned the radio to his favorite late-night country music program just in time to hear Cody Johnson singing “On My Way to You.” The lyrics said that everything he’d been through from ditches to britches was simply taking him on his way to her. It seemed to have been written just for Waylon that night, and he kept time with the music by tapping his thumbs on the steering wheel.

  He’d just rounded a sharp curve when a whole herd of deer started across the road in front of him. The squeal of his truck tires filled his ears, and the smell of hot brakes floated up to his nose. The deer scattered, and he let up on the brakes a little. Then one of his back tires blew out and sent him straight for a huge old scrub oak. He was looking out the side window, trying to swerve away from a big stump, when the airbags opened, and the seat belt tightened. None of that kept him from hitting his head on the side window hard enough to rattle his brain.

  Steve Earle was singing “Copperhead Road” when everything began to blur. The lyrics of the song reminded him of the stories his great-granddad had told about outrunning the feds and the local sheriff through his moonshine-running days. His granddad had come home from Vietnam to take over the business. His dad hadn’t run moonshine, but he had inherited enough money from his father to buy a ranch on Red Dirt Road out in East Texas. His last thought before the whole world swirled away into darkness was that this was a helluva way to die.

  * * *

  Bonnie drove so fast down the rutted lane that it sounded like the fenders were going to fly off her old truck and land somewhere out there in the wildflowers beside the road. The scene of the accident was only a few hundred yards up from the Malloy Ranch turnoff, and right away, Shiloh recognized the truck.

  “My God!” she gasped. “That’s Waylon’s truck.”

  “What did you say?” the 911 operator asked.

  “It’s my neighbor’s truck right on Highway 207 that crosses the Prairie Dog Fork of the Red River. Send an ambulance in a hurry,” she said.

  “I’ve got one coming out of Amarillo, but it’ll be about thirty minutes before it can get there. I can patch you through to the EMT so he can give you some instructions,” the lady said.

  What little tread was on the tires of Bonnie’s old truck took a big hit when she braked hard. When the vehicle had slowed down, she made a hard right-hand turn into the red dirt and brought the truck to a stop. Before she could turn off the engine, Shiloh had slung open the door, hiked up her dress, and was running toward Waylon’s truck. She reached it in time to see Waylon fall out of the driver’s side and wobble as he tried to stand up.

  “He’s alive,” she yelled into the phone.

  “Lay him out flat on the ground and don’t let him move,” the EMT said. “Is there something you can use to stabilize his neck? Is there anything like a blanket to keep him warm until we can get there?”

  “I’ll check,” she said as she threw the phone at Bonnie. “Talk to them.”

  “Got to get home. Granddad has to make a run,” Waylon muttered.

  “What you are going to do is lay down flat and be still until the ambulance gets here.” Shiloh removed her sweater and held it against the gash on his forehead.

  “Anything for you, darlin’.” He winced as he stretched out on the cold, hard ground. “Are you hurt?”

  “Be still,” she demanded. “You’re losing a lot of blood, and you could have all kinds of injuries.”

  His eyes fluttered shut.

  Her heart thumped in her chest, and her pulse raced. She’d never seen a man die, especially one who she knew so well, and had even flirted with on more than one occasion. Her hands shook as she pressed harder on the sweater, his warm blood seeping through the thin fabric and oozing up between her fingers.

  God, don’t let him die. She looked up at the stars. His breath rattled out of his chest and he coughed. Shiloh glanced at his mouth to see if there was blood there, and heaved a sigh of relief when his lips were clear.

  “Don’t you dare die, Waylon Stephens!” she yelled at him. “Open your eyes and stay with me.”

  “They say you’re doing the right thing.” Bonnie kept the phone to her ear. “Should I run back to the house and get a blanket?”

  “Ask them how much longer until they get here,” Shiloh said.

  “They say fifteen minutes. They’ve got the sirens going, and they’re taking the back roads to get here faster,” Bonnie told her.

  “It would take you longer to get there and back than it’ll take them to get here,” Shiloh told her.

  “Then here…” Bonnie peeled out of her jacket and laid it over Waylon’s upper body. “That might help a little.”

  “Thank you,” Shiloh said. “You should get back in your truck and stay warm. There’s nothing more you can do, and you’ll get sick if you get a chill.”

  Seconds took hours to go by, and minutes were an eternity. Shiloh kept demanding that Waylon keep his eyes open and talk to her. Most of the time, he focused on her face, but he didn’t say anything at all. She wondered what kind of work his granddad had done that he had to make a run, and why it was important for Waylon to get home to help him, but she didn’t ask. The EMTs had said to keep him as quiet and as still as possible.

  Finally, Shiloh and Bonnie heard the sirens and saw the flashing lights as the ambulance came around a curve in the highway. As soon as the vehicle stopped, the two EMTs seemed to be everywhere at once. They loaded Waylon onto a flat board, secured his
neck with a brace, removed Shiloh’s sweater and applied gauze to the gaping wound on his forehead.

  “I’m going with him,” she announced when they had him inside.

  “Sorry, ma’am, it’s not allowed,” the older of the two men said.

  “It is tonight,” Shiloh told him as she hiked up her dress and got into the ambulance. Bonnie threw her phone toward her and said, “What should I do?”

  The doors were closing when Shiloh caught the phone and yelled, “Bring me my purse and a change of clothes, and get Rusty to follow you in my SUV so I’ll have a way to get him home.”

  She had to pull her knees to the side to give the EMT room to start an IV, take Waylon’s vital signs, and check his eyes. “Okay, Derrick”—she read the embroidered name tag on his jacket—“tell me he’s going to be all right.”

  “I hope so, but the doctors will have to check him out for brain damage, concussion, all kinds of things. He’s got a nasty cut on his head that’s going to probably need stitches,” Derrick said above the high-pitched whine of the sirens.

  “Hate needles,” Waylon muttered, his first words in several minutes.

  “So do I.” Shiloh reached around Derrick and covered Waylon’s hand with hers.

  Driving on Texas roads was one thing. Driving in the Palo Duro Canyon was quite another with its curves, and hills, and valleys. Shiloh was glad when they finally came up out of the canyon just south of Claude, and the ambulance driver could go faster. She had flirted with Waylon at church and social gatherings, had even danced with him a couple of times at the Sugar Shack, the canyon’s only honky-tonk. Now, she wished she’d stepped right up and asked him out. The opportunities had been there, and she wasn’t shy, but she had a thing about rejection. Probably a deep-seated emotion brought on by her father not wanting her because she was a girl.

  The driver made a hard left onto Interstate 40 and kicked up the speed even more. In just a few minutes, he was pulling up under the awning, and then he and Derrick were rolling Waylon into the emergency room.