Handful of Sky

by Cates, Tory

  Jesse tried to top Emile with a story about riding backward in a Grand Entry. Emile came back with one even more outrageous. A fuzzy haze prevented Shallie from catching the beginning of Jesse’s next story.

  “. . . to ride the horse nobody could ride.” Jesse’s features seemed more pointed than ever as Shallie brought him and his story into focus. “So there I was, all alone in this big, ugly turquoise coliseum. Had the damned nag in the chute and was rigging him up, getting ready to settle down on his back when this huge hand comes down and jerks me off.”

  Shallie suddenly felt as if she’d missed something very important and struggled to surface from the cozy pool she’d immersed herself in.

  “Who? Who are you talking about?” she sputtered frantically.

  Jesse eyed her warily. “I said it was the horse that couldn’t be ridden. Your damned horse Pegasus.” Jesse’s anger lay close to the surface and it erupted when Shallie stopped laughing. “I would have ridden him too if Hunt hadn’t decided to play the big hero.” Jesse slapped a half-filled glass down. All the 100-proof merriment had leaked from his face. He stomped away, looking as angry as he had that morning in Albuquerque.

  Suddenly the hall seemed too loud, too crowded. Hunt hadn’t been lying! He had stopped a drunken Jesse from riding Pegasus. The realization screamed in Shallie’s brain. She needed air. Emile followed her outside.

  “I think I’ve had enough for one evening.”

  Emile insisted on walking her to her room. At her door, he leaned down to kiss her. Shallie turned her cheek.

  “I need a friend,” she whispered.

  “Sure, Shallie,” he answered softly. “As long as there’s a chance to become something more.”

  “I can’t promise that.”

  Alone in her room, Shallie shut her eyes, hoping to fall into a stuporous sleep before the implications of Jesse’s unwitting confession hit her. She didn’t make it. Hunt hadn’t been lying, nor had he been fighting Jesse for Trish. He had wrestled the disgruntled cowboy off Pegasus and she hadn’t believed him. It had been her caustic words that had driven him to Trish. Knowing that she had brought this misery on herself made the pain even more acute.

  Chapter 17

  Shallie awoke feeling as miserable physically as she did mentally. Still, she dragged through the day, and that evening was back at the hospitality suite with part of the crew of diehards who carried the festivities into the wee hours. It was only after too many drinks and too much forced laughter that she was exhausted enough to fall asleep before regrets and memories could begin their nightly torture. By the end of the El Paso run, Shallie was a regular on the party circuit.

  “Don’t see much of you in the evenings anymore,” her uncle said as they pulled out of El Paso.

  “I’m surprised you noticed,” Shallie snapped, “as much time as you spend on the phone to Miriam.” She instantly regretted her words, knowing they sprang more from envy and a lack of sleep than anything else. “Don’t pay any attention to me,” she apologized. “These past few months have been a strain on both of us and we still have a long way to go to the Circle M. Then we’ll just barely have time to load up the fresh stock and hit the road again.”

  “Yeah. I’m glad Petey flew back,” her uncle added, as relieved as Shallie for the change of subject. “He ought to have most of the stock separated out for us by the time we arrive. It’s strange to think that most of Double L’s roping stock is down there at the Circle M now. Our old place is pretty much deserted.”

  Shallie heard the hint of regret in her uncle’s voice. “It’s still Double L stock, no matter where it is,” she comforted him.

  “I know. It didn’t make any sense having them stuck up in the mountains when most of the shows we’ve been working are down south.” With a sigh, Walter turned his attention to the stack of mail that had accumulated during the show, when there hadn’t been time to read any of it. He chuckled softly at a letter.

  “From Miriam?” Shallie guessed easily.

  “Uh-huh.” Walter paused. “Shallie, there’s something . . . Miriam and I . . . Well, we . . .” He stopped again, then finally abandoned the effort. “We’ll discuss it at the end of the season.”

  Shallie was fairly sure she knew what her uncle wanted to discuss. Conflicting currents of sadness and joy swept through her. She was pleased that her uncle, after so many solitary years, had found someone to love and care for. But she knew that his marriage to Miriam Prescott would mean the end of the Double L and the end of his rodeo days. The spell of the road had been broken by the even stronger enchantment Miriam Prescott and life with her held.

  Her uncle ripped into another envelope. “Shallie.” He gripped her hand on the big steering wheel. “Shallie, we did it!”

  “Did what?”

  “We made the National Finals! Says here that Pegasus and some of our roping calves and dogging steers have been selected to compete in Las Vegas!”

  Shallie’s elation was curiously subdued. She almost felt as if she’d just paid off a debt, a debt she owed to her father’s memory. Only the mental image of Pegasus pitted against the best the sport had to offer excited her. “Hey, that’s great.”

  “I never thought we’d do it. What a way to go out,” Walter let his secret out in the midst of his excitement.

  “So, you are planning to call it quits.”

  Walter nodded. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Shallie. This season has been more exciting than I could have dreamed. It’s what I’d always wanted, or thought I always wanted. Until I met Miriam. But now . . . Well, none of it really seems to matter very much without her.”

  Shallie winced. Her uncle’s feelings closely mirrored her own: with no one to share it, rodeo’s thrill had vanished for her too.

  “I wanted to finish out this season, then Miriam and I planned to get married. I hated breaking the news to you, Shallie. But now that we’ve made the Finals, I don’t feel so bad about it.”

  “Don’t feel bad about anything, Uncle Walter,” Shallie insisted. “I’m happy for you. For you and Miriam. You deserve each other. Besides, I’m ready myself to leave rodeo. Life on the road ages a person too fast.” She slid her hand across the seat to squeeze Walter’s.

  “These last few years have been good, haven’t they, Shallie girl?”

  “Wonderful,” she agreed. “And the best are still to come.” The words tasted of ash and sounded, to her own ears, as false as the smile she wore for her uncle’s benefit. Shallie wondered if happiness would ever be anything other than a charade for her.

  * * *

  As she had predicted, there was no time at the Circle M to do much more than unload the trailers and fill them with fresh stock. Walter left in the car while Shallie led Pegasus to a lush pasture. Thick live oaks shaded it and the Colorado River meandered through it. She left the horse to rest and build up his strength for the Finals. The liquid coo of a dove cut through the afternoon stillness. It took Shallie back to her first evening at the Circle M, when she’d walked in the darkness with Hunt listening to that same mournful song. She felt as if that night had been half a century ago when she was still fresh and life was full of possibilities. Now, here she was, less than a year later, dismantling all her dreams even as she attained them.

  A horn honked in the distance. Petey was leaning out the window and gesturing for her. When she was close enough, he signed to her, “Hurry up. We’re ready to go.”

  She gave a meager nod and climbed in beside him. As they approached the ranch house, Jake McIver came out and flagged them down. Petey pulled up. The old man leaned in the window and growled at Shallie.

  “I can’t believe you’d leave without even so much as a howdy-do.”

  “I’m sorry. We’re running so late.”

  “Well, you’ll be running a little later. Come in the house. I want to talk with you.”

  In the living room, Jake settled himself into the cattle-horn throne in which Shallie had first seen him. “What I ha
d planned on doing was offering to sell out half the business to you,” he began bluntly, then stopped to clear his throat. “So, I called up my lawyers and had them go through the papers. Come to find out that Jake McIver is nothing more than a figurehead in this operation and my grandson is the real money man behind it. Seems Circle M has been floating on the money from his commercials and endorsements and such for several years now, and he had it rigged so that I wouldn’t find out. Anyway, I don’t have half the operation to offer you. The whole shooting match belongs to Hunt. I suppose he wanted me to go to my grave thinking I was still Mr. Rodeo.”

  Shallie started to protest, but Jake McIver held up his hand to silence her.

  “Don’t bother telling me I’m too mean to die or some such nonsense. I’m over seventy-seven years old and I’m ready to die. What’s to live for? All my friends are gone. Every time I tell a story now, everyone thinks I’m either lying or senile. There’s no one left who knows that for every story I can tell there are three more too rough to admit to. No, I won’t be sorry to go. Don’t regret a thing except, maybe . . .” McIver drew in a deep breath. “Maybe the way things are between Hunt and me.”

  Regret weighed down McIver’s words and Shallie squirmed, thinking of how harshly she had judged the old man. “He loves you very much,” she said.

  “I suppose he does.” McIver sighed. “Suppose he’d have to, to put up with me all these years, then go and spend all his money running this place and never let on I really wasn’t the boss. I’ve been tough on him, though. Might have been too tough. We never talked much. Not about anything important. I just hope he understands.”

  “He does,” Shallie said, thinking of everything Hunt had said to her about his grandfather and cursing herself for letting her insecurities and jealousy cloud the meaning of his words.

  “Things went kind of bad between us after Maggie died,” Jake mumbled, as if he’d uncorked a flow of words that streamed forth now of their own accord. “What is it now? Twenty years ago this April. Finest woman that ever drew breath. Hunt’s grandmother. My wife. My Maggie. Knew I’d never feel that way again.” He looked up at Shallie. “You remind me of her.”

  His comment caught Shallie off guard. He’d been talking as if he were no longer aware she was even in the room, much less in his thoughts.

  “Same feisty spirit,” he rumbled on. “Not about to let anyone put her on the shelf to be admired and fussed over. Not my Maggie. She was just like you, had to be in the middle of everything. Running it if she could.” He chuckled at memories two decades old and still as bright as the day they had been coined by Maggie McIver.

  “Hunt’s father never in his life felt the way about one woman that I felt about Maggie. Oh, he married Hunt’s mother, but not because he wanted to.” Jake McIver grew somber as he turned his vision inward to a sad night more than thirty years back, when a scared teenage girl had told Jake and his wife about her condition. “But that’s an old story,” Jake said, “and I don’t want to waste any more of your time with old stories about my son and my mistakes.”

  Shallie noticed that Jake never spoke his son’s name. She guessed from his expression of grief, long ago congealed beneath a mask of endurance, that it still hurt too much to hear the name he’d given to his son.

  “To make a long, sad story short, Hunt’s mother didn’t want to raise a child, so we adopted Hunt and didn’t hear too much from my son again.” Jake McIver paused.

  Shallie could read in his face the pain associated with the memories he’d unearthed. She sensed that beneath his brief outline was a complex story, which would tell most of the tale about the men Jake and Hunt McIver had become. From the way Jake’s features were hardening, though, it didn’t appear that it was a tale she was ever likely to hear. Then for a brief moment they softened again, exposing the vulnerability and tenderness he had been revealing to Shallie. His voice faltered as he spoke.

  “I wonder if Hunt hates me, the way he hates his father, for—”

  “Jake, honey, have we got company?”

  The voice that cut through Jake’s words came from the back part of the house. But Shallie didn’t need to see the speaker to know who she was—Trish Stephans.

  “You’ll tell me when Mr. Childress gets here, won’t you, Jake?”

  “I will, darlin’,” Jake shouted back to her. In a softer voice he explained to Shallie, “She wants a movie contract. I know a movie producer. He’s flying in today.”

  Shallie nodded her head as if she understood. But she didn’t, not really. All she understood was that Trish Stephans was probably the reason Jake was worried that his grandson hated him.

  Jake easily discerned her disapproval. “I’ve always tried to do something for every woman in my life. Trish wanted to be Rodeo Sweetheart, now she wants to be a movie star. I wanted her company. At least for a while that’s what I wanted. So we made a trade. Can’t see that either one of us have been hurt.”

  Jake McIver, shorn of his blustery facade, seemed to shrink before her eyes. He was right, she didn’t approve, but she could certainly understand. She understood loneliness and the things people did out of loneliness. Shallie crossed the room and put her arms around a tired old man. “He really does love you,” she assured him again.

  Jake clung to her for a moment. Tears filled his eyes as he looked up at her. “So like my Maggie,” he whispered, “so like her.” Abruptly he pulled away. “You’d better get moving before some rodeo committeeman calls up to chew my butt because his rodeo is five minutes late getting started.”

  Shallie straightened up, hesitant to leave.

  “I said get going, unless you enjoy watching old men blubber.”

  “Thanks, Jake,” she whispered, “for everything. I’ll see you at the Finals.”

  He waved her away with a show of gruffness, and Shallie pushed open the heavy oak doors of the stone home Jake McIver had built half a century before for the woman he’d never stopped loving.

  Chapter 18

  The highway was a clean slice through the Nevada desert, barreling straight into the glitter gulches of Las Vegas, home of the National Finals, the world’s richest, roughest rodeo. A gigantic cowboy grinned down at Shallie from a billboard, announcing that the nine-day-long Super Bowl of rodeo, in which the top fifteen contestants in each event competed for championships, would begin in two days. But Shallie’s mind was on her visit with Jake McIver almost one month ago.

  She’d walked out of his home, reflecting on the forces that mold people, shaping them like trees bent before a slow, yet persistent wind. She imagined that right after Maggie died, Jake had probably turned to the first of the women who would trek in an endless parade through his life for a temporary relief from his pain, the same kind of relief she’d found in compulsive socializing. When did temporary measures become permanent fixtures? she wondered. When did they move from propping up a sagging personality to being an integral part of it? Shallie would never know exactly how it had happened with Jake, just that it had.

  The last party she had attended was simply to tell Emile, as gently as possible, that she wouldn’t be going to any more functions with him. She’d learned from Jake how cruelly unfair it was to let others pay the price of her pain.

  Emile had accepted her decision with his usual good grace. She left early to return to what would become a succession of empty rooms where she would face sleepless hours and torturing thoughts of what might have been. But gradually sleep grew less elusive and by the time they rolled into Las Vegas, her natural equilibrium had been reestablished.

  The big truck hummed as Petey guided it through the maze of freeways leading to the heart of the city, where the rodeo was to be staged at the mammoth Thomas & Mack Center. Every seat had been sold out long before the first of the big semis nosed into town, carrying the animals who would form the all-star team opposing the best cowboys in the country.

  Petey slid the truck in beside a dozen others. A maze of pens made the grounds resemble a feedl
ot. Shallie hopped out and was approached by a National Finals board member, Chet Williamson, a whip-thin man who still looked fit enough to add another buckle to the collection he’d won as a national finalist during the seventies.

  “Shallie Larkin, glad to see you.” He took her hand, dismissing an unneeded introduction. Shallie would be the only woman pulling up at the National Finals in a semi loaded with stock.

  “Chet Williamson, good to meet you.” Shallie returned the warm greeting.

  “I’ll let our livestock superintendent show you around, but basically we’re penning the animals in three categories: Put your least rank stock over there.” He pointed to an area at the far end of the maze of steel pens. “Then put your top bucking horses and bulls over there. And right here,” he said indicating a complex of pens constructed of a heavier grade, reinforced steel, “are the eliminator pens. Put your unridables in here. We want to have all the stock evened up as much as possible so that all the cowboys are riding stock of approximately the same quality.”

  The first animal off the truck was her prize, Pegasus. She led her snowflake-kissed treasure straight to the eliminator pen. She knew he wasn’t absolutely “unridable.” She’d seen it done by one man. But in Pegasus’s season on the professional circuit, it had never been officially accomplished. He whinnied as if the excitement that buzzed like static in the air had infected him as well. It pleased Shallie to believe that he realized what an achievement it was for him to be here.

  His shaggy winter coat kept him warm in the chill winter air. Shallie snuggled further into her down parka. Pegasus was a spot of brilliance, shockingly white amidst the mottled browns and grays of the other broncs. Always the aristocrat, Shallie thought to herself. Her musing was cut short when Petey came up to her, his hands flying. He couldn’t find the special grain mixture she had developed especially for the horses selected for the Finals. When Shallie couldn’t locate it either, she had to borrow a pickup and head out for the nearest feed store in search of the high-protein mix.