She went to the clothesline, and he turned and rounded the barn, sauntering over to where Obie was working on Etta’s car. She’d finally managed to get enough money to buy the needed parts. It looked like Obie had most of the motor spread out around him, while he bent all the way underneath the hood. Johnny took off his hat and wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve.
“Whew, it’s hot.”
“It generally gets that way ‘bout now in Oklahoma,” Obie drawled. “Hand me that half-inch over there.”
“Why is it that the particular tool you need is always just out of reach?” Johnny asked, handing over the tool.
“One of them Murphy laws, I reckon.”
Johnny stood in the shade of the barn and watched Obie for some minutes. He asked if Obie thought he might get the car going sometime soon, and Obie said he thought he’d have it by the following afternoon. Johnny had heard the car start once, but it wouldn’t keep running, so Obie had to tear it all down again. Something about clogged fuel lines and a messed-up carburetor.
Johnny said, “Well now, seein’ as how it’s so hot, why don’t you take a break for a couple or three hours? I’d like you to drive with me and see somethin’.”
Obie glanced over at him. Johnny tried to look casual, but he figured Obie picked up a sense of his intensity, because Obie set down the socket wrench and said, “Okay. You can buy me a beer on the way.”
After a stop for cold beers, Johnny drove south along the highway for nearly an hour, the windows down and the wind buffeting their ears, with country music blasting over this. Every once in a while Obie would say, “I hope what you have to show me is worth the distance.”
What Johnny had to show him was a small farm of a hundred and sixty acres, plantings of alfalfa and cotton, fields that usually grew winter oats and maize, and a small orchard of apples and peaches. It had a house, a tin barn that had two rough stalls and room for two more, a second tin hay barn of a large size, a number of falling-down sheds that needed to be torn down, and two fenced corrals. The house was of fieldstone, solid, with two bedrooms and a small extra room made of the closed-in porch. It had a fireplace in the living room, too. There were forsythia bushes in the frontyard and half an apple tree in the backyard; a large limb had split out of it in a wind, and it lay dead on the ground.
Johnny showed Obie how he could fix the barn with four stalls and a tack room and how he wanted to build new corrals and a training pen. He showed him how the house had a small room upstairs and about all it really needed was painting.
“It’s all fine,” Obie said. “Mighty fine. You must have searched for this one, boy.”
Johnny nodded. He had searched, and this was as close as he could come to the best that he could afford. “The man who owns this is willin’ to rent it to me, and if I decide to buy, he’ll take part of my rent as payment for the purchase price,” Johnny said.
Obie propped his foot up on the dead limb that was still connected to the apple tree. “Is this what you want for yourself . . . or for Miz Etta?” he asked, fixing Johnny with a hard eye.
Johnny sighed heavily. “Both, I guess. I’ve thought for a long time about settlin’ down and starting a stock-raisin’ business. I’d like to . . . well, the long and short of it is that if I want Etta to go with me, I got to have her a place to go to. I don’t have a lot of money, Obie, but I thought this place was pretty nice.”
“It is very nice. The house is real nice, but"—Obie pulled at his ear—"I’m not sure Miz Etta would leave her place if you bought her a mansion."
Johnny looked over across the grass growing tall and waving in the wind.
“It doesn’t have to do with you, John,” Obie said. “It has to do with where Miz Etta feels secure. She has scrapped hard for that place. Ever since Mr. Roy brought her there, she has had to try to survive. And once you scrap for a place, it becomes part of you.”
After a moment, when Johnny stared at the ground, Obie asked, “What’s wrong with stayin’ up there with her anyway? She’s got a good start there.” He pointed a bony finger at Johnny. “You have a good start there. Why you want to leave that, boy?”
Johnny shook his head. He had trouble finding an explanation for something he didn’t quite understand. “Because it’s hers. If I marry her there, I’m just comin’ in to what she already has—just fallin’ into it is how everyone’ll see it. Like I married her for all that. Maybe this place isn’t so much as what she’s got, but it would be somethin’ I could give her.” Saying it out like that, he felt foolish. He couldn’t give her nearly as much as she already had, so he didn’t know why he was even trying.
Obie said, “Now, John, don’t discount yourself, boy, when it comes to givin’ to Miz Etta. You have a lot to offer her just in yourself.”
Johnny shook his head sadly. “You know what I am, Obie? I’m a man who never got past the eighth grade, and I only got that far because I skipped a grade. I’m a man who hasn’t lived in any one place since I was thirteen years old. I can’t hardly imagine doin’ so. It makes me a little sick to even think of it. The truth is that I dream of marryin’ Etta like a man dreams about Marilyn Monroe. But when it comes to the actual fact of marriage, I don’t know if I could stick it out day after day. I guess that’s some of why I want to start my own place, scrap for it like you said, and you got roots to hold you there. But even if I do that, I may not be able to stick it out. Etta knows this, too.”
Obie looked like he felt sorry, and this was embarrassing, so Johnny quickly said they needed to get on back.
“I got Miz English comin’ for a lesson this afternoon.” He started for his truck, turning his eyes and mind away from the small rock house.
“That woman’s comin’ around for a bit more than ridin’ lessons,” Obie observed as he bent himself into Johnny’s truck. He thought a bit of teasing might cheer the younger man. And he also thought Johnny could use a bit of warning about a ripe middle-aged woman who wasn’t getting what she needed at home.
He said, “You know that Miz Winslow is a woman who is bored at home and lookin’ around. Woman like that can be dangerous. You might better watch out.”
Johnny glanced at him as he headed the truck down the country lane. “All women are dangerous,” he said in a dispirited tone. “They really get a man tied up.”
“Well, I can’t argue with you there,” Obie said, thinking of Latrice.
Obie felt profound gladness for having at last obtained Latrice’s favor, however, such favor appeared so often in jeopardy that he felt constantly walking against the wind.
“You and Latrice are gettin’ along pretty good, aren’t you?” Johnny asked, drawing him from his thoughts.
Obie sort of smiled. “Yeah. ‘Course Miss Latrice is not one to let a man get too very certain. She gives, and then she takes back about twice.”
“Are you gonna marry her?” Johnny asked.
Obie shrugged. “Miss Latrice is not one who favors marriage a whole lot. Don’t get me wrong . . . she’s strong about propriety. It’s just that she has her ways and she is not a woman given a lot to changin’ them. She don’t look kindly on my kitchen, either,” he admitted a little sheepishly, “which I can’t say as I blame her, bein’ as she’s been enjoyin’ that fancy one up there at the Rivers place for quite some time now.”
He gazed out the window and recalled lying in Latrice’s featherbed. “There’s a lot to be said for small favors, John.” Then he pulled at his ear. “Truth to tell, I kinda like my space, and Miss Latrice does, too. I’ve lived a goodly time by myself, and I might not accommodate myself so well at this late stage, if Miss Latrice came in my place and went to fixin’ everything up. She feels about the same, so it’s workin’ for us.”
“What if they up and move?”
“Well, I guess I’ll just have to go along. We’d work it out, I guess,” he said. “You just got to live one day at a time, John. All of them together are too much.”
Obie reflected that there were many
things the years took from a man but they also gave. He was older than Johnny and had learned the difference between true pride and ego pride. He supposed he had faced the fears inside himself long ago and had gotten past them in the manner of a man who trusts himself and his God.
“You know,” Johnny said, breaking the thoughtful silence. “Long as I have my hands, I don’t need a woman for anything.”
Obie laughed long and hard at that, then he observed, “Hands can do a lot, boy, but they can’t kiss. And yours can’t make coffee as good as Latrice’s by a long shot.”
* * *
Chapter 24
Harry Flagg tried to talk Johnny into taking his horses over to New Mexico to race them, but Johnny told him no. He finished getting the horse that had gone through the barn fire back into some semblance of normal and sent it back to the owner, and every once in a while a guy or gal would come out and bring a horse for a day or two for Johnny to evaluate and tune, but this was the most he would allow. He steadily refused to take on the responsibility of any new horses.
Etta rented two of the now-empty stalls to a couple of barrel racers, so Johnny found himself being drawn more into that sport. Etta began riding at play-days and pasture rodeos around the area. Johnny was proud of Little Gus’s abilities, born a lot from Johnny’s own training, and he was proud of Etta and the gumption she displayed. She continued to be frightened about racing around turns, but she didn’t let that stop her.
Each Saturday and Sunday, Johnny would load Little Gus and drive past the back door of the house for Etta to race out and hop in the truck, saying, “Let’s go!” and they’d be off for five or six hours. Johnny more or less went along for the ride—a driver and helper with the horse and admirer of Etta.
She’d race Little Gus around the barrels a time or two, and on occasion, when she was in high spirits from winning the jackpot, she would consent to a match race on a straight track. More often that not, she won then, too. Almost always she made money enough to cover their expenses of entering and had some to bring home, too.
A couple of people wanted to buy Little Gus. Once Etta came to Johnny and said, “I just got an offer to buy Little Gus for three thousand dollars.”
“Well now,” Johnny said, with a smile. He thought what she told him was a pretty good thing, but Etta was not looking at him like it was.
“Do you think I should do it?”
Johnny had come to understand that Etta had moments when she truly wanted him to tell her what to do, yet if he did, she’d always back away from whatever he told her.
He said, “What do you want to do?” He was thinking that she did not want to sell the horse, that she would never want to sell the horse, so why didn’t she just accept it? Of course, he knew it was not wise to say this. Words of this sort tended to bring out her fire.
“What I want to do and what I should do might be two different things,” she said, giving a little impatient jerk of her body that was becoming a lot harder and firmer from all her riding.
Averting his eyes from her body, he grinned sadly. “It’s that way a lot, isn’t it?”
She looked at him a long minute, before going off, presumably to say no to the buyer, as she came back with Little Gus in tow, and happily, too. Johnny was happy that she didn’t sell the red gelding, too, so much so that it startled him.
“We need to get home,” she said.
After her barrel racing rides, she was always anxious to return home to Lattie Kate. Johnny didn’t know how much of this was due to mother-worries and how much was due to her still nursing. He didn’t see a need to probe into such an intimate detail.
A thousand times during these weeks, Johnny thought of ranchers he had worked for in Texas and New Mexico and how they would be happy to have him come work for them now. He also considered going on down and renting the farm with the rock house and beginning his own place.
Yet he stayed at the Rivers farm, keeping himself steady by thinking each evening that maybe he would leave the next day, or the day after that.
* * * *
He came in the barn and found Etta sitting on the stacked hay. “You got a letter,” she said.
She wore a sleeveless dress, one she often wore while working around the house. It was of some thin, flower-sprigged fabric that flowed over her body, showing all the curves. Her hair was pulled up off her neck. The strands that escaped in an unruly manner at her temples and nape were damp with sweat, as was the skin beneath her blue eyes. She looked tired, as if she’d just had to sit down.
Johnny, feeling the humming he always felt in her presence, tossed aside the halter he carried and took the envelope from her. He didn’t often get mail and was curious.
“I think it’s from Harry Flagg,” Etta said. She remained sitting there.
There was no return address, but Johnny, too, recognized Harry’s scrawl. “Yeah, looks like it.”
Removing his hat, he tossed it on the hay and wiped a sleeve over his forehead. He opened the envelope. It was a little hard to read, feeling Etta’s eyes on him. The letter was from Harry, who began with, “Hello, you son-of-a-buck,” and Johnny thought fondly of the big man’s voice.
Johnny read it, then said, “Harry wants to know if we can take on another six head for him. If we can, he wants me to come out to Sayre and get them next week and bring them back and get them ready for fall racing. He says he has a good barrel racing prospect for you.”
He looked at her. Her blue eyes were studying him.
“What do you think? Want to take them on?”
She blinked and looked down at her bare leg that she stretched languidly. He looked at her leg, too, at the skin so pale and sleek, and his eye traveled up to where the dress collapsed between her thighs.
“We have the room now,” she said, “but do you want to take on trainin’ them?”
Johnny’s gaze returned to hers. He had difficulty thinking much about horses in that instant. He felt his heartbeat in his groin.
“I don’t know. It’d take a couple of months, but it’d mean boardin’ money for you, and Harry is reliable to pay."
He noticed the hollow of her neck shone with perspiration. With heat.
“What does he say about the barrel horse?” she asked.
“Oh . . . just that he has one he thinks you’ll want to look at.’’
She sighed a sort of dispirited sigh, put her hands on her thighs in an unconscious gesture and moved the fabric of her dress. “It’s too hot to be thinkin’ about horses right now,” she said.
Her dispiritedness pricked at him. “Yeah,” he said absently, folding Harry’s letter and stuffing it back in the envelope.
For an instant he had felt anticipation at taking on new horses for Harry, but now he didn’t think he wanted to do it. But he recognized that he could just be in a low moment and the next moment he might pick up and change his mind. He wished he would get himself straightened out.
He was brought up short by Etta getting to her feet. She seemed about to say something, but then she was just looking at him. Her eyes pinned him, and he felt like a buck caught in headlights.
The next instant she was coming to him with parted lips, and he was taking her into his arms. He saw her lids slowly shut over her blue eyes, as she wrapped her hands behind his neck and brought his head down to her.
Supreme relief was the first emotion that flashed through him. At last he had her against him.
She was hot and damp, smelled of sweat and sunshine and Ivory soap. Her lips were sweet as honey, seductive, and trembling. Her entire body started trembling against him, and Johnny felt as if he were dropping down into her. He tried to resist, tried breaking away, but smoky desire closed around him.
He kissed her lips and then down her neck to the silky swell of her breasts at the neckline of her dress. He savored the smoothness of her skin and the salty taste of her. He opened his eyes and looked at her skin, saw the delicate fabric of the dress against it and the way the dress was pushed out b
y her breasts, which were heaving up and down. Her breath was hot in his ear, calling his name over and over in a breathless whisper that about drove him senseless.
“Johnny . . . oh, Johnny . . . please . . ."
He thought of the prickly bales of hay only a foot away, of his hard, narrow bunk covered in a worn flannel blanket, of Etta’s bed that he had seen only in his imagination but pictured with soft white sheets and plump feather pillows against which to lay her down and kiss her until she cried and took him into her.
Then Latrice entered his thoughts, and Obie’s caution about getting Etta pregnant came to haunt him. It was as if the cooling breeze of hard sanity swept over his back.
He placed his hands on either side of Etta’s flushed cheeks and pulled her from him.
“Etta . . ." He saw tears squeezed from her closed eyelids. “Etta, is this what you want?”
Her eyes flew open. They looked confused, glazed and shimmering with heat.
“Etta, all I got is a bunk in there, and this isn’t the way I want it to be. Where will we go from here? Sneakin’ around?”
Thinking that she would do this made him angry, and he gave her head a little shake. “Do you want to marry me?”
“Yes,” she said breathlessly, desperately. “I’ll marry you, if you’ll stay here.”
He noticed she said, “I will,” not “I want to.” He thought of it and felt the sense of being closed in a box.
With a shake of his head, he dropped his hands and turned from her. He heard her say something, but couldn’t quite make it out over the anger and confusion roaring in his head.
Then he heard her walking away out of the barn.
Drawing back, he struck out at a bale of hay, which sent pain reverberating up his arm. He welcomed the pain. It was better than the ache inside him. He looked around for something else to hit, but there just didn’t seem to be anything.
If Wishes Were Horses Page 34