GYPSIES, TRAMPS, AND THIEVES

by Parris Afton Bonds

  Abashed, Bud tugged on his newsboy cap and headed for the kitchen’s back door. “Sure ‘nough, Duke.”

  For a long moment, she and Duke stared at one another, she turned three-quarters to his male aggressiveness. With a frown, he eyed her unbound hair, tumbling in abandoned corkscrews past her shoulder blades and lapping her tiny breasts.

  She had the uneasy feeling he was thinking of firing her then and there. Oh, Jesus. Maybe, he had been right last night. The whole lust thing had been a mistake. Except she had never, not in her entire life, experienced anything so unbearably pleasurable, not merely her body, but her essence, her all – everything, that she was.

  And that jeopardized her intrinsic core, because now that she understood one human’s unremitting need for another’s touch, she feared she could not trust herself, her own will power.

  At last, he grabbed his hat from the wall peg. “The toast,” he reminded her curtly, and stalked from the kitchen.

  By 7:00 a.m., the ranch hands were shoveling down the last of their eggs, bacon, and blackened toast in uneasy silence. The fiery strain could not be ignored. It arced between Duke at one end of the table and herself at its opposite.

  Yet, peering at him from beneath her lashes, she would swear that not anger but heat as lustful as her own glazed his eyes.

  And if Gypsies knew anything, it was lustful heat. She had sensed it coursing between her volatile parents. That same blaze that had driven them to extinguish each other in one of their jealous fits.

  Within mere minutes the kitchen cleared out, and she stood there, hands on hips, surveying the table mess – and thinking of her own mess she and Duke had created. One of them obviously had to go, and it wouldn’t be Duke.

  Well, begorra, if that was to be her fate, it behooved her to prepare to earn some kind of secure living – immediately.

  While her Dessau Hall performance may have turned out to be a one-time wonder with the older crowd, two successive occurrences that morning pointed her future in another hopeful, or not so hopeful, direction.

  First, as she was readying the breakfast clutter, Glen popped back into the kitchen. “Forgot my hat,” he said.

  She nodded with a distracted smile and went back to pumping the dish water, but paused, feeling his eyes still upon her. She half turned from the waist. “Aye, Glen?”

  His Adam’s apple corked repeatedly. “I . . . uhh . . . was wondering if you could do . . . uhh . . . one of those quick readings. You know, those fortune cards tricks.”

  She faced him fully and folded her arms. “Tricks? That sounds as if ye dunna believe in what the cards say.”

  “Well, you know . . . just for fun.”

  “Now?” When you should be about your morning duties, she wanted to add.

  He crimped the floppy and soiled felt hat between his hands. “If you don’t mind, Romy.”

  What was throwing him for a loop? “To be sure. Let me find me deck.”

  Five minutes later, she located the Bicycle box tossed haphazardly at the bottom of the laundry basket, nestled among Duke’s long, white woolen socks and mingling lustily with her knickers. The musty, personal items smelled of dirt and sweat and raw desire.

  She returned to the kitchen and seated herself catty-corner from an obviously agitated cowpoke. He had removed his work softened gloves. Glen took note of the missing bandana that usually corralled her wild curls. “Jeez, Romy,” he gestured at her hair, “I didn’t realize your . . . how, uhh, comely you look, what with your hair all loose like that.”

  She smiled and nodded at the cards. “So, what ye be wanting to know, Glen?”

  He fingered his bristly chin. “Hmmm, looks like I may have whelped me a babe. I’m a traveling man, you know? If I were to settle down, would I be . . . you know, just saying, making a mistake?”

  Immediately, her thoughts hopscotched to her and Duke’s midnight tryst. That was one thing she should never have to worry about – begetting a bairn. This child, Glen’s, she felt had to have been conceived with Graciela.

  Romy shuffled, all the while her mind whirling, and passed him the deck. What would a wise person advise? “Why are ye a traveling man, Glen?”

  “Well, with the Depression, my folks couldn’t feed me, you understand. I was one of thirteen children. There were so many of us, I don’t think I went immediately missed. So, from Hebron, Nebraska, I hitchhiked, hopped boxcars, and ended up working the slaughterhouses in Chicago, where I met Skinny Henry. From there, it was only another hop, skip, and jump to cowpunching. Been on the road since I was fifteen. But I don’t want any kid of mine going through what I had to.”

  There you had it. Nevertheless, for the sake of drama, she flipped out the cards she had collected from his three cut piles into random spreads of five or six. She scanned these spreads she had fanned out: Her eye was caught by the multitude of hearts – the Eight, Seven, and Three of Hearts, specifically, in one clump.

  “Ye have an unexpected gift coming, tis true,” she said, fingering the Eight. That at the pinnacle of its spread. “What it is, the cards don’t say.” She glanced at another card. “And this Seven indicates someone whose interest in you, you could depend on. And this Three,” she said, glancing yet at the other card, “it shows your wishes comes true.”

  He eyed her doubtfully, then challengingly. “And jest what are my wishes?”

  She let her gap-toothed grin sum up her reading. “For yuir own family, Glen. The one that knows when ye go missin’.”

  A smile stretched the width of his face. Tugging on his gloves, he grabbed his supposedly forgotten hat and nodded happily at the cards. “Well, head ‘em up and move ‘em out, Romy. You’re one hell of a card reader – and a friend!”

  Half an hour later, Sally appeared at the kitchen’s screen door. “Hey, how did your gig go last night?” she asked, letting herself in. She tugged loose her chin strap and hung her peaked, wide-brimmed hat on one of the wall pegs.

  Drying her hands on the dish towel slung over one shoulder, Romy tried to keep her expression pleasant enough. The horsewoman wanted something of her. But what? “Well, ye could say the gig was not a standing-room-only performance.”

  “Oh? That’s too bad. Can you spare a cup of coffee?”

  Romy bowed up an arrow-straight brow. “Ye’re telling me ye rode three miles for a cup of coffee?”

  Sally pulled out one of the chairs and, twisting it around, straddled it. “No, I am telling you I need a friend. A friend whose advice I trust.”

  At that, Romy did a double-take. “Ye mean meself?

  “Will you do a reading for me? I’ll pay you.”

  “Let me get the coffee first,” she said, thinking rapidly, “then the cards.” She would have to be careful. Sally was quick on the uptake, she would more readily detect what Duke called bull-shit. “Coffee and the card reading are on me.”

  Serving up a cup of stale, warmed-over coffee was easier than locating the playing cards. Criminy, now where had she stashed them, only a half hour before? She found them in the pie safe, where she had stored the left-over bacon strips, well burnt and beyond appetizing. Bleh!

  For a second time that morning, she peeled open the ragged box and slid out the equally worn cards. For a flashier effect, she shuffled them thrice in her hands, rather than on the table, and ended up with an impressive bridge finish. She then passed the cards to Sally. “Cut them into three piles.”

  Sally complied, and Romy asked, “What is it ye wish to know?”

  If Sally’s sun-weathered skin could blush, then that it did. “I . . . uhhh . . . have been . . . uhh . . . keeping company, so to speak, with someone. Someone totally unsuitable for me. I want to know if there is a chance in hell of us making a go of it?”

  Us? Who was the other half of us? Remembering how her mum worked her clients, Romy put out feelers with some apprehension of Sally’s answer. The horsewoman had already shared, despite her father’s hope for a union, that she felt she and Duke were unsuited. Not only i
n temperament but also in the community’s gauge of affluence.

  “This ‘us’, is there anything you feel you two have in common?”

  “Horses. Ranching.”

  Christ Almighty! Then, it was Duke? “Mmmm,” Romy murmured, filling in the awful, debilitating silence. She flipped over the card on the underbelly of each of the three piles Sally had cut.

  Blimey! The High Priestess, the Magician, and the Emperor again – showing up in the Bicycle deck as the Queen of Clubs, King of Diamonds, and King of Clubs. In Romy’s admittedly mixed-up mind the Magician was the shyster Gideon, and the Emperor that damned Duke, ruling the empire of his run-down, flea-bitten cattle ranch.

  But who the hell had been the High Priestess all this time? Sally?

  Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Romy had thought she could never feel so devalued as much as she had when standing before the impersonal Nazi doctors. But to think of Duke and Sally as a couple, coupling . . . now, after . . . after succumbing to her own lust for the rancher . . . .

  “Uhhh, I don’t believe ye shuffled, did ye, Sally?”

  The horsewoman’s hazel eyes narrowed. “That makes a difference? I cut the cards.”

  “Aye,” she said, quickly collecting the piles and passing the deck to Sally. “Tis the energy swirling about ye that changes the cards’ meanings.” That sounded plausible, even to herself.

  Sally shuffled an inordinately long time, as if to impart that so-called important energy to the cards, then carefully and precisely cut the deck into three piles once again. All the while, Romy was ruminating.

  This time the chatterbox Jack of Hearts was the first card she turned up

  “That was in the spread you laid out for me at Christmas,” Sally noted, surprised and not nearly so doubtful now.

  “So, it was,” she said, although she truly did not remember who got what cards that day. “Uhhh, I see a cowboy.” Safe enough. Sally had mentioned ranches and horses. But Romy knew her own mind was preoccupied with what was the epitome of the Wild West, at least, for her – the cowboy who had gunned her down last night.

  She flipped over the next card.

  Sally leaned forward, tapping the Queen of Spades. “Is that me?”

  “Aye.” The last card was the Seven of Hearts. “Lovesickness,” she ventured, given the desperation and despair in Sally’s eyes. The same despair she herself was feeling.

  “You are amazing,” Sally breathed.

  “Err, why do you think this relationship won’t work?”

  “That’s why I’m here,” Sally snapped. You’re supposed to tell me.” Then, rubbing her temples, “Gee whiz, I’m sorry, Romy. It’s just so . . . unreal. Bizarre. Texas is about as bad as Germany when it comes to racism. My father finds out I am sleeping with a Mexican, and he’ll kill him and most likely me, too.”

  Romy recalled the conjoined silhouettes of Sally and Arturo in the barn, observing the pregnant Cactus Jane. An unlikely couple, she would have thought. But just maybe they met, complemented, each other’s needs.

  Relief was an instant medication for her jealousy pangs. She dealt out the rest of the deck, four or five cards at a time, in clusters. Her gaze swept over them, trying to see if she could come up with some pattern out of which to spin a plausible story.

  “This partner for ye, he be all male, pure hombre, so sometimes he will not understand ye, ye see?” Her eye caught on the adjacent Bicycle card box. “Tis like at times you two cannot ride the bicycle built for two. But, his easy going ways will balance out, like the bicycle, yuir hard pedaling ways. For sure, there be some rough riding at spots in the road, but all will be well.”

  And, if it was not, Romy figured she’d be long gone by then.

  § CHAPTER FIFTEEN §

  “Aye?” Romy answered, holding the telephone’s jump rope-like end to her right ear and standing on tiptoe to speak into the mouth piece.

  With a clicking sound, Mamie plugged over at the switchboard, and Gideon’s voice came through. “Listen, Romy – it’s Gideon. I have leveraged another engagement for you.”

  All her life she had been performing in one way or another in order to stay alive – whether it was before the public or the Nazis. But what else was there for her?

  Unemployment was once again skyrocketing. In this time of global financial chaos, the most menial jobs were snapped up. The job of ranch cook was a blessing from heaven, yet in one foolhardy, wistful night she had let her lust for Duke McClellan jeopardize all hope for security.

  “Where?”

  “It’s next month. At another one of Austin’s German beer gardens, but they’re impressed by word of mouth from Dessau.”

  She did not want to take the risk of running into Moe in Austin. Still, she would be grateful if the engagement could help her tuck away pin money for Ireland. “Does it pay anything?”

  Evading her question, he said, “Better than that – it is a saengerfest! Singers and groups from as far away as Saint Louis and New Orleans will be providing music for the city’s various beer gardens. It is a way to get your name out there And best of all there is a grand prize – a performance at the Millet Opera House.”

  She paused, then asked, “Gideon, why are ye doing this? Helping me out? All along ye’ve made it quite clear I was a pain in yuir arse.”

  Now, a hesitation on his end. So unlike him, with his quick repartee. “Well, Romy,” came his attorney’s articulated voice, “you did bail me out of a few close shaves.”

  She tested the waters. “What about Miriam? How is it between ye two?”

  “Miriam is enchanting.” His treasury of words came more readily now. “Knowledgeable in a multitude of subjects. A powerhouse in Austin politics. We enjoy each other’s company. And, of course, we share the same faith, not to mention her oh-so-dusky beauty delights the eye.”

  “The cards saw you two together – and the cards are always right,” Romy flipped back with her stock-in-trade response.

  “Always?”

  She could imagine him raising a golden-winged brow. “Well, if not, it is because I mayhap could read them wrong. But they, the cards, are never wrong.”

  “So, can you make the engagement? It’s at Saengerrunde Hall on Tuesday, April 12th, 6 o’clock prompt.”

  “I will have to see if Duke will let me off.”

  Come Saturday nights, ranch hands all piled into whoever’s pickup was working in that scarcely populated Blanco county – or else hitchhiked via either vehicle or wagon. But Tuesday afternoons were another animal. Hitchhiking into Austin on a on a long and lonely stretch of county road during the week would be most certainly unreliable.

  And on her long and lonely stretch of nights – well, sometimes good was not good enough. So much to be grateful for, aye. It was not her ashes that were drifting over Berlin rooftops. But, Jesus Jehoshaphat Christ, sometimes she just got so bloody tired of trying.

  Still, she had to snap out of her funk. She had to summon what Jock called gumption. Everyone in the bunkhouse was long asleep. She rapped on Duke’s office door. It had been three tension-filled weeks since last they had spoken within that confining intimacy of their coupling.

  He snapped wide the door. He was wearing only his denims, slung low over hips that were meant for banging home his lust. Inside her. She looked up, up into eyes whose half-mast lids were dampers on the angry heat she suspected flared behind them at the sight of her, clad only in his old shirt.

  “Yeah?”

  Ever on his guard, he was. “Uhhh, Gideon has arranged for another guitar performance for me. At Saengerrunde Hall.” Her mouth skewed to one side. “Uhh, ye think I might have off that afternoon? It’s on a Tuesday. April 12th.”

  His blew air from the side of his mouth, and she knew he was still teetering on banishing her for good.

  She rubbed her clasped palms against one another. “I’d, uhh,be willing to make up for the time lost– ye know, working on Sundays for ye, things like that.”

  “Things like that?” He bra
ced a forearm high on the door’s edge. “Well, tell me, just what would things like that be, Sunshine?”

  She looked down past her bare knees and calves to her feet, wriggled her toes, then glanced back up at him. “Card readings again?”

  His hand dropped to grip the knob – and she knew it was all he could do not to slam the door. “Hog wash? Bull shit? Claptrap? I’m not interested in your con games.”

  “Unclog me hair balls from yuir bathroom sink?”

  His mighty back arched. His head lolled back, as if in exasperation. “All right, you can take the afternoon off.”

  She knew she shouldn’t push her luck. Still . . . . “And ye think ye could give me a ride in?”

  He stood there, hands on hips, shaking his head. “If your gall don’t beat everything. “Yeah, I’ll take you. Just get the hell out bef – ”

  “ – afore you give in to yuir wantin’ to be jumpin’ me bones, here and now, Duke?”

  He shoved fingers through his unruly hair, and an exasperated grunt puffed from his lips. “Get it through your thick skull that I don’t want you.”

  “Ye want to see me naked right now, do ye not?” Mother Mary, help me. She was on a collision course with becoming a wanton woman. But once you have been bedded by Duke McClellan, all else paled.

  He groaned and this time made a move to slam the door, but she piped out, “Why have ye given up searching for a proper-like wife for yuirself? Take me to Austin, and we can still find ye one.”

  “I can find a wife on my own, thank you.”

  “Aye, most easily, ye can. But, after me, any wife will bloody well bore ye. Still, help ye I will to find the right wife while we’re in Austin.”

  She stepped away and gifted him with a Cheshire Cat grin, the last thing visible before the person disappeared – at least, according to “Alice in Wonderland’s” magical talking picture.

  He slammed the door.