Buzzard Bait

by Brett Cogburn

  No matter, it was still an impressive costume. She took both of her pistols by the butts and lifted them a little in their holsters, adjusting the gun belt cinched around her narrow waist until it felt comfortable. She looked into the mirror one last time and pressed her lips together to smooth the red lipstick on them, blowing a kiss at herself before she walked out before the crowd.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, lords and ladies,” her voice rose to the sagging tent top. “Perhaps since mankind first captured fire or mastered the art of shaping flint, there has been no greater moment than when he first sat astride a horse. Until then, his spirit was incomplete; until then, the horse’s spirit was incomplete. In that moment, when the horse first moved beneath him, the partnership was forged. Man and beast racing over the plains, swift and sure, stronger for one another. Nothing so mighty, they became like the wind.”

  She paused dramatically, noting that none of the crowd seemed to speak enough English to understand everything she said, but her tone obviously had their attention. Half of pandering to any crowd was always about the showmanship, anyway, rather than the words.

  “And in time, many men came to ride the noblest of the beasts, but every once in a generation there was born a special rider and a horseman like no other. And ever more rarely a horse was born to match him. And once every century, or two or three, that special horseman and that special horse came together and magic was the result. Man and horse working together, until the giant, beating heart throbbing beneath the rider’s legs flowed into him and they breathed and lived as one.”

  Fonzo timed his entrance perfectly. All six of the horses loped through the open tent door in a perfect line, side by side, with their long manes dancing with each stride and Fonzo standing with a foot each on the backs of the middle two, riding standing up, Roman style, with a long set of reins attached to the halters on those two horses.

  Two times, he took them around the ring, and then on the third revolution he steered to a low jump made of a small log resting on end braces some two feet off the ground. All six of the horses sailed over the jump with their front legs folded under them and their nostrils flared. Fonzo stayed standing, even through the jump, and the crowd clapped when he landed without a hint of losing his balance and his knees absorbing the shock.

  Kizzy smiled. No matter how many times she saw them, the six snow-white horses were truly beautiful. If her father had done one thing for the family show—for her and Fonzo—it was that. Ten years he had spent searching for matched animals, so alike in size and looks that anyone not a horseman might not recognize a difference in them at a glance. Every spare coin her father had ever been able to put together, he spent on those horses: Bucephalus, Herod, Mithridates, Sheba, Solomon, and Hercules. Blood and sweat and tears, and all the years putting the show together, making it something, all represented in horseflesh.

  Her attention switched to her brother. Fonzo was as nimble as a cat, slight and wiry and athletic, with grace and balance oozing from him as effortlessly as quicksilver sliding over glass. For all the trouble he often caused her, she would still be the first to admit that he could ride like no other, as if he were born on a horse, or as if he were once a part of the horse and some appendage that had been removed and found its proper working once returned to the body from whence it was taken.

  Fonzo guided the horses around the ring one more time, the horses keeping perfect pace and spacing, and their noses even, like they were bound together with invisible harnesses. The second pass over the jump, Fonzo floated up, his feet losing contact with the horses’ backs. The crowd gasped, thinking he was about to be thrown to the ground, but to their amazement, he landed on two different horses and rode around the ring smiling and waving one hand at the crowd as if it were nothing.

  The somber faces of the crowd turned to smiles and they pointed to him and laughed in wonderment. Fonzo leapt to the ground without even stopping the horses. They continued to circle him until he picked up a braided, long-handled buggy whip and whistled to them and cued them with some motion of the whip that only he and the horses understood. As one, they shifted into a single-file line, and with a second signal they stopped and faced inward to him at the center of the ring, like wagon spokes surrounding him. He raised both arms high overhead, and all six horses reared on their hind legs and pawed playfully at the air.

  While the other five waited, one of the horses then came slowly forward and bowed to Fonzo with one of its front legs stretched out before it and the other bent beneath it. Fonzo swung onto its back and led the other horses around the ring again at a fast lope.

  Riding bareback, Fonzo took a double handful of mane and swung off as if he were going to dismount on the run. The instant his feet hit the ground he bounced back up and landed again on the animal’s back. The second time he did it he twisted and contorted his body so that he landed facing backward.

  Once the crowd had quieted, Kizzy stretched one arm toward her brother in a dramatic pose. “Another round of applause for Fonzo the Great and his magnificent horses.”

  Fonzo leapt from his horse and joined Kizzy in the center of the ring, the horses still revolving around at his bidding. He motioned for the crowd to quiet.

  Fonzo’s voice rose high and clear in the confines of the tent, only slightly deeper than his sister’s. “And man soon found that the horse was good for war, and the mighty men of old broke themselves against each other in one wild charge after another, sword in hand and a swift warhorse beneath them, until empires were made, and a time came when a warrior was no warrior at all unless there was a four-legged brother beneath him and carrying him into battle.

  “Weapons of steel, sword and mace, required a strong arm, and the mighty usurped the weak, and giants ruled the world until here, on the frontier of the New World, an invention was made—a weapon so great, so cunning and minuscule, yet deadly, that history would be changed. The American cowboy likes to say that Samuel Colt made all men equal, but it is not only men that can handle a gun.” Fonzo turned and bowed to Kizzy. “I give you Buckshot Annie, at the same time the prettiest woman west of anywhere, and the finest marksman to ever lift a firearm.”

  Kizzy bowed deeply in an imitation of the courtly dip of someone paying homage, as if the crowds were kings and queens instead of dirt-poor peasants and subsistence farmers. When she raised her head again to face them, she smiled and blew another kiss.

  Fonzo went back to the circling horses and swung up on one on the fly. As soon as he was astride, she began to pitch him a series of red, shiny glass balls, one at a time. He caught them on the run, one-handed, stuffing them into a leather bag at his waist.

  Kizzy stood with her back to the crowd and slowly drew the pearl-handled Colt revolvers at the same time. She let them dangle at arm’s length beside her thighs, standing unmoving except for her eyes tracking her brother as he went around her. The next time Fonzo passed before her he tossed one of the glass balls high above him and she shattered it with one shot from her right-hand pistol. On his second pass he tossed two balls simultaneously and she busted those, too, with a shot from each gun.

  The crowd had grown deathly quiet, but she was used to that. She suppressed the smile building on her lips and holstered her left-hand gun and waited for Fonzo’s next pass. That time, he launched four balls into the air, and she shot from the hip without even taking aim with the pistol sights. She worked the trigger on the double-action Colt Lightning so fast that the four shots almost sounded as one. All four balls shattered, and brightly colored bits of glass showered down like falling stars.

  Fonzo dismounted again and the horses raced out the open door and left the tent. He ran to her side and they gave the crowd another bow. As if it had taken the farmers and goat herders that long to get over seeing such a slip of a young girl shoot so, they finally erupted into a round of applause.

  “Pretty good stuff when you can impress anyone on the border with your shooting prowess,” Fonzo said under his breath as they bowed agai
n.

  Kizzy smiled demurely at the crowd, and her eyes strained upward toward the ceiling of the canvas tent. She was a far better than average shot, but none of the spectators ever seemed to notice the tiny holes all over the roof of the tent or the unusually quiet pop her .38s made. Busting such glass balls out of the air with regular bullets and black powder charges would have been a feat of marksmanship, indeed, but the lead birdshot and reduced loads she reloaded her cartridges with, much like small shotgun loads, made it a far easier thing. And the less powerful shot loads were much safer for work inside the tent or around crowds, rather than sending stray bullets speeding to who-knows-where to hit who-knows-what. However, the scattering of the pellets over the last year since they had added her act had pinpricked the tent with holes to the point it leaked like a sieve on a rainy day, and the tent was getting in pitiful condition as it was.

  They shook hands with the villagers as they filtered out of the tent, and Kizzy did a few more trick shots with real bullets under the open sky, where she could pick a safe direction in which to shoot. Normally, Fonzo would have mingled through the crowd to find one or more men with enough faith in their own marksmanship to think that they could best a girl in a shooting match, but there wasn’t enough money in the village for anyone to make any kind of a wager.

  Fonzo let the children pet his horses, and even gave a few of them a ride, smiling even though not many months ago he would have charged four bits per person to have their photo taken sitting on one of the horses. But the camera was ruined when one of the wagons overturned crossing the Rio Grande a month before, and there might not be four bits left in the entire village.

  The sun was going down when their guests finally filtered back to their village of mud-daubed picket huts, eroded adobe walls, and bleating goats. Fonzo traded a stained and frayed red velvet jacket that his father had once worn as ringmaster, along with four pesos, for the services of two of the village men to help dismantle and pack the tent. It was long after midnight before the tent was loaded into one of their wagons, and it cost them two more pesos to buy some hay for the horses.

  The more elaborate of their two wagons was a gaudy thing, with high wheels, a bright red paint job, and gold pinstriping on every edge. It was what Kizzy’s people called a vardo. It had plank sides and a shingled roof, and inside it was their living quarters—a narrow bed on each side, cabinets for storage, and a small kitchen area and stove for cooking when the weather was too bad to build a fire outside.

  The night was too hot to light the stove, and Kizzy butchered the hen and baked it in a Dutch oven at a fire she built beside the wagon. She had already finished her portion of the chicken and carried water to the horses from the river to their picket line by the time Fonzo and his helpers were through packing up the show. He joined her at the fire, and she noticed the weary way he walked.

  He nodded at the money box she had set on the camp table beside their fire. “How much?”

  “After the cost of the hay and what you paid the men to help take down the tent?”

  “How much?”

  She pointed at the half-picked carcass of the hen grown cold on the plate she left out for him. “You get half a chicken.”

  He shrugged. “Oh well, but please tell me we have a little wine left.”

  She lifted a pottery jug and held it close to her ear while she shook it. “There’s a swallow left. Maybe we can find someone down the road that might have a little fruit to sell so that you can make us some more.”

  He picked at the cold chicken, brooding and lost in his own thoughts. She noticed the way his eyebrows tilted in together above his nose, like their father’s had when he was deep in thought. After a while he stood and paced around the fire.

  When he spoke again he switched to the Roma tongue without thinking. Although they had both been born on American soil and were as comfortable with English as any language, it was an old habit when they were alone with each other. When their parents were alive they all had spoken the language of their people among family settings. And it had other advantages when strangers were around, as it was often of benefit to them to converse where the gadje couldn’t understand what was being said. In addition to the Gypsy language, both of them spoke a smattering of French, a thing rarely used, but their mother had insisted on it, as it was the land of her birth. To add to the confusion of their multilingual skills, there was the bit of Spanish picked up during their time below the border. Without either of them realizing it, they often mixed words of many languages in the same breath, or hopped from one to another at whim.

  “Homemade wine not fit for human consumption, and a bit of cold chicken. What’s happened to us?” He lifted both arms wide and then let them drop with a slap against his hips.

  “You know what happened.”

  “I think we ought to go back to the States. There’s no money down here.”

  “And who in the States wants us, and what money were we making north of the border?” she asked, cocking one eyebrow.

  “What about the invite to Monterrey?”

  She picked up the money box and rattled the few coins in it as she had shaken the almost empty bottle of wine. “I don’t think there’s enough here to get us there.”

  He walked to the edge of the firelight where his white horses stood watching him from their picket line. He picked up a brush and began to rub it over the back of one of them—a gelding slightly larger and heavier than the rest of them.

  “Hercules looks like he’s lost a little weight,” she said.

  “They’ve all lost weight, and I fed them the last of the corn this morning.”

  “We’ll get by like we always do.”

  He whirled and threw the brush across the camp. “It isn’t fair.”

  “Nothing is fair.”

  “How many people will be at that bullring in Monterrey?”

  “I’m told that it can seat a thousand people, and the crowds are always large,” she said. “I can get you the letter from the promoter if you want to read it again.”

  “How much up front did he offer us?”

  “Only a cut of the gate after each show. Ten percent. We perform two acts a day in between bullfights. No guarantees of any kind.”

  “Getting there is a week’s trip, at least.”

  “President Díaz is supposed to be at the fights, and the U.S. ambassador to Mexico and other dignitaries, also. I imagine it will be a big crowd,” she said. “Maybe the kind of crowd that could put us back on the map.”

  He paced more, and she suppressed a smile the sight of him brought on. He had both arms folded behind his back and was bent at the waist, his face turned down to the ground and his brow furrowed in thought. A pacing general on the night before a battle wouldn’t have looked more serious.

  In an instant, his demeanor changed and he stopped in his tracks and turned to her with an impish, boyish smile lighting him like a candle. “We’ll give them a real show. I’ll break out the new acts I’ve been practicing and some special stuff for the bigger arena. And we can think up some new things for you. Maybe you’ll rethink some of my suggestions.”

  She couldn’t help but sigh. For almost a year since their parents had passed on, Fonzo had been trying to get her to add what he called some “William Tell” parts to her portion of the show—shoot an apple off his head or a coin out of his hand, much like some of the other traveling sharpshooter acts did. He had persisted so in his arguments that she had finally agreed to practice such. Their second day of practice with her shooting a silver dollar out of his outstretched hand, she took the tip off his right index finger. The sight of him bleeding and the scarred nub of that finger, minus its last joint, was more than she could take. She knew she was an exceptional shot, but it felt foolishly dangerous to risk his health. He was the last of any kind of kin or family she had on the earth, unless she counted some distant cousins, equally as nomadic as she and Fonzo, and long since out of contact.

  The shadows of two dogs c
rept into the edge of the firelight. Both of them were big and hairy with broad heads, outsized feet, and jaws like bears. The smaller of the two was brown and the larger one was white. They lay down at her feet on either side of her, and one of them, the white dog, carried a dead rabbit clamped in its jaws.

  “Look at that,” Fonzo said. “Even the dogs eat better than we do.”

  She reached down and stroked both the dogs’ heads. “Did you ever think of giving up this life?”

  “And do what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe live like normal people and stay in one place.”

  He laughed. “We’re Roma.”

  “There are Gypsies that don’t live on the road. You’ve met them like I have.”

  “What would we do to make a living?”

  “I wouldn’t call what we make now a living.”

  “I like performing, and you do, too.”

  “That’s not what I mean. Don’t you ever think what it would be like to have a real house? Maybe something solid for once. A place to winter, at the very least.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And what about the first time someone accuses us of some petty theft, or places blame on us whether we’re guilty or not? Don’t you know? We Romani are supposed to be a shifty lot. Witches, thieves, and fortune-tellers. I think I’ll go find some children to kidnap.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.” She took up her little squeeze-box accordion and began to play a wistful tune that her mother had taught her.

  “Quit that. It’s bad enough without you playing that stuff.”

  “I like that tune. It makes me think of Mama.”

  He sat down on a campstool and listened to her play awhile. “Look at us. We’re everything Gypsies are supposed to be. You playing that thing, and both of us without a penny to our names and wondering where we can go to snatch a little coin from someone’s purse.”