'Please.'
'To steal some of your husband's cattle.'
She began to smile and he smiled. She began to laugh and he laughed, looking openly at the people looking at them, but not bothered by them. Of course they'd look. How could they help it? A Mexican rider and a woman with blue stripes on her face sitting at a table in the hotel dining room, laughing. He said, 'Do you like fish? I know your Indian brothers didn't serve you none. It's against their religion.
Some things are for religion, as you know, and some things are against it. We spend all our lives learning customs. Then they change them. I'll tell you something else if you promise not to be angry or point your pistol at me. Something else I could do the rest of my life. I could look at you and touch you and love you.'
Her hand moved across the linen tablecloth to his with the cracked, yellowed nails and took hold of it, clutched it.
She said, 'You're going to leave.'
He said, 'When it's time.'
She said, 'I know you. I don't know anyone else.'
He said, 'You're the loveliest woman I've ever met. And the strongest. Are you ready? I think the man coming now is your husband.'
It seemed strange to Ruben Vega that the man stood looking at him and not at his wife. The man seemed not too old for her, as he had expected, but too self-important. A man with a very serious demeanor, as though his business had failed or someone in his family had passed away. The man's wife was still clutching the hand with the gnarled fingers. Maybe that was it. Ruben Vega was going to lift her hand from his, but then thought, Why? He said as pleasantly as he was able, 'Yes, can I help you?'
Mr. Isham said, 'You have one minute to mount up and ride out of town.'
'Why don't you sit down,' Ruben Vega said, 'have a glass of wine with us?' He paused and said, 'I'll introduce you to your wife.'
Sarah Isham laughed; not loud but with a warmth to it and Ruben Vega had to look at her and smile. It seemed all right to release her hand now. As he did he said, 'Do you know this gentleman?'
'I'm not sure I've had the pleasure,' Sarah Isham said. 'Why does he stand there?'
'I don't know,' Ruben Vega said. 'He seems worried about something.'
'I've warned you,' Mr. Isham said. 'You can walk out or be dragged out.'
Ruben Vega said, 'He has something about wanting to drag people.
Why is that?' And again heard Sarah's laugh, a giggle now that she covered with her hand. Then she looked up at her husband, her face with its blue tribal lines raised to the soft light of the dining room. She said, 'John, look at me. . . . Won't you please sit with us?'
Now it was as if the man had to make a moral decision, first consult his conscience, then consider the manner in which he would pull the chair out--the center of attention. When finally he was seated, upright on the chair and somewhat away from the table, Ruben Vega thought, All that to sit down. He felt sorry for the man now, because the man was not the kind who could say what he felt.
Sarah said, 'John, can you look at me?'
He said, 'Of course I can.'
'Then do it. I'm right here.'
'We'll talk later,' her husband said.
She said, 'When? Is there a visitor's day?'
'You'll be coming to the house, soon.'
'You mean to see it?'
'To live there.'
She looked at Ruben Vega with just the trace of a smile, a sad one.
Then said to her husband, 'I don't know if I want to. I don't know you.
So I don't know if I want to be married to you. Can you understand that?'
Ruben Vega was nodding as she spoke. He could understand it. He heard the man say, 'But we are married. I have an obligation to you and I respect it. Don't I provide for you?'
Sarah said, 'Oh, my God--' and looked at Ruben Vega. 'Did you hear that? He provides for me.' She smiled again, not able to hide it, while her husband began to frown, confused.
'He's a generous man,' Ruben Vega said, pushing up from the table. He saw her smile fade, though something warm remained in her eyes. 'I'm sorry. I have to leave. I'm going on a trip tonight, south, and first I have to pick up a few things.' He moved around the table to take one of her hands in his, not caring what the husband thought. He said, 'You'll do all right, whatever you decide. Just keep in mind there's no one else in the world like you.'
She said, 'I can always charge admission. Do you think ten cents a look is too high?'
'At least that,' Ruben Vega said. 'But you'll think of something better.'
He left her there in the dining room of the Charles Crooker Hotel in Benson, Arizona--maybe to see her again sometime, maybe not--and went out with a good conscience to take some of her husband's cattle.
Tenkiller
I.
At Kim's funeral - people coming up to Ben with their solemn faces - he couldn't help thinking of what his granddad Carl had said to him fifteen years ago, that he hoped Ben would have better luck with women.
'We seem to have 'em around for a year or so,' the old man said, 'and they take off or die on us.'
It was on Ben's mind today, along with a feeling of expectation he couldn't help. Here he was standing ten feet from the open casket, Kim in there with her blond hair sprayed for maybe the first time, her lips sealed, a girl he lived with and loved, and he was anxious to take off. Go home as a different person. Maybe look up a girl named Denise he used to know, if she was still around. Get away from the movie business for a while.
He could've taken 40, a clear shot across the entire Southwest from L.A. to Okmulgee, Oklahoma, fourteen hundred miles, but took 10 instead, drove four hundred miles out of his way to look in on the Professional Bull Riders Bud Light World Challenge in Austin. Getting away was the main thing; there was no hurry to get home.
He thought he might see some of his old buddies hanging around the chutes, not a one Ben's age still riding. Get up in your thirties and have any brains you were through with bulls. Ben entered the working end of the arena to the smell of livestock, got as far as the pens shaking hands and was taken up to the broadcast booth. An old guy he remembered as Owen still calling the rides.
Owen said, 'Folks,' taking the mike from its stand as he got up, 'we have a surprise visitor showed up, former world champion bull rider Ben Webster, out of Okmulgee, Oklahoma.' He said, 'Ben, I liked to not recognize you without your hat on. Man, all that hair - you gone Hollywood on us or what?' Owen straight-faced, having fun with him.
Ben slipped his sunglasses off saying yeah, well, he'd been working out there the past ten years, getting by.
'Your name still comes up,' Owen said. 'I see a young rider shows some style, I wonder could he be another Ben Webster. I won't say you made it look easy, but you sure sat a bull, and didn't appear to get off till you felt like it. Listen, I want to hear what you been doing in Hollywood, but right now, folks, we got Stubby Dobbs, a hundred and thirty-five pounds of cowboy astride a two-thousand-pound Brahm a name of Nitro.' Owen turned to the TV monitor. 'You see Stubby wrapping his bull rope good and tight. Ben, you don't want your hand to slip out of there during a ride.'
'You're gone if it does,' Ben said.
He had taken Kim to a rodeo in Las Vegas, explained how you had to stay on the bull eight seconds holding
