'Make that 'cowpoke,'' Betty said.
'Never done that before,' I admitted.
'Never?' the women asked in unison.
'Had a chance once,' I said, 'but had to turn it down.'
'Why?' they asked, but when I didn't answer, they rambled along without me.
But I couldn't help but think about the time I'd turned down a chance to sleep with two women. At the end of a long, tiresome domestic case back in the late sixties – one of my first – when I caught the young married woman with her lesbian lover in a Billings motel, both of them Meriwether high school teachers, she offered me their bodies whenever I wanted, if I'd just give her the pictures, and if I'd lie. If it got to court back in those days, she was sure she'd lose any claim to her children to her creep of a husband who headed the education department at Mountain States College. If I slept with the women, both solid Montana women, I'd feel obligated to lie. That didn't feel right. So I tossed her the film, gave the professor his retainer back, and walked away from the whole thing. Over the years, I had watched the young woman's children grow up rather nicely, then once they were off to college, she divorced her idiot husband, moved with her lover to Portland, and as far as I knew, lived happily ever after.
Unlike me, who always had wondered what it would have been like. And now that I knew, oddly enough, I felt slightly used, the memory blooming into a seed of doubt that clouded the lovely memories of the night. But these women – one who loved me, one who thought I was Irish – had no bones to pick with me. So I shook it off, poured more coffee, and took out a cigarette.
'Outside, cowboy,' Cathy said gently.
I nodded and took my cup of coffee into the small enclosed patio off the kitchen that overlooked the dam- bound Colorado River. Betty said she needed a shower, and left as Cathy cleared the table. Outside it was as if clouds hadn't been invented yet. The high blue sky glistened like a baby's first tooth. Only the shadows held any trace of the norther as the morning blossomed with sun-warmed air. I was on my second cigarette when Cathy came out with the coffee pot to join me. She took the cigarette from me, had a long drag, then blew a series of perfect smoke rings that hung for a long time in the still air.
'You service other people's addictions well,' she said as she handed me the cigarette.
'Thanks. I guess.'
'You know, Betty and I have been friends all our lives,' she said without preamble, 'and I hope you have some idea how much she loves and depends on you, old man, and how hard this is for her. Maybe you should think hard about giving it up.'
'It's too late to quit,' I said, wondering again why everybody wanted me to stop the investigation.
'I don't know exactly what's going on with your troubles,' she said, 'but please take care of her. Please.'
'She's already made me promise not to protect her,' I said, then laughed.
'What did you say?'
'Yes,' I said. 'But I was lying,' I admitted, laughing again, washing the shadows from the edges of my mind. 'I'll keep her as far away from the trouble as I can. You can count on that.'
'And you can count on me, too,' Cathy said. 'Anything I can do to help.'
'How did you fix Sissy Duval's orgasms?'
'Went out to her great-granddaddy's place for two weeks,' she said, 'and fucked all the resistance out of her. Taught her that sexuality is best when it's bound to love, but it ain't all that bad when it's just random fun. Trouble was, she loved that asshole, Dwayne. For reasons nobody ever understood.'
'When was this?'
'Oh, I don't know. Sometime after Dwayne took up with Mandy Rae,' she said, 'and before he got blown away. Skinny son of a bitch had destroyed her confidence.'
'Where?'
'In bed, you idiot.'
'No, where was her great-granddaddy's place?'
'A shack surrounded by abandoned pump jacks, old time oil patch machinery, and a bunch of slush pits somewhere near a hole in the road south of Lockhart,' she said. 'Town had some kind of funny name. I can't remember exactly. But it was on his first big-time producing lease.'
'Can you show me where it is?'
'I'm not sure. The old man's name was Logan, though, and she called the place Logan's dump – that's about all I remember. Why?'
'I think somebody's trying to kill her.'
'Why in hell would anybody want to kill Sissy,' she said. 'I've always liked her, but she's such a frivolous bitch.'
'Maybe you better tell me about it,' I said.
But before Cathy could start her story, Betty came out of the house, her smile as bright as a dew-sparkled rose, shaking her fluffy light red hair golden in the sunshine. 'Okay, kids,' she said, 'no fooling around without me.'
'Dammit all to hell,' Cathy snorted. 'I always knew you were a selfish bitch. Ever since you stole my four- colored pen in the third grade.'
'It was mine in the first place,' Betty said, grinning. 'And besides, it was a three-colored pen in the fourth grade.'
'Just proves my point,' Cathy said, faking a sulk as she leaned her head on the flagstone wall. 'And Miss Batson always liked you better.'
'That's because I didn't shoot her in the butt with spit wads and rubber bands,' Betty said.
'She had the kind of ass that invited pain,' Cathy whispered into the shadows.
'What's on the agenda today?' Betty asked, her hand warm on my cheek.
'Road trip,' I answered. 'I've got to go to Houston, then Louisiana to look into some shit.'
'How long?'
'Don't exactly know how long I'll be gone,' I admitted.
'How long we'll be gone,' she corrected me, 'and if we're going, I've got to run out to the ranch, then see if Tom Ben's hands can look after the stock while we're gone.'
'It would be safer if I went alone,' I said.
'Not a chance, cowboy.'
'Then I'll pick you up at Tom Ben's,' I said. 'We can leave your truck there.'
'I'll give you a call on your cell phone before I head out to Tom Ben's place.'
Betty gave Cathy a hug and me a long sweet kiss, then left.
'Alone at last,' Cathy said, her wrist to her forehead. Then she ruffled her short dark hair. 'You got time for this story?' she asked seriously. 'It's going to take a couple of Bloody Marys.'
'I counted on at least one.'
Once we had drinks in hand and perched on stools at the breakfast bar, Cathy sighed, then said, 'Austin in the seventies. What a fucking circus. It was like Hollywood with cowboy boots. Or maybe, what we thought Hollywood was like. Or maybe, we thought we were starring in our own movies. It was seventy-three and I'd just come back from acupuncture school in London, a fairly upright young woman – never as stuffy as Betty – but close. By eighty- five I'd been married and divorced three times, had the clap twice, and overdosed three times, twice on purpose, and spent most of my time hanging out with the kind of guys who were interesting when they were rebellious students at UT. But now they drove beer trucks and dealt the drugs they didn't smoke or stuff up their noses – Christ, I married two of them, much to their regret, and their daddy's trust funds – but at the lowest moment Betty and I hooked up with Sissy and. Mandy Rae and their crowd.' Then she paused for a long breath. 'Nobody has the constitution for that kind of action. I don't know how I survived.'
'How'd you get out?'
'Woke up one morning with Enos trying to strangle me with his dick,' she said, 'while fucking Dwayne was trying to squirm his skinny dick up my ass. It was too much. I stepped back, watched them go after each other without me as an excuse. Then I just stayed away, so unlike most of the rest of them, I survived those years without suffering rehab, jail, or death. Believe me, cowboy, I paid for this life. And I intend to enjoy it.'
'I noticed that,' I said. 'I'm sort of interested in where Mandy Rae's cocaine came from.'
