Handful of Sky Read Free

man carrying a clipboard. His face was stretched long with worry.
    “Shallie, thank God you’re here. Where’s your uncle? I need to consult with him about which horses have been drawn for the bareback.”
    “He’s not here, Mr. Eckles,” Shallie told the rodeo committeeman who had hired the Double L to put on his town’s annual rodeo. “I’ll be producing this show.”
    “You?” Eckles looked at her in disbelief.
    “Yes, me,” Shallie sighed. “Is there something wrong with that?”
    “Not a thing.” Mr. Eckles smiled and Shallie realized how defensive she’d become during her years in rodeo, having learned through experience that it was a world where women are generally regarded first as potential conquests. If they wanted to be thought of as anything else, they had to fight for that recognition. It was a struggle Shallie sometimes wearied of.
    “Here’s a list of the horses that were drawn and their riders,” the committeeman said, handing her a sheet of paper. “Think you can have them up by starting time? We’ve already got some spectators filling up those stands.”
    Shallie glanced up. The stands were indeed beginning to fill up. A teenage couple sauntered in, both wearing identical floral-print Western shirts and tall straw hats. They were followed by a slim woman holding a baby in one arm and leading a three-year-old with the other. Both children wore tiny pairs of leather boots. Her husband sashayed in after her, twirling a toothpick between two back molars.
    A covey of potbellied old men in white shirts and suspenders had congregated close to the trucks and were talking and pointing toward the deceptively docile-looking horses. Shallie had overheard enough old-timers’ talk to know that they were commenting on what a sorry-looking lot of horseflesh they used in rodeos nowadays.Then they’d trade tales about the “really rank” horses that had bucked and snorted across the prairies and later the arenas of their youth. And how if these drugstore cowboys thought they were so hot they should have tried to “fork down into the saddle on the back of one them boogers.”
    Shallie nodded a hasty good-bye to the rodeo committeeman and ran as fast as her boots would allow across the spongy earth of the arena. She scrambled up the metal gates leading to the catwalk that ran behind the chute and overlooked a dusty sea of denim and leather churned up by a dozen bareback riders preparing for their event.
    In the center of the chaos of cowboys rifling through the canvas duffel bags containing their gear, helping one another to pin contestant numbers onto the backs of shirts, and testing their rigging, was one cowboy limbering up. He was seated on the dusty ground, his legs angled out from him. As he bent his long torso forward, the muscles of his shoulders swelled and strained against the tight cloth of his yoke-back shirt in a way that caused her breath to catch. He stretched still more, grabbing a polished boot with both his hands and pulling himself down even farther to limber the powerful muscles in his thighs. Shallie couldn’t see the cowboy’s face but noticed a knot of scar tissue at the base of the middle finger on his right hand.
    Shallie watched the almost ritualized movementswith satisfaction. This was the one single moment she liked best. There was something about the quiet intensity of the contestants as they prepared for their few seconds in the arena that made her feel she knew what the director of a ballet, the producer of a play, went through in those final backstage moments before the curtain went up. Being a rodeo contractor wasn’t so terribly different. Without her and the stock she provided, this drama between man and beast couldn’t be played out.
    As she turned from the scene a knot of tension tightened her nerves. Hoskins and Cahill were stretched out in a patch of shade beneath the bleachers, finishing off both a cigarette and their dissection of her.
    “Wade, Pecos,”