Moving On Read Free

she cried about were merely silly. Her cheeks stung a little from the tears, but that soon stopped too and they felt cool.
    By the time she was through crying it had grown quite dark, so dark that she could barely see the sorrel horse. She wished Jim was there so she could tell him about Ed Boggs. To her left, across the parking lot, she could see the glow from the circle of lights above the open-air dance floor, and she tried for a moment to imagine what it would have been like to go to a dance with such a man. Crushing, she imagined, but then she felt a little annoyed at her own fastidiousness. He might have been a good dancer. The remark about her being too talkative to sleep with rankled, though. It had obviously been sour grapes.
    Far to the northwest there were flickerings of lightning. The quietness was broken by a splashing near at hand, a steady splashing that carried with it an odor like wet hay. The patient sorrel horse was pissing too. Patsy looked and saw the arena lights faintly reflected in the spreading puddle. In an instant it lifted her spirits, and she wished again that her husband was there. It was just the kind of coincidence he loved—the kind that might happen in life but that could never be made to work in a novel. Jim had tried to write a novel the first year they were married and had made it over a hundred pages before he got diverted.
    When the splashing stopped, Patsy felt even fonder of the horse than she had originally. She decided to get out and pet him. He was good company, and he seemed to have a sense of the absurd. Just as she was opening the car door she thought she heard someone call her name. She saw no one and was puzzled, until she realized that her name had come over the public address system. The rodeo announcer had called her name.
    “WILL MRS. JAMES CARPENTER PLEASE COME TO THE JUDGES’ STAND. MRS. JAMES CARPENTER.”
    Scared, aflutter, she started off immediately and got two pickups away before she remembered her purse. She might need it. Jim was hurt, she knew. Her chest felt tight. She hurried back and got her purse, looked futilely for some Kleenex, and then turned and ran through the cars and trucks toward the arena. Perhaps he had tried to take a picture of a bull and been gored. She began to cry and a few strands of hair stuck to her wet cheek.
    As she came dashing out of the parking area, a roper who was warming up his roping mare came within a foot of running her down. Patsy hardly saw the horse, but she felt the rush of its body past hers. She was out of breath and slowed to a walk. The roper whirled his mare and came back—he was unnerved and furious.
    “Let’s look where you’re goin’, lady,” he said. “This ain’t no damn track meet. I coulda broke your neck.”
    “I’m sorry,” Patsy said, sniffing and trying to get her breath. “I’m afraid my husband’s been gored. If you could show me the way to the judges’ stand I’ll try and stay out of your way.”
    The roper was a thin young man, no older than Patsy. When he saw how pretty she was, and how distressed, he cooled off at once and got down from his horse to help. He held a rope in one hand and had a contestant’s number pinned to the back of his shirt.
    “I’m Royce Jones,” he said. “Sorry I blew off. You scared the daylights out of me. How’d he get gored, bulldoggin’?”
    He spoke quite calmly, as if a goring were something that came to one occasionally, like a toothache, and his spurs jingled lightly as he walked beside her—a comforting masculine sound.
    “He’s probably just got raked alongside the ribs,” he added, to soothe her. “Always happens sooner or later, doggin’.”
    “Oh, no, no,” Patsy said. “He’s a photographer, sort of. I don’t really know what’s happened to him.”
    Royce Jones grinned at her in the tolerant way men of experience grin at the folly of women. Distressed as she was, it annoyed her a little.
    “I doubt he’s gored,” he said.