Cowboy For Hire (23 page)

“I didn’t
realize.”

“Didn’t think
so.”

They
talked—whispering mostly—far into the night. Karen drifted off
after an hour or so, and they kept talking. Long after everyone
else had settled down to sleep, Charlie and Amy talked while rain
pounded down, sliding off the canvas siding of the chow tent and
splashing into the lake growing outside.

Charlie told
Amy all sorts of stories about life on the ranch. He was happy to
note that she not only seemed interested, but he thought he
detected some longing, too,, perhaps for a life that had a little
more to it than drinking orange juice. His impression that she
wasn’t such an outrageous candidate for territorial living as he’d
first supposed grew as the night progressed.

He knew better
than to set his heart on anything, but he was encouraged, and he
didn’t mind admitting it. To himself.

Eleven

The rain
continued all night and into the following morning, making the
atmosphere outdoors cool and muggy and indoors steamy. For the
first time in her life, Amy smelled the aroma of many bodies
huddled together. She didn’t like it. Charlie’s wide-open spaces
began to sound more appealing as the rain continued.

The desert was
covered in water, reminding Amy of a weird, flat ocean with prickly
plant tops sticking out of it. Rain splashed in sheets and then in
sprinkles and then in sheets again. The thunder subsided during the
day, but the sky was as gray as her aunt Julia’s hair. There wasn’t
a jot of blue or a flash of sunlight anywhere. When she let her
imagination motor ahead on its own, it seemed to Amy as if the
whole world had turned sullen and dangerous.

She
didn’t get her letter to Vernon written the night of the flood. Nor
did she have a chance to write it the following day, most of which
was spent by the cast and crew of
One and Only
in digging trenches around the chow tent and
trying to repair leaks. The chow tent eventually ended up the only
domicile in the temporary Peerless lot that remained relatively
undamaged and free from water.

“Heave!”
Charlie yelled at Martin and Horace Huxtable, who were struggling
with a flat board that looked like a door to Amy, although she
wouldn’t have sworn to it.

The two
men heaved, Huxtable without even whining or complaining about
having to do some real work for once in his life. He was apparently
as worried about the picture lot and the completion of
One and Only
as anyone else on the set. The
reason they were heaving unattached doors was to create a bridge
across the trench, and thereby connect the chow tent to the rest of
the world. At present, the chow tent bore a slight resemblance to a
very small, very unstable medieval castle with a moat around
it.

The
wooden door—or whatever it was—was slapped into place, sending up a
spray of mud that coated Huxtable and Martin. Martin leaped back
and laughed. Huxtable leaped back and swore.

Amy shook her
head, thinking the two reactions could have been predicted by
anyone with an ounce of understanding in his soul. If she were
writing a script of this episode, she’d write it just this way,
with Charlie leading the pack. The dialogue would have to be
cleaned up a little, since Huxtable’s penchant for cursing was both
shocking and revolting. Amy was certain the picture-watching public
would never countenance such vile language.

She sighed as
she stirred the soup. She volunteered to work in the kitchen since
the kitchen crew had been unable, presumably, to traverse the
flooded roads from El Monte after they’d gone home the night
before. Whatever their reasons, they hadn’t appeared this morning.
Most of the resident male crew members had been recruited to work
in pursuits more muscular than cooking. Therefore, Amy and Karen
were pulling kitchen duty, while other female crew members had been
set to mending things that needed it, tent flaps and so forth.

At the moment,
Amy and Karen were engaged in fixing lunch. Breakfast had consisted
of biscuits and coffee. Since everyone in the crew understood, by
this time, how much Amy knew about coffee, she’d made the biscuits.
Charlie had told her that he and his brothers generally ate
biscuits and coffee for breakfast on the trail.

The trail. Amy
stirred dreamily, remembering his comment and thinking about life
on a ranch and how peaceful it probably was. Most of the time.

Perhaps
it was even too peaceful sometimes. Amy always tried to pepper her
dreams with doses of reality in order to keep her feet on solid
ground. She had to admit, however, that the ranching life sounded
lovely. A little boredom never hurt anyone, and it beat the tar out
of the kinds of excitement she’d lived through in her earlier
days.

“What are they
doing out there?” Karen wiped hair from her sweaty forehead and
resumed beating the cornmeal mixture she’d been assigned to put
together.

Her attention
recaptured and plunked down slap in the middle of the waterlogged
Peerless Studio set, Amy said, “I think they’re trying to secure
the rest of the tents so the water won’t get inside and ruin
everybody’s clothing and so forth. They went around earlier today
and made sure everyone’s luggage was placed on top of the beds.”
She tasted the soup, decided it needed more oomph, and tossed in
another cut-up onion and some salt and pepper. She liked
well-seasoned food.

“How are they
doing that? Securing the tents, I mean.”

Amy shook her
head. “I’m not sure. I think it involves folding up the edges of
the canvas so that water can’t leak in through the seams.” She
thought about it and shrugged. “I have no idea, really.”

“I imagine
we’ll find out eventually. If we live through this rain. It reminds
e of Noah and the flood.”

“It does
indeed.” Amy squinted at the roof of the tent, wondering if it
would hold. The chow tent was the largest and most elaborate of the
tents, and had cross-beams supporting it. Cross-beams wouldn’t be
of much help if the canvas decided to collapse around them.

But as her aunt
told her with regularity, it was no use borrowing trouble. “The
good Lord knows what he’s doing, Amy. He doesn’t need you to guide
His hand,” Aunt Julia would say when Amy got to fretting and
fuming.

Amy knew her
aunt spoke the truth. Amy’s life, which in late years had been
remarkably free from insecurity and doubt, had not always been
thus, and she still worried. When she was a little girl, insecurity
was all she’d known. Worry, when it was so deeply entrenched in a
person’s heart, was a hard habit to break.

At least
the cameras were safe for the time being. They still resided in the
wagon, and had been tucked all around with oilskin and canvas
coverings. Martin had been going outside every time he thought
about them—which seemed to Amy every fifteen seconds or
thereabouts—to check on them.

Amy found it
amusing, in a cynical sort of way, that Martin, who was really a
very nice man, should be much more worried about the cameras than
about the cast and crew. Of course, cameras, as martin had told her
with some show of irritation when she’d voiced her observations,
couldn’t swim.

Horace Huxtable
had finally been coerced into helping Charlie and Martin build the
bridge over the moat, but he’d had to be bribed with the promise of
liquor after the storm was over. Amy deplored such tactics but had
to admit they’d worked on Horace.

“I hope I won’t
be around when they give him his reward,” she huffed, changing
hands because her right arm was beginning to ache from
stirring.

Karen sniffed.
“I expect they’ll take him to a roadhouse to tank up.”

The way she’d
expressed it tickled Amy, and she giggled. “I hope he drowns on the
way.”

“I fear there’s
little chance of that happy prospect coming to pass.” Karen’s
cornbread mixture was ready to dump into two large greased tins
which were awaiting their turn at usefulness. “Would you mind
holding these things down while I pour?”

“
Don’t
mind at all.” Amy removed the huge wooden spoon from the soup pot,
tasted the soup again, decided the onion, salt and pepper had
helped a good deal, and laid the spoon aside. “It’s a miracle there
was enough wood to fire up the stove this morning. I’d expected it
all to be soaked through.”

“I guess they
have a lot of wood put aside for just such emergencies. The people
who run picture studios don’t like to take many chances.” Karen
shook out her arms and prepared to lift the huge bowl of
batter.

“You mean they
anticipated a flood?” In an effort to help her friend, Amy shoved
one of the tins closer to the bowl.

“
I don’t
know if they anticipated
this
,
exactly, but picture making can be a rough sort of business when
you leave town for the country. I’m sure Peerless has run into
troubles of a similar nature before this.”

“I suppose they
must have. Making a picture is quite an undertaking.”

Karen didn’t
speak while she concentrated on pouring out her batter, giving Amy
time to think about leaving town for the country. Arizona
Territory, for instance.

Charlie
had told her all about his ranching operation. It had sounded like
some kind of remote and gorgeous heaven to Amy. She chided herself
for being foolish. She knew good and well that it was dangerous to
leap into things without checking them out first. For heaven’s
sake, leaping before they looked was what had sickened and
eventually killed her father and mother.

She
didn’t want to think about her parents, since doing so always made
her sad. Instead, she thought about Vernon Catesby. She needed to
write a response to his letter. It wasn’t kind of her to be
spending all of her thoughts on Charlie Fox, whom she really didn’t
know very well.

Vernon was a
known and therefore a comfortable commodity in her life. It was
true that he had no tales to relate about blue lightning balls
passing back and forth on cattle horns, and he had no experience
with wildfires or flash floods, both of which phenomena Charlie had
explained to her last night, but Vernon was stable. Stability was
good. Stability was a most desirable quality in a man.

Stability might
be sort of boring, but Amy would much rather be bored than scared
and in danger. She’d been both of those things, and she didn’t
intend to be again if she could help it.

On the
other hand, the Fox family’s ranch had been a thriving concern,
according to Charlie—whom she had no reason to doubt—for nearly
fifty years. That was a long time. It sounded almost frightfully
stable.

The ranching
life also appealed to Amy for other reasons. She adored her aunt
and uncle, but she wasn’t keen on pampering the whims of
self-indulgent inmates of the Orange Rest Health Spa, like Horace
Huxtable, for the rest of her life. Although she knew she’d do that
in a minute rather than suffer the disquietude of insecurity.

But
having her own home and family on a thriving ranch in the Arizona
Territory or in California—especially in California, actually,
where there were lots of them already—sounded nice to her. She knew
her aspirations seemed dull and uninspired to many young women her
age, but they were hers, and she cherished them. A home of her own.
A loving husband. Lots of children. Wide-open spaces and fresh
country air. Maybe an orange grove, if the ranch was in California.
Why, it all sounded like some idyllic Eden to her.

“Ooof!” Karen
plopped the heavy mixing bowl on the counter, again brushed hair
from her forehead, and eyed the other greased tin with a frown.

Amy quickly
opened the oven door, picked up the batter-filled tin, and thrust
it into the oven. The stove was a modern one, thank goodness, and
boasted a regulated heating element. Modern conveniences. The world
was making great strides in appliances. Amy expected a well-to-do
ranching family would have such a stove. Maybe. If the wife of the
rancher was lucky.

She turned and
placed the other greased tin next to the mixing bowl. “Would you
like me to pour this time Are your arms tired?”

“No, thanks. I
can do it.” Karen sighed. “I’ve never been much of a hand in the
kitchen. I’m much more comfortable with a needle and thread.”

“I like to
cook,” said Amy. “I think it’s fun to feed people.”

“I’ll hire you
to cook for me when I’m rich.”

Both women
laughed, and Karen dumped the rest of the cornmeal batter into the
second greased tin. Amy scraped out the last of the batter and put
the tin in the oven. “There.” She dusted off her hands and went
back to her soup.

The crew, when
they came in for lunch, were a sorry-looking band of water-soaked
men. The women who’d been sewing patches onto canvas and mending
tent flaps didn’t look very good, either.

“Good heavens,
they look like refugees from some strife-torn European country,”
Karen muttered as she took up a ladle and prepared to serve the
crew cafeteria-style.

“They certainly
do.” Amy positioned her tongs over a huge mound of cut-up
cornbread. She supposed this wasn’t the best lunch in the world,
but it would be warm and nourishing. And if Horace Huxtable
complained, she might just whack him with her tongs.

He didn’t.
Actually, he looked too bushed to whine. Amy might have felt sorry
for him if he were an otherwise decent human being. He wasn’t. He
was a contemptible, miserable, selfish, and ghastly animal. She
didn’t even react to his sneer as he passed, but plopped a piece of
cornbread on his plate without comment.

Next in line
was Charlie, to whom she offered what she hoped was an engaging
smile and two slabs of cornbread.