by Dale Scherfling
Darlene Kessler had spent most of 1987 following the rodeo circuit between Mesquite and Cheyenne, mostly watching.
She still had the boots. Acmes, the short ones, bought at a Sheplers outside Amarillo the summer she’d driven up to watch a girl from Deaf Smith County ride a barrel pattern so clean it tightened something in her throat. She’d never quite broken the boots in right, which was something a person could see, if they knew what they were looking at.
The tattoos had seemed like a better idea then.
She had four of them now, running up and down both arms, and in the Olive Garden air conditioning they didn’t look like what she’d once imagined back at Lone Star Ink on the south side of Fort Worth. You’d have needed two hands to smooth out the skin enough to read them properly, and she knew it. Had known it for years.
The Olive Garden sat at the edge of town like something dropped from a passing truck—plastic grapevines, breadsticks, the whole arrangement— wedged between a feed store and a Dairy Queen. Most people around here ate where their trucks were already pointed.
The waiter, a boy of maybe twenty, had grown up in this county and knew what women looked like who’d grown up in it too. He was polite about Darlene in the way a person learns to be polite about things they don’t entirely understand. He’d seen worse, he supposed. He kept his opinions filed somewhere quiet and got on with it.
She ordered the Tour of Italy and asked if they had Lone Star.
They didn’t, but he asked for her ID anyway. He looked at the license longer than he needed to, then back at her boots and the tattoos, as if trying to decide whether she was for real.
Outside the window, eighteen-wheelers moved south along the interstate toward San Antonio, and she watched them the way she’d once watched the girls come bursting out of the gate on their horses, leaning hard into something just ahead of them she had never been able to name.
***
Dale Scherfling is a former National Guard and Navy journalist and photographer. His work has appeared in Third Act Magazine, Does it Have Pockets Magazine, Lost Blonde Literary, All Hands Magazine, and Pacific Crossroads.
