Annie’s Boots
Morgan drove erratically, slowing and speeding in microbursts that caused the motorists behind him to threaten various acts of mayhem, trying to decipher the directions scrawled in red lipstick on the map spread across his lap. He’d turned off the interstate more than an hour before, and was moving in a roughly north and somewhat east direction across the vast scrub pine and sagebrush wasteland of east-central Montana. The road was paved, barely, and there was just enough traffic to be annoyed at his unfocused automotive antics.
He was starting to suspect that the woman wielding the lipstick, whom he’d met in a notorious cowboy bar in Billings the previous evening, and whose script was probably schoolgirl neat when she wasn’t in her cups, might have given him bad directions, perhaps intentionally. He stopped the car dead in the middle of the road, forcing the driver of the flatbed hay truck following to swerve around him in the ditch, nearly tipping his precariously-balanced load. The man screamed in rage, hurled an unheard epithet at Morgan, and gave him the finger as he pulled the truck back onto the highway. Unaware, Morgan held the map to his face with both hands, turning it left, then right, then completely upside-down. He squinted at the unintelligible red smears. Why in hell couldn’t the damned woman just have traced the route in lipstick, instead of attempting to write out directions, thus obscuring large and, apparently, necessary portions of the map? He guessed simplicity might not always be found in a bottle.
He started the car, and eventually spied a turn onto a gravel road that was marked with a signpost containing a host of faded, white-painted wooden arrows. Stenciled in black on each arrow was the name of a farm or ranch, followed by the approximate distance thereto. All the arrows pointed in the same direction, down the road, and he wondered if it mightn’t have been easier to just paint one large signboard. Maybe no one around here was capable of doing anything the easy way.
One arrow was marked with the name “Sternhagen” and the distance “8.5”. He turned and followed the gravel. At just over eight miles on the odometer, he spied two metal poles flanking a dirt two-track that disappeared across the sagebrush flats without a building in sight, and supporting a welded metal arch with the words “Sternhagen Ranch” worked out of iron bars. A rural mailbox with the flag up was bolted to the closer pole at just about the height of a pickup truck window. He took the dirt road, following it across the sage-covered plain, around the base of a short hill, and down into an oversized coulee. At the far end of the coulee, a wind-blasted Sears farmhouse stood in front of a silvered and sagging plank barn, with a plain dirt yard worn from the native sod by a century or more of boot soles, the hooves of farm animals, and truck tires.
A woman sitting on the front porch rose as Morgan parked in the yard, setting a glass of amber liquid on the step as she turned to the young boy beside her. She helped him up and approached the car inquisitively, and Morgan sensed that unfamiliar vehicles were not often seen here. The boy hung back, gripping the porch rail tightly with both hands, staring intently into the sky and scanning his eyes back and forth, maybe scanning for space aliens or enemy bombers.
“Help you?” said the woman, an attractive if worn-out blonde in boot-cut jeans and a white t-shirt. The pointed toe of a many-times resoled boot dug repeatedly in the dust as she stood in front of him, head tilted to one side, tentative smile limned in red lipstick, same shade as the writing on his map. He grinned back without answering, and waited for recall to kick in. “You came,” she said. “I didn’t really think you’d come.”
“Why not?” Morgan said. “Nothing beats a long drive through the middle of nowhere to see a woman you only met once in a bar when you were less than ideally sober, am I right?”
“Sure. Hey, off topic, but nice car.” She made a sweeping gesture that took in the mid-sixties, mint condition, pink Cadillac El Dorado convertible. The tips of Morgan’s ears coordinated their flush with his grimace.
“My mom was a Mary Kay commando, a real five-star general. This car was all she left me, and just about enough cash to fill the tank one time. My overachieving bitch sister Mary Margaret-the-surgeon got the restored mansion in Helena and the blue chip stock portfolio. I believe I got the better end of that deal, don’t you?”
“Uh huh.” She continued her appraisal. “ I never got your name the other night. Mine’s Lana, Lana Sternhagen.”
“Morgan Riley. His eyes strayed to the child clinging to the porch, seemingly unaware of Morgan’s presence, his head rotating back and forth on a pencil neck, eyes still scouring the heavens for dangers of which he alone was cognizant.
“What’s with the kid?” Morgan said. “He a retard or something?”
“My son,” Lana said, and he immediately regretted his choice of words. “He’s got a few issues with the world.”
The next morning found Morgan engaged in a bizarre, to his way of thinking, activity with the boy, whose name turned out to be James. James was seated on an inflated automobile tire inner tube attached to several feet of rope, hanging on for dear life as Morgan swung the tube around in giant circles in the dusty yard. It was making Morgan dizzy, but James chortled and squealed with pleasure. Lana claimed he could do this for hours on end without boredom or seasickness, and that they went through an inner tube every couple of months. Morgan had no cause to disbelieve her, but it was still making him ill.
Just as he reached the point of stop or puke, Lana stepped out on the porch and declared that breakfast was on the table, eat it now or it fattens the hogs. Upon hearing this, James rolled off the tube into the dust, grabbed Morgan by the hand, and tugged him toward the house.
The previous evening had revealed a slice of life that Morgan hadn’t even known was a part of the pie. After a dinner of pot roast, potatoes and gravy, with German chocolate cake for dessert, James had planted himself squarely in front of the television set and proceeded to watch a Spanish-language station for two solid hours, staring intently at the screen, carefully observing the histrionics of the Hispanic actors, pausing for neither snack nor potty break. Lana assured Morgan that, to her best knowledge, James did not speak or understand a word of Spanish. “That’s just how it is with him,” she told him. “It’s like living with someone from that Bizarro World in the old Superman comics.” The adults drank coffee and conversed until James shut the TV off, climbed the stairs, and returned in his pajamas, ready for a kiss and a tuck.
In Billings, Lana had been a boozy siren, luring Morgan to the rocks with a smile that made his reproductive organs spasm joyfully as they wrested power of attorney from his brain. He’d followed her precarious directions to the ranch, expecting…well, he didn’t know what to expect, possibly some kind of alcohol-fueled, one night of wild-maybe-exotic sex, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am encounter, from which he would drive away in the morning, unencumbered by attachment or guilt.
Instead, he found a devoted single mother, raising a son with some type of mental issues and a herd of Rambouillet sheep on a dry-land ranch in the hinterlands, with the help of a toothless old cowboy named Leon, whose best days had been coincident with the Nixon presidency. Lana explained how she got off the place once a month “Same as any damned old crazy sheepherder”, leaving James and Leon to take care of each other for the night. She always went to Billings, always cruised the same few bars, in search of a nebulous and nagging need which could be temporarily held at bay, but defied permanent fulfillment.
“You always write directions on road maps?”
“Just the once,” she said, and flashed the smile that had launched Morgan’s ship for her shores in the first place.
He spent the night under a quilt on the sofa, and woke at dawn to James jabbering unintelligibly and pulling his covers off. From then until breakfast, they’d played the inner tube game.
“So,” Lana said, leaning back in her chair and sipping orange juice. “Probably takes a lotta gas to run that fancy pink car. How do you keep the tank full?”
“That your polite way of asking do I have a job?”
She nodded.
“Yeah. Well, I’m self-employed. I buy and sell American cultural artifacts, colonial period to mid-twentieth century.”
“Hmm,” she said. “So you’re an antique dealer?”
“More or less,” Morgan said. “Antique scout, actually. There’s a difference. I work out of the trunk of my car, don’t deal in anything that won’t fit there. That rules out most furniture, leaving mainly high-end collectibles – dolls, music boxes, bottles, firearms, that sort of thing. ‘Course, that Caddy has a trunk on it the size of some apartments I’ve lived in, so I can carry quite a bit of inventory. Dear old Mom actually did me a favor with that car. Eccentricity, or at least the appearance of, is an asset in this business.”
“So, what you got in the trunk right now?”
“Oh,” he said. “Nothing much. I do have one pretty cool item, a pair of knee-length leather boots with the most unbelievable hand-tooling I’ve ever seen, in mint condition.”
“What,” she said, “is so wonderful about some cowhand’s old, smelly boots, regardless of their condition? I’ve got a basement full of the goddamn things.”
“Well, these particular boots were made for and worn by one Phoebe Ann Moses. You probably know of her as Annie Oakley, the Little Sure Shot. They’re barely worn, the dyes in the leather are vibrant, almost no trace of the odor of unwashed feet.”
“Cool. Show them to me later? It’s time to get some work done.
Midmorning found Morgan stripped to the waist, off-loading alfalfa bales from the back of a rusting Chevy pickup under a hard sun.
“Damn, Leon,” he said, stopping to grab a drink of water from an iced jug resting on the tailgate, “you work like this all the time?”
“Betcha,” the old man said, leaning on a pitchfork in the classic supervisory pose. “Day in, day out, shit never ends.” He adjusted the brim of an ancient, sweat-dyed Stetson and spit into the dust.
“Damn,” Morgan said again, and returned to stacking hay.
“Where’d you find that mean old Mexican?” Morgan asked Lana at dinner. “Man worked me all day like an ugly stepchild.”
“Mint Bar in Jordan,” she said, trying to convince James, whose head was gyrating wildly to the rhythms of some older-than-time songline, that the forkful of green beans she held in front of him was worth his interest. “Drunk and passed out on the floor in the men’s room. Same place I find him every month, after his payday binge. Different town, sometimes, different bar, mostly, but he has an ungodly attraction for toilet floors.”
Later, having succeeded in stuffing a healthy amount of nutritional material into her son, and with the dirty dishes stacked in the kitchen sink, Lana sat on the sofa next to Morgan, watching a rerun of a generic cop-and-lawyer show. Her eyes fixed on the TV screen, she slid up tight to him and lay her head on his shoulder.
“So, cowboy,” she said. “you gonna show me those boots?”
Annie Oakley’s boots were a big hit. With James bathed and tucked in for the night “Once his head hits the pillow, dynamite wouldn’t rouse him”, Lana guided Morgan and his precious box into her bedroom. She opened the box, taking a boot in one hand. She held it gently, turning and examining its every detail, the fabulously dyed soft leather, the artful carving, the intricate stitching. She replaced the boot and carried the box into the bathroom. Before Morgan had time for a decent perusal of the family photographs adorning the walls and level surfaces in the room, she returned, dressed in nothing but the famous sharpshooter’s footwear.
“Do you mind?” she said. “They’re just about a perfect fit.” When he indicated mutely that, in fact, he did not mind at all, she nodded, saying “Okay then, cowboy, let’s ride.”
Early morning, and Morgan drove down the ranch road into a stereotypical western sunrise, thinking of the incredible night, of Lana in Annie Oakley’s boots, of the sexual response the sight of her elicited in him. He bet Annie had never dreamed that a piece of her working gear, essentially part of a stage costume, would be used for such a purpose. Or perhaps she had. An image came unbidden to him, of Annie Oakley, wearing only her Victorian underwear and the boots, preparing to mount her husband, the showman Frank Butler, riding him like the bucking broncos that were her daily companions. The unlikely vision painted a smile on Morgan’s lips that stayed with him for many miles.
He’d left the boots with Lana, not wanting to disturb her peaceful, exhausted sleep as he rose in the predawn. He wouldn’t need them on this trip, and besides, they looked better on her than he could ever envision them looking on another, original owner included. He’d peeked in on James on his way downstairs. The boy was awake, staring sadly at Morgan as if fully aware that his new playmate was moving on. He’d smiled at James, given him a thumbs-up, and was relieved that James hadn’t gone into some sort of wailing, gurgling, or otherwise noisy tirade.
Morgan hadn’t left a note, figuring there was no need. He’d left Lana wearing Annie Oakley’s boots, and that was message enough. He’d be coming back.
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