Pale Blue Horses

The vocalist preferred doing his own rendition. While not a Ray Price, he was a source of pleasure in his own right.

And I thought: “That’s right, this is just like Texas, only they don’t have no boots.”

They came in slowly, one by one, two of them stopping to get a beer at the bar before seating themselves at one of the round tables near me. It happened so quietly and unobtrusively that I wouldn’t have noticed if my senses had not been heightened. Joe Ortega was the last to arrive. He took a seat with his back to me, which I thought was most prudent for the cowhand, but then maybe he had been playing cowboys and Indians longer than me. As he sat, a man at the bar turned to look at several couples doing the Cotton-Eyed Joe on the dance floor.

Clumps of brown hair drifted down into a brown gopher head covered on the bottom half by a stingy brown beard. Exaggerated eyebrows covered the deeply imbedded eyes of the gopher. His gaze traveled the room and fell on the group near me for a full quarter second before disappearing back into a burrow of hunched shoulders and cloudy bar smoke.

I knew the game well. And this almost too casual guy had just tipped his hand. Joe Ortega, or someone else at the table, was on someone’s list.

A woman in a fish net body suit, a bunch of holes held together with shoelace, and accompanied by a solid matching leather vest, approached the table. “How ‘bout it guys, anyone of you men up for a dance?” No one responded and she started walking my way. I shook my head silently before she reached the booth. Her eyes were brittle black, dead branches encased in the ice bestowed by a winter storm. She turned away muttering some words that carried the sound of disgust: “Bunch of smelly castrated eunuchs.”

I turned a marbled column corner and found her seated at a half-sized table. Her radiance emanated the full forty feet to my spot. Something occurred to me that I had never thought before: could a person’s inner energy be quantifiable, say in units of measure, such as candlepower, for instance. Would Carressa’s radiance and smile be a hundred candlepower, or perhaps a thousand candlepower? It was something to ponder I thought as I approached.

She smiled. “What’s up?”

“I just rated you a ten thousand candlepower unit.”

“Is that a fact? And what is my ten thousand candlepower worth?”

“I dunno. I guess you could light up a city block, if you wanted.”

She nudged me lightly in the shin. “A city block, no less. Just who have you been practicing that line on, my friend?”

I looked at her. I looked at her once more. A coral colored dress clung softly to her body, a thin layer of pastel icing covering a liquid brown form. “My, you look alluring tonight. No line, just ask any man in the room.”

“Alluring, you say? Sexy would have been better, but I’ll settle for alluring. It has a nice, sophisticated ring to it. Alluring.”