Blue Corn Woman

CHAPTER 3

The Cowgirls and the Blue-Tattooed Nipples

Water, money, seed corn, and pawn trinkets are all stored and accounted for, and there is plenty of each, plenty to be reminded of. As a collection, what is displayed in the Blue Corn Trading Post is earmarked for pathfinders, dreamers, healers, spirit guides, mentors, seekers, and post-card poets, writers whose words are dictated by the desert scenery displayed on the cactus lamps with hand-colored photographs printed on plastic-coated paper and laced to a lampshade.

            Surely as a hot iron brands a calf, the drama of the day kicks up the dust like the sharp, busy hoofs of a herd of crazy javelinas. It’s the cowgirls from the Domino Spur Ranch.

            The cowgirls raise churro sheep and habanero peppers, but mostly they raise hell, and cure their toothaches with frog fat and cotton wads.

            Every few months, they get bored and ride five miles across the desert to party with Blue Corn Woman bringing with them their desert elixirs, guitars, poetry, and their game of Mexican dominoes. After two or three days, they ride back to the ranch where they do more of the same, drink cactus wine and recite sexy cowgirl poetry to each other while they play dominoes.

            Being independent is a whole lot of things to the cowgirls and they polish the pawn at the Blue Corn Trading Post with their flirtatious sass and confess their dusty desires for each other at the half-moon peyote altar at sunset.

            There is one more cowgirl than usual making her number nine. Blue Corn Woman looks at number nine’s footwear before looking at her face. She wears the biggest Chilean spurs Blue Corn Woman has ever seen. They are six inches around and she counts twenty-four points before the dust settles. She wears high-shanked boots with fringed leggings which buckled over the knee with thunderbird conchos attached, again the thunderbird conchos stare Blue Corn Woman in the crotch, and her erect, blue-tattooed nipples salute Blue Corn Woman just before the Latino cowgirl salutes her with her flat-brimmed, black velvet sombrero, the Cordoban style worn by a Chilean rodeo queen riding in a high-wheeled oxcart.

            Who this beauty is, Blue Corn Woman does not know, but she knows she has a fiery spirit just like Devi when she backed her mare up and painted a figure-eight out of hoofs. “Tequila!” the Latino woman yells and the cowgirls dismount, handing their reins to the cowgirls who have no guitar, then grab their guitars and strum to the tune of Tequila.

            Blue Corn Woman claps quite sure they have just asked for it, so she goes inside for a mescal minute and comes back out with their thirsty request. She tosses a bottle of Tequila to the Latino cowgirl, and then fondles the thunderbird concho in her jean pocket where she has kept it since finding it yesterday.

            “You were here,” Blue Corn Woman says.

            “Yesterday,” the Latino cowgirl answers.

            “Why?” Blue Corn Woman asks.

            “That is not for me to say,” the Latino cowgirl answers.