RODE HARD, PUT AWAY DEAD

Abigail Van Thiessen had been lifted, stitched, tucked, stretched, molded, nipped, sucked, mudded and sweated and she still didn’t ride worth a damn. Not that all of that remodeling should have turned her into a cowgirl, but the thousands of dollars she’d spent on horseback riding lessons could have accounted for something.

Still, with all the Choco-Willie candy fortune behind her, I supposed she wasn’t too worried about her money being flushed down the toilet.

Martin, my ranch foreman, and I sat on our horses high on the mesa watching the circus down below. We were gathering cattle and Abby and her husband of six months, J.B. Calendar were trying to flush a Brahma bull out of the brush. By my own count, Abby had almost fallen off of her horse three times in the last five minutes. But then almost only counts in horseshoes.

"J.B.’s got his hands full," Martin offered.

I nodded. "So does she."

Less than a year earlier J.B. Calendar rode into Abigail Van Thiessen’s heart on a 2,000-pound bucking, twisting, torqueing Brahma bull and never left. The wiry Arizona bull rider had been a part of the rodeo show the Rancho Los Reales entertained their corporate guests with, and that particular night had included executives from Choco-Willie. Abigail Van Thiessen and her brother Peter, sole owners of the candy dynasty, had been in the audience.

To keep everyone glued to the performance and in their seats - just as in the real rodeos - the Los Reales crew had saved the bull riding until last. There was always something in this man against beast pairing that thrilled spectators. The only difference between this sport and the Christians against the lions was that while most of the watchers didn’t mind seeing a wreck, they liked to see their heroes walk away from it. Usually that happened. But in bull riding, sometimes the good guys didn’t get up.

World champion Lane Frost was one of the ones who didn’t. Although he’d been killed a few years earlier, Los Reales had a spectacular finale where J.B. Calendar, would ride a bull, not for the required eight seconds, but for a full sixteen – eight for himself and eight for Lane Frost. The fact that he had never known Frost, for J.B. was a second class bull rider at best, or that national champion Tuff Hedeman had been the first to offer this tribute, never seemed to bother the Los Reales champ.

Double Indemnity, the ancient Brahma who was the class part of the act, always made J.B. look good. The two of them had perfected Calendar’s dismount to the point where he’d tumble into the dirt with Double Indemnity spinning into the dust beside him.

J.B. would lie, like a broken, busted doll, face down in the arena, listening to the crowd gasp and then become strangely silent. In the best John Barrymore tradition, Calendar would begin to twitch, first one finger, then a hand, a shudder of a shoulder and then a leg quiver, and finally slowly rise from the earth like Lazarus from the dead.

That first encounter was one that Abigail Van Thiessen often related in the ensuing months. "Like a Remington bronze come to life," she’d said.

"I’d never seen anything like it."

In the time it took Abby to push through the crowd eager to congratulate the dusty cowboy on his spectacular ride, J.B. had already figured out who the major players were.

The fact that the Choco-Willie mistress had thirty-two years on him didn’t hobble his courtship.

And now the happy honeymoon couple was down in the canyon below me trying to coax a recalcitrant Brahma from the brush. Watching Abby bounce on the seat of her saddle, I briefly wondered if I could be sued for someone falling off her own horse on my land.

J.B. was doing a valiant job trying to chouse the bull out from under a mesquite tree, but he might as well have been working alone for all the help his bride was giving him. At least he rode. Unlike ropers and bronc riders, a lot of bull riders are city boys, and not all that comfortable riding horses. At the National Finals Rodeo every year a lot of them hate the grand entry where they either ride or face a $250 fine.

"Chiquita, they’re never gonna get Freight Train out of there," Martin offered.

I wasn’t surprised that even at this distance my foreman knew the beast in the brush, for Freight Train was the largest bull on the ranch.

"Looks like work for you, Blue." At the sound of her name, the Australian cattle dog jumped up from under the mesquite tree where she’d been resting. Mrs. Fierce, my cock-a-schnauz had been left back at the ranch headquarters. While she would have preferred to come along on the roundup, she also took her job as head of ranch security very seriously, and I had left her with that important assignment.

As I rode down the mesa, the hot June sun flooded my face in spite of my cowboy hat. Dream, my bay Arabian, had his evaporative cooler already working as his neck and shoulders gleamed with sweat. I was glad we started early. While the ice had already broken on the Santa Cruz – a local euphemism for the first day of the year that hits 100 degrees – the weatherman had sworn last night that we’d only hover in the high 90’s. So far, he was right.

But that’s how June in the desert around Tucson is, hot and dry. While the Vaca Grande, my ranch, is thirty miles north of town, and cooler than Tucson, when you’re talking those kinds of degrees, it’s not much help. The desert was suffering, not only with the heat, but also with the prolonged drought we’d been having.

In spite of the temperature, I was happy to be out gathering cattle this morning. It gave me a good chance to clear the cobwebs in my head, and took me away from my other job as a private investigator. All in all, I’m one of the lucky ones, for I love the ranch life and I love my work, and in both I’m self-employed which means I can set my own hours, wear what I please and screw off when I want to.

As Martin and I rode up, Freight Train decided to amble out from under the tree. With a stern shake of his massive head and an impressive snort, he stamped one huge cloven foot at Abby’s horse and started throwing dirt over his shoulder. Blue was boldly nipping at his heels in an effort to dislodge him.

"Move!" J.B. yelled.

His timing was just off, for Abby’s seasoned horse knew not to get in the way of the irritated bull and the horse spun out from underneath her, depositing her at the feet of the huge Brahma. Her cowboy hat landed a few feet away.

Freight Train looked as startled as the rest of us and thankfully, instead of charging this godsend from heaven, he stomped on her dislocated straw hat and ambled off in the direction of the cows.

Abby rolled on her back and gulped air.

J.B. did a quick dismount, dropped his reins on the ground and rushed to his wife, before Martin and I could even get close. Abby’s horse browsed nearby.

"Oh, Hon," he leaned over her, brushing her blonde hair away from her face. "Don’t move, just take it easy." One of his hands was on her thigh, the other holding her hand as he watched her gasp. "Are you OK?"

His bride didn’t answer. She couldn’t for all of her energy was concentrated on catching her breath. J.B. looked close to tears.

Finally, Abigail Van Thiessen said, "I’m fine, Sweetie," as she sat up slowly and rubbed her hip.

I was now on the ground, kneeling in the dust, beside J.B. "Don’t get up too quickly, Abby," I cautioned. "Take a few deep breaths and take inventory."

The Choco-Willie heiress gave me a blurry look. "Are you part Apache?"

"What?" I said.

"J.B. said you’re part Apache, is that true?"

Calendar gave me an embarrassed look.

"My grandmother is an Apache." What in the hell did this have to do with her getting dumped? Did she have a concussion?

"Who am I?" Her husband of six months asked, obviously considering the same diagnosis.

She gave him a sly grin.

"Stud Muffin McGillicutty."

"Abby, what day is it?" I asked.

She fluffed the dirt out of her blonde, once perfectly coifed hair, and as she pushed it back from her face I could see faint surgical scars, the result, no doubt, of her many rumored plastic surgeries. Even at 68, she was still a strikingly good-looking woman. Her doctors had done a good job, for she lacked much of the stretched, numb look that so many face lifted women wear. I suspected that her lips had not escaped attention either, for they were suspiciously full. Collagen injections, no doubt. She batted her crystal blue eyes at me. "Monday. It’s Monday."

She was right.

"What’s your name?" J.B. asked.

"Abigail Van Thiessen," she paused. "Calendar."

Martin, convinced that we were not looking at a medi-vac case, rode off after Freight Train.

"I don’t think we need to bother with asking who the president is," I said.

"I’m not going there," Abby grinned. Her teeth were flawless and unnaturally white.

J.B. helped her to her feet and then retrieved her wide brimmed straw cowboy hat. She was quite a bit shorter than her groom, and rail thin. At 5’ 7" and 125 pounds I felt like a giant standing next to her.

"It’s a little the worse for wear," J.B. said apologetically, dusting her hat off against his Wranglers. From my vantage point I could see that it was a good one – a $100 Thievin’ Vaquero. He took the tips of his fingers and gently wiped the dust from her nose. "How’s my girl?"

She patted his face. "I’m fine Sweetie. Really."

He gave her a light kiss on the lips and replaced the cowboy hat on her head. Then he retrieved her horse, held it for her as he helped her get on.

Not for the first time, I studied the odd pair before me. Like many people, I wondered what she saw in him. Average looking, he did have a full head of hair and a great smile, punctuated by deep dimples on both sides of his mouth which could be seen hugging his long, black handlebar moustache. J.B.’s previous zip code had been E-I-E-I-O and he’d passed time in Elko, Santa Fe, Lubbock, Sedona, and most recently in Tombstone, where he dressed up as Bat Masterson for the tourists. As for brains, any guy who’d jump on the back of a 2000 pound bull and tie a rope close to its balls to make it even more pissed off, certainly wouldn’t qualify for a think tank in my book.

What J.B. saw in the Choco-Willie heiress was obvious. Still, for her $200 million, it seemed to me that Abby could have bought more for her dough.

"Guess I’m not doing so hot on my first round up, huh?"

"No, no, you’re doing fine," I lied. Abby and J.B. had bought the old Marvin place north of Oracle. They’d renamed it the Brave Bull and, after a whirlwind remodeling job on the old house, had been living up there for the past three months.

In marrying Abigail Van Thiessen, J.B.’s fondest dream had come true. Suddenly the itinerant bull rider found himself wearing glass slippers. Abby’s wedding present to her thirty-six year-old husband had been four magnificent bucking bulls including the elderly Double Indemnity and J.B. now had his own bull riding school. The plan was to have one-week sessions four to five times a year, sandwiched in between the Calendars’ trips to Abby’s beach home in the Bahamas, her hunting lodge in Montana, and her apartments in Milan and New York.

While J.B. had his bucking bulls, he had no herd of cattle and Abby had been eager to learn about his life - Arizona ranching and cowboys - so I had been happy to include them in our roundup.

J.B. grabbed his canteen from his saddle and offered it to Abby, who declined. As he took a long slug from it, I wondered if he’d cut his water with something stronger, for Martin and the cowboys had told me that J.B. had lately taken to drinking a lot.

"Why don’t you guys head down to the holding pasture," I suggested. "I’ll meet you there."

As I rode off in search of Martin and Freight Train it hit me. Could that business about my being Apache have been Abby’s way of deflecting attention from herself? Since she was so much older than J.B. was she sensitive about being more frail?

All in all it seemed a pretty stupid idea since any one of us could have fallen off our horses today.

Briefly, I wondered if Abby had died from her fall if J.B. would have been set for life or once again be out in the cold.

As it turned out, I wouldn’t have long to wait for the answer to that question.