Ride it out, the Cowgirl in me says. She’s got her mama’s worn-out turquoise boots and a bit of wheat in her mouth and she thinks in broad blushing horizons and the smell of dawn. And she ain’t scared of nothing.
Listen to her, once in a while. You don’t have to be in the Big Southwest to wear those boots. You are your mama’s girl. Nobody would suspect it, nobody that hasn’t seen me in bad situations. I handle it, man. I handle it like she does and we love horses and we talk to ’em while we dish out their hay and we know the world can be big and mean, but we talk it down, tough and kind, the way she talked down that man who was going to rape her. Talked to him all night long while he held her down with his body in that hammock, straight through till dawn. Because it’s always dawn somewhere and she knew pretty soon it would be there, it always is if you can talk through the night, and then you smell that smell—the indigo smell of first woodsmoke and light shivering the cold sweat off the bushes.
She had to do that because otherwise where would I be, and I learned from watching her pack up the truck and sometimes we’d spend a night in Needles. I remember how cold the desert was at night and how hot in the day, a land with a fever. And we took good care of the dogs, though sometimes the bulldog would overheat and we’d have to pour cold water on his head and feet. It was all an adventure then, but now I wonder if at night in our sleeping bag she’d fever up like the desert, thinking how it would go tomorrow, with no money and a girl and two dogs, and how it would go the next day and on down a staggering line of days like a freight train, on to where it was already morning.
Now, they tell me I’m almost as tall as her (though I don’t believe it; you’re never as tall as your mother) and I have nights like that, too, lying in bed with lots of money and a boyfriend or two, and a heart like a Richter scale, etched with every shudder in the world I feel. Mama is pretty big on that scale, a deep zagging groove like an arroyo in the cracked land.
I remember one night, maybe it was her birthday, maybe I was thirteen. Anyway it was summer and night and New Mexico and there was a Country Western band playing outside and the grass smelled like grass and mama asked me to dance. The Two-Step. She was wearing white and it looked pretty against her tan chest and she smelled like perfume and like my mother. She was soft as waves and I thought, this is what I feel like. It was like dancing with a mirror because, despite what they suspect, I am my mama’s girl, and I could have danced like that all night, swaying and spinning in little squares all the way till dawn.