Five Times Lucky by Temple P. David

Author:Temple, P. David [Temple, P. David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ChelseaPress.com
Published: 2020-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

Back on the trail, Austin didn’t feel at all good about his premature departure. His tracks were littered with memories of disappointed ladies. He now added Kat to the list.

The land grew hillier, the grasses greener. The road flirted with the foothills of the Sierras, heading generally north. He came to a stop at a two-lane highway and waited for a caravan of lumber trucks to pass. They were big rigs bearing the fruit of Nature’s bounty: massive felled redwoods lashed to their trailer beds from what must have seemed to his father’s fathers to be a limitless supply of alpine forest, there for the taking. Waiting to fall in line behind the last of these trucks as they descended into the valley, Austin took stock of life. The old West was vanishing faster than the polar icecap. On the seat beside him, his cell phone flashed notices of numerous unanswered calls and texts. “Can’t Find My Way Home” by Blind Faith played on the radio. He was back in the modern world.

Further to his right, an old-style general store at the intersection was open for business. Austin had a vague memory of stopping at this intersection as a tyke with his parents on the rodeo circuit. His old man had been a rodeo announcer in a lineage of rodeo performers harking back to the early days of Slim Pickens, who was so named because the work of the rodeo clown yielded so little money. Their family migrated like carnies from one county fairground to the next, northward in the spring, back south again in the fall. One of the last, best rodeos of the year happened to be held up ahead in the high chaparral near a town named Mariposa.

On the front porch of the store, a young boy dressed in cowboy boots and hat sat in the saddle of a mechanical horse. Lack of money didn’t hinder his imagination. The boy rocked back and forth in simulation of a canter. And when he caught the eye of the cowboy in the white Eldorado convertible with the Texas longhorns lashed above the grill, the boy dropped the rein from one hand and tipped his hat.

Austin nodded back, touching the brim of his own hat in salutation: two cowboys out for a ride, enjoying life on the wide-open range.

Austin remembered another thing about this place—butterflies. Everywhere there had been swarms of migrating butterflies meeting and mating. His mother, whose heart pumped a few pints of Native American Ahwanee blood, spoke plainly about her beliefs. “Those are the souls of dead folk headin’ home,” she said.

His dad’s Spanish forebears followed the route opened up by Franciscan monks who plotted an inland chain of missions through the San Joaquin Valley some two hundred years before. These men could not have anticipated the stream of prospectors who would follow their tracks in pursuit of gold. Much to the annoyance of the native population, they stayed. Some comingled. But for the most part, they

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