Once in the mountain town of Skeleton Ridge, they came upon sprawling streets with a long row of antique stores on the main drag and a couple of fire engines attracting a crowd. The crowd also milled about the parade staging grounds, the tall, adobe schoolhouse, from the 1880’s, where the Vaqueros y Hombres de Montana Parade was scheduled to start. A mass of people in crazy costumes, tooting band instruments, twirling batons and leading sleepy eyed burros shuffled around oxen, stagecoaches, and small, unstable floats. The Chamber of Commerce, dressed like they would have been a century earlier, kept hopping on and off their float and Apache women in early costumes sat on another float. One of the Apache women held a baby in Mutant Ninja outfit and they both watched an iphone.
The colors of the band uniforms, especially the gold epaulettes, shone in the early morning sun. Shadows spread across the main street. Carriages creaked. Men straightened their string ties. Ladies twirled their pink lacy parasols. Small girls and boys ran about screaming unintelligible things involving horses and mud. Everywhere the harnesses smelled of fresh coats of wax and the saddles gleamed in the sun. There were fancy dress groups in shimmering satin outfits and scruffy imitation miners talking on cell phones. A band in white shirts, denim, and kerchiefs surrounded a square-dance group that drank coffee.
Stephanie, Aunt Helen and Grandpa Drummond blundered their way through the crowd until they found the mountain man club: sixteen men all of them swathed from head-to-toe in suede. They were pretending to have an authentic Rendezvous, but they mostly milled around and shared made-up tall tales, did some mock tomahawk throwing, and pretended to drink out of jugs. They didn’t impress the small town crowd; someone sitting on the school fence shouted: “Look out for the Bed-Bug Brigade!” One fellow of the assembled crowd of mountain men walked around and his suede pants were so loose it looked like he wore diapers. Another mountain man had filmy eyes, desert eyes that had seen far too much sun and had been bleached out to a pale blue color, indistinct, but happy and full of so much light that there was no room for the original color. There were slack-jawed and confused looking old men whose beaded Ute costumes swept around behind them. Entire buffaloes seemed to have landed on their backs. Another young man had a horned buffalo headdress on and he walked with a wallowing command. He held his phone tight against his ear and kept asking, “What’s the word from the parade marshal? How many minutes left? What’s our ETD? Does anybody know the ETD?”
Drummond stood with his long, thoroughly fringed legs spread wide and his arms crossed over his chest. A curtain of suede fringe hung off him and the narrow fringe cuts swayed as he moved, jiggled playfully under his arms and across his chest and down his legs. Mountain man pride coursed through him. The wolf pelt on his head followed along with antics of its own, tilting and bobbing and seeming to grin at Drummond’s club members.
Soon after they joined the mountain man group Stephanie found Mr. Thom and attached herself to him.
“Are you really a cootie-ridden guy?” Stephanie asked Mr. Thom while balancing on a curb. She stood on one leg and then when Mr. Thom tried to adjust his position so he wouldn’t see her, she moved so that she stood right in front of him. She used an ingratiating, grating voice that came out of the silence around Mr. Thom like a tocsin. “Are you really a cootie-ridden curmudgeon?”
“Oh, God,” whispered Helen to her father, “Is that Stephanie with the Thom character you talked about?”
Mr. Thom assessed Stephanie, the thatch of messy brown hair and the bucktooth protruding from the middle of a pinched, wan face, which was looking up at him coldly. Every element of Mr. Thom’s outfit had been carefully researched; he despised children dressed up as mountain men, especially girl children. There had never been any children mountain men. The whole idea was absurd. And as far as women mountain people, he scoffed at the idea.
“No, no, ha, ha!” laughed Drummond, coming up quickly. “Who taught you those very funny words, Stephanie? She has such an advanced vocabulary for an eight-year-old, doesn’t she?”
Stephanie walked away without responding to her grandfather, and Aunt Helen, Grandpa Drummond and the irritated Mr. Thom watched as she scuffed around the street, climbing curbs and twirling around, all the while rearranging the strap of the buffalo robe numerous times, shifting it from one arm to another, trying to attach it to her legs, to her chest and finally stacking the thick brown rug on one shoulder so that she resembled a teeny, hairy Quasimodo. Stephanie scampered up to Mr. Thom again.
“Mr. Thom, are you a curmudgeon?” she demanded. Stephanie stood in a commanding, but hunchbacked, stance near Mr. Thom waiting for his answer. Mr. Thom chose to ignore her.
“I said, are you a curmudgeon, mister?” Stephanie repeated, smacking his arm.
Helen had to turn away. She began snickering uncontrollably.
Drummond smiled at his granddaughter, tousled her hair, and laughed in the direction of a severe Mr. Thom, “I don’t understand why I didn’t get one of those little granddaughters who like ballet and chocolate candies.”
Stephanie turned herself around several times, slowly.
Mr. Thom’s mouth stretched into a sick smirk and he tried to stroll away.
“Curmudgeon, stop!” said Stephanie, running after him and pounding on Mr. Thom’s thighs. “What’s a curmudgeon?” she asked. She squinted at Mr. Thom as though she could see his curmudgeoness or his cooties better that way. When Mr. Thom leveled a cold glare at Drummond, he shrugged and smiled blankly.
Changing tacks, Stephanie commented in a proud manner: “I’m wearing a ‘thentic outfit. Aren’t I, Grandpa Drummond?” She spread her hands and rubbed them down the front of her costume. “All ‘thentic.”
Mr. Thom coldly regarded the costume her Granny had so hurriedly assembled for her.
“What is a ‘thentic outfit, Mr. Thom? Can you tell me if ‘thentic is a tribe from round about here in old Arizonay somewheres?” She gestured cutely with her empty hands held up. She tried that cute gesture again to no effect. Getting no response from him, she made several violent kicking moves, which seemed to be karate or Tae Kwon Do or a seizure. She executed these moves while standing on one leg.
“If you keep that up you might give yourself an asthma attack,” said Mr. Thom hopefully. “One of my grandnephews gives himself those all the time when he misbehaves.” Mr. Thom seemed to derive a strange pleasure from remembering these attacks his grandnephew suffered.
On cue, Stephanie succumbed to a severe asthma attack, wheezing and pulling her shoulders toward her ears. She scooped her chest inward and crouched over her bony knees like some emaciated, tubercular monkey. Her weak and inconsistent breath drew itself through the large gap between her teeth and made a whistling attempt to escape, but was drawn back in instantly. She writhed and twisted artfully.
Aunt Helen became hysterically amused by her niece and had to step away.
“Are you all right?” asked one of the alarmed mountain men.
Mr. Thom stared at Stephanie, grunted and strolled away to the other side of the street where the phony miner was still talking on a cell phone to his wife.
Stephanie followed him happily. “Are you going someplace without me?” she asked innocently.
Mr. Thom cleared his throat. “Possibly to hell,” he mumbled in the softest voice he could summon.
“What was that you said, Mr. Thom?” Stephanie waited for an answer in vain, then she started up the conversation again. “You’ll be a mountain man, Mr. Thom, and I’ll be the mountain girl! Aunt Helen is going to be the mountain skinny lady,” Stephanie said, full of joy at the prospect. She clapped her hands together. One of her index fingers flew up a nostril and she probed around the inside.
Mr. Thom groaned.
“Were there ever mountain girls, Mr. Thom?” she asked, stopping beside him again and asking in a whiney squeal with the palms of her hands pressed together as though she were praying for Mr. Thom to tell her it was so.
“Shut up,” said the old man to a small cloud in th
e sky.
“Shut up isn’t a very nice way to talk to people,” said Stephanie. “If I said that at my school in the Seahorse Room I might get in trouble with Mrs. Bowden. I might even miss recess and have to write all the numbers from one to one hundred.” Then in a sing-song voice with her head tilting back and forth she added, “Or I might get ‘think time!’”
Mr. Thom smiled faintly. “Please, please, little girl, why don’t you give me some think time,” pled the horrid Mr. Thom.
This request received her regard for several moments. “No,” she figured finally, “I don’t think so. Hey, do I get a gun in this parade?”
“Shut up.”
“There are those words again, Mr. Thom! I think you’re saying them deliberate. Why do you wear a purse, Mr. Thom?”
The old man ignored her.
“Are you a girl? ‘Cause you’re wearing a little purse.” She pointed at it and then reached out and petted Mr. Thom’s pouch. “I think it’s kinda cute. Lemme pet it, will ya?”
Chapter Eleven