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| http://www.harnesslink.com/News/A-rare-white-Standardbred-colt-is-born-97590 |
"Some mighty fine boots you got there, Miss. How about I pull them off for you?"
So drawls Buddy Beatty hooking thick thumbs in a wide leather belt barely containing his bulging belly that hangs like a twisted water balloon.
"Not today Mr. Beatty," huffs Alice Finnerty, her chilled breath materializing from a feigned smile as she reigns the white horse away with a slight flick of the wrist.
"Next time then!" he commands as horse and rider disappear with the waning glow of an early December dusk, misinterpreting her polite response as interest in the son of her employer.
__________
Arthur Beatty, commonly called Buddy because his uncle was also Arthur along with at least eight generations before him, was a thirty-year-old man of many misinterpretations. He mistakenly thought that being told to keep an eye on the ranch meant he was the trusted heir to his father's fortune, when his mother just wanted to get him and his appetite out of the house. He assumed said fortune was from the trucking business that had his father George to central Jersey, but the tractor-trailers chugging between Perth Amboy and Eastern Kentucky were really a front for a more nefarious affair. He thought that being dismissed to a diner while the trailer was unloaded was just how trucking was done in the southern Appalachians. He interpreted the ranch hands calling him Big Buddy as respect for his spare tire of a midsection. He even thought that the slabs of pie proffered by the Silver Saddle waitresses or the free beers drawn by the bartender were because they liked him. The one thing Buddy did read accurately was horses, and seeing how easily the new girl handled his father's high strung show horse made him stir somewhere down below that rotundiform abdomen.
Alice was a lithe nineteen-year-old hired from a Branchburg farm as the trainer for Ajax, a rare all-white stallion that Mr. Beatty had discovered on a run south. Winding his rig across route 60 in the autumnal gloaming of the West Virginia mountains, he'd done a double-take at a glowing ghost galloping along a fencerow on Big Sewell Mountain. His contraband load was already too far past the highland farm to stop when he realized it was a young horse instead of an albino deer. The return trip was with a wad of cash, a makeshift stable at the tail end of the trailer, and a scheme to train the bleached colt for a detergent commercial.
__________
"Ooh baby it's cold outside," Buddy bellows as he bellies up to the stand-up bar. "How about warming me up?"
"Boilermaker?" queries the bartender, already reaching for the fifth of Fleischmann's when he catches a flash of two fingers from a tall guy in butch haircut and black leather jacket standing at the far end of the long wooden plank.
"This one's on the house," Buddy calls across the shadows of the darkening room. "What brings a city feller out to the Silver Saddle?"
"Non e niente," answers the mysterious man downing first the shot and then a pint of Ballantine before heading for the door and calling back "let's say I'm just passing through."
"Christmas dance next Friday night," Buddy booms into a frigid gust as the door swings shut.
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