Tuesday, July 15, 2025
Time: 9:05 PM
Song: Sinners & Saints
Artist: George Jones
Mode of Consumption: Listening to MP3s on shuffle on the way home from Write
On.
Link to song: https://open.spotify.com/track/720w30MoVUGawm3GuZfFhh?si=9396c30fc0894cc2
It was our Writing Workout session at Write On. Below was
our prompt. I had a hankering to write something old west. Please remember I wrote
this in 45 minutes, so don’t expect everything to be historically or culturally
accurate.
Prompt:
Over the last few months, we have read two selections:
“On the Road” by Cormac McCarthy
“Of Mice and Men” By John Steinbeck
Each selection featured two characters who were dependent
upon each other even though it was clear one of the characters was in
authority.
Tonight, develop a scene of your own with two characters who
are dependent upon each other. This can be anything or anytime or any genre. No
other constraints.
---
A hawk circled above the field, gliding in wide arcs with
its wings extended, never seeming to flutter. Instead, floating as if the air
was water that it bobbed on. Three blackbirds antagonized it, swooping in for
brief attacks and dashing away before the bird of prey could snap them with its
large talons or iron beak.
“That hawk got something on its mind,” Jed squinted, the
brim of his black hat pushed back from his forehead. “Looking to grab something
down here.”
“Maybe your nose,” Tayen said. The spirts had carved a hook
beak on the man like she’d never seen. Must be a white man’s trait, hooked
noses and bad breath. She considered what offense Jed’s ancestors must have
committed to receive such a sentence. She thought of her father’s nose, smooth,
brown, skinny at the top, widening at the bottom. A memory of tugging on it
when she was but a little squaw tickled to the front of her mind, and it made
her sad. Her father and her people were all gone now.
“You know they comin’ after me, right?” Jed had dropped to
his rear in the tall grass, exhausted from the long hours of walking in the
sweltering heat of the sun and field. Just as vexing were the bugs, with his
hands tied at the wrist behind his back, he couldn’t swat a single mosquito
from his face, which he assumed was now comprised of nothing but festering red
bites.
Tayen squatted beside the man, held out a bit of deer jerky
she’d produced from her pouch, and then placed it on his tongue before he
sucked it in and began chewing with chomps more reminiscent of a steer than a
man.
“They’ll kill you if they find us,” Tayen said, before
taking a bite of jerky for herself.
“If? If? I thought you people were great trackers! If?
Shoot, I bet they are three feet away and we don’t even know it.”
“The Sioux are not my people,” Tayen said.
Jed grinned, he was missing three teeth across the top and
even more below.
“You all red on the outside, sweetie,” he spat, “Now, if you
gave me my guns, and them Sioux came upon us, then we might stand a chance.”
It was her turn to spit.
“If I give you your guns, you’d kill me and then they’d kill
you, that’s the only difference. The Sioux might not like me, but they won’t
kill me.”
“They will if you tryin’ to keep them from gettin’ me. That’s
why you in trouble. It’s ten more miles before we reach a town’s sheriff that
will pay you the ransom, and you need that money, don’t you?”
Above the Hawk still circled, but the black birds seemed to
have lost interest in tormenting it. A breeze rustled the prairie grass which
was shoulder high and intermixed with bursts of yellow and red and purple from
the great wildflowers. Tayen’s mother had been enamored by flowers. Picking
them and braiding them in each of her seven daughter’s hair. Tayen had been the
youngest. Tayen was the only one left, or the only one free. Lomasi was
enslaved to a wealthy banker in Oklahoma. Seven hundred dollars would buy her
freedom. Seven hundred dollars was the bounty on Jed’s head.
She forced Jed to his feet and they moved on through the
tall grass, away from the cart paths. The white men patrolled the paths, but
they’d take Jed from her and collect the bounty for themselves. The Sioux would
take secret paths through the grass. It was entirely possible they were already
trapped on each side. White on one. Red on the other.
**
Jed had camped the night before near a river bed. He’d
burned wet wood at dusk, and she’d made out the white smoke from two miles
away. It was why she had him, and not the Sioux and not the county’s deputies.
Taking him had been easy enough, he was snoring like a bear
when she circled his camp. He only woke a brief second before she brought a
rock down on the side of skull, just hard enough to knock him silly, but not
kill him. The “dead” bounty was lower than the “live” bounty in this case. She bound his hands behind his back as he
rocked and moaned in the dirt. She had hoped he’d have a horse, but she wagered
he lost it in his encounters with the Sioux.
**
Jed’s head throbbed the entire night and day as they tumbled
along. Him a few feet ahead of her, her hand never leaving the butt of his
revolver. The nerve of this Indian woman to take him captive and then wear his
guns. He wondered if she even knew how to shoot one. A lesser woman he would
have tested more. This one had the look that she’d spilt some blood in her time,
and that spilling his wouldn’t weigh on her soul other than the loss of some
money.
He was sure he’d been in worse jams before, but he couldn’t
recall when. Maybe that mix up with the Spanish down there in Texas. That had
been pretty bad. At least there, he’d had allies. Now, everyone seemed to want
him dead.
The town folk wanted him for robbing banks. Yeah, he’d done
that, but lost most of the money running from the posse on his trail.
The Sioux wanted him for killing that young brave. He done
that, but he hadn’t wanted to.
And this woman. This strange Indian woman might have wanted
her bounty, but her eyes told him that she was eager to watch him hang.
She was his key. The only way to get out of this alive was
this woman, and he had pretty much reckoned how he was going to convince her.
The gold. He knew where it was, and he knew she needed it
worse than he did.
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