The Comanche Kid, page 34
Through many dangers, toils, and snares we have already come. ’Twas grace that brought us safe thus far, and grace will lead us home.
When we reached the hotel, I led Ghost up onto the boardwalk and then straight into the lobby and the clerk started yelling, “What are you doing? You can’t do that! What do you think you’re doing?”
I said, “She’s spending the night with us.”
He yelled I couldn’t do that and he was going to call the sheriff and such and such, and as I led Ghost up the stairs I said, “Then I’ll shoot the sheriff after I shoot you,” and he kept yelling, “You can’t do that! You can’t do that!”
I called down to him, “Do you remember what I told you?”
“Yes.”
“What was it?”
He said, “You don’t give a good goddamn.”
“That’s right.”
And then he said, “You’re going to have to clean up after her!”
“I surely will.”
Ghost took the stairs slowly and didn’t stumble because she’s an Appaloosa and they’re clear-footed. I led her down the hall and I opened the door of our room, and when Monty saw what I was doing he didn’t say a word about it, he just said, “He’s been real quiet. I see you in the morning,” and he left, shutting the door behind him.
There wasn’t much space but I turned Ghost so she faced Shakespeare. I took her reins and tied them to his hand, the same hand I’d placed on my heart, and then I sat back down next to him.
I told him, “You need to listen to Spirit, that’s her new name. Her name’s not Ghost anymore, her name is Spirit. You just hold on to her reins and you can say anything you want to her, or you can just listen and she’ll talk to you, although she doesn’t always use words. Sometimes it’s just a feeling, you know? A feeling, and it doesn’t make sense, like when I first met you, and it didn’t make sense, but I had a feeling for you. Or when you kiss me, it isn’t just a kiss, it’s something more than that, like talking, isn’t it? So everything is going to be OK. You just listen to Spirit, and everything will be OK.”
Then I remembered the words I’d heard, standing outside the church door, but I kept them to myself, like a secret I was afraid to confess.
A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.
Then I picked up Romeo and Juliet and continued reading to him, and I read far into the night.
When I woke up the next morning, I was still in the chair and the book was in my lap. I lifted my head, and out the window I saw the snow had stopped and the day was bright and the sky deep blue. I felt something, and I looked down, and the reins were on the floor and Shakespeare’s hand was on my belly.
I looked at Shakespeare and he was looking straight at me, his blue eyes open and clear and bright, like the sky, and he had that soft smile.
She was fluttering under his hand and I said, “Her name is Bluebonnet Hope.”
“O brave new world,” he said, “that has such people in it.”
My heart began to race and I remembered Jamie talking about some king pulling a sword out of a stone and that’s what I felt like, like something cold and hard and sharp was being pulled out of my heart of stone, and it could beat now and push blood through it and through my whole body, and I felt hot and I couldn’t catch my breath but I pretended to be calm and I said, “Hi, Roy.”
He said, “I put the white bluebonnet in there sometime after I met you because it’s rare, like you.”
“You heard me?”
“I heard everything.”
I was holding real still like I was in some china shop and if I moved too quick everything would break. “Strange thing to do after meeting some kid, wasn’t it?”
“I knew you were a girl.”
“Yeah, you told me that once. You said I was too pretty to be a boy.”
He said, “That too.”
“What else?”
He smiled at me. “We were both nightriding the herd not too long after you’d joined up and it turned cold as hell and you didn’t have your mackinaw on, and when we stopped to talk, I looked at you and that band around your chest didn’t work as well as you thought.”
I blushed and I started weeping and I hit him on his broken leg with the book and he yelled and I knew the china wasn’t going to break. I climbed on top of him and hugged him and kissed him and I was sobbing and he was holding me to him and running his hand through my hair, saying, “There, there, Janey, there, there.” And every time he said my name I couldn’t breathe because I was so happy it hurt too much.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Daniels is the author of four professionally produced one-person plays, Sam Houston: Standing in His Own Blood; Edwin Booth: The Falconer’s Voice; Custer Rides; and Wyatt Earp: Last Man Standing. Jim’s path to writing began in the theatre. He has been a professional actor and director for more than forty years, having acted at such theatres as Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Cleveland Play House, Missouri Repertory Theatre (now Kansas City Repertory Theatre), the Houston Shakespeare Festival, and the Asolo Theatre of Florida (now Asolo Repertory Theatre). His production of Othello was performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and his play about the Mexican-American War, So Far from God, was last presented at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Jim was director of performance for the Western Michigan University Department of Theatre for twenty-five years and retired as professor emeritus, then taught under a five year contract as a Senior Lecturer in Acting at the University of Texas Department of Theatre and Dance. Jim received his MFA in acting from the Florida State University/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training in Sarasota, Florida. He served in the infantry in Vietnam with the Eighty-Second Airborne and in the artillery with the First Infantry Division. Jim and his wife, Patricia, live in Austin, Texas.
James Robert Daniels, The Comanche Kid
