Calamity Jayne Heads West by Kathleen Bacus Read Free Book Online

automobiles.” We’d see how she fared on a seafaring vessel. “She’ll be twenty-two on her next birthday, and nope, she doesn’t have a boyfriend,” I said.
    “Sweet!” the pint-sized Casanova reacted.
    “Nope,” I continued. “Not a boyfriend, runt. Taylor has two, or is it three guys she’s seeing now? I lose track,” I said, purely to needle the kid. “Let’s see, there’s the hunky veterinarian with the Hummer,” I said, ticking the beaus off as I went. “Then there’s that good-looking grad student with the gorgeous blue eyes. And who was that other guy she sort of fancies? Oh, yeah. The back-up quarterback for the Hawkeyes,” I finished, spinning my little yarn.
    “Oh,” the Townsend twerp responded with a hang-dog look eerily like the one my cousin Frankie wore when he almost drowned in the water hazard at the Public Safety Academy obstacle course last fall.
    I felt the teensiest twinge of regret for my exaggera-tion. Taylor had dated all of the aforementioned hot-ties. Just not all at the same time. But the smitten sixth grader next to me didn’t know that.
    Taylor stirred and opened her eyes briefly, moving her head carefully to the side and downward toward the dwarf who had taken Townsend’s seat.
    “Hello,” Nick Townsend said. “Are you really dating three guys at the same time? ’Cause that’s what she said,” he told Taylor, jabbing an elbow in my ribs.
    Taylor gave me a put-out-but-too-pukey-to-do-anything-about-it look and moved her head back and forth as if in slow motion.
    “Not dating now,” she said slowly, and closed her eyes again.
    Nick Townsend shot me a dark glare that boded ill for me. Still, what could the munchkin do on an air-plane at thirty thousand feet with a hundred passen-gers as witnesses?
    “I like snakes. Do you like snakes? My uncle Rick collects snakes. He has lots of them. He lets me hold them. The ones that aren’t poisonous, that is. Does Uncle Rick let you play with his snakes?”
    Given another context, the mental imagery associ-ated with playing with a snake that belonged to Ranger Rick Townsend might hold some appeal. How-ever, given my very real—and completely rational—fear of all things slithery, this topic was unquestionably off limits. And totally taboo.
    “Sorry, kid. I’m not into creatures of the cold-blooded variety,” I told him.
    “I think snakes are cool. Don’t you think snakes arecool? The way they wind around your arm when you hold them, all cold and dry against your skin. Snakes rule.”
    “They also bite,” I told him. And pop out of hay bales when you least expect it. And take refuge on top of propane tanks where you can’t shoot ’em. Diaboli-cally clever creatures.
    “You want to talk about movies? I saw a cool movie.”
    I nodded, thankful to get the subject off legless rep-tiles and onto less creepy topics of conversation.
    “Oh, yeah? What was it about?” I asked.
    “It was about this airplane and a bunch of poison-ous snakes got loose and started coming out from everywhere and attacking and biting the passengers. It was, like, so whacked!”
    I stared at Satan’s spawn, wondering how the little sadist knew I was terrified of snakes, and simultane-ously realizing who the sneaky snitch was. The kid smiled up at me with a big, wide, gotcha grin on his to-tally too Townsend face. My lips felt dry and I tried to wet them with my tongue only to discover I’d devel-oped a serious case of cottonmouth myself.
    “Have you seen the movie?” he asked, and I managed to shake my head. “ ’Cause if you haven’t, you can watch it now. I brought the movie with me, and I’ve got my portable DVD player. You can borrow them if you like.”
    I found myself all of a sudden examining the struc-ture of the aircraft around me: the carry-on compart-ments, the seams that held the ceiling together above, the specter of a snake dropping down in front of me instead of an oxygen mask—the stuff my nightmares are made of.