Nor had she ever worried much about being robbed, raped, or murdered by someone who was only pretending to need help. Julie was the sort of woman who would supposedly make a good wife because — in the parlance of the old Maine Yankees, of whom there are still a few—“She’ll give ya warmth in the winter and shade in the summer.” When asked for her weight by the school nurse when she was in the fifth grade, Julie had replied proudly, “My dad says I’d dress out around one-seventy. Little less if skinned.”
Now, at thirty-five, she would have dressed out closer to two-eighty, and had no interest in making any man a good wife. She was as gay as old Dad’s hatband, and proud of it. On the back of her Ram truck were two bumper stickers. One read SUPPORT GENDER EQUALITY. The other, a bright pink, opined that GAY IS A HAPPY WORD!
The stickers didn’t show now because she was hauling what she referred to as the “hoss-trailah.” She had bought a two-year-old Spanish jennet mare in the town of Clinton, and was now on her way back to Readfield, where she lived on a farm with her partner just two miles down the road from the house where she’d grown up.
She was thinking, as she often did, of her five years of touring with The Twinkles, a female mud-wrestling team. Those years had been both bad and good. Bad because The Twinkles were generally regarded as freakshow entertainment (which she supposed they sort of were), good because she had seen so much of the world. Mostly the American world, it was true, but The Twinkles had once spent three months in England, France, and Germany, where they had been treated with a kindness and respect that was almost eerie. Like young ladies, in other words.
She still had her passport, and had renewed it last year, although she guessed she might never go abroad again. Mostly that was all right. Mostly she was happy on the farm with Amelia and their motley menagerie of livestock, but she sometimes missed those days of touring — the one-night stands, the matches under the lights, the rough camaraderie of the other girls. Sometimes she even missed the push-and-bump with the audience.
“Grab her by the cunt, she’s a dyke, she likes that!” some shitbrained yokel had yelled one night — in Tulsa that had been, if she remembered right.
She and Melissa, the girl she’d been grappling with in the Mudbowl, had looked at each other, nodded to each other, and stood up facing the section of the audience from which the yell had came. They stood there wearing nothing but their sopping bikini briefs, mud dripping from their hair and breasts, and had flipped the bird at the heckler in unison. The audience had broken into spontaneous applause. which became a standing O when first Julianne, then Melissa, turned, bent, dropped trou, and shot the asshole a double moon.
She had grown up knowing you cared for the one who had fallen and couldn’t get up. She had also grown up knowing you ate no shit — not about your hosses, your size, your line of work, or your sexual preferences. Once you started eating shit, it had a way of becoming your regular diet.
The CD she was listening to came to an end, and she was just about to poke the eject button when she saw a car ahead, parked a little way up the ramp leading to the abandoned Mile 81 service stop. Its four-way flashers were on. There was another car in front of it, a muddy old beat-to-shit station wagon. Probably a Ford or a Chevrolet, it was hard to tell which.
Julie didn’t make a decision, because there was no decision to be made. She flipped her blinker, saw there would be no room for her on the ramp, not with the trailer in tow, and got as far over in the breakdown lane as she could without hooking her wheels in the soft ground beyond. The last thing she wanted to do was overturn the horse for which she had just paid eighteen hundred dollars.