Cowboys & Indian

An excerpt from Cowboys & Indian © 2012 Mark Seymour. Available from Amazon.

I drove into Dead Fred’s driveway early on Sunday morning, as usual. We were headed for our weekly cowboy shoot, and I knew he liked to get there well before the start time. Not that we were going to shoot cowboys, of course; the event is actually referred to as Cowboy Action Shooting, thus you merely suit up like cowboys (or other typical ne’er-do-wells of the Old West), wear cowboy-era revolvers in holsters, carry cowboy-era rifles and shotguns, and shoot a lot of steel and sheetrock targets, but you shoot no cowboys. At least you try not to, as it’s frowned upon.
My spurs jingled as I stepped up on the porch, and the thud of my boots was loud on the wooden planks. That’s one of the downsides of playing cowboy; it’s hard to be quiet. You’re always making noise with something, long before you start making booms on the line. But Fred’s wife, Sally, was used to it, and occasionally said she’d damn near miss our incessant clanging and jingling. When I knocked, quietly, it being early of a Sunday, she came to the door.
“Mornin’, Rico.” She smiled when she opened the door.
“Mornin’, Miz Lynch.” It was a standing joke, among the cowboys, Fred’s last name being Lynch. But one didn’t laugh when you saw his wife. Middling height, she was built like the proverbial brick shithouse, if a brick shithouse had great tits and a narrow waist above long lean legs that she displayed by wearing, this morning, only one of her husband’s shirts, which ended well above a thick pair of socks.
“Fred’s still getting dressed.” That was another standing cowboy joke; Fred was numbingly plain and boring in real life, what with being an accountant and all, yet he insisted on appearing resplendant when he turned into a cowboy, once a month. His outfits were not the gaudy B-movie rigs that some wore, neither, he was too much a historical stickler for that, but he always came up with historically-accurate clothes and leather that put the rest of us to shame. “Want some coffee, or some breakfast?”
Coffee sounded good. “Believe I will, ma’m.”