“I haven’t met Nina yet,” I said. “Sam says she’s a stem-winder.”
“What’s a stem-winder?” Emily asked.
“That’s what I asked Sam,” I said. “He couldn’t really explain it to me very well, aside from saying, ‘That’s what Nina is. A stem-winder.’ I gather it’s some fancy modern watch that keeps better time than most. Or something.”
Emily nodded. After some consideration, she added, “Maybe she’s an actress. Some Hollywood people marry four or five times and nobody bats an eyelash. They say pretending to be in love when you’re making a movie can make two people fall in love for real. I’m not so sure I believe that’s possible. But then, of course, I’m not an actress.”
I parked the stagecoach a fair distance from the runway so the horses wouldn’t spook, set the brake and looped the reins around the driver’s knob, then went to the stagecoach boot for the nosebags I’d stocked with grain back at the stable.
A gangly kid I’d noticed sitting on an upturned bucket outside one of the hangars trotted over to offer his assistance. Boys like him were thick on the ground around the train station and the big hotels in town, angling for tips for helping wealthy tourists with their luggage. I admired the kid’s initiative for seeking out new markets and gave him a nickel for his efforts, a considerable percentage of what I kept back for myself from the pay I sent home to Tennessee.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“It’s a tip.”
He pointed to the buffalo on the coin. “What I mean is, what do you think this is?”
“Oh, that,” I said. “That’s a buffalo.”
“I know what a buffalo is,” he said. “This is a nickel.”
“So?”
“So, I guess that bellowing I just heard came from your pocket when you pinched this nickel so hard it woke the buffalo up.”
“That’s about the size of it,” I said.
The kid sighed, but helped me with the nosebags anyway.
Emily, who’d waved me away when I offered to hand her down from the stagecoach roof, had managed to descend on her own without breaking her neck or exposing her drawers to God and everybody. She returned my hat to me and arranged herself in the stagecoach’s shadow.
I put my hat on and scanned the horizon for some sign of Nina’s plane.
“It must be fun to pretend you’re something you’re not and get paid to do it,” Emily said. I must have looked baffled, so she added, “Actresses.”
“Ah.” I nodded and turned in a slow circle, searching the sky in every direction. Guests came to us from all over, and I realized I didn’t have the least idea where Nina was heading in from. We’d had a maharaja all the way from India once, one of our infrequent male visitors. We weren’t really set up for male guests, but he said he’d always dreamed of being a cowboy and so was happy enough to be quartered in one side of the bunkhouse while Sam and I doubled up temporarily in the other. A courtly, dapper man, our maharaja, who’d called himself Mr. Smith when he’d engaged his accommodations. Once he’d relaxed enough to reveal his true identity, I said I thought a maharaja could have as many wives as he wanted so I didn’t see the point in divorcing one he didn’t get along with. He answered in an accent that would have done our friend Shakespeare proud: “And I thought everyone where you come from went barefoot and played that shrunken version of a sitar you hillbillies call a banjo.” Still, a nice man. As fellow southerners—him of Asia and Sam and me of the United States—he made us promise we’d drop by for a visit if either of us ever found ourselves in his neck of the woods.
“How about you?” Emily asked abruptly.
“How about me?”
“Are you an actor?”
“An actor? Me?”
“I thought you might be. Since you’re familiar with Shakespeare’s plays.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Also every hero in the Western serials looks more or less like you. Men who are too handsome to get hired for real jobs seem to gravitate to the motion pictures.” That hung in the air between us for a bit before she said, “That came out wrong.”
“You don’t have to explain,” I said. “There are worse things on earth than being told you’re too handsome.” At least she hadn’t suggested I was too pretty to be smart.
A tiny dot in the blue-white distance gradually got bigger as its horsefly buzz grew into a puttering roar.
“Look!” I said, happy for the opportunity to change the subject. “That must be Nina’s plane.”
A double-cockpit biplane with an orange undercarriage and silver wings swept past, touched down, and taxied to a hangar at the opposite end of the runway, the jouncing figure of the pilot in back and his smaller passenger bobbling along up front. I gave the gangly boy another of my precious nickels to mind the horses while we went over to collect Nina. He pulled a face and said, “Oh, goody. Maybe the buffalo on this one will fall in love with the other one and they’ll start minting nickels. Before you know it I’ll be rich.”
As Emily and I approached we saw the pilot grab the airplane’s upper wing, cantilever himself to standing and step out onto the lower one. He bent over Nina briefly, then looked to have grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and pitched her out on the far side of the plane. He jumped down after. I broke into a run.
By the time I was within a hundred yards of the plane the pilot had come around the airplane’s nose, spotted me, grinned boyishly, and waved. He was a slim drink of water, jaunty, six feet if he was an inch, with a pale, smooth face teetering between impish and angelic. The kind of pretty young man Miss Pam called “a fine-looking boy” until he was fifty. Or so I thought until he removed his goggles and aviator’s cap, shook out silvery-blond hair, and resolved himself into a grimy-faced female with a figure eight of clean white flesh around her eyes. “Ahoy there, cowboy!” she shouted, though I was hardly more than an arm’s length away from her by then. “Are you here for me?”
“Yes!” I shouted back, the way you catch yourself whispering responses to somebody who’s lost their voice. I decided it was her packaging that had made me mistake Nina for a boy at first. She wore a roomy white shirt, none too clean, with a man’s necktie loosely knotted at her throat. A parachutist’s backpack strapped between her trouser legs and over the shoulders of her leather jacket, and a gun belt canted across her hips.
She shed the parachute and jacket as she shouted, “Where’s my buddy Sam? Don’t break my heart and say he’s left the ranch.”
“He took a carload of ladies into town,” I said.
“What’s that?” she asked, cupping a hand behind her ear. I found out later it always took a while for her hearing to recover after hours of wind roaring past in the open cockpit.
“Reno!” I hollered. “Carload of ladies! Back later!”
“Carload of ladies? Sam’s made of sterner stuff than I am! Do you have anything to drink?”
“I have water in the stagecoach!”
“Say again?”
“I have water!”