Chapter 1

Posted: June 15, 2007 - 12:09:43 pm

“From thirty thousand feet above
The desert floor, I see it there below
A city with a legend -
The west Texas city of El Paso
Where long ago I heard a song
About a Texas cowboy and a girl
And a little place called Rosa’s
Where he used to go and watch this beauty whirl.”

El Paso City, Written and Performed by Marty Robbins

It was a weird feeling, listening to a song that described you and the situation you were in perfectly. It was sort of bizarre déjà vu. I was flying from Phoenix to El Paso, and through the headset plugged into the armrest of my cramped seat, so was the hero of Marty Robbins’ ballad. Yep, and I felt like the guy in the song, too: an out of place cowboy trapped in the twentieth century. Well, a half-assed cowboy, anyway. In actuality, I was a washed up bull rider in his late thirties, working as a rodeo clown on the professional rodeo circuit.

Now before you laugh, a rodeo clown is closer to a bullfighter than he is to a circus clown. See, us clowns have the responsibility of distracting the bull away from a rider after he finishes his ride or is thrown off the bull. Yanking on the tail of a twelve hundred pound, pissed off bull to make him chase you is not a job for sissies.

During the off season for the rodeo circuit, I am ashamed to admit that I am an actor in one of those desert ghost town tourist traps that pretends to show how life was in the wild west. I played a character named Black Bart, a mean and nasty gunfighter and card shark. I also do fast draw and trick shooting exhibitions dressed up as if I were Roy Rogers. It isn’t something I’m real proud of, but it puts bacon and beans on the table for six months of the year. I was heading back from my gig as a gunslinger on the day I heard the song on the airplane.

The recorded tape had just segued into the song “Feleena” when the 727 shuddered and rolled to one side. I snatched the earphones off in alarm, and looked back towards the flight attendant, when a gaping hole opened in the fuselage by the rear exit door and the stewardess was sucked out of the plane. The emergency oxygen masks fell down from the ceiling when the cabin depressurized, and people were screaming and clutching for them as the plane nosed over into a steep dive. I instinctively reached for a mask, then forced myself to sit back. I hoped that I had enough time to pass out from oxygen deprivation before the plane augured into the desert. It would be a fitting crappy ending to an equally crappy life.

That was my last thought before I woke up. When I woke up, I hurt all over, but that made sense, didn’t it, after all, I had just been in a plane crash. As I swam toward consciousness, I took a little mental inventory. Yep, I was still Tyler McGuinn. The trouble was that I was the wrong Tyler McGuinn. When my eyes finally opened, I knew where I was, hell, I even knew what day it was. What I didn’t know, was how I got to where I now found myself. How did I end up in the back of a chuck wagon in the middle of a cattle drive in 1877, when I’d left Phoenix in 1977? Not to mention, if I was in my great-great-uncle’s body, where was he?

As I was musing, the flap to the chuck wagon flung open and Jose Orosco, the trail cook, poked his head inside. I tried to say something, but all that came out was a croaking noise. Jose jerked his head back in surprise, then peered cautiously at me. I pointed towards my mouth. He nodded in understanding, and ducked back out of the wagon. When he reappeared a few seconds later, he handed me a dipper full of lukewarm water. I grabbed the dipper with shaking hands and gulped it down. I have never had anything that tasted as good as that tepid water did right then. When I handed the dipper back to him with a ‘gracious amigo’, he gave me a strange look.

“So you did not die after all, Señor Ty,” he said in heavily accented English.

I coughed out a laugh. “Only the good die young, Pepe,” I said in Spanish.

Jose didn’t laugh at my joke. Instead, he gave me an appraising look.

“Then I think you will live a long time,” he finally answered.

Before I could zing in another pithy comment, Jose spoke again.

“I did not know you spoke Spanish, Señor Ty.”

Oops, I guess good old Uncle Ty didn’t speak the language of my grandmother.

I managed a shrug and switched back to English, “I’ve been learning on my own to impress the señoritas in El Paso. What happened to me anyway, I don’t remember anything?”

“A large rattlesnake spooked your horse. The horse threw you to the ground near the snake, your head hit a rock and the snake bit you on the arm. You are lucky to be alive, hombre.”

I smile wanly. Old Jose didn’t know the half of it. I fell back on the pallet someone had made for me to die on, and tried to wrap my head around what was happening. My ancestor was nowhere to be found, but surprisingly his memories were available to me. Some of his memories popped up unbidden, that’s how I knew where I was and who Jose was. Other things I had to dig for. Maneuvering around in my new brain required effort, but as I searched the nooks and crannies, I learned the lay of the land and it became easier.

As I said earlier, my uncle’s name was also Tyler McGuinn, but he called himself Ty Ringo. Ringo was his middle name and his mother’s maiden name. Tyler’s mother was the sister of Johnny Ringo, a member of the Clanton Gang of Arizona. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday eventually shot down Johnny Ringo at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. Uncle Ty thought it made him seem a badder ass being a Ringo instead of a McGuinn. That was going to change. It was hard for me to believe that Tyler Ringo McGuinn had been such a slime bucket. Hell, he was only twenty.

There was no denying he was, though, because the evidence was right there in his recently abandoned memories. I took a good look around, even though I cringed at what I found. Among other things, I found out my uncle had been a rapist and a bully. He wasn’t a coward, but that hadn’t stopped him from shooting two men in the back over perceived insults or slights. He’d had a huge ego and absolutely no morals. So much for my romantic notions of my ancestors, I thought, as sleep snuck up on me.

Next time I woke up it was dark. It must have been early evening, however, because I could hear voices outside the wagon. More importantly, I could smell food and I was as hungry as a springtime bear. I was also as weak as a kitten, but I still managed to drag myself out of the chuck wagon. Leaning against the side of the wagon, I unhooked the dipper from the barrel and drank it empty twice. The water made me feel better, so I staggered over to the cook fire.

Four cowboys were sitting around the fire watching me, as Jose ladled out plates of some sort of delicious smelling stew. It was telling that none of those men offered me a hand. Once I’d managed to lower myself onto the ground, someone finally spoke to me.

“It’s about damned time you got off your lazy ass, Ty, we are already shorthanded without you laying around faking sick.”

The speaker was Josh Bemis, the owner of the cows we were driving. Bemis was a pretty good man, all things considered, but he was a skinflint of the first order. We were short handed because he was too cheap to hire any more drovers.

“Let me get a belly full of that stew and a good nights sleep, and I’ll give it hell tomorrow, Boss.”

Bemis gave me an odd look. I was getting a lot of that lately, first from Jose, now Bemis. The trailboss nodded his head.

“Good man,” he said curtly.

The other cowboys were looking at me now, too. According to Uncle Ty’s memories, that was the first time in two years that Bemis had applied that appellation to him. Well, they’d get more chances to gawk, because there was a new sheriff policing the Tyler Ringo McGuinn town.

Jose Orosco had picked a campsite in a stand of cottonwoods alongside a small creek. From Uncle Ty’s memories, I plucked the knowledge that we were about a hundred miles north of El Paso. I wracked my brains trying to figure if I’d ever been hunting out this way in my other life. I was familiar with the general area, but couldn’t recall a creek anywhere near here. I shrugged and put that minor worry aside, when Jose handed me a big bowl of stew with a couple of corn fritters lying on the top.