There Ain't But a Few... Cowgirl in the Sand

text:   Logan Antill

art:    Adam Wentworth

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When Kari-Jean left town her dogs ate each other. She locked her front door and left for Texas. Then the dogs ate each other.

“You didn’t know?” said Z.  “It happened a long time ago. That bitch was crazy.”

I knew and I didn’t know.  I knew that Kari-Jean was crazy. I didn’t know her dogs devoured each other after she abandoned them.  

“I guess one of them starved to death,” said Z.  “Then the other dog ate the dead one.”

Gone to Texas with a photographer.  I heard she was back in Phoenix now.  But I’m not sure.  I haven’t seen her.  I have the feeling Phoenix used her up, the sand and the heat.  It’s a striking city that way.

I saw one of her friends, a guy covered in acne, sitting at the bar at Bikini Lounge and he told me about Texas and the dogs.  “She let the dogs eat her furniture,” he said.  That’s why she never had anyone over.  She didn’t even tell me she left.  I went over to her house and found the dogs.”

I still regret blowing off Kari-Jean at one of the last big open house parties on Garfield Street.  She was drunk and begging me to take her home, but I had eaten acid and wasn’t horny.

It was one of those parties where everyone was there, standing outside, spilling into the street and the empty lots between the palm trees.  Kari-Jean pulled on my arm and tried to drag me away.  I blew her off.  She was acting pitiful when she was usually strong, and I was so awake, in no mood for weakness, ready to go off into the dark mountains until morning.

Earlier that night she came into where I worked waiting tables and sat at the bar drinking champagne with her pimply friend.  She kept texting me and then finally, when I had a break, I took her into the bathroom and bent her over and fucked her with my apron to one side.  I came quickly and promised her she could come over to my house later and I’d do it right.

Then at the party I blew her off.  She was so drunk she started crying and left swearing at me.  I thought it was funny then, but I don’t now.  I wish I hadn’t been so cruel to her.  Because she looked like she was twelve.  Because I’ve never met a girl since who sucked cock as enthusiastically as Kari-Jean.

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I had met her some months before at an art opening downtown at the Icehouse, an old ice factory across the Madison Street Jail.  

Z and I went behind a curtain in a room without a roof and found different people sitting on white furniture drinking champagne and rum, watching horses run a race on television.  Or maybe they weren’t watching horses on television.  It doesn’t matter.  I was in one of my good moods when I didn’t care if I pissed anyone off.  Kari-Jean may have been speaking to someone else, but then I made sure she was talking to me and I liked her freckles and crooked teeth and her resilient body that got younger the more she abused it.  She could have been wasted then, hating herself, and I wouldn’t have cared.  I made her talk to me until she wanted to talk to me.  She gave me the book she was holding (these things are terribly significant) and I made her inscribe it.  When her friends wanted to leave I told her to stay and she could come to my house.  

“I don’t ever go home with guys,” she said, but I could hear the claw in her voice.

She was mostly a slut.  She told me she used to belong to a drug dealer who went to Arizona State University and lived in the Biltmore Estates.  He had an airplane and he kept her full of coke and in nice clothes.  In return she fucked him when he wanted it.  For some reason I pictured Kari-Jean walking around his sunny living room on a golf course naked in front of floor-to-ceiling windows.  There was an airplane parked on the green, a piper cub, something my father could fly.    

The first night she spent the night in my guesthouse on Culver Street she told me she used to be a cowgirl in the rodeo circuit.

“My name is Kari-Jean Consuela Montoya,” she said.  

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She put on my red Maui jogging shorts with the white piping.  She had a tattoo of a bronco on the small of her back and when I brought her into bed she jumped on me, grinding hard and fast through her jeans to prove a point and then she wouldn’t sleep with me, which was cute.  She kept her head turned and talked into the pillow and in the morning she rolled over and grabbed my cock: “I don’t do big dicks,” she said.  And she didn’t that morning.  She just rubbed me hard, let me go soft, rubbed me hard, and let me go soft again until my balls were ready to explode.  And then she left me alone.  

I enjoyed her for about a month, in and out of cars and houses.  We drove to Scottsdale through the rain and the mountains, still red in the dark, down Mcdowell road in the middle of all the humming car dealerships.

She sent me text messages while she was at work at the bank telling me what she was doing with a highlighter under her desk, telling me where she wanted my cock, my come.  Mostly she wanted to choke on it, to drown in it.  “My sin,” she called it.  “I want to choke on your sin.”

I went grocery shopping.  I thought about the horse tattoo on her back and the plane on the golf course.  The faceless drug dealer.  Kari-Jean was a western child, or she was playing the part of the western child who would be happy to die from a good fuck.  I might have been happy to kill her, strangle her with a telephone wire, put her face through a window.  

I pushed her onto her knees in my kitchen while I leaned back against the old refrigerator.  I appreciated her hunger, the hallmark of desperation.  

I met her at Emerald Lounge on 7th Avenue.  She was sitting at the end of the bar drinking whiskey with the guy who later told me about her dead dogs.

In the morning we fucked in the main house, in Robbie’s old room.  The man next door was having a new front patio poured. I pointed Kari-Jean towards the window so she could see the guys laying cement.  My neighbor came out of his house drinking a cup of coffee.  I pulled the curtains back while we screwed so she could get a better view.  

“He works for a bank too,” I said.

“Which one?”

“One of your competitors.”

That was how it was with us.  We were hateful mongrels.  I pulled out of her and there was blood on my cock.  I told her I wanted to put it in her ass and she screamed so loud the guys with the trowels looked up into the window.  The only lube I had was shampoo and I couldn’t get it to fit anyway.  I finished in her mouth and then we looked at ourselves in the mirror on the dresser.  

“We’re hot,” she said.

Kari-Jean showed more intuition than I gave her credit for.  I tire of girls quickly and so sometime after my birthday I slid her off my cock on the couch in my living room and made a bored face.  

“Are you through with me?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.  “Put your clothes on.”

She did and I drove her home.  My only regret was that I hadn’t fucked her in the tent I got for my birthday that I pitched in the living room.  I took it to Patagonia that fall and on the way back to Arizona someone stole it at the airport in Mexico City.  The only place I ever put it up was in the living room in the house on Culver Street.  Kari-Jean was the only other person to see it out of the bag.  

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