Brown-Eyed Girl Read Online Free

day Sally happened into Laramie back in 1977, needing picks and strings. Dwayne sold her three sets of strings and a dozen picks and asked her if she wanted a gig, and she figured, why not? He’d sent her to see Delice at the Wrangler. She’d walked in that cold and windy May afternoon, gotten out the Martin and sung three songs. Delice took her on, paying her twenty-five bucks a day for two weeks of happy hours in the cavernous dance hall. This was big money for somebody who had open-miked and Tuesday-nighted her way through two hard-luck years of the Bay Area music scene. Sally looked in the paper, found a cheap apartment on a monthto-month lease.
    One afternoon when Sally was playing, Dickie had come in to talk to Delice. He told her he could get her a gig at Mudflaps for two consecutive Thursday through Saturday night solo shots: fifty bucks a night. Bliss among the orange plastic booths. The second Thursday, Dwayne and some of his reprobate musician friends had come by Mudflaps for various reasons of their own. That led to five years of hauling a pickup full of P.A. equipment all over Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, the Dakotas, and hell, following the music and the money around.
    She’d gigged by herself and with partners and with bands that formed and re-formed under names like The LowDowns, Lost Cause, Saddlesore (no kidding), and her personal favorite, a short-lived western swing band she’d fronted with the amazing Penny Moss, the Sister Brothers. Through poor judgment, however, Sally’d mostly been hooked up with Sam Branch and Branchwater. Along the way, she’d written maybe two hundred songs, including possibly a dozen good ones. Including seven good songs about Hawk Green, but she didn’t want to think about him just now. Hawk was a long way back in her Laramie past.
    Over five years of raucous hard living, Sally and Delice had come to depend completely on each other. They’d formed a club, the Wranglers’ Club, consisting of themselves and Dickie, conducting bleary meetings on Monday mornings over eggs and hash browns. Both women had managed to get into sticky situations and to fish each other out again, most of the time anyway.
    Langhams had been running the Wrangler for more than fifty years, and Delice was the latest of the Langham women to take over Laramie’s most revered combination greasy spoon and sleazy dance hall. It was a matter of pride with Delice that the food at the Wrangler had not improved in over five decades, although she admitted to a light twinge of guilt every time one of her regulars wound up in the Ivinson Memorial Hospital with a coronary episode. Delice was secretly negotiating to open up a Nouvelle Southwestern Pacific Fusion Arugula place on Ivinson Street, which would be managed by cousin Burt Langham, who had run off from Cheyenne to San Francisco and returned with a degree from the California Culinary Institute and a slim, brilliant partner named Frank Walton, whom Burt affectionately insisted on calling John-Boy. John-Boy was a wizard with wasabi: he could probably figure out a way to put it on elk steaks and sell it in Laramie. Delice preferred not to have it known she’d ever heard of wasabi.
    Delice looked pretty much the same, give or take the usual wrinkles. She was wearing her Levi’s 501s tight, with a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut out and a little bit of tummy showing. Her jet-black hair (jetter than it had been in her youth, truth told) hung down to her ass, and she wore so much silver jewelry she jingled even while hugging.
    â€œI knew it I knew it I knew it,” she exclaimed, eyes closed, enveloping Sally in a shockingly familiar cloud of Chlöe perfume. “I told Dickie you’d be back today! I figure he picked you up speeding somewhere near the Holiday Inn.” Sally and Dickie exchanged glances but said nothing. “And then I saw that Mustang with the California plates parked right out front and I