That morning near Temple, Texas at a fallen-down saloon my cowgirl shirt fit me like a glove. Three buttons undone and tighter than my jeans. Looked down at my baby blue cowgirl boots and rucksack with my green army jacket inside, change of clothes and Mimi, my tiny pearl handled pistol used once. Shot a hippie’s right eye out when he sailed away on a drug trip with me inside his psychedelic bus, then I was back on the road tucking Mimi in my rucksack and thumbing quick into San Antonio, me a hitchhiking prostitute from Wisconsin who slept then with men or women when not doing other odd jobs. 

On the outskirts of Temple that morning I walked under Cedar elms, crossed a wood boardwalk and opened the saloon door. Two barber chairs sat like nobles near a row of cobweb-covered pinball machines with flasher bulbs blinking. Dart boards dotted the walls. An arcade bowling game stood at attention, pins quivering slightly. I saw a bar with six wood stools. An old man stood behind the bar, his white hair illuminated by a lit Hamm’s Beer sign. Motioned me in. Said I’m Smith, then fainted away. Dead from the effort. I went to a barber chair. Stepped on the hydraulic lift. Ran it up and down. Reclined. Sat and leaned against the headrest, my baby blue boots on a fancy cast iron footrest. The chairs were a matching pair, a little shaky but sturdy enough. Red horsehair upholstery and they spun three sixty. Went to the wall phone and lifted the receiver. The line was as dead as Smith. Took dimes and quarters from the till. Played the Buckaroo pinball machine, bumpers popping lights to the tune of the steely, cobwebs flying off lightly into space. Opened up cupboards near the barber chairs. Took out straight-edge razors and scissors and saw they weren’t rusted. I lined them up on a shelf near the barber chairs. Found folded barber bibs white and crisp yet with just a scattering of mouse dirt. Took out shaving brushes and soap mugs, the soap split and blistered but looked usable. Washed the saloon’s front windows. Pushed my way through the rest of the building, opening doors, wedging up windows. Saw five sleeping rooms on the second floor and picked one for myself. 

When I bowled three hundred on the arcade game the next morning and found keys by the till, I added gravedigger to my list of odd jobs and buried Smith behind the saloon. Found a can of paint in the shed. I found the shovel and freshened the saloon’s entrance. Drove Smith’s pickup out of the weeds. Found a store. Bought up hamburger and buns. Stacked cases of beer in the back of Smith’s truck. I fired up the griddle and fry basket. Served juicy burgers and ice cold beer that first night. Found a transistor radio in a back room and plugged it in at one end of the bar. Put up two signs: Shave and a haircut $5. Rooms $150 monthly. Two men calling themselves Murphy and MaGoo come by near closing time. MaGoo’s hair was smooth and red like his beard. Murphy’s western shirt was tie-dyed. They ordered hamburgers that night with fried onions and French Fries on the side. MaGoo poured sparkling beer from a can into a glass. Bite into his hamburger. Onions drizzled out. Ketchup clung to the curls. Finished, he cupped his lips around an Old Gold crinkled from a near-flat pack. Took a wood match from his pocket and struck it up the back of his jeans. The match flared like a torch. He lit the Old Gold. Dragged deep, then balanced his smoke on an ashtray lip. His face was lean. Murphy picked his teeth with a toothpick. The saloon emptied leaving the three of us. MaGoo stubbed out his Old Gold and nodded at my rooms sign. 

We’ll take two, he said. Can’t afford that much. But I bartend and Murphy here cuts hair, he said, pointing at the barber chairs same time I pointed out their rooms. Later that night I slipped into the velvety darkness of MaGoo’s bed and into his arms, then Murphy’s. 

In the morning they were downstairs before me, hard at work. MaGoo was behind the bar lining up liquor bottles nice and straight. I watched him fill salt shakers. Wash bar glasses. When we opened that spring day, neat white stacks of napkins in baskets sat at each end of the bar. Hamm’s Beer sign was polished and glowing twice as bright. Neon sign in the window was plugged in and flashing. Murphy set bibs on barber chairs as if expecting someone and lathered up soap in the mugs until they looked like tiny overactive bubble baths. I got music going on the transistor radio and took to fixing cracked pins on the arcade bowling game. Throughout that spring I kept the pinball machines polished and the ball shooters and springs in tip-top shape using tools in the back room I found the radio in and where I kept buckets to catch rainwater when the roof leaked. 

I stepped out that same back room midsummer with a handful of new flasher bulbs for the Buckaroo and there at the bar was a fetching pair of lanky young cowboys, longhaired, dressed in jeans and plaid shirts, faces half-hidden behind walrus mustaches. Hats tilted back. I heard them order Rusty Nails. Saw they picked their teeth like Murphy who offered them his pack of Old Golds. The cowboys tossed their Nails back and holding lit Old Golds they shifted down on their wood bar stools. A little shaky they said, looking under. They went out the saloon door to their truck and returned with fine-looking hammers and short silver nails. Flipped stools up on the bar. Pounded nails like they knew what they’re doing. They noticed the bar had rough boards. Went out for hand planes. So much to do here, the cowboy-carpenters said that night as they tighten barber chair screws. The five of us spent the evening serving drinks, beer, burgers, trimming hair, repairing shelves. When we closed, the cowboys rented the last two rooms. They stayed on working upstairs and down replacing rotted window sash. Leveling doors. They tore old roofing off the saloon right down to plank boards, nailed on plywood, tacked on tar paper, stacked up bundles of asphalt shingles to be nailed in place. On long hot summer nights after work we five sprawled the wood boardwalk sipping chilled drinks, feeling lazy and lanky and wondering, innocently it now seems, which of us would romp with who under the saloon’s eaves. 

We were busy shaking out barber bibs late summer, serving burgers to the hungry, when the hungriest of all jangled in the door at midnight. A tall woman with long red hair, exposed sleek midriff below a shimmery gold top. Jeans with a whole lot of bell at the bottom. Bangles up both arms. I served her a cold one. The beer bottle was clear as a country morning. The brew amber as a new beginning. I found out she came from upstate New York and like me had lit out on the open road, thumb out, with the same idea: Find freedom. In Temple that night we twisted and shimmied to the transistor radio. She pulled a calling card bent in the shape of her behind out of her back pocket. Handed it over. It said: Top Dollar. Nothing more. Nothing less. We lounged in barber chairs and at dawn she rented my room with me in it. Wasn’t a week gone when we slipped out of the bar one morning, I with my rucksack, change of clothes, green army jacket and pearl handled Mimi. Baby blue cowgirl boots that shelf-sat for too long back on my hard-working prostitute’s feet where they belonged. The sun was shining. Our long hair snapped in the breeze. We moved on fast charging top dollar to Nebraska-hippies-turned-truck-drivers or we found ourselves knee-deep in rodeo men or flat on our svelte backs on Rocky Mountain ledges, sun beating down, mountain women straddling us. Then we were back on the open road. Me and Top Dollar. 

Later, some months after we left Temple and she had left me, I’d picture her hitching down from New York. Picture myself hitching south from Wisconsin, us on parallel paths to Temple, Texas. I’m married now to a fine man, Corpus Rand, who rides bucking broncs in rodeos in Texas and Florida. It’s a good life. Our twin sons Ron and Joe are six and are a handful but Corpus with his calloused hands, long legs, and strong arms is a daddy beyond compare and they worship the ground he walks on. So do I. He knows about my past and shrugs it off. It’s how he met me. But he doesn’t know about Top Dollar. I remember the last time I saw her. We were in Galveston. At a bar called the Lucky Pair. She danced right out the door with a drunken tall man armed with a six-shooter. She left me that night. She left us all. They found her body alongside Interstate 45. There was no inquest. An open and shut case of misplaced passion, they said. He a local drunkard, they said. She a loose woman. Nothing good ever comes of that, they said.  

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AJ Atwater’s fiction is published in Vestal Review, 100 Word Story, LitroNY, American Literary Review, Roanoke Review, Blood Tree Literature, Green Mountains Review, PANK and others.