Rafe

“Rafe, you look like that actor Slim Pickens, and you sound like him, too.” Jenny Linn looked up over her glass and gave Rafe a look that ate clear into his heart.
“Golly, Jenny, nobody ever told me I looked like a movie star before.” Rafe’s heart was pounding and he felt himself getting a little warm. Squishing around on the bar stool he tried to figure out something cool to say. He stared right at Jenny’s halter top until she yelled at him.
“Rafe Garcia, you quit lookin’ at me like that!” Jenny was wise enough to the ways of these Kansas farm boys to know what he had on his mind. The cool breeze came through the open tavern door as she slid off the bar stool and made her way to the restroom door, her manner of walking doing nothing for Rafe’s state of mind as he slathered over his beer. He thought maybe a little poetry would be in order. As the self-proclaimed Poet Lariat of Jetmore he had penned a few romantic lines for use in times like these. But he realized it would take more than his own cowboy poetry to tame this city girl. Lord Byron came to mind. As a boy, he had fallen in love with Lord Byron’s sonnets and had memorized them all.
“Maid of Athens, ere we part, give, oh give me back my heart,” Rafe cast the words out like rocks pitched into a farm pond, the words rippling back into his own ears and bringing him a peaceful feeling as he turned back to the bar and ordered another beer.
“And don’t try to sell me one of them green sons-a-bitches like you sold Slim. Why, that stuff is just bottled up skonk piss.” He heard the sound of the stool flushing in the ladies room and waited for Jenny to come out.
Jenny came out with a vengeance. Her fiery red hair flashed in the sun as she buckled up her belt, the Hesston Commemorative Belt Buckle picking up the sun from the reflection in the bar mirror. Rafe couldn’t see with the sun at her back. He remembered now why the old gunfighters picked high noon for their duels.
“Don’t you call me no frickin’ maid, you frickin’ hillbilly!” Jenny grabbed a pitcher and arced it over her head bringing it down on Rafe’s head, glass going everywhere. She stepped back and put her hands to her mouth, sucking in air and gasping “Oh, no,” at the same time. Rafe slowly got up off the barstool and brushed the glass off his leather vest, then his hair.
“Well now, little lady, I see you don’t cotton to the poetry of George Gordon Noel Byron, Lord Byron, do you.”
“Who the hell is that?”
Rafe walked quietly down the length of the bar, picking up each empty beer pitcher as he came to it. Then he would stare at it as he brought it crashing to his forehead, all the while reciting Lord Byron’s, The Maid of Athens:
“Maid of Athens! I am gone:
Think of me, sweet! When alone.
Though I fly to Istambol,
Athens holds my heart and soul:
Can I cease to love thee? No!”
Whack! With the last line, the last pitcher came crashing down and Rafe walked out the door into the Kansas sunshine.