Rattlesnake Kate, Part II

May 9, 2011

Went home for lunch and got a call from Al Herndon. "Okay, where are you now?" I said. He told me he just left the Alamo and San Antonio, headed for Houston and home. I asked him what his favorite spot in the entire west had been on his whirlwind trip from Cheyenne, to Salt Lake City, Grand Canyon, Cave Creek, Phoenix, Tucson, Tombstone, Bisbee, Rodeo, Silver City, Cliff, Glenwood, Mogollon Reserve, Datil, Magdalena, Socorro, San Antonio (the New Mexico one), Carozozo, Capitan, Lincoln, Roswell, Bandera, San Antonio (the Texas one)?

"Tombstone. Without a doubt," Al said without a pause. He also laughed and told me he felt like he was checking in with his parole officer. Ha.

I'm still fuming about that Reserve crap where the locals don't even know who Elfego Baca is (there's like 300 people in the entire town!). Makes me want to create a group of True West Maniacs in every town and have a TW listing where you can contact them if you are coming their way. What do you think?

After lunch I whipped out another study for the transformation of Rattlesnake Kate: this one a couple moments down the osmosis path towards her feminine incarnation.

Some notes and questions on her origin story: was she banished from another world? Was she sent here for a dose of humility? This is, after all, a very brutal planet for homely people. And, if that's true, did the radioactive rattlesnakes contaminate and subvert that mission? And if all this is true, at what point does beauty become ugly?

Hmmmmmm.

"We live like dirt but we have our guns."
—The couple who take in Kate (a Texas cowboy and his Hualapai wife)