HEY, COWGIRL, NEED A RIDE?

A good-lookin’ gal gone wrong goes right but it takes a couple of lonesome cowboys to pull it off.

NPR commentator and erstwhile veterinarian Black picks up the story of champion rodeo rider Lincoln Delgado Davis, known to one and all as Lick and last seen in 1994’s Hey, Cowboy, Wanna Get Lucky?, where he rode a wild bull and appeared nude on a camel. Black sets his hero down two years later in the sparsely settled Idaho/Nevada border country where unlucky Lick is paired up with gabby WWII vet and retired rodeo rider Al Bean, looking after a small herd under a big empty sky. From which falls Ms. Teddie Arizona, a hard-partying cocktail waitress whose deal with the devil has gone way wrong. Seems Teddie (known to most as T.A.) signed on for a two-year hitch posing as the wife of a big jerk from Las Vegas, Mr. F.Rank Pantaker. It seemed like a good idea at the time. F.Rank needed to convince his family he was a sober citizen, and T.A. needed to get the hell out of Vail, where the law was about to sweep her up with her drug-dealing roommates. But when T.A. learned that F.Rank had joined with Vegas animal trainer Ponce de Crayon in a scheme to bring big spenders to Ponce’s ranch for a chance to slaughter endangered species, well, that was just too damned much. Pausing only to clear five million dollars in hunting deposits out F.Rank’s wall safe, T.A. flew out of Vegas in the company plane only to hit a storm somewhere past Elko, where she crashed into the path of Al and Lick, who were out checking up on some missing cows. Lick and T.A. have to put off consummation of a pretty mutual attraction to stop that hunt, an effort that will involve a huge, half-loco cast of characters.

Kinky Friedman meets Carl Hiaasen for harmless but slightly forced fun and games.