by Chant, Zoe
He pulled her to her feet, then let her hand go as he tested the muddy ground with its pools and puddles. “Careful,” he said. “It’s slippery.”
Sandals were not the best footwear for muddy trails. Rigo set a slow pace—but after the second time Godiva’s sandal slid in liquid mud, he offered her his hand again.
She let out a sigh of relief as she grabbed on. His fingers tightened to a reassuring grip on hers, and with his aid they made faster progress.
He kept on talking in that low, easy voice. “So there I was at last, with a string of horses but nowhere to take them. Then I remembered my land deed.”
Godiva liked their hands linked. She knew she liked it, but she wasn’t ready to talk about liking it. That’s it, I’ve reverted to eighteen years old—with wrinkles, she thought as she gazed around at the canyon. It was even more spectacularly beautiful, its colors intensified by that scouring rain. The dust was gone, the air clear and clean. But already gusts of heat blasted down as the sun tipped past midday and began its slide to the west.
She shifted her gaze to Rigo. “Land deed? You had a land deed? And you forgot about it?”
“Here’s the funny thing about land,” he said. “The whole idea of owning it is all in the head.” He tapped his forehead. “That was something my Maya grandfather taught me, that the idea of such finite creatures as us owning land is pretty funny. But there’s enough of my other ancestors to understanding wanting a piece of property that is yours, where you and yours can stay safe and unwanted invaders can be kept out.”
“Right,” she said. “No one in my family ever had any land that I know of, but I loved it when I paid off my place and got a paper saying I owned it outright. Anyway, go on.”
“How it came about was years back, before I hit rock bottom with Gravas. During the Depression. I was riding with a good outfit then. We’d been booked in Eastern Colorado. A lot of silver miners used to come down to spend their earnings. I’d sit in on poker games just for something to do while I chugged my nightly dose. I wasn’t a bad player, actually pretty good—until the liquor took hold. I was winning one night when this hombre ran out of cash, so he threw a land deed into the pot to up the ante. Turned out he went around buying up bankrupt properties for bottom dollar, and had a sheaf of deeds. I won the pot, and the land deed.”
He paused, looking down at her. “How are you doing? Shall we make getting a new cane a first priority?”
“Nah. I only use it for steep stairs or hills. If we don’t do any more hiking I’ll be fine,” she said. “Go on. Rich guy, you won a land deed.”
“He got a couple of the players to witness, and signed it over to me. I then proceeded to lose the rest of the pot as I drank myself numb, as usual. I stumbled to my room, put the deed in the bottom of my travel bag, and pretty much forgot about it.”
“Wow,” Godiva said, sighing with relief when the top of the trail appeared at last.
Rigo slowed his pace a little. She was able to catch her breath as they reached flat ground. Once again he let her hand go in that easy, natural manner. With that heightened awareness, she noted a pulse of regret. That, too, would need some thinking out.
Later.
He pointed to a picnic table a few yards away. “We can sit under the trees here for a few minutes if you like.”
How could he be so watchful without being a nag about it? She said, “Only long enough to drink the rest of my thermos off. Funny, half an hour ago the last thing I wanted was water. Uh,” she added as she took the thermos from her purse. “Want some?”
“Thanks, I’ll be fine,” he said. “You go ahead. Dehydration is bad for humans.”
“You’re human now,” she pointed out.
“I know my limits. I’m not anywhere near them.”
She swallowed down the water gratefully, even if it was warm and stale tasting. Then she said, “And so, you had a deed, and horses . . .”
“So I had to find me a map to Kentucky, and make my way there. Took a while. I had to work my way. Horses are expensive to feed, and we couldn’t always forage. But we found the place. I saw why that guy parted with the deed so easy. The land was neglected, with an old farmstead on it, falling down. No electricity, no plumbing. But the grass was good, and the horses loved it. So I hired myself onto a construction company to learn carpentry, and began rebuilding the house . . .”
As they returned along the path to the car, skirting the pools that were already evaporating in the summer heat, Rigo went on to describe how he’d learned carpentry by day so he could work on his house by night, in between taking basic care of his animals. When the house was weatherproofed, he began volunteering with animal rescue teams on weekends so he could learn something about care beyond the basics of food, water, and exercise.
“ . . . the last project was the electricity. That is, to install it. Since I’d grown up without it, I was used to living with oil lamps, candles, and in winter the fireplace, but electricity wasn’t going away. I wanted a refrigerator, which would be a vast improvement over the cold cellar. So I started taking classes in electrical engineering, while working with a farrier on weekends. I told you I can hear animals’ thoughts.”
“What’s that like?” she asked.
“Difficult to explain. Feelings, images, memory of smells, mostly. The thing is, I could figure out what was wrong but not fix it, so I had to learn how.”
He looked over, then said slowly, “It was just after I’d finished wiring the downstairs, where all the necessary appliances live, and I was about to commence the upstairs, when a new guy showed up at work. I sensed a mythic shifter. He was focused on me.”
They reached the car. She climbed in, and in seconds they had blessed air conditioning going. “Was he connected to the Midwest Guardian you keep mentioning?”
“Right. We worked together on a couple building projects before he spoke up. He brought up shifters, and when I revealed I knew a little, but not much, he told me about the Guardians, and their goal to protect shifters as well as other creatures, four-legged and two. He asked if I’d be willing to take on rescues if the Guardians needed help, and I said rescue was rescue, whoever found out about it. In fact, one came up. The day before I was to leave on one, the shifter turned up on my doorstep with this skinny kid who looked a lot like me, except he has your eyes.”
Alejo did have her eyes. Godiva’s heart turned over. She listened eagerly, hungry for all the details.
Rigo smiled reminiscently as he drove along the rain-swept road toward the highway. “Alejo had been staying with some Jackson relatives in Michigan, so he could learn how to shift without being boxed into a city, while the Guardian network found me and checked me out. He was thrilled at the idea of a road trip. I figured we could get to know each other just as easy on the road, only the two of us, as we could at the ranch, so we took off.”
“And that’s when he wrote to me. Was that your idea?”
“At first, yes. He was so excited about everything, he forgot for a week or two, but it only took the one reminder. After that, he picked out the cards himself. Once we returned that fall, I signed him up for his senior year of high school. Then I had to learn how to cook, when I was used to catching meals on the fly. I wanted to give him as regular a home as I never had. At least I had a house to offer him, instead of a tumble-down shack. Even if it wasn’t finished. But it turned out not having electricity upstairs was grand funk groovy, I believe he said.”
“He and his buddy Lance used to say that,” Godiva exclaimed, her hands tightly clasped in her lap. She felt his gaze, and consciously loosened them. “I think it was supposed to be ironic. Or as ironic as teenage boys can manage.”
“Yep. All the subtlety of a blowtorch. I remember that age,” Rigo said with a laugh. “He took right to oil lamps, but even better was getting to mess around with wires as he helped me get the upstairs wired to code. He also took to the animals. By then I’d adopted a lot of my rescues, since I had plenty of land. Within a mo
nth Alejo and all the animals were long-lost buddies, even the one-eyed cat with the bent tail and a chewed ear, who didn’t like anybody. His name, no surprise, was That Damn Cat, or Damn for short. Damn would sneak in at night—I don’t even know how he got in, when the house was shut up tight during winter, He’d sleep on Alejo’s pillow next to his head, his purr sounding like a metal shredder, but come sunup he’d vanish, nothing happened, no cat here!”
As the Phantom ate up the miles, Rigo kept up the little anecdotes, and managed to make even his failures sound like they were . . . if not fun, no real hardship. But Godiva could read between the lines. It was clear that on top of everything else, Rigo had piled onto his work schedule a crash course in the arcane rules of high school sports in order to support Alejo’s team. He’d also learned to deal with report cards and parent conferences, without revealing that he had barely an elementary school education himself. Luckily Alejo had always been an excellent student.
Then his tone changed, becoming reflective. “ . . . I began to understand how my self-medication with hard liquor during my early years had stunted me as far as developing skills as a shifter. I didn’t even know that until I heard Alejo talking to his animal.”
“Talking?” Godiva repeated. “But . . . aren’t you and the basilisk one and the same?”
“Yes, and no. When I’m the basilisk, I have a different array of senses, which means a different way of seeing the world. It’s hard to explain, especially as I don’t really understand it myself, but many shifters talk to their animals and the animals talk back. The most I get is an occasional word from the basilisk, and it’s always what I’d be thinking anyway.”
“Actually, I think I get it,” Godiva said slowly. “At least, tell me if this sounds even close. My P.I. character argues with me. If she doesn’t like the story I put her in, she gets stubborn, and I sit there at the keyboard staring at a blank screen. Until I give in, and let her take the story in the direction she wants. You can say I’m just playing games with myself—in fact, some have—but I regard her as herself, and I’m just her minion, working up her story as she lives it.”
Rigo said, “That actually sounds a lot like what Alejo and others tell me about themselves and their animals. Here,” he interrupted himself. “Coming up on a connector road. We can either take the 40 out east through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and up, or the northerly route. Number one is longer, but number two has more traffic overall.”
“Whatever’s quickest?” Godiva said. “I’ll enjoy the scenery no matter what. It’s all new.”
“Got it,” he said. “North it is. We can make up lost time by getting an early start, and driving later at night. We can catch meals during the worst traffic hours.”
She assented, and from then on she ceased to pay attention to the route, in favor of enjoying the scenery as they talked.
The rest of the day passed in a flash as Rigo finished up the saga of Alejo’s education. With an apologetic glance, he said, “I have to confess, once he was drafted, I did try to find you. I didn’t go myself—I already knew I was no good at tracking anyone down. But I paid an investigator who had a good rep. But he never found you. We figured it might be because he was used to tracking shifters, and you were human. Whatever the reason, you had vanished without a trace.”
“You didn’t think about my changing my name, even though you knew Alejo had been named Cordova when he was born?”
“I assumed you changed your name to your mother’s,” Rigo said. “Made sense. Lamas sure hadn’t done a damn thing for you other than his half of bringing you into the world.”
She understood the question in his gaze by now, and said, “I tried twice with private investigators. Both times a bust—because they were searching for Alejandro Cordova.”
Rigo nodded. “He wanted to sign up at the high school as Tzama, to avoid hassles. And once he turned twenty-one, he made it legal.”
“No quarrel there,” Godiva said. “Tzama. I never knew your last name.”
“I’m sorry I never told you,” Rigo said ruefully. “I never used it once I left home. All I could think of was my pa getting out of jail and turning up on my doorstep roaring drunk, fists swinging. But after I talked to my Grandfather Tzama, I made my peace with my background.”
“Tzama,” she said. “Of course Alejo would want to change his name after he found you. Tzama. I like the sound of it.”
Rigo smiled his real smile, the one that lit his eyes. And from there they traded stories back and forth about their own haphazard educations—Rigo at a small town night school in Kentucky, and Godiva in the hippie world of alternative pretty much everything.
Over dinner, which they ate at another hole-in-the-wall in Thompson Springs, Utah, Godiva got him to talk about the ranch. His face lit up as he admitted that he’d somehow managed to acquire a farrier’s knowledge, even if it was never made official. She got the distinct impression that word spread about his ranch full of rescues, many of whom he was able to find homes for once they were healed. He made no claims for himself, but she mentally counted up all the animals he talked about.
“It sounds like every one of them has a story,” she said as they finished their after-dinner coffee.
“That’s just it, every single one does have a story,” he said with a soft, reminiscent smile as he gazed out at a line of departing clouds half-covering the moon. “Even if they can’t tell it themselves, the story is there in their eyes, in their gait, in the scars, in how they react. I’m no storyteller. I probably wouldn’t do any of them justice if I tried. But I could make damn sure their story took a good turn. Heh. Let’s pay up. Looks like that thunderstorm is passing south of us, so we can get in a few good hours now that we’ve reached the 70.”
He got up, leaving the subject behind, and they were soon on the road. They made it to Grand Junction, Colorado, before deciding to call it quits for the night.
She lay alone in her motel bed, very aware of him in that next room.
For a time she imagined him moving around. Now he was in the shower, and . . . she let herself remember the first time she climbed into that horrible tin shower-tub together back in Hidalgo. The heat between them had banished the weak, lukewarm stream that barely worked for one person. That, the peeling plaster, everything had faded to nonexistence before the strength of desire, and the spiraling heights of glory when they came together.
Would it be that way now? She forcibly shoved the thought away. She was too old, things had changed too much.
But her body did not agree, from the way her blood hummed through her veins, the pulse of warmth deep in her core. That part of her revved its engine just fine, eighty years be damned.
Crash! Lightning branched outside the windows, followed by the exhilarating roar of thunder as a spectacular thunderstorm moved across the Colorado sky.
Was he thinking about her?
“Depends,” she muttered to the rolling thunder, “what he’s thinking.”
Anyway there was the small matter of fifty years of silence that couldn’t be addressed until they got to that post office box.
She ripped her thoughts away from Rigo and thought about the day, realizing that she’d really enjoyed herself in talking over Alejo’s senior year in high school, and his life immediately after. Though she had zero interest in organized sports, she reveled in the stories of Alejo’s high school basketball career. She rejoiced to hear about how good he was at training horses, and building things.
Hearing about the ranch, and not just the animals who came to stay, but broken shifter humans who ended up there, and pitched in to work for room and board. He had an entire staff living there now. In fact, it kind of reminded her of what she was doing, with her houseguests.
Rigo made it all sound so easy. But then, she realized as rain roared overhead, he had been that way when she’d known him. This was the real Rigo. But in her anger she had managed to convert him into something he wasn’t.
She turned that thought
over, as something about it bothered her. Not guilt. At least, not precisely. He took full responsibility for having abandoned her and the unborn baby that terrible night.
The thunder died away in the distance, and, sleepy, she gave a mental shrug. The one thing she was sure of, she looked forward to tomorrow’s journey.
And it was just as good as the day before.
Better, because she didn’t do something stupid like dash down a trail just before an apocalyptic storm. She soaked in all the stories about Alejo, no matter how small. Most of all, she was aware of her growing respect for Rigo, who rarely talked about himself, but she could feel his pride in their son, his concern, his caring.
Chapter 12
RIGO
He would not let himself speculate about tomorrow. He was grateful for what he had right now, just the two of them, and the road unspooling out before them.
Godiva was so gallant. That damn close call in Grand Canyon was entirely his fault. He knew how fast weather patterns could change over those mountains. He should have spoken up but he hadn’t wanted to disturb the fragile peace between them by insisting on a return to the car. Some might have resented that close call, but she clearly regarded it as an adventure.
Time passed faster than he was ready for. He kept strictly to himself the fact that he didn’t care the least about whatever the mystery was about the post office box that he had never seen. They had reunited. That was all that mattered to him. Plus there was still Long Cang back in California, and his promise to help.
But first priority was his mate, and this mystery mattered to her.
He had prepared carefully curated stacks of CDs for those long stretches without WiFi or decent radio stations, but he never brought them out of their box in the trunk. They chattered the entire time.