by Dan Flanigan
She broke off from him, not angrily, but firmly, as if she could find the strength she needed only by separating herself physically from him. She stood up, wiped her eyes, looked away from him, then back.
“I’m determined to hope,” she said. “There will be a time you can come to me.”
“Where?”
“That little island in the Caribbean. Where nobody will ever bother us again.”
“Well, there it is. The long-haired girl and the island too.”
“And that’s exactly what we’re going to have.”
“No, it’s just a dream. You’re chasing a dream. It’s not even a dream, it’s a nightmare. Give it up.”
But he could see that she was determined to chase it.
“Tag, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you here.”
“I can’t stay here. It’s all over for me here. I have to go.”
“Maybe you do,” he said wearily. “Too bad for both of us.”
“Yes,” she said. “Too bad for both of us.”
He was right about his daughter. She would never try to interfere with that. She looked away from him and toward the mountains. Just seeing them seemed to restore her strength. When she turned back to him, she seemed to have accepted the loss. She smiled at him. She had long ago given up whatever hope she had been born with, then life had suddenly granted her this possible reprieve—the man sitting there on the ground, the man who had shown her there could actually be romance in the world. But then, just as suddenly, that gift had been taken away. Yet there might be other gifts, other revelations waiting out there in the world for her to receive them. She knelt down in front of him and kissed him on the forehead; then she turned around and snuggled back into the curve of his body, resting her head on his chest. She took his arms and crossed them in front of her, cupped his hands around her breasts. He would hold her that way for a while, then he would begin to tease her breasts with the tips of his fingers and kiss her on the side of her neck, and soon they would be naked, his hardness against her softness, and he would play with her until she was wild to take him inside her, an act of completion, of being made whole. She was determined to believe that somehow, despite everything, her own age of miracles might someday come around at last.
CHAPTER 27
O’KEEFE RODE A few yards behind her as she guided Pegasus at a walk out of the small canyon, down the side of the corral, and past the big boulders toward the barn. Lenny charged out of the back door of the house as if he had been waiting there, watching for them. He carried the shotgun at the ready. She halted Pegasus in the middle of the open ground between the house and the corral. She had never been afraid of Lenny before, but she sensed she should be very afraid of him now. His jaws clenched tight, his face crimson, his eyes bugging like a madman’s. When O’Keefe rode up beside her, Lenny brought the shotgun up to his shoulder and aimed it at O’Keefe.
“Been enjoying yourself, O’Keefe?” Lenny said. “Well, that’s all over now. Get down off that horse.”
“Quit it, Lenny,” Tag said. “You know you won’t fire that gun, so stop playing games.”
“It isn’t me that’s gonna get fed to the buzzards out there, O’Keefe,” Lenny said. “It’s you.”
“Stay right where you are, Pete,” Tag said.
“Get away from him, Tag,” Lenny said.
Instead she spurred her horse and put herself between the two of them.
“Get away from him, Tag, or I’ll shoot you too.”
“Is that what it’s come to, Lenny?”
Lenny began to move sideways, maneuvering for a clear shot at O’Keefe. Tag moved her horse sideways too. O’Keefe, the pawn in their game, inched his hand toward the pistol holstered against his side. When he heard the first shot, he didn’t realize it was the pop of a rifle, not the blast of a shotgun. Lenny screamed and collapsed in the dirt. Then the firefight broke out, like a Viet Cong ambush all over again. Tag spurred Pegasus toward the barn. His own horse reared and bucked him off. Stunned by the fall, he lay there, watching Lenny crawl on his belly toward the house. Shots hit the dirt around Lenny as he crawled. O’Keefe jumped up and sprinted for the barn. Rounds exploded all around him. As he dived for the side of the barn, a bullet slapped into his right foot and spun him around sideways in the air. He flopped on his belly and rolled himself over and over until out of the line of fire. When he looked down at his foot, he saw that the heel of his boot had disappeared. Tag, panting and dazed, hunched next to him against the side of the barn, which shielded them from the firing. Neither of them could see the four men moving down the hill toward the front of the house.
LENNY HAD MANAGED to drag himself to the back porch. He grabbed the doorknob, pulled himself upright, and balanced on his left foot, his right leg hanging forlorn and useless, the flesh of his thigh a hunk of raw meat where the bullet had twisted out.
“He helped us all right!” Lenny screamed at Tag. “He brought them down on us! The bastard brought them down on us!”
Lenny pulled open the screen door and hopped into the house.
“You’re bleeding,” Tag said very softly, looking at O’Keefe’s foot.
O’Keefe’s face twisted in pain, but the pain was more in his mind than in his foot. He thought he might black out. He floundered in a muddy darkness of shame and rage. Then the nausea came. He gagged, almost threw up. He had brought them down on her. He had no right to have done that.
“Lenny’s right,” he said. “I hunted you down for them. I brought them down on you. I had no right . . .”
She seemed to shake off what he said, looked at the house, then back toward the mouth of the small canyon.
“We can get three on Pegasus if we ride him bareback.”
His face told her he thought that was crazy.
“All we’ve got to do is make it to the canyon back there. If we can get to the canyon, they won’t be able to follow us. But I have to get to the house first.”
“What for?”
“For Lenny. For the pack.”
“Forget the damn dope!”
“I’m not gonna forget it!” she said sharply. “Or the money. There’s no future for me without it.”
“Don’t go in there.”
“Yes, I am.”
“He’s sure as hell not worth it.”
That didn’t seem to faze her either. Her will had always been stronger than his so he unloosened the sling buckle and swung the rifle off his back and into his hands, crawled to the side of the barn, flipped the rifle on automatic, brought the scope to his eye, and pumped steel at the hillside while she ran to the house.
FROM THE KITCHEN Tag could see Lenny on the couch, weeping and clutching the backpack to his chest, seeming not to understand or care that he was directly across from the front window, exposed to fire from outside the house.
“Come on, Lenny. Let’s go.”
“We’re not gonna make it, are we?” he sobbed. “After all this, we’re not gonna make it.”
“We are gonna make it. We’re gonna ride out of here right now. Come on. Get away from that window.”
“I can’t ride a horse like this!”
“Yes, you can!” she screamed back at him. “Now get away from there!”
The first bullet shattered the window, the second pierced Lenny’s throat and exited through his ear. His hands jerked up to his neck, he coughed, reached for his ear, and fell over onto his side on the couch. Shards of flying glass slashed Tag across the right cheekbone and above the right eye. She crawled across the floor to the couch. “Lenny,” was all she could think to say to him when she saw that he was dead.
As she crawled back across the room toward the kitchen, dragging the pack, someone was kicking the front door off its hinges. When she jumped up and started to run, the back door crashed open. O’Keefe filled the doorframe. She wondered why he was aimed his rifle directly at her. She did not see the man who had appeared behind her, where the front door had once been.
“Get dow
n!” O’Keefe yelled, and she dived for his legs. The spent cartridges clattered around her as his rifle obliterated the man in the door frame. When he stopped shooting, the silence seemed to promise a truce.
“We’ve got to get back to the barn,” she said, jumping up, the pack still in her hand.
“Come on,” said O’Keefe. “And leave that damn pack!”
She did not leave it. He heard her clumping heavily after him out of the house and toward the barn. His heel cried out in pain each time he stepped down on it. He turned around in time to see the man with the rifle coming around the far side of the house and bringing the rifle up to his shoulder O’Keefe managed to fire a burst from the M-16 before he pitched backward, knocked flat on his back.
Tag watched the man twist on the ground like a mechanical toy winding down. After a few seconds he lay still. She ran to O’Keefe, lying there in the dust, blood all over the side of his head, his eyes closed in what looked like perpetual sleep. As with Lenny, she could think of nothing to say except his name, and she sat down and cradled his head in her arms.
In a few seconds he opened his eyes.
“You’re alive,” she said in relief and surprise. She kissed him on the forehead. “Let’s ride,” she said. “Can you ride?”
He nodded his head, and they crawled together into the barn.
While she tightened the cinch on her horse’s saddle, O’Keefe reloaded the rifle and slung it behind his back again. He was unable to stand with his weight on his right leg while he put his left in the stirrup, so he tried to mount the horse from the other side, right foot in the stirrup, but he could not tolerate the pain it took to try to lift himself into the saddle. Finally, he grabbed the saddle horn and pulled himself up on the horse without using the stirrups while she steadied him and pushed from behind.
She mounted in front of him. “Hold on to me as tight as you can, no matter what happens,” she said and spurred the horse into a gallop out of the barn. “Duck!” she warned him just in time as they cleared the barn door.
For a few seconds he thought it just might be easy. The men did not start shooting until Pegasus had galloped across the clearing and was pounding down the path along the side of the corral toward the canyon. A few yards before they reached the mouth of the canyon, the bullet hit him. She had told him to hold on tight, but he did not try to, afraid he would pull her off with him. All he could remember of the fall was a flash of white shirt as she galloped away from him. He flew through the air, hit on his left side, bounced once or twice, and ended up on his belly, eating dirt and seeing stars.
The shooting had stopped, so he crawled for the canyon, but it started again as soon as he made a move. The bullet had punctured his upper back below his right shoulder. He could tell from the stabbing pain in his chest that the bullet had come out the front of his right breast directly across from his heart. As he stretched his body in the crawl, his right lung felt like it was tearing apart. He hoped it was not a sucking wound. He remembered the look on the corpsmen’s faces when they saw that a man had a sucking wound. The same look every time. Another bullet nicked him, slicing off a small chunk of his right thigh below his rump.
Tag, the expert rider, could easily have made it into the canyon, out of their line of fire, on up the trail, across the bowl and into the mountains, and from there on to Mexico and, maybe, freedom. But she looked toward the distant mountains as if saying farewell, then turned Pegasus around. She jumped down off the horse and knelt beside O’Keefe, who had crawled behind a boulder that partly shielded them.
“Unbuckle the sling,” he whispered, hardly able to speak at all. “Take the rifle off and put it in my hands.”
She did as he told her, and she had blood on her hands when she finished. He did not bother to tell her there was a dressing in his first-aid kit. It was no bigger than a feminine napkin. Placing it on the wound would only make the wound seem even more gaping.
“Now slip my pack off.”
When she dragged the right strap of the pack across his right breast, he cried out in agony.
“Now open it,” he said.
He reached into the open pack and pulled out several magazines, rounds for the M-16, and stacked them side by side on the ground next to him.
He said, “Where are they? See if you can tell where they are.”
She peered around the rock, then ducked back.
“One of them is coming up the trail,” she said. “Can you shoot?”
“I can do better than that,” he said, gasping in pain as he reached for one of the grenades hooked onto his cartridge belt. “But I’m afraid if I try to heave it over the rocks, I won’t make it.”
He handed her the grenade.
“See that little pin? Pull it out. It won’t blow up as long as you keep hold of the thing and press the spoon, that silver clip there. Press it against the side of the grenade as hard as you can.”
Her jaw clenched as she pressed on the spoon with all her strength.
“Now pull the pin, but keep pressing on the spoon. You toss it like this,” he said, gesturing, and was surprised that he could move his right arm at all.
She looked quickly around the rock and ducked back again.
“How far away?”
“Twenty yards and moving slow.”
“Wait until you can hear his feet crunching the dirt.”
She listened and, in a few seconds, tossed the grenade. They heard the man yell “Hey!” as if he’d discovered a treasure, then an explosion.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s ride.”
He looked so very weary when he shook his head.
“Pete, we’re almost there. Don’t quit now.”
“I’m done. I’d bleed to death before we got across the mountains. Go on.”
“You’re losing too much blood. If you pass out . . .”
There was no need to say more. Each had seen the same vision, a rifleman standing over O’Keefe, rifle barrel pointed down, pumping rounds into O’Keefe’s head.
“I’m going for help,” she said. “I can ride around to the main road. I can get there in an hour. You think you can hold on here for a couple of hours?”
“You said there was nothing for you here. You were right. Go on.”
“I will. After I get you some help. I can call the police from the pay phone at the filling station up the road. Then I’ll go on.”
“Forget the pay phone. Just go.” Just a gesture on his part, he knew. She would do what she wanted. He had never been able to bend her will to his. That was the wild creature in her, the thing in her that had kept her spirit alive through all those empty years since her father had stolen into her room that night long ago.
“I’ll cover you,” he said, and pushed himself up to a sitting position, leaned back against the rock, and brought the rifle to his shoulder. Despite pain so fierce he thought he might faint, he forced the rifle to his shoulder and aimed. He squeezed off a round toward the back of the canyon to see if he could tolerate the recoil. He could. Barely. He tried to keep her from seeing his pain. She embraced him and held him to her. When she released him, her white shirt was smeared with his blood.
“Promise me you’ll come.”
“I promise,” he said, a promise he did not intend to keep, but she did not need to know that if it would help her move on.
She jumped up and ran for Pegasus, who stood a few yards away, waiting for her, tense but with no thought of running away and abandoning her. O’Keefe refused to watch her run away from him again, so he rolled over onto his belly and pointed the rifle down the trail back toward the ranch house. He could not see anyone, yet a rifle fired from somewhere. Above. From the rocks above us somewhere. A bullet pinged crazily off the canyon wall behind him.
Karl had worked his way up into the rocks above them and brought the rifle to his shoulder in time to see Tag run for the horse. His first shot missed. He had made the amateur’s mistake, aiming too high. His next shot hit the top of her left shoul
der, a grazing wound that still packed enough punch to make her stumble forward and fall to her knees, but she scrambled up and ran toward Pegasus, burdened by the backpack that she would not relinquish.
Karl now aimed at her horse. As she reached up for the saddle horn, Pegasus groaned—a monstrous, guttural groan of expiration—lurched, stumbled, and fell down. She saw that he would never rise again, the artery in his neck severed by the bullet, his blood spurting out on the ground.
It was then that she seemed to surrender. Suddenly. Entirely. She dropped the backpack and turned around to face the man in the rocks above her. She stood there, and waited, as if offering herself in sacrifice to a god known only to her.
O’Keefe brought the man in the rocks into the lens of his scope. By no means an expert shot, he worried that he would miss, but the loss of blood had numbed him and relaxed him, so that, for the first time in his life, his arms did not quiver at all, and the sight on the end of his rifle remained perfectly still when he took aim and fired. But he had hesitated too long, and Karl managed a final shot before O’Keefe’s bullet hit him.
When O’Keefe looked around behind him, he saw two colors, palomino and white, sprawled on the ground. The palomino whinnied miserably, kicked its forelegs feebly, trying vainly to struggle back on its feet. The white shirt and the girl in it did not move at all. He crawled over to her. There might be more of them coming, but he did not care now.
She lay flat on her back where the bullet had put her when it had punctured her heart. Her heart was still pumping, but that stream had an outlet now, and her life, red and gushing, flowed out of her and onto her shirt and the thirsty ground. It seemed like she could still recognize him when he brought her up into his arms.
“I didn’t have the right,” he said, “I didn’t have the right . . .”