Surprised at the intensity of their longing when both had just acknowledged how completely satisfied they were following the lovemaking that had rocked their respective worlds to the core, they nonetheless embarked on yet another wild, insatiable ride.
This time they didn’t even bother with the bed.
Working together proved far less uncomfortable than Annie had first imagined. Jewell had told her that Johnny Lonebear was a consummate professional, and in the days that followed he proved it. For the most part their paths took different turns during the day, but Johnny did make a point to stop by at least once a day to say hello. These meetings were not at all as confrontational as the first time he had invaded her classroom and openly challenged her authority. Annie’s students genuinely seemed to welcome his presence, as he was a popular authority figure in their lives. Most were eager to share their progress with the local hero who took such personal interest in each and every one of them.
“I told you he’s just a big old teddy bear once you get to know him,” Crimson Dawn reminded her teacher.
Annie couldn’t help but smile. So far she had managed to walk a tightrope in respect to Johnny’s precocious niece. Looking at the quality of her work, she knew it wouldn’t be long before Crimson Dawn would need no one to tell her just how talented she really was. When that fateful day occurred, Annie hoped she was far, far away from the contentious mother who surely would be looking to blame someone else for her daughter’s desire to spread her wings beyond the borders of the reservation where she had been raised. Surely the most readily available target would be the meddlesome white woman whom Ester already believed had put that foolish idea into her head in the first place.
As tempting as it was to think about putting such ugly altercations behind her, lately Annie found herself wishing that her position at Dream Catchers was more permanent. As nice as it was to think about avoiding unpleasantness, it made her sad to think about leaving behind so many people who had come to mean so much to her in such a short time. How rewarding it would be to actually watch her students grow up and to become a real part of their lives.
How intriguing to think about becoming a genuine part of Johnny’s life, rather than some meaningless summer fling that he would likely forget before the dust settled behind her little blue coupe come the first of September.
A woman who had spent the better part of the last decade subjugating her physical needs to her intellect, Annie was at a loss to explain her seemingly insatiable desire for a man who was clearly so totally wrong for her. Despite her own admonitions to Johnny, she found herself wishing that he really would pull her into some nearby closet and ravish her between classes. Every time she thought about making love to him, Annie’s body betrayed her. Her fair complexion was a gauge of her feelings at any given moment, and her pulse was as skittish as a jackrabbit. Annie didn’t think she had blushed so much since the high school speech class that her mother had insisted she take.
Annie herself had come to look forward to Johnny’s daily visits to her classroom with an eagerness that she feared would give them both away. For the past month they had been seeing each other every single chance they could. Morning, noon and night, Johnny took up most of her thoughts. That preoccupation had already cost her more than one expensive piece of stained glass. A meticulous crafts-woman, Annie was embarrassed to think that a bad case of runaway hormones might endanger the completion of the dream catcher mosaic she was working on for the school’s entryway.
She dismissed the idea that she might subconsciously be trying to delay its completion in the foolish hope of putting off saying a final goodbye to Johnny. Once the final piece of glass was soldered into place, the time for her to move on would be near.
Unfortunately, what she was going to do with the rest of her life remained as elusive as a Wyoming butterfly in December. Annie knew only that she was truly beginning to heal and put the past behind her. The solace of these wide-open spaces and the warmth of the people who inhabited them were balm to a heart learning how to trust all over again. Fascinated by the spirituality of the tribal culture that surrounded her, Annie was grateful to Johnny for sharing his heritage with her.
And to his people for seemingly accepting her presence without rancor.
Annie’s curiosity was boundless. Like any good teacher, rather than simply telling her the answers to the myriad questions she posed, Johnny did his best to show her instead. In response to an inquiry about how Christianity fit into native spirituality, he offered to give her a personal tour of the local mission. On one condition: she had to pack a fabulous picnic lunch for the two of them.
Annie was delighted to oblige. Along with fried chicken, potato salad, rolls, chocolate chip cookies and a bottle of wine, she packed a camera, hoping to capture not just the images that intrigued her but also the more elusive mood of the place. Everything was fodder for her intellect and artistry. She couldn’t remember how long it had been since she had felt so happy, and if the only way of capturing that feeling for posterity was through a photograph, she was willing to buy as much film as it took. Over and over, she kept reminding herself that Johnny had made no promises beyond the summer. Although her head understood that perfectly, she was afraid that her heart had gone completely deaf.
Annie’s students were long gone when Johnny arrived to pick her up. She was in the process of putting up the last of her supplies when his voice resonated throughout the classroom and her body. She thrummed like a guitar in the hands of a master.
“Are you ready to go?” he asked.
Wheeling around to acknowledge his presence, Annie could hardly keep from flying across the room and throwing herself into his arms. The erotic images that had beset her all morning long made it hard to maintain any semblance of professional demeanor.
Her voice sounded deceptively calm as she replied, “Just about.”
The look Annie gave him was almost enough to knock Johnny’s knees out from under him. An avowed bachelor, he couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to come home to such a welcoming smile every day. An unwanted image of a passel of children greeting him amid squeals of laughter caused something in his chest to wrench painfully. It stung worse than the piece of shrapnel lodged in his back.
It hurt almost as bad as the guilt that sometimes woke him in the middle of the night. Over and over again in his dreams, he risked his life for his buddy who was killed in the line of friendly fire. Telling himself that old soldiers made poor husbands and worse fathers, he tried shaking off the renewed sense of longing for a family that Annie had rekindled in him. He had discarded that many years ago along with the Dear John letter he had received when he had been most susceptible to such yearnings.
Certainly a man with blood on his hands from the battlefield had no business contemplating such cozy fantasies. Having failed his fallen comrade when he needed him the most, Johnny worried that he would also fail a wife and children. When the tribal elders originally approached him at the end of his tour of duty with the idea for Dream Catchers, he had leaped at the opportunity, seeing in it a chance to redeem himself by leaving the world better than he had found it. What better war could a man who had thrown down his guns fight than a war to protect young people from the despair that was eroding the culture he loved?
Believing himself unsuitable marriage material, Johnny became the father figure for an entire generation. He couldn’t help but be moved by the gratitude expressed by adults and children alike for the positive influence he was making upon the youth of the reservation. Too many children with whom he worked had been abandoned by their birth fathers.
Johnny didn’t have much use for such men. Having lost his parents at such a young age, he knew firsthand how desperately a child missed that influence in his life. Not that his grandmother hadn’t done an admirable job in raising his sister and him, God rest her soul. He simply believed that boys in particular needed a male role model in helping shape them into men of vision and compassion. A girl n
eeded a daddy to tell her she was beautiful both inside and out, and to encourage her to pursue her dreams without regard to any restrictions that society might put upon her.
As much as his sister resented Annie’s interference in what she perceived to be a family issue, Johnny couldn’t help but admire her for nurturing Crimson Dawn’s dreams along with everyone else’s with whom she came in contact. Seeing her in a purely lustful light did nothing whatsoever to lessen the ache that had opened in Johnny’s chest at the thought of starting a family with her. If anything it intensified it. She would be as wonderful a mother as she was a teacher. Gentle and kind and encouraging. He couldn’t blame his niece for being drawn to her any more than he could himself. If he had been a moth, Johnny was sure he would have already tried to immolate himself on the bright smile that Annie turned upon him.
He knew that his sister was not the only member of the tribe who frowned upon interracial dating. Johnny felt fairly certain that as long as his relationship with Annie spanned only the short length of the summer term no one would dare approach him on the subject. Off the top of his head, he couldn’t think of anyone who had such a death wish.
Their picnic proved as enjoyable as it was educational. Johnny spread a blanket on the football field where as a young man he had once proved his athletic prowess. Stately cottonwoods and elm trees lined the perimeter of the field, lending a sense of permanence to what at first seemed a desert mirage. In the shade of those mature trees, Johnny spun tales from his childhood that were a fanciful mix of fact and fiction.
“Without me they would have never won a single game,” he good-naturedly bragged, employing a sense of exaggeration that made Annie laugh out loud. “No, really. Hasn’t anyone told you that I took us to the state championship by scoring all the points myself? Nobody could catch me back then. Still can’t.”
“Is that a challenge?” Annie asked, returning his wink with a flirtatious one of her own.
She found his quirky sense of humor refreshing and his comments enlightening. Having attended the mission school as a rebellious teenager, Johnny was far more informative than any literature she could have picked up. What Annie found most fascinating of all were the bits and pieces that he accidentally dropped about his own checkered past. For instance, as she was pouring the wine, he made the comment that, “Sister Margaret Eleanor would frown upon any but sacramental wine being consumed on the premises.”
He shook his head and made a low whistling sound. “Talk about a lady who loved a challenge in the classroom. She claimed I turned all the red hair under her wimple completely gray over the course of a single semester. I was glad to hear it. Up until then, I thought she was bald. All of us did.”
Annie laughed again. It was easy to see him as a precocious adolescent defying authority at every turn. Picking up together the pieces of his past and soldering them together like the delicate fragments of glass with which she worked every day, she strove to complete a more-detailed composite of the man he was now. Because he was so relaxed today, she dared to get him to open up to her.
“Something tells me that you broke more than one rule around here once upon a time,” she remarked.
“You mean more than one ruler…” he quipped.
Annie’s jaw dropped. “I always thought those stories were exaggerations.”
The concern in her voice was almost enough to make Johnny ashamed of teasing. With a twinkle in his eye, he held up one hand. The fingers were twisted into an unnatural pose.
“I’ve been like this since first grade,” he told her solemnly. “I was hoping you would kiss it and make it all better.”
Realizing that she had been had, Annie swatted his hand away. “Shame on you for leading me on like that,” she told him. She thought about telling him to kiss her posterior but was far too ladylike to actually suggest it. Knowing him as she did, she worried he might well take her up on the offer right then and there.
“You’re such an easy mark I just can’t help myself,” he told her, holding out a chicken leg to her as a peace offering.
“So I’ve been told,” she mumbled.
The bile that rose in her throat at the memories of her past made it hard to take even the tiniest of bites. A swallow of wine did little to help wash away the bad taste in her mouth.
Although Johnny raised an inquiring eyebrow at the odd expression on her face, she refused to oblige his curiosity. It was far too lovely a day to let melancholia ruin it. Lying back upon the blanket, Annie stared at the wisps of white clouds overhead. Wyoming skies had to be the bluest and the clearest in the world. She couldn’t remember the last time she had allowed herself the luxury of watching the clouds parade overhead.
“That one looks like a white buffalo,” Johnny said, pointing to one charging toward them.
Annie started to ask him the significance of that particular image when he leaned over and kissed her tenderly. All thoughts of everything other than the warmth of his lips upon hers fled instantly. The way the earth moved beneath her as he deepened that kiss felt as if a real herd of buffalo was stampeding across that football field. Annie had never been given to romantic hyperbole. She was inclined to scoff at images such as fireworks and earthquakes to describe something as abstract as passion. Today, however, the cynic in her was overcome by the intensity of the blue sky overhead, which amplified the feeling that the world was spinning off its axis.
Closing her eyes, Annie succumbed to the delicious sensation of letting go. Only the fact that she had her arms wrapped around the broad expanse of Johnny’s back kept her from flying off the face of the planet. He tasted of fried chicken and sweet wine and unspoken promises. How easy it would be to become drunk on such a heady combination.
“I think I can say with surety that Sister Margaret Eleanor would not approve of this public display of affection,” Johnny told her, drawing back to study her reaction. The look he gave her was tender as he added, “But I think she would definitely approve of you.”
Annie smiled. She was both grateful and disappointed that he had shown the restraint to end that mind-boggling kiss when he did. It wouldn’t do either of their reputations any good were they to carry things too far in public.
“She would?” Annie squeaked, delighted with the rare compliment from him.
She very much liked the thought of some fire-breathing dragon from Johnny’s past putting her seal of approval on their relationship. It made her feel good that someone he held in such high regard would accept her for who she was. Annie breathed deeply. It pleased her that he had gone to the trouble of wearing cologne for her. The masculine scent of sage and musk suited him. And intoxicated her.
“She’d probably think you should be canonized for putting up with me,” Johnny told her in all honesty.
They finished their lunch in a languid, summertime fashion reminiscent of the picnics Annie had shared with her family on the shores of Lake Michigan. There were no mosquitoes here, however, nor hordes of tourists vying for a blanket-size spot on the beach. No traffic jams nor standing in line waiting to buy a beverage from some surly vendor. There were only Johnny and her, earth and sky, and the pristine air holding them all together.
Annie wondered if she had been wrong in encouraging Crimson Dawn to leave such an idyllic, undiscovered place.
She might have said as much to Johnny except that she didn’t want to spoil Johnny’s good humor. Or to second-guess herself. Long ago she had come to the conclusion that all anyone could expect of themselves was to do the very best they could at any given moment. And to cherish the good times while they lasted.
They put the remnants of their lunch in the pickup before embarking upon their tour of the old mission. First among the landmarks was a dilapidated building that Johnny told her was supposedly haunted. Well over a hundred years old, the convent house was one of the oldest structures on the reservation. Out of an apparent sense of generosity the resident ghosts presently shared the facility with rattlesnakes and rats and all sorts o
f creepy, crawly critters.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Annie announced in no uncertain terms.
“Most white people don’t,” Johnny replied. “Maybe that’s because they’re so much better than we Indians are at shutting out the voices of the past. While I’d generally have to say that the clergy who served here were well-intentioned people, it would be a lie to pretend that many injustices didn’t occur over the past century. Can you imagine what it must have felt like to be a young Indian child forced to leave your family and renounce your native name to become one of the many Shakespeares or Smiths on the reservation? It’s almost as if, by cutting off a boy’s braids and erasing his name, they hoped to transform a child into a member of a different race. At the same time, the government created a special reservation to keep the dirty Indian away from respectable white folk.”
Both fascinated and uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken, Annie said little as they resumed their tour of the grounds. She was glad to leave the shadow of the haunted nunnery behind and progress toward the immaculately maintained chapel itself. As much as she was sorry for historical transgressions, she felt no personal responsibility for it. She hoped Johnny didn’t presume to lump her into the same category as those about whom he spoke with such bitterness.
Perhaps he was implying that her own good intentions regarding Crimson Dawn were not as sound as she first believed when she encouraged his talented niece to follow her dream wherever it may take her.
“You believe what you want to,” Johnny said, guiding her by the elbow down a dirt footpath. “But people I know and admire swear to have heard moaning and the sound of basketballs pounding in empty gymnasiums, to have felt cold drafts pass through them in the middle of a hot summer day like this one and to have seen pieces of pipe that no living creature could bend twisted into useless pretzels when no one was on the premises.”
Annie felt a shiver run through her. Despite her avowal that she was not afraid of ghosts, Johnny was giving her the willies.
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