‘I didn’t say I didn’t want you, too. And I’m not so unselfish that I can’t enjoy the last of what I’m going to get.’
‘Well, then—’
‘I said, “Tough luck.” ’
‘And you think I’m just going to let you get up and walk out of here on “tough luck,” after this? The hell you do!’
‘If you don’t let me go,’ she whispered, ‘I’ll cry rape so loud you’ll be deaf right up to the day they take you out to hang you.’
He snorted. ‘It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?’
‘As they say, “Better late than—” ’
‘You won’t do it. You want—’
‘Try me.’
They lay looking at each other.
‘You’re tougher than Delia the worst day she ever lived.’
‘I think you’re right.’
‘And you came in here just to make me crawl so you could have the last word and walk out like a victorious bitch!’
‘No.’ Her eyes were solemn. ‘I never wanted to hurt you. I love you. I always have. And I certainly never want you to crawl to me or to anyone. I want you to be a man. Dear Jake, how I want you to stand up and be a man, but you won’t, so it’s just as well you’re going. If you’re afraid you’re crawling to me when you say what you did, it’s because you’re like a proud, stubborn little boy who won’t use his company manners even if it means missing out on the Christmas feast. That’s you; going hungry and thirsty and naked in your heart all your life because you won’t admit you need anyone.’
‘I said I wanted you.’
‘And I said those weren’t the magic words. Say “I love you, Carrie.” ’
Nothing.
‘Say “I love you, Carrie.” ’ She touched his clouded baffled face. ‘Poor Jake. You better get up now or you’ll miss your stage again.’
A dozen impulses flashed through his mind, all of them destructive and inconclusive. He wanted to do something to humiliate her now. But she lay under him, looking at him with those thick-lashed wet blue eyes, as if he were Paco who had hurt himself. Her damned arrogance! He wanted to hurt her. He just wanted her, in spite of his rage. His whole body ached for her.
He ran his hand slowly and possessively down her body until he could pull up her skirts and caress her firm thighs up to where they joined in cotton-swathed chastity. She let him, watching his face unblinkingly; even relaxed a little for him.
He thought of all the damned clothes he’d have to snatch off her while he tried to keep her from making good on her promise to scream. The same thought must have occurred to her, too, because she choked on a tearful little laugh.
He let her go and sat up in disgust to put his head in his hands, feeling closer to both murder and tears than he had ever felt in his life. The cot springs creaked as she pulled her skirts free and got up. She paused with her hand on the doorknob, looking at him.
‘Don’t do that. Don’t pretend to, either. Leave it for later; you’ll have time. In twenty years, or even in ten, when Paco has forgotten you and I’m an old woman. Then you can do that, alone. I’ll have shed all my tears by then.’
The door closed.
She was gone several minutes before the door burst open again and Paco rushed into the room. ‘Hey, tío, look at what Angelina gave me! A roseberry of holy beads and a basket of good stuff to eat on the way!’
Jake hadn’t moved since Carrie left him. Paco bounced on the cot beside him and swung the rosary around, enjoying the glint of the dark amber beads. He noticed something left out of the packing. ‘Chake, you didn’t take your picture I made for you.’ He got it, admiring it anew, and put it in the valise, then strung the beads around his neck and dropped them down inside his shirt. ‘That’s the way to do it,’ he whispered to himself. Jake scrubbed his hands over his dry face roughly and looked at Paco.
‘Let’s go now, Chake, so we can watch the stage come in.’
‘Sure,’ Jake sighed. ‘Hell, yes. Why not?’
*
No one told Carrie when they left. She had let Paco stray from her mind while she grieved on her own bed. When she remembered him she jumped up in alarm and ran out through the office. Clem and Mary O’Neal looked at her in astonishment.
‘Carrie, dear, what’s the matter?’ Her face was badly damaged by her tears and she looked wild.
‘Where’s Paco? Have you seen him?’
‘What do you mean? You know he’s gone.’
‘No, he isn’t! He’s here someplace. I’ve got to find him!’
‘You’ve been sleeping and had a bad dream.’
‘No! He wasn’t going to take him! He’s still here! Oh, God!’
Clem frowned. ‘But of course he was going to take him, if you mean Jake. And he did. I saw them both off myself. We all wondered at you for not being there.’ He looked around for Mary’s help. ‘You went to sleep and missed them.’ Carrie flew out the door with another strangled denial. ‘Mary, sweetheart, go after her. I don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve never seen her like this before.’
Mary followed her down to the empty jail and found her in Jake’s room, face down on the cot, sobbing.
‘Oh, Carrie darlin’, don’t. There now, lamb. Don’t cry for the likes of him. I’m sure he wasn’t worth a drop of your tears if he could leave you so, the blackguard! For all that he could be a fetching man if he tried, he had a cold, lonesome heart in him, I could tell. It’s the kind you never warm up if you burn your own heart out trying. I’ve seen the like. He’s like one of those little fox cubs we used to find in the fields back home that looked so much like puppy dogs. Oh, we’d smuggle them home and feed them and favor them and give them names. But when they grew up they were foxes, just wild foxes, and nothing else.’
‘He took Paco with him,’ Carrie sobbed, with her face in the pillow.
‘I know, the poor little beggar. I only hope he treats him fair and tries to find a decent home that’ll take him in.’
Carrie lifted her head and rolled over. Mary saw with surprise that, although her face was crumpled and stained with tears, she wasn’t in either sorrow or despair at Jake’s leave-taking. She looked almost radiant.
‘No, no, you see, he took Paco with him — he wasn’t going to. I know you all thought he was, but he wasn’t going to do it. I knew! He just didn’t have the courage to tell Paco. He was going to sneak away and leave him at the last minute.’
‘A better thing if he had, too. But what a mean, low trick, to ditch the poor child without a word!’
‘But he couldn’t do it! Don’t you see? He couldn’t do it! Maybe there’s hope for him after all.’
She lay back on Jake’s pillow with a groan of relief and anguish. ‘Oh, Mary, I don’t know how anyone can, be as relieved and mad and miserable and happy as I am right now. Would you mind if I asked you to leave me alone, until I get myself in hand, so I won’t go making a fool of myself on the street again?’
‘To be sure, dear. I’ll tell your brother you’re all right.’ But Mary was less reassured than puzzled by Carrie’s outburst and explanation.
*
When Carrie returned to the office she was calm and full of purpose. Clem and Mary watched her, waiting for some sign that would permit them to question her further on the matter of Jake and her tears, but she gave them no opportunity.
In a few days they began to believe it must have been some sort of dream that had made her fly out the door after a phantom Paco. They avoided mentioning either the boy or the man to her, as if they were dead.
Carrie seemed not to notice either the concern or the new reticence. She wrote, edited, swept, scrubbed, and dusted with total concentration. In the evenings she shut herself away in her room early after supper, pleading fatigue, which was reasonable. She didn’t look now as if she were either grieving or brooding. If anything, Mary thought, she looked better than she had in recent weeks. Her hair took on the shine that long sessions of brushing must have given it as she sat alone.
<
br /> Once, when Mary glanced into her open doorway, she found the room so clean and bare it could have been unoccupied.
‘Dear God,’ she thought, ‘has the woman gone and taken private vows? It looks like the cell of a nun.’ But Carrie wasn’t a Catholic.
Others in the town seemed quickly to forget Jake and his protégé. Rance Gebhardt took over as full-time marshal and occupied the jail, glad to be out from under his brother’s heavy humor. Patchy Murdoch regained his reputation as the man most to be watched at the card tables. But without a suitable rival to oppose him his audience waned and bar profits rose accordingly.
*
In the weed-tangled field behind the cantina where the glorious tent had once stood the Sánchez children found a dirt-caked cloth bag full of dead kittens. Or, rather, their skeletons, for the invading ants and other insects had found their way inside and picked the little bones clean.
There was a thick paper stuffing in the bottom corner of the bag, visible through a hole chewed in it by the field mice. They tried to pull it out, but it was wedged in too tightly. It wasn’t very interesting, compared to the delicate little bones, but they hauled the whole thing in to their grandmother to see if she wanted to make use of the remains for her spell medicines.
Sánchez found her and the children polishing up the tiny Skulls on their sleeves. He stood as if bemused, until they saw him, too, and scattered away prudently. When they were gone he picked up the filthy remnant of the bag and carried it into his private office. No one remembered seeing it, afterward.
When the westbound stage to San Diego made its stop in late June the streets were so broiling hot not even the Anglos were out on them. The stage driver advised the passengers to try the new hotel down the street if they were planning to stay, and gave notice of a thirty-minute lunch stop to the rest. A hardware drummer took the longer walk; two mining types went into the cantina. The last two passengers crossed the wide street instead.
‘Remember, you only get thirty minutes here, mister,’ called the driver. The man nodded. His companion made running circles around him in the street to stretch his legs, then straightened out into a beeline for the kitchen of the Arredondo Carriage House. The man let him go and continued across the street at an angle to the newspaper office.
Carrie was alone in the office, proofreading copy and fanning herself listlessly with a palm-leaf fan, while her brother and his intended bride dawdled over their lunch together in the kitchen and made plans for enlarging the living quarters of the building. Carrie heard the door open behind her and turned around, then got up slowly.
‘Is Paco with you?’ she asked when she didn’t see him.
‘He went down to see Angelina.’
‘Oh. How was El Paso?’
‘I don’t know. We didn’t stay long enough to find out.’
‘I see. You must enjoy traveling, to do it in this heat. Are you going back to California how? Or did you forget something here?’
He shut the door behind him firmly.
‘No. That was the whole damned trouble. I didn’t forget anything here,’ he said gracelessly. He sat down in Clem’s chair and took off his hat: He looked hot and ill tempered.
‘This is never going to work out,’ he muttered. She sat down again facing him, knee to knee. ‘You wouldn’t like keeping a saloon,’ he told her.
‘No, I don’t believe I would.’
‘Or living in a hotel with a gambling room downstairs, either.’
She looked pensive.
‘And I couldn’t spend the rest of my life shut up in a flea park like this.’ He indicated Arredondo with a slight motion of his head.
They stared at each other. ‘Isn’t there anything else?’ she asked. ‘I don’t know what—’
‘I mean, isn’t there anything else you want to tell me?’ He looked as if he had come to confess to a murder.
‘I love you,’ he said at last.
She blinked back her first tears.
‘I know you do. But I’m so glad you came back to say it.’
‘It doesn’t make me any different. Or you, either. It doesn’t do anything for either of us, except mess up our lives.’
She nodded wordlessly, her tears spilling over.
Then he pulled her out of her seat and into his lap, holding her hard, with his face against her shoulder as she clung to him; until she had her cry and began to laugh.
‘How long will it take you to pack?’ he asked after a while. ‘We haven’t got much time.’
‘I’ve been packed ever since the day you left. That’s what I was laughing about.’
He dumped her off his lap onto her feet again as he stood up.
‘God, I can see this is going to be a massacre. The only possible good that can come out of it is that I won’t have to sleep with Paco any more. Whatever we do, that kid has got to have his own room. I don’t know what the hell you’re laughing about. You’re going to be sorry. I’m going to be sorry!’
But when Paco burst through the door a short time later Jake was still kissing Carrie.
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Table of Contents
DUTCH UNCLE
Rear cover text
About the Author
Also by...
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
Adverts
Rear Cover
Dutch Uncle Page 27