Renegade Man

by Parris Afton Bonds

  So how come the kiss hadn’t changed?

  His tongue, as if it had a will of its own, gently traced the outline of her mouth before nudging her lips apart to receive a deep, sweet-tongued exchange. He heard her breathing alter, keeping pace with the ragged tempo of his own. Tenderness seeped into the tentative mating of their tongues, but Jonah knew this was all wrong.

  With a self-control that cost him dearly, he put her from him. “Now that was a kiss.”

  When he released her, she simply looked at him with a bemused expression.

  “Night, Ritz,” he said, stepping out and tipping his Stetson before he closed the car door.

  Chapter 5

  Rita -lou had no idea what her father had looked like. Her mother had never said anything about him—only that Luis had been a migrant worker. But in Rita-lou’s memory her mom had gone from a Mae West voluptuousness to pleasantly plump, not that the additional poundage had stopped an air jockey from running off with her. Rita-lou used to imagine the lo- thario pilot wearing a leather vest and goggles, with a silk scarf wrapped around his neck.

  Her later images of her mother weren’t quite so Hollywood: an aging, frowsy blonde wriggling her excess flab into a girdle. Watching this daily ritual with awe, Rita-lou had always made a silent vow that she would never go through that sausage-stuffing agony.

  Well, she had never owned a girdle, but now she did a more severe penance: she exercised and she dieted. She loathed exercise. Sometimes she thought, What the hell? There were worse things than a soft roll around the middle. How absolutely wonderful it would be to say consequences be damned and devour a calorie-laden hot fudge sundae billowing with whipped cream.

  Unfortunately, while she could thumb her nose at public opinion, she couldn’t disregard a nagging conscience. So she exercised and dieted while her brain’s pleasure center screamed for a caramel-and-nut candy bar or a slice of double-fudge cake layered with thick, rich chocolate icing.

  She groaned with an addict’s raging desire, swept up a towel and toiletries from her tent and stalked out before she could change her mind about snacking. The one good thing about excavating a site was that the arduous work kept her in shape—and there was no chance to nibble when her hands were buried in dirt from sunup to sundown.

  A glance at her dirt-encrusted nails told her that it was indeed time for a hot bath. Usually she sponged off with cold water from the Renegade, but every two or three days she was lured to make the two-mile walk to the hot springs. Magnum trotted along beside her, stopping every once in a while to sniff a plant or chase a squirrel.

  At one point along the way she could glimpse Jonah’s campsite through the foliage. His red-and-white half-ton pickup was parked alongside the silver camper. Her gaze darted to the picnic bench he used for his sampling work, but he wasn’t there, and she didn’t hear his dredger running. She thought about the way he continued to call her Ritz. She used to find it amusing, but now she suspected that this saltwater sovereign did it purely to annoy her.

  The path she followed paralleled both the old Butterfield Trail and an elk migration route. She hadn’t come across any elk on her traipsings, but she was wary of other wildlife. Mountain lions and javelina abounded in the area, as did Buck Dillard and his kind.

  To reach the springs, she had to skirt a creosote- treated pine fence—part of Split P property—that enclosed an old gold-recovery mill that had run on mule power. Even in this day and age, a rancher had the power of a feudal lord over his range, so she was delighted that each time she passed the Split P’s arrasta, Magnum slipped through the fence to relieve himself on the oak post.

  The hippie commune’s clapboard shack, its roof now fallen in, marked the location of the hot springs. Surrounded by yellow genestra and blue lupin, the hot springs were practically hidden until you topped a rocky ledge. Then the rising steam betrayed the two stone-lined pools three feet below, the larger one spilling over into the smaller one. That one overflowed in a trickling stream that emptied into the Renegade a mile away.

  Rapidly she stripped off her clothes and, with a sigh of pure bliss, eased into the larger pool. Magnum might like water, but the hot springs held no interest for him. Within five minutes he was off, sprinting after a bounding jackrabbit.

  Eyes closed, she lay back and smiled. She didn’t know how long she stayed in the shallow pool with her head propped against its fern-covered rim, but when her bones felt like spaghetti she knew it was time to bathe, so she reached for her biodegradable shampoo.

  The distant sound of whistling interrupted the chatter of the forest birds, and she went absolutely still. She recognized the ditty—“Blow the Man Down”—and that meant the whistler had to be Jonah! She shot to her feet and grabbed the towel off the ledge. Normally she had no trouble climbing out of the pool, but trying to hold the towel around her made the attempt difficult, especially when her body was still wet and slippery.

  With one leg over the ledge, she looked up and saw Jonah, his sweat-stained Stetson tilted down over his eyes. He was bare-chested, and a towel was slung over his shoulders. Slowly his lips curled into a brash smile. She couldn’t make up her mind whether to slap it off his lips or kiss it off, and the thought startled her. She settled for trying to climb from the pool with dignity.

  “Heave-ho, my hearties,” he said with a pirate’s leer. “Heave-ho!”

  “Will you shut up, John Paul Jones, and get me out of here?”

  “It’s Jonah Jones to you, my lady, or else you’ll get no help from this jack-tar.”

  She grunted, out of patience. “Jonah Jones, then. Now give me your hand.”

  After he hauled her to her feet, she took an inordinate interest in knotting the towel around her. She supposed that with any other man she would have been anxious about being caught nearly nude in a forest. But she knew Jonah would never hurt her, though the way he watched her now—with that out-law’s squint of his—flustered her. The memory of his kiss flustered her even more. She had thought she could live without romance, but Jonah had somehow managed to resurrect her sex drive.

  When she was finished securing the knot, she glanced up through her lashes and caught the look of alarm in Jonah’s green-gold eyes. “Don’t go giving me that tender-eyed look, Ritz,” he growled. “What happened last night was a leftover from years ago. That’s all.”

  “You’re mistaking curiosity for tenderness,” she snapped, stooping to sweep up her things. He had always had a knack for divining her most private thoughts, including the more disreputable ones. “I was comparing the man with the boy—and the man came up short!”

  “Look, knockit off, okay?” He tossed his towel on the ledge and dropped down to tug off a boot. “A harpy can turn a man off quicker than a cold shower.”

  She had begun to walk away, but that last remark did it. She spun around. “All right. Let’s have it out, Jonah Jones. You’ve never forgiven me for choosing Chap over you. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  He jerked off one white sock. “You mean dumping me, don’t you?”

  “You’re the one who’s ticked off. You tell me.”

  “Hey, it was all in the past. Let’s just forget it.”

  It was as if shutters clamped down over his eyes, giving his face that closed look he had worn as a kid, and she knew it would be useless to try to break through. She was locked out. That was how it had been all her life in Silver City: locked out and looking in.

  “So long, sailor boy,” she threw over her shoulder, and sauntered off. Her graceful exit was spoiled when she stepped on a pinecone and yelped.

  She whirled around and caught him grinning. Quickly he wiped the grin from his face. “Jonah Jones, forget trying to look innocent. You never could do it.”

  He smiled without pleasure. “Is that why I always ended up the town whipping boy, whether I was guilty or not?”

  “You said it, I didn’t.”

  She started off again, picking her way carefully through the brambles.

  “Ritz
.”

  It sounded as if he was laughing. She stopped, then turned slowly to face him. “What?”

  “Put your tennis shoes on. And don’t forget your shampoo and stuff.”

  She didn’t want to afford him any pleasure by obeying his instructions, but obviously she wasn’t going to make it another five yards barefoot on pine needles and acorns. She dropped her shoes and, still holding everything else, slid her feet halfway in. This exit wasn’t graceful, either, but at least she managed to get out of Jonah’s sight. Once she was deep in the woods she quickly donned her clothes, which was fortunate, because by the time she arrived back at camp Soren Gunnerson was sitting under the cottonwood, his back propped against the trunk, his hands locked around his knees. Apparently he had been waiting for her.

  When she started across the flats toward him, he got to his feet and dusted off his hands. Since it was Saturday, he was dressed casually in a blue plaid shirt and white cords. The sunlight glinted off red-gold hair peppered with gray. “Wasn’t sure I had the right place until I saw the grid laid out,” he said when she was near enough. “Here, let me take some of those things.”

  She smiled and passed him the shampoo, soap and her traveling kit. “How did you know it was a grid?”

  “I took Archaeology 123 at the Southern School of Mines. Did you know you look super without makeup? All fresh and sunny.”

  She smiled wryly. All those years of learning to put on her makeup in five minutes flat—wasted.

  “Since you can’t be reached by telephone,” he said, grinning, “I stopped by to see if you’d like to eat lunch in a restaurant for a change.”

  He’d come a long way just to ask, and she thought, Why not? It was Saturday, and she was tired of eating one-course meals. Besides, she needed to put both some physical and mental distance between herself and Jonah. “I’d love it, Soren. Let me change.”

  She had just one dress with her—a pale pink nylon- knit sundress. A single pair of sandals—flimsy white- heeled ones—completed her formal wardrobe.

  As children, she and Soren hadn’t known each other that well. He had been older, and after he’d moved away from Chihuahua Hill their paths just hadn’t crossed. “Why’d you come back to Silver City?” she asked, watching him from her side of his Lincoln.

  He glanced away from the road and smiled at her. “1 guess because it’s home. I don’t like big cities. Too impersonal.” He turned his attention back to the road. “Are you and Jonah a duo?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “Well, you were once, and—”

  “That was grade school sweetheart stuff, Soren.”

  “And now that you two are...” He paused, and she could tell he was searching for the right words. “Living in the vicinity of one another?”

  She had to smile at the flush that spread across his cheeks. Then he chuckled. “It was pretty boorish of me to say that, huh?”

  “No, you were reacting with purely masculine inquisitiveness,” she said, chuckling. “But as to your question about Jonah and me—we just happen to be tenants of the same sandbar.”

  “Well, if you ever get tired of roughing it, Rolistof’s plant manager returned to London for the summer. His cabin’s about five miles out of Santa Rita, and vacant.”

  “Too far from the flats, I’m afraid. With the summer almost a third gone, I need to be on-site as early and as late as possible. But thanks for the suggestion.”

  She had so rarely dated that she felt awkward making conversation, and Soren didn’t appear to be any more at ease than she was. During lunch, at the crowded Red Barn Steak House, she got him to tell her about his job. He seemed to relax then.

  “...if Rolistof lasts much longer, that is. Although it employs more than a hundred locals, the townspeople are up in arms, claiming it’s polluting Bear Creek. But they’re wrong. Even the Environmental Improvement Division says that Rolistof has satisfied all the state requirements.”

  She managed to pass up the chocolate torte and settled for an after-dinner coffee. “Well, since I don’t get the Daily Press out where I live, I’m not familiar with local politics.”

  “Then let me tell you all about the city these days,” he said with a warm smile. “Do you have to be back at Tomahawk Flats right away?”

  She shook her head, and he said, “Good. A walk in Big Ditch Park ought to be just the thing for a nice summer afternoon.”

  But as they walked along the lush, tree-shaded path along Main Street Gulch, Soren talked about his wife, who had died two years earlier. “I didn’t realize it would be this lonely. It’s hard starting life over at thirty-seven. I suppose that’s really why I came back to Silver City. Now that Stephanie’s gone, it’s the only home I have left.”

  They were crossing a picturesque footbridge, and they stopped simultaneously midway. “I understand that bottomless pain at losing someone you love,” she said, leaning against the railing. “My husband Robert died three years ago. I think what you miss most of all is that sense of belonging. I have a son—Trace— but he’s at UCLA, so sometimes I just can’t help getting lonely.”

  Soren took her hand in his big one. “It doesn’t have to be that way, Rita-lou.”

  * * * * *

  A slight breeze, still carrying the heat of the boiling June afternoon, rustled the oak leaves above the redwood picnic bench Jonah used for testing his mineral finds. Because its fumes were deadly, he had to heat the mercury outside his camper, and he was careful to stand upwind. Once the quicksilver in his riffle pan separated the gold from the minerals usually found with it—mostly garnet, pyrite and mica—he only had to boil off the mercury and funnel the remaining gold flakes into small jars.

  Mercury was so expensive that he was often tempted to resort to the old-timers’ simple method: splitting an Irish potato, then hollowing out one side and placing the mercury-covered gold in it. After that the potato halves were put back together and wrapped with wire. The potato was baked in a campfire, and the gold nugget was removed, free of mercury. Then the old-timers squeezed the potato and recovered a large part of the mercury for using again. Of course, the potatoes hadn’t come cheaply in those days, either. And from the looks of the tailings, he wasn’t getting exactly rich himself.

  He began to separate what he had, carefully sorting the lead from the flakes of gold. Years of rigging and disarming bombs had made his fingers as highly sensitized as a watchmaker’s.

  Not even a nugget. His dark brows slanted down over eyes that had gone a flat green. Flour gold. At this rate, not even enough to pay for the dredger. Maybe he should move on, look for richer ground elsewhere. But no, his gut instinct told him that he would eventually hit pay dirt in the Renegade.

  At his feet, Magnum suddenly whined. Jonah heard the purr of a car engine. Through the trees, he caught a glimpse of a late-model blue Lincoln, heading for Ritz’s campsite. Didn’t take too much calculating to figure out what was going on. Magnum only came over when his mistress was absent. Twenty bucks said Ritz had gone somewhere with Soren Gunnerson.

  Magnum was off—a greyhound after a mechanical rabbit—streaking across the fiats toward the two tents a quarter mile away. Jonah continued his tedious work, wishing all the while that he was swinging an ax or cleaning a hull or something just as arduous. Something arduous enough to take the kinks out of his muscles and his thoughts off Rita-lou Randall.

  Vietnam had done that. The Navy had been all too glad to get recruits and hadn’t asked questions about their age. Chu Lai and Da Nang, death and war, years and a parade of women, had wiped out Ritz’S face.

  Used to be he’d think of a woman and he’d wonder what she’d be like in bed. Receptive, innovative, giving, tigerish? With Ritz, his thoughts never got that far, because they got mixed up by his sensory cells. Just watching her walk fouled up his thought processes. Maybe it was all that outdoor working, but she moved freely, with easy strides. And then there was the way she smelled, as if sunshine had a smell.

  If tha
t wasn’t enough, his usually acute sense of hearing was thrown out of whack whenever she was around by all those old Orbison songs spinning through his brain.

  Hell, he wasn’t getting any work done, and the sun was already setting. He flicked off the mercury burner and started putting away jars and vials in an old tackle box. With fleeting satisfaction, he heard what he had been waiting for – Soren’s car headed back along the dirt road for Silver City. Then, a moment later, he heard a short scream. He shot up from the bench and then sprinted across the clearing and downriver as fast as Magnum had done fifteen minutes earlier.

  Jonah broke into the open where Ritz’s tents were pitched. She was wearing some kind of sexy spaghetti-stringed dress and was facing away from him, toward the tent. Her arms were wrapped around herself, and she was trembling. She appeared unhurt, although he couldn’t see her face. He observed all this in the few seconds it took him to race across the graveled flat that separated them.

  At his approach she whirled and threw herself into his arms. He was too astonished to do more than just hold her. Absently he stroked the sleek of her hair. “What is it, Ritz?” he murmured inanely, thinking all the while that he could eat that pink sundress off her in three easy bites.

  She shuddered. “A bat! In my tent. Hanging from the ridgepole.”

  He liked the feeling of her in his arms, so he said nothing. After a minute she tilted her head back and stared up at him. “Well, aren’t you going to do any¬thing?”

  Exasperated with himself and his foolish fancies, he said, “It’s only a bat, Ritz. Get a broom or something and chase it out.”

  Her lips compressed in a straight line of disgruntle- ment. “Big help you are.”

  “Look, Ritz, if you’re going to rough it out here with the big boys, then you’d better be prepared to handle anything.”

  “Rough it with the big boys? Rough it?” Her expression was furious. “Ohhh! You ought to know about rough, Jonah Jones. You’ve never gotten past the rough edges of your own background!”