Diamonds at Dawn

by Catalina Claussen

  From above the canyon I quiet Yas into the dappled nightshade of the mountain mahogany scrub. There’s a clear line where the light meets the deep dark, and I ride the edge, hoping to hear something, see something in the steadfast silence.

  That’s when the screen door slaps against the side of the house and a tall muscular figure, armed with a .45 lever action rifle in one hand, shoves someone out onto the snow. I silently slip from the saddle and hitch Yas to the clustered mahogany branches. From the umbered cliff edge, I pray to remain unseen. It’s hard to miss Maverick. Battered in black, he staunches the flow of red leaking from his lips and spattering across the icy white. He moves as deftly as his injuries will allow, gathering himself before shots are fired. Pop! The man cocks another round, lines up his sights and shoots again. The spent casing strikes the porch planks. Each shot tears at me in places where flesh meets bone, my spirit present with Maverick’s.

  The gunman’s voice rises, “That’s right. You’re pathetic. Where you gonna go? Crawl back to your Indian girlfriend? You know you’re not good enough, even for her.”

  He shoots again, close enough to make Maverick flinch, but far enough away that the bullet couldn’t hurt him. Maverick’s movements are confused, desperate.

  “There are few lessons that the old Winchester can’t teach,” he says, digging in his pocket for a cartridge and reloading the magazine. “The sooner your auntie gets what she wants, the happier we’ll all be. She may even drop the murder charge.”

  The gunman cocks the rifle again, setting the cartridge. He settles behind the sights and aims between Maverick’s eyes. “Why should you get all the credit for my handiwork?” Maverick, dazed, is an open target.

  “No…” I try to scream, but a hand, followed by a strong arm, pulls me further into the black. I struggle. My heart sinks. I failed him. The gunman swings his rifle in my direction. I try to break free, but I twist into the arms of my captor. His lips, sure, sweet, familiar, press against mine. He holds me close. Wrapped in his arms, my knees buckle.

  “Stay down.”

  “Chad?” I whisper.

  “Yeah?” he says, casually, pulling back so I can see the sparkle in his eye and grin spreading across his face. He breaks his gaze with mine and trains his eyes on the scene still unfolding below.

  Flooded with confusion, I don’t know where to begin. Blood on his hands. The spirit of Cougar, Náshdóítsoh, the silent protector, snuffed out. There’s no one to protect Maverick. There’s no one to protect me—from the heat rising between me and Chad and the inexplicable feeling that being with him this way is right.

  The gunman’s voice breaks across the expanse that separates us. There’s no time for pettiness. “Let’s see… where was I?” he says, his voice echoing. As my eyes adjust to the deep dark, all I can see is the taut expanse of Chad’s chest, the brawn of his shoulders working to set high enough to see and low enough to keep us both from being detected. I look up trying to think childhood thoughts, but he looks down at me again, eyes shining like the layers of stars that surround us, and he presses a finger to his lips.

  “Get off,” I say, feeling ashamed of the attraction. He belongs to Cassie. I pull his hand out from under him and flip him over in one fluid motion. I have to get to Maverick. This time I’m on top, long enough to see the gunman home in on Maverick’s forehead and squeeze the trigger one more time.

  The shot cuts through the air and ricochets off the canyon walls. Chad pulls me to him, rolling me away from danger. I can’t resist one last look at him this close. I know it’s wrong. It’s all wrong.

  “Why did you do it?” I say, spitting the words like venom.

  “Do what?” he says, innocently.

  I’m not buying his act, and he knows it.

  “Okay. Okay. For the same reason you did,” he whispers.

  What?!

  “To shut you up,” he says. A twinkle sparks in his eyes for a moment and then fades.

  The lifeless cat hanging from Chad’s saddle and Beau’s fear become real again in my mind. I gather myself.

  The screen door slaps shut in the distance followed by the scrape of the wooden door in its frame coming to a close. And then nothing. Sheltered in the night, I rise and search for Maverick. But he’s gone. A churned up patch of snow shows his retreat under the porch. That’s all I need to know.

  Chad’s up too. I brush the clinging clumps of snow from my field coat and hair, but nothing I do can get the shame off my skin. I let Cassie down, again.

  “What?” he says.

  Like you don’t know.

  “What are you doing here?” I say, suspicious.

  “Saving you,” he says, like it’s obvious.

  “Just like you saved the cat?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Things could have been a lot different,” I say, feeling his heat on my lips. “But you… made your choices.” I don’t have time for him and his games.

  I retreat back into the night shadows where Yas greets me.

  “Ahzi, you can’t do it alone,” he says.

  “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do.” I turn to Yas. “Come on, boy. We have somewhere to be.”

  I swing a leg up on Yas, and we pick our way through the darkness on the light of the snow. We follow a deer trail along the hill rise and descend into the shadowed perimeter of the yard.

  “Stay here, sweet boy. I’ll be back.”

  Yas waits in the gray tones that skirt the bare apricot tree. The square of dark cast by Hope’s tree house gives him safe harbor. I push on, step-by-step, pleading with the silence to shelter me. I reach the side of the house and get down, belly pressed against the cold, unforgiving earth. Out of the darkness now, there’s no cover, just my wits and Sicheii’s hand-me-down wisdom. I dig my elbows in and prepare to army crawl across the snow.

  Up under the porch now, I wriggle toward Maverick’s breath rising in the slanted light.

  “Mav,” I whisper, caressing his cheek. He startles, disoriented. The blood coming from his lip has slowed. His skin is pale, chilled. “I need your help to get you out of here.”

  “Ahzi?” His eyes flutter, and then he looks at me. “You’re here.” He practically cries with joy.

  “We have to get you out of here.”

  Someone rattles the front door handle and presses their weight against the wood panels. The door frees from the jamb.

  “I swear to God… Jeremiah Jones. You know what you are? A buffoon. And that’s being kind,” a woman’s voice crackles into the silence. She sets a bottle on a floorboard above us and walks on unsteady feet to the railing.

  I roll on my back into a dark patch away from the light pressing through the porch planks. I try to get my heart to settle. I swear she can hear it pounding in rhythmic waves, pushing me to dance with danger. Maverick turns to look at me through the jagged dark. The light touches his blond-brown, indecisive hair and the open kindness in his eyes soothes me. He grins weakly.

  “If you leave him out here to freeze, he’ll be dead, and that’ll be two strikes against you.” Then her voice softens, “That cat pelt is gonna bring a handsome price. Somehow he was able to haul it in from jail. I swear that kid has angels watching over him.”

  “Then he should do fine tonight,” comes the growl of the gunman. “Why don’t we go back to minding our own business? I’m sure we can think of something more interesting to do.”

  She pauses, swaying a few times under the influence of whatever’s in the bottle, and goes back inside.

  Cat pelt? And Chad. He just saved Maverick’s skin and I treated him so terribly. How did he get mixed up in all this?

  I can’t puzzle this out right now. I have to get Maverick safe and warm.

  “Come on. Now’s our chance.”

  We roll on our bellies and turn to retreat to Yas and the safety of the apricot tree. Maverick pushes through his pain, wincing each moment he spends supporting his weight on the right shoulder. He clenche
s his teeth, hushing himself. At the border between light and dark, we pause. With my eyes I ask if he has the strength. But we both know we have no choice. We push to the under edge of the porch at the blind corner of the house and listen.

  The clumsy footsteps of Jeremiah and Maverick’s aunt entwined with gusts of laughter tell us they are lost in each other. I slip out between panels of porch skirting and turn back to reach for Maverick. He lies still, his cheek pressed against the cold damp earth.

  “You can do it,” I say. A tear forms in his eye as he propels himself forward into the light. Wincing, he works his way to his feet. Clutching his upper right arm, he stumbles forward into the snow and then follows me out of the glare of the bare living room light. We work the shadowed border until we reach Yas. I look back, telling myself that we will be okay. And a shout of laughter from the living room confirms it. Maverick mounts, supporting his weight with his arm as he grabs the saddle horn. A fresh wave of blood flows from his right upper arm.

  Maverick pulls back in the saddle. I mount, and we’re off racing along the border in black and white.

  “Lean into me,” I tell him as we rise up the hillside. I steady my breath, trying not to react to the electricity rushing through us. From above the canyon, we watch the lights of Madrid’s cruiser rake the hillside as he turns from Cassie’s driveway out on the road. I stiffen.

  Was Maverick released, or is he on the run?

  Waves of doubt course through me. My instincts fail. With everything I have, I reach out. But fear stands in the way. I’ve come unanchored. I am adrift.

  The red road twists,

  Tangled in time

  And the thread that Sicheii says

  Is my destiny.

  Is my destiny.

  Fragile fibers

  Woven in rhythmic sequence

  Beating out the dance

  Beating out the dark

  All you have to do is listen

  He says,

  And if you can’t hear it

  Draw a circle

  Make a fire

  Pray, my sweet girl

  Pray

  (found twisted in the barbed wire

  fence along the county road)

  Chapter 20

  I burst through the front door, struggling to hold Maverick who shivers as heat and vitality leak from his arm.

  Sicheii rises from the open door of the stove where he is stoking the fire and helps me ease Maverick into his favorite chair. Sicheii doesn’t ask questions, just heads for the kitchen to pour tea and heat water to clean Maverick’s wounds. Draw a circle. The adobe walls hold us. Make a fire. The juniper branches crackle. And cinnamon tea feeds fire in our bellies. Pray. Pray. Pray for what?

  I head to my room and find clean tattered T-shirts. I take scissors to them and turn back to the living room. Sicheii is already there. Candle lit, glowing from the lamp stand, he bathes the blade of his army-issued knife in the flame. He turns the lamp on and positions the beam on the bleeding arm. Maverick’s head lolls away from his wound. He relaxes against the green flowered upholstery of Sicheii’s wingback chair and fades.

  Maverick is dressed in the clothes he wore on the day of his arrest. Sicheii rolls the black T-shirt sleeve up out of the blood that continues to ooze down his arm. And Maverick stirs. The lamplight casts a warm glow on his pale skin. Sweat shimmers on his forehead.

  “Let me have that,” Sicheii says, reaching for the clean rags in my hands. He presses the edges of the wound with his heated blade, and Maverick moans. He folds the cloth to make a bandage and presses the soft fabric against the wound.

  “Shouldn’t we take out the bullet, Sicheii?”

  “No. The bullet helps the blood stop.”

  Just as he says it, Maverick’s blood soaks through the last layer of the bandage. I fold more for Sicheii, and he repositions Maverick’s arm, working his fingers into the hollow where muscle meets bone. He applies pressure to the vein. Sicheii’s face is full of worry.

  “I don’t think we can do this one on our own,” he says, taking the small stack of bandages from me. “Call Maggie.”

  “No,” Maverick says suddenly.

  What harm could the EMT do? At this point, nothing surprises me.

  “Could I have some water, Ahzi?” He rallies. I head to the kitchen and bring him a glass. He sets it down, pulls a black bandana from his back pocket and dampens it with his free hand. He draws the cloth across his face, wiping away dirt and blood. I don’t help him.

  “I’m a bleeder,” he says. “It’ll stop. And you’re right, Sicheii. Don’t take the bullet.”

  It’s funny to hear him say Sicheii. I guess sharing tea, morning after morning, makes family.

  Maverick turns to me and says, “Thank you.” He sits up straighter in the chair and drinks from the glass.

  I sit on the footstool and watch Sicheii tend to him.

  Sicheii adjusts the top layer of bandages and seems calmed.

  “Okay,” he says, “Okay. I’ll stay.”

  Maverick leans back in the chair, rests his eyes, and breathes. Then he looks at me, eyes sparkling, and that devilish grin on his face. He lingers on my lips, traces the length of my unbound hair, and enjoys the way my thermal top clings.

  “Did you hear that? I can stay,” he sighs.

  I look away. I can’t hear myself when he looks at me like that. I look away because I want to believe him, believe in him, and I can’t. Not yet and maybe not ever.

  He closes his eyes, visibly relaxing in Sicheii’s care.

  The juniper log pops in the heat of the fire. I rise and tend to it, loading a few pieces in the woodstove against the night chill. The ochre flames lick the new logs, sending waves of warmth through the open door. Something about it makes me shiver—the sudden heat, the embers fading in the ash. I set the latch back in place and return to the footstool.

  Sicheii considers Maverick, letting his gaze take Maverick’s temperature and check his respiration, observing the rise and fall of his chest. Maverick’s breath slows and finally deepens.

  Sicheii sighs, settles back in his rocker, and looks at me. He considers what to say as if I’ve asked him a question. I meet his gaze at first and then turn, looking at the fire through the stove window.

  “There are two wolves battling inside all of us,” he says, polishing his words one by one. “One wolf represents all the good, the light—your mother, this house, the land.” He pauses, rocking a little in his chair as if catching a universal rhythm and then says, “And the other is dark. It represents everything that challenges hózhó or the beauty way—greed, jealousy, pride.”

  I turn back to look at him. “Which one wins?”

  He pauses, letting the fire answer.

  Finally he says, “Whichever one you feed. Whichever one you feed.”

  The fire radiates a steady pulse of heat. I rise from the footstool, suddenly tired. Sicheii places his polar fleece blanket over Maverick; the horses pictured in the plush run wild across Maverick’s chest and legs in the imaginary wind. I push the footstool closer to the chair and Sicheii wordlessly helps me pull Maverick’s ropers from his tired feet and settle his legs comfortably on the pillow top. I turn to go to my room, but then turn back.

  “Thank you,” I say, hugging the man who used to be ten feet tall and who now comes up to my eyebrows.

  In the safety of my room, I slide out of my jeans and into my PJ bottoms. Through the window the night shines, crisp and clear, moonbeams bouncing off the hard-packed snow—a desolate cold. I sink deeper beneath the comforter and Ama’s story blanket, wrestling with two wolves—the memory of Chad’s kiss, intense and intoxicating, and the look in Maverick’s eyes.

  In the early morning hours

  heat rises off the springs

  mingling with wood smoke

  The stillness traps vapors

  In precious, windless moments

  The earth tilts toward the horizon

  The dark season fades

&nbs
p; The light will return

  But it will come without you, Ama.

  As it has for more years than I care to count.

  It will come without you.

  Do you measure time, Ama,

  In minutes, hours, days?

  Does the sunrise wash the night clean?

  Is the darkness a welcome cloak?

  Or, is that the final cut?

  Are you free to float, untethered

  By sunrise and sunset

  Are you free?

  (found skipping along the ditch

  next to the county road)

  Chapter 21

  Doing the wrong thing takes a fraction of a second, and the fallout can be forever. Doing right takes practice, like cups of tea and stoking the fire enough to make it through the night. But blood on your hands, hot and thick, is undeniable.

  The house is cold this morning. I lean up against the planks of my bedroom door and pull it open, hoping to welcome heat from Sicheii’s habit of rising early and feeding the fire. But all I see are a twist of blankets and a hasty attempt at cleaning up before a quick exit. Maverick is gone.

  Outside I hear Sicheii’s steadfast staccato in conversation.

  I open the front door just in time to see Sheriff Madrid’s car heading down the dirt road at an even cruise, careful not to rut the road. Grandpa turns. His down coat is open along the zipper, his hands jammed into his pockets, and his ropers muddied.