Wind Song

by Bonds, Parris Afton

  “I’ve got just the thing,” Orville assured her and groped beneath the counter. “Left over from our last bout at Cody’s house.”

  “Oh, no. A drink right now would wrap my intestines in a Gordian knot.”

  Besides, just the mention of Cody’s name reminded her of that first night she had spent with him at his house—-that was when her troubles had really started. That was when she had become preoccupied with Cody Strawhand to the exclusion of all else. The way he looked at her; the way he touched her. Brad had never made her feel like Cody did. Cody made her feel like a complete woman. Like the kachina doll when it was finally painted.

  She tried to tell herself that she was merely reliving her high school infatuation days all over again. Still, the bottom of her stomach felt like it dropped out when, at the next moment, the bell tingled on the trading post door and Cody walked in. He seemed to fill the dim room, large though it was. His father had that same presence, a charisma that had taken Chase Strawhand all the way to the governor’s mansion in Santa Fe.

  Cody’s eyes foraged over her, taking in the suede sheath that hugged her svelte figure; then it was as though he looked right through her, as if she weren’t even there. It was a terrible feeling, being reduced to insignificance. Never had that happened to her.

  A weathered old Indian woman in a calico blouse and a brilliant turquoise satin skirt lined up at the counter behind Abbie, and Abbie was forced to pay for the box of extrastrength pain- relief tablets. She could play it cool, too. When she passed by Cody, she inclined her head in a regal manner that would have been the envy of a White House receiving line. For one frightening second she thought that he wasn’t going to let her pass.

  * * * * *

  Cody smiled sardonically. He could bed a hundred women, he thought with disgust, and still he would see Abbie’s face imprinted over theirs.

  He knew that she wouldn’t stay at Kaibeto, that the boarding school was a temporary catharsis for her. She couldn’t take reservation life any more than his mother had been able to. At year’s end she would walk out.

  But where to? Marshall? He doubted it, because that would keep her on the reservation. Cody knew that the BIA’s Western director came over every week specifically to see Abbie, and it had become all Cody could do to maintain the appearance of the friendship he had shared with Marshall. Marshall was one of the few Anglo men he admired, an honest man who truly cared about the welfare of the Indians. It wasn’t just a job for Marshall, though it might have started out that way. But Marshall’s good points didn’t lessen the sudden cooling he felt for the man.

  No, Cody thought. He couldn’t make that same mistake his father had made and try to make a socialite his. Abbie was too much like his own mother. Besides, she would only want to change him, to remake him into a successful capitalist like her former husband. If she had her way, he’d no doubt end up wheeling and dealing out of Cambria.

  They had no future together, and he would have to make a point of remembering that.

  Chapter 9

  “Now, this,” Abbie said, jabbing the umbrella handle into the large inverted cardboard box that Orville had provided, “is our television.”

  She hadn’t foreseen any problems in her students trying to read a simple primer. Everything had gone well until the children in one story had decided to watch television. Few of the Indian children had the faintest idea what a television set was. Why hadn’t she thought of taking them into a department store when they were in Flagstaff to look at television sets?

  At the one department store that they had visited, the children had been astounded that so much clothing existed, when for them one change of clothing was sufficient. It made sense to Abbie.

  Just as the nearly circular hogans made better sense than the white man’s square houses—you never had to sweep out the difficult-to-reach corners when there simply weren’t any. I must really be losing touch with reality, when a dirt-floor hogan is beginning to seem preferable to the electrical conveniences of a multiroom estate in Philadelphia. Conveniences? The task of keeping those electrical appliances in working order had often made them more of an encumbrance than a convenience.

  But the thought of Philadelphia brought a pang of homesickness for her boys. They had written with a promise to vacation in Arizona over the summer, but summer seemed so far off, still three months away. It was the homesickness, she told herself, that made her feel weepy lately, a condition so totally alien to her. For so long it had seemed that she had forgotten how to cry . . . until that day in the old mill house when Cody had taught her what sexual fulfillment really was.

  “Children,” she said abruptly, “recess.” She really must get out of her doldrums. Along with the children, who jerked their coats from their pegs, she slid into her own coat and went out to brave the brisk weather.

  Becky joined her. The girl sat on the school steps, flipping through a magazine and puffing on a cigarette as if she were sending out smoke signals. Abbie fanned away the billowing cigarette smoke that churned her stomach.

  Becky looked up through a curtain of lanky hair. “Gee, Mrs. Dennis, you really look green.”

  “I can’t imagine why, Becky.”

  Abbie took a seat one step lower than the young teacher so that the smoke drifted up and away from her. Out of habit, her gaze swept over the playground full of laughing children. Like the Navajo woman who, without counting her hundred-odd sheep, knows instantly if one is missing, Abbie had reached the point when she knew immediately if a child was absent. Yes, beneath the willow—apart from the other children—stood Robert, his eyes like obsidian stones.

  He was thinner than he had been, but what worried Abbie most was that he had resumed his habit of staring at Navajo Mountain. She knew that he was once again contemplating running away. It mattered little that he invariably went to Cody’s. If he left just once more, and if Miss Halliburton found out, that was all it would take to jeopardize her job.

  Oh, dear God, she prayed, let his father come at Easter break. The thought of Robert taking off again was enough to make her stomach roll, which it seemed to be doing often lately.

  Two weeks later, as she fried bacon early one morning before school, the reason for her unsettled stomach came to her when she rushed to the sink and hung her head over the drain. She grabbed the dish towel off the refrigerator door handle and soaked the terrycloth under cool water. Holding the towel to her perspiration- sheened face, she began to cry in great shuddering spasms.

  No, no, no . . . not at her age ... it wasn’t fair. All those years when she had wanted so badly to conceive . . . and now . . . What a naive little idiot she had been.

  She braced her hands against the counter and tried to tell herself that she could be wrong. After all, she had never been that regular. And her nausea? She could attribute it to the great strain she had been under lately. The hectic days when she worried about her contract being terminated; the sleepless nights when she tossed about trying to shake the image of Cody’s supple bronze hands making love to her again—or worse, to someone else.

  Oh, damn him!

  She would simply make an appointment with a doctor in Flagstaff and settle the question once and for all. Getting there presented more of a problem. Becky and her lumberjack had quarreled, and she was no longer seeing him. Abbie hated to ask Marshall to drive her all the way into Flagstaff, but she saw no alternative.

  She asked him Thursday when he came to have coffee with her, explaining that she needed to see the doctor about an allergy problem that had only cropped up since she had moved to Arizona. He was more than happy to oblige. “I’ll pick you up Saturday, Abbie, and we can make a day of it.”

  Saturday morning she was running late, as was becoming habitual with her lately. It seemed to take so long to get her stomach settled. She required three cups of coffee—and some toast, but nothing more—before she could operate efficiently. Marshall’s knock at the door caught her only partially dressed.

  “Come on
in,” she called out.

  The door opened and shut, and she said, “Back here, Marshall. I’ve got a stuck zipper. Here, see if you can budge it.”

  She lifted her heavy hair over one arm and walked to the bedroom door to meet him—and came face to face with Cody. Her lips parted in shock. For one naked moment they stood looking at each other, separated only by inches, close enough for her to see the fine wrinkles carved by time and weather that fanned about his sulphurous eyes.

  “Turn around,” he said.

  Slowly she pivoted, still holding the cascade of her hair over her forearm to display the cinnamon velour dress that hung open to expose her spine. “Why are you here?” Her voice sounded breathless even to her own ears.

  “Marshall telephoned this morning.” His fingers closed over the zipper, brushing tantalizingly against the small of her back. “The BIA called their directors into Gallop at the last minute for a seminar. He asked me if I could—”

  “I know—you’re to be my transportation again.” Her eyes closed and she stifled a groan. Why did everything have to go wrong?

  The zipper paused midway up her back. “You’re not wearing a bra,” he said in a voice that seemed ominously quiet.

  If he so much as touched her, she knew that all her self-control would shatter. “The snap broke— and I didn’t have time to search for another.” How could she explain that her breasts felt so full and tender that a bra was acutely and uncomfortablly binding?

  He finished zipping the dress and hooked the bateau neckline. “Let’s go,” he said harshly.

  She was even more uncomfortable during the long drive into Flagstaff. A tense silence vibrated between them. If she got sick while she was with Cody . . . Oh, no. “May I have a cigarette, please?”

  He flicked her a scrutinizing glance. “When did you take up smoking again?”

  “I . . . uh . . .” Really, she should be able to handle this situation, delicate though it was, in an adult manner. “Nerves, I suppose.”

  He withdrew a cigarette package from his shirt pocket and shook one out for her. “Is that why you’re seeing a doctor?”

  Her eyes flew up to his, then lowered as she held the cigarette to his proffered lighter, a silver case inlaid with turquoise. “Yes.”

  A spiral of smoke drifted up from between her lips. “About that night at my apartment,” she began edgily, “I—I won’t try to deny that you— that I’ve enjoyed your lovemaking as I never did with my husband, but . . .”

  “But—” he drawled with a reckless slant to his lips, “another man might serve your needs just as well. Like Marshall, maybe.”

  “That’s unfair!”

  “But true, isn’t it? As long as you don't have to form any kind of long-term relationship.”

  She stabbed the cigarette out in the ashtray. “This conversation is getting us nowhere.”

  “Which is just as well with me. Because making love to you is like being nowhere. Any woman would be as good, Abbie. Maybe better.”

  Her sharply indrawn breath seared her lungs. The words stung. What she had experienced with him had been special to her, but obviously not for him, when he had women queued up before his door like actresses at an audition. “I’m sorry that I ever—that—”

  “That you ever made love to me, an Indian?” he taunted.

  She smiled coolly. “I’m sorry that I put out that cigarette. I’d like another.”

  She could only be thankful that the doctor she had chosen was a family practitioner. Several of the patients, men and women both, glanced up curiously when she and Cody entered the waiting room. “A golden Anglo woman with a brownskinned Indian,” Cody mocked at her ear. “I’m sure the patients will all have something to tell their family and friends this afternoon.”

  “You’re about as Indian as I am,” she muttered, and snapped open a magazine.

  Cody chose to annoy her. His arm encircled her shoulder, as if she were indeed his wife, his fingers etching imaginary circles on her upper arm. “Your magazine is upside down, Abbie.”

  She shook her shoulders. “Stop it.”

  “What?”

  “What you’re doing.”

  “I didn’t know I was doing anything.”

  She glared up into his lambent eyes. Unreasonably, she felt like crying again. She did cry an hour later when the doctor finished his examination.

  “Yes, I’m certain, Mrs. Dennis. You’re pregnant, though still in the early stages. Maybe two months. I would say you’re due around the end of August. There, now,” he said, placing a kindly hand on her shoulder. “Don’t cry about it. A lot of women start second families at your age. Thirty-seven’s still young enough to adjust to such a situation.”

  Strangely enough, the news made her stronger. Maybe Miss Halliburton had been right about her indomitability. When she was at the bottom, it seemed that she fought back best.

  A cold mantle of logic settled over her on the return trip to Kaibeto. The idea of not having the baby never entered her mind. That alternative was too high an emotional price for her to live with. She would simply have the baby and return to teaching in September. Linda McNabb had done it at another Indian boarding school. There was no reason why she couldn’t do it, too. Of course, there would be Miss Halliburton to contend with.

  What concerned her more was Cody’s finding out. She wanted nothing that would bind her to him or any man again. But what would he do when her pregnancy became obvious? She glanced at his dark profile against the evening sunset. He would be perceptive enough to come to the right conclusion. He had known by her initial and apprehensive reticence at his lovemak ing, followed by her deep emotional reaction, that there hadn’t been any other man in her life since she had left Brad.

  And she sensed that, once he made up his mind, he would not easily give up what he considered his.

  She would just have to make certain that he would be unsure who the baby’s father was. She opened the pickup door and said sweetly over her shoulder, “Tell Marshall I’m sorry I missed him.”

  The nausea had finally subsided; when Abbie glanced in the mirror she saw a striking champagne blonde with iridescent blue eyes that contrasted beautifull against her glowing suntanned complexion. She seemed to shimmer with that mysterious and scintillating essence that women pay a fortune for in creams and beauty foods and health salons. She smoothed the sweater dress of ecru flaxspun over her still taut stomach and let out a sigh of thanksgiving. Her secret was safe for the time being, though she had yet to face the Dragon Lady.

  Although it was the end of March, spring whispered of its imminent arrival in the brisk, nippy wind. It was an almost perfect day for the Easter egg hunt before spring vacation began, yet she lamented the fact that the landscape had about as much grass as her living room floor.

  In the classroom the children chattered incessantly, eager to begin the hunt, a novelty for them. For three weeks they had worked on their Easter baskets, made out of shoeboxes. Karen Many Goats won for the best-looking basket; hers looked like a rabbit, with its coat-hanger ears covered in fluffy cotton balls. Leo Her Many Horses won for the best-decorated egg, painted to look like an ear of corn. Robert, naturally, had refused to make a basket or paint an egg at all.

  Abbie had mixed emotions about the egg hunt. All the teachers had enthusiastically contributed their time to the project. Some teachers pitched in at the cafeteria to boil the hundreds of eggs, others colored them, and still others painted names and designs. But when Becky had volunteered to hide them while the other teachers corralled the rambunctious students, Abbie had had no idea that the younger woman would run into Cody at the trading post and ask for his help.

  Abbie hadn’t seen him since the day he had driven her into Flagstaff, and she dreaded this face-to-face meeting. Somehow she felt as if her secret were printed on her forehead with scarlet letters. The worst was that she continued to think about him during the day—unconsciously doodling his name—and to dream erotic fantasies about him at night.<
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  It did little good to tell herself that CodyStrawhand was a lone wolf, that he was as contemptuous of her high society breeding as she was of his nonconformity. The image of his body posed over hers—and other images that crimsoned her skin—ate away at her like a cancer. She had always thought that she was ready to face any challenge, but she was afraid to meet Cody again, afraid of the sensual weakness she had discovered within herself.

  Any hope that Becky had cherished of making eyes at Cody was crushed when, on the morning of the hunt, Miss Halliburton posted herself next to him. And any hope that Abbie had entertained of avoiding the man was extinguished. His gaze riveted her where she stood with her students.

  When Miss Halliburton asked him something, his gaze released Abbie from her paralysis. She forced herself to calmly approach the two. Cody was pointing out to the principal the perimeters within which he had hidden the eggs. The spring wind had picked up, whipping Cody’s mane of hair, bound though it was by the bandana, across his chiseled face. It was all Abbie could do to hold down the hem of her dress that danced dangerously high about her thighs. His gaze ran up and down the length of her legs. She didn’t miss the provoking grin he flashed at her predicament.

  “I would offer to help . . he challenged.

  Miss Halliburton raised a censorious brow. “Mr. Strawhand!”

  “My apologies.” But his eyes laughed at Abbie. She had read something somewhere about the laughing eyes of the Navajo, and now she understood. His laughter was infectious; it was all she could do to keep a straight face.

  Then suddenly his eyes narrowed in sharp scrutiny. His gaze scanned her face in an unnerving fashion before dropping to peruse her breasts in such an intimate manner that she blushed. He couldn’t possibly know. No, she was just becoming paranoid.

  Still, she swung away to join the other teachers, who were already herding their charges out onto the far-reaching stretches of red sand sparsely splotched with wretched clumps of desert grass. Miss Halliburton and Cody followed closely enough that she could hear his deep, rich voice. “Since there was no place to hide the eggs,” he was telling the principal, “I buried them with my boot heel so that just a little of the paint shows.”