by BJ James
“I know that, too.”
“Callie.” Patience brushed hair like corn silk from the girl’s forehead. Her fingers touched the scar that marred what had been a flawless face. Carefully, regretfully, as it were an unhealed wound she stroked the twisted mark. “Hasn’t he done enough to you?”
“Don’t matter.” Again the elegant shrug. “He can’t help I make him so mad.”
Patience didn’t argue. She could have argued throughout eternity and it wouldn’t change Callie. She’d had little contact with the girl or any of the others, staying apart as Indian wished her to, and as she wished, but one would have to be blind and deaf not to see the girl’s innocence and naiveté. Only sociopaths like Snake and the Wolves wouldn’t be enchanted by her fey, sweet gentleness and unearthly beauty.
Callie was an ethereal creature misplaced in time and circumstance. One who should be cherished and protected, and left to play in shady, dew-strewn glades, not snatched away to a harsh, hard land by a pitiless marauder. Sighing in frustration at what she could never change, Patience clasped the girl’s hand, surprised all over again at the fragility of the tiny bones. Pulling Callie with her, she went deeper into the camp Indian had prepared for them. Stopping behind the concealing foliage of the juniper, she explained, “The least we can do is try to keep from making him so mad.”
Mad was the right word for Snake. Mad as in insane. But what Snake didn’t see, he couldn’t use as another flimsy excuse to abuse Callie. “Sit here by me in the shade.” Patience sat cross-legged on a blanket-covered bed of cushioning leaves. Indian had made it for her, carefully positioning it to catch the warmth of the early morning sun, then to lie in deep cooling shade in the heat of evening. “Come.” She patted the blanket. “We can visit awhile out of the sun.”
Callie rubbed her peeling nose. “That would be nice, I never burned before yesterdee, when I lost my old cap. Snake says I just must toughen up. But I do believe the sun is closer and hotter here than in Carolina.”
“You’re from Carolina, Callie?”
“Yes’m.”
“North or South?”
Blue eyes stared at her blankly. “Ma’am?”
“North Carolina or South Carolina,” Patience explained. “Do you know which is your home?”
Callie’s face screwed into a frown, her fingers worried with the hem of her loose shirt as she tried to remember. “No, ma’am, I guess I don’t rightly know.” Her frown deepened, taking on an edge of distress. “Does it matter?”
Patience covered Callie’s hand with hers, stopping the nervous fidget. “It doesn’t matter in the least. North or South, both are beautiful country.”
“Oh, yes, ma’am, my Carolina is. ‘Specially in the morning when the mists lie low in the holler. Why the whole world looks like a fairy land, so soft and gentle-like. The Cherokee call it the land of a thousand smokes, and I guess that’s ‘bout right.”
“You liked it there?”
“I surely did, ‘cept when Paw taken the strop to me.”
“The strop?”
“You know, the leather that whets his razor.”
“He beat you with a leather strap?”
“Most times,” Callie answered innocently. “In the field it could be a board, and in the barn, a harness. When there weren’t nothing else handy, he mostly used his fist.”
Callie’s speech and mannerisms suggested the mountains of North Carolina. Patience guessed her home had been one of those few surviving enclaves hidden deep in the sheltering hills, far away from the modern, sophisticated world. A land where time moved slowly, with values that were its own. In one of Keegan O’Hara’s fatherly excursions, she had lived for a month in such an enclave, coming to know its people, learning to love the old English flavor of their habits and speech. A land preserved within a land, where quaint and ancient customs still thrived. Yet, in its people, a land like any other, with those who were good and kind, and those of little honor and austere cruelty.
“The Carolinas are so far away, how is it you’re with Snake?”
“Further than I ever thought I’d be, that’s for sure. Wouldn’t a happened atall if I weren’t going home from the church social the very minute he was passin’ through. He scared me a little then and I run all the way home, but he follered me. Told my Paw he taken a shine to me. Traded a brand new, genuwine switchblade knife for me.
“My Paw warned him I was weak-minded and given to dreamin’, but Snake said that don’t matter. Now he hates it as much as Paw did when I sit too long lookin’ at a flower weavin’ in the sun, or spider webs shiny with dew.” A disparaging gesture heaped the blame on herself. “I know it’s wrong, and I shouldn’t do it, but I can’t help gettin’ caught up in somethin’ pretty. It’s like it takes hold of my brain. I use to try to draw the pretties, so I could keep them, but my Paw fed my pencils to the hogs. Hogs’ll eat anythin’, you know.”
Patience listened with growing horror. In dappled shade she watched the younger woman’s graceful moves, saw her gentle innocence, marveled at her breathtaking loveliness. Most of all she heard the reverent love of beauty that brought only heartache.
“When your father traded you for the knife, what did you do?”
Callie cast a puzzled look at Patience. “Why, there weren’t nothin’ to do.”
“Did you want to go with Snake?”
“There weren’t no choice. A deal’s a deal, I had to bide by it.” Another languid lift of her shoulders sent silver strands of her hair falling over her breasts in a shimmering veil. “At first I cried a little, Paw was mean sometimes, ‘specially since my brothers left and Maw died, but it was still home. I wanted to take my kitty. Snake said no, and Paw did, too. I cried when he kilt it.”
Patience swallowed hard, forcing impotent fury down. “Your father killed your cat?”
“Yes’m, he beat Snake to it.”
“That must have been terrible.” Patience had little trouble visualizing two subhuman men, one as cruel as the other, vying for the chance to inflict another wound to the heart of this exquisite child.
“It surely was. For a long time I was so sick for home and so lonely for kitty that I like to died.” A smile broke across her face, dreamy and thoughtful. “A kitty surely does keep the lonelies away. You look like you got the lonelies bad when Indian rides.”
Callie’s dimples flashed in a delighted giggle. She was a child with a delicious secret. “That’s why I brought you a s’prise.” She delved into the oversize faded denim bag she always carried hitched over her shoulder. “Somethin’ to make you smile.”
“Callie, what...” Patience stopped in astonishment as the girl laid a tiny kitten in her lap. “My goodness, where did you get this?”
Callie was nearly shivering in her joy of sharing the one thing she loved with Indian’s dauntless woman. “Snake stopped at a store in the country, where there weren’t nothing else around for miles and miles. There was an old momma cat there with her babies, when Snake went in for some smokes, I snuk one into my bag.” Her fingers fidgeted again, a frown creased her unlined forehead. “She had seven, I didn’t think she’d miss one. Did I do wrong? You don’t like her?”
Patience stroked the kitten, listening to the rumbling purr that seemed too noisy to come from such a tiny body. “I like her very much. I think she’s a beautiful kitten.”
“You can play with her anytime you feel bad. I was afeared Alice and Eva would find her and hurt her, but I know you won’t.”
“Callie, the kitten is wonderful. I know you need something that’s yours to love, but Snake isn’t going to like this.”
Callie took the kitten from Patience and buried her face in its fur. “It don’t matter what he likes,” she said in a rare, small spark of defiance. “Besides, nobody knows ‘bout her but me and you.” In a rush of new panic she looked fearfully at Patience. “You won’t tell? If Alice and Eva find her, you won’t let them hurt her?”
“No, Callie, no.” Patience stroked the silver h
air, soothing the girl with her words and her touch. “I would never tell, and I’ll never let anyone hurt your kitty. At least not if I can stop it. But how can you hope to keep her hidden from Snake?”
“She sleeps good in my bag, and when he ain’t lookin’, I sneak her out for a walk in the desert.”
“She’ll be too big for the bag soon, and cats don’t sleep as much as kittens. She isn’t going to be happy so confined, Callie.”
“When she’s a cat I’ll teach her to run from Snake, the rest of ‘em, too. Nobody’s gonna hurt my kitty,” Callie said fiercely. “Nobody.”
“Oh, Callie, I hope you’re right.” Patience’s voice was harsh from the sudden tightness in her throat. How could she make the girl understand the impossible task of keeping the kitten hidden? How could she keep her from being hurt again?
“Listen.” Callie was suddenly so still she hardly seemed to breathe. “Hear that?”
Patience listened. At first there was nothing, then she heard the heavy thrum of a motorcycle.
“It’s Snake,” Callie said in creeping dread.
“How do you know? How could you?”
“I just know. Glory! When we all got back, and he taken off alone again, I figgered he wasn’t gonna be back ‘fore dark.”
The sound of the engine grew louder, coming at a dangerously high rate of speed.
“I gotta go!” Callie was suddenly frantic. “He’s mad, I hear it in the way he’s ridin’.”
“Callie,” Patience began, intending to offer some encouragement, and realized there was none she could give.
“Gotta go, gotta go.” The soft voice murmured the singsong phrase over and over as she tucked the kitten into her bag. “You gotta be good, kitty, extra good.” Her task done, she was on her feet and half-away when she stopped and turned back to Patience. “Custer said you was a doctor. Not a people doctor, a animal doctor.”
“That’s true, I am.”
Callie swallowed hard, struggling with the unthinkable. “If somebody hurts her, will you fix it? Take care of her?”
“Of course I will, if I can.”
Callie nodded as if she understood the qualification, but Patience wondered if she could.
“Her name’s Calico, like mine.”
“It’s a pretty name.”
“I just wanted you to know, seein’ as how you like her and all.”
“I like her a lot,” Patience said in a tone filled with sadness for all she couldn’t say and couldn’t do for this childlike girl. “I’m honored that you wanted to share Calico with me.”
“She made you feel better?”
“You both made me feel better.”
A smile that would have brought tears to a stone shone on Callie’s face only an instant before it was supplanted by abject terror. “Gotta go. Gotta go.”
The engine was a howling shriek now, and if mechanical objects could sound mad, it did, indeed. Patience shiv-ered in the burning sun and watched Callie scamper the distance between the two camps. “Please,” she whispered, “don’t let anything happen to them.”
“If she’s careful, nothing will.” A hard, callused hand slipped beneath her braid to rest lightly at her nape. “Yet.”
Without turning, Patience circled the powerful wrist with her fingers, the tips of them lying against a distended vein that pulsed with the rhythm of Indian’s heart. Brushing her cheek over the damp heel of his hand, she muttered, “Yet?”
“I’m afraid that’s the operative word.” He didn’t explain that Callie had been with Snake three months, longer than was common. He couldn’t explain what he thought would happen to the girl when Snake tired of her.
“Her nose is peeling.”
Patience’s remark pulled Indian from dark, consuming thoughts. “Sorry, what did you say?”
“You said she never burned, but her nose is peeling,” she repeated, wondering where his thoughts had taken him. “In another day or two it will be raw.”
“Today was different. We ran into a dust storm, it left us all a little raw and tender and more susceptible to the sun. She had a cap, it must have been lost in the wind.”
“I wanted to give her my hat, but Snake would recognize it, and know that she’d been here.”
“What you did for her, petting her kitten, promising to help her, was a nice gesture.”
“It was more than a gesture, Indian. I like Callie, I wish there was something I could do.”
Sliding his arm around her neck, bending it to her throat, he pulled her back against him. “This is a catch-22. She’s damned if we don’t and more damned if we do.”
“She won’t survive this. She was meant for cooler climates and kinder times.”
“Kinder than where she came from.”
“Why?” She turned in the circle of his arm, tilting her forehead to his chest. “Why do we always hurt the gentle ones? Why are we so cruel?”
“There are some who believe it’s the nature of the species, that it’s a natural and a primitive need for the strong to prey on the weak.” His fingers found the knotted muscles of her neck and worked them skillfully, tenderly, probing their tension. “Like Snake, they believe the fragile, like Callie, were meant to be victims, that it’s their sole purpose in life.”
“Some.” She smothered a gasp of pleasure and pain as he found a particularly cramped muscle and ministered to it. “But not you.”
“There are others who don’t, as well.”
Patience raised her head from his chest, considering him curiously. There was an odd ring to his voice, as if he spoke in more than general terms. As if the others he spoke of were more than vague, faceless and nameless beings. “They would help Callie?” She risked the question. “These others who believe as you?”
Indian’s fingers grew still. He stared into her eyes, his piercing gaze reaching into her, taking her measure once more, as he judged what he should, or shouldn’t, say. After an interminable time he nodded. “They would help Callie and those like her.”
“Who are they? Friends?” With a sudden narrowing of her eyes, her gaze probed as deeply as his. “Colleagues?”
“Custer and Hoke, and their sort are my colleagues. For now.”
“For now.” She repeated, not in question but a glimmer of understanding.
“Yes.”
Indian at his frustrating and tacit best, never using two words, or three, or five, when one would do. “What do you mean by those like Callie? Who would help them? When?” If he’d worn a shirt or his vest, she would have shaken him, trying to jolt the answers from him. Instead she tapped his chest with impotent fists. “Indian!”
“Hush.” He stopped her inquisition with a finger at her lips. “It’s enough that you know there’s help. Who they are isn’t important. When?” He lifted a naked shoulder glistening with sweat that trickled to the band of low-rising trousers. “The time’s indefinite, but soon.”
Patience wasn’t to be mollified by ambiguous promises. Shrugging away from his touch, she demanded, “How soon, and will it be in time for Callie? She’s already pounds thinner since I first saw her. Snake and the desert are sucking the life out of her.”
“I’ll find her a hat, or something that will serve as a shield against the sun.”
“A hat!” Patience looked at him as if he’d gone crazy. “The girl could very well be dying and you think a hat will help?”
“It will keep her skin from burning and preserve precious moisture.”
“An ice cube on a third degree burn.” She growled the criticism.
“Only that,” he agreed mildly, “but a start.”
“Damn you!” She moved beyond his reach, her hushed tone only emphasizing the seething depths of her rage. “Damn this. Damn all of you.” Her bitter rebuke continued, her voice never rising, the tone never changing. Nothing that would torment innocents like Callie escaped her wrath.
Indian listened without comment as the diatribe ran its course. When she had exhausted her vocabulary and he
r voice, he caught her by the shoulders, shaking her a little. “I know you’re bewildered and incensed by what seems an unnecessary delay, but there’s more at stake here than Callie or you.”
“Bewildered? Ha! Where did you get the idea what I feel is that simple? I’m a yo-yo vacillating back and forth, and bewildered doesn’t begin to say what I feel.”
“What you need is to cool down.” To prove his point, Indian lifted a moist lock that had escaped her braid and plastered itself to her face.
Patience slapped his hand away. “Don’t patronize me.”
“I wouldn’t think of patronizing you. And I meant what I said, you need to cool down.”
“Sure, in a seep that’s half a toe high in a flood.”
“I didn’t say here,” he explained with maddening composure.
“Then where?” Even to Patience the demand reminded her of a sulking child.
“I’ll take you there.” He didn’t touch her again as he waited for her to follow his lead. When she didn’t respond, he prodded mildly, “Come with me, Patience.”
She wanted to say no, to keep her anger, but something in his look wouldn’t let her. Something about him would never let her. “All right, I’ll come with you.”
“It isn’t far,” he assured her, only then taking her wrist in his grasp, circling the small bones with fingers like possessive manacles. He didn’t expect her to run away, didn’t expect her to resist. He simply wanted to touch her.
There were saguaro along the obscure trail, but they grew more sparsely now. Walking where only his steps had gone in centuries, he took her deeper into the desert on a course that was hotter than hot, prickly, sticky, and so dry there was no suggestion of the cooling he promised. The trail wandered, sometimes in directionless ways around paloverde, ocotillo, and more cacti, yet ever toward the wall of a mesa of sheer red rock.
Though it appeared a greater distance, they were less than fifteen minutes from the main camp when he led her to the wall and to a fissure that rent it from ridge to ground. Patience had looked out at this towering monolith more than once, even at the fissure. She hadn’t once suspected it was more than a fold in the rock, washed in shadow and the natural, darkening mineralized stain called both desert varnish and desert paint.