“Let’s take a walk,” she said.
“I don’t know that we ought to.”
“Worried about my reputation or yours?”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Come on. Let’s take a walk down by the creek like we used to. It’s too dark for anyone to see us.”
“But . . .”
“My vows didn’t say anything against taking a walk with an old friend.”
We walked in silence until we made the water’s edge. Cindy stumbled and balanced herself against me.
“Joseph, I swear you’re even skinnier than ever.”
Cindy was always a lean, bony girl herself and not one to talk, but I didn’t offer that. If I did, she would want to argue about it, and I never could win an argument with her.
“What you need is to find you a good woman to feed you up. I fear if you don’t you’re going to end up some hermit like those old cowboys too banged up and crippled to ride a horse anymore and too far past their prime to start a family.”
“I eat when I’m hungry. I don’t think there’s any worry that would require me to find a wife.”
“Why haven’t you found another sweetheart?”
“How do you know I haven’t?”
“Don’t lie to me. You aren’t any good at it.” She bent down and picked up a rock and skipped it across the water. “Are you still sweet on me?”
“What would your husband think about you asking me that?”
“I don’t care what he thinks.”
“Then why did you marry him?”
“Because he promised me he would sell his store and take me out of this one-horse town. If I had any sense I would have married you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“Joseph, would you do me a favor?”
“You know I would.” Nobody said my name like she did.
“Kiss me.” She leaned against me before I had time to answer and kissed me so quick I couldn’t get away from her. “All the years you sparked me, and that’s, what, only the third or fourth time we ever kissed?”
“We should go back to town.”
“‘Should’ has got nothing to do with it.” Her palms were still on my chest and she kissed me again. Her breath tasted like green onions and barbeque sauce. “It’s got nothing to do with anything.”
I pulled away once more. “You shouldn’t have married him if it was me you wanted to kiss.”
“Oh, shut up. I take it back when I said you didn’t talk too much.” She gave me a hard shove in the chest, and it was so unexpected that I lost my balance and fell to a sitting position.
“I’m tired of waiting for something to happen,” she said in a husky voice that didn’t sound anything like her at all. “I’m tired of sweeping and cleaning after that sweaty goat I married. I’m tired of thinking and dreaming and nobody listening. I’m tired of it all.”
“What?”
“You get out of those pants, cowboy.”
“Cindy!”
She was unbuttoning my pants before I knew it, and her grip was surprisingly strong. She broke the last two buttons, and dug her hands under me and gave the seat of my pants a tug. I landed flat on my back and she landed sitting astraddle of me after she gave my pants another tug that left them around my knees.
“I said hush. You owe me this much.” She hiked her dress and grabbed one of my hands and shoved it between her legs. She wasn’t wearing anything under that dress.
“You can thank me later.” She was hot and wet against my hand and when she rubbed against me a hoarse little moan bubbled from her throat. “Don’t you dare pull that hand away.”
I’d like to say that I tried to talk her out of it, but I didn’t. The temptations of the flesh are strong, and I was weak. Cindy always threw me off-balance.
“That’s the way. Put your finger inside me.” Her hips had a life of their own.
Before I could do anything she was jerking at the fly of my underwear.
“My, my, look what we’ve got here.” Her fingers wrapped around me and I gasped. She shoved my hand from between her legs and scooted forward until she could slip me inside of her. “Oh yes!”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. So wrong. Fornicators and adulterers. Nothing was ever more right. Balance.
I thought she was going to pound me into the ground, but it felt too good to stop. The tangle of my pants wouldn’t let me get my heels dug in, and I scrambled to keep us from sliding down the riverbank.
“Give it to me!” she cried.
I wanted nothing more than that. Nothing else mattered, but I was doing all I could do. Lord, help me. Shame and lust squirted out of me and her fingers dug into my chest until I thought she would rip my flesh. I felt my tool going limp, but she was going wilder than ever.
“Oh no, you don’t.” She ground into me harder and fumbled at the buttons on the top of her dress and shoved it back until her breasts swung free. My hands found them, kneading them and feeling the press of those hard, tight nipples against my palm. One of her hands reached under my neck and bent me forward until my mouth was pressed to her. I took a mouthful and she moaned even louder. I felt her insides shudder against me and her whole body began to tremble and her thighs squeezed me like she wanted to break me in two. After a long while, she fell atop me, breathing heavy and her mouth hot against my neck.
All I could do was lie there and stare up through the tree limbs, my heart hammering wildly in my chest and the sweat running down the crease of my back and tickling my tailbone. Another cluster of firecrackers burst overhead.
“Want to go again?” She raised up a little and looked back between her thighs at me, clucking her tongue and shaking her head. “Doesn’t look like it.”
As quick as that, she stood and began rearranging and buttoning her dress. “Best get your pants pulled up. It wouldn’t do if someone came along and caught us like this. Goggle Eye is lazy, but even he might get his shotgun out from behind the counter and come after you if he knew you were diddling me.”
I raised my hips and tugged my pants up, and she laughed again.
“What’s the matter?”
She pointed at my feet. My boot heels had dug two holes in the soft ground of the riverbank.
“I think I might have spur marks on me,” she snickered. “Trust a cowboy not to take his boots off.”
She was a confounding woman.
“Run off with me,” I said. “We could leave here and go somewhere else.”
“You mean it?”
“I don’t have much, but I’ve saved some.”
“Much? Everybody knows your papa is the richest man in these parts.”
“Maybe, but I’m not.” I took note of the look on her face. “I make wages like every one of his hands. Thirty-five a month and found, and a string of company horses.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“But I’ve saved some.”
“How much?”
“Three hundred dollars, and I’ve got six good horses of my own that I could sell.”
“How far do you think that will take us?” she butted in before I could answer. “I’ll tell you where. Nowhere.”
“Cindy.”
“Didn’t you hear me? I want out of here. I’m sick to death of wishing I was someone else, or somewhere else that mattered. There’s got to be more and I want it.”
“I’ll work hard for us. You’ll see.”
“Too late for that. Too late for us.”
“If you could wait.”
“I’ve been waiting and waiting. Sometimes I feel I’m drying up inside and the wind will blow me away.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It isn’t your fault.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“For what?”
“For this. If I respected you I wouldn’t have brought you down here and done what we did.”
“You never cease to amaze me. That brother of yours would root me around this riverbank like an o
ld boar hog and never look back at me or say thank you when he was through.”
“Gunn? You haven’t?”
“No, that isn’t my point. But you never fail to remind me that you aren’t really a Dollarhyde. It’s plain that you’re adopted. You’ll never make one of them, or a Lowe, either.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you’re acting like you’ve taken advantage of me, when nothing is farther from the truth.”
“But . . .”
“But nothing. You think I haven’t done this before? Do you think you’re the first cowboy that I’ve crawled on when I got lonely?”
“Tell me that isn’t true. You’re just saying that to shock me.”
“I didn’t hear you complaining earlier.”
“You’ve got to leave your husband.”
She sighed. “It was fun. Settle for that. Who knows? Maybe we can do it again sometime. Fun’s hard to come by, so don’t ask so many questions the next time I ask you down to the river.”
She pushed me away when I tried to follow her, and I waited for a while after she was gone before I headed back to town. I was lost in my thoughts, trying to recall everything Cindy had said to me, so I didn’t notice the men who stepped in front of me until it was too late to run.
“Sneaking out with my sister, Dollarhyde?” Moon was a big man and he made a big shadow.
There were three of them. One of them I took to be Prince, but they didn’t give me much time to consider who the third was.
“We’re going to teach you not to be messing around with other men’s wives.”
“Leave him alone, Moon!” Cindy was somewhere behind them.
I had no doubt that I was about to hurt, and hurt very badly. That was how Moon tried to find his balance.
It had been such a perfect day.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Gunn found me not long after daylight the next morning. Somehow, I had managed to crawl my way to the bone pile at the end of the street. I guess I had passed out again. It was a fitting place. I was sure I was going to die or was already dead.
“Joseph, can you hear me?” Gunn asked.
I could hear him fine, although he sounded like he was far away.
“Take it easy with him. I’m guessing that he’s got some busted ribs,” another familiar voice said.
For some reason, I couldn’t see except for a little out of one eye. The faces in the slit of vision left to me faded in and out of focus. I tried to show them that I could walk with some help, but trying to move sent agony through my whole body.
“Run, fetch a doctor,” Gunn said.
I heard retreating footsteps and felt Gunn’s hand on my shoulder. “Hang in there.”
“It hurts. Bad.”
“Who did this to you?”
“He’s got three busted ribs, a broken arm, and I’m worried he’ll lose that eye.”
They thought I couldn’t hear them, talking about me like I wasn’t even there, until I tried to roll to my side and let out a groan.
“You save his eye. Do you hear me?” Papa said that like the doctor could do it simply because he told him to.
“I’ve patched him up the best I can. Let me know if he has any setbacks. I’ll come back to look at him this evening. Might be a while before the swelling goes down enough for me to have a better look at his eye.”
The doctor left, but that didn’t mean there still wasn’t a crowd in my hotel room. Gunn was standing there beside my bed, and Hamish, too.
I looked up at Gunn and tried a cocky grin like he would do. My face felt like it cracked when I tried it, and I gave up the effort. “Do I look that bad?”
“I’ve seen you better,” Gunn said. “Lay still or you’re going to bust your stitches.”
My hand found my face, and my fingers lightly traced the row of stitches across my cheek and the other row from my nose to my upper lip. My face felt strange and swollen.
“Let me rest here a little and I’ll be ready to ride back to the ranch,” I said.
“You lay still. I think you’re going to be here for more than a little while.” Gunn put his hand on my shoulder again.
“Rest easy,” Papa said.
“Water,” I mumbled. The words wouldn’t shape right. My tongue found a chunk missing from one front tooth.
“Get him some water,” Papa said.
“Let him rest. I’ll sit with him.” Juanita was at the edge of the bed, holding out a glass of water.
The water looked good, but I was so tired.
“Was it Moon Lowe who did this to you?” Gunn asked.
I didn’t answer him, but he knew.
“I saw Moon and some of his hands down at the livery corrals on my way here,” someone else said.
I knew that second voice. It was Breed Collins, one of Papa’s hands. We always thought he was on the run from the law up in the Indian Territory when he first hired on. Crazy fellow, and the one Gunn always took with him when he wanted to go spend a wild night on the town.
“Leave them alone,” I said. “Forget about Moon.”
“Gunn, don’t go off half-cocked,” Hamish said. “No good will come of this.”
“Listen to your brother,” Papa said. “Let’s think this out. There’s plenty of time to settle with Moon if it was him.”
“Look what they did to him,” Gunn said.
“It was my fault. I deserved it,” I said.
I heard Gunn’s boot heels on the floor, leaving.
“Breed’s coming with me. Are you going to sit here and lecture me, or come with us and set this thing right?” Gunn asked.
“I’ll go with you.” Hamish’s voice sounded tired, like it used to when we were boys.
“Stop them,” I said to Papa. I didn’t even know if he was still in the room.
Chapter Forty
I was so tired. I thought if I lay still enough I could sink into that feather mattress, and sink and sink until everything went away. But Gunn was gone out the door, and Breed Collins and Hamish with him. Hamish would try to talk some sense into Gunn, but that Breed wouldn’t help. Breed was a fire-eater and would be all for a fight.
I took the water from Juanita and gulped it down, the sting of it waking me. Swallowing hurt my insides.
“Lay still, Joseph,” Juanita said.
My right arm was in a splint and hindered by a sling, but I fended her off with my other hand and managed to sit up. My head spun badly, but I got to my feet after a bit.
“Where are my boots?”
Juanita tried to hold me there, but I staggered past her. There wasn’t time for my boots. I went out the door in my bare feet and no shirt. Folks taking breakfast in the lobby stared at me when I came down the stairs clutching to the banister and making a slow go of it.
Juanita was behind me, begging me to stop, but she was too scared of knocking me off-balance and sending me tumbling down the stairs to stop me. I also saw Tiffany stand up from one of the tables. She seemed more shocked than anyone about the sight of me, and I must have looked bad. No telling what she was thinking about the family she had married into.
I don’t know how long it took me to make my way down the street. I fell once or twice—maybe more, come to think of it. I was sure I wasn’t going to get there fast enough. Gunn was going to kill Moon Lowe if I didn’t, and then they would hang Gunn, all because of me. Me, the adulterer. Troublemaker. It’s hard sometimes being a human.
When I was a boy I used to wish sometimes I was a horse. But horses don’t have any more balance than we do. Running from shadows and spooking at the world around them. Lashing out with their hooves. Born scared before they know what to be scared of. Flighty, imperfect creatures. Unpredictable. Hurt you sometimes without meaning to.
Papa, Hamish, and Clayton Lowe were talking in front of Clayton’s store. I could tell they were arguing about Moon. Prince and another man stood on the porch behind and above them. Gunn and Breed Collins stood off to one side, facing Prince an
d the other man, and Prince was already talking loud and nervous.
I fell against a hitching rail, trying to catch my breath. Hamish went at a run across the street, and I knew Papa had sent him to get the city marshal. He wasn’t going to have time. Papa was too caught up in what he was saying to Clayton to see how Gunn and Breed were standing—spread wide apart from each other with their fists already wrapped around their gun butts.
“Where’s Moon?” Gunn asked.
“He ain’t around.” Prince was standing in the door of the store with his left shoulder leaning against the doorjamb. There was a toothpick in one corner of his mouth and a birdshead Colt stuffed behind his waistband.
“Make them stop, Pa!” Cindy Lowe was running down the boardwalk toward the store.
“Prince, you get back in there!” Clayton said.
The other man with Prince was sidling along the front wall, casual-like. People called him Wells, or something like that, one of Clayton’s freighters. He wasn’t wearing a belt gun, but he was trying really hard to act like he wasn’t inching closer to the carbine stuffed in the saddle scabbard of the horse he had tied at the corner of the porch.
“Did you help beat my brother?” Gunn asked.
Papa started for Gunn, but he wasn’t going to get there fast enough. Not with Prince sneering and mouthing like he was and all but daring Gunn to do something.
“We gave him what he deserved,” Prince said.
Gunn’s Colt swung up before the words even finished from Prince’s mouth. Cindy was still running, but she wasn’t going to get there in time, either. Prince never even got that birdshead Colt out of his pants before Gunn put a bullet in his gut and another in his chest as he was sliding down the doorjamb.
It all happened so fast—Gunn turned sideways to Prince with his pistol slowly lowering to hang beside his leg, and Cindy running and screaming across the porch. Prince’s buddy, Wells, made a bad mistake, but he had no more time to work things out than I did. He lunged for his rifle, and Breed Collins didn’t wait for him to get a hand on it. He thumbed two quick rounds at him.
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