Rain stinging his face, he walked across the pastures ignoring RedBow’s whinny and the bleating of his pastured ewes. Joe would come for the sheep. He’d be happy to tend the new babies once they were born, sell off the rams. In his pocket he fingered Maggie’s spare key.
But when he got around to the front of the darkened farmhouse, her Toyota was parked at a slant across the front lawn. He felt the hood—still slightly warm under the water beading up on the paint. Three hours down and four back in terrible weather—depending on the muddy roads, she might have finally got the chance to use her four-wheel drive for something besides a status symbol. Plenty of hotels—he wondered why she hadn’t stayed in Santa Fe. He knew she slept upstairs and her room was dark, as was the rest of the house. That long drive and the cooling-down hood probably meant she had turned in for the night. Sneaking in to borrow a bottle wouldn’t wake her.
But she wasn’t upstairs. She was in the darkened living room, surrounded as usual by sketch pads and half-finished paintings, mostly watercolor studies of animals and trees he recognized as subjects that lived just outside her front door. He’d startled her. Still wearing her jacket, she sat in the overstuffed chair, one hand covering her mouth, as if to speak would be a greater crime than Owen could imagine.
“Didn’t mean to scare you. I just came by to check the dog before I went to bed. When did you get back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Something go wrong down there?”
She made a noise, a sound of disgust. He couldn’t figure what that was supposed to mean. He went to her, knelt down by the chair, and tried to get her to turn to him. She pulled away. His eyes adjusted to the dark and he could see her face was wet, as was his own, only his was from rain. The skinny-legged dog was in her lap, one paw batting Maggie’s chest for attention.
He knew better than to ask her to tell him what had happened. She looked intact. No dents in the car. He made her a cup of tea, lingering for a moment by the wine bottles, one of which would fit neatly into his jacket pocket on his way out the door. If the old Higher Power was ever to speak to him at all, Owen knew he would say wait on the wine, have a cup of Lemon Mist alongside your neighbor.
He set the cup down on the table near her and took her in his arms. Never had he met a woman so silent on whatever was bothering her. Maybe it was hard feelings from the divorce she wouldn’t discuss, but this son of hers seemed to be at the heart of it, the mysterious teenager who was away at school but couldn’t be bothered to write a letter now and then to the woman who’d given him life. Had she seen him in Riverwall?
He took a sip of his tea. It tasted a little like one of Joe’s herbal concoctions but otherwise didn’t do much for him. Maggie ignored hers. The steam from it rose like a tendril of woodsmoke around her face. “Come on,” he said, and pulled her by the hand to a standing position.
“Where?”
“We’re going upstairs.”
“Owen, no.”
“Look,” he said. “You’re all bottled up. I’ve been patient, I’ve asked questions and waited for some answers. Nothing. Let’s get you into your long johns and tuck you in for the night.”
She pulled away and reclaimed her seat in the chair, sighing. “Contrary to male opinion, the solution to every problem in the world does not lie in between bedsheets.”
He chuckled softly. “Rein it in there, Mrs. Yearwood. All I was planning on was rubbing your back for you until you fell asleep. Get your mind out of the gutter.”
He could just make out her face in the light from the window. The furrow between her eyebrows deepened as she searched for a reply that would silence him. Her jaw trembled and she swallowed hard, that racehorse neck of hers flexing its lovely muscles.
“It’s Ms., not Mrs. anything, and don’t you forget it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Dammit, Owen!”
He knew he was pushing limits hauling out the “ma’am,” but at least she wasn’t crying anymore. She let him walk her upstairs, and she didn’t need to be tripped to stretch out on the double bed with the painted iron frame. He took off her jacket and hung it over the chair near the window. Rubbing his wide hands over her muscled shoulders, he located twin knots of tension in the arc of her shoulder blades.
“I learned this from Verbena’s brother, Abel. You press hard on the muscle until it gives up, straightens out, and behaves.”
She stiffened. “That hurts.”
“I know. Kind of like breaking colts. You’ll get a little sore in the process, but the end result’s worth it.”
Soon he felt the muscle begin to loosen. She sighed with relief, but on the edge of that letting go, he heard tears gathering, like the foul-weather clouds near Dulce.
“Cold out tonight,” he said, rising from the bed and fetching the chair with her jacket over it. “Old Man Winter has set his suitcases outside the Blue Dog Hotel and rung the bell for room service. You can curl up and go to sleep. I’ll just sit here and keep the bogeyman away.”
“You can’t,” she said into the pillows.
He turned the chair around and straddled it, resting his arms across the back rail. Echo nudged her head up against Owen’s knee, and he gave her a friendly scratch. Maggie sighed and rolled over, facing him. He reached down and traced her cheek with his index finger. “I can surely try,” he said, softly.
She didn’t answer.
Glass rattled in the windows as the rain beat against them. “I guess those old frames need puttying after all. I’ll have to get out there tomorrow and work. Will you hold the ladder for me, Maggie? Bake me some Toll House cookies if I do a good job and don’t break anything? I like them crisp-to-burnt on the edges. I’m particular when it comes to cookies. That’s one of my major failings.”
“Stop it right now.”
“Stop what?”
“You know what I mean. Trying to distract me talking about windows and cookies.”
He scooted the chair closer, until it touched the bed frame with a small click. “Here’s a little secret about me. Don’t tell Joe. I’m scared of heights. Looking down from a horse’s back is about as high-up comfortable as I get. Second-story windows on an old slate roof take more courage than I humanly own. So I put those cookies in mind while I’m up there shaking in the wind. In my mind I mix up the pure white flour with the soft butter, crack in two fresh eggs, measure out the brown sugar. I make fixing those cookies last all the way to smelling them baking as the putty knife seals up the last cranny. Otherwise I might do something foolish, like let the windows go through winter, or worse yet, think about taking a drink to lessen the distance between me and the ground.”
He could see her blink her eyes, trying to keep the tears at bay as she listened to his words. The furrow between her brows looked about to become permanent. He took off his hat and held it in his hands. “Let me kick off these boots and lie down beside you, Maggie. Tell me that’d be okay.”
She had no clock in the room. In place of ticking there was a different kind of time passing, marked by the sound of her dog scratching a nest in the laundry basket, the persistent rain outside, and his unanswered question growing like a cobweb in the corner.
“Okay.”
The chair threatened to topple when he rose from it. He steadied it, toed off his boots, and lay down beside her, feeling the softness of the old mattress as it accepted the weight of another body. When he kissed her mouth, keeping his lips chastely pressed together, she locked arms with him. Where their bodies met, his chest against her breasts, the mutual pocket between them felt warm, like springtime dirt, fertile, eager to be worked. He held her against him, wanting not to stop the kiss but stopping it all the same, tucking her under him so his chin rested on the top of her head. Immediately the crying he’d caught scent of earlier kicked in. One choking sob escaped, then another, softer this time, and then she was in the hardest current of it, treading her way to finally being honest. He held her while she emptied herself, feeling dampness
spread onto his neck, wetting the neckline of his thermal shirt. He expected when she was empty, she’d fall asleep, her head tucked into the crook of his arm, sleep more deeply than she had in months.
But from the tears she turned to him, her mouth hungrily on his neck, shaking from what he believed to be equal portions of exhaustion and risk. Her hands tried to move everywhere at once, as if to be in the middle of things would be easier than this awkward starting out. That wild hair of hers fell across his face, and he spoke to her through the strands against his mouth. “Go slow,” he told her. “There’s no hurry.” Taking her hands in his, he intended to let her direct them. Straining, she kissed her way up his face, chin, cheeks, forehead, and he realized he was holding his breath, beginning to feel lightheaded, and blew it out in one single whoosh.
“Here?” he questioned, his hand beneath her sweatshirt, where he felt the slight curve of her left breast in his grateful hand, the nipple nudging his thumb. She sighed, bringing his free hand to the right breast.
In the river she’d been shy about giving up her clothes, but in the privacy of the bedroom they fell away, barbed-wire fencing easily cut. She surrendered the shirt, unsnapped and flung off the flimsy softness of bra, facing him naked for the first time. He looked at her skin, ran his fingers over her ribs, tasted her bare skin. When he reached down, unzipping her jeans to stroke her belly, she stopped his hand.
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“I have scars.”
Against her protest, he slid down to take a closer look. Across the arc of her belly there were two scars, upturned at the edges like smiles, the skin there less taut than the rest of her body. Maybe she’d birthed two children through surgery, or just the one, then had one of those female operations, not that it was his business to ask. He traced the ridges of the scar tissue with his index finger and heard her intake of breath. “There’s history here. Same as on my ugly old face, but yours delivered you children, and all I got was beat up.” He waited a moment, then continued. “Maggie? We can stop this right now if you want.”
She shook her head no. “Give me a minute.”
He felt her reach down in the dark to touch his face, seeking, her fingertips finding his damaged eye. The fat lump of scar tissue was nerve-dead, had been for years. He felt the pressure of her hand but little else. Prying her fingers away, he pressed them to her own scars, every inch of them, edge to edge, then followed where her fingers had been with his lips and tongue.
Her tension began to loosen under his mouth. He edged the jeans down, stroked her inner thighs, like chamois to his calloused hands. He touched his thumb to her pubic hair and wasn’t satisfied with only touching. In the dark, Owen eased his body over hers, heard her groan in welcome. The moment was pure grace. Just the touch of her hand had been enough to cause him to harden enough to enter her. Swiftly, before either one of them could voice all the reasons to stop, he did. Inside she was slick and tense, a soft narrow tunnel that held him in. Oh, he tried to take things nice and slow, but with Maggie crying out his name over and over, her strong arms up over his shoulders, pulling him deeper inside her, there was no such speed as slow. She pressed his fingers against her, and then boom!—like a crack of lightning, the upward and downward strokes meeting just right, shock waves carried her away. She grabbed hold of his shoulders hard enough to make him commit to memory the pent-up need and passion she’d been carrying inside. In the window light he tried to watch her fall away into that dark, soft no place where the body could take you, but once she arched her long neck and the moonlight spilled on it, he was on his way there himself, too, blindly arching above her, hollering her name into the dark. Then, too soon, they were back inside themselves, together, heads bent, faces touching, laughing breathlessly at the simple thing they’d discovered they could do to save each other, the one option humans always forget they have, which must be rediscovered over and over again but to work its magic, need be no more complicated than breathing.
“All I did was ask him to come spend Thanksgiving with me,” she said as they sat in bed in the dark eating crackers with slices of sharp Cheddar. “Just drive up for the day and let me cook him turkey. Well, actually, with Peter it would have to be vegetarian turkey, textured vegetable protein, tofu or seaweed, some damn thing I’d slave over all day that would come out wrong. He doesn’t eat meat.”
“What happened? Dad get to him first? Kids’ll play you like checkers around the holidays. Don’t I know it.”
“No. He said he’d rather stay at school, have dinner with his host family.”
“Host family?”
She set the plate of crackers aside, and her face was fierce. “It’s hard to explain.”
“I can tell without you saying you’re a good mother, Maggie. You love that boy and I’m sure you do right by him.”
“Thanks. Wish I could make myself believe it.” She pushed on one of the crackers until it broke under her finger, spilling sesame seeds and wheat particles onto the sheets.
“His father have anything to do with his deciding not to come home?”
“Ray didn’t force it. Unusual, because when we were still together he tried so hard to force everything. Me to be the perfect wife, his work to succeed, mold Peter into the son he thought he should be—there never was any dividing line between any of that for Ray. It was something different.” She scraped the crumbs into her palm. “Kind of like an exchange student, I guess you could say Peter decided he wanted to live with another family after his…illness.”
“Well, for God’s sake, Maggie. Excuse me, but maybe what the boy needs is a good whipping. What did he catch that turned him so mean? The thirty-year measles?”
For an instant a smile crept over her sad face. “That’s very funny, but no.”
“Then what?”
“He cut school with some of his buddies. They’d been drinking, and then they thought it would be hilarious to go swimming in a pool down in TJ.”
“TJ?”
“Tijuana, Mexico. Of course the pool was polluted, and he got sick, so sick he damn near died. The whole thing was some kind of dare. He’d lose status if he stayed in class and studied. The doctors said he was lucky to only lose one thing.” She swiped at her face, angrily scrubbing the tears.
“What’d he lose?”
Her eyes glittered in the moonlight, and she cocked her head, looking for all the world like a teenager herself, cornered into telling some truth that would convict her of a terrible sin. “His hearing. He’s deaf. And yes, it’s permanent, and no, I don’t want to talk about it, so if you want to do something constructive, you can keep your mouth shut and hold on to me.”
He did. He saw her face turn toward the window and watched the dampness in her eyes spill onto her pale skin. The rain, which had been pounding at the old glass so hard that a couple of times it came close to drowning out their conversation, was suddenly still, and he knew without looking that it had begun to snow.
7
DUSTED OVER WITH SNOW IN THE DISTANCE, SHIPROCK MONUMENT had transformed from the red rock pirate’s ship run aground in the desert to something out of a fairy tale. Now it was a castle, fashioned by a wizard’s child, its fine white crystal blanket blowing up into the morning wind. Maggie leaned on her elbow and looked out the window of the Landcruiser. If Owen wanted to drive, it was fine with her.
“I’m taking you out to breakfast,” he’d said when she turned him loose earlier this morning. “So don’t start in about not being hungry, Ms. Yearwood. The way I see it, all that exercise, it’s bound to make you as starved as me. I’m not even sure these legs will hold me until then. You took more out of me than chopping six cords of wood.”
Then he had headed for her shower, leaving her in bed, feeling as full as he claimed he was empty. Now, wherever breakfast was, they were about to leave Blue Dog, head onto reservation land, two dogs in the backseat, each pretending the other didn’t exist. Echo had claimed the car blanket; Hopeful sat up wit
h his face to the window, alert, always watching Owen to see what he might do next.
Next to her Owen unbuttoned his jacket halfway, his faded flannel shirt and thermal underwear covering the skin she’d claimed for her pleasure last night. His body had surprised her. The skin was weathered where it had worked in the sun, loosening with age, but everywhere she put her hand or tensed her thigh, she encountered absolute firmness in this workingman’s frame. His chest was covered with blond-to-graying hair that appeared coarse, but as she pressed her breasts against him, she discovered its softness and warmth. His hands were knowledgeable as he cupped her here, stroked her there, but it wasn’t the precise, flawless lovemaking Ray had practiced. There was a thoughtful, let’s-just-give-this-a-try attitude in his hands. When whatever he’d done elicited a happy response, she could feel the charge drive though him as strongly as into her own flesh. It was silly to have held out so long, but she realized she hadn’t done it out of any latent moralistic notions. She simply hadn’t wanted to be hurt again when he notched his belt and went on to his next partner. She had probably scared him half to death, jumping on him this morning before she’d even made him a cup of coffee. Her body felt hungrier than her stomach. Why was it when there was nowhere else to go, yourself was the last place you considered for comfort?
“You mind?” Owen said, his hand on the radio.
She shook her head no. She’d owned the car four months, lived in Blue Dog for three, and during all that time, hadn’t gotten around to setting the stations.
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