by Cora Brent
“Yup,” Mad said, thinking. “They tell you about the lost treasure?”
“There’s no treasure,” Gaby scoffed, but she was smiling. “Someone would have found it a long time ago.”
“There was too,” Maddox insisted, skipping a flat rock across the other rocks. It clattered and then was still. “A safe full of pure stolen gold. The shithead in charge of the whole mining operation was squirreling it away. Then he would accuse the poor sons of bitches who worked for him and hang them from the nearest cottonwood tree until their faces turned fucking black.”
“Maddox!” cried Gabriela and this time she wasn’t amused.
Mad ignored her. He hunkered down and looked his nephew in the eye. “The hell of it was that the mayor and the asshole who was the sheriff or some shit was in on it. At least that’s how the story goes.” He wagged a finger and winked. “And that, Miguel, is why you shouldn’t trust the law.”
But Miguel frowned and looked away. “My Dad’s a cop,” he said quietly.
Maddox straightened, regretting what he’d said. “Yeah and he’s a good cop. He wouldn’t get involved in shady shit. Not Jensen McLeod.”
Gaby kept her eyes faced away and he could see the tension in her posture. Maddox nudged the kid. “Follow me. I’ll show you something cool.”
Maddox had discovered the cemetery when he was about Miguel’s age. It was a blazing summer day when he went out in search of spots on the Hassayampa which would have filled in from the monsoon rains. Jensen was with him. They both ignored their mother’s warning to stay away from the river water. It was full of dangerous bacteria. Maddox had become sidetracked following the tail of a jackrabbit. When he stepped on the first marker he didn’t recognize it for what it was. Jensen was the one who made his way knowingly along the ground, looking down and uncovering others.
“Graves,” Jensen had said with the certainty of an older sibling who was used to being right.
Maddox recalled scoffing. These didn’t look like any graves he had ever seen. Jensen always thought he knew it all. “How the hell do you know?”
Jensen had rolled his eyes and kneeled at Maddox’s feet, carefully pulling back the brush to show the flat stone underneath. Crudely chiseled into its face was just a death year and a single word. “See?” he said in triumph. Maddox saw. Jensen was right. He was always right.
Miguel wrinkled his nose as the three of them picked their way along. They were past the dry river and closing in on the outer rim of the mining camp. Maddox was fairly sure there were no old shafts in this area but he warned Miguel to step only where he stepped, just in case.
“What’s that smell?” the boy asked, sniffing. “Smells like salsa.”
“Cilantro,” Gabriela told her son, picking off a stalk from a feathery bush. “Funny how it grows wild here. Must be just enough shade coming off these ancient mesquites to protect it all from the sun.”
Maddox kneeled down and pushed the layers of desert detritus back from the stone. Miguel leaned over his shoulder.
“What’s it say, Mad?”
Maddox already knew. “The year 1890. And below that the word ‘Brother’.”
Gaby looked too. “Wasn’t 1890 the year of that flood you were talking about?”
“Yeah. Could be a coincidence. There were quite a few deaths from the flood.” Maddox straightened, staring at the stone and considering the remains which were long buried underneath. “More likely he was some poor miner fucked over by black lung or dynamite.”
Miguel was entranced. Maddox had known he would be.
“Are there any more?” he asked eagerly and Mad smiled.
“Seventeen with markers.” He gestured across the plot, pointing out the remains of the barbed wire fence which had once surrounded the cemetery. “Town must have forgot about this place hell and gone years ago. Jensen never mentioned it?”
Gaby shook her head. She seemed disturbed. “No, not to me. Miguel,” she called, “don’t go far.”
“He’s fine,” Maddox told her, squinting into the sun as Miguel poked around the area on a macabre scavenger hunt for more graves. “No shafts around here. This was the miner’s cemetery. These men didn’t have families, no one in these parts who gave a shit about them. So they were dumped here and forgotten.”
Gaby pointed to the stone at their feet. “He had family,” she said quietly.
“Yeah,” Maddox agreed slowly, “I guess he did.” He stared at the roughly etched word, ‘Brother’, until his vision began to double. He had the jarring thought that once another man must have stood on this very spot and stared mournfully into the ground which held his flesh and blood. Maddox didn’t consider himself a sentimental sort but the thought troubled him.
Gabriela’s arm lacing through his was unexpected. She leaned her cheek against his shoulder and sighed. Maddox closed his eyes as a confusing current of emotion coursed through him. He was mildly dizzy and felt strongly it had something to do with being here, in this place. Things of consequence had happened on this spot. As Gaby held tight to him he suddenly wanted to make something else of consequence happen. He grabbed her roughly and kissed her with ten years of pent up desire.
She responded to him as if she had been waiting. Her lips opened and their tongues found one another in a desperate dance. Maddox curled his arms around her back and pulled her body against him, lost in the pleasure of her soft flesh. He wanted her to feel how hard he was and as she pressed back he knew she did.
“Shit,” she swore, backing away and pushing him off with a suddenness he couldn’t quite keep up with. His first instinct was to pull her back with more insistence but then he saw how her head turned as she searched for her son. Miguel was about twenty yards away, bent among the creosote and searching for the graves of lost men. He hadn’t seen them embrace.
Gaby threw Maddox a glance so full of confusion and remorse he had to look away. As he heard her heading in Miguel’s direction he kept his eyes trained on the simple grave marker at his feet.
The man who had long since rotted beneath him had lived once. He’d had hope and suffered pain. Hopefully before someone carved up this stone he’d managed to love or at least fucked with some satisfaction. But he’d taken his mysteries with him. There wasn’t anyone alive who knew a thing about his years on earth.
Maddox watched Gaby and her son. An abrupt chill washed over him which had nothing to do with the warmth of the late morning. When he was a boy he’d believed in the business of spirits and of lost treasure. Miguel still did. Maddox hoped that the years wouldn’t take that from him.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he called hoarsely, stepping over the broken wire of the fallen fence. Twenty or so yards away he saw a shallow cave which had for generations served as a den for various animals. He’d forgotten about it. He and Jensen used to consider it their secret clubhouse, a place to store the things of childhood which seemed so freaking important until sex and other shit took over. There were a few more of them around, small caves of small significance.
He was damn sorry he’d come to this place. Once it had been pure and magical, back when he didn’t understand grim mortality. He waited for Gaby and Miguel to file out ahead of him and they headed back to the McLeod home. Once he thought he heard a whisper at his back but it must have only been the soft whistle of the wind.
***
Gabriela gave no hint whether their kiss was on her mind. Maddox began to wonder if it had even been real. Since he’d set foot in Contention City he’d felt out of sorts. Perhaps it had to do with the approaching death of his last parent, or maybe it was the result of being too close to her again.
He sat on the back patio of his father’s house in an old lounge chair which smelled heavily of moldering plastic. The screen door was open and he heard the noise of dishes being washed. Casey, Jensen’s wife, had brought over a couple of rotisserie chickens from Basha’s. She didn’t talk to Maddox at all and fawned all over her husband throughout dinner. Mad didn’t tr
ust her. He knew the type.
Over the sound of the sink he recognized his nephew’s excitable chatter and his brother’s answers. Mad’s ringtone, a version of Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire, startled him. He withdrew the phone from his pocket and saw who it was.
“Boss,” he said into the phone.
Orion Jackson’s deep voice answered back. “Hey, Mad. How is he?”
Maddox exhaled raggedly. “He’s hanging in there. But it’s bad, man. Sometimes he opens his eyes and sees me. But most of the time he ain’t all there.”
“Yeah. I’ve seen that before.” The President of the Defiant Motorcycle Club cleared his throat. Orion Jackson wasn’t often given to maudlin expression. “Maddox, just wanted to say that I’m sorry.”
“We all got to go sometime, don’t we?”
“That we do.” Orion paused. “Listen, is there anything you need? You or your folks?”
Maddox smiled in spite of the subject. He loved this guy. He was consumed with the sudden intense longing to be back in Quartzsite, maybe banging some local ass in his trailer as the raucous music of the Riverbottom played in the background. Then afterward he could shoot the shit with Brandon or Gray and sleep it all away without conscience.
Orion didn’t carry the conversation long and Maddox didn’t need to say that he appreciated the call. He hung up the phone with some regret after telling Orion he would keep them updated. Orion didn’t ask about Gabriela. It occurred to Maddox that he might have forgotten that story, spilled one night in the company of drink and despair. But that wasn’t likely, he reasoned. Orion Jackson didn’t forget anything.
Maddox didn’t want to go back in the house. Hospice had left hours earlier. Soon the rest of them would leave and he would be alone with Priest. Occasionally his father opened his eyes and saw the man in front of him, but mostly he was unconscious, resurfacing in a place where Maddox was a boy under his roof. Maddox cursed himself out loud. Again. He should have come sooner, when Priest was still Priest. Before his father withered into the shell which rattled in an old bed and called out in vain to his long dead wife.
He was so lost in own reveries that Jensen managed to surprise him. Maddox jumped a little and his brother held out one of the beers he carried. Jensen grabbed another chair and unfolded it. The old hinges creaked something awful. Maddox watched as Jensen eased carefully, with obvious pain, into the chair.
“It’s quiet now,” Maddox said. He had just realized it was true.
Jensen distractedly rubbed his left knee as if it hurt. “Gaby took the kid home. And I told Casey she didn’t have to stick around.”
“The old man still sleeping?”
“Yeah,” Jensen looked at him. “He’s still sleeping.”
Maddox twisted the cap off the beer and tossed it into the darkness. He pointed to Jensen’s knee. “Remind me again how that happened?”
Jensen seemed caught off guard by the question. Maddox took a drink and watched the struggle across his brother’s face. Jensen wasn’t a natural liar. Maddox had gotten into trouble more than once when Jensen let fly the truth upon being confronted by their mother.
“Where you been, boys?” she would ask in an accusatory tone.
Maddox would grin and say, “Just up at the playground behind school, ma.”
Tildy McLeod’s lips would purse and she would look to her squirming older son. It never took long for Jensen to blurt out that they had actually been playing among the forbidden mountain caves and jumping across the open mine shafts.
“Line of duty,” Jensen said carefully, then tilted his head back to look up at the sky.
Maddox didn’t feel like letting him get off so easily. “So who shot you, bro?” Jensen glanced at him sharply. “And more importantly, did you have the balls to shoot back?”
“Chaz Colletti,” Jensen said flatly and Maddox figured he’d heard wrong.
“No fucking way,” he shook his head. “I never heard that.”
Jensen’s tone darkened. “How the hell would you have heard, Maddox? Maybe caught wind of the news when you came home for Christmas?”
Maddox scowled. He wasn’t in the mood to go in that direction. It would bring out too many other things which were better left alone.
“So what the hell did old Chaz the Spaz do to warrant a bullet?”
Jensen had already finished his beer. He let the bottle clatter to the ground. “He fired first and I’m a better shot, Mad.” Jensen laughed starkly. “No doubt you wish it had ended differently.”
“You think I want you dead because you screwed my girl a lifetime ago?”
“Don’t you?” Jensen asked with quiet conviction.
“No,” Maddox shook his head. “Well maybe I did.” He rose abruptly and kicked his chair over. “Damn you, Jensen.”
Jensen didn’t mince words. “You damn yourself, you selfish asshole.”
Maddox returned to the house and slammed the screen door. He usually didn’t mind coming to blows for whatever reason. Once he would have had trouble holding his own against his older brother. But things had changed. He’d grown stronger and Jensen was softer, cop or not. Maddox stood in the living and balled his right hand into a fist. He pictured ramming it into Jensen’s gut, knocking the very breath out of him. But an instant later he imagined the look of horror on his nephew’s face if he were to see that. The fight went right out of him. His hand fell limply to his side.
Maddox walked into Priest’s room and sat beside the bed. The painkillers made his father comfortably unconscious. Even though Maddox knew it was unlikely Priest even recognized he was there, he didn’t want to be anywhere else. He didn’t hear the back door open, which meant Jensen had either left or was still out there in the dark wrestling with whatever ghosts haunted him.
“Dad,” Maddox whispered, just because he still could. He held his father’s hand and felt the faintest pressure of a return grip.
Maddox was unaware of time passing as he sat beside his father. Thoughts of Gabriela kept intruding no matter how he tried to push her away. That afternoon he had felt a dull satisfaction in realizing her hunger and knowing that she wanted him. Maddox couldn’t begin to count the number of women he’d fucked in the last ten years. How many times had he sheathed his dick and stuck it in some unknown pussy without a name? There were some who were more frequent liaisons, like Alice, but nothing he couldn’t live without. Having Gabriela de Campo would be different. Once inside her, Maddox would be lost.
Maddox finally heard the low screech of the screen door opening and recognized his brother’s shuffle. Jensen darkened the doorway and stared inside. Maddox didn’t raise his head until his brother sighed and retreated across the hall. Mad might have asked why the hell he didn’t go home to his damn wife but decided he didn’t really care.
Mad kept thinking about the cemetery. It was sadder than most such places; a pack of forgotten lives clustered together in a lonely spot no one ever visited. That first grave got to him more than the rest of them put together.
1890.
Brother.
Maybe that one troubled him because of the single word epitaph. Someone had cared about the man in the ground.
He wondered what his own stone would say if he had one.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Contention City, Arizona Territory
1888
Annika remembered his last lingering kiss hours earlier. Yet as she awoke for the day she still reached for him, her heart sinking with regret when her arms found nothing but emptiness.
The thought of his hard body atop hers no longer made her blush. Indeed, she reveled in the memory and reached between her own legs to feel the want building there.
A predatory bird cawed loudly overhead and Annika sighed. The day could be easily idled away by indulging in thoughts of Mercer. Reluctantly she got to her feet, noting how the air was growing crisp in the mornings, though it would heat up considerably in the afternoon.
After dressing, Annika built a fire in the sma
ll stone pit behind the schoolhouse. She heated some water and carefully stirred in the ground coffee beans which had been part of Lizzie Post’s supplies. The liquid was bitter but she dared not sweeten it with her limited sugar supply.
After she put out the fire, Annika began to walk in the direction of town. It would take a few months of careful saving, but a horse would be the first thing her wages would buy. Of course she had no idea where she might keep a horse but that was a problem which could be solved somehow. No man or woman could gain an ounce of independence in the Territory without a horse.
Annika had learned to pay no mind to the drunken sots who stumbled out of the saloons after a long night of gambling and drink. Many were miners but there were all sorts mixed in. Once she had pretended not to notice Mr. Swilling as he lurched down the street and then heaved into a water barrel. He lost money on a regular basis in the raucous card games which sometimes ended with a gunshot.
Annika warily eyed the group of men who ambled out of The Rose Room. The three of them wore pistols on their hips and did not have the pale, somewhat bedraggled look of the miners.
She turned away and tried not to listen as two of them called to her. One of the establishment’s soiled doves lounged indecently on the balcony and laughed.
Annika’s first inclination was to tell the men where they could put their crude insults. But fighting every scoundrel in Contention City would be futile and would only draw more attention to her. She was quite aware of how tempting a target she must be; a lone woman living too far beyond the town’s center for any screams to be heard.
She quickened her pace and headed to the Mercantile. Mrs. Meyer, the wife of the German proprietor and mother of two of Annika’s students, accepted the Wisconsin-bound letter Annika gave her and handed over an envelope which had arrived during the week. As she left the Mercantile, Annika turned the small envelope over in her hands, examining it, savoring this piece of home. The letter was in the hand of her sister, Britta.