The Rogue

by Janet Dailey

  “It’s just as well I never married.” Rube began talking again. “No goddamned daughter of mine would ever have been as perty as you. I used to pretend you was my little girl. Ain’t that a laugh?” He tried to laugh, and he started choking again on his own blood, but he managed to add, “Imagine me thinkin’ I was the Major.”

  Diana closed her eyes, squeezing them tight, and felt the tears running down her cheeks. She had never guessed, never suspected, that Rube had thought of her in that light. Why did a person always find out these things when it was too late?

  “You’re a good man, Rube.” Her voice was small and taut. “Loyal and dependable. The Major always said so.”

  “Hell, you’re a goddamned liar.” He smiled and looked pleased despite the pain that twisted his face.

  “Why don’t you rest for a while, Rube? We can talk some more later,” Holt suggested.

  “Yeah, we’ll talk more later,” he agreed and seemed to sigh, as if he was very, very tired. His gnarled fingers continued to curl around Diana’s hand, and she made no attempt to disengage them. When he hadn’t moved for several minutes, Holt lifted an eyelid.

  “He isn’t dead?” She clutched at Rube’s hand, staring at Holt.

  “No. He’s unconscious.”

  Diana swallowed at the lump in her throat. “He’s bleeding internally, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Holt pushed to his feet.

  “Isn’t there something we can do?”

  “No.” Holt turned away, lowering his head to rub the back of his neck.

  Diana maintained her vigil at Rube’s side, holding his hand, hardly changing her position. Her back and shoulders ached and her legs were numb. When Guy returned with the bedrolls from camp, they stripped the saddle pads away and covered him with the blankets from the bedrolls.

  Rube stirred and coughed. “It’s cold. Ain’t nobody . . . gonna start a . . . goddamned fire?” His voice seemed to gurgle when he talked.

  “Guy will do it this time,” Diana told him, but he had seemed to drift away. She didn’t know if he had heard her.

  A fire wasn’t needed for warmth, but Guy built one, anyway, to have something to do, more than anything else.

  Two hours later, Rube died, quietly, without struggling. Diana slipped her hand from the loosened grip of his fingers, her eyes dry as Holt pulled the blanket over Rube’s face.

  Stiff and silent, she walked to the fire. She felt cold and sick. Someone put a blanket around her shoulders. She didn’t know who and she didn’t care.

  Almost a full hour later, the whir of a helicopter broke the unearthly silence. Diana flew back with Rube’s body and no one questioned why.

  Chapter XVIII

  A sack of clothes to be given to the Salvation Army sat outside the door of the small apartment. Diana put the last of the canned goods from the cupboard into another sack and carried it outside, as well. She walked back into the two-and-a-half-room unit. She checked the bathroom again to be sure she hadn’t overlooked anything.

  In the bedroom, she paused to stare at the brown suit laid neatly on the bed, and a white shirt, the only one Rube had owned. A stringed tie with a liberty-head dollar was on top of the suit, and a pair of boots sat on the floor by the bed, the polish not hiding the scratches of use. Everything there was destined for the funeral home.

  The closet and chest of drawers were empty. Diana noticed the small drawer in the night table and walked over to open it. The only thing in it was a dog-eared Bible. Diana frowned. She had never known Rube was a religious man. She couldn’t remember him ever going to church. She opened it and found a name scrawled on the inside cover—Anna May Carter Spencer. His mother?

  Sighing, Diana turned to carry it to the kitchen table, where the rest of his meager personal possessions were collected in a basket. Something slipped from the pages of the Bible and fluttered to the floor. It was an old photograph, a picture of her when she was eight or nine. Diana’s jaw tightened briefly as she replaced the picture in the Bible. She set it on the table instead of in the basket.

  Diana tried to remember what she’d thought of Rube when she was growing up, but no impression lingered. She guessed she had taken his existence for granted, never concerning herself with what his dreams might be. If anything, she had probably regarded him as a silly old coot, in an indifferent sort of way. Everyone had dreams.

  There were footsteps and the screen door to the far unit of the fourplex opened and closed. Diana glanced around the small, empty room and picked up the basket containing Rube’s belongings. She carried it outside and walked to the last unit.

  Her knock on the screen door brought Holt’s response of: “Come in.” He was drying his hands on a towel as she entered. He turned, irritation flitting across his face when he saw her. The gray eyes seemed to look very old and very tired. “What is it?” He hung the towel on a hook.

  Diana was too numbed to be upset by his unwelcoming tone. “I have been cleaning out Rube’s place. There are a few personal items here that I didn’t know what to do with.” She set the basket on the table. “There isn’t much: his razor, a pocketknife, his watch, a radio, and a couple of other things—nothing that’s worth very much, but I thought . . .”—she shoved her hands in the pockets of her jeans as Holt walked to the table—” . . . maybe there’s something here that some of the boys might like to have. I thought you would know and could see that they got it.”

  “Yes, I’ll take care of it.”

  She continued to stare at the contents of the basket. “There’s a sack of canned goods, too. The flour was wormy. Stuff like that I had to throw out. There’s some beer in the refrigerator and some butter and eggs. I left it there for the time being. It isn’t much, is it?” Her voice cracked on the last sentence.

  “You should have let somebody else do this.” Holt sounded grim, angry with her.

  “I wanted to do it.” Diana lifted her gaze to him. “You see, I never knew . . . Rube was just. . .” A shudder quaked through her. She saw the half-movement Holt made toward her, as if to offer comfort. The bone-chilling numbness became too much and she turned to him. “Hold me. Please, hold me.”

  There was a second’s hesitation before he gathered her into his arms and rocked her gently. His body heat slowly began to thaw her benumbed state. She began to feel again, with her heart and her mind and her senses. There was pain and guilt and grief. . . grief for a man she had never really known. She wound her arms around Holt’s waist, drawing on his strength. Tears began to gather in her eyes, the first tears she had shed since the accident yesterday.

  Now the shock of Rube’s death had worn off and Diana began trembling in reaction as the tears fell. Her face was buried in Holt’s shirt, the dampness on her cheeks moistening the material. The steady beat of his heart was comforting, as was the hand stroking her hair. Aching, Diana pressed closer to the solidness of his support and felt the brush of his mouth against the top of her head.

  Spreading her fingers over his shoulder blades, Diana lifted her head to rub her brow against his jaw and chin, like a cat wanting to be stroked and reassured. She felt the warm pressure of his mouth against her temple in response. His caresses of solace continued; he kissed her eyes and the tears from her cheeks. His hands were moving over her body, seeking and massaging away the hurt until there didn’t seem to be an inch of her that hadn’t felt the touch of his hands. His embrace was gentle and healing. Diana shuddered against him in relief.

  “It isn’t right,” she said of Rube’s death, her voice breathless as Holt’s mouth nuzzled the black hair near her ear.

  “Nothing is right.” His response was muffled by the silken thickness of her hair. “What I’m feeling right now is wrong, but what the hell does it matter?”

  With a sweeping mastery, his mouth closed over her lips and parted them. Diana became engulfed in the flame of his passion. It ignited her fiery core and she responded with all the abandonment of previous times.

  Lifting her off her feet, Hol
t carried her into a side room and set her down beside an unmade bed. There, he undressed her and laid her on the bed. The sheets were warm with the smell of him. The mattress groaned as it took his weight. In the next second, Diana was glorying in the feel of his naked torso against hers, the white-hot flame of their desire fusing them together in an explosion of wondrous sensations. The force of it lifted them higher than they had ever gone before. It took a long time to come down.

  Even then, neither of them wanted to bring it to a total end. Her head rested in the crook of his arm. Diana was smoking the cigarette Holt had lit for her. The ashtray they shared was on his stomach. Suddenly she found it easier to speak of Rube.

  “It all happened so fast. I saw the stallion charge and his horse rear over with him. It didn’t seem like I was that far away. If I had reached him sooner, before the stallion trampled him, he might not be dead now.”

  “If you had reached him sooner, both of you might be dead. You can’t think like that, Diana. There was no way of predicting what happened. The only thing that might have saved him would have been getting him immediate medical attention. It was too far away.”

  “I’ve known Rube all my life. Yet, in all these years, I never once guessed that he thought of me in any special way. I just took him for granted, the same way I did with Guy. They were just conveniently around when I . . .” The sentence trailed off as Diana sensed the sudden stillness that had come over Holt. She stared at the smoke curling from the cigarette and the ashes building on its tip. They had been so close. Now Holt had withdrawn. “I wish I hadn’t mentioned Guy,” she murmured.

  “It doesn’t matter.” He crushed out his cigarette and handed her the ashtray.

  “It does matter! You keep accusing me of being sexually involved with him, that we’re having an ongoing affair. It isn’t true.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Holt repeated in a hard, flat tone.

  Tears stung her eyes as she snubbed out her cigarette. “Please.” The muscles in her throat had constricted, making her voice husky and taut. “I don’t want to argue with you about Guy, not this time.” Not the way they had done every time before in the aftermath of their lovemaking.

  There was a pause as he inhaled deeply and released the breath in a long sigh that bordered on regret. “Neither do I, Diana.” Holt turned on the mattress, caught her chin in his hand and kissed her, but he didn’t let it deepen into passion. He slipped his arm from beneath her and sat up on the edge of the bed.

  Love sprang from the eternal well of her heart. Rising, Diana moved to where he sat, her hands gliding over his shoulders to circle his chest. She pressed close to him and kissed the fading white scars lining his back with crisscross marks. It was a release of deep emotion rather than a desire to have him make love to her again. Gently, Holt unwound her arms from around him and partially turned to set her away, ending the embrace without rejecting it.

  “It’s almost noon,” he said.

  Nodding, she made no attempt to reach for him as he rose. Diana remained in bed, watching him dress, feeling she had the right to such an intimacy. Her gaze kept being drawn back to the scars, her blue eyes clouding over with question. Holt turned and intercepted the look. He hesitated, then reached for his shirt, hiding the old marks from her sight.

  “My father beat me when I was a child.” Holt buttoned his shirt, seemingly indifferent to the words he had just spoken. “He was a rodeo clown. My mother showed me pictures of him. He followed the circuit, so he wasn’t home much. I used to wish that he’d never come home. Every time he did, I got a beating for something, and once he started hitting me, he couldn’t stop. My mother would be crying and begging him to quit, but I was usually unconscious by the time he stopped.”

  “Oh, my God, Holt, no!” she choked out the protest.

  “I was eleven when a bull crushed him against a fence and broke his leg. He came home for a week after he got out of the hospital. He had a rawhide quirt and he used that on me instead of his hands.”

  “But surely there was someone—your teacher, a neighbor ...”

  “That was before adults ever admitted there was such a thing as child abuse. What a parent did to a child was his business, enforced by the excuse that the kid probably deserved it.” His mouth quirked cynically.

  “But surely there was something that could be done about it, wasn’t there?” Her mind recoiled from the idea that he had been hopelessly trapped in the situation, with no way out.

  Holt didn’t answer immediately, taking an abnormal amount of time tucking his shirttail inside his pants. “A few months after he whipped me, my mother told me he was coming home for the weekend. When she went to buy groceries, I ran away. I swore he was never going to beat me again. Two days later the police found me and brought me back. My mother was home alone. She said he was out looking for me and he’d promised never to hit me again. But when he came home and I saw the look in his eye, I knew it had all been a lie. He started yelling at me for upsetting my mother and worrying her out of her mind. When I saw the quirt in his hand, I ran for my mother’s bedroom. Because she was alone so much, he had insisted she keep a loaded shotgun in her closet. I remember him saying once that if you were going to shoot something at close range, a shotgun was better than a handgun. I don’t know if it was in my mind to scare him with it, or kill him. I cocked it and pointed it at the door. When he came through, I pulled both triggers.”

  Diana felt sick. She knew she had gone white. Holt’s face was impassive, registering no emotion. He buckled his belt and reached for his boots.

  “There were never any charges filed, because of the circumstances and the fact that I was a juvenile. But they put me in a home for a few months, then released me to my mother. We moved away then ... to Arizona.”

  “I... I’m sorry.” It seemed such an empty thing to say.

  “If I had the moment to live over again, I’d do the same thing.” Holt walked out of the bedroom.

  It was several minutes before Diana recovered enough to rise from the bed and dress. There didn’t seem to be anything left to say when she joined him in the main room.

  “I have to check on one of the horses. I’ll see you at lunch.” He held the screen door open.

  “Yes.” Polite phrases that avoided the stark truth they both knew. Son hating father ... in the past and in the present.

  A brisk ride in the warm, morning sunlight had not eased her conscience. Rube’s funeral was tomorrow, but the depression and guilt Diana felt had nothing to do with his death. She walked her horse slowly to the stables, skirting the main buildings in an effort to avoid others. She watched the horse’s head bobbing from side to side as it walked.

  “Diana! Hey! Come on over!” A voice broke through the mist of her mind. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going for a ride? I would have come along.”

  At the sound of her name, Diana had automatically stopped her horse. On her left were the gasoline barrels, mounted above the ground on steel supports. Beyond them was the old trailer that Guy had partially restored as living quarters. He was sitting in a dilapidated lawn chair, half the webbing broken. The chair was in the shade cast by the trailer.

  “Come on over and talk to me!” He motioned toward her. There was something unnatural both in his voice and his actions.

  The temptation was to ride on, as if she hadn’t heard him, but it was hardly possible now that she had stopped and looked in his direction. With a sigh, she turned her horse into the narrow gap between the supports for the gasoline barrel and a machine shed.

  “It sure is hot this morning, isn’t it?” Guy didn’t move from his slouched position in the chair when she reached his trailer.

  “It isn’t too bad.”

  “Get down. Get down.” He waved her off the horse. “Sit with me and talk.” He rose from the chair, swaying unsteadily for a minute. “You can sit here. I’ll get another chair from inside.”

  As Diana dismounted, Guy walked very erectly into the trailer and c
ame out with a second lawn chair in equally bad condition as the one he had offered her. He set his beside the one she was to occupy.

  “How about a cold beer?” There was a faint slurring of his speech.

  “No, thank you.”

  “I think I’ll have one. Be right back.” He smiled and went inside the trailer once more.

  Stacked around the chair were a half-dozen empty beer cans, the aroma fresh in the air. Diana realized that Guy had been drinking, and it wasn’t even noon. She sat carefully in the lawn chair, and the thin webbing held.

  “Sure you don’t want a beer?” Guy came back out with one in his hand.

  “No, I don’t.”

  He sat down in the chair beside her, slouching into his former position. He took a swig from the can, then stared at it, something sad flickering across his sensitive face.

  “It’s Rube’s beer,” he said. “The boys gave it to me when they divided up his stuff. Floyd took his watch and Don wanted his wristwatch. I was going to take his radio, but the damned thing didn’t work.” Guy laughed at that and looked at Diana. “Are you sure you don’t want to have a beer on old Rube?”

  “I doubt if there’s any left,” Diana murmured dryly.

  “There’s still a couple of cans,” he assured her.

  “I’ll pass.”

  “You know”—he leaned his head back to stare at the sky—“we ought to have a wake for Rube. He’d like that. A rip-roaring, beer-busting wake. Shoot some craps, maybe. He loved dice. How he used to talk to them! He was a lousy poker player, though. You could bluff him out of any pot. He loved to gamble, but he was afraid to risk a dollar. Did I ever tell you he taught me how to gamble?”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “He was a lousy teacher.” Guy sighed and drank some more beer. “He didn’t have any family, did he?”

  “None that he ever talked about. The Major thought he had a sister somewhere, but Floyd thought she had died a few years ago. They’re trying to find out.”