Thunder Over the Superstitions

by Peter Brandvold

  “Just between you and me,” Jodi said, “Pima’s weak. He’s got a weak mind and a weak soul. You know. You heard him talkin’. And what’s more, I can’t trust him. He don’t have no integrity. I can tell by lookin’ at you, though, that you got integrity. You wouldn’t double-cross a girl who only wanted you to kill the man you already wanted to kill yourself and make you rich and give herself to you for an added reward.”

  She brushed her nose against Hawk’s jaw, and smiled.

  “Would you?” she asked.

  Hawk gazed at her, lifted his mouth corners slightly. He glanced down her shirt because he knew she wanted him to, and then he broadened his smile and narrowed his eyes lustily. “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “We got a deal, then?”

  “Deal.”

  The girl stared at him skeptically, considering. And then she reached into her pants pocket. Hawk had just finished using the rock behind him to grind through the rope around his wrists, and now he swung both arms forward, showing her his hands.

  “No need for the knife. But I will take a gu—”

  Miller’s voice cut him off. “Hey—what the hell’s goin’ on over there?”

  Hawk turned to see Miller running toward him on the left, climbing the rise and holding Hawk’s rifle across his hips.

  “Hey!” Miller shouted as he started up the rocks toward the camp.

  The girl looked from Hawk’s freed hands to Miller and screamed, “Pima, help!” She dropped the coffee cup and scrambled back away from the prisoner.

  The rogue lawman lunged for her, intending to grab her around her neck and take the pistol she usually carried wedged against the small of her back. But Hawk’s ankles were still tied, restricting his movements, and his fingers only brushed the girl’s chest before he fell forward on his belly.

  Miller’s boots thudded. His spurs rattled. Hawk could hear the man’s raspy breaths as he ran up the rocks. Hawk turned his head in time to see the killer standing over him, boots spread, glaring down and raising the Henry, barrel up.

  “I was just tryin’ to give him a cup of coffee!” Jodi screamed, feigning horror.

  “Why, you son of a bitch!” Miller raked out just before he rammed the brass butt plate of the rifle against Hawk’s right cheek.

  One more smack with the Henry laid the rogue lawman out cold.

  He didn’t know how much later he woke. All he knew was that for a seemingly endless time his slumber had been racked with a searing pain in his head. It had felt—still felt—like someone had sunk a hatchet through his skull. His belly and hips ached and burned. Making the pain in his head worse, all his blood had seemed to pool in his brain, feeding the tender nerves.

  His heart was two giant bells tolling wickedly in his ears.

  As he opened his eyes, he saw the ground passing in a brown blur beneath him. The rich, warm tang of horse and leather filled his nostrils. He looked around. He’d been thrown belly down over his own saddle, across the grulla’s back. That was the grinding he felt against his midsection. His wrists were tied even tighter than before.

  His ankles were also tied and hung down the grulla’s opposite side.

  As he rode, gritting his teeth against the clanging in his head, Hawk heard the girl and Miller talking, one of them leading the grulla. The girl was acting as though Hawk had jumped her. She was insisting Miller kill him and “get him out of their hair for good.”

  They wouldn’t need the reward money. Not with all the gold waiting for them in that old Mexican mine.

  Miller obviously, wisely, didn’t trust her much more than Hawk did. The killer wanted to keep Hawk alive until he was certain the mine was real and not just one of Jodi’s stories or a figment of her “tawny-headed imagination.”

  Hawk had to grin through his pain at that.

  And then he saw his opportunity to get shed of these two.

  They were traversing a razorback ridge. Just beyond him, a deep canyon dropped nearly straight down. What the hell? He couldn’t be in any more pain than he was already in.

  And he doubted he’d ever get another chance to free himself, another chance at hunting Miller down and killing him.

  What was the worst that could happen?

  That he’d join his waiting family?

  Hawk laughed soundlessly.

  With a low groan, Hawk funneled every ounce of his remaining strength into his arms and legs. He pitched and bobbed until he’d worked his knees up onto the grulla’s back.

  “Be seein’ you, old pard,” he muttered to the horse as, using his knees and elbows, he hurled himself into a somersault off the horse’s back and into the canyon.

  As he tumbled down the steep, shale-carpeted slope, he realized he’d been wrong. There was a whole other world of pain just waiting for him at the bottom of that canyon, grinning its snaggle-toothed grin.

  CHAPTER 15

  TORMENT CANYON

  “How you feelin’, sugar?”

  It was the voice of Saradee Jones—intimate and lilting, faintly raspy and familiar to Hawk’s ears. The outlaw girl’s voice spoke to him from far away, as though from the top of the very deep well at the bottom of which he lay.

  Of course, it wasn’t really Saradee speaking to him. He was only dreaming the voice as he’d dreamt the voices of Linda and Jubal, whispering into his ears, urging him to let go. To release this world of aching torment and endless grief, and to walk with them over the green fields of their new home.

  Where they would live together in serenity throughout eternity.

  “Feelin’ better? Why, I do believe you’re still kickin’, after all.”

  Saradee’s voice. Or his mind’s fabrication of her voice. She wouldn’t be in this canyon. They’d parted ways back in his hometown of Crossroads. She’d sensed, rightly, that he’d wanted to visit the graves of Linda and Jubal alone. He hadn’t seen her after that visit, had no idea where she’d gone. That wasn’t unusual. Their partings had always been spontaneous and without formality, just like their infrequent liaisons.

  They were not partners. At least, in Hawk’s mind they were not. A few months ago, she’d saved his life in a town called Trinity Ridge, when he’d been hanged upside down from a burning gallows by the Tierney Gang, and he supposed he was beholden to her for that.

  But for no other reason. She was an outlaw and a killer. Someday soon, he would kill her.

  Someone touched his shoulder, jostled him slightly. Her voice again. It was starting to annoy him because it was drawing him up out of the deep well of sleep again, and away from his misery. He wanted to remain deep inside the well. He felt that rising from it would only return him to an unbearable world of pain—one that he could feel hammering at him as though on the other side of a stout, log door.

  The pain was like a pack of hungry wolves yapping and howling outside that door.

  “Hey, Hawk,” Saradee said. Close now. Very close. Her lips seemed to be just off his left ear. “Haw-awwk,” she said in her lilting singsong.

  He opened his eyes, squinted against the pain that was like a railroad spike hammered through both ears. What his eyes finally focused on was something shiny. Shiny silver. A cross dangling from a rawhide thong down a girl’s neck, resting atop a deep well of dark cleavage exposed by the first few buttons of a well-filled hickory shirt.

  The girl’s neck and chest were lightly tanned. At the first downward slope of the cleavage, on the far side of the little valley from Hawk’s face, was a single, jagged-edged, whiskey-colored freckle.

  “Hey,” the girl said. “Quit starin’ at my tits. How ’bout some water?” She jostled a hide-wrapped canteen; Hawk could hear the water sloshing around.

  And then he realized how thirsty he was and that he’d been dreaming of snowmelt—of diving into a snowmelt stream and letting the water flow into his mouth, down his throat, and into his belly.

  Hawk lifted his head, which he then realized was being held up by the girl’s right shoulder. She lifted the canteen across her
well-filled blouse and the silver crucifix nestling at the top of her cleavage, shoving the flask toward his mouth. But Hawk found himself raising his right arm and wrapping that hand around the canteen, taking it from her.

  He tipped up the canteen, pressed the metal ring of the opening to his lips, and drank thirstily.

  “Easy, fella,” Saradee said as water dribbled down the corners of Hawk’s mouth. “It’s been three days. You drink too much too soon, you’ll founder.”

  Hawk couldn’t help himself. The water tasted too good. He pulled the canteen away from his mouth, filled his now-thirsty lungs with air, and then let the water wash down his throat once more, filling his belly. Instantly, it buoyed him, made him feel better. He was like a plant that had gone too long without water.

  On the other hand, for some reason, that hammering at his door now seeped through an opening, rapping that railroad spike from both ends. He hardened his jaws, gritted his teeth, pulled away from the girl, and leaned his head back against a wall.

  “Hell!”

  “Yeah, well, I told ya,” Saradee said, taking the canteen from him. “You oughta listen to Saradee. She’s here to help . . . just like always.”

  “Where in the hell am I?” Hawk said, dragging a ragged breath into his lungs.

  He felt a strange pressure around his head and reached up to feel a bandanna tightly wrapped around his forehead and tied in back. His fingers touched crusted blood at the front and back.

  Only then did he remember his tumble down the steep slope into the canyon—the raking, hammering pain in every joint, sharp rocks and cactus thorns biting into him.

  “Found this old shack,” Saradee said, looking around. “I think the canyon’s called Torment. Leastways, it says that on an old map I took out of the stage station. I reckon that would be fitting under the circumstances, wouldn’t it?”

  Hawk looked around. Stone walls, mostly ruined, rose around him. There was a brush roof over his head, but most of the roof of the small casa—probably an ancient Mexican rancher’s or herder’s hovel—had tumbled into the barren rooms. The floor was hard-packed desert caliche.

  Outside, the sun shone brightly off barren rock. A hot breeze slid a catclaw’s branches back and forth in a far window. The branches scraped softly against the old stone.

  A saddle and other tack lay on the floor around him. There was a fire ring mounded with gray ashes and a charred cedar branch. A coffeepot sat to one side, as did several other eating utensils, pots and pans.

  Saradee’s gear.

  Her words had been slow to penetrate his brain. Now, as they did, he turned to her sitting close beside him. “Stage station?”

  “Superstition. Shadowed you there.” She huddled close to him, wrapped her hands around his left bicep. “Just can’t seem to get shed of me, can you?”

  He stared at her, gave a wry chuff. He wasn’t surprised that she’d followed him. He wasn’t sure what she wanted from him. She seemed amused by him, somehow. Amused by his venomous quest for vengeance. It seemed to attract her, keep her dogging his heels, as though she were mesmerized by his singlemindedness.

  She was no more capable of love than he was, so he knew she didn’t love him. He had to admit feeling something for her, though.

  More than something.

  A insatiable hunger for her body, which, young, ripe, and supple, was impossible for any man to ignore. And once he’d fallen prey to this blonde-haired, blue-eyed succubus’s bewitching wiles, the man found himself thinking about her almost constantly.

  At least, when he wasn’t thinking about killing.

  “You followed me into the mountains.”

  Saradee sighed and let her hands flop against her thighs clad in skintight, light-blue denim under leather chaps. “Search me why I came. You’d think I’d have outgrown you by now, gone back to bank-and train-robbin’, cold-blooded murder and my sundry other wicked ways. But when I saw you pull through Albacurk, I just couldn’t help but dog you, see what kind of bailiwick you ended up in next.”

  She squirmed against him, kissed his cheek. Her sun-bleached blonde hair hung straight and long past her slender shoulders. It fell down both sides of her doll-like face bejeweled with the long, deep-blue eyes of an outlaw sorceress. They were crazy, taunting, eminently alluring eyes—even crazier and more taunting than Jodi Zimmerman’s eyes.

  She was similar to the other young outlaw woman whose path Hawk had recently crossed. But even Miss Zimmerman could learn a whole book of unspeakable lessons from the outlaw queen known as Saradee Jones, whom some said acted like a witch because she indeed was a witch.

  An outlaw witch.

  Pity the poor fool who let her sink her bittersweet claws into him, as Gideon Hawk had made the mistake of doing himself. Every time he laid eyes on Saradee, he rued the day he hadn’t killed her before she could lure him into her bed.

  Now, since she’d somehow saved his hide again—or, at least gotten a roof over his head and doctored his wounds—he knew he should be glad that he hadn’t drilled a bullet through her beautiful head. But he just couldn’t manage it.

  Hawk found himself staring at her in disbelief at both her beauty, the pureness of which belied her malevolence, and the fact of her presence.

  “That was you I sensed around Miller’s camp last night, wasn’t it?” Hawk said.

  “I was workin’ around you, tryin’ to figure a way to get you out of there. Wasn’t in much of a hurry, I reckon. I was kinda wondering if that randy little bitch, Miss Jodi, was going to lure you into the trap she was settin’.”

  Hawk chuckled as he grabbed the canteen out of her hands. “You must’ve been close.” He threw back another deep drink.

  Saradee snatched the canteen back from him. “You wanna founder?”

  She returned the cap to the canteen’s mouth and said, “I was scoutin’ from across the canyon when you pulled that fool move, throwin’ yourself off your horse. You fell a ways but you might’ve fallen farther. Got hung up on a ledge of sorts. Miller was going to shoot you but the girl—she’s a smart one, ain’t she?—she knocked his rifle away. Must’ve reminded him of the Apache danger. I reckon they figured you were a goner, anyway, so they moved on. I had a devil of a time gettin’ you off that ledge and hauled into the canyon. Rigged a travois, dragged you around lookin’ for shelter, found this place.”

  Saradee appraised their surroundings.

  “It ain’t much, but it’s been home now for the past three days. I reckon it’s grown on me. Don’t recollect stayin’ in one place this long in a month of Sundays.”

  “Three days, huh?”

  “Three days. I bet you gotta pee like a plow horse!”

  It was then that Hawk realized he was naked beneath a coarse army blanket. He lifted the blanket. Aside from a large bandage cut from a blanket wrapped taut around his ribs, and another couple of bandages wrapped around cuts on his legs, he was as naked as the day he’d been born.

  Saradee had even taken off his socks.

  She laughed. “Don’t worry, sugar—I’ve seen it before.” She winked at him.

  Hawk cursed. Not because he was naked, but from the general wretchedness of his situation. Little modesty remained in him. He flung the blanket aside, heaved himself slowly, heavily to his feet, setting his jaws against the hammering in his head, and stumbled barefoot and naked out of the shack. A few feet beyond the front door, he evacuated his bladder on a prickly pear.

  Saradee’s big palomino stood hobbled nearby, in a patch of shade between a couple of mesquites growing among the rocks. The horse lowered its head, whickered softly at the naked man watering the prickly pear. Hawk looked around, saw that they were in a slight bowl surrounded by low, barren hills.

  Almost straight to the west rose the finger-like formation of what was most likely the peak called Weaver’s Needle. Some old prospectors called it by its Spanish name, El Sombrero.

  The sun was blinding. That, coupled with the shrill, pulsating music of the cicadas, cause
d the ground to rise and fall around Hawk. He suddenly felt sick to his stomach. He grabbed the doorframe to steady himself but, twisting around, he dropped to his knees anyway.

  Saradee was there beside him, draping one of his arms around her neck, wrapping her own arm around his waist.

  “Easy does it, sugar!” Saradee said, grunting against the big man’s considerable weight.

  Hawk got his feet under him but his knees felt like wheel dope. He leaned against the girl but his knees were grazing the ground by the time she got him back to the crude pallet she’d made for him over leafy willow branches and burlap. Hawk lay down in the makeshift bed. He tried fighting against the nausea and the infernal swimming in his head, the pounding in his temples, but it was no use.

  Outside, thunder rumbled. He glanced toward the doorway, saw the white-hot light dim slightly. Another summer storm was moving in.

  More thunder rumbled like distant war drums. Hawk took that as a sign to give into his own weakness and the pressure of Saradee’s hands pushing him down, and flopped back against the pallet.

  He was asleep before his head had hit the saddlebag pouch that the outlaw girl had filled with sand for his pillow.

  When he opened his eyes, it was dark. A small fire burned nearby. It shone in Linda’s yellow-blonde hair as, straddling him naked, she rose and fell slowly, gently grinding against him. He looked down to see his wife’s hands with her gold wedding band pressed against his chest. As she lifted her hips, she leaned forward, pushing comfortingly against him. As she dropped back down to his pelvis, the pressure on his chest lightened.

  Hawk smiled. He was home. His smile broadened. His pain was gone. There was only Linda making love to him, her long hair obscuring her face as it cascaded down her shoulders to caress his chest, soft as corn silk, when she leaned forward.

  “Oh, Gid,” she whispered. “Oh . . . Gideon . . .”

  Behind her now in the firelight he could see the basinet in which their baby, little Jubal, slumbered among the quilts she’d sewn for him during her pregnancy.