The Romantics

by Peter Brandvold

  Hotchkiss’s attention was on the plump little brunette in his lap, a pleasure girl in a skimpy pink dress hiked high enough on her leg to attract more than a few lusty stares.

  Cameron made it to the table and stood there silently for half a minute before Hotchkiss rolled up an inebriated eye and saw him. “Well, look what the cat dragged in!”

  “I see you’ve been worried about me,” Cameron said. He turned his gaze on Jimmy Bronco. Two beer mugs sat before the lad. One was three-quarters full, one empty, with webs of froth stuck to the insides. The kid stared into space with a dreamy smile.

  To Hotchkiss, Cameron said, “I told you not to give the kid liquor.”

  “That ain’t liquor—it’s beer.”

  “It has the same effect.”

  The kid’s head wobbled, turning, and tipped back. “Hi, Jack,” Jimmy said thickly. He grinned.

  Cameron looked down and saw that his holsters were empty. Probably Hotchkiss had the kid’s pistols tucked inside his own gunbelt. Cameron was thankful for that, at least.

  “You get him?” Hotchkiss asked Cameron.

  “Yeah, but I lost the body in a canyon. I don’t have proof. Already talked to the jackass the Army sent, and he won’t take my word for it.”

  Hotchkiss frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we don’t get the reward.”

  Hotchkiss’s face mottled red and his eyes opened wide. He removed his hands from the girl’s legs to the arms of his chair, as though to shove himself to his feet. “Well, that’s a goddamn crock!”

  “I know it is, but I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it. It’s my own damn fault.”

  “Tell ’em to go check it out their own selves!”

  “I did. They won’t. Sorry about the money, Bud. I know you were counting on it.”

  Hotchkiss ran his hand down his beard and blinked his eyes as if to clear them. “Well, you were, too. No use cryin’ over it. At least you got the bastard.”

  “Did you bury Pas?”

  Hotchkiss nodded sourly. He picked up a full shotglass and tipped it back, draining it, then slammed it on the table. He smacked his lips. “We might be out a few hundred dollars, but at least we ain’t restin’ toe-down!”

  “Not yet, anyway,” Cameron said, his countenance dark as he thought of his Mexican friend and the family Pas had left behind.

  “You get the Indian, Jack?” Jimmy said, not having followed the conversation.

  Cameron scowled and shook his head. He started away, but before he had taken two steps, Hotchkiss said, “Oh, Lordy … Run, Jack, while ye still can.”

  Cameron looked at him, puzzled. “How’s that?”

  Hotchkiss was looking at something or someone across the room, behind Cameron. “She’s comin’ for ya. Been askin’ about ya. Said you promised her one thing or another last time you was in town. She’s said it before, about other men, and they ain’t been seen since. Go, Jack! Go!”

  “Who’re you talkin’ about?”

  “Too late,” Hotchkiss said. “She’s on you like an Apache on a wagon train.”

  A finger jabbed Cameron’s shoulder, and he turned to see the pouting red lips of Dinah Maxwell. She was a redhead, pretty in a hard sort of way, about thirty years old. She wore a dress so low-cut that her full, powdery white breasts appeared about to spring from their lacy nest. She clutched a silk shawl about her slender shoulders and squinted one teacolored eye like a schoolmarm. She came complete with a distinguishing mole about two inches left of her nose, a full, brightly-painted mouth, and feathers in her hair.

  “Well … hi, Dinah. How ya doin’?”

  “Just fine. Where have you been keeping yourself, Jack Cameron?”

  “Well, I been—”

  “Been making yourself scarce around here, haven’t you?”

  “Have I? Well, I been busy, Dinah.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Don’t you give me that horsecrap, Jack Cameron! I know when I been hornswoggled.”

  Cameron was flushed and feeling faint with hunger, boneweariness, and now this. “I did pay you for your services, Dinah.”

  Hotchkiss gave an uproarious laugh. Cameron didn’t look at him.

  Dinah stepped forward and took Cameron by the arm. “Come on. We have some talking to do, mister.” Cameron tried pulling his arm away. Dinah hung on.

  “Listen, I’m awful sorry if I offended you last time I was in town, Dinah, but I’ve been on the trail for more days than I have fingers to count, and I just need some food and sleep.”

  “Food and sleep, eh? Maybe a drink or two?”

  “Possibly,” Cameron allowed.

  “Right this way.”

  Dinah tugged on his arm. Too weary to fight her, he let himself be led through the jostling crowd, toward the stairs. He glanced back at his friends. Hotchkiss slapped his knee with laughter. Jimmy Bronco just stared into space.

  Cameron let Dinah lead him up the stairs, as several cowboys below jeered and whistled. Ignoring them, Cameron concentrated on keeping the saddlebags draped over his shoulder, and on negotiating the steps, which seemed to grow steeper and steeper as he climbed.

  “You poor dear, you really are run ragged, aren’t you?” Dinah said as she slipped the key in her door and turned the knob.

  “Yeah, I really am. If you don’t mind, I’d really just like to put my feet up for a while,” Cameron said as she led him into the room.

  He let Dinah take his rifle and let the saddlebags fall off his shoulder as he collapsed on a red velvet settee under a gilt-framed painting of Dinah. Dinah liked to tell her visitors that a renowned artist had painted the portrait—which showed her reclining, cloaked in only a slender pink boa, on the very settee on which Cameron was now collapsed—when she was dancing on the best stages in the East. She was a little trimmer back then, and there were fewer lines around her eyes, but Cameron had to admit she was still a finelooking woman, considering all the years she’d been doing what she did.

  He tried to remember what promises he had made last time he was in town, but his mind was too sluggish to offer any clear answers. Besides, he’d probably been drunk on Dinah’s liquor—some of the best Spanish brandy you’d find this side of New Orleans.

  Now Dinah tugged off his boots, then went over to a big walnut dressing table and poured a glass of brandy. “Now you just relax right there and drink this while I go over to Crow’s Kitchen for a big plate of food.”

  She handed Cameron the brandy and waltzed out of the room.

  Cameron sat back, tossed his hat onto a wall peg, and sipped the brandy. As he swallowed, something very close to a smile widened his unshaven cheeks and brightened his eyes. He was beginning to realize how, given enough brandy and the kind of manly comforts Dinah Maxwell was so adept at dishing out, he might have promised her things he wouldn’t ordinarily have promised anyone.

  He took another sip of the brandy, feeling a warm glow spread up from the pit of his stomach, feeling as though his stars were realigning themselves.

  Go easy now, he told himself. Take it slow with the liquor and don’t get yourself into any more compromising situations … you goddamn idiot.

  But the liquor did taste mighty good. He managed to crawl up from the settee and pad across the room on his creaky legs and in his sweaty socks and pour another glass all the way to the brim. He had just settled down when the door opened and Dinah entered with a plate covered with a napkin in one hand, and a napkin-covered wicker basket in the other. The smell of roast beef and onions mingled with the French perfume Dinah always wore.

  She stopped to kick the door closed, then set the plate and basket on the dresser. “Those clods didn’t even have a tray—can you imagine!” she exclaimed. “Sometimes I wonder why I stay in this dump.”

  She removed the brandy and the other glasses from the silver service, set the plate and basket on the tray, and carried it over to Cameron.

  “Lordy, something does smell good,” he said, dropping hi
s legs to the floor and pushing himself to a sitting position. The smell of the food invigorated him.

  “They were about to close up over there, but I told them you were in town, and hungry, and Mrs. Harvey didn’t bat an eye.” Dinah gave him a sharp look of inquiry. “You haven’t been making promises to her too, now, have you, Jack?”

  Cameron sighed. “None that I know of, Dinah.”

  “Well, that’s not much of an answer, but there you go. Dig in.”

  She pulled the napkins away, revealing a plate heaped with several thick slabs of roast beef, slightly charred at the sides and smothered in onions, and a hill-sized pile of fried potatoes overflowing with rich, dark gravy. Next to the potatoes sat a mound of baby carrots boiled in butter.

  In the basket nestled three sourdough biscuits, still steaming from the warming rack; their warm fragrance complemented the beef and gravy so well that Cameron’s stomach let out a yelp. His hands shook as he seized the knife and fork and plunged them into the beef.

  He ate like a ravenous animal. Dinah lay back on the bed and lit a thin cheroot, grinning at him and smoking.

  “Get enough?” she said, when he’d mopped the dregs of the gravy from his plate with the last of a biscuit.

  Still chewing, Cameron set the plate on the floor and nodded. He washed down the gravy with a slug of brandy, kicked his feet out, and slumped down on the settee.

  “That was one fine meal, Miss Maxwell,” he said, thoroughly grateful.

  “Well, I’d like to say I cooked it, but I only fetched it. It was Mrs. Harvey who did the dirty work.”

  “Just the same, I’m much obliged.” Cameron suppressed a belch, covering his mouth with his hand.

  Dinah took a long drag off the cheroot, turning her head sideways, then tipping back her chin as she blew smoke at the canopy over the four-poster bed. “But you know, Jack, I can cook, and I’d be obliged to cook for you regularly if you’d give a girl a chance.” She flashed her eyes seductively.

  Cameron smiled. “I appreciate the offer, Dinah, but you know me. I’m just a dirty old bachelor from the desert. Ain’t fit for civilized company. Throw one of those over here, will you?”

  “Don’t give me that hogwash,” Dinah said, taking a cheroot from her bedside table and tossing it to Cameron, followed by a box of matches. “I think you’re just shy.”

  Cameron lit the cheroot and waved out the match. “Well, I’m somethin’.”

  “You can’t grieve forever, you know.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Over Ivy Kitchen. She’s dead these six long years, Jack.”

  “Six years,” he said with a sigh. “It’s been that long?”

  “Six years she’d been dead, and you’re still alive. You gotta start actin’ like it.”

  She paused. They looked at each other soberly.

  “Another drink, Jack?”

  “Why not?” he said.

  She got up and poured them each another drink. She set the decanter on the bedside table and lay back on the bed, cheroot in one hand, glass of brandy in the other. She crossed her legs invitingly.

  “My Donovan died back during the war,” she said after a while. “Suicide. He had mining interests out here and they all dried up when the fighting began. He couldn’t take it.”

  “I didn’t know you were married.”

  She nodded. “I had to do something so I started dancing again, and eventually … well, turned to what I’m doing now. I know it ain’t respectable, but I didn’t have any other choice. There ain’t too many choices for a woman in the West, and I didn’t have the money to go back East.”

  “I never been much of a saint myself,” Cameron said, and sipped his brandy, feeling the warmth of the food and liquor in his belly. But he also felt a strange melancholy, talking about such things as Ivy Kitchen and not facing up to life the way he knew he should, but couldn’t.

  What the hell was he still doing out here, anyway, in this godforsaken country? Why didn’t he go up and settle in Nebraska or the Indian Nations where it didn’t take so damn much land to graze a single beef, and where it rained once in a while and flowers bloomed and trees greened up the way they should?

  It sure would be nice to see a river again—a real river with eddies and rapids, not just a trickle of brackish water in a bed of sun-bleached gravel. He’d like to see geese again, as well—big honkers following the snowmelt rivers back to Canada.

  “So what do you say, Jack? Will you make a respectable woman out of me?”

  He looked at her and saw her brown eyes on him. They were so vulnerable and tragic that they broke his heart. To cover it, he took a drag from the cheroot and forced a thin smile. He was about to undercut the question with an attempt at humor.

  She sensed it coming and said, “Don’t turn it into a joke.” Her voice was thin.

  He watched her for a moment. “I can’t,” he said finally. “I … I don’t love you, Dinah.”

  Her expression remained serious for about five seconds. Then a smile grew. She laughed. “Well … hell, Jack, I don’t love you, either!” she said. She laughed again and sipped her brandy. “I wasn’t talkin’ about love. I was talkin’ about shackin’ up together and keepin’ each other’s feet warm in our old age.”

  Her laugh made him feel hopeless and pathetic, and he suddenly wanted to leave. He finished the brandy and stood up. Her eyes followed him.

  “Stay with me, Jack. I’ll make it worth your while.” She smiled. “Free of charge. No strings attached.”

  Suddenly she looked like a child. Despite how bad he felt and how tired he was, he knew he couldn’t leave her alone. She was having one of those dark nights of the soul he was only too familiar with. Such nights brought him to Contention City or Tucson every few months, to lay with women he did not love, and to talk—for the comfort of human company. Not that Jimmy Bronco was not company, but sometimes a man needed a woman.

  Dinah Maxwell had fulfilled that need for him in the past. The least he could do was return the favor.

  He put his hand on her leg and she pushed herself into a sitting position beside him. He took her in his arms and kissed her.

  “I … I haven’t had a bath,” he said. “My horse smells better than me.”

  “I love the way you smell,” she whispered, pushing herself against him, kissing him, running her hands down his back, pressing her fingers into the weary muscles above and below his shoulder blades. Her hands felt so good he almost groaned with pleasure.

  Finally she pulled away from him and stood. Giving him a seductive look, she loosened her hair and let the lush, rustcolored mass fall about her shoulders. She stepped out of her shoes with practiced grace and peeled the dress down her shoulders, exposing her pear-shaped breasts.

  She was good … very good, Cameron thought halfconsciously, beneath the passion he felt stirring in his loins. Any woman who could get his temperature up, after what he’d been through, knew what she was doing. Part of him considered marrying her but, tempting as it was now, as he watched her step toward him naked, he knew it wouldn’t work.

  He simply did not love her and she did not love him. He had not yet become so cynical as to marry a woman he did not love, no matter how much he liked her or how well she satisfied him in bed.

  Cameron pulled his sweaty tunic over his head, then fumbled with his holster.

  When he’d unfastened the buckles, Dinah tossed the belts aside and helped him with his pants, then unbuttoned his undershirt, pressed her hands deep within the hair at his chest, and ran them down his hard, knotted belly to his groin. Finding his stiffening member, she slipped it out of his undershorts and gave a groan of passion.

  Cameron collapsed on the bed with a sigh.

  WHEN THEY’D FINISHED making love, Dinah fell asleep but Cameron could not. She was used to the loud music and the voices booming throughout the building. Cameron was accustomed to quiet nights interrupted by only the occasional yodel of a lonely coyote.

  Sleepless, h
e lay in the bed for a time, hands crossed behind his head, staring out the window. Finally he got up and dressed quietly. He strapped his gun and cartridge belts about his waist, picked up his saddlebags and rifle, and headed for the door.

  At the door he stopped, dug in his pockets for some coins, and set them carefully, without a sound, on the marble washbasin. He squeezed the doorknob, turned it, and opened the door.

  “Good night, Jack,” Dinah said quietly, half-asleep.

  “Good night, Dinah.” He thought for a minute. “Hey? If I promised you anything last time I was in town—”

  “Oh, you didn’t promise me anything, Jack Cameron,” Dinah said, turning onto her back. “I was just trying to get old Hotchkiss’s goat. See ya next time?”

  Cameron smiled. “Next time.”

  He stepped through the door, closed it softly behind him, and walked down the carpeted hall. Laughter and squeaking bedsprings sounded behind nearby doors. Downstairs, men and women were singing an Irish ballad to the tinny pounding of the player piano.

  He did not want to walk through the saloon, so he headed for the back steps, which clung to the outside rear of the building. Once in the alley, he looked around to get his bearings, then headed in the general direction of Ma Jones’s Boarding House.

  CHAPTER 14

  GASTON BACHELARD KICKED his gray horse up the rocky ridge and inspected the night-cloaked valley below. A little ranch nestled there in a canyon, starlight glinting off the corral and the thatch-covered adobe barn and cabin.

  It was hard to tell in the dark, but there seemed to be three or four horses in the corral. The breeze, from behind Bachelard, must have brought the scent of his horse to the corral, for the animals whinnied and snorted and danced around, shaking their heads.

  A dog gave several tentative barks and growled. The buttercolored lamplight in the window of the adobe hut disappeared, replaced by reflected starlight.

  Bachelard smiled. He turned to the men next to him. “I’m going to ride around the back of the house, and approach it from there,” he said. “You men stay here for about ten minutes. Give me time to disarm our friend Martinez. Then corral your horses and join me in the hut.”