Tame the Wildest Heart

by Parris Afton Bonds

  He watched her fingertips wipe a trickle of perspiration from the hollow created at her throat by her collar bones. She was totally unaware how sensual the action was.

  That he could find this wretched female sensual, even for a mere moment, amazed him. Her stubby fingernails had half-moons of dirt beneath them.

  Had she no dignity, no sense of propriety? He had hoped to leave women like her behind, back in the childhood years of blight.

  He forced his gaze back to the map. The only thing more wrinkled was the surrounding landscape. “The way I figure it, our best possibility for finding Bingham and his cache is along the San Miguel River. One end empties near the Barranca del Cobre, the other runs north through the Sierras to the border and Apache Pass.”

  “What does she look like?”

  Gordon glanced up. Head canted, she was peering at him over the glowing tip of her cigarette. The sight of her smoking was incongruous with her childlike frame.

  He put away the map and flexed his hands. They hurt. He was getting too old to be throwing punches. “Diana? Golden like a Greek goddess. Gold skin. Gold hair. Gold eyes. So much light, it almost hurt the eyes to behold her.”

  Mattie stubbed out her cigarette in the sand. “Gold always did blind the beholder.” She rose and tugged the rumpled skirt down over her narrow hips. “Better be putting some miles behind us, Halpern.”

  He didn’t know whether to be angry or amazed. Wisely, he kept silent. He had little recollection of his mother, so his childhood experience with women was limited. Perhaps, because of this, he found the species fascinating. And he found Mattie McAlister especially fascinating. She was so maternal. When discussing Albert, her features took on a protective, aquiline fierceness. Yes, she was most definitely a fascinating creature.

  As the day wore on, his fascination with her was in inverse proportion to the climbing heat. Ahead, on the western horizon, gray-brown humps and mesas of the Sierra foothills promised shelter and shade.

  Midafternoon brought the distinct shapes of trees. Only scruffy mesquites and scraggly cottonwoods in shallow canyons. Heavier timber in the higher ridges required several more miles of riding and several more hours.

  A sideways glance toward the northwest told him that he wasn’t likely to make it to the security afforded by the mountains. A stew of brown clouds bubbled and boiled on the horizon. It hadn’t been there a quarter of an hour before. “Mattie—”

  “I know. I’ve been watching it for some minutes now. A dust storm. ’Tis moving fast and furious.” She pulled her red neck scarf up over her nose. She looked like a bandit, by God, if ever he saw one.

  She was the kind that could steal one’s certainty about truth and alter one’s philosophy of life by twisting it into an irreverent yarn. She confused him, by making bad seem good. And all the while laughing at the pomposity of manners. A bizarre character, she was.

  She pointed beyond the curve of a hill toward a rocky wall of a rising cliff some distance ahead. A darker area appeared to be a hollow in the limestone. “There,” she shouted through the flannel material. “Shelter!”

  Before he could knee his horse, she spurred hers. The Indian pony broke into a trot. His bay balked, then followed suit.

  Incredibly, within the space of a couple of minutes, a blast of wind and corrosive dust buffeted him. Mattie’s sombrero was whipped off, as was his own hat. Only the tie strings kept their hats from accompanying the tumble weed and other brush sweeping past them. The wind’s sudden roar obliterated all other sound.

  Immediate darkness the color of sandstone shrouded everything. Gordon couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of him and had to trust that his mount would instinctively follow Mattie’s.

  For a harrowing moment, he thought he had lost her. Then she materialized out of the biting alkaline haze. Her hand grabbed his reins and tugged his horse forward. In the lee of the cliff, the force of the wind dropped sharply. After he rubbed the grit from his eyes, he could see why—he was gazing into the cyclonic eye of a mine shaft!

  “Get down!” Mattie yelled.

  The dust storm might just as well have been an Arctic storm. He sat frozen in the saddle. Nothing short of the Second Coming was persuasive enough to beckon him enter that black portal.

  Mattie stared up at him, uncomprehendingly. “Halpern, ye got to get out of the storm!”

  She jerked hard on his arm, and like a block of ice he fell from the saddle. When she would have nudged him forward into that gaping hole, terror welled in his chest. His lungs felt like collapsed bellows.

  His terror must have communicated itself. At once, she stopped pushing and slipped around in front of him. “What is it, me love?” Her voice was still loud in order to make herself heard, but there was a cooing in its tone. Her rough hand caressed his cheek. “Come along with me. ’Tis a grand place to keep us safe. Like bairns in the womb. Come along, now. We’ll not be going any farther than just inside the opening.”

  She lured him into the mine shaft entrance. He felt her hands on his shoulders, pressing him to sit. His back scraped against the rock wall. Sagging timbers coalesced in his vision. The sight should have made him bolt, but with her hand holding his, her shoulder buttressing his, he felt okay. An overturned wheelbarrow all but blocked his flight from the mine’s black maw.

  “Something ye said made me wonder,” she said, her voice soft now, “if your fear came from working in the coal mines. ’Tis so, isn’t it now?”

  “Yes.” Cool air wafted across his face, like the fingers of death.

  “Well, now. We all have fears that cramp our spirit. Me, I fear fire. I keep an eye on the hearth even. Just to make sure the fire is banked afore I sleep.”

  He knew she was talking to take his mind off his surroundings. He tried to respond intelligently, but words were on short supply.

  “Your house ever catch fire?”

  “No. Nothing so easily replaced.”

  Her little hand tightened in his. “Ye see, it happened six or seven months after Nantez took me captive. By then I had given birth to Alicia. Me daughter by Reggie. Nantez’s band was on the move again. He had attacked the Mexican town of Galeana.”

  She paused, and he heard her rasp of breath. “Mexican soldiers from Casas Grandes had tracked us down and attacked that portion of the band traveling with Nantez. Thirty-two warriors and a few women and children. He directed us to take cover in an arroyo. The men stood off the Mexicans while we women dug holes for the warriors in the dry little creek bed. Nantez and his men are good shots. They picked off the Mexican soldiers as fast as they appeared.

  “Then the soldiers disappeared. Nantez suspected a ruse. After dark the Mexicans set fire to the grass, hoping to burn us out. We were surrounded by a prairie fire, the circle of it drawing closer.”

  “And?” he asked, caught up in her story.

  “Alicia was crying.” Her baby’s cry had had that same low keening as the wind outside. “Nantez told me that if I didn’t quiet her . . . he would choke her. I . . . I couldn’t get her to stop crying. I was forced to watch him choke her. So that her squalling wouldn’t give away our movements. We all crawled through the fire. Got away without being seen.”

  She was trembling. He released her hand and put his arm around her thin shoulders to draw her against him. Her head drooped against his chest. Her hair smelled of wood smoke and dust.

  He didn’t know how to comfort her, so he talked. As she had. “Just after my eleventh birthday, my mother abandoned me. Ran off with a Methodist minister. I was big for my age. I got work in the mines. High-grade ore, we mined. Three candles a day to keep the darkness at bay for ten hours.

  “Day after day, year after year of darkness. It got to where only my sheer will forced me go down into the mines. The poverty, the soot, the dark depths of the mines became nightmares that I beat back by boxing.

  “One day a dynamite cap went off in the tunnel I was working. Two other men and I were trapped. They died from their injuries bef
ore rescue came. Three days I lived with their bodies, their rotting bodies touching mine.”

  “I assume that at that point, ye had wee desire to pursue the underground profession?”

  The light tone of her voice eased his panic. “I never was more sure. When I emerged, I kept going. All the way to Pittsburgh before a promoter saw me boxing and offered to stage a bout for me. In my off hours, when I wasn’t training or fighting, I began a self-education program. Read all the classics at the local library, then—”

  A muted neighing interrupted him. “Sonofabitch! Sonofabitch!”

  He looked down at her. “What?”

  She was already shooting out of his clasp and charging toward the mine entrance. “Pepper!”

  “What?”

  “Our horses!”

  He caught up with her just outside the entrance. Driving dust got into Gordon’s nostrils and inside his mouth and ears. Searing wind hurled him against her. “Are you crazy? You can’t find them in this!”

  She tried to pull away. He held her tight against him.

  “Don’t ye understand? Without horses—out here—how long do ye think we’d last afoot? Without water or food?”

  He half-pushed, half-dragged, her back inside the rocky cavity. Grabbing her shoulders, he whirled her around to face him. “Listen to me, Mattie. Don’t be so damned hardheaded. If anyone goes after the horses I do. I have an affinity for the darkness. I can feel my way around—I guess it’s like a second sight. I just know.”

  Her compressed mouth didn’t indicate a readiness to yield.

  So, he added, “Besides, I’d rather go anywhere than back inside the mine.”

  The resistance seemed to leave her body, that small body. She was no taller than he had been at nine-years-old. “All right, Halpern. I give ye half an hour. Then I’m going out meself. After the horses, not yourself, ye understand?”

  His laughter was short. “So, it’s come to this. I’m not even a match for horseflesh.”

  He left then, before she could change her mind. With his neck scarf over his nose and his chin tucked against his chest, he leaned into the wind and started walking. It was foolish, because the two horses could have wandered off in any direction.

  Still, he hadn’t been lying to Mattie. Call it blind instinct, but he had learned to rely on another sense. That sixth sense that had no name.

  He stumbled over something, a cholla cactus, but caught his balance in time. The land rose and fell beneath his feet with gullies and hills. After a few minutes, his eyes began to detect and distinguish shapes. Trees that looked like scarecrows. Boulders that were blobs.

  Sand abraded his skin and stung his eyes. The resulting tears formed tiny mud cakes on his face. Something moved across his field of vision. The horses?

  No! Someone!

  He shouted. The wind stole his voice. He staggered into the wind. Drew closer to the other person. Shouted again. The other turned, saw him, then began to run in the opposite direction. In that fraction of a moment, he got a glimpse of the ghostly figure’s features: Indian. Unmistakably Indian and unmistakably a boy in western clothing.

  “Wait!”

  The kid charged ahead, into the shroud of sand.

  A dozen thoughts darted through his mind. The kid might not be Albert. Even if he were, he obviously did not want to be found. To go after the kid meant losing track of the horses. Hell, it might mean getting lost himself.

  He turned his steps back toward the familiarity of a rock-crusted ledge, rising out of sight in the dust. The wind pushed at his back, hurrying him.

  Abruptly, he spun around, cursing his foolishness even as he trudged back into the unknown. There was one chance in a hundred of stumbling over the kid again. He had to have lost all sense of good judgment out here.

  Despite the face handkerchief, he inhaled sand through his mouth and nostrils. “Damn you, kid! If I catch your red hide, I’m . . .”

  His words couldn’t be distinguished from the growling, rasping wind, but yelling made him feel better. “You little shit, you haven’t—”

  His boot struck something. He went sprawling. Quick as lightning, the kid was atop him. A butcher knife, no less, pressed against his throat.

  Surprise had been on the kid’s side. Strength and experience were on Gordon’s. He jackknifed to one side. The kid was thrown off.

  They both scrambled to their feet. Dust swirled around them as they circled each other. Admittedly, the kid was agile. He glared at Gordon with what had to be centuries of accumulated hate.

  “Give me the knife,” Gordon ordered.

  The kid lunged at him, swiped, and missed.

  Gordon didn’t. He chopped the kid’s wrist with the side of his hand. The knife flew beyond his vision. The kid’s face showed panic. This time he didn’t give him a chance to bolt. He snared the kid around the waist and hauled him up against his side.

  “Put—me—down!” Kicking, punching, squirming, howling. “—cos—Naat’-aani!” Indians words mixed with English.

  Gordon couldn’t help it, he started laughing. This infuriated the youngster even more. Gordon continued with his burden in the direction that he could only hope led to the area of the mine shaft.

  Now, he wasn’t so sure. All his declarations to Mattie about his affinity with the darkness had been vainglorious. The tussle with the kid . . . he had lost his sense of direction. Damnit, had he passed that depression in the rock before? Was he gradually climbing? Or, mayhap, descending?

  “Goddamnit!” he cried. The kid had bitten him.

  Taking advantage of his loosened grip, the kid struggled free and took off at a Kentucky Derby gallop. Let him go! Good riddance! Gordon thought.

  Yet, if Zwigenhut hadn’t gone after him after he had lost that first fight, hadn’t brought him back, hadn’t encouraged him . . . .

  He had been only a few years older than this kid. And someone had cared about him. Just not his mother. That scrap of humanity known as Mattie McAlister cared about her child. That was enough.

  He took off at a lope, his long legs covering twice the distance as those of the kid’s. Ahead, the boy was a blur. He tackled his quarry, smacked it hard against bedrock, heard the breath whoosh from the boy’s chest.

  Then he half-dragged, half-propelled the kid back in the direction of the mine shaft. At least, in the direction he hoped was the shaft. He grunted. “If I had your mother’s knife, kid, I’d scalp you!”

  He couldn’t see anything by now. His world was reduced to an hourglass, and the sand was running through its waist faster than he could move. Where in the hell was the mine shaft?

  Just when he was cursing the run of his luck, he collided with Mattie. “Oh my God, Halpern, I thought ye were a goner!” She tugged him inside the mine shaft, where there was no wind, no sand. It was a womb. “Sonofabitch, where have ye—”

  He deposited the kid before her.

  Her reaction surprised both Gordon and the boy, but probably not the species of humans known as mothers. She glared down at the seething mound of bones and flesh and black hair. The boy’s longish hair, hanging over the collar of his fringed leather shirt, was matted with dust.

  She jammed her fists on her hips. “Albert! Do ye realize that ye haven’t done your sums and you’re missing school to boot?”

  The kid grinned up at her with genuine contriteness. New ragged-edged teeth made his smile look like a picket fence.

  She dropped onto her knees, grabbed him against her breasts, and began rocking, crying, crooning.

  Gordon stared down at the two. How had he gotten himself entrapped with this pair? He had wanted only to rescue Diana. He would do anything to get her back. The possibilities were looking dimmer by the moment. As dim as the sand-blasted sunlight.

  Should he even stumble upon Nantez’s camp, as he had stumbled upon the subchief’s son, how could he even begin to hope to carry Diana away when seventy-five or more warriors stood ready to carve his heart from his chest?

  And t
hen an idea lit the darkness of his hopes. Before him, he had the answer. An exchange of one soul for another.

  § CHAPTER SIX §

  Mattie trudged along beneath the sun’s broiling light. Behind her, Albert dragged his feet. Beside her, Halpern’s long strides indicated his impatience.

  Impatience could be a deadly thing in the desert. Ahead lay steep mountains, rugged canyons, cliffs, rough lava beds. In between, a burning, bleached desert. A goat skull they passed attested to the land’s sun-struck fierceness.

  The sandstorm had driven them farther from their quarries—Nantez, Diana, Bingham—and their mounts. The driving wind had obliterated any hoof tracks. Reason pointed to the refuge the mountains offered.

  Thirst parched Mattie’s throat. Blisters bubbled on her feet. Hunger rumbled her stomach. Occasional dizziness distorted her vision. Sweat and her body’s salt had dried her calico shirt. She knew she smelled rank as a wet mongrel.

  Her thoughts naturally turned to her present folly. As of yesterday afternoon, she had her son back. But she did not have, would not have, any recompense for pursuing Nantez and his captive, Diana Halpern. She, Gordon Halpern, and Albert were without mounts, food, and water. To continue would be to court death. Anyone with half a mind could see that she should turn around and return to Fort Lowell.

  Yet she had Albert at her side precisely because of the very same man who was dependent upon her to get him to his wife. She felt obligated. She had a debt to pay.

  She squared her shoulders. “Mister Halpern, I’d like to suggest we repair to yon cactus.”

  He looked down at her, as if the sun had indeed fried her brain. “What?”

  “That agave. We’ll find—”

  “Shade? I doubt that, seriously. Cool water? I doubt that, too. And my stomach growls for something more than cactus pulp. A thick, juicy steak would be more to my liking. The kind served up in the American Restaurant at Philadelphia’s ’76 Centennial Exhibition. Now if you think you can—”

  “Your palate will be satisfied, I assure ye,” she interrupted him, directing her steps toward the agave. Actually, it was a scattering of the cacti. Hardly an oasis.