Bed of Roses

by Rebecca Paisley

  “Lorenzo!” she shouted at the old man.

  Curled up in a ball on the sagging bed with Mariposa, Lorenzo continued to snore.

  “He is asleep,” Pedro announced from his spot on the floor, where he was busy adding to his net. “Dreaming about a land flowing with milk and honey. Poor Lorenzo, he is afraid that I am going to turn him into a pillar of salt. I thought about doing that when he would not help me get my net up here. But I did not do it. Maclovio brought my net up here for me. To thank Maclovio for his help, I am going to wash his feet with my hair and—”

  “Lorenzo!” Sawyer shouted. He pulled Zafiro to the bed and shook Lorenzo’s shoulder.

  The old man opened his eyes and smiled. “Tia is making potato cakes and she said I could have as many as I wanted. There is no one in the world who can make potato cakes like Tia—”

  “Can you open this lock?” Sawyer shouted into the old man’s ear.

  “Clock? No, there is no clock in here, but if you want to know what time it is, I will teach you how to read the hour by studying the way the sun makes shadows on the land. It is a simple way to—”

  “Lock!” Sawyer shouted again, his lips so close to Lorenzo’s ear that the old man’s hair tickled his nose. “I need you to open these cuffs because Zafiro can’t find the key!”

  “Pee?” Lorenzo scowled and pointed to a small pot in the corner of the room. “That is what Maclovio, Pedro, and I use, but I do not think you should use it in front of Zafiro because—”

  “Key, not pee!” Sawyer yelled. “Dammit to hell!” So frustrated that he could barely see straight, he thrust his cuffed hand in front of Lorenzo’s face, hoping the old man would understand the problem.

  Lorenzo looked at the cuffs. “You are wearing handcuffs. Why?”

  Sawyer’s anger rose dangerously close to fury. “Take them off!” he shouted so loudly that he swore he heard his brain rattle.

  “Cough?”

  “Off!”

  “Tia makes a good cough remedy with honey, lemon, and—”

  “It’s no use,” Sawyer muttered. “I can’t make him understand a damn word.”

  Zafiro quickly intervened. Using her fingernail, she pretended to pick the lock, knowing her simple action would help him to understand.

  Lorenzo’s face split into a smile. “You want me to open these cuffs? Well, why didn’t you tell me? There is not a lock, safe, or bolt in the universe that I cannot open.” Using Mariposa as a grip, he took hold of the powerful cat’s head, pulled himself into a sitting position, and smiled when Mariposa licked his hand. “Ciro, he used to say that the Quintana Gang could not have survived without my skills. I got the gang out of jail—”

  “Just open the cuffs, for God’s sake!” Sawyer blasted.

  “Cake?” Lorenzo stood and ambled to a large chest of drawers that sat between two open windows. “You will have to wait for your potato cake, just like the rest of us, Sawyer. I do not know why you think you can have yours before we have ours. That is greedy.”

  “Sawyer, my handsome stallion!” Azucar exclaimed as she hobbled into the room.

  Sawyer smacked his own forehead when he heard her voice. “God help me,” he whispered. “The whore of yore.”

  Sensing Sawyer’s forbearance had almost reached its limit, Zafiro patted his shoulder and shook her head at him. “Try to be nice.”

  “Nice?” he yelled. “Nice? I’m handcuffed to you for what might be forever, I’m trying to get a sleepy old deaf man to cooperate, in only a few seconds I’m going to be ravished by a walking antique, and you expect me to be nice?”

  “Heist?” Lorenzo removed a black leather case from the top drawer of the dresser and returned to the bed. “Yes, the Quintana Gang pulled hundreds of heists, and only the Night Master ever got the better of us.”

  “Come with me, Sawyer,” Azucar said, eyeing his groin, “and I will grant your deepest desires, your wildest fantasies.” She ran her hands down the sides of her torso.

  “Sit down, please, Zafiro and Sawyer,” Lorenzo instructed.

  “I have to sit down, Azucar,” Sawyer told the old woman.

  He sat down on the bed with Zafiro and, his every instinct trained on the elderly prostitute, watched as Lorenzo opened the black case. A set of tools lay neatly inside: an assortment of metal picks, two pairs of pliers, several stiff cards, a variety of knives, and an instrument that looked to be a surgeon’s scalpel.

  Lorenzo picked up the scalpel-looking instrument. “A glass cutter,” he announced, smiling a wide, toothless grin. “Thanks to this little blade I robbed jewelry stores without ever setting foot inside the establishments. I just cut a hole in the front window, dipped my hand inside, and helped myself to whatever jewelry was on display. One time I even did it in broad daylight during a town parade. I think that was somewhere… Well, I do not know where that was. Everyone was so involved with the festivities that no one saw me near the store.”

  He reached for one of the metal picks, a long, slender implement whose tip curved and resembled a cat’s claw. “Of course, I did not keep all the jewelry,” he hastened to explain, bending over the lock on the handcuffs. “Some we sold for money and some we gave to people who had nothing.”

  With trembling fingers he inserted the pick into the lock. “Once I gave a pearl bracelet to a poor farmer’s wife who had served us all a chicken dinner. She and her husband both fainted. It was good chicken that she made, worth every pearl of the bracelet. Fried, if I remember right, with crispy crust—”

  “Concentrate on the cuffs!” Sawyer exploded. “Not the chicken dinner!”

  “Thinner?” Lorenzo continued to work the pick inside the lock. “Yes, I am thinner now than I used to be. I think it is because we rarely have any meat. Now, please be quiet while I open this lock.”

  He leaned over even farther, laying his head on the mattress while he continued to move the pick within the metal opening of the lock.

  And then he began to snore. The pick fell from his fingers and clattered to the floor.

  Sawyer felt a tic begin in the muscle in his jaw. “I can’t believe this,” he whispered. “I just can’t—”

  “He must have had to get back to his dream about a land flowing with milk and honey,” Pedro ventured, still tying knots into his net. “He is a good man, Lorenzo is. I remember when he gave the pearl bracelet to the farmer woman. I also remember when he gave a solid gold pocket watch encrusted with rubies to a ragged little boy who was in a field calling in his goats. Lorenzo hid behind some rocks, caught one of the goats, and tied the watch around the animal’s neck. Then he let the goat go and sat back to watch what would happen. The boy found the shiny watch and started to dance with joy. All the angels and saints in heaven sang on that day.”

  “Zafiro,” Sawyer seethed under his breath.

  “Yes?” she asked sweetly, maintaining her smile even when she saw Sawyer’s terrible frown.

  “We didn’t come in here to listen to stories,” he whispered harshly. “I want these cuffs off.”

  “Well, you will have to wait, Sawyer. It is story time right now. We do this every now and then, you know, so no one will forget the past.”

  He stared at her. He’d forgotten his own past, and she wanted him to listen to the daft old men’s stories?

  He started to stand, but felt a sharp pain shoot through his cuffed wrist when Zafiro yanked him back down again.

  “Zafiro, I am not staying here to listen to age-old tales of adventure.”

  She looked directly into his eyes, wishing with all her heart that she could see what thoughts were going on behind them.

  Something about holding her father’s gun had reminded him of his own past. She knew he remained deeply upset over whatever he had remembered or even partly recalled.

  He wanted to be alone. She realized he did. But she knew also that the lighthearted stories her men would soon relate would be good for Sawyer. The heartwarming tales would most likely take his mind off his problems.r />
  At least for a while. “You will stay here, Sawyer, because I am staying, and that is the end of it.”

  Having scolded him, she turned her attention back to her charges. “I remember when you did a good deed too, Pedro. We were in Nuestra Senora de las Rosas, and you met those two little girls who were crying because their friends were making fun of them for believing in miracles.”

  “This is unreal, Zafiro,” Sawyer snapped quietly. “We’re handcuffed, and you want to tell stories?”

  “Yes,” she said without looking at him. “Pedro, do you remember the girls?”

  Pedro smiled. “They were sisters, and they lived in a little hut made of sticks and mud. In the front of the hut they had planted purple flowers. Their mother had recently died, and their father worked on a nearby hacienda until very late at night. The girls, they made their own supper—nothing but tortillas with a bit of grease spread on them. They were the poorest of the poor. They did not even have shoes to wear, isn’t that right, Zafiro?”

  “Yes, but you changed that with a little miracle, didn’t you, Pedro?” She glanced at Sawyer again, suppressing a smile when she saw the expression of grudging interest on his face.

  “Pedro told the girls to pray for help from heaven, Sawyer,” she explained. “He said that with help from heaven their father would not have to work so much and that they would have more time to spend with him. They said their prayers right in front of him. He kissed them on their cheeks, then pretended to leave. But he did not leave. Instead, he sneaked into their little hut and placed a treasure map on their father’s straw mattress. Then Pedro buried some gold and a few jewels near the river that ran near the town. The father found the treasure by following the map. The next time we visited Nuestra Senora de las Rosas, the family lived in a very nice house and the father owned his own shop.”

  Sawyer looked at Pedro and Lorenzo. A gold watch-bearing goat and a treasure map. The two old outlaws had certainly come up with unique ways with which to share their wealth. He wondered what sort of things Maclovio had done during the gang’s days of riding together.

  “Do not forget Maclovio’s kindnesses,” Tia said from the doorway, where she’d been listening to the exchange for the past few minutes.

  Sawyer smiled. “I was just wondering about that.”

  “A mother always knows what her child is thinking, my little Francisco.” Balancing two trays of food and drinks in her hands, Tia proceeded into the room and set the trays on top of the dresser. “Not only did Maclovio once give his beloved horse to a man who did not have one, but I once saw him risk his own life to save a kitten.”

  She interrupted her own story for a few minutes while she made the plates of dinner, filling hot tortillas with potato cakes, fresh sliced tomatoes and onions, and sprinklings of chopped green chilies.

  “We had stopped by the seashore and were enjoying an afternoon near the water,” she went on, passing out the plates as she talked. “There were rocks in the surf, and Maclovio and the other men walked out on them. While there the men heard a cry, almost like a baby’s, and Maclovio soon spotted a tiny white kitten in the waves. Ciro, Lorenzo, Pedro, and Jaime, they tried to hold him back, but Maclovio jumped into the water. The sea was rough that day, and the waves dragged him down several times. But he saved the kitten.”

  “And you kept the kitten, Zafiro?” Sawyer asked, deciding that Maclovio had probably given the little animal to her. He picked up one of his potato-filled tortillas, bit into it, and closed his eyes in appreciation. Tia was certainly a bit touched in the head, but she was a damn fine cook.

  He wondered if his real mother had been as equally skilled in the kitchen.

  “Maclovio saved the kitten several years before we found Zafiro in the basket, Francisco,” Tia said, passing out drinks of lemon-flavored water. “If I am thinking right, he gave the kitten to a kindly shopkeeper who was troubled with mice.”

  “That is right,” Maclovio said as he lurched into the room. “I gave him to a shopkeeper. And do you remember what you did for that man, Tia?”

  Tia waved her hand at him. “I did nothing for him—”

  “You did.” Shaking his head and rubbing his face in an effort to clear his alcohol-sodden mind, Maclovio sat down on the floor to eat next to Pedro. “He did not have a wife to cook and clean for him. You spent two days cleaning his house and shop, and you also made meals for him.”

  “I offered him a free night in my arms,” Azucar stated proudly, taking a seat on the bed and pulling up her dress so she could swing her bare leg. “But he did not accept my offer. I think he was too shy.”

  “All of you were and still are wonderful,” Zafiro claimed. “Don’t you think so, Sawyer?”

  Sawyer saw her gaze touch each of the old people in the room, including the sleeping Lorenzo. There was no doubt she loved them and they loved her. They might not be her blood kin, but the relationship between them was every bit as close and devoted.

  He wondered if he had a family somewhere. People whom he loved and who loved him in return. If so, had they given up ever finding him?

  He ran his free hand through his hair.

  “There is a special place in heaven for all of my men, Sawyer,” Zafiro continued, wondering what had caused the faraway look on his face. “My father and grandfather, they are already in their special places, but Luis will not have one. That is a man who will burn in hell for all of eternity.”

  “But he must die first,” Maclovio said. Bowing his head, he looked at his half-eaten meal and set his plate aside. The sadness he felt both diminished his appetite and sobered him. “The past… When I think about the past… There have been many times when I have wished that things had been different. My good friend Jaime, gone. And all of us living here. Hidden away from the whole world.”

  “Are you saying that if you had it all to do again, you wouldn’t be a thief?” Sawyer asked.

  “No, that is not what I am saying. It is true that thievery is wrong, but we helped many people. For that I am not sorry.”

  Zafiro nodded. “All money has a top and a bottom.”

  “There are two sides to every coin,” Sawyer corrected her.

  “Yes, and that includes the coin of thievery,” Zafiro said. “The Quintana Gang was never selfish.”

  “And we only robbed the rich,” Pedro added. “But not even from the very wealthy did we take more than we needed.”

  “That is right.” Maclovio exhaled a great sigh, then took a deep, shuddering breath.

  Watching the big man, Sawyer realized this was the first time he’d ever seen Maclovio sober. The drunken slur had vanished, and Maclovio was actually making sense.

  Sawyer wondered who the real man was inside Maclovio. Oddly enough, he found himself looking forward to meeting the true side of the outlaw. “What would you do differently, Maclovio?”

  “Luis,” Maclovio growled. “If I could do things in a different way, I would have killed him with my bare hands the day I first realized he was not like us.”

  “And when was that?” Sawyer queried.

  Maclovio hoisted his large frame off the floor and began to walk around the room. “He had been with us for only two days and was sixteen years old. Young, yes, but old enough to know that baby birds need their mother.”

  “You did not tell me this story, Maclovio,” Zafiro said. “What happened?”

  “He shot a mother bird right out of her nest. I saw him do it, and I grabbed him straight off the ground. He said I was mad over nothing. That it was only a bird. It was then that I knew in my heart that he had no feelings. No compassion or consideration for anyone or anything. That is the day I should have killed him.”

  “You have never killed anyone, Maclovio,” Zafiro stated.

  “That does not mean that I will not. When Luis comes, I will kill him.”

  Sawyer took note of the fact that Maclovio said when, not if. “You’re sure he’s coming?”

  “We all are,” Pedro answered emphati
cally. “If Zafiro feels danger, then danger comes. It must be Luis. He swore to find her. Her gift is more valuable to him and his gang than anything he could ever try to steal, so do not think that he has forgotten her.”

  “I will kill him,” Maclovio repeated, balling his hands into tight fists.

  “And I will help you,” Pedro promised. “Luis is the devil’s doing, and we must not allow such evil to continue. It is every man’s responsibility to destroy any evil he finds.”

  “I know nothing about killing,” Tia said, “but I will do whatever I can to keep Zafiro safe from Luis. There have been many days and nights when I am afraid to even wonder where he is.”

  “Sometimes I see him in my dreams,” Azucar admitted. “I remember him so well that it is almost as if I just saw him yesterday.”

  Watching a tear slide down Azucar’s wrinkled cheek, Sawyer knew instant pity. Old women shouldn’t have to be afraid, he thought. They should be allowed to spend their final days in peace. “Luis is probably miles and miles away from here, Azucar,” he tried to comfort her.

  No one in the room made a reply. By the looks on their faces Sawyer realized his comment hadn’t reassured a single person.

  They all believed—knew—Luis would come.

  And Sawyer began to wonder about the bastard too. “But how can he find you?” he asked, hoping to dispel some of the gloom. “Ciro did a great job hiding this place the way he did. If no one else has found you—”

  “The devil will find a way to tell him,” Pedro said. “Even now Satan is probably whispering into Luis’s ear.”

  “If you will just be still for a moment, I will open the lock,” Lorenzo said, awakening from his little nap. “I—” He broke off when he saw the expressions on all their faces. The women appeared afraid. Maclovio and Pedro’s eyes glittered with hatred. “Luis,” he said. “You are talking about Luis. Only talk and thoughts about him cause all of you to feel such fear and hatred.”

  Everyone nodded at the same time.

  Absolute silence crept through the room, heightening the sense of fear, the apprehension of pondering the unknown. Like a wicked sword that cut out tongues, the silence rendered everyone mute, challenging someone to break its unnerving power.