Heart of the West (26 page)

She twisted her head away. She sucked in a breath, and then she, too, caught sight of the wolf. She tensed, but she didn't scream. Rafferty thought of his gun, hanging on his saddle horn, too far away. The lobo was definitely alone, a renegade cast out of the pack. It moved stiffly as if its limbs were frozen, and its ribs showed skeletally beneath its matted gray hide. Its lips were curled back from its teeth in a growl, though it made no sound. Saliva drooled in foamy globs from its mouth.

"Atta Boy, stay!" Rafferty shouted. But the hound charged down the bank at the wolf. They met in a brief frenzy of gray and pale yellow fur and snapping teeth before Atta Boy yelped in pain and ran off with his tail deep between his legs.

With a strangled snarl the wolf leaped into the river and came at them.

Rafferty thrust her to the ground and threw himself on top of her just as the wolf hit the island with a spray of water. Rafferty flung up one hand as the wolf lunged, his fingers digging into the animal's neck, while he groped for his knife with the other. Bloodstained teeth snapped, barely missing his eyes, spraying foam and strings of saliva and bathing his face with fetid breath. The flesh and fur beneath Rafferty's fist vibrated with the growls that were trapped in the wolf's convulsing throat. At last his free hand closed around the hilt of his bowie.

He stabbed the blade deep into the wolf's neck and ripped it open.

Blood gushed, spilling over his hands, splashing onto Clementine's face.

She uttered not a sound, although she thrashed with her arms and legs, heaving against his back and shoulder, which had her trapped. He flung the wolf's body off them and hauled her to her feet. He dragged her into the deep part of the river and pushed her head under the water. She came up sputtering, then began to scrub frantically at her face and hair. "Get it off of me," she said in an eerily controlled voice. "Get it off."

He pushed her under twice more before he was satisfied that the river had washed away the wolf's blood and saliva. Shudders racked her body. Her hair was plastered to her skull. Her mouth fell open, her lips white and trembling. His hands hovered over her face, needing desperately to touch her.

"Clementine... Oh, dear Christ, Clementine. Did he bite you?"

She started to shake her head. Her gaze became caught in his and she grew still. Her eyes were turbulent green seas, deep and dark and forbidden, and he fell into them. His hands clasped the sides of her head and, with a low sound of despair, he brought his mouth down over hers.

His kiss was hard and desperate. He was being too rough and he tried to soften the pressure of his lips, but he wanted her, oh, God, but he wanted her.

One of her hands clenched in his hair, the other gripped his waist. Her lips moved beneath his, hungry and seeking. They opened, inviting his tongue. He drank of her, growing dizzy from her woman's taste and smell. He crushed her against him, pressed the length of his body to hers, felt her quiver, swallowed her moans, and somewhere, somehow found the will to stop.

He tore his mouth from hers and thrust her away from him. He gasped for air, his heart and lungs straining.

She brought a trembling fist up to her swollen lips and turned her face away, as if everything inside her would shatter if she had to look at him. She pushed her knuckles hard against her mouth. He wanted to lay her down and undress her slowly, and kiss and touch every inch of her. He wanted to spread her legs wide and bury his face between them and lick and suck her there until she came with soft cries and small tremblings and deep yearnings.

His hand came up to touch her, because he could no longer bear another moment of not touching her. "Clementine—"

Her palm swung up and around, striking his cheek with such force that his head snapped to the side. She pulled back her hand to hit him again, but he grabbed her arm.

The slap kept echoing until it faded into the sounds of the river. They stared at each other, breathing hard. The fire surged and crackled between them again, raw and violent.

"Don't touch me!" she cried. She tried to pull away, and that was when he saw the smear of fresh blood, the gaping cut on the white inside of her arm. Terror whipsawed through him with such force that he swayed.

"I thought you said he didn't bite you!" he shouted, his voice guttural with fear and unleashed hunger. "Dammit, woman, did he bite you?"

"I don't know, I don't know! Why?" She shuddered and backed away, pulling against his grasp on her arm. "Oh,
God,
I hate you."

He let her go and then gripped her face hard between his two hands. "Clementine, look at me, listen to me. That lobo had rabies."

Her head moved, shaking a denial. Horror filled her eyes. "Oh, God," she whispered, "what am I going to do?" And he knew the question, and her terror, had nothing to do with a rabid wolf.

He swung her up into his arms. She stiffened and pushed against him, but he pressed her head into the curve of his neck and spoke to her softly. "Lie still, lie still. I'm only taking you back to the cabin."

She went quiet as he waded across the river and climbed the bank.

Gus had just begun to nail the siding onto the framework of the new house. When he saw them emerge from the cottonwoods, he threw down his hammer. He cut across the furrows of the freshly mown hay meadow in an awkward, staggering run.

"Clementine!" Gus stumbled to a halt before them, his chest heaving. He saw the blood on her arm, and his face went stark white. "Jesus, Jesus, Zach, what's—"

"A rabid wolf attacked us down at the river," Rafferty said. He pushed past Gus, unable to look into his brother's face, to meet his brother's eyes when he could still taste his brother's wife on his lips.

He carried Clementine into the cabin and laid her on the coffee-case couch. Gus halted in the doorway. "You sure it bit her?"

"No, dammit, I ain't sure." The way he'd been plunging her in and out of the water... The cut was ragged and deep. It could easily have been made by a submerged stick or a rock. Or teeth.

He reached for his knife and realized it was still in the wolf's neck. He swung around to Gus. "You got a toad-sticker on you? Give it here."

But he had to cross the room to take the knife out of the sheath at Gus's waist. Already a glazed look had come over his brother's eyes. Gus was running away inside his head as he'd done so often when they were kids.

"That wolf couldn't have been rabid, Zach. You said he attacked y'all down by the river. Rabid animals are scared of water."

"This one wasn't. He ran right through it to get at us."

"I'm going to ride to Deer Lodge for the doctor. Just in case." But he stood unmoving in the doorway, his hands hanging helpless at his sides. "I mean, he probably wasn't rabid anyway, 'cause rabid animals are scared of water. And you said yourself you don't even know whether he got to her."

Rafferty set the back of his teeth. He didn't say what he wanted to, which was that there wasn't a damn thing any doctor could do, whether the wolf had gotten to her or not. He used a poke to open the door to the round iron stove and squatted on his haunches before it. He dumped wood into its belly, then thrust the blade of Gus's knife into the freshly fed flames.

One day to Deer Lodge, one day back... And that sawbones over there was next to useless anyway. He spent most of his hours dead drunk in a whore's bed. It would take a whole day just to sober him up enough to fork a horse.

"There's an Indian cure I heard of," Rafferty said into a room so quiet he could hear Gus's harsh breathing. "They burn out the infected wound with a red-hot iron."

He looked over his shoulder. Clementine sat in stillness on the couch. She might have just been resting there, out of the heat of the day, except for the faint line between her brows and a tautness in her jaw. Gus still hovered at the door. He rocked from one foot to the other.

"Gus," Rafferty said, "you're gonna have to—"

"No!" Gus backed up, shaking his head. "No. No, I couldn't..."

"She's your woman, brother."

A retching sound tore out of Gus's throat. He whirled and stumbled outside.

Clementine's wide-eyed gaze, deep and still, fastened onto Rafferty. "You must do it for him," she said.

He swiveled around and thrust the knife deeper into the fire. His hand shook. A moment passed. The sound of a hammer pounding hard smacked through the heavy air. Then all was quiet except for the hiss and crackle of the burning wood.

"Do not tell me, Mr. Rafferty, that it won't hurt unbearably, that it will only singe off the hair and a bit of hide."

He shook his head, unable to force any words past the tightness in his throat. He put a tin cup brimming with whiskey into her hand.

"I don't know as how I dare to allow the devil's brew to touch my genu-ine, starched-up lady's lips," she said, staring up at him with eyes that were too wide and too bright.

"Drink it, dammit!" He drew in a ragged breath. "God, I'm sorry."

He laid his hand on the side of her face and tilted her head back. "I'm going to take a knife, Boston, a knife that will be hot enough to burn through leather, and I'm going to push it deep into that cut in your arm and hold it there while I count to ten and then count to ten again, and it's going to hurt much worse than any branding. Much worse than anything you could possibly imagine."

Her lips trembled, and her throat jerked as she swallowed. "There are times, like now, when I think I must truly hate you. But you've always been unfailingly honest with me. Don't ever stop."

He allowed his fingers to trail down her bare neck. He didn't know the smile he gave her was full of pain and tenderness. "Drink up. And then I'm going to make you hate me even more, because I'll be tying down your arm before I burn it."

She swallowed again, hard. "Oh. Yes, of course."

When he took the knife from the fire, it was white and glowing. She watched him with eyes that were dark and heavy-lidded with whiskey and fear. And then he did just what he'd told her he would do. He pressed the searing hot knife deep into the wound and held it there while her flesh hissed and burned and her arm jerked against the bindings, and he waited for her to scream, waited for it with a scream choking his own throat, and yet no sound came from her at all except for the breath sucking harshly in and out of her nostrils. It wasn't until he was untying her arm that she fainted, and by then he was shaking so hard himself he could barely manage to undo the knots.

It took him a long time to bandage the wound, because he was still shaking, and because he kept stopping to look at her pale, still face. When he was done, he lifted her into his arms and carried her into the bedroom. He laid her on his brother's bed.

He brushed away the drying wisps of hair that had caught in her pale lashes. Then he stepped back and back until he was up against the wall.

The air hurt his skin. He could feel each separate stroke of his heart. He looked at her. At her hair spilling across the pillow like tangled sunbeams. The gentle curve of her cheek. The soft, full lips parted slightly in sleep. The white slope of her brow. Each part of her brought him pleasure.

Somewhere between the time at the river when he had touched her face and kissed her mouth and now, standing with his back flattened against the wall unable, afraid, to breathe... somewhere deep inside him something had been shattered beyond repair.

And outside, the sound of his brother's hammer, pounding, pounding, pounding.

The blue of early evening had settled over the room by the time she awoke. Her eyes, luminous in the half-light, rested on him a moment, then moved to the window. Her lips formed a word, breathing it more than speaking it aloud. It sounded like "lightning."

She lay still for so long he thought she'd dozed off again. He could still hear his brother's hammer, though it had surely grown too dark to see a nail. He told himself that he could leave her now, but he stayed. A rising moon cast light through the window, glossing her face with silver. He felt something inside him tear, and it bled and hurt. Oh God, it hurt. After an eternity she turned her head and speared him with her gaze. "Come here, Mr. Rafferty."

His legs nearly buckled beneath him as he crossed the room. He leaned over her, and she reached up and grabbed his shirt, pulling him closer. For a wild moment he thought she was going to kiss him, and he was convinced his heart had stopped. When it started up again it beat in unsteady lurches.

But she only wanted to see into his eyes. "How long does it take to die of the rabies, once you've gotten it?"

He let his fingers hover over her cheek, desperate to touch her. Forbidden to touch her. He breathed in her name on a stab of anguish. "Clementine..."

Her grip on his shirt tightened. "How long?"

"I don't know. Days... a week, maybe." Too long.

"If I go mad like the wolf," she said, "you must shoot me."

He drew in a breath that clutched at his chest. "Christ Jesus."

She shook her head, hard. "I don't want to die raving and foaming at the mouth. Rafferty, please... Shoot me cleanly. Like you did the snake."

He could do that, he thought. For someone he loved.

The old biscuit-colored hound never came home.

Every day for over three weeks Rafferty rode out to look for him, in between the constant chores at the ranch. He always took his Winchester with him.

And Clementine knew the day he found him. When she spotted Rafferty from her bedroom window, riding into the yard in the middle of the afternoon. It was the way he sat his horse, stiffly and drawn deep inside himself.

He dismounted and the little orphaned calf came trotting up to him, but he shooed it away. Gus talked all the time now about how that dogie was going to be shipped off for slaughter next fall. It was some kind of test that Gus had set up for his brother. A dare. Like finding Atta Boy had been a test Rafferty had set up for himself.

He disappeared inside the barn. She didn't want to go to him.

Unlike Gus, he never tried to spare her or coddle her. He'd told her straight out it could be weeks before she would know if she had the canine madness. In the beginning she'd thought about it all the time, and her terror was like a moth trapped in her throat, fluttering there. But the sun rose and set and the days went on, and there was the washing and the cooking and the cleaning to get done and one couldn't live on the knifepoint of fear every moment.