Mittman, Stephanie (10 page)

Boy,
that little fellow could eat! The squash disappeared faster than a rabbit at a
coyote convention. And the water rag didn't seem to be satisfying his thirst.
He kept turning his head in Sweet Mary's arms and trying to find a teat worth
draining.

"There's
nothing for you there, Paddy," she said. "I'm not your mama." To
Sloan it wasn't clear who she was reminding, the baby, herself, or him.

"Ben,"
he corrected. "After my father. Which is just where he's going once we get
outta this mess."

"You're
taking the baby to see your parents?" Mary

Grace
asked. She was sitting with her legs spread wide, stretching the skirt like a
hammock for the baby to lie on while she changed his diaper. The cold of the
floor must have been freezing her little ass off, he thought, judging from how
cold she'd been down in the kiva, but she'd found a way to keep his son's
bottom from touching the floor.

"Gonna
give Ben to my mama to take care of while
I go back and thank the Tate boys
properly for what they done to me," he said. She'd had the fresh cloth
ready, and before the cold air even hit it, the diaper was over his little
pecker and she was pinning it in place.

"And
then you'll go back for the baby?" she asked around the pin in her mouth.

He
leaned over and added a slender stick to the small fire they had allowed
themselves.

"You
know we really should get those diaper pins with the little plastic part that
prevent them from..." she stopped and looked up at him. "Never mind.
They probably don't exist yet."

Did
she really expect him to believe that she was from the future somewheres? The
thought that it might be possible fascinated him. It was about the only thing
the Indians could agree on—Oak Creek Canyon. It wasn't just the Havasupai, but
the Yavapai and even the Apache and Navajo, too, who called the canyon the home
of the Great Spirit. The shamans had told him it was where they went to pray to
their ancestors and said that men could realize their true dreams and ambitions
there. The Indians themselves would never live in the canyon. It would be like
living in a church.

"Ow!"
The pin she'd been fiddling with stabbed her, and blood puddled on her
fingertip. She stared at it. "Well, then, I guess it's not just a
dream."

He
came over and bent his good knee, stretching his
stiff leg out next to him, and
took her hand in his. He tilted it until the firelight glistened off the
perfect scarlet dot. It was just a little pinprick, and he popped her finger in
his mouth and sucked on it for a second. Even in the dim light, he could see a
blush creep up her cheeks. He let go of her hand, and she pulled it back
quickly and finished seeing to the child.

He'd
sure pegged her wrong when he'd figured she was one of the Tates' women. It was
obvious she wasn't any too comfortable around men. Leastwise, any contact with
him seemed to make her uncomfortable. Oh, she was fine mouthing off to him the
way she did, and she could hold her own with the pain of riding and sleeping on
the floor and lugging around his boy, but when it came to the simplest of
touches, she seemed to go to pieces. She was trying to hide the fact, but those
cheeks of hers gave her away every time. Well, she had nothing to fear from
him. And she could thank Harlin Tate for that.

"I
didn't mean to be too forward," he said, standing upright again and trying
to look anyplace but at the rise and fall of her breasts as she tended his
child.

The
firelight played on her hair as if little lightning bugs were dancing around
her face. She waved his apology away with her hand.

"And
while I'm at apologizin', I might as well ask your pardon for the things I said
about you and the Tate boys. I guess I just thought, with you being in the
house with them, and takin' your clothes off all the time..."

Her
head spun around and her eyes opened wider than a snake's jaw. In the darkness
they looked all black, not the soft green he had seen earlier. Everything about
her was soft, from the wispy red hair that seemed to float around her face and
down her back, to the moccasins on her small feet.

"Taking
my clothes off?" She pretended to be looking
for something to wrap the baby
in, as though they were in a regular home and all she had to do was reach out
and grab a clean vest for him. She'd insisted Sloan take his shirt back after
they'd emerged from the underground room, but now he unbuttoned the cuffs once
again.

"So
you still say you're from the future?" he asked, fishing around for a
change of topic.
I
saw you at the river, naked as the day God made
you.

She
nodded. "I fell off a cliff. I thought I was going to die, but I landed in
a river, instead."
You saw, didn't you? You saw everything.

The
firelight caught the bracelet she was wearing, and he tried to get a closer
look without taking her hand again. Damned if it didn't look like a miniature
timepiece strapped to her arm.

"What
is that?" he asked, gesturing toward her wrist.

"My
watch? Surely you have watches. Even Scrooge checked his watch, and Dickens is
a lot older than the 1890s."

He
couldn't help picturing his father's pocket watch. A knot formed inside his
chest at the memory. "Course we got watches. I just ain't never seen one
tied to someone's arm before."

"Oh."
She looked surprised. "Wristwatches. This one is nothing. One of the guys
in my office has one with a calculator in it."

He
didn't want to ask her what that was. He hated feeling like a fool around her
when, after all, she was the one who was strange.

"I
fell off a cliff once," he said, returning the topic to her fall while he
shrugged out of his shirt and handed it to her to wrap around the baby.
"It was still 1888 when I landed in the creek."

"Well,
it was 1994 when I drove up to that ridge,
and if you're not just messing with my
head..." She paused, her eyes fixed on the wall behind him as if she
couldn't stand to look at his naked chest. He'd thought the two wounds on his
chest had healed pretty well, but she wouldn't even let her eyes wander to his
body. She searched the wall, the floor, the fire, his face. Anywhere but the
chest that was within her reach. He didn't want to think of how she'd feel
about the rest of his scars, the ones that were even lower. Not that a woman
like her was likely to see them.

"1994,
huh?" he said. His annoyance showed in his voice, and he made no attempt
to hide it. "Well, in 1994 do they sleep sitting up?" She was leaning
against the wall, her feet still spread, Ben asleep on her skirt, and she
shrugged as if she had no choice.

"He'll
be cold on the floor," she explained, as if he hadn't figured that out.

"I
told you before—I'm his papa. I'll see to him." He eased his way down to
the floor, not far from the fire, and reached his hands out. "Give him to
me. He can sleep on my chest, and we'll both stay warm."

And
me? How will I stay warm?
She picked the baby up gently without awakening him
and scooted over to Sloan. One arm acted as a pillow for his head, the other
reached out to take the baby and steady him on his broad chest. The firelight
caught two ragged circles on his lower right side, down near the end of his rib
cage. The bottom half of one of the circles disappeared into the waistband of
his pants. He took the baby and placed him over the scars. Embarrassed, she
turned away.

"Don't
sleep too far from the fire," Sloan warned her. His voice was sharp, and
she couldn't account for the sudden change in him. "It's gonna be a cold
night."

On
the opposite side of the small fire, she settled
down and tried to make herself
comfortable. The floor was hard and cold. Every muscle in her body ached, and
she shifted from one side to the other until she found a position that didn't
rest on one of her many bruises.

Except
for the crackling of the fire, the adobe fell silent. And yet, the quieter it
became inside, the more aware Mary Grace became of the noises outside. Was it
an owl's cry she heard in the distance, or an Indian sending a signal? Was that
a coyote? She heard a screech. Another.

She
raised herself on her elbow to see if Sloan was awake. "Mountain
lion," he said simply. "Go back to sleep." But she saw that he
had moved his rifle to within his reach.

"It's
a pretty fancy rifle, isn't it?" she asked, trying to fill the quiet with
the sound of her own voice.

"A
gift. It seems to like me. Lost it twice now, and each time it finds its way back
to me."

She
lay back in silence. Perhaps the man, like the mountains, had some kind of
magnetic force. On the inside of her eyelids she could see him, the Pied Piper
of Oak Creek Canyon, his rifle following him, and behind that, his baby, and
behind that, Mary Grace O'Reilly.

***

"But
won't the Tates just follow the horse's tracks right back to us?" Mary
Grace asked when she returned from relieving herself and saw the stallion
waiting on the mesa for them. Before he answered, Sloan handed her a cup of something
warm. He had managed to find some clay pots and had heated water in them. To
the water he had added pigweed leaves, which made quite a palatable tea.

"Climber
prefers the rocks to the desert. Either way, his trail should be impossible to
follow." He pointed to the horizon. "You see those clouds? Whole damn
trail ought to be washed out before noon."

"So
we wait here?" Mary Grace asked, taking the baby back from his daddy and
straddling her hip with him. She was surprised to find him dry. She smiled at
Sloan, but his attention was fixed on the sky, an ominous green color that made
the stillness around them even more unnerving. Far to the west she could see
black clouds that boiled on the horizon, rising up and reaching, reaching.
Clearly it wasn't safe to leave the shelter of the adobe ruins.

"Can't
stay here," he replied, placing his fingers in his mouth and whistling
across the flat land to the west. The horse raised his head and turned toward
them. Sloan whistled again, and the horse came running.

"They
all really do that!" Mary Grace marveled at Sloan's stallion just as she
had been surprised by Wilson's. "I really thought that they did that just
in movies and on TV."

Sloan
looked at her oddly, and she realized what she'd said. She shook her head. There
was so much she could tell him about, so much of more importance than
Bonanza.
He shrugged off her comment and turned his attention to Climber, stroking
the horse's nose, patting its neck. He reached into his saddlebags and moved
things until he found what it was he was looking for.

"Shoulda
taken this out last night before I let the damn horse go," he said.
"Don't know what I was thinking of." He pulled out a poncho-like
garment and handed it to her. Then he removed the sling he had carried the baby
in the day before, and put it over Mary Grace's head. But he put it on
backward, the knot between her breasts, and then took the baby from her
arms. He had a
way of touching her, at once intimate and yet impersonal, that unnerved her. He
touched her the way a man touches a woman, gently, his hands aware of her
breasts, her hips, the smallness of her compared to the size of him. And yet
she felt she could have been any woman, an anonymous someone of the female
gender. Oddly, she was disappointed. It wasn't like her to want to be noticed
by a man, and it left her confused.

He
tucked the baby into the fabric strap against her back. "He's got to go on
your back, or he'll get crushed between us. When we get onto the horse, put the
poncho over yourself and Ben. It'll keep you dry."

The
sky was darkening perceptibly. Mary Grace thought she could see the rain in the
distance, a heavy wall that moved closer and closer toward where they stood.

"But
why don't we just stay here?" she asked, watching him swing up easily into
the saddle. On the horse he was as at home as any man with two good legs.

"If
Mason has a brain in his head, they'll come back here when they see the storm
coming. If not for their own shelter, then because they know we know about this
place and they'll figure we'll come back." He settled her behind him and
tried to help her get the cloth over her head as best he could. He felt her
fumbling behind him and turned to see what she was doing. She had bunched the
poncho up in front of her and was trying to widen the neck hole.

"Just
put it over yourself. Ben'll be OK under it," he insisted.

"Are
you sure we should go?" she asked him again. "There's no sign of the
Tates."

"You
don't seem to be understanding me, Sweet Mary. The Tates are out there, and
they're hoping to kill me. I don't know what exactly they have in mind for
you."

She'd
seen the look in Mason Tate's eyes when he
thought she wasn't looking, sizing her
up as though he was checking the fit. To his credit, he hadn't touched her, but
she wasn't looking forward to ever seeing him again. And if they found her, it
wouldn't just be Mason, but Wilson, too.