Nightway (9 page)

This summer he had left his pickup at the hogan of a cousin, borrowed a horse, and ridden into the high country where his Uncle Crooked Leg had taken his sheep. Although his main hogan was the one a few miles from where Hawk had lived as a boy, his uncle had several dwellings scattered over the country because of the need to have grazing land and water for his sheep. The air was cooler in the higher elevations away from the desert floor, the summer heat less uncomfortable.

The two weeks always passed so swiftly. During
them, Hawk followed the customs of The People, observing their life-style and taboos. He used water sparingly, washing his hands and face as everyone did, since cleanliness was important. It was bathing that was so rare because of the large amount of water required. Since it was summer, most all of the family slept outside the hogan, but Hawk took care not to step over any sleeping person lest some unknown evil befall him. He avoided lightning-struck trees, never killed a marauding coyote or a rattlesnake. To Hawk, these superstitions were no more ridiculous than the white man’s mania about black cats, Friday the thirteenth, and walking under ladders.

Hawk worked, doing his share of whatever task was at hand. He sat in the sweatlodge with the adult males of his uncle’s family, singing the chants to the north and purging his body. In the evenings, he gathered with the others around the campfire, exchanging gossip and stories. Crooked Leg was having a government house built for his family, and he discussed this at length with Hawk since he lived in such dwellings. The main hogan would remain standing because the curing chants could be done only in a hogan. There were many questions from his relatives about Hawk’s life in the east where he attended college. In all the conversations, Hawk noticed the supercilious attitude his mother’s relatives had toward the whites. This arrogance was shared, in varying degrees, by all The People.

It was morning when he left his mother’s family. The August sun stayed until the evening hours. Night was drawing its curtain across the sky as Hawk drove the pickup into the ranch yard. He noticed all the activity around the main house and belatedly remembered that Chad was due back. An impromptu party was obviously in progress to welcome home the Faulkner son and heir.

Harboring malice or jealousy was foreign to his nature. Hawk had The People’s trait of accepting the status of situations that couldn’t be changed. Life went more smoothly that way.

With the truck parked in front of the Rawlins’ house, Hawk paused to listen to the beckoning sounds of laughter, music, and English-speaking voices drifting across the yard from the main house. It stirred a need in him different from the one that had taken him to the Reservation. He glanced down at the clothes he’d worn for several days straight at his uncle’s, clothes were washed as infrequently as baths were taken, then entered the house to shower and change.

A half-hour later he joined the party in progress. Drifting around the edges of the gathering, Hawk spoke to a few of the ranch hands, unobtrusively worked his way to the bar for a can of cold beer, and stood to one side to drink it and watch the others. He had just located the guest of honor, Chad, over by the buffet table with Katheryn when he observed his father approaching.

“I see you made it back, Hawk.” A smile accompanied the gravelly voiced greeting.

“Yes.” Hawk nodded and took a swig of beer. “Crooked Leg sent his greetings.” Unconsciously, he forced an acknowledgement of where he’d been the last two weeks.

“How is he?” The question was asked with interest.

“Fine.” His gaze strayed across the patio to his half-brother. Maturity had given Chad a sophisticated charm to go along with his good looks. At that moment, Chad glanced up, his gaze locking with Hawk’s for a fraction of a second before it shifted to the graying man beside him, then narrowed again on Hawk in vague suspicion. Someone distracted Chad and
Hawk let his gaze wander on. “Chad seems to be enjoying his homecoming,” he remarked.

“The party is sort of a personal celebration for Chad. I told him tonight that I was putting him in charge of managing my real estate holdings in Phoenix.”

The news came as no surprise to Hawk. For years his father had been grooming Chad to step in and take over part of the family business.

“He’s been trained for it.” Hawk stated the obvious.

“Next year you’ll have your degrees in business administration and political science. There’s quite a push on now to have minorities working in government. I won’t have any trouble arranging for you to be appointed to a high position in the state.”

Hawk listened to the plan his father laid out and watched the self-satisfaction settle in his expression. It was easy to read the dual purpose of the plan. His father was buying him the respectability of a high position to overcome his illegitimacy and mixed heritage. At the same time, he was acquiring a beneficial connection in a government office. Hawk had to admit there was a stroke of genuis in the plan, but his father invariably gained from his own actions. In this, he gained doubly because he would be assuaging his guilt about Hawk and putting one of his own in a position of influence.

“You have it all well thought out,” Hawk remarked and caught the scent of wildflowers. He anticipated Katheryn’s appearance before she interrupted his father.

“Yes, I—” he began.

“This is a party, J. B.,” she declared in her richly cultured voice. Hawk half-turned to see the woman approach, an arm linked with her son’s. “You shouldn’t be over here in a huddle.”

Amusement twisted at Hawk’s mouth. Katheryn allowed him to exist on the fringe of her family, but she jealously guarded any intrusion into the immediate circle. She regarded Hawk as some kind of threat to her son. This suspicion had rubbed off on Chad.

“Hello, Chad. J. B. was just telling me the news. Congratulations.” He reached out to shake hands with his half-brother, aware that Chad was testing his remark for envy or resentment.

“Thank you.” Then Chad turned to his father and Hawk found himself shut out of the conversation.

Draining the last of the beer from its can, Hawk let his attention return to Katheryn Faulkner. She had an ageless and aloof kind of beauty. Hawk wasn’t entirely sure why she commanded so much of his affection. Because of the death of his mother, perhaps he was regarding Katheryn as a substitute. Or possibly the matrilineal society of the Navaho had given him an inbred sense of loyalty to the matriarch of the family. His attraction to her was real; it wasn’t something that Hawk tried to figure out, but simply accepted.

He moved to one side to set his empty beer can on a patio table. Petticoats rustled near him and he turned to find Carol nearly at his side. The demure white dress was at odds with the beguiling look in her green eyes. Two weeks of abstinence had made his desires hunger for satisfaction. The sight of Carol whetted his appetite.

Her rose-colored lips curved in a provocative pout. “As late as it is, I don’t know why you bothered to show up.”

“I just got back.” He explained his tardiness without apologizing for it. “You didn’t really miss me—not with your beloved Chad here,” Hawk teased.

“Chad thinks I’m quite beautiful,” she retorted.

For once, Hawk was in full agreement with his
half-brother. Last summer he had noticed the way Carol was blossoming into a woman, the baby fat melting away to reveal round, firm breasts, a slim waist, and curving lips. He had noticed, and he had wanted, but she had been uneasy around him, changeable as the wind. Sometimes she had moved in a way designed to attract his attention; then when he showed it, she would take flight in a kind of panic.

But this summer it had been different almost from the day he had returned from the university. The invitation had been there in her look, her smile, the way she moved, and the absence of innocence in her eyes. It hadn’t mattered to Hawk that he hadn’t been the first to take her; nor did he care who had lain with her before. The Navaho didn’t prize virginity in a woman the way the white man did. He found experience preferable to the time-consuming task of soothing the fears of the uninitiated.

Eventually, Carol had confessed that Hawk had disturbed her the previous summer, arousing in her feelings that she didn’t know how to cope with. Hawk blamed it on her mother, Vera Rawlins, who had filled Carol’s head with a lot of nonsense about sex being sinful and wicked, and terrible things would happen to her if she didn’t wait for a wedding ceremony to sanctify the union.

Even now, Carol’s reticence hadn’t completely vanished. It was revealed in the excuses she used to seek him out alone, and the discreetly friendly attitude she maintained toward him in front of her parents and others. Hawk had no objections. A Navaho wouldn’t flaunt an intimate relationship in front of family members or friends.

“Don’t you think I’m beautiful?” she challenged when Hawk failed to reply.

“You know you are,” he returned smoothly.

“You could be more forceful about it,” she complained with wounded dignity. “Chad didn’t have any difficulty.”

A trace of amusement slipped across his expression. She was always trying to promote some kind of rivalry between Hawk and Chad. In typical female fashion, she wanted to see the two brothers come to blows over ber to prove her feminity. It irritated her when Hawk wouldn’t rise to the provocation.

And he didn’t accept the challenge this time. “I’m not going to compete with Chad for your attention.”

“Who said you could?” she flared, then spun away to seek out Chad.

He watched with a kind of amused indifference while she flirted outrageously with his half-brother and coaxed him into dancing with her. Hawk wasn’t surprised when the couple slipped away into the night’s shadows. This wasn’t the first time Carol had used Chad to even up some imaginary score with him. Hawk knew he would have his turn.

Two days later, he was out on the range. He cantered his horse over the crest of a hill and reined it to a halt near a turning windmill. Dismounting, Hawk checked the motor on the water pump of the well bore. It was functioning smoothly. Turning to walk back to his ground-hitched horse, he paused to scan the raw, wild landscape. The voice of the land and its mysteries pulsed around him, warmed by the heat of a mid-afternoon sun. As far as the eye could see, nothing stirred. Yet its wildness touched him, striking a responsive chord deep inside him.

The pressure that kept his mouth in such taut, controlled lines was eased. Inner pleasure brightened
the deep blue of his eyes. Long hours in the summer sun had darkened the skin stretched over lean cheeks, skin that already possessed a natural copperish hue. Even his cheeks were relaxing into a vague smile.

This ancient familiarity with the land was a gift to him from The People. It comforted him and fed him. From it, Hawk knew what white men could never understand. Land owned people, but people never owned land. And this land kept pulling him back, exerting its influence even across the breadth of a continent.

His side vision caught movement. Hawk turned to identify it and saw a horse and rider approaching. He recognized that curved shape instantly and waited for Carol to reach him. Her long, golden hair was no longer forced to curl into ringlets, but allowed to fall free to a point well past the middle of her back, stopping just short of her waist.

At eighteen, she was all woman, versed in the ways to heat a man’s blood, as his was heating now. She reined her horse to a stop a few feet in front of him, letting it dance sideways to show off her rounded silhouette. Her breathless smile held the natural sweetness of honey. Hawk craved the wild taste of those lips, but he held that desire in check. The time would come, he knew, as his gaze swept the natural, unrestrained outline of her breasts beneath the thin material of her blouse and knew what it implied.

“I finally found you,” she declared.

“Was I lost?” he mocked smoothly.

She wrinkled her nose at him in a provocative protest to his teasing. “Momma wants me to remind you that we’re having dinner at the main house tonight. You have to be back in time to shower and change before we go. She didn’t want you to forget and be late.”

“I hadn’t forgotten.” He moved to the horse’s head, taking hold of the bridle and stroking its velvet nose to quiet it.

“Sometimes, Hawk, you have a tendency to lose track of time when you’re out riding alone. I don’t know what it is that keeps you out here,” Carol murmured.

Turning, Hawk let himself be distracted from the beauty of her by the lasting beauty of the land. “The Navaho believes he is Made-from-Everything, all the things necessary for life. He is made from Water because its wetness is in his sweat, his blood, in the juices that flow from his mouth, the tears that wet his eyes, and the waste that is excreted from his body. He is made from Air. It fills his lungs, and is transmitted through his blood. He is made from the Sun, because like the sun, his body radiates heat. And he is made from the Earth, the dirt that gives him sustenance and to which he will return when he dies. ‘Dust to dust, ashes to ashes—’” His gaze swept the rugged terrain. “Look out there, Carol, and you will see the ‘Everything’ that I was made from. In two weeks, I’ll have to leave it again to return east, but it will be the last time I leave. When I come back in the spring, it will be for good.”

“But what about your degree?” At her question, Hawk pivoted back to face her. His blood ran warm with desire again. “You aren’t going to let it go to waste, are you?”

“Learning is never a waste,” he corrected.

“But you know J. B. is going to get you a job. Chad has taken over the management of all the real estate. You—” Hawk reached up to lift her out of the saddle, letting his hands slide up to her ribs as he set her on the ground. An eagerly bright light glittered in her eyes. “Do you think J. B. will turn over the ranch to you?”

“Why should he?” The possibility seemed remote to Hawk, especially in view of the plans his father had for him. That fact didn’t bother him. “Your father is managing it very well.”

“But Daddy could work for you,” Carol reasoned.