Whitehorse (17 page)

A beeper sounded. Sam dug through his pocket and withdrew the credit card-sized machine. "Looks like the boss needs me. You ladies excuse me while I use the phone?"

As Sam made his way toward the pay phone, Dolores poured herself and Leah another
margarita.
"What a pleasant man. He seems to adore you, Leah."

Leah moved her foot away from Johnny's. "Sam's a good guy."

"Is it serious?"

"Define serious." Leah sipped her drink.

"Think you two
will …
you know. Get married?"

"This is only our third date."

"So? There are a great many people out there who know the moment they meet someone that they're destined to be together forever."

"That's not the case with Sam. He's
a …
friend. Nothing more."

Smiling, Dolores looked at Leah sternly. "I get the idea that Sam feels differently. He positively beams when he looks at you. Of course, who can blame him? You're still as lovely as you were in high school. Isn't she, Johnny?"

Johnny tossed down the chip he'd been eating and gave her a flat smile. "Prettier. Much prettier. In fact I'd say she was the best-looking woman in this room. And probably the brightest. At least she knows when to keep her mouth shut."

"Goodness. Seems I've hit a nerve." Picking up her glass, Dolores toasted Leah. "Here's to old friends and lovers. To pasts, and futures."

Johnny looked at Leah. "I'd like to dance with you. As I recall you always enjoyed this song."

Leah tipped her head, listening to the band's version of the Righteous Brothers' "Soul and Inspiration."

Pushing back his chair, Johnny reached for Leah's hand. "If you say no I'll probably make a scene. I'd hate that because it would wind up on the front page of the paper tomorrow, making me look like the ass
I'm
feeling like right now." He flashed a glaring Dolores a bright smile. "Just for old time's sake. Right, sweetheart?"

With his fingers wrapped around Leah's wrist, he threaded their way through the tables and onto the dance floor. Pressed and jostled by swaying dancers, Johnny slid his arm around Leah's waist, entwined his fingers with hers, and drew her up against him, close.

She felt rigid, her movements clumsy as they settled into the slide-and-sway rhythm that Johnny set for them. So far, she had not said a word, just set her focus on the wall of bodies around her and appeared to tune Johnny out.

"Relax," he whispered. "You feel as if you're going to shatter. I don't bite—unless you want me to." He grinned.

"Why do I get the feeling things are a little tense between you and Dolores tonight? It wouldn't have anything to do with our spending last night together, would it?"

"Probably."

Her head fell back as she looked up at him, her blue eyes serious. "You told her?"

"It's not like we have something to hide."

"I hardly call your practically undressing me on the hood of your truck innocent conversation."

"Just a kiss for old time's sake."

"You didn't tell her
that."

"You know I don't lie, Leah. She asked me. I told her."

"No wonder she looks as if she'd like to scratch my eyes out. I don't blame her."

He pulled her closer. "Remember the first time we danced to this song? I'd bought that collection of old 45s at a flea market. I think I paid a whopping five bucks for the entire box."

"And we used your father's old phonograph to play them."

"The record kept skipping and I'd have to kick the player—"

"And you broke the needle—"

"My father got pissed—"

"And you drove all the way to
Alamogordo
trying to find a needle to replace it."

"Yeah, well, the old man was pretty fond of that phonograph." He spun her around and drew her in again, this time close enough that he could lay his cheek against the top of her head. "Still using the same shampoo, I see. Apple. No wonder I was always hungry around you."

He felt her laugh, and she relaxed, allowing her body to melt slightly into his. Turning his lips against her brow, he closed his eyes and allowed the essence of apple to filter through his senses until the heat of close bodies became a cocoon of memories of her and him dancing under a spray of pine trees to a tune he hummed in her ear.

The song ended. The couples parted and shuffled back to their tables.

Reluctantly, Johnny stepped away, releasing her hand only after she turned and moved back toward their table. He watched her walk, remnants of her childhood ballerina days still evident in her graceful stride, shoulders back, arms loose. She glided smoothly as a swan on water.

Sam had returned. Dolores, however, was missing.

Smiling as he moved around the table to join Johnny and Leah, Sam said, "Dolores stepped away to speak to a friend. She'll be back directly. Mind if I dance with my date?"

Stepping aside, Johnny watched Sam take Leah's arm and escort her back to the dance floor.

He thought,
Yes I do mind. If you hold her too close I'll pound out your brains, Sam old boy. You won't ever get the chance to sell another of the rolling crap cars you foist on unsuspecting customers.

Leah and Sam were immediately swallowed by the couples sliding and spinning to the rhythm of "A Whiter Shade of Pale."

"Mr. Whitehorse, would you care for another drink?"

He looked around. The waitress smiled and stepped a little closer. "A drink?" she repeated, pointing to the empty
margarita
pitcher.

"Better not. I'm driving."

She handed him a piece of paper. "My phone number. Just in case, you know. If you got nothing better to do."

Johnny smiled and tucked the paper into his pocket. Her eyes widened; her cheeks flushed. As she walked away, he dropped down into his chair, thinking about all the phone numbers women had shoved into his hands. No doubt they had waited by their phones for hours, days, believing he would call them on a whim and sweep them off to fantasyland. He often wondered what was worse for them: to sit around waiting for a call that never came, or to know that the minute they were out of sight he would toss their numbers into the nearest trash bin.

The song ended. Another began.

Where the hell was Dolores?

Where the hell were Sam and Leah?

He searched the dance floor, so packed with bodies that couples were forced to dance between the tables.

"Hey, Buddy."

An overweight, bald man wearing a dyed chicken-feather Indian headdress tapped Johnny on the shoulder, his jowls flushed by too many drinks, his eyes bloodshot.

Where the hell was Dolores?

"How," the man said, grinning.

"How what?" Johnny replied.

"You know. How." The man lifted his hand, palm out. "How."

Where the hell was Dolores?

"Don't you speak Injun?" the man slurred.

Johnny glanced at the table of snorting, chuckling tourists from which the drunken moron must have come. Another man got out of a chair, an instant camera clutched in both hands as he headed across the room, bouncing off diners and a waitress who nearly dropped her tray of empty glasses.

The idiot in the headdress bent over Johnny so his breath rushed over his face, smelling like gasoline. "You don't dress like no damn Injun. Where's your loincloth and wolf teeth? You do speak white man's English, don't you? Wanna say somethin', Cochise? Ug?"

"Hey, Howard," the cameraman yelled. "Put your headdress on him and I'll get a picture of you two together."

Howard dragged the bonnet from his head, prepared to do just that. Johnny grabbed it, crushing the fragile feathers in his fingers as he slowly stood up, towering over the squat man who stumbled back, his grin sliding from his face.

"Hey, you broke
my…"
Howard licked his lips and glanced around. The room had become suddenly silent as the patrons all stared, anticipating Johnny's reaction. "What's ever'body staring at? Geez, we're just having a little fun here. That's why we came here, ain't it? To look at the Injuns?"

Randy Moorhouse appeared from nowhere, sliding in between Johnny and the tourist. "Do we have a problem here, Mr. Whitehorse?"

"Seems one of your customers has had a little too much to drink, Randy."

"Sorry about that, Johnny." Randy shot a look at the nervous tour guide, who had frozen in her shoes the moment Johnny got out of his chair. "Carrie, you want to do something about the gentleman? And you, no photos, please." He pointed to Howard's friend.

The man looked at his camera, then back at Johnny. "I'll pay him ten bucks for a picture with my wife so we've got a snapshot of her with a real Indian."

"I don't think so," Randy replied, wagging his finger at the camera.

"Twenty bucks, but he's got to wear the war bonnet."

"Johnny?" Leah laid her hand on Johnny's arm. "There is something to be said for tolerating ignorance. Your grandfather once said that such tolerance helps to make you wiser and stronger."

He turned his back on Randy and the tourists, trying his best to ignore the explosive stab of anger and intolerance gouging at his raw mood. Like those years before, Leah's calmness slid around him like a cool blanket of crystalline water. How many times had he grasped that gentleness, that understanding, that acceptance she offered in a touch of her hand or a smile of her lips, and clung to it while his anger and frustration sent him on an emotional riptide. Had it not been for Leah those years ago he would have wound up in prison—a confused and furious young Native American like so many of his peers—fighting against a white man's establishment and prejudice that had destroyed their pride and future so many generations ago.

Her hand still on his arm, Leah smiled. "Think of who and what you are. What you've become. What you can and will stand for. Is punching him in the nose worth losing all of that? Besides, we both know you'll hate yourself in the morning."

He took her hand from his arm, folding his fingers around it. "Come home with me," he said.

Her eyes widened, her lips parted. For an instant he was again looking down into a girl's eyes full of intense love, and the wing beats of memories fanned his anger into a much hotter flame, an inferno compared to his desire to pulverize a white man's face. But
then…

She stepped away, taking her hand and burying it in the folds of her sundress skirt. "Can't." She lowered her
eyes. "Sam…"

Johnny raised his gaze to the used-car salesman with his tacky tie and sweating scalp, standing in the background with his pudgy hands on his pudgy hips, his pocket full of napkins Johnny had signed for his no doubt pudgy daughters back in
Austin
.

Randy slapped a hand on Johnny's shoulder. "Sorry about all this, Johnny. You know what they're like sometimes. They don't mean anything by it. He'll wake up with a hangover tomorrow and feel like a jerk. Look, I'm picking up the tab for this party—"