She laughed and said, “This is crazy, crazy! We are playing with one another and carrying on a calm conversation at the same time!”
Having risen to the occasion some more, Longarm rolled his naked hips between her welcoming brown thighs and let her guide it in for him again as he grinned down at her and observed, “I know, and it sure seems friendly. I hardly ever go back for seconds with a pretty half-wit, but there’s some gals I really enjoy talking to like this.”
She hugged him down against her with her strong arms and chunky legs as he continued in the same tone. “There’s this one old gal I know down Texas way and another up around Bitter Creek who both like to jaw with me about my work for the Justice Department. So every time I find myself that far afield, either direction from my home office, I seem to find myself having a conversation much like this one and… Never mind, that’s two other stories, and right now I’m fixing to shoot my wad in a wicked witch!”
She bit down tight with her innards and pleaded with him to make it last and take her with him. So he tried his best, and managed to make it almost a mutual orgasm while they both made promises nobody born of mortal woman would ever be able to keep.
This time he really made it to his tobacco and matches. So as he sat on the blanket beside her lighting up, Kinipai sighed and told him, “I still say I would ride with you forever in the dark desert grayness of the dead. But there is a bare chance we could make it if we are not more than one good run from the reservation line to the cast!”
Longarm took a drag on the cheroot and held it out to her as he said, “I know where we are. My kind ain’t as afraid to look up at the stars as your kind, no offense. I’ve been studying on a downhill dash for the Chama Valley. You’d know better than me whether your hacks are sore enough to spill blood off their official reserve.”
Kinipai took a luxurious drag to give herself time to consider. “I don’t know. The BIA has my people very cross. Some of the younger hackis want to stand their ground and fight. But our older nadas, who have fought the blue sleeves already, think it may be better to move to Tularosa Canyon and live poorly than to give the pindah lickoyee the excuse to see we do not live anywhere forever.”
Then she asked, “What has this to do with you and me? You are not N’de and I have been banished as a witch, to be killed even slower!”
Longarm said, “Your kind as well as mine will suffer considerable if armed and dangerous so-called Apache make any reservation jumps whilst the BIA is meeting with their chiefs to discuss their future! I told you why I doubt anyone’s hot on our trail. But sooner or later someone’s sure to take you up on even one steel-shod hoofprint, and it might be best to leave him inside the reservation line as we work our way down past Stinking Lake. I told you why I have to work at least that far south. Others may or may not figure you’re riding with me aboard a police pony. They’re just as likely to dismiss any police pony tracks as the sign of a routine patrol by Sergeant Doli and his boys. Witch hunters with a guilty conscience might be a tad more interested in avoiding such patrols than tracking them. But in any case, once we’re south of Stinking Lake, we can beeline for the haunted canyons of La Mesa de los Viejos, and what the hell, would you be tracking a wicked witch into chindi country if you believed in either witches or haunts that could kill you with a dirty look?”
She said she hoped he was right, but asked if they could screw at least one more time before they wound up as chindis themselves.
He was willing. Most men would have been. But he suggested they do it dog-style this time, so he could keep an eye on that smoke-talk from an upright kneeling position just in case.
She thought that was a grand notion, and gave him back his lit cheroot as she rolled over on her hands and knees. So he gripped the smoke between his grinning teeth and got a good grip on Kinipai’s bare brown hips to pound her hard from behind in the cool ridgetop breeze. Meanwhile, off to the west, others were whipping wet blankets or deerskins on and off smoldering piles of green brush to dot the blue sky with white puffs.
He knew it would only upset the gal he was dog-styling if he told her there were three sets of smoke signals now. It unsettled him enough as he tried to read their meaning. The new smoke was rising more to the south, not too close, but in line with the very direction he’d been planning on heading as soon as it seemed safe to move out.
As she arched her spine to take him deeper, Kinipai moaned, “Hear me! I don’t want them to kill you too. I think you should make a run for the Chama Valley alone. I do not think they would attack you if they saw you were not helping a condemned witch!”
To which Longarm could only reply, “Neither do I. But we get out of this together or nobody gets out at all, you pretty little thing.”
CHAPTER 5
They spent the day smoking, screwing, eating canned beans and tomato preserves, but mostly talking. Longarm wound up learning more about Jicarilla medicine ways, or witchcraft, than he’d have ever bothered looking up in any library. But he listened tight because you just never knew when some bit of useless information could come in handy.
Kinipai confirmed what he’d already thought about the Jicarilla being as close to Navaho as the other official Apache nations. The Mexicans to begin with, and the Anglos coming afterwards, had accepted the Pueblo classification of Na-dene-speaking strangers who’d never known they were different nations. “Apache” came from the Pueblo word for any sort of enemy. The Jicarilla qualified as Apache by hunting and raiding a tad closer to the Zuni and Tanoan pueblos down the east slopes of the Continental Divide. “Navaho”or “Navajo,” the Mexican term came from the Pueblo word for a cornfield, Navaho. But none of the Na-dene involved gave a damn. The ones who were an inconvenient distance away for raiding corncribs had gotten captives to show them how to grow their own. The so-called Navaho had raided with almost as much glee until Kit Carson and the U.S. Cavalry, with some field artillery tagging along, had shown them the error of their ways back in ‘67. The Jicarilla had gone on raising hell as late as ‘73, making them Apache raiders instead of the domesticated Navaho. But Kinipai seemed to talk the same way about the same spirits as a friendly Navaho gal he’d met up with a spell back over in the Four Corners country. But when he allowed he’d heard that the Chiji, as they called Chiricahua, worshipped White-Painted Woman instead of the Navahos’ Changing Woman, the condemned witch laughed and told him his kind wrote things down silly.
She explained, or tried to, that neither term was exactly what an Indian meant in evoking the friendly Holy One known to them as Asdza Nadle’he, or Asdza Nadle’che.
When he said both names sounded much the same to him, she smiled and said, “The Chiji speak with a different… accent? When white eyes with pencils come to put down the names of the Holy Ones on paper, my people try, but the words do not come out the same in English. I wish I could explain this better, but I can’t, even though I have been taught both ways of speaking.”
Longarm nodded. “I follow your drift. Sort of. A French Canadian once assured me the worst thing you can call somebody in French is a camel, a critter with a hump on its back and an evil disposition. But try as she might, and speaking English almost as good as me, she just couldn’t say why it was dirtier to call a Frenchman a camel than, say, a dog or pig. She said those were insults too. But nothing to compare with ‘camel.’”
Kinipai nodded. “When one of my people is so cross that killing would not be enough, he may say, ‘Yil tsa hockali!’ And if anyone has one shred of honor, they must kill him for cursing them that dirty. Yet there is no way to translate the curse into English, Spanish, or even Zuni. You have to be N’d and think N’de to understand the terrible thing that’s been said about you.”