She stared about nervously in the tricky light of a harsh desert sunrise as she asked who might be creeping up on them out there in the middle of nowhere.
He answered, “Likely nobody, Miss Consuela. I left that coach road on what was almost a sudden impulse when I noticed it was passing through a ridge with lots of slickrock and little deep caliche. We had to leave sign hither and yon along those three furlongs of ridge we just now negotiated. But like you say, it looks like the middle of nowhere and nobody has any call to expect us over here in this common-looking clump of mesquite. So what say I unroll some bedding and let you recline with some tomato preserves for a lie-down breakfast?”
She looked sort of shocked, but managed a polite smile as she told him it was not that she didn’t feel grateful to him for having rescued her from that frightening situation, but that he had to give her time to think.
She said, “Is true I have left Carlos forever, having caught him doing vile things with a mere servant. Maybe I did say I would do the same vile things with the first handsome man I met back in Ciudad Mejico, for I was most hurt as well as angry. But I was not expecting a handsome gringo, and I feel suddenly awkward about going to bed with you.”
Longarm smiled thinly and demanded, “Who said anything about me going to bed with anybody? Don’t I have anything to say about it? Is that all you women ever think about?”
She blinked owlishly up at him, suddenly laughed like hell, and said she’d always heard that worked the other way around.
To which Longarm could only reply, “Maybe it does, other times and places. Right now I figure we’re a day’s ride from help in any direction, with the Yaqui on the rise a heap closer. So if it’s all the same with you, Miss Consuela, I mean to keep this Big Fifty in my arms instead of you or even Miss Ellen Terry. For, no offense, neither of you gals, pretty as I find you both, can spit six hundred grains of lead half as far!”
Chapter 9
Longarm had read those unwinking desert stars all too right. It was pushing a hundred in the shade before noon, and the sun-lashed desert all around was shimmering as if behind a rain-washed window pane, while a shimmering silvery sea, or a mighty realistic mirage, now covered the coach road and the dry land beyond as far as some nameless ridge of shattered bedrock.
He’d gotten Consuela to stretch out atop a flannel blanket in her thin silk dress. She’d even dozed off more than once for a hot and sweaty catnap. But then she’d wake up to drone some more about her awful love life.
Longarm had long since noticed that when it came to screwing, men couldn’t think of much else they’d rather do, and women couldn’t think of much else they’d rather talk about—especially when it just wasn’t practical to really do it. So Longarm was commencing to feel left out as she went on and on about all those other men who’d used and abused her during an adult life that hardly seemed long enough.
To hear Consuela tell it, she’d been sent off to a convent school after her momma caught a wicked but hardly cruel stepfather feeling for pubic hair where none had sprouted as yet.
She’d felt for it herself a lot, and run off with a handsome groundskeeper at the precocious age of thirteen. So the same stepdad who’d fooled with her earlier had had the peon love of her life shot for trespassing. Then, since her momma found her awkward to have around the house, they’d married her off young to a rich as well as dirty old man. She’d found some of his advanced notions about the ways of a man with a maid delightfully exciting. He’d found her such a delight in bed that he’d died there, leaving her a rich young widow.
She said, “I never should have married Carlos a year later. He was only after my money and not, alas, my body. He said La Santa Fe forbade all but one position, and so I steeled myself to accept my lackluster lot. But then I caught him in the position of sixty-nine on the floor tiles, with a cleaning woman of mixed blood!” Longarm suppressed a yawn and said, “Some men seem to like a bowl of chili after they’ve been dining on steak for a spell. I hope you had the sense to get your money out of there before you lit out in person aboard that night coach.”
She sighed and replied, “I wired my bank for to transfer my account to Puerto Periasco two days before I left, while Carlos was away on business, or with some puta, the beast.”
Longarm stared thoughtfully at some seagulls floating on the sea over yonder as he cocked a brow and asked, “You can wire south to the capital and across to the Sea of Cortez from that dinky border town? No offense, but I ain’t seen many telegraph poles along that coach road to the east. None sticking out of all that mirage either.”
She explained how the telegraph line ran a more direct course to Mexico City and from there to the west coast. She didn’t have to tell him why the nationalized telegraph network had to avoid some parts of a north infested with unreconstructed Indians and bitterly poor mixed bloods. But she told him anyway.
He found it felt better to chew on a mesquite stem than a smoke when it got this hot and dry. So he was doing so as he sighed and observed, half to himself, “Los rurales in Sonoyta will have wired ahead to Puerto Periasco by now then. They wear those big gray felt sombreros as a rule, right?”
She nodded. “Es verdad, but for why would los rurales take any interest in my leaving Carlos?”
Longarm smiled thinly and replied, “You’re right. I’m likely just worrying over nothing. Them four white sombreros out yonder wouldn’t be los rurales or even honest vaqueros at this hour of the morning on such a dazzling day.”
Consuela sat up to peer off to the east the same way, sounding a bit like a little kid as she marveled, “Ooh, el mirave! But I see no sombreros of any color out there. Do we seem to be underwater to them as well?”
Longarm morosely replied, “They must see something over this way. That’s likely why they’re heading so directly at us. Watch what seems to be bitty white dots near that three-branched saguaro. All those bitty dots are shimmering in the rising heat waves, but only the four white ones are moving closer.”
She gasped, “Ay, Dios mio! I see what you mean! I hope they are not those savage Yaqui!” Longarm sighed and said, “So do I. It ain’t my fight, and some of the Yaqui I’ve convinced of that treated me tolerable enough. It’s the ones I can’t seem to convince that I try to avoid. As friend or foe, your average Yaqui seems more emotional than your average gent of any other breed.”
He smiled wistfully at the memory of a lean brown Yaqui gal it wouldn’t have been decent to brag about, and continued. “I savvy just a few words of the more northern dialects of their overall lingo. A Papago can understand a Hopi or Shoshoni about as well as a Spaniard could follow the drift of a Portuguese or Italian. But every time I’ve tried that on Yaqui, they answer in Spanish and tell me not to mock ‘em. I reckon it’s something like the way you folks feel about high-toned Castilian and Border Mex.”
She told him in a worried tone not to worry about that, and asked if he knew how to tell Yaqui in Spanish that some of her best friends were Indians.
He chuckled dryly and replied, “If they’re willing to talk first. I’ve found it best to just dodge ‘em when they’re on the war path. We ain’t close enough to their home range in the Sierra Madre for them to be picking flowers.”
She looked wildly about, her unbound hair whipping like burnished telegraph wire, as she asked which way they could ride to dodge those ominous white dots.
He wearily replied, “I just said that.” Then he rose to his feet to take up a new position a few feet closer to the line of the higher ground they’d followed to this rare patch of shade.