Listen to the Mockingbird (22 page)

Finally, he drew back and sat numbly against the wall. His eyes seemed barely focused. The wind was again snarling at the entrance.

“Rivas,” I said. “The man from Mexico City. Was he in town that day?”

Tonio shook his head. “No. They said he had left for El Paso del Norte the day before.”

“Did he…Do you think…”

“Yes, I think he did. I think he had me followed after I talked with him. I think he had some allies among the Apaches—there are Catholics among them. I think this representative of the Church to which I had devoted my entire life sent them to slaughter us. I think he then intended to take the mine for himself.”

“Did he ever find it?”

“I don’t know. There wasn’t much left to show for it.”

I reached for his hand. “What you did was not wrong. This was hideous, voracious greed. Rivas’ own greed. The Church would never have sanctioned that.”

“That is what I believed. Until I returned to Mexico City and learned that I had been excommunicated.”

I closed my eyes against the pain I felt in him. Isabel’s sources had told her true. “Well, it certainly was not some vengeance from God. Surely, you don’t think that.”

Tonio made a small, weary smile. “No, of course not.”

I realized I was holding his hand and started to draw mine away. He tightened his fingers and drew me toward him. Slowly, very slowly, his mouth descended onto mine, and some ember I thought had died long ago ignited inside me. His beard tasted of salt and spice.

He cupped my face in his hands. Eyes like two dark daubs peered into mine. “I have been half mad with wanting you,” he said. “Sometimes it has taken more strength than I thought I possessed to stay away.” He lifted my chin and kissed my nose, my cheeks, my mouth.

I raised my head, my eyes searching his for his soul as my hands moved to his shirtfront and I began to undo the buttons.

A shudder ran through him.

The fire felt warm on my skin as we shucked our clothes and tossed them in a jumbled pile. Half-sitting, half-lying against the wall where it joined the hearth, he pulled me toward him and the flames warmed my left side as he stroked my shoulders, my arms, my belly.

“Even I did not guess you were this beautiful,” he said, brushing the palms of his hands across my breasts as if he were a sculptor in awe of his own work.

His thumbs brushed like feathers over my nipples, then his fingers closed and tugged. I gasped and arched my back as he swelled beneath me.

The fire muttered to itself about the wind.

We lay tangled and spent, watching the red-and-yellow tongues of flame lick at what was left of the wood in the niche behind the hearth.

I turned to look at Tonio. Dark, curly hair made a mat across his chest. And the reflected fire danced in his eyes. “Why did you stay away?” I asked.

He gave me a puzzled look, one eyebrow at half-mast.

“You said you deliberately stayed away from me.”

“Ah.” He lay back. “I suppose I thought you had little need of a weary old man with a hopelessly twisted history. You seemed like pure fire, devouring every difficulty with such spirit.”

I stared at him. “Surely you’re jesting.”

He sat up and looked at me again. “I suppose I was a little like you once, the quintessential adventurer, with a future mapped out and a detailed plan of how to get there.”

“You make it sound so simple. I wish it were true. I truly do.”

Tonio rolled over and propped his chin in his hand. “That is my persuasion, but I confess I know practically nothing of your history.” He chuckled. “The rumors are rampant. They even say you robbed a stagecoach.”

I dipped my chin to my chest and peered at him somberly. “I did. I also served time in jail for it.”

Tonio was watching my face. I could see him struggle to cover his surprise. “You needn’t talk about it if you don’t want to.”

I looked down at my hands. They looked old. I was old. My youth had fled sometime when I was busy elsewhere. “There’s no secret about it anymore.” I drew up my knees, hugged them to my chin and told him the rest.

When I finished, Tonio drew me into his arms. I buried my wet face in his chest and asked the question that had obsessed me those many years: “Why did it happen? Why did Andrew become such a fiend, a monster? Why?”

Tonio looked down into my face and said gently, “Even if you could have answered that question, you could not have changed him.”

I held my fingertips to my eyes and willed myself calmer.

“And you are still wed to this man?”

I had not permitted that thought to enter my mind for many years, and the truth of it overwhelmed me. “In strictest sense, I suppose I am.”

999

At some point we dressed; and Tonio replenished the fire and from a pot, doled some red chile stew into bowls. And at some point we undressed again and slept there, in front of the fire, welded to each other as though resenting that our skin was a barrier between us.

When I woke, the fire had gone out but the hearth was still warm. Tonio snored softly beside me. Half in a dream, half out, I hugged him to me. A cold wave crested and swept into my consciousness.

I eased my arm from under his shoulder and stood. What was I thinking of?

“What are you doing?” Tonio asked sleepily.

“Dressing,” I whispered, as if someone might hear. “I have to get home. Winona has probably called out a search party. The rest of them will think I’m a brazen strumpet.”

“You are,” Tonio chuckled.

I knelt and kissed his eyelids.

“Uh-uh,” he grunted, rolling over and getting to his feet. “I will see you to the door.” And we both laughed, choking it back like a secret too good to tell.

999

Poor Fanny had not had her oats. She raised her head and nickered when she saw me. The moon was lopsided, as though some animal nibbled at it. I made sure to give her an extra measure of feed when I left her in the barn.

I had closed the kitchen door behind me and was waiting for my eyes to adjust to the absence of the crooked moon when something at the kitchen table moved, then grew taller.

A scream rose in my throat, but I smothered it there. Through the gloom I saw Winona, drawn up to her full height, arms crossed over her bosom, chin down, foot giving a little tap. “I done worry myself into apple-plexy.”

The implications of my absence dawned on me. “Oh, Winona. I am truly sorry. You didn’t…the men aren’t searching for me, are they?”

“I just happens to take me a ride for a look-see, and there be that horse of yours, down by the cuevas. So I tells everybody that of a sudden, you got to go into town.”

I gave a soft chuckle and threw my arms around her.

“Go on, now, get yourself to bed,” she growled.

I hastily prepared to dive into bed, yanking off my clothes for the third or fourth time since I’d dressed in that room the morning before. I was taking off my shoes when something caught my eye, some movement or some shadow beyond the tiny window.

I rose and walked across the room. It was dark; I hadn’t lit a candle, but the crooked moon was still bright. Sometimes the hands went that way toward the bunkhouse, as did Nacho and Herlinda to reach their quarters at the back of the house. But all of them would have retired much earlier. Nothing outside seemed out of place, although I shuddered a little remembering peering through that other window just as the boy fell against it.

But tonight there was no bloodied face, no dying mule slued across the door to the barn. All seemed still. I decided I must have imagined it.

I was turning back to the bed when the corner of my eye caught movement to the left. A coyote aiming to try his craft at the chicken roost? They usually didn’t venture so near to the house. I leaned my head against the window to see better. A shadow was rounding the corner of the house. It seemed too short and squat to be a man—but far too tall to be a coyote. It might have been a woman, but that was ridiculous. No woman would be out and about at this hour.

I picked up the pistol and made for the door, but two wary circlings of the house revealed nothing.

The next morning I woke up full of contrary bits and pieces that tugged and shoved at each other like a litter of kittens with one ball of yarn. Tonio’s story had been so full of pain, his grief so real, that his determination to rid the world of that map, to erase that mine from human knowledge, was indisputable. I was not willing to try to coerce him to redraw the map for me.

On the other hand, I did need to know more about Diego Ramirez, the boy who had fallen against my window and died in my barn. It seemed clear now that the killing had to do with the map. Whoever had shot Diego may well have seen the map, had maybe been with Diego at some point. His killer might very well be the same person who was trying to buy, burn me out or run me off my land.

While I was dawdling over a breakfast of biscuits and honey, I remembered something Winona had said. I braved Herlinda’s scowl, left my plate unwashed and saddled Fanny.

It was Julio’s turn to tend the cattle. I found him on the mesa near the windmill that pumped water from the well to the cow pond. The wind of the night before had given way to a sun as sharp as a newly honed knife. A yearling calf stumbled, seeming startled by my approach.

Julio looked like he would have welcomed a visit from Satan himself more than mine, but he yanked off his hat and nodded. “Señora.”

“Put on your hat, Julio,” I said gruffly. “The sun will scald your head.”

He nodded cautiously, as if I had asked him to stand on his head, and clapped the filthy, wide-brimmed thing back over his hair. He was seventeen or eighteen and swarthy, built like a young boar hog, legs a little spindly and short body solid as a barrel. For no particular reason other than that I often smelled liquor on him, I had always reckoned he was pretty stupid. I can, at times, be stunningly arrogant.

“My name is Matty,” I said carefully, consciously trying for the first time to combine the roles of female and jefe and finding I was no more comfortable with it than he was. “I want you to call me Matty.”

He nodded, wordless.

Just then, the calf stumbled again. “What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“She is the blind one, sen—Miss Matty. The one you find last year.”

I peered at the calf more closely. One of the eye sockets was puckered and white. “So she survived.”

Julio nodded. “I think at first it would be better to shoot her. But she is only blind in the one eye. The other, it heal up real good.”

“You’ve been the one seeing to her?”

“Si,” he said warily. I could see him considering whether he was going to be scolded for feeding the calf too much or too little.

“Thanks.”

“De nada,” he mumbled.

“Julio,” I said, fiddling with Fanny’s saddle horn, “I hear you do drawings. Pictures.”

He started to deny it.

“No,” I said, “I think that’s good. It’s a fine talent to have.”

We sat there in the sun atop our horses as he struggled to figure out where the high ground was. “Si,” he said finally, cautiously. “I do the drawings. Sometimes. After the work is finished.”

“Good. I’d like you to draw something for me.”

He just stared at me, eyes puzzled.

“You remember that kid who was killed here last year?” Julio nodded. “Could you draw a picture of him for me?”

The furrow above his nose deepened. Suddenly it dawned on me that Julio knew I’d been arrested for the kid’s murder, and that the boy had been a Mexican about his own age. “Look,” I said, “I don’t know what you’ve been told, but I did not kill that boy.”

“Si,” Julio said. “Papa, he say that. But already I know it. I know it is impossible that you kill.”

I half smiled at what seemed like a lame attempt to curry favor. “Why not?”

“You bring in calf that cannot see,” he said, returning the half-smile.

I felt like a jackass. “Thank you for knowing that.”

He nodded, less wary now.

“I need a picture of that boy so I can show it to people and ask them if they saw him. I think I know his name now, and I sure need to find out who did kill him.”

Julio looked at the calf, then back at me. “Si.”

In the barn, I watched the stubby fingers, gripping an equally stubby lump of charred wood, moving quickly over a tattered bit of white cloth he had nailed to a board. Paper, Julio had explained, was hard to come by and tore easily. Soaking the cloth in oil, then letting it dry in the shade, made it much better than paper.

On the cloth, a narrow face was emerging the way clouds sometimes make images. Suddenly there it was. “That’s him,” I said, “at least that’s very close.”

Grinning happily, Julio deepened some of the lines, made the nose shorter, darkened the area around the eyes and drew in the hair and the scraggly, half-grown adolescent beard.

“You are really good.” My awe was genuine.

He shrugged, still adding lines. “Mama, Papa, Ruben, they say is estupido.”

“Dumb! Not at all! It’s very good, a wonderful talent.”

He flashed a sheepish grin, his mouth overflowing with very white teeth. “Good for what?” He was still busy with the charcoal.

“You could make money with that.”

He gave me a patient, disbelieving look.

“With a newspaper, for one thing.” I wished for the hundredth time that Jamie were alive. Photographs were still a novelty.

“I do not believe they buy from a Méxicano.” He lifted the charcoal from the drawing. “I should put the place of the bullet?”

“No. I want him to look like he would have looked if he met someone in the plaza.”

Julio made a few more marks and turned the board toward me, propping it on his knee.

I gaped at the drawing, my words of praise dried up in my throat. This was as good a sketch of the boy who had died in my barn as I could ever expect to see. It also was not the face of the bloodied man who had stumbled against my window that night.

This face was rounder. The boy’s neck had been short, as Julio drew it. The man at the window had a longer neck. I realized now that man was also older, five or ten years older than the boy we found in the barn. And he had been bleeding from a wound at the temple. How could I have been so mistaken?