Paloma and the Horse Traders (34 page)

“
Is this how you eat, when you are
with the horse traders?” Graci asked.

He had built a small, hot fire in the shelter
of a cliff overhang, probably a cutbank years ago when the river
had reached much higher. The Rio Bravo was as changeable as a woman
who hears bad news and edges away, not for days or weeks until the
pout is over, but for years.

“
Yes, we eat like this.
Javelina
is the worst.”

Graciela made a face. “Have you eaten
skunk?”

“
Tastier than you might
think.”

The slave put down the small bone she had been
gnawing on. He had marveled to himself that anyone could look
ladylike gnawing on a bone, but Graci did. “Did you like that
life?”

She had never asked him a question so personal,
and it touched him. In their brief time together, Paloma had asked
such things, but she was his sister. Graci had no particular reason
to be interested, but she was. Outside of Paloma and Marco, he
couldn’t think of anyone else who cared.

“
I thought I would always trade
horses.” He paused at the look on her face. “All right, then! Steal
horses sometimes. Lately, I am not so certain.”

“
Señor Mondragón seems like the kind
of man who would offer help,” she said. “I know that la señora
doesn’t want you to leave.”

He knew it, too. Head against his saddle, he
lay back and considered the stars, neutral observers of the human
drama that played out beneath them. It struck him that he used to
be a neutral observer. Now that he had found his sister, there were
decisions to be made, the possibility for heartache,
responsibilities. He suspected these were just the irritations that
some men ran away from, because life alone was surely simpler. But
was it as much fun?

He glanced at Graciela, pleased that she didn’t
seem to mind listening. “Funny, isn’t it, how life seems to plod
along, one day much like the one before, until we get to thinking
that nothing will ever change? Then it does.”

“
Here we are, on an empty plain,”
Graciela said, staring at the stars, too. “I wonder … how far
ahead do you think the others are?” She pulled her blanket tighter
around her shoulders and shivered.

“
They had two or three days on us,”
he said. He watched her as she clenched her jaw to keep from
shivering.

Claudio looked away, ready to roll into his
blanket and tough it out until morning, as he had the night
before—in fact, as he had on most nights of his life since the
raid.

He made the mistake of looking back at
Graciela, with her tense jaw and squinting eyes. He had seen the
fear in them when he doused their little fire, but she had said
nothing.

He couldn’t credit what he did next to any
particular show of benevolence, since that was not his nature, in
recent years. He looked at Graciela, saw someone cold and took his
chance.

“
Graci, you can sit there and shiver
until daybreak, and I can do the same thing, but that makes us
foolish.”

“
Wh … what do you mean?” she
asked.

“
Just that.” He stood up and shook
out his blanket. “If we put our blankets and … and ourselves
together, we’ll be warm. That sounds pretty good to me.”

He waited. He saw the fear in her eyes, and her
rapid intake of breath. Best be straightforward. “If I had wanted
to take you, I could have done that our first night on the trail.
I’m bigger than you are and I’m stronger.”

She nodded, her eyes wide, but the fear
receding, replaced with wariness.

“
It may come as a surprise to
you—and maybe to me, too—but I’m a gentleman,” he told her. “For
too many years I forgot I was, but that’s what I am. That’s how my
mother and father raised me, same as they raised Paloma to be a
lady.”

A long silence followed. He was about to call
it a bad business and wrap up in his blanket again when Graci
cleared her throat. “Only if we lie back to back,” she
said.

“
Suits me, Graci. I’m tired of being
cold.”
And alone, and broke, and hopeless
, he wanted to add,
but he didn’t. He had some dignity remaining.

Graci stood up and held out her blanket.
Businesslike, he told her to lie down again and face away. She did,
and he lay down beside her, spreading both blankets around them,
which felt like heaven on earth. For one small moment, he wondered
why Paloma hadn’t given them more blankets. Marco had ridden out
with two blankets, plus he wore a
serape
over his wool
shirt.

He pressed his back against Graciela’s and
tucked the blankets around him. He heard Graciela do the same. He
started to chuckle.
If I get back alive, I am going to ask my
little sister if she gave us one blanket each on purpose
, he
thought, even though he was pretty sure what Paloma would
say.

“
What’s so funny?” Graciela
asked.

“
I’ll tell you later,” he said and
faked a yawn. “Too tired now.”

He lay there beside the slave, a woman he would
have taken without a qualm only a few weeks ago. He was conscious
of the tension in every muscle of her back. She sighed, and the
tension lessened. In a few minutes, she slept, her breathing even
and deep. He listened, closed his eyes, and slept, too, finally
warm in body and heart.

In the morning, Claudio thought Graciela might
shy away from him, but he underestimated her. After he built
another small fire, she deftly shoved more buffalo chunks on last
night’s toasting stick, cooked it until the meat was hot and
smoking, and gave him more than his share. He tried to protest that
she should divide it equally, but she narrowed her eyes and dared
him.

To top it off, she rummaged in her saddle bag
and pulled out two linty lumps of honey candy, giving him the
larger piece. He brushed off the lint.

“
From where did this appear?” he
asked.

“
Señora Mondragón made some candy to
placate Soledad,” she said, popping her piece in her mouth. “I
stole some.”

“
Paloma told me you weren’t stealing
tortillas anymore,” he said, enjoying the rare treat, but willing
to tease her.

“
No tortillas.” She shrugged. “This
was different.” She laughed, a soft sound muffled by her hand
covering her mouth. “And what do you know, I forgot I had it. I
forgot
.” She said it again, with wonder in her voice, as if
she understood, for the first time in a long while, that she had
enough and some to share. She was wealthy.

He saw it all in her pretty face and smiled
back. They were two conspirators now, not just a beaten-down slave
and a battered horse stealer, dragging sins and misdeeds on chains
he could not see. The knowledge warmed him as much as the blankets
and her body heat.

After another day of riding, mostly in silence,
they ate what remained of the buffalo meat, drank from a river that
anyone else would have called a stream, and bundled up
together.

“
Tomorrow we will be near a favorite
camping area for Rain Cloud,” she said, when Claudio thought she
slept. “It is a place he likes to leave the women and children
while the warriors hunt the valley for elk and deer, sometimes
buffalo.”

“
Great Owl’s camp is near,
too?”

“
Over the mountains, toward the
Staked Plains. I will show you and Señor Mondragón, when we find
him.”

“
It will be safer if you draw a map
and remain with Rain Cloud’s women,” he said.

“
Oh, no. I am coming with
you.”

He turned around until he was facing her back.
She heard him move and turned around, too.

“
It’s too dangerous. Marco will just
send you back.”

She started to cry, weeping silent tears, the
kind of tears he understood. He had cried enough of them, after the
Comanche raid, when he found himself in the hands of rough men who
would only tease and humiliate him.

“
Graci?”

“
I have a daughter in Great Owl’s
camp,” she managed to gasp out before another wave of sorrow
covered her. “I have to find her.”

“
Child of a Comanche?”

It sounded stupid and naïve when he said it,
and he could have kicked himself. But that wasn’t necessary,
because Graciela Tafoya kicked him.

“
What other baby could it be?” she
hissed. “She was not the first, but she is the only one who
lived!”

He did the only thing he could do, which was
hold her tight as she sobbed. Claudio thought she might pull away,
but she burrowed into him like a small animal. Thank God he was too
smart to wonder out loud why a Comanche captive would want such a
child. He held her close, remembering a horrible day when Lorenzo
and Paco had been hired to return a Spanish captive to her people
on a
rancho
near Tesuque.

She had run to them with a child in her arms,
which Lorenzo had wrenched from her and tossed back to the
gathering of sullen Apaches, prisoners themselves now, courtesy of
Governor Mendinueta. She had screamed for the child and sobbed all
the way to Tesuque. When they passed through the village only six
months later, he learned she had been dead for weeks, her heart
broken, or so her Spanish family said. Lorenzo just shook his head.
Claudio had nightmares, new nightmares piled onto old ones, until
he never wanted to close his eyes.

“
We’ll see what we can do, Graci,”
he said and his words sounded so lame.

“
That sounds like no,” she said
quietly. “I am tired of hearing no.”

She turned around, her back to him again. He
did the same, wondering why Paloma had allowed him to roam around
off the Double Cross, since he obviously had no brains and no
heart.
When this is done, I swear I will go back to my horse
traders
, he thought. The notion gave him no comfort.

At some point in the long night, perhaps
triggered by Graciela’s revelation, he had the nightmare he so
dreaded, the one where he saw the torn body of his mother,
clutching his unborn baby brother. Usually the dream morphed into
the sight of that baby thrown by Lorenzo, end over end so slowly,
back to the Apache prisoners, as its mother screamed and tried to
reach for it with abnormally long arms. Instead, the sight of his
mother was blocked from his vision as a young Paloma walked in
front of him. He called to her, and she kept walking, unhearing and
unseeing, until she was out of sight on what he knew was the road
to El Paso.

It seemed so real that he called again, wanting
her to turn around and wait for him, as he buried his mother with a
teaspoon. She walked on and eventually disappeared, as the dream
turned into the more familiar terror, with the Comanche captive and
her long arms.

And then it was over. He lay there in a sweat,
someone’s cool hand over his eyes, pressing down. “Graci?” he
whispered.

“
Who else would be here?” she
whispered back. “I’m not very happy with you right now, but no one
needs to cry out like that. Go to sleep.”

He did as she said, and remembered nothing more
until morning. When he woke up, Graciela was kneeling by the cold
campfire, slicing bits of cactus into smaller bits, somehow making
it look like more. She hummed as she sliced, and he marveled at the
resiliency of women. He took a deep breath and another, enjoying
the silence. There was no Lorenzo to curse at Rogelio and thrash
him for being slow, or childlike, or in the way. This was
better.

“
I don’t think men understand women
and babies,” Graciela said, with her back still to him. “Let us
leave it at that.”

A coward, where delicacy and tact might be
called for, Claudio was happy to agree.

They started into another morning on the wide
plain, and he could have kicked himself again for leaving the
shelter of the mountains. They should have started out during the
night. The moon was nearly full now, and they could have traveled
in more safety than in this broad sunlight.

“
Graci, let’s wait,” he said, when
they had hardly begun their day’s journey.

She had ridden ahead of him, probably grateful
to distance herself from an idiot. She looked back at him, then
beyond him, and gasped. He turned around in surprise, and watched
in horror at a cloud of dust in the distance.

The air was calm, so he could not say it was
wind blowing dust.
It’s over
, he thought.

“
Di … di …didn’t you say
that Rain Cloud’s men were hunting buffalo?” he asked.

“
It’s not buffalo.” She edged her
horse closer, whatever quarrel she had against him gone, at least
for now. Or maybe for always, if the dust cloud turned into
Comanches.

“
There is nothing we can do,” he
said calmly. He pulled an arrow from his quiver, surprised how
steady his hand was. “I’ll shoot as long as I can.”

Her face was set and brave. She took her knife
from its sheath, and turned to him. “It’s funny. I started to make
some plans, even while I was tending Señora Mondragón’s little
ones. Maybe it’s better not to have plans.”