Wind Song (16 page)

He smiled. “The stranger is unmasked—and the stranger is you, isn’t it?”

That’s too deep to think about right now.  She stirred sensuously beneath him.  “Cody . . . you—you haven’t . . . uhhh . . .”

He chuckled. “It’s our turn together now, my love.”

Languidly, she arched her hips against his jutting flesh, and he smiled.  The mill’s ghosts were at last put to rest.

* * * * *

He had liberated her from all her past inadequacies, from all the failures that Brad had subtly attributed to her. Suddenly she was a glutton for sensual experience. The mere way Cody’s eyes made unabashed love to her across the dinner table that night set her off all over again.

If Chase or Deborah noticed the sensual communication that flowed between their son and Abbie at dinner, they said nothing. Robert, she was certain, did notice. With a child’s fine sense of perception, he felt the tenuous change, the new shading, in her relationship with Cody. His eyes flickered from Cody to her several times before he shuttered his expression.

She puzzled over the boy’s continued hostility later that night as she bathed, and she puzzled over her new self. Her whole body was now full of mysteriously secret places ... the tip of her tongue, the cushion of her fingertip, the hollows behind her knees. In the warm, scented bathwater she considered those places, finding an infinite responsive pleasure in her body. Why had she always found giving herself an orgasm more a dutiful release of tension than a slow and gentle exploration into her own sensual delight?

Yet she was almost afraid to face Cody the next day, afraid she might see the condemnation that she would have received from Brad had she demonstrated such a liberated response to his lovemaking by going down on him so rapaciously, swallowingly so greedily,  as she later had Cody. At breakfast she found no condemnation in Cody’s dark, enigmatic eyes, but she did detect a reservation within those depths, as if he were awaiting something further.

After breakfast his father asked him to deliver a bale of barbed wire to Wild Cat Camp, one of the three ranch houses on Cambria. Cody took her and Robert with him in the ranch’s pickup. The pickup bounced and jolted over unmarked land carpeted with winter grass toward a destination known only to Cody. No trees indicated boundaries, no hillocks or draws hinted at direction. Yet the emptiness of the land offered a freedom that appealed to Abbie. The men and women who had conquered this rough, unyielding land had to have been strong.

Occasionally she slid covert glances at the man who handled the vehicle with such assured control. She knew so little about him. She would have liked to ask him a hundred questions about himself. She wanted to know all the things that had happened to make him the man he was, but she sensed that in many ways he was as closed as Robert was.

Cody pointed out Wild Cat Camp, which consisted of a line cabin that was little more than a shack, a shed and two staked corrals. A mile or so further on he began to parallel a stretch of fence and followed the line for several more miles before a lone horse came into view. Near the roan gelding a young man, his shoulders hunched against the cold, waited. Cody got out and greeted the cowpoke with a tip of his hat and said something Abbie didn’t catch; then the two men hefted the bale of barbed wire out of the pickup bed.

She and Robert slid out of the pickup into the arctic cold. Their breath crystalized in the air. The pickup’s cab shielded them from the frigid wind while they stood and watched Cody help the rail-thin ranch hand repair a section of fence. After a while Cody came over to them. Hunkering down next to Robert, he slid his big leather gloves onto the boy’s smaller hands and explained in Navajo how to tack the wire tautly to the fence post.

Robert hunched down next to the young hand and began tacking. The boy’s hair had begun to grow and no longer looked so much like peach fuzz. Watching with Cody, Abbie could see that the boy’s face lost some of its sullenness. “You’re good with Robert,” she told Cody.

The cold wind whipped her hair across her face, and his hand caught the wayward strands to push them back. “He’s learning to give of himself, Abbie. Will you?”

Beneath the Stetson’s brim Cody’s eyes were inscrutable. She looked away, turning her gaze back to Robert. “That depends on what you’re asking.”

Cody made no reply; instead he moved away to help Robert and the ranch hand finish up the section of fence.

That night, lying on the old-fashioned mattress stuffed with fluffy wool, she reflected on Cody’s question. What exactly was he asking of her? More than she was prepared to give?

Yet again, her thoughts returned to the previous afternoon and their wild abandoned lovemaking. How strange it was that her union with Brad, legalized by a marriage license, should have seemed so often like debasement. But with Cody . . . he was right, it had been profoundly soul stirring.

Just as she reached out to flick the bed lamp off, the door opened. He stood there. He wore only his jeans and boots—and the bandana that made him look so untamed. He seemed to be beyond the dictates of civilization that decreed a man’s dress, a man’s code.

Slowly he shut the door behind him. She didn’t try to shield her scanty satin and lace nightgown with the sheet as she would have done at one time, but neither could she meet the directness of his gaze. Her eyes lowered to the expanse of broad, coppery chest and followed the shift and play of his flesh and muscle as he crossed the room to her with that graceful stride.

He leaned over her, one fist planted on the mattress at either side of her hips. “Abbie? Look at me.”

She dragged her gaze up to meet his.

“Do you still have”—he paused, as if searching for the right word—“an
isnati?”
He hesitated again, then found the word. “Your monthly flow?”

Crimson flooded her face. “Yes,” she breathed.

His eyes had that disconcerting habit of watching her lips. “And are you protected?”

Her breath caught in her throat. “I—after the twins—we wanted more children. But I never became pregnant. It seems that I must not be . . . fertile.”

“And if you are?”

“Why are you asking all this?”

“I’m telling you, Abbie, that I want to see your toothbrush next to mine, to find you at my side when I awake in the morning, to argue with you over the brand of coffee you bought . . . silly, mundane things that make up a relationship.” Automatically her hand reached for a packet of cigarettes on the nightstand. Of course, there were none. Whatever had possessed her to give up smoking? “The marriage blanket again,” she said dully.

“Yes.” It was a flat, harsh sound. “I’m asking for a commitment, not necessarily one made legal by paper, but certainly one of the soul.”

She looked off into the room’s shadowy corners, where the lamp’s light did not reach. “Cody . . . you don’t know how much you ask. For twenty years I struggled to be what Brad wanted me to be, and I couldn’t do it. I can’t make that kind of suffocating commitment to a man again, not for a long time, not until I know me again, maybe not forever.”

His fingers nudged her chin back toward him, forcing her to meet the ferocity in his gaze. “And in the meantime? What about what happened yesterday?”

“I don’t know what you’re implying.”

“I’m implying that what happened yesterday between us—without a commitment—makes you little better than a whore, my love.”

Without thinking, she slapped him. At once she regretted the action. She was appalled at what she had done. Violence had never been part of her nature, but this made the second time she had resorted to violence with Cody. Her eyes widened at the reddened imprint on Cody’s jaw—and the fury that burned in his eyes that were now smoke black. His grip tightened brutally on her chin; then abruptly he dropped his hand.

“I think the holidays are over. I’ll fly you home tomorrow.”

* * * * *

“It was nice of you to run Robert and me into Albuquerque.”

Deborah took her eyes off the busy interstate highway long enough to cast Abbie a sympathetic glance. “You’re probably right about catching a commercial flight. It will give Cody a chance to cool off.”

She returned her attention to maneuvering the car around the curves of the Sangria Mountains. “You know, Abbie, I’ve found that Cody’s passions, like my husband’s, run deeper than those of ordinary men.”

Abbie stared below them to the undulating foothills that embraced Albuquerque. “I know,” she replied in a small, miserable voice. He hadn’t even bothered to see her and Robert off that morning. Chase had diplomatically explained that his son had instead ridden out to one of the camps to deliver salt licks and bales of hay for the winter feeding.

“You see,” Deborah was saying, “Cody didn’t have a normal child’s life.” She flicked a glance at Robert, who sat taciturnly in the back seat and lowered her voice. “Perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I think it’s important that you understand.”

Abbie didn’t bother to temper her sarcasm. “I must say, Cody Strawhand is certainly an enigma.”

“As the son of New Mexico’s governor, Cody had unique opportunities,” Deborah explained. “He attended the very best schools; he often sat at dinner tables where there were as many nationalities represented as there were guests; he spoke three languages fluently; he played with the children of diplomats and celebrities and entrepreneurs. All this when he was still just a child.

“Unfortunately, the demands on a governor’s social life kept Chase and Christina, my husband’s first wife, from establishing a normal home routine. Rather than run again for office, my husband chose to serve on the Navajo Tribal Council at Window Rock. That’s the Navajo Nation’s capital—like Washington, D.C. I think that by returning to reservation life, my husband hoped to give Cody the kind of close family relationship every child needs. In that way, the decision was a good one. Cody learned to exist with the necessities of life alone. You might say my husband was trying to strengthen his son, to teach him survival on the most basic level.”

“But? . . .” Abbie asked, hearing the reservation in Deborah’s voice.

“But the deprivations that Christina faced . . . well, you can imagine the culture shock she underwent, leaving the governor’s mansion to live in a hogan. Dirt floors, no electricity, no running water. Within the year she left Chase and Cody, who was ten or so, for another politician, a man of her own race that time.”

“I see,” Abbie said slowly, hurting for the child Cody had been. That explained why Cody demanded all—or nothing.

“Now you can understand why Cody harbors such a deep resentment for the pretentiousness of social roles, why he harkens to the call of the wild places and avoids the upper echelons of society like the plague. He wouldn’t even accept his inheritance of Cambria, so his father and I must return periodically to oversee its operation.”

Deborah bit her lip to still its trembling, and Abbie said, “You love Cody very much, don’t you?”

“Like my own son. He’s so very much like his father.” She ran slender fingers through her sophisticated short-cut hair. “I wish I had a cigarette.”

For the first time Abbie laughed. “You gave up smoking too?”

Deborah grimaced. “Chase never let me get started. I remember the first time I pulled out a package of cigarettes I had found. . . She gave a small laugh. “I think I’ve been rattling on, Abbie. But I like you very much—and I wanted you to understand Cody, if that’s possible for anyone.”

“Tell me about you and Chase. Please.”

“There’s not that much to tell. I met him at the Santa Fe Indian Boarding School . . . and fell wildly in love with him, although I was just six or seven at the time and he was already a senior. Years later, when he was going to the university, he met Christina, and after the war—World War II . . . .

“And?” Abbie prompted. “When did Chase finally come back into your life?”

Deborah hesitated. “During the war when Chase and I  had been marooned on a Philippine island briefly and following the war we were engaged – also briefly.  But after Chase was elected governor Christina decided she wanted him back. When I learned later that they had divorced, I knew I might never have another chance.” She shrugged and smiled self-deprecatingly. “So I stalked him like a lioness.”

Once more, Deborah glanced in the rearview mirror at Robert, and, Abbie, turning her head silently, followed the woman’s saddened glance.  The boy sat as dispassionately as Cody had at breakfast.  “Abbie, it will be difficult to reach below the child’s self-imposed barrier—and Cody’s—but love could do it. I suspect you are capable of giving great love.”

She sighed.  “But the question is, Deborah, would I want to give it to outcasts such as those two?

“The way Chase loves me now—the force of his passion and the strength of his love—it was worth those first few years of self-doubt. Of wondering if he would take Christina back if she came to him again.”

Abbie looked out the window, but she didn’t see the outskirts of Albuquerque slip by, the modern malls and stuccoed condominiums. Passion. The force of Cody’s passion threatened to overpower her, catch her up in one of those blinding, stinging dust devils, and just possibly whirl away, leaving her for a woman of his own kind. Had she met Cody when she was younger, perhaps she would have been equal to it. But now . . . now she had been conditioned by too many years of repression, had acquired the debilitating quality of self-containment. She could no longer give so easily of herself. She didn’t even know if there was any of her left to give. And that was what was of supreme importance to her now—to find herself.