Nightway
Page 9
The blackness swallowed him and he slumped over like a dead weight.
“He’s finished, boss.” Luther Wilcox was on Hawk’s right. He let go of his arm.
“Pick him up.” Rawlins’ voice was guttural and winded, vibrating with savagery.
For a pulsebeat, there wasn’t a sound. Then Luther hissed an appeal for some rational thinking. “You can’t kill him, boss. My God, he’s—” His gaze darted to Chad. He checked the words he’d been about to say, not wanting to be the one who called attention to Hawk’s blood relationship to Chad.
Moreover, Luther wasn’t convinced that Tom Rawlins was within his rights to do more than just work Hawk over. He’d seen Rawlins’ daughter out riding with Hawk a couple of times this summer. If Hawk took advantage of the girl, it might have been because he’d been given some encouragement. And he wasn’t so sure Hawk was the only one. Besides, there was J. B.’s reaction to consider if Hawk was killed.
The silence lengthened without Luther’s appeal for reason being dismissed. Vengeance still burned in the set of Rawlins’ features, but the murderous light was fading from his eyes. Luther sent a brief, sidelong glance at the cowboy gripping the waist of the half-crumpled body.
“Let him go, Bill,” Luther ordered with a nodding gesture of his head, his voice low and quiet, careful not to let his tone usurp Rawlins’ authority.
There was a dull thud as the arm was dropped and the rest of the body hit the ground. It seemed to snap Rawlins out of his poised stance, his hands stiffly flexing out of their fists. He turned to shoot a glance at his daughter. At some point, with Chad’s help, she had succeeded in putting on her blouse. His arms were around her, offering both protection and comfort. She had buried her face in the front of his shirt. The handsome face of Chad Faulkner smiled grimly back at Rawlins. Then his hands were moving to her arms to hold her away from him.
Her fingers clutched at the front of his shirt. “Hold me, Chad,” she whimpered.
“Wait here,” Chad ordered gently. “I’m just going to get your horse.”
As Chad moved away from her, Rawlins walked over. Her head was bowed, her face hidden from his sight by a tangled curtain of gold hair. When he laid a hand on her shoulder, she trembled and turned her head away from him. Rawlins murmured something which produced an affirmative nod. It was Rawlins’ shoulders that were hunched as he removed his hand, a sensation of helplessness seeming to defeat him.
Halfway to Carol’s ground-hitched horse, Chad stopped beside the limp body. He looked down; then he stepped over the still form to gather the reins of Carol’s horse and lead it over to the girl.
The bay horse Hawk had been riding lifted its head and whickered a protest at the sight of the five riders trotting away from the wellhead. No one looked back. Its reins were dragging the ground and the horse was too well trained to ignore their significance. The horse turned its head to the man on the ground, its ears pricking, but the man didn’t move. Lowering its head, the horse began to graze again, the bit jangling between its teeth as it tore off chunks of nourishing yellow grass.
When Hawk finally regained consciousness, the high desert air was cool and the sky was a black backdrop to a parade of stars. Everything was fuzzy. At first he couldn’t figure out where he was or why he was lying on the ground. Then he tried to get up. A pain, so sharp and so intense, stabbed through him and he collapsed with an unearthly cry. When he could think clearly again, Hawk realized that the ribs on his right side were either cracked or broken.
Favoring them, he tried again to rise. This time he succeeded in staggering to his feet, where he swayed drunkenly. The top of his skull hammered, making it difficult to string two thoughts together. His face felt all pulpy and broken. There was something wrong with his nose. His eyelids were all puffed up, the openings merely narrow slits. Every part of him ached, some worse than others, his muscles stiff, cramped, and sore. His mouth felt dry and cracked, throbbing with the pain of a thousand needles. Hawk attempted to moisten his lips and tasted grains of dirt mixed with salty blood and sweat.
He started to lift a hand to his mouth when he heard the rattle of a bridle bit. Turning, Hawk tried to locate the source of the sound. Outlined against a night sky, he recognized the shape of a horse a few feet from where he was standing. He tried to walk to it, but the signals his brain sent to his legs became muddled in the transmission. His steps were uncoordinated, almost drunken.
When he reached for the reins, the horse shied away from the smell of blood he carried. Hawk spoke to the animal, slipping into the Navaho tongue. It snorted nervously, but let him catch the reins and loop them over its neck. Wedging a foot into the stirrup, he used all his strength to haul his body into the saddle. Hawk locked both hands around the saddlehorn in a death grip, leaving the reins slack and giving the horse its head.
The animal needed no urging to turn for its home corral, striking out in a jarring trot. Hawk passed out before they had traveled a hundred yards. Instinct alone kept him in the saddle, his legs clamped to the horse’s sides and his hands strangling the saddlehorn.
Hawk surfaced from the pain-induced stupor long enough to realize the horse had stopped. He nudged it with the heel of his boot. The horse shifted, but refused to go forward. Hawk roused himself sufficiently to look around. It was several seconds before his brain could identify the corral. He swayed in the saddle, nearly falling off. Somewhere, not far away, he heard the sound of someone leading a horse, but his haze of pain was too dense to let it mean anything. He concentrated his efforts on dismounting with the minimum amount of pain.
“Hawk!” Someone called his name. It was a voice he should know. Only when the person spoke again did he recognize the concerned and rasping voice as his father’s. “I heard there was trouble. I was just going to ride out to look for you.”
One foot touched the ground, but he lost his balance when his boot slipped out of the stirrup. Clutching the saddlehorn with one hand, Hawk swung around in a weaving half-circle. The horse’s flank was a wall for his back to lean against and stopped him from making a complete circle. With difficulty, he focused his eyes on the stricken face of his father as the man paused in mid-stride.
“Oh, my God, Hawk!” The hoarse words were ripped from his father’s throat. Then he raised his voice to shout: “Frank! Pedro! Come over here and give me a hand!”
“No!” Hawk’s refusal rang out clear and strong when J. B. took a step toward him.
But a great weariness was threatening to overwhelm him. Pain was a hot fire that burned and pulsed over his face and throughout his body. From the murky depths of his memory, Hawk dredged up the knowledge that this corral shared a long horse trough with the adjoining one. Releasing the saddlehorn, he ordered his weaving, staggering legs to carry him to it.
When he reached it, his hands gripped the metal sides to steady himself. Then he immersed his head into the water all the way to his shoulders. As he surfaced, the shock of the cool water washed his senses clear. His awareness returned. He could think coherently again. Something warm trickled from his nose, and it wasn’t the water that was streaming from the rest of his head. Hawk realized that not only were his ribs broken, but also his nose. Out of the slitted corner of an eye, he saw his father approaching and remembered the first words his father had said.
“You were coming to look for me?” It was difficult to make his split and swollen lips shape the words. Hawk knew his speech was slurred. “Did somebody finally do something that wasn’t part of your plans? Did you forget to tell Rawlins that you were going to buy me some respectability in a few years?”
Still leaning on the metal sides of the water trough for support, Hawk turned his head to look at his father. Other cowboys had gathered behind J. B. besides the two he had summoned by name. Hawk was beyond caring who heard what he said, gripped by a reckless indifference.
“I never guessed you were so … badly beaten up.” It was a lame comment, a weak attempt to avoid the rawly worded questions.
“We’d better get you to a doctor.” His father started toward him again.
“No!” Hawk leaned heavily on the trough until the sickening weakness passed. Hanging his head, he closed his eyes. There was nothing a doctor could do for a broken nose or ribs. No internal damage had been done—no lung had been pierced.
“I’ll talk to Tom and get this straightened out,” J. B. said.
Gathering himself together, Hawk straightened into an unsteady but upright position and faced his father. “A long time ago, J. B., you counseled me that I would have to make my own way. I don’t need you to make plans for me. I’ll handle Rawlins alone—the same way I have handled everything else.” He rejected the offer of help with careless disdain.
His father hesitated, turning pale. He seemed to make an effort to ignore Hawk’s statement. “Under the circumstances, it might be best if you returned to college early.”
Hawk’s mouth curved into what was supposed to be a smile. “Run away? That’s what a Navaho would do, isn’t it?” he challenged in a derisive drawl. “When things get too hot and he’s outnumbered, he takes flight. I bet you’d like that—you … and Tom … and Carol. It would make it easy for you, wouldn’t it? You’d all like it even better if I never came back. But I’m not going.” Hawk let the words hang in the air for a minute, heavy and electric. “What’s more, I’m doing things my way from now on. And if you don’t like it, you can go to hell, J. B.”
Hawk walked away with all his muscles protesting. His departure stirred a murmur of voices in the audience of ranch hands. J. B. watched him leave in a numbed silence.
Lights burned in the windows of the Rawlins’ house, a house that—for the lack of a better word—had been his home for the last eleven years. Hawk fought off the tiredness that was draining him of feeling and hauled himself up the steps to the back porch with the hand rail. His bruised and battered body wanted rest, but the night wasn’t over yet.
As he entered the back porch, he caught sight of a face in the mirror above the wash-sink. It wasn’t recognizable as his own. Cut, bruised, and swollen, it belonged to a monster with black hair.
Turning away from the mirror, Hawk shut the door. The movement left him facing the kitchen, where Tom Rawlins sat at the table, glaring at him. His hands were encircling a cup on the table in front of him. Hawk moved into the opening.
“I’ve come to get my things,” he stated in his pain-impaired voice.
“Get them and get out!” Rawlins snarled.
There was a time when Hawk would have held his silence, but all that had changed. “You know me, Tom. And you know I didn’t violate your daughter. You may have treated me like a son, but I was the last person you wanted as a son-in-law. What was it that turned your stomach, Tom? The idea of your daughter marrying a half-breed? Or J. B.’s bastard?” he challenged with curling contempt.
A dull red spread across Rawlins’ face. He made no comment but averted his murderous stare. Hawk knew he had scored a direct hit. Circling the table, he crossed the room to the hallway leading to his bedroom. Vera Rawlins appeared, stopping abruptly at the sight of Hawk, shock registering first in her expression, then an avenging anger.
Before she could give voice to it, Hawk spoke again, addressing his comment to both of them. “By the way, I wasn’t the first man to take your daughter, although I admit it probably wouldn’t have stopped me if she had been a virgin.”
He shouldered his way past the woman and down the darkened hallway to his small room. Cradling his right arm against his broken ribs, he leaned against the door to summon more strength, then moved to the bed and shook out the woolen blanket folded at the foot. It was the same blanket that had carried his personal belongings when he had first arrived here. Hawk used it again, emptying the dresser drawers and closets of his clothes and dumping them into the center of the blanket. When this was done, he paused to look around the room for any more of his possessions.
A faint sound came from the hallway outside his door, a sound that implied stealth. Hawk remained motionless, listening intently, his back to the door. He heard the furtive turning of the doorknob and his muscles coiled into alertness when it was pushed silently open. There was only one person who would want to see him without anyone else in the house knowing it—and that person was Carol.
“Hawk, I’m sorry.” It was her voice that whispered the apology to him. “I don’t know why I said what I did. I was so … scared. You’ve got to believe me. Mom and Dad would kill me if they knew I was in here with you.”
He pivoted slowly to face her. Her eyes widened as she recoiled at the sight of him, a hand reaching up to cover her mouth while her other arm clutched her stomach. She turned white and looked away, as if afraid she was going to be sick.
“I make a pretty revolting picture, don’t I?”
“Please … forgive me?” she murmured, unable to look at him again.
“When I forgive you, am I also supposed to forget this ever happened?” He turned away and began tying together the ends of his blanket. “Why don’t you run to Chad? He’ll forgive you.” With his left hand, he picked up the knotted blanket and had to breathe in sharply to control the pain.
“Hawk, please?” Her head was bowed when he turned. She murmured to herself, “None of this would have happend if you were Chad.”
The comment twisted his mouth, inflicting pain from his cut lip. He reached out and let a strand of her long hair slide through the fingers of his right hand. “All that glitters … isn’t sunshine,” he mused, then walked out of the room.
It was a long walk across the ranch yard to the bunkhouse. Weariness dragged at his feet. All talking ended the minute he pushed the door open. Hawk was too tired and too hurt to care about the stares directed at him. One eye was nearly swollen shut, but out of the narrow slit of the other, he spied an unmade bunk, the mattress rolled into a cylinder at the head of the bed. With awkward haste, he walked to it and dropped his bundle on the floor beside it.
It took him only a second to spread out the mattress and gingerly lower his frame onto its length. Not bothering to take off his boots or find a blanket to cover himself, Hawk closed his eyes. Instantly, he was asleep. It was a deep, drugged sleep that allowed his body to go to work and begin its mending process, free of pain and unhampered by the conscious mind.
For thirty-six hours straight, he slept—unconscious. When he came to, the blood had been washed from him, his ribs were bound, and there was a steaming cup of broth near him. His gaze rested on the calloused hand holding it and trailed up the arm to the face of Luther Wilcox.
“What is it? Poison?” Hawk’s voice was hoarse, his muscles screaming with stiffness when he tried to move. “I suppose you intend to finish the job you started.”
“Don’t need to.” Luther waited until Hawk had taken the cup, then explained his statement as he walked to a table to resume his game of solitaire. “Carol went to Phoenix to stay for a while with J. B. and Mrs. Faulkner.”
The cowboy sat in a chair with his back to Hawk. He didn’t speak again, ignoring Hawk.
Three days later, Hawk saddled a horse, packed some supplies, and rode to the canyon. He stayed a month, visiting his mother’s relatives. But there was no life for him there, although he found contentment and strength.
After a month, Hawk returned to the ranch. No one asked where he had been or questioned his right to move back into the bunkhouse. In the morning, he rode out with the men to work the cattle. Rawlins never tried to give him an order and never acknowledged the work Hawk did, but his eyes burned with loathing each time they came in contact.
Two months after his beating, Hawk heard the news that Chad and Carol were married. It meant nothing to him. Six months later she gave birth to a baby boy, who was promptly named after
his grandfather—John Buchanan Faulkner.
PART
III
“… With the zigzag lightning flung over your head,
come to us,
soaring! With the rainbow hanging high over your head,
come to us, soaring!
With the zigzag lightning flung out high on the ends of
your wings, come to us, soaring!
With the rainbow hanging high on the ends of
your wings, come to us, soaring!
… He stirs, he stirs, he stirs, he stirs.
Among the lands of evening, he stirs, he stirs;
The pollen of evening, he stirs, he stirs;
Now in old age wandering, he stirs, he stirs;
Now on the trail of beauty, he stirs, he stirs.
He stirs, he stirs, he stirs, he stirs.
… I have made your sacrifice,
I have prepared a smoke for you.”
Chapter VII
The skies over Phoenix were blanketed with a layer of black clouds that blotted out the sun, throwing the city into premature darkness. At frequent but irregular intervals, bolts of yellow lightning streaked out of the clouds, briefly illuminating the rolling and crashing thunderheads. The brilliant flashes of electric fire were accompanied by explosive claps of thunder that vibrated the air and ground.
The rain fell in wind-whipped sheets, slowing the six o’clock traffic to a crawl. The wipers swished frantically back and forth to sweep the blinding deluge off the Volkswagen’s windshield. Behind the wheel, Lanna Marshall flexed her fingers to ease their tense grip. She had heard Phoenix natives talk about the sudden and violent storms that could descend on the land without warning, but she hadn’t believed them. Everything was so dry and dusty, baked by the unrelenting heat of the sun, that it seemed unlikely large quantities of rain ever fell on it. Now she knew better.