Renegade Man

by Parris Afton Bonds

  Along this portion of Tomahawk Flats, the Renegade was shallow, wide and rapid. Kneeling, she dashed the chilly water over her face, then washed her hands. She was fastidious, overly fastidious for an anthropologist.

  She sat back on her heels, patting her face dry with the back of her sleeve while she watched the shifting pattern of light and shadow on the river. Her interest was caught by the opposite bank, higher than the one on her side and with an overhanging ledge.

  She had walked this area of the creek extensively on her preliminary exploration, but this was the first time she had seen things from this angle. If she hadn’t been squatting, she wouldn’t have noticed the steel cable anchored in the solid underside of the rocky ledge and dipping down into the water. It swayed slightly with the current. Curious—and a little concerned—at this evidence of other human habitation, she rose and followed the cable downstream, searching for stepping- stones to the opposite bank. Trails through this area had been heavily used in the 1820s by fur trappers as a route to the beaver grounds of the Gila River. But once the area became cattle country, it had been relatively unpopulated.

  A Gambel’s quail took flight at her and Magnum’s approach. The Renegade looped here, deepening as the creekbed narrowed. In an area with a dense growth of desert willow and salt cedar, she found a suitable crossing. The boulders, large and planed smooth by centuries of rushing water, crossed the creek where it ran six feet deep or more. The cable spanned the rocks in the middle of the crossing, and several yards downstream it moored a blue plastic pontoon on which some kind of machinery was mounted.

  She turned her attention back to negotiating the slippery rocks. On this side of the Renegade, the sunlight was filtered, the air cooler. Although she was concentrating on her balancing act, she gradually became aware of the eerie hush of the river birds. She felt a little shiver of nerves wholly unlike her. On the bank beside her, Magnum whined unhappily.

  “Coward,” she whispered.

  She didn’t even carry a gun, though a drug enforcement agent had warned her to do so in this area of the state. With illegal aliens and drug smugglers creeping through the border wilderness, anything could happen.

  It did.

  As if she were living a scene from The Creature from the Black Lagoon, something slick and black slithered into her peripheral vision, rising from the water to wrap its arms around her and yank her back¬ward into the icy depths.

  Chapter 2

  He had seen a lot of action as a SEAL. He had almost been run down by a drug smuggler’s powerboat, had been shot by a South American revolutionist and carved up by a berserk, knife-wielding terrorist, and had survived three underwater mine explosions. But in all his twenty-year navy career he had never wrestled a woman in a river. And that the claim jumper was female, he was certain. Her body, curved like that of Venus rising from the sea, attested to that fact. Talk about finding the mother lode! Reluctantly he released his latest discovery.

  On the bank, a dog snarled ferociously. With a snap of his fingers and a command of “Sit!” he intimidated the Labrador into at least backing off—but with its fangs still bared.

  The woman came up sputtering. Her dripping shirt clung to her breasts and outlined her nipples, as round as creek pebbles, and her shorts molded hand-filling hips. Her long hair fell back from her face, and she planted clenched fists on her hips. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing, mister?”

  He tugged off his mask. “I might ask the same of you, lady. You’re on federal land, twenty acres to which I hold the mining rights.”

  “A prospector!” she said, disgust curling her lips. “Well, I beg to differ with you on one point. We are on federal land, but I hold the archaeological rights. I filed an assessment map with Santa Fe’s Bureau of Land Management over a week ago. That gives my claim priority over either a grazing or a mining claim.”

  He had hated to strong-arm her, but he most certainly didn’t want some snooper blabbing around in Silver City about what he hoped would turn out to be a hot area for “placer gold,” gold deposited by water in places other than where it originated. The Bureau of Land Management gave a miner a ninety-day grace period until the claim was officially recorded in the county courthouse for all to see, and he wanted that head start.

  “Lady, I staked out the corners of my claim almost two weeks ago.” He swept a hand toward a corner post stake he had driven, just visible through the trees. Beneath it he had buried a common plastic pill bottle holding the necessary plat and papers recording the mine’s name—Landlubber—the date and location of the claim, along with his own name as locator. “Until the BLM can rule on this,” he growled, “you’re nothing but a claim jumper as far as I’m concerned. You’ve got sixty seconds to clear out of—”

  “It’s you!”

  “What?”

  Her wide-eyed gaze dropped to his long, narrow feet, slid up his skintight black wet suit, paused at the knife strapped to his thigh, scooted on past his one- hundred-pound leaded weight belt and settled on his face, framed by the close-fitting black hood. “I don’t believe it. Jonah Jones!”

  He blinked the water from his lashes and stared hard at her. With her hair plastered against her head and streaming down her shoulders like sargasso seaweed, she didn’t look particularly familiar. Yet the way she said his name told him who she was. Dismayed, they stared at one another, regarding each other across a distance of twenty years. Pain that had long been dormant flickered in the eyes of one, twinges of uncomfortable guilt in the other’s.

  “Ritz,” he drawled finally.

  Her mouth tightened. “Rita-lou.”

  He ignored her. His cynical green gaze took in the strong, wide mouth, the dark slashes of her brows and the deep pools of her eyes, contrasting startlingly with her pale hair. “The last time we talked, you had dropped out of Western High and—”

  “Gotten pregnant and left town.”

  “Had gone to work for the Kingsleys,” he finished firmly. He didn’t bother to keep the contempt from his voice. “1 was lumber jacking for their lumber mill that summer, Ritz—if you remember.”

  He remembered. All too well. She’d been standing in the doorway to the Kingsley carriage house, which had been converted to living quarters for the help. She hadn’t changed out of her black uniform with the white cuffs and collar. She had always looked remote, untouchable. But she had never looked so remote as she had that evening, when she had told him it was over between them. He remembered feeling awkward, feeling like digging his boot toe in the lush green grass, running his finger inside his suddenly tight collar and begging. But he hadn’t. And he wouldn’t now. It had simply been a schoolboy crush, and he was long over her.

  She cocked her head and studied him. “So where’d you go after you left Silver City?”

  His smile was chilling. “I joined the navy and saw the world. And you?”

  She didn’t even bother to smile, nor did she answer. She wrapped her arms around herself.

  “You’re shivering like an Eskimo. Let’s get you out of those clothes.”

  “Thank you, but I’ve been dressing and undressing myself for a good thirty years or more.”

  She stomped out of the creek, water sloshing in her tennis shoes. He watched her sun-brown legs and the enticing sway of her derriere, hugged by the wet shorts. She was even prettier than she had been in school, and he’d thought then that he’d never seen anything prettier. But that girl couldn’t begin to compare with the woman walking away from him.

  Purely a sexual attraction, he told himself, following her onto the bank and through the dense growth of trees. But that attraction had been done with twenty years ago.

  In grade school, he remembered, she had been a real scrapper, always with a smudge of dirt somewhere on her face. Then, in junior high, he had noticed how she had suddenly grown breasts—and grown even more standoffish. Now, as a mature woman, her hips had widened in delicious proportion to those breasts.

  Dangerous thoughts,
since he certainly didn’t need a busybody in his vicinity. Best to let this encounter end as it had begun—explosively. He knew better than to let himself become distracted by a woman. Men had gotten killed over women. Samson had gotten blinded over Delilah, John the Baptist had lost his head over Salome, and—

  And damn! Now he had real trouble to deal with: two rifles trained on him and Ritz!

  The center horseman, flanked by his two gun-toting mounted henchmen, leaned forward and braced himself on the pommel with hands that were as wrinkled and tough as a dry chamois skin. “You two have wandered off the main road. This here’s Kingsley land.”

  “The federal government doesn’t see it that way, C.B.,” Jonah said, bestowing a faux amiable smile on the grizzled patriarch. “You may have the grazing rights, but as long as I fence off any holes and close gates, I can prospect to my heart’s content.”

  “Another prospector!” The word was pronounced with the same disgust Rita-lou had exhibited. What with the sanctions against South Africa, the United States minting gold coins for the first time in almost fifty years, and the skyrocketing price in the commodity, gold prospectors were prowling the hills again. A new breed of forty-niners had appeared.

  Kingsley’s mouth twitched with obvious annoyance. “You know who I am. Just who the hell are you?”

  C. B. Kingsley had aged a lot in twenty years, Jonah noticed. At either side of the red-veined nose, his cheeks were florid, and his jowls were prominent now. “Jonah Jones. I used to work cattle and lumberjack for you some twenty years ago.”

  The information appeared to leave a negligible impression on the cattle baron. Instead, he focused his attention wholly on Rita-lou. Standing at Jonah’s side, she was trembling with suppressed emotion. From the look of holy fire in her eyes, Jonah guessed.it was pure loathing. And C.B. appeared to return it.

  “So you had the gall to come back, did you? Silver City didn’t think much of you then, and I doubt people’s feelings have changed. I’d advise you to go back to wherever you came from, girl.”

  “It’s Ms. Randall to you. And I’m not going anywhere. My anthropological claim takes precedence over both your grazing rights and Mr. Jones’s mining rights.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Jonah snapped, feeling himself rise to a slow boil. He wasn’t about to surrender the Landlubber’s potential value for a sack of crumbling bones.

  C.B.’s head jutted forward. He had once been powerfully built, and even though he had a sizable potbelly now, he still had bull’s shoulders. “You gonna be digging? Here?”

  Rita-lou tucked her hands into the back pockets of her wet shorts. Jonah thought that Medusa had probably exhibited a more pleasant smile than Ritz was at that moment. “That is right. I am.”

  C.B. glowered down at her.

  Sensing the tension, the horse on Jonah’s left pranced nervously. Jonah didn’t recognize the grulla’s rider, a man with a weak chin. But the other man, the barrel-chested rider to the right of Kingsley, was Buck Dillard. He had played varsity football for Western High their sophomore year, when he had been just mean enough to earn the sobriquet of Meat Processor. His glassy-eyed gaze was riveted on Rita-lou, noting the way the soaked blouse clung to her breasts like a second skin.

  “Then let me warn you,” C.B. said at last through clenched teeth. “We’ve been getting some cattle rustlers in these parts. They just cut a few barbed wires, back their semis inside the fence and load up a herd. By the time the theft is discovered the next morning, the cattle are somewhere in another state being butchered. You understand that I can’t let this happen to Split P cattle. My men are on order to fire first, girl, and ask questions later.”

  “Like I told you, it’s Ms. Randall to you,” she said coolly.

  Jonah, along with the Kingsley bunch, watched in silence as she strode off down the gravelly riverbank. Buck shoved his hat back on his head to reveal thinning reddish-brown hair, and whistled softly.

  C.B. shot him a harsh look, then turned on Jonah. “The same warning goes for you.” He sawed on the reins, wheeling his buckskin quarter horse in the direction opposite the one Rita-lou had taken. “Let’s go, boys!”

  * * * * *

  Since a trip back into Silver City took a good hour and a half, Jonah limited his visits to one or two a week at the most to patronize the grocery store, laundromat, hardware store and whatever.

  He considered every moment spent away from prospecting a moment squandered, but now he realized that a visit to the barbershop was in order, as well as a little restocking of his larder. Besides, he wanted to stop by the courthouse and file a research request on his twenty acres, which Rita-lou Randall so adamantly asserted overlapped her claim. The subject had been on his mind since she had stalked off three days ago. Not that it would do him any good to be in any hurry. Researching conflicting claims sometimes took the BLM months.

  After dropping his dirty clothing off with the laundromat attendant, he parked his red-and-white Ford pickup in the parking lot of the Texas-New Mexico Power Company building, disregarding, as he always had, the sign threatening to tow away unauthorized cars.

  He crossed the busy street to the Buffalo Barbershop. The place hadn’t changed much. The dusty wild turkey in flight was still mounted over the shampoo basin. As a kid, getting his hair washed, he had half expected to have his forehead spattered with droppings. Tacked over the old-fashioned cash register was the obligatory girlie calendar. Miss June was wearing a roustabout’s hard hat and not much more.

  “Will you look at that! If it isn’t Jonah Jones!” From behind the far chair, old Sam Vodsky waved his barber’s razor in recognition. “So what I heard was the gospel truth. What are you doing back in town, son?”

  Jonah removed his straw Stetson and hung it on the hat tree. “Well, now, Sam, I figured that seeing as how the Buffalo Barbershop always knew things before they even happened, it would also know what I was doing back in Silver City.”

  “Hear tell you got the gold fever,” the rotund barber called.

  “Jonah!”

  At the sound of his name, Jonah turned around. Nelda Wright stood beside an empty barber chair. She wore a delighted smile. “You look like you could use a haircut, Jonah Jones. And a mustache-trimming.”

  He settled his six-foot-three-inch frame in the chair and let her drape a plastic cape around him. He grinned at her pert reflection in the mirror. The strawberry blonde had been a cheerleader and Mining Days queen, and he had turned scarlet and stuttered if she even looked his way. But she hadn’t turned him inside out the way Ritz had. Somehow, Ritz had always managed to put him in a tailspin. In the Vietnam era of politicians shouting “Charge the hill!” he had joined the navy and abruptly gotten buyer’s remorse. He had left with his feelings for Ritz unresolved. For months after she dumped him, he had felt ' as if he’d been left hanging and empty.

  “You haven’t changed much, Nelda. Still just as pretty as you were in high school.”

  She nudged him playfully in the back. “With a pound on my hips for each year we’ve been out of school, and a hundred gray hairs for each of my three kids. Looks like you’ve put on fifty pounds of muscle since you left Silver City.”

  He laughed. “The navy did that.”

  “So that’s where you were all this time.” She began briskly clipping the longish butternut hair she held between her fingers. “I wondered why you never came back to visit.”

  He stared at her face in the mirror. “After Pa passed on, there was no home to come back to, Nelda.” Everyone in Silver City had known his father was the town drunk. And Rita-lou Randall’s mom had been the town whore. He and Ritz were Chihuahua Hill kids. Funny how she had stayed on his mind the last three days, when he’d hardly thought about her for almost twenty years.

  “So why’d you come back, Jonah?”

  “Like Sam said, I got gold fever.”

  “Bah! The last pocket of gold petered out of P.A. a century ago.”

  “Who said anything abou
t Pinos Altos?”

  “Jonah, even a beginner knows not to waste time trying to find gold someplace where it’s never been discovered. Tilt your head a little. There, that’s it.”

  “Didn’t you know thar’s gold in them thar hills?” he chided with a chuckle. Gold. The yellow dream- dust.

  “Where you staying?”

  “Out in the Mimbres Valley. Got a camper trailer out there I call home.”

  “Want your boots shined, senor?”

  Jonah glanced down at the scrawny kid with the coal-black hair and eyes. Hopeful eyes. Where would we all be without hope? he wondered. The kid could have been himself thirty years ago. “Sure, son. Why not?”

  “Seen any of the old group since you’ve been back?” Nelda asked.

  “Nope. Not unless you count a run-in with old Kingsley earlier this week.”

  “Cattle Baron never was the most pleasant of men, but ever since Chap left town he’s been bitter as a pi non nut. And just as hard.”

  Jonah recalled that time easily: the Mining Days Fiesta held each Labor Day weekend. Everyone had been decked out in the customary turn-of-the-century garb; there had been the usual beard-growing contest, pie-eating contest and old miners competing in loading and pushing the old-style mining cars along a section of tracks.

  But that Mining Days weekend hadn’t been usual or particularly festive. Chap Kingsley had run off after anargument with his old man. The highway patrol had been alerted, the sheriff called in, the townspeople questioned. But Chap had covered his tracks too well.

  “Funny, Jonah, the week before Chap ran off, Rita- lou Randall left town.” Nelda tactfully didn’t add the word “pregnant,” but he knew it was on the tip of her tongue. “Then, that same week that Chap ran off, you quit school and left town—to join the navy, right? Now, twenty years later, you and Rita are back. Wouldn’t surprise me if Chap didn’t show up, too.” Jonah propped his boot up for the boy to shine. “If he doesn’t, who’s C.B. going to leave his empire to?”