Renegade Man

by Parris Afton Bonds

  On Friday nights the main drag of Silver City was lit up like the Strip in Las Vegas. Cowboys, college students and miners all cruised the boulevard. Jonah spoke for the first time in the hour-and-forty-five- minute drive. “Where do you want me to let you out?”

  “The Border Cowboy.”

  A frown pulled down his lips, but then his big frame seemed to relax. He dropped his voice to a mocking drawl. “Listen, pardner, that place ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

  God, what charm. How had she missed it when they were kids? She shrugged and managed an easy “Let’s give it a try.”

  The Border Cowboy was jammed with laughing, sweating customers. Jonah, who towered above almost everyone else there, surveyed the room. He dipped his head toward her. “Which way you going?”

  “Upstairs.” Out of the main logjam of bobbing human bodies.

  He tugged his hat lower over his eyes. “I’ll take downstairs, then.”

  Feeling as if she had been curtly dismissed, she spun away and began to make her way through the packed, perspiring people. She might as well have been going up a down escalator. The lack of air ignited claustrophobic feelings that constricted her lungs even further.

  Then Jonah was there, his roughened hand protectively on her arm, towing her along as he shouldered a path for them.

  Upstairs the place wasn’t as crowded, but it was hotter. The rising heat didn’t stop the gyrating dancers. She recognized two or three people from her high school days, but since they weren’t expecting to see her there, they didn’t take note of her.

  Jonah released her arm, and at once she missed the reassuring warmth of his touch. She looked up at him, and he tipped the brim of his hat with his fingers. “See you at midnight?”

  She only nodded, afraid that if she spoke she would ask him to stay with her. Her eyes swept the filled booths and packed dance floor. What was she going to do with herself for three hours?

  She was saved by a man coming off the dance floor: Soren. A young woman with a brightly made-up face—Rita-lou didn’t recognize her—clung to his arm.

  “Rita-lou!” he said. “Are you with anyone?” His voice was warm with pleasure.

  She glanced around at Jonah. He was already moving away. “No,” she said, turning back to Soren. “I’m not.”

  “Then join us. We’re at that round booth, there in the corner.”

  The young woman he introduced as Babs didn’t appear too happy about his invitation, but Jonah had vanished in the crowd, and Rita-lou had too much pride to run after him. “I’d like that, Soren.”

  Two cowhands, two young, jeans-clad women who could only be coeds and a thirtyish man in a business suit, who Soren introduced as Rolistof’s purchasing agent, were hunched over mugs of beer, talking and laughing. They scooted around to make room for her. She had expected Nelda to be with the group. And her next thought was, if Nelda’s not here, is she downstairs?

  The thought troubled her, because she knew a man like Jonah could find comfort in the other woman’s arms. Nelda wouldn’t demand more of him than he was willing to give.

  A man like Jonah. She tried to tell herself that he was just a man like any other. No better, no worse. But that wasn’t true. Time and experience had made him stronger in spirit than others, larger than life. Kinder than he would have people know.

  “What are you thinking?” Soren asked at her side.

  “Oh, nothing, just watching the dancers.”

  She could tell he didn’t believe her, but he didn’t make an issue of it. “Don’t you get lonely out there at Tomahawk Flats, Rita-lou?”

  She stared into the eyes of a man who was trying to understand her and, yes, who wanted her. “No. I like the solitude.”

  “But tonight you came to one of the last places on earth where you’d find solitude. So if you’re looking for company, I’d like to offer mine. Dance?”

  “Yes, I’d enjoy that.”

  The music was slow, romantic. Most of the couples were dancing the two-step, but Soren moved her around the sawdust-covered dance floor in an old- fashioned waltz that made her feel ridiculously sentimental. If only the man holding her so close were Jonah. To combat such foolish dreams, she asked, “How is RolistoPs battle with the city going?”

  “None too well. The Silver City councilmen are forcing the water issue to an election. Despite our ad campaigns, the Rolistof people are seen as foreigners—Englishmen without the same civic interests as other industries—which just isn’t true. How’s your search for Renegade Man going?”

  She tilted her head back and smiled at him. “None too well,” she said, echoing his own answer. “Several days ago a cattle stampede wrecked two weeks’ worth of work. I think C. B. Kingsley was behind it. I’m going to pay a call on him when I decide the time is right.”

  “You have a real fight on your hands.”

  “I can handle it,” she said, wishing she felt as confident as her statement made her sound.

  His hand at her back pressed her against him again, and she fitted her temple against his jawline. At her ear, he said, “You know, for a long time after my wife died I tried dating, but it was so damned difficult to change my life-style, to adjust to the single life and single women. But you’re different from other women, Rita-lou. An independent soul, that’s what I’ve decided you are.”

  “I’ve heard that the Scandinavian women are war rioresses,” she said, trying to tease him out of his somber mood.

  “My mother was. But I think that, like her, you have a softness at the center. A mystery that would take a lifetime to divine.”

  She tilted her head to smile up at him. “And I believe you have a poetic soul, Soren Gunnerson.”

  “No, I’m fascinated. By a lovely American wild-West Valkyrie.”

  “Soren . . . I’ll be leaving when I find my Renegade Man.”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  She stared into his impassioned, Nordic blue eyes, and she thought about Jonah, who refused to take any chances at relationships. She smiled up at Soren, a smile that couldn’t be interpreted as anything more than platonic. “Will you take me home tonight?”

  “There isn’t anything I’d like to do more, Rita-lou.” He grinned down at her, his eyes dancing. “Well, something else I’d like to do even more. Kiss you.”

  She wrinkled her nose at him. “I’d settle for a ride home, thank you.”

  * * * * *

  Nelda sat in the pickup next to Jonah. After flicking the radio dial to another channel, she rested her hand lightly on his denim-clad knee. He knew he’d had just enough liquor to make him reckless. He felt almost cheerful—or rather, he had felt almost cheerful until Ritz had appeared at the downstairs bar and informed him that Soren was taking her back to Tomahawk Flats.

  Nelda’s breathing was still rapid from the kiss he had given her before he started the engine. She snuggled against his side, rested her head against his shoulder and sighed. “Jonah?”

  “Mmhh?”

  She tilted her face upward to brush her lips along his jawline. “I know I can take the sting from you, keep you contented.”

  “I don’t doubt that.” But there were other needs, mirages of colored fancies, floating through his mind. Needs only one woman could satisfy.

  “I know you,” she said confidently. “You’re the sort of man who always thinks there’s something be¬ond the next river. One day you’ll cross enough rivers to find out that there isn’t anything on the far side that isn’t on this one.”

  “I think I’ve run out of rivers,” he said, knowing he’d had too much to drink. He parked the pickup down the street from Livingston’s food store, in front of one of several timber- and-stone duplexes that had been built on the site of a razed drive-in theater. The spring of his sophomore year, he had brought Ritz to that drive-in in a borrowed car. He had been foolishly content to lie on the hood alongside her and munch buttered popcorn while they watched a horror flick. The speaker had been out of order, but he had
n’t cared.

  He tried to fix his attention on Nelda, and wanted to curse when Orbison began to wail over the radio. “Crying.” Her arms closed around him, quick as a trap. Her kiss was hot and hungry, but then she pulled away abruptly. “Think of that, Jonah Jones. And when you see her and think you see something wonderful, remember she’s made just like me.” She got out of his pickup, her manner light and cheerful.

  He didn’t have to ask who “her” was.

  Chapter 9

  Living in Jonah’s camping trailer was taxing Rita- lou’s self-control. Electricity charged the air. She and Jonah were uncomfortably aware of each other, and a casual brushing of a hand against a sleeve, an accidental exchange of glances, had a strange, tense and unanticipated significance.

  She and Jonah were both exhausted from hours of uninterrupted work, and she was trying hard to guard against an isolated, fragile moment that could intensify the power of their awareness of one another. But keeping their relationship on professional terms, keeping it strictly asexual, was becoming very difficult, especially when they had to change clothes. In the mornings Jonah left before she got out of her bunk. In the evenings, after the dinner dishes had been washed and dried, he always seemed to find a reason to take a stroll. She used those brief moments of privacy to change into her night clothes—an oversized T- shirt now that long johns were no longer necessary against the night’s cold – and brush her teeth.

  He obviously wanted to keep their relationship dis-passionate just as much as she did.

  Come the weekend, they would escape into Silver City to go their separate ways. Weeknights, however, they were too tired to do anything but retire after dinner. Unhappily, physical fatigue did not necessarily induce mental fatigue. So, after a week of stirring restlessly in her bed, she switched on her night light and wrote in her field journal. The next evening Jonah switched on his light and read a sailing magazine, one with a gloriously colored cover photo of a large sloop, sails furled, slicing through high seas. For a while this became the pattern of their evenings—her writing, his reading.

  “What makes you want to fool around with fossils and dead things?” he asked one evening without looking up from his magazine—a business journal this time.

  “I’m driven by the intellectual excitement of what I learn.”

  He didn’t say anything. Forty-five minutes later she said, without glancing his way, “I always thought sailors were jocks, not intellectuals who followed the economy.”

  “You ever watch a sailboat race? The America’s Cup, for instance? The skipper who wins has to be a brilliant tactician. Psychological warfare and management ability are as important as athletic skill.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  The next evening, after another silent dinner, he asked, “Do you know how to play hearts?”

  She focused her attention on the plate she was washing so she wouldn’t have to look at him looking at her. Her hands still in the dishwater, she shrugged. “Sure.” If she had any skill at cards, it was the ability to lose strategically and overwhelmingly.

  She lost almost every hand. Across from her, Jonah sat on the narrow bench, his back against the wall, his legs stretched out in front of him. He watched her with a satisfied smile, that singularly crooked tooth of his gleaming irresistibly among its perfect companions.

  Disgusted at having been bested, though not su¬prised, she stopped by a discount store in Silver City the following weekend. “You ever play Trivial Pursuit?” she asked Jonah innocently later that night. On the Guatemalan dig, the students and the Earthwatch team had played the game whenever bad weather or darkness prevented them from working.

  “A little,” he replied laconically.

  The first night she amassed five of the six wedges necessary to win before he collected his first, then went on to take the game. The next night he suggested they play again. “What’s the matter?” she taunted merrily. “Don’t like losing?”

  “Damned right I don’t.” He slung the dish towel over his shoulders and grinned amiably at her. “But let’s make it a little more interesting this time. Say for every wedge one of us gets, the other one gives up an article of clothing.”

  She raised one brow. “Sort of like strip poker, only without the poker?”

  “Yeah.”

  She cocked her head to one side and scrutinized him. He looked so smug. She knew he was baiting her, but she had confidence in her ability to win. She had played this game too many times. “You’re on, buddy.”

  She had an early run of luck and had Jonah down to his cutoff jeans and one white sock that drooped around his ankle. Then he began reeling off answers, reducing her to her front-clasp bra and denim shorts.

  “Is all your underwear lacy?” he asked, his smile guileless.

  “None of your business. Do you want to try for this wedge or not?”

  “Fire away.”

  “My pleasure.” She reeled off the question, one she was sure he couldn’t answer.

  He drummed his fingers on the table, rubbed his stubbled jaw, studied the overhead air vent for a moment, then shocked her by responding correctly. “How did you know that?”

  “Your choice, Ritz—the shorts or your bra.”

  Her gaze narrowed on him. “You said you’d only played this a little!”

  “A little compared to what?” He held out his cal- lused hand. “Your bra, please.”

  “You cheated!”

  “You should know better than to play games with a sailor,” he said calmly. “What do you think we do all day long when we’re off duty?”

  “Seduce the local maidens.”

  His cocky smile mocked her iritation. “Is that what you’d like? To be seduced?”

  She grabbed her blouse, socks and tennis shoes off his bunk and dropped them on the end of hers. “I’m not the naive kid I used to be, Jonah Jones. And I’ll tell you what I’d like. I’d like to... to..

  “Yeah?”

  “Get ready for bed, if you don’t mind.”

  “You look just about ready. Of course, the shorts have to go.”

  She stared at him, and he held his hands up, palms out. “All right, I admit it. Lusty thoughts are definitely dancing through my head, but I get the hint. This ancient mariner is on his way out the door to chart the stars.”

  So it was back to her writing and his reading. But she knew that the tension was building steadily toward an emotional explosion. They were both taut, tight, wound up. Things couldn’t go on much longer.

  * * * * *

  Frontier Days was Silver City’s version of the Fourth of July: fireworks, rodeos, parades, bazaars and barbecues. The week before Soren had asked Rita- lou to the celebration that July 4th, and she had accepted, glad for an excuse to take off from work, to relax. At Tomahawk Flats she felt all breathless and panicky. It was stupid of her to let Jonah affect her like that, but when had she ever made anything easy on herself? How could she have let herself fall for the Captain Kidd of Silver City?

  The best thing she could do was acknowledge it, try not to make a fool of herself—which she had been doing lately—and ride the thing out. By summer’s end they’d both be going their separate ways.

  Soren had wanted to pick her up at Tomahawk Flats, but she had convinced him that it would be ridiculous for him to make the long round trip. “Besides, it’ll be time to pick up my mail again. I’ll meet you in town.”

  She and Soren arrived in time for the cookout at Gough Park, which was already crowded with families. While she saved them a spot beneath a shady sycamore, he filled their plates with barbecued ribs and red beans. The day was gorgeous, with a cloudless sky so blue it hurt her eyes. Close by, old men pitched horseshoes, and she thought how long it had been since she had seen anyone playing the game.

  Resting her head against the tree trunk, she closed her eyes, listening to the laughter of children nearby. In the distance, she could hear the sounds of a guitar and a fiddle coming from the flagstone pavilion and, fart
her away, the popping of firecrackers.

  “Pleasant, isn’t it?” Soren said as he passed her a plate. Despite his bulk, he dropped down agilely beside her. “I get so caught up working that I forget to take time to stop and smell the flowers.”

  “Don’t work so hard, Soren.” She touched his hand and said, “For five years I did that, and it’s not healthy. You lose all perspective.”

  He turned his hand over and caught her fingers, giving them a gentle squeeze. “I like you, Rita-lou Randall. A lot. You’re a sassy, classy woman.”

  She smiled. “I liked you, too.” He reminded her a bit of Robert. But what she said was, “You remind me of the jolly green giant—except with red hair.” Laughter rolled from his barrel chest, and she relaxed, feeling her restlessness and tension back away. Soren’s genial nature kept it a bay, for the moment, at least.

  The rodeo, held out at the Sheriffs Posse Rodeo Grounds, was attended by cowboys from all over the Southwest. While they might not be built like weight lifters, what flesh they did carry was hard and tough. They had hands thickened from constant use and the squint that came from years of narrowing their eyes to protect them against sun glare and wind.

  As she watched the contestants compete in the steer-wrestling and bull-roping events, Rita-lou couldn’t help but be reminded of Jonah. Like those hell-raising cowboys, he was a loner, and there was a little bit of outlaw in him. He had the incorrigible nature of a spirited horse that would never be quite broken, even though it might eventually accept the bit and saddle.

  She glanced at the men around her in the stands, contrasting them with Jonah. He possessed the same independent quality, unknown to the average working man, who had mortgage payments and lived in terror of an IRS audit.

  But didn’t that willingness to face small daily fears for the sake of a loved one take a special kind of courage? Maybe Jonah was the coward.