Alessandra, who couldn’t quit shivering, hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until she tried to speak through numb lips. “Just what did he look like, Mr. Shelton? The Indian?”
The agent spit another yellow wad at the copper vessel. “Like all redskins, ma’am. Can’t tell one from the other ’lessen you’re ’round them for awhile. This one wasn’t no young buck. Middle-aged or so. Taller than most, I’d say. I could have used his help, transferring you two to my Haynes, but next thing I knew, he was lickety-split gone.”
“Was he . . . Was this Indian big, like a bear? And dressed all in white . . . underneath the animal fur coat?”
“Ma’am, out there this morning everything was white.” He nodded toward the bare, dust-coated window, where sunshine now feebly peered through. Snow still rimmed the window ledge. “Even you two. Whiter than any live body should have been.”
Neil looked askance at her but waited to say something until Shelton deposited them back at the Jeffrey Quad, parked just outside the Chetro Ketl ruins, an endless series of rooms and kivas. Once inside his truck, he turned to her.
“What’s this all about, Mrs. O’Quinn? This Indian-in-white thing?”
“You saw him, too, didn’t you?”
“I don’t believe in ghosts, Mrs. O’Quinn.”
“You saw him.”
“I — I felt his . . . someone’s presence. But,” he quickly added, “when the body temperature starts falling, one’s mental ability is impaired. All sorts of hallucinations are possible . . . and probable.”
“I felt him, too.” She would say no more. Neither she nor Judd, she suspected, were ready to admit openly the possibility . . . or probability of something operating beyond the world of the five senses.
Nevertheless, when she returned to Taos and found Dr. Jung visiting Peg again, she had no reticence this time revealing herself with her probing questions. She didn’t exactly reveal everything, though, not with the possibility that Lawrence or Lady Brett could enter the room at any moment. They were upstairs joyously painting scenes on the second story’s bathroom windows while Frieda napped. Tony was outside, hammering together a colony of pigeon houses.
Both Jung and Peg listened to Alessandra’s implausible tale. Tapping out his pipe, Jung said, “When trauma is too severe, parts of the vital, feeling self will split off to lessen the impact of the trauma.”
“Then you’re saying, Dr. Jung, that both Judd and I imagined the details of this . . .” she refrained from saying ‘intimate contact’, “. . . this rescue simultaneously?”
“Not at all, Alessandra, my dear. These split-off parts are lost in a vast, undifferentiated region called the unconscious.” He puffed on his pipe, then added, “This region could very well be teeming with dissociated memories, forbidden primal impulses, archetypal religious imagery.”
“How does this—this psychological jargon relate to what I know really happened?”
“She wants plain English, Carl,” Peg said with a chuckle.
He blew an eddying smoke ring, then went on. “In discussing this concept with Manuel Mondragon, he led me to believe that in the shamanic view, the split-off parts don’t go into an undifferentiated, no-man’s land of the unconscious. Rather, the soul part lives a parallel existence in non-ordinary worlds. I find this concept absolutely fascinating.”
So did she. And she meant to ask Man about it herself.
Has he married yet? The thought was too painful to ask Peg.
* * * * *
Alessandra waited until the next day, when she was more rested, and ready to do battle. Dressed in warm clothing, a fox-fur hat and mittens, galoshes, and her double-breasted Chesterfield over a simple black woolen dress, she set out for the Pueblo.
Here the recent snow storm had laid a soft white blanket over the land. Beautiful, especially with the clouds of mist enveloping Mystery Mountain; but the snow was already melting under the high desert’s intense sunlight that took the night chill off the air and turned the road into a muddy sludge. A passing, black, fringe-topped surrey splattered her with daubs of the sticky stuff.
Once she had believed northern New Mexico’s sun and air alone should be enough to make life sufficiently rich. But life without love, she had since discovered, was merely existence. She wanted desperately to believe that when one lived with a clear, passionate wish, that when one had the courage to desire with passion and act upon that passion, then the Universe responded.
Without really seeing the good-natured Puebloans, smelling the sweet piñon burning, hearing the sounds of an easier lifestyle, she trod straight through the village, beyond its crumbling wall, beyond the fields, to Man’s adobe. At his door, she hesitated.
What will I find? Man with peyote? Mud Woman with Man?
Before Alessandra could lose her nerve, she knocked.
No answer.
After a long, agonizing moment, she knocked again. This time more resolutely. When no response came, she tentatively tried the door, her memory darting back to the unpleasant scene she had encountered the last time she had entered his home uninvited.
She nervously glanced around. Rolled blankets were stacked against the neatly whitewashed wall. Next to one of the blankets, a pair of beaded moccasins stood. Large ones. Her breath flowed a little easier. She shed her muddy galoshes next to the moccasins and stepped further into the house.
Dry cedar apparently burned every day from the nearby stack of small branches studded with light blue berries. A large yucca floor mat before the fireplace and several serapes in other areas covered the hard mud floor. A banco ran along two sides, serving as both a place to sit and a shelf for Man’s drums.
She shrugged from her coat and, dropping it alongside the drums, wandered on. In one wall, niches served as cupboards. Against the far wall, near the deal table and bench, sat a fishing basket and a coiled up hair rope.
Man’s hunting rifle, a Spencer Repeating Carbine, lay propped in a pair of deer horns. Clothing hung from another set of horns and a wooden peg, none of it a woman’s.
On the chimney place, along with Man’s hunting knife, she found a feather-festooned flute. Removing her mittens, she let her fingers caress its smooth wood of red willow. Man’s. She rubbed its hard length against her cheek then placed its tip between her lips.
“You are better?”
She whirled, her hand flying to her throat. “You scared me!”
Stepping through the doorway, he filled the room, forcing all air from its space. He shut the door behind him, casting the room into an intimate dimness. “You like flute?”
Flustered, she stashed his flute back on the mantle. “It’s all right.”
His grin infuriated her.
He tossed his blanket across one of the chairs. “Indians also play Grandfather Flute, Mystic Flute, Love Flute, and Female Flute.”
Heat suffused her. “Is that so?”
“Sit.”
“No.”
He raised a brow.
Her breath as rapid as a hummingbird’s wings, she retorted, “Yes, my liege lord.” Weak-kneed, she sat, barely catching the edge of the banco. Her mittens tumbled to her feet.
“Not that hard to obey, is it?”
Wordlessly she shook her head, her gaze fastened on her twisting fingers. How had he shattered her customary defiant charade?
“You want I teach you how to play flute?”
“No. No.”
His tone lowered, soft yet husky. “But then you already know, do you not? My body remembers well.”
Her eyes snapped up. He was smiling. He knew exactly what he was doing, this teasing. “I want to know . . . .” She couldn’t find the right words and knew she should be ashamed of her rude intrusion. The reason that brought her here . . . she felt extremely self-conscious . . . if what she thought may have happened . . . and angry and not quite certain why. She forced herself to meet his inquiring gaze. “You asked if I’m better. Better than what? Why did you ask that?”
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p; He turned from her to kneel before the fireplace and stood several sticks of wood upright inside it. His dexterous fingers tucked a little cake of ashes mixed with kerosene oil inside the stick pyramid.
She sighed and waited.
Soon the subtle, soul-stirring incense of green piñon filled the room. Still hunkered on one knee, he pivoted and faced her. “Are you better than when I found you at Chetro Ketl?”
“No!” The single word was an utterance from the pit of her stomach. A gasp. “No, it couldn’t have happened. It can’t be real.”
Firelight flickered over his face, so beautiful it derailed her, made logical thinking impossible. Something of his mystery would forever hold her enchanted. “Anything possible when the heart is right.”
“No. Not something like that.”
“Why not?”
She stared unseeingly at a burned spot on the yucca mat, where a cinder had popped from the fireplace. Why not? He possessed a magical power of Being. Slowly, she raised her gaze to meet his intense one. “Why?”
“You were dying.” He rose and crossed to kneel before her. His fingers nimbly unlaced first one of her French kid brogues, then the other. His hand held her ankle, branding her flesh with his heat through the white wool stockings.
“Take off your hat,” he ordered.
Numbly, she followed his order, the hat dropping to the floor as well.
With one hand he reached up and removed her comb from her hair. It tumbled about her shoulders in rebellious curls. His eyes blazed. All too quickly, his other hand released her foot. He strode back to the fireplace to toss another ashcake on the smoldering embers.
“I was dying when I came here.”
His back to her, he shrugged those massive shoulders. “Is it not good to be alive at last?”
His questioning reply was inadequate. The power of fury surged through her. She sprang to her feet. “Did you make love to me?”
A long moment. With only the flames hissing. Then . . . “Yes.”
Propelled by rage, she hurled herself at him, catching him off guard, knocking them both to their knees. “How could you?! Without my consent. Without my knowledge?!”
He captured her beating, flailing hands. His black braids wrapped in pink yarn, swung down to frame either side of her face. They were locked knee to hip to breast in cosmic combat. “Why anger?”
“Because . . . ” tears of fury stung her eyes, “. . . because it’s amoral!”
“Amoral?”
“Without morals . . .” she stuttered, trying to find a definition. “You violated the moral code of any civilized society.”
“Civilized? Moral? Nothing moral in stare of the hawk. Nothing moral in death. This is life, Alessandra.”
“Why did you save me?” she demanded. “Why, when people are dying everywhere? Why me?”
He grew utterly quiet. Not even seeming to breathe. His lids closed, as if would shut her out, then opened to fasten on hers with intensity. “Our hearts are one. Do you not know this? You were brought from afar that we could be one.” Goodness limed his voice. Certainty shone in his eyes. These were the wise eyes that watched from the pueblo’s highest rooftops, that gauged Father Sun’s movements from its house mountain. These were the wise eyes that looked with compassion upon people’s souls.
Instantly, she felt ashamed and humbled. “You’re marrying Mud Woman,” she nevertheless insisted, refusing to surrender her ego out of fear there would be nothing left of her.
He released her hands to bracket her waist, twisting her suddenly so that she lay on the yucca mat. He crouched over her, then lowered his huge weight, bracing his forearms on either side of her head. His nose was mere inches from her, his beautiful face filling her entire vision. His breath smelled sweet with the scent of recently chewed mint leaf. And more subtly . . . of pinon and kerosene and the natural, musky odor of a man moist with his own juices. “I do that out of responsibility to my people. What has that to do with love? What has that to do with the bond that locks your soul with mine, as our flesh is locked together now?”
“Because I could not live as your lover, knowing you have come from another woman’s arms to mine. Smelling the scent of another woman on your skin, in your long hair!”
“You do not know her. You do not know yourself.”
“I know that in my world a marriage is sacred. A man commits himself to loving his wife and no other.”
“All men?” he murmured with an affectionate, contemptuous smile. “Did your husband?”
“Never again will I be second to another woman!”
“You are not second to Mud Woman. Years ago, after my wife died, I give my word to wed with Mud Woman. Am I not a man of honor that I should no keep my word?” Wounded integrity shone in his face.
“Yet you would make love to another woman after you wed? The laws of the white man would call that adultery.” She hated the nasty sound of bigotry in her voice. Certainly, he could and should turn the table on her and charge her as an adulteress.
“And our laws require we provide for . . . and honor . . . our wives. But you, Alessandra . . . you are first in my heart.”
“But she will be first in your bed,” she cried. “Each night. Every morning. Her eyes will be the last you see at night. Her lips the first you greet in the morning. She will bear your children.” At this last, she choked back a sob.
“Do you not know there is only you in my heart, in my mind, in my blood? Do you not know you want me in you so that we are one? Do you not know we have been one since stars began to wander the skies?”
“No!”
“How sad for you then. Old Woman Moon weeps for you.”
She hated his pity. Because it reached her as passion would not. She buried her face in the hollow of his muscled throat. Inhaled the fragrant smell of his skin. “How can I?” she asked brokenly. “How can I?”
“Lonely heart can only make its magic when joined with other. When sorrow and loneliness are joined with other in new song.” He spoke with such impassioned conviction, but she was so out of rhythm with his world.
She moved her head from the alcove of his shoulder to gaze up at him. Frustration radiated from his countenance. He was staring down at her, his eyes searching every inch of her face for some clue to her thoughts.
“It is the thing with my people? That I am Indian? That you can no love what is different? How small your thoughts then,” he said scornfully and rolled away from her.
She jackknifed to crouch at his side. “Damn’t, you know better than that!”
He dug his thick fingers into her hair, cupping the back of her head with his big hands. “Then what? Name it.”
“I can’t bear the pain of sharing your love with another woman,” she wailed. “Damn’t, why can’t you understand that?!”
His eyes flared with a dark edge. “To never know in my arms joy of loving? Is that pain any less?”
In his voice, she heard the disgust, the bewilderment. “For Christ’s sake, Man, what do you want from me? My scalp at your belt? A notch on your bow?”
“I want you. If I must share you with your husband . . . this I am willing to do. As long as you are in this world with me. Nothing else makes sense.”
Far away in the hills coyotes laughed maniacally. She shivered.
Their plaintive cry echoed in his voice. “I am not just me,” he said, peering up at her intently. “You would understand I am also my people. Part of them. Nothing is simple. Nothing stand alone. Separate. Morning Star Older Brother shares sky with other Night People. With Old Woman Moon and Sister Stars and Father Sun. What I do . . . it affect not just me. Not just you. But everyone. Every one. Every thing. I would have you think . . . ,” he paused, as if searching for the right English words, “. . . think what for this thing we are doing, what for we want to bring about.”
Her rage subsided into helpless melancholy. Could she take this gift of love, imperfect as were its conditions?
“You are woman I love, A
lessandra. Through you, I get back that part of my lost soul. The part of me that make me whole in this lifetime. In all lifetimes. This you cannot understand?”
The fire crackled. “Yes.” Tears spiked her lashes.
He stroked her tumbled hair from her face. The pause of his hands caused her to glance up at him. He eyes studied her, as if considering, evaluating. Then he took her by surprise. Gently, his hands framed her face. He drew her lips down to his, and brushed them with his. Very softly. His breathing ebbed into a slow, deep, and intense concentrated seduction. Solely focused on her lips, her mouth.
It was like a rolling earthquake jolted her, time and again. Blinded by unexpected passion, she clutched at his shoulders.
“Dulce,” he whispered in Spanish, taming her with his gentle kisses that now found her lips, the shell of her ear, and trailed back to her mouth.
She stilled, inhaling shallowly, feeling the fluttering of her heart, savoring the warmth of his mouth closed over hers, as if to slowly steal her breath. She sighed with the sweet ecstasy moving vein by vein throughout her body to at last tingle even her fingers and toes.
Something changed. An urgency. The nature of his kiss altered. Abruptly, he shifted her beneath him in one fluid motion, his sinewy body dominating her diminutive, delicate one, anchoring her so that escape, had she wanted it, was impossible. But she didn’t. Her body clamored for his. Now. Rough. Deep. Deep. Deep.
His hands snared her hair and forced her head at an angle. His tongue thrust inside her mouth, conquering, taking, subjugating. She wrapped her arms around his muscle-corded shoulders, returning his kiss with little darts of her tongue that brought a moan from him. Her pelvis bowed against the washboard of his corrugated stomach. Somewhere from afar she could hear her panting mixed with delirious sighs and his jagged breathing. His tongue continued to ravage her until she thought she would surely faint from the desire beating at her without mercy.
Indian Affairs (historical romance) Page 22
