Wind Song
Page 9
Why would he think any differently? Every time she was alone with him, it seemed, she all but threw herself at him. It was quite clear that she wasn’t ready for the fast-paced single life.
The pickup slid to a halt in front of her apartment. She turned to him. “About last night ... it was a mistake—”
“Your coming to Kaibeto was a mistake. You’re out of your environment, lady.”
She slammed the pickup door. “Not if I have anything to say about it!”
Chapter 6
A dismal drizzle slide down the windowpanes. The indoor recess would be as good a time as any to start the children working on the necklaces. She pulled out the boxes of coral beads that she had ordered and began passing them out among the restless students.
With a display of aloofness, Robert grudgingly accepted the box she placed before him. When no reprimand for the runaway burros had been forthcoming from her, he had gradually fallen into the school routine, but always with a show of reluctance, as if he were afraid of fully trusting her.
She herself had received a reprimand, the latest in a series. This one had been for being late to report to class duty. How could she adequately explain to the spinster, Miss Halliburton, that she had been celebrating a divorce? Or that she had slept in another man’s bed? And, oh, that hangover! She remembered the bag of cement that had dropped inside her head when she had bent over to slip on her shoes.
It seemed that she wasn’t really doing too well as Abbie Dennis, the woman.
Her role as wife was officially terminated, but the role of mother . . . She picked up the letter from Justin that lay on her desk. With the enthusiasm that marked everything he did, he had written of his latest girl friend. He would be spending Thanksgiving with her parents, and Jason was planning on visiting the home of a football buddy for the holiday weekend.
She stifled a sigh. It was the weather that made the day so depressing. And the knowledge that everyone else was going away for the holidays: Becky to stay with her boyfriend; Linda and her baby to visit her parents; Marshall to see his daughter.
Abbie decided that she would simply accept Dorothy Goldman’s invitation to have turkey dinner with her the next afternoon and make every attempt to enjoy herself. But the four-day weekend stretched out interminably.
Thanksgiving dinner the next day seemed just as interminable. Abbie sat in Dorothy’s cramped apartment, a showplace for all the salt shakers and cellars the old woman had collected, and listened to her talk about the past over her glass of whiskey. Still smarting from her overindulgence celebrating her divorce, Abbie had declined a glass.
“Oh, my, yes, indeed. I’ve been a widow for thirty-five years now. After Tom died”—her plump little fingers fidgeted absently with the whiskey glass—“well . . . teaching was all that was left for me—and this collection shakers and cellers that Tom and I started. Now just look at this one, Abbie, dear.” The old woman set aside her near empty glass to retrieve salt shaker shaped like a lamp. “Notice the initials engraved on the shaker’s bottom. Some experts claim that . . .”
Nothing to look forward to but retirement— and collecting salt cellars. The prospect of such a bleak future appalled Abbie. After dinner she walked back to her apartment feeling terribly lonely as cottonwood leaves swirled about her in th elate afternoon sunlight. Dejectedly she jammed her hands into the pockets of her alpaca sweater. The sight of Joey Kills the Soldier sitting on her porch with his chin propped on one fist cheered her considerably— and concerned her, too.
“Joey, what is it?” She knelt beside him. “Why haven’t you gone off with your family for the holidays?” Most of the children had left the dormitory—except for the usual few, Robert Tsinnijinnie among them. She could count on him to be more recalcitrant than normal come Monday morning and the return of classes.
Joey Kills the Soldier’s raisin black eyes crinkled in a smile. “I wait for you.” His stubby finger pointed toward a flatbed wagon outside the perimeter of the school fence. An Indian wearing a tall, sugarloaf black hat sat on the wagon’s seat, holding the reins. Next to him, wrapped in a plaid wool blanket, sat a ponderous Indian woman. “You go with us, eh, teacher?”
“Where, Joey?”
His brow knitted as he tried to find the English word he needed. A broad grin spread across his moon-shaped face. “Sing.”
“Ahh, you want me to go with you and your parents to a Navajo sing?”
Joey nodded vigorously.
Why not? she thought. Why spend Thanksgiving night sitting home alone? “All right. I would love to.” She let him take her hand and pull her along behind him to the waiting wagon.
His parents dipped their heads once in acknowledgment of Abbie. With Joey beside her, she slid onto the back of the wagon, her legs dangling over the side along with his shorter ones. What did it matter if the bed’s wooden splinters put runs in her cranberry-colored charmeuse dress? It was worth it just to be going to a sing, just to be enjoying herself for the evening.
The wagon lumbered over a corduroyed road much like the one she and the children had taken the day of the seed-gathering, except that it wound further back and upward so that walls of soaring evergreens canopied the wagon. The black velvet night hid the rocky precipices that bordered the rutted road, which was just fine with her. She was able to relax and laugh with Joey as he swung his legs in tempo with hers.
Soon a different tempo could be heard, that of drums and tortoiseshells combined with a muted chant, eerie and mysterious. She wrapped her arms about herself as protection against the night’s seeping chill. The wagon rounded a ragged promontory to roll into a small canyon lit by a blazing fire. Like the bonfires of college, she thought, and looked forward to its welcoming warmth. Its leaping light illuminated the many pickups, wagons and battered automobiles that banked the clearing. Within the clearing shadowy figures bobbed and dipped and swayed to the repetitious beat of the music. Bells tied about the dancers’ knees provided a rhythmic counterpoint to the drums’ insistent thumping.
By the time Joey’s father halted the wagon between a 1937 Ford pickup and a burro, Abbie realized that there had to be at least five hundred people at the sing, standing and sitting and dancing. She and Joey followed his parents across the parking area littered with tin cans and beer bottles and shouldered their way through the spectators in search of a place near the front to sit.
In one area a fire dance was in progress, with the dancers’ bodies painted white with clay to ward off the heat as they raced around the blazing bonfire. Here and there an Indian tipped a bottle of beer or the ubiquitous tiswin, com whiskey made in stills hidden in the back canyons. The sight of the families, the close-knit clans, celebrating stabbed Abbie with loneliness.
But would she have been any happier if she were still married? Brad would no doubt have been half-drunk, snoring on the sofa after the large dinner that she worked all morning on. The twins, in their earlier teens, would normally have spent the afternoon sledding on fresh- fallen snow. Last year they had gone deer-hunting —and she hadn’t relaxed until the two had walked through the door, grinning with triumph at the racks of antlers they produced from behind their backs.
She would just have to realize that every period in one’s life required time for adjustment. No, she wouldn’t go back, she wouldn’t reverse her decision to leave Brad if she had it to do all over again.
She let Joey tug her along to another area where men and women danced together. Joey’s parents found a spot where they seated themselves, crossing their legs Indian fashion, to watch the dance. Joey pulled Abbie down on the ground between him and his parents. On the far side of the fire men furnished the music by beating a large cottonwood drum and singing. Before her the women, all dressed in skirts of intense colors and wrapped in blankets, held to the rear waistband of their partners’ trousers. The men simply stood and pivoted while the women danced backward in a circle around them. Abbie could only dub it a cross between an Irish jig and a double shuffle.
“Good!” Joey said.
“Good!” she laughed.
The music altered subtly. The rattle of the tortoiseshell and the beat of the drum took on a more primitive rhythm. The couples began to move in an arm-in-arm promenade, their steps fitting their own preference. There was a barbaric splendor about the sight ... the firelight dancing over the participants, the fierce gazes of the men, the shyer ones of the women.
Then, only a few feet away, between the shoulders of two dancing couples, she saw Cody. Looking up at him, smiling, was Dalah. Cody’s dark eyes left Dalah’s upturned face to meet Abbie’s startled gaze. Beneath the flannel headband the mesmeric quality of his eyes riveted her until a man’s body moved between them and broke the contact.
She was shaken. That breathtaking intensity washed over her as it had the first time she had met him at the trading post – and with each meeting thereafter. It was a primeval feeling that left her weak when she was at last released from Cody’s extraordinary magnetism. She tried to focus her attention on the dancers before her, but as the couples ebbed and flowed and another dance began she became aware only of the man who loomed over her. Refusing to give in to his compelling gaze, she made herself watch the new dancers who moved into the circle of firelight.
Cody hunkered down in front of her, blocking her view. His hand rumpled Joey’s shaggy hair, and he said something to Joey’s parents in Navajo. They nodded in unison. Then his eyes slashed to hers. “This is a squaw dance, Abbie. You must ask the man.”
Where had her breath gone? “I . . . the dancing ... I don’t know how—”
Before she could protest, his hands slipped her pumps from her feet. He took her hand and pulled her upright. “Hook your fingers inside my belt,” he instructed. “You simply circle around me, always moving backward.”
He propelled her into the gathering of couples. The music took up its wild beat. For a moment she hesitated; then, beneath his mocking regard that dared her, she followed the actions of the other women, sliding her fingers behind his belt and slowly moving her feet in a slip-slide fashion. At first she felt self-conscious. Her dress and coloring clearly marked her as an outsider. Then, gradually, she forgot all as she lost herself in the lure of the savage music.
Cody watched her face, his eyes capturing hers. The very air seemed to scintillate with his sensuality. She swayed against him, and his hand came up to catch her arm.
He drew her out of the circle of dancers and led her away from the fire’s brilliant light. Pine needles crunched beneath her feet, but she forgot all about her pumps, left with the Kills the Soldier family. As she followed him, the press of people thinned out, with only an occasional couple talking or walking hand-in- hand while they wandered between the randomly parked wagons and automobiles.
Cody’s hand released its grasp of her arm, and he slid his hands into his jeans pockets. She longed for him to put his arm about her, to feel his warmth again. Like an automaton she fell into step with him, not really caring where they were going. Sometimes they had to circumvent a spiral ing pine or twisted juniper.
“Was it Joey’s idea to bring you?” he asked.
“Yes.” She kept her eyes on the worn path before her. “He told me we were going to a sing.”
“It’s really a mountain chant. Some call it a wind song, in honor of the promise of spring—the renewal—the wind brings. Did he tell you it’s a dusk to dawn affair?”
“No.” She glanced up at him shyly. “But I wasn’t going anywhere, anyway.” She rubbed her hands along her arms. She had been so warm dancing with Cody.
“Cold?”
Not when his eyes burned over her like that. She looked away. “A little.”
“The pickup isn’t too far off—there, just beyond that buckboard.”
“I really should go back.”
“Joey’s parents don’t expect you to.”
Her head jerked up. “Why not?”
They reached the pickup, and he leaned over the tailgate and brought out a blanket. “Because I told them I was keeping you with me for the night.”
Her lips parted in protest, and he laid his forefinger against them. “Not tonight, Abbie,” he said quietly. “No arguing between us tonight. Nothing will happen that you don’t want.”
She said nothing, merely stood mutely as he draped the soft, fleecy blanket about her, shawl-like. “I’ve been to your world,” he said, smiling down at her. “Too often, I sometimes think. Welcome to mine.” His head lowered over hers and he kissed her lips ... a soft, searching kiss that demanded nothing. But when he raised his head, she was breathless with its effect.
“I could do that all night long, Abbie Dennis, but there are other things I want to show you first.”
She eyed him warily. Then a small smile gradually ripened her mouth. “I would have to say that this is my first date in twenty years . . . and I’m not quite certain after all this time how to act.”
“Forget everything but the essential facts that you are a woman and I am a man and we are here tonight to enjoy ourselves.”
He took her hand and began walking back toward the throng of merrymakers. He pointed out a blanket-wrapped Indian off to their left, juggling rounded stones. Ahead a clown burlesqued the priests, dancing out of step, and the children giggled at his antics. She and Cody joined in the laughter before moving on.
Within a stand of evergreens Cody chose a spot bedded with incense-cedar boughs that was close enough to allow them to watch the succession of ceremonial dances but far enough from the pandemonium of the music and revelers for them to be completely private. Propped against a cedar, he drew her down beside him and, after tucking the blanket about her feet, nestled her shoulders in the crook of his arm.
“Originally the squaw dances, or mountain chants, were war dances celebrating a victory or a call to battle,” he explained, his mouth next to her temple. “Now they’re part of a get-together, a social event that sometimes lasts for as many as three nights. It’s held in a different place each night, usually fifteen or twenty miles apart.”
“Dalah!” she said, suddenly remembering the young Indian girl.
“She came with her family. Because of the isolation of the families, these dances are the only opportunity that many young Navajo women have of meeting and getting acquainted with prospective husbands.”
Abbie looked up into the bronze face. “And are you some maiden’s prospective husband?” she whispered.
His unwavering eyes held hers. “There is not enough room in my thoughts for anyone but you, Abbie.”
She pulled her gaze from his, her senses dazed by the intensity of the passion she read in the depths of his dilated pupils.
Before her passed the dances and legerdemain of the Indian ceremonies, eerie shadows that leaped and bowed. But she was scarcely aware of the performances as she sat there—delighting in the feel of Cody’s knuckles nuzzling her cheek, the masculine scent of his skin, his deep, rich voice.
“It is the Navajo goddess of Creation, the Changing Woman, who created the Dine’e—the people,” he told her. “She molded them from the skin of the undersides of her breasts.” His hand, encircling her shoulder, slid down beneath the blanket to cup the underswell of one breast. Her lids closed. Her breathing seemed to stop. “The tenderest and most sensitive part of a woman’s skin, Abbie.”
Her breath came out in a raspy, whispery sigh.
One dance faded into another, children grew sleepy and crawled into their mothers’ arms, the ancient wandered off to exchange a beer and tales of their youth, while the younger took up the passiona
te beat of the dance. And Abbie sat spellbound as Cody made slow, rapturous love to her beneath the privacy of the blanket.
While his mouth played gently with her lips, her nape, her ear’s shell-like rim, her lashes, his hand tunneled through her hair, loosing the clasp. His fingers dropped to her sweater and unfastened its furry buttons to slide inside her blouse. He caressed the rise of her breasts and dipped lower beneath the wispy bra to discover the turgid nipples. Her head lolled back against the tree trunk, her lashes lying like sable half-moons on her cheeks.
Once more she experienced that sweet, fierce tugging within her that Cody was capable of arousing. She had thought that that part of her— that intrinsic, internal part of her that was supposed to come alive with sensual arousal—had atrophied from disuse. Brad had often cursed her inability to respond. Yet now—now she felt the sweet excitement that was every woman’s right when she lay with her man.
Had she ever been so thoroughly kissed? Brad would have kissed her hurriedly—as if the act of kissing was a preliminary that had to be gotten out of the way as quickly as possible. Cody was taking his time, all night, as if it was enough for him just to touch her.
“Cody, kiss me . . . there . . . please.”
He released the wispy bra’s front clasp to let her breasts tumble free. She lifted one breast, and his head dipped to allow his tongue to gently lave the stiffened nipple. She gasped at the pleasant sensation generated by his mouth that flexed in hungry, sucking motions, elongating her nipple.
“I want to see you,” he said in a voice husky with his passion. “I want to see your coloring.” His hand pulled the blanket back, and in the shadow of the trees her breasts gleamed pale white, the aureoles a pale brown, darker where the nipples rose taut and aching. The music beat incessantly, in time with the throbbing within her each time his lips claimed her lips, her nipples. The heel of his hand cupped her beneath her bunched skirt, his fingers rubbing that very feminine area protected by her panties, but not invading. She arched her hips with the music, rolling with the movement of his hand as it rhythmically increased in tempo.