Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Mayhaps she don’t know much American, Asa,” Bass said, “but this is a gal what means business.”

  “Lo, but a woman’s heart is wormwood, Mr. Bass,” McAfferty warned as his eyes flicked around the room. “Best you watch your backtrail with this’un.”

  As the barmaid came around the end of the short plank resting atop four large oak barrels, Bass looked over the room with a growing worry. Wasn’t natural the way everything had come to a stop and everyone was studying the two Americans.

  “Ain’t this Mex gal I’m worried ’bout, Asa. Looks to be these soldiers don’t want us here.”

  “Aye, Mr. Bass,” McAfferty replied, and threw back the rest of his liquor. “‘To keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman.’ These here whores don’t mind taking American money, but their men don’t cotton to having gringo dogs dipping their stingers in Mexican honey pots.”

  The barmaid slipped her arm in his and Scratch beamed with anticipation. “I s’pose it’s time to dip my stinger.”

  “‘And upon her forehead was a name written,’” McAfferty called to Scratch’s back as Titus left with the woman. “’MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH!’”

  Conchita led him back to the portal of that darkened hallway, stopping for a moment to pull a candle from an iron holder hammered into the whitewashed adobe wall. On down the hallway she stopped and pulled open a sagging door, then held back a thin blanket to let Bass into the tiny crib where she plied her ancient trade.

  Setting the candle in another wall-side holder, Conchita turned to the bed, where she flung back the layers of thick Indian blankets, then stepped right up to the American and proceeded to help him off with his pouch, then his coat. Next she yanked up the long tail of his buckskin shirt, tugging it over his head.

  Hurling his garments aside piece by piece, without any preliminaries the shorter woman surprised Scratch when she stood on her toes and ran her lips across his chest, the hot tip of her tongue circling his nipples before she dragged it up the side of his neck.

  While Titus threw back another long swallow of his fiery Taos lightning, her fingers yanked at his belt buckle, then dragged aside his breechclout as the belt dropped. Suddenly she pushed him toward the thick pad of mattress and blankets tucked in the corner of her tiny cell, so abruptly that he spilled some of the liquor from his clay cup, drops spilling onto the back of her head as she went to her knees in front of him as Bass eased back onto the bed.

  As her sure hands flew over the knots lashing his moccasins around his ankles, then tugged at the top of his leggings to pull them off his feet, Scratch found his flesh hardening, stretching, growing just with the sight of her breasts all but spilling out of that loose-topped camisole, growing warm with the sweet anticipation of having himself buried deep within a female once more.

  He wasn’t sure if it was the heat from the pale, amber liquor, or the closeness of the small room where the single candle flutted against the mud wall. Maybe even the strong odor of lard coming from that poor lamp made of nothing more than a burning wick set within a small cup of pig fat. Perhaps it was the cinnamon oil he could tell she had rubbed in her hair.

  But he knew he was ready to explode when she rocked up on her knees above him and thumbed down the top of her camisole, slipping it off her bare shoulders one side at a time, tugging it over each of those breasts the color of smooth milk chocolate stirred into steaming coffee. But when he reached up to grab them, Conchita pushed his hands away and instead rocked forward so that her shoulders were right over his hips. Smiling broadly enough to show her two missing teeth, she gently spread her fleshy breasts apart enough to swallow his hardened penis between them.

  Then, with her hands clamping the soft, chocolate flesh around him, the woman began to rock herself up and back, up and back as she rested her chin on his upper belly and gazed up at him devilishly.

  Savoring the delicious wickedness of having her watch him as she brought him to climax, Scratch was certain she knew exactly what she was doing. Sure she had done this a hundred times before—even a thousand … with a thousand other men. But as he felt the boiling eruption begin all too quickly, those others didn’t matter. All that was important right then was the woman-hunger that overwhelmed him every few months … thinking back to how it was when he had been a young man and this unimaginable hunger had run hot in his veins more frequently than it did nowadays.

  With the sudden explosive release as his hot eruption washed over her breasts, he once again realized that of all the different women in all the Indian camps, and of all the whores in every one of the Taos knocking shops—none of them could come anywhere close to satisfying what he figured he truly wanted. With each passing season, each new moon, with every day’s sunrise, he wondered why he was no longer satisfied to have each new woman spread her legs for him and be done with her. In years gone he would have been more than content to take his pleasure and quickly move on.

  But of late here he was beginning to get the nagging sense that something was missing from these infrequent grapples with a woman’s flesh. Not that this bucking and thrashing of that ol’ monster with two backs didn’t bring him a moment’s peace and contentment … but rarely anything lasting. And even as deliciously wicked as the way Conchita had used her soft breasts on him, the satisfaction of this long-pent release she had just given him began to fade quickly like a cooling breeze come to erase the fever from his skin.

  Then, again, perhaps that was the way it was meant to be between men and women—that they somehow coexisted despite never truly giving one another what each really wanted. In the end they were at best able to give one another only what they themselves needed.

  With that moist, mindless, momentary compulsion to couple brought to a boiling eruption—men and women retreated from each other, back to truly needing little else the other could give. Although married—as his parents were, as Able Guthrie and his wife were, as were all those who clung to one another in the sight of their God—a husband and wife struggled through their days together as no more than polite strangers come from different sides of the river.

  He was certain no woman would ever understand what lay inside him, waiting to be spoken. He was sure no woman ever could. And for him to attempt to fathom the depths of a woman’s soul … why, he might as well climb to the highest peak in the mountains and with his rawhide lariat try to rope the moon.

  Men and women were never meant to live together—that much was plain to him from the painful thrashing life had given him. Hell, there were few men he could live with day after day himself. But he was certain that unanswered, aching loneliness each man and woman must feel a’times compelled them on rare occasions to reach out and somehow touch a private place within one another, no matter how brief and short-lived that intimacy. Still, what troubled him was that as soon as each brief fever had passed, both man and woman went back to walking on alone. Went back to feeling little more than emptiness until they struggled to reach out for one another again.

  As he felt his flesh hardening, Bass realized he had been asleep. Conchita was awakening him with her hands. He opened his eyes into slits and watched her in the slowly dancing candlelight as she held him between her two palms, rolling his responsive penis between them like tortilla dough a woman kneaded. Here she massaged his stiffening flesh into readiness.

  As Conchita rolled onto one hip and kicked a leg over him, he savored the fleshy sway of those healthy, pendulous breasts as she straddled him, took his manhood in one hand, then settled down upon him with an earthy groan from them both. It fired him anew to find just how moist she was for him, so wet there was hardly any friction as she immediately set about her throbbing dance upon him. With every thrust she took upon him, Conchita became more furied, driving herself more wild, causing her breasts to dance and volve above him until he found himself so maddened, he seized them both—pulling her down savagely so he could suck on one as
her hips continued to drive up and back, up and back.

  A wild, feral sound was born low in her throat as she pounded herself so fast and hard above him that he knew she was going to flatten out the straw mattress stretched out beneath him on the earthen floor. So savagely did she hurl herself down upon Titus again and again that he knew Conchita was going to hammer him right into the ground itself before she was done with him.

  Yet of a sudden he didn’t care again. His own rising fever boiled over in those last few moments before the mindless explosion overwhelmed him, causing Bass to lose himself in the soft coffee-brown flesh of her, tugging for all he was worth at her colorful striped skirt she had hiked up over her hips.

  Conchita immediately stopped bobbing atop him for those few seconds it took her to reach down, untie the knot in the upper hem, and pull the long skirt away from her hips, flinging it over her head, where it landed against the nearby wall. Now she was completely naked but for her crude moccasins and that silver crucifix around her neck that rhythmically tapped against his cheek as he pulled the other breast to his mouth and began to suck.

  “Mr. Bass!”

  She tasted so good—piñon woodsmoke and aguardiente and cinnamon. Oh, the way she gripped his manhood within that moist, heated crevice of hers—

  “Mr. Bass!”

  Reluctantly he opened his eyes and gazed into her face, expecting that she would call out his name again in that muffled way he heard her call out before.

  But Conchita’s head was thrown back and to the side, lost in the delicious passion … and she was biting her own lower lip as she continued to hammer herself down upon him so she couldn’t have spoken—

  “Mr. Bass! Your union with that whore is over!”

  Almost there. He felt himself like an overripe fruit about to burst, when more voices suddenly grew loud right at the edge of his consciousness. Exactly the way he might see something flit at the corner of his eye but—when he looked—it would be gone.

  Just when he was certain Conchita was moistening even more around him and Bass sensed that first wave of release himself—

  —a sudden rush of cold air flooded into the tiny room as the blanket was flung back.

  She froze above him as he jerked up on an elbow.

  In the darkened open doorway stood a figure wide of shoulder. A man.

  “Conchita!”

  Although she did not dare dismount from Bass, the woman nonetheless reached over and swept up her skirt, pulling it up to cover her breasts as the man in the doorway lumbered into the room, into the gently flutting candlelight, stirring shadows and hues of saffron as he came in two long steps and stopped, his arms hung at his side, his chest heaving, fists clenched as he snarled low foreign words at the woman.

  Bass did not understand anything of what the man barked at her, but his meaning was never more clear. The import of the intruder’s words was as shockingly plain as the ominous bark of a strange dog encountered on the backtrails of Boone County, the warning growl of a cornered badger, the hostile grunt of a grizzly boar closing in on him.

  The stranger took another step into the room as Titus searched frantically for his coat, his belt that had been wrapped around the coat, the scabbard that had been hanging from that belt—

  Then looked up at the intruder.

  The lieutenant!

  “You son of a bitch!” Bass spat at the soldier who stood above him, bare-chested, wearing only his black pantaloons, held up by wide leather braces.

  Conchita suddenly dragged herself off him, both of them still wet from their mutual release. He began to rise to meet the soldier who Scratch knew felt nothing but hatred and rancor for the Americans who had trailed the Comanche into the mountains to save what women and children they could.

  In the hallway behind the sergeant shadows darted, voices called out, someone grunted and others screamed as a heavy object struck the wall outside. A man cried out in pain. Then a second, and a third body smacked against the side of the hall. And in those fleeting seconds as he rolled onto his hip, scrambled to his feet, and hurled himself at the soldier, Bass thought he heard the white-head barking in that dark, narrow tunnel of a hallway—grousing with fire and brimstone and a most certain eternity spent in hell’s own fire for those he found arrayed against him.

  A solid thunk burst through the doorway from that hall, echoing with the sound of a heavy maul striking tight-grained hickory.

  The sergeant met him in the middle of the room. Conchita screeched in horror as they grappled, arms and legs a blur. For a fleeting moment Bass was gratified that his opponent had burst into the room without a weapon … gratified, that is, until the Mexican cocked back a huge, hard-boned fist and drove it against the American’s temple.

  With the light of a thousand shooting stars the darkened crib lit up as Scratch rocked back on his bare feet, then shifted his weight back farther still to keep from pitching over, when the sole of one bare foot landed on the wide band of thick leather. He stood there, blinking his eyes to clear them of stars as Conchita burst up from the floor, shrieking, her arms outstretched before her as she lunged for the sergeant’s arm curling in the wavering candlelight, in that hand a long double-edged dagger appearing right out of the air.

  Ramirez swore at her while she struggled to pull the arm down far enough to seize the knife. Sobbing, she implored him as Bass blinked again, trying vainly to clear the rain-soaked cobwebs from his mind: hearing men banging the wall outside, the grunts and curses in a foreign tongue, McAfferty’s cries almost as foreign to his ears.

  “‘… will I lay apart the Philistines like sheaves of wheat!’”

  Then, as Scratch sank to his knees, his temple throbbing still but the shooting lights grown dim, he felt the belt beneath one hand. And beneath the other, the rock-hard rawhide sheath.

  At the moment Titus seized the scabbard in one hand, gripped the knife’s handle in the other—he watched the sergeant clench his beefy left hand into a fist, drag it back as a man would cock the huge goosenecked hammer on a smoothbore, then fling it at the woman’s face.

  The wide row of hard knuckles struck Conchita squarely across one eye and the bridge of her big nose. Titus watched her head snap back from her shoulders like a withered shaft of the corn he sheared with a huge scythe back on that Kentucky farm so many years ago. As the woman collapsed against the wall, smacking her head into the crude mud bricks, Ramirez slowly quartered around on Bass, grunting from somewhere within his barrel of a chest.

  The soldier’s long blade shimmered in the candlelight as he held the weapon out in front of him and began to snarl in Mexican.

  Just behind the lieutenant’s shoulder a knot of shadows congealed against the crude plank door; then a body collided with the door itself, smacking the planks against the mud wall as the man melted to the floor and in stepped a white-headed warrior. His long hair flowing about his shoulders like corn silk in that muted candlelight, McAfferty immediately whirled about, putting his back on the room as he inched inward—a tomahawk in one hand, his long skinning knife clutched in the other. Foot by foot he retreated, holding more Mexicans at bay there in the darkened doorway.

  Both Bass and the lieutenant realized McAfferty had his back to them at the same moment.

  Like a strip of night torn from a midnight sky itself, Ramirez whirled and brought up his dagger, yanking it into the air as he started to lunge for McAfferty.

  And like sunlight glancing off the rushing surface of mountain creek water, Scratch exploded from the floor. Slinging his left arm around the soldier’s bull-thick neck, he plunged his skinning knife into the side of the barrel of a chest there below the arm raised to strike McAfferty.

  With a piglike whimper of surprise, Ramirez jerked, muscles tensing as Bass felt his thin blade slide along a rib for an instant, then suddenly plunge in clear to the hilt.

  He had it buried until it would sink no farther.

  The soldier tried jerking away, tried flinging Bass to the side, but the Ameri
can clung there like a bloated tick to the hump of the herd bull.

  Stumbling to the side a step, the Mexican nonetheless swung his knife downward at McAfferty. Missed. Then yanked his huge knife back into the air to try it again.

  Bass’s arm pistoned only enough to free his knife from the enemy’s chest before he jabbed its razor point between another pair of ribs, feeling the warmth ooze over the back of his hand as he twisted the skinning blade this time, working it side to side through the muscle, slashing it on into the man’s bellows.

  Again from the corner of his eye Scratch watched that huge right arm swing up and down toward McAfferty—realizing too late that the lieutenant’s target was not the white-head. The Mexican was arching his knife back at the naked tormentor plastered on his back. Too late—

  “Arrrghghgh!”

  The pain grew hot as the huge flat blade plunged into the meat of his right thigh, close to the hip.

  So much pain that Bass almost went faint, sensing his damp, sweaty grip loosening around the Mexican’s neck. Feeling his hand releasing the warm, slick handle of his skinning knife.

  “Asa!” Titus cried out desperately as he watched the muscular Mexican yank the knife out of his leg and cock it into the air for a second plunge.

  At his call McAfferty whirled in a crouch no more than three feet from the sergeant and immediately raked his left arm to the side before him. The dull oil-blued metal of the tomahawk blade slashed through the Mexican’s flesh, which gaped like a bloody mouth opening with bright-red berry juice the way Mexican women stain their own lips with the seductive red of the alegría, that honed blade cleaving the entire width of the man’s belly in that one smooth motion as the Mexican’s arm drove downward, completing his reflex.

  Ramirez’s knife planted itself into Bass’s leg a second time before the big, hard-knuckled right hand tensed into a bird’s claw, releasing the weapon’s handle. He left it quivering in the meat of the American’s thigh.

  “‘The bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength!’”