Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  She was woman enough and he had been without long enough, she put the blood so thick in his throat that he could scarcely swallow the ribbon of fire the tequila made descending from his tongue. The pulque didn’t possess the reassuring and familiar formaldehyde stench of frontier whiskey.

  She smiled like sunrise calm in the autumntime, something smoky and warm to it, and tossed back the hot tequila in one gulp, hammering the table once as she set her clay cup back down and poured more of the fiery cactus juice into it. That teasing, taunting look in her eyes had probably condemned many a hapless, helpless man to doom in this same stinking cesspool of a cantina.

  From the corner of his eye Hook noticed the tall vaquero at the bar for the first time, a young dandy who stood a head above his companions, their faces shrouded in smoke rising from their corn-shuck cigarillos, voices clanging sharp-edged like tiny cymbals. The handsome horseman was dressed in creamy leather all lashed together with stamped conchos and roped in gilt braid. In the dim candlelight Hook could barely make out the man, not much more than a foggy blur of the vaquero’s face as the Mexican glared flints in his direction, and for a minute his tequila-dulled mind argued on which one of them the Mex was looking at. Perhaps the vaquero simply did not like Two Sleep. No matter, really. There would always be those who didn’t take to Injuns.

  But that did not quite fit, either, the more Jonah’s slow mind kneaded it while he kept on eating, his teeth tearing at the chiles and the tortilla, sucking back the softened beans, then gazed up at the vaquero again and decided the man was glaring at the woman. That was it, he decided. She had come over from the bar, where he remembered seeing her looped beneath the vaquero’s arm when he and Two Sleep had blown in and slammed the crude door behind them, the fine powder from the trail settling like gold dust in the pale, yellow candlelight. Ever since Jonah had felt her hot black eyes on him.

  The way he now sensed the Mex’s eyes burning a hole of hate in his left shoulder.

  From where Jonah sat, he faced the door and the room’s only window, his back for the most part turned on the bar and half of the room. His partner watched the rest of that low-roofed hovel.

  “How many’s the others?” he asked Two Sleep, grumbling it in English.

  The Indian did not answer at first. Instead, he swabbed some more beans and chiles into his tortilla and stuffed it in his mouth. As he wiped the back of a hand across his lips, only then did the Shoshone’s eyes quickly rake the half of the room under his gaze.

  “Five,” he replied in English. Then moving his hands quickly, but casually, in the ballet of plains sign language, Two Sleep told Hook the rest.

  Three of them do not belong to the rest of the poor ones. Three of them are for us.

  “Three with him?”

  The Shoshone nodded his head.

  When Hook began to look back to the woman, he watched the Indian’s eyes climb and narrow. Jonah smelled the man before he heard the leather-heeled boots clatter to a halt beside his chair.

  “You may be only a slut,” he told the woman gruffly. “But tonight you are my slut. Come with me.”

  Her black eyes went to Jonah’s, perhaps to search for hope, to plea for help, to find a hero.

  “Come!” he roared at her.

  Jonah’s eyes climbed to the vaquero’s now. Blinking, clearing them of the tequila-and-chile tears, he found the Mexican’s eyes shining like those of some despised, creeping night animal. The man’s breath rose and fell in great gusts, sweetened with agave.

  “Time enough for you to have her, friend,” Hook told the man in Spanish. “Go and leave her for now. Go back to the bodega and your friends. Time enough for you.”

  With a smooth movement the vaquero brought his right hand to rest on the handle of the long knife stuffed in the colorful sash at his waist. The left hand seized the whore’s wrist and yanked it up.

  “Come, I said!”

  She began to babble in pain, gripping the hand that imprisoned her. Her head was thrown back as he kicked the chair out from beneath her, yanking her roughly to her feet, yanking her back from the table.

  “No cause to do that,” Jonah said quietly, in his own tongue. “Leave the woman be.”

  As the vaquero’s three companions inched toward them, the bar at their backs and the massive rowels on their Mexican spurs jangling like tambourines, Hook thought he heard the click of two hammers coming to full-cock.

  “Two Sleep?” he asked as he rose slowly from his chair, without looking at the Shoshone.

  The Indian whispered, “They are dead men—they move on you.”

  Jonah turned back to the vaquero. “I will say it for the last time,” he spoke in Spanish. “Leave the woman be.”

  With a laugh the vaquero whirled the whore backward out of the way, pulling his knife as Hook’s arm swung, bringing up the cup filled with tequila. It splashed into the Mexican’s face at the same moment the knife glinted candlelight across the distance at the end of the vaquero’s arm. It moved like quicksilver sliding off an upended piece of isinglass.

  Numbed by the liquor, Hook didn’t feel the pain of the blade’s slash along his left arm. Yet he knew in that primitive way of the animal that his flesh had been opened. A moment later he sensed the hot, sticky beading along the slash. The Mexican stood smirking at him, wiping the tequila off his smooth brown face.

  For a moment Hook stood transfixed by his blood-slicked arm, his glazed eyes crawling past the three others at the bar, then coming to stop on the vaquero’s face as Jonah’s right hand went to his belt for his own knife. It came into the candlelight slowly, a dull glint reflected off the long blade that had scalped more than one of the Danites he hunted with a vengeance.

  “No. Shoot him and we go,” Two Sleep snapped, pushing his wobbly chair back slightly. “Put the goddamned knife away. Shoot him now.”

  Hook wagged his head, shaking loose wispy webs as his eyes crawled across the men gathered at the bar, stopping once on the fat bartender, his brown neck plopped atop his shoulders in unwashed rolls like a turkey’s wattle, long ristras of dried chiles hung behind him like crimson curtains. The man’s hands were out of sight. Danger pricked Jonah as he looked back at the shrieking woman, the back of her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide in terror.

  He sensed she had seen enough blood spilled on her account. Women like her drew trouble, like flecks of iron to a lodestone. Yet knowing it did not help. Here he was, his own knife drawn against the young vaquero, who again pushed the whore back out of his way and turned sideways, crouching slightly at the knees.

  There was no grace, no finesse in Hook’s sudden, drunken lunge for the Mexican. The only thing that saved him was the surprising suddenness of it, closing before the vaquero could slash out at his enemy.

  A cry of shock, a yelp of pain reverberated in Jonah’s ear as he slid his knife along the Mexican’s ribs, dragging the man close with his free arm. He felt the warmth ooze over his blade hand. With all the strength he had, Hook held the vaquero close, continuing to dance from beneath the man’s wild swings with that knife, knowing that if the Mexican broke free …

  His breath exploded from him when the vaquero spun Hook and pushed him backward against the bar. The Mexican’s free hand clamped around Jonah’s wrist, repeatedly hammering the arm and hand against the edge of the bar. Unable to maintain his grip, the knife popped free, sent spinning down the bar.

  As quickly Jonah brought both hands up, seizing the vaquero’s wrist, holding his red-tainted knife high overhead. There they struggled, pitching their weight against the other, spinning and each trying to throw his opponent off balance. Hook lunged for the vaquero’s ear, catching it between his teeth, squeezing down until he felt the salty, thick syrup trickle over his tongue. With a squeal of pain followed by a grunt of effort the Mexican drove his knee into Jonah’s groin.

  Down Hook tumbled, the sudden pain radiating out from the core of him like exploding stars.

  In triumph the vaquero stood over his vanqu
ished enemy, rotating the knife handle as he dropped to his knees on top of Hook so that he could plunge it into the gringo’s heart. He smiled, then as suddenly as he had descended on his enemy, the vaquero wore a look of utter surprise, a pinched look of panic as he rocked back to gaze down at his chest where the American released a second knife.

  Staring dumbfounded, the Mexican struggled to rise. But his legs had gone to water and would not hold him.

  Hook shoved the Mexican off. The vaquero tumbled to the floor, his legs beginning to draw up as Jonah pulled his knife free from the man’s chest—then savagely plunged it into the red-stained white shirt again and a third time, splattering flecks of blood across the creamy buckskin jacket.

  “Donde?” the vaquero asked with a gasp, blood on his lips.

  “Where? Where’d I get the knife?” Jonah asked in reply, slowly pulling the blade from the man’s chest, then holding the sharp tip against the vaquero’s Adam’s apple. “Where I come from, a man never carries just one knife, Señor. Never just one.”

  With a jerk Jonah fell to the side as the bunched gunshots boomed in the low-roofed earthen room. A last one rang in his ears before Jonah rolled over to find Two Sleep still sitting, his pistol muzzle smoking, and two of the vaquero’s companions crumpling slowly, a third clawing desperately at the edge of the bar, their own guns tumbling from their hands to clatter dully onto the pounded clay floor.

  “Watch the drink man,” Jonah snarled at Two Sleep, his head nodding at the bartender.

  Two Sleep leveled one of the pistols at the Mexican behind the bar as Jonah crabbed back to the vaquero, who lay wreathed in blood, his breath coming ragged. He put the tip of his knife blade back against the Mexican’s throat, then gazed up into the flickering candlelight, eventually finding her.

  “C’mere!” he ordered her in English. When she did not obey immediately, he called her gruffly in Spanish.

  Whimpering, the whore stood over him, tears having streaked the alegría she had used to rouge her cheeks.

  “You want me to kill him quick?”

  She shook her head, then nodded yes. “Sí. No, no—leave him be.”

  “You love him, eh?” Jonah asked as he slowly drew the bloody knife from the vaquero’s throat, wiping it off on the buckskin jacket.

  “No—I could not love him. He is trouble to me every time he comes in,” she said quietly in the hushed cantina. “But there would be more trouble for me if you kill him.”

  Hook peered down at the Mexican and sighed, then gazed up at the whore. “It doesn’t matter now, Señorita”

  “He is dead too?” growled the bartender.

  As he rose, Jonah stuffed the second knife away inside his boot. “These others, they should have minded their own business. How about you? Will you mind your own business?”

  The man’s puffy black eyes were like a frightened, caged animal’s as they darted here and there, then eventually landed back on Hook’s face. He slid Jonah’s knife down the bar toward the American. “Sí. Just go. Go now and never come back.”

  Two Sleep still had his pistols drawn, covering the room as Jonah dragged up the Winchester propped against their table. Hook reached over to clamp his right hand around the woman’s wrist, holding his left forearm protectively in front of him.

  “You owe me, Señorita. You better help me stop this bleeding—for saving your life.”

  Her eyes climbed from his bloody shirt, softening as they peered into his. “Yes. I owe you, Señor.”

  27

  Spring 1873

  SHE SMELLED MORE of dust than anything else. It wasn’t that the woman was dirty. Just this land, the mud houses, what with the wind that blew night and day—it seemed natural for her to have the same sweet, musky smell of the land.

  That, and the slightly damp feel to her sere-colored flesh as she worked herself into a frenzy, throbbing like a steam piston up and down atop him. Her breasts quivered inches from his eyes, the nipples coming rigid and rosy against the dusky hue of her skin. Jonah reached up and brought one round melon to his mouth as she trembled atop her perch in his lap. Throwing her head back, the high Indian cheekbones firing her eyes with an even brighter flame and her long black hair slithering over the curve of her shoulder, she shuddered from chin to toe.

  The whore whimpered softly as her mouth came forward toward his, then slid off his lips, tantalizing him as her teeth sought the side of his neck. She bit him, hard enough to make Hook wince.

  He hadn’t been bitten like that in … Jonah couldn’t remember a woman ever biting him before. Not in anger. Nor in passion.

  Hurriedly leaving the smoky cantina, the whore led the two horsemen across the alameda, a tree-lined walk, then on down the muddy street pocked with the holes cut by recent hooves and streaked with greasy rivulets carved by iron-rimmed wheels, each silvery, moonlit sliver of water afloat with the day’s refuse tossed from most every door leading into the rain-drenched darkness. On she took them to the poorest part of this squalid village, where the houses squatted like colorless mud toads amid the low-hanging smoke of cedar fires.

  First she took them to a small stable, where they stripped their horses and pack animals. It was there the woman told the Indian to make himself a bed of straw. When Hook had loosened the lashes that held his bedroll behind his saddle and dropped it atop some hay in an empty stall, the whore shook her head.

  “Oh, no, Señor. You will come with me,” she had told Hook, beckoning not just with her finger, but with those black eyes like evil a’light.

  Telling the Indian that they would be in the small hut across the muddy street, she led Jonah back into the storm and darkness, dodging puddles and piles of droppings gone cold with spring’s onslaught before ducking out of the rain. In the tiny room she lit a single candle. When he straightened there beside the short doorway, the crude door hung awap on its loose leather hinges, Jonah had to remove his hat to keep it from brushing against the low ceiling, his shadow cavorting across the near wall in the dance of flame thrown out by that tallow candle.

  She had turned then, her black hair dripping with rain, catching the flicker of the single flame like a red mirror, hair strands hung in dark tendrils over her eyes as she pulled his coat from his arms, gently nudging him back toward one of the only two chairs in the room. It sat opposite the narrow rope-and-timber bed. She turned away and went to a small table, where he heard her tear a strip of cloth. His eyes danced across the walls—carved in the mud wall over the bed was a niche where stood a small painted saint, hands folded before him, a gilt halo perched on the crown of his head. Beside the door hung a figure he supposed was the Christ—this one fashioned poorly of corn straw and shucks. On its hand-carved head lay a wreath of bramble thorns, drops of bright red blood stained the brow.

  She came to him, gently tore open the slash in his sleeve, and dabbed cold water onto the wound. He didn’t think it deep enough to worry over as she snapped a cactus leaf in two and squeezed its milky juice onto his arm, working it down into the long wound. That complete, the woman took the pieces of cloth she had torn from one of her own garments and wrapped Jonah’s forearm. Turning it this way and that, she inspected her work and her knot, then knelt before his knees.

  Reaching for his belt, she hurriedly opened his britches. Jonah rose off the chair slightly as she took his flesh in her hands. He was the dry tinder, she the flame licking him into fire. He was rigid by the time she broke away to pull off his boots, then yanked his trail-stiffened canvas britches off his legs. In a damp trail of puddles tracked clear across the clay floor, she carelessly threw his coat and shirt.

  His breath came short, in heavy gushes, spiraling in clouds of hot vapor in the cold room as she tucked her arms inside her chemise and pushed it down to her waist, exposing the small, firm breasts. With one hand she again took hold of his rigid flesh, the other hand encircling the back of his neck to pull him toward the dark aureole of her breast.

  He hadn’t sucked long when he found the warm, swe
etish liquid spilling across his tongue. That unforgettable taste compelled him to draw at the breast harder still, more insistently as she locked him against her, drove her hand up and down the length of him like a ramrod. Jonah moved his mouth to the other breast and found the nipple already dripping in milky readiness.

  It was then that she drew away from him and said, “No, Señor. Do not take everything.”

  She stood, right before him, pushing the chemise, skirt and all, down over her hips, stepped out of them, and flung it all to the low bed. Now she wore only the crude moccasins that were all most cantina women had to wear—nothing so rich as shoes imported from Madrid or Barcelona. Not even a pair of high-heeled dancing shoes brought up the trade routes from Chihuahua.

  When at last she returned to Jonah, she took one of his hands and put it between her thighs, massaging herself on him, working his fingers back and forth over her warm cleft, into the very moistness of her. When she finally pulled his hand free and came astraddle him, settling slowly while he groaned in exquisite, delicious torment, Jonah wanted to explode.

  She felt it, his readiness, and immediately stopped her moving atop him. Reaching beneath her with one hand, the whore gently cupped his scrotum in her palm and pulled ever so slightly. Again and again she milked him until she felt she had done enough to delay his climax.

  Then she resumed her work atop his rigid shaft.

  Twice she performed that same magic on him, delaying his release, and twice more she thrust herself atop him, trembling and whimpering, reaching her own climax with him still firm and unspent inside her.

  When she finally brought her teeth away from the side of his neck, Jonah sensed a temporary relief wash over him as that exquisite pain diminished. Once more he could concentrate on the woman. Laying his hands along either side of her face, Jonah laid a middle finger across her rouged lips. Instantly, eagerly, she opened and swallowed the finger whole, sucking on it playfully as she drew his heated flesh back and forth into that deepest part of her.