“Horses are herd animals,” he said now. “And we’re their herd. They’ll stay with Ol’ Red here-unless a better deal comes along.” He grinned at her over his shoulder. “They’re not a lot different from humans in that respect.”
Lauren punched him on the back. She was unprepared when he swore and brought the stallion to a shuddering bone-crunching halt. “What?” she gasped, blinking away tears of pain from a bitten tongue and a bruised pubic bone. Then, in the sudden quiet she heard a new noise-a rushing roaring noise.
Bronco had lifted himself high in the stirrups in order to see farther ahead. Now he settled back in the saddle, still swearing and shaking his head. “Damn,” he said. “Damn, damn, damn.”
“What is it?” Her breasts had shivered hard and tight, brushing against a body suddenly taut and twitchy with ill-contained frustration.
“Flood,” he replied succinctly as he urged Cochise Red forward at a cautious walk.
A few paces farther on she could see it for herself. See that the earth ahead of them ended abruptly at the edge of a deep gulley. The bank on which they stood was higher than the one on the far side, and at least twenty feet below, a torrent of yellow-brown water boiled and churned and roared by with the speed and noise of a runaway freight train.
“Flash flood,” Bronco said, his voice distant and tired. “All that rain yesterday-last night. I told you it was a male rain-no good to anybody. The soil’s baked dry-the rain comes too hard and fast to soak in. So it just runs off-from every slope and down every little ravine-until it all winds up here. A few miles farther down it’ll spread out and either soak into the sand or stand on the hardpan until it eventually evaporates. But that won’t do us any good.”
“We have to cross that?” Lauren asked in a small voice.
“Yeah,” he replied on an rusty exhalation, “we have to cross that. Except we can’t. So we’ll have to go around it-one way or the other.” He turned to look at her and she saw the bleak set of his features, the furious black glitter of his eyes. “It’s going to take time…”
Time they didn’t have. Though neither of them said so, the knowledge that they were running out of that precious commodity lay like a chasm between them. What day was it? She’d lost track and couldn’t bring herself to ask him. The convention-it must have started by now. The acceptance speeches would be on the final day. How would they possibly still get there in time? Oh, Daddy, I’m so sorry.
New sounds intruded on that vibrant space-a squeal of surprise, a frightened whicker.
Bronco jerked around in the saddle. He muttered, “Oh, hell,” and an instant later was on the ground and running toward the edge of the wash. Still clutching the back of the empty saddle, Lauren watched in frozen fascination as the hindquarters of the gray mare, Linda, sank from sight, while her front hooves still lunged and scrabbled futilely at the edge of the ravine. Then all at once, undercut by the flood waters, the entire section of bank gave way. With a terrified scream, the mare disappeared. And right behind her was Bronco, plunging feet-first down the slide, into the raging torrent.
Just that quickly it happens. The unthinkable. Lauren felt the searing pain of a scream rip through her throat, heard the echoes of her own voice hanging in the hot shimmering sunlight, crying out his name.
Then, somehow, she was in the saddle and the reins were in her hands, and the big red stallion was thundering along the edge of the wash while she strained to catch a glimpse of one black head in all that water. She could see the mare thrashing, struggling to stay upright-if she started rolling, she was as good as lost. But where was Bronco? She screamed his name over and over. “Johnny! Johnny!”
There he was! Yes-she could see him, churning through the water, arms reaching for the frantic mare. But then, before he could grab hold of her mane, the current caught him, tore him away and rolled him under.
“Bronco!” Searching frantically for a glimpse of him, Lauren raced Cochise Red flat out along the edge of the gully, racing the torrent, refusing to accept that Bronco could be gone. Gone so completely, so suddenly. Just that quickly the unthinkable happens.
Then, once again she saw him, clinging with all his strength to a clump of willows far out in the middle of the maelstrom. Crying his name, sobbing with relief, she reined the stallion to a halt and all but fell from his back. “Hang on, I’m coming!” she yelled, frantically trying to free the coil of rope that was tied onto the front of the saddle.
There-she had it in her hands. Now-she needed something to secure it to. A rock or a bush… She smacked her forehead with her palm. Of course-Cochise Red! He was a quarterhorse, bred and trained to work cattle, strong enough to hold steady against the pull of a bucking steer. Oh, but he was tired, bone weary. Would he be strong enough to hold against a flood? A swift look around told her she had little choice-there were no rocks close enough to snub a rope around, and all the bushes seemed pitifully small. It was the stallion or nothing-and if she did nothing, Bronco was going to drown.
In seconds she had the rope securely tied to the pommel of the saddle, and just for good measure, snubbed it twice around the horn. “Whoa, boy, hold steady,” she crooned, stroking Cochise Red’s neck. She didn’t know what commands to give him; she could only hope he’d understand.
Then she was running, uncoiling the rope as she ran. The bank wasn’t as high here, but the flood was much wider. Bronco seemed so far away. Would the rope even be long enough to reach him? Could she throw it that far?
He was waving his arm, shouting at her. “Hold on,” she yelled, “I’m coming!”
“Go…go!” The words carried to her above the roar of the water. “Don’t try it. Take Red and go!”
“Are you crazy?” Lauren shouted. “Just hold on. Don’t you dare let go!” Standing as close to the edge of the flood as she dared, she hurled the coil of rope with every ounce of strength in her body-and watched in dismay as it fell with a plunk-far short of its target. Sobbing with frustration and fear, she reeled it in and tried again-with the same result.
“Go!” Bronco yelled. “It’s too far! Take Red, follow the flood until you come to the road. Go, dammit! You have to get…to your father…in time. Please…just go!”
Lauren was no longer listening. She was sobbing, furious with him beyond all understanding, muttering over and over under her breath as she reeled in the rope one last time, “I’m not going to leave you. I’m not going to leave you…”
Okay, but she had to accept the fact that she wasn’t strong enough to throw the rope out to him. It seemed to her there was only one thing left to do: she’d have to take it to him. Oh, she couldn’t possibly swim against the current, she knew that-she’d only drown, and then where would Bronco be? But there was Red. The stallion was strong. If they started far enough upstream and swam hard across the current, they could make it to the middle of the flood before it carried them past the willows.
With no other options open to her, she didn’t waste time thinking about it. Climbing into the saddle, she backtracked Cochise Red along the edge of the gully, then dismounted and tied the free end of the rope around the base of the biggest strongest-looking bush she could find. Then, fervently praying, she lifted herself once more into the saddle and urged the stallion forward. Forelegs stiff and trembling, he plunged over the side of the bank. She leaned far over his neck, coaxing and encouraging, begging and cajoling. “Come on, big boy, we can make it…we can do it…”
And suddenly they were in that muddy churning torrent. She felt the water hit with unbelievable force, felt Red’s feet lose their purchase, and for a horrible heart-stopping instant believed that they were lost. Then all at once she knew that the stallion was swimming, swimming gallantly, powerfully, swimming for his life, and all she could do then was hold on and try as best she could to keep him headed in diagonal across the current, on a line toward the clump of willows.
The current was so swift! More quickly than she could have imagined, before she even had time to think about it
, the willows were looming ahead, dark above the churning rapids. And then suddenly Bronco’s hand was reaching toward her, clutching at the stallion’s neck…at the saddle…at her. Through a muddy veil of water his eyes blazed at her, black and bright with fury.
“You idiot!” he gasped. “You should have left me!”
“Shut up! Just shut up!” she sobbed, her fingers tangled in his hair, in his shirt. “Did you think I’d leave you? Just shut up and hold on. We’re getting out of here.”
But to do that they’d have to pull themselves back along the rope, working against the current-and against Cochise Red, who was doggedly determined to continue on as he had been, swimming with the flow.
“Let him go!” Bronco shouted, struggling to get a better grip on the rope and on her. “It’s the only way. We have to let him go!”
Lauren gave a shriek of protest and shock, gulped water and came up choking and gagging to watch the stallion surge away from them, lunging and fighting against the waves-and then disappear from sight. But she had no breath for sobs, and no time for tears. Because almost in that same instant, the rope that was their only lifeline suddenly went slack, and she and Bronco, too, were being swept away with the flood.
After that she was aware only of churning water and Bronco’s arms around her and pain and exhaustion and terror-and something inside her. A voice, a spark, a rage that would not let her give up. And then, when she no longer believed it possible, the feel of something solid beneath her feet. She thought it must be a dream, a miracle, but she fought to hold it nonetheless, to gain a step, then another. Clinging to each other, half dragging each other, she and Bronco pulled themselves and each other inch by inch out of the clutches of the current. And then she was on her hands and knees, retching and vomiting muddy gritty water onto the sunbaked rocks.
A few feet away, Bronco lurched to his feet, swaying. “Why didn’t you…” he rasped, then crumpled to the ground.
Lauren crawled to him and gathered his head into her lap. She held him tightly cradled against her chest, sat and rocked him, peeling strands of sand-crusted hair away from his proud warrior’s face, crooning in a hoarse and half-drowned voice, “I won’t leave you, Johnny. I won’t leave you. I won’t leave you.”
“Johnny’s strong. He’ll be okay.” Grandmother Rose looked up, and for a moment her eyes glittered in her broad lined face like little black beads. Then they went back to watching her fingers cut strips from tin cans and roll them to make the “tinklers” that would adorn the large hand-woven basket near her feet. When completed, the bead-decorated basket, along with others made by Grandmother Rose’s daughters and daughters-in-law, would fetch a pretty penny from a mail-order catalogue company headquartered in Gallup. “He’ll take the sweat bath with his uncle Frank and cousin Roger,” she said. “Then he’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
Lauren nodded, but it was too great an effort to reply. She felt utterly drained, limp and bone weary. She thought she might never find the energy to speak a word or move a muscle again. She felt so good here-safe and comforted and warm.
She was sitting on a blanket in a “summer shed,” a shelter made of wooden poles, open to the breezes on three sides and thatched overhead and along the back wall with willow branches. It was surprisingly comfortable there in the shade, even in the midday heat. A few feet away Rose’s great-grandson Matthew slumbered peacefully in his “cradle board,” propped against the back of the shed. His mother, Roger’s wife, Rachel, had gone into Rose’s modest but modern prefabricated house to prepare lunch; the menfolk would be hungry when they emerged from the sweat lodge. Like Grandmother Rose, Lauren was dressed in a “squaw dress,” a voluminous soft cotton skirt with a loose-fitting matching top. Lauren’s was fuchsia; the old lady’s was turquoise blue. It, too, was surprisingly comfortable and cool.
From where she sat Lauren could see the brush corral in the shade of two gnarled cottonwoods, where Cochise Red and the little gray mare were being brushed, fussed over and fed handfuls of corn and hay by a half-dozen assorted-size boys in jeans and T-shirts, cowboy boots and cowboy hats. She and Bronco had come upon the two horses a little ways downstream from where they’d managed to drag themselves from the water, standing together with heads low and flanks heaving. Red’s saddle had been hanging half under his belly; the saddlebags and blanket were gone. Of the buckskin mare they had seen no sign.
Lauren’s eyes shifted to the sweat lodge, a canvas-covered frame that had been set up on the banks of what must normally have been a small meandering stream. Now it, too, was a churning freshet of muddy water, rushing down to join the main flood. She could hear it roaring in the distance, like the rush of wind through trees. She’d always liked that sound, but now, from this day on, it would remind her of terror and panic, the feeling of utter help lessness that comes with the certainty that death is imminent.
She gave an involuntary shiver. Bronco’s grandmother glanced at her, then, following her gaze, made a sound that reminded Lauren of his dry one-note laugh. “Yeah, that flood come down early this morning. Heard it when I woke up-still dark, but I knew what it was. Took out part of my garden, too. Good half of my peppers and most of the pinto beans.” She shrugged; what, after all, could be done about weather?
Then the old woman surprised Lauren by reaching for her hand, taking it up in fingers as smooth and dry as leather and giving it a gentle squeeze. “Johnny’ll be fine,” she said again, softly. And after a moment added as she went back to her task, “His soul’s troubled, but Frank can help him with that.” His uncle Frank was a shaman, Bronco had told Lauren. He was teaching his son, Roger, to be a shaman, too, which was a process that could take years.
Grandmother Rose glanced up, her bright black eyes almost hidden in the creases of her smile. “It’s not a bad thing, you know, to have a troubled soul. What’s bad is to have no soul to be troubled.” Her eyes shifted once again to her busy hands. “Johnny didn’t have a soul for a long time. His mother took it with her when she left.” Lauren must have made some small sound, because the old woman’s eyes darted back to her, wide open, and now as warm as black fur. Oh, how they reminded Lauren of Bronco’s eyes. “He’s got it back now, though, I can tell,” said Rose. “Maybe you gave it back to him.”
“Oh,” Lauren protested in a crackling voice, “I don’t…” Under the soft cotton dress her heart was thumping, and she no longer felt safe in the summer shed. She felt hot and scared. She’d been feeling scared ever since the realization had come to her, there on the edge of the flood, that she’d been willing and prepared to give up her own life to save Bronco’s.
As if she sensed how Lauren felt, Grandmother Rose veered abruptly away from that subject. At least, it appeared for a moment as if she had.
“Johnny’s mother wasn’t a bad person,” she said in a gossipy way. “She was a sweet girl-a real sweet girl, too kind-hearted for her own good. You ask me, I think she left because she got her heart broke one too many times.” She dropped another twist of metal into the pile that had collected in the dip of her skirts between her knees, then stirred her fingers through them, listening with satisfaction to the jingling sound they made. “She was a teacher, you know. She used to say it broke her heart to see them, those bright beautiful little children, so talented, eager and full of promise, wasted.” She looked at Lauren and now her eyes seemed sad. “So many of our children, you know, they grow up and the alcohol gets them. They get to drinking, get themselves killed on the highway, or they go on the streets and get killed there, like my cousin Lutie’s boy, Daniel. Got knifed in a bar fight in Albuquerque.” She shook her head and went back to cutting and twisting. “Couldn’t take it anymore, Grace couldn’t. She had to leave-went back home. She lived back there in the East, you know.” She looked up suddenly. “You from back East?”
Lauren shook her head. “Iowa.” To her, “east” meant New York, New England.
Grandmother Rose wrinkled her nose and said, “Huh. I was back East once. Long time ago,
after my husband, George, got killed in Korea. They gave him a medal, and I had to go back there so the president could give his medal to me. All I remember was a whole bunch of trees. Never saw so many trees. Trees, trees, everywhere you looked. Drive down the road and it was like going down a long green hallway-nothing on either side but trees. Never could figure out which way was which-east, west or whatever-no mountains to guide you by. How a person’s supposed to know which way to go, I’ll never know. Funny thing is-” she paused to toss another jingler onto the pile with a tiny clink “-all those trees, and most of ’em won’t even grow out here at all. I tried it-brought a few home with me, watered ’em, took care of ’em. One or two struggled along for a while, but eventually they all died. But now, some trees, like those willows there-” she pointed up at the greenish-gray thatch overhead “-they grow just about anywhere. You give a willow enough water, it’ll grow wherever you plant it.” Her eyes slid sideways to twinkle at Lauren, and she smiled again in that sly way. “You so tall and slim you remind me of a willow, in a way.”
While Lauren was choking and trying to find an answer to that, Rachel came to the door of the house and called, “Grandmother, how’s Matthew doing? He still sleeping?”
“Like a baby,” Grandmother Rose replied with a cackle of laughter. “He’s such a good baby,” she said to Lauren. “Reminds me a lot of the way Johnny was when he was a baby.” She reached out her hand and again gave Lauren’s a squeeze, but this time it seemed to Lauren there was something urgent about it. “Johnny’s a good man, too. A good man.” She placed a hand on her ample chest. “I know it-in here.” Then she shook her head and added dryly, “Even if he’d like everybody to think he isn’t.”
The Cowboy’s Hidden Agenda Page 21
