It was the first time Tracy had ever heard him speak of his second wife. “When did she die? Shea must have been pretty young. I can’t remember her at all.”
“Doubt if he can, either.” Dry, ancient pain sounded in the old man’s voice. “Elena didn’t die. She left when Shea was four. Ran off with the foreman.”
“Patrick! I—I didn’t know! I’m sorry—”
“All blood down the creek.” He hitched his shoulder. “At least she left me the boy and that shows how miserable she was, because she loved him. Guess I was too busy, and lots of the ranchwork—branding, cutting—tore her up. I was mad as hell. Wouldn’t give her a divorce for a couple of years or let her see the boy.” He sighed. “Looking back now, I can’t blame her much.”
“She never saw Shea again?”
“No. She died of cancer a year after I gave her the divorce.”
Tracy was silent, trying to absorb the shock. “Have you told Shea all this?” she asked at length.
“I tried a few times. But, hell, Tracy, it’s hard! And he said he didn’t want to talk about it.” Patrick brooded. “Of course, that made it extra bad when that flighty little Cele ran out on him.”
Yes.
Tracy had to sit down. She’d derided Shea for letting a girl-child’s duplicity sour him on women, but to have been deserted by his mother—one who must have been loving and playful! It made his behavior much clearer, while giving Tracy a sense of defeat.
Even if, now, Patrick convinced Shea that Elena had loved him, could the knowledge filter from brain to heart? Could Shea, even if he wanted to, really trust a woman?
Devastated for a small boy’s grief, Tracy reached for a happier subject to distract Patrick. “Did Geronimo keep on his side of the seat last night?” she teased Mary.
“Yes, but there’s no way to keep him from going on about how we ought to get married!”
“He’s a good lad,” Patrick soothed.
“With stone-age notions! His wife can’t do dirty work, crawling under engines and so on.” Mary snorted. “He wouldn’t care if I spent the day cooking his meals and washing diapers, though!”
“You really are set on this mechanic thing, aren’t you, Mary mía?” asked Patrick.
“I am! I like it, I’m good at it, and housework bores me stiff!”
“Well, then be a mechanic. If you give up what you want to do, you and your man’ll both regret it.” Patrick squeezed her hand. “We’ve got enough trucks and vehicles on the ranch to keep you busy. But hell, Mary mía! How’ll I get along if you ditch me for a broken-down tractor?”
She laughed and hugged him. “I’m not leaving you, Patrick. But this summer I want to take a night class, drive in a couple of times a week.”
“Good God, girl! That’s a fifty-mile round trip.” Patrick’s right eyebrow scowled. “Don’t call me Geronimo, but I don’t like that much.”
“Tivi Sanchez is taking the same course. I can ride with him.”
“Mm,” said Patrick. “What does Carla think about it?”
“She thinks it’s fine,” said Mary. “But that Geronimo!”
“In this case, I’m with him,” Patrick grunted. “Not that I don’t trust Tivi, but I don’t want my nurse worn out. Give me the phone.” A few minutes later, he had called a Nogales garage and arranged for their best mechanic to come over a few evenings a week and teach Mary, Tivi and any other ranch people who wanted to learn. “There,” he said contentedly.
“But you’re paying him a fortune!” Mary protested.
“We’ll make it back on work you and Tivi can do,” Patrick grinned. “Shucks, honey, I can’t swing much these days! Let me manage what I can.” He chuckled. “I bet Geronimo takes the class just to keep an eye on you. Which could be kind of funny, because he walked off from the Army when it was trying to make a mechanic out of him.”
“Walked off?” Mary frowned.
“And never went back. He was over at Fort Huachuca and one day he just took off through those mountains. Army never caught him any more than they did old Pia Macheta.”
“Pia Macheta?” prompted Tracy. “Who was he?”
“He was a Papago who never really believed the United States had taken Arizona over from Mexico,” Patrick said. “This was back fairly early in World War II. Anyhow, the government got all scared about the chances of a Japanese force landing in Mexico and then coming up through Sonora and the Papago Reservation, taking Tucson, and marching on to attack California from the east. To be sure none of the Indians sided with the Japanese, the Papagos were supposed to take an oath of allegiance. Now old Pia thought Mexico was still in charge. When some local officials tried to get him and his people to take the oath, they roughed up the officials, ran up the Mexican flag, and skedaddled.”
“I don’t believe it!” Tracy gasped.
Patrick chortled. “You better! Pia and his band dodged around awhile till a friend who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs calmed him down and persuaded him to give himself up.”
“What happened?”
“He was tried, and even though a bunch of profs and civil liberties people went to bat for him, he was sentenced. Eighteen months, I think it was. Then he went back to the reservation and lived in peace and quiet.”
“It’s about the wildest tale I ever heard,” said Tracy skeptically.
“All true,” Patrick vowed. “What’s wilder, he and his fellow prisoners really liked the Pima County jail! Said it was very comfortable and they loved the food.”
Mary grimaced. “Bet they’re the first and last to say anything good about that dump!”
Patrick was in a reminiscing mood that day. “You’ve heard of Santa Teresa, who cured my mother’s blindness?” he asked. “Well, Teresita, as they called her, lived right near the customs house in Nogales after Díaz drove her out of Mexico. Later, she and her father lived for a time pretty close to Calabazas where Rio Rico is now. That’s where my mother saw her, at a place called Bosque.”
He went on to tell how his parents had developed a grudging respect for Emilio Kosterlitzky, the Russian officer who had made General Díaz’s rurales into a notorious but effective body of mounted police. According to his lights, the colonel had been just and had once compelled a rico to marry the peon girl he had raped, with the warning that he had better not hear of any mistreatment of the unwanted bride.
Tracy had lunch with Patrick and Mary before she left. She hadn’t seen Judd since the disastrous plane tour, nor Vashti in almost as long. It was not a happy house, though Mary had made a tremendous difference. Strangely, it was the paralyzed blind man who seemed most at peace in the family.
His revelations about Shea’s mother dismayed Tracy more the longer she thought about them. It was no wonder he was guarded. Maybe it was more than that, maybe he really meant all he said about not making a big thing of sex. He might be willing to oblige her several times a week, but that wasn’t what she wanted, damn it! She loved him.
In stages, Tivi got the blind mounted where Tracy could set up her camera and he made holes through which she could observe or take pictures. Following remembered advice from her outdoor editor, she placed reflectors on the outside. The owls seemed to accept the box-like thing on stilts that had suddenly appeared in the vicinity, so Tracy went up the ladder at twilight and settled to wait. She would have liked Le Moyne’s company in the dark but had shut him in the house for fear he might alarm the owls.
Suddenly, a white, valentine-shaped face appeared in the big knothole. Though Tracy didn’t want to take pictures that night lest she frighten the birds, she watched excitedly as the owl waited for a few minutes, then spread wide wings, and dissolved into the deeper night.
A moment later, the ghostly white body of its mate filled the hole before it, too, launched forth. There was not the slightest whisper of sound. Tracy remembered Chuey’s telling her that the forward edges of an owl’s main flight feathers were lined with soft fluff that made its flight inaudible as falling snow. Its prey heard nothing
till the talons closed.
The terror by night. Tracy shivered and turned up the collar of her jacket. Somewhere in the darkness, in order to live and feed their young, the owls must kill. Their large ear openings would detect the slightest mouse rustle or movement. They hunted by night what hawks and eagles took by day.
This swift, impersonal doom in the night brought back to Tracy the attack outside her apartment. She told herself, as she had so often, It happened to me but it wasn’t me. It was the leap of a rabid beast, a bolt of lightning hitting the nearest grounding. Nothing personal. Think of it that way, a senseless accident.
A screech sounded from the distance. The owlets began a “shh” that mounted in intensity as more screeches announced the return of a parent. Tracy could see only a blur of white as it lit. It was barely gone when the other owl flew in.
During the next hour, the owls made five returns but the clamor of their nestlings seemed no less demanding. Shaking her head at the rigors of being an owl parent, Tracy climbed quietly down and was soon in bed with Le Moyne’s comforting bulk stretched out nearby. She touched the pillow where Shea’s head had rested and hoped vengefully that he thought of her even half as often as she thought of him.
Flashbulbs startled the owls but they went on with their hunting and feeding. She got shots of them bringing in field mice, a small snake, a gopher. The adults’ big dark eyes in the valentine faces must have been temporarily blinded by the flashes, but their brood’s hungry slurping sounds soon had them scavenging again.
Tracy’s photos were accumulating gradually, and their subjects ranged from the slapstick of a javelina making off with a bag of Fritos, to the tender one of a doe and a fawn touching noses. She had rigged a sugarwater container on a raised log and put out scraps each evening. A beautiful fox, its bushy tail as long as it was, loved the sugarwater and drank daintily each night though it vacated the log when a raccoon approached. Skunks fed with the slow deliberation of gourmets from the “salad” Tracy put out, elegant little animals who could fluff their tails in a manner reminiscent of a peacock’s display.
The elusive fox thrilled Tracy, but her favorite was a ringtail, with its miniature fox face and luxuriant banded tail. It so enjoyed some hardened fig bars she put out that she began to toss a couple on top of the roof for it and attach from the edge its own special jar of sugar-water. The greedy racoons caught on to that, hanging over the ledge to grip the jar in their clever dextrous “hands,” so she abandoned that idea and kept more sugarwater down low.
Patrick enjoyed hearing about her creatures and told her of some of his encounters with wild creatures. “I killed a bear one time,” he said. “I never killed another. It cried just like a woman—cried for a long time. But that’s not what stopped me hunting.”
“What did?”
“When it hit me that man’s a killer at a distance—the only predator that can kill without touching his prey.” Patrick thought back as if picturing the scene in his darkness. “I was riding one day and came out of some trees to spot three deer. One took off. One kept feeding. The third made a couple of bounds, then turned to wait. It watched me as if it thought the space between made it safe.” He shook his head. “Nothing showy. It just made me sorry—kind of ashamed—that animals don’t know what they’re up against.” He went on after a moment. “Later, I thought man’s long reach isn’t only with guns. It’s a time thing, too. Animals fight over territory or mates but they don’t hold grudges the way humans do. People kill years after the first trouble. It’s this awful knack we have for distance killing.”
“Have you ever talked to Shea about the war?”
“No. Have you seen him lately?”
“Not since we left that eagle with him.” Tracy turned to Mary, who was coming in with Patrick’s shaving things. “Do you know how the eagle’s making it?”
“Alive and meaner by the day, Geronimo says.”
“And how’s Geronimo?”
Mary grinned. “He’s studying mechanics along with Tivi and me. We’re both a lot quicker than he is.”
“Wouldn’t blame him if he kidnapped you down into the Sierra Madre the way the Apache Kid would have,” chided Patrick.
“I’d bend a wrench over his head,” said Mary succinctly.
Tracy laughed and kissed Patrick good-bye. She still got her mail at the ranch and the bundle of Houston papers made her wonder if the Stronghold article was in them.
It was, in the Sunday magazine section. The photos of Pardo and his trainees had reproduced well, and very little of the story had been cut. Judd’s voice behind her made her jump.
“God job!” He flourished a clip of the feature. “Just got it from a friend in Houston. And that’s not all, baby! AP’s picked it up. I’ve been asked to be on one of those big morning talk shows! How about that?”
Stunned, Tracy said, “I didn’t think you’d like the story.”
He laughed. “It’s clear enough that you don’t approve, but your interviews with trainees show they’ve got a right to be scared and getting prepared. Hell, some Houston businessmen were so impressed that they’re asking me to tailor a special program they can fly over and take on a long weekend.”
Confounded, for the last thing she’d intended was to get Stronghold more clients, Tracy turned speechlessly away. Judd caught her arm. “I’m flying up to New York next week, cousin. Come along and we’ll do the town!”
“Thanks, but I’m busy.”
His exultant smile faded. Tawny eyes probed hers. “Hey, you aren’t still huffy about that deal I tried to pull on Shea? I’m the one who got hurt! Bushels of red tape, plenty of bribes and arm-twisting, and with it all, I got back only two-thirds of the cattle. Must be a couple hundred trucked off to the butcher or stashed out in the boonies.”
“Your hassles with Shea are one thing. Lying to Patrick is another.”
“Lying? Goddam! Man in his condition can’t be told a lot of things.” Pausing, Judd reined in his anger and a broad persuasive grin showed his strong white teeth. “Tracy, you must know I have to be careful with Dad,” he said earnestly. “A real upset could kill him. Maybe I was wrong to tell him I had a new lease, but damned if I was going to sell the cows!”
“Well, what are you going to do with them?”
“Right now I’m buying hay and you can bet I’m cussing my brother with every bale!” Judd’s face tightened. “It’ll take time, but I’ll get his lease revoked.”
“Patrick won’t be very happy about that.”
“He doesn’t need to know. I’ll give Shea one thing, he doesn’t run to Dad.”
“If you two could just compromise—”
“We could, if he’d let cattle on the lease.”
“He said he would if you’d reduce the number.”
“He can go to hell.” Judd’s teeth showed again, but this time he wasn’t smiling. “Come with me, Tracy. You won’t be sorry.” His broad hands dropped on her shoulders.
“Well!” cut in Vashti’s bright voice. She held a plum robe around her with one hand and a drink with the other. “I haven’t seen you in ages, Tracy, though I know you’re here almost daily. You must stay for dinner one evening or at least have a cocktail.”
“You could drop into your husband’s room,” Tracy said. Stepping clear of Judd’s hands, she turned and left the house.
XIII
She was sitting on a log next morning, brushing LeMoyne, who responded with soft rumbles of pleasure, when she heard the crunch of hoofs.
“Geronimo!” she called, rising. “I didn’t know you ever rode anything but a pickup!”
“Try not to.” He grimaced as he shifted in the saddle. “We don’t have a horse trailer, though, so Shea asked me to bring you this filly. Like her?”
Tracy gazed in delight and wonder at the golden mare he was leading. “She’s for me? That’s my old saddle and bridle on her.”
“Chuey rustled them up,” Geronimo explained. Getting down from a rangy bay gelding, he traile
d the reins and patted the palomino’s gleaming neck. “Shea was breaking Güera for himself but decided she was just right for you.”
“Why didn’t he bring her?”
Geronimo flushed. “Now, chica, he was busy and anyhow you know how he is.”
“I know how he is. And I don’t like it!”
Geronimo sighed. “He’s not as cantankerous as Mary! How about some coffee, chica? She bumped a wrench into my head last night and it’s still aching.”
“I wonder what you were doing,” Tracy commented unsympathetically. “Coffee should still be hot.” She went to bring him a cup.
When she returned, he was unsaddling the horses. “I’m leaving Sangre with Güera. They’re special friends, the way horses get to be, and she wouldn’t be very happy by herself.”
“Who’s going to ride him?”
“Mary might like to when she’s visiting.” He flashed a smile. “Or Shea or I will often enough to keep him from going bronco.” He drained the cup. “Will you give me a lift to the Sanchezes, chica?”
“Sure.” And as soon as I get back here, I’m riding that gift horse over to see why His Mightiness won’t deliver his own presents.
“One thing you better watch with Güera,” warned Geronimo as they got in the pickup. “She’s scared of snakes. If she hears a rattler, she skitters, and sometimes she thinks she hears one when she doesn’t.”
“In other words, she’s spooky. Is this Shea’s way of getting my neck broken?”
“Chica! He wouldn’t do that! Güera’s sweet-tempered. She’s got speed and endurance.” He shrugged broadly. “Horses are like people. They all have their little problems.”
“Some more than others.”
“Yeah. Mary and her crazy fix on being a hotshot mechanic!”
“I wasn’t talking about Mary. Say, have you heard anything about Blondie? The guy Shea rammed into the wash?”
Geronimo’s black eyes widened. “Didn’t you know? He broke jail a couple of weeks ago. It was on the radio.”
Muscles tightened in Tracy’s stomach. “Does Mary know?”
“Sure. I thought she’d told you.”
A Mating of Hawks Page 15
