A Mating of Hawks

by Jeanne Williams

  Tiredly, Shea said, “I owe a duty to the land and the people who’ll live here after all of us are dead.”

  Judd’s furious gaze took in Tracy, swept back to Shea. “Your kids!” he jeered. “Sure, you’ll have a parcel of brats and you’re willing to have green pastures for them! Well, I don’t have kids or an old woman and I care about right damn now!”

  Stalking to the door, he spun around, teeth flashing in a malicious grin. “I don’t have you by the balls like you’ve got me,” he said. “Not yet. But I can sure start making you uncomfortable! Think I’ll start by calling the Border Patrol on that wetback you got working. And that good buddy of yours, Geronimo! The Army still might like to know where a deserter is.”

  Shea’s lips tightened. “The immigration folks would be a lot more interested in those mercenaries you’re training. Pretty cute trick, having your recruiters smuggle illegals in. You’ve got them where you want them then. Teach them to shoot and hire them out wherever such fighters are wanted. Real profitable for you.”

  “You’ve been spying!”

  “No. Jaime talked to some of them a week or so ago.”

  “They’ll get their wages—more than they’d ever make at anything else.”

  “And a lot of them are going to get shot.”

  Judd shrugged. “That’s war. Those damn Commies have got to be stopped. This is my way of helping. I just about break even.”

  “You probably think you deserve a medal,” Shea said in disgust. “Stronghold’s the pits but you’re within the law there. This other deal, though—Close it out, Judd, or I’m going to turn you in.”

  Flaming brimstone described the color of Judd’s eyes. “You’re not even a half-brother of mine,” he said thickly. “Some lousy bastard got to your whore of a mother and what they had was you!”

  This time he wasn’t drunk. Shea knocked him out into the yard. Judd felled him, kicked savagely at his head. Shea rolled out of the way, sprang up, and nearly lifted Judd off his feet with punches to the gut. Judd bellowed and closed his big arms around Shea, crushing him. Tracy snatched up a skillet and was going to bring it down on Judd’s skull when Shea locked his leg against Judd’s, threw him.

  They struggled in light and darkness, broke free and dragged themselves up. Judd aimed a vicious kick at Shea’s crotch. Shea grasped the booted foot and forced it up and over. Judd flipped like a roped steer. This time he didn’t get up.

  Tracy helped Shea carry Judd to his RV, followed with the pickup while Shea drove Judd to the Sanchezes. Judd was still groggy and Shea warned Chuey to watch for signs of concussion and call the doctor if Judd didn’t come around fully in a short time. As Shea climbed into his pickup, Judd roused enough to mumble through split, swollen lips.

  “You’re a goddam bastard, not my brother. You’ve as good as stolen that land you’re hogging.”

  Chuey said in bewilderment, “What is this, Don Shea?”

  “Never mind, Chuey. Just call him a doctor if he needs one.”

  Shea leaned heavily back as Tracy drove them home. “I wish you’d just turned him into Immigration,” Tracy said. “Now he’s got two reasons to hate you.”

  “Make it three.” Shea laid a hand on her thigh. Distraught though she was, a thrill hummed through her. “He wanted you.”

  Shea was battered and bruised but not seriously damaged. “Maybe we ought to let you rest up a couple of days,” Tracy suggested. He shook his head.

  “I’d just stew around. And it’d be better to fade away while Judd chews over the facts and phases out his war games. He knows now he’s got to do it, but it’ll save his pride a little to close down while I’m away.”

  Tracy sighed. “We’ll certainly be uneasy neighbors after all this.”

  “I doubt we’ll be neighbors.”

  With a rush of fear, Tracy caught Shea’s hand. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing drastic,” Shea grinned reassuringly. “Judd can’t keep on raising cattle on the scale he wants to. It’s costing money now and there’s a limit to what he can pay for prestige, though he gets a nice income from other Scott-O’Shea-Revier interests.”

  “Then what—”

  “My guess is that he’ll make a deal with Fricks or someone like him. Sell his part of the ranch for development. With the bundle he’d get, he could start a new ranch someplace else where land’s a lot cheaper.”

  The Socorro ranch cut in two, with acres of golf green, and mock Mediterranean villas around a country club? “But that’d be awful!”

  “No more than what he sees as the waste of El Charco is to him,” Shea reminded. “I wish I had the money to buy him out—have to use a front, of course. But I haven’t been making anything off El Charco, just spending plenty to bring back the range.”

  “I don’t have anything like a smell of what it would take,” Tracy regretted. A possibility, repugnant, but still perhaps better than what Shea predicted, struck her. “Shea, supposing we sell Last Spring? Fricks would pay enough to maybe swing an offer to Judd, pooled with what we could borrow and scrape together from our incomes.”

  He didn’t even hesitate. “No.” Circling her waist with his arms, he leaned his marked face against her belly and his breath warmed her. “That’s your dowry, honey. If we keep it and the land around the old ranch house, that’ll do for sentiment and in time El Charco can be productive. We’ll do our best.” He chuckled. “Patrick and all our ancestors couldn’t ask more than that!” He drew her down and kissed her hard in spite of his bruised lips. “What they’d all be proudest of, though, is those good-looking, spunky, smart kids we’re going to have!”

  He carried her to the bedroom. Ecstatically pleasured, cherished in his arms, Tracy exhausted herself with giving, offering, taking. Judd’s threatening face receded and she fell blissfully asleep, head cradled where she could hear the steady comforting beat of Shea’s heart.

  Stopping at Bosque and Tubac, they lunched in the shady patio of a restaurant on a back road near San Xavier and drove the long road through mountain-surrounded desert to Gila Bend. That improbable metallic oasis of trailers and fast-food places existing mostly as an escape from Luke Air Force Base soon faded like a mirage, as they threaded along a rutted dirt road twining into a wasteland of sand-covered lava flows, exposed mineral like large black pockmarks, dry washes fringed by persistent, hopeful trees, and mountains that looked pink or blue or golden or gray, depending on the light and their composition.

  When they stopped at the ruins of what had been the Tecolote Mine, run by Marc Revier before he married Talitha, they remembered Lonnie, the young Texan who had died near here to save her. He was buried at the Socorro, but this secret region had many graves, topped with crosses formed by stones, crosses sometimes the size of a man, sometimes as small as a child.

  “And a lot that died away from the road must not have even had graves,” Tracy said.

  Shea nodded. “It would be kind of interesting to know what percentage of people who look for gold find death instead. One guess is four hundred died on the Devil’s Road during the Gold Rush. You can still die in this country. It wasn’t so far away that that group of Honduran refugees died of thirst a few years ago. If we had time, we’d go southwest of Yuma to look over what has to be one of the weirdest projects anyone ever dreamed up.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know that besides watering California and Arizona, the poor puny Colorado has to deliver an allotment to Mexico, too.”

  Tracy nodded. “The Mexican government was complaining that the water’s so salty from irrigation runoff that their farmers can’t use it.”

  “Right. So our Interior Department’s set up a $356 million plant to take out enough salt—just enough, mind you—to make Mexico’s water usable. It sucks the water through its works, a hundred million gallons a day, then dumps it back in the river while a canal drains the brine into the Gulf of California.”

  “Whow!”

  “And then some. Be a great place
to grow halophytes.”

  “Come again?”

  “Plants that can grow on salty water. The University of Arizona and the Mexican government are doing some joint research. Fascinating. Salt bush seems the best bet so far, though pickle weed is edible and Palmer’s grass has a seed that’s very tasty and eighty percent protein.”

  “Can they grow on pure sea water?”

  “Not too well, but even slight desalinization helps. The big thing is that much of the world’s water is too saline for regular crops but could grow halophytes.”

  They climbed back in the pickup. Stunted palo verde, meager saguaros and an occasional hundred-headed cactus gave way to creosote flats, endless expanses of widely spaced tiny-leaved bushes, some still brightened by small yellow flowers.

  Only a particularly mean and tough species of cereus shared this isolation. The few rabbits and quails disappeared. Tracy gazed across this waste at the black peak for which the area was named, Cabeza Prieta. Far to the southeast Shea pointed out the purple shape of Pinacate and Carnegie Peaks.

  “Map or no map,” said Tracy with feeling, “I’m glad you’ve been here before!”

  “Patrick took Judd and me a few times when we were kids.” Shea’s jaw hardened and Tracy ached for the bitter alienation between the brothers. They had grown apart as adults but there were years of shared memories as well as the blood bond. Judd couldn’t really have believed his slur on Shea’s parentage. Shea, when it came right down to it, looked a lot more like Patrick than Judd did. “I’ve been to Pinacate once since I came back to the ranch, but I’ve never made the whole grand tour at once, the way we’re doing.”

  A range of fierce granite mountains rose above a wash that sustained a growth of trees, shrubs and vines, which seemed breathtakingly lush in this arid wilderness. Shea stopped at the bottom of a small elevation facing sheer gray stone walls. Cleft down the center, the rock let rain sluice down it to collect in a series of rock hollows reaching from near the top to a large pool at the base.

  “Here it is,” said Shea, grim wonderment in his voice. “The only sure water in the hundred miles between Quitobaquito and Yuma. Awful thing was when travelers made it this far but found the first tank, or tinaja, empty and couldn’t crawl up to the second or third.” He swept his arm around at the dozens of graves. “Most of these poor devils died that way and were buried by the next party—if they didn’t die, too.”

  Tracy shuddered, shielding her eyes against the glare. “That’s what happened to Frost. He died trying to get to the higher tanks.”

  “From all they say about him, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.” They wandered through the thick bushes to explore around the cañon, and Tracy exclaimed over the countless holes in the flatter rocks where Arenero women had ground seeds and mesquite beans, gossiping and laughing in the shade while naked brown children played nearby.

  Shea squinted at the westering sun. “Want to stay here tonight? I’d rather not try to find the way out in the dark.” Tracy looked at the hill of graves and thought of Judah Frost. She didn’t believe in ghosts but she thought it likely that extreme emotions might linger in a place, charge the atmosphere with despair or grief or joy.

  “Could we camp down the wash a little way?”

  Shea grinned as if he guessed her reason. “Sure. Would you like the tent?”

  “No. Let’s just put our cots close together, hold hands and look at the stars.”

  He kissed her. The wild sweet fire that could only be banked for a short time flamed up between them. He said huskily, “Do you think one cot can hold us both a little while?”

  Drawing him closer, she whispered, “Let’s find out!”

  XXI

  They passed more graves next morning along the faint tracks of the Old Yuma Trail, as the Devil’s Road was also known, and took a short cut through Organ Pipe National Monument. As the black top of Cabeza Prieta and the lava and light-painted shapes of the other mountains receded, Shea asked Tracy if she’d ever heard of Pablo Valencia.

  She frowned. “I don’t think so.”

  “Back in August of 1906, he just about duplicated Patrick O’Shea’s ordeal by thirst. Practically nothing was known about this area then, but W. F. McGee, an early geographer, was spending the summer researching at Tinajas Altas. It was at his camp that Pablo stopped to rest before he headed into the sand dunes searching for gold. Eight days later he dragged himself close to McGee’s camp—on top of that hillock with all the graves—and gave a sort of hollow roar. He’d been six days without water!”

  “In August? I can’t believe it!”

  “McGee was logging temperatures. Over a hundred in the day, though they dropped to the eighties at night. Ground temps probably ran as high as one-twenty or more when Pablo crawled or lay down. He should have died on his third day without water, but he set a world record for survival.”

  “He completely recovered?”

  “Yes, but he wouldn’t have without McGee’s nursing. I’ve seen a picture of him, Tracy. He looked like a mummy with the wrappings off. Baked skin; mouth, eyes and nose peeled back. They soaked him in water as you might rawhide and he was so dehydrated that his cuts couldn’t bleed.”

  “The stories say that’s how the first Shea looked when Socorro found him.” Tracy shivered. “We have plenty of water, haven’t we?”

  “Lots more than we’ll need. Person ought to figure on two gallons a day if you’re moving around much in the desert summer. And I always carry extra in case I meet someone who’s run out.” He grinned at her. “Don’t worry, honey. When I go into country like this, you can bet I have extras of everything, including gas. It’s a long way to help.”

  Crossing the border, they traveled down the highway that connected Mexico with California, turning off on a dirt road. They passed a ranch where dogs ran out barking and cattle drifted around the windmill-fed tank. Granite mountains resembling those in a child’s play set rose from the flat plain to the northwest. Southeast stretched the Sierra Pinacate.

  Beyond the ranch the road became tracks. Pinkish-gold shone in the distance, with what looked like the top of a small range rising above it. “The sand dunes and the Buried Range, or Sierra Enterrada,” explained Shea. “The dunes run toward the gulf till the salt flats begin. There were three ways a Sand Papago or Arenero youth could become a full man. Capture an eagle, kill an enemy of the tribe, or walk to the gulf.”

  “They’re all gone now, aren’t they?”

  “They have descendants in western Arizona and Sonora, but the main group disappeared from El Gran Desierto a hundred years ago. They’d been knocking off too many travelers so a posse from Sonoita went after them. One version is that nearly all of them were killed. Another is that a good many captives were taken to Caborca and settled there, but one Sand Papago named Juan Caravajales lived near where we’ll stop, at Papago Tanks, first with a woman, then alone, and vanished about 1912.”

  “He liked his privacy,” Tracy said.

  She was used to desert, but this was moonscape country of cinder cones, lava flows, barren mountains and vast craters of ancient volcanoes. Their first crater was McDougal. Tracy wondered why Shea had parked at this rather unpromising location beneath a small slope, but got out and walked with him through bits of brown-red lava that shone as if they’d been waxed.

  “Desert varnish,” Shea told her. “And look, where small bits are pressed down in the earth like a mosaic, it’s called desert paving.”

  She nodded, then gasped as they topped a small elevation. A vast hollow spread below, walled by spills of rock. Far below on the flat bottom was a small world of dry watercourses fringed with trees.

  “We could go down,” Shea said, enjoying her awe. “But let’s save our energy for Sykes’. It’s three miles around and 750 feet deep.”

  Tracy groaned. “That had better be a morning project!”

  “First light, honey. We’ll take a quick swing to the edge of the dunes and head back to camp at Sykes’ t
onight.”

  They stopped near Papago Tanks and trudged up the wash till they had to scramble up boulders to find the natural cisterns. It was an oasis of trees and grass, a prime watering place for birds and animals. “That Sand Papago hermit picked about the only place to be,” Tracy decided as they munched trail mix and enjoyed chilled oranges and iced tea. She watched a hummingbird sip at a red chuperosa flower. “If Socorro and Shea had found a place like this, they might have just homesteaded rather than trying to walk out.”

  “Enjoy it,” advised Shea. “This is the only Triple A on the tour.”

  Past the forbidding Sierra Estraña—“The Strange Range,” Shea rhymed—the dunes appeared so close now that they dazzled, endless sweeps of that glowing rosy gold.

  Moon Crater was almost silted to its rimmed circumference, but the reddish core in the center rose like a jagged crescent. There was breeze enough to inspire them to climb up the rugged sides to the top. From there they could see scattered ranges, isolated tracings of green growth along arroyos, and the sensuous tawny dunes to the south and east. White droppings showed that hawks and eagles had often perched here, too, surveying their vast and undisputed kingdom.

  On the way back, they stopped for no reason that Tracy could discern. A bit grumpily, she followed Shea, who searched around a bit and then called triumphantly. “Papago Tanks is prettier but this place is air-conditioned!”

  “So’s the truck,” muttered Tracy, but she clambered up a small slope and gazed down into a large opening in the rocks. Ten feet below was a dirt floor and on either side there seemed to be a cavern.

  Shea, already on the bottom, offered a shoulder for her to step down on till she could reach a pile of rocks. It was a good twenty degrees cooler, but Tracy sniffed and wrinkled her nose. “What’s that musty smell?”

  “Caves smell musty,” Shea teased, “But I suspect that aroma comes from bat guano!”

  “Bat!”

  “Well, sure,” he said reasonably. “If you were a bat, wouldn’t you like it here?”