He reached down a hand and yanked her to her feet. “What got you so riled up, anyway?”
“That's none of your business," she said with a toss of her head. She pulled her hair, heavy with water, over her shoulder and began to squeeze out the excess, coolly disdaining the look of irritation he turned on her.
“Next time you might not be so lucky," he warned. He swung up into his saddle. Looking down at her, her fist knotted at her hips in a belligerent stance, he said, “I’d better not catch you on Cristo Rey land again.”
“Try and stop me!” she shouted after the departing figure.
She ran into him several times after that, and, curiously enough, he fell in alongside her mount each time with a simple “Howdy.” Together they would ride a spell over the Huachuca foothills, never exchanging a word, until she would decide to return to the post. He would nod desultorily and swing his horse off in the direction that she imagined the Stronghold must lie.
She often thought their relationship odd, for Nick seemed to accept her, as the post children did not. As she was different in other ways, she also was in her looks. But Nick seemed not to notice her tawny-gold skin or the eyes with the slightest suggestion of a slant.
Yet on their last meeting, she thought maybe he did notice her more than she realized. They had dismounted to sit beneath the shade of a mesquite, and she leaned back, inadvertently tangling her hair in a cat’s-claw. Her pained “Ouch!” brought his deft, sun-browned hands to free the snarled strands from the bush’s thorny twigs.
For a few brief seconds she was able to study the face as he concentrated on her hair. She could have almost sworn she saw admiration in those sharp eyes; admiration for her hair’s blue- black silkiness—her one feminine vanity.
Of course, Nick did not know, as did the post children, that her father was Japanese, part of that “yellow peril” that threatened Anglo society. Yet neither could she say that his attitude toward her was one of casual acceptance.
They both watched each other warily, like circling bantams. On her part, the hatred for the Godwins was so great she could not deal with it and simply had to let it simmer within her until she one day found the vent for it.
During those times she was with Nick she castigated herself for not avenging the Davaloses. But to do something like throw a rock or spook Nick’s horse so that he would be left mountless in the middle of nowhere would have been too easy and have accomplished too little. The few times that her mind turned toward the darker side, that of actual murder—perhaps stealing one of the post rifles and ambushing him—would have put too swift an end to her revenge.
And on Nick’s part . . . what did he feel? Whatever he felt, he concealed it well behind that controlled countenance. Yet she sensed that he could not help but be aware of the turbulent flow of feelings that ran between them like a flash flood through a desert draw.
There was the constraint on her part, for she could never let herself forget that their grandfathers had been stepbrothers, that Nick Godwin possessed what was rightfully hers.
Overriding the constraint was the more powerful, unidentifiable feeling which to this day she could find no accurate description for . . . a sort of grim bondage of the souls that nothing that side of heaven or hell could sever. Whatever it was, it had a mesmeric effect on her that transcended the bounds of mere fascination.
CHAPTER 43
Amanda was not to see Nick again for nearly four years, for soon after that last meeting on Cristo Rey the country sank into the miry depths of the Great Depression. Employment was scarce, and the men in the area resented that her father had employment at the post, though he worked for less than anyone else. He was still an Oriental, and the cook’s job should go to a Caucasian. Officials bowed to pressure, and her father had to look for employment elsewhere.
She could recall her father’s face, remarkably unlined for his advancing years, when he told her they were moving to Bisbee, that he might be able to find work as a muck in its copper mines as he was still an incredibly strong man. An unutterable sadness dulled those loving eyes. It was not just the appalling working conditions, the fact that one never saw the light of day—that one literally breathed, ate, and eventually was consumed by the insidious dust. It was also the living conditions to which he knew he would be subjecting his daughter.
Amanda tried to explain to her father that she really did not mind the move. “Life at the post was getting to be humdrum,” she told him, as she sat his teacup on the kotaku and took her place opposite him.
Her peers, who found her outrageously independent, would have been surprised if they had known she followed the Japanese custom of submission in her father’s home. Yet to this man who had bestowed on her mother and herself such undemanding love she freely gave loving servitude.
“What is this ‘humdrum’?’’ he demanded, as he did whenever she slipped into slang, for he expected faultless English from his daughter. But his black-lacquered eyes did sparkle. They sparkled for the daughter whom he loved so dearly, for the daughter who was a reflection of his Lotus Woman.
Lotus Woman had granted him that rarest of gifts, if only mankind could know or understand. She had granted him immortality. And she had permitted him to be a participant in the truest sense of the word in life’s performance of perfect loving. He wondered if his daughter would ever know or understand the exquisite type of loving, of giving, that had existed between him and her mother.
“Boring, monotonous,” Amanda answered now in Japanese.
He shook his head. “I do not like it. I shall be working until nine or so at night, and you will be alone after school.”
“Then I will quit school and get a job. Fourteen’s old enough.”
Taro shook his head brusquely. “No! You will finish your schooling.”
She reached across the table to cover his muscle-veined hand with hers. “Father, I know your fathers set great store by education, but you know that we will need the money,” she said calmly. “And if I work, I won’t be alone at home then, and we can go home together.”
Taro was adamant that she would not work, and she was just as determined she would. In the end they compromised, and she worked after school.
However, those first few weeks in Bisbee were ones of difficult adjustment. The anachronistic town of thirty thousand or more was crowded onto the steep hills of Mule Pass Gulch, and it seemed to Amanda that the little frame shacks had to be glued to the canyon sides to keep from slipping.
Its Brewery Gulch section was a wide-open den of gambling, prostitution, and careless killings. The housewives with their handkerchief-size gardens hid inside houses separated by mere inches. And there was none of the orderliness, the spit-and- polish cleanliness, found at the Huachuca military post.
Still, there was an excitement that was almost tangible in the Bisbee mountain air. and Amanda wanted to be a part of it. Its hillside setting and robust activities made it an inland replica of early San Francisco. In that popular mining town, she was not set apart, for few realized she had a Japanese father. Because of her fierce pride, she had been more often than not on the defensive at the military post. In Bisbee she went about for the most part unnoticed.
Unnoticed, at least, until she began to mature into a woman. For four years she had been fortunate enough to work in the Victorian Copper Queen Hotel’s elegant restaurant, first as a dishwasher, then as a waitress. All the waitresses wore the same uniform of long black skirts and white cotton blouses with the ruffled white cap and apron. At first glance the waitresses all looked vaguely alike. But at nearly eighteen, Amanda was still different from the others.
Many men whispered compliments on her enchanting beauty as she laid out the blue-checked tablecloths or poured the flagons of wine into the crystal glasses. She suspected it was because she was different from the other waitresses, girls who were mostly of Slavic origin. Instead of the standard blue eyes, hers were green— but tilted, though they did have the Caucasian’s double fold. Instead
of cool, pale pink skin, hers was a warm sandy color. The Slavic waitresses were short and stocky with pendulous bosoms, while she was tall and slender with smaller breasts that she thought looked like tiny muskmelons beneath the starched blouse, nothing at all to excite the men whose flirtatious gazes followed her movements.
The patrons of the Copper Queen were of the wealthy class— the stockholders of the mines, the resort visitors seeking the healthy climate, and the great landowners—for during the Great Depression there were only the very poor and the very rich, the middle class having been almost wiped out in the country’s financial devastation.
It was a gentleman of the latter she noted on a sunny afternoon in October—the day she turned eighteen. The gentleman’s gaze followed her as intently as the others; yet the fierceness of that gaze communicated itself to her, and she unaccountably set down the tureen of pot-au-feu before the matronly woman and the pompous old man and turned to face the room of crowded diners, searching for what it was that disturbed her so.
Her gaze moved beyond the nearest tables to the veranda, where the sidewalk tables were set up for the lunch hour. Her breath cut short, as if from a jujitsu chop at her windpipe. Beneath the shade of the umbrella her gaze encountered the smoldering one of Nick Godwin.
CHAPTER 44
It seemed she stood looking at that arrogantly masculine face for an interminable length of time so that she burned each separate feature into her brain to recall many times later . . . the careless ruffle of hair the color of old cork, the mocking tilt of the full lips, and the eyes—as blue-hot as a flame's center. They seemed to strip her naked there in that crowded, noisy dining room. It was a handsome face in a homely way, if one defined power as handsome.
Did Nick Godwin remember the tomboy who had challenged him so often, or did he merely stare at her, as did the other males, because of her unusual beauty?
“Miss. Miss.” The old man at her table snapped his fingers impatiently. “A refill of the coffee.”
She broke the snake charmer's spell Nick seemed to hold on her and turned back with murmured apology to fill the old man’s cup. The availability of jobs shrank every year, and she could not afford to lose hers.
She refused to look again in the direction of Nick's table, but when her duties carried her near the veranda, she could hear his low laughter mixing with that of his three companions—another young man and two very pretty young women who had, as did Nick, the look of college imprinted on them, the V-neck sweaters and pleated flannel pants and wool skirts that whispered of casual elegance.
The college boys often drove their dates down from the university of Tucson to spend the day at Bisbee, which with its narrow streets twisting up and down the mountainside, so different from Tucson’s flatness, and its population of Finns and Swedes and Slavs held a decidedly European flavor.
It was easy for her to resent the rich college youths who carelessly accepted the privileges wealth afforded them. The desire to attend college burned in her almost as greatly as the hunger for revenge. She knew she would never escape the poverty of the mining towns or the stigma of her heritage unless she could make something of herself.
True, she had completed high school the previous spring, a rare accomplishment in that mining town, but there was no money for college that fall. It took all that she had earned working part-time and the meager salary her father made to pay the rent on their shanty and furnish food and clothing.
She was immensely relieved that the veranda was not her serving section that afternoon. Somehow it would have been too demoralizing to wait on Nick Godwin, to serve him and his elegant companions when she foolishly fantasized making him grovel at her feet, ruining him financially, and ultimately taking Cristo Rey from him.
When a lull in the afternoon diners occurred, she allowed herself to dart one furtive glance toward the veranda. She was disappointed, rather than relieved, to find that Nick and his companions had left. She had in a way looked forward to a confrontation.
Unexpectedly she had the opportunity to confront Nick the following Saturday when he returned, this time alone. He took a table in one of her sections, as if he had known beforehand which tables she was working.
She stood behind the latticework divider, staring at his back as he scanned the menu. Her hands were clammy, twisted together. Since when have you ever been afraid of anything? As a child she would have taken on anyone who looked at her the wrong way and especially anyone who was foolish enough to taunt her about her father. But at that moment the effort it cost to cross the oakwood floor and speak to Nick was beyond her capability.
“Ssss!” the floor waitress hissed at Amanda, jamming her thumb in Nick's direction.
Reluctantly Amanda acknowledged her cue with a nod and somehow managed to traverse the room to Nick’s table. “May I help you?” she asked in her most efficient wooden voice. She tried to keep her gaze just below the level of the block-like chin, but her peripheral vision picked up the amused quirk of his lips, and her whole body prickled beneath his bold stare.
“Is it true?” His voice had deepened even more over the intervening years. What was he now, twenty-one, twenty-two?
Caught off guard, she glanced up to meet the laughing eyes. Was he referring to her Japanese heritage—or had he finally discovered that she was a claimant to Cristo Rey? “Is what true?”
"Is it true you won’t date?”
This she could handle, had often handled. “What would you like?” she asked stiffly, her pencil posed over the pad.
“You, Mandy.”
Her face flamed. So, he remembered her. Then a small smile played on her lips, as she enjoyed the brief moment of power he had inadvertently accorded her. “I’m afraid I’m not for sale. I’ll have someone else take your order, sir.”
She moved to signal the floor manager, but Nick’s hand hooked her wrist, stopping her. “I’d really like to talk with you,” he said, serious now. Then his eyes crinkled in a grin. “I’ve never forgotten the girl who could wrestle like a boy—or have you forgotten the boy?”
Dumbly she looked at him. Didn't he know how she disliked him? But why would he? He had no reason to suspect that she was anything but a young working woman he had known in his childhood. An easy mark for his kind. A weekend tumble in the hay that whatever girl he had pinned in Tucson would never find out about.
Finally she found her tongue. “I’m sorry, I don’t have time to talk.” She fled to the rear of the dining room before he could detain her further and summoned another young waitress, Anna—a plump strawberry-blonde who was only too glad to wait on him.
Still, Nick did not let Amanda escape. At six, when her Saturday shift ended, he was waiting for her at the back steps of the Copper Queen Restaurant. Thumbs hooked in belt loops, he leaned negligently against the fender of a sleek metallic-blue Duesenberg convertible coupe which had to have cost a cool twenty grand.
When he saw her freeze, he came to his feet with a wicked grin. “You didn’t think I would give up so easily?"
He was not that tall, maybe two or three inches under six feet, and with her own height she was almost eye level with him; yet there was the essence of power stamped on him—in the authoritative set of the brawny shoulders, the unyielding mouth, and sharp, shrewd eyes. It certainly was not a handsome face—but a strong one that proclaimed vigor and forcefulness.
She held her ground. "I thought you would have the good taste to recognize a rejection.”
He grinned and took her arm, steering her toward the car and ignoring her resisting footsteps. "No one ever accused me of good taste.” He deposited her in the front seat with little gallantry and went around to the driver’s side.
“I don't guess it ever occurred to you,” she said when he slid behind the wheel, “that I don’t like you.”
He chuckled and maneuvered the car out onto the cobble-stoned street. "Sure," he said, "but I don't let little things like feelings stand in my way. Feelings can be altered."
�
�Not in this case, Mr. Godwin.”
He pulled out a pack of Chesterfields and offered her one. She shook her head. “Where do you think you're taking me?” she demanded, though she was not really worried. Yet.
“I hear Chihuahua Hill Road is a great place to take a date.”
“I’m not your date!"
“A girl you want to take with you, then,” he amended.
She folded her arms. "Whatever you want to say to me, you can say now.”
“Oh, no.” He flashed a grin in the dimming evening light. “I want to concentrate my full attention on you.”
The challenge of the confrontation excited her, but she said nothing and stared with a set expression out her lowered window at the musty hotels with rusted grille balconies and the miners’ old weathered boardinghouses they passed. Against her will she even enjoyed the ride, for it was the first automobile she had been in, if she did not count the vintage World War I bus that had brought her and her father from Fort Huachuca to Bisbee.
The luxurious automobile whipped up the curving road at a high speed in eerie silence. Nick halted it on top of the bald hill. Below them the tiered city was lighting up against the night. He turned to her, putting his arm on the back of the plush leather seat, and she instantly felt diminished by the sheer force of raw power that was like a blast of dynamite.
“All right, then,” he said, no longer smiling. “Tell me why you dislike me.”
She wished he were not smoking, because the smoke en wreathed his features, so that she could not tell what he was really thinking. Yet she had the feeling her thoughts did not go so easily undetected by those keen eyes. She looked away, to the twinkling lights below. “You don’t know, do you?” she whispered. “You never guessed.”
“I don’t have the damnedest idea what you’re talking about.”
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