Tame the Wildest Heart

by Parris Afton Bonds

  With a hard smile, she headed for his table. Well, she would make him squirm while he propositioned her. The Mexican prostitutes of Tucson were far gone in disease, and only the rawest recruits from Fort Lowell sought them out. Few of the prostitutes’ patrons could appreciate the quiet charm of good taste.

  She saw his eyes alight on her. Brownish-green eyes, the color of a deceptive desert at high noon and just as intense, watched her. Over the left eye was a puckered scar beneath the raven brow.

  Mattie plopped one glass in front of him and, pulling out the cane-woven chair opposite, poured the amber nectar into her own glass. It was her contention that the peddlers of this tarantula juice, known as whiskey, showed a callous disregard for the palates and internal workings of their clientele. “Ye wanted me?”

  She saw him take stock of her dry, rough hands and broken nails as she filled his glass. Her mother’s admonition, “White, soft hands are much sought after,” triggered the fleeting memory of her mother spreading oil of sweet almonds and two egg yolks into gloves that she wore to bed every night.

  Mattie could tell that the man was repelled by her coarseness. No soft curls fringed her face to lighten its harsh lines from the sun. Her wild hair, dry and frizzy, looked like a dirty, ragged mop after too many years’ use. That’s what she had been. Used. But not anymore.

  Her lack of obvious feminine attributes found disfavor in the deepening of the furrows below his mustache. “Mattie McAlister?”

  She drew a match from the rolled-down folds of her buckskin moccasin, then lit up a Mexican cigarette. “Among other identities,” she said, the cigarette tucked into one corner of her lips. She narrowed her eyes and stared at him through the stream of smoke. “And yourself?”

  “Gordon Halpern. From Pittsburgh.” He stared at her as if she were subhuman.

  She plucked from the window ledge a fan with pink flowers on one side and E. J. Smith’s funeral parlor advertisement on the other and waved it lazily. “Hot in here, isn’t it? Sweating like a Salem witch, I am.”

  “People in Tucson say you’re a witch, all right. A witch doctor.” He batted at a buzzing fly. “That you learned healing from a medicine man of the Netdahe band of Apaches. That you know the Apache language and Apache ways.”

  She eyed him steadily. He was older than she had first thought. The ebony hair had been misleading. Up close, it and his mustache, were flecked with gray. Lines at the outer corners of his eyes suggested he was in his mid-thirties. His facial bone structure was powerful and suggested an equally powerful will.

  Mattie clashed with powerful wills, which was not in her best interest. So, she had learned detachment. “Ye wanted to discuss business with me?”

  He leaned forward, those battering-ram hands cupping his glass. “You lived in Mexico as Nantez’s squaw?”

  She downed half the contents of her glass. She probably drank more than was good for her; certainly, she could match any man drink for drink. His expression hinted that he found her about as appealing as a punch in the face. “Ye might say I took the cure in Mexico. Ye killed a man in a boxing match?”

  He didn’t look surprised that she had heard about him. “I’d like you to guide me down into Mexico— to Nantez.”

  She smiled and flicked a cigarette ash into his whiskey glass. “Sure, and I’d like a glassful of ice chips.”

  Beneath his mustache, his lower lip flattened. Both his hands tightened, so much that she feared he would shatter Sam’s glass. He seemed to struggle to quench a volatile temper. Then, with the calm of an Indian meditating on a vision, he poured his polluted drink into the small, potted geranium, which she had placed on each table and devotedly nurtured.

  She wanted to slap him. One of those slaps that sent the lips flapping, like in a Mark Twain novel.

  “With what I am willing to pay, Miss McAlister, you can fill the glass with ice chips. My glass, yours, every glass in Tucson. I’m willing to pay three thousand greenbacks to get back my wife. Last month Diana was captured by Nantez’s warriors.”

  She controlled her surprise. It was a trick she had learned well during her captivity. Emotions betrayed one’s vulnerability.

  Still, for one soaring moment, she was tempted. Three thousand dollars was an astronomical sum. With three thousand dollars, she could return to a life approximating the one she had once lived. She could even go back East, where no one knew her.

  She stabbed out her cigarette in the geranium pot. Whom was she kidding? One look at her son, with his fierce, Indian features, and ruinous gossip would start again. For every Reverend Bingham and Mrs. J. J. Hamburg in the Arizona Territory, there were a thousand more like them back East.

  “Not any amount would tempt me.” She tossed the fan back onto the window ledge. “Not even all the ice in the Arctic.”

  She started to rise, and he grabbed her wrist. “You’re the only one who can help me.”

  “Hire yourself an Indian scout from the fort.”

  “You know they all work for the Sixth Cavalry headquarters and field staff.”

  That was true, which meant that the military and those on its payroll were forbidden to cross the border to search for warring Apaches retreating into Mexico. “Like I said, I’m not interested.”

  “Look, I’ve been told that you lived with Nantez for seven years and know well the chiefs habits.”

  “The man is a will-o’-the-wisp. No one knows him. That’s why he is still terrorizing Mexico and lower Arizona and New Mexico.”

  “But if any white person could understand Nantez’s thoughts and actions,” Gordon Halpern persisted, “it would be you.”

  His hold on her wrist made her nervous. She shook off his manacling fingers. Obviously, he hadn’t heard the stories about her pouch. “I know him well. I don’t know the countryside, but I do know I shan’t return to it. I’d as soon drink tea with the major’s wife, and that’s not a prospect I would relish either. She’s pompous and boring. And besides, the old biddy lets wind. Abominable stenches if I do say so meself. G’day to ye.”

  Later, as she helped Sam Kee wash the dishes from the midday dinner, she recounted the story of Halpern’s visit. “He’s the same Eastern dude who Cyrus said supposedly killed a man in a boxing match held on a sandbar in the Rio Grande.”

  Old Sam fished a cracked dish from the cast-iron tub’s wash water. “What do you plan to do, missy?”

  She took the dish and dried it. “Nothing.”

  He eyed her. “You are one hot-damned good healer.”

  “If I wasn’t,” she joked, “ye wouldn’t be around to say so.”

  She had found Sam down by nearby Rillito Creek, where she had gone to collect the medicinal oil of sage. He had been snakebitten and delirious with fever, and his forearm was swollen as big as a saguaro trunk. She had treated him at her house, and he had healed completely, except for two withered fingers. Afterwards, he had offered her a job working for him in the restaurant he had started five months before. It had seemed infinitely preferable to washing long johns for the soldiers and selling her body on the side, as many post laundresses did.

  He dried his hands on his apron and faced her, arms crossed. “I say you this, missy, you needy to heal yourself. You Americans, you put periods at end of your sentences. You needy to put period at end of sentence.”

  She shelved the dry dish. Intuitively, she knew that Sam was telling her that the only way she could heal her pain was not to resist it but to replace it. But with what? She pushed from her thoughts any inclination to earn the staggering sum of three thousand dollars. “Any contact with Nantez is enough to dampen the allure of bettering me position.”

  Besides, she didn’t like Halpern. Not only could she tell he was hot tempered and eccentric, but his almost brutish appearance triggered most unpleasant memories of Nantez.

  Albert was due home from school shortly. She removed her apron and, carrying a box of lunch leftovers for Albert’s dinner, started homeward. She didn’t have to be back at Sam K
ee’s until just before evening supper was served.

  Back at her shanty, she thought about how very nice it would be if Albert could come home from the post school just a little less sullen. He had problems adapting to the Anglo regimen and was an outcast at Fort Lowell. Every few months, she had to straddle her son just to snip the hair he was determined to wear long like an Indian’s.

  Her heart went out to her nine-year-old son. All she could do was be there for him; console him and assure him that he was perfect, whole, and complete—just as he was.

  She picked up his strewn clothing, filled the lamp, emptied the coal scuttle into the stove, and put some tea on to boil.

  Then she sat down in the cane rocker to remove first one of her high-top beaded moccasins, then the other. With a sigh, she stared down at her feet. The skin was weather-cracked and covered with corns, bunions, and scars . . . not a sight that set a poet to penning verses of adoration.

  From her medicine pouch, she withdrew the corked jar and rubbed some of the jar’s contents, glycerin and rose water, onto each foot. Feet that had been cut and burnt and bruised during her years of captivity were now secretly pampered, her one admission of feminine vanity.

  With the daily ritual completed, she donned again her moccasins, then poured a tin cup of tea to savor before returning to Sam Kee’s.

  The time came and went for Albert’s arrival from school. The remainder of tea in her cup grew cold as Mattie grew worried. Something niggled at the back of her mind, as it does when one knows something isn’t quite right.

  Staring past the cast-iron stove, she realized what it was. Behind the stove, the wall where she kept a butcher knife pegged was empty.

  She strode to the shelf where Albert stowed his personal belongings. His tattered deck of playing cards was missing!

  She recalled how an old sod, a cavalryman due to retire, had found Albert and her as they had wandered dazed in the desert after their flight up from Mexico and Nantez. They had been detained at Camp Huachuca until they could be transferred to Fort Lowell. At Huachuca, the old cavalryman had taught Albert to play solitaire. From that time on, the boy was rarely parted from his deck, school being one of the few exceptions.

  Until now.

  Sam presented himself at her door. His normally stoic demeanor was clearly in a state of agitation. “Buckboard, missy! It’s gone! Soldier, he say he saw Albert driving it.”

  At once, she knew. He had taken his deck of cards and Sam Kee’s buckboard and God knew what else. Albert was returning to his father! He had threatened as much when she had insisted he go to school that morning.

  She pushed past the startled Chinaman and set out in a rapid gait toward the post.

  In her mind ran a litany of those times, those times of weakness, when she had wished she weren’t saddled with the burden of an Indian baby. Then shame at her disloyalty would always overcome her. At those times, she would ask herself if Albert wouldn’t be better off with what he knew and understood.

  Now, a frantic and fierce protectiveness surged in her blood and thundered in her ears. She would not give up on Albert. He was as much white as Indian. He was her child! Worrying about her son’s disappearance, she wasn’t even aware of the looks given her by the soldiers she passed—looks of wariness mixed with disgust. Judgments. Who were they to judge? Their opinions were as valid as desert mirages.

  Even though evening was nigh, a group of military prisoners were still scything the grass that clung tenaciously to the perimeters of the parade ground. There drilled the almost two-hundred officers and enlisted men posted to Fort Lowell.

  Troopers, bent on errands, came and went from post headquarters, which was a long, low building with thick adobe walls and a veranda that offered meager shade. Inside, the outer office was stuffy, as was the balding aide-de-camp, who sorted through the paperwork strewn across his desk. His appearance was spiffy. He looked startled at hers.

  “I want to see Colonel Carr. Now!”

  His glance strayed to the door to his left, which was banked by a potted fern. The plaque on the door was stenciled with Commanding Officer. “That is impossible, miss.”

  Though his tone was neutral, the look in his eyes was not. After eleven years, she had learned to read emotions as well as conceal them. And in him she read contempt.

  She planted her small rough hands on his desk. “Either ye announce me, or I shall announce meself.”

  “I can’t permit that, miss.” Not “ma’am” or “madam.” Just “miss.”

  She straightened and stared down at him, watching something deep inside him begin to squirm until it manifested on the outside in the nervous flicker of his lids.

  Her hand smoothed over the oblong object outlined beneath her skirt. “Lieutenant, your bowels will jolly well be hanging out before ye can summon help. Do ye believe me?”

  “What’s going on here?” Colonel Carr asked from his office doorway. He clutched a sheath of papers in one hand.

  “The woman here—”

  From behind his bifocals, Colonel Carr fixed her with his imperious gaze. “Mattie McAlister, isn’t it? Step inside.”

  She followed him into his office. He left the door open, as if he thought she might commit mayhem before he could summon help. Leaning back against the front of his desk, he said, “You wanted something?”

  “Me boy, Albert, he has run away.” She tried to control the panic in her voice. “I want ye to send out a patrol to find him.”

  “Miss McAlister, if I sent out a patrol every time someone—”

  “Please. Albert’s all I have left.” In that awful instant, she realized she was afraid of being alone.

  The colonel’s voice hardened. “My soldiers are too damned busy chasing Apache warriors this side of the border to have time for half-breed kids, Miss McAlister.”

  Her heart pounded heavily, like the rhythmic beat of a funeral dirge. “I see.” She summoned her dignity. “Then g’day to ye, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

  Just outside his doorway, she paused to spit into the fern’s clay pot. “Needs watering, ye dolt.”

  She strolled out and stopped beneath the veranda’s lattice awning. Eyes narrowed, she stared across the parade ground at the setting sun. The clouds had deserted it, and now it was blood red.

  Apaches believed a blood-red sun was an omen. It could be good or bad.

  She, too, believed a blood-red sun to be an omen. Changes were afoot. She hoped that Reverend William “Buckskin” Bingham felt the same. If not, she meant to convince him.

  § CHAPTER TWO §

  The right Reverend William “Buckskin” Bingham removed his hat in public rarely. Only inside a church, and that was rare, too, since he entered a church about as often as he joked. His services were held in the great cathedral of the outdoors.

  At sunrise, the trickling Santa Cruz River, which ran just west of Tucson, was the locale of his latest service, a baptism. The neophyte was a boy of Pima Indian/Mexican heritage. A potpourri of relatives and the curious of Tucson and Fort Lowell had gathered to observe the solemn ceremony.

  Mattie was among them, but she wasn’t there for any religious reasons. She waited beneath a stunted cottonwood tree while Bingham finished his benediction over the shivering copper-skinned boy who wore only his breech cloth. The desert still retained remnants of the night’s coolness.

  Arms spread wide, head thrown back, Bingham announced in his stentorian voice, “‘After John had proclaimed before His coming a baptism of repentance to all—

  He lowered his head, his fiery gaze scanning the paltry crowd to find her beneath the tree. His accusing finger pointed at her and he began to quote from the Bible.

  “‘All you who bend the bow, shoot at her; do not be sparing with your arrows, for she has sinned against the Lord. Reproofs for discipline are the way of life, to keep you from the evil woman, from the smooth tongue of the adulteress. Do not desire her beauty in your heart, nor let her catch you with her eyelids. For on ac
count of a harlot one is reduced to a loaf of bread, and an adulteress hunts for the precious life.’”

  In twos and threes, the onlookers turned toward her until she had the rapt attention of the whole crowd. She had been expecting them to shrink from her as if she had smallpox. Instead, chuckling erupted among them. The good reverend had painted a seductress, and they beheld a crusty, hard-bitten woman who they thought was unlikely to stir lust in the most ardent heart.

  She straightened her thin shoulders and walked toward the Mormon preacher. The crowd parted for her. She stopped in front of him and stared up at those eyes of brimstone. “Ye are afraid of me,” she said in a low voice that those nearest had to strain to hear.

  “I am a God-fearing man.”

  “And I don’t even fear hell.” She glanced at those around them and lowered her voice even further. “Do you want to earn half of three grand? Think of it, fifteen hundred dollars!”

  His gaze darted over the watchful faces. He took her arm and drew her away from the dripping boy and the others. “You would seduce with money where charm fails?”

  “Me bairn has run away.” They continued walking, their shoes squashing in the riverbank’s soft mud. “Albert’s returning to his father. Remember Nantez?”

  In less than the flickering of an eyelid, a visible shudder came and went through Bingham. His ash- colored eyes stared at her with skepticism. “Where would you get that kind of money?”

  “A man wants me to lead him to Nantez, because his warriors have captured the man’s wife.”

  He stopped, glanced back at the people still milling around the baptismal site, still watching. “Why me?”

  “I know Nantez, but not the countryside that he operates out of. Not that well. Not well enough. As a circuit rider in Mexico, ye know the paths crisscrossing the Sierra Madres as well as the scars crisscrossing your scalp.”

  He fingered his beard. After a minute, it parted to show tobacco-stained teeth. “I want it all. The entire three grand. Nothing less would induce me to return to Mexico.”

  Money was nothing to her. But Albert . . . if she could bring him back . . . money meant a better life to him. “Ye’d never find Nantez without me, Bingham. He’d find ye first.”