Tame the Wildest Heart

by Parris Afton Bonds

  “You’re not hungry?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “No.” Leaning forward, she went to work on her other foot. Her eyes closed. Her sigh was almost a purr.

  “It must have been awful,” he said, placing the empty can on the washstand. “What you went through.”

  Finished, she dropped the jar back into its leather pouch and dug out the tin of papers and the small bag of Mexican tobacco.

  “You’re curious,” she said, holding a thin rice paper between her fingers. “Like all the rest of the men.” She shook out a plug of the tobacco and licked the rolled paper. “Well, I’ll tell ye, now. A man doesn’t begin to know what that kind of forced submission does to the spirit.”

  He reached for his saddlebags and drew out another bottle of pulque, which he must have purchased downstairs. “Then tell me what it does to the spirit.”

  She struck the sulfur match and held it to her rolled cigarette. “The spirit leaves the body. Stays away. So that the body is empty. Empty body, empty mind.”

  He took a deep draught. “I often wonder if that was how Diana felt.”

  She wasn’t certain she understood him. “Ye mean what she’s feeling now—as Nantez’s captive?”

  “No.” He tilted the bottle again. “I mean what she felt—as my wife.”

  A pencil-thin column of blue smoke eddied from her parted lips. She looked over at his profile. It seemed as menacing as Nantez’s. “Did ye be beating her, Halpern? Did ye rape her, now?”

  His laugh was short, harsh. “No. The only beatings I gave were in the ring.” He finished off the bottle. “Even that I found . . . distasteful. When I left an opponent comatose, I swore off boxing forever.”

  “I heard ye killed him.”

  “Killed—?” He looked at her with a puzzled expression furrowing his dark brows. “You’re talking about the match on the Rio Grande? How do you think I raised the money to finance this expedition? Though, God knows, I certainly didn’t mean to kill Jack Johnson. I only wanted to win the prize money and get back Diana as quickly as possible. I swore then I’d never fight again.”

  “Your wife is very fortunate,” Mattie said. If only she had been loved like that.

  “Diana, fortunate? She didn’t think so. Once she had subdued the beast, she was no longer interested.” She heard the bitterness in his voice.

  “Interested in—?” She couldn’t bring herself to complete the sentence.

  “In me. Period. In my touch. Hell, even in my thoughts.”

  The pulque was casting its spell on him. “I was the beast that the coal mines had belched forth. She had taken me to her very proper home and cleaned me up. And then she found me disgusting.”

  From below came the plunking of guitar strings. She dropped her cigarette stub into the bottle Halpern still held, making a quick hissing sound. “Would ye mind dousing the light?”

  He tossed the bottle beside his saddlebags and gun holster. “My regrets to you, Mattie, but I like a light left burning at night.”

  Trying to figure out what was going on in his mind, she peered at him from beneath her lashes. He couldn’t possibly be afraid of the dark, so why the light? Unless he was expecting company. O’Neil perhaps?

  “But I will lower the lamp wick,” he said.

  For a moment its bright light cast a radiant glow on his face. From her angle, she got a glimpse of what he might have looked like without his battle scars. A Romanesque profile with sternly chiseled features. He must have been extraordinarily handsome.

  Then the light shrank to a pinpoint. She turned over on her side. From the shifting of the mattress, she could tell that he had done likewise. The guitar was joined by a mournful trumpet.

  She couldn’t sleep. Judging by his restive breathing, he couldn’t either. “Do ye still love her?” she asked softly.

  He didn’t reply, and she thought maybe she had been wrong about him being awake. The guitar abandoned its efforts. The trumpet continued its serenade.

  Then, he said, “I don’t know. Whatever I felt for her nine years ago . . .” The bed shifted, and she knew he had turned on his side, facing her back now. “An illusion? I’m not sure.”

  “And yet ye went into the ring again to raise money to rescue her.”

  “I suppose I still love her. She’s a woman that consumes a man like the fire in the pulque here.” There was such an emptiness in his voice. She knew that feeling. And knew that no words, no matter how well intentioned, assuaged a pain that could literally crack the heart. “With luck, we’ll rescue your wife.”

  “Have you ever been married?”

  “Aye. For six months.”

  Mattie thought about Reggie. Before they were married, he looked upon her as something mystical, sensuous, desirable. “Ye are my magic,” he would tell her. Then afterwards, complacency and familiarity and the distortion of pregnancy made her ordinary to him.

  “He . . . died?”

  “Reggie ran off and left me and my parents to face Nantez and his warriors. The raid had been cyclonic in its swiftness and destruction.”

  Her voice, she realized, sounded as hollow as Halpern’s had. “Later, maybe a year later, I learned Reggie was, indeed, dead. A Mexican woman from Madera had been sold to Nantez by a band of Chiricahuas. She told me Reggie had taken refuge in her husband’s barn. Reggie had been wounded—an arrow in the thigh or something. Anyway, while he was recuperating at their rancho, the Chiricahuas attacked and murdered her husband. And Reggie.”

  Halpern touched her shoulder. “No wonder . . .” That was all he said, then his hand was withdrawn.

  She was surprised she missed its comforting touch. When much later, in the deep of night, his arm encircled her waist and gathered her against him, she was even more surprised. Surprised at herself, that she did not resist. That she did not flinch. That her body yielded and melded itself against the cradle created by his body.

  § CHAPTER FIVE §

  Mattie McAlister had a quicksilver tongue and Scottish brogue that delighted the ear. Her face intrigued the artist in Gordon: features that announced a strong-willed and seasoned individual. It wasn’t even an attractive face, but nevertheless, it would weather the years better than the run-of-the-mill pretty ones.

  Her wide mouth, with its asymmetrical upper lip, indicated both a whimsical and a passionate nature. The way she didn’t turn her head toward you but rather let her eyes seek you out said something else about her nature. A confidence in her own self. Yet a certain wariness, too.

  Yes, she was without a doubt an interesting person. Oddly proud. A wild creature.

  Initially, Gordon had thought her only a little above the savages with whom she had lived for so many years. A heathen, lacking in the rudiments of social graces. Now, he was figuring out that it wasn’t that she was lacking in the civilities, merely that she chose not to utilize them.

  Yes, she was definitely an interesting and quaint little character, he thought, recalling how during the night his hand had accidentally brushed the knife strapped to her thigh beneath her skirt.

  Thinking about that knife reminded him of the finger bone she was said to carry in her leather pouch. He’d wager his best work, Coal Miner’s Kid, that that finger bone didn’t belong to a gambler who cheated her or a gent who had gotten too familiar. Nope, if that finger bone didn’t belong to Nantez, he’d ride a Pittsburgh trolley buck naked. That is, if the finger existed at all.

  He continued to hold the woman now, her back against his chest, even though the sun had already crested the Sierra Madres a good thirty minutes ago. He could say he held her because the bed sagged so badly that the two of them had perforce rolled together.

  But there were other, more compelling, reasons why he held her. Even that tiny pinpoint of lamplight was not enough, would never be enough. So he held her as a talisman against the dread of darkness. Do we see our mates as talismans against our fears, he wondered.

  And held her even though he continued to find her uncouth. We
ll, refinement wasn’t everything. Or was it? In his soul of souls he knew he was repulsed by her because she represented to him all that he had been, and there was in the dark spot of his soul a fear that he could become that again.

  It had been so damn long since he held a woman, much less Diana. There had always been only Diana for him. From the moment he had first seen her.

  She and her mother had been standing before his portrait of an urchin whose face was covered with coal-mine soot. Diana’s expression had been one of bemusement, her mother’s one of critical study.

  It had been a gallery show. Pittsburgh’s Brighton Gallery had been highlighting him as an up-and-coming artist, as well as pushing an established artist who hadn’t sold recently and a moneymaking artist who in the past had withheld some of his paintings. The theme was Pennsylvania People.

  He had been as nervous as a miner whose candle has gone out. At last, Diana’s mother had nodded her head and pronounced the portrait, “Excellent. The artist shows great promise.”

  Thus the tough kid from West Virginia had found a patron in the arts society of Mrs. Harold Ashley. And eventually, almost two years later, a wife in her lovely and refined daughter, Diana.

  In his arms, Mattie stirred. Strands of her snarled hair enmeshed itself with the coal-black hair matting his chest and forearms. “What time . . . Dias muire! I overslept!”

  She half-turned to disengage herself from his embrace. The startled look in her eyes told him she had been unaware of where she was. “I. . . uh . . .”

  “You slept deeply. You needed it.”

  At that moment, she reminded him of the urchin he had painted. A wild, rebellious, and lost child. Determination looked out of eyes that mirrored an old soul, in utter contrast to the childlike body that was slight but all lean muscle. Those eyes were deep enough to absorb a man.

  Briskly, she swung her legs over the side of the mattress. Her little feet dangled above the floor. “And you didn’t?” She tugged down her skirt and tunneled her fingers through her matted hair. “From the shadows beneath your eyes, ye look rather spent yourself.”

  He knew she was talking to cover her uneasiness. He rose, reached for his saddlebags. “I sleep in short stretches.”

  He fingered his stubbled jaw and determined he could forego shaving for another day. Funny, how the isolation of the West made you disregard some things that civilization deemed important.

  Still, a bath would be most welcome. After the years of emerging from the mines, his skin black from the coal dust, he was almost fanatical about bathing. “Do ye mind . . . . .?”

  He turned back to her. “Yes?”

  Her look was one of discomfort, even embarrassment. She nodded toward the chipped porcelain commode.

  Enlightenment dawned on him. He had figured that once they were underway again, he would mosey off somewhere into the brush and do his business. “Uhh, yes. I’ll take our gear on down.”

  Relief and gratitude eased the ever-present lines tensing her thin face.

  He collected his and Mattie’s effects and started down the staircase. He guessed she was as glad as he to put the shabby little room and the night of enforced intimacy behind them.

  At the bottom of the stairs, someone was waiting, watching. It was too early for most people in a cantina to be up and stirring. In the semi-dark of early morning light pouring past the slatted batwing shutters, the man was silhouetted, making it difficult to identify him. But the lanky build and the brush of sideburns told Gordon that this was O’Neil, Mattie’s Trader-in-Humanity.

  Gordon continued down the staircase with the easy grace of a pugilist. The demanding movements peculiar to a fighter had been second nature for him as a kid growing up in the poverty and soot of a coal-mining town.

  Sheer determination to rise above his station in life had brought him from the coal mines of West Virginia to the boxing arenas of Pittsburgh, where he had discovered he had a flair for painting, especially portraits. Once abreast of O’Neil, he nodded. “’Morning.”

  O’Neil nodded but said nothing.

  Gordon kept on walking toward the doorway, but behind him he heard the stairs creak as O’Neil started up them. In midstep Gordon pivoted and dropped his gear.

  The bounty hunter must have heard him coming. O’Neil spun back toward him and went for the knife sheathed at his waist. The man was damnably quick.

  But so was Gordon. In boxer fashion, he ducked to one side and swung his cane like a claymore. The cane snapped. The knife clattered on the stairs.

  O’Neil’s eyes widened. He drew back his fist, but Gordon popped up under the man’s striking arm. The right hook impacted O’Neil’s jaw with a jarring thunk. O’Neil staggered back, lost his footing on the stair. He swung out at Gordon, but Gordon dodged, taking the punch on the side of his head. O’Neil’s next one didn’t even connect.

  Gordon didn’t wait. A winning fighter displays neither indecisiveness nor mercy. He pummeled his opponent’s face. Right. Left. Right again. Blood spurted. The face sank lower. The battering was distorting what once had been distinctly human characteristics. Eye sockets, lips and cheekbones blurred into a lumpy mass.

  “Halpern! Halpern! Halpern, for God’s sake, leave off!”

  Only then did he realize that someone—Mattie— was tugging at his shoulder, trying to pull him away from O’Neil.

  “Leave off, Halpern!” she was saying. “We’ve got to get out of here! Now!”

  She might have said more, but he didn’t hear her if she did. He was wheezing, and his ears were ringing. He shook his head, trying to restore completely his peripheral awareness. He had that survival knack for focusing solely on vanquishing the foe. In an uncivilized place like Mexico where no rules governed the sport of bloodshed, that knack could be dangerous for both combatants.

  He straightened, staggered, regained his balance and his breath. Mattie took his hand. He let her tug him down the stairs, where they collected the gear he had dropped.

  Like a puppy, he followed her out to the corral out back of the cantina. A boy in huaraches straddled one of the corral’s mesquite-wood bars. “Your horses, senor, they’re still here. I watch them good.”

  Gordon dug a bleeding hand into his shirt pocket and withdrew the last of his coins to flip into the boy’s palm.

  Now a mere fistful of currency stood between him and poverty. And they had yet to replenish the stolen supplies. Frontera was certainly not the place to do it. Not now.

  She began saddling their mounts. “Just grand, Halpern. Ye acted like a wild man back there. Now we have to watch our backs for not only Apaches and Mexicans but for O’Neil as well.”

  “You’re right.” He took his gelding’s reins and led the bay through the gate that the grinning boy held open. “I should have killed the man.” With a wince, he mounted. “Or maybe I should have just let him kill you.”

  “Then ye wouldn’t find Nantez,” she said, mounting. One of those superior smiles tipped her lips. “Ready to go after him?”

  Hell, he could barely sit straight in the saddle. But he didn’t relish lingering in Frontera. “After Nantez? No. We’re going after Bingham, my two hundred, and our supplies. Without them, we won’t have a Chinaman’s chance of continuing the expedition.”

  Her laugh was just short of disgust. “Finding Nantez will be easier than finding Bingham. I know Nantez. He’s intelligent and practical. Bingham’s unhinged. As unpredictable as a jenny.”

  “A what?”

  “A jenny—a female donkey.”

  “1 grant you, female anythings are unpredictable. Furthermore, men are predictable about certain things.” He stared out into the scattering of tall cacti that were lifting their fluted arms and headless necks to an already white-hot sky. “Like money, for instance. Bingham obviously could be bought. He agreed to help us find Nantez, didn’t he?”

  She nodded. “I see what you’re getting at.”

  “He has $750 now. As well as my two hundred. The question is, where
would he go next? Back to the States? Or would he—”

  Beneath her sombrero, her eyes lit up. “Halpern, Bingham’s headed for a spot where he found placer gold when fleeing Nantez’s camp years before! That money would serve as his grub stake.”

  He reined in on his mount. “Do you have any idea where that mine could be?”

  The light in her eyes as quickly faded. “No.”

  “Think about it. At the time Bingham ran away from Nantez, do you remember any prominent land marks?”

  “Well . . .” Her eyes took on a faraway gaze, and he knew she was going back in time. The lines around her mouth seemed to deepen with the tension of the memory. “It seems it was before we reached the Big Canyon. The Mexican federalistas were pursuing Nantez, and we climbed down inside it and waded across its river in order to lose them. The descent was terrifying—slipping and sliding down rubble and pebbles.”

  “So, that means that this placer gold would have to be on a bed of a river or creek between Barranca del Cobre and the border. In a desert, there can’t be too many rivers.”

  It turned out Gordon was wrong about this. When he and Mattie paused for rest and food at an arroyo whose bank offered shade, they dug out a tattered map of Mexico. It had been drawn by scouts for the Mormon colonists thirty years before and was not all that reliable.

  He stared at the dozens of lines dotting the Mexican state of Chihuahua, indicating dry creek beds that could become raging torrents in the rainy season.

  When they finished with the last of the hardtack and sausage, Mattie settled back against the gravelly bank and deftly rolled one of those God-awful Mexican cigarettes. Her deer-hide skirt was hitched up above one of her high-top moccasins, revealing a shapely knee.

  She tilted her head and let out a helix of slow-swirling smoke. “Sonofabitch, here we be traipsing after not one but three missing persons. We must be sunstruck!”