A Little Town in Texas

by Bethany Campbell

  “Let me try to fix the fire,” Mel muttered. “That’s what’s causing the smoke.” He let go of her, and half-crouching, made his way to the fire. He kicked a few sticks of kindling back into the fire circle. He fed the dying flames a new branch. The fire hissed and sputtered, but flared higher.

  He swore. “I feel like a caveman. I’m putting my pants back on.”

  She almost smiled, but her face felt stiff as the stone around them. Suddenly the thought of being naked as a worm repelled her, made her feel weak and vulnerable. “I want my clothes, too.”

  “Right,” he said, zipping up his jeans. He picked up her shirt, cargo pants and vest and brought them to her. He knelt before her, his hand skimming over her hair. “Are you all right?”

  “I was too frightened to be frightened. If that makes any sense.”

  “I understand perfectly,” he said.

  The fire was still unsteady and behind him, but even by its uncertain light, she saw his face was badly cut and bleeding. His left arm, too, was gashed, his shoulder darkened by a bruise.

  “You’re hurt,” she said in concern. She reached to touch his face. The cut ran from the top of one cheekbone and half across his upper lip.

  “It’s okay,” he assured her. “It could have been a lot worse.”

  The realization sickened her. “Part of the ceiling caved in, didn’t it?”

  “Yes.” He drew back, picking up what was left of his shirt. He shook the dust and rubble from it and wiped it first across his face, then his arm. He swore again.

  “I need to wet this outside,” he said. “Let me see if I can get the light back.” He squatted by the lantern as she slipped awkwardly into her clothes. They were damp and prickly with grit.

  Among the debris Mel found the box of matches. He struck one. By its light she could see just how ugly the slash across his face was. Blood dripped from his cheekbone.

  But something like a smile touched the harsh line of his mouth. “Amazing,” he said, setting the lamp upright. “There’s a chunk knocked out of the top of the chimney, but I think it’ll still work.”

  When he lighted the wick and put the broken chimney back in place, the lamp cast a circle of illumination. Kitt fought flinching at Mel’s cuts and bruises. But then she looked beyond him, and what she saw made her gasp.

  “My God,” she said. The natural spring and basin were gone. They were covered with ragged slabs and chunks of limestone. Fully a third of the cave was buried in the mountain’s own rock. Half its mouth was blocked with a dark and jagged wall of fallen stones.

  He turned and looked. “Yeah,” he said grimly.

  She knew he was thinking the same thing she was: If we’d been on that side, we’d be dead now. Kitt was not a person who cried, but tears smarted in her eyes and her chin trembled.

  “I’m going to push back some of those vines to get the air circulating,” Mel said, moving toward the cave’s mouth. “I’d rather be wet than smothered.”

  The lamp in his left hand, he began to tear at the vines with his right. He gritted his teeth, and his movements were almost savage in intensity. Fresh air, damp with rain, wafted in. It was cold, but she breathed it deeply and gratefully.

  He said, “I’m going to step out and—”

  He stopped as suddenly as if a wizard’s spell had turned him to stone. Holding up the lamp, he stared downward, outside the cave. His mouth had dropped open, and horror etched his face.

  “The ledge is gone,” he said. He said it with a deathly finality.

  Kit had pulled the blanket around her again. “What?” she said.

  “The ledge. It’s gone. We can’t get out of here.”

  She swallowed hard. She remembered the ear-splitting crashing, the shaking of the cave. She imagined boulders tumbling down the mountain’s side, smashing against the ledge, tearing it away.

  “It’s sheared off like somebody took a stone cutter to it,” Mel said, still staring, transfixed. “There’s no way to get back to the path. If there still is a path.”

  The enormity of his words sank into her consciousness. She looked at him staring out at the rainy blackness. She looked at the fall of rock that had destroyed so much of the cave’s space. Then she looked at him again.

  “We’re trapped,” she said. A frightening numbness crept through her.

  “Yes,” he said. He held the rag of his shirt out to wet it in the downpour.

  Fear began to mount in her. “And it’s still raining….”

  “Yes.”

  “We could have another—another slide, another cave-in,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She had an idiotic desire to descend into hysteria, to start crying and screaming “We’re going to die here!” and other futile nonsense. Even as she fought back the urge, she could imagine the rock layers above them shifting, slipping, sliding. Even a minute movement of those layers could be deadly.

  Mel didn’t look at her. Almost mechanically, he held the wetted cloth to his face and kept watching the lantern light glint on the falling rain. She took a deep breath and tried to make her voice sound calm. “Come here and sit by me,” she said levelly. “Let me clean those cuts.”

  HOW MUCH TIME HAD PASSED?

  Mel didn’t know. His watch face had been smashed in another lifetime. And in another lifetime, he’d been vowing to keep this woman safe from harm forever. Now, he realized how helpless he was to keep her alive until even morning.

  He sat beside her, his good arm draped around her shoulders. She leaned her head against his bare chest. In her lap, she still clutched the bloody fragment of shirt she’d used to clean his wounds.

  “Get rid of that thing,” he said, gently prying it from her fingers. She’d been hanging onto it as if it was a talisman or charm. He took it and flung it toward the mouth of the cave.

  As he did, he heard the stone ceiling above them groan, as if it were in too much pain to bear. She heard it, too. She tensed and looked up. A pebble dislodged from it and dropped to the floor with an ominous rattle.

  Don’t make it worse for her, he lectured himself. “You hungry?” He made the question as casual as if they were sitting at a nice, warm bar somewhere. “I could open a can of something.”

  “I’m not hungry.” He could tell she struggled to keep her voice steady.

  For a moment they were both silent. She put her forefinger to his cut lip. “How did you get cut on your face? Did you look up?”

  “Hell, no,” he said with feeling. He didn’t know how. “I guess something bounced. A shard of rock. Something.”

  “It cut that handsome mouth of yours,” she said.

  The dark irony made him give a small, bitter laugh. “How fitting.”

  “Why is it fitting?” she asked. “That’s one of the first things I noticed about you. You’ve got an almost perfect mouth.”

  She was trying to flirt with him, distract him, God love her. He remembered the rumbling moan the ceiling had made, and he decided life was too short for lies, too short for anything but truth.

  “Yeah,” he said, touching the cut. “It’s a nice mouth. The best money could buy. If we get out of here, I’ll tell Fabian you admired it. He’ll be gratified.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged almost negligently. “This wasn’t the mouth I was born with. Or the nose. Fabian paid to have it all—fixed.”

  Her frown grew more perplexed. Her hand against his lip went still. “What are you saying?”

  He made a sound of self-disgust. “My older brother’s a good-looking guy. So’s my younger brother. Handsome, both of them.”

  She said nothing. She waited.

  He wanted to tell her, for her to know who he was, and why. “I wasn’t like them. I didn’t imagine I’d ever be like them. I was born with a cleft lip, a misshapen nose. My mother cried when she saw me. She thought it was her fault. Somehow.”

  Kitt’s hand moved to his chin, turned his face more fully toward hers. Her
eyes were disbelieving. “You mean you had a cleft palate?”

  He shook his head. Odd, but now that he’d finally said it to someone, it didn’t seem as shameful, as important to keep secret. “No. That’s more serious still. I had a cleft lip. A harelip, they call it.”

  His classmates over the years had come up with some other, more imaginative descriptions of his appearance. He’d hated his classmates, hated his life, hated himself. How stupid that all seemed—now.

  He said, “What I had is called a unilateral cleft, just on one side, but it went clear up to my nose. My nose was flattened. My mother couldn’t afford to pay a doctor, so she—so she—”

  He made an angry, helpless gesture. “So she took me to this sort of—charity clinic. I can’t remember it. I was—what?—a year old. The lip got sewed up—but not well. Left a bad scar. The nose they didn’t bother with. But at least I could learn to talk okay. Just didn’t have much to say.”

  She stroked his cheek softly. “You were unhappy?”

  His smile was rueful. “That’s an understatement.” He paused, remembering. “I wouldn’t let my picture be taken. If my mother sneaked one, and I found it, I’d tear it up. I wouldn’t make friends. I joined nothing. Except for track. I liked running. I was good at it.”

  “The loneliness of the long-distance runner,” she said studying his face.

  “Exactly,” he said. “To run until it hurt. Then to run more until it didn’t hurt. Till you feel the high of just—escaping.”

  “Yes. Things are bad. So you run.”

  He touched his cut lip. “My mother, of course, was over-protective. Nicky—Nick was another matter. He wouldn’t baby me. Just the reverse. I guess he thought it was his job to make a man out of me. God, I hated him sometimes.”

  He shook his head at the memory. “He’d needle me. And I’d hate his pretty face and take a swing at him. But the damn thing about Nick was that he would never hit back. He’d say anything. But hit? Never.”

  He took a deep breath, wrapped his arm more tightly around her. “Once he was ragging me for sulking about something, and I hauled off and smashed him good. Split his lip clear open. He just spit blood, then smiled. He said, ‘Well. Now I guess I look like you.’ And he walked away. I wanted to kill him.”

  He sank into silence. Nick had meant well, he supposed. And he supposed Nick might have been jealous himself. It was Mel who was their mother’s biggest concern. Nicky was supposed to be “the man of the family.” A loner himself, Nick had never seemed to doubt his ability—or his charm when he wanted to use it. Or, of course, his looks.

  Mel raised one eyebrow. “Then my aunt sent us money to come to New York. My mother got a job with Fabian. He took an interest in her. In us.”

  She cradled his chin in her hand. “But why? Everybody talks as if he’s a monster, a raging egotist. Why was he different to you?”

  He pressed his lips together, then grimaced because it hurt. “How can I explain? First, my mother. She’s a dynamo. She reminded him of his own mother. And we—we boys—reminded him of—him.”

  “How?”

  “We were poor. But smart. We did well in school. We were Italian. Catholic. There were three of us. He’d been a middle son, too.”

  “Been?” Kitt asked, narrowing her eyes.

  “His mother, both his brothers died,” Mel said. “In a car crash. Left him alone in the world. With nothing. Except a very big settlement. And ambition. And he was like me.”

  “You?” she asked, leaning closer.

  “He’s kind of—freakish, too. A little guy. Twisted up from bone disease. He’s got a nervous syndrome. It gives him facial tics, makes his hands flap. It also gives him enormous powers of concentration. But narrow interest. He’s not good at social things.”

  Mel leaned back against the damp stone. “But my mother—she saw past that. She saw somebody lonely. She’d invite him over. Over to our dump. For spaghetti. Pizza. Meatloaf. And he came. By God, he came.”

  Mel watched another pebble fall, bounce. “So he made my mother this offer. He’d help all three of us with our schooling and fix my face—if we’d agree to work for him. My mother thought he was our guardian angel. My face? Presto chango. There’s some magic that money can buy.”

  “Surgery?” Kitt said.

  “Many surgeries,” he corrected. “Many.”

  “When did this happen to you?” she asked.

  “When I was sixteen. That spring I’d been a miserable kid in public school. That fall, I was in private school, and I wasn’t a freak any longer.”

  She shook her head, her face full of sympathy. He’d always despised sympathy, but hers was different. He didn’t know how, only that it was.

  “There were other surgeries after that. To make it better still. Fabian said, ‘Let’s make it as perfect as possible.’ And finally, I was even better-looking than Nicky. I, the ugly duckling…”

  “Became a swan,” she said softly.

  “No. Became a son of a bitch. Became a complete arrogant, cynical bastard. Girls who wouldn’t have looked at me before? Hell, I could have them like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  “But I knew it wasn’t me they wanted. All they wanted was the facade. So that’s what I gave them. That’s what I took from them. I didn’t want anything deeper.”

  “And Nick?” she asked.

  “Nick was never crazy about the idea of selling his future to Fabian. He did it partly for me. But he needled me. Like always. I was superficial. I was cold. I was overcompensating. Nick can be very good at psychobabble when he wants. But he had a point.”

  She kissed him softly beside his wounded lip. “Everything I thought about you at first was wrong.”

  “No,” he said. “It was right. I’d kiss you back, but I’d bleed on you.”

  “Bleed away,” she said.

  He didn’t kiss her, but he pulled her closer, wanting her again. Above them the ceiling creaked. It moaned. It dropped another pebble.

  KITT NESTLED AGAIN in the crook of his arm. “I tasted your blood,” she said pensively. “I should feel like a vampire.”

  “No,” he said, nuzzling his nose against her hair. “Vampires take life. You give it.”

  Another pebble fell from above, and then another. Kitt should have been frightened, but she felt strangely at peace.

  Outside the wind keened. The rain dropped more slowly now, but steadily, and blew inside in moist gusts. The points of the fire rose and fell.

  “If we don’t get out of here,” Mel said, “I want you to know that I—well—love you. You’re the only one I ever have. Loved, I mean.”

  She burrowed closer, pulling the blankets tighter. “I love you, too.”

  He put his hand on her upper arm, squeezed affectionately. “So are you going to tell me about why you went to Stobbart?”

  “Sure,” she said, almost airily. “Why keep a few little secrets when a mountain might fall on you any minute?”

  “An excellent question,” he said. “So what happened?”

  She exhaled, suddenly wearied by how long she’d kept her own past hidden. “You can probably guess,” she said.

  “My guess is abuse,” he said. “Your stepfather. Or one of your stepbrothers.”

  She nodded, her head against his shoulder. “My stepfather. My mother wouldn’t believe me. I see now that she was afraid to believe me. She had my little brothers to bring up. What would she do if I was telling the truth?”

  “If she wouldn’t listen, how did you get to Stobbart?”

  Kitt’s teeth clenched as she remembered. “One day the bastard came after me in the stable. In broad daylight. Cal McKinney caught him. Punched him almost halfway across the stable.”

  She smiled wanly at the memory. “And I was glad. Glad to see him be hurt for a change.”

  “So,” Mel said, “your stepfather. Did he actually do anything to you? Or just try?”

  She turned her face against his bare chest. “Up till then, he’d just trie
d. That day he almost succeeded. He had his hand over my mouth, had me pinned, was unzipping his jeans with the other hand—ugh.”

  She shuddered. Mel whispered, “It’s over, love. It’s in the past.”

  She tapped her temple. “Not up here it isn’t. Not completely. Cal took me to Miss Pauline. That was J.T.’s first wife. She called Reverend and Mrs. Blake.”

  “And they got you to Stobbart?”

  “The Blakes had a friend there. The family took in kids from time to time. I begged them to keep it quiet. I pleaded. And they did. They concocted a story that Stobbart wanted me for the track team.”

  She paused. “Miss Pauline had my stepfather fired. I don’t think even J.T. knew the whole truth. My mother had to be told, of course. But she still wouldn’t believe it. It took me a long time to forgive her for that.”

  Mel wiped a smudge from her cheekbone. “But you did?”

  “Yes. Finally.” Kitt made a regretful face. “Myself, I didn’t forgive so fast.”

  He wrapped both arms around her again. “I know what people say. Some people. If that’s what you mean.”

  She looked down at the stones. “That I went away to have somebody’s baby? Cal McKinney’s? And that the McKinneys paid my way to Stobbart?”

  He nodded. “Yes. That’s what I heard.”

  She raised her gaze to his again, defiance burning in their eyes. “Well, it’s a lie. I didn’t have anybody’s baby. Miss Pauline helped me—that’s true. Cal? He never touched me.”

  “But you had a crush on him?”

  Her mouth quirked ruefully. “I thought I was in love. I was barely sixteen. He’d saved me. He was handsome and kind and—dashing. To me, he was a knight on a white horse.”

  She shrugged, angry with herself. “I was terrible. I wrote him letters. Embarrassing letters. Highly embarrassing letters. He never answered them. I came back to Crystal Creek a few times. I pretended it was to see Nora. In truth, all I wanted to do was throw myself at Cal. I’d dress up, very feminine, very flirty. I was shameless. He finally told me to leave him alone. He was nice about it. But he made it clear. To him, I was a child.”