Beverly Byrne

by Come Sunrise

  She closed her eyes in relief.

  24

  THE CADENCES OF SANTA FE LIFE ARE GENTLE AND slow to change. The rhythm of the city is determined by a history which, however dramatic, took place when life moved at a slower pace. Nonetheless, things were different after the war. The cowhands congregating on the plaza around Joe Turner's barbershop discussed the alterations.

  "Some smart boy in New York says we're livin' in the roarin' twenties."

  "Looks like they're gonna roar right by New Mexico."

  "President Wilson says we ain't never had it so good. "

  "Don't matter what he says. He ain't runnin' again, and Harding's bound to beat that democrat, Cox."

  "Ain't gonna matter none to us who's president if the price of beef keeps goin' down."

  The man who knew the sobriquet applied to the times knew too why cows were suddenly cheap. "The war's over, so the federal government ain't buyin'. And they cut off the ranchers' credit, cause now we're not an 'essential war industry.' "

  "You blamin' the drought on Washington too?"

  "No, but I sure blame 'em for that Stock-raising Homestead Law."

  Inevitably at the mention of the odious law the men fell silent and drifted apart. Some things were too painful to talk about.

  In 1916 Congress promised six hundred and forty acres to anyone willing to raise cattle. After five years, if they survived, the land was theirs. Nobody mentioned that it was arid desert land and six hundred plus acres could support no more than sixteen head. If a homesteader was lucky enough to find water, it was likely to be four hundred feet deep. The cost of digging and maintaining such a well was prodigious.

  They moved across the horizon of Amy's world, these land-hungry Easterners heading west. They came in beat-up motorcars and antique wagons. Eventually almost all were forced to make the return journey. It was a sad and tragic epic.

  "Fifty million acres!" Rick railed one afternoon. They'd taken Estella and Kate and Tom Junior on a picnic, and were forced to watch yet another defeated family dragging themselves and their pitifully few belongings back to wherever they'd come from. "Those loco fools in Washington have no idea what this place is really like. But they've managed to take fifty million acres of it out of the control of those who could use it, and give it to people they might as well poison. Worse, poison would be quick."

  It was a few weeks short of Christmas 1920. Amy had lived long enough in New Mexico to understand. In a drought every inch of grassland was precious. Ranchers who had the skill and the manpower could move their herds and find forage. But guileless homesteaders put up fences, thus taking vast tracts of land out of circulation.

  "Barbed wire is going to be New Mexico's shroud," Rick said bitterly. He looked quickly at Amy, then looked away. It was one of their unspoken rules. They didn't discuss Tommy. But Amy knew what Rick meant.

  Faced with numberless cows dying of starvation, many ranchers banded together and sent a delegation to Washington. Negotiations with the Mexican government followed. Recently the land south of the border had received rain when none fell to the north. Chihahua, for instance, had knee-high grass, but scarcely an animal left to eat it. To feed his rebel army, Pancho Villa had stripped the country of cattle.

  So a great migration was organized. Stockmen loaded their herds onto trains and sent them south under bond. The theory was that they would feed and fatten in Mexico. When rain resurrected the American range, they would be brought home. It was a scheme born of desperation, and most who took part knew they'd never see their herds again. Tommy Westerman didn't participate.

  Tommy had a different vision. He had no sentimental attachment to the old golden days. And he had water. Even with the water table getting lower by the week, the hole at Santo Domingo wasn't dry. Tommy deepened it, and covered it to reduce evaporation. He kept armed guards there day and night. His entire eighty thousand acres, a relatively small spread by southwestern standards, was fenced with barbed wire and vigilantly patrolled. It didn't make him popular, but it was making him rich.

  At the end of the war three-year-old cows had brought sixty to eighty dollars a head. Now their price had dropped back to thirty. Tommy sold yearlings at twenty. "They're going to develop a taste for veal back east," he said. They did.

  Amy knew all this, but she lived her life somehow apart from it; just as she separated herself from the rest of her husband's behavior. Tommy still kept Rosa Mandago in the house near the Pecos Trail. He had other girls as well. From Albuquerque to Santa Fe, Westerman was known as a womanizer and a hard drinker, and famed for his lavish parties. He didn't use the hacienda as a venue, instead Tommy would hire the entire floor of a hotel.

  Somehow he managed to sidestep the law of prohibition passed in 1919. There was plenty to drink and plenty to eat, and often he'd entertain all comers for two or three days at a stretch.

  Stories of these bacchanals reached Amy, but she ignored them. They did not prevent Tommy from attending brilliantly to his business, thus providing security for her and the children. She had Kate and Tom Junior, and she was often a surrogate mother to Estella, whom she had grown to love. Most important, she had Rick. For a brief space of time it seemed as if he would be content to go on under the terms she'd stipulated. Only when he took her hand or gazed questioningly into her eyes did she face the fact that she'd only built a temporary barricade. The tide of passion still threatened to overwhelm them both.

  One day in the summer of 1921, Rick called at the ranch after visiting patients in the pueblos. He was hot and tired, and his customary patience was frayed at the edges.

  "Hola, Don Rico!" Maria greeted him with a smile and hurried off to summon Amy. Rick went to the living room and poured himself a drink. When Amy came he was staring into the empty fireplace.

  "Rick! What a nice surprise. I was thinking ..." Her voice trailed away when he didn't turn around. She noticed how stiff and tense he was. "What's the matter?"

  He spun round and faced her. "You and me, that's what's the matter."

  "I don't understand."

  "I can't believe that." He tossed back the drink and put the empty glass on a table. "For God's sake, Amy, how long is this charade going to continue?"

  She twisted her hands together, conscious of her wedding ring and the sapphire that had belonged to Tommy's grandmother. "I'm married, Rick. I have two children. I've told you how it must be. What in the world can you expect me to say?"

  He wouldn't give in. "One thing only," he said quietly. "Go or stay."

  "Now, you mean? Tonight? Tommy's away, but he might be back this evening."

  "No, that's not good enough!" He crossed the room and grabbed her roughly. His lips punished hers, then they were clinging together in mutual desire. "Oh, God," he moaned. "Amy, Amy, stop torturing us both! Leave him and marry me. The two of us, the children, we'll be so good together. ..."

  She tore herself away and tried to still her trembling. "I can't," she whispered, "I can't ever leave Tommy."

  "Then at least tell me why. I keep thinking about it. You can't be worried about the scandal; you must know we're already talked about." She shook her head and his voice grew hard. "Are you surprised by that? Don't be a child, Amy. Everyone says that you're my mistress. Even Tommy thinks so." He laughed softy.

  She dropped into a chair. "Why are you doing this? Why do you want to hurt me?"

  "Hurt you!" Rick knelt beside her and took hold of her hands. "Querida." he whispered. "I would never hurt you. But you are destroying us both. You must make up your mind."

  "I have made it up," she said tonelessly. "It's all tied up with things you don't know, things I can't talk about."

  "You want me to go, then," Rick said. He stood up. "Very well, the choice is yours."

  "I never said that!" She was suddenly desperate. The thought that he would disappear from her life was insupportable. "I couldn't survive without you! Why can't we go on as we are? Can't we be friends? Isn't that enough?"

  The word no
formed in his mouth, but he didn't utter it. Rick looked at her. She was beautiful, fragile, alone for all intents and purposes; she was the woman he loved. He could not say that he would go away and never see her again because it wasn't true; he did not have that much strength. "My dearest friend," he said softly, taking her face in his hands. "Claro, mi nina. That is all you will give, so I will try to be satisfied."

  It was once more an uneasy truce, but Amy was grateful for it.

  She suspected that Rick sometimes visited the house of Dona Zia, where men could buy pleasure, but she would not allow herself to dwell on such thoughts. Physical love was something she could never have, she told herself. The thought of Rick in the arms of some other woman, even a tart whom he paid for the privilige, was agony. It was worse than the surge of jealousy she'd known when she'd realized that he'd been Beatriz Ortega's lover. But how could she be angry with Rick for seeking elsewhere what she repeatedly denied him?

  There was something else. Deep as were her feelings for Rick, Amy didn't trust them. She had loved Luke, and he had rejected her. Tommy had loved her, and she had married him because of that, not because she returned his love. Now she must repay that injustice with the rest of her life. It was all a painful tangle of wrong choices and what might have been. Often Amy wondered if the true flaw was in herself. Perhaps her peculiar heritage had marked her forever.

  Most of the time she succeeded in burying both the past and the simmering dangers of the present. Only once, when Tommy was home and drinking more than he usually did at the ranch, did Amy lose her control.

  "Have a drink," Tommy said when she went into the living room. She'd thought him in bed, but he was sitting with a half-empty bottle by his side. "Bathtub gin," he said, gesturing with his glass. "Illegal rotgut, but it's all there is at the moment. Have some."

  She shook her head and murmured something about going to sleep.

  "Never do anything illegal or immoral, do you?" he said with a chuckle. "Pure as the driven snow, that's my wife. Come off it baby, I know better."

  "You're drunk. I don't think we'd better talk anymore. Good night." Instantly he was out of the chair and had hold of her arm. "Don't you turn your back on me, lady." His voice was quiet, but full of menace.

  Amy could not summon fear; too much had passed between them for her to be afraid now. "What do you want, Tommy?" she asked tiredly.

  He cocked his head and studied her.

  "Now that's a good question. How about a faithful wife? Will that do for openers?"

  "You have that."

  He threw back his head and laughed. "You and your spic boyfriend just hold hands. Is that what you're saying?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "The hell you say! It's all right, baby." He dropped her arm and turned away. His voice began to slur, as if the quantity he'd drank had just caught up with him. "I don't give a damn anymore. You're a whore. I know it and you know it. Not even able to produce more kids. I don't give a damn what you do."

  Amy fled upstairs and locked herself in her bedroom. That night she had terrible nightmares, and when she woke she remembered a dream in which Rick had made love to her, and when it was over he looked at her with disgust and loathing.

  At dawn Tommy came to her door and knocked repeatedly. She had to let him in or he would wake the whole house and frighten the children.

  He was pale and drawn, but sober. He didn't look at the big bed they had once shared, or at her half-clad form. "I came to say I'm sorry," he said grimly.

  For a moment Amy wondered if he meant sorry about everything. Maybe they could find a meeting ground and begin again, for Kate's sake and Tom Junior's. "I'm sorry too," she said. "About so much."

  "Don't mistake my meaning. I'm only saying that I understand the rules. We both do exactly as we want, as long as the kids are taken care of, and no smut gets as far as this house."

  "I see," she said.

  "I hope you do. You can sleep with whomever you want. My brother, the doctor-any man that takes your fancy. Just don't do your whoring in any way that's going to hurt my daughter or my son."

  The house on the Pecos Trail was really a cabin, a tumble-down wooden structure hastily erected by some prospector in the last century. Tommy won it in a poker game around the same time that he acquired Rosa Mandago. That was in 1917, when he was scratching for every penny needed to rebuild Santo Domingo. It was logical for him to install his half-breed mistress in the cheapest quarters available. Since then he'd many times offered to replace the shanty with something more substantial, but Rosa always refused.

  "Will you come to see me more often if I have a better house?" Rosa demanded every time he mentioned it.

  "I come when I can. Don't start that again."

  "When you find nothing better, you mean," she said. "When your fancy wife has the big belly, or the chicas in Albuquerque are too far away."

  Usually Tommy would leave when the familiar harangue began; sometimes he would respond by kissing her lush mouth, fondling her ripe breasts, and finally finding peace and release between her tawny thighs. It was all a question of his mood.

  When he first met Rosa, she drove him wild. She was so unlike any female he'd known or imagined that the mere mention of her name enflamed him. Then he'd ride any number of miles for the privilege of pouring his seed into the voluptuous crevices of her alien flesh. Eventually the novelty faded, and she became just another easy lay. Still Rosa remained different from other women. She was his in a special way, one more symbol of his conquest of New Mexico. That's why the business about the Indian so enraged him.

  "I just passed a redskin riding away from here," he told her when he arrived at the cabin late one night.

  "Si, he came to see me."

  Rosa sat on a sofa covered with woven blankets. It was the only piece of real furniture in the room. Her black hair was loose over her shoulders, and she clutched a red satin dressing gown across breasts which strained at the fragile restraint. Her fingers too were red-tipped, and they sported a profusion of rings which sparkled in the light of the oil lamp."He is from my pueblo," she added with a trace of pride.

  Tommy had removed his jacket and was unbuckling his belt while she spoke. He paused long enough to laugh. "What the hell do you mean, 'your pueblo'? There can't be any self-respecting pueblo prepared to claim you, my girl. Not Rosa Mandago the mestiza whore. "

  She stared at him through half-closed lids. He liked to make her angry, but tonight she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction. "That shows how much you know. My mother was from Pueblo San Felipe, so it is my pueblo. Always, no matter what."

  "Yeah? Well, ok, if you say so. I still want to know why an Indian was riding out of here after midnight." Tommy was naked now. He didn't wait for Rosa to answer, but walked into the bedroom, expecting her to follow.

  Even without turning around he could sense that she'd not yet risen to do so, and that she was thinking hard about the answer to his question. He began to feel real anger, and a kind of surprised jealousy. Rosa was bought and paid for years before. It was absurd to have to remind her of that yet again. He stood where he was, his back still to her, and said in a soft, aggrieved voice, "I'm waiting, Rosa."

  "I'm coming."

  He could hear the swishing sound made by her robe as she removed it. "That's not all I'm waiting for," he said.

  She came up to him and slid her arms around his waist. Her breasts pressed into his spine, and he could smell the raw, animal scent of her skin. "For why you worry about the Indian? Is no man I like better than you. Maybe you forget that. Now I show you."

  Tommy gripped her hands where they were clasped above his belly and wrenched her round to face him. "You stinking whore," he said softly. "You've been spreading your legs for some lousy heathen, haven't you?"

  She shook her head, and the great mane of black hair swung from side to side. "No, no! What you think I do that for?"

  "That's what I want you to tell me." He didn't release h
is grip on her wrists. "Talk, baby. Quickly, while I've got some patience left."

  "I ain't got nothing to talk about. You making it all up in that crazy head of yours. You think too much, I always say it."

  Only once in his life had Tommy Westerman hit a woman, the night he slapped Amy when she came back from riding with Diego. There was still enough of his boyhood and his upbringing in him to make the idea repugnant. Now he wanted to punch Rosa's face.

  He wanted to retrieve his belt from the other room and whip her senseless. Maybe if he'd been drunk he'd have done it, but he was cold sober and self-disgust mingled with his fury. "You lousy bitch!" He pushed her away from him and she stumbled and hit the wall and slid to the floor. "You stinking cunt! What's his name?"