Authors: Jeanne Williams
Shea answered, but his manner was as chillingly remote as Geronimo's was flirtatiously friendly. “If you can imagine Patrick paralyzed on one side, flat in bed, that's how he is.”
She flinched, not able to grasp such a disaster for the man who'd been father and grandfather to her since she came to live at the ranch when she was four, after her parents, freedom riders, had been killed in Alabama.
As nearly as Tracy could decipher the complicated Scott-O'Shea-Revier-Quintana family connections, Patrick was a sort of great-uncle. He was the only son of Santiago Scott and Christina Revier, who between them had mingled the bloods of the founders of Rancho del Socorro, Yaqui, Apache, Irish, German and assorted Anglo strains. Patrick, hence Shea, sprang from the proud, sometimes tragic legitimate side.
Tracy came from the stranger seed, a quixotic graft to the family tree added by Johnny Chance, the young labor organizer killed in the Bisbee deportation of striking miners back in 1917. Christina Revier had borne his child in the shelter of Santiago Scott's love and name, but inside the family there'd never been any mystification about it, or any shame. Johnny Chance's memory was accepted and honored. His son had died in the Spanish Civil War, leaving the daughter who died in the south.
Precariously, that line had survived, managing to reproduce itself in each generation, sustained by the rooted, stable people of the ranch. It was hard not to feel under some kind of a curse, though Tracy was determined not to be a martyr.
“My bags are over there,” she said, not following up on Shea's report of Patrick's condition because there was nothing to say.
Shea frowned at the canvas duffel and under-seat bag. “I hope you're planning to stay longer than that indicates.”
“I can stay as long as Patrick wants. I've learned to travel light.”
He gave her his first grudging approval. “Guess being a big city reporter taught you that.”
“I did travel quite a bit for features.”
And to escape writing up weddings and engagements. That was why she'd learned photography, so she could cover more kinds of news. But even before the mugging, she'd been wanting to get out of the city, maybe try a children's book illustrated with her own photos.
“Will the paper save a job for you?” Geronimo asked.
“They'll buy any features they like.”
Swinging the duffel over his shoulder and scooping up the small bag, Shea sounded almost derisive. “It's not exactly as if you need the money.”
Though the ranch and extensive family holdings in real estate, mining and freighting were controlled by the main branch of the family, Tracy's inherited bar sinister brought with it a very comfortable trust fund. Jet-setting held no lure for her, though. Maybe it was a legacy from Johnny Chance, but she wanted to do something useful, something she could feel good about. Not that she hadn't taken some glamorous vacations and enjoyed them thoroughly. But to live that way all the time was like a steady diet of rich desserts.
“You're not a pauper yourself,” she told Shea crisply. “And maybe people who don't
have
to work need to the most.”
“Zappo!” applauded Geronimo, giving her a lingering hand up into the high-floored cab of the dusty sage-green pickup. It was scratched and dented but sported extra-wide treads to ease through mud and deep sand that would capture most tires. “If this kissin' cousin of yours acts up,
chica
, let him have it in the chops!”
They were cousins, in a degree so elusive that she wasn't about to try to puzzle it out, but she doubted there'd be any kissing. She didn't know why, but Shea was unmistakably hostile.
Maybe he faulted her for not staying in closer touch with his stricken father? She hadn't been back since a brief visit three years ago, when Vashti had been unmistakably rude, but she had phoned Patrick every week and written him occasionally, enclosing clippings of her stories.
Shea, after three years in Viet Nam, had disappeared into Mexico and God knows where else for four years without communicating at all. With that record, it was hard to see how he could fault her. She searched her memory further. Hadn't there been a divorce while he was in Viet Nam, some kind of mess that Patrick wouldn't discuss?
She gave a mental shrug. If he was down on all women because of one, that was his problem. She wasn't going to waste energy trying to win or placate him. But a compelling tension vibrated between them, rousing a sweetly fierce awareness she hadn't experienced since the classic affair between worshiping student and married professor who regarded his seductions as necessary rites of passage for favored initiates. She just hadn't found young men very interesting, and though she had somewhat desperately had a few encounters, they had been neither physically nor emotionally fulfilling.
Shea attracted her so strongly she was sure he had to feel some of it. Damned if she'd let him see it and reinforce his apparent contempt for women. She couldn't keep from stealing a glance at his hands, though, and almost recoiled in shock.
What had happened to them? The tanned, capable hands with long sensitive fingers were ridged with white scars. She remembered, from childhood, hearing him play the grand piano that had belonged to his grandmother Christina. Patrick had loved to listen though he'd been scornful, almost frightened, when Shea had mentioned studying music in the East. At his father's insistence, there'd been one year at the state university and then Viet Nam. Since then, after that four-year Mexican hiatus, he'd gone back to the university, and had made, Tracy remembered, at least one trip to Israel. But Patrick had never mentioned this damage to Shea's hands, just that he'd been wounded in Cambodia.
There was a lot she'd like to know about this cousin of hers, distant in more ways than one, but his reserved manner didn't encourage launching into a series of “Do you remembers?” And she was tired, not so much from the flight as from the hour-and-a-half taxi ride to the Houston airport at morning rush hour.
Settling back between the two men, knees to one side of the gearshift, Tracy was amazed at how relaxed she feltâsafe for the first time in months, protected. For in spite of Shea's aloof behavior, there was a rocky steadfastness about him, a certainty that exacted trust. And there was no doubting Geronimo's ebullient, admiring good will. She was tired of being on guard, tired of fending for herself, and if that was weak, she didn't care.
It wasn't only the comforting physical presence of two men she'd known in childhood, but seeing again the purple marching mountains in every direction as they proceeded down the Santa Cruz Valley on the Nogales highway. The massive Santa Catalinas rose to the north above Tucson, the Rincons were east, and to the west, against the Tucson Mountains, gleamed the white walls of San Xavier del Bac on the Papago Reservation, one of Padre Kino's missions. When Apaches had forced Christianized Pimas to flee their mission at Tumacacori farther south, the Indians had carried their saints and sacred vessels in their burden baskets to this White Dove of the Desert.
A ribbon of green showed the track of the Santa Cruz River through the broad flat valley, defined by the Santa Ritas to the east and smaller, scattered ranges to the west.
Except for that slim fringe along the river, the country looked parched and dead in spite of its being March. “Has it been a dry year?” she asked.
“Mighty dry. We're a long way from that average eighteen inches at the ranch and of course Tucson's under its average of eleven.”
Spreading beneath the highway and sprawling in all directions stretched acres of white stuccos topped with what seemed from this perspective to be overlapping red tile roofs.
“Green Valley?” gasped Tracy. “It's grown like crazy.”
“Crazy is right,” Shea said grimly. “And getting more so. Some big pecan growers pumped lots of precious water to get groves established, but they're selling to developers who'll root out the trees and pack in all the fake Mediterranean villas they can on the acres they've gotten zoned for building. People use less water than agribusiness, of course, but I wonder what they'll do when there isn't any.”
“What this place needs is a few good Apache raids,” Geronimo said. “Let me tell you, in the good old days, we were a damned efficient check on urban sprawl.”
“Which part of you's bragging?” grinned Shea. “You psyched them out in the Army, Sanchez, but I happen to know you're three-quarters respectable vaquero stock. And besides, I'm everything you are,” Shea reminded.
“Sure. But the proportions are a little different.” Geronimo squinted balefully at the flat-topped low ridges on their right. “Those damn mine tailings!”
“Don't bitch, Sanchez. Can't you see Duval's revegetating them?”
“I've seen more sprouts on a bald man's skull!”
“Maybe someday they'll use them to pave water catchments the way they're doing up by Black Mesa on the Navajo Reservation.”
“We should live so long,” grunted Geronimo.
The highway by-passed the old presidio of Tubac now, but Tracy glimpsed the adobes housing art galleries and craft shops, the steeple of the church. In Spanish, then Mexican days, the presidio's tiny garrison, sometimes less than a dozen men, had tried to ward off Apache raiders, but the valley had been depopulated from the early 1820's till the influx of American miners after the Gadsden Purchase of 1853. Tubac itself had been abandoned several times, its soldier-settlers and friendly Pimas refuging in Tucson, the region's other military outpost.
“What's happening at Rio Rico?” she asked, nodding at the roads of the old Tumacacori Mission.
“GAC Corp's still pushing its Shangri-La.” Shea didn't even glance at the roads. “Calabazas had its booms between its busts. First a
visita
for Jesuits, then a sheep and goat ranch run by a couple of Germans in partnership with the governor of Sonora. After the U.S. takeover, there was a camp there on and off, and a customs collector. Big building surge in the 1880's with a classy hotel and such. Wonder how long Rio Rico will last?”
“You're just full of optimism!” Tracy charged.
He shrugged. “When you see what's brewing at the ranch, you'll know why I'm so bright and cheerful.”
Turning off the Nogales highway, they followed Sonoita Creek along a bottom flanked by the Santa Ritas to the north and stretching into foothills and mountains to the south, fading into Mexico. Juniper and oak studded red earth and gray rocks ascending up the mountains. Giant black walnuts outlined whitetrunked sycamores and fresh green cottonwoods. Cattle browsed among catclaw and mesquite, and there was comparatively little cactus.
Red Mountain rose behind the little town of Patagonia. “A developer wanted to put in a big subdivision here,” remarked Geronimo. “But the sewage system is in such bad shape that the State Water Quality Control Board wouldn't issue a permit.”
“Just wait,” grunted Shea.
They were getting into country now that Tracy remembered from riding over it. Her eyes feasted on the familiar stretch of the sparkling creek, running shallow in its wide bed, but life-giving here, of boundless importance. The valley broadened, bottom lands and gentle slopes guarded by mountains, and to the east were the jagged Whetstones, dark blue against the azure of the Huachucas.
Tracy's flesh prickled and she was close to tears. It wasn't only that she knew this country. The remembering went deeper than that. “I wonder,” she said softly, “how it looked to them.”
“Who?” frowned Shea.
“Socorro. Patrick O'Shea. Tjúni and Santiago.”
“After all they'd been through, I expect they were damned glad to find a place to stop.” Tracy thought Shea must resemble the Irishman for whom he was named, who'd fought for Mexico in the San Patricio Battalion, the one Mangus Coloradas had protected for Socorro's sake and called “Hair of Flame.”
“Socorro must have been some lady,” said Geronimo. “There she was, brought up guarded and protected, and all of a sudden she's alone in the cinder cones and lava flows, with her escort dead. Finds water. Lives off desert plants. And then she finds her redhead, just a husk of baked rawhide, and brings him back to life.”
“It's strange how all those four who started the ranch had been the same as dead,” Tracy mused. “Santiago was the only person left after scalp-hunters hit, and he'd have died if Shea and Socorro hadn't found him. Tjúni's whole village had been wiped out. So there you had an Irishman, a Spanish creole, a Mexican vaquero and a Papago, all thrown together and depending on each other.” Tracy smiled at Geronimo. “And then your family came to work the cattle.”
He nodded. “Don't forget Talitha Scott. She raised Socorro's and Shea's children after Socorro died so young, and she held the ranch together when Shea went off to the un-Civil War.”
He'd never come back to that yellow-haired girl who'd adored him since childhood when he'd ransomed her and her half-Apache brother, James, but Talitha had at last found love and peace with Marc Revier, a young German mining engineer who'd taught her to read and waited yearningly for her to grow up.
Surprisingly, Shea joined in. “The one I've always felt for was James. He didn't fit with either Apaches or whites. When he became Fierro the raider, he must have known there was no chance for his people to shut out the whites.”
“At least he and Caterina left a child,” Tracy remembered.
It was Sant, a grandson of Caterina, daughter of Shea and Socorro, who had married Christina, granddaughter of Talitha and Marc, at last uniting the separated bloods in Patrick, Shea's father.
The old house was hidden by huge trees except for glimpses of mellow adobe and broad veranda, but they didn't turn in there, following instead a graded road that led back through a spine of hills, a road she didn't remember.