A Mating of Hawks (5 page)

“All right, I'll try,” she said aloud. Maybe she could use this time, back at the place where her memories began, to decide where she was going, what she would be and do.

For the first time, she noticed the case atop the armoire. Rising, she climbed on a stool and discovered that it was another relic, Johnny Chance's guitar.

To her surprise, the strings didn't snap as she tuned them. Maybe Patrick had remembered that she played a little and had recently instructed someone to restring it. He always enjoyed hearing her, especially when she sang ranch songs and folk ballads. Maybe he'd like to hear her now, if he wasn't asleep. It would be less strain on him than making conversation.

Tuning till she was satisfied, Tracy gave her hair a swift brushing and left with the guitar slung over her shoulder.

III

Patrick was lying still, but though Tracy entered quietly, his shaggy white head turned toward her. His half-face smiled and he spoke her name.

She came to kiss him and held his scarred brown hand. “Can you always tell who it is?”

He gave her hand a caressing squeeze. “Vashti's shoes all make a little click. Concha sort of oozes along, dragging her feet. You step too soft for a man. So I don't get real high marks for guessing.”

“You had lunch?”

“I had dinner. Supper's tonight.”

She stayed out of what she remembered as a running argument between him and his third wife, thanked him for seeing that her old furniture and things had been moved from the home place. His hand tightened painfully on hers.

“Sure hated to leave. But Vashti always claimed it was rundown and uncomfortable. She wanted to bulldoze it.”

Tracy couldn't repress a gasp. She couldn't have been more shocked if Vashti had suggested razing the family cemetery. Patrick rumbled on forlornly, “No way I'd do that! And I sure wasn't moving to town. Seemed pretty selfish to keep Vashti in a house she hated when, hell, I couldn't see it! So here we are.”

Poor Vashti! Doomed to live like a feudal queen, when before she'd charmed Patrick into marriage, she'd sold real estate for a living! Anger hummed through Tracy, though she warned herself that she mustn't interfere. No outsider could understand the debits and credits of a marriage so it was presumptuous to try to figure them. If Vashti wasn't worth the problems she caused Patrick, he could send her to town and hire all the housekeeper-companions he wanted. Tracy privately considered her a calculating, cold-hearted schemer, but there must be more to her than that or Patrick wouldn't care about her.

Still, it seemed cruel, cruel, to force an aging blind man from the home he'd loved all his life. Patrick sighed gustily. “Anyhow, there's life and loving in the old house, honey. Chuey Sanchez—he's my foreman since Umberto died—Chuey's there with his kids and grandkids and a couple of orphaned nieces and nephews. You'd ought to go see them. The vaqueros always ask when their
doncellita
's coming home.”

Yes, they had called her that, little maiden, and they'd sung “Las Mañanitas” under her window on the dawns of her birthdays, because this had always been done for daughters of the house. She was no maiden anymore, though she realized with dismay that she was the youngest of the family who had grown up at the ranch, since neither Judd nor Shea had yet produced children. The branches of the clan living in Phoenix and ranching in the Verde River country east of Prescott had gradually built up allegiance to their own locations and didn't stay in touch.

“I'll go see Chuey and Anita tomorrow,” she promised. “And now, Don Patrick, shall I play for you a little?”

He patted her hand and his smile dragged at the lax side of his face. “You remember some of the old family songs?”

“If I lose the words, you help me.”

Perching on a stool where she could watch him and still gaze out where the majestic timbered rise of the Santa Ritas faded to purple, she hummed and tuned, closing her eyes to bring back words she'd grown up with but hadn't heard in years.

The double-branding of Patrick O'Shea who endured the searing iron to ransom Talitha's baby brother from the Apaches; the valiant women, Socorro and Tjúni, who killed the ravaging scalp-hunters and earned the protection of the great Mimbreño, Mangus Coloradas; the ballad “Ay, Caterina!” told how the daughter born at the cost of Socorro's life had loved James-Fierro all her brief years and died with him along the Verde. From this tender lament, Tracy launched into the irreverent Wobbly songs Johnny Chance had played on this same guitar and wondered what genes of his, surviving in her, responded to the music.

“Long-haired preachers come out every night,

Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;

But when asked how about something to eat

They will answer with voices so sweet:

You will eat, bye and bye,

In that glorious land above the sky;

Work and pray, live on hay,

You'll get pie in the sky when you die.”

A hand closed on her shoulder. “Damned if you don't make that old ‘I Won't Work' propaganda sound real good!” chuckled Judd. “But you're going to have bleeding fingers if you don't toughen them gradually. Let me play awhile.”

Without waiting for her assent, he slipped the strap over her head and settled on a footstool that left his tawny head close to her knee. The warm brush of his hands had sent a slow, sensuous shock through Tracy; his proximity kept an electric awareness pulsating with every beat of her heart.

What was happening to her anyway? Was her body rebelling against her long celibacy or was it that both these distant cousins of hers aroused some deep, primitive hunger that other men didn't reach? She must be careful, very careful. She'd come here for peace, not passion. Above all, she mustn't get caught up in anything that would make it difficult to stay with Patrick as long as he needed her.

Still, she couldn't keep from watching Judd's fingers thrum the strings, caress the guitar that curved like a woman's breasts and hips with the narrow waist between. If he touched her that skillfully—

Her cheeks grew hot. She wrenched her eyes away, but not before his lion's eyes caught them and his long mouth curved into a smile.

“Do not look for me along the highway,” he sang in Spanish. “Look for me along the shortcut—” He was still singing love songs when Vashti came in with that clicking Patrick had mentioned, and regarded the three of them with asperity.

“That might all be very nice if I could understand it.” She took the guitar from Judd and put it on a chest. “Be a darling, Judd, and make us all a drink.”

Lazily, he moved over to the bar. “Just tomato juice for me,” Tracy requested.

“Don't spoil my tequila with a bunch of ice,” growled Patrick.

Vashti took Judd's seat and clasped her perfectly manicured hands about her knees in a way that pulled her dark green velvet caftan tight across the curves of her high, full breasts, further defined by the heavy antique silver medallion resting between them.

“I hope all this troubadouring hasn't exhausted you, love,” she said to her husband.

“It sure beats listening to recordings, or thinking about how danged useless I am!”

“Patrick! You're getting better all the time. Doctor Garth thinks you can start sitting up in a wheelchair any day you feel up to it.”

“God damn a wheelchair.”

Vashti flushed. When she spoke, her voice was taut and brittle. “That's right, Patrick. Feel sorry for yourself. See how hard you can make it on those of us who're trying to take care of you.”

It was clear he was no easy patient. Though Tracy's sympathies were all with him, she reluctantly had to admit that Vashti was in a trying position. Judd handed his father a drink, snapping the tension, and turned the mechanism that lifted the upper third of the bed so that Patrick was able to swallow.

Patrick took a swift draught and shifted his good leg. “Sorry, baby,” he told Vashti. “I'm getting mean as a rattler in August that can't shed his skin. I can't get all worked up about straddling a wheelchair, but bring one up here tomorrow and I'll try.”

Rising gracefully, she kissed his cheek, though it seemed to Tracy that she hesitated for a second, as if having to nerve herself. Well, that was natural. Something in healthy people instinctively wished to avoid sickness or disfigurement, probably out of unconscious fear that the same thing could happen to them.

“Thank you, darling,” she said, and resumed her seat, accepting the martini Judd handed her. Giving Tracy her juice with a teasing smile, he fetched his own Scotch and raised it in a flourish.

“Here's to Tracy's homecoming!”

“We've already drunk to that,” Vashti said with some annoyance.

Judd's mocking stare subdued her jewel-green one. “I haven't,” he reminded. Bowing to Tracy, his eyes had the sheen of the rich whisky in his glass.
“Salud
, cousin.
Pesetas y amor y tiempo gozarlos
.” Money, love, and time to enjoy them.

“The same to you,” she laughed, then frowned as she discovered that he'd mixed a strong jolt of vodka into her drink.

He laughed boyishly. “Just couldn't do it, Tracy! Breaks every law of hospitality and proper welcoming of prodigal daughters.”

“This once,” she said, smiling, though there was an edge to her voice. “In future, though, please give me what I ask for.”

He sipped his drink, savoring it as he watched her. “But what if you don't ask for a few things I know you'd like mighty well?”

“I'd rather have what I choose than something I might like better that was foisted on me.”

“The perversity of woman!”

“Free will.”

He laughed caressingly. “Guess we can be thankful you haven't cut off your pretty nose to spite your face!” Patrick moved restlessly and Judd refilled his glass.

“You boys work out something on the El Charco lease?” Patrick demanded.

“Shea plays the same old record. Dump a thousand head.”

Patrick's good hand clenched on his glass. “Can't figure what's got into that kid!”

“Comes from getting all scientific. Hell, he's had the nerve to map a survey of the whole ranch with recommended uses—a real fancy plan. Only trouble is, we'd go out of the cattle business.”

“He talked to me about it,” Patrick said slowly. The live side of his face contorted as he turned toward the window, out of which he was powerless to see. “Is the range in as bad a shape as he says, Judd?”

“It's dry,” Judd admitted. “But a few good rains'll bring it back. You've pulled through enough drouths to know the answer isn't to sell at a loss every time it gets dry.” He hesitated as if trying to sense his father's set of mind. “Dad, like I've told you, there's another way to go. Sell off some of that worn-out land along the highway. Use the proceeds to put in an irrigation system.” Judd spread his hands expansively. “We could grow enough alfalfa to feed our herds in bad years, and in good years we could sell it.”

“That'd take a lot of water.”

Judd grunted impatiently. “That's why they're putting in the Central Arizona Project, running Colorado River water over this way.”

Tracy frowned. “I've heard the Colorado River's already overcommitted. Anyway, don't the Papagos have first claim on CAP water since Tucson, the mines, and agribusiness have taken so much of their water?”

“If the Colorado dries up, we'll get it from someplace else,” Judd said confidently.

“You sound just like the farmers I interviewed up around Lubbock in West Texas,” Tracy remarked. Raised in an arid region, she knew water was life, and Judd's careless talk made her angry though she kept her tone even. “They got a water depletion allowance, just like that on oil, since everyone knew groundwater would be used up in time. Now that it's happening, they want the government to bail them out—have other taxpayers foot the cost of pumping water uphill from the Mississippi.”

“Hey, now!” protested Judd. “The Ogallala aquifer underlies those high plains!”

“Sure. Fossil water from thousands of years ago. Do you know its rate of recharge?”

“What's that got to do with us?”

“The whole West is in the same position, pumping groundwater that can't be replaced.” Tracy went over to stand by her great-uncle, rest her hand on his shoulder. “Patrick, the Ogallala recharges from a quarter-inch to a half-inch yearly! There's not enough surface water in all of Texas to supply West Texas growers at their present rate of use. Even if there were, the cost of delivery would be exorbitant. I'm not too familiar with Arizona's problems, but I do know agri-business uses ninety percent of the water. It
has
to be crazy to grow high-water-volume crops where water's so scarce and costs so much.”

“You've sure been to the city!” Judd snapped. “The country's got to eat.”

She had done an article on that, too, and was able to say with sweet reasonableness, “The question is, how long can we squander the grains many peoples live on in feeding up meat animals?”

Patrick's blind eyes glared at her. “Well, Tracy girl, as long as I got a tooth to chew with, I'm having my beef three times a day!” The glare switched to his son. “You're saying that land along the road's so poor we ought to get rid of it. Maybe there's something to what Shea argues.”

“Those pastures closest to the old ranch house got the heaviest use for years,” Judd said with bitter patience. “They're not typical of Socorro range.”

“They're the heart of the home place. I want them brought back to grass.”

“But that'll take years!”

“I don't care if it takes till hell freezes over!” Patrick dragged the paralyzed side of himself higher by hitching up the half that could move. “Some of our family's going to live in the old house again, and they're going to look out at good grass, not some damn beehive development!”