Renegade Man (3 page)

“You’re
shivering like an Eskimo. Let’s get you out of those clothes.”

“Thank you, but
I’ve been dressing and undressing myself for a good thirty years or more.”

She stomped out
of the creek, water sloshing in her tennis shoes. He watched her sun-brown legs
and the enticing sway of her derriere, hugged by the wet shorts. She was even
prettier than she had been in school, and he’d thought then that he’d never
seen anything prettier. But that girl couldn’t begin to compare with the woman
walking away from him.

Purely a sexual
attraction, he told himself, following her onto the bank and through the dense
growth of trees. But that attraction had been done with twenty years ago.

In grade school,
he remembered, she had been a real scrapper, always with a smudge of dirt
somewhere on her face. Then, in junior high, he had noticed how she had
suddenly grown breasts—and grown even more standoffish. Now, as a mature woman,
her hips had widened in delicious proportion to those breasts.

Dangerous
thoughts, since he certainly didn’t need a busybody in his vicinity. Best to
let this encounter end as it had begun—explosively. He knew better than to let
himself become distracted by a woman. Men had gotten killed over women. Samson
had gotten blinded over Delilah, John the Baptist had lost his head over
Salome, and—

And damn! Now he
had real trouble to deal with: two rifles trained on him and Ritz!

The center
horseman, flanked by his two gun-toting mounted henchmen, leaned forward and
braced himself on the pommel with hands that were as wrinkled and tough as a
dry chamois skin. “You two have wandered off the main road. This here’s
Kingsley land.”

“The federal
government doesn’t see it that way, C.B.,” Jonah said, bestowing a faux amiable
smile on the grizzled patriarch. “You may have the grazing rights, but as long
as I fence off any holes and close gates, I can prospect to my heart’s
content.”

“Another
prospector!” The word was pronounced with the same disgust Rita-lou had
exhibited. What with the sanctions against South Africa, the United States
minting gold coins for the first time in almost fifty years, and the skyrocketing
price in the commodity, gold prospectors were prowling the hills again. A new
breed of forty-niners had appeared.

Kingsley’s mouth
twitched with obvious annoyance. “You know who I am. Just who the hell are
you?”

C. B. Kingsley
had aged a lot in twenty years, Jonah noticed. At either side of the red-veined
nose, his cheeks were florid, and his jowls were prominent now. “Jonah Jones. I
used to work cattle and lumberjack for you some twenty years ago.”

The information
appeared to leave a negligible impression on the cattle baron. Instead, he
focused his attention wholly on Rita-lou. Standing at Jonah’s side, she was
trembling with suppressed emotion. From the look of holy fire in her eyes,
Jonah guessed.it was pure loathing. And C.B. appeared to return it.

“So you had the
gall to come back, did you? Silver City didn’t think much of you then, and I
doubt people’s feelings have changed. I’d advise you to go back to wherever you
came from, girl.”

“It’s Ms.
Randall to you. And I’m not going anywhere. My anthropological claim takes
precedence over both your grazing rights and Mr. Jones’s mining rights.”

“We’ll see about
that,” Jonah snapped, feeling himself rise to a slow boil. He wasn’t about to
surrender the Landlubber’s potential value for a sack of crumbling bones.

C.B.’s head
jutted forward. He had once been powerfully built, and even though he had a
sizable potbelly now, he still had bull’s shoulders. “You gonna be digging?
Here?”

Rita-lou tucked
her hands into the back pockets of her wet shorts. Jonah thought that Medusa
had probably exhibited a more pleasant smile than Ritz was at that moment.
“That is right. I am.”

C.B. glowered
down at her.

Sensing the
tension, the horse on Jonah’s left pranced nervously. Jonah didn’t recognize
the grulla’s rider, a man with a weak chin. But the other man, the
barrel-chested rider to the right of Kingsley, was Buck Dillard. He had played
varsity football for Western High their sophomore year, when he had been just
mean enough to earn the sobriquet of Meat Processor. His glassy-eyed gaze was
riveted on Rita-lou, noting the way the soaked blouse clung to her breasts like
a second skin.

“Then let me
warn you,” C.B. said at last through clenched teeth. “We’ve been getting some
cattle rustlers in these parts. They just cut a few barbed wires, back their
semis inside the fence and load up a herd. By the time the theft is discovered
the next morning, the cattle are somewhere in another state being butchered.
You understand that I can’t let this happen to Split P cattle. My men are on
order to fire first, girl, and ask questions later.”

“Like I told
you, it’s Ms. Randall to you,” she said coolly.

Jonah, along
with the Kingsley bunch, watched in silence as she strode off down the gravelly
riverbank. Buck shoved his hat back on his head to reveal thinning
reddish-brown hair, and whistled softly.

C.B. shot him a
harsh look, then turned on Jonah. “The same warning goes for you.” He sawed on
the reins, wheeling his buckskin quarter horse in the direction opposite the
one Rita-lou had taken. “Let’s go, boys!”

* * * * *

Since a trip
back into Silver City took a good hour and a half, Jonah limited his visits to
one or two a week at the most to patronize the grocery store, laundromat,
hardware store and whatever.

He considered
every moment spent away from prospecting a moment squandered, but now he
realized that a visit to the barbershop was in order, as well as a little
restocking of his larder. Besides, he wanted to stop by the courthouse and file
a research request on his twenty acres, which Rita-lou Randall so adamantly
asserted overlapped her claim. The subject had been on his mind since she had
stalked off three days ago. Not that it would do him any good to be in any
hurry. Researching conflicting claims sometimes took the BLM months.

After dropping
his dirty clothing off with the laundromat attendant, he parked his
red-and-white Ford pickup in the parking lot of the Texas-New Mexico Power
Company building, disregarding, as he always had, the sign threatening to tow
away unauthorized cars.

He crossed the
busy street to the Buffalo Barbershop. The place hadn’t changed much. The dusty
wild turkey in flight was still mounted over the shampoo basin. As a kid,
getting his hair washed, he had half expected to have his forehead spattered
with droppings. Tacked over the old-fashioned cash register was the obligatory
girlie calendar. Miss June was wearing a roustabout’s hard hat and not much
more.

“Will you look
at that! If it isn’t Jonah Jones!” From behind the far chair, old Sam Vodsky
waved his barber’s razor in recognition. “So what I heard was the gospel truth.
What are you doing back in town, son?”

Jonah removed
his straw Stetson and hung it on the hat tree. “Well, now, Sam, I figured that
seeing as how the Buffalo Barbershop always knew things before they even
happened, it would also know what I was doing back in Silver City.”

“Hear tell you
got the gold fever,” the rotund barber called.

“Jonah!”

At the sound of
his name, Jonah turned around. Nelda Wright stood beside an empty barber chair.
She wore a delighted smile. “You look like you could use a haircut, Jonah
Jones. And a mustache-trimming.”

He settled his
six-foot-three-inch frame in the chair and let her drape a plastic cape around
him. He grinned at her pert reflection in the mirror. The strawberry blonde had
been a cheerleader and Mining Days queen, and he had turned scarlet and
stuttered if she even looked his way. But she hadn’t turned him inside out the
way Ritz had. Somehow, Ritz had always managed to put him in a tailspin. In the
Vietnam era of politicians shouting “Charge the hill!” he had joined the navy
and abruptly gotten buyer’s remorse. He had left with his feelings for Ritz
unresolved. For months after she dumped him, he had felt ' as if he’d been left
hanging and empty.

“You haven’t
changed much, Nelda. Still just as pretty as you were in high school.”

She nudged him
playfully in the back. “With a pound on my hips for each year we’ve been out of
school, and a hundred gray hairs for each of my three kids. Looks like you’ve
put on fifty pounds of muscle since you left Silver City.”

He laughed. “The
navy did that.”

“So that’s where
you were all this time.” She began briskly clipping the longish butternut hair
she held between her fingers. “I wondered why you never came back to visit.”

He stared at her
face in the mirror. “After Pa passed on, there was no home to come back to,
Nelda.” Everyone in Silver City had known his father was the town drunk. And
Rita-lou Randall’s mom had been the town whore. He and Ritz were Chihuahua Hill
kids. Funny how she had stayed on his mind the last three days, when he’d
hardly thought about her for almost twenty years.

“So why’d you
come back, Jonah?”

“Like Sam said,
I got gold fever.”

“Bah! The last
pocket of gold petered out of P.A. a century ago.”

“Who said
anything about Pinos Altos?”

“Jonah, even a
beginner knows not to waste time trying to find gold someplace where it’s never
been discovered. Tilt your head a little. There, that’s it.”

“Didn’t you know
thar’s gold in them thar hills?” he chided with a chuckle. Gold. The yellow
dream- dust.

“Where you
staying?”

“Out in the
Mimbres Valley. Got a camper trailer out there I call home.”

“Want your boots
shined,
senor
?”

Jonah glanced
down at the scrawny kid with the coal-black hair and eyes. Hopeful eyes. Where
would we all be without hope? he wondered. The kid could have been himself
thirty years ago. “Sure, son. Why not?”

“Seen any of the
old group since you’ve been back?” Nelda asked.

“Nope. Not
unless you count a run-in with old Kingsley earlier this week.”

“Cattle Baron
never was the most pleasant of men, but ever since Chap left town he’s been
bitter as a pi non nut. And just as hard.”

Jonah recalled
that time easily: the Mining Days Fiesta held each Labor Day weekend. Everyone
had been decked out in the customary turn-of-the-century garb; there had been
the usual beard-growing contest, pie-eating contest and old miners competing in
loading and pushing the old-style mining cars along a section of tracks.

But that Mining
Days weekend hadn’t been usual or particularly festive. Chap Kingsley had run
off after anargument with his old man. The highway patrol had been alerted, the
sheriff called in, the townspeople questioned. But Chap had covered his tracks
too well.

“Funny, Jonah,
the week before Chap ran off, Rita- lou Randall left town.” Nelda tactfully
didn’t add the word “pregnant,” but he knew it was on the tip of her tongue.
“Then, that same week that Chap ran off, you quit school and left town—to join
the navy, right? Now, twenty years later, you and Rita are back. Wouldn’t
surprise me if Chap didn’t show up, too.” Jonah propped his boot up for the boy
to shine. “If he doesn’t, who’s C.B. going to leave his empire to?”

She brushed away
wisps of clipped hair from his drooping mustache. “Well, the empire ain’t what
it used to be. I think Cattle Baron lost some of his drive after Chap left, but
he’s still one of the richest men in this part of the state.

“There.” She
smiled at him in the mirror. “You look like you’re almost civilized, Jonah.
Make it into town often?”

“Only to do my
laundry and grocery shopping.”

“The Border
Cowboy Bar is still there.”

He glanced in
the mirror at her hands as she unsnapped the plastic cape. No wedding ring. He
had just assumed she was married.

She caught his
eyes. “Divorced. Five years last February. Stan Acton.”

Of course. The
high school jock and class president.

“Stan got itchy
feet. Got tired of being tied down, tired of small town life.” She tried to
smile brightly. “You know how it is when you get married just out of high
school.” She flushed. “Well, I don’t guess you would.”

He smiled. “I
might head into town one evening when I get tired of listening to the coyotes
baying at the moon. The Border Cowboy still got two dance floors?”

He and Nelda
chatted a while longer, and by the time he got back to the laundromat, it was
after five and the attendant had left. Only one other person was there, folding
clothes as she removed them from the dryer. He should have known he’d run into
Rita-lou Randall. The woman just might be standing in the way of him achieving
his lifelong dream, and now he had to be polite to her.

He nodded curtly
to her and strode on down the aisle to hunt for the dryer in which the
attendant had left his clothes. In uneasy silence, the two of them folded their
clothing.