Thunder In Her Body (54 page)

C
HAPTER 37

             
¤

   
And Then Aaron Was Gone

B
laze kept his promise to his bride.  In fact, he kept every promise he ever made to her. He loved her with a passion that lifted her every day, even on the days that were trying.  She knew he loved her with all his being, and that was the one thing that she’d needed all her life.  He comforted her, honored her, cherished her and each time he slipped into her, he made her feel young, fertile and totally irresistible.  It was what every alive woman wants and that was, without pretense or contrivance, his daily gift to her.

“Stand still,” Blaze said quietly to his wife one afternoon, as he used the weight of his body to press her against the hallway wall.  Placing the flat palms of both hands on the wall well above her head he held her in position with his body.  His lips were wet as he lowered them onto hers.  His full lips went softly onto her full accepting mouth.  He kissed her for a long time, moving his face around hers.  He breathed into her mouth, then sucked his air back out.   He kissed her more and more.  He did not want intercourse.  He had a meeting to go to.  He just wanted to mash his body against hers and kiss her.  He loved the taste of her mouth.  He just wanted to kiss her – for a long time.  He’d told her before, that he just couldn’t get enough of her.  He told Aaron the same thing.  She was his obsession, his love; the woman who made him lay awake at night just looking at her after all these years of marriage.  The woman who gave him back all the love he had missed.  If ever there was a woman who completed a man, she was it.

During that busy first year of marriage, he took Lynette to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to revisit the Tetons.  She truly enjoyed returning to places with which she’d fallen in love, and she cherished the second visits more than the first, because she was with the man who made the world glow for her.  French explorers thought the high, pointed peaks looked like breasts, and the French word for breasts is
Tetons
.  Crustal block up-faulting had created these wonders of nature.  Blaze reflected on how he liked his peaks full, rounded and soft.  Beautiful though the mountains were, he liked Lynette’s more!

Lynette just couldn’t explain her fascination with mountains.  Maybe it was their majesty, and how they reached to the heavens.  Maybe it was their ever changing colors, and the way snow shaded and shadowed the rough peaks.  Maybe it was their arrogance, standing unmoved by all that the earth threw at them.  Whatever it was, Blaze understood and treated her to these panoramas whenever he could.  They rode horses in the snow, snuggled up before a huge, roaring wood fire in a lodge with a fireplace almost as huge as the one in the lobby of Yellowstone National Park’s grand lobby.   Despite his brush with death that day on the ski slope, Blaze went downhill skiing at Santa Fe, Steamboat Springs, Telluride and Vail but later explained that he liked the intimacy of Asombroso more.  After all, that was home for him and, regardless of his near tragedy,  he could ski there every day during a good winter if he chose, and come home to a warm house, a home-cooked meal and a woman who was simply grateful for his very existence.  Under his careful tutelage, Lynette did learn to ski, though she preferred tubing more, and when their son was only three or four years old, BC put on his first pair of tiny skis and slipped slowly down the “bunny slope” with his dad on one hand, and his mother on the other.

              Once BC was up some size, in school, and in the care of Clare and Lucinda, with Hawk and Aaron there to help, Blaze and Lynette went back to Alaska – not once but twice.  They stood at Point Barrow, looking out to the Arctic Ocean to the west and Beaufort Sea to the east.  It was a barren and desolate landscape, but it was also beautiful in an ethereal kind of way.  It was like the beginning and end of the world.  They stayed in the gracious homes of Inupiaq families in the far northeast of Alaska, and later hosted several Alaskan indigenous families from time to time at the ranch.  Like Lynette, Blaze came to understand the draw of Alaska.  Primal, majestic, unforgiving, it was a place in this world alone in its beauty.  They’d kept up with Kenny Underworth, who after a serious accident, was driving a desk at the Interior Department in Washington.

They also went to Europe and visited castles built out of love, and atop the Eiffel Tower, Blaze kissed his forever-bride and put another ring on her finger.  It was an emerald ring given in thanks for making him so happy.  They held hands, as they always did, and other tourists asked if they were newlyweds.  “Yes,” Blaze answered.  “We’ll always be newlyweds,” he would say with a big smile, his bright, straight teeth gleaming in the evening light beneath his golden skin.

In the years that were to come, they would need each other’s hands.  The hands the priest had blessed on the day of their wedding.  There is so much pain in life, but it can be endured when there is a steady and patient hand to hold on to.  Theirs was a strong, loving marriage.  Theirs was an undying belief in the Creator which allowed all things to happen for a reason.

A crack rang out from somewhere up on a ridge high above where Aaron, Blaze and the new hired hand worked.  In less than a split second, Aaron fell to the ground, a rifle shot to his head.  He was dead before his limp body hit the dusty earth.  Blaze threw himself over Aaron to protect him from another blow, if it was to come.  A second shot rang out, striking into the dirt only inches from where Blaze’s upper torso shielded Aaron’s now lifeless corpse.  In the few seconds that followed, the hired hand reached into the cab of Blaze’s truck and pulled down the rifle from its rack.  He aimed at where the shot came from, firing four shots directly at that spot.  Then there was silence.

“Get him in the truck,” the hired hand screamed, “I’ll cover you.”

Blaze lifted his body off of Aarons and looked down at his beloved brother.  There was no need to rush him to medical care.  He was dead.  Blaze stumbled a few steps past where his brother’s body lay and he vomited, falling back to his knees as he wretched.

Clare shrieked in horror as Blaze deposited his brother’s bloody corpse on the couch in the living room of Rancho Whitehall.

“I’ve called the sheriff.  I just couldn’t leave him laying out there in the dirt with the ants crawling all over him.  I couldn’t do it,” Blaze spoke through his tears.  “He didn’t deserve to lay out there in the dirt,” he said, crying freely now.  Clare threw herself onto her husband’s lifeless body and sobbed aloud, alternating choking sounds with yells.

“Why, why?” she asked.  “Who would do this to him.  He never hurt anyone, who would do this to him?  Why?,” she kept saying.

“I don’t know,” Blaze replied, but by God whoever did it will not live out the fullness of his days,” he said resolutely.

Blaze was devastated at the loss of his big brother.  He loved that man, and he knew Aaron loved him.  Though they did not share the same blood, they shared much of the same life, and Blaze was almost inconsolable at his death.  He was glad that Aaron had not suffered from some long, painful, debilitating illness that would have robbed him of his manhood, but he was not ready to loose the man who had been so much a part of his entire world.  Not like this.  Blaze mourned him in the Apache way, and he led the pallbearers in a black business suit – always a man of two worlds.  Lynette was there to help guide him through this tragedy, but at times, she stood aside and let him work through the pain, which no one could relieve.

While Clare, with Lynette’s help, made the necessary funeral arrangements, Blaze went back to the exact spot on his own ranch where Aaron had fallen.  The blood still stained the brown earth, and there were dozens of foot prints all around where the sheriff’s investigating team had tramped.  But the dark red, dried blood was still there.  He did not cry this time.  He was angry.

“Before I give myself over to the long sleep, I will find the man who took you away,” he vowed to his dead brother.  “I will send him to you and you can have your revenge.”

Blaze slept only briefly, and then fitfully for days after Aaron’s murder, and after the funeral, he seemed to just give up sleeping.  He paced the floors of the cabin as if looking for something he’d misplaced; he wandered around the ranch going nowhere, coming from no place.  His strong legs supported him as he stood for hours looking out at all he and Aaron had acquired.  With all of what seemed to be mindless behavior, he was thinking, planning – putting Aaron’s death out into the Universe.  His every waking moment was thoughtfully in pursuit of the man who took his brother away from him.

Hawk came from town with possible news.

“I started asking around, you know, asking some of the people who know everything that goes on up here on the mountain.  A man, an old drunk, who was being patched up in the hospital’s emergency room on the night Aaron was killed, told some folks that a blinded Indian was also being treated that night.  He had cuts on his face and pieces of rocks had lodged in his eye socket.  The doctor’s couldn’t save the eye.  Whatever sent the fragments into his eye must have come from something high powered, because the pieces literally chewed up his eye socket,” Hawk said.  There was only one man, maybe two, that Blaze knew of who would want to hurt him, but none that would have malice toward Aaron – unless – unless – the bullets were meant for him!

Blaze went looking for Tomahawk Mason, who was nowhere to be found.  From all he Hawk and Maurice could gather, Tomahawk came up missing immediately after Aaron was murdered.  He surmised – no, now he was sure – that the bullet was meant for him, but he had to know why.  Blaze hired a full investigative team out of the state capital,
Santa Fe, and what they finally brought to him shocked and stunned him.

“Mr. Snowdown,” the somewhat shabbily clad, but expert investigator said, sitting in Blaze’s home office, “evidentially, a P.P.Izzard and Tomahawk Mason were involved in some rather illegal land dealings with a crew from up around
Albuquerque.  Seems they’d promised a big money land deal that would bring this crew, or syndicate if you will, countless millions of dollars in a quick turn over scheme.  Well, for whatever the reason, the scheme went bust, and the syndicate lost their ass, if you know what I mean,” he said, chuckling.  “And because they were beholdin’ to some crime family out on the west coast, somebody had to pay for the fuck up.  You know what I mean?” he asked, knowing that Blaze had his meaning.

“Go on,” Blaze said.

“Well, they found parts and pieces of Izzard in trash bags out at the County landfill down off of Interstate 25 a few years back, and his head showed up outside Phoenix, Arizona, with his ears and tongue cut out.   It seems that Tomahawk disappeared from the face of the earth for several years.  He showed back up on a computer print-out at the border patrol center in southern Arizona with some Salvadoran illegals, but because he’s an American citizen, he was processed, held for a few days for investigation while they verified his citizenship, then released about a week before your brother was murdered.  Somehow he made his way back up here and was trying to squeeze money out of some tribesmen so he could leave the country again.  By all rights, he probably would have wound up in bags like Izzard, if he hadn’t been able to get across the border and blend in.  You know what I mean?” he asked again.

“Yeah,” Blaze replied flatly.

“There’s a heap of money out on his head by the syndicate because his mess brought several of them to federal trial and most went to prison. Another bunch had their homes, bank accounts, cars and boats confiscated by the feds, and let’s just say that there are a hell-of-a-lot of influential people who lost their asses, and want his, you know what I mean,” he said as a statement, not a question.

“Where’s the
son-of-a-bitch?” Blaze asked impatiently.

“As we speak right now,” he’s back in the hospital in
El Paso.  He was headed back across the border.  Seems like something happened to his eye.  An old injury to one eye got infected and the infection has spread all over his face, some kind of flesh eating shit,” the private investigator laughed.  “He told a man on his ward that some fella shot at him and the fragments of the surrounding rocks flew up in his eye, that’s how he got originally hurt.”

Blaze sat forward in his desk chair.

“What hospital?” he asked with a menacing tone to his voice.

The investigator didn’t answer right at first.  He looked long and hard at the expression on Blaze’s face, measuring him.

“Mr. Snowdown, I’m not a rich man, but I
could
be, if I let the right people know where he is.  Like I said, there’s a heap of money out there if he’s found and, huh,…if you get my meaning…  I’m in the information business, and certain people will pay handsomely for this information.”  There was a pause again, as Blaze rose from his chair and walked over to the window of his office.  He looked up at the mountain.  He reasoned that when Tomahawk shot Aaron and his hired hand shot back, the rifle bullets must have struck extremely close to Tomahawk’s face, spraying those rock fragments into his eye.