Whitehorse (11 page)
Johnny was on the cell phone to Triple A when she crawled into the truck. With the box resting on her lap, she sank into the dove-gray leather seats and closed her eyes.
After all these years, Johnny's voice sounded the same. Deep and smooth as a slow-flowing river. Funny how safe she suddenly felt, as if the world could disintegrate around her yet her reality would remain unscathed. Then again, he'd always had that effect on her.
Johnny hung up the phone and tossed it onto the back seat. Glancing over his left shoulder, he eased the truck out onto the highway.
They rode in silence toward the
Sacramento Mountains
, which were little more than a black silhouette against the star-filled sky. Occasionally, Leah peeked from under her lashes to see Johnny focused on the road ahead, wrist caught on the top of the steering wheel, shoulders cocked just slightly toward the driver's door.
Finally, she sat up, hitting something with her foot. She fished around the floorboard until coming up with a black kid-leather makeup bag that smelled strongly of floral perfume. The zipper had been left open. Inside were tubes of
Estée
Lauder lipsticks, a compact, nail polish, and a package of condoms—ribbed and lubricated for enhanced pleasure. One was missing.
Leah zipped the bag closed and placed it carefully on the console between her and Johnny. "Coming home from a date, I take it."
He glanced at the bag and shrugged.
"Anyone I know?"
"You know I don't kiss and tell, Leah."
"Still a gentleman where women are concerned." She smiled and fingered the bag. "She has money, I take it. Must have. Only a successful career woman can afford to spend twenty bucks for a tube of lipstick."
Hitting the blinkers, Johnny turned the truck onto Highway 70, bypassing the turnoff to downtown
Ruidoso.
If they continued to travel east they would ultimately arrive in
Roswell
—home of crashed UFOs and embalmed aliens. Once upon a time, at least once a month, she and Johnny had driven all the way out to
Roswell
, parked amid the cactus and tumbleweeds, made love under the night sky, and waited to be abducted by little green men with eyes like dragonflies.
They had not used condoms back then, ribbed or otherwise. She had wanted as much of Johnny Whitehorse inside her as she could get, consequences be damned.
"So …
is it serious between you?" she asked.
"You're sure asking a lot of questions."
"Am I being too personal?"
"I just wonder why you care."
"I don't. Just trying to make conversation."
He grinned. "I don't know if it's serious."
"Are you in love with her?"
"I don't know."
"Is she Native American?"
"Yes." He nodded.
"Figures."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Only that the last few years you've worked to focus the public's attention on the plight of the Native Americans, and most recently to shatter the stereotype of what most people think of Indians. It seems natural that you would settle down with a woman who reflects your ideals and beliefs."
"Jesus, you sound like Dolores."
"Is that her name?"
"No comment."
"Spoken like a fledgling politician."
Silence again, neither of them desiring to traverse the topic of politics, which would lead them to her father, which would ultimately cause a fight.
Johnny made a sudden turn down a gravel-topped road that was little better than a footpath, or so it seemed in the dark of the crowding forest. Had anyone else been driving, she would have questioned his motives. But Johnny Whitehorse knew the region around the reservation better than most people knew their own backyard. After ten minutes of bouncing over rocks and splashing through remnants of previous rains, they came out on
Carrizo Canyon Road
and headed south, passing signs pointing to
Mescalero
Lake
and the
Inn
of the Mountain Gods.
Laying her head back against the seat, Leah closed her eyes.
"Where is your husband?" Johnny asked.
"I don't have a husband," she replied sleepily.
"Your ex-husband then."
"I'm not sure. The last I heard he was living in the
Florida Keys
with some nineteen-year-old swimsuit cutie of the month and trying to write the great American novel. I think he believes he's Hemingway reincarnated. I expect to hear anytime that he's in
Spain
running with the bulls."
"You married a writer? I thought you had better sense than that."
"I married a petroleum engineer with a master's in business who, at the time, was vice-president of an independent oil company. Just after our son's third birthday he decided life was too short to waste it doing something he didn't enjoy. His dream had always been to live in the Keys and write. So bye-bye marriage and responsibility. I'm outta here for the good life. I'll drop you a line when I get settled. That was four years ago. The only correspondence I've gotten is a sad tale of his inability to pay his child support because 'those fools in
New York
publishing couldn't see a good book if it leaped up and hit them between the eyes.'"
"So you're getting nothing in the way of child support from the jerk?"
Leah opened one eye and found Johnny frowning, his hands clutching the steering wheel as if he were strangling it. "No," she replied, sounding much too weary for her own liking. "And when he quit his job there was no more insurance…" Clearing her throat, Leah sat up again and rubbed her eyes. "I really don't like to talk about it. There isn't any point. I learned a long time ago not to get mired down in
what ifs
and
if onlys.
You can drive yourself crazy wallowing in self-pity."
"Fucking loser," Johnny mumbled.
"My sentiments exactly," Leah replied, laughing softly.
"So how did you meet such a prize?"
"I hesitate to tell you."
He looked at her with his dark eyes, which were not amused, and something inside her trembled. "My father introduced us. He approved of Richard, so naturally I told myself that I could, eventually, come to love Richard."
"And did you?"
"Hey, for someone whose replies to me were made up of little more than 'no comment,' you sure are getting personal."
"I just want to know if you loved him."
"Why?"
"Because."
"Because why?"
"Just curious, I guess, over how a woman could marry a man she didn't
love …
and have a child with him."
"That's hardly unique in this day and age."
"If you're gonna make a baby you'd damn well better love who you're making it with, don't you think?"
"I goofed, okay? In a moment of lust we got too carried away to stop and take precautions. That, however, has nothing to do with how I feel for my son. He's my reason for living. My universe. I couldn't love him more if he had been planned."
Johnny veered off the road and onto a dirt driveway that wove over cattle guards and around cactus gardens. He hit the brakes hard, skidding toward a small white
frame house with a porch crowded with clay flowerpots. Shoving open his door, he said, "I hope to hell you like goats." Then slammed the door so hard the truck rocked.
SIX
A
s Johnny used wire cutters to peel the rusty strands of tearing teeth out of the dying goats' hides, he could not help but wonder how Leah would have managed the bloody, stomach-turning task on her own. Somehow, he suspected that she would have found a way. As she went about the somber business of euthanizing most of Ramona Skunk Cap's goat herd, her calm, soft-spoken professionalism reminded him of a surgeon—hands gentle and deft, eyes watchful, mind ticking over any and all possibilities of saving the bleating, agonized animals, more for their traumatized owner's sake than for the animals themselves.
The animals whose wounds were not so severe were moved into Ramona's kitchen. Under the yellow glare of a solitary bulb hanging from the ceiling, Leah pumped drugs into the animals' veins and proceeded to sew up their injuries while Johnny held the trembling goats down on the newspaper-covered kitchen table. Ramona stood in the background, talking to herself and smoking one cigarette after another.
At
went to bed, leaving Johnny and Leah to oversee the drugged goats themselves. On paper she found in a kitchen drawer, Leah wrote out explicit instructions on how to care for the animals over the next few days—how to clean the wounds, apply salves, administer antibiotics by crushing them into fine white powder and lacing it with honey in their feed. Leah would come back out in three days to check the goats for infection. She would remove the stitches in ten days. If Ramona had any questions or fears, she was not to hesitate calling Leah any time, day or night.
Leaving Leah to clean up the bloody kitchen, Johnny went outside to wrap up the dead goats in plastic garbage sacks. He found a shovel in the garage and buried the animals in a hole he dug behind the goat shed. To avoid the coyotes from returning and digging up the corpses, he dragged a rusty oil drum over the grave. Then he returned to the kitchen.
Leah sat in a chair, her head on the table, her eyes closed, cheek pressed into the blood-stained newspaper she had apparently failed to remove before falling asleep. She had not even managed to remove the rubber gloves from her hands.
He wanted to turn his back on the scene and walk off into the dark, put the memory of her lips parted in sleep back into his treasure trove of memories that had, over the years, numbed to the pain of losing her. Now here she was again, older, but just as beautiful, more beautiful because of life's hardships. The tiny lines around her eyes accentuated their depth of compassion. And those lips—always so easy to smile, to
laugh …
to kiss. They were bracketed now with slight creases. Not from smiling. No. He suspected that she did not do much smiling any longer.