Winter Rain (37 page)

He hadn’t been bitten like that in … Jonah couldn’t remember a woman ever biting him before. Not in anger. Nor in passion.

Hurriedly leaving the smoky cantina, the whore led the two horsemen across the alameda, a tree-lined walk, then on down the muddy street pocked with the holes cut by recent hooves and streaked with greasy rivulets carved by iron-rimmed wheels, each silvery, moonlit sliver of water afloat with the day’s refuse tossed from most every door leading into the rain-drenched darkness. On she took them to the poorest part of this squalid village, where the houses squatted like colorless mud toads amid the low-hanging smoke of cedar fires.

First she took them to a small stable, where they stripped their horses and pack animals. It was there the woman told the Indian to make himself a bed of straw. When Hook had loosened the lashes that held his bedroll behind his saddle and dropped it atop some hay in an empty stall, the whore shook her head.

“Oh, no,
Señor.
You will come with me,” she had told Hook, beckoning not just with her finger, but with those black eyes like evil a’light.

Telling the Indian that they would be in the small hut across the muddy street, she led Jonah back into the storm and darkness, dodging puddles and piles of droppings gone cold with spring’s onslaught before ducking out of the rain. In the tiny room she lit a single candle. When he straightened there beside the short doorway, the crude door hung awap on its loose leather hinges, Jonah had to remove his hat to keep it from brushing against the low ceiling, his shadow cavorting across the near wall in the dance of flame thrown out by that tallow candle.

She had turned then, her black hair dripping with rain, catching the flicker of the single flame like a red mirror,
hair strands hung in dark tendrils over her eyes as she pulled his coat from his arms, gently nudging him back toward one of the only two chairs in the room. It sat opposite the narrow rope-and-timber bed. She turned away and went to a small table, where he heard her tear a strip of cloth. His eyes danced across the walls—carved in the mud wall over the bed was a niche where stood a small painted saint, hands folded before him, a gilt halo perched on the crown of his head. Beside the door hung a figure he supposed was the Christ—this one fashioned poorly of corn straw and shucks. On its hand-carved head lay a wreath of bramble thorns, drops of bright red blood stained the brow.

She came to him, gently tore open the slash in his sleeve, and dabbed cold water onto the wound. He didn’t think it deep enough to worry over as she snapped a cactus leaf in two and squeezed its milky juice onto his arm, working it down into the long wound. That complete, the woman took the pieces of cloth she had torn from one of her own garments and wrapped Jonah’s forearm. Turning it this way and that, she inspected her work and her knot, then knelt before his knees.

Reaching for his belt, she hurriedly opened his britches. Jonah rose off the chair slightly as she took his flesh in her hands. He was the dry tinder, she the flame licking him into fire. He was rigid by the time she broke away to pull off his boots, then yanked his trail-stiffened canvas britches off his legs. In a damp trail of puddles tracked clear across the clay floor, she carelessly threw his coat and shirt.

His breath came short, in heavy gushes, spiraling in clouds of hot vapor in the cold room as she tucked her arms inside her chemise and pushed it down to her waist, exposing the small, firm breasts. With one hand she again took hold of his rigid flesh, the other hand encircling the back of his neck to pull him toward the dark aureole of her breast.

He hadn’t sucked long when he found the warm, sweetish liquid spilling across his tongue. That unforgettable taste compelled him to draw at the breast harder still, more insistently as she locked him against her, drove her hand up and down the length of him like a ramrod. Jonah moved his mouth to the other breast and found the nipple already dripping in milky readiness.

It was then that she drew away from him and said, “No,
Señor
. Do not take everything.”

She stood, right before him, pushing the chemise, skirt and all, down over her hips, stepped out of them, and flung it all to the low bed. Now she wore only the crude moccasins that were all most cantina women had to wear—nothing so rich as shoes imported from Madrid or Barcelona. Not even a pair of high-heeled dancing shoes brought up the trade routes from Chihuahua.

When at last she returned to Jonah, she took one of his hands and put it between her thighs, massaging herself on him, working his fingers back and forth over her warm cleft, into the very moistness of her. When she finally pulled his hand free and came astraddle him, settling slowly while he groaned in exquisite, delicious torment, Jonah wanted to explode.

She felt it, his readiness, and immediately stopped her moving atop him. Reaching beneath her with one hand, the whore gently cupped his scrotum in her palm and pulled ever so slightly. Again and again she milked him until she felt she had done enough to delay his climax.

Then she resumed her work atop his rigid shaft.

Twice she performed that same magic on him, delaying his release, and twice more she thrust herself atop him, trembling and whimpering, reaching her own climax with him still firm and unspent inside her.

When she finally brought her teeth away from the side of his neck, Jonah sensed a temporary relief wash over him as that exquisite pain diminished. Once more he could
concentrate on the woman. Laying his hands along either side of her face, Jonah laid a middle finger across her rouged lips. Instantly, eagerly, she opened and swallowed the finger whole, sucking on it playfully as she drew his heated flesh back and forth into that deepest part of her.

Her black eyes smoldered, shiny and as dark as chimney soot. With a growing frenzy of whimpers come to growls, the woman climbed and climbed evermore until he spent himself in her, causing the whore to cry out as she shuddered savagely atop his lap each time he pulled her hips downward atop him brutally.

“Sí! Sí! Ahora, Señor—sí!”

She sat huddled against him as he grew soft, murmuring something unintelligible into the side of his neck not bruised by the passionate clamp of her crooked teeth. When at last Jonah felt he could trust his knees not to turn to water beneath him, he rose unsteadily, still holding her against him, and carried the woman to the small bed. There he dragged back the musty, threadbare blankets and laid her atop the bare tick mattress.

He tried to stand, to look for his clothes, but she pulled insistently on his hand, bringing him down beside her before pulling the blankets over them both. She fell asleep quickly, her head nestled in the curve of his shoulder, his now-soft flesh curled protectively between her two hands.

When Jonah awoke, it came of something easy: moving only his eyelids, and those barely opening, sorting his place in things. Through those gritty slits he first saw the fading of the night’s darkness and the graying of the light. It was raining again and he was warm here beside the woman, in her blankets, sensing the rise and fall, the slight rasp of her breathing. So he closed his eyes again, knowing after all this time on this trail, there was nowhere he needed to go in any great rush.

The next time he awoke, Hook found her gone. The damp air chilled him as he sat up, the blankets sliding
away. He dressed quickly, listening to what few distant sounds announced the village coming awake. As Jonah pulled on his last boot, the woman pushed open the door and reached down, ushering in a small child, who heaved herself over the doorsill, then immediately stopped in fright, wide eyes locked on the gringo. In the crook of the whore’s arm she carried a second child, a bundled infant.

She closed the crude door behind her, shutting off some of the chill, shutting out the rain-soaked breeze, and pulled the long black rebozo from her head, shaking the drops from it as she asked, “You go before breakfast?”

He glanced at the small earthen oven built into the corner of this mud-and-wattle hut. It would serve as oven, stove, and fireplace, easily heating the small jacal.

“I have miles to go,” he said quietly, gazing down at the small child, a girl, who squeezed up-against her mother’s leg with a thumb pressed against her lower lip, gazing up at the stranger with doe-eyed fright.

“Please,
Señor.
You can eat. Go get your friend. He will want something hot to eat too. Go, get him and I will heat up some coffee.”

Hers was a smile that warmed him from the inside out. Jonah finally relented. “Yes. I will let you cook us breakfast … if you let me give you what you will cook in your pots.”

She nodded at last. “It is settled. Go get your friend and I will settle my children.”

As he pulled on his coat and set his hat down upon his hair, the woman laid the sleeping infant in the bed, then motioned the older child over. She was taking the thin, crudely sewn coat from the girl’s arms as Hook ducked from the door and crossed the muddy street to claim Two Sleep from his warm, fragrant bed atop the stable hay. While the Indian climbed from his blankets, Jonah stepped to the jakes out back, a stinking room made of thin tree limbs daubed with mud to hold back the wind and rain.

Returning to the mud hut with the Shoshone, Hook shut her small door behind him. She knelt at the corner fireplace, a small fire already warming the tiny room. Motioning for the Indian to sit in one of the two chairs beside a narrow table, the woman went back to her work over the blackened skillet. Jonah dropped his oiled canvas bag beside her. From it the woman pulled some hard-bread, a small sack of cornmeal, and an oiled paper wrapped about nondescript strips of dried meat, as black as the bottom of that skillet of hers.

Jonah turned back to look over the rest of the room and noticed the small child again. His heart went to her as quickly, those big eyes so filled with fright of him and the tall Indian. She stood frozen at the edge of the firelight, there at the foot of the bed, gazing anxiously at the two strangers.

“She is afraid of men?” he asked the woman. “That is a good thing, perhaps.”

Turning her head slightly, the woman said, “No. I think she is most afraid of your friend. Indians.”

“Sí,” the little girl responded, her voice a’quaver “Comancherias! Comancherias!”

“No, no,” the woman soothed, rising and going to the child. She took the girl in her arms and lifted her, stroking her black hair. “Not Comancheria. From far, far away to the north is where the Comancheria live.”

When she brought her daughter into the greasy light of that flickering candle, into the spreading glow of the fireplace’s warmth, Jonah was not immediately struck with the child’s garb. Yet as he watched the whore calm her daughter, explaining that there were many tribes of Indians and they were not all the feared and hated Comanche, who rode back and forth through this country plying their seasonal raids into Sonora before they returned to their homes in the southern reaches of the Staked Plain—Hook was eventually taken by something strange in the girl’s
clothing. Rather than dressing the child in a small chemise and skirt, smaller copies of adult clothing, the woman had instead draped her daughter in what appeared to be a boy’s shirt, long enough to reach the crude, wet moccasins the child wore. It was plainly a pullover, three-button style, the sort to be found among most households on the southern plains, the sort offered for sale in any sutler’s or mercantile.

Yet this was not a white settlement, his thoughts boiled as he studied the child again.

“Step over here,” he told the woman gruffly, with roughness taking her elbow in his hand.

“Señor?”

“Come over here to the light,” he said, his voice low. “I don’t mean to frighten you.”

Her eyes pleaded with him. “My child,
Señor.”

“Yes, I know,” he replied, trying to smile at the young girl. “Just … just bring her into the light.”

That look of fear still captured on her face, the whore did as Hook demanded, reluctantly bringing her young daughter closer to the light.

When he reached out to touch the long hem of the shirt, the child shrieked and the woman pulled back. “No. Just tell her not to be afraid. I won’t hurt her. Only want to look at this shirt”

“She grows so fast,
Señor
,” the woman began to explain, apologetically. “I can’t keep her in nice things—a child that plays in the streets when my mother watches her. I go to work and my mother watches—”

“All right,” he interrupted the whore, having inspected the dingy, faded hem of the shirt. “Turn her around. I want to see in the back of the dress,
Señorita.
Please, turn your daughter around so that I can look.”

In curiosity the woman turned her daughter’s back toward Hook. He gently pushed aside the child’s long hair and twisted open the back of the collar.

“Over here—to the light more.”

She cooperated by leaning the child more into the candlelight on the narrow table where Two Sleep sat watching the whole process with curious eyes of his own.

Jonah felt it rush over him as he let go the collar of the shirt. He touched it with his fingertips, running his hand down the full length of the child’s back until his hand rested on the woman’s bare forearm.

“What do you want for the dress?”

Her eyes narrowed. “
Señor?”

“How much will you take for the child’s dress?”

“I do not understand—”

He turned abruptly and dragged up his outer coat, stuffing his hand into a small inside pocket. Pulling out a small skin pouch, Jonah brought forth a single eagle into the candlelight. She gasped slightly at the sight of the gold piece, her eyes grown even bigger while the frightened child buried her face in the crook of her mother’s shoulder.

“I’ll pay for the dress.”

“Señor
, I do not know what to say—”

“Say yes,” he interrupted, his mind scratching for more of the Spanish words to express it. All of it was coming so hard—staring at that scrap of shirting hung over the small child like a simple sack dress: … how dingy, dirty, sun faded, and stained. Across all these years.