A Feather in the Rain (23 page)

Gut-shrunk and wolfish, he walked into Callanan's. The bass was grilled to perfection and two pints of stout put a polish to it. A sharp loneliness came upon him. His head went down and he wondered what she was doing right then. The longer she was gone, the greater grew the emptiness.

T
he fan-stirred air blew warm across his skin. The seeping scent of honeysuckle through the parted curtain drifted in the room. What am I to do? The answer was prompt, filled with dread. Leave it alone. Don't call. It's done. But then came the weakness that said no, I can't do that. I cannot toss away this thing of beauty as if it had no value. But then another voice told him that he could, he should, he was too old, and she needed things he couldn't give or wouldn't give. He left his bed and went to the porch.

He curled his arm and leaned his face against the rubbed surface of the cedar post and wished for a way to be shut of it all. But wishing ran before memory as he heard the screen door clack shut in the Colorado afternoon and saw her smiling, walking in ripples of pale blue silk among beards and spurs, denim and flannel. He felt again the harsh beating of his rapid heart followed hard upon by damn near every moment he'd spent with her and every thought and feeling he'd ever had, until his brain became a bowl of cold Quaker Oats. He went back to bed.

Deep in the night, he suddenly turned and sat up. He rubbed his face and stared as if at some threat. Then he reached for the phone.

Since he'd watched her slender grace round the bend in the boarding bridge and disappear, a fever of loneliness had seeped into his bones. She had given him the power to live again. Now it was gone.

He touched the numbers. Bear's recorded voice answered.

“It's Jesse. Is anybody there?” Stupid question. I'm waking the whole house up.

“Hey,” she said. If smoked honey made a sound, that was what he heard. “What are you doing? Besides waking up the whole house?”

“I can't even begin to understand what happened. I only know I've never been so unhappy.”

“Well, I've been having a great time. Dining and dancing, doing the town, burning up the streets of Kiowa…” Her voice grew small and sad. “Having a big time…”

“I love you, Holly. I need to see you. We can't leave it like this. Meet me somewhere.”

“Where?”

“Wherever you like. You name it.”

“I've always wanted to go to Santa Fe.”

F
lame-light flickered a warm glow on thick, white walls of adobe.

Mesquite burned in a corner igloo. They sat on a deep Navajo rug. She looked across the top of her clasped knees into the shadows of his mind.

He stared at his right foot as if the secrets of the universe were in his big toe. “I'm a desperate man. I come here ignorant. I never did think I knew much of anything. Now the only thing I know is that I don't know nothing.” He lifted his eyes to hers. “Except that I love you. I guess I came here to tell you that I shouldn't be here. It could never work. I'd be jealous of every man who looked at you. I'm not that good a fighter. You'd probably end up a nurse, taking care of an old geezer dribbling on hisself and wishing you'd never met me. If we had a child, I'd be going to his soccer practice with a walker. You might even end up murdering me and going to the gas chamber.”

She rolled the wineglass along her lip and peered across its rim
with silver-ice in her eyes. A soft smile curved in silence. Then she said, softly, “If you're afraid of love…you're afraid of life. If you fear life, you are already mostly dead. You're this rough tough cowboy outlaw bronc rider who's done a bunch of dangerous stuff, but have you ever really taken a risk?”

She continued to speak gently. “Nothing is permanent, Jesse. Everything passes. That's what you're afraid of, the passing. So you don't get involved. I understand that. But when I'm with you, I'm not afraid.”

“Why?”

“Trust. I want to get close to you quickly, to experience as much of you as I can before it's gone.”

“What's gone?”

“You, me, it, us. I could die tomorrow. I could die right now, in the next ten seconds. It happens. We know that. My brother and Zack were younger than I am. If I died before you, then all your arguments are invalid.”

In that moment, as the words left her lips and the sweet scent of crushed lilac and Holly Marie came to his senses, he knew certainly that he couldn't live without this woman as long as he believed she wanted him. The dark places in his mind filled with light. An enormous spine-bending burden lifted and ceased to exist. “You are a silver-tongued devil…” He reached into his pocket and took out a ring and placed it in her palm. “I love you.” She held the ring to the firelight. An opera of dazzling facets sparkled as his heart-powered mouth began to babble. “It's an antique…platinum…from the twenties. The blue on the sides are sapphires, kinda like your eyes sometimes…and the rest are…little diamond chips around the…the big one, the huge one, the monster.” Then he started to laugh at himself. “Everything loses its meaning without you…and I want to ask you to marry me.”

“When?”

“When get married?”

“When do you want to ask me?”

He laughed. “Now. I'm asking you now.”

“Asking me what?”

“Will you marry me?”

She dropped her eyes and said, “Jesse, I would like more than anything in the world to be able to say yes. But I can't. I can't turn off my desire to have a child. I want it so much. It would be a compromise I know I couldn't live with.”

“I've thought about it. A lot. I've been stuck in a rut for so long it's come to seem normal. I'd forgotten what it's like to have a new thought, a new feeling, see things in a different way. You've made me realize that. So I'm turning loose all my old rules and beliefs. I want to start out clean and new with you. I just want to see where you take me. Please be my wife.”

“You mean that? You'd be happy about being a daddy?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Then I'd be happy and proud to be your wife. But first you have to ask Bear.”

“Okay. I'll ask Bear.”

“I'm serious. You have to ask Bear.” It was something she'd thought about ever since she first knew what it meant to be female, a man asking her daddy for her hand in marriage. “Jesse, this is the most beautiful ring. She held it between her thumb and forefinger. He took it and slipped it on her finger. She held her hand to the light and whispered, “A perfect fit. I can feel the love in it. Do you know whose it was?”

“No. There were three I liked. All different but from the same era. I closed my eyes and had the man put each one separately in my hand. I just held them. This one said take me and when I opened my eyes, it was the one I liked the best.” He took her in his arms and eased her down to the thick rug and nuzzled his lips in the fragrant softness under her hair. Her pale arms laced around his neck, she slid her leg between his knees and said, “You're a Goofy-head.”

“Are you really gonna be my wife?” he whispered in her ear.

She pushed her lips to his mouth. “Yes,” she murmured.

B
ear was putting the fluff to the gray's bedding with a rake. Jesse had his arms hung across the back of the mare, his fingers absently massaging her side. “So, Bear, this may not be the best news you've ever heard. Hopefully, it won't be the worst. But if it would be about halfway tolerable for you and Ruby…I would like to ask Holly to marry me. I love her more than I can say. I'll take real good care of her, the best I can in every way.”

Bear looked slapped. He leaned on the rake as he absorbed what he'd just heard. A huge grin began to spread across his bright face till his teeth sparkled in the morning Colorado light. He laughed and said, “Hey. That's great. I know she loves you. We all do.” They came together and Bear locked his bear arms around Jesse in a bear hug.

An hour later they were all sitting on the porch in the purple of the evening admiring the ring and talking about a wedding.

I
t was Holly's idea to marry in the place where they met. There were still a few hours before the ceremony. Larry and a band of outlaws sat with Jesse on the bunkhouse porch torturing him. Larry glanced at a pickup coming at the far end of the drive. The truck jerked forward then stopped, then jerked forward again, meandering from one side of the road to the other as it made its way toward them. As it got close enough to identify its occupants, one could see arms waving wildly and big upper body movement on the part of the passenger. Larry said, “Oh, shit. I don't believe it. That crazy bastard…” He stood shaking his head and laughed.

“What?” said Jesse.

“Fred Langston. This guy is something else. He's got a mechanical arm and leg. No foot. He carves his own pegs. He drives a tractor. Takes a truck completely apart and puts it back together. He can climb a ladder faster than a fireman. Cat is his girlfriend. She's blind. Can't see a damn thing. He's got her driving that truck.”

Just then the truck swerved and came to a cushioned halt against a yielding scrub oak. They were too far to hear but when they got out to switch places, it was clear they were laughing hard. Fred backed the truck out of the bush, drove up to the house and left Cat to go in on her own while he marched his particular mechanical legswinging gait to the bunkhouse porch and smiled at the men laughing and said, “What?”

Someone handed him a beer and asked if he wanted a shot of tequila to wash it down. Fred used his prosthetic hook to pop the can and replied, “Oh, my God. If I have a shot of that, it'll make me want to bring back stuff I never even stole.”

When someone asked what the hell he was doing having a blind woman drive his truck, he scratched a cheek constantly furred with a white stubble and said, “She usually does pretty good, but we got to laughing. You know, most times I forget she's blind. I mean, she doesn't act like someone who's blind. I saw a woman one day showing her photographs and Cat just stood there like she was seeing them. I don't know what the hell I was thinking of, but one time I asked her if she didn't think I ought to change a light bulb that was burnt out. She said, ‘I don't give a damn if you change the light bulb, I'm in the dark all the time anyway.' Hell, I like her though. I tell her I'm young and good lookin'.”

Larry had gotten hold of a cream-colored carriage from a friend who showed driving horses. It was fittingly elegant, festooned with flowers artfully applied by volunteers led by Larry's wife, Rosie. Larry had hitched one of his golden Belgians to carry the bride and her father to the congregation that spilled from the porch to the grassy knoll around it. Jesse and his best man, Larry, looked like the Earp boys in their black suits and white shirts as they waited for the carriage to appear.

A halo of light at the end of a beam lancing through the trees outlined the carriage coming over the rise. The big Belgian, proud of his task, stepped out smartly and headed down the gentle green slope to the side of the porch. A plain but pretty woman with long
dark hair and drooping eyelids filled the air with enchantment from her violin. Holly's beauty always took Jesse by surprise. A fairytale princess at her father's hand, she descended from the carriage. Jesse's heart pounded the air from his lungs. She was all in pale, dusty beige like white gone old. A broad-brimmed straw hat, the veil sashed with silk at her neck. Behind the symbol of concealment, he saw her eyes blaze like diamonds in the sun and the pink of her lips smiling softly in the shadow. He knew the flowing folds of her dress cloaked a tumultuous heart. Bear brought her forward in the rustle and scent of silk and civet, a living portrait of feminine elegance, grace, and beauty.

When he heard her say I do, a flood of tears rushed to the rims of his eyes. He bit his lip to lock them there.

They spent the night in each other's arms in one of the cabins, whispering child things and declarations of passion. The next morning, Larry drove them down to Colorado Springs, put them in his twin-engine Cessna, flew them to San Francisco, bought them lunch at an Italian place near the wharf, then kissed them goodbye, flew back to Colorado, and rode four horses before walking up to the house, with his cell phone to his ear, to wash his face for supper.

T
hey walked the hills, rode the cable cars, and climbed the broad gray steps to the Fairmont Hotel. They tumbled on the bed next to a cart with caviar, smoked salmon, triangles of toast, lemon slices, bits of eggs, chopped onions, and black pepper. They clinked their glasses and emptied them and kissed each other's lips wet with wine. She took the bottle and laughed wantonly as the champagne foamed over the rim of her glass and onto the rings on her fingers. She flicked her tongue over the platinum and diamonds and refilled Jesse's glass. She reached her champagne hand to his face and slipped a finger in his mouth and poking at the inside of his cheek, said, “You're a Moolie Monster.”