Bed of Roses (2 page)

She hated that he drank, for although the years were certainly catching up with him, he remained big and strong for his age. There were many heavy chores around La Escondida that he could perform. Drunk as he always was, however, his size and strength did Zafiro no good at all.

“He is not looking where he is going,” Sister Carmelita said. “The tree—”

“Maclovio, the tree!” Zafiro shouted. “The tree!”

Maclovio walked straight into the thick trunk of the oak. His head fell back over his shoulders; his bottle slipped from his hand. A moment later he crashed to the ground, flat on his back, rendered completely unconscious.

Zafiro sighed. “It is just as well, Sister. If the tree had not knocked him out, the liquor would have.”

Sister Carmelita nodded. “He spends more than half his time in a senseless state. And Pedro spends the same amount of time on his net. Look at him there,
niña.”

Zafiro glanced at Pedro, who sat on his large rock with his knotted rope net spread out in front of him. A string of keys dangling around his scrawny neck, he was busy adding and tying more rope to the net.

Another sigh escaped Zafiro as she continued to watch him work on the net. He claimed he had lost the other one. The first one that had hauled in hundreds of fish.

The one Jesus had told him to throw over the side of the boat.

Pedro believed he was Saint Peter the Apostle. The keys he wore were the keys to heaven. His rock was the same that Jesus had sworn to build His church upon. And if ever Pedro heard a cock crow three times, he dissolved into tears that only hours of prayer could stem.

Sweet Pedro loved to preach. To tell Bible stories. A pity he always got the sacred tales so mixed up.

He was seventy-seven now, the oldest of the Quintana Gang. Once upon a time his expertise with weapons had been the stuff of legends. But the hands that had once handled guns with such precision now tied and knotted rope into a net that was already almost too heavy to lift.

“And then there is Lorenzo,” Sister Carmelita said, pointing to the third member of the Quintana Gang as he exited the cabin and walked across the well-swept yard.

“Yes, and then there is Lorenzo,” Zafiro echoed, smiling as he sauntered toward her with a ginger-colored chicken in his thin arms.

Lorenzo was seventy-three. In his prime, a lock or safe didn’t exist that he couldn’t open. Claiming he could hear soundless clicks within catches, bolts, and other sorts of metal fasteners, he could unlock whatever device the gang needed open.

But tiny sounds within locks were not all his sharp ears heard.

The years fell away, and Zafiro remembered all the times she’d bared her soul to Lorenzo while she was growing up. After her father’s death. Sometimes she’d sat by the campfire with him while the rest of the gang slept. She’d taken long strolls and gone fishing with him. During those times he hadn’t only heard her speak to him with his ears, he’d listened with his heart.

He couldn’t listen anymore. Couldn’t be her confidant ever again.

Because Lorenzo was deaf.

He slept almost constantly now, drifting into slumber quickly and without caring where he happened to be at the time. And when he awakened it was as though he hadn’t slept at all. Indeed, he immediately continued whatever conversation he’d been having before falling asleep.

“You took your nap, Lorenzo?” Zafiro shouted at him when he neared her.

“Lap?” He returned her tender smile with a toothless one of his own. “Yes, you used to sit on my lap, Zafiro, but you are too big to sit there now.”

“Nap!”
Zafiro shouted again, her lips almost touching his hairy ear. “I asked if you had taken your—”

She stopped trying to talk to him. What was the use? Lorenzo never heard anything correctly, no matter how loudly one shouted.

“I have been napping,” Lorenzo said. Wiping the remains of sleep from his eyes, he slowly sat down on the ground and leaned against the barrel. “Jengibre was bothering Tia, so I brought her outside with me.” Gently, he caressed the hen called Jengibre. “Tia is making tortillas, and Azucar is mending a rip in one of her dresses.”

Tia and Azucar, Zafiro thought, her gaze rising to the window of the room the two women shared in the cabin. Precious Tia had done all the cooking and doctoring for the gang while they’d still been in the outlaw business, and declining in years though she was, her culinary and medical skills hadn’t diminished. She was seventy-one now, but, provided she had enough food and other supplies, she continued to keep everyone at La Escondida well-fed and healthy.

“I do not know what I would do without you, Tia,” Zafiro whispered. “If only…if only…

If only Tia could accept the fact that her son was dead, she finished silently, compassion for the woman sweeping through her. Tia had lost her little Francisco to cholera several years before she’d joined the Quintana Gang, but nothing or no one could convince the grieving woman that he was gone.

Indeed, she “saw” Francisco in every man she met.

With the exceptions of Maclovio, Lorenzo, and Pedro, no man was safe from her unfulfilled desire to mother.

And dear, dear Azucar. “Oh, Azucar,” Zafiro murmured, another wave of tenderness filling her heart as she contemplated Azucar.

The woman had seen eighty-two years come and go and had spent a little over twenty of those years as a highly successful harlot. When Ciro had met her, however, age had already stolen her beauty and she’d been but a destitute old woman with an empty belly and a bag full of scanty crimson gowns. Ciro’s big heart had gone out to her, and the gang had taken care of her ever since.

Special
care of her, for Azucar had yet to come to terms with her age. Though her wrinkled skin hung off her limbs in much the same way scraggly moss drooped off thin, dead tree branches, a decrepit woman was not the reflection she saw when she gazed into a mirror.

In Azucar’s dark and bleary eyes she was still the young and desirable seductress she’d once been. She continued to wear the scarlet satin gowns that had been her strumpet’s garb, and there was nothing she enjoyed more than talking about all the sensual things she would do to the next man who paid for her services.

Through the years Zafiro had learned a great deal about sexual intimacy while listening to Azucar’s vivid descriptions of lovemaking. Ciro had never told her a thing about what happened in bed between a man and a woman, and she’d never asked. Who better to learn from than a seasoned lady of the evening?

Yes, indeed, Zafiro mused, her thoughts wandering. When she married she would know exactly what her husband wanted from her on their wedding night. She would know exactly—

Her daydream ended abruptly.
When she married?
Save Maclovio, Lorenzo, and Pedro, she didn’t know a single other man. And since it was quite likely that she would be forced to remain hidden away in these mountains for a good many years to come, the chance that she would ever have a sweetheart, much less a husband, was nonexistent.

“Zafiro?” Sister Carmelita murmured. “Do I see tears in your eyes, my child?”

“Tears?” The very word dried the moisture that had just begun to sparkle in Zafiro’s eyes. “I do not have time for weeping, Sister. Did you bring the gun?”

Sister Carmelita slipped her hand into the deep pocket of her habit and withdrew a small pistol. “It belongs to Rudolfo, the farmer who lives near the convent. I promised him I would return it to him. But there is only one bullet in it, Zafiro. Rudolfo, he did not have more to give to me. Poor Rudolfo. He is like many of the other villagers. His livestock have taken sick and died, and his crops do poorly. If I give you this gun you will pray for him?”

Zafiro shut her eyes.
Lord, take care of Rudolfo and us too. Amen.

She held out her hand, closing her fingers around the gun when Sister Carmelita gave the weapon to her. Staring down at it, she ran her fingers over the cool metal.

“You do not need more than one bullet anyway,” Sister Carmelita said. “Your men will not remember how to shoot. Do not do this to yourself, my child. Lorenzo, help me dissuade her from trying to do the impossible.”

In answer Lorenzo let out a snore so loud that it startled the birds from the trees.

Holding her head so high that her chin nearly pointed to the sky, Zafiro marched away from the edge of the woods and placed the gun in Pedro’s bony lap. “Where is your faith, Sister Carmelita? You are too doubting.”

“Yes,” Pedro agreed, his gnarled hands caressing the pistol. “You are too doubting, Sister. Just like my good friend Matthew.”

“Thomas,” Sister Carmelita corrected him. “It was Thomas who doubted.”

“Thomas is a tax collector,” Pedro argued. “He doubts nothing. Do you know I once saw Thomas bring a dead man back to life? Cain was the dead man’s name, and he had a brother called Noah. Noah lived in the Garden of Eden with Moses, who spent most of his time turning water into wine. Moses was—”

“Pedro, please,” Zafiro pleaded. “Enough stories. Now, show Sister Carmelita what you remember. Shoot the gun.”

Pedro lifted the pistol from his lap and raised his arms. Squinting, he pulled the trigger. The resulting explosion knocked him off his rock, and the bullet he fired ricocheted off a tree trunk, shot a hole through the top of Sister Carmelita’s wimple, and finally smashed into the chicken coop. The wooden birdhouse toppled over, its gate swinging wide open. Squawking and flapping their wings, all nine hens raced around the yard.

“Santa
Maria,
my chickens!” Knowing the barnyard fowl would disappear into the mountain coves if she didn’t catch them, Zafiro scurried after them, Pedro doing his best to help her.

With as much dignity as a nun with a bullet hole in her wimple could muster, Sister Carmelita plucked the pistol off the ground and headed toward the hidden exit from La Escondida. “Help her, Lord,” she prayed as she slipped through the secret opening within the rocks and thick brush. “You are the only one who can give her what she needs. A miracle.”

A
week after her talk with
Sister Carmelita, Zafiro felt the strong need to visit the convent. Her worries about Luis had increased tenfold, and she knew that while a brief call on the nuns would not completely alleviate her fears, being with the holy women would at least help her to relax for a short time.

After warning her charges to behave while she was gone, she slipped out of La Escondida. As she turned to make sure the hidden entrance to the hideaway was secure, she noticed her pet cougar, Mariposa, stretched out upon a large, flat rock. The great cat gleamed in the sunlight, and she looked more like a gold statue than a living creature.

“Take care of La Escondida while I am with the sisters, Mariposa,” Zafiro told the lion. Smiling, she blew a kiss to her pet, then made her way down the craggy slopes. The trip to the convent was much easier and faster upon Rayo’s back, but the burro suffered a bruised hoof.

If only Coraje would let her mount him, Zafiro mused as she finally left the pebble-strewn ground and walked into the cool shade of an evergreen forest. But the coal-black stallion had never let anyone but Ciro near him. Now, after two years without being ridden, he was wilder than he’d ever been.

“Five elderly people, a hurt burro, the meanest stallion in Mexico, two lost chickens, and Luis searching the country for you, Zafiro,” she told herself aloud, swiping at low-hanging tree branches as she trudged through the pine-scented glade. “And do not forget that there is no meat, that the fences are falling down, that the roof leaks, or that every rabbit in the mountains thinks you have planted the vegetable garden especially for him!”

The burden of worry she bore became heavier with each step she took, and by the time the old Spanish mission came into her view, she felt as though she carried on her shoulders one of the Sierras themselves.

She stopped at the edge of the woods, her gaze missing nothing as she surveyed the area surrounding the convent. She truly enjoyed being with the good sisters, but each time she visited she took the chance of being seen by someone other than the nuns.

No one
could know where she was.

Finally convinced she was alone, she made her way to the convent door and rang the bell that hung suspended from a rusty hook in the stone wall. The scent of cut grass caught her attention while she waited for one of the nuns to come to the door. She also recognized the smell of freshly dug soil and decided the nuns had been toiling in their flower gardens this morning.

Other things began to capture her notice as well. The huge statue of the Blessed Mother stood upright in the flower bed. Only last week the granite sculpture had been lying on the ground, too heavy for the nuns to lift. The dead tree was gone too. The one that had been killed by lightning several years ago. Only a smoothly cut stump remained.

And the nuns’ quaint little pond was prettier than she’d ever seen it. The good sisters loved to sit on the stone benches around the pond, basking in the sun and watching turtles poke their heads out of the shining water. Sometimes they recited the rosary there too.

Zafiro had made a mental note to help them clean the pond, for the winter months had left the water slimy and filled with leaves and sticks. She was also going to try to mend the crumbling stones that encircled the pond.

The stones she saw now, however, were new, and there wasn’t a leaf or twig to be seen upon the glassy surface of the water.

Baffled, Zafiro turned to ring the bell again.

The door swung open abruptly. “Zafiro!” Sister Pilar exclaimed. “How good it is to see you, my child.”

The nun’s warm welcome drew Zafiro into the foyer and straight into Sister Pilar’s arms. Hugging the nun tightly, she closed her eyes and breathed deeply of all the aromas of the convent.

The perfume of lemon oil swirled around her, as did the hot smell of burning candles and wood smoke. She smelled roses, and the soap Sister Pilar used to wash her habit, and apple cake too, which was Mother Manuela’s favorite dessert.

The familiar scents were so comforting. The whole convent was, and Zafiro visited as often as she could. To find a bit of serenity. And to hear whatever news about the outside world that the nuns learned from travelers who stopped at the holy house for rest and a bit of food.