Nightway (12 page)

His father hesitated, turning pale. He seemed to make an effort to ignore Hawk’s statement. “Under the circumstances, it might be best if you returned to college early.”

Hawk’s mouth curved into what was supposed to be a smile. “Run away? That’s what a Navaho would do, isn’t it?” he challenged in a derisive drawl. “When things get too hot and he’s outnumbered, he takes flight. I bet you’d like that—you … and Tom … and Carol. It would make it easy for you, wouldn’t it? You’d all like it even better if I never came back. But I’m not going.” Hawk let the words hang in the air for a minute, heavy and electric. “What’s more, I’m doing things
my
way from now on. And if you don’t like it, you can go to hell, J. B.”

Hawk walked away with all his muscles protesting. His departure stirred a murmur of voices in the audience of ranch hands. J. B. watched him leave in a numbed silence.

Lights burned in the windows of the Rawlins’ house, a house that—for the lack of a better word—had been his home for the last eleven years. Hawk fought off the
tiredness that was draining him of feeling and hauled himself up the steps to the back porch with the hand rail. His bruised and battered body wanted rest, but the night wasn’t over yet.

As he entered the back porch, he caught sight of a face in the mirror above the wash-sink. It wasn’t recognizable as his own. Cut, bruised, and swollen, it belonged to a monster with black hair.

Turning away from the mirror, Hawk shut the door. The movement left him facing the kitchen, where Tom Rawlins sat at the table, glaring at him. His hands were encircling a cup on the table in front of him. Hawk moved into the opening.

“I’ve come to get my things,” he stated in his pain-impaired voice.

“Get them and get out!” Rawlins snarled.

There was a time when Hawk would have held his silence, but all that had changed. “You know me, Tom. And you know I didn’t violate your daughter. You may have treated me like a son, but I was the last person you wanted as a son-in-law. What was it that turned your stomach, Tom? The idea of your daughter marrying a half-breed? Or J. B.’s bastard?” he challenged with curling contempt.

A dull red spread across Rawlins’ face. He made no comment but averted his murderous stare. Hawk knew he had scored a direct hit. Circling the table, he crossed the room to the hallway leading to his bedroom. Vera Rawlins appeared, stopping abruptly at the sight of Hawk, shock registering first in her expression, then an avenging anger.

Before she could give voice to it, Hawk spoke again, addressing his comment to both of them. “By the way, I wasn’t the first man to take your daughter, although I admit it probably wouldn’t have stopped me if she had been a virgin.”

He shouldered his way past the woman and down the darkened hallway to his small room. Cradling his right arm against his broken ribs, he leaned against the door to summon more strength, then moved to the bed and shook out the woolen blanket folded at the foot. It was the same blanket that had carried his personal belongings when he had first arrived here. Hawk used it again, emptying the dresser drawers and closets of his clothes and dumping them into the center of the blanket. When this was done, he paused to look around the room for any more of his possessions.

A faint sound came from the hallway outside his door, a sound that implied stealth. Hawk remained motionless, listening intently, his back to the door. He heard the furtive turning of the doorknob and his muscles coiled into alertness when it was pushed silently open. There was only one person who would want to see him without anyone else in the house knowing it—and that person was Carol.

“Hawk, I’m sorry.” It was her voice that whispered the apology to him. “I don’t know why I said what I did. I was so … scared. You’ve got to believe me. Mom and Dad would kill me if they knew I was in here with you.”

He pivoted slowly to face her. Her eyes widened as she recoiled at the sight of him, a hand reaching up to cover her mouth while her other arm clutched her stomach. She turned white and looked away, as if afraid she was going to be sick.

“I make a pretty revolting picture, don’t I?”

“Please … forgive me?” she murmured, unable to look at him again.

“When I forgive you, am I also supposed to forget this ever happened?” He turned away and began tying together the ends of his blanket. “Why don’t you run to Chad? He’ll forgive you.” With his left hand, he picked
up the knotted blanket and had to breathe in sharply to control the pain.

“Hawk, please?” Her head was bowed when he turned. She murmured to herself, “None of this would have happend if you were Chad.”

The comment twisted his mouth, inflicting pain from his cut lip. He reached out and let a strand of her long hair slide through the fingers of his right hand. “All that glitters … isn’t sunshine,” he mused, then walked out of the room.

It was a long walk across the ranch yard to the bunkhouse. Weariness dragged at his feet. All talking ended the minute he pushed the door open. Hawk was too tired and too hurt to care about the stares directed at him. One eye was nearly swollen shut, but out of the narrow slit of the other, he spied an unmade bunk, the mattress rolled into a cylinder at the head of the bed. With awkward haste, he walked to it and dropped his bundle on the floor beside it.

It took him only a second to spread out the mattress and gingerly lower his frame onto its length. Not bothering to take off his boots or find a blanket to cover himself, Hawk closed his eyes. Instantly, he was asleep. It was a deep, drugged sleep that allowed his body to go to work and begin its mending process, free of pain and unhampered by the conscious mind.

For thirty-six hours straight, he slept—unconscious. When he came to, the blood had been washed from him, his ribs were bound, and there was a steaming cup of broth near him. His gaze rested on the calloused hand holding it and trailed up the arm to the face of Luther Wilcox.

“What is it? Poison?” Hawk’s voice was hoarse, his muscles screaming with stiffness when he tried to move. “I suppose you intend to finish the job you started.”

“Don’t need to.” Luther waited until Hawk had
taken the cup, then explained his statement as he walked to a table to resume his game of solitaire. “Carol went to Phoenix to stay for a while with J. B. and Mrs. Faulkner.”

The cowboy sat in a chair with his back to Hawk. He didn’t speak again, ignoring Hawk.

Three days later, Hawk saddled a horse, packed some supplies, and rode to the canyon. He stayed a month, visiting his mother’s relatives. But there was no life for him there, although he found contentment and strength.

After a month, Hawk returned to the ranch. No one asked where he had been or questioned his right to move back into the bunkhouse. In the morning, he rode out with the men to work the cattle. Rawlins never tried to give him an order and never acknowledged the work Hawk did, but his eyes burned with loathing each time they came in contact.

Two months after his beating, Hawk heard the news that Chad and Carol were married. It meant nothing to him. Six months later she gave birth to a baby boy, who was promptly named after his grandfather—John Buchanan Faulkner.

“… With the zigzag lightning flung over your head,
     come to us,
soaring! With the rainbow hanging high over your head,
     come to us, soaring!
With the zigzag lightning flung out high on the ends of
     your wings, come to us, soaring!
With the rainbow hanging high on the ends of
     your wings, come to us, soaring!

… He stirs, he stirs, he stirs, he stirs.
Among the lands of evening, he stirs, he stirs;
The pollen of evening, he stirs, he stirs;
Now in old age wandering, he stirs, he stirs;
Now on the trail of beauty, he stirs, he stirs.
He stirs, he stirs, he stirs, he stirs.

… I have made your sacrifice,
I have prepared a smoke for you.”

The skies over Phoenix were blanketed with a layer of black clouds that blotted out the sun, throwing the city into premature darkness. At frequent but irregular intervals, bolts of yellow lightning streaked out of the clouds, briefly illuminating the rolling and crashing thunderheads. The brilliant flashes of electric fire were accompanied by explosive claps of thunder that vibrated the air and ground.

The rain fell in wind-whipped sheets, slowing the six o’clock traffic to a crawl. The wipers swished frantically back and forth to sweep the blinding deluge off the Volkswagen’s windshield. Behind the wheel, Lanna Marshall flexed her fingers to ease their tense grip. She had heard Phoenix natives talk about the sudden and violent storms that could descend on the land without warning, but she hadn’t believed them. Everything was so dry and dusty, baked by the unrelenting heat of the sun, that it seemed unlikely large quantities of rain ever fell on it. Now she knew better.

The traffic around her was traveling slowly but smoothly. Not taking her eyes from the congested lanes of the interstate highway, Lanna leaned sideways to reach down and untie the shoelaces of the white leather
oxford on her left foot. The shoe slipped easily off her white, nylon-stockinged heel. While her left foot took possession of the accelerator, she removed her right shoe and wiggled her cramped and tired toes.

“Ah, that’s better,” she sighed aloud at the instant sensation of relief that flowed through her aching feet.

The traffic ahead slowed to a crawl and Lanna braked to match their reduced speed. It was still five miles to her exit, and two more after than to her apartment. At this rate, it would take her another half-hour to get home.

With a grimace of resignation, she lifted a hand to her hair, sleeked away from her face into a smooth French coil. Searching fingers found the hairpins that secured the restrained style and began plucking them out and slipping them into the handbag on the seat beside her. A combing rake of her fingers sent her shoulder-length hair tumbling free. It was a mink-brown color that gleamed with a rich luster.

A smile lifted the corners of her generously curved mouth. Sometimes Lanna felt like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis when she shed the disciplined trappings of her nursing profession. Not that the white uniform did all that much to conceal her obvious physical assets. On the contrary, its staid, tailored lines emphasized her curved figure and the nipped-in slimness of her waist.

The combination of summer heat and driving rain made the enclosed air of the car oppressively close. Rolling down a window for circulation would just admit the driving rain. Not for the first time, Lanna wished for air conditioning in her car. In Denver, it had seemed a luxury she couldn’t afford, but here in Arizona, she was learning it was virtually a necessity. She unbuttoned the top two buttons of her white uniform and lifted the sticky nylon material away from
the valley between her breasts. The only relief she derived from it was in her mind.

Off the road on her right, Lanna glimpsed the flashing red taillights of a stalled vehicle. Seconds later her headlights illuminated the yellow pickup truck parked on the shoulder of the highway. As she slowed the Volkswagen to pass it, the door on the driver’s side opened and a tall, stockily built man stepped out.

In that brief moment when the car lights illuminated him, Lanna glimpsed the bowed shoulders beneath a light tan jacket, white peppered hair below the wide brim of a western hat, and the sagging jowls of a tired face. On the side of the truck was a sign that read F
ALCON
C
ONSTRUCTION
and an emblem showing the black silhouette of the head of the predatory bird. Then she was past the pickup and its driver. Her gaze lifted to the rearview mirror, where she could see the elderly man start out walking, his head bowed against the driving rain.

Lanna hesitated only an instant before she flipped on her turning signal and eased the Volkswagen out of the traffic lane onto the paved shoulder of the highway. Leaving the motor running, she leaned across the seat and rolled down the window on the passenger’s side.

When the old man swung out to the right to skirt her car, Lanna shouted above the clapping thunder, “Want a ride?”

The man paused in apparent surprise, then bent down to peer in the passenger’s window. Rainwater streamed from the rolled point of his hat brim. Beneath thick, iron-gray eyebrows, a pair of pale blue eyes studied her. The accumulation of years had grooved lines in the rugged, sun-tanned face, giving it a certain leather toughness, but Lanna wasn’t frightened by what she saw.

“Get in,” she invited again with a faint smile.

He hesitated for a split-second, then opened the passenger’s door. “Thanks.” The gravelly quality in his voice seemed to match his rough exterior.

“It’s pretty wet out there. You’re already soaked to the skin,” she observed as he tucked his big frame into the small car and rolled up the window.

“Yeah, I noticed.”

Lanna shifted the car into forward gear and eased it back into the slow-moving traffic. She stole a sideways glance at the big man filling her small car. Crowfooting lines splayed out from the corners of his eyes, relating an impression of deep sadness. There was something about the man that reminded Lanna of an aging Teddy bear masquerading as a silver-tipped grizzly. As if sensing her curious inspection, he turned his head to look at her. Lanna swung her gaze back to the rain-swept interstate lane.

“Didn’t your parents ever teach you not to pick up strangers on the road? It’s a dangerous thing for a young girl to do—or didn’t they ever tell you that?”

This prompted a soft laugh from Lanna. She was being reprimanded by the very man to whom she’d given a ride. “Yes, they warned me all about hitchhikers and strange men,” she told him with lilting assurance. “But they also told me the story of the Good Samaritan. I guess that appealed to me more. What happened to your truck?”

“The points got wet, I guess.” He sounded disgruntled as he answered her question.

Lanna glanced at the green road sign for the approaching exit. “I can’t remember if there is a service station at this exit, but I know there is one at the next.” It was the off-ramp that she would take. “I can give you a lift that far. They can probably tow your truck in for you.”