Renegade Man (7 page)

One business
that still acted as a shipping and receiving point for the local mining
industry was Southwest Mining Supplies. Now a husky red-haired man who somehow
managed to appear dapper in a three- piece pin-striped business suit waited at
the counter while the female clerk searched through a catalogue. “I can order
that electrolytic amalgamation unit for you,” she called over her shoulder to
him.

Since she was
busy, Jonah picked up another catalogue and began leafing through it for
compressors.

“Jonah Jones!”

He did a double
take when he saw the man next to him, then grinned. “Soren Gunnerson.”

Soren pumped
Jonah’s hand in a genial handshake. He had a broad, intelligent forehead and a
smile that was pure sunshine. “I’d heard you were back in town, old buddy! Been
doing any fishing?”

As boys, Jonah
and Soren, who was two years older, had fished in the streams and walked in the
forests, quieter than any Indian, they were sure. But then Soren’s father had
been promoted at Kennecott Copper, and the family had moved out of Chihuahua
Hills to the more affluent Black’s Addition. While Soren might be only part
Swede, his Swedish great- grandparents had been among the area’s first
settlers, having worked turquoise in the Tyrone Mountains for the famed Tiffany
Company way back in the 1870s.

“Not lately,
Soren. All my time’s spent prospecting for gold. How about you?”

Soren grinned
ruefully. “No time to fish these days. A British company, Rolistof, keeps me
busy underground mining lead zinc. One thing about my job— the weather’s always
the same down there.”

Jonah’s glance
moved upward from the tassled leather loafers to the tailored suit and the
royal-blue silk tie. “These duds don’t look like rubber boots and a yellow
slicker, good buddy.”

A sheepish smile
tugged at Soren’s mouth. “What can I say? I’m a company man.”

“A company man”
meant a professional geologist: closemouthed types working for the big boys.
Nine-to-fivers. Such a routine made Jonah mentally shudder.

In his book,
there were four other personality types in the mining industry. The
indies—independents— openly hustling small mining companies. The young ones,
fresh out of the Southern School of Mines and inexperienced, but because they
didn’t know any better they sometimes made major strikes where gold and silver
weren’t supposed to be. Then there were the old, self-taught miners, usually
retirees from Ohio or Maine chasing the sun. Last came the young treasure
hunters with no education.

Jonah wasn’t sure
just where he fit. His was a wild¬catter’s dream. And he had lived in Silver
City long enough that he should have known the futility of such dreams.

“How about a
drink at the Border Cowboy?” So ren asked.

“After five?”
Jonah said.

“Don’t needle
me, buddy,” Soren said. “Of course after five.”

After a stop at
his post office box, which contained only a month-old SEALs magazine, Jonah
headed for the Border Cowboy. It was only four-thirty, but he had nothing
better to do. Along with most western mining towns, Silver City had had its
share of modest tent saloons, as well as magnificent booze emporiums where
soft-handed gamblers in wide-brimmed black hats and diamond-studded cravats
presided at the gaming tables, and where cowboys strode up to a long bar, demanding
shots of red-eye or mescal.

These days,
Silver City had only three beer halls that could claim any relation to the
saloons of old. One was a biker bar, Gold Gulch. Another was the Watering Hole,
a hangout for the town’s artsy element.

The Border Cowboy
was something else. Twenty- five years ago the place had been a honky-tonk, but
the two-story clapboard building had since evolved into an atmospheric
gathering place for a wide array of customers: cowboys, of course, but also
Western New Mexico University students, white-collar Kenne cott office workers,
loggers, survey crews and a few local artists who were careful not to sashay
when they entered.

Since it was
Friday afternoon, the booths and bar on the lower floor, where dinner was
served, were filling up rapidly. The lone pool table was surrounded by men who
looked as if they had just come off a three- month trail ride. An electronic keyboard
system provided the music, but a country-and-western band would be arriving
later. In the old days there had been no strobe lights to add glamour to a
place that by daylight had been rather dingy.

There was
another dance floor upstairs. Jonah sought the relative peace of the second
floor and sequestered himself in a comer booth whose plank walls were festooned
with pickaxes and placer mining pans.

Over a
foam-topped beer, he observed the jocular customers beginning to drift up from
below. Several giggling female miners, their occupations betrayed by the hard
hats and yellow rubber boots they still wore, slid into a booth across from
his. Every so often they flashed flirtatious glances his way.

Where had they
been when he was fifteen and in desperate need of encouragement, too shy to ask
a girl out on the dance floor? In those days he had remained in a dark comer.
If Ritz had attended the ninth-grade prom. . . but she had been too poor to
dress appropriately, and too proud to go dressed as she was. And he—he had been
too proud not to go, but he had worn faded jeans and tennis shoes instead of
loafers and a T-shirt in place of a button-down.

He took another
deep swallow from his frosty mug. Over its rim, he saw Nelda talking to Soren
while the two made their way across the dance floor toward him. The strawberry
blonde looked fetching in some kind of yellow polka-dotted sundress.

“Hi, Jonah.”
Nelda’s smile still had its impartial cheerleader friendliness, but her eyes
glowed with a warm and personal message. '‘Look who I ran into. Do you mind if
I join you two?”

“I told her we’d
be affronted if she didn’t,” Soren said. “Almost like old times, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Jonah
agreed. Except in the old days, Ritz had also been there.

“Hey, why don’t
we reserve a table downstairs for dinner tonight?” Nelda asked.

“Sorry, but I’m
not staying.”

“Oh, come on,
Jonah,” she coaxed with a bright smile. “For old times’ sake.”

He began to
shake his head, then stopped. “You’ll have to convince Ritz.” He nodded toward
the stairs. “I rode into town with her.”

In the strobe's
dim light, her khaki pants and brown shirt were a blur, while her hair was
almost luminous. Her hair was one of her most astonishing features, he thought.
Very blond and generous, like her wide, perfectly formed mouth. She still
carried herself with that touch of arrogance, and her brilliant, dark brown
eyes surveyed the room with a look that seemed to announce calmly, “I couldn’t
care less about your opinion.” In all his travels, he had never met a woman who
looked more capable of taking on the whole world than she did.

She, in turn,
had seen him, and as she made her way toward his booth he felt irrationally
annoyed that the sight of her could arouse heartaches he’d thought he had put
to rest—and, yes, a sense of excitement, too.

Soren, Jonah
noted, had also become alert. Above his broad Scandinavian cheekbones, his blue
eyes flared with renewed interest at the woman who paused before the booth with
all the majesty of a queen inspecting her guard. Jonah thought he caught a
shadow of wariness in her eyes, a defensive straightening of her shoulders, at
the sight of her old classmates.

Soren rose at
the same time he did and said, “I don’t believe it. Rita-lou Randall. If you
don’t make a mockery of middle age, I don’t know what does.” She offered her
cheek for his good-natured kiss. “You’re not doing too badly yourself.” She
slid into the empty space beside Jonah, and he smelled again the faint scent of
some woodsy perfume he couldn’t identify, except that he remembered smelling it
the afternoon she had come up out of the river, struggling in his arms.

“All we need is
Chap,” Soren said, “and it’d be ‘Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.’ ”

Jonah spotted
the jab Nelda delivered to Soren’s ribs. Soren had already gone off to college
when the blowup occurred between Ritz and Chap and C.B., and apparently all the
talk had died down by the time he returned.

“It’s all right,
Soren,” Rita-lou said. “I took the skeletons out of the closet a long time
ago.”

A relieved smile
eased Nelda’s worried expression. “I think we all have some skeletons we’d like
to bury. In my case, Stan Acton—the polecat!”

“Could we
convince you and Jonah to stay for dinner?” Soren asked Rita-lou.

She shook her
head. “No, but I’d settle for a light beer.” She glanced at Jonah with a
questioning smile. “That is, if you have the time.”

He felt as if
he’d been hit in the stomach. It had always been like that, him stumbling all
over himself and her not even aware of the effect she had on him. He shrugged.
“Why not?”

“But just one,”
she qualified. “I’d like to get back to camp before dark.”

“Camp?” Soren’s
brow’s lifted in surprise. “Are you backpacking through the Gila Wilderness?”

She smiled, and
Jonah thought it was like a rare gift, transforming her face from merely pretty
to unsurpassed beauty. “Anthropology, Soren. I’m working on my Ph.D., digging
over at Tomahawk Flats.” Soren signaled for a round, then let his curious gaze
settle on Jonah. “You’re assisting her?”

Jonah smiled
thinly. “Hardly, though you could say we’re both working the same piece of
land.”

“That’s right.
You’re prospecting.” Soren popped some beer nuts the waitress had brought into
his mouth. “You know, a lot of the old guys are still going by old regulations
that are no longer valid, and they’re losing their claims. These days, you have
to be up on the law.”

Rita-lou shot
Jonah a silent look. He knew what she was thinking: that one of them was going
to lose claim to Tomahawk Flats. “Yeah,” he said with an indifferent shrug.
“There’s a lot of paperwork these days.”

“Unfortunately,
more mining gets done in bars than in the hills,” Rita-lou said dryly. She
raised her mug. “See, it’s far easier to bend an elbow than to swing a pickax.”

“Dance, Ms.
Randall?”

All four of them
looked up to find Buck Dillard hulking over them, the lights glinting off the
pearl snaps of his leather vest. Jonah felt Rita-lou tense at his side. “She’s
with me, Dillard.”

“I don’t see her
dancing with you.”

C.B.’s foreman
was spoiling for a fight, and Jonah felt more than ready to comply. The tedious
underwater work had left his muscles cramped, and weeks of keeping a lid on old
emotions had left him ready to explode.

Under the table,
Rita-lou laid a calming hand on the bunched muscles of his thigh. “I am now,
Buck,” she said.

Jonah let her
pull him onto the dance floor, where several other couples were doing a sliding
two-step, and damned if the tune wasn’t Orbison’s “Running Scared.” He took her
in his arms. The top of her head didn’t even reach his chin, and her hair
smelled of fresh air and green grass. He liked the feel of her, soft and
pliant, molded against him. “Reminds me of the eighth-grade sock hop, Ritz.”

He felt the
merest tremble vibrate through her. “It’s Rita-lou.” Then, more softly, she
added, “Don’t let Buck rile you, Jonah. He’d do anything to get you in trouble,
to get you run out of Mimbres Valley.”

He looked down
at her upturned face. “I’m not going anywhere till I’m ready.”

Her gaze dropped
to somewhere near his shoulder. “And when will that be? When you find your
gold?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why? Why are
you wildcatting like this?”

“You know I was
never a nine-to-fiver... Rita-lou. At thirty-five, I’ve reached the point where
that childhood dream of mine—sailing the seven seas—has become a now-or-never
project. But to do it, I need a forty-foot sailboat, and if I go after it the
normal way, I’ll be saving into my golden years. I’m opting for a go-for-broke
scheme.” He broke off, feeling uncom-fortable. He had revealed more of himself
than he had intended.

“Placer mining!”
she said, her voice laced with contempt. “You’re nothing but a
blanket-and-burro prospector. You know what the old-timers called the Assay
Office, don’t you? The Office of Heartbreak.”

“A heart can
only break once.” Disgusted with his sentimentality, he said, “Let’s get out of
here. I’ve still got the sluice boxes to clean before dark.”

She looked
dazed, as if she hadn’t realized that the dance was over and they were the only
couple still embracing. She stepped quickly out of his arms. “Right.”

They said
goodbye to Nelda and Soren, then started back. Rita-lou made no attempt to talk
this time. By the time they reached Tomahawk Flats it was almost eight-thirty,
and the sun had already sunk out of sight behind the Burro Mountains. The
western sky was streaked with brilliant blues and pinks and purples that on
canvas would have looked gaudy. Evening’s hush had settled over the valley, a
quietness, a serenity, that came only at that particular time of day.