§ CHAPTER THIRTEEN §
To Romy, the position of ranch cook seemed an easy enough gig to swing. She had cooked for Old Duke most of her life, since she was seven and could stand on a step stool and scorch the food for lack of concentration.
But young Duke was something else.
Not to mention, the kitchen vegetable garden the gig now included. She had not realized Texas’s NYA cook position would also require filling the roles of seamstress, washwoman, and gardener.
Well, she had bartered with Duke for the additional tasks, but those reading and writing lessons were getting fewer and further between. And she was reluctant to bring them up. It made sense – not to push the issue, or Duke might just well balk and ship her out. Johnson and men like him he did not fear.
But surely he feared something. After all he was mere mortal man.
That frosty February morning, dressed in a thick, faded green cable knit sweater some kind-hearted soul had donated, she harvested onions, radishes, potatoes and several carrots, most so severely stunted that only a farm animal would deign eat them. Which suited her fine. The stunted carrots were a welcome excuse to visit her horse friends.
Other friends – or one of the two a semi-friend, Sally – awaited her within the warm barn. Romy had the feeling that Sally resented her, living in such close quarters with Duke, as she did.
Arturo spotted Romy and called heartily, “Ven y mira! Cactus Jane, soon she ees ready to foal.” He was showing Sally the pregnant mare, whose belly and udder were quite broad.
“Duke is over at the south pasture,” Romy told the horseman.
“Oh, I was just checking on Cactus Jane,” Sally said, smiling, and returned her attention to the stall.
Romy stepped up to the its gate and, standing next to Sally, peered between the slats. “Cactus Jane’s been restless,” she said. “Lying down for longer periods, and her udder has begun to drip. T’will not be long now. A day or so, at the most.”
Sally looked askance at her. “You know horses?”
“Ye might say that,” she said, passing a runty carrot between the slats for Cactus Jane to nibble.”
Sally’s deeply etched lips pursed. Then she suggested, “I can offer Duke the services of my veterinarian.”
“Oh,” Romy ventured, “I think Cactus Jane will figure out on her own what she be needing to do.”
Sally nodded, feminine pique clearly warring with grudging respect. “I hear tell you will be performing at Dessau Hall.”
“Aye.” So, word was already out. Had Arturo – or Duke – told Sally?
Gideon’s call had come a couple of days before, at dinnertime; and, taking the call, Romy had turned her back on Duke and the ranch hands. But they had been watching and trying to listen in as Gideon launched into the details.
“The only drawback,” he had told her, “is that that the venue is this next Wednesday afternoon, when few people frequent the hall.”
“And payment?”
“Drinks on the house are served in lieu of payment. Now it is up to you to make sure McClellan gets you there – and on time.”
Sally swung from the stall gate to face Romy. “You realize you should appear for your performance garbed suitably.”
Romy envisioned the cardboard crate containing the meager – and much of it shoddy – donated clothing, and her consternation must have shown on her face, because Sally said indifferently, “Well, I just happen to have charro regalia leftover from my childhood rodeo days that may fit you.”
“Tis still not sure I am that I want to do this.” She felt as if she were jumping from the frying pan into the fire. She should refuse. But would alienating Johnson make matters worse? Besides, maybe getting out of the ranch house would open the pressure lid vent a wee bit for both her and Duke.
“But truly,” Sally continued, unfazed, “I cannot make a silk purse out of a sow – ”
“ – of sauerkraut,” she finished with an arch smile that matched Sally’s.
The horsewoman stiffened straighter than a fence post, then she broke out laughing. “I like you, Romy Sonnenschein.”
After Arturo sallied off to his duties, the horsewoman accompanied her back to the ranch house. These days, Sally seemed less forceful, her voice less strident.
“You know,” she said, linking her arm with Romy’s, “I must confess I feel right badly about my behavior. It’s occurred to me I’ve acted like a horse’s ass. And I see clearly that Duke and I are as mismatched as a mustang with a thoroughbred, but, still, it sticks in my craw, acknowledging it. And when I realized that your presence forced Duke to realize it, as well, I was bitter”
“Me presence? What did me presence have to do with the relationship between you two?”
“Oh, my dear,” she said patting her wrist, “your presence has influenced everyone here.”
And Duke would most likely attest that for the worse, Romy thought despondently.
§ § §
As he drove north toward Austin’s outskirts of Dessau, Duke’s gaze continually swept Highway 20 through the cracked windshield for deer. Normally, they bedded down during the hottest time of day, but it was not unusual for one to bound from the scrub across a highway at any time.
Course, long as he kept his eyes peeled on the hilly highway, that meant he kept them off Romy, scooched against the pickup’s passenger door. She blistered the eyeballs, gussied up as she was in Sally’s Mexican frillery – a flounced red and silver dress, cut low to flaunt small but very feminine mounds.
Oddly, it was the traditional sombrero, with its chin strap and concealing brim, studded with silver braid and conchos, that kept yanking his burning gaze back to her face – to the slope of her nose and the generous sweep of her lower, childlike full lip.
“Ye understand, Duke, that this act pays nothing – and costs ye time and petrol.”
What he understood was that he had to get shunt of her before she wrecked all his plans. Grand ones and small ones. On the small scale of plans, he should be balancing on a twenty-five-foot high windmill platform at that moment, replacing a defective blade.
But here he was playing chauffeur . . . while his body clamored to shove up that sequin-and-lace skirt. God almighty, when he could be covering any number of females who better fit his plans . . . and here he was in midwinter burning up with a fever.
Day and night. And the nights were worse. He was losing precious sleep.
He switched off the heater. “What I understand is that you are not what I agreed with Rabbi Hickman for – when I signed on for a cook.”
“So, tis back to that? The hands seem to like me cooking now.”
He shot her a quick glance. “You know it’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
February, and perspiration dampened the back of his neck. Who would have thought? He rolled down the window a couple of cranks. “Look, you’re a Gypsy. You’ve been around the block.”
“What? Around the block?”
Damn’t! He realized just how little the two of them had in common. “You haven’t led a sheltered life, right?” He glanced over at her to see how she was taking this.
A drollness took control of her mobile mouth. “Ye might say that.”
“Then, it’s got to be as plain as the nose on your face if you stay on at the S&S, we’ll end up in bed together.” There. He had got it out in the open, what bedeviled him.
She tilted her head toward him, eying him from beneath the brim of her hat, and her single pearl earring swung out to glint challengingly. “And that is a problem?”
“You’re goldurned tootin’ it is, ‘cause I am not marrying you.”
Once more, she was looking straight ahead, and that elfish smile graced her profile. “I am not asking ye to.”
He swiped at the sweat rolling down his nape. “Just as long as you got it in your thick skull that come October your term of service with S&S is over, and it’s back to your Gypsy life and all the bull shit you dole out.”
“Aye,” she said airily.
Giving up easily wasn’t in his soul. And didn’t seem to be in hers, either. Still, he would yet be shed of her. “Speaking of the Gypsy life, this gig is right up your alley. Wow the audience, and you are on the road to adventure.”
Her lips lost their usual crimp. “Tis not adventure I want. I have had meself plenty of that, thank ye now.”
The chilling wind whisking through the pickup window’s slot was doing little to alleviate his sweating discomfort. “Well, what in the hell do you want?”
When she did not reply immediately, he took his eyes off the highway briefly. A wistful smile played upon her lips.
At last, she murmured. “Trees. Grass. Plenty of green grass, mind ye. Water. Clean water. Flowing water. Safety – ye know, security, so ye sleep easy enough. Chil – ” She broke off with a gulp.
Gypsies were known for their dramatic skills at duping their marks, and, God Awmighty, if she did not almost persuade him she was earnest. “Score big at Dessau, and you’re on your way to making all that happen.”
She may have been willing to settle for security, but he had to give it to her – she sure as hell didn’t settle for mediocrity that afternoon in Dessau Hall.
The beer garden was all decked out with velvet wallpaper and crystal chandeliers. Unlike saloons such as Stonewall’s Sawdust, German beer gardens were convivial places that opened their doors only at scheduled times or for familial events like summer concerts. The Germans, not the Mexicans, had been Texas’s predominant population in the prior century.
Granted only a handful of patrons, mostly older folks, had turned out that blustery February afternoon, but they were riveted from her first, “Guten tag,” as she settled atop the stage stool and adjusted her spread of ruffled skirts. Sally’s ruffled skirts, maybe, but he doubted they had ever looked so good on Sally.
At the welcoming applause, Romy gave that goofy grin, which slid away into the solemnness of concentration while she propped Arturo’s guitar upon her lap and tuned the strings.
Duke snagged a table at some distance from the stage and ordered a beer to wet his whistle.
Amazingly, she did not appear nervous. Head cocked to the right in that quaint way she had, she riffed through the strings, then eased softly into a flamenco rendition of what he identified as Malagueña.
When she accompanied her playing with singing, in Spanish, his jaw dropped. He had no idea she had such a rich voice. Her fingers danced over the strings impossibly fast. Hell, he couldn’t even think that fast.
Interspersing the melody with rhythmic flourishes, she suddenly switched to the German lyrics, and the spectators clapped enthusiastically along with her accelerating pace and the staccato thumping of her palm on the guitar. After she finished the piece, they were on their feet.
She smiled shyly, or at least that was the impression the rip-off artist meant her smile to impart She waited until the applause ebbed, then launched into several more songs, none of which he recognized – but he did recognize Goldman, stein in hand, making his way toward Duke’s table.
Pulling out a wooden chair, Goldman doffed his felt hat onto the table. “Who knew? She is a guitar virtuoso.”
Duke was well aware the German attorney was slick and smart and self-serving – and naturally mistrusted him while grudgingly liking him. Somewhat. The question was, how much did Romy like him? “How did you get here, being without wheels?”
Goldman glanced from the stage to him. “You are looking at the right honorable Gideon Goldman, newly hired Assistant Press Secretary to Congressman Johnson.”
He swigged some beer. “Moving up in the world, are you?”
Goldman nodded his golden head at the stage. “So is she.”
The ‘she’ to whom Goldman referred peered out from under the brim of Sally’s sombrero, seemingly staring right at their table. Coming to her feet, Romy began to strum another song, a tempo largo, one limed with longing. Singing softly, so that patrons quieted and strained to listen, she slowly descended the stage’s five steps and meandered among the tables.
“I’m lost in your smile, think I’ll stay here a while,
A vacation from a lonely life.
My heart’s beating wild, I feel like a child.
I’m happy here, lost in your smile.”
This was the Gypsy girl? Romy Sonnenschein? S&S’s cook? Duke downed the remainder of his beer and signaled for another.
“I’m feeling free, floating down the stream.
Memories and unfulfilled dreams.
No frustration, no strife, they are not part of my life.
I’m happy here lost in your smile.”
She directed a meaningful glance at his and Gideon’s table.
“Some people, they need a hand to hold,
Some people, they need a kiss,
Some people need to make love for a while.
But me? I’m happy here, lost in your smile.”
At last, she strolled to stand before him and Goldman.
“Don’t look away, share the rest of my stay.
You need not a word to say.
Won’t look around, keep my feet on the ground.
I’m happy here, lost in your smile.”
For which of them was her song intended? Duke swallowed hard. He had not bargained for this. Hells bells, it was not he who was lost in a smile but his good sense that was lost. Period. And yet, watching her, he was transfixed, unable to remove his gaze from her.
Finished with her performance, she settled her wealth of spangled skirts into a chair across from him and Goldman, who said with apparent sincerity, “I haven’t heard anything quite as comparable in artistic quality since Django Reinhardt.”
Laying aside the guitar, she flashed her ready grin. “Aye, another Gypsy. Me grandfather and meself saw him perform at a Paris dance hall musette. I tried to memorize some of his techniques, but, alas, all too soon the management caught up with us and threw us out.”
Duke sat uncomfortably, while, with the kiss of her Irish brogue, she and Goldman exchanged fond reminiscences about Weimar Berlin street life, its cabarets, its artists and intellectuals.
For someone who could barely write her name, her knowledge on a wide range of subjects was eye-blinking astonishing. “Aye, I saw both The Three Penny Opera and Blue Angel. And do ye know now Albert Einstein himself visited the Europahaus, when some of me people were performing a juggling act there?”
Her people. He sighed. And his people? A close-knit family was definitely not what he would have called his own family.
As talkative as Romy had been at the Dessau Hall table with Goldman, she was as conversely silent on the drive back to S&S. Which was just fine by him. One thing that drove him to distraction was a yappy woman.
But somehow her silence made him feel shut out.
§ § §
Hands clasped behind his neck and barefoot, Duke sat back on the porch steps and stared up at the stars burning holes into black velvet. He supposed that was why he never considered the years at sea a complete loss. Because at night, they burned as hotly as they did over the West Texas Hill Country.
As his body was burning. Burning up with wanting.
He thought of all those lost years when he would yearn for home. He had left home a wild, undisciplined, rebellious, no-good fourteen-year-old, if his gin-stupored old man’s damning charges were anything to go by, and they probably were.
But for almost three years, between ten and thirteen, while his pa was away fighting the Jerries, he had been the man of the house to his ailing mother. He had not been ready for his pa to return home and try to tell him what he was doing wrong.
After his ma’s death, it had seemed a good time to strike out on his own. With the advent of the Great War, the value of livestock had more than doubled, and afterwards cowhands had been in great demand in Texas.
Riding the range for a short period and the waves for far too long, he had, finally, come home to start over. Perhaps all those years of wandering had made him a magnet for others like himself. All his hands were drifters, some of them rail riders, most likely here today and gone tomorrow.
Except for Romy. She was like a tick, attaching itself to his life’s blood. Here he was, just now getting on his feet, only to have that Gypsy waif turn everything topsy-turvy.
That evening, the wind was still gusty, and if he listened hard enough, he could hear the old house groaning. And at the banging of the screen door, he wanted to groan, too. He knew without looking around it was the thorn in his side.
A moment later, Romy’s wraith-like body slipped down to sit next to him on the step, but not touching him. A plaid enwrapped her bony shoulders. “Tis bloody cold out here,” she said softly.
“I hadn’t noticed.” His clasped fingers knotted even tighter behind his nape. His gaze was not so easily reined in. Peripherally. he eyed her delicate profile . . . the fistful of buttermilk-yellow curls that poked from beneath her head kerchief and trailed like wisteria vines down the slope of her pale neck, her upper teeth that worried her lower lip, as plump as the down cover he had snuggled beneath as a boy.
She reached out a small hand, tentatively touched where his Levi’s had ripped out at the knee. Reflexively, his knee jerked the way it did when docs did their examinations with their silly little rubber hammers. “Come to bed, Duke.”
His heart skipped a beat, and he broke out in an immediate sweat. So, there it was. Caesar’s Rubicon. The point-of-no-return. That moment of truth.
His large hand engulfed hers, now intentionally capping his knee. No electrifying bolts from heaven. But something even more disturbing. A warming flash of need that suffused his body through and through. A need that went deeper, that was more pervading, than even nature’s overpowering sexual impetus.
He pulled her up by her hand from the step and, bending, hooked one arm beneath her knees to cradle her slight, compliant body up against his chest.
As his old man would warn, he was hell bent for leather.