§ CHAPTER FOURTEEN §
Candles, crystal balls, cards – they were all tricks of the Gypsy trade. But it was neither candle nor glaring light bulb but a kerosene lantern’s amber glow that Romy counted on to ease the crossing of this bridge – and, as adventures went, she knew not what awaited on the other side.
A risky crossing it was, but she had to get beyond her mind’s incoherent jabbering, her lower stomach’s stupid seizures, her betraying palsied hands as she turned the lantern’s wick low.
She had to get to that side of the bridge where the Order of Womanhood was not a novelty to her. Once inducted, she would, as usual, adjust; she would regain her Gypsy’s natural sense of direction, and move on with life, wherever its road took her.
She turned back to Duke, where he sat, waiting and watching, on her mattress – well, his mattress, if proprietorship was a factor. What did she do now?
“Okay, Romy,” he breathed, holding out his hand – and she crossed the few steps to lay her damp one in his palm, but approached no closer. “I am tired of your Gypsy wiles.”
He drew her to stand between his legs. His huge hand cupped her quavering chin and forced her to look at him, on eye level with her, sitting though he was. “I want the real deal.”
Cripes! “Err, Duke, I . . .uhh . . . what ye see is what ye – “
“I know, you’re going to tell me you’ve never been kissed.”
“Well, there was Giorgio, that once. But he and I were betrothed,” she rattled on. “We were only fourteen, and that isna the same as . . . as what you and I are –”
He frowned impatiently. “And don’t forget that brotherly kiss Gideon gave you in Galveston.”
From out of nowhere, something new burgeoned, that primitive instinct in her femininity that had somehow, someway, been delayed. A small but knowing smile tipped her lips. “Why dunna ye do what ye’re wanting, Duke.”
“Hell,” he muttered. He pulled her onto his lap. His mouth covered hers as though driven to shut off, not only her prattle, but all her thoughts of any but himself. And mayhap his own misgivings.
And its ferociousness did just that, with his mustache abrading her mouth. Why . . . why, this was more invasive and more stomach-dropping than any mere lip kiss. And, crikey, if her tongue didn’t go and betray her good senses to couple and mate with his.
But then his kiss softened, explored, as if searching for something invaluably necessary to him. She sank into the lulling sensations of that transmuting kiss. His hands cradling her face, his thumbs lapped so close at the corners of her lips that they constrained his questioning and questing mouth.
His kiss was something different, different from that of Gideon’s bluffing one and Giorgio’s boyish one. Something that scoured the barnacles of grief and rage lining her heart’s cavity. Now, she understood the justification behind foolish, romantic songs and moving pictures.
Needing more, she slipped her arms up his chest to entwine behind his neck. Like a hatchling, she tilted her face up to be sustained by his life-nourishing mouth. Without ceasing dispensing his possessive kisses over her lids, her cheeks, her temples, he shifted her body, lowering her onto the mattress beneath him.
Its springs squeaked intrusively; still, she gave herself over to this splendid sensation of his mouth, his weight, his hands. There was nothing impersonal about this as had been the Nazi examination, and exposing herself to this pleasuring was almost more than her untried body could tolerate.
As his lips scoured kisses from her heated cheeks, along her jawbone, and down the column of her neck, which arched to welcome his touch as a sunflower arched to sunshine, she lost all sense of time and place and coherent thought.
Until, those fingers found her headscarf’s knot at her nape. She shrank from him, trying to twist aside. “Nay, please!”
“Yes,” he growled, his arm underneath her shoulders snatching her back, directly beneath his heavy weight. She could hear his frustration, turned on himself, as if disgusted with his lack of constraint. “No handkerchief with its surprise rabbit beneath, Romy, or ace card up your sleeve this time. Just you. Show me what you do.”
At that, he stripped off her shield’s negligent fabric. Her freed locks tumbled into his hands. They grasped her mass of curls like they were a life buoy. His face buried in the hollow of her neck, his lips scalded her skin, and his fingers tunneled through the riotous ringlets at her temples – and, alas, stopped short at encountering that shriveled appendage.
On one elbow, he raised above her, his head cocked, with the lantern light reflecting a disturbing yellow in his puzzled, midnight blue eyes.
Mortified, her lids lowered, her eyes staring sightlessly at the fine black hair that whorled at his throat where his soft cambric shirt fell open. In merciless slow motion, his fingers slid aside her swath of concealing hair.
She, whose agile body was so animate, so freely moving, lay there as stiff as a three-hour-old corpse beset with rigor mortis.
“What . . . how did this happen?”
How not to sound mawkish? “Well, ye see,” she exposited, “in some parts of Czechoslovakia tis permissible to cut off the right ear of a Gypsy woman. In other parts, tis the left ear. Our vardo took a wrong turn and just happened to land me and me grandfather in the wrong part of Czechoslovakia at the wrong time.”
At his silence, she risked peering up, dreading seeing either revulsion or pity. His face was filled with fury, but his voice marveled low, “What a little scrapper you are, Romy Sonnenschein.”
She would have been all right if he had just left it at that; but, no, he had to dip his head and brush the mutilated place with lips that lingered. Suddenly, she could not breathe, as his tongue traced her ear’s damaged contours.
Her chest, her throat, her mouth flooded with salt water too long dammed. It geysered upward, stinging her nostrils, and gushed over her lids in a raging and raucous torrent.
His hands with their long fingers cupping her bony shoulders, spanned the entirety of her narrow back. He gathered her spasm-wracked body against his. Her wet face was muffled against his blue shirt’s wash-worn fabric. Her seismic slobbering and sniffling and blubbering nigh washed it again.
As if gentling her, he stroked her spine, from her nape, beneath her unbound hair, down to the small of her waist. “Go ahead. Sob your heart out, Sunshine.”
She did just that. Cried until, surely, she was empty, drained of shame and pain and suffering.
And then he began the sacrament of refilling her. Rolling her beneath him, his large body covered hers and shut out the insanity of her world. He kissed moist lids and lashes, smoothed back damp hair from her forehead and temples, and this time nuzzled both ears.
Deeply, she inhaled. He smelled fresh and life renewing, so vastly different from that of a charnel house. Her starving lips trailed from below his beard-stubbled and scruffy jawline to nestle at the conjuncture of his broad collarbones.
“I think I found me power again,” she mumbled, her head tilted, her lips pressed against the thick, ropy cords of his neck.
“Power, magic, illusions,” his shallow breath caught at her tongue wandering tongue, “whatever it is you wield, Sunshine, keep right at it.”
“Stay with me, Duke. Hold me. I need you to keep yuir arms around me. Now.”
His callused hands framed her face. “All night, if you want, Sunshine.”
“When ye do the things ye do . . . I want that too,” she whispered. “I want everything ye do. All of yuirself.”
“And I don’t want to ever see you wear any damned kerchief again.”
She grinned. “Aye, aye, sire.”
With that, clothing was slowly slipped off with a reverence for revelation that made her feel special. Then, spurred on by his kisses and touches, she surrendered into synchronization with him . . . exploring, adoring, getting lost in rapture. Time slowed, and the rest of the world fell away.
His taking her into womanhood was accomplished with little pain, so ready was she for his touch, his loving. But she was not ready for the explosion ripping through her body much later. His mouth absorbed her outcry. His roaring groan followed, as he pulled from her to lathe the still-quivering muscles of her concave stomach. “Oh God, Romy!”
This time, the way he moaned her name, it was everything she could have ever wished to hear. Well, almost everything.
Drenched in sweat and slick with their juices, her replete body sought out the refuge his powerful torso and limbs afforded. She drifted, cocooned in the culmination of after-splendor.
His chin resting atop her head, he mumbled in that gravelly voice of his, “Why didn’t you warn me you had never been with a man?”
“Would it have made a difference, Duke?” she whispered, her nose buried in the damp, springy hair matting his chest.
“Damn straight it would have.”
Inside, she went still, like a doe sensing danger. “How? Why?”
“Because . . . ” she felt his shrug, “‘cause I would be just another man among many. No problem there.”
“That is what ye thought of me?” she asked in a small voice.
Challenged, he muttered, “For all I know, you might have been planning all along on my marrying you. After all, tonight was your idea.”
She bristled. “Ye think I seduced yuirself, do ye? Ye, a two-bit saddle tramp?”
Now, he was the one to bristle. “Hell, you could have been hoping I would legitimize any offspring tainted with wild Gypsy blood resulting from tonight.”
She recoiled. His contemptuous words shattered her. “I may be wounded in body, but ye are wounded in spirit, Duke McClellan.”
“This was a monumental mistake,” he muttered, rolling from her and rising from the mattress in all his naked magnificence, his body sun-browned to the low back of his waist, his muscled hips and long legs flesh pale in the lantern light but for the faint matting of hair. One hand swooped up his Levi’s, the other his shirt. “Horseplay and hired help should never be mixed.”
§ § §
Sleepy dawn sunlight poked through the kitchen’s poorly sewn curtain strips. An equally sleepy, or sleepless, Romy stood in front of the stove, flipping the boxties, the Irish potato pancake.
Young Bud peered over her shoulder. It seemed to her, he was coming of age with male rutting, dogging her every step when not out riding the range. Before, his attention had been that of adulation; now, it bespoke of an adolescent hankering.
Duke chose that moment to come into the kitchen. He took one look at her and Bud and glowered. “In case you can’t smell it, Romy, the toast is burning again, and, Bud, get your scrawny ass outside and finish up your morning chores.”
Abashed, Bud tugged on his newsboy cap and headed for the kitchen’s back door. “Sure ‘nough, Duke.”
For a long moment, she and Duke stared at one another, she turned three-quarters to his male aggressiveness. With a frown, he eyed her unbound hair, tumbling in abandoned corkscrews past her shoulder blades and lapping her tiny breasts.
She had the uneasy feeling he was thinking of firing her then and there. Oh, Jesus. Maybe, he had been right last night. The whole lust thing had been a mistake. Except she had never, not in her entire life, experienced anything so unbearably pleasurable, not merely her body, but her essence, her all – everything, that she was.
And that jeopardized her intrinsic core, because now that she understood one human’s unremitting need for another’s touch, she feared she could not trust herself, her own will power.
At last, he grabbed his hat from the wall peg. “The toast,” he reminded her curtly, and stalked from the kitchen.
By 7:00 a.m., the ranch hands were shoveling down the last of their eggs, bacon, and blackened toast in uneasy silence. The fiery strain could not be ignored. It arced between Duke at one end of the table and herself at its opposite.
Yet, peering at him from beneath her lashes, she would swear that not anger but heat as lustful as her own glazed his eyes.
And if Gypsies knew anything, it was lustful heat. She had sensed it coursing between her volatile parents. That same blaze that had driven them to extinguish each other in one of their jealous fits.
Within mere minutes the kitchen cleared out, and she stood there, hands on hips, surveying the table mess – and thinking of her own mess she and Duke had created. One of them obviously had to go, and it wouldn’t be Duke.
Well, begorra, if that was to be her fate, it behooved her to prepare to earn some kind of secure living – immediately.
While her Dessau Hall performance may have turned out to be a one-time wonder with the older crowd, two successive occurrences that morning pointed her future in another hopeful, or not so hopeful, direction.
First, as she was readying the breakfast clutter, Glen popped back into the kitchen. “Forgot my hat,” he said.
She nodded with a distracted smile and went back to pumping the dish water, but paused, feeling his eyes still upon her. She half turned from the waist. “Aye, Glen?”
His Adam’s apple corked repeatedly. “I . . . uhh . . . was wondering if you could do . . . uhh . . . one of those quick readings. You know, those fortune cards tricks.”
She faced him fully and folded her arms. “Tricks? That sounds as if ye dunna believe in what the cards say.”
“Well, you know . . . just for fun.”
“Now?” When you should be about your morning duties, she wanted to add.
He crimped the floppy and soiled felt hat between his hands. “If you don’t mind, Romy.”
What was throwing him for a loop? “To be sure. Let me find me deck.”
Five minutes later, she located the Bicycle box tossed haphazardly at the bottom of the laundry basket, nestled among Duke’s long, white woolen socks and mingling lustily with her knickers. The musty, personal items smelled of dirt and sweat and raw desire.
She returned to the kitchen and seated herself catty-corner from an obviously agitated cowpoke. He had removed his work softened gloves. Glen took note of the missing bandana that usually corralled her wild curls. “Jeez, Romy,” he gestured at her hair, “I didn’t realize your . . . how, uhh, comely you look, what with your hair all loose like that.”
She smiled and nodded at the cards. “So, what ye be wanting to know, Glen?”
He fingered his bristly chin. “Hmmm, looks like I may have whelped me a babe. I’m a traveling man, you know? If I were to settle down, would I be . . . you know, just saying, making a mistake?”
Immediately, her thoughts hopscotched to her and Duke’s midnight tryst. That was one thing she should never have to worry about – begetting a bairn. This child, Glen’s, she felt had to have been conceived with Graciela.
Romy shuffled, all the while her mind whirling, and passed him the deck. What would a wise person advise? “Why are ye a traveling man, Glen?”
“Well, with the Depression, my folks couldn’t feed me, you understand. I was one of thirteen children. There were so many of us, I don’t think I went immediately missed. So, from Hebron, Nebraska, I hitchhiked, hopped boxcars, and ended up working the slaughterhouses in Chicago, where I met Skinny Henry. From there, it was only another hop, skip, and jump to cowpunching. Been on the road since I was fifteen. But I don’t want any kid of mine going through what I had to.”
There you had it. Nevertheless, for the sake of drama, she flipped out the cards she had collected from his three cut piles into random spreads of five or six. She scanned these spreads she had fanned out: Her eye was caught by the multitude of hearts – the Eight, Seven, and Three of Hearts, specifically, in one clump.
“Ye have an unexpected gift coming, tis true,” she said, fingering the Eight. That at the pinnacle of its spread. “What it is, the cards don’t say.” She glanced at another card. “And this Seven indicates someone whose interest in you, you could depend on. And this Three,” she said, glancing yet at the other card, “it shows your wishes comes true.”
He eyed her doubtfully, then challengingly. “And jest what are my wishes?”
She let her gap-toothed grin sum up her reading. “For yuir own family, Glen. The one that knows when ye go missin’.”
A smile stretched the width of his face. Tugging on his gloves, he grabbed his supposedly forgotten hat and nodded happily at the cards. “Well, head ‘em up and move ‘em out, Romy. You’re one hell of a card reader – and a friend!”
Half an hour later, Sally appeared at the kitchen’s screen door. “Hey, how did your gig go last night?” she asked, letting herself in. She tugged loose her chin strap and hung her peaked, wide-brimmed hat on one of the wall pegs.
Drying her hands on the dish towel slung over one shoulder, Romy tried to keep her expression pleasant enough. The horsewoman wanted something of her. But what? “Well, ye could say the gig was not a standing-room-only performance.”
“Oh? That’s too bad. Can you spare a cup of coffee?”
Romy bowed up an arrow-straight brow. “Ye’re telling me ye rode three miles for a cup of coffee?”
Sally pulled out one of the chairs and, twisting it around, straddled it. “No, I am telling you I need a friend. A friend whose advice I trust.”
At that, Romy did a double-take. “Ye mean meself?
“Will you do a reading for me? I’ll pay you.”
“Let me get the coffee first,” she said, thinking rapidly, “then the cards.” She would have to be careful. Sally was quick on the uptake, she would more readily detect what Duke called bull-shit. “Coffee and the card reading are on me.”
Serving up a cup of stale, warmed-over coffee was easier than locating the playing cards. Criminy, now where had she stashed them, only a half hour before? She found them in the pie safe, where she had stored the left-over bacon strips, well burnt and beyond appetizing. Bleh!
For a second time that morning, she peeled open the ragged box and slid out the equally worn cards. For a flashier effect, she shuffled them thrice in her hands, rather than on the table, and ended up with an impressive bridge finish. She then passed the cards to Sally. “Cut them into three piles.”
Sally complied, and Romy asked, “What is it ye wish to know?”
If Sally’s sun-weathered skin could blush, then that it did. “I . . . uhhh . . . have been . . . uhh . . . keeping company, so to speak, with someone. Someone totally unsuitable for me. I want to know if there is a chance in hell of us making a go of it?”
Us? Who was the other half of us? Remembering how her mum worked her clients, Romy put out feelers with some apprehension of Sally’s answer. The horsewoman had already shared, despite her father’s hope for a union, that she felt she and Duke were unsuited. Not only in temperament but also in the community’s gauge of affluence.
“This ‘us’, is there anything you feel you two have in common?”
“Horses. Ranching.”
Christ Almighty! Then, it was Duke? “Mmmm,” Romy murmured, filling in the awful, debilitating silence. She flipped over the card on the underbelly of each of the three piles Sally had cut.
Blimey! The High Priestess, the Magician, and the Emperor again – showing up in the Bicycle deck as the Queen of Clubs, King of Diamonds, and King of Clubs. In Romy’s admittedly mixed-up mind the Magician was the shyster Gideon, and the Emperor that damned Duke, ruling the empire of his run-down, flea-bitten cattle ranch.
But who the hell had been the High Priestess all this time? Sally?
Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Romy had thought she could never feel so devalued as much as she had when standing before the impersonal Nazi doctors. But to think of Duke and Sally as a couple, coupling . . . now, after . . . after succumbing to her own lust for the rancher . . . .
“Uhhh, I don’t believe ye shuffled, did ye, Sally?”
The horsewoman’s hazel eyes narrowed. “That makes a difference? I cut the cards.”
“Aye,” she said, quickly collecting the piles and passing the deck to Sally. “Tis the energy swirling about ye that changes the cards’ meanings.” That sounded plausible, even to herself.
Sally shuffled an inordinately long time, as if to impart that so-called important energy to the cards, then carefully and precisely cut the deck into three piles once again. All the while, Romy was ruminating.
This time the chatterbox Jack of Hearts was the first card she turned up
“That was in the spread you laid out for me at Christmas,” Sally noted, surprised and not nearly so doubtful now.
“So, it was,” she said, although she truly did not remember who got what cards that day. “Uhhh, I see a cowboy.” Safe enough. Sally had mentioned ranches and horses. But Romy knew her own mind was preoccupied with what was the epitome of the Wild West, at least, for her – the cowboy who had gunned her down last night.
She flipped over the next card.
Sally leaned forward, tapping the Queen of Spades. “Is that me?”
“Aye.” The last card was the Seven of Hearts. “Lovesickness,” she ventured, given the desperation and despair in Sally’s eyes. The same despair she herself was feeling.
“You are amazing,” Sally breathed.
“Err, why do you think this relationship won’t work?”
“That’s why I’m here,” Sally snapped. You’re supposed to tell me.” Then, rubbing her temples, “Gee whiz, I’m sorry, Romy. It’s just so . . . unreal. Bizarre. Texas is about as bad as Germany when it comes to racism. My father finds out I am sleeping with a Mexican, and he’ll kill him and most likely me, too.”
Romy recalled the conjoined silhouettes of Sally and Arturo in the barn, observing the pregnant Cactus Jane. An unlikely couple, she would have thought. But just maybe they met, complemented, each other’s needs.
Relief was an instant medication for her jealousy pangs. She dealt out the rest of the deck, four or five cards at a time, in clusters. Her gaze swept over them, trying to see if she could come up with some pattern out of which to spin a plausible story.
“This partner for ye, he be all male, pure hombre, so sometimes he will not understand ye, ye see?” Her eye caught on the adjacent Bicycle card box. “Tis like at times you two cannot ride the bicycle built for two. But, his easy going ways will balance out, like the bicycle, yuir hard pedaling ways. For sure, there be some rough riding at spots in the road, but all will be well.”
And, if it was not, Romy figured she’d be long gone by then.