down around his booted ankles, he rolled on top to hook one elbow under either of her chunky brown knees and finish right.
She gasped that he was fixing to rupture her innards, but begged him not to stop seeing that they were both about to get killed in any case and this seemed a far nicer way to die.
After they’d both climaxed more than once and she found herself still alive and well, sharing a three-for- a-nickel cheroot with him as they lazed naked on the blanket in the shade, Kinipai giggled and confided, “I have never had anything that big in me, unless you want to count the time some of us were acting silly with corncobs when we were locked away to await the Pollen Dusting Way.”
Longarm just chuckled and enjoyed another deep drag. He didn’t need to be told how silly kids acted when they first found out why boys and girls had been built differently. Na-dene gals who’d started their first monthly period got locked up in a dark brush lodge to get over it together so their elders could throw them a fine dance and sprinkle them with corn, bean, squash, and tobacco pollen to make them strong and fertile women now that they were grown. Like the Pueblo they’d likely learned from, Na-dene set great store by pollen. It was never burnt as a sacrifice to the Holy Ones. To burn pollen was to destroy hope. But dusting a young gal’s hair and making her sneeze with such powerful medicine was meant as one hell of an honor for her. It wasn’t true Na-dene knowingly mistreated women. They just treated them unusually, by a white man’s standards. It was usually Anglo or high- toned Mexican gals who went insane after they’d been captured by so-called Apache raiders.
Of course, all bets were off when dealing with a witch. So they’d barely smoked that cheroot down before Kinipai was nagging him some more about that smoke-talk. She’d doubtless learned, while learning English, how white eyes put up with much more nagging before they hit a grown woman. Hitting children for any reason was considered sort of unmanly by most Indians. But any Indian could see a grown woman had no call to carry on like some bawling baby.
Longarm told Kinipai so, adding firmly but not unkindly, “Whether they’re looking for us or trying to get away from you, I doubt they have the least notion where we are right now.”
She whimpered, “Hear me, my people are the best trackers this side of the gray spirit world and we were riding ponies, steel-shod ponies, all this way!”
He stretched out his free arm for another smoke, saw that his duds lay an unhandy distance away on the pinyon duff, and reached down to feel her up some more instead as he replied, “You’re bragging a mite, no offense. Nobody tracks better than Papigo, as some of your Chiricahua cousins learned to their sorrow a spell back.”
He began to treat her friendlier down yonder as he added, “Don’t ever stop running once you raid Papigo. They can track a sundial’s shadow and cut its throat after sundown.”
She reached down for his private parts as he assured her, “I’d be able to brag on scouting and being scouted by heaps of nations, including your own, if I hadn’t been raised so modest. I made sure we rode across all the dry sod and slickrock I could find for us as we made her this far. We left that creek to cross gravel scree and mummified pine needles getting here.”
She laughed and said, “This is crazy, crazy! We are playing with one another and carrying on a calm conversation at the same time!”
Having risen to the occasion some more, Longarm rolled his naked hips between her welcoming brown thighs and let her guide it in for him again as he grinned down at her and observed, “I know, and it sure seems friendly. I hardly ever go back for seconds with a pretty half-wit, but there’s some gals I really enjoy talking to like this.”
She hugged him down against her with her strong arms and chunky legs as he continued in the same tone. “There’s this one old gal I know down Texas way and another up around Bitter Creek who both like to jaw with me about my work for the Justice Department. So every time I find myself that far afield, either direction from my home office, I seem to find myself having a conversation much like this one and… Never mind, that’s two other stories, and right now I’m fixing to shoot my wad in a wicked witch!”
She bit down tight with her innards and pleaded with him to make it last and take her with him. So he tried his best, and managed to make it almost a mutual orgasm while they both made promises nobody born of mortal woman would ever be able to keep.
This time he really made it to his tobacco and matches. So as he sat on the blanket beside her lighting up, Kinipai sighed and told him, “I still say I would ride with you forever in the dark desert grayness of the dead. But there is a bare chance we could make it if we are not more than one good run from the reservation line to the cast!”
Longarm took a drag on the cheroot and held it out to her as he said, “I know where we are. My kind ain’t as afraid to look up at the stars as your kind, no offense. I’ve been studying on a downhill dash for the Chama Valley. You’d know better than me whether your hacks are sore enough to spill blood off their official reserve.”
Kinipai took a luxurious drag to give herself time to consider. “I don’t know. The BIA has my people very cross. Some of the younger hackis want to stand their ground and fight. But our older nadas, who have fought the blue sleeves already, think it may be better to move to Tularosa Canyon and live poorly than to give the pindah lickoyee the excuse to see we do not live anywhere forever.”
Then she asked, “What has this to do with you and me? You are not N’de and I have been banished as a witch, to be killed even slower!”
Longarm said, “Your kind as well as mine will suffer considerable if armed and dangerous so-called Apache make any reservation jumps whilst the BIA is meeting with their chiefs to discuss their future! I told you why I doubt anyone’s hot on our trail. But sooner or later someone’s sure to take you up on even one steel-shod hoofprint, and it might be best to leave him inside the reservation line as we work our way down past Stinking Lake. I told you why I have to work at least that far south. Others may or may not figure you’re riding with me aboard a police pony. They’re just as likely to dismiss any police pony tracks as the sign of a routine patrol by Sergeant Doli and his boys. Witch hunters with a guilty conscience might be a tad more interested in avoiding such patrols than tracking them. But in any case, once we’re south of Stinking Lake, we can beeline for the haunted canyons of La Mesa de los Viejos, and what the hell, would you be tracking a wicked witch into chindi country if you believed in either witches or haunts that could kill you with a dirty look?”
She said she hoped he was right, but asked if they could screw at least one more time before they wound up as chindis themselves.
He was willing. Most men would have been. But he suggested they do it dog-style this time, so he could keep an eye on that smoke-talk from an upright kneeling position just in case.
She thought that was a grand notion, and gave him back his lit cheroot as she rolled over on her hands and knees. So he gripped the smoke between his grinning teeth and got a good grip on Kinipai’s bare brown hips to
