Wherever the cactus roots or flash-flood washes left room, you saw thin chaparral, or stickerbush, from creosote and catclaw to eight-or ten-foot whitebark and paloverde.
It was just as well the egg-shell-white trail they were following got plenty of dappled shade as they trudged ever upwards to the jagged teeth of the Growler Range to the east. It was already warm enough for the snakes and lizards to have quit for the day. Here and there something rustled amid the stickerbrush as they passed. But the only critters to be seen were buzzards and white-trimmed chocolate-dipped birds about the size and flocking habits of common crows. Rosalinda called them halcones. He had no call to argue with her, seeing she hailed from the same country as the big brown birds. But they didn’t look like hawks to a West-by-God-Virginia boy.
He figured they’d walked about six country miles when they came to a dip, shaded by whitebark and carpeted with creeping thyme. Rosalinda dropped her own load and threw herself full length on the soft sweet-scented herbage, declaring she needed a rest but wouldn’t be too averse to some gentle screwing in such a romantics setting.
Longarm was leg-sore enough to put down his load and prop the Big Fifty in a fork of whitebark. But even as he flopped down beside her, he said, “It’s fixing to get hotter before it gets any cooler, querida. It ain’t that I don’t admire the way you’re smiling up at me from under the hem of that scandalous lace chemise, but we just don’t have the time!”
She rolled over on her hands and knees with the lacy hem all the way up around her waist as she pouted, “Just one chingita before we get to my uncle’s band, por favor. Is impossible to do in daylight without making the children laugh and point the fingers.”
Longarm was sorely tempted. Most men would have been. But it was going on 9:30 or later, and they had a ways to go before that August sun rose high enough to bake their brains inside their skulls on the open trail. He said so, as Rosalinda wiggled her bare brown behind and moaned over her shoulder, like an alley cat in heat, that she’d settle for two fingers if he was feeling too flojo to do it right.
He laughed despite himself and said, “It’s tempting enough just looking at it, as well you know. But sin faita, mi corazen, the two of us are fixing to wind up with heat stroke if we don’t make it to that canyon!”
She shook her head, tossing her unbound brunette waves as she insisted, “Pero no. Is going for to rain this afternoon. Clouds will shade the trail ahead for us by the time you satisfy me. Metetelo al funciete and satisfy me if you are in so much of a hurry!”
Longarm tried to ignore the pressure inside his pants as he gaped up at the clear blue desert sky and demanded, “How did you come up with that grand notion, querida? I’ve heard tell of wishful thinking, and it ain’t that I don’t wish we had the time, but …”
“Ay, gringo mio,” she cut in. “Did nobody ever tell you for to watch the birds along the trail?”
Longarm swept the clear sky with his keen eyes as he mused, half to himself, “I don’t see any birds up yonder at the moment.”
Then the penny clinked inside the player piano, and as the old song began to tinkle, he nodded at the only bird in sight, a distant buzzard perched atop a tall green saguaro, and decided, “Right. Birds don’t fly as much when they sense a sudden change in the weather. You get your summer rains from the southwest in these parts, right?”
She moaned, “Es verdad. Take off your clothes. Put them away if you wish for to wear them dry this evening. Then put it in me and make us both sweat a lot, so we can really enjoy the cold shower we are in for whether we are entwined in el rapto supremo or not!”
Chapter 4
The Sonora Desert was unusually hot and dry because it was usually cut off from the Pacific westerlies by the coast ranges on the far side of the Colorado-Gila Delta. It was unusually green for a desert because from time to time it paid host to wet contrary winds from the Sea of Cortez or Gulf of California to the southwest. When it did this it got a lot of tropical rain all at once, along with downright dangerous thunder and lightning. So Longarm and Rosalinda were fairly sated by the time the desert downpour ended. For the reverends who advised horny young gents to take cold showers for their hard-ons had never showered with as horny a pal as Rosalinda, and every time the lightning had flashed it had inspired her already tight charms to clamp down like a hot, slick hangman’s noose while they both wallowed in slippery mud and warm pounding rain.
The sun came back out to dry their hides and freshly laundered duds as they strolled on, naked as Adam and Eve before the Fall, had Adam been packing a Big Fifty along with his burlap sacks and such.
Where desert pavement lay flat, the rainwater was already getting blotted up by a root jungle that would have made Professor Darwin hug himself with glee. Stickerbush and cactus could grow closer to each other than either could abide neighbors of its own breed. The cactus roots spread far and wide but shallow, while the creosote and mesquite reached way down deep for water the cactus had failed to sop up near the surface.
Cactus got by between rains by storing water aboveground in its green pulp. In a wet year, such as this one, cactus could overindulge. It was usually too much water that ended the otherwise long and uneventful life of a tall saguaro. As Longarm and Rosalinda passed close by a couple, they could see the pleated thorny trunks were already commencing to bloat like the arms and legs of untended battlefield casualties, and by the day’s end Longarm knew more than one ancient saguaro would have split its thorny green hide, like a kid grown too big for his britches, to expose its vulnerable juicy pulp to all the thirsty critters, large and small, who lay in wait all around for such rare treats.
Somewhere in the hazy blue-green distance they heard a long groan and the muffled crash of something big and soft smashing brittle dry branches. Rosalinda said, “Hohokam. They do that sometimes when it has been raining.”
Longarm frowned thoughtfully and said, “We’d best stop here and put our duds back on. I thought that was a water-logged saguaro just now. Ain’t Hohokam what your Papago kinfolk call the old time pueblo farmers who dug all those canals across a desert that must have been a tad less sand in their day?”
Rosalinda paused to take her black lace chemise from one of her own sacks as she explained. “Hohokam is difficult for to explain in Spanish or English. My mother’s people do not always think a word as you Saltu, Anglo or Mexican, say it. Is bad medicine for to say muerto or dead in the tongue you call Papago. Hohokam may be thought as ‘all used up’ or ‘those who have gone before us,’ comprende?”
Longarm hunkered to remove his boots and put on his underwear as he replied with a dubious frown, “I ain’t sure I do. I know the folks we think of as Apache or Navajo call the old-timers who left ruins up in their neck of the woods Anasazi. They seem unclear if they mean Ancient Enemies or just Old Timers when they call ‘em Anasazi. I can’t say I ever heard a Navajo call a dying cactus an Anasazi, though.”
As he pulled his boots back on over his long underwear and pants, the part-Indian gal half-concealed her tawny
