“ Granny always used to say I’d grow old having potential.”
It had grown dark outside the windows. The first thunder rumbled in the distance. Jo Jo trembled at the sound. “I wanted you to reach for the stars, and you…”
“ Short-armed it,” I said, using the disparaging term for chickenhearted wide receivers.
She moved closer to me on the sofa, closing time as well as space. “You cared for me, Jake, I know that. But something inside of you tightened up when it came time to show it. Maybe you were afraid that if you cared too much and lost me, you’d be hurt again, like when you lost your father and mother.”
Maybe she was right, I didn’t know. I’ve always found introspection to be painful, and analysis from someone else is downright excruciating.
“ Why did you leave me?” she asked.
I thought about it. Really thought. And it was agonizing. But in the reflected glare of intermittent flashes of lightning I looked at her face and tried to remember what it had been like.
After a moment, I said, “I was a fool. I hadn’t grown up. You were right about me, and I didn’t like hearing the truth.”
“ Oh, Jake!” She breathed the words, and in that graceful way women move, she was in my arms. I don’t remember turning toward her. I don’t remember putting my arms around her, but I held her close, my face pressed to her neck, inhaling the scent of warm flesh, and in a moment, I felt a warm tear trickle from her cheek to mine.
Then, it was just like the old times, or was it? Could it have been, when each of us had traveled so far. Her breath was warm and sweet as I kissed her, cradling her head in my hands. Her full lips parted, and we kissed again. She delicately rubbed her face against mine, catlike, and nipped at my earlobe, then ran a hand through my hair, tugging at it. In a moment, she slipped out of her halter and her shorts, and it was all so familiar. Had it really been all these years?
Her nimble fingers unbuttoned my shirt, and she ran her hands over my chest, tracing figure eights with her nails. Then she unbuttoned my pants, and I fumbled with my shoes, kicking them off, as she tugged at my belt. My hands explored the slopes and curves of her, and she whispered something in Spanish.
A bolt of lightning, followed by the crackle of nearby thunder, lit up the sky and rattled the windowpanes. We changed positions on the sofa, and she emerged on top. The rest was a blur of mouths and hands, the fullness of her breasts, the ripeness of her hips. Again, we tumbled over one another, and this time she was beneath me, our bodies pressed together. When she spoke, her voice was low, the words throaty, “ Quiereme, te necesito! ”
I obliged, and she wrapped her long legs around me. We lay there, rocking in perfect harmony on the sofa like a sailboat in gentle seas, and she exhaled several short gasps, then opened her eyes long enough to let them roll back in her head. “Jake, te amo,” she said finally. “ Siempre te he amado.”
Fat raindrops were plopping off the tin roof now, and driven by the gale, pounding into the windows. Tree branches strained, whined, then snapped and fell against the house. We listened to the wind and the echoing thunder as the storm sat above us. “Thunder and lightning, clouds and rain,” she said.
“ Are you giving a weather report?”
“ With you, Jake, I feel the lightning and the thunder. Then I drift above the earth in the clouds and the rain.”
Later, as the storm moved on, we lay there, limbs still entwined, and she said, “I didn’t know how much I missed you. We could have been so much to each other, Jake. We could have changed each other’s lives.”
“ Maybe we still can,” I said, smoothing her dark hair from her face, not knowing just how true that was.
We were snuggled into a bed a bit too short for me when I said, “Tell me about Kit Carson Cimarron.”
I felt her body stiffen.
“ What do you want to know?”
“ Everything.
In the darkness of the small bedroom, she sighed. Outside the pounding rain had let up, and a light drizzle pinged against the roof. I was on my back, and she lay with one knee over my leg, her head on my chest, breathing in time with my heartbeat. “It was so stupid of me that I’m embarrassed by it, even now. I was so alone then, and he seemed so attentive, so caring. Simmy’s a powerful man, very determined, very strong. It’s quite a combination, Jake, and I just fell for it, very hard.”
“ Simmy?”
“ It doesn’t fit at all. I mean, he’s as big as the side of a barn, but I thought I detected a gentle side to him. I was wrong. He’s an egotistical manipulator and a master operator. He makes my brother look like the pope. In fact, Simmy is what Luis always wanted to be.”
“ What about Rocky Mountain Treasures?”
“ It’s Simmy’s deal. He brought my brother in on it.”
“ Blinky told me it was legitimate.”
Jo Jo laughed. “Only in the sense that neither one is likely to go to jail. It’s a great, legal scam. You’ve seen the prospectus. It’s got all the exculpatory language: ‘Be advised this investment is highly risky, and you may lose part or all of your capital investment.’
“ That ought to keep people out.”
I felt her hair swishing across my chest as if she was shaking her head. “You’d be shocked how many people read those clauses and still put money into oil wells filled with sand and mountaintop property with no access roads. People are greedy and gullible. When I prosecuted consumer frauds, I was constantly amazed how easy it was to separate people from their money with a great sales pitch.”
“ Which is where your brother fits into the deal.”
“ Exactly. And something I learned from Luis, the more outlandish the promises, the easier the sale.”
“ I don’t get it.”
“ Either do I, but it’s true. Buried treasure is easier to sell than bushels of apples.”
“ Wait a second,” I said. “Back up. Does Cimarron own these mines or not?”
“ Sure, he’s got mineral rights to thousands of acres. He bought up hundreds of leases over the past fifteen years or so. He tried mining for gold and copper and silver, and he lost his shirt. Not that he couldn’t find the minerals. He could, but the price of excavation and smelting or refining exceeds market price. At the same time, Simmy was always a nut about the old West. He collects the stories-legends really-about the lost gold mines and buried treasures. He can sit around a campfire and tell twenty different stories. There’s the Lost Padre in California, the Lost Dutchman in Arizona, the Lost Pitchblende in Colorado. Everything’s lost, but none of it’s ever found.”
“ Never?”
“ Well, not exactly never. When Simmy was barely out of his teens, he stumbled onto a cache of double eagles. That’s what got him started.”
“ Whoa. Double eagles?”
“ Twenty-dollar gold pieces, San Francisco mint, about three thousand of them, worth about one-point-five million today. And he wasn’t even looking for them. He was camping out on Devil’s Head Mountain in Colorado. He didn’t know it then, but there was a legend about a gang that robbed a government train near there in the 1870s. They were chased by a posse and buried the loot at the foot of a towering spruce tree. They marked the tree by sticking a long knife into it, then took off on horseback. Winter came, and the next spring the gang tried to find the tree, but couldn’t. After all, the forest probably had fifty thousand spruce trees that looked just alike. They kept looking through the summer. Then a thunderstorm started a forest fire and burned most of the trees to the ground.”
“ So what happened to the gold?”
“ A hundred years or so went by, and Simmy was riding the backcountry by himself, hunting and camping out. The way he tells the story, he was pounding some stakes into the ground to pitch a tent when he hit a rotting old saddlebag that had been brought to the surface by erosion. The wonderful thing is that gold doesn’t rot. The eagles polished up just fine, and Simmy had his first nest egg.”
“ No wonder he believes in secret treasures.”
