Crack in the Sky

then motioned for them to enter. The sudden warmth of the place surprised him as they stepped into the entry. On two sides of a large parlor flames danced in tall fireplaces. Rugs and blankets lined the walls where a half-dozen men sat, each of them accompanied by a woman. As the Americans followed the large one toward a small bar in the corner, the room fell hushed of a sudden, merry laughter and happy voices disappearing as if swallowed in one great gulp of silence. Only the two guitar players in another corner played on a few more measures before they too looked up in wonder and fell quiet.

The fat woman stopped and snarled something at the musicians, and they began to play again as she pointed the way for the Americans to accompany her to the bar.

Behind the broad cottonwood plank a woman set down two clay cups and poured the gringos a drink from a wicker-wrapped gallon jug. McAfferty pulled a single coin from his belt pouch and slapped it down on the plank. The fat woman held up four fingers to the woman behind the bar, then turned away.

Dragging his cup from his lips, Titus reached out to grab the fleshy arm of the large one who had answered the door that evening as twilight gave its way to night.

She looked at him with disdain and sighed as she pulled her arm free of his hand.

“Barcelos?” he asked.

“Si.”

“I want Conchita.”

Her brow furrowed. “Conchita?”

“Si,” he replied, nodding. “Conchita.”

For a moment she looked him down and up. “Bueno” and then she turned to the woman at the bar, to speak rapidly in Mexican before turning away once more.

Bass watched as she left, about to speak when the woman at the bar spoke.

“I am Conchita.”

Bass whirled, his throat suddenly constricting. “Conchita?’

“Si.”

“Bill Williams … he said I should ask for you.”

“Conchita … me,” and she tapped a finger into that cleavage between the full breasts that strained against the low-slung camisole she wore with nothing more beneath it to conceal her fleshy charms.

“He said … Bill said I should ask for you.”

“Conchita, me,” she repeated, a little confusion crossing her face.

“You don’t know much American, do you?”

“Gringo … Conchita,” she explained slowly, as if to make the trapper understand, while pouring McAfferty some more of the pale aguardiente from the wicker jug. “Gringo … pesos, Conchita go gringo.” And she pointed toward a darkened hallway leading from the parlor.

“Mayhaps she don’t know much American, Asa,” Bass said, “but this is a gal what means business.”

“Lo, but a woman’s heart is wormwood, Mr. Bass,” McAfferty warned as his eyes flicked around the room. “Best you watch your backtrail with this’un.”

As the barmaid came around the end of the short plank resting atop four large oak barrels, Bass looked over the room with a growing worry. Wasn’t natural the way everything had come to a stop and everyone was studying the two Americans.

“Ain’t this Mex gal I’m worried ’bout, Asa. Looks to be these soldiers don’t want us here.”

“Aye, Mr. Bass,” McAfferty replied, and threw back the rest of his liquor. “‘To keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman.’ These here whores don’t mind taking American money, but their men don’t cotton to having gringo dogs dipping their stingers in Mexican honey pots.”

The barmaid slipped her arm in his and Scratch beamed with anticipation. “I s’pose it’s time to dip my stinger.”

“‘And upon her forehead was a name written,’” McAfferty called to Scratch’s back as Titus left with the woman. “’MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH!’”

Conchita led him back to the portal of that darkened hallway, stopping for a moment to pull a candle from an iron holder hammered into the whitewashed adobe wall. On down the hallway she stopped and pulled open a sagging door, then held back a thin blanket to let Bass into the tiny crib where she plied her ancient trade.

Setting the candle in another wall-side holder, Conchita turned to the bed, where she flung back the layers of thick Indian blankets, then stepped right up to the American and proceeded to help him off with his pouch, then his coat. Next she yanked up the long tail of his buckskin shirt, tugging it over his head.

Hurling his garments aside piece by piece, without any preliminaries the shorter woman surprised Scratch when she stood on her toes and ran her lips across his chest, the hot tip of her tongue circling his nipples before she dragged it up the side of his neck.

While Titus threw back another long swallow of his fiery Taos lightning, her fingers yanked at his belt buckle, then dragged aside his breechclout as the belt dropped. Suddenly she pushed him toward the thick pad of mattress and blankets tucked in the corner of her tiny cell, so abruptly that he spilled some of the liquor from his clay cup, drops spilling onto the back of her head as she went to her knees in front of him as Bass eased back onto the bed.

As her sure hands flew over the knots lashing his moccasins around his ankles, then tugged at the top of his leggings to pull them off his feet, Scratch found his flesh hardening, stretching, growing just with the sight of her breasts all but spilling out of that loose-topped camisole, growing warm with the sweet anticipation of having himself buried deep within a female once more.

He wasn’t sure if it was the heat from the pale, amber liquor, or the closeness of the small room where the single candle flutted against the mud wall. Maybe even the strong odor of lard coming from that poor lamp made of nothing more than a burning wick set within a small cup of pig fat. Perhaps it was the cinnamon oil he could tell she had rubbed in her hair.

But he knew he was ready to explode when she rocked up on her knees above him and thumbed down the top of her camisole, slipping it off her bare shoulders one side at a time, tugging it over each of those breasts the color of smooth milk chocolate stirred into steaming coffee. But when he reached up to grab them, Conchita pushed his hands away and instead rocked forward so that her shoulders were right over his hips. Smiling broadly enough to show her two missing teeth, she gently spread her fleshy breasts apart enough to swallow his hardened penis between them.

Then, with her hands clamping the soft, chocolate flesh around him, the woman began to rock herself up and back, up and back as she rested her chin on his upper belly and gazed up at him devilishly.

Savoring the delicious wickedness of having her watch him as she brought him to climax, Scratch was certain she knew exactly what she was doing. Sure she had done this a hundred times before—even a thousand … with a thousand other men. But as he felt the boiling eruption begin all too quickly, those others didn’t matter. All that was important right then was the woman-hunger that overwhelmed him every few months … thinking back to how it was when he had been a young man and this unimaginable hunger had run hot in his veins more frequently than it did nowadays.

With the sudden explosive release as his hot eruption washed over her breasts, he once again realized that of all the different women in all the Indian camps, and of all the whores in every one of the Taos knocking shops— none of them could come anywhere close to satisfying what he figured he truly wanted. With each passing season, each new moon, with every day’s sunrise, he wondered why he was no longer satisfied to have each new woman spread her legs for him and be done with her. In years gone he would have been more than content to take his pleasure and quickly move on.

But of late here he was beginning to get the nagging sense that something was missing from these infrequent grapples with a woman’s flesh. Not that this bucking and thrashing of that ol’ monster with two backs didn’t bring him a moment’s peace and contentment … but rarely anything lasting. And even as deliciously wicked as the way Conchita had used her soft breasts on him, the satisfaction of this long-pent release she had just given him began to fade quickly like a cooling breeze come to erase the fever from his skin.

Then, again, perhaps that was the way it was meant to be between men and women—that they somehow coexisted despite never truly giving one another what each really wanted. In the end they were at best able to give