“Yonder looks good for us,” Jack explained, pointing upstream. “We’ll picket the horses, then mosey down for supper.”
That evening the company trappers hosted Hatcher’s outfit. Over the flames broiled juicy quarters of elk and antelope, as well as two bighorn sheep that hunters had brought down to camp earlier in the day.
“Ain’t never had me no sheep afore,” Scratch told the man who served up a slab of the red meat thicker than two of his fingers. He stuffed the end of the sliver in his mouth and sliced off a healthy bite, finding the texture and sweet taste of the meat entirely pleasant.
The company man settled on his haunches right at Bass’s knee. “And I ain’t never knowed no one gone to Mexico afore. Heard tell the food’s every bit as hot as the sun can boil a man’s brains there. Any of that true?”
“A feller can get hisself a pepper belly, that’s for sartin,” Isaac piped up on the far side of Titus.
“Forget the goddamned food!” A second of Campbell’s men squatted near them. “The women—tell me ’bout them.”
“Nawww,” Scratch said, shaking his head. “You don’t want us to go and tell you ’bout them Mexican women.”
“Hell if I don’t!” he roared in mock wounding.
“We been dry since we come in to ronnyvoo,” explained that first of the company trappers who pointed across the stream. “Them Snakes over there ain’t bringing out their wimmens for none of us.”
“Course they ain’t,” grumbled the second man. “Leastways not till Sublette gets here with shinies and foofaraw what can make any Injun woman plop on her back and open her legs for an American!”
“So go right ahead and tell us ’bout them greaser gals!” a third man exclaimed as he strode up, grease dripping from his lower lip into his chin whiskers.
“Why, now … they ain’t like no white gals I ever poked,” Bass said, trying his best to emulate that knowledgeable tone of the backwoods schoolteachers he had suffered under for so many years. “Not like no Injun women neither. My, my—”
“That’s a crock of shit!” Wood blurted out. “And this nigger’s full of it up to the bung!”
Bass whirled on him, growling around a chunk of bighorn sheep, “Careful who you say is full of shit, Caleb!”
“This here pilgrim ain’t never bedded down no Mex gals but one,” Wood continued. “Nary but that one.”
“It ain’t cause I didn’t wanna—”
“Must’a took a shine to her since you humped just her all winter long!” Caleb interrupted.
Scratch shrugged, explaining, “She was a good whore. Good ’nough to last me the winter.”
“You had a Mex whore?” asked one of the company men.
“Mama Louisa’s fine Taos whores,” Caleb declared. “I been through ’em all—forwards and backwards, boys. I can tell you anything you wanna know ’bout them greaser womens.”
Another company man lunged in anxiously. “They any good?”
“Good? You ask me if them bang-tails is good?” Wood replied. “Just how good a willing woman gotta be when a man’s been ’thout for nigh onto half a year?”
They were attracting more of Campbell’s trappers as Caleb warmed to his task before this attentive audience.
“They really good, eh?”
“Good ain’t the word for it,” Caleb declared matter-of-factly. “Better’n any red gal, twice’t as good as any white whore I poked.”
One man licked his lips unconsciously; another dragged the back of his forearm across his mouth, eyes wide, glistening in primal stimulation.
“G’won, Caleb,” Hatcher said as he walked up, a curved and meaty rib in hand. “Tell ’em how good them greaser women are for American men.”
Wood nodded, leaned forward, and said in a low, dramatic voice, “You boys know them Mex folks cook most of their food with hot peppers in it?”
He waited until most of his audience bobbed their heads in eager agreement.
“Well, now—I s’pose it’s them peppers.”
“What ’bout them peppers?” demanded a Campbell man.
Caleb looked at him straight-faced. “I figger the peppers they eat just makes them Mex gals naturally eager to jump on a likely American. Makes ’em just ’bout as hot to jump on your wiping stick as them peppers they eat in their food!”
Some of the men whooped in glee; others stomped a moccasin on the ground or slapped a thigh, while a few whistled with lurid approval. This was just what they wanted to hear. More fantasy to feed their womanless dreams as brigades of men roamed this far and lonely mountain west. Fanciful dreams to warm a man on cold winter nights, trapped in the fastness of the wilderness, far from Indian camp or white settlement or Mexican village. Sometimes dreams might just be enough for a man to make it through to spring, on till rendezvous.
If he made it, then a man had cause to celebrate—what with waiting and yearning all year long to find himself a gal who would fulfill even the slightest of his inflated fantasies … for after a long autumn, a terrible winter, and an endless spring of fevered, womanless dreaming, it damn well didn’t take much at all for most any woman to fill those wildest of cravings.
As Bass leaned back against a pack of company beaver, Campbell’s men leaned in attentively, totally captivated by Caleb Wood’s exploits with one Mexican maiden after another: tales of bared shoulders, filmy camisoles allowed to hang so loose, they barely covered the rounded tops of a woman’s breasts, how those Taos females shamelessly flaunted their ankles and calves beneath a swirl of short skirts, their cheeks reddened with a bright-red berry juice, clenching corn-husk cigarillos between their full and provocative lips.
How brazen were those brown women, he explained, women who called out to the Americans whenever they passed through the town’s narrow byways. Women actually beckoned a man to join them for a drink, a meal, and often more … for some modest payment. Women eager, perhaps, to find and catch themselves a likely American husband rather than some poor, earth-grubbing
“Ain’t none of ’em got any money?” asked one of the company men.
“Most don’t have much at all,” Hatcher explained as he came up and sat. “Only a few got anything to call their own. Their kind looks down their noses at the rest of their people, not just Americans.”
A Campbell man turned to Caleb. “You ever poke one of them rich gals?”
“Nary a one what was real rich,” Wood admitted with a wag of his head. “They wear too damn many clothes—just like our own gals back in the States. Almost like they don’t wanna show no skin on their bodies. So them poor gals is the only ones ever showed me a good time … they’re the kind of woman what gonna show you ever’thing on their bodies!”
As Bass dragged out his tiny pipe, then retrieved a small chunk of tobacco carrot from his belt pouch, he listened to Caleb and Jack go on to tell the company men about the wonders of Mexican women. Between a finger and thumb he crumpled a bit of the dried leaf over the bowl, tamped it in with a fingertip, then crumpled in some more until he had the pipe filled. After retrieving a twig from the fire, he lit the tobacco, inhaled, then sighed, ruminating again on Kinkead and Rowland.
John must surely have made it back to Taos by now, he decided. Likely Rowland went straight for Matthew’s place—stay there for a time till he sorted out what he figured to do. Till he figured out how he could get himself over the miseries for his Maria.
As much as he had made peace with himself for leaving those two women in the past, Scratch wondered how a man ever came to feel so much for a woman that he found himself grieving and lost without her. Then he remembered sensing more than a twinge of that sort of strong, undeniable feeling for Marissa Guthrie. Admitting that it was possible to feel that way about a woman … because it was just that sort of feeling that compelled him to leave Marissa before that feeling grew into an unmovable thing, before his need for her outweighed his hunger to see what lay beyond the next valley.
More than likely it was possible for a man to care about a woman and stay to one place with her as much as a man could be lured to see what lay over the next hill, what beckoned from the far valley, what adventure awaited him far away from the bothersome nattering of a woman who rarely gave her man room to breathe, room to be.
Poor Rowland, having give up so much for that woman … only to have what little he had left of a sudden took
