Page 24 of The Promise of Jenny Jones

Jenny set a northern course midway between the Sierra Madres and the railroad tracks that rolled down the Central Plateau. If she could hold to a hard pace of twenty miles a day, she figured to make Chihuahua in about two weeks.

But two weeks was beginning to look like a wildly optimistic estimate.

Three days out of Durango, the terrain gave way to rocky desert soil and deep arroyos that slowed her pace.

Noonday heat blistered the ground, and they had to stop, seeking shelter where they could find it until later in the day.

As night approached, Jenny sought out the low shacks of the campesinos who labored to scratch a life from the poor soil. She knew she’d find a trickle of water near their pitiful patches and maybe a chance to buy fresh meat and milk for the kid.

“My face hurts,” Graciela mentioned sullenly, staring with distaste at the chunk of goat meat roasting over the fire.

“Did you rub aloe on your skin like I told you?” The smell of roasting meat made Jenny’s mouth water in anticipation. The campesino’s woman had sold her fresh tortillas, too, and a ripe squash. They would feast tonight. “Drink that milk,” she reminded Graciela. “It cost the earth.”

Graciela turned her sunburned face toward the campesino’s shack, a dark smudge against the night. No light showed through the walls of mud and branch. Either the residents had gone to bed, or they sat around a flame too small to penetrate the chinks.

“Why can’t we sleep in the house with them?” Graciela asked in a whiny singsong that had begun to grate against Jenny’s nerves two days ago. “I don’t like to sleep on the ground. I’m afraid bugs or snakes will crawl in my bedroll.”

“Kid,” Jenny said, striving mightily for patience, “That’s no hacienda up there.

Believe it or not, most people don’t live like you did.

Most people aren’t rich and don’t have servants, they don’t have extra food or beds.

Eight people live in that shack already.

They don’t have a square inch for you. Plus, no one up there is sleeping in a bed.

They’re either in hammocks or sleeping on the ground just like we are. ”

Graciela flung her the I-hate-you look. “You said you wouldn’t call me kid.”

After an interior struggle Jenny conceded that she deserved the accusing tone.

“You’re right,” she snapped, leaning to inspect the chunk of roasting meat.

“I’m sorry. If you find a bug in your blankets, squash it.

If a snake gets in there, you get out.” She stared at Graciela across the fire pit.

“Complaining isn’t going to change a damned thing.

So just make up your mind that it’s going to be a tough couple of weeks and keep your mouth shut about the inconveniences, all right?

You aren’t the only one who’d rather be sleeping in a bed, but you don’t hear me complaining all the time. ”

The kid already looked a bit worse for the wear.

Her fashionable maroon riding outfit was grey with dust and soiled by sweat.

Part of the hem had torn loose. Since they had no water to spare for washing, their faces were dirty above fresh sunburns.

Perspiration had blended with the dust near their scalps, creating a film of mud that eventually dried and began to itch and torment.

When a charred crust had formed on the meat, Jenny cut slices onto their plates and scooped mounds of hot squash on the side. “I know you’re tired,” she said to Graciela, “but you have to eat to keep up your strength. So clean your plate.”

Graciela glared at her. “Uncle Ty didn’t order me around.”

“Huh! From what you’ve told me, you ordered him around.” The goat meat was dry and on the tough side, but not bad, not bad at all. She’d eaten worse in her time. The tortillas, on the other hand, were thick and chewy and went down the throat the way she imagined ambrosia probably would.

According to her dictionary, ambrosia, a word she liked the sound of, was the imaginary food of the gods.

Now that was something to think about. Before she ran across ambrosia, Jenny had never imagined God sitting down to supper.

All day she’d been wondering who cooked the ambrosia.

Surely God didn’t prepare it Himself. Or maybe imaginary food didn’t need to be cooked.

Graciela forked up a piece of goat meat, tasted it, and made a face. “Ack.”

“It’s not ambrosia, but it’s all we’ve got, so eat it,” Jenny said, pleased to have worked a new word into conversation.

“Uncle Ty wouldn’t make me eat something I don’t like.”

Jenny narrowed her eyes. “I’m getting sick and tired of hearing what a swell fellow your Uncle Ty is.”

“He’s nicer than you are.”

“Why? Because you wrapped him around your little finger? Because he waited on you and let you sit there like a useless bump on a rock?” She snorted.

“Let me tell you something, kid. Sorry… Graciela. Since you and me hitched up, you’ve learned to make a halfway decent pot of coffee, you’ve learned how to lay a fire, you’re dressing and undressing yourself, and you’ve learned to pin up your own hair.

You can water the horses and fold up a bedroll.

You can scrub out the supper dishes, and tomorrow, like it or not, you’re going to cook most of our supper.

You still don’t know squat about most things, but you aren’t as dumb as you used to be.

Now you tell me… doesn’t it feel good to know how to do something more than sit on your behind and watch other people take care of you? ”

Graciela chewed another bite of goat meat and didn’t say anything.

Now was as good a time as any to ask a question that Jenny had been wondering about. As casually as she could manage, she inquired, “Did your uncle Ty say anything about me?”

“He hates you because you killed my mama,” Graciela answered, after she had swallowed and patted her lips with her handkerchief.

“He said that?” Jenny stared. “I told him what happened. He knows damned well that I didn’t have anything to do with Marguarita’s death! Did you explain to him that I don’t lie?”

Graciela hesitated. “I told him what you said about promises.”

“But he still thinks I had something to do with your mother’s death?” She set her plate on the ground. “That son of a bitch.”

She was still fuming after she got the kid into her bedroll and settled for the night. Sitting cross-legged on the ground, she stared into the embers of their cook fire and thought about Ty Sanders. It occurred to her that she was spending a hell of a lot of time thinking about Ty Sanders.

She couldn’t look at Graciela without seeing the cowboy’s blue-green eyes. Every time the kid mentioned Uncle Ty, and that was about two hundred times a day, she saw his lean wiry body in her mind. Remembered the hard muscle knotting his thighs and arms.

Jenny didn’t seek out brawls, but she’d been in a few fights over the years. This was the first time, however, that remembering a tussle with a man had made her feel hot and strange when she thought about it afterward.

Worse, she knew what feeling hot and strange meant. Rubbing a hand over her forehead, she rose from the embers and walked toward the campesino’s scraggly maize field, then turned and walked back to the campsite.

There had been a man in Yuma a few years ago, a man who for no reason that she could figure had made her feel hot and strange inside.

Eventually she’d recognized it meant she had a hankering for him, and she had satisfied that hankering out behind Shorty Barrow’s saloon in a wholly unsatisfactory coupling that had left the man smiling and her blinking up at the stars in bewildered disappointment.

Now here she was, having another hankering when she knew damned well that sex was a man’s sport and there was nothing in it for a woman except a few bruises and two minutes of having someone’s breath in your face.

And, afterward, a feeling of loneliness as dry and empty as a desert.

Never in her life had she felt as gut-bad lonely as she had that night out behind Shorty Barrow’s saloon.

Until she met the cowboy, she hadn’t had a hankering since.

Drawing back her boot, she kicked dirt over the embers in the fire pit, then strode over to her bedroll and crawled inside. Folding her hands behind her head, she stared up at the stars until she found Marguarita.

“I’m too fricking tired to tell you about today. Nothing happened anyway,” she said. She squinted suspiciously. “Can you read my thoughts?”

That was a disconcerting possibility. She’d have to find a subtle way to ask the kid if people in heaven knew the thoughts of living people.

She had a sinking feeling that dead people knew everything, especially those like Marguarita, who probably became angels.

After worrying about it for several minutes, she decided that she didn’t care if God knew she had a hankering for the cowboy.

God was in the forgiveness business. She didn’t think God wasted too much time thinking about Jenny Jones anyway.

But it made her acutely uncomfortable that Marguarita probably knew she liked to remember how good it had felt rolling around the hotel room floor with the cowboy on top of her.

There had been one startling moment when she’d had a chance to knee him in the groin, but she hadn’t done it because the hankering feeling had suddenly hit her hard and addled her brains.

Well damn. Her hands formed into fists behind her head.

For all she knew Ty Sanders had a wife and family back in California.

Not that it mattered. A man that good-looking wouldn’t give Jenny a second glance in any case.

He’d want some tiny little woman rigged out in lace and ribbon.

Most men did. Men preferred birdlike women who smelled like flowers.

Women who thought a callus was something unique to men.