Wind growls at the corners of Ruby Fortune’s mouth as she leaves the flatland and zigzags up a sharp, rocky incline toward Silver Tip Mine, four miles east of Jericho in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. Ruby’s neck is still sore, the tail of a sickly yellow bruise circling her throat. He could have killed her. As she shoves her kerchief over her nose and mouth to avoid dust, strips of hair whip her cheeks, glance off her eyes. Pulling her wide-brimmed hat low, Ruby flings tangled hair behind her shoulder. It’s as futile as harnessing air.
Ruby has borrowed Doc Swendsen’s best mare today before she changes her mind. The horse path up Oldfather Peak is slower than the ore road, but less dangerous—don’t want to be crushed by a twenty-mule hitch careening down the mountain, hell bent for leather, drivers cussing like cowboys that a woman is riding up into their domain.
“C’mon, Maisie. ’Atta girl.” Ruby clicks her tongue. She needs to rein in her shaky nerves today. She’s had two shots of whiskey and it isn’t noon yet.
The mare’s deft hooves crunch on hardpan and clatter up loose gravel as Ruby winds her way around cactus thickets, thorny ironwood, and sun-whitened bones of the dead: big horn sheep, mule deer, bobcat, desert hare. Millions of years ago, the earth heaved up so quickly that there wasn’t time to smooth the edges, so chain after chain of mountains rise from the cracked desert floor like islands in a sea, here at the rough edge of the world.
Crossing a dry riverbed, ocotillo line the snaky pathway, their spindly stalks casting oblong shadows across the trail. Stark white billows bank up against the jagged Santa Catalinas as Ruby gains altitude. It’s August now, February’s moody twin. It won’t be long before lightning rips the sky and thunder gallops behind, rumbling savagely the length of the mountain chain. Ruby trains one eye on the sky and the other on the trail. Monsoons can make a body nervous.
The boys are with Divina today, Virgil, Fletcher, and Clayton, almost like triplets at eight, nine, and ten. And little Sam—now there’s a worry. Only four, he wasn’t a big talker before Ruby shot the boys’ pa. Sam hasn’t uttered a word since that day. It’s been what? Two weeks? She’s still alive, and her boys too, and she wouldn’t have been if she hadn’t pulled the trigger.
A shy half-mile from the mine, Ruby’s skirt catches on a white-thorned acacia bush, tugging her backward for a moment. She whacks the branch away with blood-red leather gloves. There are still traces of an old burn here, but the desert is, if anything, resilient. Ruby hears a snort. Just ahead, past a copse of scraggy mesquite creped with mistletoe, a squadron of javelina snuffles across the trail, chuffing snouts close to the ground. The mare whinnies.
Horses have navigated this terrain since Francisco Vasquez de Coronado brought horses north from New Spain in the 1540s. Conquistadors, priests, and vaqueros have roamed these Apache hills for centuries. And then the floodgates opened: trappers and hunters, soldiers and settlers navigating well-worn trails long before Ruby took to the saddle. None wants to cross a javelina on a bad day.
Ruby uses her damp shirtsleeve to wipe sweat from her brow as she waits for the javelinas to pass. She pats the mare and feeds her a lump of sugar. When Ruby was learning her ABCs, her father fed her lumps of sugar, too, like a favorite horse. “Word by word, Ruby,” she hears her long-dead father say. Still good advice as she spools out the exchange she’s going to have in a quarter-hour’s time. She has to get it right. Her heart taps a steady rap rap rap at her ribcage as she draws in more dust than breath, even with her face covered. Could God Almighty turn off this wind, just once?
Sitting straight as the saguaro up ahead, Ruby rides up the last incline and skirts a deep cleft in the trail. Ruby is not so worried about falling into a crack in the earth and finding herself in China. It’s Hell she’s more nervous about. Now that Willie Fortune is buried in Jericho Cemetery, others—including the man she is riding to see—might rather it had been her funeral. It’s scandal enough as it is, a mother of four shooting her husband in broad daylight and walking away. Today, Ruby’s loaded derringer is fastened to the belt that circles her boy-like waist. One can never be too prepared.