CAMERON KNEW THE only place he could get a decent night’s rest in Contention City was at Ma Jones’s Boarding House. It sat well off the main street, where cowboys whooped and hollered all night, and the din of piano music and occasional gunfire made sleep, at least for Cameron, virtually impossible.
And tonight, of all nights, he needed good, sound sleep.
The only problem was, Ma Jones closed up at nine o’clock every night and went to bed. She believed that anyone out later than nine was up to no good, and she didn’t want “nogoods” in her hotel.
When Cameron had ridden into town late in the past, she’d opened up for him and given him a room. His Apachefighting exploits were known and admired in the area, and she was proud to have him stay at her place. She even had a signed picture of him, wielding a Spencer rifle and decked out in a tan hat, fringed chaps, and red neckerchief—his scouting garb—hanging in the dining room in which she served her guests.
As he climbed the porch steps now, saddlebags draped over his shoulder, rifle in hand, he hoped she’d be as happy to see him tonight as she’d been in the past. He also hoped she wouldn’t mistake him for the “rough element” and blow him into eternity with the fabled double-bore with which she always greeted after-hours callers.
He had to pound for five minutes before a light appeared inside. A thin figure clad in white appeared, holding a lantern in one hand, the storied shotgun in the other.
“It’s Jack Cameron, Ma,” Cameron announced through the glass.
Ma came to the door, raised the lantern and peered out. Her face, drawn with sleep, appeared deathly gray in the lantern light. She threw the bolt and opened the door with more disgust than exuberance. It appeared Cameron was beginning to wear a little thin.
“You’re keeping some sorry hours, Jack,” she said.
“Sorry to wake you, Ma. Thanks for opening up for me.”
The old woman turned and moved toward the desk at the back of the room. Cameron followed her contritely. Hoping to arouse some motherly approval, he added, “I’ve been tracking an Apache,” which was as much of the truth as he wanted Ma to hear.
The woman stood the shotgun against the wall and made her way behind the desk. “When are you gonna get married and settle down, Jack Cameron?”
“When the Apaches give me a chance, I reckon.”
She set the lamp on the desk, where it brought out the deep grain of the wood, and produced her spectacles from the pocket of her robe. Cleaning them against her robe, Ma said, “You know, my daughter fancies you—Ruth Agnes.”
“Right pretty girl,” Cameron allowed, wishing like anything that he could get off his aching legs.
“She’s a little lazy now, but I think all Ruth Agnes needs is a husband to bring her around, show her the way. Get her to cookin’ and cleanin’ for him, makin’ his breakfast of a mornin’, his supper of an evenin’. I believe marriage would change her for the good.”
“I believe in marriage as an institution,” Cameron said
woodenly, about to fall asleep on his feet. “Listen, Ma, it’s late, and—”
“I think it would do you some good, as well, Jack Cameron. You wouldn’t be gettin’ bored and lonesome out there, just you and that hammerhead boy, Jimmy What’s-His-Name. You wouldn’t have to go to Tucson and come here two, three times a year, and practice the evilness that goes on over there … You know where I’m talkin’ about, and you know who I’m talkin’ about, too—that tart.”
Cameron just stood there, feeling more than a little like he was standing before Saint Peter at the pearly gates. Finally Ma gave a disparaging sigh and opened the register. Cameron could have kissed her. Placing the glasses on her nose, she ran her finger down a page of the open book.
“Room seven,” she said wearily, as if there was no getting through to this sinner. “That’s right next to your friends that come in earlier.”
Cameron frowned. “Friends?”
Ma Jones ran her finger up the page and tipped back her head to read through her bifocals. “Mr. and Mrs. Adrian Clark. Right fancy couple. What they’re doin’ here, I have no idea.”
She glanced up at Cameron from beneath her thin gray brows, a touch of curiosity flickering in her pious eyes. “I’m sure I don’t need to know, either.”
Ignoring the implicit question, Cameron nodded thoughtfully, feeling a pang of dread at the prospect of having to parry with Clark and his wife again. They would no doubt still try to convince him to help them find the gold, which he had no intention of doing. He also did not want to see those inkyblack eyes of Marina’s again, either … that jet-black hair …
He accepted the room key Ma held out to him.
“Much obliged,” he grumbled, heading toward the stairs.
“Good night,” Ma said behind him, closing the register
book with a thud. “You give Ruth Agnes some thought. She’s a good girl, not a tart like some others.”
“I’ll do that, Ma,” he said, climbing the stairs.
He found his room, stripped off his dusty, smelly clothes, and rolled into bed with a groan.
HE WOKE UP ten hours later, facedown on his pillow.
He wasn’t sure what woke him, but he lifted his head from the pillow and turned to his left. The room was filled with orange light as the sun penetrated the shades over the windows.
He looked at the door. Closed. He thought he must have heard something, but whatever it was, was gone. The building was silent, as was the street outside—strangely silent.
Then he remembered it was Sunday.
He reached for his tarnished silver watch on the stand beside the bed and flipped the lid. Ten-fifteen. Sure enough, no doubt everyone respectable was in church. Everyone unrespectable was probably still in bed, as he was. But they were sleeping off drunks and other sundry sins; he was sleeping off half a dozen days of trail and a skirmish with one of the deadliest Apaches Arizona had ever seen. There was the little matter of Dinah Maxwell, but that hadn’t been his fault.
He deserved to sleep till ten-fifteen, conscience and the voice of his Iowa farmer father, who had never slept later than six A.M., be damned.
He lay back on his pillow and heard the floor squeak outside his door. Someone knocked lightly and whispered, “Jack?”
Cameron frowned and looked at the door with its fly specks and chipped white paint. “Ruth Agnes?”
“You ready for a bath?”
Cameron thought about it. “Yeah … I reckon.”
“Open the door.”
Cameron did not get up, but only reached over, unlocked the door, and twisted the knob. The girl’s smiling face appeared, her cherry-blonde hair swept back in a bun.
She wore a light calico dress with lace along the low-cut neckline, and she was barefoot. Thrusting a cup of coffee at Cameron, she said, “Here. This’ll tide you until I get the tub brought up and filled with water. It won’t take long. I’ve had the boiler stoked all morning.”
“Oh … you don’t have to wait on my lazy bones—”
“Just never you mind—it ain’t no trouble at all, Jack. Why don’t you give me your clothes and I’ll send them over to Mrs. Donleavy for washin’.”
Cameron waved a halfhearted arm at a Windsor chair buried beneath his dusty trail clothes.
Ruth Agnes threw the door wide, strode in, picked up the clothes, and clutched them to her bosom. Striding toward the door, she said, “Be back in a minute.”
She pulled the door closed behind her, and the hall’s floorboards squeaked under her retreating bare feet.
Fifteen minutes later she’d carted the tin tub into his room and filled it with hot water. Leaving, she asked him if he needed anything else, with a peculiar expectancy etched on her lovely young face, and he told her no, a little perplexed. The girl had always been accommodating, but she seemed especially accommodating today, not to mention cheerful.
Cameron wondered if it could be her birthday, or maybe she’d found a boyfriend and she was practicing for marriage. Then he remembered the conversation he’d had last night with Ruth Agnes’s mother, and his stomach took a leap.
Oh, shit. She wasn’t thinking …?
Cameron soaked in the cooling water, smoking a cigarette, sipping a second cup of coffee he’d planted on the Windsor chair beside the tub, and stared absently out the window at
the sky turning brassy as the sun climbed toward its apex.
He was thinking of Marina and wishing she’d change her mind about heading south when he heard the floorboards in the hall squeak again and the tap on the door.
He knew who it was.
“I ain’t decent,” he called with the cigarette in his lips.
“That’s all right—I won’t look at nothin’ important,” Ruth Agnes said, flinging open the door and striding into the room with a kettle of steaming water. She poured the water into the tub. “Just thought you might be wanting a warmup.”
Cameron brought his legs up and cupped his hands over his privates, temples pounding with embarrassment. “Good Lord, girl,” he said, “people are gonna start talkin’, they see this …!”
“There’s no one here—they’ve all gone out,” Ruth Agnes said, setting the kettle on the floor. “Momma’s at church. She’ll be there all day. It’s just you and me, Jack. Hand me your sponge—I’ll wash your back.”
Well, she was here now, and he did need his back washed, so Cameron found the sponge and gave it to the girl, who soaped it up, told him to lean forward, and went to work on his back. The girl’s hand was deft, and having his back sponged with hot, soapy water felt so good that Cameron forgot his embarrassment and fairly groaned with pleasure.
Ruth Agnes dipped the sponge in the water and brought it up to the back of Cameron’s sunburned neck.
“Momma said you might have a question for me today, Jack,” she said demurely.
His frown deepened the already deep-cut chevrons in the saddle-brown skin of his forehead. “Question?” He hoped the girl didn’t mean what he thought she meant.
“You know—she thought maybe you might have something important to ask me.”
The girl stopped scrubbing. Slowly she dipped the sponge
in the water and wrung it out, sliding her now bashful eyes between the sponge and Cameron’s face.
He’d turned to look at her.
“You did have a question for me, didn’t you, Jack?” Ruth Agnes said, a note of disappointment entering her voice.
Cameron sighed. What was it with the women around here, wanting to marry him? He supposed that any halfway civilized man with a decent job was a prime target in these parts.
He squinted his eyes sympathetically. “I don’t know what Ma told you, Ruth, but if she gave you the idea I was going to ask … that I was going to propose to you today, she shouldn’t have.”
A cloud passed over the girl’s eyes. “You … you weren’t going to … ?”
“Ruth Agnes, I’m thirty-five years old. I live out in the middle of nowhere with a kid who thinks he’s the next William Bonney. I drink too much and, whenever I get the chance, I carouse. You don’t want to be married to a man like that.”
Ruth Agnes’s shoulders slumped as though the sky had fallen on her, and the cheerful light left her eyes without a trace. She stared at him and blinked. “I … thought you liked me. You gave me that dress last time you were in town, and that bracelet last year …”
“That was because I do like you and wanted to let you know I appreciate how you always clean up after me around here and heat my baths and wash my clothes. I know Ma can’t pay you much, and I just wanted to give you something that said I was obliged, which I was … am …”
She seemed to be only half listening. Her brows were furrowed. Inclining her head, she stared at him as if trying to discern some foreign script. “Don’t you think I’m pretty?”
“You’re beautiful, Ruth Agnes.”
“Then—why … ?”
Yes, why? he wondered. She was beautiful and would no doubt get even more lovely with age. Any man in his right mind would marry her, given the chance.
The problem was, as with Dinah Maxwell, he didn’t love her. He was a lonely, aging desert rat trying to scrape a living off cattle whenever the Apaches gave him a chance. That was no life for a woman. Ruth Agnes was young and pretty. If she followed him out to his ranch in the middle of nowhere, she’d hate him for it later.
Thinking that, he wondered for the first time if Ivy Kitchen would have hated him for the same reason by now. Maybe the perfect love, he pondered, was the one that wasn’t consummated, the one that was never allowed to grow to its fruition.
Maybe he and Ivy had had the perfect relationship.
He looked at Ruth Agnes. Hell, she didn’t want to get married and settle down any more than he did. Not yet, anyway. She was young and had her wild oats to sow, though sowing them probably took some imagination with a mother like Ma Jones skulking around with her shotgun. No, Cameron was certain Ruth Agnes was more curious about lovemaking than about marriage, about living out a girlish fantasy than settling down to the grim business of keeping a ranch house for a man old enough to be her father.
He didn’t say any of this, however. “Why? Because I’m older than you by a long shot, and I’m even older than my years.”
She turned angrily to the window and crossed her arms over her breasts. “There’s someone else, isn’t there?”
Cameron laughed. “No, there sure as hell isn’t, Ruth Agnes.” He only vaguely noted the defensiveness in his tone.
She looked at him. “Is it the Mexican woman? The one that came in here with the dandy with the Southern accent?”
“Marina? She’s married.”
“So? My pa ran off on my ma, an’ he was married.”
“Well … I wouldn’t do that,” Cameron said. “Foolin’ with a married woman is a great way to get yourself back-shot … and deserving of it.” He frowned, the mention of Marina’s name making him feel something he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Ruth Agnes turned back to him. “You think I’m just a kid.”
“You are a kid.”
“I’m fifteen.”
Cameron laughed ruefully and shook his head.
“Okay, so you won’t marry me,” she said huskily, kneeling back down by the tub and dropping her eyes to stare at the soapy water between his legs. “But I don’t see any reason why we can’t—” She gave a lusty smile that made her brown eyes flash with wickedness. “—you know.”
Cameron was flabbergasted. “Good Lord, girl!”
Her hands clutched the tub and her hair brushed her incredibly smooth face. “Come on, Jack. I ain’t never done it before, an’ I was savin’ myself for you.”
“Ruth Agnes! If Ma heard you, she’d shoot us both!”
The girl grinned coquettishly. “I’ll show you my titties.”
He bit his cheek and turned his eyes to the ceiling. “I ain’t interested.”
“They’ve gotten big in the past six months!”
Cameron ignored her. “Why don’t you go see if my clothes are done?”
“Not that I’m an expert in such matters, but it looks to me like you’re interested, Jack.”
Cameron looked at her, then followed her gaze to his member lifting its brown head above the water.
“Holy shit!” he yelled, splashing as he covered himself.
Ruth Agnes slapped her hands to her mouth and squealed.
“Now look what you did!” Cameron exclaimed.
“I ain’t never seen one that size before!” Ruth Agnes laughed, eyes wide and downcast. “Todie Embers showed me his last summer, but it was just a little wisp of a thing.”
“Out!” Cameron ordered, face red with embarrassment.
“Come on, Jack—just one more peek?” Ruth whined.
“Out! I ain’t a goddamn circus show!”
Ruth Agnes scrambled to her feet, giggling, and ran out the door. Returning, she poked her head back into the room and asked, “Need more water?”
“No thank you!”
She turned and ran down the hall, squealing.
“I don’t know what the hell’s so damn funny about it,” Cameron groused, taking a troubled gander between his legs. “Women.”