"And I say that if Jason Bolt vouches for the boy, that's good enough for meself." Clancey's thick Irish brogue, clotted with drink, cut through the fog of silence in Lottie's saloon picking up the threads of the argument he had discarded moments before.
Aaron Stempel squinted at his empty glass. The sea captain's pledge of loyalty didn't particularly impress him. He and everyone else in the bar knew that if Jason Bolt jumped off a cliff, Clancey's Irish ass would be one of the first to follow into the abyss.
"And if anything did go wrong, you can count on Jason to do the right thing." As Lottie moved to freshen Clancey's drink, Aaron shook his head in disbelief. What was it about Bolt that made had the people in town lose whatever good sense they were born with?
"I'll make sure of that." Aaron's fingers lightly stroked the cool, empty glass on the table before him. He briefly debated pouring himself another whiskey, then reluctantly decided against it. Bolt was slippery enough for him to prefer dealing with the man sober, particularly with the stakes as high as they were today.
"Well, from the way they came back into town, I'd say they were only playing, Aaron. Ben's voice was laced with anxiety. He was looking for reassurance, a reassurance that Aaron couldn't give, a reassurance he know Bolt would pour on as soon as he arrived.
"Ben, the next time that Indian boy goes on one of his wild wagon rides, it might be your little baby that he takes along with him." Ben winced as Aaron drove his point home. "Will you excuse it as just playin' then?"
"Aaron," Jason's voice made Ben's answer immaterial, as the loggers broad muscular frame blocked Lottie's doorway. "I understand you wanted to see me."
It wasn't quite a question. Both men had known this meeting was inevitable, ever since their first confrontation when the Bolt brothers had insisted on taking in the wounded, orphaned Apache boy.
"Yeah, you're right." Aaron tapped the glass, then set it down. Bolt looked rested and sure, not at all like a man who was currently sleeping on a lit powder keg. Either the atmosphere was a lot calmer up at the logging camp than it was here in town or Jason had simply decide to bluff things through again. In Seattle the mood was definitely not calm. For the first time in his ten years of residence Aaron knew of guns kept on bedsteads, and loaded rifles hooked next to locked doors.
"He's your responsibility, Bolt. You promised to control him."
"No one's hurt." Jason's voice was smooth and reasonable, his eyes guarded.
"Do you think we ought to wait till someone does get hurt, Jason?" The thin thread of worry in Ben's voice told Stempel that the storekeeper, too, had heard the stories of Apache atrocities that had been told and retold in town these past days.
"Oh, don't be foolish, Ben. Of course not." Jason dismissed the question with the ease of long practice.
Aaron's eyes narrowed grimly. Even after that boy's attack on Candy Pruitt, and his abduction this morning of the two children, Bolt clearly had no intention of giving even an inch. He was going to keep the boy up at camp, dangerously close to town, and he was gonna ignore any warnings, any advice, any facts that Jason Bolt didn't want to hear.
"You shouldn't even have the boy. He's a ward of the federal government." Aaron all but shouted the words, and Jason turned quickly toward him.
"And you hate him."
The swift, flat accusation stung Aaron, then surprise gave way to cold rage as he realized that Jason had met him at the saloon only to make that charge. Even if there was a small grain of truth in the accusation, there was none in what Jason implied. He might hate the boy, but he was no bigot.
"I do not." Stempel's words were laced with cold fury. He stood as the logger walked toward him.
"Then I'll have to call you a liar." Jason's words were flat and deliberate.
Aaron tensed, wishing he had the luxury of solving this problem with his fists. Behind Jason, Lottie watched him with a worried frown. The bar was as quiet as a graveyard, all eyes locked on the two men. Aaron pushed his chair away and, aching to throw the first punch, he forced himself to pick up his empty glass. There had been enough said in here, perhaps too much. What he knew Bolt wanted from him, his reason for hating the Apache, he would give. But not here. Not in front of half the town.
He tuned and strode toward the back room with broad angry steps, then swung open the door.
"Bolt."
Jason had already moved to follow, carrying the bottle and another empty glass. The door slammed shut behind him.
As Jason sat down at the small table and filled the glasses, Aaron moved toward the window. The short walk had drained away the heat of his anger, leaving him wary and ill at ease. He wasn't a man given to confidences, or to personal exchanges of any sort, particularly with someone like Bolt. He valued his privacy too highly to feel anything but intense discomfort at exposing his personal scars.
Now that the time had come, he hesitated, prevaricating.
"Maybe you're right," he finally said. "Maybe I did lie in there...If I did, I'm sorry. But he's an Apache and I know 'em. I've seen what they can do...I've seen what they become." His voice trailed away and for a moment he could all but feel the hot desert sun burning into his shoulders, see the blood-streaked honey blond hair trailing through his fingers.
"When?" Jason's harsh question broke him from his reverie. Aaron realized, too late, that his own words had pushed the conversation in the one direction he had hoped to avoid.
"Oh, it was a long time ago." He made the words deliberately vague and dismissive, though he knew Bolt wouldn't be put off the scent so easily.
"When? How long?" The logger's voice was strident, challenging.
Aaron focused on him abruptly, for one pure moment indulging in an intense dislike of the man. It was a philosophical difference, one that cut to the bone. Aaron traded in hard currency. Jason Bolt traded in emotions. And the only chance of getting Jason to listen to him, to pay him any heed, was to strip himself bare and trade on Jason's level.
He turned restlessly toward the window again, toward the illusion of space that afforded him. Familiar smells washed over him--strong lye soap, overlaid with stale beer and cigar smoke. Ignoring the branches that clicked against the window glass, he forced himself to recall the bite of dust clogging his nostrils and the sweet smell of rain in the desert.
"Oh, it was...fifteen years ago now...doesn't seem that long..." His voice closed up as he was swept by a sudden sense of overwhelming loss. The better half...how often he had heard that phrase. He closed his eyes, aching for the half he had lost.
"There was a girl...Helen." The room faded a way and for an instant she stood before him, so real he half felt he could touch her. The soft honey hair, the too long nose and wide expressive mouth, the shining brown eyes...no beauty, but oh so warm and dear. He fumbled, then forced himself to continue.
"We were plannin' on lookin at some la...some ranch land outside of Tucson...just a place to settle down and..."
Raise a family. He let the words die away, unsaid. Helen would have been a wonderful mother, and perhaps with her he might have been a decent father, at least better than his own had been. She had gentled him, taught him patience and compassion. For that brief time with her he had owned the world. A small sad smile touched Aaron's lips as he thought back to the man he had once been. Impossibly young. He could never have been that young.
"Helen had to come by stagecoach...It had to...pass through territory sometimes held by the Apache...she never arrived."
He had waited. His skin crawled even now as he remembered that wait. At first he had been filled with an unlikely, overwhelming joy. It had faded slowly to impatience, to worried anger, and then to fear. It was terror that he had felt when some of the local men began organizing a search party. Terror, as he listened closely to tales of Apache atrocities that had happened last year, last month, last week. Yet the terror was never totally real, it could never overwhelm the conviction that nothing could happen to Helen because he needed her so much.
"Five days later we found the coach." Now the memories came in sharp flashes and he did nothing to fight the pain. Helen's head smashed by a tomahawk, bloodied almost beyond recognition, the blood already dry in her soft hair. She had been raped. Her dress was little more than a few wisps of torn fabric, her exposed body covered with bruises and welts. Blood had dried in rivulets down her lags. One hand had been cut from her arm, the ring finger severed and gone.
"What we could identify..we buried...the rest we burned." He could remember the other bodies, the ones he didn't even recall seeing at the time. Two little girls with their skulls crushed. Three men who looked like they had been used in some macabre target practice. One old woman whose head they never found. Of two little boys there was no trace, and only a severed hand remained of their sister.
For one awful minute he felt again the desolation, the obliteration of shock that left his body untouched as it cut away his soul. He could feel the shovel in his hands, the searing heat, as he dug through rock hard caliche. He had dug graves like a fury, like a man possessed, and the other who had seen that particular madness before had let him be. They had caught him and brought him back to town, after sunstroke felled him as he began on his fourth grave.
"Aaron, I'm sorry didn't know."
Jason's voice pulled him from the desert, cutting through the fresh pain. There was only the cold sweat of memory gathered between his shoulder blades. Aaron closed his eyes, tasting the acid tang of bitterness, then straightened deliberately and met the logger's blue eyes. The open sympathy on Bolt's face surprised him. Jason was sincerely sorry, of that he had little doubt. Aaron knew that he shouldn't give a damn, and was a little surprised to find that he did.
He sighed, and slowly sat down.
"Don't be sorry, Jason. Just listen to what I have to say." He leaned forward, for one totally unselfconscious, struggling only to find the right words. "We're not talkin' about prejudice now. We're not talkin about bigotry. We're talkin about a way of life, the way that boy was brought up, and what it does to him inside. That boy is a warrior already. I can see it in his eyes. It's just a question of time before he..."
He let the sentence die away, pushed into frustrated silence by the measure of resistance he could see in Bolt's eyes.
"That boy is wounded. He needs help. Do I turn my back? Do I just ignore that?" Jason's yes were open and candid as he laid out the question as he saw it. In the freshness of recent memory, Aaron could see in the logger that same idealism he knew he had once had, a luxury that had bled away into the desert with Helen's life. He felt oddly protective of that idealism, knowing how brutally it would turn if it were Lottie that was hurt, or Jeremy or Josh. All of them were potential targets for the Apache boy.
"No. But you don't endanger a whole town because of him either."
There had been more than one wagon train lost in the years he had spent in Tucson, more than one ranch burned, more than one life to mourn. Some of them done in by boys no older than this one. He could list them now, all of them, and he knew that Jason would listen patiently and say all the right words.
But it wasn't more sympathy that he wanted. And there was no way he could make Jason Bolt share the vicious reality that lay behind the memories the Apache boy had brought back from oblivion. There was no way Jason could know as anything but tales, what Aaron knew from bitter experience.
A grim smile touched Aaron's lips briefly, then he spoke.
"Jason, in some ...odd sort of way...I suspect that you and I are friends." Bolt's eyes widened as he recognized the ironic truth and, more important, the fact that Aaron had chosen to acknowledge it. Aaron paused to fill both glasses before he continued, knowing that for perhaps the first time ever he had Jason's absolute, undivided attention. "So, as a friend, I'm gonna tell you this. Send him away."
There were reasons the boy couldn't stay, dangers that Bolt's stubbornness and idealism had blinded him to. If Jason could never understand the past, Aaron would force him to deal with the present.
"There were people in this town who were afraid when you brought him here the first time. What he did this morning won't do any good either...I've heard people say they'll shoot him on sight if he sets foot on their property."
He waited as Jason absorbed that last piece of information, watched as the logger registered the implications. The loaded guns on mantles, the watching eyes, the hatred of some and the fear of many, and in the center a wounded, grief-stricken half-wild Apache boy. It was an unmistakably disastrous mix. Even with Jason Bolt's famous luck, sooner or later it was gonna blow the whole town sky high.
"Do you think it's right," Jason asked.
Aaron shook his head lightly, evading the probe. He'd killed Apaches before, killed until he had sickened at the everlasting carnage and his rage had burned away into a wary respect for a merciless cornered foe. He wanted no more killing, had no reason to wish the boy dead. But how he felt was beside the point.
"I think it's so. Whether it's right or whether it's wrong, the boy will be just as dead." Hard currency. Facts. He saw the smile that began in Jason's eyes, as the logger recognized that stubborn absolute. Their eyes met and locked in silent recognition of the distance that lay between them, and of the very tenuous bridge that sometimes spanned that gulf.
"You know, Aaron," Jason's voice was light, telegraphing the shift of words that followed. "In an odd sort of way, we are friends."
Aaron gave a small exasperated sigh that turned into a snort of reluctant laughter. Trust Bolt to take that avowal of friendship and erase the slight question that had touched his words, by making them personal and mutual. Aaron raised his glass in a silent toast, and Jason's glass rose with his.