Silver and Spice

Chapter 7

Lazily, Anne’s lashes fluttered open. A thin band of sunlight stole through the curtains surrounding her upper berth. The droning of the engine told her that the motor home was on the road. Groggily, she rolled over, tugging her comforter with her, and with a sleepy yawn parted the curtains enough to see out.

The rich, black farmland and the cornfields had disappeared, as had the gentle, long rolls of western Iowa. Pale wheat now stretched along both sides of the serpentine road, except where a gnarled gray butte jutted up from nowhere. The arid landscape was strangely colorless, stark and bleak. Fences suggested cattle land, yet she saw no sign of life. Or houses. Or even trees… Then suddenly a clump of cottonwoods whizzed by as Jake took a curve. The trees were beaten and bent by the kind of wind Anne could only imagine might blow through here and never stop.

She climbed down from the bunk and went to stand behind Jake. “Good Lord, where are we? How on earth long have you been driving?”

“Since two this morning. I had in mind your seeing the Badlands by dawn, but couldn’t quite make that. On the other hand, you slept in to just about the right time.” His eyes flickered up to meet her gaze in the rearview mirror, and he immediately flashed her a crooked smile. “When you get around to it, I’d sell my soul for a cup of coffee.”

“Would you, now?” She yawned and shook herself sleepily, still half immersed in the crazy dream she’d awakened from. She’d been standing stark-naked in a room, explaining to the silver-eyed rogue in front of her the futility of investing in high-risk, low-yield stocks, and he’d been listening, dressed in a gray flannel suit, interrupting her only to mention that he wanted to live in a two-story brick house in the country. She yawned again. The dream vaguely irritated her. She expected even her unconscious to have better sense, and Freud could take a hike.

Her bare toes sank into the lush blue carpet as Anne rapidly disappeared into the bathroom, splashed her face with cool water and stared sleepy-eyed at the mouth that had all but begged Jake to take her the night before. She splashed more cold water on her face.

Distress didn’t seem to wash off that easily. The lingering image of the child who had appeared toward the end of the dream was even more disturbing. A little boy with Jake’s special eyes… Anne compressed her lips. Old pains were very good erasers; so was an intense determination to make sure no child of hers would ever experience the insecurities and instabilities that had marked her own childhood. Hurriedly, she ran a brush through her hair. Last night had been a narrow escape, but she had escaped, and she doubted even Jake’s ability to conjure up a hot tub in any other campground. In the meantime, she’d seen his whiskered chin and weary eyes.

A few moments later, she removed a steaming cup of coffee from the microwave oven, set it in the console next to Jake, then moved rapidly back to get her own cup. “I’ll drive for a while,” she called to him. “Just give me a few minutes to get dressed.”

“Stop worrying about your clothes and come here.”

She brought her cup, vaguely miffed at the order, very definitely startled that the man’s attitude this morning so blatantly lacked the lover’s seductive skill of the night before, and peered out the window where he motioned. Rather abruptly, she sank down in the passenger seat. The wheat fields, just that quickly, had changed again.

The road ran precariously along a ledge high above a bottomless gorge that yawned threateningly below them. Pink cliffs lined the lonely horizon with strange, contrasting striated lines of crimson and yellow. Pinnacles and buttes jutted up from the gorge below, some shaped like needle-slim knives aimed skyward. In places, the limestone was formed into mystical castles, complete with turrets and waterless moats. In other places, the wind had worn perfect circular holes, caves or giant mushroom-shaped ledges into the rock. The twisting gorge seemed to gnarl and turn for endless miles; the knifelike peaks stretched high, and the sun streaming onto those desolate rock formations brought out a rainbow spectrum of colors. Pink and blue and green, colors that didn’t belong in rock.

“This is one of my favorite places on earth,” Jake murmured. He reached for his coffee, glancing only once at her. Through shuttered eyes, he took in the high-necked flannel nightgown, the fair hair loosely coiled over one shoulder, the complexion all rose and cream. Before her nerves could register that intimate perusal, he was turning away. “The Sioux called this land Mako Sica-Bad Land-but they found a harmony with it. The white settlers in such a hurry to get across to find their gold and silver must have called it hell-those that survived.”

Anne held her cup in both hands to keep the coffee from spilling as Jake negotiated the twisting uphill road. She immediately decided that this landscape was one of her least favorite places on earth. The land was terrifying, with its gutted hollows and lonely spires. She couldn’t imagine how any living thing could survive here. No trees, no water, rock faces too steep to climb; just endless mazes of stone in shadow.

Yet, mesmerized, she couldn’t seem to turn away from the window. The colors were incredible, strata of almost bright pink and yellow. The rock formed men and elephants and buildings, and almost any other shape the mind could imagine.

“All kinds of dinosaurs used to romp around here,” Jake remarked. “Fox-sized horses and saber-toothed cats, too. Three thousand years ago, nomads hunted this land, finding caves where they could build their fires for the night… Would you like to get out?”

Intrigued, she nodded, and set down her cup. When he pulled the motor home to the side of the road, she reached for the door handle.

“Anne?”

She glanced back.

“There’s very little chance we’ll run into anyone, and it certainly doesn’t matter to me. But you might want to put on shoes, honey.”

She let go of the door handle as if it were a hot potato. “I was hardly going outside in my nightgown.”

“Of course you weren’t.”

Six and a half minutes later, she emerged flushed and breathless from the back door, wearing a red turtleneck sweater tucked into navy wool culottes, nylons and a pair of sturdy walking shoes. She had twisted her hair hastily into the untidiest coil she’d ever accomplished in her life, and her makeup consisted only of blusher and lipstick. She was exceedingly pleased with what she’d achieved in six minutes; Jake’s responsive chuckle was unnerving. “Break down and tell me the truth, now, Anne. Do you even own a pair of jeans?”

“Where I grew up, you didn’t travel in jeans,” she said flatly, thoroughly irritated that her appearance didn’t pass muster. It was useless to remember that she’d deliberately packed with the thought of playing stiff, formal lady to Jake’s devil-may-care vagabond, because at the moment she felt distinctly like a violinist at a rock concert. Truthfully, jeans wouldn’t have helped her anyway. She could never fit in here as Jake so easily did, with his hands on denim-clad hips against a backdrop of those jagged peaks, up and down, up and down, like sharp Ms across the sky. With his silvery hair and stubborn square chin and rugged profile, Jake could easily have been one of the original pioneers…the kind who made it.

He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward a steep rock formation.

“Look,” she started unhappily.

“Now don’t get all touchy. I love your taste in clothes. I only make fun because you just beg to be teased. Are you wearing the camisole I gave you?”

“I returned it,” she snapped through gritted teeth. “I told you that.”

“Fib. I saw it buried in your bottom drawer when I was helping you pack-or trying to. You brought it along, didn’t you?”

One of Jake’s many character flaws was that he thought he knew so much. Anne declined to answer. He started to climb, and she followed silently. The land was veined like old leather, oddly giving beneath her feet, the dusty yellow soil like hard-packed sand but without substance beneath. She reached out and clutched his hand, only because instinct kept telling her that somehow the land wouldn’t hold her. Jake moved like an animal, sure-footed and silent, leading them into a crevice between two steep rock walls. For Anne, it was a far different kind of exercise than standing in line to buy tickets to a symphony concert.

“Look,” Jake said suddenly.

She looked, and backed promptly into the wall of his chest. She was staring at a set of teeth embedded in the rock. Real teeth!

“Fossils are all over this route,” Jake commented, clearly fascinated by the dental display. He tugged at her hand. “There are a thousand things I’d like to tell you about this place, but we haven’t got much time. Idaho’s still five hundred miles from here, and I’m determined to get there in the next twenty-four hours. But you have to see this-”

What he evidently wanted her to see was a ledge where one step in the wrong direction could result in an instant plunge of several hundred feet. Wonderful view, Anne thought fleetingly. They seemed to be in hell. Jake’s arms draped around her waist and pulled her back against him, providing the only familiar, solid thing to hold on to anywhere in sight. Her eyes skimmed over the scene. Barren cliffs dropped below to a gaunt, lonely terrain of scalloped ridges and mystical shapes. Fire could have raced through this land and never made a difference. Fire, ice, storm…

Jake loved this land? She hated it. It was just one more example of the differences between them… She suddenly caught sight of a single flower, a purple burst of softness growing from a crack in the rock. Then she had a glimpse of the strange prism of rainbow colors on the cliffs, breathtakingly brilliant hues accented by sun and shade.

Jake’s chin nuzzled the crown of her head. “I’ve heard many stories about this place. A group of people were trying to cross here around a century ago, and they didn’t have enough water. They buried two of their party in the sand up to their necks, to preserve what body moisture they had.” His arms tightened around her waist. “They survived, Anne, but that’s what it took to survive.”

She shuddered expressively, leaning back closer against him.

“Then there was an outlaw named Joaquin,” Jake drawled. “He hated miners. His bride was Antonia, a sweet, innocent, lovely woman. While he was out one day, a group of miners assaulted his wife. Joaquin was very young, Anne, not more than twenty, and he turned killer after that, killer and thief, with a reputation that surpassed that of any other outlaw in the West.” Jake hesitated. “I think of that story every time I come back out here.”

An icy chill touched her spine. “Not a very cheerful tale, is it? Thank heavens that kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore.”

“And we’re all civilized now?” Jake shook his head as he slowly turned her around to face him. “You think so, Anne? He was a man alone in a hostile world, who saw only one way to get back at life. I can understand that,” he said quietly, holding her closer. “Haven’t you ever felt helpless? Powerless to control things that were happening to you? As a little kid, didn’t you ever feel rage that people were hurting you and you couldn’t stop them?”

“No. Of course not.” She slipped quickly from his arms and started the climb down to the motor home. Suddenly, she couldn’t get inside the vehicle fast enough. The land was damned. Desolate and hostile, the kind of place that bred outlaws. She wanted her peppermint tea and a twentieth-century chair and a reassuring book about stocks and bonds. She stepped up and into the motor home, out of breath. Only Jake would be demented enough to see a similarity between the feelings of some long-dead outlaw and those of an innocent child.

Some minutes later, Jake silently vaulted into the driver’s seat, and they headed back onto the road. After a time, Anne moved up to the passenger seat with a fresh cup of tea warming her hands. She kept as silent as he was. From nowhere, she had a sudden mental image of a five-year-old girl, green-eyed and blond and innocent…desperately shaking her most precious doll.

It was the day her dad died, a memory buried so deep she hadn’t known it was still there. As a little girl she’d had no idea how to deal with so much anger. How dare he die, how dare he die, how dare he never hold me again… More images flooded her mind. Marriages, and more marriages, and more marriages. How very adept she’d become at being flower girl at her mother’s impulsive weddings. But the image Anne remembered most vividly was of herself hurling pillows and books and pencils. She didn’t want to go to another school! She’d just made friends at the old one. No one had asked a seven-year-old-child if she wanted to be so joltingly uprooted, if she minded changing schools four more times in the next four years. Boarding school had been Ralph’s idea; he was her third stepfather. Her childhood had been a horror of loneliness, a long, disjointed train of in media res starts and abrupt finishes and never knowing where anyone was going.

Rage had no place in Anne’s adult life; she’d put all that behind her. Everything had changed, anyway, once her grandmother had taken her in. Jennie Blake was stern but loving, a wonderfully strong woman whose home had been a haven. Anne had clung to the stability of household rules and discipline as to a lifeline. There was no more helpless anger. But Jake had touched some very old scars just now, reopened some very deep wounds…

Jake’s eyes suddenly flashed to hers, a flicker of dark gray compassion, of the kind of understanding that was just part of Jake. “Maybe I can understand your outlaw,” she offered quietly.

“I thought you would.” He turned back to the road. “You weren’t the only one buffeted around as a child, honey.”

She averted her eyes, painfully aware of what different roads they’d taken to overcome those uncertain beginnings. “You look tired,” she said briskly. “Don’t you think it’s time I took a turn at the wheel?”

She drove all afternoon. Jake slept in the back of the motor home. And all afternoon, she was haunted by images of his young outlaw. The one who was so very much in love with his innocent, sweet wife. And she thought of Jake, who’d never cared if he had two nickels to rub together…but heaven help anyone who tried to harm anything he did care about.

Buttes gave way to steep hills by midafternoon. A huge, low violet cloud ahead of her kept growing larger on the horizon, as the road continued to dip and curve and climb. Only late in the afternoon did she realize that it wasn’t a cloud at all, but mountains that reached for the sky in front of her, snow-peaked and craggy, proud and royal purple.

“We’ll be in the heart of the Bighorns by nightfall.” Jake suddenly yawned from behind her, then moved forward to crouch down on his haunches between the seats. “Would you believe there’s snow predicted in the Bighorns tonight, yet it’ll be seventy degrees tomorrow in Idaho? That’s West.” He yawned again sleepily. “And to really get you into the spirit of the land-” he grinned “-I think I’ll serve you yellow-jacket soup by a campfire. Think you’re ready?”

She didn’t particularly feel ready for anything. This strange, unpredictable landscape frightened her, evoked odd and uncomfortable feelings. Awareness of things she hadn’t thought of in years, didn’t really want to think of…yet her eyes were captivated by those mountains, and she risked a quick glance at Jake after maneuvering the motor home around a treacherous turn. “Yellow-jacket soup-as in bees? Are you out of your mind?”

He was.

Jake drove two forked sticks into the ground, then took out a pocket knife and started to whittle the bark off the spit that was to lie between them. The fire, dancing and crackling, was waiting for him. “The thing with yellow-jacket soup,” he said gravely, “is to find the yellow jackets’ ground nest when it’s full of grubs. And this is all going to be very difficult to explain if you don’t wipe that cheeky grin off your face.”

“I’m so sorry.” Anne’s eyes flashed merriment. “Most recipes start with ‘Preheat the oven,’ but all right, Jake. Then what?”

“Why do I sense this doubting-Thomas attitude?” Jake sounded wounded.

“You’re imagining it,” she assured him.

“How are you coming there?”

“Fine.” She was kneading some sort of flour mixture in a big bowl on her lap, another culinary creation of Jake’s. Which was fine, except that it was snowing. No big blizzard, but there was no question that the white stuff fluttering down was a little more than falling stars. The cold was seeping through her culottes; it was the biggest, blackest night she’d ever seen; and they were totally alone in a state campground in the Bighorns. Naturally. No one else would be camping-much less cooking out-on a night like this. No one in his right mind.

“Are you ready to hear what else you have to do to make yellow-jacket soup?” Jake demanded.

“I certainly am.” The doughy horror was sticking under her fingernails, but she continued kneading. At least the mixture was coating her hands-one way to ward off frostbite.

“You get the grubs off the nest by poking them with a lit match. Then you heat the nest over the fire until it dries out a little. About then you pick off the yellow jackets and cook them separately over the fire, pop them into boiling water, add a little seasoning, and voilà…”

“Yellow-jacket soup,” she applauded. Jake faced her with a level stare as he took the bowl from her hands, removed the dough and set it in a greased pan near the fire to rise. Anne started laughing helplessly, and pushed up the collar of her coat with her forearms, since her hands were white and sticky.

“It’s an authentic Indian recipe-”

She started laughing again.

“-that happens to be quite delectable.” He clapped her on the back when she started choking.

“Come on, Jake, you’ve never eaten any such thing in your life!”

“I have, too. Once.” He paused, his face taking on a peculiar expression. “God in heaven, once was enough.” He rapidly turned toward the fire again. “Nevertheless, you’re getting an authentic Indian meal tonight, lady. Just not quite that authentic.”

“So tell me.”

He cast her a sudden critical glance. “Why didn’t you tell me you were getting cold?” He hustled her speedily into the motor home, washed the dough off her hands, haphazardly draped her shoulders with a blanket, and covered her hands with a pair of Italian kid gloves he discovered in her purse before hustling her back outside again. Jake gave the gloves a wry look. They were as soft as a baby’s bottom, but they wouldn’t keep her hands warm even in the tropics. She loved those gloves, though.

When she was settled on the log with the blanket beneath her, he started in again. “First we’re having bannock.” He motioned to the floury concoction she’d made. After the oddly textured, stiff dough had risen for a few minutes, he stretched it and wrapped it around a stick in coils. “It’s a trail bread. You roast it over the fire. No prospector or trail hand or self-respecting Indian would ever have a meal without it. Very important.”

“Aaah.”

He cast her another critical look, though evidently not for that peculiar sound she’d made. Moments later, her head was covered with his orange wool scarf. The fabric chafed her soft cheeks, but it was certainly warm; she just had a sneaking suspicion that the men from the funny farm would find her any minute now. In the orange scarf and blue blanket and cranberry coat, sitting on a log with the mountains all around and the snow lazily drifting down. Worse than that, she was starting to laugh again.

“Then we’ll have cactus salad,” Jake continued as he turned his back to the fire. “Then Apache-fried rabbit. Only no rabbits happened to have the misfortune of running in front of the motor home. So it’s Apache-fried chicken, as it happens. Chicken via the grocery store, but we don’t need to mention that-”

“I don’t know when you had the time to pick the cactus,” she said delicately. Not that she doubted him.

“Well…” Jake sighed. “Once again, we had to veer just a little from our chosen course. The cactus came from a seven-and-a-quarter-ounce can.”

“Darling.” Anne rarely used casual endearments; this one was necessary to soften the blow. “Cactus doesn’t come in a can.”

He took a can out of the trash and held it up so that she could read the label: Natural Cactus in Salt Water, Drain before Using.

“I beg your pardon,” she apologized gravely.

“You persist in thinking I don’t know what I’m doing.”

She persisted in thinking nothing of the kind. Jake always knew exactly what he was doing. Her smile faded, just a little. No one but Jake would have made her knead bread dough in the middle of a snowstorm in the Bighorns; no one but Jake had ever elicited purely whimsical laughter from her. She was fascinated by the mountain lore he’d picked up from heaven knew where. Fascinated, happily relieved that she wouldn’t have to eat bee soup, and just slightly…sad.

Her dark prince had always charmed her, had always created a quiet, intimate, delicious fantasy when just the two of them were together. How could she help reaching out for him? But a lifetime was very different from scattered moments. Sand castles never lasted.

Are you thinking about that boring stuff again? Her emotions warred with her mind. Anne, can’t you leave it alone even for a minute?

Jake’s eyes sought hers over the crackling fire. The chicken was sizzling on the spit, the bread was browning and the slices of cactus were arranged on two small plates, pimiento slices between them, swimming in a dressing of tarragon-and-pepper-seasoned oil. All of it, unbelievably, looked and smelled quite good.

“You will reserve judgment, Anne, until we’ve had dinner.” His voice was still teasing, but for a moment the humor didn’t reach his eyes.

Anne decided to reserve judgment a little longer. The look in his eyes had nothing to do with Apache-fried chicken.