El Huerfano by Shanghai_jim (R) - Parts 4 and 5

[gryvon]

Title: El Huerfano
Author: shanghai_jim
Fandoms: Newsies
Pairing: David/Jack
Genre: Drama

Summary: Jack struggles to reconcile his dreams with the expectations of his friends. A bequest brings opportunity but also danger.


4. Las Animas

David looked out over the driver's dusty shoulder and sighed. "Somehow I expected something a bit ... grander."

Jack set his boots--cowboy boots bought in Santa Fe--on the rain-dampened earth and looked at the low, crumbling adobe structure rambling along a hollow in the flat, arid land. A well with both a bucket rig and a handpump was next to the ranch house. The windmill above it, running the water pump no doubt, spun in the steady northeasterly wind.

"Looks fine to me," he said. He nodded to the shotgun man who tossed down their bags, said, "Gracias, amigo," and hefted his knapsack. He waited as David dusted himself and his suitcase off. "You ready?"

David grunted. "As I'll ever be."

"C'mon, Dave," Jack coaxed. "This is great!"

They had finally left New York at the beginning of May. Les cried at the station, saying he wanted to go with them. David tried to hush him, but it was Jack who managed to spin things around and make the ten-year-old smile.

"Hey, you're my deputy now," Jack told him. "You got to keep the newsies in line, stand up to Spot Conlon." He added, "Keep me up to date on the baseball scores at the Polo Grounds. Right?"

"Right," said Les.

"Go Giants?"

"Go Giants!"

"Beat the Dodgers?"

"Dodgers are bums!"

Esther was there too. "Now you're coming back, right? This is just for the summer. Like last year."

David smiled. "Yes, Momma. I'll come back." At Jack's questioning glance, he shook his head.

Esther nodded. "You're a man now," she said. She glanced briefly at Jack, but didn't say anything.

Mayer shook Jack's hand. "Have the deed?"

Jack touched his shirt pocket for his father's billfold. "And David has the copies and all the paperwork with him."

"Good," said Mayer. He put a hand on Jack's head. "God bless you, Francis Sullivan, and may all your ventures be fruitful." He then shook hands with his son, blessed him as well, and that was that. Their family waved from the platform as the train to St. Louis pulled out.

After two days they arrived at St. Louis. David spent most of the trip reading guidebooks to the West, some of the books Jack had been reading up on, while Jack stayed at the window drinking in the changing scenes. The woods and towns of western New York giving way to the rolling Alleghenies of Pennsylvania and then the rounded farmland of Ohio and Indiana and then the crossing of the big river at St. Louis itself. "Jesus Christ," Jack said, as the train took ten minutes to cross the spring-swollen Mississippi. "It's bigger than the harbor."

"No," David said, "it just looks bigger."

Jack remembered a conversation with Sarah, and smiled.

They were in coach seats for the first half of their trip, and so could not do anything with each other, nor were they interested in doing so. There was so much to see, for Jack; so much to do, for David. Jack made friends with the people in the dining car and the club car, introducing himself as a college student on his way to San Francisco.

"And what is your course of study, Mr. Kelly?" asked one dowager in the club car.

"Animal husbandry, ma'am," Jack replied, and got the reaction he was looking for.

"Animal husbandry," David scolded later on.

"What? That's what being a rancher is all about."

David smiled knowingly. "You really think you'll stay in New Mexico and raise beef?"

"You saying you're leaving me in September when I pledged me love and devotion to you, against my nature, just to win your father's approval?"

David kicked him as Jack laughed.

In St. Louis they switched trains and found themselves with a private sleeper berth on the Atchison-Topeka-Santa Fe line. That let the two days pass quickly, or rather the nights.

The second morning Jack woke first just as the sun was rising and he saw the mountains that had been at a distance but growing closer now fully shining high against a strident blue sky with their peaks touched by snow and sharp against the clear high air, rose and scarlet and crimson from the sunrise to the east. The Sangre de Cristo. Beyond that was Santa Fe. He didn't wake David; David was sleeping soundly, and selfishly Jack wanted to devour this sight all by himself.

The train arrived in Santa Fe and let the two young men off along with the last of its travelers, cattlemen, bohemians, and Indians having done business in St. Louis, dressed in sober suits and hats with long braids and feathers under their modern garments. Along the Plaza Mayor and the Palace of the Governors Jack and David wandered, David scrutinizing the wares being offered in the zocalo, Jack gulping air through his nose scented with pinon and spices and the fragrant dust.

They came to the cathedral in the center of the town and admired its gleaming golden limestone.

"It's like the Parthenon," David said.

"Wanna go inside?"

"I'm Jewish."

"So's Jesus. Just keep quiet and don't touch nothing." The interior of the church was hushed like St. Patrick's, except the air was dry instead of damp, and the singsong chant of the Dominican rosary was being recited in Spanish and Latin. Jack left David admiring the architecture and made his way along the alcoves of the saints to the last one near the Marian altar.

There, St. Francis stood in image, his brown robe and gentle mien and the animals around his feet and the moon, sun and stars around his halo, the patron of the town for whose "holy faith" it was named. The saint was also Jack's namesake, and his years in parochial school and his own native condition made Jack kneel and touch the brown scapular at his throat and say a little prayer for the repose of the souls of William and Eileen and Michael, beloved father, mother, and brother. And Jack meant it. Even for his father.

He collected David in the antechamber, David reading a chaplet he'd picked up about the French archbishop who had come to Santa Fe and built the cathedral out of the native stone. "Did you know Santa Fe is one of the oldest cities in the Americas?"

They were heading for the hotel where they'd stay while Jack had the deed processed in the territorial offices. Jack grunted. "Yup."

"It was founded nearly three hundred years ago."

"Yup."

David closed his guidebook. "Well, excuse me, it's not as if you've ever regaled me at length with all your vast stores of knowledge."

"Your mouth doesn't know when to quit, does it?"

"Like you complained ..."

"Ah quit it, I just came from church." Jack started whistling a lonesome tune, focused on three notes, middling, high, and then fading, a wistful air.

"What is that?" asked David.

"Just something me mother sang to me once. A lullaby for Michael. If I had my harmonica I'd play it for you."

David smirked. "You lost your harmonica?"

"Yeah. Months ago. I dunno where it went. I probably should get a new one, but I was thinking of learning the violin."

At the hotel David reached into his bags and called out to Jack: "Think fast," and then threw an object across the bed that Jack caught one-handed without looking.

Jack stared at it. His harmonica. "You had it?" he roared, starting to grin. "You had it all this time?"

"Just waiting for you to miss it," David teased, and then giggled as Jack tackled him onto the bed. Clothes were opened and flung haphazardly away and they didn't stop until they'd christened the city with their version of fireworks.

At the Palace of the Governors the next day Jack presented the original deed and the additional paperwork prepared by Mr. Owings. He then added the letter of credit from Theodore Roosevelt, which instantly transformed the clerk from crabby and bored to ditheringly obsequious. After almost an hour of waiting on the dark wooden benches in the promenade of the Palace they were called back inside and presented with the title and current arrears of Rancho Las Animas in Las Cruces.

"Just present this to the credit union down in Las Cruces and the spread's all yours, Mr. Sullivan," said the clerk.

"What's the best way to get there?" asked David.

"Train stops at Las Cruces," said the clerk. "Then you can get a ride on a coach to the ranch. You might want to send a telegram ahead and have one of your hands meet you with horses."

"Horses," David said, a bit green, as they exited the Palace.

"I'll see if Suarez can send someone to meet us," Jack decided. "You go get us tickets to Las Cruces."

Suarez wired back that he had relatives in Las Cruces who could pick them up and take them to the ranch. The day before they left Santa Fe Jack lingered for a while in front of the cathedral while David went shopping for more suitable clothes. He couldn't believe he was here. He was finally here.

But he was not yet at his destination. They took the train, the same line, to Las Cruces, David's jaw dropping as the high desert spread out into a broad plain marked by block thrust mountains and miles of creosote. Jack pointed out pronghorn among the bajadas and arroyos, and red-tailed hawks high above the train, though what he really longed to see were wild horses, any wild horses he could find. Finally they came to the Crossroads in the wide Mesilla Valley with the Organ Mountains, craggy and ice-tipped, rising high above the meandering Rio Grande.

They didn't take a room. Jack bade David wait at the train depot while he went to find the bank and present the papers to control Las Animas.

The bank and trust off Main Street was a generous edifice for the town's size, though its walls bore unpatched bullet holes in its stuccoed adobe. Jack couldn't help grinning as he thought of Black Jack Ketchum and the Hole in the Wall Gang, so recently active in the area and some said still lurking in the backcountry with other outlaws. No, the frontier was not dead. Not in the slightest.

The clerk here was a balding gentleman in shirtsleeves and an open waistcoat. There were three other persons there, all men, two behind the cages and one dozing on a bench with a newspaper folded over his chest. Jack took off his hat and waited. Nothing. He coughed.

The clerk looked up. "Can I help you?"

"I'm Jack Kel--Sullivan, Francis Sullivan, from New York City," said Jack. "I'm the new owner of the Las Animas Ranch."

Slowly every head turned. The man with the newspaper recrossed his legs. He had clever eyes and an ornate watch chain draping from his vest pocket. The head clerk looked at Jack over his reading glasses. He reminded Jack of Owings.

"Oh, yes, the man who knows Teddy Roosevelt," he said. He wiggled a finger. "Thought you'd be older. All right, let's see the papers."

The papers were in order, something which seemed to peeve the clerk, who stamped them with his own rubber stamp as if they had offended him and needed punishment. As he handed the papers back to Jack he said, "You got lodgings in town yet, son? Because let me tell you, there ain't nothing out there in the Animas Ranch except that Mexican's hut and his chickens. Unless you count the outlaws making time as cowboys with the geriatric cattle."

More chuckling. Jack glared at them. "No, we'll be fine."

"Suit yourself," said the clerk. "Some rich kid from the East Coast," he added in a stage whisper to the others, just as Jack was crossing the threshold. Jack nearly turned on a dime to correct him. But then he realized it was true. The papers in his hand, the deed and everything else, announced he was the sole owner of ten thousand acres of land. He started to smile instead, turned slightly, touched his hat, and said, "Much obliged," just like in the books.

He found David standing arms akimbo and hat in hand staring at the buckboard wagon and the driver and shotgun rider next to him. "This is our ride," David said as Jack approached. "Apparently."

Jack nodded to the men. "Buenas tardes."

They nodded back at him.

Jack's eyes went to the horse. He wasn't versed well enough to tell exact mixes of breed, but he knew enough to see mustang blood in this old mare. He paused and stroked her flank and withers and then rubbed her jaw under her bit. She seemed to stir and respond to him. "Nice to meet ya too, girl," Jack said softly. The mare nuzzled his empty hand.

David was shaking his head as they loaded their things and themselves into the buckboard. "You and horses," he said.

"And that's another reason they called me Cowboy back East."

They rode for two hours at a walking pace through the high desert watered by recent rains. The creosote bushes were flowering yellow and the bush sage purple across the valley floor and into the hillsides up to the Organ Mountains. The day was hot and Jack and David shed their jackets, David wishing aloud he'd gotten a cowboy hat.

"Now you know what the brim's so wide for," Jack needled.

"Oh go chase yourself."

They passed a broken line of ancient rusted wire. Jack asked the driver, "Es este el rancho?"

"Si."

"This is it," Jack said to David. They both looked around. The landscape seemed exactly the same: the spring flowers, the old sedges and creosotes, the mountains at their back, the subtle roll and rise of the falsely flat ground. David slouched back again and looked at Jack. Jack took longer, but soon gave up too.

"I don't see the cattle," David said.

"They're probably being pastured somewheres," Jack said, fiddling with a cigarette.

David took it from him. "I think it's time I learned how to smoke."

He was still coughing when they passed a sturdier fence, made of hewn boughs and reused planks, and then entered a gate with the name Las Animas on it, accompanied by a sign bearing the ranch's mark, a stylized dove in flight. Now Jack sat up and asked the driver in Spanish if this was it. It was.

Now, having gotten down and with their bags in their hands or on their shoulders, Jack and David walked up to the broken old ranch house, paused, and then went to the small wooden shack nearby, where a flicker of smoke rose from a tin chimney.

As they came near, a girl emerged from the front door. She was a bit older than them, nineteen perhaps, and her long black hair, waved like willow switches, fell down her back. She had brick red skin and a firm jaw. She was beautiful, and she looked at them with a moment's confusion and then comprehension and came to greet them. Jack's eyes widened at the sight of her. David noticed and his eyes narrowed.

"Ola." she said. She spoke to David. "You are the boy from New York who has the deed to the ranch?"

"No, no, not me," David stammered, intimidated. He pointed at Jack. "You want that one."

The girl looked at Jack. He touched his hat to her. "Buenas tardes, senorita," he said. "I'm Jack Sullivan." David gave a start, but said nothing. "I'm the man with the deed."

"Annalisa Suarez," she introduced herself. "My father is the caretaker here. You got the deed from the crazy son of the old man?"

Jack thought back to the history of the deed. "That's right. My father met him in prison."

"Your father got the deed in prison?" said Annalisa.

Jack nodded. "Seems like it."

A smile played on her lips. "Maybe you are not the true master of the ranch, then, senor." She called over her shoulder. "Papa!"

David inched toward Jack. "I don't like her."

Jack dismissed him. "She's feisty."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing my sweet fanny," David muttered as a man emerged from behind the shack, in boots and dungarees and a work shirt and vest with a broad, almost flat hat on his head and an ornate belt buckle at his waist. "Oy, here's Suarez."

"Senor Sullivan," said the man. "I am Juan Suarez. Welcome to Rancho Las Animas."

"Muchas gracias, senor," Jack responded. "This is my friend David."

"Hello," said David faintly.

Suarez acknowledged him. He took a bag from each of them as Annalisa his daughter watched with what looked like scornful amusement. "I am sorry about the condition of the house, but since the young master left no one has lived in it for very long."

"It's okay," Jack said. "We're used to roughing it."

"You will stay in my house," said Suarez. "You will have my bed."

David stared askance at the small building, which threatened to be smaller than the footage of his parents' apartment. "No, Mr. Suarez, we can't put you out like that--"

"Senor," Jack interrupted, "we're very young and we ain't fancy types. Just show us a place to pitch a tent or place our bedrolls and we'll be fine. There'll be time enough to fix up the old place for later."

Suarez looked at him with interest. "Then you are staying."

Jack glanced at David. "I am," he said.

"You are not selling the river bottom?"

Jack thought to the survey of the ranch he had received in February via Denton. There was a seasonal stream emerging through an arroyo in the heights which eventually fed to the Rio Grande. It was good grazing country, he was told, but also the place where the Texas Oil Company was interested.

He mentioned that now. "You been talking to Texaco people, senor?"

Suarez was not offput or surprised. "They have been here," he said. "They think there is gas for burning, maybe even oil, in the bottom land. Senor Coningham from the town has been here several times in the past two months." They entered the Suarez home as the caretaker added, "Ever since we received the news that you were coming to claim the ranch, Senor Coningham has been very interested in us, when he never noticed us before."

"That's interesting," David said, distracted by the religious art on the stained walls and the odor of something full of chiles and beans in a pot on the black stove.

Jack was thinking about the people in the bank. He remembered the man on the bench with the newspaper.

"Something tells me I already met Senor Coningham," he said.

***

They met the Suarez family: the matron, a plump woman with a sharp nose like her daughter, and then the three boys, all younger than eleven. An elder son had apparently left for work in Albuquerque; another had died in a gunfight with outlaws. David had jumped a bit at that, even as he ate the spicy stew served by Senora Suarez; Jack shot him a glare to settle down and asked if there were many outlaws still around.

Suarez shrugged. "Not like when I was young," he said, and then he spoke of the Doolin Daltons and the Hole in the Wall Gang and even the Wild Bunch, which was known to pass through here on the way to Mexico, but which Jack said were pretty much up in Utah and Wyoming, weren't they? Suarez agreed, and said sometimes there were Apaches who wanted to relive the passing glory of Geronimo but who really were pretty much the same kind of outlaw as the anglos. "Forgive me," he added.

"Ah, forget it," Jack said. "I'm Irish. And David's--"

"Not important," David interrupted.

"Why?" asked Annalisa.

"Annalisa," scolded Suarez sharply. "Show respect for our new hacendado."

Annalisa stood. "He is a boy from New York City, not our hacendado." With a flourish of her dark hair she stomped out of the house, her footfalls sounding the gravel into the distance. A horse neighed faintly from the corral.

The Suarez boys giggled.

Suarez looked apologetically at Jack. "My daughter, she is headstrong. She went to study in Santa Fe. An education spoils a woman for a wife."

David glanced at Suarez's wife, who ate her stew in silence, her eyes careful.

Jack listened to the sounds coming from outside. He heard a few nickers, a brief whinny.

He put down his spoon and stood.

"Excuse me," he said.

"Where are you--" David asked.

"Gonna go see about that girl," Jack replied. "Stay here. Go over the papers with Suarez. Senor, Senora--muchas gracias para la cena."

"De nada," said Senora Suarez, with a glance at her husband as Jack exited the door.

David sighed. He fidgeted and glanced at the door several times.

Suarez addressed him. "Are you good friends with Senor Sullivan?"

"Jack," David corrected the caretaker. His eyes went to the shut door. "Call him Jack. Everybody does."

***

Jack walked out into the cold dry night. The sky was clear but for some clouds in the southwest and the Moon, waxing full, lit the crags of the Organ Mountains in a line of guarding silver. Annalisa was standing by the corral petting a bay stallion, her head pressed to its forehead. Jack went to her, running his hand through the rainwater in the drinking trough and drying them on his bandanna on his way.

"Hey," he said.

She looked at him. "What do you want? An apology?"

Jack let out a laugh he didn't really feel. "Jesus. Two thousand miles and I run into another one of you."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Forget it." Jack stuck his thumbs in his back pockets. "Did I do something to tick you off or are you always this feisty, senorita?"

Annalisa smiled. It looked dangerous and bewitching. "Mr. Sullivan--"

"Jack."

"Mr. Jack, you have not yet seen me 'feisty'."

Jack nodded. "Okay. I'll give you that. But you sure seem like you've taken a set against me, and I'd like to know why."

"Why?" she shot back. "Is it so difficult to understand?" She gestured at the windswept prairie all around them, from the broken arroyos of the highlands east to the mountains north to the big river south. "My father has worked all my life to keep this rancho going. While its spendthrift owner gambled his fortune and his health and apparently his life away in New York City. You say he died in prison. I am not surprised from what I have heard of him. And his father was a Rebel who came here after the war with the North, and stole this rancho from the de la Paz family who had owned it since this was the land of Spain. My father's family were their retainers too. A hundred years and more into the past before America ever crossed el rio grande. Once Las Animas had a thousand head of prize cattle thundering like the buffalo over these fields," and again she gestured at the empty land all around them, "and the mestenos would come down from the mesa to drink in the river bottom and we would take some and break them for riding and roping the cows. My brother Hernan did this. He was good with horses. He was shot trying to be an outlaw like Papa's stories of el Nino." She didn't see Jack give a start. "For years my father has kept this ranch together, against the speculators and the carpetbaggers and the thieves in office in Santa Fe and that man Coningham in Las Cruces. Now here is Texas Oil with their machines wanting to drill into the bottom land."

She turned a black-eyed glare at him. "When we heard a claim was coming from New York City, I had some hope. I thought it would be one of the rich fools wanting a piece of the 'old West', who would deal with the gang in Santa Fe and put Coningham in his place, put up the money for a new house and let my father run the rancho as it once was run." She sneered. "Instead it is a boy in a new hat and unbroken boots, come to play cowboy with his bookish little friend. I think you do not even know how to ride a horse."

Jack had been listening quietly during her screed. Now he smiled. He made a show of kicking a bootheel across the dirt in front of him, and then he went to the corral and looked out at the horses penned there.

"So your father knew Billy the Kid?" he asked.

"Know him? No. But he saw him once."

"My father knew the Kid," Jack replied. "When they were little. He was born in New York City, you know. Same neighborhood I'm from. His real name wasn't William Bonney, it was Henry McCarty. My dad knew him before his ma moved them to Indiana and then out here. I always looked up to him whenever I read about the Wild West."

She snorted. "There was no Wild West. That is a burlesque run by Cody."

"I know him too," Jack said.

"You are from some sort of important family in New York?"

"No. Actually I'm a street rat born and bred." With a grin he skipped over the corral fence and started walking among the horses.

"What are you doing?" she protested.

"I'm going for a ride."

She laughed at him. "You joke."

"Why don't you ride with me?" Jack was studying the horses, but he had already picked the one he wanted.

Now Annalisa sounded interested. "What for?" she asked.

"How about a race?"

"A race," she repeated.

"Yes, a race," Jack replied. "You speak English real well, you know what that is."

Annalisa's brows drew down in fury. "Very well then! I will get the saddles!"

"Don't bother for one for me," Jack said negligently. "I don't need one right now."

She saw him undo the rope at his waist. "What are you doing now?"

"Gonna get me a horse." He was approaching a young appaloosa colt.

"The appaloosa?" Annalisa exclaimed. "No, he is just fresh from the mountain herd, he is barely greenbroke--"

She fell silent as Jack, hand outstretched, touched the skittish colt and soon was cradling and caressing the animal's face.

"Hey there, Spot," he said. "Mind if I call you Spot? You look like a Spot I know." Deftly he flung the rope neatly around and along the colt until he had formed a simple rope halter. With Annalisa still speechless, Jack nimbly mounted with the same strength he used to climb up balconies and down rooftops back in the city. "Whoa, whoa, Spot," Jack crooned low to the colt as it skittered nervously under his weight. "I'm okay. We're okay. You're okay, I'm just gonna hang on, okay? We'll go run. How do you like that, huh? A good run tonight?" Now Jack looked at Annalisa, mouth agape at the fence.

"You coming or not?" he asked.

***

They rode down the low rise from the ruins of the ranch house and out into the dry prairie towards what Annalisa said were salt flats. They then turned north, towards the tumbled highlands where the seasonal creek was flowing from the spring rain in its steep-sided arroyo, and then west, towards the late Moon. The silver light deepened and hushed the colors of the brief-lived flowers and their ancient roots along the flat plains of the grasslands, and it was there that Annalisa showed Jack the cattle, a small and weary herd mostly reclining in repose on the pastureland.

Jack listened as Suarez's daughter pointed out the weaknesses of each individual animal, and the few strengths, the young cows who were fruitful with calves, the young steers that could be brought to market, and of course the old bull, El Jefe, who rose from his repose to snort at the earth at the smell of the horses and the riders.

He told her, "You should run this ranch with your father."

She flashed her eyes again at him. "For you?"

"Maybe," he said.

She rode around him in a circle. She had taken the bay stallion. Jack's appaloosa colt was nervous around the older, prouder stud.

Annalisa smiled teasingly.

"We have yet to see if you will 'stick around', senor." She tossed her hair free from her face. "Now let us race."

"Back to the house?"

"Si. Ready?"

"Yeah--"

"Go!" She kicked her heels into the stallion and broke away in a splash of the rain-damp earth.

"Hey!" Jack shouted, but he grinned, and with a flick of the rope halter and a nudge of his own heels he urged the appaloosa after her.

They sped back over the flat land, Annalisa riding high with her hair streaming, Jack riding low and keen. He caught up with her halfway and kept pace for a half a mile and then grinned his devil-may-care grin and sent the pony dashing over the blooming desert as fast as they both could go.

He waited for her a short distance from the corral. "I guess I can ride, can't I?"

"You can for certain," Annalisa admitted as she guided her horse past his. "But by the by, the end of the race is to the corral itself. And you are just sitting there losing."

Jack's jaw dropped. For a moment he had the urge to snap the rope and make a dash for the fencing. But he didn't. He just shook his head, grinned, and watched her lead her horse to the corral, slip off its back, and bring it a bucket of water to drink.

"She's something, ain't she, Spot," he told his colt. The appaloosa snorted.

Jack looked towards the house. David was there, holding up a half-rigged tent, watching them. When Jack saw him, he turned away, and went back to trying to put the tent up, and not doing it right.

***

Jack eventually helped David put the tent up. They put their bedrolls down and unrolled them and lay down for the night.

"Maybe I should put on pajamas," David wondered.

"Scorpions," Jack replied.

"I put down a tarp."

"They'll come in. Go to sleep."

"Where did you go?" David asked.

Jack turned over away from him. "Just out riding. She thought I was some dude from the city who couldn't."

"You showed her."

"Yeah. It was a nice ride, though."

David spooned up against him. They shared each other's warmth through their clothes.

"Is this all you ever wanted?" David asked quietly.

Jack listened. The whisper of the wind, the shadow of the flowers, the nearby shuffling of the horses, the further rumor of the wan herd. He waited, hoping to hear a coyote, or perhaps a nightbird, or, if he was lucky, a wolf, its call carrying over all the miles from the mountains.

"We'll see," he said. David's hand crossed his waist. Jack shrugged it away.

"No?"

"I don't think we should." Jack shifted a bit away from David. "Suarez and all."

"Fine," said David. "Whatever suits you." He withdrew and rolled over the other way. Jack knew he was hurt, but his own mind was far too filled with the ride to care. The flowers. The moon. The desert. The horses. Annalisa.

5. The Kid

For the next several days Suarez took Jack and David around the ranch. He introduced Jack to the hands, all three of them: an old cowboy called Parsons, a young drifter who said he was from Texas named Grayson, and a half-Navajo called Rey. They obviously sized Jack up and made the same mistake Annalisa had made; but the first time Jack rode out with them to the run the herd to the upland pasture and pick out new calves to brand, they found out their mistake. Jack rode nimbly in the saddle with a new rope in his hands, tied into a lariat so expertly even old Parsons was impressed. Suarez was there on a black mare and he directed Grayson and Rey in lassoing and hogtying the calves while Parsons and Gregorio, the eldest of the young Suarez boys, prepared the branding iron.

Jack called out to Suarez. "I've got that one," he said, indicating a white-faced calf at the edge of the spinning herd.

"Senor Sullivan--Senor Jack--" But Suarez failed to dissuade him. To his amazement, and to the amazement of the hands, Jack rode his appaloosa around and among the milling bovines with the lariat dangling at ready. Even as the calf and its mother began to bellow and balk, Jack swiftly and surely spun the lariat over his head and let it fly. It claimed the calf by the front hooves like a snare. Quick as a cat Jack was off his appaloosa and on one knee hogtying the calf and soothing it as best he could with his hat.

After the day's work the hands were much more amenable to Jack. "So how'd a New York City kid learn to throw a rope like that?" asked Parsons.

"The Wild West Show," Jack replied with a wink. "You think calves are hard? You try lassoing an elevated train."

The hands whistled and snorted. "What would you rope a train for?" asked Rey the half-Indian.

Jack grinned. "Beats paying!"

With Suarez, and Annalisa, Jack helped David become at ease on a horse. It was hard. David could not rest easy on any of the steeds they had in the corral except for the old gray mare who didn't do much except munch on her feed and pace a few steps here and there. David complained one night a week or so after they came to the ranch.

"I'm just not a very trusting person," he said, "and the animals can sense that. Horses are very sensitive. They know I don't trust them and so they resent me and want me off their backs!"

"Gee," Jack quipped, "wonder what that feels like."

"Oh be quiet." The tent was now pitched in the broken-down main chambers of the old ranch house. There they had privacy, though they had not been together since they arrived.

"So where did you go today?" David asked, slipping out of his clothes and rubbing his aching back.

"Annalisa and I went down to the bottom land to investigate what Texas Oil was looking for there," Jack replied. He was going through an old book he'd found in what used to be the ranch library, a diary in Spanish by one of the de la Paz family that used to own Las Animas. Jack could speak passable Spanish but reading it was more difficult.

David sat down on his camp bed, brought in from the ranch hand shack. "Annalisa," he said.

Jack put down the book. He propped himself up on an elbow, squinted exaggeratedly with one eye, and then said, "You jealous?"

David colored even in the light of the oil lamp. "No!" he insisted. Then: "Should I be?"

Jack got up, crossed to David's bed, and knelt down. He put a hand on the back of David's neck and said, "I'm here with you, remember? I promised."

But David said, "I always thought it would be a hard promise for you to keep."

Jack frowned. "You saying you think I'll go behind your back?"

"Annalisa is exactly the kind of girl my sister is," David retorted. "Even more so. She pushes all your buttons and you love it."

"Does that mean I love her?" Jack responded. "Even if I did feel all hot under the collar for her--okay, she's a dish, you can see that plain as day--and I ain't saying I do, by the way, just that she's hot--does that mean I love her? Dave, I known her a week. I'm here with you." Again he tried to be reassuring. "Anyway, you ain't right that she's like your sister."

"Really."

"Yeah. Sarah was sweet on the outside. Annalisa's a straight talker and a stubborn ass. Actually, she's a lot more like you. And I already got you," Jack finished with a flourish.

That seemed enough for David, at least that night. But they did not share a bed, and continued to not share a bed, and Jack drifted off, more than once, to fantasies about Annalisa.

***

It was in the second week after their arrival that Edward Coningham came to visit.

Jack was helping shoe the horses with Parsons and Grayson while David went over the accounts with Suarez and Annalisa when they heard the putter of a gas engine firing and backfiring coming up the wagon road. Soon the motorcar appeared bearing four men, two of them with rifles. The man at the passenger's seat stepped out. Jack recognized the man from the bank in Las Cruces. So he'd been right.

"Good afternoon," said the man to Jack. "Mr. Sullivan?"

Jack gave the foot of the horse he was shoeing to Grayson with a nod, soothed the animal with a pat, and then, peeling his work gloves off, nodded to the man. "Mr. Coningham," he said.

Coningham made a show of a smile. "That's right, that's right, young man. You're a sharp one, aren't you."

"I have me moments," Jack said. He nodded to the motorcar, whose engine was still sputtering and occasionally belching black exhaust. "Your automobile's spooking my horses."

"Well, I'm a modern man," said Coningham. "I'd have thought such a young man all the way from New York City would appreciate the twentieth century."

"I'm a throwback," Jack said. "How can I help you, Mr. Coningham?"

"Well, now, I just wanted to welcome you to the county, and see how you're settling in. This old place is pretty bleak for a place to live."

"It'll get better," Jack said.

"I'm sure you'll do your best," Coningham agreed. "But even the best ranches down here don't need more than six, seven thousand acres. Economies of scale and all that." He wore a creamy white hat with a Texas brim. "It can get real expensive, keeping up all this with such a small herd and so few hands."

Rey, watching from the Suarez shack with the boys, spat through his teeth.

Jack looked from his hands to Coningham. "Well, that's all right," he said. "I got enough collateral to get this place on its feet again."

"Oh, yes, that's right," Coningham said. "You're on personal terms with Theodore Roosevelt." He was clean-shaven, and when he smiled he appeared too sincere. "You should come to town sometime, meet the other important men in the county. If you're planning on staying, of course. To be honest, if I were you, I woudn't stay."

"Oh yeah? Why's that, Mr. Coningham?"

"Oh, well. You know. Things happen. The ranch way of life is passing, son, if you haven't heard." Coningham waved his hand. "Big spreads like this just don't make sense anymore." He paused, and then reached into his coat pocket. Behind Jack, Grayson's hand moved to his own hip, where he wore a pistol.

But Coningham only produced a folded paper. "Let's be straight now," he said, unfolding the slip of paper. "I'd like to purchase the ranch from you. If you want to keep some for a profitmaking or tourist enterprise, I'll give you the same amount just for the two thousand acres you've got on that little creek that feeds into the Rio Grande."

Jack looked at the figure. It was considerable, and Jack considered it. Then he handed the paper back to Coningham.

"I'll have to think about it, Mister Coningham," he said. "I just got here, after all. Still learning my way around the herd and the land."

Coningham nodded expansively. "Of course. I understand, I really do. Say what, why don't you visit my offices in the general store some time you're in town? We can talk again then. I can introduce you to some of the other ranchers and entrepreneurs in town. We're always interested in who's the new blood in Las Cruces." He touched his hat. "Mr. Sullivan." He looked at Suarez. "Juan. Gents." He got back into his car and clatterd off, trailing the noxious exhaust in his wake.

David came to Jack as they watched Coningham and his men leave. "You're not really going to consider selling the ranch, are you?"

"No," Jack said. "Not to him anyway."

Suarez joined them. "Coningham talks a big game," he said.

"How big is his store in town?" Jack asked.

"The biggest," Suarez said. "A man named Levi once tried to open a store that competed with him, but only in the fine things the rich and the ladies wanted. Coningham tried to buy him out. When Levi refused, his store was hit by outlaws twice, and his home vandalized once, and then the bank refused to loan him money for his payroll. He was forced out of business."

"And Coningham bought it?" asked David.

"No," said Annalisa, joining the conversation. "He tore the building down and sold the lot to a friend of his to build a dance hall."

Grayson, the young ranch hand, came up to them. "My pa got in trouble with credit at Coningham's. He came home one night beat up. Said some thugs waylaid him on the way back from the saloon. But he ended up selling one of my ma's necklaces to settle the account right after. They went back to Texas after that. Said better the devil they knew."

"Does he always travel with guards?" asked David.

"They don't usually do guarding," Grayson said, looking directly at him. He was a fit, compact young man, a little like their old newsie friend Kid Blink, but with brown hair and two plain brown eyes. To Jack he said, "I know you don't cotton to wearing a pistol, Mister Sullivan, but maybe you ought to start."

Jack nodded. "Maybe you're right."

***

A couple of days later when everything was quiet around the ranch and David was not being thrown off yet another horse, Jack rode to Las Cruces to do some investigating of his own.

He left his horse tied to a hitching-post on the outskirts of town and with his hat pulled low moseyed idly down the main street, sizing up the buildings and the businesses within them. He spotted the general store, a large warehouse of a building with a brick frontage, next to the theatre and the dance hall mentioned by Annalisa. Taking out a cigarette, Jack picked a corner upon which to linger where he would be in plain sight and yet because of that easily ignored.

On the opposite corner, a boy was selling newspapers. Jack went to him.

"Hey kid," he said. "How's the headline today?"

The boy frowned, then looked at the newspaper himself. "Looks pretty boring to me," he finally judged. "They sure ain't selling."

Jack smiled. "How much for two?"

"Five cents?"

"They're two and a half cents out here?"

"Yeah. Why?"

Jack shook his head. Economies of scale. "Here," he said, passing the boy a dime. "Keep the change. What's your name?"

"Ralph."

"Ralph. I'm Jack. I'm new in town. This your corner, Ralph?"

"My what?"

"Your spot. You always sell papes on this corner?"

"I guess ..."

"You know Coningham, the owner of the general store?"

Ralph nodded. "Sure," he said. "But he doesn't buy from me. He gets his from the stock he sells in there. He sells everything," he confided.

Jack looked at the store. "Yeah," he said. "I bet he does." Again he smiled at the boy. "Thanks for the papes. Oh, and don't worry about the headline. Just use your imagination. Stretch it a little. Because headlines don't sell papes--newsies sell papes. Got that?"

Ralph nodded, his eyes gone wide. "Who are you, mister?"

Jack winked. "A cowboy," he said. "If anyone ever asks, I was never here. Got it?"

Ralph nodded again. "Got it."

Jack moved a bit to the shadowy side of the corner and settled down to wait. It didn't take long. The sputtering of Coningham's motorcar announced his arrival. Jack rose from where he'd been squatting and watched the store owner walk into his premises.

"Okay, kid," he said to Ralph, "remember what I told you."

Blithely he sauntered across the intersection. He knew the best way to draw attention was to appear to be hiding. Only one he got the side of the general store did he forego the niceties.

He found a pile of discarded packing crates and used them to make his way onto the roof. Moving quickly he scanned the plain flat rooftop for what would give away a private office, and then found a chimney set apart from the rest, with a small raised box bearing a clerestory of skylights. Good enough for ragtime. He swiftly and quietly went to the skylights. Gently he teased one open a crack and listened for any conversation. He got it.

"Yes, yes, it's a done deal," Coningham was saying, speaking through a telephone. "The boy good as said he'd consider it ... some trash from New York, but he's chummy with T. R., and you know if there's anything overt that old windbag will come down here and cause trouble for us up in Santa Fe ... overt, I said. Overt. There ways to persuade a person to cooperate, if the boy's pigheaded. Yes, he's that sort, just like the Kid: read too many penny dreadfuls about the Wild West, now thinks he can make a go of a two-bit operation on a golden platter of a spread ... no, won't need to bring the Judge into this; only if that publicity hound Garrett becomes involved ... well, there is that ... no. Leave it to me. If he turns down this offer, I'll make another one. Everyone is ultimately persuadable. All right. All right. Thank you. See you soon indeed."

At that point he glanced up at the skylight over his office, but like almost everyone else, he was too late to spot the cowboy.

***

Back at the ranch Jack discussed this with Suarez and David with Annalisa listening nearby. Suarez advised caution.

"We do not know when or how Senor Coningham will come," he said. "It is best to go on but be watchful."

"We have ten thousand acres to guard," David said. "With six men--"

"And me," Annalisa said.

David flushed hotly at her but agreed, "Seven guards, how would we know if they'd come into our territory?"

"But they ain't after all ten thousand acres, Dave," Jack said. "They just want the river bottom by the arroyo."

"So you think that's what he was on the telephone to? Texas Oil?"

"Yep."

"All the way to Texas?"

"They don't need to be in Texas," said Annalisa, coming to sit next to Jack with a plate of fresh hot tortillas and a dish of re-fried beans. She handed the plate first to Jack, while pretending to ignore him, and Jack took one tortilla the same way, eyes not meeting. David fidgeted and refused to take from the plate when it was offered.

"Maybe later," he said. "So what's your plan?" he asked Jack.

Jack folded up his tortilla, dipped it into the beans, and took a big bite. "Not sure yet," he said. "But wouldn't hurt for somebody to ride out that way every day. Just to check."

"Armed," said Annalisa.

"We're bringing guns into this situation?" asked David.

"Guns are in this situation, Mr. Jacobs," she replied.

Suarez held up a pacifying hand. "A watch on the river bottom will take one of us from the cattle. There are already signs of coyote."

"Then we'll all pull extra weight," Jack said. "First of all, though, I'm gonna write a letter and tell Senor Coningham--real polite--to stick his money where it don't shine. Real polite, though. You write it, Davy."

Annalisa chuckled. David scowled. "Fine," he said.

***

In their tented room in the old ranch house that night Jack decided to get frisky. But this time it was David who pulled away and said he wasn't interested.

"Ain't interested?" Jack protested. "You been whacking off every day since we got here. I heard you."

"Well perhaps that's my problem," David replied.

Jack sat up. "What's the matter with you anyway? You've been grumping all day. You remind me of Skittery back in New York."

David lay down in his own bunk and turned over. "Maybe I'm coming down with something," he said. "Why don't you ask Annalisa?"

"Annalisa?" Jack asked incredulously. "Dave--nothing's going on between me and Annalisa!"

David said nothing.

Jack got up. He flung on his trousers and grabbed his hat and coat.

"Fine," he said. "Maybe I will go see Annalisa. Maybe something should be going on." He made a show of storming out, secretly hoping David would call him back. But David didn't. Jack spent the night in the bunkhouse with the hands.

***

Suarez was right: nothing untoward occurred for nearly a month. David continued to get better at riding. Meanwhile, Grayson was helping Jack perfect his shooting.

"You never own a gun in New York City?" asked the young hand as they practiced on cans upon the homestead fence.

"Not me personally," Jack said. "Gets you in trouble."

"There's already trouble to be had around here," Grayson said. "Guns sometimes get you out of it."

Jack grinned. He liked the feel of the Colt in his hands. "Everyone kept telling me the West is over, it's done," he said. "Looks like they was all wrong."

"West will never end," Grayson said. "Till people like Coningham and the carpetbaggers up in Santa Fe and Texas Oil become everybody. And I pray that never happens." He drilled his can straight through the middle, then glanced at Jack. "Sorry to say, Mr. Sullivan, but I had you first pegged for a carpetbagger."

"Oh yeah?" Jack said. He knocked his can off the fence, but didn't cut it through. "Hey, and pal, call me Jack. I'm only eighteen. You're what, twenty? Twenty-two?"

"Twenty-one," Grayson said. The second to last target was an old whiskey bottle with a cork at the top. He shot the cork off without shattering the glass.

"You always a good shot?" asked Jack.

"Born that way."

"You never thought of going, I dunno--outlaw?"

"I been in jail once," said Grayson. "Didn't like it. You know what happens to fifteen-year-old kids in jail?"

"Actually," Jack said grimly, "I kinda do." He hit the whiskey bottle, letting it burst into a hundred piercing shards.

"Yeah?" said Grayson. "In New York?"

"Yeah."

"Albuquerque. After my parents left."

"You ever think a going back to see 'em?"

"Nope," Grayson said. "This is my home now." He took Jack's gun and reloaded it for him. "Sure getting good real quick, Jack," he said. "Soon you'll be as good as me."

Jack shrugged. "Born that way."

***

Jack took his turn along with everyone else riding past the river bottom in case Coningham or agents of Texas Oil showed up without permission. So far nothing had changed. It was the start of summer now and the heat had baked what had been the fields of flowers into crusted gray brush and the ubiquitous creosote. The seasonal creek was still flowing, however, and that day Jack decided to stop and take a quick swim.

He got off his appaloosa and let him walk free with the reins dangling, skipped lightly down to the rocks, stripped, and found a pool in the water deep enough to sit in. He wished he could find a place to swim--the nearest thing would the big pond where the cattle drank, but the water was foul and barely two feet deep at the center. At least this creek was clear and pure. He dipped his head in the running water, threw his hair back, and reached over to his clothes for a cigarette.

He lay there for a while, smoking, letting the cold water leach the excess heat of the day from his muscles. He reached for his hat and put it on, not wanting to burn his face, and started to whistle the same sad tune he had called his mother's lullaby when he and David had been in Santa Fe. Three notes, one middling, then one reaching, but swiftly fading to a long and wistful tone, of a dream unfulfilled. For some reason it still sounded sad even though he was now supposedly perfectly situated within it.

He heard the approach of a horse. Swiftly he pulled out his pistol and stood up with the weapon already leveled and cocked.

It was only Annalisa on her bay stallion. She was regarding him with a haughty smile.

"What's up?" he asked, standing there.

"We were wondering where you were," she replied. "I decided to go look for you since your friend David is not yet a very good rider."

"Don't underestimate Dave," Jack warned. He walked up out of the creek. He knew she was admiring his naked body. He picked up his britches, paused, then removed his hat and stood there plainly and said, "See something you like?"

She giggled girlishly. It was surprising. "I've seen plenty," she replied.

Jack made a sneaky face.

"On horses," she clarified, offended.

"Oh, okay then," Jack said, "I'll take that as a compliment."

She got off her horse. She went to him. Still he didn't move to get dressed, wanting to see what she would do. The harsh sunlight made her skin shine golden and brought out burnt umber lights in her rippling hair. She did not stop until she was inches away from him.

"You are shameless," she said.

"You're the one coming over here," he replied.

She kissed him. It startled him. He embraced her instinctively, felt his body react, began to let his hands wander.

But then he let out a sigh and stopped. He pushed her away and shoved himself into his shorts and trousers.

"Sorry," he said. "I can't do this."

She looked at him curiously. "Is there someone back in New York?"

Jack thought. "Not like that," he said, surprised he felt a longing for the city he had long wished to escape. The people he had left behind. Only one of them had come with him--the most important one--and because it was the most important one, Jack felt an obligation.

Annalisa was studying him. "Your friend David," she said.

Jack didn't mind. "What about him?"

"He is ... so?"

Jack had to smile at the way she put it. "What's it to you?" he asked her.

"You are not so," she said.

I'll make this bargain with you. If you can promise, not to me, not even to David, but to yourself, in your heart of hearts, and Jack you have such a heart, if you can promise yourself that you can love my son enough to stay with him no matter what the lure may be, somewhere else, somewhere down the road, then I will buy him a ticket to Santa Fe myself, the minute he finishes this year of schooling. And let him go with you. With my blessing...

... I don't know if we're still gonna be in each other's pockets in a year. I can't promise anything like that. But I need you. And I love you. Yeah, I said it. I mean it too. Come with me, Dave. Let's see that big sky together.

"It doesn't matter what I'm not," Jack said. "What matters is what promises I keep."

***

A few days after this Rey and Suarez came back from Las Cruces. One of Coningham's men had met them at the store and handed them a letter "for the kid."

"The kid, huh?" Jack said, taking the letter from his foreman and opening it. "I think he got me confused with somebody else." He scanned it, grinned a bit, and then read it aloud: "My dear Mr. Sullivan--I regret to be informed of your decision not to enter into our business arrangement. I hope this will not be a cause of grief or extremity for you. A dwindling herd on such a vast land is not easy to keep track of. My door remains open should you decide to reconsider. Yours very sincerely, Edward M. Coningham, Esq." He made sure to say "esk".

They glanced around the table. They all could figure out what Coningham meant.

"We've barely started restoring the wire," David said first.

"Just the river bottom, right?"

"Yeah. But all the northern reach, the western--basically three sides of the square is still old and rusted and most half-torn down."

"Should we double the watch?" asked Annalisa.

"That will mean all of us pulling extra shifts over what we're doing already," said David.

"I can hire more hands," said Suarez.

"No," said Jack. "We can't afford it. The bank's run by Coningham's pals, they're looking for any excuse to foreclose on this place."

Suarez sighed. "Perhaps it is best to reconsider, Jack. It is only the river bottom."

"But that is the best grazing!" Annalisa protested. "And that is where the mestenos drink!"

The mustangs. Jack had not seen them yet.

"Donde estan los mestenos, Juan?" he asked Suarez.

They were on the mesa beyond the uplands, replied the foreman, separated from the San Andres mountains by the white sands; the appaloosa came from them, when mares were let go to breed with the wild stallions and then they and their young brought back to the fold. "They will come with the afternoon rains in August when the creek swells again."

"August," Jack said. It was only the beginning of June. "They're on the mesa, you say?"

"Si." The foreman's browns knitted. "Porque?"

***

Jack saddled the appaloosa colt that night without telling anyone, though he was sure Suarez knew. The moon was just past full and the sky was a shield of stars as he set off for the uplands at the northeastern corner of Las Animas.

It was a night's riding, but he didn't mind. How many nights had he spent awake, running from rooftop to rooftop, looking for trouble--stopping what he found, making some when he found none. He was the boy who rode the backs of the El trains for fun. The boy who monkeyed his way up to the belltowers of St. Patrick's and listened to the hush that fell on the city late at night. He'd swum Jamaica Bay and the Bronx River and had gone into the old pneumatic tunnels that led to the ancient caverns under the ground so old David never believed him when he told him. Carvings of a lost race of giants. And that was just by himself, with his old cotton alpineering rope that he could tie with a hundred different knots. Upon a horse, out here in spaces that finally requited his imaginations, Jack felt the undeniable buoyancy of freedom. He missed New York; he knew he'd go back now and again; but this ... this was pure.

As he approached the mesa, his horse noted familiar paths, and he figured it was recalling its infancy with the herd. He'd have to be careful not to let it go. "I know, bud, I know," he said softly to the appaloosa's ear as it scented the herd and became nervous. "They're your old family. I know what that's like. But stick with me awhile longer, huh? Have I steered you wrong?" He smelled them too, and now heard them.

He climbed with his horse to a lookout point and stopped cold. The herd was there, grazing on desert grass on a field of flat ground that slowly tumbled down towards the sea of pure gypsum dunes: the white sands.

Suddenly all Jack could think of was his father. William Sullivan, before the drinking and the obsession turned him wrong. When they were happy, and he told his sons about New Mexico and the wild horses and the free air. About his childhood friend Henry McCarty. Jack didn't really know if his father ever knew the Kid when they were little back in New York.

As he had by Bishop Lamy's great limestone cathedral in Santa Fe, Jack said, "I'm here, Pa. I made it." But now he added. "And I won't let it go."

He gently guided his horse away from the herd. He could feel its homesickness through his skin like his own.

Just as he paused to soothe the appaloosa once more, he felt the faintest flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. He drew his gun and aimed.

But it was only a lone mustang descending from the herd onto the gypsum dunes. It frolicked and tossed in the cool dry grains, soft as snow, and for a moment Jack thought he was just imagining things. Then a mare, perhaps its mother, whinneyed to call the colt back home, and it did, trailing glistening dust.

***

Jack got back before dawn. He settled, watered and brushed his appaloosa, and then made his way up to the old ranch house and the tent where he and David slept.

He found David lying in bed with Ned Grayson. Both were naked and in the attitude of having fallen fast asleep after lovemaking.

Something turned in Jack's stomach. For a moment he considered grabbing Grayson by the neck and throwing him off his property, or worse.

But he didn't. Instead he lay down, boots and all, on his own bed, and closed his eyes. They would see him lying there when they woke, and then they'd know what he could have done, that he did not decide to do.