Little more than silence passed between them as they rode west again at a middling pace. James' weathered eyes glued to the horizon, sitting stiffly on his horse as his bones tugged down heavier than they had in what felt in quite a while indeed. Shame. Regret...it sliced slow and oily like a knife in the belly. Bad enough being half a man, a charity case. Bad enough knowing himself how he lived, off crooked cards and petty theft. He hadn't wanted her to find out, too. Hadn't wanted his only daughter to see how her pa was just a damned cripple, a useless wretch. Maybe it was inevitable, once she'd found him...but he'd had hopes of making it back to Anavio with the secret still intact, catching that bullet with her still unaware. Going to his grave with a shred of dignity. Maybe even with a trace of her respect. Now...better that he'd died in that dark and stinking room than this. Better for him to have succumbed to the infection, left her wondering, dreaming of the man he'd painted for her in a thousand bedtime tales, instead of finding the pathetic shell he had become.
She'd been the hardest part. The memory of her, when he was trying to forget the life he'd left behind. Friends were no concern; he didn't have a habit of trusting men enough to have any worthy of the name. Even his wife, sweet Molly O'Connor, hadn't been too difficult to push down into the unexamined past, beneath thought and reflection. But Alice...Alice was different. Her face had bubbled up, softly smiling in quiet moments, poisoning his mood with the dismal cast of loss. The high tones of her voice, the tinkle of laughter echoing in his ears like silver bells, reminding him of what he'd once had. What he'd thrown away. And the feeling of proud devotion that once had filled him as he gazed upon her features...without sustenance, it had withered to a cold and constant resignation, an icy distance that took up residence in his mind and flattened all experience with the weight of what had gone before.
He'd adapted, of course. Coped with circumstance as all men must, one way or another. When fortune favored him, that meant liquor enough to dull thought and feeling past the point of meaning - in leaner times, he could do little but endure, suffer through the dischordant pangs of emptiness that struck at his heart whenever he saw children playing in the dusty streets. Fight back the urge to return, just to see her face again. The decision to stay away had taken not a moment, but a lifetime - a dozen times he'd lingered in Oracle, the nearest town east of Anavio, struggling with himself over whether he ought to cross those last few miles. Each time, it was easier to stay away. As months became years, he could see more and more clearly the new life they surely had without him. Molly remarried to Billy Jack, the gold he'd saved up in his prospecting days covering any hard times at the ranch. Alice looking up to a new father, one without blood on his hands. Who could perhaps still throw her up into the air, as he once had. If James had come back, he'd have been an interloper, a cad, a low-down dog - there could be no happy reunion, after years of absence unexplained. Better just to stay away, leave them to their lives while he muddled through with his.
Or so it had seemed, at the time. More regrets to throw on the heap. Though he hardly saw what better path he could have traveled, maimed as he was. Perhaps best would simply have been to finish for himself what the fever hadn't. Take one last life, so she could never have tracked him down, never suffered the shattering of her illusions. He'd contemplated the idea anyway, time to time, in the dark and alone of those long desert nights...was hardly as though he was living for much. But he never scraped together the guts for it. Stayed yellow, when a better man might have ended things with honor.
His thoughts spun darkly in these circles for hours as they trotted slowly across the plain. And when they were finally ripped away, it was only to exchange one shame for another. The fascination he'd felt before, appraising her on that first night. Guilty awareness of her body, of the beauty which had grown with her years...they had stopped at a small stream to refill their canteens. Hardly more than an idle glance in her direction as she briefly doffed her hat, poured a measure of water across her scalp, cooling in the heat of the midday sun - but his gaze stuck like a fly in honey, watching as the liquid trickled down along the finely sculpted angles of her face, dripping damply down the elegant curve of her neck, glittering beads clinging like little diamonds on her skin. Shining brilliant in the noontime bright, a sheen of wetness alluring, pearlescent. A glow like that of gold. And beneath, the body he was finding increasingly difficult to ignore. His gaze tracking down unbidden to the modest swell of her bosom, to the narrow waist and slim, athletic hips vaguely outlined by her coat.
It was an effort of will to tear his eyes away, to turn his back to the too-enchanting vision she posed. Shame burning hot at the back of his skull - she was his daughter, damn it. His little girl, even if he no longer deserved the connection. Even if she'd become a woman in the time that had passed, had manifest all the loveliness of her mother, and a little more besides...it wasn't right, for a father to notice such things.
Didn't help, either, that he'd been too long without a woman's company - if the saloon girls and whores with whom he sometimes dallied could even be called such. Graceless ladies in masks of painted white...he felt a fool after every visit, swindled and empty. But he always went again, on the rare occasions when he had the money to spare. After days, weeks, months out on the trail, it got so the sight of a shapely leg could just about turn a man's mind to mush. And he was already well into 'months.' Even if he wasn't the kind of man to leer at the preacher's wife in the middle of a sermon, it was hard not to notice Alice's womanly charms. Hard to keep his eye from lingering on the lithe, acrobatic flex of her waist as she lifted herself again atop her stallion, on strong thighs, gripped tight around its girth. Or, what was more, on the tight contradiction in her features as she glanced back at him, steely determination in the firmness of her jaw alongside the anxious flash of uncertainty in her eyes.
Strange to think about, the paradox in her manner. Fearless when she was a child, and fearless now - even after just these two days, he could not think that he'd ever seen so bold and daring a woman, so intriguing in her intensity. And yet still bearing so plainly the wounds of her youth. Injuries he'd dealt her, hardly hidden beneath the costumed armor of a careless swagger and a narrowed eye. A note of vulnerability that pulsed painful in his heart, made him wish he could still sweep her up into her arms. The way he'd used to, a lifetime earlier, for skinned knees and bumped elbows. When a hug could cure the world's ills.
Pointless. He knew it well enough, certainty dark and bitter in his gut. He was the last man who could comfort her, the last she would want to. It was all he could do instead to corral the unrighteous interest that stirred inside him. Kick his tired old mare forward, ahead, so he couldn't watch her. Hurry on with this last journey, the final leg of the mess he called a life. The best he could hope was that she'd take at least some solace in putting him under - that blood would heal the hurt she carried, that he saw sometimes in her eye.
---
Another fire crackled between them by the time night fell across the plain. Another pot of trail stew, bubbling brightly, red potatoes and more dried beef. James sat silent, impassive in the sand as Alice slowly stirred with the same wooden spoon as before, still half-encrusted with the previous night's meal. Scooping up an occasional taste, prodding at the potatoes to test their firmness. No words - but eyes met at times above the flames, a momentary touch of brown and dirty green, when James glanced up from the glowing coals to find her gaze already on his features. Both dodged away, wandering in the outer darkness or amongst the embers as though their meeting had been a chance occurrence, unwelcome...but it was not long before she once more stared through yellow tongues of fire at the face which waited opposite. The features, shadowy and worn, that inspired in her such aching hesitancy, longing so conflicted. In this deepening darkness, the streaks of grey in his hair and new wrinkles on his face were all but invisible, and the child's voice inside her echoed in an endless chorus, desperately rejoicing.
It's him, it's him, it's finally him...
Stomach twisted up with nerves, she ate little of the finished stew; the deep skillet was still mostly full when she rose up to her feet, wandered round the fire to pass it along to her father. Sat down again there next to him, Indian-style, with just a foot or so distance between them - she almost fancied she could feel him, his presence, as he ate in silence. Scraping up just a few large spoonfuls before he, too, pushed the food aside, set it down still half-full in the earth between them to grow cold and unappetizing.
