Weight shifted on the mattress to his right. Celeste had her back to him. Thick black curls spilled over the pillow she curled into as she sighed and slept on.
Around the four-poster bed were furnishings finer than Néstor had seen anywhere but a few stolen glances inside la casa mayor of Los Ojuelos. He tallied them to ground himself. Silver candlesticks. A table of Nicaraguan cedar where Celeste cast expensive things carelessly: a hand mirror of polished silver; cosmetics; the black mantilla she had been wearing the afternoon before, on her way back from Mass to the Romero family’s second house in the center of Laredo.
This was where Néstor generally stayed when cattle drives brought him south from El Paso del Norte. He had when Celeste’s husband was alive too.
The shame in Néstor’s gut pooled deeper. Perhaps because of the stray thought of Celeste’s dead husband, perhaps because of how his habit of staying with Celeste continued without remorse. Perhaps because lately, and with unnerving frequency, he woke with terror alight in his skin.
Or perhaps it was because lately, whenever he slept next to a woman, he woke with someone else’s voice in his ear.
Someone who was long dead.
He threw the sheet off. Planted feet on floorboards. He dressed with as much speed and silence as he could muster, keeping his eyes averted from the bed. He needed to be out of this house. Away from Celeste and the fine furnishings that reminded him so keenly of Los Ojuelos.
As a rule, he didn’t vanish before Celeste woke as he might with other women. That was rude. It might imperil the possibility of future stays when he was next near Laredo or Rancho Buenavista, the land she had inherited from her late husband. Usually, he and Celeste slept late. They had coffee in bed. Néstor kept her talking about the business of running her rancho, learning all he could from her venting about finances, cattle rustlers, and her beef buyers in Cuba. If it was spring, there was branding to do, which brought Rancho Buenavista’s herds close to Laredo and kept Néstor in the town’s orbit for several weeks. It kept him in Celeste’s bed for just as long.
Women took Néstor out of his own head. Celeste was more engaging to him than most—with her shrewd mind for business and interest in his questions about her rancho, it was not often when he was with her that he felt like conversations were hollow, that he was a shell.
But last night he did. Last night, awareness of his own emptiness writhed under his skin. He was a mask turned out to the world. A husk.
If Celeste noticed this change in him, it only made her conversation more animated, her kisses more determined. She was eager to rein him back to her. If she woke, this would continue, for she was not a woman accustomed to the word no.
But he could not stomach speaking to anyone. Not after waking like he had. Not after feeling so powerfully that she was there.
So he crept downstairs. He helped himself to some water and one of yesterday’s breads from the open-air kitchen, then slipped away before any of the Romero household’s servants woke.
Madrugada hung still and gray over the town. The moon was long set. The stars had paled, but the cool tinge of the sky said sunrise was an hour away yet. The air was spiced with dozens of kitchen fires. Somewhere in town, bakers were at work. After weeks of waking to the piney, cold sharpness of the chaparral, the smells of town were usually novel to him. Welcomed, even. Now, the sight of other buildings, tidily nestled next to one another like crows on a corral fence, made his skin itch.
His mare, Luna, had spent the night tethered with Celeste’s favorites just to the side of the house. She raised her head in greeting, her velvety black ears pricked at the sound of Néstor’s boots in the dirt. She shifted her weight. Let one cocked back hoof come to the earth with a stamp. When Néstor rubbed her forehead and murmured good morning, she exhaled in reply, her breath warm on his chest. A soft sound that was half greeting, half chastisement, as if to say we’re in town, why on earth are you awake this early?
“Bad dreams, Lunita,” he answered, planting a firm kiss on the sickle-shaped white star that gave the mare her name. Luna smelled like sleep and night and home. “You know how it is.”
He curried and saddled her. Checked her hooves. Lost himself in the ritual of buckles and saddle blankets and packing his supplies. He kept his attention away from the house, from Celeste’s expensive glass windows. He had grown too comfortable in Laredo lately, too comfortable with Celeste, and that was dangerous. He had been foolish enough to make his home another person once before. He would not do it again.
He mounted, put his back to town, and rode.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
BY DAWN, HE found the outline of nine horses, the horns of their saddles like a small mountain range against the lightening horizon. A thread of smoke curled up from a fire; low, sleep-roughened voices rose as he approached. He had reached the encampment of Buenavista’s vaqueros.
The pungent smell of the herds rode the breeze toward him; the cattle were not far. Good. That meant the caporal, the leader of this corrida of vaqueros, meant to leave today for Texian territory.
“Is that Duarte?” a voice called as Néstor dismounted.
“No,” said another voice, the syllable long and incredulous. “I told him . . .” One figure rose, unfolding like a lean plume of smoke. Albert Fitz Cepeda—universally known as Beto Cepeda—cursed soundly as Néstor left Luna to gossip with the other horses. A chorus of the other vaqueros’ laughter followed.
“Morning, Beto,” Néstor said.
“The fuck are you doing here?” Beto held a tin mug of coffee; he glowered at Néstor over the rim as he took a long sip. “We’re driving today.”
“I know.”
“I thought I told you to rest.”
“I did.”
Beto rolled his eyes. He alone among the other vaqueros—who were all Celeste’s employees—knew where exactly Néstor stayed while he was in town.
“When you’re as old as me you’ll regret working the way you do,” Beto grumbled. The so-called old man—twenty-seven to Néstor’s twenty-two—smelled like his incurable tobacco habit. Mesquite wood smoke, cold night. A white curl of steam rose from the coffee as he offered the mug to Néstor. It was hot against his calluses.
For the first time that morning, Néstor felt like he had his feet on the ground. Like he was looking out his own eyes instead of being caught in cobwebs.
“And you’ll regret the drinking. God,” Beto swore in English. “You still smell like it. Disgusting.” Beto had taken Néstor under his wing six years ago after Néstor saved his life by roping a charging longhorn and bringing it to its knees in front of an unhorsed Beto. The vaqueros of the ranchos surrounding las Villas del Norte knew them as a matched working set, itinerant and as inseparable as brothers. They only rarely hired themselves out to separate drives, except when Beto was trying to teach Néstor the virtues of rest by planting him in a town and ordering him to stay at least a week. “Would it kill you to sleep in a bed for at least two nights in a row? By yourself, even?” he added in a lower voice.
Néstor shrugged, taking a sip of coffee as the other vaqueros broke camp, shoveling dirt on the fire and beginning to sing.
“Imagínalo,” Beto continued his lecture. “Three square meals a day, fresh pan dulce every morning, meat that isn’t salted leather? Maybe get your sinning ass to church, for once? Doesn’t that sound appealing?”
Néstor handed the coffee back to Beto. “Not really.”
“So are you with us or not, Duarte?” The caporal barked as he saddled his mare.
“With,” Néstor called.
“Lord knows why,” the caporal said dryly, casting Néstor a dubious look. “I will never understand why you would work yourself to death for a ranchero, chamaco.”
“Because I’m going to be one of them soon,” Néstor shot back, adding a wink as he said, “and if you’re lucky, I’ll let you work for me, old man.”