11. Desperado
Desperado, why don't you come to your senses?
You been out ridin' fences for so long now
Oh, you're a hard one
I know that you got your reasons, but
These things that are pleasin' you
Can hurt you somehow*
They were the restless sort – moving, always moving. Here to there and never getting attached to any one place, because they couldn't come back here tomorrow. Maybe next week or the one after they'd come around again, but the stay would be every bit as short then as it was today. It was hard, Luke would justify, to hit a moving target.
They were even more nomadic now that they'd gone against Luke's principles and attacked the Hickory boys at night while they slept in their own home territory. It seemed stupid, when she had that same Duke honor in her that had hated everything about that raid, to try to explain to Luke that principles didn't belong here. Not in this feud, maybe not in any. Feuds, after all, were just small wars with all the same gruesome goals attached. Wear down the opposition until they stopped fighting – but that was too simple. The men who had started this ongoing skirmish, who stoked it and kept it aflame, mostly fought by proxy. Winning, then, meant killing or maiming the boys that did the fighting in their name.
There were things that Daisy would never do, but Yellow-eye had. Seemed crazy, since they shared one body and one brain, but it was true. Daisy would never fire a gun, but if she did, she'd never point it anywhere near another person, whereas Yellow-eye was reckless and took pride in his perfect aim. He could make a bullet miss a man by no more than a breath of air, a bloodless shot leaving only kicked-up dirt clods in its wake.
But they hadn't, either of them, killed a man. Daisy figured that was good, because if Yellow-eye ever did kill someone, she was pretty sure she'd have to banish him from her life and there was no telling what kind of damage to her sanity that sort of separation could cause.
Luke hadn't killed anyone either, she didn't think, at least not directly. Not by a bullet out of his own gun, but he acted like he had anyway. Felt each death as if it was weighing on his own soul, and maybe they all were. But he didn't stop, didn't even take the time for an extra breath, he just kept on leading anyone who would follow him into fight after fight. And in between battles the whole bunch of them kept on shuffling and moving.
Paradoxically, Daisy loved the constant roaming – it spoke to her adventurous streak, the thing deep in her heart that made her want this life in the first place – but Yellow-eye hated the shifts and changes because he had to scout out each new location. Time spent wandering the narrowest of trails, half of them buried under the detritus of last year's fallen foliage, looking for a nook or cove with enough of a clearing to sleep more than a dozen, but well protected from attack of any kind. And once he'd found a spot (because when Daisy was Yellow-eye, she was a he, no matter how crazy the notion might seem to anyone outside of her head) Luke still had to inspect and approve it. A process that, about a quarter of the time, led to more searching and seeking until Luke was fully satisfied. The good nights were the ones when they went back to stay at an old campsite.
And the very best days were the ones in Hidden Hollow, where she and Luke (because she was always Daisy in Hidden Hollow) would retreat, just the two of them. The excuse they gave each other was grooming, the ongoing effort to maintain her identity as a man. Which was tied to Luke, or they both tacitly agreed to pretend it was. She had, after all, managed the task for a year before he came along to help her. Funny how easy it was to forget that.
This was a treasured moment, separate from all the other moments they lived, when she could feel the gentleness of her cousin's hands and they ran through her hair, lifting it away from her head to trim off the ends with the small knife that he kept in a pouch on his belt. Not a weapon, but a tool wielded with inordinate kindness.
Funny how soft and easy his fingers could be when every other muscle in his body was tensed. Ready for a fight, any time and for any reason, looking for something to hit or strike out against to release all that was pent up inside him.
But the only thing that let go was his tongue, clicking against the back of his teeth. Hands working through her hair again, as he measured lengths and silently berated himself for an uneven cut.
"Gonna have to take a little more off now," he mumbled, but it was to himself, not to her. Because he was the only one that was upset about his mistake. She knew beauty, had been beautiful once and it had been a losing proposition. There were no mirrors in her life now, and even if there had been, her appearance wouldn't matter to her. It was important to Luke, because he wanted things for her. Had designs on seeing that she was happy, and when it came right down to it, he was nothing but a man. Men were easily confused (unless they were women pretending to be men, in which case they were brilliant) and equated beauty with pleasure. Which Luke wanted her to feel, because he could see a future for her. But he couldn't see one for himself. Couldn't see anything around the knot of hatred and fury in his gut, the need for revenge over what had been taken from him.
"Thank you, sugar," Daisy said, turning around to kiss his cheek when he pronounced her haircut done. In their earliest days of doing this, she used to hug him. Up on her toes with her arms around those tight shoulders, and the tension wouldn't ever leave his body, but he'd put one arm around her waist, and give her a token pat before stepping back. Half of his first year in the gang, maybe, it happened that way until one time when she put her arms around him and his heavy hand gripped her by the ribcage, pushing her back. Not rough—just firm, no-nonsense. Then he'd told her that she needed to find herself a good man and settle down.
Your virtue is safe from me, she'd answered back, her pained emotions veiled by a light laugh. He'd matched her with a snort over things long gone, things he'd had once and lost, things he could never get back. He'd accepted a kiss on his cheek, because they had secrets between them, but romantic interest in each other was not one of them. She could still see the little boy he'd once been, muddy up to his knees, scabs on his knuckles and a lopsided grin that the devil himself would have admired. Her affection for him now was the same as it had ever been and somewhere under all those layers of anger and pain he knew what she knew—that she touched him with kindness because he needed it and deserved it, even if he couldn't remember how to properly accept it anymore. Sometimes it made her wish that she still lived the life of a girl at the top of Lookout Ridge, so she could make him a pie. He couldn't hug, but he could still eat.
She had, perhaps three times since Luke had re-entered her life, gone back up that hill, dressed in the clothing that she and Luke kept hidden under the porch of the schoolhouse he'd once gone to. Dress, corset, petticoats and those abhorrent shoes, all wrapped in layers of burlap and shoved through a hole in the latticework, just waiting for her to reclaim her femininity for a few hours here or there. Not Yellow-eye's clothes, but they weren't Daisy's either. Garb that Luke had gotten the prostitute Ruby to lend him on some pretense or other. Probably hadn't taken much; he'd probably told the girl not to ask questions and she'd simply acquiesced.
Ruby thought she loved Luke, that much was obvious to anyone—or any woman, and maybe it wasn't fair for her to carry Daisy's brain in Yellow-eye's disguise, to watch things through feminine eyes framed by a masculine haircut—who looked. The poor girl was waiting to be rescued. To be saved by a man who didn't even know how to save himself, and she was a fool, Daisy could admit that. But Luke ought to be a better man than to trade on that foolishness. He was raised to be that better man.
Daisy didn't pretend to know what the purity of true love was, but she did know it wasn't something to be mocked. Nothing to pretend at or mislead someone about. She reckoned she had the high moral ground on this subject; she'd left home over the attempt to marry her off to someone she couldn't feel love for.
(But what did love feel like? Was it that dull ache in the pit of her stomach when she got to dwelling on the people who had raised her, who were still alive up on the mountain while Luke's kin were buried in the unforgiving ground? Or was it that other thing, the flutter in her chest, the way her breath got shallow and her limbs got loose and untrustworthy when she was in the same space with the boy that helped Pastor Jesse? Enos, he said his name was, but she'd barely heard it over the blood rushing in her ears.)
She'd don the ill-gotten clothes, and she'd slide through town undetected. She'd learn what she could, she'd report back to Luke, and then, every once in a great, long while, she'd take her leave and strike up over stony paths, aching in those shoes that her feet no longer knew how to wear. She'd knock on the door to the house where she'd grown up, and she'd be welcomed with quiet hugs and sad eyes that knew she wasn't going to stay. She'd make sure her parents were still healthy and ask if they wanted her to bring them something from town next time, and her mother would tsk over beauty wasted and tell her no. It wasn't much, but it was enough. A few hours here or there to know precisely who she was, to not mentally trip over the he and the she of the situation. To just be a Duke.
And though almost no one called him anything but Duke, Luke had forgotten that. What it meant to be a Duke, to have the guiding star of integrity in his soul, to do more than survive—to live.
Maybe, she thought as they switched places and she began to stroke her fingers through his hair, choosing where to cut first, today would be the day he'd let her remind him. Maybe he'd tolerate her efforts to show him affection. Maybe, if she asked him the right way, he'd shave off that month's growth of beard and reveal the face underneath. The one of a young boy, still three months shy of twenty. Maybe, for a minute, he'd shed that haggard look of a man in search of revenge. Maybe he'd catch sight of his reflection in the water of a stream and see something there that was worth saving, worth giving up his demons for. Maybe he'd remember that he was a Duke.
"Come on," he groused, when she took too long to measure out what she'd already cut against the longer hair that she hadn't gotten to yet. "We ain't got all day for this."
Ah, well. A girl could hope. And be patient, because they'd be out here again next month, doing this same thing. Maybe she'd find a way to talk sense into him by then.
* "Desperado" © 1973, music and lyrics by Don Henley and Glenn Frey