The Wild Girl (11 page)
“Don’t think I didn’t see you slip out the back door with the little
puta,
” Tolley said when I got back to the table. “Damn, Giles, you don’t waste any time.”
“She’s not a whore,” I said. “She’s a nice kid. And we were just talking.”
“Not a whore?” Tolley said, incredulous. “Just talking? Good God, old sport, don’t tell me you didn’t do the dirty deed?” He laughed. “Why, you’re even more naive than I thought. And I’ll bet you paid her anyway.”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” I said. “Double. You know, Tolley, you’re a rich kid, you’ve always had everything you’ve ever wanted. It’s probably never occurred to you that some people are forced to do things against their will in order to make a living.”
“Oh, isn’t that sweet?” Tolley said mockingly. “Young master Giles to the rescue of the damsel in distress. But please, spare me the class lecture, would you? We all have our crosses to bear, old sport, even rich kids such as myself.”
We had a couple more shots of mescal, and then I left Tolley in the cantina and headed back over to Douglas. It had been a long day, and I was tired and suddenly quite drunk. Outside the night air was cold and a waning moon rose late over the mountains, flooding the plains so that the sparse greasewood bushes and mesquite trees cast thin shadows across the desert. As I left the yellow lights of Agua Prieta behind me, the coyotes took up their moon song, a high warbling pitch that seemed to accompany the tinny cacophony of music from the cantinas.
I walked unsteadily back to the hotel with the strange, giddy, exhilarating, drunken sensation that the door from my childhood had swung closed forever behind me tonight, and that nothing would ever be the same again.
BILLY FLOWERS TURNED TO PULL A SHIRT FROM HIS SADDLEBAGS IN
order to cover the heathen girl’s nakedness, and when he turned again to see what had so suddenly agitated his dogs, who had begun whining and barking and straining at their chains, she was gone. He could not see or hear her running, no rustle of her tattered dress, for it lay now in a pile on the ground as if she had simply vanished within it.
He thought, but only for the most fleeting moment, that perhaps she had, after all, been some kind of spirit being. But Billy Flowers was no great believer in supernatural manifestations, preferring to believe that both God and Satan worked more quietly in the souls of men.
Flowers knew instantly from the dogs’ posture what direction the girl had taken. He quickly scanned the surrounding country, catching just the slightest movement in the rocks above the river bottom, a movement so fleeting that it was little more than the memory of a movement. But it was enough. He considered but quickly rejected the notion of releasing the dogs, for he knew that if they caught her, they would certainly kill her, and that knowledge would as surely make of him a murderer. Instead, he unhooked a small liver-spotted bitch named Queenie and secured her chain to his own belt. Then he picked up the girl’s ragged dress, which stank of her wildness, and he rubbed it in the dog’s nose. “Now, Queenie, you are going to trail this heathen girl,” he said. He picked the dog up by the collar and with a rattle of chain swung her up onto the pommel of his saddle, where she balanced herself deftly. Accustomed to having dogs as passengers, John the Baptist did not flinch. Flowers climbed up behind.
He knew that with her head start, the girl could easily outrun him on foot. Nor did he attempt to ride into the steep rocks where she had fled, for it would clearly be impassable to the mule. Instead he followed the river bottom, until they came to the first dry arroyo that spilled down out of the hills, and up this he rode.
John the Baptist was the best mule Billy Flowers had ever owned, seemed to know where they were going even before his rider, as well as the best way to get there. He was an athletic animal and understood his limits, pushed himself as far and fast as he knew he could safely go, sometimes farther and faster than Billy Flowers would ever have expected or attempted himself. And he let his rider know, in no uncertain terms, when he could go no farther. Flowers respected the animal’s courage and judgment and had never asked him to do anything that he said he could not do.
The arroyo was so steep where it topped out on the ridge that the mule took the last few steps as a series of grunting lunges, trying to keep forward momentum in order to avoid sliding back down on the slick rock. Flowers leaned forward in the saddle, holding the dog splayed tight around the mule’s withers, trying to keep their weight as neutral as possible. “That’s my boy, John,” he whispered like an entreating lover in the mule’s ear, “that’s my good John, almost there now, yes, my John.”
With a final lunge, dog chain rattling like the mail-clad mount of a medieval knight, John the Baptist gained the level ground of the ridgetop, trotted a few paces, snorted, his sides heaving. “Well done, John,” Billy Flowers said, patting the mule’s lathered neck. “We’ll leave you here now.” He dropped the dog Queenie to the ground and dismounted behind her, hobbled the mule’s front legs, and from behind the saddle untied the thongs that held his lariat on one side, and his coiled bullwhip on the other. “You wait right here for us, John, and we’ll be back shortly with the heathen child.” Caught up now in the excitement of the hunt, a thrill that had not paled for him in better than sixty years, Billy Flowers had not yet even stopped to ask himself why it was so important that he capture the girl.
Flowers knew that he was above her now, and that she would probably move laterally in the rocks, looking for a crevice or a cave in which to hide. He did not think that she’d come right away to the top, but would first find a place to lay up, a place where she’d feel safe from the dogs, and where she could stop and listen to see if they pursued her. Prey does not run unless chased—a central law of the hunt. Had he pursued her from below, or had she heard the dogs trailing her again, she would almost certainly have kept climbing. As it was, Billy Flowers believed that he had preempted her next move, forced her to seek a secure hiding place, the natural instinct of animals. She would wait until after dark before she traveled again, which gave him nearly two hours of daylight still to find her.
The girl lay crouched in a shallow cave in the rocks, listening. She could hear the dogs barking distantly where they must still be chained, for the sound did not come closer or change direction. She heard the clattering hooves of the mule climbing the arroyo, striking rock, reverberating through the earth all the way down to her hiding place, and from there entering her bones. She heard the chain rattling, a sound which she would forever after associate with dogs. And she knew from all this that the old White Eyes was after her, had ridden up the canyon to the top of the ridge, was now on foot himself above her and that he must have at least one dog with him.
She was naked now, but for her moccasins and a breechclout that covered her sex. She had lost her small ration of roots. She knew that she could survive the night here; it was a small enough space and well protected, although it would be very cold. She did not think that the old White Eyes would find her, at least not before dark. The rocks themselves did not betray footprints and she had been careful to sweep away the little bit of sand and pebbles that she had disturbed at the entrance to the cave. But the dog would eventually find her, and if she waited until dark to move, she would be exposed to the night cold with no way of covering herself. All this she considered.
The cave smelled faintly of cat urine and she found beside her in the dark a small piece of dried scat, so that she knew a she-lion must have denned up here to give birth, the scat left by one of her kittens. The girl hoped that the lion wasn’t coming back here tonight, although she was far less afraid of that right now than she was of the old White Eyes. She lay curled in the cave, exhausted now beyond the point of simple tiredness. She slept.
It had been the one they called Indio Juan who had brought the Mexicans down upon the People once and for all. He who had been bitten in the face by a rattlesnake when he was a boy, so that he had the snake sickness, the madness, his face grotesquely disfigured. It was Indio Juan who would ride boldly with his warriors in full daylight into the tiny mountain villages and announce from astride his horse, “
Yo Indio Juan
.” And he would laugh as the villagers in the street fled screaming in all directions, and he and his men would kill them all, entire towns thus depopulated.
It had been Indio Juan’s idea to steal the Huerta boy, although the girl’s grandfather, the white Apache named Charley, tried to talk him out of it. The Huertas were a powerful ranching family and Charley knew that such an act would do nothing but further enrage the Mexicans. He and Juan quarreled over this, but Juan was loco and no one could tell him what to do, and the more Charley told him not to steal the boy, the more determined Indio Juan became to do so. Knowing the trouble this would cause the People, Charley finally took his own small band and moved farther south, to another
ranchería
deeper into the Blue Mountains.
The girl was sorry to see her grandfather leave and she wished that she could go with him. Her own father had been killed by Mexican soldiers some years before and her mother, Beshad-e, had married Indio Juan’s cousin. And because her sister was married to Indio Juan, she had no choice but to stay with his band. So it was among the People.
They had taken up their positions in the hills above the Huerta ranch, waiting patiently, as is the Apache way, watching for weeks until they knew the daily habits and rhythms of the ranch, knew all who lived there, who came and went. They knew on what day the family went to church in the village, at what hour they departed, knew that Geraldo’s mother always drove the one-horse buggy with the boy on the seat beside her, that his father always rode his horse alongside, carrying their infant daughter on the saddle in front of him. They knew that where the trail narrowed in a small pass between the rocks, the man had to drop back to allow the buggy to pass first. And it was in this place that Indio Juan planned to abduct the boy.
Because she was nimble and small enough to operate in the close confines of the buggy, Indio Juan gave the girl the job of taking charge of the reins and the boy, while he himself cut the woman’s throat. The two of them crouched together on the rocks above the pass, waiting for their moment, while the others stayed with the horses farther up the trail. And as the buggy passed beneath, they fell upon it, dropped soundlessly from the sky with nothing but the faintest rush of displaced air to warn the hapless churchgoers. Maria Huerta looked up in that instant and it must have seemed as if enormous birds of prey were stooping upon her from the heavens, blocking out the sun. Her eyes were wide with terror as Indio Juan fell onto her back, took hold of her hair, snapped her head backward, and drew the knife across her throat. In the same instant, the girl dropped onto the buggy seat beside her and gently took the reins from the woman’s yielding hands as if Maria Huerta were herself complicit in the abduction. She remembered how the Mexican woman had looked at her in that moment, the surprise and terror in her eyes, how she had tried to cry out for her son, but nothing came forth but a final rush of escaping breath from her severed windpipe to which she raised a futile hand to stem the geyser of warm blood that spilled flowing down her breast. The girl had seen a great deal of violence and death already in her short life, and she had been brought up to consider all Mexicans her enemies. Yet as she looked in the woman’s dying eyes all she saw was the heartbreak of a mother taken from her child.