The Wild Girl (32 page)

“Don’t be a fool, Neddy,” she said. “As long as Indio Juan is alive, you’re not safe. You wouldn’t last another day here.”

“What about my grandfather?” Albert asked.

“If your grandfather has passed out, Albert,” said Margaret, “he’s hardly going to be able to travel. And Joseph, too, can take care of himself here.”

“I must insist that you not stay here on my account, miss,” Mr. Browning said. “Nor you, sir. I, too, am quite capable of looking after myself.”

“I’m staying, and that’s all there is to it,” Margaret said. “I’ll be all right. Get out of here now, Ned. All of you. It’s our only chance and you’re wasting valuable time.”

Tolley, Albert, and I looked at one another. It was an impossible decision to make. Were we cowards for running, abandoning our friends, and in Albert’s case, his grandfather, in order to save our own skins? Was I so afraid of Indio Juan that I would let Margaret stay here in my place? Did we all feel some flicker of relief that we were the ones chosen to leave? Yes . . . probably so.

“I’m sure that I shall be quite recovered when you return with the cavalry, gentlemen,” Mr. Browning said bravely. “And ready to resume my full duties, sir.”

“Take care of the lady, will you, Mr. Browning?” I said.

“Of course I will, sir,” he said.

We each shook Mr. Browning’s hand and hugged Margaret good-bye. “We’ll be back for you, Mag,” I said. “I promise you that.”

“I know you will, sweetie,” she said. “You’re doing the right thing, the only thing. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

We didn’t want to risk walking through the
ranchería
again and so Tolley, Albert, and I took a circuitous route around it to reach the edge of the meadow where the stock had been turned out for the night. It was so quiet that you could hear the sounds of the animals grazing, ripping grass from the ground, and an occasional contented sigh as they chewed. The moon was lower in the sky now, but still provided enough silvery light that the grazing animals were each perfectly defined, casting their thin shadows across the meadow.

We rested for a moment on the edge of the meadow. We were filthy and bloody from the trials of the past twenty-four hours, our clothes torn, Tolley and Albert’s faces streaked with black soot, their hair singed. And we were as exhausted as any of us had ever been in our lives. Were it not for the fear that fueled us, we could have curled up right here in the cool grass among the peacefully grazing stock and slept. But now there was just the faintest streak of dawn on the eastern horizon, and we knew that we must keep moving.

A single boy guarded the herd. He sat cross-legged on the ground, wrapped closely in a blanket against the cool mountain air. We stood watching him for a moment, trying to decide what to do next. We assumed that there must be a few in the
ranchería
who had not indulged in the alcohol and who had gone back to their lodgings when the drinking began, and that one shout from the boy would bring them running. “We’re going to have to take him with us,” Albert said finally. “It might even be useful to us later to have a hostage. But one of us is going to have to sneak up on him, get a hand over his mouth and a gag on him before he can alert the others.”

We moved around through the trees into position behind the boy. I crawled on my stomach toward him through the cool grass, moving very slowly, certain that he would hear me. But he never moved and I wondered if he might have dozed off in his sitting position. When I was directly behind him, I rose quickly to my knees, clamped one arm across his chest and with the other hand covered his mouth and pulled him over backward onto the ground. I held him tightly there, and after his initial panicked struggle, he lay perfectly still, rigid. Tolley and Albert came to us. Albert slipped a bandanna in place and pulled it tight across the boy’s mouth as I removed my hand. He tied the boy’s hands behind his back, and we rolled him over to have a look at him in the moonlight. It was Jesus.

The boy’s eyes welled up with tears of relief as I removed the gag. “What the hell are you doing here, kid? Why did they let you guard the stock?”

“I am not guarding the stock,” he said. “The Apaches who take me are
borracho.
They forget to tie me up. I am going to run away but I do not know where to go. I do not know where to find you, Señor Ned. So I come here. I think maybe if you can run away, you come here, too, to get mules.”

“You think right, kid. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

We caught several of our old mules who were hobbled with the others and even managed to recover some of our tack, which had been piled on the edge of the meadow. As I was saddling my mule, I felt a light touch on my arm and turned to see
la niña bronca
standing before me. She smiled shyly.
“¿Ya te vas, marido mio?”
she said. “You are leaving me, my husband.”

“I’m sorry, I have to go,” I said.
“Tengo que irme, lo siento.”

“¿Regresarás?”

“Yes, I’ll be back.”

She nodded. “You will bring the Mexican soldiers and the White Eyes with you.”

“I only want my friends back,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Then she did a strange thing. She put a hand on her belly and she said:
“Dzaltsa. Estoy embarazada de tu bebé.”

“That’s not possible. How can you know that already?”

“Sí. Tu bebé.”

“I have to go now,” I said.
“Tengo que salir ahora.”

The girl hugged me then, holding on tight, and I hugged her back, feeling her hard, slender body fitting itself against me, her breasts against my chest, her strange earthy scent that was part of me now.

“I’ll come back to you, Chideh,” I whispered to her.

“Sí, mi marido,”
she whispered. And then she was gone.

It was nearly dawn by the time we mounted and rode away from the
ranchería
. Our only hope was that the Apaches would be sleeping it off for at least a few more hours, and that by the time they finally woke up, they would be too sick to follow us. Our next greatest hope was that the expedition wasn’t too far behind and that we would be able to find them.

“Do you really think you know the way out of here, Albert?” Tolley asked after we had set out.

“I may have grown up on the reservation and in the White Eyes Indian schools,” Albert said. “But I still have an infallible sense of direction. It’s in our blood, passed down by a hundred generations of wanderers.”

“I saw for myself how Apache you still are,” said Tolley.

“Not Apache enough,” said Albert. “Neither a White Eyes, nor a real Apache. My own people tried to put me to death.”

“When they dangled us from the spit, you didn’t utter a sound,” Tolley said. “How much more Apache can you get than that?”

“They wanted to see us suffer, Tolley. They wanted to hear us scream and beg for our lives. I did not wish to give them the satisfaction.”

“Well, they got their money’s worth out of me, didn’t they?” said Tolley.

Dawn was coming on fast now, the moon not yet set behind the peaks of the sierras, nor the sun yet risen, that brief spectral time between day and night, moonlight and sunlight. The air was cool and dead still, which seemed to amplify the clattering of the mules’ hooves as we climbed the pass. Every now and then one of the animals would dislodge a rock off the trail and send it tumbling down into the canyon below; you could hear it bouncing, echoing hollowly all the way to the bottom, and it seemed that the sound must be audible to the whole world.

But for the steady clack of hooves and creak of saddles, we traveled silently under the cold morning moon and I think we must have all been thinking the same thing as we looked out over the endless sierras lying like a rough dark sea in all directions. How could we ever expect to find the expedition out here? What could we possibly have been thinking? What fools we had been, and were. How long would it take the Apaches to track us down? What a lonely place to die. We had left Margaret, Mr. Browning, and Joseph behind in that terrifying world on the other side of this one, a world that seemed already like a dream, peopled by dream people. We wondered if we would ever see our friends again or would they simply fade gradually away in our memories as is the way of dreams, until the specific details became only a vague feeling and then the feeling itself is gone.

The sun rose before the moon set, two enormous twin orbs on either side of the horizon. I remembered with a pang of heartsickness the already indistinct image I had of the girl, her rich, loamy scent, her brown skin and sleek, hard limbs, her dark impenetrable eyes, the way she moved like a spirit. I tried to bring her back into sharp focus as one focuses a camera lens, but I could not. I understood that we did not inhabit the same earth, could not live in each other’s worlds; in mine she curled up in a fetal position and starved herself to death, and in hers I was stoned to death by savage women at dawn.

“Albert,” I asked, breaking the silence, “does the word
chideh
mean anything in Apache?”

“It means ‘blackbird,’” he said.

“That’s her name,” I said.

“Whose name?”

“The girl. My wife. Her name is Chideh. Blackbird. That’s pretty, isn’t it?”

Now, as we rode through this limbo space between the setting moon and the rising sun, amid all this wild country that lay around us, nothing looked even remotely familiar to me. Only Albert seemed to know the way back, and so we followed him blindly, as dumb and trusting as cattle trailing the lead cow.

And, in fact, after several hours we reached the place of our original abduction, and here we stopped and dismounted, and walked the narrow trail above the canyon, leading our mules in single file.

“Right down there,” Albert said, pointing to the bottom. “There’s your poor damn horse, Tolley.” And we all heard again the terrible screaming of the horse falling into the abyss.

The sun was high enough now that the world looked a bit less foreign and frightening. We were beyond being tired, aware of how exposed we were in the daylight, but simply too exhausted to care. We imagined the Apaches waking up, discovering our flight, perhaps already in hot pursuit. How long would it take them on fresh mounts, moving like the wind across these peaks, to find us? Not long.

“We’re going to have to rest for a while,” Albert said. “Maybe sleep for a few hours.”

“I say we push on,” I said. “I’ll bet they’re after us already.”

“Easy for you to say, Giles,” Tolley said. “You probably had a little nap last night, didn’t you, after you consummated your marriage? While Albert and I dangled from the spit?” He took off his hat. “Look at the top of my head; it’s sunburned.”

“It could have been worse, Tolley,” I said.

“Indeed it could have, old sport,” Tolley said. “I haven’t even thanked you properly for saving my life. I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”

“You already have, Tolley,” I said. “Remember your boxing instruction? By the way, I haven’t had a chance to ask you, were you really lightweight champ at Princeton?”

“Not exactly,” he admitted. “But I
was
in the boxing club. And I could tell with one look at you that you were a lousy high school palooka.”

“We’ll compromise,” Albert said. “We rest for one hour.”

“I’ll stand guard,” I offered. “You’re right, I did get a little sleep last night.”

We found a small clearing by a spring, watered and hobbled the mules. The others collapsed on the ground and fell instantly asleep. I sat with my back against a tree. I had realized earlier that when I ran from the wickiup toward Tolley’s screams, I left behind my camera, which Margaret had recovered, in its bag with all my film and all but the one notebook I still had in my pocket. I hadn’t dared go back for it before we left the
ranchería
. If we ever get out of here, I’m going to catch hell from Big Wade for losing his Leica, that much is sure.

NOTEBOOK VI:

Among the Sierra Madre Apaches
(by Margaret Hawkins, filling in for Ned Giles)