The Wild Girl (37 page)
“Once we are discovered here, we will not be allowed to live free,” he said. “Even if we give up the boy. This much we know.”
“How do you know?”
“We have lived peacefully here for a long time,” he said. “But now the Mexican government has reinstated a bounty on Apache scalps. The bounty hunters are so greedy to collect their reward that they kill and scalp our neighbors to the south, the Taramuhare, who are a peaceful people without weapons. The Mexicans can’t tell the difference between Apache hair and Taramuhare hair. Some of them even kill and scalp their own people, as long as the hair of the victim is long and dark.” Charley smiled slyly. “In the villages you will see that the Mexican men all wear their hair very short now, in order not to tempt their neighbors.” He took his own long red locks in his hand. “But I do not have to worry about losing my scalp, as who would pay a bounty for hair of this color?”
I smiled myself. It appeared that Charley McComas had a sense of humor. “You should never have taken the boy,” I said. “You must know that the Huertas are a powerful ranching family. You brought this upon yourselves.”
“There are those among us who I do not control,” he said. And, of course, I knew that he was speaking of Indio Juan.
“Your only chance is to give the boy up.”
“No one who comes here is ever allowed to go back,” Charley said. “Our warriors are already in pursuit of your men who escaped. We will catch them. The only reason we did not kill them before is because you saved my granddaughter’s life. But now that favor has been repaid.”
“That’s how you repay a favor?” I asked. “You send a madman to attack us on the trail? You hold knives to our throats? You bash a dear, gentle man’s skull in with a rock? You hang the others over a fire to explode their heads?”
Charley spoke angrily to Joseph in Apache.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He says that the white slave woman has very bad manners.”
“Very bad manners?”
I said.
“Be careful, Margaret,” Joseph said. “He says that you need a beating in order to learn your place here.”
And then I made a serious cultural misjudgment, and one about which I should have known better. Not wishing to appear weak, or afraid of Charley, I challenged him. “Well, go ahead, then, big boy,” I said, speaking to him in Spanish. “Go ahead and beat up a girl if that will make you feel like a man.”
Charley looked at me coldly and then he stood calmly and came over to me. He reached down, took hold of my hair, and wrapped it around his enormous fist, and he dragged me, kicking and hollering, behind the wickiup. There, out of their sight but not out of their hearing, he beat me, methodically and passionlessly, the way a man whips a dog simply to teach him a lesson, slapping me about the head with his open hands, until my ears rang, and I could feel my face swelling, the warm blood running. I fell to the ground and curled up and tried to cover my head with my arms.
I do not remember how I got back there, but I woke up in the other wickiup with the girl dabbing my face with a wet cloth. My eyes were swollen so that I could barely see her and every inch of my body ached, particularly my face, which felt like it had been overinflated with air and was about to explode. “Oh God, I hurt,” I muttered. And in Spanish I said to the girl, “Why did your grandfather do that to me? What is the matter with you people that everything must be addressed with violence? With murder, torture, and beating?”
“He did it to teach you respect,” she said, “and because he had to do it. You insulted him in front of others and the chief cannot lose face in that way. To do so is to weaken his position.”
Of course, I should have known this, indeed, I did know; it is a common law of native tribal societies that the chief must not be challenged, particularly in front of others. But I had stupidly let my own professional hubris get in the way of my instincts for self-preservation.
“And he did it to protect you from Indio Juan,” the girl added. “By beating you, he claimed you once and for all as his slave. If another ever touches you again, he can kill him.”
So this, once again, little brother, is what women are reduced to in both the civilized and savage worlds—seeking protection from men, a position that I have been trying to escape my entire life. And in order to satisfy your curiosity, I will tell you a little something about that life now. My mother died of malaria in Brazil when I was ten years old. My father was a difficult, demanding man, for whom his profession was everything, and after her death, I largely took over the household duties that had been my mother’s responsibility. We were living in the jungle in very primitive conditions, and there was always a great deal of work to be done. I became somewhat of an indentured servant myself, working for room and board, and the education my father gave me himself, as, of course, there were no schools in the Amazon. I was daughter, student, housekeeper, cook, laundress, gardener, and when I reached puberty, my father had me assume the rest of my mother’s duties—as his wife. A man has needs, my father explained, and he did not care for the native women; he said they were dirty, that they stank of the mud they rubbed upon themselves. He preferred blond women, like my mother, like myself.
There was never any question of saying no to my father, about that or anything else. Indeed, our life there was so isolated that it wasn’t until some years later, after we had returned to the United States, that I even realized how deeply wrong this had been, how deeply, and irrevocably, my father’s despotism had scarred me.
Does that explain some things to you, little brother? The law of the jungle which I learned at a young age, and have been trying to escape ever since, is that we do what we must to survive.
The Rescue
22 JUNE, 1932
“Mr. Giles,”
Billy Flowers intoned in his deep Old Testament voice. “You have lost three of your party and all of your outfit.”
I had fallen asleep, after all, sitting up against the tree, writing in my notebook, and I thought for just a moment that I must be dead, that I had gone to meet my Maker, that here He stood before me. For when I opened my eyes all I could see against the deep blue morning sky was the outline of his craggy head, his long white hair and beard, his intensely blue eyes boring into me. I scrambled to my feet.
“We were ambushed,” I said, “not far up the trail.” The others, too, had come abruptly awake to the sound of Flowers’s voice.
“Yes, I know,” Flowers said. “I’ve seen the place where it happened. I saw Mr. Phillips’s prize polo pony dead at the bottom of the canyon. They were eight altogether in number who set upon you, including
la niña bronca
herself, who aided them in your capture. I identified her track. So much for the savage’s sentimental attachment to her new white friends.”
“If it hadn’t been for her, they would have killed us right then and there,” I said. “We’ve been to their
ranchería
. We escaped last night.”
“And left Mr. Browning and the woman behind?” Flowers asked. “And the old heathen? Or are they dead? Someone was badly injured by a rock during the attack, that much was clear in the sign I saw.”
“They’re alive, they’re all still alive but we had to leave them.”
“You left a white woman in the clutches of the savages?” Flowers said. “Shame on you. You know what they do to them, don’t you?”
“We had no choice,” I said. “Mr. Browning was hurt too badly to travel and Margaret insisted on staying with him. How far behind is the expedition?”
“Less than a half day’s ride,” Flowers said. “I came ahead to scout the route.”
“We have to get to them before the Apaches find us again,” I said. “We can lead them back to the
ranchería
.”
“I am quite capable of finding the
ranchería
myself, young man,” Flowers said. “Just by following your trail.”
Tolley spoke up then. “You don’t want to do that, Mr. Flowers. Not alone, in any case. The
ranchería
is well protected. We need reinforcements.”
Flowers smiled. “Ah, yes, so you have finally discovered,
Captain
Phillips.”
“I never thought I’d say this,” said Tolley in a small voice, “but I’m happy to see you, Mr. Flowers.”
Flowers set a grueling pace. We followed him, traveling with one eye cast back over our shoulders, half expecting that at any moment the Apaches would fall upon us again. Someone once told me that chickens and game birds never learn to look up into the air, which is what makes them so vulnerable to avian predators, but for our part we had learned our lesson and at every rocky pass through which we traveled, and every canyon wall beneath which we rode, we looked skyward, remembering the shadows descending upon us from above. And I think we all had the same eerie sense that even though we had not seen them yet, they were following us, watching and biding their time.
The summer monsoon season was just getting under way, and the heat and humidity built all day, dark storm clouds piling on the southwest horizon, wicking their cargo of moisture up out of the Gulf of California. In the afternoon, the winds picked up and bent the tops of the tall pine trees, pushing huge black cumulonimbus clouds over the distant mountains. We watched them coming gradually closer, roiling and rumbling and flashing with lightning, and we could smell the rain long before it reached us, its pure fresh scent delivered on the warm wind. We watched as the gray undulating sheets obscured the far peaks and the wind came cooler, the temperature dropping precipitously, until it was suddenly quite cold and enormous ice-cold silver-dollar-size drops began to fall, just a few at first splattering off the mules’ backs, and then harder and harder. We rode into the expedition base camp just at dusk and just as the rains came in a sudden vicious deluge.
Two wranglers came out in their raingear to tend to our nervous mounts, the roar of the rain so loud that we had to shout to be heard over it. Now the thunder seemed overhead, great erupting bursts and cracks of it, and the camp was lit by brilliant flashes of lightning. Billy Flowers went off to tend to his dogs and the rest of us were led to the mess tent, where people were just beginning to congregate for dinner.
“Hey, kid!” Big Wade called out from one of the tables. “Jesus Christ, you look like a
fuckin’
drowned rat.” He rose and came over and gave me a big bear hug. “Damn, am I ever glad to see you. We figured the Apaches had gotten you.”
“Yeah, they did,” I said.
“Where’s the rest of your bunch? Margaret and Mr. Browning. Are they okay? And goddammit, Jesus, where the hell have you been? You were supposed to stay with me, boy. I’ve had to pack my own damn gear.”
“Margaret and Mr. Browning are still with the Apaches,” I said. “We had to leave them behind.”
“You left them with the fuckin’ Apaches?”
“It’s a long story, Big Wade.”
“Yeah, well, I want to hear the whole damn thing,” Big Wade said. “But first, you know what my next question is, don’t you, kid?”
“Sure I do, Big Wade: Did I get the shot?”
“Well?”
“Not only did I not get the shot,” I said, “but I lost your camera.”
“You lost the Leica? You can’t be serious, kid?”
“Well, I didn’t exactly lose it,” I said. “I think Margaret has it.”
“You
think
Margaret has it? Oh well, this is just dandy,” Big Wade said. “Because I imagine the Apaches will be taking real good care of my equipment . . . considering that they are, after all,
Stone Age people.
I can’t believe you lost your
fuckin’
camera. Kid, you do know what a photographer is without his camera, don’t you?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, Big Wade, a photographer without his camera is like a man without a dick.”
“In the lad’s defense, Big Wade,” Tolley said, “we ran into a spot of trouble among the bronco Apaches. Young Ned here was busy with such niggling matters as saving our lives and entering the state of unholy matrimony.”
“Oh, you got married while you were away, did you, kid?” Big Wade said. “Well, why didn’t you say so? I guess congratulations are in order. Who’s the lucky girl?” He shook his head, and muttered under his breath,
“Jesus Christ, I leave you alone for five fucking minutes . . .”