The Wild Girl (45 page)
Tolley surprised everyone by laughing at that moment, his high whinnying laugh. “Have you lost your mind, Colonel?” he said. “Why in the world would they give the boy up and surrender themselves to you now? You remind me of Custer’s famous last words at the Little Bighorn: ‘We’ve got them now, boys!’”
Carrillo’s face darkened in rage. “Your father’s money may allow you to address people in this manner in your own country, Señor Phillips,” he said in a low threatening voice. “But you are in Mexico now, and you are here at the pleasure of the
presidente.
I will have you stood before a firing squad and shipped home to your father in a box before I will tolerate your disrespect.”
“Let’s all calm down,” Chief Gatlin said in a conciliatory tone. “It’s been a long campaign for everyone. We’ve lost men. Everyone is tired. Everyone wants to go home. Toward that end, Colonel, may I respectfully suggest a compromise?”
Carrillo looked at him, his dark eyes shining with an unnatural fervor. Tolley had clearly touched a nerve, and the colonel’s own military career was probably at stake with the success or failure of the Great Apache Expedition.
“Is the white man you claim to be Charley McComas still with the Apaches?” Gatlin asked us.
“Yes,” Margaret answered. “He’s their leader. But it’s the Apache called Indio Juan who is killing your men, Colonel, not Charley.”
“Charley, is it now?” Gatlin said with an amused smile. “How nice that you’re on a first-name basis, Margaret. I’m beginning to wonder whose side you folks are on.”
“We’re on the side of all those,” said Margaret, “—white men, Mexicans, and Apaches—who won’t die if we negotiate a fair and peaceful conclusion to this.”
“Which will be exactly the result of my compromise,” Gatlin said. “I understand your reluctance to negotiate with the savages, Colonel. But why not accede to their demand for the horses in return for the boy, on condition that their leader, the white man, comes in alone and unarmed for the exchange? I want Charley McComas alive. I want to take him back across the border to his own people. That’s two kidnap victims saved from the clutches of the savages—one American boy and one Mexican boy. What more fitting conclusion than that to our noble mission?”
“Charley McComas hasn’t survived up there for fifty years by being stupid,” Margaret said. “Why would he agree to come in with the boy to get the horses alone and unarmed?”
“Because you’re going to convince him to come in, Margaret,” Gatlin said with a small thin-lipped smile. “That’s why.”
“Fuck you, Leslie,” Margaret said. “I’m not participating in your little plot.”
“Yes, Margaret, you are,” Gatlin said. “As you clearly enjoy Charley McComas’s confidence, both you and Mr. Giles are going to participate. And as your own loyalty seems to have been somewhat compromised, Colonel Carrillo has given me an excellent idea to ensure that participation. The colonel is going to put all three of you—you, Mr. Giles, and Mr. Phillips—under house arrest. The charge will be collaborating with the enemy, a charge of which, under the circumstances, you are clearly guilty. In any case, you will be tried by a Mexican military tribunal, without access to an attorney, or to our own system of due process. Indeed, as the colonel points out, he has absolute authority in the field, and even without a trial, can order your execution by firing squad.”
“Oh, nonsense,” said Tolley with a slightly uncertain bravado. “You can’t execute Tolbert Phillips Jr. My father has connections all the way to the White House. It would cause an international incident.”
“You would be surprised, Mr. Phillips,” said Gatlin, “at how little influence your father has in a Mexican military court. At the very least you’d be facing a long prison sentence . . . ummm, ten, maybe twenty years, is that about right, Colonel?”
“At the bare minimum,” Carrillo said. “And that is only if I decide not to have you stood up in front of the firing squad instead.”
“Ten years in a Mexican prison taking it up the ass every day from half a dozen hardened criminals,” Gatlin said, shaking his head. “Even for a faggot like yourself, Mr. Phillips, I should think that might feel like a long way from home.”
Tolley had gone quite white.
“And so, Margaret, and Mr. Giles,” Gatlin continued, “I believe that the colonel might consider dropping all charges against you and your friend if you were to agree to bring Charley McComas in with the Huerta boy. It would be a way to negotiate a fair and peaceful conclusion, as you yourself put it, Margaret, a way to save your own skins, and to avoid a great deal of bloodshed in the process.”
“Tomorrow morning, Mr. Giles,” Colonel Carrillo said, pivoting on his toes like a bullfighter, “you and Miss Hawkins will lead us to the Apaches. You will enter their camp alone, bearing a white flag. You will tell them that we have agreed to their demands and you will escort the boy and the white man out to us, under whatever pretext is necessary. Mr. Phillips will be waiting here for word of the successful completion of your mission.”
As the sergeant led us from Carrillo’s tent, we looked at one another in stunned silence. Tolley spoke first.
“If I hadn’t listened to you, Giles,” he whispered, “I would be in New York right now, staying in Father’s suite at the Waldorf and being fitted at Brooks Brothers for my fall wardrobe. Instead I’m going to be stood in front of a firing squad in the middle of the Mexican desert.”
“Carrillo is not going to execute you, Tolley,” Margaret said. “It’s a bluff. He wouldn’t dare.”
“Yes, well, the alternative does not sound much more attractive, does it, darling? And by the way, old sport,” he said to me, “I might just remind you that you’re rather an adorable little white boy yourself, and your own charms will certainly not be lost on the Mexican prison population. My father may be able to pull some strings to get me out, but who’s going to come to the poor orphan boy’s aid?”
We were split up then, Margaret and Tolley taken to their separate quarters, and I back to Big Wade’s “press” tent, where I make these entries by the light of a lantern. A soldier stands guard by the entrance.
Jackson himself has lost a great deal of weight in the weeks since the expedition departed Douglas, and actually looks healthier than I’ve ever seen him.
“It’s not easy to get a drink out here, kid,” he said. “I’ve had to ration myself to whatever rotgut I can lay my hands on in the villages we pass through. And just try finding a decent cigar.” He held out the unlit butt he was chewing. “Look at this piece of shit. I swear the Mexicans roll cow shit up in cornstalks and call it a cigar.”
“You look good, Big Wade,” I said.
“What’s with the guard, kid?” he asked. “What kind of mess have you gotten yourself into this time?”
I told Big Wade everything. And when I had finished, he shook his head. “Didn’t I tell you not to get involved?” he said. “Didn’t I tell you just to do your work? That your only concern is to get the shot?”
“Hey, look,” I said, holding out the camera bag. “I got the Leica back. And I
got
the shot. Wait’ll you see this film, Big Wade, you’ll be proud of me.”
“What are you going to do, kid?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You don’t think Carrillo would really execute Tolley, do you?”
“I don’t think so,” Big Wade said. “But, hell, this is Mexico, anything can happen. And as Gatlin said, whether they execute him or not, they can make a world of trouble for you kids. Look, everyone’s tired and frazzled, nerves are on edge. Carrillo has lost men, and every night it seems like the Apaches manage to sneak into camp, pilfer supplies, steal horses and mules. They already slit two guards’ throats. And scalped them. It’s spooky as shit, they’re like fuckin’ ghosts the way they got the run of the place.”
“That’s just how they are, Big Wade,” I said. “Like ghosts. Even when you’re among them, they come and go like ghosts. They’re not like us.”
“No shit.”
“It’s how they’ve survived all these years up here,” I said.
“What about Charley McComas?”
“He’s just as Apache as they are,” I said. “It’s strange because he’s a huge man, maybe six-four, six-five, with long hair and a beard . . . Tolley says he looks like an Irish cop in need of a haircut and a shave . . . but he’s just like one of them, and after a while you don’t even think of him as a white man, or see him as being any different from the others. And they don’t see him any differently, either. He’s not going to surrender to Carrillo, Big Wade. That much I know for sure.”
“Then I’d say you’re fucked, kid,” said Big Wade. “Right now Gatlin and Carrillo are both just trying to save their own asses from this fucking disaster. Unless he produces the Huerta boy, dead or alive, Carrillo loses face. And if Gatlin goes home with nothing to show for all of this but half a dozen dead volunteers, his own career is finished. Their backs are against the wall, and that’s when men like them are most dangerous. If I were you, kid, I would figure out a way to bring Charley McComas in. That’s the only solution that lets everyone off the hook.”
“Are you coming with them tomorrow, Big Wade?” I asked.
“Hey, you think I’m going to let you hog the limelight again, kid?” he said. “And miss a story like this? Besides, you’re going to be way too busy to cover it yourself.”
I wish I could talk to Margaret tonight. I don’t see what choice we have other than to betray Charley. And in so doing, of course, I will betray Chideh. The band can survive without him, as they have for several centuries, and indeed, without Geraldo to draw the Mexicans—or Charley, the Americans—it’s possible that the survivors might simply fade away again into the mountains to live as they always have. I know I’m making excuses now for giving Charley up, but I just can’t see any other way around it. Even if Carrillo is bluffing, I can’t take that risk. My father always taught me that in every situation there is a right thing to do, and all you need is to figure out what that right thing is and everything will be okay. But then my father killed himself, and I wonder where he found the right thing in that . . . I’m beginning to realize that Pop was wrong about many things. As Margaret has pointed out to me, sometimes there is no right thing to do. And sometimes the right thing doesn’t reveal itself until it’s too late. And right now, everything about tomorrow feels wrong to me.
The Aftermath
17 NOVEMBER, 1932
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Almost three months have passed since I left Mexico and only now can I begin to try to set down the terrible events of our final days there. I have to laugh when I read my last entry . . . for the right thing proved to be even more elusive than I had expected . . . and, indeed, it never did reveal itself.
We rode out of camp at dawn the next morning, a clear, windless day in the plains of Chihuahua, the mountains still black against the horizon, the pale sky cloudless, darkened only by Mexico’s ubiquitous circling buzzards, for whom, before the day was out, we would make fresh carrion. Despite all the precautions and the fact that Carrillo had bivouacked out in the open, Indio Juan and his renegades had still managed to penetrate the camp in the night; that morning they found the young wrangler, Jimmy, murdered, his throat slit ear to ear, his scalp taken. I knew how jumpy Jimmy had been in his night-guard duties, and I imagined his terror when the Apaches had set upon him. I’ll bet it happened just before dawn in that pearly twilight, when he was feeling relieved at last that another night was over. Everyone had liked Jimmy, and the mood as we set out that morning was particularly glum and vengeful.
In a show of force obviously intended to intimidate the Apaches, Carrillo had mounted his entire company, except for less than a dozen soldiers, wranglers, and volunteers who had been left behind to guard the base camp. They moved out in perfect formation, their bright dress uniforms seeming gaudy and clownish against the muted earth tones of the desert. It was a solemn procession and the only sounds to be heard were the metallic rasp of spurs and clank of sabers, and the dry moans of saddle leather before it has been lubricated by sweat and the heat of day.
We civilians rode alongside them: Chief Gatlin, Señor Huerta, Billy Flowers, Wade Jackson, Albert, Margaret, and I. We had left Jesus back at camp to look after Tolley, who had been confined to his quarters, and whom we had not been allowed to see before our departure. Because of the proximity of the others, Margaret and I were unable to talk privately as we rode, and we had not formed any kind of plan. The Apaches would surely already know that we were on the way, and I knew that they must be watching us even now as we made our way across the desert. By now, a keen-eyed scout would have identified the herd of six unsaddled horses that were being driven between us and the soldiers, and Charley would have concluded that the Mexican colonel had agreed to the trade. As Tolley had pointed out, Indio Juan was the wild card in this whole game, and there was no telling where he might be or when he might launch another of his strikes.