From the desert flats of sparse creosote bushes, prickly pear, and cholla cactus, we soon gained the foothills, lightly timbered in scrub oak and cedar. The sun was up now and the mountains had turned the copper color of tarnished pennies. As we gained altitude, we looked back to see the camp lying below in the plains, so peaceful looking, smoke still curling from the morning cook fires.
By midday we had reached the general area in which the Apaches had been camped the day before. After some deliberation with Billy Flowers and Chief Gatlin, Carrillo found a place to hold the rendezvous, an opening on the edge of the pine forest, protected on one side by a low ridge, upon which he stationed some of his men to stand guard.
“Mr. Flowers will lead you on to the Apaches’ camp,” Carrillo said. “We will wait for you here. You will bring the white man and the boy to us. You will tell the white man that we will give him the horses as soon as the boy has been released to us. There is to be no deviation in the plan.”
“What if he won’t come?” I asked.
“Then your friend, Mr. Phillips, is in grave danger,” Carrillo answered.
“Why should Tolley be held accountable?” Margaret asked. “What if Charley agrees to give up the boy but refuses to come in himself?”
“You know the terms,” said Gatlin. “We want both of them. You’re very persuasive, Margaret. I feel certain that you can convince Mr. McComas that we wish only to meet him. A powwow, isn’t that what the savages call it? Tell him we’re inviting him to have a smoke and a powwow. And then he can have his horses and be on his way.”
Big Wade was already setting up his camera gear, taking a light reading with his meter. “Knock ’em dead, kid,” he said to me, cigar butt between his teeth, half distracted by his work. “We’re counting on you. I got things covered on this end.”
“Just make sure you get the shot, Big Wade,” I said.
Billy Flowers, Margaret, and I rode through the tall pine forest, silent and shadowed from the sun. As I always did in Apache country, I had the eerie sense that we were being watched. And I think Flowers and Margaret felt it, too.
“What will you do when this is all over, Mr. Flowers?” Margaret asked, her voice sounding hollow and unnatural in the stillness of the forest.
“I will do what I have always done, Miss Hawkins,” Flowers said. “I will go back to hunting the lions and bears. I am told that some Mormon ranchers in Colonia Juarez wish to contract my services.”
“Don’t you ever tire of killing things?”
“The killing is a necessary part of it. But it is only the end result. It is the hunt of which I never tire.”
“Don’t you ever get lonely?”
“I have my dogs.”
“Didn’t you ever want to settle down with a family?”
“I have a family,” Flowers said. “A wife and three children back in Louisiana. I still send money home but I haven’t seen them in almost thirty years.”
“What happened?”
“I had to leave them when the Voice summoned me,” he said, “and I’ve been on the move ever since.”
“What kind of Voice would send you away from your family?” Margaret asked.
“The Voice from on High,” Flowers said, “the Voice of our Lord Jesus, the Voice of our beloved Creator.”
“You believe that God told you to abandon your wife and children so that you could spend your life killing grizzly bears and mountain lions?” Margaret asked. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“‘As it is written, the just shall live by faith,’” Flowers said.
Before we had even reached the Apaches’ camp, one of the boys, afoot, faded out of the trees in front of us, and without a word turned and began trotting through the timber. We followed him and a short distance later came upon Charley, Joseph, Albert, and Chideh, all mounted. Neither little Geraldo nor any of the others in the band were anywhere in sight, but I knew that they were close by, hidden in the trees and rocks, as only the Apaches can hide. The girl looked shyly at me and smiled.
Charley and Flowers regarded each other, two large bearded white men, one a heathen, the other a Christian, and it occurred to me that in an odd way, they were more similar than they might have known.
“Why do you bring this White Eyes with you?” Charley asked. “Why did you not bring the horses?”
“Did you think they were going to give you the horses before you turned over the boy?” Margaret asked. “You must come with us. They wish to speak with you first. Then you can have the horses.”
Albert looked searchingly at Margaret, sensing that something was wrong.
“For what reason do they wish to speak with me?” Charley asked her, himself suspicious.
“Because they know who you are,” she said, her gaze not wavering from his. “And they wish to see Charley McComas in person.”
“The only way they’re going to give you the horses,” I added, “is if you come in and make the exchange for the boy yourself.”
Charley considered this for a moment. “I will speak with them,” he said finally. “Chideh will ride behind me with the boy. She will come just far enough so that all can see her. When they have given me the horses and I am safely away from the soldiers’ guns, only then will she release the boy. But if they betray us, she will kill him. This is how the trade will be made.”
Charley whistled once, a piercing sound like the shriek of a hawk, and from the trees behind us, little Geraldo Huerta appeared. He trotted up to Chideh’s horse, and with her assistance, deftly swung up in front of her. He moved just like an Apache.
Now I looked at the girl, this girl with whom I had shared intimacies, tried to see into her dark inscrutable eyes. Did I still know so little about her that I didn’t know whether or not she was capable of killing a child, a child of whom she was clearly fond, whom she held now on her horse, her arm lightly and affectionately around him? I realized that not only did I not have the answer to this question, I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to have it.
“That’s not going to work,” I said, with an edge of desperation in my voice. “Mag, Charley has to ride in with the boy, no one else. You heard Carrillo, there can be no deviations.”
Charley studied me for a long moment, and then he reined his horse around. “We will keep the boy,” he said. “They can keep their horses.”
“No, wait,” Margaret said. “It will be as you wish.” And to me she said, firmly: “Neddy, keep your mouth shut now before you queer the whole deal. A small deviation is better than nothing. Charley has agreed to speak with them and they’ll see that he brought the boy. That’s the important thing. We’re fulfilling our end as best we can; that’s all we can do.”
“I have to speak a moment with my wife,” I said. I rode over alongside her, and our horses standing head to tail, we faced each other. “Don’t do this, Chideh,” I whispered. “Take the women and children and ride into the mountains and hide. I’ll find you.”
“I cannot,” she said. “I must do what my grandfather asks of me.”
“I’m your husband,” I said. “You should do what I tell you.”
She smiled sadly. “He is my family.”
“You couldn’t kill that boy, could you?” I asked.
“I must do what my grandfather asks of me,” she repeated, tears filling her eyes. “If the soldiers betray us, I must kill the boy.”
“
I
have betrayed you,” I said, tears coming to my own eyes. “Please, take the others, run and hide.”
A slight breeze came up as we rode back toward the rendezvous, swaying the tops of the tall pines, a faint whispering sound like a warning. Flowers rode in the lead, Margaret and I behind him, followed by Joseph and Albert, then Charley and the girl with little Geraldo on the saddle in front of her, this thin, delicate boy whose abduction had launched this entire expedition, who had brought us to this place at this time. At last he was going home to his father.
We approached the clearing where Carrillo and the others waited, and I wondered if everyone else felt the same sense of doom as I, the sense of things set irrevocably in motion, and already gone wrong. And then Billy Flowers intoned in his deep Old Testament voice: “‘The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand,’” and Margaret whispered under her breath: “Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”
I turned in the saddle to look back at the girl. She smiled again at me, an oddly hopeful, even innocent smile.
We stopped at the edge of the clearing. When Fernando Huerta recognized his son, he cried out:
“Geraldo, mi chico, mi chico pequeño!”
He spurred his horse forward but two soldiers cut him off, one of them taking hold of his bridle.
Colonel Carrillo spoke sharply to him. “You will wait, señor, until we have conducted our business as planned.” The colonel waved us in.
The girl hung back on the edge of the trees as the rest of us rode into the clearing. She still held her arm lightly around Geraldo, in a kind of sisterly embrace, except that now she held a knife in her hand for all to see. The boy did not appear frightened, only a bit confused by these proceedings. He had been only three years old when he was abducted, and he did not seem to recognize his real father.
Carrillo and Gatlin sat their horses in the middle of the clearing, behind them a dozen or so mounted soldiers. Big Wade stood on the ground to the side of them with his Graflex set up on a tripod in order to capture this historic moment.
Charley looked around as we rode in, checking the lay of the land, identifying the soldiers on the ridge. Carrillo held his arm up in the universal sign of greeting as we came to a halt in front of them.
Gatlin spoke first, in a low voice of wonder: “Well . . . I’ll . . . be . . .
goddamned.
” And of us he asked: “Does he understand English?”
“I don’t know, but he speaks Spanish,” I said.
“Is your name Charley McComas?” Gatlin asked.
Charley looked at the chief but did not answer. He addressed Colonel Carrillo. “
Tomaré los caballos
. I will take the horses now.” He glanced up at the sun. “You and your soldiers will stay where you are until the shadows of the trees strike this place.” He gestured with a slash of his arm. “At that time, the girl will release the boy to you. If you move before then, she will kill him.”
“Why, you dirty
son of a bitch,
” said Gatlin with venom in his voice. “You think you can dictate to us? Look at you, a traitor to your own race. Well, we’ve come to take you home,
little
Charley McComas, back to your own people.” I realized in that moment that Gatlin hated Charley more for being a white man who had gone over to the Apaches than he would have had Charley been a full-blooded Indian.
Everything fell apart right then, in such rapid succession and in such utter chaos that as I look back it’s hard to reconstruct the exact chain of events, what was remembered and what was only perceived. Clearly aware that things were going wrong, Charley turned to signal the girl, wheeling his horse, as Carrillo barked an order to his troops. In that same instant, Indio Juan came riding hard out of the timber, headed directly for the girl. I called out to warn her. The sound of gunfire came from the ridge above. At first I thought it must be the soldiers stationed there who were firing; but then two of the soldiers mounted behind Gatlin and Carrillo fell from their horses, and I realized that Indio Juan’s men must have taken the ridge. The rest of Carrillo’s mounted troops broke ranks in disarray.
Indio Juan slowed briefly when he reached the girl, snatching the boy roughly from her. Geraldo cried out, terrified, and his father answered him in an anguished bellow, spurring his horse toward his son. But Indio Juan was already disappearing into the timber with the boy. Three more soldiers fell from their saddles, and several others had their horses shot out from under them in the deadly cross fire from the ridge. It was all the rest of us could do to control our panicked, bolting mounts. Some of the soldiers tried to return fire but they weren’t even sure where the shots were coming from.
Charley had broken away and now rode for the girl, who was herself retreating into the trees. Carrillo was still shouting orders, trying desperately to rally his confused troops. I didn’t know in that moment who or where my enemy was, but like everyone else, my first instinct was to flee, and yet I seemed paralyzed as if in a nightmare, stuck there in the clearing with the deadly bullets flying, trying desperately to control my wild-eyed mule as horses and men fell screaming around me. In the chaos, I lost track of Margaret and the others.
The shooting stopped as suddenly as it had begun as Indio Juan’s men fell back from the ridge. Only then did Carrillo manage to bring what remained of his soldiers under control, and they galloped off in the direction Charley had taken. I looked around desperately for Margaret but could not find her. Wounded men and horses floundered on the ground. The Mexican army doctor attached to Carrillo’s company was trying to minister to the wounded soldiers. It was then that I saw Big Wade lying on the ground next to his shattered camera and tripod. I dismounted and ran to him, kneeling beside him. He was covered in dirt and blood but he was still alive.
I hollered for the doctor. “Aw, Jesus Christ, Big Wade. What happened, are you shot? Oh,
goddammit,
please.” Tears welled up in my eyes.
“I’m okay, kid,” he answered, clearly in great pain. “Don’t be a
fuckin
’ crybaby. Where’s my camera?” He tried to sit up, but fell heavily back to the ground.