The Wild Girl (48 page)
I sat on the ground, breathing heavily, Indio Juan’s bloody scalp in hand, his dead body lying beside me. My rage drained away quickly, my sense of vengeance soon replaced by a vague queasiness, a sense of anticlimax. I guess you have to kill a man to know this feeling.
The second boy still sat his horse, paralyzed, staring at me, terrified now, certain that he would be next to die. “Go on,” I said, waving him away. “
Vamonos
. Get the hell away from here.” And the boy smiled at me with relief and gratitude, pressed his heels to his horse’s flanks, and galloped away.
Later, I presented Indio Juan’s scalp to Señor Huerta, scant consolation to be sure for the death of a man’s son . . . Besides the wounded Apache boy, who died moments later on the ground beside me, Carrillo’s soldiers had managed to kill several of Indio Juan’s men in the running skirmish. The other Apaches, whom Billy Flowers had been tracking, largely women and children, had dispersed into the mountains, leaving a dozen separate trails.
The chase was finally called off and we bivouacked that night in the mountains, burying the dead and attending to the wounded. No one slept much for their moans and cries in the night. The next morning, we headed back down to base camp in the plains, a trip that took us most of the day, our progress greatly slowed by the transport of the wounded.
We made a ragged procession riding back into camp, and from our greatly reduced numbers and those who were carried, or dragged in on travois, it was clear to all there that our mission had been a disaster. They had brought Tolley out of his tent for our arrival and he stood between two soldiers as we rode in. Of course, I knew even more surely now that Carrillo had no intention of executing him, or me, or of putting us in prison. Having lost little Geraldo and so many of his own soldiers and volunteers, the colonel had enough professional troubles without now causing an international incident. Ironically, the single success he could claim was the death of the notorious Indio Juan. I heard later that they put his (scalpless) head on display in the town square in Casas Grandes and that people came from all around to see it.
The Great Apache Expedition was officially disbanded a few days later, though Colonel Carrillo sent to Mexico City for reinforcements and resupply, and he and his soldiers spent several more weeks in the mountains, searching in vain for the remaining Apaches. But as is their way, they seemed to have once again vanished off the face of the earth, absorbed like the spirits of the dead in the canyons and arroyos and the hidden valleys of the Sierra Madre.
The old predator hunter Billy Flowers took his dogs down to the American Mormon settlement of Colonia Juarez, near Casas Grandes, where he contracted to hunt mountain lions for the ranchers there. And the rest of us followed Chief of Police Leslie Gatlin back across the border to Douglas, Arizona. Gatlin may not have brought little Charley McComas back to show off, but the very act of contact with the mythical white Apache has saved his reputation and given the Greater Douglas Chamber of Commerce the fodder to organize yet another expedition next spring. Now instead of using little Geraldo Huerta as the bait, they tell everyone that a poor defenseless young woman anthropologist by the name of Margaret Hawkins, from the University of Arizona, has been kidnapped by the bronco Apaches; it makes a better story that way, despite my repeated insistence that Margaret went with them voluntarily and did not wish to be rescued.
Most of Wade Jackson’s film had been exposed that morning when his camera was trampled under the horse’s hooves, but I managed to salvage a few frames. One of them was “the shot” Big Wade had referred to in his dying words—an image of Charley himself, riding in to meet with Carrillo and Gatlin just before things went wrong. The
Douglas Daily Dispatch
ran it on the front page the following week, under the banner headline:
WILD MAN CHARLEY MCCOMAS FOUND!
Both the story, which I wrote myself, and the photograph were picked up by the national press services and have run in newspapers all across the country. Big Wade would have been pleased with our final collaboration. On the strength of it, and because of my other work on the expedition, I was offered a job here on the
Albuquerque Journal
. Bill Curry asked me to stay on at the
Daily Dispatch,
but I took Big Wade’s advice and got the hell out of Dog-ass.
I said good-bye to Tolley at the train station in Douglas. Like all of us, he had been subdued by the terrible attrition of those past weeks and months. “Christ, Giles,” he said before boarding the train, “you and me and the kid are all that’s left, aren’t we?”
“It looks that way, doesn’t it, Tolley?”
“You think we’ll ever see Margaret and Albert again?” he asked.
“I don’t know, what do you think?”
He looked south toward the Sierra Madre and shook his head. He held his hand out to me. “I wish I had something amusing to say in parting.”
“Me, too.”
“Adios, old sport.”
“So long, Tolley.”
As to Jesus, I left him back in Agua Prieta, where presumably he has resumed his career as a street hustler, guide, and “facilitator.”
“I will come to America with you, Señor Ned,” he offered. “I will carry your camera.”
“I don’t think so, kid,” I said. “I think I’d better carry my own camera for a while. I’ll come back and look you up sometime, though.”
And he nodded sadly, because we both knew that I probably wouldn’t.
I went to see the Mexican girl, Magdalena, the last time I was in Agua Prieta. They had taken her back at Las Primorosas, after all, and in those few months she seemed to have settled into her profession. She seemed coarser and more predatory, flirting with the men, one eye always out for her next trick. We danced together, but it held none of the innocent romance that it had before. We had both changed; neither one of us was any longer a kid, and it seemed like those days were another lifetime ago.
“Come to my room now,” she said at the end of the dance. “I will make you very happy.”
“No, I don’t think so,” I answered. “I just wanted to see that you were doing okay, Magdalena.”
But she was already looking around for another mark.
The next day, I recovered the Roadster from the parking lot at the Gadsden, where I had left it those many weeks ago, and headed out of Douglas. It has been a strange adjustment returning to the world of automobiles and trains, and to the cities and the economies that the White Eyes have built. The Depression, which we more or less forgot all about during our time in Mexico, has deepened even further. But Roosevelt just won the election, and everyone has high hopes that he can turn things around.
I’ve rented a little adobe casita in the barrio neighborhood of downtown Albuquerque, and I’ve set up a darkroom in the shed behind it to process my own work whenever I have time off from the newspaper. On weekends I sometimes drive down to the Mescalero Apache reservation to shoot film. As Albert used to say, on the reservation there’s always a depression going on, and I can see why he didn’t want to come back here. I’ve been to see his mother, to tell her what became of her son and her father, and to give her some photographs of them. I like to visit with the Apaches at Mescalero, to make images of them, and to practice the language with some of the old-timers who still speak it, though sadly, not many do anymore. Even though I’m a White Eyes, the people there have more or less come to accept me. I tell them stories of my time in the Sierra Madre. I don’t know if they really believe me or not, but they listen quietly and politely as is the Apache way. I tell them that I have an
In’deh
wife, and a son or a daughter, up there somewhere in the Blue Mountains, still living in the old way, and that someday I plan to join them.
12 JANUARY, 1999
Albuquerque, New Mexico
I have kept up these notebooks on and off for most of my life; I have filled hundreds of them over the years, thousands of scrawled pages to be carted off to the town dump upon my death. Sixty-seven years have passed since the last entry represented here, an entire lifetime gone by, as lifetimes have a strange way of doing, and of course, at the end they rarely resemble anything we might have imagined for ourselves in our youth . . . which is probably a lucky thing, after all.
As it happened, I didn’t make it back to the Sierra Madre until I got home from the European front, where I was covering the Second World War for the Associated Press . . . nearly fifteen years. I drove down to Casas Grandes and hired a Mormon cowboy out of Colonia Juarez to guide me. We spent three weeks on horseback in the mountains trying to find some of the old Apache haunts. But by then everything had changed. The primeval old-growth pine forest of the high sierra had been mostly logged over and the country had been overrun by cows belonging to the Mexican and American ranchers who operated cattle ranches in Sonora and Chihuahua. The range was badly overgrazed, the banks of the once-pristine trout rivers I had fished as a young man trampled and widened by the cows, and by the cutting of the timber that once lined them, so that the monsoon rains rushed down them in a vicious torrent of mud and rocks, and the trout were no more. I don’t know what I had expected to find after all that time, but nothing looked even remotely familiar, and, of course, there was no sign of the People . . . no sign at all of them.
I kept in touch with Tolley Phillips for a few years after our time together in Mexico, but eventually our correspondence dwindled and finally ceased altogether. I tried to look him up when I got back Stateside after the war, but I learned that at the prodding of his father, Tolley had enlisted in the navy and had been killed in North Africa in 1942. I guess that must have finally made a man out of Tolbert in his father’s eyes.
Of Margaret I actually had some news. Almost exactly a year after I left her and Albert in the Sierra Madre, the fall of 1933, I received the following letter. It was addressed to me in care of Wade Jackson at the
Douglas Daily Dispatch
and forwarded on to me at the newspaper in Albuquerque. Written in Margaret’s hand on her notebook paper, it was postmarked
Pueblo Nuevo, Durango,
which is a small town in the southern Sierras. It was dated . . .
Summer, 1933
Dear Neddy,
I have scant faith in the Mexican postal service, and I doubt that this letter will ever reach you. But as I’ve already gone to the trouble of stealing the money for stamps, and as I don’t know when we’ll be near a village again large enough to even have a post office, I guess I’ll just have to take my chances.
Sad news first: Old Joseph is dead. He asked Charley to take him back to the Sea of Cortez, near which he was born and which he remembered from his boyhood with Cochise’s band. (Remember the abalone-shell amulet that Joseph always wore around his neck? Well, that’s where it came from.) Neither Charley, nor any of the others, had ever traveled that far east before and none had ever seen the ocean. In fact, Charley hadn’t believed Joseph when he told him that the water was so wide that you couldn’t see land on the other side. “There is no water so big that my horse can’t swim across it,” Charley boasted. But then when we reached the sea, he had to admit that the old man was right.
Joseph had told us all along that he wished to die there, and that’s just what he did. He went off alone one night where we were camped in the hills, and sat down looking out over the sea and began to sing his death song. We listened to him half the night, and in the morning after he had fallen silent we found him dead there. That old man lived a long, hard life, and he saw and did some terrible things. But he got to come home and die in the place where he was born, which was all he had ever asked for. I miss him terribly; he taught me so much, and was for me a link between the old Apache world and the new. At the same time, in a strange way, along with Albert, Joseph was my last connection to my old life, and with him gone now, I feel even more removed from it. You know the last thing the old man told me, Neddy? That his greatest regret for which he could never do sufficient penance was for all the children he had killed as a young warrior. He said that if there was really such a place as hell, as the Christian missionaries on the reservation had taught him, then he would surely go there, for what kind of god could forgive a man the murder of children?