The Wild Girl (49 page)
Now the happy news, Neddy. This past spring, two weeks after Joseph’s death, your child bride gave birth to a plump, healthy baby boy . . . presumably your son, although frankly I see little familial resemblance. Despite the fact that you have abandoned her,
la niña bronca
has not yet taken another husband, holding fast to the notion that you will one day return to her. Too, there are so few men left in the band that she will practically have to wait for one of the boys to reach puberty before she can realistically remarry.
I don’t know how many hundreds of miles we have traveled since you left us. With the exception of this one detour to the west, we have headed due south, keeping to the mountains all the way to the state of Durango. We avoid the villages and towns, except when we need to pilfer food and provisions and this we do only at night. It is not an easy life, little brother, but neither is it entirely disagreeable. One of my biggest difficulties lies in procuring paper and writing implements with which to keep up my research notes. These supplies I am forced to steal from the Mexicans in the mountain villages past which we travel; I’m afraid that I’ve become rather an expert thief in my own right. Because of my white skin, I can actually enter these villages in the daytime, although I attract a certain amount of attention, as most of these are quite primitive and hardly accustomed to visits by American tourists. But I simply tell the people that I’m a scientist traveling in the mountains with a research group. Then I “case the joint,” as your man from Chicago Al Capone might say. I find out where paper and pens or pencils are available (if indeed they are, as many of these settlements are largely illiterate). Then I come back in the night, either alone or with one of the others, to steal what I can. Nor have I been above stealing currency itself, if available, and later using it to purchase my writing supplies in other villages. Most of them are desperately poor to begin with, and stealing anything from the residents fills me with shame and remorse. Truly I have long since crossed the line of objective professional observer . . . and I’m sure that the results of my research here will be discredited on that basis by my jealous male colleagues, who sit in judgment upon their soft, pale tushes in academia. Oh well . . . this is the least of my immediate worries, isn’t it?
Speaking of crossing the professional line, Neddy, I must tell you that you have yourself become somewhat of a legend among these people. The boy who was riding with Indio Juan at the end told us everything about the little maniac’s demise at your hands, including the fact that you scalped him . . . and before he had even died, too! So much for maintaining journalistic neutrality, little brother! Astonishing, isn’t it, how quickly civilized man is capable of reverting to his essential savage nature once he steps beyond the constraints of his own society? Not that our society isn’t capable of equal savagery. How many native babies have our own warlords slaughtered in the past two hundred years while conquering this continent in the name of civilization? At least Joseph recognized his sin (and what else, as Joseph came to understand, can the murder of children be, finally, other than a sin?). And yet our own leaders, Christian hypocrites that they are, are not only entirely without contrition for their own sins, but actually smugly self-congratulatory when word filters back to them in their clubs and smoking rooms that the soldiers they have sent out to do their unspeakable bidding have found and destroyed yet another village of innocent women and children. It is for these men expressly that we hope the hell of which Joseph speaks really exists. But now the renegade anthropologist rants . . . they will say that like Conrad’s Kurtz, she has gone insane herself!
And so, little brother, I save my biggest news for last: Believe it or not, I do my own part to keep the species alive, to replace the slaughtered babies with a new generation. As you know, I’ve never really considered myself to be well suited for motherhood, preferring to concentrate my admittedly limited maternal instincts on my work, and yet I find that I’m going to have Albert’s child . . . a little brown infant all my own—proof positive that I do not live in the heart of darkness, but rather seek the light. This certainly complicates matters in terms of our leaving here, but that we’ll just have to deal with when the time comes. As it is, I have much work left to do, and in any case, as you and I discussed at some length, defection from Charley’s band is going to be problematic, to say the least . . .
As for Albert, all I can say is thank God for him. I do not know what I would have done here without him. He is the finest, sweetest, gentlest man I have ever known. Oddly, I believe that in a certain way this life has been even harder for him than it has for me. I have a professional excuse for being here, and my research keeps me well occupied with the process of observing and recording. But Albert came with us largely to look after me and his grandfather. At the same time, I think that he also had some preconceived notion of recapturing a past he had never lived in the first place. When he was taken from his family and shipped off to the Indian school in Pennsylvania, and the priests cut his hair and dressed him in white-man clothes and forbade him to speak his own language, they cut him off forever from that past. As you know, he’s a very bright man, and well read, and his education, too, has further distanced him from this wild life. He didn’t have many resources growing up, but one thing he did have was access to books, and he misses them. Which is to say, Neddy, that you were right. He is a civilized man somewhat at loose ends in the wilderness. (So you see it is my relentlessly clinical nature to study even my loved ones!) Having said that, he does seem less angry, but that I attribute to the fact that he has the love of a good woman.
And that, Neddy, is my news for now, which you will probably never even receive . . . and if by some miracle you do, will not be able to respond to. I’ll find you when I come out of these mountains at last with my completed manuscript in hand. That I promise you. We’ll round up Tolley and we’ll all celebrate together with champagne and dancing. In the meantime, if you see him, do give my love to the big poufter (as Mr. Browning put it!), will you? What I would give for news of you both . . .
Until then, little brother, I send you all my love.
Margaret
That was the last time I heard from Margaret Hawkins. As far as I know, neither she nor Albert Valor ever returned from the Sierra Madre. For many years, I scanned the lists of newly published books, hoping to find her opus of the bronco Apaches in print at last, and from time to time I phoned the anthropology department at the University of Arizona in Tucson to see if they’d had any word of her. But she was permanently listed as having disappeared in the field, and some years later they even named a little research library after her: The Margaret Hawkins Memorial Library of Cultural Anthropology.
What happened to Margaret and Albert? What became of my young Apache wife, Chideh, my son, and the rest of the bronco Apaches? Were they finally hunted down and killed by the Mexicans, driven to extinction like so many other species that once inhabited those magical mountains? These questions have haunted me my entire life. And I have no answers to them. How many times I have dreamed of them, dreamed of Margaret and Albert, and
la niña bronca
and our son, running from their wickiups as the soldiers thunder through camp, firing their rifles, killing every living thing as soldiers are trained to do. In this dream, I am always somewhere nearby, but I can never quite find them, can never quite reach them in time to warn them or to help them escape. From this dream, I wake sweating, filled with the terrible dread of the night terrors, the inescapable regrets and shame that follow me to my own grave. I should have gone back for them. I don’t know why I didn’t. I suppose because I was, after all, only a young man and it seemed that there would be plenty of time for that later. And, in any case, what could I have done for them?
And then, as happens, I got busy with life. If that seems like a stunningly inadequate explanation, it should be remembered that both retrospection and introspection (neither of which is to be confused with wisdom) are largely gained with age. From the time that my parents died when I was sixteen and I hit the road, I did not look back, at least not for many years; I got busy with my life, and with my career, both of which now seem in retrospect to have been largely a means of distracting myself from the terrible events of that long-ago year 1932. I learned at an early age that things tend to end badly, and that I needed to stay one step ahead of them. And so I have done. But eventually you grow old and can no longer run, let alone stay ahead of anything, and all the old dark monsters catch up with you.
But then from time to time I have the other dream, where things don’t end badly, after all, the dream in which the People, Margaret and Albert, Chideh and my son among them, all survive. In this dream, they have found another secret valley, farther south and deeper in the Sierra Madre, where no White Eyes and no Mexican has ever ventured. The valley is watered by a spring that bubbles up from the ground at one end and forms a creek that runs the length of the valley. The creek is full of fat trout and the meadows through which it runs are a brilliant green. There are citrus trees here, as well as many other varieties, heavy with lemons and oranges, and in these trees the colored birds that talk like men, chatter and squawk. In this valley the people have made their
ranchería,
their wickiups covered in canvas painted with brightly colored designs. The women all wear dresses of astonishing beauty, made from fabric obtained in trade from neighboring Indian tribes, dyed in brilliant colors and patterns. They wear exquisite jewelry recovered from Montezuma’s lost treasures, hidden all these centuries from the Spanish invaders, and recently discovered by the People.
In this dream, I am still a young man and I ride into the secret valley on a large white mule. Riding beside me on a sideways-prancing polo pony is my dear old friend Tolbert Phillips Jr., dressed, inexplicably, in black tie. Behind us on a burro comes the boy Jesus, leading Tolley’s several packhorses, laden with French champagne and other extravagances. The People all come out to welcome us, men, women, and children, whole herds of excited children, the women trilling in the gay lovely way they do. There’s little Geraldo Huerta, and little Charley McComas, a happy, sturdy fair-haired boy. There’s Margaret, brown as a native, carrying her baby strapped to a baby board, with Albert beside her. And old Joseph, smiling, walking toward us with his funny, rolling, pigeon-toed gait. There’s Mr. Browning, looking as tidy and erect and dignified as ever. He tips his bowler hat to Tolley and says: “If I might be of assistance, sir.”
In my dream,
la niña bronca
drops behind me on my mule, as if falling from the sky above, giggling and wrapping her arms around me; she swings nimbly around to face me, her lean brown legs thrown over mine. “I knew you would come back to me, my husband,” she says.
“What took you so long, little brother?” asks Margaret, looking up at me quizzically. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“I got lost,” I answer. “I’ve been trying all this time to get back.”
“You never did have much of a sense of direction, did you, White Eyes?” says Albert.
Now Joseph reaches us. Beaming, he raises his open palms in the universal sign of greeting.
“I thought you were dead,” I say to him.
“I came back,” he answers simply, and in my dream that makes perfect sense.
“There are so many children here,” I say, looking out over the sea of children. There are Mexican children and white children and Apache children. “Where did they all come from? Did you steal them?”
“Yes,” the old man says, nodding slyly, “I made a raid on the Happy Place and stole the children back. They had too many there, and the People did not have enough.”
“Which one is mine?” I ask. “Where is my son?”
Old Joseph Valor smiles and waves his arm out across the sea of children. “Pick any one of them you like, White Eyes,” he says. “We have enough now for everyone.”
When the end of the earth is coming, all the water will begin to dry up. For a long time there will be no rain. There will only be three springs left. At those three springs the water will be dammed up and all the people will come there and start fighting over the water. In this way most of the people will kill each other off.