Valley of Fire (20 page)

Red lava. Black lava. Yellow sandstone slopes rising from the lava, and pink sandstone ledges on the ground. That's all you could see, except for the clumps of brush and cactus and the mountains looking so blue and black way off to the east and west.

“Must've been a hell of a volcano,” I said, just to say something on account nobody had said nothing since breakfast that morning. It hadn't really been breakfast. Mostly some hardtack that was only slightly softer than the rocks that surrounded us, and water that tasted harder than them rocks.

I showed off how smart I was, saying them lava rocks come from volcanoes. I knowed that. Thought I did. But I reckon I should've kept my mouth shut and just listened to the wind.

“Micah.” Sister Rocío sounded just like she had back at the orphanage when she was about to correct my ignorant answer or inform me that I owed her ten Hail Marys, five Our Fathers and one Glory Be. She even waited till I turned around to face her, as if she could see me. “Do you see any volcanoes around here?”

“None smoking,” I said.

Nobody laughed. Seeing that stern look that told me she didn't appreciate smart alecks, I sucked in a deep breath, let it out, and said more respectful, “No, ma'am.”

“There is nothing that even looks like a volcano, is there?”

The nearest mountains was the Capitans, and they looked like mountains, not volcanoes. She waited for me to look around, but I wasn't going to do that for some blind woman. I'd traveled around these parts enough to know that nothing resembled a volcano.

When she figured she had given me enough time, she said, “Of course, you don't. Because there is no volcano here. These flows were not caused by a volcano, but vents in the valley floor. The molten lava flowed, cooled, and formed these islands.”

“Islands in a wine-dark sea,” Sister Geneviève said, because she was still focusing on wine-dark seas.

“The islands are called kipukas,” the blind old bird said.

Even Sister Geneviève turned, her face revealing curiosity and surprise, to face the old woman.

“How do you know all this?” Geneviève finally asked.

I felt more grouchy than curious or surprised, and was grinding my teeth to keep from calling the blind nun a know-it-all. A teacher's pet.

With a smile Sister Rocío explained, “A scientist—a geologist—spoke to the Sisters of Charity two years ago come September.”

Me and Geneviève stared, first at the nun, than at each other.

Said Rocío, “He was quite informative.”

Me and Geneviève done some more staring.

“We sponsor many such lectures,” Rocío explained. “Back in '81, Governor Lew Wallace read a chapter from his stunning novel
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
shortly before he left the territory. He proved, to the thinking of the Mother Superior and myself, to be much more capable as a writer than as a governor, and though his novel had Protestant leanings, we did admire that chariot race. To my thinking, however, the best lecture was a friend of the carpenter who fixed our door who had known and ridden with Kit Carson. This person spoke about the days of the mountain men and fur traders in Taos. He was quite the salty talker.”

We didn't say nothing.

“Well,” Sister Rocío said with a snort, “what do you expect us nuns to do, read the New Testament and gossip about the archbishop behind his back every day?”

The two women had gotten some sleep the previous night, but I hadn't. A body doesn't sleep too good when he knows that Sean Fenn's gonna be trailing him. So I was bone tired when we ate a cold breakfast, then started scouring the Valley of Fire for a grave that only a blind woman knowed where to find it.

Morning had passed slowly as we picked our trails through the lava flows, seeing some colorful lizards sunning themselves, but nothing else. Had to be ten or eleven that morning when I eased the bay over toward Sister Geneviève and asked to see that cross again. After she handed it to me, I turned it over, read them words again, looked across the Valley of Fire, and scratched my head.

“Sister.” The saddle creaked as I turned toward Rocío. “What does this mean, ‘From the top of Ararat we must climb down'?”

“It means what it says. You climb down off Mount Ararat.”

I give the cross back to Geneviève, looked around to study the land.

Well, if I clumb high enough up the nearest sandstone slope, I reckoned that I could see the Capitan Mountains, and a bunch of brown grass filling the Tularosa betwixt them mountains and where we was sweating. But I don't think I could see all the way to the Old Testament in the land of the Israelites.

Another memory latched on to my brain. It hit me so sudden, so hard, that I reined in the bay, and sucked in a deep breath.

You spill as much whiskey as I'd done, you ride hell-bent for leather enough to save your hide, you don't recollect all the things nuns made you do back when you was living in an orphanage. I'd forgotten all about it, till everything surged up and like to have knocked me out of the saddle.

Geneviève started, “What's the mat—”

“You used to make me draw pictures . . . back when I was a kid.” I was already pointing a finger at the blind nun.

Another smile cracked through that grizzled face. “You should have stuck to art, Micah,” Rocío said. “You were talented.”

“At stick figures,” I said with a snort.

“Yes, but your landscapes were spectacular.” She smiled, and said almost in a whisper, almost like she was coaxing something up that had been buried in my memories, “Remember?”

'Course, I'm thinking,
how the hell would a blind nun know if my drawings was artistic or not?

“Remember,” she repeated softly.

It was like Rocío had transformed herself into that buxomly lass with the turban and the silver rings and pretty necklaces who had tried to hypnotize Big Tim Pruett in Albuquerque that day. She told him to watch the gold watch she kept twirling, but all Big Tim and me could focus on was them enormous breasts of hers. She didn't put Big Tim under, but somehow Sister Rocío was doing something to my mind, my memories.

“And close your eyes.”

I done, and . . .this is the strange part. Once I'd shut them eyelids tight, I wasn't no thirty-something-year-old drifter wanted for murder and stuck with a beautiful woman and a blind nun, with a cutthroat named Sean Fenn likely just a half day's ride behind us coming to kill, and maybe a fortune in gold somewhere in a hole in all these black rocks that were twisted and wavy and hard and reminded me of giant cow turds.

Instead, I pictured myself as a twelve-year-old orphan sitting in a room in an adobe building in a sleepy town called Santa Fe with a blind nun who had only one arm. It had just slammed the back of my head hard enough to make my front teeth chatter.

No. No, that ain't right, either. You see, I didn't picture myself as that kid who once was me. Instead, I was that little boy.

 

 

“
You are drawing Mount Ararat,” Sister Rocío says sharply.

 

 

My horse started peeing, but my eyes remained closed. I knowed my left hand was atop the horn, and my right index finger drew an imaginary pencil across the open palm. Must've been doing that while in that trance, that vision, that whatever-the-hell-you-call-it, but it didn't feel like my finger tracing my palm. Felt like I was holding a pencil and scratching my thoughts on paper.

“What do you see, Micah?” Sister Rocío asked.

My eyes opened, and it was like I half-expected to see a painting or a map, but all I seen was my finger on my calloused palm. I turned to Sister Rocío and answered, “I see a canyon.”

She smiled. “Exactly.”

That crone had given me hope, which can be dangersome. Hell, I felt like a ten-year-old on his birthday. Standing in the stirrups, I stared across the valley. 'Course, I didn't see the Ark, and I sure didn't spot Mount Ararat. I didn't see nothing except one of them lizards on a giant lava cow turd, grass, and cactus.

Still smiling, I settled back into the saddle, wet my lips, and smiled at Geneviève, who, smart as she was, pretty as she was, looked at me utterly stupidly.

“You had me draw Mount Ararat.” I eased my horse over to Sister Rocío. “From your memories. You told me what it looked like, but you had me drawing what you remembered. Not from some Bible illustration.” I patted her shoulder and looked again.

“Do you see it?” Geneviève asked.

“I don't see a damned thing but black lava.”

Sister Rocío's knuckles cracked my skull, just above where I'd cut my noggin after Fenn had slammed me against a rock.

“Ten Our Fathers, Micah,” Rocío instructed me, even though I didn't have a rosary or the time to say no penance.

“So . . .” Geneviève started. “How?”

I'd turned the bay around. “Well, now I know what I'm looking for.”

“Which is?”

“Tan rocks,” I said. “A mountain of large but loose tan rocks.”

“Could it be red?” Geneviève was suddenly excited. She jerked around, pointing to a little rise off to the northwest. “There are red rocks over there.”

“That's lava,” I told her. “Red lava. No, I think what I'm looking for isn't lava, but sandstone.”

I could see in my mind what I'd drawed for Sister Rocío back all them long years ago.

“The sandstone was here when the lava emerged from the vents,” Sister Rocío was speaking like a geologist lecturing a bunch of Sisters of Charity again. “The sandstone remained its natural color, yellow-tinted tan, on the slopes, but where the lava seeped across it, the sandstone was turned into a more pinkish hue.”