Ghost Warrior

by Jory Sherman

  “There was a Narbona once, a Navajo warrior, who fought Kearney and Kit Carson. A very bad man. A thief. A killer. A man without mercy.”

  “I have heard of that man,” Gregorio said. “But he is dead, is he not?”

  Zak looked through the door at Nox, whose black form was swathed in shadow now, as the sun fell past the rim of the Jemez range. The sheep still bleated and there was nobody to tend them. The birds were flying to their night roosts and the land was beginning to gentle, as if smoothed by some unseen hand.

  “Yes, that Narbona has been dead a long time,” Zak said.

  It was odd, he thought. When a Navajo died, his name was never mentioned again. Nor was it ever used again by any living Navajo.

  “Did you hear the names of the white men? Or the names of any of the other Navajos?”

  Gregorio raised his head. He swiped the sleeve of his shirt across his cheeks to erase his tears.

  “I heard the name of ‘Pete,’ and the other one was called, how do you say it, ‘Rafael’? No, a gringo—I mean, an American name.”

  “Ralph?” Zak said.

  Gregorio nodded.

  “Yes. Ralph. It is a difficult name to say on the Spanish tongue.”

  “What about the Indians? Hear any other names?”

  “The one with Narbona, yes. Narbona called him Largos. That is an odd name, no?”

  “Yes.”

  Largos, too, was a dead man’s name. He had ridden with Narbona, fought against Kearney and Kit Carson when the government was trying to stop the stealing and the murders in New Mexico and drive the Indians to reservations. The Navajos had left a bloody trail, and it had taken years to isolate them. They had never been conquered, Zak thought, and now some of them were back on the rampage, murdering, pillaging, terrorizing settlers along the Rio Grande.

  “Gregorio, do you want to wash your brother and dress him in clean clothes? And your brother’s wife as well? I will help you bury them tomorrow.”

  “Yes. Help me carry them to their bed. I will wash and dress them.”

  “Where can I put up my horse? I will stay with you this night.”

  “There is a shed and a barn in back of this house. Did you not see it?”

  “I was looking at other things,” Zak said.

  “Will Narbona come back this night?”

  “No. Did he drive off any of your sheep? Did he steal anything, any of your stock?”

  “I do not know. I heard the Indians yelling and cursing the sheep. I heard their guns. Maybe they killed some, or maybe they stole some of them. I do not know.”

  “Where are all the herders? All dead? Where are the children?”

  “The children are in Santa Fe. They go to school. There was only one herder and me. I think they killed Juanito. I have not seen him.”

  “It will be dark soon. We can find out what I need to know in the morning.”

  Zak helped Gregorio carry the bodies of the dead woman and man into a back bedroom. There were three bedrooms, a small sewing room, and a kitchen. They laid the bodies on top of the bed, and Zak walked back outside to take care of Nox.

  It was not yet dark, but the sun had fallen behind the mountains, leaving a pastel glow in the sky. Small, thin clouds hung like effigies of salmon or trout, their edges gleaming silver and gold against a paling aquamarine sky.

  He found the small barn, put together with adobe and whipsawed lumber. There were two mules and a burro in it, and he found a bin of grain. He put Nox in a stall, stripped him of saddle, bridle, saddlebags, and rifle. He grained and watered all of the animals, left his saddle and bridle on a sawhorse near a small tack room. He carried his rifle and saddlebags back to the house and went inside. He closed the door and dropped the bar.

  Gregorio had lit an oil lamp in the front room, and down the hall, Zak saw a pale orange light emanating from the back bedroom and some kind of yellow flickering light in the kitchen.

  He took his rifle from its scabbard and leaned it against the wall by the front door. He set his saddlebags next to the couch and walked to the window to look out toward the river.

  Zak’s orders had been signed by an adjutant he did not know, a brevet colonel named Ernest Buehler, on behalf of General Crook. He wondered how much Crook knew about the “predations” along the Rio Grande. How long had they been going on? Did anyone know about a Navajo named Narbona? And what about Largos?

  Perhaps those two were still alive. If they were, they would be very old. He would have to ask Gregorio about that.

  Some odd thought scratched at a corner of his brain, clawed its way up out of the black morass of doubts and into the light of knowledge. What was going on? What was truly going on? Perhaps Crook did not know and meant for him to find out.

  And why had Narbona told Gregorio to tell the soldiers that he had done these deeds?

  Any other Indian raider would have tried to hide his tracks.

  And who were the two white men with Narbona? Soldiers? Ex-soldiers? Deserters?

  So many questions. And no answers.

  The Navajos had not tried to hide their tracks. They had openly murdered a poor farmer, left him on the road in plain sight.

  This did not look like anything Zak had seen before. In all of his years of fighting Indians with Crook and others, he had never encountered a puzzle of this complexity, an enigma that eluded explanation no matter how hard he looked at it, turned it around in his mind to examine all sides.

  There was a chilling aspect to what Narbona had told Gregorio. “Go tell the soldiers,” he had said.

  Why? Zak wondered.

  That was the last thing he would want if he were a hunted man—to have soldiers tracking him down.

  Narbona wanted the soldiers to come after him. That was the only explanation Zak could come up with, and it didn’t make sense.

  “Why?” he asked again, this time out loud.

  The land outside the window sank into shadow. He could see the flow of white sheep as they moved down to the river to drink, and they looked like foam on a long wave streaming across a dark sea. And off in the distance he heard a coyote call in the darkness, its voice a chromatic ribbon of melodious notes rising up the scale and hanging there until they faded into the empty cavern of a deep silence.

  Chapter 3

  The stench of death clung to the walls of the adobe. Before dawn, while the dark was still upon the land, Zak arose from the bed Gregorio had given him and walked outside to breathe the still air, gaze at the stars, listen to the frogs down by the river, the murmurs of the sheep as they grumbled in their sleep.

  He and Gregorio had eaten cold mutton, beans, and hard corn cakes the old man’s sister-in-law had made. They talked of life and death, of injustice and prejudice.

  “Democracy,” Gregorio had said, “is a word found only in the dictionary. Discrimination is found everywhere.”

  Zak had not said anything, but he saw the truth in what Gregorio had said, from Gregorio’s perspective. He learned that Gregorio and his brother, Pablo, had both been born in Socorro, had been raised dirt-poor and had no education.

  “You know what socorro means, eh?”

  “I know,” Zak said.

  The word meant “help,” or to be more precise, he thought, “succor.”

  “We had none in that little town,” Gregorio said. “And my brother and I make a journey to Taos and then to Santa Fe. He met his wife, Consuela, in Santa Fe. Her father was poor and wanted to sell her so that his large family would have food.”

  “Your brother bought her?”

  “Yes. He paid two dollars for her. It was all the money he had. I did not have money, so I could not buy Consuela’s sister, Loreta. I did not like her anyway. She was ugly. She had the bad breath. Her teeth were rotten.”

  “Now you are a landowner,” Zak said.

  “Ha. We had to fight for this land and we stole sheep from the Navajo, who stole their sheep from someone else. There is no justice in the world.”

  They tal
ked of the dead sheepherder lying somewhere out there in a field of grass. Gregorio spoke of irrigating their crops of millet and corn, the grasses and the beans, the tomatoes and yams, the hot chilis and garbanzo beans. All while the dead man and woman decayed and blowflies laid their eggs in their flesh and the votive candles flickered and released scents that could not hide the aroma of the dead.

  Zak listened and did not talk much.

  Before they both retired, he asked Gregorio just one question.

  “This Narbona,” he said, “how many years did he have, would you say?”

  “He was young. He had no more than twenty-two or twenty-three years. All of the Navajos were young men, very strong. The gringos—the Americans—they had more years, maybe thirty or more.”

  Zak did not take the term gringo as an insult. He knew the origin of the word from tales told around the campfire. In the early days of Mexican contact with Americans, the Mexicans heard them singing “Green Grow the Lilacs.” They heard “green grow” as “gringo,” and the word became a handy nickname for the white men.

  Zak thought of that on this early morn when the moon was high and full and the Milky Way stretched its glittering band across the heavens and Venus commanded a corner of the sky above the mountains, bright as a diamond. Young men with dead men’s names. Not old men in their fifties or sixties, but young men in their twenties.

  In the east Zak saw a thin crease in the sky, a spreading cream that was the dawn. The black velvet sky paled above that rent, and the stars, the Milky Way—all began to evaporate, leaving only the Morning Star, Venus, shining brightly just above the horizon. Then that star, too, disappeared and the dawn rose in all its splendor, spraying light on small puffs of clouds, turning the sky a pale robin’s-egg blue.

  There was a stirring in the house, and Zak heard the patter of sandals on hard-packed earth, the rattle of a wood stove, the clank of a coffee pot, the slosh of water from a bucket. His stomach roiled with hunger and a low growl indicated juices flowing in an empty cavity.

  Moments later he turned to see Gregorio step through the door, disheveled from sleep, his clothes rumpled, his gray hair askew.

  “Good morning, Zak,” he said. “Did you sleep well?”

  “Good morning, Gregorio. I slept like a baby with the itch.”

  Gregorio laughed, then coughed up night phlegm, hawking the gob onto the ground.

  “You make the joke, Zak.”

  “I slept.”

  “With one eye open, eh?”

  “Sometimes two. Like an owl.”

  Gregorio laughed again, not so hearty this time, as he stepped alongside Zak.

  “The water, it boils. Soon we will drink the coffee to clear our minds, then take a little breakfast, eh?”

  “We have some digging to do. Do you know where you want to bury your relatives?”

  “Yes. On a little hill where there is ocotillo and palo verde. And we must find Juanito Salazar and lay him to rest as well.” He paused for a moment, then said: “And the dogs. They must be buried with dignity.”

  “For sure,” Zak said, the Spanish falling easily from his tongue.

  Gregorio had a little flatbed cart in the barn, with handles on both ends. After breakfast the two men went to the pasture and found two dogs, small black-and-white border collies, and loaded their carcasses on the cart. They found the body of Salazar next to one of the irrigation ditches. They laid out the bodies next to a little hill, then went back to the house to get the other bodies. Gregorio had wrapped them in sheets, and he took another sheet with him for Salazar. He also took a bucket of water, a cloth, and soap. At the barn they loaded two shovels on the cart, one on either end. Gregorio washed Salazar’s face and around the bullet wound in his chest while Zak began to dig the graves. He could hear Gregorio chanting soft prayers over the three corpses and the two dogs.

  Gregorio dug the two graves for his brother and sister-in-law, dug through grass to rock, and for a long while the only sound was the ring of the shovels on stone. The sun rose and shrank the shadows, spread across the green fields and glinted off the river. Quail piped and doves whistled past them, their wings flashing teal as they flew downriver, and geese honked as they fed on the banks.

  When they finished burying the two dogs and the three people, both men were soaked with sweat. They leaned on their shovels and looked at the mounds.

  “I will make crosses,” Gregorio said, and there were tears in his eyes. “I will remember them each day of my life.”

  Zak said nothing. He could feel the man’s grief. It lay like a heavy weight between them as the old man wept silently.

  Finally, Gregorio knelt on one knee and crossed himself. He said the prayers in a halting voice choked with emotion. They were simple prayers, composed on the spot, prayers that seemed to come from somewhere deep in Gregorio’s heart and mind. Zak bowed his head and breathed the air that drifted down from the high frozen peaks of the Sangre de Cristo range, which loomed over the hills in majestic splendor.

  Later, when Zak was saddling Nox, Gregorio came up to him.

  “What will you do about your sheep, Gregorio?”

  “First I will ride to Santa Fe and tell the soldiers about Narbona and what happened here.”

  “There is no need. I will tell the soldiers.”

  “I must find men to help me tend the sheep. I must try and buy two more dogs.”

  “Will that be an easy thing to do?”

  “I do not know. I must do these things. And I must tell the soldiers, as Narbona ordered me to do.”

  “I will tell the soldiers.”

  “You are going to Santa Fe?”

  “Not today. I am going to track Narbona and find out where he goes.”

  “Ah, that will be very dangerous, Zak. You are one man. They are many.”

  “This I must do.”

  “Who are you?” Gregorio asked. “I know what you are called, but who are you? Why do you come here?”

  Zak did not want to tell him much, but the man deserved some kind of answer.

  “You say, Gregorio, that there is no justice in the world. I am a man who does not believe that. I bring justice with me for such men as Narbona. For bad men.”

  “Who pays you to do this?”

  Zak pulled the single cinch tight through the D ring, wrapped the leather into a loop, and ran the end through the loop and pulled it tight. Nox swelled his belly and Zak bumped him with the back of his hand where he had swelled. The air went out and Zak tightened the cinch even more, until the saddle was secure on the horse’s back.

  “The United States pays me,” Zak said.

  “Ah, you are a soldier?”

  “I was a soldier. Now I ride alone.”

  Gregorio took a step backward and cocked his head as he looked Zak up and down. “You have the bearing of a soldier,” he said, “but you have the look of a hunter. You ride alone, and I have heard of such a man. They call him jinete de sombra. Is this you, on your black horse, wearing the black clothing? Are you the one they call Shadow Rider?”

  “I am a friend,” Zak said, “who hopes that he will see you again, Gregorio. I share the grief you carry in your heart and I will take the memory of your tragedy with me. I will carry justice with me. Justice will be in the bullets that I put in my rifle and pistol and in my bare hands. That is all that you need to know.”

  Zak climbed into the saddle as Gregorio stared at him with a look of wonder on his face.

  “Go with God,” Gregorio breathed. “Beware of Narbona. There is a red flower in the blade of his knife.”

  “I know,” Zak said. He had heard the comment before, from some poet born in Mexico. The knife flower. He knew what it meant. Blood sprouted from the blade of a knife into a crimson blossom. It was a hideous thought, but it was also very beautiful.

  “Have care where you ride, Zak,” Gregorio said. “You do not have fear?”

  Zak touched a finger to the brim of his hat and started to ride out of the barn.
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br />   “I am the fear of Narbona,” Zak said. “I am the fear that comes in the deep of night and walks in his dreams. I am the fear that comes when a man is standing before a firing squad with a dozen rifles aimed at his heart. I do not fear. I am fear.”

  Zak rode out, down through the green pasture and onto the track of the men who had spilled the blood of innocents and stolen that which could not ever be given back: life. There was steel in his jaw and a fierce glint in his eye.

  He turned and waved to Gregorio, who stood in front of the house in all his sadness and grief, a man who knew that there truly was no justice in the world.

  And even if there was, it could not bring the dead back to life.

  Chapter 4

  Zak heard the pitiful bleating not long after he entered a small canyon where the tracks had led him. Narbona had driven off a dozen sheep after killing the Delacruz husband and wife. That much, the tracks had shown. Now they told another story. Before entering the canyon, the shod horses veered off to the south. The separation, evidently, had been prearranged. None of the horses had stopped. It was a case of the white men veering off while the Navajos continued on into the foothills. The sheep went with the Indians. The white men rode off together. Zak followed the Navajo and sheep tracks.

  Not many sheep for a raider, Zak thought.

  Now, in late afternoon, he heard sheep where no sheep should be.

  He rounded a bend and saw them. The sheep were all bunched together, bleating like lost souls. They started to run when they saw Zak and Nox, all of them moving at once. They ran only a short distance, still bunched up, and stood there, all of them staring at him and pleading to be rescued.

  It was plain to Zak that the raiding party had stopped there in that small bowl in the canyon. He took his time deciphering the maze of tracks—horse and sheep, white men and Indians. Yes, Narbona had felt safe in that place, but he had posted lookouts or guards at the east entrance and, from the dried-blood pools and the pair of fleecy hides, had butchered two sheep.