Grimacing, Gus whispered, “Yes….” His head swam with fever. He wasn’t always sure where his feet were going to land. Yet Cam was so strong and steady for him. A fierce love of her swept through him. Today had been a special hell on him. When he’d awakened early in the grayness of the dawn, he had broken out in a heavy sweat with a raging fever. All day he’d fought the vertigo, the throbbing, pounding pain in his left arm, and kept trying to think clearly. Without Cam, her soft coaxing voice, her strong arm around him, Gus knew he’d never have made it this far. It seemed with every step her determination to get them to help grew. Amazed by the strength he felt radiating from her, Gus truly began to appreciate her inner toughness and resiliency in an emergency.
“Listen,” he gasped, carefully stepping forward, “the Yaqui…” He grimaced, tightening his lips and closing his eyes as Cam steadied him.
Breathing savagely against the pain, Gus opened his eyes. Cam kept up their slow, mincing pace. “The Yaqui,” he rasped. “They have a woman leader and a man leader, though they’re matriarchal. They’ll speak some Spanish intermixed with their own language. In case I go unconscious, tell them that I’m the son of a Yaqui woman. They’ll give you extra special care. They take care of their own, Cam. Okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, “I hear you.” She saw several people walking toward them now that they had been spotted. “I just pray they have a phone—anything—so we can get you help pronto.”
“Don’t be disappointed if they don’t,” Gus warned her. Sweat dribbled into his eyes and he blinked it away. The fever was making him feel light-headed. He knew his temperature was high, maybe 103 degrees. If it went any higher, Gus would become delirious. Already he was seeing things that weren’t really there. Every once in a while, he’d see a gold-coated jaguar with black crescent-moon spots walking near him. He’d blink and the apparition would disappear. And then, as he gave in to the fever again, the jaguar would reappear. Not wanting to mention it to Cam for fear of scaring her even more than she already was about his deteriorating condition, Gus forced himself to concentrate on one thing only: putting one foot ahead of the other.
Heart speeding up, Cam raised her hand as three people, all middle-aged, began to trot toward them. Hope flared in her. “They see us, Gus. They see us!”
Hearing the joy in her voice, he groaned. The ground was flat, but small pebbles made the sole of his boot roll, causing him to momentarily lose his balance. Cam’s arm would automatically tighten around him to keep him upright. Hanging his head, he clenched his teeth. His left arm felt like a huge, swollen sausage. And it looked like it, too. Gus worried about losing his arm. If they couldn’t get him medical help soon, he worried that partial loss of his arm’s function would be the very least he would suffer. If that happened, he could no longer fly. Traumatized by the possibility, he pushed that aggravating fear away.
Within twenty minutes, Cam met with the village elders. Two were women in their fifties, with steel-gray hair and black, flashing eyes. The man—she assumed he was the other leader—was also gray-haired, with dark brown, weathered skin. As they drew to a halt, Cam saw their eyes widening. First she saw fear there as they stared at them. And then, when Gus raised his head and began to speak in Yaqui, Cam saw the fear go away and relief replace their original looks.
She knew only Spanish, and not the mother tongue of these short, thin people. They were dressed in colorful cotton garments, with leather sandals on their feet. The man carried a rake over his shoulder, as if just coming from a garden somewhere near the village.
Gus smiled tightly. “Okay, Cam, here’s the deal. They have no phones. Senora Marquez, the woman to your left, who’s wearing the red skirt, is the leader of this village. Her husband, Juan Marquez, is also a leader. He’s the guy with the rake.” Gus halted, pain ripping through him. Biting back a groan, he said, “I told them who I was. They want us to come back to the village with them.”
“Good,” she said, smiling and nodding to them in thanks. They smiled and nodded back.
“There’s more,” Gus groaned. “There’s a drug dealer that comes once a week to their village. If these people don’t find peyote buttons on the cactus, and give them to him to sell, he pistol whips someone in the village. They’re basically unprotected out here. They have no way to defend themselves against this guy.”
Frowning, Cam looked around at the flat stretches of the desert, at the mountains, jagged and black, rising loftily behind the small town. “Well…does this guy come by car?”
“That’s the bad part,” Gus whispered. Sweat ran into his eyes. He could feel himself beginning to weaken. His knees felt like jelly. “He flies in by helo once a week. And he’s armed. His name is Robert Clark. He’s a norteamericano drug dealer. Apparently, he works for a local drug lord out of Tijuana. That’s all they know.”
“I see,” she said grimly, looking around. “Okay, let’s get you to the village, Gus. We’ll worry about these other things later. Right now, all I want to do is contact someone for help.”
With all the water she wanted to drink and hot food to eat, Cam felt like her old self within the next two hours. The Yaqui village was small; perhaps thirty people lived here, all related to one another. Gus lay in the headwoman’s adobe home on a pallet of soft grass with a blanket thrown across it. The medicine woman, Senora Ramos, had cleaned Gus’s wound, placed damp, warm herbs around the ugly red, swollen flesh and rewrapped it with a clean bandage. He was sleeping, the fever having taken a terrible toll on his strength.
Worried, Cam walked around the village. Night was coming, the eastern sky darkening while the red-and-peach-colored sunset spread in a breathtaking wash on the western horizon. She was followed everywhere by curious children of all ages. Their Spanish was broken, but she managed to converse with them. Earlier, Senor Marquez had taken her outside the village that wrapped around the plaza, to where the helicopter would land.
Cam had seen how the dust had been disturbed by a powerful blast of rotors. When she tried to find out what kind of helicopter the drug runner flew, the kindly gentleman had shrugged and opened his hands. He’d smiled, revealing a gap where his two front teeth were missing. More than anything, Cam wanted to know if the chopper was armed.
Her thoughts swung back to Gus as she reconnoitered the area around the village. It was flat desert with a lot of brush, and a few stubborn trees that defied the heat and still survived through the summer. The Yaqui had a well, a shallow one, but it supplied water to their massive gardens, which were sprinkled about the area.
“Señor?” Cam asked as they walked back toward the center of the village. “When does this helicopter come to your town?”
Shrugging, Juan said, “No one knows when he will fly in on his devil bird, Senorita Camelia.” He waved his hands in a frustrated gesture. “You will hear him coming. The devil bird is loud. Everyone—” he waved his hands, sadness in his tone “—runs and hides in their adobe homes. They fear him. He lands over there and comes with his gun drawn. If I do not bring him a bag of peyote buttons right away, he will go through each home, tearing it up, breaking our pottery, ripping things apart, to find them.”
“The bastard,” Cam whispered tautly. She flexed her fists in rage. “How long has he been doing this?” She looked down at the lean farmer, who wore a long-sleeved, white peasant shirt and a pair of faded jeans that were frayed on the bottom.
“Just the last year, Señorita. He came out of nowhere—” Juan pointed to the west “—out of the place of death.”
Cam nodded. That was where Tijuana lay, to the west of them. “How far from this city are we, Señor?”
Laughing, Juan shrugged. “Oh, many, many hours, Señorita. The nearest phone that you speak of is fifty miles farther to the south. There is a Catholic mission, a small one—there at San Anselmo.” He pointed in that direction.
Grimly, Cam’s mind spun. Fifty more miles. “And you have no way to get there? No car? A truck?” She’d not seen a single vehicle.<
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“No, Señorita. Nada. None. You must walk. Oh, you could take one of the donkeys that we use to plow with, to plant our corn every year, but you are much larger than the poor beast. You would do best to walk there.”
“I see….” Cam said. They entered the village, where long shadows were falling across the main plaza. A number of black pots hung from tripods there, the small fires beneath them tended by women. The odor of rice and beans wafted temptingly through the dusk. Dogs and children were standing around each cooking pot, which was being stirred by a woman.
“Tomorrow,” Juan said, patting her arm, “I will have Jose, my son, who is our strongest young man, take you to San Anselmo. Your man, Senor Morales, is very sick. He needs help we cannot give him.”
Nodding, Cam halted at the door of the man’s dark brown adobe home. There was a bright red wool blanket in place of a door. The house had three rooms. Thanks to their generosity, Juan and his wife had given up their bedroom to her and Gus. “Thanks, Juan. And yes, if Jose could be ready to leave early tomorrow? Say at dawn? We might be able to make San Anselmo in a day’s time.”
“Sí, sí,” Juan agreed eagerly, gesturing for her to enter. “Come, come, my wife makes tortillas for dinner. Please, come in….”
Gus groaned as he felt a damp, cool cloth being pressed against his hot forehead. Lying on his right side, a lumpy pillow beneath his head, he barely opened his eyes. Because his fever was high, everything was blurred in the semidarkness. Seeing Cam leaning over him, cloth in hand, her eyes filled with worry, he managed a twisted smile.
“You’re the most beautiful apparition I’ve seen so far,” he muttered. Feeling thirsty, his mouth gummy, he tried to sit up.
“Take it easy,” Cam whispered, and supported him as he eased into sitting position so that his back was against the earthen wall. Searching his washed-out face, and seeing the fever in his darkened eyes, Cam reached out and wiped his sweaty face with the cool compress. “Are you thirsty? Hungry? It’s nearly 2100.”
The flickering of an old oil lamp in the corner of the room made shadows dance before Gus’s eyes. Blinking, he saw a jaguar, he’d seen the same one earlier, sitting in the doorway where a dark blue cotton blanket separated this room from the next one. He was having another feverish hallucination.
Lifting his chin, he looked up at Cam. “Yeah…I’m thirsty….”
Nodding, Cam reached for a bottle of water. “Let me help,” she murmured, crouching at his right side. Gus looked terrible. When he tried to lift his hand to help guide the bottle to his lips, his fingers shook badly.
“Easy,” Cam crooned softly as she placed her arm around his shoulders. Gus was weak—alarmingly so. His hand fell limply at his side. He couldn’t hold it up at all. When she held the lip of the flask to his mouth, he drank deeply.
Dribbles of water trickled from the corners of his mouth when Cam took away the bottle. Sated, he tried to lift his right hand again. He couldn’t. “I feel like a baby,” he confided, his voice husky. “Useless…”
“You’ve got a high fever,” Cam whispered as she sat back on her heels next to him. “Are you hungry, Gus? You need to eat. You have to keep your strength up. Senora Marquez slaughtered a chicken. She made you some delicious chicken soup. Want some?” Cam hoped he did.
“These people shouldn’t be cooking their precious chickens for me,” Gus said, frowning. He saw a pottery bowl filled with hot, steaming soup nearby. But he wasn’t hungry. The fever had him in its clutches.
“Hey, you’re like a son to them,” Cam chided with a smile. “They wanted to do something to help you, Gus. You’re one of their own. Everyone is worried for you.”
“I’m worried for myself,” he joked weakly. He watched as Cam reached for the bowl and brought it over to him. She sat down facing him, the wooden spoon in hand.
“Tomorrow morning, early,” Cam told him, as she placed a spoonful of clear broth into his mouth, “I’m leaving for a Catholic mission, San Anselmo. It’s a day’s walk from here. They’ve got a phone, Gus. Once I can get to a phone, we’re home free. I can call in the help we need.” She gave him a tender look as he patiently slurped the soup she fed him.
“You’re going with a guide, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Juan’s son, Jose.”
“Good,” Gus muttered. He forced himself to eat half the contents of the soup bowl, a mixture of shredded chicken, potatoes and onions. The soup was salty and tasted good, but his stomach was roiling threateningly because of the constant pain he was in.
“You did good,” Cam said, giving him a soft smile as she wiped his mouth afterward. “Keeping water and food in you right now is the best thing possible. It will keep you going.”
Snorting softly, Gus looked around the shadowed room. It was small and warm. There was a square window, but no glass in it, only a blanket pinned into place. “I feel like a weak baby—completely helpless, querida.”
Arching at the endearment, Cam put the bowl aside, along with the damp cloth. Gus’s uniform was dirty and damp with sweat. She wanted to get him out of it, but feared that moving his left arm might start the bleeding again. No, he might be in dirty clothes, but he was stable, so she let that idea pass.
“I had a dream about us,” Gus told her in a quiet tone as she came and sat cross-legged facing him. “A little while ago…”
“Yeah?” Cam smiled, reaching out and grazing his darkly bearded jaw. The stubble only accentuated Gus’s high cheekbones, showed how sunken his cheeks had become in the last two days. Trying to put her worry aside, Cam allowed herself the privilege of wrapping her fingers around his good hand, which lay at his side. His fingers were hot and damp. She could see the wildness, the fever, gripping him.
“Nice dream…” Gus tipped his head back and closed his eyes. “We were at this incredibly beautiful place, like a Garden of Eden. There was jungle around, and in the distance, big, beautiful mountains with snow on the peaks.”
“Sounds nice,” Cam murmured, “but it sure isn’t around here.”
His mouth twitched in a slight smile. Squeezing her hand, he said, “No…I don’t know where it was. You were with me. We were sitting on this sloping, grassy hill that had an oval pond at the bottom of it. The water…” Gus forced his eyes open and drowned in Cam’s tender look “…was incredible, Cam. It was like living, vibrating turquoise. It was clear, and as I sat there with you, the desire to walk down there and step into it was almost overwhelming.” He closed his eyes and quirked his mouth. “I knew if I walked into that water, if I submerged myself in it, I’d be healed.”
“Wow,” Cam murmured, “that’s pretty far out. Wish I knew where this place was. You need it.”
Hearing the humor in her voice, he nodded slowly. “Yeah, this place…I’m telling you, I felt like I was there. It was so real, Cam. So real…”
“Well,” she whispered gently, “maybe when you go to sleep in a few minutes, you’ll go back there. Next time, get in the water, okay? We need all the miracles we can lay our hands on now.”
The humor revived him slightly. Gus opened his eyes. “Help me lie down? I’m so dizzy I feel like I’m going to pitch over….”
Getting to her feet, Cam eased Gus onto his right side. Once he was as comfortable as he could be, she tucked several blankets around his shoulders to keep him warm.
“Thanks…” he whispered wearily. “I love you, Camelia Anderson. All the way. With all my heart.”
His gritty words flowed through the quiet room and touched her heart. As sick as Gus was, and in such unrelenting pain, he could still share that with her. Getting down on her knees, Cam leaned over him. Gus had already shut his eyes. His brow was beading with sweat again. She could see the pain and how it pulled his face into lines of unrelenting tension.
“And I love you, Gus Morales. Sleep, just sleep…” She stroked his damp hair with her hand. “Go back to that beautiful garden with the pond.”
Her words lulled him into a deep, spiraling sleep. The
fever had him once again. Even with his eyes shut, Gus could see the female jaguar sitting near the curtained doorway. She was looking at him with sparkling sun-gold eyes. A sense of care and protection emanated from her. As he felt Cam’s hand stroking his head, Gus sensed, for the first time, that things were going to work out. Cam’s words—that she loved him—embraced him and flowed through him. How nurturing she was. Like a sponge, he absorbed each of her tender touches. Tomorrow was a new day, he told himself. Tomorrow, Cam would go for help. Maybe by tomorrow night he’d be in a hospital getting the medical attention he needed.
As Gus drifted off, he heard the low, rumbling growl of the jaguar, who seemed to be very close to him now. He couldn’t see her, could only feel her strength and presence. In his fevered brain as he spiraled into sleep, Gus thought it must be his mother’s guardian, or perhaps his own, come to protect him. He had grown up listening to stories of the mountain and desert jaguars that had once roamed this part of Mexico. Oddly, Gus felt comforted by the apparition. That, and Cam’s closeness. Hope flowed through him as he drifted off into the dark, feverish realm of sleep.
Chapter 17
Cam didn’t want to leave Gus, but she knew she had to. He lay huddled beneath the warm blankets they’d shared last night. She’d lain against his back, her body curved against his. Half the night he’d been delirious with fever. Only when she slid her arm around the dampened waist of his flight suit, pressing her palm against his chest, did Gus cease his restless thrashing. He stopped muttering in Yaqui and Spanish, two of the three languages he’d grown up with.
Picking up the holster now, Cam strapped it around her waist and buckled it. Dawn was just touching the horizon, so the room was shadowed. Though she was barely able to see him, Cam made sure that a bottle of water was within Gus’s reach for when he woke up. And she picked up his pistol, which had eight bullets left in it, and put it near the water. Her mouth tingled in memory of the kiss she’d pressed to his damp brow. Worried, Cam knew she had to meet Jose, who waited in the next room, and make that long, fifty-mile trek to San Anselmo. Giving Gus one last look as he lay sleeping deeply, she whispered, “I love you, Gus Morales. I’ll be back, I promise….” And she quietly exited the room.
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