Blood Sky at Morning

by Jory Sherman

  “It is not our land. It belongs to the Great Spirit. He lets us hunt it and live on it and wants us to defend it. The white man drives wooden stakes in the ground and writes words on paper that tell us the land belongs to him.”

  Ted looked at Jeffords for help.

  “That is the white man’s way,” Jeffords said. “The army wants to protect the Chiricahua and let Cochise have his land. He will keep the white man away from Chiricahua land. That is the white chief’s promise to the Chiricahua.”

  “Is this true?” Cochise asked O’Hara.

  “Yes,” Ted said.

  Before he left the camp, Ted saw a strange sight and it startled him. A white man, dressed in black and riding a black horse, appeared from behind a low hill with two Chiricahua braves. He waved to Cochise, turned his horse and rode off into the hills and canyons that formed a maze around the Apache camp.

  Cochise waved back to the man.

  “Who was that?” Ted asked without thinking. Jeffords shot him a look of warning.

  Cochise caught the look and waved a hand in the air as if to dismiss Jeffords’s attempt to silence Ted.

  “He is called the Shadow Rider,” Cochise said. “He comes to us from the north and he brings the words of the white chief Crook with him. He speaks our tongue.”

  “But he’s a white man,” Ted blurted out, still puzzled by the man he had seen.

  Cochise shrugged and some shadow of a smile flickered from his leathery face.

  “Who is to know what blood runs in the Shadow Rider’s veins?” Cochise said. “My people trust him. I trust him.”

  “Will you also trust this man?” Jeffords asked, nodding toward Ted.

  “I think this man speaks with a straight tongue. We will talk about him when you have gone. We will seek wisdom from our elders and from the Great Spirit.”

  “That is good enough,” Jeffords said.

  Ted’s memory of that strange meeting was still vivid in his mind. He had a great deal of respect for Cochise, and after he reported his visit to Captain Bernard, he felt that peace with the Apaches was possible. He just hoped his superiors felt the same.

  He had not told Bernard about the Shadow Rider, but he had asked Jeffords if he knew the man.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Zak Cody,” Jeffords told him. “And he is under orders from General Crook.”

  “Army?”

  “I don’t know. Once, I think. You better just forget you ever saw him in Cochise’s camp. I think he’s under secret orders from Crook and from President Grant.”

  Ted had let out a low whistle of surprise. Though he wanted to know more about Zak Cody and his mission, he’d asked no more questions of Jeffords.

  Now, Ted opened one eye and stared at Cavins, then shifted his gaze to the shaft of moonlight streaming through the window. The light seemed placid and steady, but it was swirling with dust motes and air, and when he shifted focus, he could see only the light itself. But when he refocused, the motes twirled like tiny dervishes gone mad, with no apparent pattern to their movements. In that moment before he closed his eyes, he compared the vision to Trask’s incomprehensible mind. Somewhere in that brain of his, Trask was scheming and planning.

  Ted vowed that he would be patient and learn that secret. He just hoped that he would live that long and beyond that discovery. Trask was a dangerous man, and cunning, as a wolf or a fox is cunning, and he knew he must be careful. Very careful.

  Finally, he fell into a restless sleep, dreamless except for shadowy shapes that flitted through the darkness of his mind, indefinable, featureless as dark smoke in a darkened room.

  He was awakened by the sound of boots stalking across the floor, and when he opened his eyes, he saw a man shaking one of the stage drivers.

  “Time to get up, Cooper,” a voice said, and the bearded man on the bunk rose up and rubbed his eyes.

  “Shit,” the driver said, “it’s dark as a well-digger’s ass.”

  “And you got a run to Yuma, Dave.”

  Cavins had fallen asleep in his tilted chair and he blinked in the low light from the lamp over his head. His paper book had fallen to the floor and lay there like a collapsed tent, open to the page he’d been reading.

  Outside, Ted heard the creak and jingle of harness, the snorting of horses, and the low, gravelly voices of men speaking both Spanish and English. The moon had set, or had drifted beyond the window over his bunk. His back was soaked with sweat and his flesh itched under the leather straps.

  Trask entered the bunkhouse.

  “Cavins, go get some grub,” he said.

  The other driver woke up, adjusted his suspenders and walked outside to visit the privy. Trask and Ted were alone in the room.

  “We’ll get those straps off you pretty soon, O’Hara.”

  Ted just glared at him.

  Trask smiled.

  “We’re going to use your map today. You’re going to take us to those places you marked.”

  “Apaches move around a lot,” Ted said. “They could all be gone by now.”

  “That would be your tough luck, Lieutenant. But I want to ask you something, and it’s just between you and me, okay?”

  Trask picked up a chair and set it by Ted’s bunk. He sat down and leaned over so his voice would not carry.

  “Go ahead, Trask. You have me where you want me.”

  “Patience, patience. Only a little while longer. We’ll get some breakfast for you, some hot coffee and you’ll be good as new.”

  Ted sighed, resigned to being bound awhile longer.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked Trask.

  “When you and your company were checking on the Apaches out there, did you find out where they keep their gold?”

  Ted stiffened. “Gold?”

  “Yeah. We know they been hiding it somewheres. You must know where they keep it. You tell me.”

  Now he knew what Trask was really after. Apache gold. There had been rumors of it at the post and in Tucson. He’d never paid much attention to the talk. But now he knew that Trask believed the rumors and he wanted what he thought the Apaches had.

  He also knew that his life depended upon his answer to Trask.

  He felt as if he were in a roomful of hen’s eggs, and if he made a wrong step, he would break those eggs and Trask would have no further use for him. He let the answer form in his mind, take shape, harden into what had to sound like truth coming from his mouth.

  Trask’s breath blew against his face, hot and smelling of stale whiskey and strong tobacco.

  Ted closed his eyes and opened them again.

  Trask was still there, leaning close to him, waiting for his answer.

  And Ted’s throat was full of gravel, and his gut had tightened with fear and uncertainty.

  Trask waited for his answer, a cold look in his pale, steely eyes.

  Chapter 15

  Cloud shadows grazed across the land like the lingering and bewildered shades of sheep. Buttes and mesas stood like the hulks of rusting ships lost on a long ago sea, and the sun blazed down on it all with an unrelenting fire that would bake a lizard’s blood. Carmen’s face sweated under the brim of her straw hat and no amount of fanning with her hands would push cool air through her mouth and nostrils.

  The wagon tracks were dim now, but still visible on the baked sand, like snake tracks turned to fossilized impressions by centuries of sun compacted into a single searing moment. Chama sniffed the air as if seeking a vagrant breeze that might cool his face, dry the sweat soaking from his hairline into his eyes and staining his shirt under his armpits.

  Zak worried a small pebble in his mouth, spat it out as he rode up alongside Carmen, who was riding between the two men, Jimmy in the lead, Zak following in the rear.

  “You’ve been to the next station,” he said to her. “Know who’s there?”

  “Why should I tell you anything, gringo?”

  “Because I asked you with politeness, C
armen.”

  “Phaa,” she spit, but she could not produce a drop of saliva. “You take me prisoner, make me ride in the hot sun, and you say you are polite? You are ladrón, a thief. My husband will kill you as he would kill a cockroach.”

  “So much killing,” he said, half to himself.

  “Yes. You. You kill. Cabrón.”

  “Verdad,” he said. “True.”

  “And so, you too will die. By the gun.”

  “I knew a man,” Zak said, “who taught me much. He was a Lakota. An Ogallala.”

  “I do not know what that is. Indio?”

  “Yes. He was an Indian. His name was Two Hawks. We were watching the dances. He told me that when the people danced, they held hands. They formed a circle. He said that was to show that all people are connected to one another. That we are all the same, in spirit.”

  “We are not all the same. I am Mexican. You are gringo, norteamericano,” she spat as if the very words left a bad taste in her mouth.

  Zak looked at her and felt pity.

  In her eyes, and in the lines on her face, he saw centuries of suffering and pain. He saw the Yaqui blood beneath the skin on her cheekbones, the faint glow of vermillion smeared across the high planes, the ancient bronze of Moorish ancestors in the cast of her jaw, and the black coals of Spanish mothers so sad and haunting in her eyes.

  He thought that she must have been pretty once, as a girl is pretty. With a sweet, smiling face, good white teeth, soft locks of shiny black hair. Now, the years had taken their toll. She was no longer a pretty young girl. But she was a beautiful woman, in the way that old, polished wood is beautiful, in the way a gnarled, wind-blasted tree on the seacoast is beautiful.

  “You have the Indian blood in you?” she said after a while. “You do not look it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not full blood?”

  “No, not full blood,” he said.

  “That is why you do not show the Indian face of your mother,” she said, and he wondered what she was thinking, through that labyrinth her reasoning took her from, that simple black and white place she had come from long ago and journeyed through over so many years.

  “Do we ever know who we truly are?” Zak said. “Do we know our fathers and mothers? Can we trace their bloodlines in ourselves? Or do we forge ourselves in their molds so that we look and act the same? If so, that is very sad, and it makes the world a sad place to live.”

  “The world is a sad place to live,” she said, so softly he had to strain to hear it.

  “Someday, maybe, if the world keeps growing as it is, as people mingle and marry and leave children to grow, we will all have the same bloodlines. As it was in the beginning.”

  “The beginning?” she asked querulously, as if she was lost in the fabric of that world he was weaving with his words.

  “Adam and Eve.”

  “The first man and woman,” she said.

  “Yes. We all sprung from that same seed. Or so the Bible says.”

  “I do not believe that. We are not all from the same seed. That seed did not carry the blood of blacks and red men and Chinese.”

  “Skin colors do not matter. A man bleeds the same red blood, no matter the color of his skin.”

  “Inside, you mean? We are all the same?”

  “Yes. Maybe.”

  “It does not matter to me. I do not think of such things. I know who I am. I know where I came from.”

  “But do you know where you are going?” he asked, and the question went unanswered as Carmen drew back into herself and wended her way through that labyrinth of reasoning, that maze of bewilderment that faced each person who tried to plumb the depths of life’s true meaning.

  “You could save some lives if you tell me how many men are at the next station and, maybe, what kind of men they are. We could spare their lives if they have wives and children and just want to ride on instead of fighting us.”

  “I might tell you who is there,” she said, sounding almost like a pouting child.

  “I wish you would. Before we get there. Otherwise, we have to assume they will not ride away and we will have to kill them.”

  “They are just men. They work for Ferguson, too.” She paused. “Like my husband.”

  “Do you know these men?”

  “I know their names. They are—”

  She broke off and he wondered what she had been going to say. He could see that she was troubled by his questions, by her thoughts about the two men manning the line shack, the way station. Perhaps, he thought, she was worried about her husband as well.

  “Are you Catholic?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “I am Catholic. So is my husband. The two men at the little post house are, how do you call them, heathens?”

  “They do not believe in God?”

  “They believe in money. They bring death with them. That is why they work for Ferguson.”

  Her words were laden with a sudden bitterness. He sensed that she wished things were different. That her husband did not work for Ferguson, that he did not mingle with such as those two he would soon have to face.

  “You do not like Ferguson?” he asked.

  She spat. “Filth. Greed. That is what he is. I do not like him.”

  Zak let out a breath. “These men…they are gunmen?”

  “Yes. They carry guns. I have heard my husband speak of them. They are robbers. Murderers. These are the kinds of men Ferguson hired to drive away the Chiricahuas. Bad men.”

  “You do not want this?”

  “I do not care,” she said. “Nor does my husband. He does not care about Indians, and neither do I.”

  But she did care. He knew that. Her voice quavered when she spoke of them, and he sensed that she was a dam about to break. She had been alone for a while. With only her thoughts. Now, she had someone to talk to about things she held inside. But he would not draw them out. It would be like lighting a fuse on a stick of dynamite.

  “How far to the line shack?” he asked, more to change the subject than to garner information.

  She looked around. For landmarks, he thought. Then she looked at the wagon tracks, what was left of an old stage road, as if trying to recall memorable features.

  “I know there is more distance between the next one than between all the others. My husband told me this. We will not reach it while the sun is still shining. It will be dark by the time we get to it.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because when we left that station, it was dark when we arrived at the other, where Julio left me.”

  “Then it will be dark,” he said. “And maybe that is a good thing.”

  “You will sneak up on them,” she said.

  “I will talk to them. If you will tell me their names.”

  “You want to know who you kill.”

  Stubborn, she was. Honing in on his words like some bird of prey, pouncing on them with a sharp beak, trying to rip them to shreds.

  “So I can call them out. Reason with them.”

  “To do what?”

  “To leave that place without shedding blood.”

  She uttered a wry laugh, a mirthless laugh that was like the crackle of dried corn husks.

  “They are called Lester Cunningham, he is the oldest, and Dave Newton. Dave has the hot head, how you say it, and Lester, he is the quiet mean one, who is always thinking, who always undresses me with his eyes to make me naked in his mind. Julio does not like him. He does not trust him.”

  “And this David, your husband trusts him?”

  “No, but Julio says he is like the cocked pistol with the hair trigger. Muy peligroso.”

  “Very dangerous, yes.”

  They rode on as the sun fell away in the sky, burning into their eyes, and they had cold tamales she had made when they stopped at a small spring just off the wagon path. Zak complimented Carmen on her cooking, even though the meat was old and toug
h, the cornmeal too salty.

  Jimmy Chama had been quiet during the meal, but now, as he sat in the shade of his horse’s belly, he spoke to Zak.

  “I heard you talking with Carmen,” he said. “We will reach the way station after dark.”

  “Yes.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I will talk to the two men there, tell them to go back to Tucson or die.”

  “You want me to back you, then. And who will watch Carmen?”

  “No, you watch Carmen. And wait. I will talk to them. See if they listen to reason.”

  Carmen laughed that dry toneless laugh of hers, that scoffing laugh that was at once a sign of wisdom and disbelief.

  An old wooden stock tank, the tar in its seams badly shrunk and deteriorated, sat on decaying four-by-four whipsawed beams, the water inside, at the bottom, scummed over with green algae. A lizard lay along the top board, blinking its eyes, wondering if it should venture down into the tank. Zak watched it, knowing that the creature would probably drown if it ventured down to the stagnant water. Flies buzzed around the tank in aimless patterns, rejecting the lizard as a source of food.

  “That Lester,” she said, “he is always looking. He will see you, or hear you, and then his gun will talk to you. His gun does not reason.”

  “She’s probably right,” Chama said. “You will go up against two men. If one doesn’t get you, the other one will.”

  “Yes,” Carmen said, her breath hissing over the sibilant like a prowling serpent.

  Zak drew a breath.

  “I will have the night,” he said. “Before the moon is up. I will be only another shadow in the darkness. They’ll hear my voice, but they won’t see me.”

  “Ah,” Chama said. “You will be the shadow, eh. Is that why you are called Jinete de Sombra, the Shadow Rider?”

  Zak did not answer.

  Carmen looked at Zak, shaken by Chama’s question. As if she knew. As if she had heard the appellation before, somewhere. She ate the last of her tamale and washed it down with water, her throat suddenly dry and clogged with meat and masa flour.

  Zak looked up at the sky and the puffs of clouds. The sun had coursed lower on the horizon and would soon set, drawing the long shadows of afternoon into a solid mass, like a burial shroud.