“And you think that’s the white girl Lulu wrote about?”
“It could be,” Stan replied. “Especially considering what happened next.”
“What’s that?”
“The girl had another lover—I guess she was betrothed—and he confronted her and Estevan as they tried to put the finishing touches on the sculpture. There was a fight, and she was killed, her last life’s blood splashing the statue. Estevan abandoned it then, afraid of what her blood might do to it.”
“This is all kind of out there, Stan.” Oliver had gone through the town, passed the brightly lit Express Stop and was on the dark stretch leading almost due south. The speed limit was back up to fifty and he struggled to hold it there.
“I thought I had convinced you that you need to give in to magical thinking to understand this stuff,” Stan reminded him.
“Right, sorry, go on.”
“They left the statue where she died, after burying her body and the man’s, whom Estevan killed. I do think this is your girl’s statue.
“Word of it has spread throughout the magical community—and yes, before you ask, there is one, and I’m not talking about David Copperfield and Lance Burton. I’m talking about serious magic users, the underground occult. The statue—missing for at least three centuries—is reputed to be an extremely potent artifact, capable of endowing its possessor with incredible powers. Except nobody knows for sure because like I said, for several hundred years no one has known where it’s been. Lately, according to my sources—and before you ask, don’t—there’s been a bit of a buzz around it, suggesting that maybe it’s resurfacing. Its return is somehow supposed to herald the rediscovery or reclamation of Aztlán—I told you it all tied together. They call her La Niña Blanca. This is something that people would literally kill to get their hands on.”
Oliver thought about the Lavender family, dead in their little ranch house, and missing Lulu. “Okay, Stan. Thanks for all this. It’s way more than I could have dreamed of.”
“You got me intrigued,” Stan said. “And now that I’ve made a few inquiries, I guess I’m involved in some way too. Let’s hope I’m wrong and the damn thing stays missing.”
“Sounds good to me.” Stan was starting to break up, and Oliver knew the call had to come to an end. Just in case, he pulled off the road outside the Holy Trinity Monastery. The rain sounded louder when the car was still.
“One more thing,” Stan said. “Nobody knows what the de Vaca party’s route was precisely. Most current scholars think they went directly into Mexico from Texas, and never got into New Mexico, much less Arizona. Hallenbeck, though, who wrote one of the first definitive histories of the adventure, believed that they did make it into Arizona. Not only that, but according to Hallenbeck’s figuring, they passed right by where you live, through the Sulphur Springs Valley and into Mexico near Douglas. I don’t know what connection that has to anything, but thought you should know it.”
“I owe you a big one,” Oliver said. “Let me know if there’s ever anything I can do for you, Stan.”
“Just don’t bone any more students, Oliver. That’s good enough for me.”
“You don’t need to worry on that score.” Oliver checked his mirror, but the road was as empty as it had been since Benson. As he pulled back onto Highway 80, he thanked Stan again and ended the call. Before he put the phone away, he tried Jeannie again. No one answered. Just in case, he tried Lieutenant Shelton, with the same result. Where is everyone? he wondered.
The speed limit was still fifty, but he sped up to sixty-five, so that when it jumped to sixty-five in a few minutes he could accelerate to eighty without the change being too abrupt.
17
At the door, Buck swallowed and dropped his flashlight back into its sling on his duty belt. Raul, holding a tactical entry ram in both hands, gave him a single sharp nod. Buck pounded on the solid wooden door hard enough to rattle it in its frame. “Cochise County sheriffs!” he shouted, backing away two steps and putting both hands on his .40-caliber Beretta. He held it high enough to fire over Raul’s shoulder if it came to that.
No answer came from within. “Take it down,” Buck said. Raul nodded again and swung the ram from the shoulders, slamming it into the door just above the lock. The frame splintered under the blow, the door swinging into darkness. Raul tossed the ram to his right so it wouldn’t be in the way and clawed his weapon from its holster.
A half second of silence followed, maybe less. Then the darkness bloomed with fire and thunder, as if the sky’s crash of light and sound had somehow transported itself into the little cabin. Buck almost had enough time to blink before hot knives darted into his face and neck and thudded against his chest. Buckshot, he thought as he threw himself backward, twisting in midair, breaking his fall with his left hand so he didn’t drop the gun in his right, and then, as his elbows folded and his knees touched down and his stomach and finally his chin landed in the mud beyond the cabin door, in that moment when time seemed to stand still, he thought, Buck shot, and even managed a brief smile.
And then he remembered Raul, who had gone in first.
“Raul!” he shouted.
Raul had gone down, flat on his back, hands splayed out to his sides.
In the dim light the blood pooling behind his head—what remained of his head—looked black with silver highlights. Raindrops rippled the pool.
From around back came the sounds of people shouting, running. “Don’t go inside!” Buck cried. “It’s booby trapped!”
He knelt beside Raul, grabbed a wrist, felt for a pulse. He couldn’t bring himself to touch the neck, where one might have been easier to find, because there just wasn’t much neck there. Flaps of shredded skin joined shoulders and chin. Raul’s face was hamburger, one eye gone entirely and the other oozing white.
He found no pulse, no life.
Already he was thinking of whom he’d have to notify. Raul wasn’t married, but he dated a woman who worked at the Gadsden. Anna something, Buck thought. He would have to find her and let her know. And then there were Raul’s parents, his brother and two sisters and their families. Uncle Raul was a favorite with the kids.
“Buck.”
Randy Cummings stood beside him, touched his shoulder.
“He’s gone, Randy.”
“I can see that.”
“Bastard set a booby trap in there. Shotgun, connected to the door. Soon as it opened up, the gun went off, and Raul took the worst of it.”
“You’re hit too,” Randy said.
“I’m fine. She’s not in there, is she?”
“We haven’t entered yet.”
“I’m pretty sure the front door is clear now. Just use plenty of light and be careful. If she’s in there, we have to find her, but I don’t think she is. I think this was nothing but a trap.”
“We’ll check, Buck. You’ve got to get to a hospital though.”
“I have to get down to Douglas, tell Raul’s family what happened.” He blinked hard, swallowed. “It’s on me. I should never have let him go in first.”
“He knew the score,” Randy said. It sounded heartless, but it was just Randy’s way: direct and honest. He squeezed Buck’s shoulder as if to hoist him back to his feet. “Come on, Buck. Carmela or Scoot can drive you. We’ll take this place apart board by board. Anything’s here, we’ll find it.”
“The fucker set us up,” Buck said. He steadied himself against Randy’s stable form and rose slowly, feeling suddenly ancient and infirm. “Over the span of years and in different states, all for this. All so he could take out a cop. What kind of human being is he?”
“You sure he is one?”
“On the way back we would have argued about what music to listen to. He would have wanted Ricky Martin or Christina Aguilera or Selena, some Latin pop star, and I would have said, I hate that Mex shit, you might as well listen to corridos about drug dealers and dead dogs or something.”
Randy draped an arm around Buck’s shoulders, t
rying to steer him away from Raul. “You’re in shock, Buck. We have to get you out of the storm.”
“Of course I’m in shock, some murdering motherfuck just killed my friend.”
“We’ll find him, Buck. He couldn’t have done all this without leaving some traces. We’ll find him, and he will pay.”
“You’d better find him before I do, Randy,” Buck said. “Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy never killed the bad guys, right? They just shot the guns from their hands and then knocked them out cold.”
“That’s the way it usually went,” Randy said.
“You’d better find him because if I do, I will kill him. No matter what. I will kill him.”
“Come on, Buck.” Arm over Buck’s shoulders, Randy walked him toward the Yukon. “I’m going to keep Carmela here with me. Scoot’ll drive you down to Douglas. Hospital first, promise me.”
“Hospital first.”
Randy led him to the passenger side, opened the door, helped Buck into the seat. Tenderly, as if assisting a child, he fastened Buck’s seat belt. “I’ll get Scoot,” Randy said, and then he ran back into the night and the rain.
Interlude: 1536
The first time he saw men on horseback, after his years in the wilderness, Alvar thought they were centaurs or some other miraculous beasts. They rode toward him from far off in the distance, over a flat, barren plain. Heat shimmered off the dirt, adding to the sense of unreality, as if they came through a veil of some kind. Behind them the plume of dust they kicked up lingered in the still air like low brown clouds.
Alvar had been so immersed in the realms of magic that the simple explanation—they were Spaniards, and they rode horses—didn’t occur to him until Estevan shouted out. “We are saved!” the Moor called. He turned to Alvar, walking a dozen paces behind with eleven Indians behind him (Alonso del Castillo and Andrés Dorantes had stayed in a largely abandoned village ten leagues back, too exhausted to continue), and Alvar could see that, parched as they all were, tears had formed in the man’s eyes. “By the grace of the good Lord our God, those must be Christians!” Estevan said.
It was true that the Indians they had lived among and traveled with these many years did not ride horses. They could learn to, he supposed. They had demonstrated that they were not the subhuman beings other Spanish adventurers had claimed. Even Alvar’s paternal grandfather, Pedro de Vera Mendoza, conqueror of the Canary Islands, had staffed his household with conquered Guanche slaves that the old man described as inarticulate, unintelligent and incapable of holding on to thoughts that weren’t beaten into them. Alvar and his companions had found the opposite to be true; the Indians they had befriended had different experiences and beliefs, but they were just as able and quick-witted as any European.
“If it is true, Estevanico,” Alvar whispered while they were still alone, “and they are Christians, not another word of our ungodly doings must ever pass our lips.”
Estevan squeezed his lips together with two slender fingers. Alvar could see in his eyes that the Moor agreed. He only hoped the man could be trusted.
He had suspected they neared civilization, and believed they had long since crossed into Mexico. Days ago, in an impoverished village where the ancient natives (there were no children, and few men or women of an age to fight or labor) had surrounded them and spent an hour touching their flesh, baked by years in the sun but, even so, pale and hairy by comparison, fingering their hair and beards, feeling the rags they wore about their loins, Alonso had become separated from the others, and at one point had let out a cry of alarm.
Alvar, Andrés and Estevan had broken free of the crowd and joined him at once. Alonso pointed at one of the village’s warriors, a man with short dark hair that he undoubtedly cropped with one of their stone tools, a round belly and a grin that revealed only a dozen or so teeth. Alvar found nothing especially strange about the man on first examination. The villages they had passed through in recent weeks had been poorer than the permanent adobe settlements they had seen before, the number of healthy adults fewer, but except for his health and age this man did not seem especially noteworthy.
“Ahh!” Estevan said. He saw whatever it was that had made Alonso cry out, and he moved closer to the warrior, almost hesitantly, pointing at the man’s chest.
The warrior wore a narrow strip of leather around his neck and, suspended from that, a sort of amulet. Alvar realized, once he examined it, that the thing was a buckle from a sword belt. A horseshoe nail had been stitched to it with a bit of thread.
These people had precious little, not even much corn to offer their guests, and they had neither swords nor belts nor buckles, neither horses nor shoes nor nails.
Those things could only have come from a European.
Alvar brushed past Estevan, grabbing the amulet in his fist. “Where did you get these?” he demanded. “How did you come by them?”
An interpreter who had accompanied them from the last village came forward and translated Alvar’s questions. When the warrior spoke, the interpreter, a tall, lanky fellow with one eye and a horrible scar where the other had been, said, “From heaven.”
“You did not go to heaven after it,” Alvar insisted. “Who brought them from there for you? From whom do you have these things?”
The warrior pointed to the south and west, and spoke again. “There is a river,” the translator said. “He says that bearded men such as yourselves came to the river while he and some friends hunted there.” He turned back to the warrior, who continued his tale. “He says that the bearded men rode on the backs of beasts and carried spears twice as long as a man is tall, and long knives, and wore clothing over their entire bodies and over their heads.”
“Armored Spaniards, with lances and swords,” Andrés said, his voice fraught with wonder.
“He says there was a fight. They stabbed two of his friends with the long spears, but he hid across the river until they had gone. When he went to see his friends, he saw that the bearded strangers had left these gifts for him in the sand.”
“No doubt one’s belt was broken in the scuffle,” Alonso said. “And a horse threw a nail.”
“Where did the men go?” Alvar asked.
“Back across the river and toward the sea,” the interpreter said after relaying the question.
“We must go the same way,” Alvar said. “Those are our people, and we must be reunited with them.”
The interpreter translated that, although Alvar had not meant him to, and the warrior’s eyes bugged with fear. He backed away from the Spaniards, shouting something to his fellows, and the rest of the villagers kept their distance after that. Alvar and his companions didn’t even sleep in the village that night, but kept going and camped several leagues away.
After that, the villages they encountered were mostly abandoned, fertile fields bearing crops left to rot. What natives they saw had taken to the mountains, hiding. They said that bearded men had invaded and burned their villages, taken their children and any women and men able to work.
Slavers, Alvar understood.
Over the next few days, most of the Indians who had followed them for so long, village to village, week by week, turned back. Everyone knew what it had taken Alvar days to comprehend: Spaniards were raiding up from Mexico City, enslaving the natives and leading them away, killing any who dared to defend their lives and their homes.
Alvar knew that they had to catch up to the Christians, slavers or no. He had demanded a quickening of their pace, which had worn out Andrés and Alonso, and then had continued on ahead with Estevan and a handful of the Indians who remained steadfast. Now they would meet, for the first time in years, people of their own kind.
Coming out of the wavering air, the four riders reined up before Alvar and Estevan and peered at them with confused expressions. “I am a Christian,” Alvar explained. The words felt strange in his mouth. “I am a Spaniard!”
“You don’t look like one to me,” one of the riders replied. “Don’t look like anything
I’ve ever seen. A hairy-legged Indian with a beard, perhaps.”
“My name is Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca,” Alvar said. “I was the treasurer for the expedition of Pámfilo de Narváez, lost in the Floridas. My companion is Estevan, a Moor, the property of Andrés Dorantes, also with that expedition. Dorantes and Alonso del Castillo, also Spaniards and Christians from the Narváez expedition, wait for us ten leagues or so behind, too weak to continue.”
“Even if I believed all that you say,” the rider who had spoken before answered, “what would you have me do?”
“My Spanish may sound odd because I have not been using it much these last years,” Alvar said. “But have you known an Indian who could speak it as well? We are countrymen, and fellow Christians, and I insist that you take me to your captain.He will send men and horses back to fetch our companions, Castillo and Dorantes.”
The riders spoke quietly among themselves, so that Alvar could not overhear. He knew they would go along with his request. But he did not like the way they eyed his Indian companions, whom they no doubt saw as nothing more than other potential slaves.
He had worried for many months, if not years, that when he finally met Christians again, he would fall out with them over his use of magic during his time among the Indians. Now he knew, without a moment’s doubt, that he had been wrong all that time. They would still fall out, but it would be over the treatment of the Indians, whom the Spaniards valued only as wealth, as property, and whom Alvar viewed as friends and fellow humans put on Earth by God. He wondered how strained relations would become with those Spaniards he would encounter.
Alvar and Estevan had feared burning at the stake. That was not to be Alvar’s fate, or Estevan’s, but Alvar would never successfully rejoin Spanish civilization. After several years and other adventures he would find himself in chains and then banished to Africa, and although the king would annul the sentence and he would die in honor, he would never again feel at home in Europe. Estevan would die in the north, on the expedition of Fray Marcos de Niza in search of the seven cities of Cíbola.
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