by Bacon Thorn
“Stuck him in the balls with the handle of the shovel when you started your act.”
“Good,” she said fiercely. “God, I hope he’s incapacitated for a long, long time. Filthy little animal.” She gave her hand to Navarre, who squeezed it, and she said, “I can’t get over it. It was so surreal. Everything happened so fast. I feel excited . . . and sick.”
Her teeth chattered suddenly; she looked white and strange around her eyes. He grabbed her as she swayed, holding her tightly. She cried then, silently, bowing her head into his throat. Her body shook and heaved against his. Her tears moistened the side of his neck. He patted her shoulder awkwardly with his right hand, softly touching the hair at the back of her neck.
“You did fine,” he mumbled. “You did fine. We were lucky.”
Her shivering lessened, and then stopped. She held on to him for a moment longer, then stepped back, brushing her eyes with the back of her hand. The sun lighted her drying tears with fractured rainbow bubbles. She smiled weakly, wryly. “Big, brave girl, huh? Whew, I feel mucho better.”
She pushed her hair out of her eyes and detected a scant amount of warmth in Navarre’s approving grin.
“I never thought I’d be so glad to be alive,” she said. “What now?”
Navarre looked at the van, at the huddled Mexican shivering and hugging himself, and drew her aside, a few feet removed from Elidio’s hearing but still within the protection of the van.
“We don’t have much choice,” he said. “Into the mountains. The priest I told you about, do you remember? The one I was visiting in Duelos? He’s got a mission at Sisiqichuc. I think we can get there. It’s a long trip, and it won’t be easy. It’s probably a hundred miles from here. Maybe more. But once we find the railroad tracks to the north and west, we can follow them to him. With the van we can make it by tomorrow or the next day, I think. If we don’t get lost. It’s four now, judging from the sun. In three hours it will be dark. We can drive a long way by then.”
He studied her face and examined the sleeveless blue-and-red print blouse and the pale blue denim skirt she was wearing. He looked at the flat-heeled leather sandals on her slim feet.
She pursed her lips. “I’m not exactly dressed for traveling in the outback, am I?”
“No, and neither am I.” He was coatless; his summer-weight khaki slacks were thin. The portion of his undershirt that showed through the V of his open shirt collar was spotted with dried blood. His hair and the front of his shirt and slacks were covered with dust and grit. He was unshaven, and the discoloring bruise above his right temple had spread beyond the adhesive patch they’d given him in a magnificent circle of purple and yellow.
Yuma shook her head and gave him a small, comforting laugh. “You look terrible. Your poor face. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. Maybe I can fix it up some later. Hadn’t we better hurry? . . . I almost forgot. What do we do about him?” She turned and looked with disgust and hate at the cowering Mexican.
“I’m going to strip his shirt off his back, for starters.”
“His shirt? What for?” Yuma asked, turning to Navarre.
“To protect your shoulders from the sun.”
“But what about him? We can’t leave him. The other one got away, but we’ve got this one. We’ve got to do something to him. They tried to kill us.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Well, you could shoot him.”
“No, I can’t. I can shoot Esquivel because he’s out there with a gun and will shoot us if we give him a chance. I can’t just kill this man, Yuma.”
Elidio, who did not understand English, gazed miserably at Navarre and Yuma. He knew they were talking about him. He was frightened and started to cry. Tears ran down his cheeks. He tried to look smaller than he was.
“Look at that little bastard,” Yuma said. “He understood. He’s scared to death.” Suddenly she stamped over to Elidio and kicked him. The toe of her shoe caught the Mexican in a spot just above where his legs were pressed together. He screamed and fainted.
Navarre thought he heard noises in the bushes on the far side of the van. He bent over and hastily unbuttoned the khaki shirt Elidio was wearing and pulled it off of his limp form. Finally, he handed it to Yuma.
“Time to go,” he said. Suddenly, he put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a squeeze.
She smiled with a funny expression. “I never thought I’d feel sorry for somebody who just tried to kill me. God, I hate this place,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Quickly, she followed Navarre into the van, ducking to keep her head below the level of the window on the passenger side. Navarre turned the motor on and put the van in gear. The wheels caught in the sand, and the van started moving.
Three sudden loud popping sounds made both of them jump. Navarre tromped on the accelerator, and the van spurted ahead. They heard the popping once more and a crinkling metal ticking sound in the front of the van where the motor was mounted. Another bullet striking? Then nothing but the engine racket and the van moving.
“Esquivel,” Navarre said. “He must have skirted the van from behind those bushes and moved ahead of us. Keep your head down. I think we’re out of range now, though.” He steered the van west on a clear sandy path, weaving in and out among bushes and rocks. Yuma, warily lifting her head, investigated the driver’s compartment and found a pair of high-power binoculars. There was a water bag hanging on the window handle on her side and a coil of rope on a shelf behind the front seats. In the same place was a tightly woven red-and-blue blanket that Navarre identified as a saltillo, an all-weather garment. Another garment, a rebozo, smaller than the saltillo, was meant to be worn over the shoulders. Also, there was a worn, soft leather pouch tied with a knot at the top. She unfastened the leather strings, poked her finger inside, and tasted the coarse flour substance that stuck to her skin.
“Tastes like sweet corn,” she said.
Navarre grinned. “Probably pinole, parched ground corn mixed with sugar. A lot of Mexicans in the back country use it as a quick energy source.”
Yuma’s exploration in the cab brought forth two other items, a pocketknife with a broken handle and a box of wooden matches.
“You’re worried about going up there, aren’t you?” she asked. “Couldn’t we just sneak away, veer around and skirt where Esquivel is, and head for the road?”
“The mountains are our best chance, Yuma. Esquivel’s going to get help. We can count on that. We’ve got maybe eight or nine hours’ head start. It’ll take him at least five hours to cover on foot what it took them about an hour to drive. There’s no place we can go by road within two hundred miles where we wouldn’t stick out like sore thumbs. And we don’t have a dime between us. They’ll be looking for us on the roads. You can bet your life on that.
“Up there,” Navarre pointed with his arm, “we can disappear. But it’s not going to be any picnic. Imagine crumpling a piece of paper into a ball in your hand, then letting it unfold. That’s what the Sierra Madres are like. A maze of peaks, valleys, ridges, and depressions. But there are tiny villages scattered in the hills and mountains. We can get food. We’ve got water and the pinole. That is a good start. But we won’t even be safe up there for long. Esquivel will be back with dogs to track us. But at Sisiqichuc, if we make it to Hebrano, we’ll be fine. It’s a better chance for us than down here.”
Yuma’s eyes flared with alarm. “Dogs, Thomas? Big dogs? Oh, Jesus, I’m scared to death of big dogs. Where would he get dogs?”
“Back at the farm. Didn’t you hear barking this morning in the room where they held you?”
“Maybe,” she shrugged. “I don’t remember.”
“Well, I think it’s a breeding farm for guard dogs. Esquivel will be back with them and more help.”
She stared at him curiously, trying to define her trust in him more perfectly. “Why do they want to kill you so badly, Thomas? I was with you; that’s why they wanted me. You said they’re assassins. Who are th
ey after?”
“I’ll explain it to you as we drive along. We’ve got to cover as much ground as possible before dark.”
In the next half hour, Navarre told Yuma about his reason for returning to Mexico and what had happened to him since his arrival in Duelos, including his meeting with Hebrano and the curse of the Zopilote. He told her about his visit to Gracia Esparza and explained how he had sneaked up behind the police car in which Yuma had been held in front of the church. He hesitated for a moment, and then described the mutilation photos of Gracia which Nuños had forced him to examine. He deliberately omitted the attack on him by the booted figure after the accident on the highway which took his wife’s life two years ago.
Yuma was silent for a moment as she listened to Navarre’s story, then said in a low voice, “I can’t understand people who would abuse and kill a woman like that, slitting her neck. The terror she must have gone through. I feel . . . duped . . . as if everything I believe about people is wrong.”
“I can’t help you, Yuma. I just know that murder’s old fashioned and we never get used to it. They’re coming after us and they won’t stop till they find us or we escape.”
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Chapter IX
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“How high are we, Thomas?”
“From sea level, probably 3,500 feet. Maybe higher. We’ve come up a ways.”
Navarre looked at the girl and carefully placed the binoculars he had been holding on the hard sandstone of the outcropping where they were resting. Yuma was sitting with her tanned legs stretched out in front of her and her back braced against the scaly trunk of a mesquite tree stubbornly clinging to the bare white rock. It was twisted, contorted, and east bent from the west winds that had buffeted it since its seed had sprouted in a fissure in the stone. Its leaves were crisp and dark green in the sunlight and dappled Yuma’s face with their elliptical shadows.
She had torn a strip of cloth from the tail of Elidio’s shirt and tied it around her forehead to keep her hair from falling in her eyes. It had served as a sweatband as well and was darkly stained from her perspiration. Her skin had absorbed the harsh sun burning through the overcast, turning darker on her face and legs and arms. In the hollows of her throat the dampness from her exertions had collected dust, moistened it, and deposited streaks of grime. Despite her fatigue, her green eyes sparkled and she seemed fresh. Over her shoulders, she wore the Mexican’s shirt like a tattered mantle. Above their heads the blue sky, free of the thin clouds that had obscured the sun, rolled magnificently, a great, wide, depthless canopy stretching far off to merge with the purple haze of the mountains.
They had marched in a slow, continuous ascent for two hours or so since abandoning the van. It had rolled along for a distance of about ten miles before the motor temperature had begun to rise. Soon, the radiator had steamed, and the motor started making alarming knocking sounds. Navarre, who admitted to Yuma that he knew next to nothing about engines, stared bleakly at the steaming radiator and observed that most likely, one of Esquivel’s random shots had punctured a hole in it, draining the motor of water. They were stranded, forced to strike out on foot, feeling naked and disadvantaged, the margin of safety between them and their pursuers suddenly drastically altered.
Soon after they started walking, carrying the binoculars, the canvas water bag, the saltillo, the rebozo, and the rope. They discovered a dry, rocky goat path that weaved among small hummocks of sand, islands of soapweed and little yellow-flowering agave plants. They stayed with the trail, trudging mile after mile until they reached the broad base of a huge outcropping of stone that rose like the uplifted stern of a sinking ship. Directly below the upthrust was a rock-strewn arroyo they must cross to continue their journey higher into the mountains.
Navarre hesitated before deciding to ascend the turtlelike back of the tilted slab. He felt their lead time had almost eroded away and he had a prickly sensation in the back of his neck that the hunters were closing in. Every awakened instinct in his body warned that not far behind and gaining were unleashed trail dogs sniffing and barking their fresh discoveries as they arrowed in tortuously on the scent of their fugitive quarry. Unlike him and Yuma, who had picked their way through the sand and rocks and brush, the dogs would have a clear trail of footprints to follow.
He had chosen the rising escarpment because it afforded a higher viewpoint from which he could scan their back trail, he hoped. And so they climbed up the back of the rock, struggling for footholds all of the way, jumping over wide cracks, skirting fissures, until they arrived, winded and sweat soaked, at the promontory—a small, flattened plateau where, near the lip, like a gnarled sentinel, a lone mesquite tree stood guard. Long ago it had driven its hardy, enduring taproot deep into the heart of the rock, seeking moisture, and widened the fissure in which it survived as it grew older.
Navarre patiently surveyed the desert country through which they’d struggled and saw nothing but stone boulders, lengthening shadows from the lowering sun, the scarce trees, and the brittlebush dotting the plain. He was not satisfied. But at least, he thought, he had an observation platform from which to spot the tracking dogs and men when they appeared. It was his insistent sense of warning that prompted him now to prepare a defensive niche for Yuma and himself and an escape route in case the dogs came before nightfall.
“Got your wind back?” he asked.
She smiled, flashing her teeth, looking piratical and wild with her ragged headband cutting across her brown forehead at a rakish angle over one dark eyebrow.
“Sure, but tell me what’s ahead of us. Where are we?”
Navarre hesitated for a moment before answering. He had been in the high Sierra Madres several times before as a much younger man and had never forgotten his fascination with the ancient Tarahumara people who lived in the high mountains where “the quiet was crystallized in a great impressive hush.” This description, which he had read in a dusty book, matched the overwhelming solitude that had embraced him when he last stood twenty years earlier on the brink of the great Barranca de Tareracua. Eight thousand feet above the sea to the west, it shouldered the sky, and from its highest point plunged steeply downward to a depth unmeasured by explorers who failed to find its bottom.
To Yuma, he said softly, “It’s a strange, haunted land. Depending on whom you talk to, it’s unbelievably cruel and harsh or it’s so spellbinding and isolated that the loneliness can be shattering.” Then he told her about the night he spent all those years ago near Pomachi, a large pueblo of the Tarahumara Indians.
“I could see the little dots of light that were the lonely cave fires of the cliff dwellers burning out there in the darkness in the great walls of rock and high up the sides of the Tareracua. It means,” he said, “the bottomless arroyo. Just think, the people who still live in those mountains occupy the same caves their ancestors did five hundred years ago.”
When Navarre fell silent, Yuma stared out at the desert horizon gathering dusk and said in a subdued voice, “All this emptiness frightens me. It is lonely out here, and I can’t comprehend people living in holes in the side of a mountain. How long will it take us to get to the place you want to go?”
“With the van gone, with us on foot and being chased, I don’t know. Several days, probably. We’ll have to take it one day at a time. I believe the place where we are is the lower part of the chain of mountains called the Sierra Madre Occidental. Some Mexicans call them the Red Mountains.”
“It sounds awfully lonely to me.”
“It is lonely, and we’ve got a long march ahead of us, but we’ll make it.”
Yuma fell silent, staring between her outstretched legs at the bare rock on which they sat. Then, in a voice only slightly louder than a whisper, she said, “That hateful place back there where they were going to kill us—it’s a graveyard, isn’t it? I know it is. I’ve never been anywhere as desolate, as if . . . as if the hopelessness of all the people buried there is concentrated into a big sigh of despair. It hangs over the graves
like a shadow of gloom.” Crossing her hands over her breasts and clutching her arms protectively, Yuma shivered suddenly. She smiled weakly at Navarre and said, “I’ll be okay in a minute. How many bodies do you think are buried there?”
“Hard to say,” Navarre answered. “Could be a hundred or more. People who’ve been killed because they knew too much.”
“Because they knew too much . . .” Yuma echoed. “I guess that fits us. What do we do next?”
“First, prepare for tomorrow, tonight, and then investigate what’s down there below the edge.”
“Oh, great. From here it looks like tons of empty space.”
Quickly, Navarre unrolled the saltillo he had been carrying, withdrew the broken-handled knife from his pocket, and spread out the square blanket. From one end he sawed through the rough fabric with the rusty blade until he had a strip of cloth about one foot wide and five feet long. Then he ripped it in half with the knife and said, “We’re going to be in the sun most of tomorrow. We’ll both need to protect our heads from heat stroke. I can make crude hats from the strips I’ve cut off. You can wear the saltillo and I’ll take the rebozo. This way, we’ll have protection for our heads and shoulders from the cold at night and the sun.”
“Good idea to make hats, but let me do it,” Yuma said, gathering the blanket in her lap.
“Before you do that, let’s see what’s below us.”
Yuma crawled with him gingerly on her knees, and then lowered herself to her belly, as he did. When they approached the sharp, jutting edge of their rocky platform, they were higher than he had thought. At least four hundred feet to the bottom of the arroyo that ran like a dry, crooked river below them. To the west for miles there was a wide plain heaped here and there with jumbled boulders and a dry wash like a curving snake and there were pencil-thin tracks leading from the south, wiggling north and down from the sharp foothills.
Yuma turned to look at him. “Is this a smart idea, being up here? There’s no place to go but down . . . straight down.”