The Right Eye of God

by Bacon Thorn

  “It’s not the best place in the world,” he agreed, “but look out there. There’s nothing, no place to hide until the foothills. They’ve got to be ten miles away. But look here, Yuma.” She followed his eyes to a wide outcropping, a thick ledge that ran horizontal to the arroyo below, about ten feet or so down from where they lay.

  “You want us to go down there?” she asked sheepishly.

  The ridge that Yuma was drawing back from protruded downward from the face of the rock like a slanting upper lip with a hole gouged in it where the outcropping sheared off, then bulged out again with no bridge across the empty gap. The yawning space was about eight feet wide. Farther down, perhaps twenty feet lower, another stone lip, much wider and several hundred feet long, angled even more sharply downward. From their vantage point the two could not see whether it extended into the arroyo at the bottom. Throughout the face of the cliff hundreds of vertical cracks, fissures, and spidery fractures wrinkled the placid rock like age lines on the leathery skin of an old woman. Navarre could almost touch the drooping ends of that portion of the mesquite tree’s roots which pierced the face and dangled like stringy tentacles in the air.

  He looked behind him at the weltering sun; in half an hour it would disappear behind the brooding mountains. Twilight was already blurring the sharp edges of the desert’s clarity.

  Would the dogs come at night?

  No, he decided. Esquivel, cautious, smarting from his first failure, murderously intent upon retrieving his injured pride and making a quick, clean kill, would hold his animals in check. He knew Navarre was armed and in the cover of darkness would be doubly dangerous.

  But what about the next half hour or so?

  He had refrained from telling Yuma what he feared most. When the tracking dogs came, well ahead of their masters, he was certain they would attack, not merely bark to attract their lagging handlers. The plan he conceived when his eyes explored the ledge and the yawning chasm below it was to tie one end of the rope they carried around the trunk of the mesquite, and with the other end secured around their waists as a lifeline, they could cling to it while they stood on the ledge below. Pistol in hand, he could blast the dogs when they poked their snouts over the edge of the cliff. That was his plan.

  Yuma’s eyes were big when he explained what he wanted her to do—descend alone to the outcropping layer of stone and wait for him until he sighted the dogs. Then, he would hastily join her. If they failed to appear, they would hold their position until the enfolding night made it safe for them to climb back up the wall.

  “If they come, you’ll shoot them, right?” she asked him urgently.

  “That’s the idea. Even I can’t miss at point-blank range.”

  She took a deep breath, bobbed her head, and then tested the elasticity of the hemp with a straining pull against the knotted end he had tied around the tree. Satisfied, she lowered herself over the edge. He lay on his belly and handed down the water bag, binoculars, saltillo, rebozo, and the small bag of sweetened ground corn.

  “Hey, there’s plenty of room down here. We could spend the night if we had to.”

  He nodded and dropped one of the two loops he had fashioned in the rope over his shoulders, snuggling it under his arms. The other loop was fastened around her waist at the end of the line, leaving about twenty feet of slack between them.

  He crawled away from the edge and crouched loosely on the apron of the stone not far from the mesquite tree. An erratic wind had come up with the slow, measured sinking of the sun and it ruffled his sand-stiff hair and rustled the leaves in the tree.

  It could not have been long, ten minutes perhaps, before he heard the dogs and saw the two of them bounding together up the back of the rock. Even at a distance he knew they were Beaucerons: the savage red-stockings breed praised in Europe for their keen intelligence, powerful bite, and extreme aggressiveness toward strangers.

  They were flashing swiftly toward him now, muscular, intent, wolflike predators with a blaze of tawny red on their feet and thighs flaring against the dark liver of their body fur. He hesitated a moment longer to make certain they had fixed him as their prize; then, carefully, as he had planned—and fighting the panic in his stomach—he flattened himself on the rock and pushed, crablike, backwards, guiding himself on the rope until his feet stuck out over the edge. He retreated faster until he hung like a bent pin with his legs pointed down and felt Yuma’s reassuring hands on his thighs. When the dogs, snapping their teeth and snarling, were about fifty yards away, he shouted a challenging defiance at them: “Perro, eh, perro!”

  Suddenly, as his taunting yell died and he was edging down the rock, he felt the revolver slide up from where he’d tucked it between his shirt and the back of his belt. He reached back awkwardly, anxiously, feeling disaster impending, and his fingers brushed the handle grip as the weapon slipped. He felt it fall away and heard it clatter as he went over the edge. He shouted a frantic, futile warning to Yuma, “The gun, catch the gun.” He knew it was too late when he yelled and he clenched the rope, feeling it tighten under his weight. At the last instant before his eyes dropped below the rock verge, he saw the lead dog—large, viciously slanted mouth opened rakishly, the white fangs gleaming, the drowning sunlight glittering in its eyes—spring into its vaulting attack. Thomas dropped, breathless, a plunge of two feet, Yuma’s hand sliding up his thighs and waist, steadying him. Her terrified scream was piercing in his ear as his feet touched solidly on the ledge. “Thomas! Hug the wall. The dog, the dog, it’s coming!”

  Desperately he stared at her. “The gun is gone.”

  She shook her head mutely; her eyes popped wide, hopeless with fright, her mouth working silently as she saw the dog’s red-streaked forelegs, rust belly, and hind legs careen over the lip of the rock above Navarre’s head.

  The dog came in a growling rush, launched in an irreversible attack, seeing too late the empty maw where Navarre had disappeared. Its momentum, unchecked by the frantic bicycling of its hind legs, carried it into a falling arc, past the two of them pressed against the cliff, in a long curving trajectory that ended in the arroyo far below.

  The dog’s companion hunter, lagging a few paces behind its mate, scuffed to a stop on the edge and gazed down anxiously. Its enraged face was not three feet from Navarre. The dog’s head was shaped in the sleek configuration of the classic Doberman but with a shorter, blunted muzzle. The ears were pointed; the tinted hairs below the dark eyebrows gave the yellow, shifting eyes a startling prominence. A stripe of red extended in a dull blaze up from its nose. The drawn-back lips revealed sharp, wetted fangs extending from the deep mouth. Saliva from its tongue dripped on Navarre’s forehead. The dog’s eyes fascinated Navarre. They were dark, vividly intelligent. They fastened on him with predatory eagerness. Navarre wiped his face on his sleeve and shivered, thinking about his foolhardy baiting of the pair, and realized his throat was dry.

  “Do something, Thomas,” Yuma pleaded, hugging the cliff face. She trembled violently as the dog snarled down at them and swiped at Navarre with its claws extended, missing by a foot and a half.

  Navarre nudged Yuma carefully farther over on the ledge; their distance increased the dog’s fury. It began a fretful pacing along the edge, whining in its throat, the wind fluffing the hair on the back of its neck and forming a raised, bristling ocher collar that glinted in the dying sunlight.

  Suddenly, it stopped and sniffed the taut rope leading from Navarre’s hands to the tree. It cocked its head at Navarre, and then attacked the hemp with its teeth, eyeing Navarre for his reaction.

  “I’ll be Goddamned,” Navarre swore. “Yuma, quick, take the rope and keep the slack tight. I’ve got to do something. Anything! In a minute he’ll have the rope chewed through. We’ll be stranded!”

  The dog stopped gnawing the rope when Navarre transferred it to Yuma, then glanced down at her brightly and assaulted the corded hemp with intensified fury, the flashing teeth ripping and cutting. Bits of shredded strands whipped away on t
he wind.

  Navarre yanked off his shirt, buttons popping, and quickly tied a knot in one end. He cautioned Yuma to keep a strain on the line, and then flipped his shirt at the dog. The wind puffed it back at him, but the animal reared back, watching Navarre intently as he tied two heavier knots in the joined sleeves and wrapped the shirttail around his hand. This time when he swung the knotted shirt in an upward arc, it connected with the side of the dog’s snout and there was a sharp, brittle click of its teeth closing on air. Enraged, the dog danced above Navarre, barking furiously and showering him with grit and loose stones kicked up by its paws.

  Navarre swung again and the dog was ready. Its teeth clamped firmly on the first knot as it sailed forward, and it yanked upward with its head and shoulders powerfully at the same time Navarre hauled downward with all of his strength. He could feel his heels lift as the stubborn dog strained forcefully, and then felt the tension ease, and he knew the animal had miscalculated. Sensing its mistake, it tried to spit the rag out of its mouth, but it was impaled securely on its long teeth.

  The dog slipped forward, growling querulously in its throat, teetering on the edge, digging its claws furiously into the crumbling sandstone, and then suddenly it was over the edge in the air, plunging, mouth agape, at Navarre.

  The sudden release of the dog’s tension on the shirt that bound them together unbalanced Navarre and he tottered back on his heels. He screamed at Yuma as he leaned into space, “Pull in the slack!”

  He seemed to float for a moment as his feet lost touch with the ledge. In that moment, with the sinking, sick feeling in his throat, with the wild-eyed dog descending on him, with Yuma’s staring, chalky face and heaving shoulders as she reeled in the rope with her hands, Navarre was suspended between life and death. He was jolted forward by Yuma’s desperate tug, just as the dog hurtled down, smashing against his shoulders. The blow drove him head on into the cliff, and the dog bounced off his back. His right arm, linked to the falling animal by the shirt rag which was twisted around his hand and hooked to the dog’s fangs, shot downward, jerking him to his knees. Then the ribbon of fabric stretched and parted. The dog disappeared, trailing a streamer of khaki like a flag of defeat from its open mouth.

  Yuma stood transfixed, stunned, gazing into the depths long after there was nothing to see. She heard Navarre groan and bent over him anxiously. His scalp wound had reopened from the crack to his head when the dog’s falling weight rammed him into the cliff. It was oozing blood. Crumbs of dirt were imbedded in the lacerated flesh. The bandage had sweated off long before they had reached the rock. He struggled to his feet with the help of her steadying arms.

  She couldn’t control her frightened anger. “Goddamn it, Thomas, don’t you ever scare me like that again.”

  He tried to laugh, but his knees were trembling violently. “I feel like an old man,” he said.

  A few minutes later, cold and exhausted, the sun drowning in a final fiery dying, the two of them sprawled on the naked rock with the water bag, binoculars, and coverings beside them. To the southwest the rising plain in front of them swept into the hazed horizon under towering thunderheads, fire edged with the blood of the drowning sun. Below them, immense and brooding, the broken scarp of the Sierra Madre chain pitched up purple shadowed and craggy over the tangled line of brush that lined the arroyo at the bottom. Yuma moved closer to Navarre as the sky darkened and consumed their own stretching shadows. They merged with the menacing ones of the mountains.

  With the darkness quickly swallowing the remaining light, Yuma swept their sleeping area clean of rubble with her hands. After she completed her work on the blanket she found several rocks, baseball size and larger, which she placed three feet or so from the ledge drop-off side of the shelf. Sharp-edged protection against rolling too far in their sleep, she said.

  That was the moment when Yuma, looking up, discovered two nasty surprises—the first was that the rope, their lifeline, no longer was connected to the mesquite tree. But the second shock was the terrifying sight of a third dog whose appearance seemed huge in the last light. The sight of him made her stiffen and cry out, which galvanized Navarre out of his torpor.

  Speechless with fear, Yuma pointed above her head and with a strangled whisper croaked, “Thomas, Thomas, look!”

  In the indistinct dark, a large, silent animal looming over the edge of the cliff seemed to have risen from the naked rock like a stony sentinel. His threat was magnified by his voiceless scrutiny of the stranded couple. He had made no sound, no warning; he was suddenly present, an evil, heart-stopping premonition of disaster.

  Yuma whispered in awe, “God, Thomas, he just keeps staring; he’s transfixed, and silent as death. He’s enormous, big as a horse! What are we going to do?”

  The dog, discernible in the closing darkness, was black as coal, short furred from head to tail. He was, Navarre estimated, at least six inches taller at the shoulders than the two Beaucerons who’d plunged to their deaths. His chest breadth was massive, his head huge with a flat forehead, like a roof that sloped down between the erect ears to the blunt nose. He was inarguably the dominant dog of the pack.

  It was the superb control and silence the animal displayed that convinced Navarre the beast was extremely dangerous. Also, he was certain the dog’s vocal cords had been severed. European canine breeders, bent on creating ruthless predators who would not betray their presence by barking, were known to favor the surgery. There were ancient legends about ruthless canines that slipped like deadly shadows behind enemy fortifications, killing the unwary silently and then disappearing like wraiths in the night. Apparently, he thought, before his own death, the vet Rodriguez had been ordered to perform the surgery. And the truth was, Navarre acknowledged, that a voiceless dog was much scarier than one with a bark. But why hadn’t the dog acted quickly to jump down from the ledge above once he had spotted his prey? It dawned on him with sudden reassuring clarity that the extreme risk of dropping down ten feet from the top of the cliff to the narrow ledge below was too dangerous. The slightest miscalculation would plunge the hound past the ledge in a deadly fall to the bottom of the arroyo. Navarre breathed easier. He turned to Yuma. “I think we’re safe from attack tonight. He can’t get down to us and he knows it. He’ll stand guard like he’s supposed to do until Esquivel gets here early in the morning. You can bet on that.”

  “Are you sure he can’t get down?” Yuma asked, her eyes pleading for his strong assurance.

  “Yes, I am. But with our rope disconnected from the tree, we’re stuck here on the ledge. It probably snapped at the place where the second dog gnawed on it. My weight when I fell back must have severed it. In the excitement, we just didn’t notice it. But we’ve still got at least one hundred feet left.”

  Yuma shrugged. Color had returned to her face. She said in a low voice, “I’m okay, just so I don’t have to look at that horrible beast. You’re sure he can’t get down?”

  “From where he is, I don’t think so. Yes, I’m certain he’s not going anywhere.”

  Navarre fell silent for a moment, and then said, “Sorry about losing the gun.” His teeth were chattering.

  Yuma stared at him, her eyes softening. “To hell with the gun. You’re exhausted and cold. I’ll help you with the rebozo and then I’ll snuggle against you.” She helped him to stretch out on his side with his back to the cliff. She lowered herself next to him with her buttocks against his stomach, pulled the saltillo over her shoulders, and drew his arms around her waist.

  She knew when he dropped into sleep on the hard surface; she felt his limbs relax, his sensitivity to her change from awareness to surrender. It may have been an hour that he slept with her in his embrace, breathing gently, evenly. Secure in his arms, aware of the dog as a delayed threat, Yuma examined her feelings for the man who had brought violence and the threat of death into her life. She did not want to misinterpret the tenderness she felt for this man. She did not want to give it greater meaning than it had. She knew her attraction t
o him was not love, quite yet, but she was far beyond the first stage of strong fascination.

  When she thought about his sudden reappearance at the window of the policeman’s car the night before, she remembered hearing his voice with a thrill she had never experienced in her life. It had been far more than relief and gratitude at being rescued from an unpleasant situation. It had been confirmation of her earlier intuition that between them something remarkable could happen. She had sensed it almost from the moment he had climbed into her car on the hot, lonely road to Chihuahua, and it had alarmed her and made her defensive, brash—and foolish. But Yuma also knew her track record . . . Time, give it time, she thought as she gazed into the unfathomable sky, a moment’s respite from fear.

  She had been stunned when he had walked away after her terrible words—those she’d used to cover up the ones she had wanted to say. But how was she to explain to a man she had just met, one who was running, that she thought something marvelous could happen between them? She knew he was in trouble, but it was unimportant. She had gone to the church to find out what she could about him because it was her only strong link to him. He was different . . . his innate goodness, his protectiveness of her, and what drove her most crazy was his resistance to her, which only added curiosity to the smoldering fire that she felt could burn out of control.

  Now, with his breath rising and falling on her cheek, she looked at the night around her and felt content. The wind had stopped. The moon above was a great silver platter in the sky; there was the fragrance of mesquite to give the air character and sweetness. She thought about Thomas Navarre and compared him to Cid Camaro and felt a moment of panic and doubt. She’d been attracted to Cid—still was in the strange, fatalistic way of a woman who knows she is courting disaster. He was strong, masculine, and cynical about his female conquests. She found him to be a challenge. But he wasn’t trustworthy. He was egocentric, generous, and terribly cruel. Why compare the two? she asked herself. Because, she acknowledged, Cid is unfinished business. He is too much like the other men in your life, she heard the quiet voice within her admonish.