by Bacon Thorn
His hunch was that Nuños was betting on them to take the easier route, find the railroad, and follow it west to Creel, where the mission was located.
Smiling crookedly at Navarre, Yuma said, “There doesn’t seem to be much of a choice for us, does there?”
Two days later, on a path that led them higher into the Sierras, they munched on the last of the wild pig that was safe to eat and were trudging in the late afternoon through knee-high grass wet from a thunderstorm that had flooded the ground. They were hunched and cold with their coverings pulled tightly under their chins when the sun came shining through low clouds at their backs. Navarre looked downward through the pine boughs, down at the sloping tumble of the mountains rising from the east under the pale pink of the distant sky. As the sun warmed him, he loosened his rebozo and paused to listen. Both he and Yuma had heard faint, faraway noises, thin human voices, and the muffled sound of hooves for the past two hours of their climb. They were exhausted, but wary and suspicious. They had spotted smoke from small adobe houses that seemed to have grown like mushrooms from the brown soil. They had heard barking, along with the faint tinkle of cattle bells, but people they had not sighted. Both of them acknowledged that the voices and horse sounds they heard were not part of the quiet that blanketed the mountain like a veil of cotton. They were sharper, more strident and intrusive.
The shape of the land had changed remarkably as they climbed. Now it was composed of gray-green walls of stone, dotted with caves. The walls plunged hundreds of feet from the jagged rims of dozens of mountain crags into connecting arroyos that deepened into larger, steep-walled canyons below. And like a silver thread, at the foot of each one wound a river, for which Navarre had no name. He was certain, though, that he and Yuma had reached an elevation of seven or eight thousand feet and were far enough west for the parakeets and parrots they saw chittering and fluttering their wings to have flown from the distant Pacific Ocean on the west side of the Sierras to feed on pine nuts. “Guacamayos,” Navarre said to Yuma, giving a name to the colorful green birds that swept above them in the half-lit silence.
“I wonder what scared them?” he said. Then, abruptly, he pointed to one of the caves that opened above a long, stony ridge and motioned for her to follow him. Once they had reached the opening, they were pleased to see that it was several feet deep, dry and comfortably wide. When they deposited their gear to rest for a few minutes, Navarre turned to Yuma and said, “This is as high as we go. We’ve got to work our way south and down. If I’m right, we can’t be too far from the mission. If those sounds we heard came from hunters looking for us, somehow we’ve got to slip by them.”
A sudden swishing sound and faint, foul odor startled Navarre and frightened Yuma. Wide eyed, her face white and drained, she was speechless with terror. Shrunk against a stone wall, she could only point up at the branches of a lone pine tree. Scrawny, about one hundred feet high, it was anchored in the earth no more than fifty feet away from them.
Whipping around with his heart pounding, Navarre stared in disbelief at the black-feathered, bald-headed, turkey-sized buzzard perched on a high bough. Its red-veined yellow eyes sunk in the hollows above its curved yellow beak were fixed coldly on him. Its long, black wings, clutched tightly against its body, were poised for flight from the narrow limb on which it sat.
Navarre couldn’t fire his pistol at the scavenger; the noise would give away their position. But he could scare it away. Navarre reached to the ground and picked up a smooth, round stone about the size of an orange. He didn’t expect to hit his target. When he drew back his arm and hurled the rock with all his strength, luck directed his aim, and the stone struck the evil vulture just as it jumped off its limb and stabbed the air with its wings. The stone thudded against its narrow chest and popped off a few short feathers, and it screeched from the force of the blow. Staggered from its flight path, the zopilote sank, flapped its strong wings urgently, and awkwardly gained height. It was gone before its gagging stench reached Navarre and Yuma.
Navarre looked at Yuma squarely and saw the bewildered question and fright in her eyes. “Don’t ever believe in ghosts,” he said. “That vulture isn’t the same one who died in the fire. Leave resurrection to the Bible. Come on, let’s go.”
They walked hurriedly through a thin copse of straggling timber. Scrawny wooden sentinels, the trees peered austerely into nearby jumbles of mountain rocks and twisted formations. An eerie silence muffled the sound of Navarre and Yuma’s passage, and they tramped silently until they found a shallow hollow where they could shelter out of the wind.
In their new stone pocket, Yuma shivered as she stood looking at him helplessly, her wide green eyes moist with tears, her face still pale, and her lips pressed together in a tight white line to hold back a cry of desperation.
Navarre drew her into his arms and held her tightly, whispering in her ear, “Don’t give in now. You’ve been incredibly brave. I know the vulture scared you, but you are trying to understand things that have no explanations. You can’t keep your sense of reality intact out here. The giant mountains, the unforgiving isolation and loneliness, are so depressing that people here invent stories and superstitions to fight against the oppression. The zopilote you saw in the tree is not the black bird we saw take shape in the smoke rising from the burning van. I believe what we saw was an illusion, a deception too real not to trust. We refuse to doubt what our eyes witness and our memories record because they don’t lie to us. But it makes better sense to reject the impossible as false than to accept the unseen world of gods, demons, and ancestral spirits of the zopilote.”
Yuma quietly absorbed Navarre’s argument for rational interpretation, and then she looked up at him and shook her head slowly. “I believe,” she said stubbornly, “that there is more than one alternative. Things are not as simple as black and white, and I don’t believe in intellectual cages. I do think the ugly vulture you chased away has been following us, and he is part of the mystery of Mexico, with its illusions, misdirections, and evil witches.”
She hesitated, and then added, “I don’t know what the truth is, but I won’t hide from it. Also, I’m not going to probe for a better answer because I’m certain I’ll never find one.”
Navarre shrugged, then said, a little disappointed, “I want you to hide in the hollow of the rocks, where it’s warmer. I’m going to sneak down and see who’s below us. We can’t make any plans unless we know what we’re up against. I may be gone for an hour or more. But don’t worry. I’ll be back.”
Yuma pressed her hand against Navarre’s chest, pushing herself away so she could look squarely into his eyes. “You’re not going anywhere without me,” she said in a suddenly fierce voice. “If something happened to you, I’d be lost. I’m not going to stay behind. We win or lose together, just like it’s been from the start!”
Navarre threw up his hand in mock surrender.
“Okay,” he said, taken aback, grinning at her ultimatum and admiring her spunk.
“You’re right, of course. Let’s start down while we still have some light before the sun drops behind the mountains.”
She nodded. But the stubborn expression remained on her face.
Cautiously they descended, walking slowly through the fading light, conscious of the sharpening bite of cold in the air. After they had picked their way lower in the next half hour, their vision was aided by a last pale burst of the sun between black clouds. The fading shower of light painted a faint ochre edge to the pines, and to humps of grass-covered rocks which they skirted. Soon the wind came sighing in the timber, carrying a sharp reminder of the snow in the high peaks it had passed as it plunged lower. They cleared the pines, then, teeth chattering, they made their way into a cup shape in the land where rain came striking in the wind and chilled them deeply.
Feeling his own desperation with the cold clamping down viciously, robbing them of energy, Navarre knew they had to find warm clothing and shelter soon. Both of them were wet, miserable, depressed,
and on the verge of panic. He motioned for Yuma to stop as he studied the shape of a great oak through the rain-streaked binoculars that hung from his neck. “There are horses under the tree,” he said, handing the binoculars to her.
“You’re right,” she whispered. “I know about horses. They can be our salvation. I can’t take much more of this. I’ll go first; I know how not to scare them.”
“We’ve got to be careful,” he said, warning her needlessly and following behind her. “They belong to somebody, and we don’t want any nasty surprises.”
As they covered the wet grass, dusk deepened the quiet and lay in a huge silence that spread to the rim of the sky above them. Quite plainly he saw the four horses now and he held his breath as Yuma walked softly and certainly to a large bay that nickered when she touched her muzzle and smoothed her jaw with her hand. Navarre heard her murmur low, soothing words to the horse, and then she untied the rope that secured the four animals to the oak and boosted herself gracefully on the bay’s bare back.
It came then, as Yuma drew abreast of Navarre, as fast as the lightning that streaked the sky above the mountains—the small thunder of the shot, the bullet’s thwack, the scream of the struck horse, its clumsy lurch, and its thumping collapse on the ground. Dazed for a frightening instant—as the bay’s haunch knocked him to the ground—as he saw Yuma leap clear of the body falling from under her—as he saw blood splashing from the bay’s mouth—Navarre squeezed the soaked earth.
He was breathless with the rage that made vivid the image of the man he’d glimpsed for an instant before he fell. The horseman with a rifle was coming on now; he heard the sound of hooves and felt their tremor through the dripping ground on which he lay. With a savage whisper to Yuma—“Don’t move!”—he pulled the pistol from his pocket. He sheltered it under his hand and said silently to himself: Lie still, lie still, wait, wait until—until the hooves stopped running, slowed, until the legs and chest of the horse loomed above him an arm’s length away. Now! Now, he said, raising his body on one arm, whipping the gun into the air, squeezing the trigger, and hearing the flat crack of sound. He felt the kick in his hand, saw the shadow looming above him lurch, tumble, and fall. He jumped up, hot and furious at the shape on the ground, ready to pounce, to kick, to choke; he heard with a start the hack of his own breath, the beat of his own heart, as the shape twitched in the rain, went limp and silent.
“Is he dead?”
Navarre drew a deep, shuddering breath into his lungs and nodded his head. It took him a long moment to find his voice. He saw that Yuma had grasped the reins of the dead man’s horse, calming the animal.
“Was he one of those who’re after us?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
He looked at the man in the deepening twilight. The sun was over the mountain, but there was enough color in the early night to distinguish the rider as a vaquero, probably. He wore sheepskin chaps, a heavy woolen shirt, and a faded saltillo over his shoulders. The rifle he’d fired lay in the grass next to the bay horse with the red hole in her neck, still leaking blood.
Carefully, Navarre removed the crumpled hat from the dead man’s head, jammed it over his own wet hair, and decided not to turn him over face up. He did not want to remember the features of the man he had killed. Maybe he was innocent and maybe he wasn’t, but he had shot at Yuma to kill her. That was proof enough of his intention and his faulty aim.
In the next few minutes, Navarre pulled the saltillo away from the corpse, handed it wordlessly to Yuma for her to throw over her shoulders, to replace the wet one, and motioned for her to catch another horse while he retrieved the horseman’s rifle and wiped it as dry as possible on the shirttail of the dead man. His actions were methodical, but he was frozen inside, unable to speak. The cold rage that had gripped him when he faked his own death to trick the horseman was, in his thinking, treachery. He had been astonished at the fury that welled up in him and he was ashamed at the depth of it. It was the betrayal of his own sense of honesty, far different from the killing of Elidio and Esquivel in the van. They were conscienceless, without worth. The horseman was an unknown who had miscalculated.
“Quit blaming yourself,” he heard Yuma say. “He tried to kill us. That’s reason enough for what you did. We can’t stay here.”
Navarre looked at her strangely for a moment, and then nodded as though he had had difficulty absorbing her words.
He said, “I’m sure the man I killed was not alone. If others heard the shots, they know he ran into trouble. So they’ll be looking for him. We’ve got to get out of range fast, but let’s wait for the dark.”
As the pale sun over their heads finally died in the west, lifting its weak glimmering from across the ground and leaving blue shadows behind, Yuma gripped Navarre’s hand and squeezed, a sign of her confidence in him.
Just as they started forward, drawing two of the horses after them, Navarre detained her. “Look,” he warned, “over to the right. Do you see it? A light, hard to spot, but it’s there.”
“Yes. I can make it out. What do you want to do?”
Navarre was silent for a moment, and then said, “We’ve got the element of surprise on our side. I’ll bet they’re in a shelter with a fire. If they didn’t hear the shots, they won’t expect us. We’ve got the rifle and the empty gun and if we’re careful we can sneak up on them.”
Twenty minutes later, with sudden icy rain tapping hard on their heads and shoulders, Navarre and Yuma hunched close together miserably, shivering behind a low bush. In front of them, perhaps one hundred and fifty feet away, was a small, doorless adobe hut inside of which three men scrunched around a small fire they had built in the center of the earthen floor. It was apparent the men were vaqueros, Navarre said. From a distance, they appeared to be armed, but Navarre couldn’t be sure. In a whispery voice, he explained to Yuma what he wanted to do and the part she played in his plan. She nodded slowly, crossed her fingers, and said, “God, I hope it works. I’m so cold I’d do anything to cook by that fire.”
Navarre remained kneeling for a moment as he memorized the position of the adobe hut, the dim line of the humped ridge that rose behind it, and when he was sure of his approach, he said to Yuma, “Stay close behind me, so we don’t get separated. Here’s the rope. Leave the horses and everything else here, except the knife.”
He bent suddenly, crouching down, scuttling forward on his hands and knees, heading in a line that would take him to the left of the hut, beyond the circle of light that extended from the fire and painted the wet ground beyond the door opening with a splash of yellow. He knew they had an advantage over the men, whose night vision would be blinded by the glare of the fire. He knew they could walk straight up to the door opening and not be seen until the last moment. But he couldn’t take a chance that one of the men might get up and leave the adobe to relieve himself in the wet dark. The swirling darkness was his cover, his advantage, as he moved quickly, streaming freezing water from his stolen hat, from his sodden clothes, making wet-shoe squelching sounds as he scrabbled through the wet grass and slimy, cold mud.
He paused, heard Yuma stop behind him, as he reached the point he had aimed for left of the adobe and three feet or so behind the corner where the front wall of the adobe ended. Quickly, he straightened, scrambled to the wall, flattened himself against the rough side, and breathed deeply as Yuma joined him.
Carefully, he levered a shell into the chamber of the rifle, reassured by the weight of the weapon, and eased around the corner to the front wall. He was stationed only a few feet from the open door and could hear the men’s lazy voices, but not their words. Plenty of time, he told himself. Stay calm. Focused. The gun is your argument. Your surprise, your deadly threat. Take a deep breath. Let it out. Now!
Navarre stepped through the door into the circle of light, the rifle held firmly in his hands. “Hands up, or you’re dead, hombres,” he heard himself say in Spanish.
The tableau that unfolded in front of him was frozen fo
r an instant. Huddled around the small fire of dried pine sticks were three men sharing a bottle of mescal. They were seated on their leather saddles, with their horse blankets thrown over their shoulders. Two of them wore leather gun belts bristling with shells, and in the leather holsters rested pistols. A rifle was propped against the front wall within arm’s reach of the third man.
The dark, wet, and dripping figure wearing the soggy hat of a dead man and a hard face was framed against the black night, holding death in his hands. Stunned by Navarre’s sudden appearance, the men stiffened for a moment. With the cold rain pounding on his shoulders, he was more than frightening. He was the embodiment of ancient mountain fears: one of the hidden wizards who could steal into the heart of trees, into the cold darkness of stone, into the shrieking wind. He was one of the guamas, chiseras, naguales, the many demons who haunted the night. He had flown out of the storm to kill them.
The youngest of the three men, a youth no older than seventeen, wide eyed and shaken, touched a metal cross on a dirty string around his neck just as a knot popped in the fire, scattering sparks. It broke the spell, and Navarre deliberately cocked the trigger of his rifle with his thumb.
“On your knees,” he ordered. To Yuma behind him, he said, “cut long pieces from the rope to bind them.”
The oldest of the three, a grizzled man with white prickles of hair sticking out from his dark complexion in stubby patches, said, “You won’t get away with it, you and the woman. We know about you. There is a reward. You’ll be caught. You’ll be dead.”
“Don’t count on your friend out there in the dark to kill us. Don’t count on him. He’s dead. Now lie down, flat on your stomachs, with your hands behind you. All of you!”
There was grumbling, and the third man, wiry, black haired, with a crooked jaw and small, mean eyes, glanced furtively at the rifle leaning against the wall three feet away from him. Navarre saw the intention in his eyes, saw his muscles tense, could almost hear him thinking, weighing his chances to reach, grab the rifle, dump a shell into the breech, and fire before Navarre reacted.