by Bacon Thorn
“You’ll be dead before you touch it,” he said in a flat voice. The man looked surprised, stared defiantly at Navarre, then lowered his eyes. He complained after he rolled over on his belly that the rope Yuma tied around his wrists was too tight. Distrusting him, she tightened it more and moved to the youngest, whose face reddened as she grasped his wrists and wound the rope around them. Even in her bedraggled condition, long yellow hair plastered to her scalp, her face dirty from mud and leaves, she was strongly feminine. And as the fire warmed her skin, the faint fragrance of her body, mixed with the outdoor scent of pine and the odor of the wet blanket drooping from her shoulders, gave off a husky, thick perfume that was intriguing and disturbing to the boy.
When she had finished tying the men, guarded all the time by Navarre with his cocked rifle, the three were trussed flat on their stomachs with their bound wrists connected by rope to their ankles. They would be able to free themselves eventually when they were alone, but it would take a lot of squirming before they loosened the knots.
Quickly, Navarre handed two of the tightly rolled bedrolls he’d found to Yuma, grabbed two of the saddles, and dragged them to the open door. “If you bring up the horses, we can throw the saddles on them and be gone.”
As an afterthought, he unbuckled the cartridge belts from two of the men, dropped them over one shoulder with their holstered pistols, and then removed the stained hat from the head of the third man and gave it to Yuma when she returned, leading the horses.
When he mounted, near the doorway, he said to the captives, “Unless you like chasing around in the dark, you won’t find the other horses. We’ve let them go.”
By the time the two faded into the night, the wind and rain had died, and with Yuma following behind him, they pointed the horses north and downhill. Six hours later, their blankets wrapped under their chins, their animals’ legs drenched with dew, the sun came blinking in their eyes over the crags of the Sierras. As it warmed them, they folded their blankets on their saddles and joggled along in their northwestern direction.
In the midmorning they came down a steep slope to a long, high plateau rimmed with mountaintops. They rode out upon the level in grass faintly gold from first frost. The stalks were stirrup high, and as the sun grew hotter, grasshoppers whisked from one slender stem to another.
“It’s so lovely,” Yuma said. “It almost makes me forget we’re not safe. They can come at us from any direction, can’t they?”
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Chapter XIII
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Except for taking a water break and a moment to stretch their legs, Navarre and Yuma stayed in their saddles until early afternoon, when they passed through a brief but violent thunderstorm that washed them clean of the dirt and grime they had accumulated on the mountain where they had left behind a dead man and an enigmatic zopilote which Yuma was sure had returned from the dead.
The bare and rocky soil of the ridge top on which Navarre and Yuma were riding was an old roadway; it was evident that people had used it once and it probably ended at some abandoned mine. Fresh tracks in the mud of the old roadway revealed where a hungry coyote had just crossed, moving quickly after the storm to search for small rodents driven from their flooded burrows. Yuma pointed out a roadrunner fluffing its feathers in the sunshine, looking twice its normal size as it dried from the rain.
As the long day wore on, Navarre knew that if Yuma was as bone weary as he was, she was ready to drop. He could see the strain in her face, half-moons of paler, dirty skin under her eyes, contrasting with the light-cinnamon coloration of her face. He thought that if he could divert her attention from her aching body, she might quit thinking about how exhausted she was. Though it was an effort to talk on horseback, he said, “Out here somewhere to the east of us is a bruja, a very wicked and magical witch who, according to Victor Villaseñor, who wrote a story about her, grew the most luscious peaches in all of Mexico on a tiny farm. Once she sent the village priest a basket of the juicy peaches and some fried chicken, and he died.”
“You mean she poisoned him? Why?”
“She was a witch.”
“Okay, why were her peaches so great?”
“Because she fed them on the blood of the chickens she killed. She sliced their throats and held them at arm’s length to bleed over the roots of the trees.”
“Don’t tell me you believe that?”
“Sure, it’s true, just like the sun is the right eye of God.”
“And I suppose the moon is his left eye?”
“Could be, and it’s just as true as what they’ll say about you when we reach Sisiqichuc.”
“And what’s that?”
“Las piernas más torneadas.” He smiled at her. “It means you have the best-carved legs in the whole village.”
Yuma blushed, chuckled, and said, “You really know how to cheer up a girl, don’t you?”
In the late afternoon, when the two sunburned, exhausted travelers dismounted and stumbled into a desert shelter, they dropped to the sandy floor, bone tired and weary beyond words. Side by side, after drinking from their water bag, they sat against one of the rounded stone walls of a shallow cave in a small arroyo with their legs outstretched in front of them. For several minutes they slumped, breathing slowly, grateful to be resting their aching bodies. An hour had elapsed by the time they had restored themselves enough to prepare their shelter for the night ahead, and the sun had begun to sink in the west. They unsaddled the horses and shooed them away. The animals would be a dead giveaway, they decided, if they encountered anyone who asked sharp questions. Before they hid under bushes the saddles and guns they had taken from the three vaqueros, Navarre substituted his pistol for one they had stolen; it was fully loaded. While he checked his new weapon, Yuma ran her hands carefully over the patch of sand where they would sleep to remove stones, dried twigs, and other lumpish objects that would prod them painfully when they settled down. When she had smoothed their sandy bed to her satisfaction, she said, “I think it’s better if we sleep spoon fashion, with our backs against one wall. With the blankets and our body heat, we’ll be warm enough.”
She hesitated. “You don’t expect trouble tonight, do you?
“No, we’re safe enough tonight. Tomorrow’s another story.” Taking in her lean, brown figure, resting in a dimple in the sand made by her bottom, Navarre thought how well suited she was to the wild and remembered the moment she’d rushed out of the cave three days before, gripping the desert rattler fearlessly in one hand as if it were a harmless garden snake. But her expression suddenly changed; she took in a deep, ragged breath, let it out with a shuddering sigh, and squeezed her eyes shut. “I feel so lost in all this . . . this loneliness, like somebody’s looking over my shoulder. I’m sorry, but I think I’m going to bawl like a baby. I feel so overwhelmed.”
Wordlessly, Navarre clasped her in his arms with her head against his chest, held her closely while she made small, muffled crying sounds and snuffling, heaving breaths. When her tears came to an end and she pushed gently away from his arms, dusk was descending on the great sweep of the desert. The wind, light and steady from the west, came to them with the soft, fragrant scent of sage and juniper. Above them, drifting, broken clouds tinged with impossible shades of red and gold from the dying sun sailed high in the deepening sky.
“It’s so big and lonely out here,” Yuma whispered, leaning back against Navarre’s chest. “It’s hard to believe that last night we were freezing in the mountains. God, will we ever be safe?”
“We’re still free. They haven’t caught us yet. If we’re careful, they won’t. We’re close to the mission; I just know it,” Navarre said softly.
“This country doesn’t scare you like it does me. You really like it, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. The Apaches knew it best. Not too far from where I think we are, the Chiricahuas had their secret stronghold. It was called Pa-gotzin-kay, and it could only be reached through the wild and terrible canyons and cliff falls of the Mex
ican Sierra Madres.”
“My dad would have liked it out here,” Yuma murmured. “He had a collection of western movies, videos he watched religiously. Every Saturday morning, when I was old enough, I joined him. Mom, she was bored to death with his hobby, and with him. She left us one day and never came back.”
Yuma rose to her feet, wiped away the drying tears on her cheeks with the tips of her fingers. “Dad did me a big favor. He kept after me to follow my dream, even if he didn’t do it himself.”
She yawned and sighed. “The best-paying job I had was working for the herpetologist. It gave me the money to study to be an actor. That’s where I learned not to be afraid of snakes. And maybe some other things. And now,” she said, looking suddenly washed out, drained, and a little pale, “I’m so tired that it’s an effort to breathe. I’m going to flop and sleep forever.”
She crawled into Navarre’s arms and squirmed into a comfortable position with her back against his chest. She was asleep in moments.
As he listened to her breathing, an Apache moon rose, spreading a ghostly white light that turned desert shapes into phantom figures and painted the sand with an iridescence that sparkled like millions of diamonds laid in a shining carpet. The stillness was so complete that he could plainly hear her heartbeat, and he was conscious of time running away from them, like sand through their fingers. How many hours away was the sun and, with it, those who searched for them?
This question lent an urgency to their pace the next day, and they altered their hurried drive only when an early afternoon storm, like on the day before, sent thundering rain which washed the dust from their hair and clothes and created shallow rock pools from which Navarre refilled their water bag.
They could see for thirty miles or more across low limestone ridges and wide, shallow valleys to the chain of saw-toothed peaks ranging southward on the western horizon. There, ragged clouds from a recent storm were trapped by the mountains reaching up some nine thousand feet above the desert.
As they descended from the ridge, following a southwesterly direction into a long, narrow valley, they were startled by the sudden, unmistakable clatter of a helicopter flying low and rudely breaking the silence surrounding them. The air-thrashing sound of the machine was still distant but warning enough that they dared not get caught in the open.
It was Yuma who pointed ahead to the shambles of a small, collapsing bridge of skinned pine poles that crossed a small arroyo, now running with a brisk stream of storm water.
“We can hide under the bridge,” she yelled at Navarre and sprinted ahead of him. Navarre followed her trim, bronzed figure, splashing in the wake she made in the stream. Before ducking under the bridge, he removed the revolver he was carrying from his right front pocket to save it from immersion. As the two crouched under the deteriorating wooden poles, with the hip-high water swirling around them and nudging them with surprising force, Yuma turned to Navarre. “You don’t suppose they can see our footprints in the mud from the air, do you?”
Navarre frowned and shifted in the cold water. “No, they’d have to fly too low for safety to do that. I think we’re okay, as long as we stay out of sight.”
Yuma squirmed in the water uncomfortably. “I think I’ll freeze my bum if we have to stay here much longer.”
She fell silent, then said, “You’ve got to say one thing for that bastard who’s following us: he’s determined. How does he know you and I weren’t among the burned bodies at the van? It seems logical.”
Navarre peered out from under the shelter of the ruined bridge and looked at the sky before answering. The helicopter had disappeared. It was a big country to search for two people who were fleeing on foot. He turned to Yuma and said, “The answer is not enough bodies, if he counted the ones that were burned. He made a big mistake by underestimating us. And he can’t take the slightest chance that we might reach Lazlo Peñas, the man I told you about. Even though I don’t know the plan for the assassination, or where it will take place, Nuños as much as admitted to me that it’s going to happen. That’s enough for Peñas. Also, don’t forget, I can link Nuños to Raldon’s death . . . and of course to the others. So, eliminating us is a matter of protecting himself.”
Navarre paused, and then added grimly: “The worst part for me—and I’ve never said this to anyone—is my own guilt and confusion about losing Meg. Anger over what Nuños stole from me seems stronger now than my grief for the loss of her life.”
Navarre frowned, fell silent, and stared at the water flowing out from the shadow of the bridge into the sunlight.
Yuma placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Finish what you were going to say.”
“There’s not much else. I know I shouldn’t feel the way I do, but I do.”
“My dad told me once, after Mom left, that if you fill an empty heart with hate, you’ll destroy yourself. I wonder if Meg would have approved of the hate you carry?”
Navarre turned to face Yuma squarely; she was shivering in the cold stream and her teeth were chattering. His own face, even in the half-light under the bridge, seemed less strained, more open.
“You’re right, of course,” he said. “She wouldn’t have approved. Now, let’s get out of here before we turn blue.”
Yuma detained him a moment, reaching out suddenly and fiercely squeezing his hand. “Please,” she said urgently, “don’t misconstrue what I said. Sure, make peace with Meg’s death, but you can’t give up your determination to get Nuños: for her and for me and for all the others. Monsters like him are evil and have to be stopped or they will continue to leave wreckage, murder, and sorrow in their wake.”
“That’s a promise,” Navarre said, then added, “My hunch is that the old road we’ve been following is taking us closer to people who can help us get to Hebrano’s mission. I just wish we could get there faster than the snail’s pace we’re making. Only the mountains move slower than we do.”
Preceding Yuma with the revolver held clear of the water, Navarre crawled out into the sunshine. Both of them were grateful for the instant warmth that soon took the chill out of their bodies. It was when they had resumed walking down the old road and it had taken a blind turn that Navarre called a halt.
“Look,” he said excitedly, pointing to the opposite side of the small arroyo in which the stream ran. There on a flat about halfway up a muddy slope stood a two-room adobe painted with a fading whitewash and sheltered by a tidy roof made of the bundled leaves of the giant desert yucca called daga española, or Spanish dagger.
Nearby was a small dirt stock tank, brimful of fresh water, and a small corral made of juniper posts and pickets from the sturdy sotol cactus. There was no horse or burro in the corral and no human in sight. A dozen chickens were perched on the ridge of the roof, where they preened their feathers or dozed safely from hungry coyotes. The sight of a wisp of smoke coming from a pipe sticking out at a crooked angle from one adobe wall cheered Navarre.
Taking Yuma’s hand in his, he said to her: “We’ve got to trust somebody.” Then he pulled her across the stream and up the slope. They stopped at a polite distance from the house. In a friendly voice he called out in Spanish to the hidden occupant of the little adobe, “Hola, señora! Está en casa?”
A few of the chickens on the roof fluttered at the sound of a strange voice and a rangy, feral, striped cat scuttled from its perch on the sill of a shuttered window and disappeared behind the house. Navarre and Yuma waited patiently, aware of how hungry they were.
After a few moments a Mexican woman shyly cracked the front door and stared out at her visitors. Apparently satisfied that they were harmless, she stepped out on the hard, bare dirt of the yard. Since she was alone and there were no children peeking from around her skirt or out of the door, Navarre concluded that her man was probably away.
He greeted her politely, noting that her right hand was held slightly behind her back, indicating that she might be holding a pistol. He knew that pistolas were commonly carried by vaqueros and farmers i
n the rugged and wild mountainous ranching and farming country of southwestern Chihuahua. He asked the woman for permission to visit for a few minutes and to seek directions.
Graciously she welcomed them to Tanque de la Vibora and the Rancho de los Bríos. She said her husband was riding fence and would not return for at least another day. “What brings you here? Are you lost?”
“Yes, señora, we are on our way to the mission at Sisiqichuc. We have not eaten and would be grateful for any food you can spare.”
Navarre was familiar with frontier women of her quiet strength and endurance. She was a slight woman, no more than five feet tall, and her cotton skirt fell just above her ankles. Her face and eyes were the color of the brown earth beneath her feet, and her skin was crossed with tiny creases that spoke of a lifetime of work in the harshness of the desert sun and wind.
She wore no shoes, and her bare feet were tough and dusty. Her thick, black hair, pulled back and tied behind her head, was wet, making it evident that not long before she had stood out in the rainstorm to wash the desert dust from her body. It was also apparent from the flour on her hands and short apron that she had been making tortillas when he and Yuma approached the adobe.
She looked steadily at them with a frank expression of curiosity on her face, and then she said, “You’re the ones the jefe looks for.” She smiled shyly. “It is admirable that you have escaped his trap. There are men hunting for you. They have stopped here, so you are safe for a little while.”
She smiled again, then turned and ducked into the dark interior of the adobe and emerged five minutes later with hot, fresh tortillas filled with beans and laid out on two palm leaves.