The Wild Girl

by Jim Fergus

  Here then are some of the things you need to know, Neddy, both those that have happened to me and those that I have pieced together since I have been here. It is a story that does not fit in your viewfinder, that cannot be told in photographs, or in simple notebook entries describing the events of our days. Tolley is quite right about that.

  After you, Albert, and Tolley left, my first order of business was to try to keep poor Mr. Browning alive, and as comfortable as possible under the circumstances. It was quiet below in the ranchería, the fires burned all the way down to smoldering embers. When Mr. Browning dozed off again, I slipped down from the cave. What a scene there to behold. The area in which the dance had been held looked like a battlefield littered with living corpses, or as if some terrible plague had struck, bodies lying in twisted heaps, the acrid mingling odors of smoke, gunpowder, and vomit. The revelers slept fitfully in the predawn stillness, some breathing heavily and snoring, others moaning sickly or mumbling insensibly in their drunken repose. A feeble hand reached out and grabbed my ankle as I passed, but I kicked it away and hurried on.

  With some difficulty I finally located the wickiup where I had patched you up, and there I changed back into my own clothes—my boots, riding breeches, and jacket. I took a woolen blanket and retrieved your satchel with your camera gear and these notebooks, and I found some strips of dried jerky and a piece of flatbread to take back for Mr. Browning, even though he had not yet eaten what the girl had brought to him last night. I went down to the creek and filled an earthen jug with water. The water was clear and cold and in the breaking light of dawn sparkled off the riffled surface of the creek in a way that in different circumstances might have seemed cheerful.

  Mr. Browning woke with a start when I got back to the cave. He seemed groggy and disoriented, and even paler than before. I asked him how he was feeling.

  “A little foggy, miss, the truth be told,” he said. “I’ve a terrible headache.”

  “Drink a little of this water,” I said, holding the jug to his lips. “I’ve brought you a little something to eat.”

  He drank. “Ah yes, that’s lovely, miss, very kind of you,” he said. “But really I don’t have much of an appetite.”

  “We’re all alone here now, Mr. Browning,” I said. “Just you and me. Don’t you think you could call me Margaret? And I’ll call you Harold.”

  “Very well, Margaret.”

  “Yes, that’s much better, isn’t it, Harold?”

  “Indeed,” he said, and he smiled … dear, sweet Mr. Browning … what a fine gentle soul. “What do you think will happen, miss … oh, terribly sorry … what do you think will happen, Margaret, when they discover that the others have departed?”

  “I don’t know, Harold. My guess is that they’ll go after them.”

  “Yes, I would expect so,” he said. He chewed a little of the jerky and tried to take a bite of the flatbread. “Oh dear, a bit hard, that, isn’t it?” he said. “Liable to break a tooth on that, one is.”

  “You should probably try to get a little more sleep,” I said.

  “I am rather tired. Can’t seem to keep my eyes open.”

  “I’m tired, too,” I said. “I brought us a blanket. I hope you won’t mind my asking, but would it be all right if I curled up next to you, Harold? It’s a little chilly, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t mind at all, Margaret,” Mr. Browning said. “Indeed, it would be a great comfort to me.”

  So I curled up behind Mr. Browning and covered us with the blanket, and I put my arm around him and held him. “Before we fall asleep, tell me something about your life, Harold,” I said. “Just anything at all … You never told me if you’d ever been married. Or if you had a family.”

  “My employers have always been my family, miss,” he said.

  “Haven’t you ever been in love, Harold?”

  “Yes, Margaret, I have. Once.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “All right, Margaret,” he said. “Have I told you that I spent several years in Africa with my former employer, Lord Crowley? Yes, in Kenya. You see, the lord was involved in gold-mining operations there. We first went over in … in … twenty-one, I believe it was. Spent the better part of the decade on the continent … a fascinating time really …”

  And so Mr. Browning began to tell me the story of the woman he had fallen in love with. “Ours was a forbidden love, Margaret,” he said. “She was African, a member of the Kikuyu tribe, and the servant of one of Lord Crowley’s business colleagues. She was so stunningly beautiful …” Mr. Browning talked on softly, remembering his forbidden love, the only love of his life, until his voice trailed away, and he drifted off to sleep. And I, too, slept, curled beside him, my arm around him. When I woke again, the moon was low on the horizon and dawn was coming on, and I knew from the cold, still feel of his body against me that Mr. Browning was dead.

  I sat for a while in the cave with him, just to keep him company, and because I couldn’t bear to leave him alone. I spoke to him, and told him things that I have never told before. And I wept for dear, sweet Mr. Browning. The ranchería lay silent below in the deathly quiet of daybreak. I thought about how simple it would be for me just to walk away from here. Except, of course, that I had nowhere to go. I wouldn’t last a day out there alone, and in any case, they’d only find me and bring me back. Oddly, despite my grief over his passing, with Mr. Browning gone, I was suddenly less afraid, I felt a certain relief, for now I had only myself to worry about. I decided that I would put my professional hat squarely on again, and in the same way that you, Neddy, hide behind your camera, I would thus be able to maintain the illusion of safety. Another lesson I had learned in the Amazon was that one must never allow the natives even a glimpse of one’s fear, for to display weakness is to invite attack.

  I walked back down to the ranchería. As the sun rose, a number of last night’s revelers crawled off to their wickiups; others were just waking up, so sick and hungover that they barely seemed to notice me. I had in mind to find the girl, and if I could, Jesus, to see that he was safe. I didn’t know where to begin my search and so I started peering randomly inside the huts and wickiups. But before I could find either of them, I ran directly into Indio Juan.

  He was sitting on the ground in front of one of the wickiups and appeared to have just woken up himself. He seemed dazed and half drunk still, and when he saw me he looked at me murderously and struggled to his feet. I should have run right then, but instead, stupidly, stubbornly, I stood my ground. I blamed him for Mr. Browning’s death and my anger and grief overcame any fear I had of him in that moment. He staggered toward me; I could smell the stench coming off him—the sweet-sour odor of alcohol, the acrid stink of vomit that stained the front of his shirt, and a deeper, rotten scent that I think is simply the smell of his evil. He held his arms out to me.

  “Has vuelto con Indio Juan, mi esclava bonito,” he said. “You have come back to Indio Juan, my pretty slave girl.”

  “Fuck you, you filthy swine,” and I slapped him as hard as I could.

  Even in his half-drunken stupor, Indio Juan’s next movements were so brutally fast and rough that I was completely overwhelmed. He grabbed me by the hair, yanked me to the ground, and fell atop me. He is not a large man, shorter than I, but I was astonished by his sheer brute strength. I tried to bite him and he struck me savagely across the face. He held me by the throat, cutting off my wind, tore open my blouse, and pried my legs apart. Unable to negotiate the complexities of my riding breeches, he drew his knife, intending simply to cut himself access. I knew then that I was going to die and I experienced a peculiar sense of detachment. I remember thinking, Ah, yes, of course, now I remember why women aren’t given ethnographic fieldwork assignments … In the next instant I heard a hollow ringing sound, and the breaking of glass, and Indio Juan went limp atop me. I looked up to see la niña bronca standing over us, holding one of Tolley’s empty wine bottles by the neck.

  “I hope you killed the
bastard,” I said.

  The girl and I sat cross-legged together in the wickiup. I had cleaned up at the creek and changed my torn shirt. The side of my face was swollen from where Indio Juan had struck me and it was painful to talk. The girl had built a small fire in front of the wickiup and put a tin coffeepot on to boil.

  “Where did you go last night?” I asked her in Spanish.

  “I took some of the young girls to hide in the caves,” she said. “When it is like that, no one is safe, bad things happen.”

  “Do you know where Joseph is?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Jesus?”

  “He has run away with the others.”

  “You know that Ned and the others are gone?”

  “Yes, I saw them before they left.”

  “Did you know that Mr. Browning is dead?”

  The girl looked away from me with a sudden frightened look in her eyes. I remembered that the Apaches are terrified of death; to even mention the word is enough to conjure up the dead person’s ghost. I should have said that Mr. Browning was “gone.”

  I took her face in my hand and turned it toward me and made her look me in the eye. “Mr. Browning is dead. Your people killed him when they hit him over the head with the rock. Do you understand me? He was your friend. He was kind to you. He was a good, gentle man. And now he is dead. Murdered. For no reason.”

  The girl nodded and tears welled up in her eyes. “My mother, too, is dead,” she whispered. “And my sister …”

  “That’s right, sweetheart,” I said. “And they, too, were murdered by bad men for no reason. Ned and the others are going to bring the Mexican soldiers and the Americans back here. They just want the boy, Geraldo. If you do not give him up, more of your people will die. Please, I must speak to your grandfather.”

  A woman tended the fire in front of the white Apache’s wickiup. A cradleboard in which was strapped a cheerful smiling baby was propped up beside her. The girl spoke to the woman, who answered crossly, and gestured for us to enter the wickiup, as if she was completely disgusted with its occupants and wanted nothing to do with them herself.

  The air was dim and rank inside, and as our eyes adjusted I saw that Joseph and the white Apache, Charley, both lay asleep, sprawled atop the blankets. A not quite empty bottle of mescal lay on its side between them. Seated cross-legged in the rear of the wickiup was the old blind woman Siki; she stared straight ahead out of milky eyes. The girl spoke to her softly and the old woman smiled and returned the girl’s greeting.

  I gently shook Joseph’s shoulder until he opened his eyes. He looked at me blankly for a long time, as if trying to place me in his memory. Finally he dragged himself into a seated position, his eyes hollow and sick. “Where is my grandson?” he asked.

  “He is safe for now,” I said. “But while you were drunk last night, they strung him up over the fire. If it hadn’t been for Ned, they’d have cooked his brains.”

  “I have not had a drink of alcohol since the last time my friend Harley Rope and I got drunk at his shack in White Tail,” Joseph said. “That night Harley went outside to take a piss and when he finished he walked out to the highway and lay down and fell asleep. He was run over by a truck just before dawn. Harley was my last friend from the old days. We had ridden together and scouted together and had been in Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma together. Once a week, I walked to his shack, or he to mine, and we got drunk together. But after Harley died, I decided that I would not drink alcohol anymore.”

  “What made you drink last night, Joseph?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer for a long time, just stared hollowly into space. Finally he nodded and said, “I was feeling pretty bad.”

  “How are you feeling now?”

  He smiled wanly. “Not too good.”

  “What were you feeling bad about?”

  “It was a very long time ago …”

  “Tell me.”

  He looked at the white Apache, who still slept heavily. “This man’s name is Charley,” Joseph said. “Charley McComas. I caught him when he was a boy.”

  “Yes, I heard you say so yesterday,” I said. “I’ve read about little Charley McComas. Kidnapped by the Apaches outside Silver City, New Mexico, when he was six years old. His parents were killed during the abduction. The boy was never found.”

  “That’s because he is here,” Joseph said.

  “And you’re sure it’s really him?”

  “Of course,” Joseph said. “I caught him. I killed his mother.”

  Here then, Neddy, is the story that I have cobbled together about little Charley McComas, both from that which Joseph has told me about that long-ago day of his abduction, and what Charley himself, his Apache mother, the old woman Siki, and the girl, his granddaughter, your wife, Chideh, have all related to me in bits and pieces during my days here. Of course, like so many native cultures theirs is a strictly oral history, the stories passed down through the generations, subtly altered and elaborated upon in the retellings until it’s hard to say exactly where the truth leaves off and the legend begins. Further adding to this difficulty is the fact that I myself have taken some creative license in order to fill in the blanks, which, to be sure, is poor science, but I hope at least makes for interesting reading for you. And although I would be drummed out of my profession if I ever admitted it to any of my colleagues, in the little time that I have spent among these people, I am increasingly of the opinion that one can more accurately describe them with an act of imagination than with the strict facts. Therefore, without further ado …

  Little Charley McComas and his parents were traveling in a buckboard wagon on the way to Lordsburg from their home in Silver City. It was late March of the year 1883, and the McComases had stopped to have a picnic under a walnut tree. For dessert they were having a cherry pie that had been baked by the nice woman at whose inn in Mountain Home they had stayed the night before, and with whose children Charley had played. The pie had still been warm when they left Mountain Home that morning and Charley had been able to smell it in the wagon all morning long.

  They had stopped to eat their picnic under a walnut tree. It was a lovely spring day and his mother had taken the picnic basket out of the back of the wagon and laid all the food out on a red-checked tablecloth that she had spread on the ground under the tree. They sat cross-legged on the tablecloth, just like Indians, Charley remembered thinking, and they ate cold fried chicken and hard-boiled eggs and fresh bread that Mrs. Dennis had also baked for them. Charley’s father was a judge, a stern, severe man of whom Charley was a bit afraid. His mother was pretty and gay, vivacious, a good tonic to her sometimes dour husband. They were having a fine time at their picnic. The cherry pie was set out under a white cloth napkin. Charley could hardly wait to eat a piece for dessert. He’d been looking forward to that pie all morning.

  But Charley McComas never got to eat his pie. Because at that moment a hole tore open in the universe and his old world began to rush out of it, like water swirling down a drainpipe. The horses in their traces suddenly raised their heads and nickered softly and Charley and his parents looked up to see the Apaches thundering up the arroyo toward them, like some terrible vision from hell, riding hard and yipping in a way that would eventually become very familiar to Charley, but at the time sounded so strange and savage.

  A cloud of dust roiled up from the Apaches’ horses’ hooves, which made it appear as if they were riding out of a misty dream, and Charley wasn’t so much afraid at first as he was fascinated at this spectacle of real Indians riding down upon them.

  His father said: “Get in the wagon. Now!” And his mother snatched Charley to his feet, her own terror washing over him like a stink; she ran with him, stumbling, to the back of the buckboard, where she half lifted, half threw the boy in. She screamed at him in a high thin voice he had never before heard, ordering him to lie down. His father picked up his Winchester repeating rifle, and both his mother and father climbed into the front seat of the w
agon. His father took the reins and slapped the horses’ rumps with them, hollering them into motion. Why did his father think that he could outrun mounted Apaches in a buckboard wagon? Later, after Charley grew up and became an accomplished Apache warrior in his own right and the People told the story of his abduction, he would think less of this White Eyes man who had been his father for this terrible lapse of judgment. It would have been far better to release the horses from their traces, to cut them out if necessary, or even to shoot them where they stood and take cover behind the wagon. His father could have held the Apaches off for a long time with his Winchester, and with his Colt pistol, at least killing a few of them, and possibly aborting the attack or at least slowing it, buying time until help came.

  Before they had gone fifty yards in the wagon, the first bullet struck his father in the arm. He cried out and handed the reins over to Charley’s mother, taking the Winchester from her. “Go!” he said. It was the last word Charley would ever hear his father speak. “Go!” and his father leaped from the wagon to the ground and began running toward the approaching Apaches, firing his rifle. Whether he had initially panicked or not, it was a courageous, if futile move on Judge McComas’s part, to try to divert the Apaches while his wife and son escaped. Charley watched solemnly, trancelike, from the back of the wagon as more bullets struck his father until finally he stopped running and fell to his knees, still jacking shells into his rifle and firing, even as he was dying. In their retelling of the story, the People always said that Judge McComas had been a brave man and had died honorably, and for that they did not scalp him or mutilate his body.

  Charley and his mother did not make it far. A bullet struck one of the horses and it fell dead in its harness and the wagon came to an abrupt halt. The Apaches approached on their horses, surrounding them, yipping and waving their rifles overhead in triumph. His mother leaped from her side of the wagon and tried to come to Charley, who sat up now in the back of the wagon, but they blocked her way and one of them, the man called Goso, struck her mercilessly in the face with his rifle butt, knocking her to the ground. Charley hollered and tried to jump from the back of the wagon and go to his mother’s aid, but one of them stepped off his horse onto the back of the wagon and held the boy there. He struggled fiercely against the man, which caused the others to laugh at the boy’s feistiness—there was nothing that the Apaches admired more than the display of courage—but he was only six years old, after all, and the man easily subdued him.