“Pinda’lick’oye say Apache all got attitude,” he replied. “Why should this one be any different?”
“This isn’t just about attitude,” Easton said confidently. “It goes deeper than that.”
Ironheel made no reply.
“Was it white men?” Easton said. “Or your own people?”
Ironheel’s face remained blank, his eyes unreadable.
“What did they do, Ironheel? Did they steal from you? Cheat you? Shame you? What was it?”
Still no answer. It was like talking to a rock. But Easton wasn’t about to let go now.
“Let’s say it was shame,” he said. “Shame because you were helpless, maybe. You’d hate that, being you. Or maybe you could get no redress for something that had been done to you. That kind of shame cuts deep. So deep you decided you might as well be what everyone thought you were, another badass Apache, right? Then what? You started hitting the bottle, is that it? Picking fights? Petty theft and all the rest of it? How am I doing?”
“Enough of this,” Ironheel growled. He made a chopping motion with his hand. “N’zhoo!”
“Sure,” Easton said. “Whatever you say.”
“You think you understand,” Ironheel said, biting hard on the words. “But you understand nothing. Doo nt’é da! Nothing!”
“Maybe I would if you told me about it.”
“No,” he said emphatically. “No.”
“It’s hard to come back, isn’t it?” Easton said, softly. “To climb out of the hole. Believe me, I know.”
The words clearly struck a chord. The angry frown creasing Ironheel’s forehead disappeared. Again Easton saw what might have been a hint of surprise in his dark eyes. At least he put it down to surprise. He didn’t want to flatter himself into thinking it might be respect.
“When a man can no longer be what he was,” Ironheel said. “He becomes what he has to be.”
Easton nodded. “Go on.”
Ironheel looked away and waited a while before replying.
“Each morning I ask Yusn for the courage to face whatever may come,” he said, the words coming slowly, as if he was reluctant to speak at all. “And to thank Him for the help he has given me in the day just gone.”
“Your people and my people say the same things. We just talk to a different God. Or maybe, the same God with a different name.”
Ironheel looked away again, as if seeking inspiration from the sky. For a moment Easton felt he was going to say more, but if he had intended to, he changed his mind.
“Perhaps we will speak of this another time,” he said. Then he turned away abruptly and went outside. The stronger the reaction, the closer you are to the truth, Easton thought. Ironheel was a man carrying a hurt. Takes one to know one.
Ironheel was gone long enough for Easton to begin wondering whether he was coming back at all, then he silently reappeared in the doorway carrying a plump sage hen by its feet.
“Slingshot,” he said, in answer to the unspoken question. “Best I could do.”
“Looks good to me,” Easton said.
While Ironheel coaxed the fire back to life, he plucked the quail and quartered it. They broke dry branches from one of the trees near the house and used them as skewers to roast the meat over the flames, then ate it hungrily. The meat was strong tasting and juicy.
“All we need now is coffee and an English muffin,” Easton said.
“Zhá’yugo,” Ironheel replied.
Easton took that to be the Apache equivalent of ‘dream on’ and concentrated on the food. Nothing was said about their earlier conversation. It was as if it had never taken place.
Half an hour later they put out the fire, cleaned out the fireplace and doused the embers thoroughly with water to kill any possibility of recombustion. That done, they set off across open country toward the Marcials. Both knew they would be sitting ducks if a State Police helicopter happened their way. The morning sun was already bright and warm and the going soon got tough. Easton’s back was stiff and his legs felt like an elephant had slept on them.
Even down in the lush green irrigated fields of the Pecos valley, crossing open country on foot wasn’t easy. Up here in the mountains where the air was thin and the terrain was hostile, it was damned hard work. Ground that looked level from a car was almost always rough and broken, undulating scrubland interspersed with stretches of soft sand that horses could have trouble floundering through.
It was impossible to travel in anything like a straight line – clumps of staghorn, cholla, prickly pear, juniper and mesquite forced them to duck, weave, stoop, and constantly zig-zag. Outcrops of stone or boulders had to be carefully negotiated: where in normal circumstances a sprained ankle would be no more than an inconvenience, in their case it could literally prove fatal, so you chose your foothold rock by rock. More than once when loose shale moved away under his feet, Easton slid down a cut or a gully on his backside.
“Alright?” Ironheel would say.
“Okay,” he would reply and they would move on.
After about an hour, they quit making any attempt to avoid the reaching branches of mesquite or cholla, just pushed on dully through them, ignoring the scratches, not even thinking about poisonous spiders whose bite could numb your arm or leg for half a day, or the darting insects feasting on their sweaty bodies. And always as they walked there was the tension of knowing that if they were to run into a juiced-up rattler among the rocks, light jeans and low-top work boots didn’t offer much protection.
After another hour, Easton’s whole body was aching dully. A cross-country trek like this one required a particular mind-set. This was not a summer mountain excursion, this was not fun. This was about endurance, something you needed to quit thinking about and just do. It wasn’t even walking, it was more like tunneling, weaving now into deep shade under arching branches, next zigzagging through interlaced scrub beneath the scorching sun. The land, the creatures in it, and the very vegetation were hostile.
It became a sort of mantra: just keep up a steady pace. Don’t push too hard going uphill, be careful of going faster down. Forget about distance. Forget your mouth is dry. Forget your back hurts and your thigh muscles throb. Just keep going, praying your wounded side will hold out. Just get there.
He knew this part of the country. They were heading roughly northeast, following an old trail that paralleled the Rio Lindo. It would take them through the hills and on up to a point on the maps known as Buena Vista. Once they got up there the close-growing trees would provide plenty of cover.
They moved steadily higher into the hills, leaving the rough scrubland behind. Now and again they moved through cool woodland into open grassy glades, but most of the time the big trees crowded close. After maybe two hours more they crossed the last gully, passing a couple of creaking windmills on their way down the hill to the highway. Easton figured they must be two or three miles east of the village of Marcial. The road interrupted the trail they had been following, which crossed Salado Creek and continued up the hill parallel to a dirt road that led to the Marcial Gap.
They came warily out of the screening trees, watchful for people or traffic: the last thing they needed now was to run into a patrol car. The highway lay before them like a river. On the far side, between it and Salado Creek, stood a small adobe cabin with a corrugated iron roof shaded by a couple of miserable-looking cottonwoods. To get where they wanted to go they had no alternative but to pass it. Easton looked a question at Ironheel, who nodded, keep going.
As they crossed the wide highway and started toward the creek, two wild-looking black dogs about the size of coyotes uncoiled from the shadows in the backyard of the cabin and ran along the wire fence and back again, barking furiously. A gray-haired man appeared in the doorway of the house. He appeared to be in his sixties. He wore only an undershirt and work pants held up by broad suspenders. His uncombed gray hair looked like a rat’s nest.
“Blue!” he yelled. “Lucy! Leave off that goddamn racket!”
The pale-eyed dogs quit barking, but kept on running wildly along the fence, left to right, right to left, panting audibly, teeth bared, tongues lolling. The gray-haired man standing in the yard stared at Easton and Ironheel for maybe twenty seconds. Then he turned round fast and went inside, slamming the door.
“Maldito!” Ironheel growled angrily. The old man had figured out who they were. You didn’t need to be a genius to guess what he was doing now. Hell, they could almost hear him dialing.
As Ironheel led the way in a walking jog, Easton did some rapid thinking. The old man’s 911 call would be automatically routed to the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office in Junta, but he knew they didn’t have the manpower there to mount a convincing pursuit, so it was a safe bet they would pass it on to the State Police and to SO in Riverside. From what he knew about their response times, Easton reckoned they had maybe an hour’s grace before the law came smoking.
He was wrong.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Forty minutes after they started up the trail into the Marcials, the oncoming rattle of a chopper sent them scrambling into the black shadow of an overhang of boulders, huddling immobile and impotent as the whirlybird made passes overhead.
Ironheel’s plan – to head through the Marcial Gap using the cover of the forested north-facing slopes beyond it to get unseen to the state road near Encierro – was as dead as Methuselah. On those bare hillsides and in the Gap itself, they would be as easy to spot as tarantulas on a whitewashed wall. Worse, the fact they’d been sighted meant the hunter-killer helicopter of two nights ago would probably be back in the hunt. It wasn’t a cheerful thought.
“This where we switch to Plan B?” Easton said.
“No need,” Ironheel said, staring at the steeply sloping southern flank of the mountain rising before them. “Get up there, take the summit trail over Marcial Peak and we’re good.”
Easton called up the map in his head, visualizing the jeep trail that ran along the divide. It might be a way out, but just getting to it was going to be tough, a climb of more than 2500 feet in less than two miles.
“Think we can make it?”
Ironheel shrugged. “You tell me.”
Don’t get mad, Easton told himself. It’s not personal, it’s Apache.
The chopper quartering above them, a two-seater Cayuse with tubular skid landing gear and 317 hp Alison shaft turbine engines that made a noise like an angry buzz saw, finally tilted sideways and soared away, checking the slopes lower down. As the engine noise faded to a low drone, Ironheel nodded and they made the break.
From get-go the climb was steep and rocky, and at this altitude there wasn’t as much vegetation to provide cover. Stumbling along behind the Apache, sometimes taking two steps to make one on the sliding shale that covered the slope, or laboring through tracts of heavy sand, Easton muttered his dogged mantra: don’t think, just do it. One foot, other foot, one, two, one, two. He lost track of time. The wound in his side throbbed ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum and he remembered the dream.
As they got higher, the terrain became more difficult, and the more difficult it became, the more Easton wondered whether Ironheel’s plan was going to work. Was there another way?
Think like the enemy.
What would I be considering doing if I were in charge of the pursuit?
One option would be to fly in a SWAT team and drop it on the summit ahead of the fugitives, another was to flood the whole area with well-armed State shooters and just wait for the fugitives to show. Either way, they would never know exactly where their pursuers might be, or for that matter, how many men were out hunting them, until they suddenly appeared. Timing was everything. If he and Ironheel could make it to the high ground first, big though the ‘if’ was, they’d have a fighting chance. But was a fighting chance enough? Was there a better strategy?
Maybe two hundred feet below the summit ridge they halted to rest in the shadow of a huge boulder. Even in its shadow it was stifling hot: the big rocks that had soaked up the morning sun were now reflecting heat outward like storage heaters. Scorpions liked to hide under big warm boulders, Easton remembered.
“Not bad,” Ironheel said. “Don’t think we left much sign.”
Easton looked back down the slope at the wilderness of tumbled scree and huge boulder, and wondered how much sign was not much.
“Any is bad,” Ironheel replied. “Mescalero tracker will spot things cops wouldn’t even notice,” Ironheel replied.
Easton caught something in his intonation. “You think they’ve got one?”
Ironheel pointed with his chin. Way on back below, a knot of uniformed men was picking its way uphill. In the lead was a big guy wearing a blue shirt and pants and a black Stetson with a high crown.
“Mose Kuruk,” Ironheel said, and there was contained anger in his voice.
Easton marveled he could identify Kuruk at such a distance, then remembered Ironheel’s jibe in the Riverdale jail cell. Apache got eye like eagle, remember? Maybe he hadn’t been kidding about that, either.
“How come he’s in this? I thought the rule was, Apache don’t betray other Apache?”
“Kuruk’s the exception to all the rules,” Ironheel said. “He’s like one of those Apache scouts the US Army used to hunt their own people: Peaches, Dutchy, Mickey Free.”
“For money, you mean?”
“That’s what the Army thought, but there was always more to it than that. Apache call it itisgo. Being honored. A pride thing, to prove he’s a better Apache than Apache he’s chasing. Cleverer. Tougher.”
“Sounds like you know him pretty well.”
Ironheel nodded thoughtfully. His eyes were dark and somber, and Easton knew he was sharing only a small part of his inner thoughts.
“Kuruk knows Apache will only run so far. Then he says dákogégo, no more. Here I stand. Die, if I must.”
“Is that what’s going to happen?”
Ironheel shook his head almost impatiently.
“Apache always try to avoid going head to head,” he said. “Better to out-think your enemy. But Kuruk wants to boast to the old men that he hunted me down. That he is more Apache.”
“Why?”
Ironheel shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Does to me,” Easton said. “Or have you forgotten why we’re out here in the first place?”
Ironheel looked away, his eyes fixed on the men laboring doggedly up the slope way below. Then once again the sudden roaring clatter of a helicopter overhead made them scramble to find cover. The chopper flitted overhead like a huge mechanical dragonfly, the throbbing roar of its engine hammering off the rocks, then quartered off across the canyon. As the engine noise faded, Ironheel stood up, but Easton stayed put.
“Hold it, Chief,” he said. “Tell me how you think Kuruk is going to play this?”
Ironheel thought about it for a moment, his lips pursed, twin lines of concentration between his brows.
“He’ll push,” he said. “Try to wear us out.”
“Wear me out, you mean.”
Ironheel made one of his impatient gestures. “It’s me he wants. Not you.”
Well, it was brutally honest, even if it wasn’t particularly flattering. It might even prove to be pivotal. Easton filed the thought away.
“And he thinks if I can’t cut it, you’ll take off alone, is that it?”
“Ha’ah.”
“And will you?”
“Kuruk thinks so,” Ironheel said. The evasion was unexpected.
“That being the case,” Easton said, as his thinking came together, “maybe we need to turn the table.”
Squatting down on his haunches, he used a stick to draw a map in the dust, a roughly D-shaped figure, sloping to the left at a forty-five degree angle.
“What’s this?” Ironheel said impatiently.
“Kuruk thinks were fugitives, right? So if we make it look like we’ve made a run for open country, he’ll probably buy it.”
Ironheel lifted hi
s chin. Go on.
“Here’s Marcial, here at the top end of the D,” Easton said. “The vertical line is the highway. It goes through Franklin and on down to Riverside, here on the bottom end of the bow. The arch is the state road that runs up and around from Marcial to Riverside. And we’re here, somewhere in the middle, right?”
Ironheel nodded. “And?”
Easton drew a line in the dirt from the highest arc of the bow that was the state road to the center of the line representing the highway and made a cross in the dirt.
“Pacheco,” he said.
“What about it?”
“Change of plan. That’s where we’re going.”
Ironheel’s expression hardened. “You crazy?”
Easton ignored that one,
“Hear me out,” he said. “We’ve been lucky this far. But once they get a sighting of us, not only will have ever-increasing numbers of law enforcement coming after us, but also that big chopper and whoever sent it breathing down our necks. We need to disappear.”
Ironheel stared at nothing for maybe thirty seconds. Then he spoke.
“I could do that now.”
“Alone.”
“N’juh,” he said. “Yes. Not with you.”
“And spend the rest of your life on the run. Is that what you want?” Easton replied angrily. “Is that why I put my life on the line for you?”
Ironheel shook his head, almost angrily. It might even have been exasperation, Easton thought.
“Tell me the plan. Then I will decide.”
Easton let that one slide by as well. “We give Kuruk what he wants,” he said. “Make him think we’re heading west, then double back.”
“To Pacheco?” Ironheel said. “What’s in Pacheco?”
“What we need most,” Easton said. “Time.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Working their way yard by punishing yard up to the summit trail was more brute hard work, fighting the sliding shale, grabbing the gnarled trunks of mesquite for leverage, solid heat coming at them off the rocks.
Apache Country Page 21