Piccadilly Doubles 1

by Lou Cameron

  A few yards up the wash, huddled with her children and serving-maid against the steep marl bank, Ernestine Unger watched the morning activity around them, as well as she could with apparently downcast eyes. Where had she ever gotten the idea that the coldest possible stare was that of a gray-eyed Prussian officer? These terrible Indians had eyes of frozen ink. Fortunately, if one held still and neither spoke nor appeared to notice them, the Apache tended to ignore one. Perhaps they were like reptiles, attracted only by movement. Aside from the one who’d spoken Spanish to Jezebel, none of their captors had seemed at all interested in communicating since they’d been hauled, numb with terror, from their wagon.

  The long night ride was still a kaleidoscopic blur in Ernestine Unger’s fatigue-drugged mind. She had put up a weak struggle when Willy was snatched from her by an Indian on a spotted pony, and was relieved when she saw, from the back of the burro she and Jezebel had been forced to share, that the Indian carrying Willy in one brawny, naked arm seemed gruffly gentle with the sick child.

  They’d given Willy back to her, once dismounted in this brushy, sandy gully, and Alfrieda had run over to join them, tear-streaked and tangle-haired, but otherwise seemingly unharmed. Ernestine had no idea what had happened to the two young men out in front with the team. She’d hoped they’d got away, but one of those mules just down the gully with the Indian ponies looked a lot like one from her own team.

  Her thoughts were abruptly interrupted when a dark, pockmarked boy of ten or twelve came over to them with a basket, knelt to place it on the sand near Jezebel, and murmured, “Que lo aproveche, senora.”

  Jezebel quickly asked, “Habla ’Spanol?” and the boy smiled shyly and said, “Si, senora, soy de Sonora en Mejeco.”

  “You a Mexican?” Jezebel asked in Spanish. The boy looked uncertain and answered in the same language, “I used to be Mexican. Now, I think, I am Nadene. My new father’s name is Kaya-Tenay. He says I am not to speak of my old family. It is bad medicine to speak the names of the dead.”

  Ernestine nudged her maid-servant and asked what she and the boy were talking about. Jezebel explained, “He’s brung us a basket of vittles, ma’am. He says he’s a Mexican boy these Apaches run off with, like ussen.”

  The boy caught the word “Apache” and cautioned Jezebel in Spanish, “It is best to call my people Nadene, senora. Apache means ‘enemy’ in the tongue of the Pueblos. You and your friends are in no position to remind them they are not your friends, comprendas?”

  A middle-aged woman up the dry-wash shouted, “Digoon!” and the Mexican boy murmured, “I must go. Cho-Ko-Ley said I was to gather water for the ponies after feeding you.”

  He stood up and moved away as Jezebel frowned, trying to understand that business about … gathering water? Her Spanish was probably rusty.

  Meanwhile, Ernestine had removed the lid from the basket and was examining its contents dubiously. She had no way of knowing her captors were on short rations, and neither the parched corn nor the jerked venison looked very appetizing. She reached in uncertainly and handed a sliver of jerky to Alfrieda. As Ernestine gave another piece to Jezebel, Alfrieda took an experimental taste and said, “Pooh, it’s as hard and dry as an old chair rung!”

  Something thudded to the sand nearby, and they looked up to see the woman who’d called the Mexican boy away. She was wearing a shapeless cotton smock and knee-high moccasin-boots. Her moon face, framed by wings of gray-streaked hair, was totally devoid of expression. As Jezebel reached for the Mexican army canteen that Cho-Ko-Ley had dropped to them, the Nadene woman stared blankly down at the feverish boy, whose head was held in Ernestine’s lap once more.

  Cho-Ko-Ley searched her memory for the few words of Spanish she knew. Then she asked, not looking at anyone in particular, “Que pasa? Es enfermo?”

  Jezebel nodded and in Spanish said, “The boy has a fever. He has been sick since we crossed the Colorado. Do you have any quinine?”

  Cho-Ko-Ley said, “No,” and turned to walk away without another word. Jezebel shrugged and said, “At least she gave us water. You want me to tear a rag offen my shimmy skirt and wet it for Master Willy, ma’am?”

  The worried mother nodded as Alfrieda, forcing down a bit of jerky, opined, “Mean old Apache squaw don’t care does Willy die or get well. You see the way she looked at him, Momma? She looked pure daggers through poor Willy, that’s what she did.”

  Jezebel tore a patch from the hem of her petticoat and reached for the canteen as she explained, “I asked did they have medicine, but she said they didn’t, ma’am. Maybe a damp rag on his forehead will help him break the fever and . ..”

  “It’s no use!” Ernestine sobbed, rocking the dying child’s head in her lap as she bent over him, as if to shield him from the Angel of Death with her breast. Willy’s flesh was hot and dry, and he’d stopped moaning or trying to move in her arms. He was dying. She knew he was dying. The prayers she’d said were as meaningless as a mother’s tears in this godless, endless wasteland. What was it that Freddy Dodd had said about no law west of the Pecos, and no go west of Apache Pass? She’d laughed the first time she’d heard it. How was she to have known it was no joke?

  Jezebel held the damp rag out until she saw her mistress was ignoring it. Then she touched Ernestine gently on one arm. “Let me take him for a mite, ma’am. You’re plumb wore out and you oughta eat some.”

  Alfrieda looked up, saw her mother’s dazed expression, and moved closer, saying, “Let Jezzie take him, Momma. You ain’t helpin’ him, holdin’ him like that.”

  “She ain’t listenin’, Mizz Frieda,” said the servant-maid. “She’s off someplace where she can’t hear.”

  Alfrieda nodded, but put two firm hands on her mother’s shoulders and said, “Take Willy away from her and sponge his head, Jezzie.”

  “She don’t look like she aims to let him go, Mizz Frieda.”

  “You do as I say, Jezzie. Momma ain’t herself and we have to do right by my little brother.”

  The slave girl hesitated and Alfrieda insisted, “You do like I say, hear?”

  “Mizz Frieda, you ain’t but fourteen years old, and ...”

  “I’m old enough to see my momma can’t think straight, you sassy nigra! You just tend to Willy and let me worry about how old I am!”

  Jezebel shrugged, reached out for the sick child and, as Alfrieda held her bewildered mother, moved Willy to a more comfortable position with his head down and covered with the damp cloth. Ernestine struggled mindlessly for a moment, whimpered, and suddenly buried her head against Alfrieda’s breast. The adolescent held the frightened woman in her thin, strong arms and soothed, “It’s all right, Momma. Everything’s going to be all right. I won’t let them hurt you or Willy.”

  Matt Caldwell waited until high noon before he made his big mistake. They’d ridden nearly twenty miles southwest of Fort Havasu at the mile-eating, maddening gait of a walking camel, when Caldwell called a break.

  The midday break was not the mistake. The men were stiff and tired after more than six hours in the uncomfortable Tuareg saddles, and the overhead sun was becoming a hellish open furnace door in the sky.

  Greenberg’s Indian tracker, Rabbit-Boss, had walked all the way ahead of the column and took immediate advantage of the break to crawl under a mesquite and take a nap. The others made their camels kneel and climbed stiffly off, cursing, relieving themselves in the bushes, and searching for slivers of partial shade to eat their dry rations in a bit of comfort.

  The mistake Matt Caldwell made was when, near the end of the twenty-minute break, he decided it was time he tried to control his camel on his own. High Jolly had held the lead for him since leaving the fort, and he was sure his mount by now had gotten used to the idea that he was in command of this patrol. It was all very well for Greenberg to be led about by Trooper Dorfler. The scout was only on temporary duty with the Camel Corps and made no bones about his dislike for the ungainly animals. To Greenberg, the camel was only a means to get across th
e desert without walking. When it came to the serious business of fighting Indians, Greenberg preferred to stand on his own two feet.

  But Caldwell felt ridiculous leading a patrol on a mount he couldn’t control. Before ordering his men to mount up again, he decided to put the matter to rights. The twelve camels were kneeling in a hobbled line, apparently oblivious to their hot and dry surroundings as they belched and burbled, chewing their cuds. Fatima, the mare camel High Jolly had selected for the lieutenant, had been hobbled near a clump of American saltbush that was close enough to camel’s-thorn to serve as fodder. As Caldwell approached, Fatima’s snakelike neck stretched out for another mouthful of saltbush, and when he said, “We’re going for a little ride, Fatima,” his soothing words evoked a look of bland disinterest from under the camel’s heavy eyelids.

  Taking the rein in one hand, Caldwell leaned to loosen the slip-knot noose that kept Fatima’s left foreleg doubled under her. In the middle distance, High Jolly called, “No, Effendi!” as the officer climbed up into Fatima’s saddle and shouted, “Arrah, arrah, get up, old girl.”

  Fatima twisted her serpentine neck to :tare back at him in utter contempt, as Caldwell repeated the command he’d heard High Jolly and the others give to make their camels rise. High Jolly was running over, yelling something in Arabic, as Fatima belched, groaned, and suddenly lurched to her feet. Pleased with himself, Caldwell kicked his heels against the flat dun sides of the big animal and muttered, “Hike! Hike! Giddy-up, goddamn it!”

  For a moment, nothing seemed to happen. Then Fatima lurched forward and started in the general direction of the Atlantic Ocean at a dead run!

  A camel walks a little slower than a marching soldier. It runs much faster than a horse. There are no stages in between. Full speed is a series of stilt-legged jolts, and Caldwell was immediately sorry he’d started the whole thing. Clinging to the high cruciform pommel with one hand, he hauled back on the rein as hard as he could with the other and gasped, “Whoa! Shhh! Shhh!” and when that didn’t work, he tried to turn the brute at least by yelling, “Adda! Adda! Where in the hell do you think you’re going, you lop-eared crazy bitch?”

  Fatima neither swerved nor slowed as she bounced east on her long, stiff-kneed legs. The saddle bobbed from side to side on the flabby hump, and Caldwell was having enough trouble staying aboard before the right stirrup strap gave way. He clung desperately for a few more strides, half out of the saddle at a crazy forty-five-degree angle, and then he muttered, “The hell with it,” and concentrated on holding the end of the rein as he fell.

  The desert came up to meet him with a bone-jarring thump, and then he was dragging through the dust and gravel on the end of the braided leather line, cursing and spitting dirt and smashed greasewood brush from between split lips as the camel fought the drag of his dead weight.

  And then Fatima gave up, as suddenly as she’d begun, and dropped her bleeding nose to nibble disdainfully at a creosote bush. Matt Caldwell watched narrowly, lying on his elbows and clinging to the line for all he was worth. But the camel had apparently decided she’d had enough.

  High Jolly ran past, grabbed the rein near the nose ring, and smashed a camel goad across Fatima’s head, shouting, “Kh! Kh! On your knees, Daughter of Ahriman!” as he forced the runaway to kneel. As Caldwell got weakly to his feet, High Jolly looked back and said, “You did well to hold on to the rein, Father of Meharim! If you had let go, this thrice-accursed beast would not have stopped this side of the Colorado!”

  “Yeah, well, give me that goad and wait here until I find the damn stirrup I threw back there. I think I’m getting the hang of it.”

  “Effendi, you cannot be serious! We are not in the corral back at the fort. If she throws you again out here in the open, there will be no catching her. None of the others can run as fast with a man in the saddle as Fatima can without!”

  “She might throw me, High Jolly, but she’s not going to make me let go unless she kills me first.”

  As Caldwell turned away, High Jolly sighed, “I fear Fatima knows this, too, Effendi.”

  Looking back the way he’d come, Matt Caldwell was surprised at the distance. The rest of his patrol seemed far away, except for Corporal Muller, who’d followed High Jolly and was now approaching with the lost stirrup in one hand. From where he stood, holding Fatima’s bridle, the Muslim called, “Talk to the Effendi Lieutenant, friend Muller! He is determined to master this stubborn mother of stampedes!”

  Muller came over to give Caldwell the stirrup, saying, “If the lieutenant won’t mind a suggestion, me and High Jolly could maybe ride on either side and … ”

  “Just let me buckle that son-of-a-bitch stirrup right and stand clear, Corporal,” Caldwell cut in, limping over to Fatima to replace the loosened strap. Standing near the camel’s head, High Jolly insisted, “Listen, Effendi, you will lose this mount, even if you don’t break your neck! I told you back at the fort it takes at least a week to learn the art of the Mehari!”

  Muller added, “She smells the river, Lieutenant. The wind’s from the east and these critters go loco when they taste water in the air.”

  Caldwell insisted, “She’s not thirsty. She’s just ornery. But you know how the old song goes, there was never a critter that couldn’t be rode?”

  “Yes, sir, and never a rider that couldn’t be throwed! Do you lose your mount, sir, we’re gonna have to double two men up on one of the camels.” But Caldwell was climbing up into the saddle with a firm expression. He asked, “Have either of you seen my hat?” and Muller answered, “Yes, sir, it’s in that clump of pear yonder.” Caldwell nodded and said, “Pick it up for me and hang on to it, will you?” Then he turned to High Jolly and said, “Give me that rein and untie the hobble, drover.”

  “Effendi, do you think this is wise?”

  “No, but turn her loose and let her buck!”

  The Muslim shrugged, muttered, “Inshallah, he will live through this fall as well as he did the last,” and did as he was told.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then Caldwell kicked and shouted, “Arrah! Arrah! Let’s see you do that again, you oversized cross between a rocking chair and a nanny goat!”

  Slowly, Fatima got to her feet, moaned, and turned her head toward the east. Caldwell pulled the rein, slammed her on the side of the head with the camel goad, and insisted, “Adda! Adda! Turn around or I’ll break your goddamn skull!”

  Fatima burbled, groaned, and majestically turned, as if that was what she’d had in mind all the time. Caldwell saw Muller had his hat and swung the camel toward the corporal, saying, “Hot-hot-hot!” to slow Fatima’s pace as he leaned over and grabbed his hat on the fly with a desperately nonchalant nod of thanks. He replaced the dusty hat on his disheveled hair and walked the camel back toward the others. A cheer went up from the dismounted cameleers and Caldwell shot them a stern look. What was the matter with the idiots? Hadn’t they ever seen a man ride a camel before?

  By three p.m. the temperature had stabilized at a hundred and twenty-six degrees in the shade, and there was, of course, no shade atop a moving camel. The movement helped, creating the effect of a three-knot breeze as the column plodded southwest. The instant evaporation of sweat in the bone-dry desert air was a mixed blessing. It kept a man from dying of heat prostration, but the crust of salt it left in crotch and armpits of one’s uniform itched like hundreds of crawling ants. Matt Caldwell stared dully at the plodding form of Rabbit-Boss, on foot ahead of the column, and envied the Indian his naked state. Under a white man’s roof, the “savage” Digger had seemed ignorant and primitive, even by Indian standards. Out here on the trail, his life style was beginning to make a lot of sense. As Greenberg had observed, Rabbit-Boss hadn’t refused to wear so much as a breechclout because he was “proud of his pecker,” but, simply because anything you put next to your skin in this country itched!

  Having more or less mastered his mount, Caldwell had taken the point, although High Jolly kept his own mount within discreet distance fo
r a sudden swoop to the rescue. The Muslim knew, better than Caldwell, how often a camel might simply be waiting for a chance to take advantage of an unsure rider.

  On the other side, unwilling to waste his time on foolish notions, Digger Greenberg rode his own mount, led by Trooper Dorfler. This freed Greenberg’s hands to grip the buffalo rifle across his knees, and if there was occasion to request a change in course, Dorfler understood Greenberg’s garbled, half-forgotten Yiddish better than he did the English commands of the lieutenant. Both Greenberg and his Hessian attendant, in fact, thought that what Greenberg referred to as “old country” was some form of German. The scout spoke a bit of Cree from the other side of his family tree, and in time, his twentieth-century descendants would remember him proudly as one of those tall, blond Nordic “mountain men” who’d “tamed the West.”

  Trooper Dorfler, in turn, was fated to found a petty dynasty of Regular Army noncoms who, once they’d anglicized the name to Dorman, would teach a future Kaiser a good lesson.

  Corporal Muller and his squad followed in a line less military than the A.R.’s prescribed. The lieutenant, remembering that the first thing he’d seen of the formation the day before had been the fluttering red and white guidon, had left Muller’s squad pennant behind at the fort. It was easy enough to dress a line of twelve camels at close range, and he saw no reason to make it any easier to see at a distance than he had to.

  From their high seats on the Turkish saddles, the members of the patrol had well over a five-mile view to the horizon. There didn’t seem to be much more than desert pavement and knee-high scrub out there to see. From time to time, a locust whirred out from under a camel’s foot, but otherwise the flat they were crossing seemed devoid of animal life. It hardly seemed possible for a lizard to live out here on these fiats, let alone a band of Apache.