Forcing Amaryllis

by Louise Ure

  Maybe he hadn’t seen which trail I took. Three paths led away from the parking lot, and each of those branched out like veins within a quarter of a mile. Bear Canyon was the southernmost of the trails. I moved as quietly as possible, careful to plant my feet and not dislodge pebbles or scare night creatures into flight.

  I couldn’t hear any motion behind me, so I thought I had bought myself a few minutes. I picked up my pace from a creep to a crawl. The path was narrow, and mesquite trees brushed my face with their soft, feathery leaves. I gave an involuntary shudder. On my left was the moonlit path leading to the picnic area where Selena, Giulia, and I had waited to hear the verdict. I didn’t take it. I would have felt too exposed.

  Canyon tree frogs croaked lonely serenades around me, then went silent. Suddenly footsteps crashed in the brush behind me, and I took off running. The trail rose and fell in gentle waves, but my feet stumbled over even the smallest pebble. I fell to one knee and scared the whitetail deer that leaped out of the thicket as much as he scared me. If Cates hadn’t known where I was before, he did now.

  I made as much noise as possible in case someone else was in the canyon. “Help!” I yelled. “I’m here! I need help!” No answer but the running footsteps behind me.

  The terrain changed to loose rocks and steep hillsides on my left. I had no sense of how far I had run, but my lungs burned with the hot, dry air, and my legs, unused to adrenaline or exercise, shook with palsy.

  When I splashed into four inches of water in the creek, I knew I was lost. I found another trail on the far side of the creek and began to climb up the rocky hillside. I gripped the craggy edge of a boulder with my right hand, but my woven leather shoes slipped on the volcanic stone, and I dangled like a kitten caught on a string.

  Talonlike fingers grabbed my ankles, and I shrieked. Cates yanked with the strength of the rightfully accused and tossed me to the ground. He dropped to his knees and caught my flailing hands between iron fists. I bucked and scrambled, my grandmother’s voice ringing in my ears: “Calla, you’re not much for pretty, but you’re sure good for strong.”

  His hands lost their purchase on my wrists, and I skittered away toward the creek. Thank God for those low-center-of-gravity Italian genes.

  Cates gave another lunge, this time pinning my legs and grabbing my hair. He dragged me to the shallow water and pushed my face into the silty runoff. It was only a couple of inches deep. If I could turn my head to the side, I would be able to breathe. And if I couldn’t, then that palm reader’s prediction of a drowning death would soon come true.

  Cates was stronger than my resolve. I sputtered and flailed as the pressure on the back of my head increased. I scratched and clawed at his hands, and my glasses flew off, lost in the darkness. Like a beetle in resin, I was held immobile between the stone of his fists and the trickle of water that would kill me.

  It took all of my courage and the last of my breath, but I quit fighting and let my arms float free. Cates did not let up, continuing to grind my face into the wet sand. I let my arms drop to my sides and took a firm grip on the sun-shaped belt buckle. When I sensed the slightest release of tension from above, I flipped over like an angry cat and raked at his eyes. The metal gouged his face, and the wet leather strap snapped like an insult. He gave a bellow of pain and surprise and put his hands to his face. I didn’t wait, racing blindly away from the creek to lose myself in the trees.

  Without my glasses the night was a blur of shadow and shape. I was facing the rising moon when I started on the trail, but it was now well above the horizon. I didn’t know which direction to turn.

  Maybe I could follow the direction of the creek. No, the creek ran to the southwest, back in the direction of the visitors’ center and the parking lot, and that was the direction where Cates waited.

  I felt my way farther up the canyon. If I was right about the trail I was on, it only went one place: Seven Falls.

  38

  I paralleled the dirt trail, moving more toward the absence of shape than from one place to another. To my damaged eyes a dark shape could be a shadow or a stone, and absence of darkness meant either a clear part of the trail or the possibility of a silent stone to step on. A rounded shape could be a boulder or a brittlebush, a tall shape a man or a saguaro. I blinked and squinted, but it didn’t help.

  The moon cast a yellow and black tapestry across the desert floor. I inched farther up the mountainside from one pool of lighter shade to another, slipping on loose shale, panting with fear and once walking smack into a jumping cholla cactus that hooked its wiry barbs into the tender flesh at the base of my ear. I swallowed my cry of pain and brushed away the blood that oozed from the thorny gashes.

  In the daytime Seven Falls is a popular gathering spot, a year-round receptacle for the sweet rainwater that washes down off the Santa Catalina Mountains. Flat, house-size boulders provide natural stepping stones for the cascading water, and an afternoon of lolling in the narrow canyon can bring respite and release. But under a full moon and populated only by residents who crawled, it would be a nightmare landscape.

  I found that I fell less often if I stayed on my knees. So, like those other canyon dwellers, I crawled, a blind penitent in the desert night.

  I couldn’t see my watch, but by my reckoning I had inched across the canyon floor and hillsides for almost three hours. Three hours and almost three miles farther away from help. I took a deep breath and leaned back against a still-warm boulder.

  The deep canyon had not yet accepted my presence and had not resumed its cacophony of desert sounds. The wind sighed softly, rubbing creosote branches together and perfuming the air with the promise of rain. It was a shadow-filled world, the full moon now overhead. The dark monoliths of giant saguaros stood like a surrendered army.

  Suddenly Cates was in front of me, close enough that even my dull eyes could see the rictus mouth and the thick spittle on his lips. He bunched my shirt into his fist, pulled me toward him, and threw me across the desert sand. Mica and shale ground into my cheek and my knees. I flailed my arms to the side but found only a cholla cactus that dug achingly into my palm like a self-adhesive grenade. I gasped with pain, scooted back into a seated position, and tried to dislodge the spiny cactus from my hand.

  Cates was breathing hard. I couldn’t see his face. Without my glasses my world had narrowed to one of sensation and sound. There was no shape, no definition that was clear enough for me to recognize and avoid. I was held captive in a gauzy, blurry world of gray and black, unable to find an exit route or a weapon, or even to avoid an onrushing fist.

  I cowered there in my seated position, his hot breath on my cheek.

  “I got a big kick out of you coming by to give me back my belt.” He panted the words into my ear. “But I couldn’t trust you to drop the whole thing. Someday … somehow … you’d start thinking about this belt again. And you’d start asking questions.”

  He pulled his belt from where it lay by my side, wrapped the leather around his hand, buckle-side out, then gripped my left hand like a manacle. “Let’s see how you like the feel of it.”

  Said with such complete confidence and composure. A personal mantra I knew he had used before. My teeth began to chatter, and I pain-flexed my right hand, still held in the iron grip of the cholla cactus.

  All the rage I had felt for the last seven years boiled up in me. The loss of Amy’s smile, of her laugh. Seven years of cringing and living with my elbows tucked in. With a wordless grunt, I lashed out at the sinister shadow that hung over me and ground the cholla into his eye.

  He roared with pain.

  I ignored the cactus spines imbedded in my palm and scrambled backward over sand, shoe-size rocks, and brittle thorns. Even with one damaged eye he still had some vision. That was more than I had. I had to hide.

  I groped my way across the sand to the flat boulders Seven Falls was famous for. The water level probably wasn’t high, but a thin stream below me cascaded from one stony shelf to another. There didn’
t seem to be any place to hide along this flat, open plain of rock, so I continued moving, crablike, reaching out with a Braille hand to read the geography of the canyon with each step. I sensed a darker shadow, an overhang of stone, perhaps, above me. I would still be in the open, but in a darker patch of open. A dark nest that was as warm as a cooling oven.

  “Motherfucking son of a bitch,” I heard behind me as he continued to pull the razor-sharp spines from his face. “You’ll pay for this.”

  His steps came toward me, deliberate with menace and finality.

  “You’re going to regret this,” he promised. “I’ll make it last. I’m going to take a long time to kill you.”

  I heard a soft rattle beside me. I froze. I couldn’t see it, but I recognized that deadly maraca sound. On warm summer nights the rattlesnakes come out to bask on the still-hot flat rocks of the canyon. By the sound of him, we had interrupted the nap of a sizeable adult diamondback. The hollow rattle painted a picture in my mind—an elongated, gray diamond design as intricate as a woven basket, a forked tongue tasting the air for prey.

  Don’t move, don’t breathe, I cautioned myself. Two predators: one beside me and one in front. If Cates continued his angry march in this direction, the snake was just as likely to lash out at the closer of its two targets. Me.

  My legs ached with the held position and the desire to run. I grabbed a small, sharp-edged stone with my thorny hand. I may have lost my sense of sight, but I still had hearing. And Cates’s fury had robbed him of that.

  I listened for his steps across the stone, hard-soled cowboy boots slipping on the smooth surface. He growled and cussed in pain. When I sensed he was just an arm’s length away, I threw the stone toward the snake and rolled to my left. The rattler, recognizing the danger of another predator, struck twice at the target in front of him.

  The sky was changing to a hint of navy blue on the eastern horizon with the promise of a new day, even if it was still hours away. Without my glasses I still could have found my way back down the trail in two or three hours, but I chose not to.

  I wanted to watch him die.

  I scooted far enough away to know that I would no longer be disturbing the rattlesnake, and far enough to know that Cates couldn’t reach out for me. I hung my head and listened to the progress of his pain.

  He wailed terror-pitched high notes against the ache in his groin and his hand. The snake had first struck high on the inside of Cates’s leg, piercing the thin khaki cloth and hanging there momentarily with his fangs caught in the fabric. When Cates reached down in reaction to the hot-poker sting of the bite, he struck again.

  I listened to Cates’s ranting as the delirium grew worse. First he complained of the pain, then became dizzy and weak, his vision blurring to a cottony myopia I could identify with.

  “It’s your family crest, isn’t it?” I said. “The Sleepy C brand. Just like the archway at the entrance to your ranch. I even saw you drawing it that first day at the jail.” I remembered the sketch I’d thought was a landscape of freedom: the dip of a valley and two high-flying birds. “That’s what the cuts mean. You had to mark these women. Show them how powerful you are. And you did it by carving your brand into them.”

  He grunted. Neither an acknowledgment nor a denial.

  “You called my sister Sweet Thing, too.” He looked at me with curiosity, perhaps not realizing it was this signature phrase that had condemned him. “Amaryllis Del Arte. That’s her name. Not Sweet Thing.”

  “Huh.” This time recognition of the words, but too much pain for more than that.

  Sweat poured off his face. When the convulsions started, I knew it was close to the end.

  A darker shadow moved across the moon.

  “Ray, it looks like you can’t do nothin’ right,” Salsipuedes said.

  39

  Where did you come from?” Fatigue was making me stupid and slow, and my words sounded as if they came from underwater.

  “Ray called me on the cell phone when you got away from him,” Salsipuedes replied, then turned his head to Cates. “Sorry it took me so long to get here. I made it from the ranch pretty fast but had some trouble finding you in these hills.”

  “Ray is the one who raped my sister,” I told him. “And Miranda Lang. He probably killed Lydia Chavez, too. I’ve got proof now.” Maybe I could appeal to Salsipuedes with the truth. He was certainly loyal to the Cates family, but I didn’t think he would have provided that alibi if he knew Cates was really guilty.

  “Naw, that was me. Ray’s never been able to finish anything on his own.”

  My head jerked up. “You?”

  His lip curled into a sneer. “Yep. Ray’s never been able to get the job done. Calls me every time he gets himself in trouble. Calls me his ‘cleanup man.’”

  My mind was reeling. I was hunting for one man and thought I had the proof against him. Now I knew that Cates was the lesser of two evils. He was still the vicious sexual predator Sharon had known in her preteen years, but he’d found himself a stronger arm, a more virulent evil, in Salsipuedes.

  “And my sister?”

  “Yeah, Ray recognized that picture I took from your house. So that little slut in Nogales was your sister, huh? Ummmm, pretty little thing. She picked Ray up—did you know that? Slow traffic leaving the rodeo, so she yells over to him and asks if he wants to stop and get a cold drink. I was in a truck right behind him. Got to watch her in the bar sucking on that soda straw like it was a cock.”

  Oh, Amaryllis, you thought you brought this all on yourself.

  “She was something.” He was happy to reminisce. “They had a drink, and then, when Ray got her in that motel room, I came in and tied her up. Let him do what he wanted to.”

  He came back to the present with a lazy blink of his eyes. “Take off your shirt.”

  I knew now the terror that Amy had felt in the motel room. That moment of incredulity that Miranda had described when her attacker lashed out at her. That gut-wrenching sense that you were not going to live through the night and there was nothing you could do to stop it.

  My fingers fumbled at the buttons on my shirt, and Salsipuedes, in a fit of pique or excitement, ripped the last two buttons off and grabbed the cloth. He unleashed the blade of a slim knife, its razor edge as long as my hand, and began slicing the white cloth into ribbons. He wrapped three strong strands together and bound my hands in front of me.

  He glanced at Cates. “Hang in there, Ray. I’ll get you out of here. But first I have a little partying of my own to do.”

  I scooted back out of his reach, listening for the deadly rattle of the snake, but I didn’t dare hope it would save me twice tonight. Salsipuedes took one step forward and dragged me back by the wrists.

  Cates’s breathing was shallow now. I didn’t think he’d survive a trip back down the canyon. But I also didn’t think Salsipuedes really wanted him to.

  “You don’t care if Cates lives or dies, do you? You can just go back to being George Cates’s best cowhand and almost son.” I sneered the last two words, hoping to disturb his serene confidence.

  He turned his head toward Cates’s supine form. Cates wasn’t moving. “Naw, it suits me just fine if he dies here with you and everybody thinks it’s over. Ray’s always fucked up anything he tried to do. He’s been trying to prove he’s a man his whole life, and he can’t even do that right. Can’t get it up. Has to use a knife or a gun instead of his cock—and then he can’t go through with the killing. It’s been up to me for years. But I did it for Mr. Cates, not for Ray.”

  And George Cates rewards you for it. “What about Lydia Chavez?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He smiled as he remembered. “I thought for a while that deputy was going to remember the old ranch truck in the parking lot there. Ray and I were hunkered down behind the bushes just a few yards away from him. She was still alive then … for a little while longer, anyway.”

  I didn’t have to ask about Bonnie DeGroot; it was clear who had killed her. Salsipuedes pr
obably expected a pat on the back from Cates senior for ensuring a not-guilty verdict. And for convincing me of Cates’s innocence.

  I groped around me for anything I could use against him. Nothing but plum-size rocks and sand. My knees shook. I didn’t know if my legs would support me if I tried to stand.

  “And Miranda Lang?”

  “Which one is she?”

  “She was at the mariachi concert.”

  “Oh, that was just Ray. I had nothing to do with it. Guess that’s why she’s still alive. He fucked that up, too. Like his daddy always says, ‘Ray, you’re not man enough to piss standing up.’”

  He grabbed my leg and tied a strip of cotton around my left ankle. I jerked my right leg as far away as I could.

  “My sister is still alive. I guess you don’t always clean things up,” I taunted.

  Salsipuedes squatted in front of me and waved the knife in a figure eight. “You’re right. I thought she was dead. Ray sliced his brand and used the knife inside her just the way he likes to do, so when I came in for sloppy seconds, I didn’t even think she was breathing.”

  “That’s about your speed, raping a dead woman. That’s probably the only way you can get it up.” I picked up a small, flat piece of shale between my bound hands and hid it beside my knee.

  When Cates had come after me, I had the advantage of silence. His bellowing rage and pain had deafened him to the sounds around him. Against Salsipuedes I had nothing, and his calmness made him a much more dangerous enemy.

  The fist came out of nowhere, connecting with the left side of my face. He grabbed my bra and pulled me toward him, but the clasp broke, and he lost his grip. I scuttled crablike toward the edge of the falls.

  “I’ll show you what I can do to a live woman.”

  He crept toward me, first toe then heel, like an Indian stalking a deer. I leaned back and felt the rocky edge of the precipice. There would be five shelves of rock below me to escort the water down the canyon. Five shelves that were beyond my reach.

  Salsipuedes sprang, tackling me as I tried to move to the side. He ground my face into the wind-cleaned rock, and his weight bore down from my shoulders to my knees. The sound of the waterfall was buzzing in my ears.