Valley of Fire

by Johnny D. Boggs

  Well, they could have strung me up right then and there. But they give me a day or so to rot in the jail. Torture, I call it. Making a body think about that hemp scratching your throat, wondering what it’ll be like, if your neck will break or if you’ll just kick and choke and strangle. Sons of bitches.

  Guess there ain’t no point in trying to explain that I was innocent. Sure, I had killed Hernandez’s brother-in-law, but I had warned Gomez not to pull that pistol, had told him he was making a bad mistake, and he had gotten off the first shot and come a couple inches from killing me. That made it self-defense, even if I had been cheating, which nobody could prove unless I confessed, and that certainly wasn’t in the cards. I had been protecting my person. Same as I’d been forced to do with that drover in Missouri, and that outlaw down in the Indian Nations. I hadn’t killed nobody in Texas, but them Texians seemed to suspicion just how come other men’s horses kept following me home.

  That was my story. And Sister Geneviève’s? That was what I was trying to figure out.

  Staring at that pepperbox, her gloved hand so delicate on those rosewood grips, her finger tighter than I’d like against that trigger, I began to suspicion that Sister Geneviève wasn’t no Sister at all. Granted, I had spent some years trying to forget what those nuns had tried to beat into me back at that orphanage, but my memory told me that nuns usually didn’t have such cold brown eyes, and seldom looked so beautiful, not to mention deadly. Maybe they’d cuss a little when riled, but I doubted if nuns carried pepperbox pistols. And, sure as hell, I’d never heard of a nun busting a fellow out of jail a few hours before he was scheduled to die. Even the Pope, I figured, would frown upon a Sister going that far to save a gent’s soul.

  I didn’t have to figure how Felipe Hernandez would take my escape. Sounds from the street drifting through the open window told me that, plain enough.

  Criminy, just a few minutes earlier I had been confined in the worst jail I’d ever struck, picking over the hog and hominy I expected was my last meal, washing it down with cold coffee—and no sugar, mind you—wondering if I’d wet my britches when they come to string me up. About that time the jailer, a toothless old coot named Evers, had ducked his head into the hallway and said, “A nun’s here to see you.”

  I had rolled my eyes.

  “Boy,” Evers said, “iffen I was you, I’d see her.”

  “You worried about my eternal damnation?” I asked.

  He snorted and spat. “I don’t give a hoot ’bout you, mister. But that sister, she looks finer than frog hair cut eight ways. Was I younger and condemned to die, I’d be of mind to pray with a gal like that.”

  “Hell, Evers, send her in.”

  Old Evers was right. This nun walked in, clutching a Bible in her right hand, and pressing the silver crucifix she held in her left to right pretty, full, rosy lips. Dark as that pit was, I couldn’t see her too well, and considering how she was all decked out in a loose dress of black serge with white coif and black veil covering most of her head, about all I could make out about her was her face.

  A beautiful face. Perfect nose, not a blemish about her, with such soulful brown eyes. When she got closer, over the stink of the dungeon, I could even smell lilac on her person. She looked younger than me. Lowering the crucifix, she told me, “I am Sister Geneviève of the Sisters of Charity.”

  Sisters of Charity? That sent a chill up my spine, recalling to mind them years just down the trail in Santa Fe where I had spent most of my childhood getting walloped by nuns who had looked nothing like her.

  She turned to ask Evers, “May I enter the cell to pray with him?”

  Sounded perfectly French. Not that I knowed what perfect French sounded like.

  Evers, miserable reprobate that he was, shook his head. “Nobody’s allowed inside, Sister. Marshal’s orders.”

  Marshal’s orders? I thought. You mean Felipe Hernandez’s!

  “Very well,” she said, and bowed in the filth and muck that covered the flagstone floor. Once she taken to praying in Latin or some foreign tongue, Evers left and locked the big oaken door behind him.

  Soon as Evers turned that key, she looked up with eyes not so much soulful but rather harder than a beer bottle. “I need you to take me to the Valley of Fire.”

  “Ma’am?” Valley of Fire? At first, I figured it was some Catholic talk, about me telling her the wickedest things I’d done—which would have taken considerable time—and feeling the fires of Hades before getting absolution and avoid going to the bad place.

  “You heard me.” She sure wasn’t speaking Latin. Or French. She sounded like the hard-rock madam at that hog ranch a few miles north of Trinidad, Colorado. She asked again, her voice far from forgiving. “Can you take me there?”

  That inquiry was the last thing I expected, and I spilled most of my cold coffee over my duck trousers and almost sat down in the slop bucket. “Ma’am?”

  “Take me and others to the Valley of Fire.”

  This was summer. The Valley of Fire, or Fires, as some folks called it—as if it wasn’t hot enough already down there with just one fire—lay east of the Jornado del Muerto, the “Journey of the Dead” along the old Camino Real, maybe a day or so from Lincoln . . . but more than a hundred and seventy-five miles from these gallows. Brutal as that country was, it did seem more inviting than what Las Vegas offered me. But there was one little thing....

  “Sister,” I said, “much as I’d like to help you out, I don’t think Felipe Hernandez is gonna let me guide you nowhere.”

  She was standing. “Let me worry about that. If I get you out of here, will you help me?”

  “Hell, yes!” I felt no pressing need to meet up with Saint Peter.

  “Deputy!” she called. Had to call twice more before Evers unlocked the door and headed down the hallway.

  “That was quick. You—” He almost choked on the quid of tobacco he was gumming when she stuck that pepperbox in his face.

  “Let him out,” she said, spoken like the word of God.

  She didn’t give him time to stall. When he just stood there drooling brown juice into his beard, she cracked him upside the head with that little pistol, and brought her knee up savagely into his groin. Old Evers went down, and her knee went up again smashing the poor fool’s face, then she pounded the back of his head with her Bible and the pepperbox. He fell hard against the flagstone, and I feared she had killed the reprobate. That .22 disappeared in the folds of her habit while she grabbed the ring of keys he had dropped.

  Faster than David could sing a psalm, we was out of that jail, skedaddling in the shadows. Seemed to me like we was making a beeline for the livery stable, when all of a sudden we both heard old Evers screaming and cussing from the door to the jail. Made me wish she had hit that loudmouthed jailer harder, maybe even killed him. As luck would have it, Felipe Hernandez happened to be riding right past the jail with a bunch of his gunmen. So much for sneaking to get us some horses. Shots was fired, and every drunk in town came flying out the saloons along the plazuela. Instead of running to the livery, we cut down an alley and hurried up the back stairs of El Hotel Gallinas, making it to the second floor. The good Sister had a key, and after she unlocked the door to room 22, we quickly found ourselves panting and listening to the ruction being raised outside.

  Wasn’t much of a room, illuminated only by a couple candles, but El Hotel Gallinas ain’t much of a place to hang your hat. Once I had caught my breath, I thanked her for her trouble and told her I’d see about fetching a horse and be on my way. That’s when I was suddenly looking down the same pistol barrel that old Evers had seen before she’d knocked his lights out.

  That’s when she told me, “I didn’t bust you out of that hellhole ten minutes ago to have you quit on me now. So sit down, Mister Bishop, or I scream, and that mob hauls you back to jail, or, more than likely, straight to the gallows tree, providing I don’t wallpaper this pigsty with your miserable brains.”

  I didn’t sit. “How you plan o
n getting me out of here?” I jutted my jaw toward the window. Since she sure wasn’t deaf, she could hear those shouts from the darkened streets. Men was cussing a whole lot more than she’d just cussed me, and I could savvy that Felipe Hernandez wanted me brung back dead, and he didn’t care what they did to the gal who had sprung me loose, either.

  “I got you this far.” She jerked her head toward the cot. “Sit down!”

  The bed squeaked.

  “You said you’ll guide us to the Valley of Fire.”

  Who was us? I wondered. Being honest for a change, I said, “A man about to hang’s likely to agree to just about anything.” I smiled.

  She didn’t.

  The pepperbox came closer to my eyeballs. I’d expected what she had just done—a nun, helping a convicted murderer bust out of jail—to weigh heavily upon her shoulders, to cause her to tremble, and cry, and maybe fall into my arms. Instead, I got another good look down the barrel of that little cannon.

  “Are you really a nun?” I asked.

  But she must’ve not heard me because she was saying, “Sister Rocío insisted that you were the only one....”

  “Rocío?” Instinctively, my right hand felt the back of my head.

  Her eyes hardened. “You know Sister Rocío?”

  I rubbed my noggin. “An old one-armed crone?”

  Sister Geneviève’s head bobbed just slightly.

  “She cracked my skull and knuckles a million times back at the orphanage.”

  My rescuer didn’t trust me. Not yet. “Where was this orphanage?”

  “Santa Fe.” For effect, I emphasized. “Sisters of Charity. Next to St. Vincent’s.” That was the hospital the nuns had started right after the War of the Rebellion. Later, them nuns had formed the orphanage, and then what they called an industrial school for girls. Those sisters wandered all across the Rocky Mountains begging for money, for help.

  “She was older than dirt back then, and I left, what, sixteen years ago. She couldn’t be alive after all this time. She looked liked she was about to bite the dust when I knowed her. She must be dead. You must have another Sister Rocío.”

  “Left arm amputated at the elbow. Blind. She just turned seventy-three.”

  “Seventy-three? I thought she was a hundred when I knowed her.” Still, I couldn’t stop smiling. “Good for Sister Rocío!” I meant what I said, but I was also thinking, That old hag’s mind has gone. She’s mistook me for some other wayward lad she tried to beat sense into.

  “She insisted that you’re the only one who could take her there.” Geneviève Tremblay was whispering to herself, but I heard.

  When I stood, she pointed that pepperbox right at my stomach, but my fingers slowly reached inside my vest pockets, though I knowed they was empty. Then I checked the mule-ear pockets on my britches, but they was the same.

  “Thieves,” I said.

  “What are you talking about? What are you looking for?”

  “Just a rock. An old black piece of lava. Watch fob. Rocío gave it to me right before I run off—before I left.” I smiled. “That and a heavy silver Cross of Lorraine.”

  “Lava?” she asked.

  “That’s how the valley got its name,” I explained.

  It must have convinced her that I was honest, sometimes, because she lowered that gun, and said, “I’ll take you to Rocío.”

  Outside, among all the shouting from the streets, came words like muerto, guero, and puta. The population of Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory, sounded mightily riled.

  “I don’t mean to sound skeptical, Sister, but the way I figure it, old Evers has told everyone that it was you who busted me out of the calaboose. They’ll likely search your room.” In a pig’s eye. Criminy, there wasn’t no likely to it. At that moment, I heard floorboards groaning and spurs chiming just outside the door to our room.

  Footsteps stopped, and the doorknob squeaked. I grimaced. The door opened, but Sister Geneviève didn’t even look away from me. I was about to risk getting my eyes shot out, or my head blowed off—those “Ladies Companions” are known to misfire and shoot all five rounds at once—but stopped myself as a man entered the room, and quickly shut the door behind him.

  “It’s not my room,” she said. “It’s his.”

  The long-legged gent swept off his wide-brimmed black hat and stepped into the candlelight. He wore a black robe, and a silver cross hung from his neck. I was only beginning to suspicion that Sister Geneviève wasn’t a nun, but I damned sure knowed this guy wasn’t no priest, and not because of the Texas-sized spurs he had strapped to his boots.

  “Hello, Bishop,” Sean Fenn said.

  Me? I faced the hangman’s noose here in New Mexico, but only on account of some misunderstanding and having killed a relative of a powerful hombre. Unjust decision, if you ask me. But Sean Fenn? That son of a bitch deserved to die.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “You’re a lucky man, Bishop.” Sean Fenn moved to the dresser, opened a drawer, fetched out a bottle of Jameson and two tumblers.

  I hadn’t felt too lucky when I recognized Fenn, but sight of that Irish whiskey—providing it was Irish and not forty-rod poured into a Jameson bottle—made me feel a mite better . . . till Fenn poured two fingers in one of the glasses, and handed it to the nun. The second, he filled with four fingers, and took that one for his ownself.

  “I don’t feel lucky,” I said.

  Outside, it sounded like the entire population of Las Vegas was running around. I could hear Felipe Hernandez barking orders in Spanish, then English. I could still hear a lot of cussing.

  “You should.” Fenn sipped his drink. “First, Hernandez wanted to bring in a lot of his relatives to see you swing, including his sister and cousins in Santa Fe. That’s how we found out you were in jail. Hadn’t been for Felipe’s sense of honor, of justice, you’d be dead by now, and we wouldn’t know what to do.”

  I ran my hand over the beard stubble on my face. “The Valley of Fire.”

  “That’s right.” Fenn downed the rest of his Irish.

  “Even you could find it, Sean. It’s pretty hard to miss. It’s a big valley.”

  Sister Geneviève hadn’t touched her whiskey, so Fenn, smiling, took the tumbler from her hand and passed it over to me. I barely tasted the peat as I shot down that Irish.

  “Big valley,” Fenn said, “but what’s buried there isn’t big.” He moved to the window, pulled back a curtain, peered outside. “The train will be arriving directly. We should be at the depot.”

  Shaking my head, I almost laughed. “We? I think Señor Hernandez might object to that.” I was getting tired of making that point and nodded at his getup “Even that outfit won’t help you, Sean, not after you got a nun to bust me out of jail. They won’t trust nobody.”

  Fenn was moving, kneeling by the bed, reaching underneath. With a grunt, he began dragging something across the plank floor.

  I got off the bed.

  Kneeling beside him, the nun helped pull a long pine box from underneath.

  I frowned. “A coffin?”

  Geneviève pulled off the lid, leaning it against the dresser.

  “Get inside,” Fenn told me.

  Now, I don’t never try drawing to inside straights. I don’t put my hat on a bed, don’t bet on a horse with four white feet, and such things like that, but it ain’t on account that I’m of a superstitious nature. But lie down in a coffin?

  “I’ll do no such thing!” I said, all indignant-like.

  About that time, we heard the hotel’s front door open, and a bunch of boots downstairs, more shouts, and the proprietor saying something that nobody could make out on account of the cussing and commotion.

  “Alive now,” Fenn said, “or dead after they hang or shoot you. Your choice, pard.”

  I pulled off my hat, grumbling, but a moment later found myself lying inside that box.

  “You too, Sister Gen,” Fenn said.

  She protested worser that I’d done.

  “They k
now you busted him out of jail,” Fenn said. “They’ll be looking for you, or any nun.”

  “How about a priest?” I said, but Fenn was already shunning his robe and crucifix.

  “Get in,” Fenn snapped at the nun. “We don’t have much time.”

  He was right about that. Boot steps sounded on the stairs.

  Geneviève climbed in on top of me. She was small. I wasn’t that big, but it got to be a tight fit . . . yet, rather pleasurable. I mean, I could smell that lilac real good. She squirmed, trying to get comfortable. I moved my arms, put them around her back. Our faces were close, but she turned hers, pressed it against my shoulder, and sighed.

  “Y’all look might cozy,” Fenn said, and I watched him head to the door. The fool hadn’t put the lid on yet.

  The door opened, closed almost immediately, and I caught the scent of something that didn’t smell nothing like lilac. Fenn appeared over me and the nun again. Geneviève? She couldn’t see on account that she was lying facedown, but I’d clumb into the pine box like a dead man. Fenn held up a flour sack. He was smiling at first, till he opened the sack.

  His face turned into a mask, and he started to lower the sack, then just plain dropped it. It landed on the nun’s back, then slid down to my right.