“And if you combine the one in Nevada to the one south of here you’d have two,” Corbin said lightly.
“Making them the Valley of Fires.” The Pockmarked Man nodded his head as if that was the final word on the subject.
It wasn’t.
“Or the Valleys of Fire,” Corbin said.
“Gringo,” Benigno said. “Norteamericano. Imbecíl. I tell you, it is Fires.”
“Who gives a damn!” Sean Fenn had the last word on the matter. He gestured angrily at me. “What happened in the Valley of Fire?”
I shot Geneviève a glance. See, all this story I’d heard from her, but then Blanco and that big farmer from along the Pecos River had come upon us, and she hadn’t finished the story, but I made me a good guess. “It was buried there.”
Had to be. They seemed to think I knowed where it was, but I didn’t know nothing. Excepting what Geneviève had told me, and she hadn’t finished that tale.
“Where?” Fenn demanded.
“In the Valley of Fire.”
“Fires!” Benigno said, determined to prove his case.
Fenn shot the Mexican the meanest look I’d ever seen him give, and Benigno promptly decided that it didn’t matter one way or the other what anybody called it.
“Where in the Valley of Fire?” Fenn asked me.
“How the hell should I know?” I decided to make them do some talking, instead of me.
“Here’s why.” Fenn jumped to his feet, his face reddening once again.
That man needed to do something about that temper. He was liable to have his whole head just blow up from all that blood rushing to it.
“I’m in Santa Fe, minding my own business, when some damned Mex named Felipe Hernandez barges into the saloon, yelling that he is going to hang Micah Bishop the day after tomorrow, and everyone is invited to see the killer of his cousin—I forgot the dead man’s name—swing. I laugh, even consider taking the northbound up to Vegas to watch you jerk. But almost immediately, I start hearing stories about this nun. This old crone of a nun with one arm and blind as a bat. The stories that reach me at the faro layouts are that she must save Micah Bishop.
“Now, I could care less, but then there’s another story making its way in Santa Fe. That burg has more gossips than a Baptist church. I start hearing crazy things. About a fortune in ancient ingots. Buried in the Valley of Fire.” He glared at the Mexican, just daring him to say something, just give him a reason to blow his fool head off. Benigno kept quiet.
“So . . .”
I finished for Fenn. “So you sent her . . .” I tilted my head toward Geneviève. “. . . to the Sisters of Charity orphanage. Had her make a quick friendship with an old blind nun. Get the story from the nun herself, find out if I was really worth saving. Something like that, Sean?”
“You aren’t as stupid as I remembered,” Fenn said.
I kept looking at Geneviève, waited till she raised her head to look at me. “How’d you manage to fool the Mother Superior, get inside, find Sister Rocío?”
Geneviève lowered her gaze, wrapped her arms around her knees, begun rocking back and forth, staring at the dirt.
“They were expecting a nun to join their cult,” Fenn said. “Figured Gen could play that part for a day. Got her all dandied up, sent her on her way.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but the Mother Superior—”
“She was almost a nun.” Fenn cut me off. “Almost. Till she met me. Ain’t that right, Gen?” He spoke vindictively.
“Don’t call her that,” I said.
“What? Gen?”
“Yeah.”
He laughed. “Pardon me all to hell.” He laughed at Geneviève, still rocking, not saying nothing, not crying, just rocking.
I drawed a deep breath, let it out, and shrugged. “Well, I don’t know what Sister Rocío told you. Don’t know how I can help you fellows. You should ask the nun herself.”
“An excellent idea!” Fenn laughed.
Geneviève stopped rocking, and looked at him with the most hatred I’d ever seen in a pretty woman’s eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“You brought her here?” Geneviève came to her feet, shaking with rage. “You pathetic bastard! You brought a seventy-year-old nun, blind and frail with a bad heart and dying of carcinoma?”
That hit me like a .45 slug in the chest. My breath come up short. Sister Rocío was . . . dying?
“Well, it wasn’t quite as romantic as your little excursion here,” Fenn said, all snug, all snide. “We took the train from Santa Fe to Socorro and rented some horses. The old biddy said she’d only ride a burro, but I am always one to please. We compromised on a mule. A small mule.”
“And brought her here?” Geneviève’s arm swept across the crumbling rock walls.
“Yes, damn it.” Fenn wasn’t so snug no more. He was angry. “But you two are to blame. When the train pulled into Santa Fe, you two weren’t on it. You’d flown the coop. I didn’t know where or how. Didn’t know if you were dead or alive. And three-quarters of a million dollars worth of gold ingots . . . well . . . what did you expect me to do?”
He jabbed a finger at me. “She, that damned old, blind nun, she said you were the only one who could find it.” Fenn had to stop, put his hand on the rocks.
I was praying that he might drop dead of apoplexy right then and there, but, no luck.
When he looked up, when his mouth started moving, he wasn’t shouting no more, but speaking evenly, softly. “What I did know was that here, Gran Quivira, was the starting point. If you were somehow still alive, you would get here with Bishop.” He was grinning, a mean-spirited smile. “Or maybe, I thought, just maybe, you might decide that Bishop was a better pard than ol’ Sean Fenn. Maybe you might decide that all you needed was Micah Bishop to lead you to all them riches.
“I guess that’s about what happened.”
She spit in the dirt. I shook my head.
“Either way, I figured you and him. . . .” His gesture at me wasn’t so gentle. Fenn had to catch his breath again, steady himself, get some control back. “You and him would have to start here, too.”
“Why here?” I asked.
“Don’t play me for a damned fool, Bishop!” He spoke with such forcefulness, I spilled what was left of that coffee on my shirt, even slid back some.
Son of a bitch was crazy.
“You know why. That nun said we had to start here. So you’ll guide us to that fortune, Bishop. Or I bury you and your lovely concubine here.”
“And the old nun?” Geneviève asked.
“Well, that’s why I brought her here.” Fenn smiled. “In case you were dead, or caught, or lost. I thought maybe I could persuade the nun to let me find that fortune.” He clapped his hands. “But let’s go ask her. Shall we?”
The first Spanish mission went up at Gran Quivira in 1629. At least, that’s what the Santa Fe New Mexican reported after I was back in the Las Vegas jail. They let me read newspapers while I waited to see if any judge would allow my lawyer’s appeal, which, of course, as you already know, didn’t happen.
The second church, the real big one, they begun to build in 1659 when the new priest, Father Diego de Santander decided to put up a bigger one. ’Course, they never finished this one. It was all over by 1670, ten years before the big Indian revolt. They just stopped building the church and left Gran Quivira.
Read that in the New Mexican, too.
We wandered back through the maze, me and Geneviève following Benigno and The Pockmarked Man, Corbin and Fenn dragging behind. We crossed more rocks on the slope and come to the unfinished, but mighty impressive, walls of the second church. The sun made these walls look almost white, like the biggest tombstone ever made, and I was glad to step through the opening and into the shade.
My heart skipped some, because there she was, sitting on the massive rock windowsill, her one arm resting on what must have been left of an old viga from the roof, staring at the blowing tan grass, the cholla, th
e juniper trees, and across the emptiness, and on toward the mesa. That country looked real pretty from there, and not as Geneviève and me had seen it up close and dying of thirst.
’Course, the sad part about it all was that I knowed that Sister Rocío couldn’t see a thing.
“Sister,” Sean Fenn called out, all polite and respectful and charming and as deadly as a sidewinder, “that gallant nobleman Micah Bishop has finally arrived.” He pushed me toward her. “And Sister Geneviève is here with him.”
I heard Geneviève walking behind me.
The old nun turned. She wore her habit, same as Geneviève had been wearing when I’d first seen her. Her eyes were dark, empty, as I remembered them, but she held out her hand, and smiled. She had no teeth, but I remembered that she’d only had two or three–and one of them was black—back when I’d been a kid.
“Micah,” she said, her voice old, fading, but just as I remembered from them times at the Sisters of Charity orphanage. She muttered something in Spanish, crossed herself, and asked almost hopeful, “Is it you, my son?”
I gripped her hand, worn and rugged as old leather, squeezed it, and sat on the ledge beside her.
“What’s left of me,” I told her.
Then I couldn’t help myself. I embraced her in a deep, strong hug, and she give me a good squeeze herself with that one arm of hers.
When we separated, I had to dab at my own eyes, cussing the dust and the wind.
Softly, she said, “Your voice has changed, Micah.”
“It’s been a hell of a bad week,” I said.
The fingers unfolded and she slapped my face, which got the tooth Sean Fenn had loosened to aching and the gums bleeding again. Sternly, she chastised me. “Watch your mouth, Señor Bishop. Ten Our Fathers—muy pronto.”
What, fifteen, sixteen years had passed, but she moved real quick, still packed a wallop, and didn’t need no eyes to find my face.
“How long has it been, my child?” She was all quiet and kind, again.
I told her. She sighed. “It feels much longer.”
“I feel older,” I said, which weren’t no lie. Felt about as old as she was.
She fell silent, thinking back all those years. After a long moment, she said. “If my memory has not failed me, you were not confirmed before you . . .” She had to pause again, thinking of the right word. “Before you . . .”
“Ran away.”
“Sí. That is what you did.” Her head shook, but I thought she was smiling.
“When was your last confession?”
I smiled back at her, though she couldn’t see me. “Rocío,” I said. “I wasn’t confirmed. Remember? I ain’t Catholic. I’m pagan.”
The fist connected again. “Don’t be disrespectful, Señor Bishop. I am Sister Rocío.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I tested my jaw.
“You say you have not been to confession?”
“No, ma’am, I haven’t.”
“You have not repented? You are still as wild and as wicked as you were when you first arrived at the orphanage?”
“Probably even wilder.”
“So you are telling me, Sister Rocío, a dying woman who will not live to see many more sunrises, you are telling me that we shall not walk the Streets of Gold together?”
I wet my lips, hated to answer, but I didn’t want to get knocked in the jaw again.
“Probably not, Sister.”
Another long, sad pause.
So long, it got to be awkward, so I broke it by saying, “I’m sorry.”
Her head bobbed. “It is probably for the better, my son. Who would want to be in Heaven with evildoers and whoremongers and gamblers and wicked, wicked men like you?”
I waited. The fist didn’t strike.
At last, a grin made its way through the pits and crevasses of her deeply browned face. “It is a joke, Micah.” She patted my arm. “You may laugh.”
As I obliged her, she squeezed my arm.
“My son, you are nothing more than bones. Do you have the carcinoma as the doctors say I have?”
“I hope to hell—” I took a deep breath, rethought, and said, “I don’t think so, Sister Rocío.”
“You are not ill?”
I shrugged, considered the bullet wound across my side, the stitches in my forehead, the rawness of my left calf and ankle, the bruises and scrapes and aches throughout the rest of my person. “Well . . . I’ve felt better, but I ain’t sick or nothing.”
Those fingers turned into a wheelwright’s vice, digging into my arm. “Must I correct your grammar?” Again, she fired off something toward God and Mary and the Holy Ghost in Spanish. “¡Ay, caramba! English is my second language, and I speak it better than this wayfarer.”
“I’m not sick,” I corrected myself so blood might flow to my hand and fingers once more. “Not sick or nothing.”
“Or anything.”
“I’m not sick or anything.”
“And Geneviève.” She turned, must have felt Geneviève’s presence. Her hand left my arm—to my joy—and reached toward the Sister who wasn’t a Sister. “Sister Geneviève, you are here as well?”
Geneviève took the old woman’s hand in both of hers, squeezing. “I am here, Sister Rocío.” She sounded perfect French again.
“My new friend . . .” Rocío patted Geneviève’s arm, causing the pretty young fraud to bite her lips because of all those bruises and scrapes on her person. But you couldn’t fault the blind nun none, since she couldn’t see how she was hurting Geneviève. And you had to respect that pretty girl, because she didn’t let Rocío know no better.
“You found the prodigal son,” the old woman said. “I am much happy.”
“I am happy I found him, too.” Geneviève was looking at me when she said it.
“He is everything I told you he was?” Rocío asked.
Geneviève’s smile seemed genuine. “Everything and more.”
That was all Sean Fenn could take. “Sister Rocío, I have brought Micah Bishop to you. You want to find the gold, and you say he’s the only one who can do that. Well, he’s here. You said we should start our journey here.”
“To pay our respects to the dead,” the nun said solemnly. “To pray for God’s forgiveness.”
“Well,” Fenn said. “We probably should get a move on.”
The wind started picking up, and I checked the sky, but didn’t see no rain clouds.
“Sister Rocío,” I said gently, putting my hand on her shoulder, giving it a nice squeeze. “You told these people that I could find the gold. But . . . well . . . I don’t know anything about this.”
“Yes, my child, you do,” she said, and for a moment there, I thought she could see, blind as she was, I thought she could see not only me, but right through me. “And, yet, you don’t.” She turned toward Fenn’s voice, and told him, “It is not the gold I seek, but you may have what you find.”
She begun her story.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
She started at the beginning, which is where most stories begin, even though we knowed—or thought we knowed—all about how the gold was found in Mora, how it got to Gran Quivira, where it got rediscovered in 1848. Sister Rocío repeated all that, but I knowed a lot better than to interrupt her.
On the other hand, Sean Fenn didn’t.
“We know all that!” he snapped. “Where the hell’s the fornicating gold today?” Actually, that ain’t exactly what he said. He used another word, one that caused the rest of us who’d gathered around Sister Rocío to hear her story to cringe. I mean, even nuns and priests swore a right healthy amount, but there’s some words that you ain’t supposed to say in polite society.
She just stopped, pursed her lips, and turned toward Fenn’s voice. “Young man”—she spoke to him like she would a child—“using profanity simply shows one’s ignorance. If you’d care to hear my story, I will tell it in my own way. If not, you may leave and go fornicate yourself.”
Nobody interrupted the old
nun after that.
After about an hour and a half, she reached the part just before Geneviève had stopped when she was telling me about the gold and all. That’s when the giant farmer from the Pecos River and that bastard of a horse trader from Anton Chico had interrupted our evening, and started us both on the road to Hell.
Started us both on the road to Hell.
That ain’t bad. If I had more time at this writing thing, I might could find me a job writing for the Illustrated Police News. I always loved to look at them pictures.
Anyway, Rocío and the gent from the Smithsonian had found the bodies of all them poor dead Indians and the ingots. They had sent for supplies, fetching burros and grub from Socorro. They brung back something else, a fact Geneviève had left out or forgotten.
The guide named Cortez returned with five nuns.
According to Sister Rocío this is what happened next.
“Why on earth did you bring these women with you?” asked the gent from the Smithsonian Institution, who called hisself Doctor Erskine Primrose IV, all haughty and offended.
“They are bound for the mission at San Elizario,” Cortez told him.
That is right near El Paso. I know, on account that there’s a jail there that I’ve spent some time in. It wasn’t a bad place to be because it’s right close to the mission. Those bells sounded mighty pretty, but not as pretty as when the choir or congregation started singing. It was some of the best music I’ve ever heard whilst in jail. Almost as pretty as that deputy sheriff who clawed the banjo so fine in Ouray, Colorado.
“That is the way we planned to travel, is it not so?” Cortez pointed out.
Dr. Primrose said, “Yes, but—”
“But,” Cortez said. He was pretty good at making plans.
Well, maybe not that good, since he was soon to be dead, but there wasn’t nothing wrong with his plans.
“But,” Cortez said, “if we are merely transporting five nuns, six including Sister Rocío, who would think to rob us for a fortune in gold?”
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