Valley of Fire

by Johnny D. Boggs

  I showed off how smart I was, saying them lava rocks come from volcanoes. I knowed that. Thought I did. But I reckon I should’ve kept my mouth shut and just listened to the wind.

  “Micah.” Sister Rocío sounded just like she had back at the orphanage when she was about to correct my ignorant answer or inform me that I owed her ten Hail Marys, five Our Fathers and one Glory Be. She even waited till I turned around to face her, as if she could see me. “Do you see any volcanoes around here?”

  “None smoking,” I said.

  Nobody laughed. Seeing that stern look that told me she didn’t appreciate smart alecks, I sucked in a deep breath, let it out, and said more respectful, “No, ma’am.”

  “There is nothing that even looks like a volcano, is there?”

  The nearest mountains was the Capitans, and they looked like mountains, not volcanoes. She waited for me to look around, but I wasn’t going to do that for some blind woman. I’d traveled around these parts enough to know that nothing resembled a volcano.

  When she figured she had given me enough time, she said, “Of course, you don’t. Because there is no volcano here. These flows were not caused by a volcano, but vents in the valley floor. The molten lava flowed, cooled, and formed these islands.”

  “Islands in a wine-dark sea,” Sister Geneviève said, because she was still focusing on wine-dark seas.

  “The islands are called kipukas,” the blind old bird said.

  Even Sister Geneviève turned, her face revealing curiosity and surprise, to face the old woman.

  “How do you know all this?” Geneviève finally asked.

  I felt more grouchy than curious or surprised, and was grinding my teeth to keep from calling the blind nun a know-it-all. A teacher’s pet.

  With a smile Sister Rocío explained, “A scientist—a geologist—spoke to the Sisters of Charity two years ago come September.”

  Me and Geneviève stared, first at the nun, than at each other.

  Said Rocío, “He was quite informative.”

  Me and Geneviève done some more staring.

  “We sponsor many such lectures,” Rocío explained. “Back in ’81, Governor Lew Wallace read a chapter from his stunning novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ shortly before he left the territory. He proved, to the thinking of the Mother Superior and myself, to be much more capable as a writer than as a governor, and though his novel had Protestant leanings, we did admire that chariot race. To my thinking, however, the best lecture was a friend of the carpenter who fixed our door who had known and ridden with Kit Carson. This person spoke about the days of the mountain men and fur traders in Taos. He was quite the salty talker.”

  We didn’t say nothing.

  “Well,” Sister Rocío said with a snort, “what do you expect us nuns to do, read the New Testament and gossip about the archbishop behind his back every day?”

  The two women had gotten some sleep the previous night, but I hadn’t. A body doesn’t sleep too good when he knows that Sean Fenn’s gonna be trailing him. So I was bone tired when we ate a cold breakfast, then started scouring the Valley of Fire for a grave that only a blind woman knowed where to find it.

  Morning had passed slowly as we picked our trails through the lava flows, seeing some colorful lizards sunning themselves, but nothing else. Had to be ten or eleven that morning when I eased the bay over toward Sister Geneviève and asked to see that cross again. After she handed it to me, I turned it over, read them words again, looked across the Valley of Fire, and scratched my head.

  “Sister.” The saddle creaked as I turned toward Rocío. “What does this mean, ‘From the top of Ararat we must climb down’?”

  “It means what it says. You climb down off Mount Ararat.”

  I give the cross back to Geneviève, looked around to study the land.

  Well, if I clumb high enough up the nearest sandstone slope, I reckoned that I could see the Capitan Mountains, and a bunch of brown grass filling the Tularosa betwixt them mountains and where we was sweating. But I don’t think I could see all the way to the Old Testament in the land of the Israelites.

  Another memory latched on to my brain. It hit me so sudden, so hard, that I reined in the bay, and sucked in a deep breath.

  You spill as much whiskey as I’d done, you ride hell-bent for leather enough to save your hide, you don’t recollect all the things nuns made you do back when you was living in an orphanage. I’d forgotten all about it, till everything surged up and like to have knocked me out of the saddle.

  Geneviève started, “What’s the mat—”

  “You used to make me draw pictures . . . back when I was a kid.” I was already pointing a finger at the blind nun.

  Another smile cracked through that grizzled face. “You should have stuck to art, Micah,” Rocío said. “You were talented.”

  “At stick figures,” I said with a snort.

  “Yes, but your landscapes were spectacular.” She smiled, and said almost in a whisper, almost like she was coaxing something up that had been buried in my memories, “Remember?”

  ’Course, I’m thinking, how the hell would a blind nun know if my drawings was artistic or not?

  “Remember,” she repeated softly.

  It was like Rocío had transformed herself into that buxomly lass with the turban and the silver rings and pretty necklaces who had tried to hypnotize Big Tim Pruett in Albuquerque that day. She told him to watch the gold watch she kept twirling, but all Big Tim and me could focus on was them enormous breasts of hers. She didn’t put Big Tim under, but somehow Sister Rocío was doing something to my mind, my memories.

  “And close your eyes.”

  I done, and . . .this is the strange part. Once I’d shut them eyelids tight, I wasn’t no thirty-something-year-old drifter wanted for murder and stuck with a beautiful woman and a blind nun, with a cutthroat named Sean Fenn likely just a half day’s ride behind us coming to kill, and maybe a fortune in gold somewhere in a hole in all these black rocks that were twisted and wavy and hard and reminded me of giant cow turds.

  Instead, I pictured myself as a twelve-year-old orphan sitting in a room in an adobe building in a sleepy town called Santa Fe with a blind nun who had only one arm. It had just slammed the back of my head hard enough to make my front teeth chatter.

  No. No, that ain’t right, either. You see, I didn’t picture myself as that kid who once was me. Instead, I was that little boy.

  “You are drawing Mount Ararat,” Sister Rocío says sharply.

  “I don’t wanna,” I rebel.

  Wham. My head hurts.

  “Where are you?” the nun’s voice asks.

  “In Noah’s Ark.”

  “You are looking for . . . ?”

  “The dove I sent out.”

  “And what do you see?”

  “Water. Black as midnight. Deep water.”

  “But there it is. . . .”

  “Land!” I cry.

  “Exactly,” Sister Rocío says. “Mount Ararat.”

  “We sail for it,” I tell her.

  “What does it look like?”

  “Red.” I’m drawing, eyes closed, trying to figure out what it must be like to be Sister Rocío, blind and all. I only draw with my right hand. I never open my eyes.

  “No, not red. There is a red trail on the ocean, but the mountain isn’t red. It’s more yellow. Yellow boulders, but not corn yellow. More like . . . tan.”

  “A jumble of boulders,” Sister Rocío says. “Round?”

  “Not really.” I can see them, chipped, some long, but most of them flat, red, tan, probably weighing one to five tons each.

  “Is it easy to climb?” she asks. “Ararat?”

  “Yes. If you pick the right path.”

  “Vegetation?”

  “Prickly pear. Some cholla. Grass. Yucca. A pine tree.”

  “Juniper,” she corrects.

  Yep, she’s right. It is a juniper, twisted and mean and tough and sturdy.

  “Does it sme
ll like juniper, though?” she asks me.

  I breathe in deeply and slowly exhale. Because I’m fourteen years old and because I know I’m in Santa Fe and it’s dinnertime, what I should smell are roasting chiles and beans and coffee, or the sweat of an old woman coaxing me to draw her a pretty picture. But that’s not what I smell.

  “It smells like . . .”

  “Like?” the nun coaxes.

  “Creosote.”

  “Then there must also be . . .”

  “Creosote.” I feel smart. I want to turn in my desk and give Nancy Jean Dobie a smug look, but I don’t . . . because I don’t want to get my head slapped by ruler or fist or forced to say penances till I can hardly speak no more.

  “What’s at the top of Mount Ararat?”

  “The Ark.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’ve landed.”

  “But do you still see the scene from your perch in the sea?”

  My head bobs. “I am the dove. I am flying. I can see the cabin and the decks, and the animals sticking their heads from over the sides.”

  “The Ark has been sailing for a long time,” she says.

  “There is moss—”

  “Mold,” she corrects.

  “Mold on the sides.”

  “What does the mold look like?”

  “Green spots.”

  “And now where are you?” Rocío asks.

  “I’m on top of the Ark.”

  “And what do you see?”

  “Clouds.”

  “More rain?”

  “Mountains.”

  “Where?”

  “To the east.”

  “Look to the west.”

  I obey.

  “What do you see now?”

  “Just ocean. Black, black ocean.”

  “So east is land. Can you look down?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you see, Micah?”

  My horse started peeing, but my eyes remained closed. I knowed my left hand was atop the horn, and my right index finger drew an imaginary pencil across the open palm. Must’ve been doing that while in that trance, that vision, that whatever-the-hell-you-call-it, but it didn’t feel like my finger tracing my palm. Felt like I was holding a pencil and scratching my thoughts on paper.

  “What do you see, Micah?” Sister Rocío asked.

  My eyes opened, and it was like I half-expected to see a painting or a map, but all I seen was my finger on my calloused palm. I turned to Sister Rocío and answered, “I see a canyon.”

  She smiled. “Exactly.”

  That crone had given me hope, which can be dangersome. Hell, I felt like a ten-year-old on his birthday. Standing in the stirrups, I stared across the valley. ’Course, I didn’t see the Ark, and I sure didn’t spot Mount Ararat. I didn’t see nothing except one of them lizards on a giant lava cow turd, grass, and cactus.

  Still smiling, I settled back into the saddle, wet my lips, and smiled at Geneviève, who, smart as she was, pretty as she was, looked at me utterly stupidly.

  “You had me draw Mount Ararat.” I eased my horse over to Sister Rocío. “From your memories. You told me what it looked like, but you had me drawing what you remembered. Not from some Bible illustration.” I patted her shoulder and looked again.

  “Do you see it?” Geneviève asked.

  “I don’t see a damned thing but black lava.”

  Sister Rocío’s knuckles cracked my skull, just above where I’d cut my noggin after Fenn had slammed me against a rock.

  “Ten Our Fathers, Micah,” Rocío instructed me, even though I didn’t have a rosary or the time to say no penance.

  “So . . .” Geneviève started. “How?”

  I’d turned the bay around. “Well, now I know what I’m looking for.”

  “Which is?”

  “Tan rocks,” I said. “A mountain of large but loose tan rocks.”

  “Could it be red?” Geneviève was suddenly excited. She jerked around, pointing to a little rise off to the northwest. “There are red rocks over there.”

  “That’s lava,” I told her. “Red lava. No, I think what I’m looking for isn’t lava, but sandstone.”

  I could see in my mind what I’d drawed for Sister Rocío back all them long years ago.

  “The sandstone was here when the lava emerged from the vents,” Sister Rocío was speaking like a geologist lecturing a bunch of Sisters of Charity again. “The sandstone remained its natural color, yellow-tinted tan, on the slopes, but where the lava seeped across it, the sandstone was turned into a more pinkish hue.”

  “Some lecture you got there,” I told her.

  Rocío grinned. “Actually, I preferred the salty-tongued rapscallion who had known Kit Carson.”

  Pointing south, I start speaking to Geneviève. “We haven’t crossed the road that leads to Carrizozo. I think we need to find it. That’s where she buried those nuns and the gold.”

  “What makes you think that?” Geneviève asked.

  “Because an Army patrol found her, took her east to Socorro.” I felt good. I mean, when you feel smart, you feel good. Usually, I’m dumber than a fence post, but in a poker game—providing I hadn’t drunk too much whiskey or just wasn’t playing smart cards—and out in the open country when my life depended on things, I did have a brain that worked halfway decent.

  “They’d be following a trail. On horseback. Wouldn’t want to cross this valley except on a trail.” I motioned toward Rocío. “She’d just hacked off her arm and was suffering from exposure. She couldn’t have wandered too far.”

  Geneviève smiled, nodded, and eased her horse south, pulling Rocío’s mule behind her. I tugged on the other mule’s lead rope, and felt good and smart and lucky.

  Till I looked behind me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I didn’t tell Geneviève or Rocío about the dust I’d spied off to the northeast. No need in getting them all scared and concerned and fearful that Sean Fenn was heading our way. Way I figured things, I was scared and concerned and fearful enough for us all. Besides, that dust could have come from a herd of cattle, or some peaceable cowhand headed up to White Oaks, or just a dust devil blowed up by the wind. Could’ve been anything.

  ’Course, deep down, I knowed better.

  We rode down the trail, smelling creosote and dust, that black lava rising higher and higher. I’d rein up, ease down, and climb afoot up the rocks, looking around for Mount Ararat.

  Nothing that I could see resembled them drawings I pictured in my head.

  Back in the saddle, I kicked the bay into a walk, tugging the mule behind me, and called out to the blind woman, “Sister Rocío, I need some help.”

  “Yes, son, I know,” she said, all friendly, but it prompted a chuckle that Geneviève couldn’t stifle.

  I give her my meanest stare, which made her laugh even more.

  “Well, yes, ma’am, don’t we all,” said I, “but, what I mean is, this is big country. Better than a hundred sections. There are lots of little hills here and there. Could take us months to search for that hill you call Ararat, and we ain’t got months.”

  Thinking, but not saying, Probably ain’t got more than a day.

  “What do you remember?” I reined up, turned, and waited. Geneviève stopped the claybank, and Rocío sat on the mule.

  “Close your eyes, Sister Rocío,” I told her, just like she’d done to me, hypnotic and all. “Think back.”

  She snorted. “Micah, I am blind. I don’t need to close my eyes to picture anything.”

  Geneviève looked back at me, but I give her the look that dared her to laugh. Besides, the old woman did close her eyes. So there.

  “It was winter,” she said. “The land was covered in snow and ice, but I do remember . . . a bat.”

  “Bat?” I asked.

  Her empty eyes opened. “Yes. Bat. It looked like a rabbit.”

  Her mind’s gone, I told myself again.

  “You know,” she said. “Long ears?�
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  “Don’t bats migrate?” Geneviève asked.

  “Not the one I saw,” she said. “It was dead. But these bats do not migrate, either. They live here. Cortez, the guide, told me this.” Her head bobbed at some ancient memory. “Now, I remember. Cortez said the bats were common along the Tularosa Valley. We had found some guano and the dead bat. How is that?”

  “Fine,” I said, and couldn’t hide my irritation. “Now all I got to look for is a pile of bat dung, and a skeleton of a big-eared bat.”

  “Exactly,” Rocío said.

  She wasn’t been sarcastic, like me. She was dead serious.

  “A big-eared bat,” she said. “That’s what it is called. Thomas’s big-eared . . . no, that isn’t it. Thompson’s, no Townsend’s. A Townsend’s big-eared bat. They roost alone. They have really big ears, and their fur, usually brown or gray, protects them while they hibernate. And they do not migrate. So they are usually around this country, even during the winter.”

  My mouth was open. So was Geneviève’s. You don’t expect to hear so much from a nun about bats, which I’d always been taught was critters of Satan.

  “One of our lecturers,” Rocío explained, “called himself a chiropterologist. Oh, I guess that was five or six years ago. He was on his way to Carlsbad, the deep cave there, to study the bats that call it home during certain times of the year. I forget the exact species. Anyway, he planned to stop in the Tularosa Valley to study the Townsend’s big-eared bat. He gave a most inspired talk. Very passionate about ‘the order Chiroptera,’ as he called it.”

  Geneviève said, “A chi . . . uh, chiro . . . a . . .”

  “Chiropterologist,” Rocío completed.

  “Too bad he ain’t here with us.” I stood in the saddle, looked back northeast, but didn’t see no dust—which didn’t mean a damned thing. “He might be able to tell us where to find a dead bat that was here about thirty-eight years ago.”

  “You are being silly, Micah. We do not look for a bat skeleton. But near a cave. When I saw the dead bat and its giant ears—poor creature, he must have frozen to death—poor Lorraine, she feared it was an omen. That bats were instruments of the Devil. Those French, they have some strange notions. But Cortez said they were common here, and he pointed south and west. He said the big-eared bats often migrated in a cave. He said we would soon be near the cave, and suggested that we hide there from the banditos. Alas, we never made it there. But I remember—” She paused, thinking back. “But we were near there. We must’ve been.”