Black Apache

by Clay Fisher

  Outraged that the simpletons dared imagine that Nunez would be fevered of such worldly evilments as a child-woman’s bobbling teats or jiggling buttocks, I immediately sent the girl down the hill to the Bustamantes. They prudently married her off to zapatero Baca, the middle-aging shoe-leather prince of Casas Grandes. By all reports Baca was delighted with his Apache wildcat, but Charra had a pagan sensuality not to be assuaged by the banked fires of middle years. To the present day she had remained a sultry, hot-minded she-creature, more true to her barbarian blood than to her mission upbringing.

  I had not, to that same present day, taken occasion to visit her since sending her to live with Bustamante and his fat wife. This was not for lack of interest in the child but only in deference to the tiny minds of my parish. Men, and more so women, will forever mistake gallantry for gonadal ambition in their priest. It is one of the burdens of the cloth. But I bore it then as I bear it now, true to my vows and to mine own self. Let them think what they will. I, Nunez, know what I have done.

  Besides, what harm is there in honest admiration for a buttock’s bounce beneath its cling of skirting? Or in the appreciation of the manner, say, in which a woman’s nipple will erect itself in response to frank and open salute from the eye of an inspired male beholder?

  Pah! Small lives made small minds.

  I, Nunez, was a free man.

  4

  THE WHORE OF FRONTERAS

  I found a stub of candle in the barn of my friend Bustamante and struck a sulfur match to it and lit its charred wick. In the waxen light I saw the dance of the devil in the eyes of Charra Baca watching me and waiting for me to speak. Drawing deep breath, I not alone directed Beelzebub to get him behind me but also the Lord of Hosts to shore me up from in front. It was no real question of Nunez falling upon this dark angel, quita! It was simply that the look of her was of that feral nature to drive a man’s mind from his beads to his codpiece. An ordinary man, that is. For myself, the tempting tried my mettle but did not untemper it. Nunez had reared this child of desire; he was her only father.

  “Listen, Charra,” I said quickly, “I need to find your cousin Kaytennae. Is he still with Juh’s people?”

  “No, Kaytennae went to live with the Chiricahua of Warm Springs, up in Arizona. He thinks they are his true people and that he won’t be an orphan anymore.”

  I frowned, displeased. “It is strange he did not come see me; he was as an own-son to me.”

  “He is an Apache, father.”

  “Well, Charra, and so are you an Apache.”

  “More so each day, father. I am leaving Baca, going home to my mother’s people. I would have told you.”

  “But, here, girl! You cannot do that. You are married to Baca, a good man.”

  “No, father, he is not. He cannot arouse me, nor elevate himself. No good in any way. I am going.”

  “Where will you go, God’s name?”

  “Arizona. Kaytennae found his people there. Perhaps I can find my people there also. You know, father, you always told me my mother was of the Chiricahua of Cochise.”

  She had me there. But no matter. I had already conceived a better way out for Nunez.

  “Well, I must say you are one lucky girl,” I smiled. “I am by coincidence myself bound for Arizona and will thus accompany you on your way.”

  “Us,” she corrected me. “My mother is going with me. She finds business failing in Fronteras. There is a new place up in Arizona. A mining camp. Very big one, they say. They call it Tombstone.”

  A mining camp! Here was my answer to locating the expert in mineral work that I wanted for El Naranjal’s exploration. Plus the bonus also of Charra leading me to Kaytennae in the process. God was in command.

  “Your fosterdam does not concern me,” I lied. “I have been in her company many times.”

  “That is what the villagers whisper, father.”

  “Hush, you vixen!” I ordered. “Do you dare mock me?”

  Charra turned lovely face to me. “No, father,” she murmured. “You are all the father I know. I do but tease you, as my mother did.”

  “Will you stop calling that low trollop your mother,” I complained. “Your mother was a noble Apache, even perhaps a warrior woman. She died to bring you to my doorstep. Do you then still call that damned whore ‘mother’ in her place?”

  There was a flurry in the outer darkness of the barn, and a familiar rough voice attacked me.

  “And what damned whore are you calling a damned whore?” it demanded. “Why, you rat turd of a spoiled priest, I ought to tell the girl a few of those prayers you taught me while I was suckling her at your little Mission of the Virgin, eh?” Zorra strode in out of the murk where she had been hiding. Arms akimbo, she struck the pose I recalled so well, a bastard posture half accusatory, half sexually inflammatory. “Well, priest,” she defied me, “will you apologize, or must I begin reciting my catalog of blackmail?”

  Belatedly, I sought to defuse her temper, which was memorable.

  “Neither course should be necessary with old friends such as we,” I shrugged. “How many times have you called me a damned priest?”

  “Ahhh,” she sighed, letting the anger flow out of her still matchless figure. “You little humpbacked son of a bitch, you still can make my parts turn warm. You know it, too, damn you. Come here to me, you rotten, ruined padre, you.”

  Before I might elude her, she grasped me to her monumental bosoms and delivered me a buss of such suction and succulence as to render me giddy for three drawn breaths.

  “By God!” she testified. “They may have taken away your order, padre, but they left your ardor. You bastard!”

  “Mother,” Charra reprimanded, “be still. Father Nunez may have lost his church but he is not to be taken in this lewd manner of yours. You do him a dishonor to remind him of days we all would forget.”

  “Hah, speak for yourself, stripling wench. Who wants to forget such days? And the nights! Eh, Nunez?”

  “Dear sweet Jesus,” I pleaded with them, “will we three go together to the United States, or will we not?”

  Zorra peered at me through the candle shine.

  “Why,” she murmured, “if you see no priestly stain in traveling with a prostitute, where is our reason to delay?”

  “If you would but desist in calling yourself such a woman,” I admonished her, “no one would ever guess your guilt. I would know you for una dama grande anywhere.”

  “Ah, Rat Turd, you could always mold me.”

  “And you, Charra?” I said, wincing to the endearments from the fallen lady of Fronteras. “My little girl of yesterday. Does it suit you that I join you to find Kaytennae and to visit the great new mining camp? How was it you called it? Headslab, Arizona?”

  “Tombstone,” Charra said. “It is in the country of the Cochise people, my people.” She looked upon me in a way very close to love. “Of course you may travel with us, father,” she agreed softly. “But don’t you think you should discard your robes of lost office? You know, travel as an ordinary hombre del monte, like all the other mestizos? After all, you are no longer a priest.”

  Indignantly, I drew myself up to my full five feet and one inch. “As long as the cloth and the charity of God’s patience endure me to do so,” I declared, “I shall go as Father Nunez. The people may desert me, the Indians make sport of my misfortunes, the very tides of fate engulf my broken body, yet so long as the Lord my God suffers me to serve him, I shall travel in his name.”

  Zorra gazed upon me with unhid admiration. As honestly, she delivered me a blow athwart the shoulder bones that well-nigh restored the straightness to my bent spine.

  “By Christ,” she said. “A sort of God’s padre, is that it, little priest?”

  I nodded in pained acceptance.

  “Yes, that’s it. God’s padre.”

  And we blew out the
candle and stole from the barn of Bustamante, outward bound upon the finding of Kaytennae.

  Who would lead us to Sergeant Flicker?

  Who would, por supuesto, take us to the gold mine of the orange grove?

  5

  AWAY TO ARIZONA

  As befitted a cloistered savant I was of notably simple mind about the real world. I had never been to the United States of America and as we trudged north past Janos, the last Mexican settlement, I kept asking my two ladies when we might expect to see the line separating that great country from Mother Mexico. Eventually, Zorra made abrupt halt.

  “Damned fool priest,” she fumed, “there is no line to see. When we come to Estados Unidos, it will seem no different than Méjico.”

  “How will we know when we are there, then?” I asked.

  “When we see Anglos, father,” Charra answered for her bellicose dam.

  “Aye,” Zorra nodded. “You know an Anglo when you see one, don’t you, Nunez?”

  “Hah! Nunez know Anglos? Who do you think it was that saved all those Anglos when Flicker bombarded my mission?”

  “I cannot imagine. Who?”

  “It was I, Nunez, you hussy. Naturally, with a bit of help from Kaytennae.”

  “Lah! A bit, you say? You should hear how Kaytennae tells the same story!”

  “Never mind; hush, woman. An Indian will forever extend the truth in his own favor.”

  “Just like a priest, eh, Nunez? Telling lies all day and drinking the altar wine all night. Mierda!”

  “Mother, don’t talk like that to father,” Charra Baca scolded. “Priests don’t make up those lies they tell. They are all written down in the Holy Book they carry. They can’t help it that the church employs them to trade those lies to the people for their small coins and dear belongings. It is no different than the comancheros selling us rotted buffalo hides or rancid back fat. Or the scalp hunters offering our dead Indian hair in the marketplace at Ciudad Chihuahua. Or the Americans letting their Apaches raid down here, steal our Mexican horses and herds of fine beef animals, and drive them back up to Arizona for sale.”

  “God’s name!” I exploded. “What is this idle chatter you spout? Am I to be compared with One-Ear Kifer? Or with some stinking Comanche half-breed who sells putrid hides in Santa Fe? Or with the damned Yanquis who protect Del Shay and Loco and Nana and Victorio and those other murdering Arizona Apaches? Santissima!”

  Zorra yawned in my reddened face.

  “Go to hell and come on,” she said. “It’s getting late. We will never get to Tombstone at this pace.”

  She took up her cudgel-stick and trudged onward. My flame-haired foster child, Charra Baca, smiled at me and patted my hand and told me to forgive the fallen one and to follow her to Arizona. Grumbling and threatening, I did as advised. After all, I had no useful knowledge of the land beyond Janos and Rio Casas Grandes. Now that the security of these remembered haunts lay behind us, I was in reality lost.

  Not so my twain of disparate females.

  Zorra had plied her art as far afield as San Diego, in California. Charra, her nursling cub, had also been to Estados Unidos. She had run away as a very small child to go with the Nednhi Apache of Chief Juh on a tribal visit to American Apache kinfolk near mighty San Carlos Reservation. She knew Sonoita, Tubac, and other familiar place-names in that country of Cochise and the Chiricahua of southern Arizona. Or so, at least, she said.

  I was to learn to my sadness that her memory did not match the maps of the United States. But for the moment there in the trail dust outside Janos, what argument might I make against the widely traveled pair who were my raffish guides? I was of no more worth there than back amid the broken adobes of my mission, in Casas Grandes. I was but a spoiled priest fleeing the authority of his faith. A purblind fool who knew nothing of the harsh world waiting beyond his vestry’s walls.

  One thing, however, I did know.

  I would be quite content to lose Zorra in Headstone, Arizona. And to then leave Charra Baca with the Cochise people whom I prayed might indeed prove to be the blood of her lost mother.

  The very moment that I had located Kaytennae and he had found Flicker for me, I was finally and doubly done with these women. A brazen Mexican prostitute and a wild seventeen-year-old Apache Eve were scarcely the trail companions of choice. Certainly not on an expedition of outlawed men through chartless mountain wastes to find and purloin the Franciscan gold of the orange grove.

  So, rearmed by determination, I tucked up my habit and opened the tarantula’s scuttle of my crippled stride to gain again the sides of my temporary comrades.

  “I will be of no further trouble to you in the matter of asking when we will be in America,” I assured Zorra. “I will leave it all to you.”

  “Good,” answered the courtesan of Fronteras, not slowing her long gait. “You see that little pile of rocks back there where we passed the paloverde grove? Squint hard. About five miles back there.”

  “What of it?” I demanded, seeing no pile of rocks and not even any stand of paloverde trees. “This cursed desert is full of rock piles.”

  “Not like that one, priest. The Mexican soldiers from the garrison at Janos put it there for a marker.”

  “A marker of what, God’s name? The grave of some Gila monster or great horned toad?”

  “No, Father Rat Filing,” answered Zorra the whore. “The marker beyond which the American cavalry will know it has passed into Mexican territory.”

  “What! You monstrous bawd!”

  “Yes, Humpback. We have been walking in Americano dust for the past two hours; this is Arizona.”

  I made her no reply.

  It is a wise man who knows when both ears of the jackass have been awarded him.

  6

  THE BATTLE OF

  ALAMOHUECO TANK

  We had not entered Arizona as my guides had permitted me to believe. Rather, we had come into the United States through a little corner of the New Mexico Territory. Indeed, one cannot, except that he be a bird of the air, enter Arizona from Chihuahua. I should have understood this. I knew that there was a mule road of good quality going by way of Penuelas over the Sierra to Agua Prieta, in Sonora, just at the border of the Arizona country. But by the time I remembered this fact, we were lost in the Alamo Hueco Mountains of New Mexico.

  My guides had separate explanations.

  “Quita!” Charra said, frowning all about her. “This does not seem to be the same way that I came with Juh and the Nednhi to find the Warm Springs people. These bastardly rocks are strange to me.”

  “De ahí!” scowled Zorra. “Stand aside, you simple-witted she-mule. I shall take the lead.”

  “You!” Charra cried out. “Who was it told Father Nunez we were in Arizona?”

  “Arizona, you say?” Zorra was gripping hard on her knobby mesquite walking stick. “Who was it said those Warm Springs Apaches lived in Arizona?”

  “Not I,” Charra denied. She backed off a step, eyeing the mesquite stick. “It’s the Cochise people who live in Arizona. That’s all I said.”

  “Liar!” Zorra swung the mesquite stick with a lunge, but the girl danced lightly free. The older woman regripped the stick. “You said Nunez wanted to find Kaytennae, with the Warm Springs people. That’s in New Mexico, and far into it. That’s why I didn’t say anything when I realized you were taking us into New Mexico, instead of Arizona.”

  “Now who’s a liar?” Charra incautiously challenged her foster-mother. “Wasn’t it you who told Father Nunez where we were? He didn’t ask it of me. I said nothing to him. And what did you answer him, whore mother? All I heard was Arizona.”

  Thhwwaacckkk!

  The mesquite stick caught the girl across the lovely slant of her left buttock, from the side. Charra yowled like a dog kicked by a burro, and she instantly attacked the woman who had suckled her at the breast.
They were rolling in the rocks and sand like two cats before I might even think how to dissuade them.

  Then I spied the mesquite stick where it had fallen from Zorra’s grasp. I at once seized up the cudgel, hesitating to employ it, fearful that I might injure one or the other of the combatants. But when women fight it is like no other fighting in the world. There is no zest in it, no sense of the good contest hardly fought to the gallant conclusion. Women do not fight for fun. They intend to kill one another.

  So I laid into the whirling bundle of their forms with the knobby mesquite stick. But the damned stick struck a boulder and broke into two equal pieces. The broken pieces struck Charra and Zorra with force enough to halt their snarling battle, but only by turning its fury onto myself. Each of the screeching females grabbed a half of the shattered mesquite staff and came, fire-eyed, for Father Dunce Cap.

  In terror, I held up my silver cross, crying, “God’s name! Halt!” I may as well have employed the cruz to turn aside the lightning forks of the Mexican Sierra Madre. With a perfect rain of welting blows descending on my shoulders and the bony processes of my priestly buttocks, I fled into the higher rocks. At bay up there, I prepared to die as a man. Or as well as a man can die who must be cudgeled to his end by two women. However, the Lord finally intervened. Zorra, in her eagerness to be first at the kill, tripped and fell all the way down out of the higher rocks, hitting Charra in the course of her tumbling flight, landing them both back down below and full into the tanque, or desert water hole, where we had stopped to rest.

  They surfaced spitting and coughing from the water, then began to laugh wild as loons at sunset. All in a moment they had seemingly forgotten Father Nunez and were stripping off every stitch of their hot and sweated clothing down to the very fluff and tufting of their delicious parts! Santissima! For mortal shame!

  Down the mountainside I raced, determined to threaten them with eternity in hell, or at very least a penance of a hundred confessions. Or six months of Hail Marys to purge them of this gross sin of disrobement before the eyes of a priest.