by Clay Fisher
“How will you have it, Nunez?” he asked. “Apache frying pan or Yaqui bonfire?”
“That is the way you see it, hombre?”
“Yes. We can sizzle or get spit-roasted. Your call.”
“You forgot something,” I protested indignantly.
“Ah?”
“We can pray.”
He studied me a moment, laughed softly.
“You forgot something, padre,” he said. “Your license has been lifted. Your prayers aren’t legal anymore.”
“Nonsense, Flicker! I serve God.”
“Your church says you don’t.”
“What do you say, Flicker?”
“I don’t give a damn.”
“Flicker.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you send for a priest in Tombstone jail?”
“I told you before: If those deputies brought back a padre, I was going to use him as a hostage under threat of knifing him. You can’t run that bluff with a Protestant minister. People don’t rate them half so high as priests.”
“Flicker, were you baptized?”
“Yes, I was stream-dipped a Baptist.”
“You are no atheist, then.”
“I never said I was.”
“But you defame your Lord.”
“No, I just say he hasn’t ever done anything for me but bad.”
“You’re alive. You might have been hung.”
“I’m black, too, and I might have been white.”
“But what does that matter?”
“It doesn’t. Except to another white man.”
“Flicker, you must come back to God.”
“Father, face the facts. We’re birds of the same stain, you and I. They took my commission away from me. They defrocked you. And I suspect for the very same reason. We didn’t wash white enough.”
“Absurdo! Qué pamplinada! You know better than that!”
“So do you, Nunez. You didn’t lose your mission because you befriended the Apache. You lost it because you were half Indian yourself, and then you befriended the Apache.”
“And you, Flicker?”
“Me, padre? I lost my lieutenancy because a white man raped his own sweetheart and said it was me. He even followed me west to make sure I was drummed out of the army, even as a sergeant in the ranks. He couldn’t take the chance that I might yet prove him the criminal.”
“But there was another raping, I remember,” I told him. “And you fled from Texas.”
“That was of my sweetheart,” Flicker said in a low, cold voice. “And the same man raped her. The same officer who followed me west.”
“She died,” I said.
“She was killed,” Flicker corrected. “By him.”
“And they thought it was you?”
“Yes. I ran for Mexico.”
“You went to live with the Apache of Juh?”
“Yes, the Nednhi. But you know all of this, Nunez. Why do you inquisite me over it again?”
“Because it bears on what I said of prayer.”
“What?”
“Yes, Flicker; didn’t you also have a dream, even as Nunez has, and indeed for the same wild people?”
The black soldier fell silent. I could see his mind traveling the years.
“I did,” he answered at last, and softly. “It was to lift these poor damned savages into something important. To show them that being red did not make them less men than the White Eyes or the Mexicans. But God didn’t see it my way. Look what is happening. This entire country we’ve been through today and will go through tomorrow is filled with American Apache fleeing American cavalry. The poor devils are getting shot, bayoneted, raped, shipped off to Florida, starved, poisoned, trapped, driven incessantly, lied to, cheated, robbed, betrayed, scalp-hunted, rounded up, made beggars of, and, in the end, destroyed as men. I didn’t do this to them, Nunez. God did.”
“Flicker, you blaspheme!”
“Don’t be a fool, Nunez,” he said, black face demonic in the fire’s light. “It isn’t blasphemy to call God a damned liar. How can God be truth, when he treats black man and Indian, even Mexican of too-brown skin, as dirt, while the white man wins it all, and every time. Answer me that, Father Alvar Nunez, Order of Franciscan Monks.”
“I will not deign to answer it!” I said, pale lipped.
“You cannot,” Flicker replied, low voiced. “I was winning with the Apache people, returning their pride and their power. I was doing good but I wasn’t white, eh, Nunez? The Americans heard of my work and sent the US Army down here to stop it, and to kill the black messiah, right, padre? But I just about killed the army, my Apaches and me, and would have but for that God of yours sending in the Texas Rangers. Nunez, you know this. It cost you your mission. That’s your God, priest, always winning for the whites.”
“Flicker, be sure,” I said. “Think. Was it our God who lied to you? Wasn’t it you who lied? Who deserted him? You who were praying to false gods, Flicker? To heathen images? To Apache gods who were not your gods? Weren’t you the liar who was damned, Flicker?”
“Heathen images?” he said. “False Apache gods? Now who is lying, Nunez? Did I not hear you only this very morning telling these Indians of ours you would build them a church where their gods would be welcome?”
“But you are not an Apache, hombre!” I cried. “You were born in Christ, baptized in his holy name. I don’t lie to you or to them. They can pray to their gods and I will listen with them. I said that. Where is my lie?”
“Let is pass,” black Flicker scowled. “You saved my life. I can’t forget that, or fight you longer here.”
“God saved your life, Flicker.”
“The hell!” he flared. “Was it God put me into that secret tunnel under your altar at Casas Grandes? Who sent me running through that tunnel when the rangers were inside the walls and would have riddled me with Texas lead? If so, God is a little humpback Mexican half-breed.”
“It was my God who told me to do it,” I insisted.
“Ah, Jesus, padre,” Flicker sighed, reaching to place his hand on my shoulder. “There is no hope in your faith for me. My Apache dream is done, and so is yours.”
“No, Flicker! Together, we can make another dream. We will share this one. You, the Apaches, Alvar Nunez.”
Slowly, Flicker shook his head. I could see that he had for that hesitating moment considered the salvation I had offered him. But the moment was gone. In the black soldier’s face was only his old sardonic distrust.
“I will tell you what I’ll do with you, Nunez,” he said. “You said that by prayer we could seek solution of a way through the bad going that lies ahead. All right, I’ll pray with you, providing one thing—that you can arrange a miracle for us.”
“Name it,” I said, jutting priestly chin.
“Send us the answer to this question: What trail shall we take, Mr. White Eye God, to get us past both Apache and Yaqui. That’s a tough one, padre. I’ll wait.”
He said it without meanly ill humor but decidedly in that derisive manner he had whereby he held the entire world at black bay. In the ordinary case, too, he would have been the easy victor over me. God is always hard put to vanquish doubters of the exceptional talents of Robert E. Lee Flicker. But this was a Roman night.
I later thought it a grand touch that, through an Apache pagan, the Holy Father answered Flicker’s little faith.
Of course it was slim Kaytennae who stepped forth from the shadows behind us. He was apologetic. He had overheard too much of our talk before we were aware of his Indian approach. Yet he could not help but understand our dilemma and be brought, therefore, to speak out.
“There is a way to follow from this fire,” he said, “that will spare us from Apache as well as Yaqui bad ones. Its secret has been given to a few of my people; I am one of
them. If you want me to, I will show you this way.”
I crossed myself and turned to Flicker.
“Did you hear that?” I asked, and he nodded.
I quickly put to Kaytennae our gratitude for his coming forward, bade him suffer no embarrassment at overhearing our troubled talk, accepted his offer with alacrity but of course dignity. He was pleased. Both black Flicker and humpenbacked Nunez sat wordless, while the young Warm Springs warrior melted back into the night that had brought him to our fire at Contrabandista Spring, in Sonora state, that long-ago night.
When he was gone, I asked of Flicker, without looking at him, what he would call Kaytennae, what would be his name for what had just walked away into the darkness.
“Was that an Apache?” I said.
“No, that was a miracle,” Flicker answered.
And so we had our guide, and our agreement, for the dangerous way ahead.
“Flicker,” I said in gratitude and thinking to remind him of his promise to pray with me should I produce a suitable milagro, “let us give our thanks to the Lord.”
I bowed my head, crossed myself, commenced to mutter some applicable litany or other. Not hearing answering recitation from my black comrade, I unbowed head sufficiently to steal a side-glance at him. His head was unlowered, his lips motionless. He was staring past me into the night and the silences that crowded in upon our little camp at Contrabandista Spring.
There was such a look on his face as would bring foreboding to a senseless stone. A priest feels these things. It came to me that Flicker was seeing not the future but the past. Not our problems of tomorrow but his own sorrows of yesterday. He was seeing his life as hombre negro. As a black man with no home among brown Mexican, Anglo white, or bronze-skinned Apache. No true place with any color of fellowman, saving for his own race. And that race knowing a despair of past, present, and future to break the human heart.
I had been about to accuse him that he was not praying. That he had broken our small bargain.
I did not do so. Not that night and not ever.
For the first time in my lifetime of devotion to God, I knew a doubt of the Holy Trinity, of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost—of my dear God himself.
If there were not, as black Flicker had insisted, a God for all men of whatever skin color, then there was no God for any man of any color.
The idea—its sheer possibility—was frightful.
It was heresy.
And I was thinking it.
26
HAY MUCHO TRABAJO
I sat on with Flicker seeking to counter his despairful mood. The expedition, I recited for him, was assuming the nature of a full and proper company. Did this not cheer him? We had the three good horses of Kifer and his deputies, plus the tall bay, the two mounts of the Tombstone possemen, and Zorra’s ragged mule. Our armament was bristling with the addition of Kifer’s Winchester and Crench’s shotgun, together with the revolvers, or belt guns, of both. We had also secured a supply of rifle and revolver ammunition in the cartridge bandoliers of the scalpers. Numbering these items with the very latest Winchester lever guns of Kaytennae and our Mexican Apaches, and adding in the sundry blades carried by the Apaches and taken from Crench and Kifer, we were in reasonable armor for the moment. “As well,” I finished, totting up for Flicker, “I have found my chief of soldiers, my Apache guide, my good watchdog for the camp, and, barring but my mining expert, it would appear my little company has been blessed by God.”
Flicker looked at me, dark lips pursed, the sardonic smile lifting to show the least gleam of white teeth.
“I will name you some other gifts of your God, Nunez,” he said. “Back there at the island we have Crench and the blind Kifer. Somewhere in their vicinity Belcher lingers. He will surely free them and, even if the scalper is sightless, I cannot rest easy with Kifer to my rear.” He paused, swinging handsome face to peer into the night, southward, were we would go tomorrow.
“And out there ahead of us somewhere,” he continued, “are Lupe and those two Bedonkohe hesh-kes of his. Three bad Apaches, well armed, well mounted, and knowing that Chongo will be thinking of them and of what they did to him and Packrat. That will make them nervous, and when an Apache gets nervous, clear out of the vicinity. When three of them do it all at the same time, sleep light and on your rifle. Now, you want more, padre?”
I assured him it mattered not if I did, there was no more of bad news that he might dredge up that night.
“Ah,” he nodded. “Let me try.”
I saw he was still smiling his Beelzebub smile, and I nodded back for him to go ahead, to have his try.
“We are carrying an old Mescalero lady who has to get down from her horse every half hour to make water,” he said. “We have also two other women who will be worse than useless on the trail or in a fight. Indeed, they present a real danger to us. There is simply no way that a Mexican whore with good teeth and a chestnut-maned she-child like that daughter of hers can be anything but scary news to the men they’re with. I just hope to Christ we don’t meet up with Loco or Geronimo, let alone those devils down along the Rio Yaqui.
“Also, that damned guard dog of yours can’t even keep pace with the whore’s lame mule, and I will have to shoot him yet. I won’t be held down by an old, sick dog.”
At this juncture, I found my feet like an Indian orator, letting Flicker know I meant business.
“See here,” I scolded him, “please don’t call that whore a whore. Her name is Zorra and you will find she carries her own weight in any fight. As for the girl, I realize the problems posed by the jiggling of those noble mammaries and the fine bounce of buttock that is hers. However, I shall instruct her to loosen her garments to ameliorate the temptation, and I will personally see that her mane is braided and put up on her head so that a good sombrero will cover it. Now—”
I suspended my lecture to probe his muscled chest with threatening forefinger. It was like tapping a cabinet of teakwood, but I did not flinch.
“As to the dog and any posture that means harm to him, you will have to kill Nunez before the dog may be shot. Do you hear, you black scoundrel?”
Flicker did not laugh.
He scowled, rather, and pushed away my finger and said in the soft, dangerous way he had when aroused, “It could come to that, Nunez. Don’t get between me and anything I need to do from this camp forward. We are just over the line into Sonora. There is no safety yet, nor none until we have come out of the country of the Apache on this side of the Sierra and managed to successfully outmarch the Yaqui the next two hundred miles. By then we will be damned near into the Tepehuane country and, as you well know, the Tepehuanes are the Indian guards of El Naranjal. ‘The bronze guards of the orange grove,’ the legend calls them. So it will be our ass wherever we go and by whatever trail Kaytennae may think he knows.”
Flicker scowled the harder, concluding, “Now how do you like the lie of those horse apples that your God has mixed into the roadway of our grand luck so far, friend priest?”
I refused to dignify the question with an answer.
At the moment, saving me further embarrassment, Packrat came over to the fire from the picket line, where our people were sleeping near the horses. He seemed happy about something.
“Kaytennae is saying that you are well pleased, Jorobado, with our little party, but that you wish aloud for a mining expert, one who knows of gold, especially.”
“Why, that is so,” I said, puzzled. “Are you saying you know of such a one?”
“No, damn it, priest; I am such a one.”
“You, a mining expert?”
“Ask me some questions,” said the pudgy brave. “Let Flicker there do so. He knows of mines and yellow metal.”
“I also know of little fat rats,” Flicker said. “But I never heard before that you were a prospecting rat, as well. Where did you learn?”
“From two masters,” Packrat said. “One a student like yourself, one just a plain white man, but very smart.”
“First one?” Flicker said.
“You ever hear of Mackenna, Flicker?”
“The man who found the lost Adams Diggings?”
“The same one. I was his packer and guide for seven years before he found that Adams map. He taught me much about gold, where it might lie, and where not.”
“And the other, your second man?” Flicker queried.
“You will know him, too,” Packrat said. “It was Old Mad. You know—Seebie.”
“Sieber?” Flicker asked, unbelieving. “Al Sieber?”
“He was the only Sieber,” Packrat shrugged.
“He was indeed,” Flicker whistled softly. “How did you come by him, or more likely him by you?”
“He saved me from some bad Indians—Yaquis.”
“With Yaquis, there is no other kind.”
“Yo lo crea, hombre; I believe it. Animales, todos.”
“Were they from the high Rio Yaqui country, where we must pass? Above the big forks? Above Soyopa?”
“Yes, they were of Monkey Woman’s band.”
“My God, no. Not Simialita? Kifer’s mother?”
“The same,” shrugged Packrat, but his laconic reply to Flicker’s startlement only struck into my own memory like the shaft of an arrow of curare. Nombre Dios—Simialita?
Here, amigos míos, a man must take you back. While brave black Flicker shakes his head to Packrat’s innocent creation of a nightmare by day, Nunez must tell you of what the dread name meant. It begins with the father of Santiago Kifer, and in this wise:
The original Dutch John Kifer, sire of Santiago, was an American scalp hunter operating through northern Mexico in the decade of the 1840s. Unquestionably, one of the most gruesome mass murderers of human history, the senior Kifer was still the product of his era and its environment of Indian hatred by both Anglo and Mejicano. Scalphunting was neither an invention of Dutch John’s nor an exclusive viciousness. Men of his time did stalk and kill other men simply for the bounty paid upon the hair of their heads. If Dutch John Kifer in an average season murdered more than two hundred Indians, was his the primary crime? What of the government in Ciudad Chihuahua that paid each year, for many years, a price of one to two hundred American dollars for every Indian scalp lock delivered to it?