Black Apache

by Clay Fisher

  The water was almost but not quite bad.

  By sitting up all night skimming and straining its slow seepage, Young Grass was able to fill our solitary burro-gut canteen. It was as well. Next day’s journey on into the real headwaters of Rio Moctezuma was even longer. But it was broken by a gift of God.

  Shortly before nooning, Flicker saw smoke to our left. It was where no settlement was and no rancheria familiar to him, Kaytennae, or Packrat. The column halted in shade, another offering of Dios. It was a sycamore grove, an oasis in the desert of gray and thorny scrub. These lovely white- and brown-barked trees meant groundwater always. Flicker commanded Packrat to instruct the women in digging for this precious find so as to replace the poor water in our burro bag with sweet fresh water from the sycamore sands. Also the trees would hide us, no idle advantage with strange smoke showing.

  “What do you make of it?” Flicker asked Kaytennae.

  The two had drawn off a bit to be away from the women, and I had come over to stand with them.

  “Yo no sé,” shrugged the Apache. “Not Indians maybe.”

  “You got a better idea than Indians?” Flicker said.

  “Mexicans maybe,” Kaytennae answered. “Una recua de mulas. That’s the old trail over there.”

  “Hmmm,” Flicker nodded. “From Nacozari up to Agua Prieta, eh? I’d forgotten that old road.” He paused. “A mule train, you say. At noonhalt, likely.” The Negro tilted his nostrils to meet the light breeze working our way. “They’re cooking something. I smell meat burning.”

  Kaytennae sampled the air in his turn and nodded. “Bad meat,” he said. “We’d better go over there.”

  Flicker hesitated. “How bad?” he said.

  “I’ve smelled it only once before,” the slender Apache replied.

  “Where?” said Flicker, dark eyes narrowing.

  “In a Yaqui camp,” Kaytennae said. “Get the horses.”

  “Hold on,” Flicker scowled. “You saying it’s Yaquis over there bushwhacked a Mex mule train? De ahí, amigo! You don’t massacre a mule train without firing a shot, and we didn’t hear a pistol pop, nor a musket boom.”

  “You talk empty,” Kaytennae grimaced. “I’m going; I smell bad meat. Stay here with the women, if you are afraid. I won’t blame you. It might be Yaquis, still.”

  “Make up your mind,” Flicker complained. “You said it wasn’t Indians, first off. Now you keep saying Yaquis.”

  “They’re not Indians, they’re bárbaros,” Kaytennae said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Flicker growled. “Padre, you want to come over here and go along with your foster son and your soldier-chief? I’m going to need an interpreter for this Apache guide of ours. He’s harder to follow than a white bee in a snowstorm.”

  “Follow?” I queried, feeling my stomach shrink. “Where to?”

  “To Banbury Cross to ride a cockhorse,” Flicker replied cynically. “What the hell you think, padre? We have to know who’s cooking what, yonder. Or haven’t you savvied the idea yet that we’re getting close to Monkey Woman’s country?”

  “I thought Yaqui land did not begin until we were beyond Nacozari?” I argued hopefully.

  “Well, if we run into any Yaquis, yonder, we will tell them they are out-of-bounds,” the black rider answered. “Come on, I want you along. It’s past time that you got some war trail experience. It’s not safe working for a man that doesn’t know mule-pack smoke from peaceful cookfire sign. Packrat can watch out here while the women dig for good water.”

  I found my horse and clambered aboard the resentful brute, which had just found some green grass growing by subirrigation of the sycamore water. Kicking him around, I brought him to where Flicker and Kaytennae waited.

  “First war lesson,” the black rider greeted me, pointing toward the distant, thin smoke. “Never argue with your pureblood Chiricahuas. You can massacre a mule train without firing a shot; mira.”

  He pointed again, above the smoke this time, and I saw the ominous dark birds at circle there.

  “Buharros!” I cried. “God help the poor souls.”

  “Maybe it’s only the dead mules,” Flicker offered. “Buzzards aren’t particular.”

  “True,” Kaytennae said, unsmiling. “They will even eat Mexicans—just as the Yaquis will.”

  “Vamos, amigos,” I said, suddenly afraid.

  And away we went to see what lay dead, man or mule, beneath the white smoke and the black bare-necked birds.

  And to find, God forbid, what strange meat cooked there, where el buharro circled.

  31

  THE KING AT KILL

  We lay on our bellies just at the crest of the rise.

  Ahead was the place of the smoke. In the pellucid air of the desert we could plainly see each detail of the uniforms of the native rurale troops who were the patent murderers of the Mexicans for whom the buzzards circled.

  The mules were all yet standing, all yet under pack, in the spider line of the ancient trailway. There had been tres arrastreros, three drivers, and a woman as well. The men were dead, the woman wishing she were, and we three behind the rise raging in our hearts to see her as she was.

  Well, two of us were.

  Kaytennae’s slitted Apache orbs studied the scene of rapine and death without blinking. If he had any emotion whatever, let alone of empathy for the captive woman, it did not show on his narrow dark face.

  Coming to that, Flicker’s black features did not twist in the same fury of helplessness as did Nunez’s. That was a white woman out there. Did my Negro chief of soldiers see her as my Apache guide did? Were they gazing upon the poor bloodied creature as a white man might study, in reverse wise, a black or Indian woman broken thus by brute captors? Although my own white blood was minimal, I did not think so. The Anglos have a compassion for suffering things, fearsome as they are in their other cruelties. They have never achieved the stony emotion of the Apache, nor the entire savageness of the African. They are—for that very reason—less adapted for survival in any land such as that within which we lay beneath the fierce sun and watched to see what the brutes below us would now do.

  Kaytennae looked finally at me. “The woman is Yori,” he said, using the Yaqui word for white people. “I don’t think she will die. A lot of blood there, but she seems active enough. Just badly beaten.”

  “I saw she was white,” I answered him. “Why are we waiting? Why don’t you and Flicker kill them?”

  Both had their Winchester rifles, yet neither had made a move to use the weapons. At this range, of course, they could not be sighted closely enough for certain kills. But that was not the answer and I knew so.

  “Get up closer where you can shoot these cimarrones, these outlaws,” I whispered fiercely. “Someone must reach the woman before she bleeds to death lying there.”

  “You heard Kaytennae,” Flicker grunted. “He says she won’t bleed out. Now, calla, padre. Let me think.”

  He had told me to hush up, and I did so.

  Flicker let the wind blow another soft-whistled time of silence, then said to Kaytennae, “You thinking what I’m thinking about those noble soldados, schichobe?”

  “Do you mean that they are not noble soldados?”

  “Anh, schichobe. If those ladrónes are genuine rurale troops, I’m a teniente of the Mexican Cavalry. No es verdad?”

  “Yes, true,” Kaytennae nodded. “Let us kill them.”

  “No shooting,” said Flicker. “Ojo por ojo, diente por diente. Bueno, hombre?”

  “Sí, bueno,” said the Apache. “Ugashe, let’s go.”

  “Stay!” I gestured desperately. “What is this Hebrew vengeance of Moses, in this pagan hell? Eye for eye, tooth for tooth? Have you mislaid your senses, Flicker?”

  “Long ago,” nodded the muscular Negro. “All we are saying here, Nunez, is that we think it fit that those re
d-ass Indian rurales yonder die as they killed the Mexican muleros—by ambush and blade; no easy shootings.”

  “Idiotas, no!” I pleaded. “You must use the rifles.”

  “Calla, padre, por favor,” Kaytennae cautioned. “You talk too loud, and the wind is falling. We had best go, Mirlo.”

  Kaytennae was one of the Apache who called Flicker “Blackbird.” Flicker seemed to like the name, for he grinned now and said, “All right, Kite. Lead off. Padre,” he turned to me, “you get back to that mesquite draw and make sure the horses don’t get tangled in their tie-reins. Keep them happy. We won’t be long. Providing.”

  “Providing what?” I hissed at him.

  “Why, that our approach to the problem proves efficacious, father.”

  “Which is to say what, Blackbird?” I asked caustically.

  “That Kite and I can get in there and salt the tails of those birds without gunfire.”

  “Sweet Mary!” I blurted underbreath. “There are six of them.”

  “Yes, well, almost. You missed one. Look near the base of the paloverde to our right. Close to where the woman bleeds.”

  “Another. And stark naked. Seven of them!”

  “He’s the one tried the woman, then beat her,” said Flicker, and for the first time I saw the muscles move to grow hard in his jaw. “We’ll save him for later.”

  I called some other queries after them, but they were gone now, snaking off, one each way, to come down upon the massacre-place in the mule path from Nacozari to old Agua Prieta. The fascination of the playlet of death held me in trance. I did not go back to the horses as commanded but lay where I was, witness thus to one of the most appalling stalks of men by other men in the folklore of North Sonora.

  All the while that Flicker and Kaytennae went forward, creeping bent over double, or on hands and knees, or even running where hard rock gave guarantee of no dust sign arising to betray them, I could see them clearly as flies on a sheeted corpse. Yet the rurale soldiers at the noonhalt fire had no least warning glimpse of them. Thus utter were the war talents of my two bravos and so unbelievably swift was the little time of their closing in on the unwary feasters.

  The first sign that came to my worried vantage at the last of it—Flicker and Kaytennae had by then disappeared from my sight—was the reappearance of the black warrior. He stood, as I saw him, within five feet of the naked brute who dozed by the captive woman. I could even see him bend to pick up something. Then, unpausing, he came over the drowsing one and struck him with the skulling stone. The creature arched his back like a snake that has been run over, quivered there, and collapsed.

  Flicker stepped over his still form, and I saw him reach a hand to the woman’s shoulder and touch her in warning to be silent. I saw her respond. Then he was gone again on the instant.

  Next heartbeat, he reappeared behind and beyond the line of pack animals dozing in the trail. Taking cover of the halted train, he slipped from mule to mule, directly toward the fire about which the remaining half dozen cimarrones were feeding. Before these outlaws might know an enemy was within day’s march, my black fighter knifed two of them in their backs. Then, as the survivors did spring to foot, Kaytennae rose up from behind the bodies of the dead Mexican drivers. His Apache blade went into the backs of two more of the brutes as they all whirled to face Flicker’s presence.

  Two of the murderers of the Mexican muleros remained alive, all within my one held breath of watching. And those two wished to stay alive. They took wild flight.

  It was then I witnessed la cosa más increíble de todo mi vida: It was Flicker at the kill.

  Now all Indians of the desert can run. It is a part of their life from birth. Apaches can run down horses. What these strange broncos of Rio Moctezuma might do, I could not know; they seemed swift as darting birds to me, utterly uncatchable. But I had never seen Flicker at full race. Espíritu Santo, it chilled the spine.

  The great black body launched itself after the fleeing cimarrone killers like some dark arrow from the bow of an alien god. The muscled legs exploded. The lean torso whipped and strained. The sinewed arms arose and thrust like black and living pistons. Yet with all the vast power of his springing drive, the remaining effect of his gait was of fluidity and grace. It was compelling and yet beautiful to watch him run down and kill the first prey, and then the second. I could not believe it. That was no ordinary man yonder. It was a black lion of the desert of another and far-off land. Africa was that land and Flicker the lion that killed like the king-beast he was.

  He was back at the mule trail before I could even go and get the horses and ride them on the gallop over to the grim site. He smiled to see my reddened and perspiring face, gave me a kindly pat on the knee for reassurance, then told me to please take the lead rope of the first mule and guide the halted train back to our women at the camp of the sycamore water. He and Kaytennae would do what must be done here, then follow on.

  I did as he told me. With the mules under way behind me, I looked back. Flicker and Kaytennae were coming on. The Apache had the unconscious rapist over his horse’s withers, carrying him “sacked” as the Anglo and Tejano expression put it. In his turn, Flicker came proudly straight, bearing in his great black arms the limp form—with its fall of long, blood-caked hair—of the battered white woman. In the Apache way, he guided his horse with his knees. I could not discern, from the slack hang of the woman’s body, if she were now quick or dead.

  Tending my string of purloined pack mules on toward the sycamores of our camp, I prayed that the woman did live. And that, as well, our way through that fierce land would continue to be guarded, as on this day, by His hand. And, ah! How generous He had been.

  It required no practiced eye to see why the attackers had stalked this particular small train. Those half dozen good mules each bore a double pack abulge with desert treasure. One could smell the fat provisions of food. And see the trade goods, the pots, pans, cutlery, tools, all things needed for survival in outland Sonora state. Gracias a Dios. Y a Jesús y María, también. What some worthy merchant of Nacozari would now never receive from his agent of trade in old Agua Prieta would instead supply our long march to Durango and Sinaloa.

  Flicker had found his commissary.

  With six stout mules to transport it.

  I could scarce wait to demand of him what he might now say in denial of our God’s hand in this unprecedented luck of the desert.

  32

  SISTER OF THE PISTOLERO

  What a dunce and simplon, I; of course Flicker did not care to speak of Divine intercession immediately upon such a chase and blooding as his Yaqui killing had been. He was much too wrought yet.

  “Here, damn you, Nunez,” he growled at me. “Never mind God. Help me with this lamb. He damn near let her get shorn yonder. I don’t know if she’s going to make it.”

  Humbled, I fell to the work, beside him, of reviving the woman. The first moments were anxious ones. Then her breathing steadied and she opened her eyes. After another few moments, and although still in some shock, she commenced to glance about and to show other signs of a returning normal curiosity. Much relieved, I sat back and pronounced her safe.

  At this, Flicker forgot himself enough to mutter, “Thank God,” and I said soberly to him, “That’s a beginning, Flicker,” and he laughed and patted me on the head and said, “Amen, Nunez,” and the woman, hearing us, smiled fleetingly.

  Further efforts to encourage her failed however.

  After some particularly futile tryings to get her to speak or even to nod in response, I gave up and went off to examine the captive rurale. Flicker stayed on with the woman, I noted. That was interesting, but I found the rurale prisoner compulsively more so.

  Our Apaches had spread-eagled him against the gnarl of a sycamore stump. They had tied him standing upright and left him naked as a new-fledged bird, private parts adangle. His sole adornment was the
gag they had stuffed in his mouth to garrot his snarlings while he thrust and strained to be free of the pack-ropes with which they had lashed him to the ancient snag. As well, I suspected, they hoped the gag would strangle more than the rurale’s animal growls. But that was the Apache of it. For centuries they had feared these squat wild men of the western slope. One dared not now instruct them in Roman charity to the helpless foe.

  Moreover, the fellow’s behavior appeared to demand some overcruelty of restraint. He was glaring all about and slobbering in the manner of a rabid wolf. Plainly, he was a most dangerous guest in our little camp. Flicker had made me to see this even as we labored over the rescued white woman. His words were tight with warning.

  These seeming rurales, in their baggy uniforms so common to north Mexico of the time, were a fraud and deception. The leader and his half dozen dead comrades were in fact renegade Yaqui Indians. They had little doubt gotten their uniforms the same way they had the pack mules of the murdered Mexicans. What the band of dissident Yaquis were doing this far north of their usual haunts in the main forks of the River Yaqui, Flicker could not guess. Like their Apache cousins, they ranged far and near. But it was forever worrisome to find them farther from home than nearer it. For this very reason, we must work hard at discovering this group’s true purpose.

  To accomplish this discovery, however, the big Negro admonished me, I, Nunez, must be brought to understand more of the Yaqui as a whole people. We must not judge them by these misfits masquerading as rurales, nor by Apache opinion.

  The Yaqui were the largest of all Indian populations in Sonora, outnumbering the Apache of all bands by five to one. As well, the Yaqui spread over nearly the whole of Sonora, where the Apache, chiefly Chiricahua, ranged only the northernmost border—convenient to their American cousins and the conjoint raidings into Arizona and New Mexico. The Yaqui, on the other hand, had no second base in Estados Unidos, hence made no war on the Anglos there.