Deadville

by Robert F. Jones

  Ahead of us lay the final mal punto on our march to El Paso del Norte: a chain of bald sandstone cerros eroded into grotesque shapes by the wind and rain of centuries, through which the road wound in sharp switchbacks and a series of ever narrower, ever steeper canyons toward the open plain beyond. We were now near halfway to El Paso; if only we could survive the passage of this last treacherous outcropping of hills we would be relatively safe for the rest of the journey. However, as Jorge informed me, the guards called this section of the trail La Garretera de Acecho, or Ambush Highway as it were; and that it certainly proved to be.

  The alcalde, ayuntamiento, caballeros, and ricos of the town all rode in the van of the column, accompanied by the entire force of soldiery from the presidio; then came the poor people, and finally the prisoners, with our hapless guards bringing up the rear. These last could be relied upon, I knew, to drop their muskets and flee at the hiss of the first Apache arrow. The privileged persons ahead, along with their escort, would bolt ahead on their fleet steeds, hoping to outrun indio pursuit. That would leave the rest of us at the mercy of Mangas.

  Once again I found my mind veering toward memories of Bar-che-am-pe, her long black hair reaching nearly to her toes, her breasts firm beneath the doeskin shirt. But no, with bitterness this time: She had promised to come to me, to free me from this fate. Instead the fickle vixen had left me to this fate. But no, perhaps she’d died at the hands of the Apaches in trying to fulfill her promise, the vow expressed by her sinuous fingers at our last interiew, there in the Mimbreño camp. What if…

  But even then I would blame her. After all, she’d failed us both, me most of all.

  THE KILLING GROUND: Mangas had chosen well. The trail wound through a narrow slot, in shape like the letter ; sheer walls of unscalable sandstone rose to either side; above us, at an elevation of perhaps fifty feet, ledges followed both sides of the canyon walls, studded with boulders behind which Apache marksmen could easily conceal themselves. By now the sun stood directly overhead, its light reflecting and refracting from the pale yellow of the rock to create a blinding glare when one sought the sky.

  We were well into the canyon when the attack finally came: no yells, no drums or whistles or war whoops, just a faint hiss through the air, the silent, sudden fall of iron-shod arrows.

  There were no screams at first, not even from the women. All up and down the column, Santa Ritans fell in place or toppled from the spines of their burros, arrowshafts sprouting from backs, breasts, and bellies like the wild shoots of a storm-pruned apple tree.

  The troops and ricos and bold caballeros charged ahead, as I had predicted. They disappeared on their tall horses, around a lefthanded bend in the rock, into another ambush I am sure. Beside me, a panicstricken soldado loosed a shot from his musket though he had no visible target. The boom of the explosion echoed down the canyon and I heard the ball whine as it caromed off the wall. Again only the hiss of arrows… .

  Then I saw Mangas himself. He stood on the knife-edged ridge of sandstone directly before us: tall, wide, black against the hot white sky, his lank black hair framing that sad, cruel face. Watching, watching … I grabbed a musket from the hands of a stupefied prison guard, cocked the hammer, raised it to my shoulder, dropped the sights squarely on the Apache chief s face: fired … click, spark, boom …

  And Mangas seemed to yawn: opened wide his mouth to catch the bullet, chewed it to a pulp, and spit it back at me, laughing… .

  I WOULD LIKE to tell you how Jorge and I escaped from that death trap. Oh yes, I would: how we found behind a screen of cactus a narrow adit in the sandstone wall, slithered into it; how it opened out to the height and breadth of a man; how we ran barefoot down a long, cool, dark tunnel, its walls veined with gold and silver, deep into the heart of the stone, pursued at first by bowlegged Apaches; how at each turning I killed them one by one, crushing this Mimbreño’s throat, ripping that one’s heart from his breast, but running, running, running all the while; how suddenly, dreamlike, our old dog was at my side, bold Thump, long dead now I know, but in this dream of mine young again, and the size of a lion; how she turned and rent with her fangs those who would kill us, her wicked growl, her jaws filled with steaming meat, all of this in silence save for the hiss and thwack of arrows; and how that tunnel opened out onto another world: green glades, cool ponds, songbirds, and butterflies … Vermont! Or was it the Welsh otherworld, the Uffem?

  But that is not how it happened. What happened instead was Bar-che-am-pe.

  4

  AT FIRST I did not recognize her. She was dressed as a man, her hair bobbed to shoulder-length, her nose strangely different. She came up the canyon at the head of a phalanx, riding a black horse, leading two others. Death itself, I thought—that hard, cruel face… . But as the other Apaches charged ahead, their lances atilt, spearing those last few Santa Ritans who still lived, grabbing up frightened infants and dashing their brains out against the stone walls, she reined in her horse before me and told us to mount, in the Crow tongue. Then I knew her at last, by her hard voice and the heat of her eyes.

  And we rode back out of that butcher shop. Behind us, spurring us forward, came the first high screams of the torture victims. No Apaches were yet in pursuit of us, but certainly they would follow. We rode north, then west, then north again. All the rest of that day we rode hard, and on through the night. By dawn we were nearing the Mogollóns. Far behind us I could see vultures wheeling in a tall column, over the sandstone hills. We could not afford to rest our mounts, time was of the essence, and now the horses were failing fast. They sweated a foul white foam, tongues lolling, cracked and dry, until their eyes rolled back in their heavy heads and they foundered, one by one.

  Pine Leaf cut the throat of her mount and we drank the hot, sweet blood. She cut out the horse’s backstraps; they would serve us for supper. The horsehide we rolled into a dripping package which I carried over my shoulders; it would serve us later for moccasins. Jorge and I were barefoot, and soon our feet would be bleeding. Then we ran, ever upward toward the snow peaks, until we had reached the height of land from which the Gila descended. By now it was near dark of the second day.

  “Into the river,” Bar-che-am-pe signed. And in we plunged.

  Ah, the blessing of cold water: rolling downstream with the currents, agua fria, drinking even as we swam, down through the long dark green pools, then onto the shingle, then running knee-deep through the shallows over gravel, trout flirting out from beneath our heavy feet; and again into deep water. Finally at dark we emerged onto a sandy bar beneath sheer granite cliff topped by pinons and scrub oak.

  Cold and wet as we were, I took her in my arms and kissed her. It was every bit of what I had hoped and dreamed these many years: release at last! I wept.

  NO, I CANNOT account for the weakness that swept over me that day and persisted for such a long time thereafter. Perhaps four years of prison life had unmanned me; perhaps it was too sudden an exposure to the light of freedom, the bright vastness of the Great West itself, when what I was accustomed to was the dark of mine pit and despair. Physically I was strong enough, though underfed to be sure, but four years of swinging a pick and shovel, of dragging baskets of ore up those steep tunnels, pushing heavy barrows over broken ground, had given me muscles like steel cable. The weakness was surely in my soul. I felt, as I lay there in Pine Leaf’s strong embrace, like a babe in the arms of its mother: content to lie there forever; yes, let her feed me and rock me and sing me a lullaby, let her teach me to walk and to talk… . But not yet, not yet.

  SHE TOLD ME then of her life among the Mimbreños. She had been too bold in her speech for Mangas Coloradas, too hot to handle as a wife. After many whippings, Mangas had given up up on her. She was an outcast then, too fierce to kill, too strong to die, wandering from jacal to jacal begging scraps from the women, fighting the dogs for leftover guts and bones. On her own one day, using a riata fashioned from the skins of rattlesnakes she had stoned to death, she captured a wild horse on
the prairie and broke it to bit and saddle.

  Yes, the very horse whose throat she had just cut, whose blood we had drunk, whose bloody black hide I carried across my shoulder. She was tough all through now: Grow tough, Apache tough.

  From ashwood she had hewn herself a bow, from reeds and knapped flints a supply of arrows, fletched with the feathers of vultures she slew with rocks. These long, light, hollow-shafted arrows had a short piece of hardwood inserted at the forward end, on which was mounted the inch-long, razor-sharp arrowhead. Soon she was following the war parties on their raids into Mexico. The Apache soldiers made fun of her at first, but when one of them tried to rape her she put a knife into him and defied the others to avenge their brother. Impressed with her valor, the warriors set her many tests of courage, endurance, and skill with arms, finally accepting her as a warrior.

  “Many Mejicanos are dead to my arrows,” she told me, “many Spanish hearts skewered on the point of my lance.” The Mimbreños gave her a new name: Tats-ah-das-ay-go, the Quick Killer.

  “Why didn’t you head back to Grow country as soon as you could?” I asked her as we sat huddled together at the base of the cliff. “It would have been a simple matter once you had become a soldier.”

  “I promised you I would come for you,” she said.

  “But how could you know I was still alive, after all these years?”

  “I found out where you were from the women who trade in Santa Rita. I watched you from the sagebrush when I could,” she said. “Going to and from the mines.”

  “But if you could observe me that closely, why did you not try earlier to free me from the Spanish stronghouse?”

  “Too many soldiers,” she said. “Too many guns. I could get no Apache warriors to help me. ‘Why should we risk our lives to liberate a filthy White Eye?’ they asked. Besides, until the killing of the Apaches in Santa Rita, Mangas and Cuchillo Negro were content to remain at peace with the town. There they could trade gold and silver, taken on their raids down in Mexico, for powder and lead, blankets and knives and coffee, even pulque or mescal at times, though they manufacture those kinds of Strong Water themselves. Only after the slaughter did they vow vengeance on all of Santa Rita. You have seen what they do when their hearts are bad. Now we’re free of them, both the prison and the Apaches, and we have to make good time. I’m afraid your compadre from the calabozo won’t be able to keep up. His eyes anger me. They are soft, like those of a doe before the flight of the arrow.”

  She rose to her feet and drew her knife.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Kill him. Then fill his belly with stones and sink him in the river.”

  “No,” I said, shocked at her brutality. “Wait, please… . He’s my amigo; can’t you understand that? He’s just a harmless, gentle, simple mestizo from far to the west of here. And he knows the country we’re headed into, the language of the people. Spare him.”

  “Then let me at least cut his eyes out. I can’t stand those Spanish eyes, and I will not have them on us, not when we make love.”

  “Christ, you’re a hard woman,” I said. “All right, I’ll send him away. I’ll tell him not to look at us, on fear of death.”

  “Then do so at once,” she said. She shook her head. “You white men and your amigos. Captain Beckwourth was always going on about personal loyalty, honor among friends, and he’s not even white.”

  I hurried over to Jorge and explained the situation. His eyes filled with fear.

  “I should have let the Apaches kill me,” he said. “At least in battle they do it swiftly.”

  “Now goddamnit, stop that,” I said. “Get over to the far end of the sandbar, behind that pile of driftwood, with your back to us, and stay there until I tell you. Don’t you dare look back at us. Otherwise you’ll end up worse off than Lot’s wife: with your guts ripped out and a belly full of rocks for supper, swimming with the leeches at the bottom of this river.”

  “But I—”

  With that I cuffed him across the mouth, spun him around, and kicked him in the direction of the driftwood.

  LATER, AS PINE Leaf and I lay wrapped in the stiffening horsehide, all passion spent, we heard Jorge creeping up the shore. In the morning he was nowhere in sight.

  “The Apaches will get him,” Pine Leaf said. “It would have been swifter if I had done it.”

  Heartless as it may sound, I was nonetheless relieved to be shut of Jorge.

  That day, after she cut and sewed me some moccasins, we made our way farther down the Gila, traveling swiftly now on the bluffs that lined the river. Our aim was to follow the Gila down to the San Francisco River or perhaps even the Colorado, then by swinging north and well west of Apachería make our way back to Green River by mid-July. There we could join the American fur traders during their customary summer rendezvous. Perhaps Captain Beckwourth would be there, and my brother with him. And maybe even that bastard Lafcadio Dade… .

  Pine Leaf said that during the Mimbreños’ march to the canyon where they avenged themselves on Santa Rita they had cut Dade’s trail, heading north from Chihuahua. He had many men with him: Mexican peons for the most part, along with offscourings of the city’s jails and slums: borrachóns, ladrónes, matricidios, et cetera. I thought little of it at the time, but later the problem began to eat at me. Why would he bring a small army of unskilled men to the Rockies? Certainly not to trap, nor yet to serve as cannon fodder against the Blackfeet. Then the answer came: of course, to work the gold mine in White Hart Hollow! He had found it at last, perhaps with the aid of his allies the Gros Ventres, and was planning to develop it: extract from the depths of the hardrock all the hidden treasure … that rightly belonged to me!

  On the instant my temperature rose five degrees. Yes, Gold Fever is like malaria: it recurs without warning.

  AS WE DROPPED down the Gila over those next few days, the landform and vegetation changed. Pine, piñon, aspen, and juniper gave way to sycamore and ash; lower still grew vast stands of scrub oak, which the Mejicanos call an encinals. Cottonwoods leaned craggy and crooked along the seasonal feeder streams. Then we were into a treeless country where everything had teeth. We began to see forms of vegetation and cactus peculiar to this increasingly arid region: the big biznagas, the sap of which the Mejicanos made into tasty candy; stately pitahayas, which bore a tart, luscious fruit; tough mesquites whose aromatic beans we crunched as we hiked, and whose gum was pleasant to chew; mescál, palmillo, palo verde, and the wicked Spanish bayonet.

  FROM TIME TO time during that long traverse I smelled gold or silver in the rock of our passage. Good leads they were, too, quartz and black sand in abundance all along that greasy green river. But none of them as rich as what I had found on the Buenaventura. Dillion never went into the padres’ mine, did he? No, we had no time. It was wonderful in there, a shelf of pure quartz in which was marbled the gold vein itself, like the fat in a buffalo’s hump. I felt I could reach through the rock and dig it out with my bare hands, smear it on my face like butter. Oh yes, we had a treasure within our grasp that day. Then Dade came along… .

  THE HEAT OF the days grew fiercer, more oppressive, the river water increasingly alkaline as we descended. It griped my bowels and left me thirsty even after I’d glutted myself on it, but Pine Leaf fashioned a leather bucket from our horsehide, filled it, then sliced some small plates from the sides of a nopal cactus and immersed them in the water. The mucilaginous juice clarified it immediately, removing the bitter taste as well.

  We had left the highlands of the elk and mountain sheep behind us; now we saw only blacktail deer with their long mulelike ears, along with countless coyotes, jackrabbits, gophers, polecats, and a few ratty-looking badgers waddling across the flats. The ugliest creature we met with in that wasteland, though, was the escorpión, a black venomous lizard up to three feet long, known also as the “Gila monster,” which dwells among the sun-heated rocks along the riverbank. Pine Leaf said they bite fiercely and are loath to release their poisoned
grip even after their heads have been severed.

  One day, crossing a prairie of thick grama grass, we spied a small band of antelope in the distance, standing still as statuary, watching us in our progress. Pine Leaf quickly dropped to her knees, motioning me to stop but remain standing. She broke off a stalk of yucca, removed her red bandanna, and tied it to the tip of the pole. Then she told me to resume walking.

  This prairie was flat as a billiards table, with no cover whatsoever, yet when I looked back over my shoulder to where I had left her I could see nothing of Pine Leaf, only the lone yucca stalk standing there in the grass, its red flag winking in the breeze. As I proceeded, the antelope began moving cautiously but with great curiosity toward the flag. I stopped perhaps a quarter-mile farther on to observe. There stood the antelope now, clustered around the flag, staring at it, transfixed at its movements. Then a prongbuck suddenly dropped into the grass, next another, and finally a third. At last their companions grew frightened, flashed their white rumps, and ran away. Pine Leaf emerged from where she had buried herself in the grama and proceeded to dress out her victims with the knife that had slain them. Quick Killer indeed. “We will make camp up in those rocks ahead while the meat dries,” she said. “It should carry us through to the Colorado.”