by Clay Fisher
Any other course at all would have involved General Lee and, through him, the memory of James Flicker and Black Jim’s dream.
The army had promptly sent him as far as it could.
Sergeant Robert Flicker had arrived at Fort Bliss barracks, Post of El Paso, only the year before our meeting with him in Juh’s Stronghold.
But that year had been a fateful one.
Owing to his remarkable command of languages, Sergeant Flicker was assigned to the cavalry, just then engaged in a series of illegal forays into Mexico for the purpose of hot pursuit of raiding Apaches or for gathering intelligence against future raids by the hostile red men. In the course of this duty, Flicker learned not only the tongue of Juh’s wild people, but much of their ways. He came to admire them and to believe he understood why they would not, or perhaps it was that they could not, surrender to the white man. At the end of six months duty in the far Southwest, Sergeant Flicker was aware of the first real stirring within him of the idea that was to lead to his eventual desertion—his longing to live as the Indians lived, wild and free, masters of their own fates as well as of the manner in which they died, and survived. At the time, he put the feeling aside as unworthy of a loyal army regular. The Indian was the enemy.
The summer passed in this way, with one welcome new addition to the lonely post life of Robert E. L. Flicker; the Negro sergeant fell in love.
The girl was the teenage daughter of the post sutler, a lovely thing born of her white father’s illicit romance with a Lipan, or Texas Apache, woman.
The sutler, Bert Thompson, was a man of his times. Of middle years and a saving Scot’s nature, he was neither a good nor a bad man but only the victim of his era’s prejudgments and discriminations. Although he would admit of his fathering the half-breed girl, he would not go so far as to “Christianize” a heathen squaw—his name for Luana’s mother, a stoic Lipan woman working in the post store as a laundry and cleaning domestic. Neither would he, when he learned of his daughter’s interest in the young soldier, consent to Luana going on with the Negro trooper.
“It ain’t anything personal, mind you,” he told the young cavalryman. “I just don’t want no horse soldiers fooling around with her. She’s just a baby.”
Privately, in fact quite publicly, he told a different story. “No damned colored man is going to stick his black pecker into my daughter!” was his outraged cry; and Flicker, knowing the rules governing his race, understood that, once again, he had been found guilty and sentenced to banishment.
But this time he did not bend to the rule; he risked, instead, the full danger of breaking it: he continued to see the girl by dark and by devious trysting places and, as summer waned, came to know, with equal qualms of panic and warmest love, that he would be a father.
Luana and he discussed this wonderful and threatening new factor and, as so many star-crossed lovers before them, decided to let the future disclose their proper course, doing nothing the while.
It was into this uneasy peace of continuing chanceful meetings and passionate embraces “down by the summer-warm Rio Grande,” that fate sent the unkindest hurt of all.
A new officer was assigned from the East to command the troop of which Flicker’s scout patrol was the essential heart. The new man’s name? Lt. Jefferson Flowers.
A more wicked turn of blind fate could not have come to pass. Flowers, discovering Flicker’s presence in his new command, became as a man possessed. Instead of time having mellowed his memories of his black roommate, Flowers’ mind seemed to have become completely poisoned. Flicker learned that the fiancée had sickened in her mind from the attack and that Flowers had gallantly married her nonetheless, only to have the poor creature put a pistol to her head within the month to make him a widower before even the wedding couch had cooled. The bereaved officer had told the same story at that time that he told the Negro sergeant upon arriving in El Paso: it was that the girl had suddenly remembered the man who had raped her and, remembering him, could not live with the shame of having been violated by a black man fearing, as the memory returned to her, that the child she knew she was carrying within her would prove to be that of the bestial Robert Flicker.
When the lieutenant told this gross perversion of any possible truth to his sergeant-of-scouts, Flicker knew he was lost. For whatever reason that twisted the mind of Jefferson Flowers, an innocent Negro was going to be crucified in order to justify and dignify the suicide of a white woman whom that Negro had never even seen. In the ensuing seizure of desperate panic, Flicker could think of but one rational way in which he might convince the hollow-eyed white officer that he suffered a delusion about his ex-roommate’s guilt of any crime involving the lieutenant’s late wife. Flicker would tell Flowers about his own love for Luana Thompson and ask the white officer’s understanding, in a forgiving God’s name. Flicker had found a new life and wanted to let the dead past remain in peace.
To his enormous relief, Lieutenant Flowers responded to the plea with unexpected sympathy, even implied apology. He did not directly recant the falsehood of his accusation against Flicker in the death of his young wife, but definitely gave the Negro sergeant to believe that such retraction lay in the very near offing.
The first warning Flicker had to deny this naked lie was when he did not find Luana the next evening at their secret riverside meeting place. Returning to ask Bert Thompson of her whereabouts, the sutler had told the sergeant that the girl had gone “down by the river to watch the moon rise” with the new young officer, Lieutenant Flowers. And more than that. The lieutenant had winked at Thompson and told him to “be ready to announce an engagement any minute now.” Naturally, Flicker would understand from that the same that Thompson had: the engagement would be that of the dashing cavalryman and Miss Luana Thompson, daughter of Mr. Albert A. Thompson, Post of El Paso.
In wounded lover’s fury, Flicker saw the girl the following night. She weepingly denied any knowledge of an engagement, insisted she had gone to the river only to “hear how the grand people lived.” The lieutenant had been very kind. There had been no familiarity, no talk even of such a thing. No, he had not asked to see Luana again. Yes, of course, she promised not to see him again. Now, would Flicker take her in his arms and make everything as it had been before this foolishness?
Flicker of course had done that.
For that night happiness returned.
But only for that night.
With the dawn of next day, the girl’s violated body was found “down by the river,” where she and Sergeant Flicker were known to go. The young sergeant had heard the news from an Indian worker at the post. The Indian had heard it in Juárez, coming over the bridge to work that daybreak. Flicker, not waiting for any more trials by military tribunal, much less civilian hanging juries, went out of the noncommissioned officers barracks by the rear window in the gray light of early morning. Reaching the river, he went into the bottom-land brush and upstream a long way, crossed over and stole a horse and rode the entire day into Mexico. He believed, with nightfall and final failure of his mount, that he was seventy-five miles south of the international border. Stealing another horse, he rode the night through, guiding on the stars and by certain landmarks that he had learned in his scouting, to make for Casas Grandes and the Sierra Madre of the North.
Here, the principal narrative ended.
Flicker sat silent for several moments, and neither Allison nor I felt called to say a word. Juh, without instruction, took Little Buck and left the jacal. The Negro deserter roused up as if from a medicine trance.
“I have not recounted this story to anyone else,” he told the Texan and myself. “What would be the use?”
He shook his head, pausing again.
“They would not believe me, as you have not believed me. If a man is black, nothing else can alter the judgments made against him. This is equally true if the jury be Anglo or Mexican. I am sure, Father,” he sai
d to me, “that you understand the truth of this.”
I nodded that I did, and he continued.
“Now we come to the difficult part. Do I understand that you still have the document I prepared which I instructed Juh to leave with you?”
“Si, Capitán,” I said, then frowned. “How do you wish to be called?” I asked him. “Have you a preference?”
He gave me a quizzical, brief stare. “How would you call me if I were white?” he countered.
I had not thought of it and admitted as much. “However,” I guessed, “I suppose I would call you as I call Allison here. I would call you simply Flicker.”
“Do it then.”
“Yes, but you do not call me simply Nunez.”
“Sergeant Flicker, then, Father Nunez.”
He looked at me, dark face clouding.
“Now we come to the ugliness, eh?” he said. “The ransom note properly delivered should be reaching the authorities in Texas this same morning. Instead, either you or your white friend has it on his person here in this mountain camp of my people.” His smoldering eyes found both the Texan and myself, searching us with a common glance.
“My people,” he repeated. “The new Chihuahuenos.”
Allison and I nodded instinctively.
“The paper,” he said. “Give it to me.”
“But you don’t understand,” I delayed. “It has been left behind at the mission. For safekeeping, Sergeant.”
I could see his face tighten and knew he would challenge the lie. By supreme will, I prevented my eyes from appealing to Allison for help. “God’s Name, Flicker,” I said impulsively, “do you know that ‘sergeant’ sounds no more correct to me than simply Flicker. May I make another suggestion? I would like to call you teniente.”
“Lieutenant?” he said, with warning softness. “Why?”
“Because, when first I saw you, I said to myself, there is a soldier; no, more than that, he is an officer surely. That is God’s truth, Flicker.”
“Yes it is God’s truth, Father. But I don’t want to hear that rank spoken again to me. My name is Robert Flicker. You had better remember that.”
“It is not permitted then to call you by the rank you have bravely earned?”
“It would change nothing. Must I warn you again?”
“Ha!” I snorted. “Calling me a bishop would not elevate me, either. But I relish the sound of it.”
He did not answer but turned to his solitary window and stood staring out of it. At last, he said to us, still not turning from the window, “I don’t know what to do with you. Go and clean yourselves up. Rest if you wish, or wander about the camp. You have the freedom of the rancheria.”
He raised his voice, calling Juh, and the Nednhi chief entered. Flicker repeated the instructions he had furnished us, except to add an Apache proviso.
“If either of them moves to get away,” he said, “kill them both.”
22
Juh remanded us to the custody of Kaytennae.
It was then just after eleven in the morning.
One may imagine we were not sleepy. The ascent of the great cliff may have wearied our muscles but our minds were alert to our position. As to that, Allison rated it a camino cerrado, a dead-end trail. We would try to discuss it as quickly as we might be rid of our young guard. Fortunately, Kaytennae helped out here. He wanted to go and see his aunt Huera, he said, and warned us to try nothing, as he would be away no longer than a pack mule required to stale. We promised to wait quietly where we were, on the knoll above the warrior woman’s wickiup. He departed on the hurried trot.
“All right, Padre,” Allison said. “It’s tally time.”
We had the ransom note. It was hidden in the sweatband of his flat black hat. But it meant nothing. It had no power. Flicker could write another in five minutes. Forget the note. What of Juh and the Nednhi then? Strike them also. They would be what Flicker led them into being. We were back to the black deserter.
What of him?
He meant to try us by the Mexican law, Allison said. He was speaking of the ley fugue, the “shot while attempting to escape” rule of the Juaristas and ruralistas.
I demurred, incensed. Whatever he was, poor fellow, Robert Flicker was no killer.
Allison admitted my championing of the colored man touched him deeply. Nevertheless, he insisted, he himself would continue to fret about a way out of that Apache encampment alive. I was forgetting that Flicker was a wanted murderer, whether guilty or not. He could not afford to free us, nor risk our making an escape, nor give the Nednhi time to remember what they owed Father Nunez. We were not, he assured me, an even-money bet to “make it home with our hair on.” Not that Apache springtime.
“Mr. Robert E. Lee Flicker is sooner or quicker going to tell these here ’Paches of his to give us a two-jump head start and commence firing,” Allison concluded. “That’s as sure as bullets bring blood.”
“Never!” I cried. “He is a man of culture, of great dignity, whom life has cruelly used and who, in this pristine solitude, with these untutored but honorable children of nature, has at last found a home. I pray for his happiness, and for theirs.”
The big Texan bobbed the flaxen mane of his hair, pulled down the wide brim of his black hat.
“Whilst you at it, Padre,” he said, “throw in a Hale Marie for our side, too, will you?”
“Hail Mary,” I corrected stiffly.
“You bet,” he said. Then, pointing suddenly, “Speaking of your colored friend finding himself a better hole to hide in, lookit yonder. Ain’t that him a-striding all hot and bothered down to Huera’s wickiup?”
It was Flicker, of course, and at first I did not identify the flush that spread over me. Allison’s eye caught it, however.
“Son of a gun, Padre,” he said. “You’re jealous.”
This was total pig-swill, a reductio ad absurdum of most flagrant sort, and I shouted as much back at him.
“Plumb center!” he crowed delightedly. “Bang!”
I would not stand for this and stomped away from him. There is nothing so irritating to an educated human being as the truly simple mind.
There is also, at times, nothing so devastatingly able to see the truth.
Kaytennae came back to us with fearful proof. He had been dismissed when Flicker arrived at Huera’s wickiup but had not come back to us immediately. Rather, he had idled at the rear of the brush hutment in seeming delay to repair a rip in his moccasin. Sitting on his rock seat, there behind the wickiup, no more than twenty feet from its thin walls, he could hear every word spoken therein.
It was those words that now so deeply troubled Kaytennae.
“Blackrobe Jorobado,” he said, “I owe you a life. When I was but a boy I had the brain fever caught from horses, and you cured me of it. Now I would return you that life, but do not know how to do so.”
Ben Allison instantly sensed the deadliness here.
“Begin by telling us what you heard down there,” he broke in tersely. “Más pronto, hombre.”
I was certain the youth would comply as instructed except that now, of a seeming sudden, we had been discovered by the other youngsters of the camp and an entire horde of them, complete with one pet deer, three camp burros, and a tame raven, was bound up the rise to join us. Kaytennae rose to the need. With adult Apachean hauteur, he told the rabble that his orders were to keep Blackrobe Jorobado and the tall Tejano pistolero apart from all in the rancheria, especially curious and troublesome children. “Ugashe!” he shouted at the button-eyed starers. “Back to your mothers!”
The little ones did not raise any dust departing, but they did straggle off, and Kaytennae continued.
“The black one, He Who Has the Plan,” he said, “has told my aunt that the wonderful new Winchester guns are a sign from Ysun that the plan must go forward. A new ransom not
e will be sent off with sunrise. Imagine, he told her, if only ten new Americano rifles could kill nine Texas Rangers and defeat a company of Mexican cavalry, think what might be done with all the new Americano rifles in the arsenal at Post of El Paso? That is why he nearly ran to see my aunt. She must bless any change of venture, as she blessed the first El Paso raid. And the black one has told her this is the time.” Kaytennae paused, frowning. “There is another bad thing, too.”
“Wonderful,” Allison nodded. “Just what we need.”
“I think I know something even Juh does not suspect,” the Apache youth persisted. “I think He Who Has the Plan is in love with my aunt.”
“Bah!” I cried, flushing again. “You have been listening beneath too many ramada thatches!”
“But I listened well, Blackrobe.”
“Rascal! You should be flogged.”
“Hold up, Padre.” It was Allison, of course, returning to realities. “We’d best hear the rest of what the kid has to say. You got to remember that Flicker hooked me and you to the same whiffletree. Happen this ’Pache catch-colt of yours means to lead you out of these here Nednhi bulrushes, I go along.”
I had in truth forgotten the black soldier’s instruction to shoot us both in case of trouble with one. Apologizing to Kaytennae, I urged him to continue. He did so, but palpably nervous now. He kept throwing anxious glances toward the wickiup of Huera the Blonde. I could see the perspiration bead his sensitive face, and I took heed: when an Apache sweats, wise Mexicans and white men will look to every possible exit from the vicinity.
23
Kaytennae addressed himself to me, but I watched Ben Allison: I wondered how he would feel now about killing every Apache in Juh’s El Paso war party, having found this brave young friend among that party’s number?
The youth began by saying that his uncle had been initially lured to steal the Texas white boy by the promise of the black soldier that they could exchange the boy for a ransom of all the new rifles in the American arsenal at Post of El Paso. And the black one had said that these new rifles were the wonderful kind, called Spencers, that had the short barrels, were loaded through the butt stock, and would shoot seven times at the flick of the lever.