RENEGADE MAN
by
Parris Afton Bonds
Published by Parris Afton, Inc.
Copyright 2012 by Parris Afton, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Cover artwork by DigitalDonna.com
Kindle Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away.
For Rita Clay Estrada.
Like gold, which is always in the purest state, a friendship’s luster never dims.
You are that noble metal.
With special thanks to David Berry of Homestead Mining Company,
Silver City, New Mexico,
and
Dave McCracken of The New 49er’s Happy Camp, California
Chapter 1
Rita-lou was back in town, and Silver City, New Mexico, hadn’t had so much to talk about since Geronimo’s warriors raided the settlement a hundred years before.
Livingston, the old-timer who owned the grocery store, peered at her over his dust-spotted, wire-rimmed bifocals, then glanced down at her Texas driver’s license. Livingston had been old as long as she could remember. Old when she’d worn pigtails and gone shoeless. Old when she’d run away from Silver City twenty years ago.
“Ya ain’t by any chance that Randall girl, are ya? Rita-lou Randall?”
She could have purchased her supplies at the new Furr’s Supermarket, but instead she had come here, to Livingston’s Food & Mercantile—and despite the oscillating fan on the linoleum-topped counter, the store was as hot as the Chino smelter fourteen miles down the way. She tugged a chilled beer can from a six-pack she had bought and popped its tab. “One and the same, Mr. Livingston.”
His shaggy gray brows rose behind his bifocals. “Well, I’ll be—”
“Certainly not damned, Mr. Livingston. Indian Hills Baptist Church would never permit that.”
She took a sip of the cooling light beer and smiled kindly at the old man over the rim of the aluminum can. After all, he had offered her candy once, the last day of school. She had hung back near the screen door, watching the other second-graders grab their free licorice sticks and jawbreakers from fishbowl jars. The rest of the kids had been poor, but she had been even poorer. Dirt-poor, in the literal sense of the word. And too proud to accept the tempting, sticky sweets.
The old man chuckled. “Still spitting like a cat, ain’t ya?”
She leveled a steady gaze at him. “I believe it was an alley cat back then, Mr. Livingston.”
His heavy brows rose again. “You always did have a tough outer crust and a mouth that wouldn’t quit.” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling and sighed. “I’ll be here through the summer, and I’d like to set up an account with you. I can provide all the credit cards and references you need.”
“Humph! Don’t need nothing.” He began packing her provisions in sacks. “You didn’t steal as a kid, so I don’t guess you’re gonna start now, are ya?”
The small glow of unexpected pleasure she felt at his backhanded compliment surprised her. She lifted the two heavy sacks. “Mr. Livingston, I’m getting ready to commit the biggest robbery in history. I’ll make our Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy look like a pair of sidewalk Santa Clauses.”
The old man’s faded eyes widened, and she winked. “You might call it grave robbery.”
He chuckled again, and as she turned to leave he said, “Yup, tough outer crust, but a marshmallow inside.”
Outside, she ran into Mrs. McLeod. The wealthy old widow had long been the town gossip. She stepped back, shook her cane at Rita-lou and sniffed. “Watch where you’re going, you young hooli—well, for pity’s sake, aren’t you May Randall’s kid?” Her rheumy eyes took in Rita-lou’s faded denim shirt tucked into white shorts, and the exposed length of her tanned legs. “Still wild as the wind, I declare!”
“That I am, Mrs. McLeod.” She stepped aside for the gnarled little woman, who had somehow been the first to spread the news that fifteen-year-old Rita-lou Randall was “in the family way.”
As Rita-lou watched Mrs. McLeod hobble away, her dark brows knitted together. Coming home was going to be more difficult than she had anticipated. She had thought the hurting was over, that she didn’t care anymore, but she did. And that made her mad.
With her mouth set in a determined line, she stored the grocery sacks in her battered green Chevy, then started its clanking engine. She had given her Lexus to her son in trade for his old Chevy clunker when he’d gone off to college, because she hadn’t wanted to worry about him breaking down somewhere out in Death Valley, much less on one of L.A.’s congested freeways. Trace had teasingly complained that she was overly protective. Maybe she was. After all, hadn’t she left home alone at fifteen? Left this grassy valley dotted with juniper and yucca for the cement and freeways and smog of Houston—an even worse kind of isolation.
She turned onto the bridge that crossed over Main Street Gulch. Actually, Main Street had been obliterated in July of 1895, after two days of rain had caused a flood to race down it, tossing boulders as big as houses against anything that stood in the water’s way. When the twelve-foot torrent had passed, stunned citizens saw, instead of a street, a chasm running through their town, with halves of houses hanging over the edge. Eventually bridges were built across the abyss to rejoin the two parts of town. Later, the Civilian Conservation Corps of the Depression days had created a lush park within the fifty-five-foot-deep ditch, still called Main Street to this day.
When she reached Kingsley Street a bitter taste crept into her mouth. The closed trap of her memory sprang open to let in all sorts of forgotten images, and the street, named for the powerful and influential ranching family whose roots reached back to territorial days, certainly didn’t evoke the happiest ones.
Kingsley Street was like the main streets of hundreds of small towns across America. Twenty years ago it had been in a state of gradual deterioration, but in the last few years the chamber of commerce had revitalized it. Physical improvements to the downtown’s historic buildings had been limited to restoring the character of the architecture of silver-boom days. Spanish Colonial, Victorian and Italianate residences and commercial buildings crowded shoulder-to- shoulder with art galleries along the narrow, brick- paved thoroughfare.
Kingsley Street had long been considered the demarcation line between the good and bad sides of Silver City, originally called La Cienega de San Vicente. Residents north of Kingsley Street had been regarded as being on the side of the angels, while those to the south, perched on Chihuahua Hill, had been regarded as the shifty-eyed, great unwashed. Self- professed nonpartisans had been regarded with suspicion by both sides.
Chap had been one of those few nonpartisans. Chap, the sensitive white knight of her youth. A sense of sadness momentarily overrode her bitterness. She had thought she had gotten over the handsome Kingsley scion. Shows what digging up the past gets you, she thought, then had to smile at her unintentional pun, one of her anthropology prof’s favorites.
As if she enjoyed inflicting emotional pain on herself, she abruptly turned off Kingsley, the last strip of greenery between historic downtown and barren Chihuahua Hill, and started up steep Bayard Street. Named for the old fort that had guarded ranchers and prospectors against attacks by the Apaches, Bayard Street had been the boundary of Silver City’s red-light district.
Involuntarily she glanced in her rearview mirror to see the North Addition district rising on the hill north of downtown. North Addition was made up chiefly of elaborate homes from the early 1900s, built by people like William Randolph Hearst’s parents, who had amassed the fortune for his great newspaper empire from gold gleaned from the ground in Pinos Altos, six miles outside Silver City. Succe
ssful artists and health- seekers, attracted to the area’s many hot springs, now occupied the old residences. The three-story Kingsley mansion rose in their midst, its grandeur still overshadowing them.
Her mother had worked there as a cook. And she herself as an upstairs maid. Briefly.
Wistful melancholia tripped the light fantastic through her heart in an ever-increasing whirl, and she heard an inner voice emphatically whispering, “Pay the piper and stop this dance!”
Resolutely she turned her attention back to Chihuahua Hill. It was less squalid than when she and her mother and Grandpops had lived there. Stone houses held together by mortar, as well as flat-roofed territorial homes with exposed vigas, were all that remained. The tar-paper-and-corrugated-tin shacks, like the one she had grown up in, had vanished for the most part. The railroad tracks had passed through here, which had meant she was definitely from the wrong side of the tracks in the eyes of Silver City’s respectable citizens.
Respectability.
She hadn’t realized the power the word possessed. Its power had drawn her back to the small mining town in the foothills of the Gila Mountains, deny it though she might. She had learned early in life that it did little good to lie to oneself. She was what she was: a thirty-five-year-old widow, the mother of a college freshman, and a doctoral candidate in anthropology. Not bad for a tenth-grade dropout who had gotten an equivalency diploma instead of the real thing.
She had convinced Greenwald Research to give her a foundation grant to finance her work because she strongly suspected she would find proof of a prehi¬toric man predating New Mexico’s Folsom Man. However, she could honestly admit that she wasn’t sweating out a broiling summer at Renegade Creek merely for the international fame such a find would bring her.
A discovery of that magnitude would not bring a monetary reward, but that was no longer a priority for her since her husband had left her debt-free, at least, if not luxuriously situated. What the discovery of Renegade Man would do for her was something intangible: it would force Silver City to change its poor opinion of her. It would earn the citizens’ unwilling respect.
That was a thought she relished. After all these years, their respect was vitally important to her, if only because she wanted to avoid having any negative reflections cast on her son—ever. Trace should never have to pay for her mistakes.
Of course, there was also the satisfaction that she would feel, because such a discovery would be an achievement she had earned on her own, after letting Robert try to do everything for her during the twelve years of their marriage.
Her dark brown eyes, almost black, smiled back at her in the rearview mirror. If staking out an archaeological site on Split P grazing lands enraged mean-hearted C. B. Kingsley, why, that would be even better!
Heading east out of Silver City, beyond the Chino smelter’s twin smokestacks, she passed the legendary Santa Rita copper mine, for which she was named. Well, for that and for her father, a Mexican migrant worker by the name of Luis. Apparently he had worked in the Silver City area just long enough to cultivate the fields and her mother.
Rita-lou entered the Mimbres River Valley. Here the Mimbreno Indians, members of the prehistoric Mo gollon culture, had produced a pottery of finely painted geometric and natural designs that was world- famous. And here, along a tributary of the Mimbres River, she hoped to find her thirty-five-thousand-year- old Renegade Man.
It wasn’t even nine, and already the June morning was heating up. She rolled down the window, letting the fresh air whip her shoulder-length hair. The color of sawdust, Grandpops used to say. Fresh air! She slowed down to a leisurely pace and inhaled deeply. After smelling Houston’s exhaust fumes for twenty years, her nostrils took a positive delight in distinguishing the meadow scents: new-mown hay, a vegetable garden on the right and an apple orchard just ahead.
Funny how smells could trigger memories. Her first memory of Chap was of him catching her when she slipped from the apple tree she had been plundering. A Kingsley apple tree. The whole lower Mimbres Valley had belonged to the Kingsleys. It had been the headquarters of the once-famous Split P ranch. In 1884 the Split P had been described as the largest ranch in the world. Now C. B. Kingsley—everyone called him Cattle Baron Kingsley behind his back— possessed only the grazing rights to this part of the valley.
When she reached a cluster of beehives, she swung off onto a bumpy dirt road that tested the springs of the old Chevy. Unlike the upper Mimbres Valley, a mountainous wilderness that was part of a national forest bigger than Connecticut and New Jersey combined, the lower valley was grassy, and its low hills were peppered primarily with pinon, cottonwood and scrub oak.
Once the Chevy rattled over the first cattle guard, she still had another forty-five minutes of driving through isolated countryside before she reached Tomahawk Flats. Her campsite was set up under a grove of cottonwoods on a flat stretching away from Renegade Creek. The campsite consisted of little more than two canvas tents she had pitched atop the cushioning blue gamma and shorter buffalo grass. One tent would serve as a crowded workroom, replete with four folding card tables and chairs; the other would be her living quarters.
Due to a lack of amenities, the inside of this tent was much more spacious; it held just one card table to function as a dining table, a GI grub box for tableware and a portable butane cooking burner and refrigerator. For light, a kerosene lamp was suspended from the tent’s ridgepole over her sleeping bag. Her wardrobe fit inside a duffel bag. It wasn’t much, but it was a damn sight better than the inside of the dirt-floored shack of her childhood.
On the other hand, the bathroom was even more Spartan than what she had grown up with: the great outdoors, or, when nature called at night, a bucket. As for bathing, a marvelous hot spring—a two-mile tramp away—had been lined with smooth stones by a hippie commune that had eventually come of age and decamped.
She had carefully selected her excavation site after calculating where Renegade Man would have been most likely to make his camp. All the evidence pointed to this locale, the crossroads of several Indian cultures, where Toltec Indians from Casas Grandes, Mexico, had traded feathers for Mimbres pottery, and where the Basket Weavers of west Texas traded yucca- fiber sandals for fish hooks made out of shells from the Pacific coast.
The flat would have been a lake then. Renegade Man could have sat on his haunches on one of the surrounding hills and seen everything that came to the water to drink, or he could have crouched along the banks to gather clay for his pottery, which he had decorated with images of the humpbacked god Koko Pelli. Only a few examples of such pottery had been found, but Rita-lou was sure it had been created not by any currently known culture, but by the Renegade Man whose existence she hoped to prove.
The thought of the work to come aroused a sense of excitement in her. It always had, even before her very first dig as part of an Earthwatch team on the banks of the Rio Motagua in Guatemala, searching for pre-Columbian jade. Her excitement dated back to her childhood days, when she would find arrowheads and pottery sherds here on the Split P. With each small discovery she had felt an exhilarating sense of leaping backward through time.
Magnum, the black Labrador retriever Trace had bequeathed her when he’d gone off to UCLA, made his own leap toward her as she got out of the car. The dog’s tail wagged joyously. Chuckling, she scratched him behind his ears. “Hey, fella, you’re not just another pretty face, are you? Did you miss me?”
Magnum’s tail wagged another joyous response that correlated with the “Whoof!”
Anxious to get to work on her project, she stashed her perishable groceries in the minuscule refrigerator, then went to the other tent and found a hammer, a steel measuring tape, a compass, surveyors’ stakes and a ball of twine. By noon she had staked out a twenty- yard grid that resembled the sheet of graph paper she had prepared earlier. Sweat trickled down from her hairline, and she wiped her damp palms on the back of her shorts before she began to string the twine along the stakes, creating a waf
fle effect.
As she worked, steadily, methodically, meticulously, she was conscious of the light breeze stirring the cottonwood leaves and of the doves perched on the branches, cooing in noisy chorus. A good feeling, a feeling that all was right with the world, welled up inside her. It was a perfect day, a day without the intense heat that would come later in the summer.
She hadn’t realized how much she had missed the Gila wilderness. As a child, she had run wild here come roundup time, when her mother had been brought out to the Split P’s ranch headquarters for two weeks every spring and fall to cook for the cowhands.
At thirteen, that term had been one of the first things Rita-lou had learned from Chap. Cowhands were the proudest members of the cattle industry, the riders who worked cattle—trailing, cutting, roping, branding and rounding-up. “When you call them cowpokes,” he had told her, grinning, “you smile and act like you’re just kiddin’.”
Cowpokes, the aubum-haired fourteen-year-old had gone on to explain slyly, needed only one thing: a poor sense of smell. They rode with the cattle during rail shipment, when it was their job to see that none of the animals lay down, because that could cause others to stumble when the train’s brakes were applied. Their name came from the small sticks they carried to poke the cows and urge them back to their feet.
Of course, she had eventually learned much more from the shy, handsome boy. She had learned the joy of loving and giving, and the devastating agony of being left to face down the condemning stares and vicious gossip alone. Well, not exactly alone. Before long she had had their son Trace to brave the world with her.
The two of them against the world. No, she thought, fiercely rehammering a stake into place, it had eventually been the three of them against the world: she and Trace and her husband Robert.
Hot and sweaty and more than ready for a lunch break, she laid aside her hammer, painted fluorescent yellow so it could be easily located, and, with Magnum trailing, strolled across the flat’s gravelly silt. It was strewn with driftwood from recent rains. After a heavy rainfall the creek became a violent river that overflowed its bank. Yet normally it appeared and disappeared along its course until it emptied into a small lake in Chihuahua, Mexico.
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