by Lon Frank
Lucky opened his eyes and stared at a centipede just crawling over the edge of his still-askew rubber nose. Living in the low country of the bayou land, he should never have been so afraid of bugs. But he was, incredibly and irrationally so. As he literally leapt, flat-bellied from the sand, Lucky’s head came up perfectly between the old Indian woman’s legs.
As he lifted her into the air, perched on his shoulders like some Indian-costumed clown assistant, her gun went off and Redford crumpled to the ground.
Oblivious to the woman on his shoulders, Lucky hopped around furiously, trying to get his hands on the centipede which by now perched on the bridge of his nose, directly between his crossed eyes. On the third hop, the old woman flailed the air like some unfortunately inept rodeo cowboy and made a slow-motion back flip off the clown’s heaving shoulders.
Or at least, it would have been a back flip, had she been a little higher. As it was, she landed squarely on the crown of her head and her body dove on past her with a sickening crunch as the bones in her neck snapped. Her feet came down toes first into the sand and for a moment she was balanced there like a human tripod, her butt pointing skyward. Then she slowly rolled over, her open eyes staring at the equally lifeless and equally ancient ones of the painted White Shaman.
The bullet from Agnes’s gun hit Robert almost squarely in the center of his forehead. Maybe the load was just defective, or maybe his head was turned just right, or maybe the spirits of the mesa just didn’t want him coming along right then, but the bullet ricocheted off his skull and embedded itself in a side wall. There, it permanently defaced a painting of a female shaman holding a black knife in one hand.
Lucky tightly bound Agnes’s leg and used her cell phone to call for help. She sat in the dust among the moonlit paintings and cradled Robert’s head in her lap as she dabbed the dribble of blood from his forehead.
“You took a bullet for me, you know that?”
“Yeah, well it seemed like a good idea at the time, I guess.”
“And you said you cared for me.”
“Yeah, yeah, it sorta just came out, you know.”
Agnes gently placed a delicate long-fingered hand on his cheek, where a wayward tear had just landed. He touched her thigh.
“How’s the leg?”
She did not take her eyes off his as she whispered,
“I think we’ll both live. Partner.”
By the time help arrived and the medics carried out Agnes, Lucky was turning in circles and pacing rapidly around the painted walls. He suddenly grabbed Redford and lifted him to his feet.
“Look. Look here; see all these marks chipped into the rock. This is a moment-print; a map along the horizon of time. Only Tsarthor could have done this. He actually was here!”
Robert gently fingered his throbbing eyebrows.
“Wait, just wait a minute. You mean that he was here and somebody read his time-map, or whatever, and came and sucked him up into the sky, like the old broad said? But who? Who could’ve found him?”
“Well, I could. I mean if I still had a time machine, I could. But I don’t.”
Robert looked closely at his feet for a moment before meeting the old clown’s eyes.
“But we do. Back in D.C. The brainiacs have been working on one for a while. Remember the diagrams from the Eden Studio collection? Well, they were some help, but nobody knows just how to make it work. Nobody, except maybe the guy who helped build one with Arthur LeMaire.”
The old clown carefully took off his rubber nose and gently pinched the dust from his pale nostrils.
“So, that’s why you came for me?”
Agent Redford’s eyes focused over the old man’s left shoulder and on the wall behind him, to the magnificent and malignant being, rising into tortured heavens, and to the little figures crouching in terror at his feet. Directly above it was depicted the glaring lightning and the wavering four-legged image of Lucky’s time machine.
“Yeah, old man. I guess we want him. We want him back.”
THE END
(At least of this adventure...)
THE SECRET OF THE CHISOS
The old timers say
that if you stand in the door of the chapel
at Presidio San Vicente on Easter morning,
you will see the sun’s first rays
fall on the entrance to the lost mine.
The Indians first named it Quivira, and it was old then. It was born in another time; a time before the remembrance of man, a time before counting, a time before history began. When the earth was new and its dry places were fresh from any footprint, the great landmasses shifted and wandered about in the endless ocean. Coming together, in a time men would later imagine as 300 million years ago, they formed the mammoth continent of Pangea. The collision of north and south rumpled the fragile crust and pushed up jagged mountain ranges across what would become, in time, Texas.
The first ranges, the old ones, would stretch from Mexico diagonally across into Oklahoma and Arkansas. Men would eventually name these the Ouachitas and they were the first coastal boundary, their steep and stony flanks holding back the shallow gulf where the first creatures swam. In time, the falling waters wore down the peaks and filled in the seas to form coastal plains, the roots of the mountains becoming the great spring-filled outcropping called the Balcones Escarpment. When white men came, they settled here. In the fertile backland farms and pecan bottoms below the flowing streams, they built homes and cities out of the mountain bones, granite and schist and limestone.
But they didn’t come to Quivira, they didn’t carry off its bones, they didn’t know what awaited them below its brow. A remnant of the mighty Ouachitas, the tiny range survived in the Chihuahuan Desert just north of the great bend of the Rio Grande. Huddled among the eastern flanks of the magnificent Rockies, Quivira was storm-bitten and sun-ravaged. It slept through the eras when volcanic explosions shuddered around it. It slumbered through eons of wind which tore at its shale sides. Silent, it waited and held its secret.
Isolated by the deserted lands, that huge desolate area the first Spanish explorers called the desplobado, the tiny group of vertical spears persevered and came to be called the Chisos Mountain Range, and eventually became the centerpiece of a National Park called Big Bend. Today, visitors by the thousands hike the agave-studded trails and capture snapshots of the roadrunner and javelina. Emma Augustine, a tourist, was one such visitor within the playground of the great park, unknowingly gone astray under the shadow of Quivira.
Emma lay absolutely flat, her belly pressed upon the parched floor of the arroyo. Her hands and feet were still tightly bound, but the blindfold lifted enough that she could see across the endless desert to her right. The elegant limbs of the ocotillo wavered and lifted above the desert floor, as if struggling to escape the heat which was building as the sun neared its noon position. The sweat pooled in the valley between her shoulder blades, and when she moved, it ran, stinging into the open wounds the rope cut into her neck. It was a mercy to her that she couldn’t see the carrion birds circling in the rising air currents above. The man kicked her savagely to make her rise and walk again, and suddenly Emma remembered that in two days she would be nineteen.
But it isn’t here that our story begins.
* * *
We have seen a land rich in gold, silver and other wealth...great cities...and civilized people wearing woolen clothes...the city of Cibola rising out of the desert, with walls and gates, larger than Tenochtitlan.
Fray Marco de Niza, 1540
Fray Antonio Rodriguez carried the honor of ‘hildalgo’ with the same proper attitude he gave to his erect posture. The social title identified him as the son of an important person in his native province of Castille. He was educated in mathematics, language, and the arts in finer schools, and proved to be an excellent, if solitary, student. From his early teenage years, he realized a propensity towards two general fields of interest, both unusual for a promising young man of his time. He displayed
an obsessive fascination for the expanding geography of the New World, and harbored a private lust for tales of ruthless Conquistadors, and the dark-skinned people they left in bloody heaps upon conquered jungle temples. The young Antonio might have grown to a distinguished military career or a place as a respected priest in one of the large cathedrals in Barcelona, but for a deep-seated character flaw. His attraction to cruelty, which he diligently suppressed, even though he on occasion succumbed to a pseudo-sexual thrill by torturing small animals in the privacy of a hidden shallow cave near his childhood home. A thrill which expressed itself in an untenable aversion to discipline, either military or religious.
His mother grew worried over his reclusive habits and by his seemingly total lack of interest in the young women to whom she laboriously arranged for him to be introduced. She privately acknowledged a sense of relief when, at age twenty-two, he announced his intention to join the brotherhood of the Franciscans. Four years later, his secrets still intact, he won the appointment to accompany an expedition into the despoblado, north of the great desert river which cut its canyons untiringly through ragged mountains as desolate as the face of the sea.
The year was 1581, and the little party of Spaniard explorers gathered at the tiny mining village of San Bartolome’ to prepare for their entrada. The great civilizations of the south had been conquered, decimated, and assimilated under Spanish culture and Toledo steel. Their idols melted into doubloons and reales, sent east over the oceans, their ancient art plundered to provide ornament for the ladies of Seville. The remaining indios were being taught the ethic of work as slaves on rancheros and in mining camps under what once were the heavens of their grandfathers.
The flow of New World gold became contagious, the economic advantages of slavery grown addictive. Cabeza de Vaca failed 40 years earlier to discover the fabulous cities of Cibola, the seven cities of gold, but he had not failed to strengthen the Spanish dreams of riches for the taking, just beyond the muddy water of the Rio Grande. As Fray Antonio waited in the predawn stillness of a Mexican April morning, he gazed north into the mountains where he would find his own personal new world. Pulling his dark robe closer together, he watched as the sun began to paint the stark cliff sides and shivered slightly as they suddenly burst with a golden glow. His right hand stole quietly into a hidden pocket, where he slowly broke the bones of a hapless captive lizard.
* * *
We were brother to these stones.
We were sister to this water.
Their dust became the bones of our children
It’s music, the rhythm of our lives.
The word of his name has been lost to language, but we will call him Two Feathers.
The tribal elders of a little group of Chisos Indians huddled on the dusty floor of the overhang shelter that had been their summer camp for generations beyond counting. A warrior already advanced in age at his twenty-sixth summer, was holding a fist-sized rock in his right hand and gestured politely with his left as he addressed the circle of peers. His face and arms were striped with lines of yellowish ocher.
“I have heard of men whose skin is made of stone and shines in the sun. They sit on great hairless buffalo, and carry skins with their pictures of red and yellow upon them. They walk for a moon without water and can be seen on the horizon, shimmering as the light on rippling water. Our cousins say they kill with thunder from a clear sky and leave the bodies of their dead for coyotes. They have fire in their bellies and blow smoke through their mouths when they rest.”
“The Jumanos who live in mud houses have seen them and tell many wondrous things. They bring gifts beyond our understanding, knives which can’t be chipped, fire which you can carry in your hand, and drink which takes men to the land of dreams. And this, my brothers, this is what the shining men seek.”
He held the rock above the light of the fire and the reflection of the flames danced upon the smooth surface of the unnaturally heavy nugget which was almost pure gold.
Two old men grinned toothless grins at Two Feathers. They had heard such tales before, the fantastic shining men who breathed fire and ate their hairless buffaloes in the desert. But the eyes of the younger men glittered with the golden reflection of the nugget and dreams of riches beyond their knowledge. Running Bird was the first to speak.
“My brother, Two Feathers, will the shining men come to us? Might they kill us with thunder and burn us in the fires of their bellies, or will they give us wondrous gifts and love us? If they seek the yellow stone, should we give it to them or should we hide until they go north to the land of the bean-and-maize eaters?”
Two Feathers tossed the rock to the younger man before answering.
“Little brother, Running Bird, the shining men will never come here. This has been our refuge for time before the moon woman went into the sky. Here we feed our children, here we bury our dead, here the spirits of our people speak from the cliff walls. The strangers will never come here. We must go to the mountain where the yellow stone lives and take what we can carry to our Jumano cousins. They will give the stone to the strangers, and keep their treasures for us. The wife of Black Hand is of their people; she will ask this for us.”
And so it was decided among the men of the council that the gold would be collected and traded through the larger group of their relations who lived on the fringe of the Pueblo culture to the west. This decision would bring to them all the gifts of the strangers, the same gifts given to Montezuma, to the Aztec, to the Mayan. It would bring to them the treasure of sadness beyond their understanding, and the riches of pestilence, slavery, and annihilation. They looked with bright and shining eyes into the darkness of their future.
* * *
I live, but I shall not live forever
Mysterious Moon, you only remain,
Powerful Sun, you alone remain,
Wonderful earth, only you live forever.
—Death song of the Texas Kiowa
The children shuffled their feet in the dust as they shyly approached the stranger in the black robe. Holding out their open hands, each would be given a small brown chunk of rock-hard and poorly refined sugar. Then each would scamper away, some to lick tentatively at their lump, others to hold it melting in their mouths as the sweet liquor seeped down their throats.
It was now three days since the old woman had motioned secretly to Fray Antonio, then showed him the handful of gold nuggets. Keeping his wits about him, he frowned with disgust then pocketed the stones, and handing the woman a cheap trade knife, instructed his mestizo interpreter, “tell her to wait until the others leave, and to tell no one but me.”
With much fanfare and waving of flags, the military contingent under Francisco Sanchez, known as “El Chamuscado” for his red hair, departed the village and turned toward the northwest, following the Rio Grande into New Mexico. Fray Antonio stayed behind, professing a revelation of divine guidance to shepherd this particular village of Jumanos. Only his mestizo assistant remained with him, Salvador, who had been brought along to help tend the pack animals.
The burro-wrangler, Salvador, was one of those individuals which can be found in times of prolonged war or at the temporary demise of civilization. Completely Indian in his facial features, he had a great barrel chest and short limbs of incredible strength. His palms were almost devoid of creases, and his stubby digits were twice the girth of Fray Antonio’s own delicate index finger which wore a magnificent emerald ring, once the proud belonging of a Meztec noble. He spoke seldom, and then mostly in guttural grunts punctuated with sneers from his huge, round, pock-marked face. The Spaniard instinctively chose him as an ally after seeing him slyly coax an Indian camp dog into arm’s reach and then kill the animal easily by breaking its neck with his bare hands. Even though the military supplies included dried beef, Salvador then carried the lifeless beast to his solitary campsite where it later adorned a spit above the fire.
Three days later, the body of the old woman who first gave the handful of gold nuggets to the S
paniard was found in a ravine half a mile west of the village. She had evidently stumbled and fallen, instantly breaking her neck. Fray Antonio made the sign of the cross on her forehead, and blessed the corpse as it was covered with stones. He then instructed his assistant to break camp and prepare to move toward the eastern horizon. Toward the lonely spires of the Chisos mountains.
* * *
On the cliff faces the Indian pictographs
fade slowly in the wind, a silent testament
to the history of a people forgotten.
It had been two years since the stranger arrived at the little camp of the Chisos people. Now, Two Feathers was the last of the warriors still above ground. The people were frightened at first, when word came that the black-robed man and his companion had been sighted, marching in single file along the secret trail into their hidden oasis. But their fears soon gave way to curiosity, as parcels were opened showing gleaming steel blades and glass beads of colors beyond the desert rainbows.
Gifts were given, and in time, food and shelter came to Fray Antonio and Salvador. The Franciscan sat with the injured and soothed their skin with ointments of olive oil and camphor. He enthralled the children with a magic looking glass, and tales whispered about waters as great as the desert from the peak of Quivira, and boats that grew tall trees which caught the wind and moved upon its surface. The women cast shy glances at him as they offered unadorned pottery bowls of stewed rabbit or the tiny roasted breasts of white-winged doves. Soon, the men wore cloth sashes about their waists, the red and gold of Leon and Castille.
It was two moons before the bearded Spaniard casually asked about the gold. They had no way of knowing of the secret interview Antonio and Salvador held with the old Jumano woman, nor of the price she paid for her knowledge. But they knew that the yellow stone was the reason he had come to them from across the great waters; the real reason.
