by Ben Stroud
Six days later Mota and his men reached the ragged settlement that was Tamotchala, a single street of tents and half-finished adobe houses. In its fly-filled market Indians sat with vegetables and twists of rusted tin on their blankets, gathered from who knew where, while scrawny mules stood roped together, avoiding sale. It was a desperate, dreary place, but Mota, despite himself, felt a muffled fluttering in his gut. He had been to Tamotchala just once before, to inspect the nearby Ojo de Dios mine, a pit worked by a handful of creoles and half bloods living beneath stick shelters. But he’d never been beyond the town. Few had. Above Tamotchala spread the blank parchment of the viceroy’s map.
A SANDY INDIAN TRACK LED NORTH and cut through a forest of dry, tangled trees choked with cactus. Mota and the others picked it up just across the river from Tamotchala and for days followed it without event. They passed two abandoned settlers’ clearings, cabins burned and corrals torn down during the uprising, and after the fourth stream they crossed they came upon patches of tilled bean fields, a village of dried mud, and a square of ash and blackened timber. Indians in the fields and in the mud houses stopped their work and looked.
“These are the Mayos,” Father Pascual whispered in Mota’s ear. “That”—he nodded discreetly at the ashen square—“was one of our missions.”
The Mayos watched as Mota and the others passed through. It seemed to satisfy the Indians that the party wasn’t stopping but continuing on. Over the next days the forest began to thin. Their third day from the village, they rode past bleached bones, and the sixth day out they arrived at the grassy edge of a wide river. Mota saw a mud break in the distant reeds, the track continuing on the river’s other side. But before he could ford the river, Father Pascual stopped him. They had entered Yaqui territory, and this was the water they must follow east.
“First to the village of Bacom,” Father Pascual said, “and from there to Cocorim, and then into the mountains.”
Cottonwoods grew along the river, but soon gave way to another bean field, at the end of which was a village much like that of the Mayos, with mud houses and a few old stilt huts of mat and cane. As they approached the village, Father Pascual hung at the back. Since leaving Mexico, he had grown out his beard, and now he pressed his hat low on his head.
Just as in the Mayo village, they were watched from hut and field, but here an old man in a long cotton shirt waited for them in the middle of the track. He didn’t move as Mota approached, and when Mota halted the old man asked their business in piecemeal Spanish.
“We’re riding into the mountains,” Mota said. He had worried there might be trouble when they reached this part of the journey. It was from here, the country along the river, the Jesuits had taken their slaves. But the soldiers had been cruel when they came north to put down the rebellion, and Mota hoped the memory of that cruelty would be fresh in the Yaquis’ minds, make them wary and timid. He listened to the dull slide of metal against leather, El Sepo drawing his ivory-handled stiletto.
The old Yaqui spat. “Nothing good in the mountains.”
“We go under orders of the king. We have no dealings with the Jesuits.”
“Mountains empty,” the old Yaqui said. “You turn back.” He watched Mota with flinty eyes, but when Mota spurred his horse, the man got out of his way.
Messengers must have sprinted through the bean fields with whispers of their arrival, for in the next village—the one called Cocorim—Yaquis lined the path. No one tried to stop Mota or the others, but one Yaqui danced before them as they rode, contorting to show the curdled skin of his burnt shoulder, the ridged lash marks along his back, his broken, twisted arm. He yelped and turned, and as Mota watched him turn again he saw the vacancy in his rolling eyes, the absence of a reason long since lost.
AFTER MARÍA ISABEL, Mota had made formal court to no other woman. At times on his journeys daughters were presented to him like goods at auction; he would politely confess their charms and keep a committed bachelor’s distance. Beyond the occasional camp woman and the more common stretches of solitude, he’d confined his desires to the widowed sister of the baker from whom he rented his room in Mexico, and the skinny, untended wife of a Pueblo horse dealer, who preferred to meet him in the stable and wear a blindfold while he took her from behind. Like the beasts, she insisted—she would have it no other way. But in the last year the baker’s widowed sister had cut off their liaison, as she was being courted in earnest by a pastry maker, and the horse dealer’s wife had suddenly turned pious, pretending not to know him the last two times he had visited. Without their comforts, he’d felt the rot spread through him unchecked. New Spain, that great mill to which the unhappy and disappointed of the world came to be stamped anew, had left him ever as he was.
Then the viceroy had spoken the name Tayopa, and Mota’s heart had beaten briefly within his chest. He cursed himself as a fool, but such discoveries had transformed other men. He often saw them racing their pasteled carriages through the streets of Mexico, laughter and feminine squeals escaping from their windows.
WITHIN TWO DAYS they were beyond Yaqui lands. Now the river bent, flowing from the north, and they kept alongside it, riding into craggy foothills grown with sparse stands of oak and pine. Mountain Indians—Opata—were said to live here, but there was no trace of them, and blended in with the regular tick of nature’s chatter there seemed a particular silence.
After another day’s ride they passed through a scattering of abandoned stone huts, and four days later they came to a bottleneck too narrow to lead their mounts through. Without speaking they backtracked, and when Mota spotted an animal path they walked the horses and mules up it until they reached a small plateau, which gave onto a new canyon. They halted there while Fernando penciled their trail and El Sepo looked through the spyglass. Mota took a piece of biscuit from his pack. He was picking out weevils with the point of his knife when he heard El Sepo whisper, “Cattle.”
Putting the biscuit in his pocket, Mota took the spyglass from El Sepo and looked where he pointed. In the canyon below, four mottled cows stood in a clump of dried grass. Their ribs showed through their hides; they looked lost, half-wild, and Mota wondered how they had gotten here. Then he moved the spyglass, and the air caught in his lungs. On a rock, watching over the cattle, sat a woman. Long hair hung loose over her back. Mota goaded his horse over to Father Pascual.
“I thought this country was empty,” he said, keeping his voice low.
THEY RODE DOWN. Their path took them through several knots of pine, blocking their view of the woman’s rock, and when they reached the bottom of the canyon she was gone.
Mota sent El Sepo to track the woman while he and the others waited by the stream. Perhaps they should ignore her and travel on, but he’d seen through the glass that she wasn’t an Indian and he was curious. Besides, she might know something of the mine.
When El Sepo returned, he reported that the woman was hiding in a cave. He told too of a hut farther up the canyon—likely the woman’s—and Mota sent the others there to wait. Meanwhile he followed El Sepo up a path and then a ledge into a blind hollow high above the canyon. Here the cave opened atop a slope of red dirt. Mota motioned for El Sepo to stay where he was while he climbed. A few feet from the cave’s mouth, he stopped. The sun was directly above, and no light fell into the cave’s interior. “Don’t be frightened,” Mota shouted. “We only want to talk to you. We’ve come from Mexico. We can take you there, or to any town on our path.”
There was no answer. Mota looked down at El Sepo. El Sepo shrugged.
“I’m coming inside,” Mota said to the cave, and stepped in.
Beyond the first, penumbral feet, the cave’s void was entire. Mota fumbled over a blind jag of rocks, then stopped and listened. Silence. She was there, somewhere before him, behind the darkness. He strained his eyes, willed them to adjust. They refused, flooded black, liquid and numb. Mota moved forward, then stopped again when he hear
d the scrape of bare feet.
In an instant she was on him, a tangle of limbs pulling him down, and just as quickly he felt a sudden, sharp pain in his side. He caught her by the waist, held her squirming body to him. She struggled, but he kept her close and pulled her toward the sun. Once they were out of the cave she clawed at him, grunted and screamed, and El Sepo rushed up and took her by the arms. She kicked and stomped, but the mulatto carried her down the slope with ease. Free of the woman, Mota inspected his side. She’d stuck him with a cactus needle. He removed it—it slid easily from his flesh, drawing a bubble of blood—and dropped it among the brambles.
A DIFFERENT PATH LED OUT OF THE HOLLOW, and as they took it the woman traded her kicking for hanging lifeless against El Sepo’s grip, dragging her feet into a stumble. Still, she barely slowed them, and when they arrived at the hut Mota whistled at Father Pascual and gestured for him and Fernando to join them inside. El Sepo had already taken the woman there, and Mota could hear her shouting. As they entered she turned and made her address general. “Go ahead. Rape me. See how you like it. I’m stuffed with glass and quills.”
The woman sat on a rickety stool and El Sepo stood over her, his arms crossed. Her brown skin was reddened from the sun, and her body was animal-lean save for the loose breasts that swung beneath her shift as she twisted toward each of them. She might be a quarter blood, but Mota wasn’t sure.
“Please,” the woman said. “It would be such pleasure.”
“Enough!” Mota said. “None of us will harm you.”
This quieted the woman, though she continued to tremble.
“Just a few questions and we will leave you, if that’s what you wish,” he said. “We’re looking for a mine. Do you know anything about a mine?”
“When the Yaquis came, hammers and picks in their hands, I learned.”
“Have you been to it?”
“No.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“No.”
Mota glanced about the ramshackle cabin. It was little over three varas on either side. Dried plants and a pair of rust-bitten pots hung from the ceiling. On the far side of the room slumped a narrow bed. Maize leaves and feathers wriggled from its split mattress.
“How long have you been here on your own?”
“I’m not on my own.”
Mota laughed at the thinness of her lie. “How long?”
She looked away. “Two years,” she said.
BEFORE MOTA FINISHED QUESTIONING THE WOMAN, he learned her name was Beatriz and that she had been married at fifteen to a rancher named Tómas, who had brought her here and been killed by the Yaquis—an event over which she showed little regret. She had nothing else to tell them and after they bartered with her for a string of dried sausages they rode away from her hut. Mota had offered again to take her with them, but she’d only stared at him.
That night they made camp near the top of a ridge. As Mota was talking to Fernando and examining the maps, he spotted Father Pascual with the sackcloth bag he’d had the morning they left Mexico. Throughout their journey it had remained hidden. Mota watched as Father Pascual unknotted the bag then stuck his hand inside and pulled out a bull’s horn. Fernando made to get up, but Mota reached out to stop him. Holding the horn, Father Pascual scrambled to the top of the ridge, and, once he’d steadied himself, blew. The blast shot across the dusk, echoed against the slope that faced their camp, then fell away.
Father Pascual blew the horn again. After the last echo, again from the slope, he came back.
Mota was baffled. When he asked Father Pascual what he was doing, the ex-Jesuit said he was listening for Tayopa. Mota felt a flash of sickness—they’d come all this way with a madman. He ordered Father Pascual to explain himself. “There’s a particular echo,” the man said. “One of the mountain Indians, who led Father Xavier to the mine, told him of it. Once we left the woman’s canyon, I could tell we were near. When you hear the echo, you’ve found the valley.”
“What does it sound like?” Mota asked, the sickness gone, replaced instead by something rarer, something like wonder.
The sackcloth bundle returned to the pack, Father Pascual pulled out his bedroll. “No, no,” he said. “I tell you, and then what am I worth? I don’t think so. I am not in the mood to have my throat slit.”
FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS they continued east while Father Pascual climbed every slope and promontory and blew his horn. Mota’s fascination quickly dulled, and in the length of these days his mind refused to wander. He monitored the dry passages of his bowels, thought of the slight, pinkish mound that remained on the side of his belly, where he had been stuck with the cactus needle. At times it throbbed and he touched it. Pressing it made the throb sharpen then disappear.
He’d been fingering the needle wound when he was thrown by his horse. As they were riding across a gully, the horse stepped on a rattlesnake. Bit, it reared, and Mota landed in the gully’s creekbed, his leg catching against a rock. For a moment he lay dazed, trapped still in his thoughts, thinking the fall had happened there. Then a sharp pain streaked up his leg.
The others were shouting, and as Mota tried to sit up El Sepo pinned his shoulders. Baltazar’s impassive face, a frowning moon, hovered above him. He was their bonesetter, and as he felt along the leg, a new, dizzying pain cut through Mota’s flesh.
“Is it bad?” Fernando asked.
“An even break,” Baltazar answered. “It could be worse.”
Mota ignored the pain as he listened. He wanted to apologize, but was too ashamed to speak. Had he not been distracted, he might have checked his horse or at least landed better. The last thing they needed was yet more delay. He stared up at the sky, blue, distant; at the gnarled finger of an oak where a jay chirped and twitched its head. He counted days on his fingers. Tamotchala, the nearest town, was over two weeks away, and it was half lean-tos and tents. Mota tried sitting up again. He wanted to stand on his leg, to punish it, to let the pain surge through it, but El Sepo kept his hold on his shoulders. All the while his horse snorted in mad bursts. Its tackle jangled as it shifted and danced. It thought it could cast off the snakebite, but it was mistaken. It would have to be killed.
Baltazar, who’d left, now returned with branches and rope. He knelt over Mota and worked the bone, twisting and pushing it into place: Mota bit and groaned as the pain flashed then settled then flashed again. Above him was the sky’s clean blue, the undisturbed jay. At last the bone was set, and Mota lay there a moment, sweat dripping from his skin, then said, “The search is everything.
Leave me with provisions and a pistol.”
“Don’t be foolish,” El Sepo said. “We can make our camp here.”
“This is already slow work,” Mota said, then jerked his head at Father Pascual. “He has to blow that cursed horn forty times a day. If you stay here, it’ll slow the search even more.”
“But we can’t just leave you,” Fernando said.
“I agree,” Baltazar said. “Besides, you need shelter.”
“Take him to the woman’s hut,” offered Father Pascual, who’d been silent the entire time. “It’s not far.”
At this the others paused. Their search had been slow, and they could make the hut by nightfall. Fernando and Baltazar quickly took up the idea, and as they talked Mota remembered the feel of the woman—beating, warm—as he’d dragged her from the cave. Since they’d left her, the image of her feral body in its thin shift had pulled on his mind.
WHEN THEY ARRIVED AT THE HUT, at dusk, the woman was not to be found. Mota was not surprised. He had assumed she would startle at the first noise of their coming. The others carried him from the mule they had balanced him on to the bed, then brought in his pack and a pair of crutches Baltazar had fashioned. They sat with him for an hour and played cards. Mota thought he should say something, but he’d never encouraged intimacy, rarely inquired of his companions’ lives beyond the
trail. El Sepo suggested, for the third time, that either he or Fernando stay with him, but Mota shook his head. “The mine,” he said.
In the morning, the woman still hadn’t appeared, and at this Mota felt a pinprick of sorrow. Father Pascual was already on his mule when El Sepo and Fernando took their leave, standing over him awkwardly, and Baltazar gave the leg a final inspection. Then they put on their hats and left, and Mota was alone, the wooden hut empty save for a pair of flies that traced a crooked path above him.
The hours crawled alongside the doorway’s shifting portion of sun. Maize leaves poked through the mattress and gave him sweat rashes. Mota stood only to piss and defecate into a bowl. Baltazar had cautioned him against using the crutches overmuch in the first days, and, his leg still throbbing, it was all Mota could do to make it to the door and scatter his waste.
A WEEK PASSED, a long, slow week. The woman never came to the hut, but, after the first days Baltazar had warned him of, Mota began hobbling around the clearing outside, then wandering farther up the canyon, working the crutches over roots and stone. His third day out he found her. As before, she was with the cattle. They stood in a rocky clearing, and she sat in the shade of a knobbly pine.
“Hello,” he called.
“You are walking,” she answered without looking up.
He hobbled closer, saw that a small red carcass lay at her side. Before her was spread the animal’s skin.
“I am,” he said. Though he hadn’t admitted it to himself, in his wandering he’d been looking for her. He thought to get nearer, but stopped himself, lest he rewake the mad fright she’d displayed when he pulled her from the cave. “I’m sorry to have forced you from your bed,” he added.
“It is no matter,” she said. She scraped at the skin.
“I’d be pleased if you returned,” he said. “I promise you, I am harmless. As you see, I’m slowed.” He tapped his leg and grinned. “I have books with me. Reports from Mexico. I could read to you, if you like. Surely, after so much time alone, you want for companionship.”
