The Baron Range

by Jory Sherman

  He had crossed these plains before, but it seemed he had been in a delirium, a small child strapped to his mother’s back, a hood of rabbit hide over his forehead to keep the sun from blinding him. He had sucked on cactus for moisture and fed on small, shapeless creatures, cracked their little succulent eyes for their juices. He had counted his ribs on both sides for a pastime on the endless journeys through the boiling hell of Mexico.

  He rode through the little nameless towns and asked the old ones where his people might be. They pointed in all directions, but mostly toward the mountains of his childhood, where his people had retreated from death at the hands of Spaniards, Mexicans, others of their tribe, redskinned men from the north, Comanches and others. So Bone kept riding toward the distant mountains until he passed no more towns. He had to find water in tinajes and dig for it in dry creek beds and slash for it with his machete in the barrel cactus, and his food supplies dwindled, and once again he could count his ribs like a man plucking an outsized guitar, only there was no music, just the sad echoes in his memory of his people singing plaintive songs of heartbreak and lost battles, lost wars, lost tribespeople.

  He followed the old trails, though they were no longer visible to the eye, and the mountains drew close and his memory sharpened in response to his hunger and his need, and he remembered the jagged black sierra rising above the land, recalled the pictographs of beasts and the tales told by the old ones when the fire threw shadows on a cave wall in the blackness of night, and Bone found his way through memory when the thirst was burning his throat and his stomach had shriveled like a dry, twisted gourd collapsing from its own inner decay.

  And then he was at the edge of the mountain range the Mexicans called the Sierra del Tlahualilo, and Bone looked up and saw the signal mirrors flashing silver from the dark recesses of rocks, and he looked into the dark face of the sierra and knew that he was coming home, home to a place where he had been before, and he could smell the blood and hear the screams of his mother and sisters, could see his brother fall to the lead bullet, as lifeless as a doll made of hide and sinew and stuffed with quails’ nests, and the drunken, laughing, raucous Mexicans riding black horses through the camp and snatching up young girls and throwing them to the ground and raping them and then cutting their throats and scalping their private parts and their heads and he could smell still the burning gunpowder, see the white smoke like little clouds of death and hear the women keening until explosions tore their throats open and their blood ran like rivers on the earth.

  Mexican men grabbed him and other boys his same age and they asked them questions. They beat the young ones when they faltered in their Spanish and then they asked the older braves questions in the Spanish tongue.

  “What are you called?”

  Mickey did not understand and a Mexican drove a fist into his face.

  And one of the old men answered. “He is called Counts His Bones.”

  The Mexicans laughed and called him Cuenta Sus Huesos and another said that he looked like a boy he knew who was called Miguel. The Mexicans called him Miguel Hueso and took him and the others back to their town and made slaves and servants of them. But first they slaughtered all the grown male Lipan Apaches and the old ones, both men and women, and smashed babies against rocks and cut off testicles and scalps until there was only an abattoir where the camp had once been. The ants and the worms were at the corpses before the sun stood straight over a man’s head. Mickey never could erase those images from his mind of once-living people reduced to meat and bones, and he still heard the young girls screaming as they were kicked and struck and raped and murdered for no reason that he could ever determine.

  As he rode into the sierra, the talking mirrors danced all around in front of him and he looked hard to see the people using them, but he never saw a face or a hand and did not understand the messages the mirrors flashed and rode on in ignorance, his throat tight from thirst and fear and his belly drawn up and burning with a pain he had never known.

  The mountains swallowed him and the silence grew around him until it filled his heart and mind and the mirrors no longer flashed. He heard quail piping in the long draws and other birds that did not sound right. But there was a path, a narrow trail, and his horse took to it naturally and carried him up the spine of a ridge and then he saw the talking mirrors again.

  The trail narrowed and took him into a bewildering maze of ravines and ridges and towering mountains. Then a man stepped out onto the trail and drew his bow with an arrow nocked to the string. Then others joined him, springing up out of the rocks and from the little ravines. They all had bows drawn except for those who carried pocked and rusted rifles with stocks bound in rawhide and dull tacks embedded in the wood.

  Bone halted his horse and held up his right hand to show that it was empty. He looked at the men blocking his path. They were filthy and he could smell their musk. Some had scabs on their bare chests and arms, and one of them had a fleshy pock on his face where one of his eyes had once been. Their clothing was tattered and torn, old and patched. They looked worse than the beggars he had seen in the Mexican towns, and dirtier.

  “I come in peace,” Bone said in Spanish. He wanted to bite his tongue and pull the words back into his mouth and swallow them.

  “Who are you?” one man asked in the Apache tongue.

  “I was called Counts His Bones. When I was a baby. I am Querecho. Lipan.” The Apache words sounded like baby talk to his ears. He was surprised that he remembered the language.

  The men all seemed to speak at once. Bone could not understand very much of what they were saying, but the intonation, the aspirates of his own tongue were music to his ears. He had not heard that Lipan dialect in many years and more memories flooded his brain as he listened to the men talking. And then he picked up snatches of conversation that he could understand.

  “I have not heard that name in many years.”

  “It is a dead man’s name and should not be spoken.”

  “Why would this man use a dead man’s name?”

  “There was a baby a long time ago called Counts His Bones. The Mexicans took him away. This one is dressed like a Mexican vaquero.”

  “Maybe the Mexicans killed him. Maybe this is a Mexican who wants to kill some of us.”

  “Did he come alone? Do you see any Mexicans? Are there soldiers hiding?”

  It seemed to Bone that he sat there on his horse for hours while the men spoke as if he was not there. Some looked at him from time to time and others studied him intently. He could smell the stink of their unwashed bodies and almost feel the lice crawling in their straight black dirty hair. He waited and wondered if he had done the right thing in coming to this place, this place so far from the life he had lived since being taken away by the Mexicans.

  Finally, when the chattering got louder and the arguments more heated, Bone spoke, and his voice boomed over the men and silenced them.

  “I am the one who was taken away. I am Counts His Bones and I have come here looking for my people.”

  One of the older men stepped forward. He carried an old trade gun that looked as if it had been thrown from a mountain and dragged by horses over rocks and cactus.

  “Why do you look for your people?” the old man asked, in the Lipan dialect. “Maybe they are all dead.”

  “I have lost my way,” Bone said. “My heart is on the ground. It is so heavy I cannot lift it. I have had dreams and visions that my people are here. I have dreamed that they can help me find my way back to the Great Spirit that is in all things. For this I come.”

  “Ah,” voiced several of the men.

  “He is lost,” said another.

  The old man stepped closer to Bone, but he kept a safe distance and held his rifle at the ready. “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

  Bone looked at the man closely. There were old scars on his face, and part of his scalp was missing, grown over in a hideous blotch of flesh. No hair grew on that part of his head.

  “I do not
know who you are,” Bond said. “But there was a man in my village who was called Big Rat. I saw him killed by the Mexicans.”

  Big Rat had been only a year or two older than Bone when the Mexicans had come to the encampment. He had fought bravely. He had tried to protect his sisters from being raped. Bone remembered that one of the Mexicans had shot Big Rat and had scalped him. He recalled that there was much blood on Big Rat’s face, and after another Mexican struck him very hard with the butt of his rifle, Big Rat had made no sound. The visions of that day swam in Bone’s mind, pieces that floated to the top and then sank below the surface, fragments of the terrifying things that had happened.

  Some of the men gasped and others uttered oaths and they looked at one another in wonder and surprise. They seemed dumbstruck and confused.

  “I am called Big Rat,” said the old man.

  “Then you did not die,” Bone said. “Your face was red with much blood and you made no sound.”

  “I was dead,” Big Rat said. “I died and the Great Spirit came to me and breathed the breath back into my chest. I have killed many Mexicans. I hate them.”

  “Do you remember me?” Bone asked.

  “The Mexicans took you away. They made you into a Mexican.”

  “No. They called me Miguel Hueso, but I am an Apache. I am a human being.”

  The men all grunted and signed to one another in the old way, but they did not speak. They all looked at Big Rat to see what he would say.

  “Give me your guns,” Big Rat said. “Give us your horse.”

  “I will give them to you,” Bone said.

  “Then you can walk with us through these holy mountains and we will smoke and make talk. Do you have tobacco?”

  Bone nodded.

  “Good. You will give me the tobacco, too. Now step to the ground from your horse and give up all your things.”

  Bone dismounted and held out his rifle. Big Rat stepped forward warily and snatched the rifle from Bone’s hands. Another man dashed forward and took the reins of the horse. Another took Bone’s pistol, while still another rummaged through his saddlebags. A man held up Bones’s sleeping blanket and wrapped it around him like a giant shawl.

  Bone stood there as the Apaches swarmed around him. But as he looked at them more closely, he realized that they were not all Lipan. Some were Kickapoo, and he recognized another as being of the Yaqui tribe. He wondered then if they were going to kill him, and he began chanting a song he had heard long ago, a song some of his people had sung the day the Mexicans came to their camp. All time seemed to stand still as he stood there, singing in a very low voice.

  The others looked at Bone and none said a word, for they knew he was singing his death song.

  21

  URSULA SIGHED DEEPLY as Jack slid from her and sank into the bed. She touched the raspberry flush on her face, felt the warmth of her blood. She basked in the passing rapture of the lovemaking, still felt Jack’s fingers on her arms and shoulders. The heat of his body still lingered on her breasts. Her lips still tasted his mouth and tingled from his hungry kisses.

  Jack was still breathing heavily when he reached over and touched Ursula’s breast, cupped it tenderly. He tweezered the nipple with his thumb and forefinger, then tweaked it gently until it swelled with her blood once again.

  “That was good, hon,” he said.

  “It was beautiful, Jack.”

  “Been a long time for me.”

  Ursula said nothing. She floated somewhere above herself in a roseate haze. She wanted never to come down from that high place where the air was thin and sweet, scarce enough to keep her in a giddy state, her body light as down.

  She opened her eyes as she floated down from the heights. Moonlight pewtered the room with a delicate incandescence, softening the walls and the chest of drawers, divining the geometry of the room and defining the shadows as the moon rose, moving them slowly over shifting objects that seemed to float as she floated, in and out of focus. The room seemed different with Jack in it, more intimate, not so familiar. Changed. She sighed and closed her eyes again and began to hover once again, her body somewhere below, basking in the heat of the afterglow. She sighed with contentment and sorrow. She knew Jack was leaving in the morning and taking their son Roy with him.

  “My heart,” she said.

  Jack grunted. “What?”

  “You are my heart, Jack.”

  “Oh. Well, it was good, hon.”

  “Do you love me, Jack?”

  “Sure. You know I do, sugar.”

  “Sleep tight,” she said as Jack turned over on his side, away from her.

  “Urs, I got to ask you something.”

  “Well, go ahead, Jack, and ask.”

  “Them soldier boys. The ones you talked about. Like the one who came here this afternoon to get his laundry.”

  “Yes, what about them?”

  “Did you? Do you, I mean?”

  “Did I? Do I? Do I what?”

  “Don’t keep me on the dangle, Urs. I got to know.”

  “Know what, Jack?”

  “Dammit, Urs. Are they sparking you?”

  “Why, Jack. I haven’t been sparked since you started courting me.”

  “I mean, way outside of flirting. Did you ever take any of them boys to your bed?”

  Ursula smiled in the darkness, in the dull rime of the moon’s faint glow. “Jack, that’s a crude thing to say.”

  “I got to know, Urs. Did you do it with any of ’em?”

  “Would it make any difference?”

  The silence lasted several seconds. “It might,” Jack said finally.

  “You wouldn’t love me anymore?”

  Another silence. Then Jack turned over, cocked himself up on his elbow and looked at her. She could not see his eyes. Just shadows and the pale glint of his tousled hair. She looked at the wall of his massive chest, felt the strength of him surge through her. She wanted him again, right at that moment.

  “Well, sure, I’d still love you, I think. But I wouldn’t feel good about it. I mean—knowin’ you was with another man while I was gone, you know.”

  “Have you been with other women, Jack?”

  “Shit,” he said.

  “That’s quite an answer,” Ursula said.

  “I mean, what’s that got to do with it?”

  “Same with a man as with a woman. I don’t like to think of you with other women. But I know you do. I know a man needs it more.”

  “Aw, Ursula.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Just answer my question, will you, Urs?”

  Ursula touched his chest, twirled a finger through the wiry red hairs. When she had a lock twisted firmly, she pulled on it.

  “Ouch,” Jack exclaimed.

  Ursula laughed. Then she put her hands on his neck and pulled him close. “Jack, there haven’t been any other men. Not that I haven’t had the chance. But there’s just no other man for me. Just you.”

  She could hear Jack swallowing. She pushed him away playfully.

  “Are you just sayin’ that to make me feel good?” he asked.

  “Well, what do you think? Don’t you believe me?”

  She could feel his gaze on her, probing. But he could not see her, she knew. He could not see inside her. Could not see the deep parts of her, the secret places of a woman, the places where her love pulsed like a beating heart, where it always waited for just a single touch of his hand.

  “I guess I believe you,” he said lamely.

  “Well, that sure gives me a boost up the ladder,” she said.

  “I mean, I want to believe you, I guess.”

  “Well, if you don’t, Jack, then you’ll never know. I’m not that kind of woman and you should know that. Without asking.”

  “Jesus, Urs, I had to ask.”

  “Then you don’t know. And you’ll never know. I think of us as one person. You see us as two people.”

  “That ain’t true.”

  “Mmm. No? Well, it might
be, Jack. You got to settle that with yourself. No answer of mine’s goin’ to change your mind. If you think the worst of me, then that’s how I’m going to look to you.”

  “You make it hard, Ursula. You take a simple thing and just tangle it all up like brier brush.”

  “Do I? Well, you asked the question. And I gave you an answer. That should be enough to satisfy you.”

  “Damn, Urs. You make it sound like I just want to be satisfied. And that ain’t true.”

  “Whatever you say, Jack. I love you and you are my heart. My only heart.”

  “Aw, Urs.”

  “Happy?” she asked.

  She waited an eternal silence for his answer.

  “Real happy, Urs.”

  “Good. Now, get to sleep if you want. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

  “I am some tired,” he said, dropping back onto the bed, on his back. He was like a giant, she thought, resting after a battle with a dragon. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Then she withdrew to her side of the bed, glad that it was over, glad, very glad, that Jack had asked her. It showed her that he still cared about her, even if he couldn’t say it straight out. That was enough for her.

  She was content. She rose up again to tell him that, but she saw that he had fallen asleep. His mouth was open and he was breathing through his nose. It sounded like some mighty river at rest, its energy contained for the moment, but ready to burst into flood and roar like a lion.

  “Good night, love,” she whispered and lay back down. It was funny, she thought, how it was to make love. A Mexican woman had told her once that they called it the little death. There was that one starburst of rapture and then the little death. Sleep, she supposed, only sleep, and in the morning, Jack would awaken and they could die again in each other’s arms.

  22

  THE TRACKS WERE not hard to follow. They were still fresh, as there had been no rain overnight. Four horses, Martin figured, the fourth fresher than the other three, by the better part of an hour, at least.