Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

  They fell backward together against the boulder, catching Bass at the back of his hips, bending him on across the curve of the rock. Arcing the muzzle around a second time the instant the warrior drew back to make a try for his own belt knife, Scratch caught the Apache along the temple with a crack as loud as a maul colliding with a tight-grained hickory stump. Titus never watched the warrior settling into the sand at his feet.

  He was already spinning back to find the rest.

  Yanking back on the hammer—then suddenly remembering that he held an empty rifle.

  Hurling it aside as McAfferty scrambled to his knees, wagging his head groggily, Bass scooped up the smoothbore. He was snapping back the huge goosenecked hammer as he caught sight of Asa rocking forward on his knees, the pistol coming out at the end of both arms—a jet of bright, incandescent yellow spewing from the big muzzle.

  Shadows loomed even larger in the coming light of morning, playing off the gray of sky and dull shimmer of river surface. The first lunged into the air and landed in a crouch atop the low boulders, his wet moccasins clawing the surface, coiling instantly, then springing on toward the white men.

  “Other pistol–”

  Bass raked back on the smoothbore’s trigger as he shouted his command, watching the warrior rock sideways. As the Apache fell between the two trappers, gurgling, clawing at the damp sand, Titus turned aside. Lifting the empty smoothbore into the air by its barrel, he brought it down savagely on the warrior’s neck, then smashed the brass-plated butt three more times into the back of the Apache’s skull.

  McAfferty cried, “My last shot!”

  Pulling back from that last, sodden crush of the enemy’s head, Scratch turned in a crouch the moment McAfferty fired that second pistol of his. As he dropped the smoothbore into the sand beside Asa, Bass lunged for the handles of two of the tomahawks they had laid out in readiness beside the white-head.

  Just as he rose and straightened, one of the last two Apache leaped out of the stream like a panther, howling in a crouch as he landed on the rocks, immediately snapping his bow string forward. On the dry air Scratch heard the thwung as Asa gasped, a moment before Scratch swung the tomahawk sideways through the air like a scythe, catching the warrior’s belly, slashing through soft flesh, sensing the hot blood gush across his sunburned wrist as the Apache crumpled backward, nearly cut in half.

  A searing cry warned of another behind him.

  Spinning around, Titus had no more than a heartbeat before the eighth warrior sprang from the narrow shelf, falling spread-eagled out of the dawn sky for the white man. From the corner of his eye, Bass watched Asa’s arms jab forward, both hands clutching a skinning knife, blade pointed skyward as the Apache plunged downward.

  The knife caught the warrior just below the breastbone, where the Apache’s weight and McAfferty’s sudden twist to the side drove the weapon deep, opening up the warrior’s abdomen as he collapsed against Bass, writhing on his knees.

  The Apache’s arms flailed helplessly, a knife spilling out of one of the brown hands that clutched his wound. Stumbling backward, Scratch collided with the rocks. For a terrifying moment the warrior’s face seemed to hang in front of his, a dark river of black blood oozing from his lips as the eyes locked on Bass’s … then rolled back to whites as the body continued its slump to the sand.

  His heart thumping, hot adrenaline coursing through his veins, Scratch stared down at the warrior crumpled around his knees as if merely resting there, half in a squat. He cocked back with a foot, knocking the Apache free, and leaped aside. Spooked by those eyes that had locked on to his for that moment in time, eyes that were already dead even in that instant.

  His right hand wet with drying blood, he shoved the tomahawk into his left, snatching his pistol from his belt. He was dragging the hammer back to full-cock as the last screaming Apache vaulted over the top of the rock downstream suddenly. The warrior lunged forward, knocking Scratch’s right hand out of the way the instant the pistol came up, swinging his own brown hand out wide in a savage arc that showed a glint of steel.

  Collapsing back suddenly, Bass sensed the burn of the blade as it raked past his belly. Sensed that sudden cold of the dawn air against the wound, that seep of icy warmth as the blood beaded and oozed.

  Already the warrior was beginning a second sweep, coming from Bass’s right this time.

  Yanking the pistol back, Titus suddenly shoved the right hand upward, flinging the Indian’s wrist aside as he brought the short barrel’s muzzle under the brown chin and pulled the trigger.

  With the Apache’s knife hand crookedly imprisoned beneath the man’s chin, the top of the warrior’s head exploded in a glittering spray of crimson as the first orange rays of light seeped over the edge of the gray desert.

  Gripping the tomahawk handle all the tighter in his left hand as he spun back toward the river, Titus stared over the low boulders, ready for the rest.

  Everything was quiet but for the murmuring river.

  And McAfferty’s raspy breathing.

  Nothing moved. Nothing but the light on the water as the ribbon’s surface lost its silvery glitter in those moments … became a river once more. Brush and rocks no longer shadows.

  And along the banks, there lay those brown bodies half-submerged in the shallow water, one of the warriors bobbing up to the foot of the waist-high boulders, slowly turning in the gentle current until the Apache stared at the dawn sky with glazed eyes, a great dark smear on his chest as he bobbed to the side, wedged in the eddy that lapped against the rock.

  So quiet suddenly, so quiet that he thought he could hear the water lapping against the dead man’s body.

  “That … that all of ’em?” Asa croaked.

  Bass finally turned and glanced at his partner before his eyes studied the rock ledge behind them. He sighed, “Looks to be. Any more of ’em—they’d be all over us now.”

  “‘That thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and the tongue of thy dogs in the same.’”

  Scratch knelt, so weary, he wasn’t sure he would ever stand again.

  McAfferty watched Titus settle. “You’re cut.”

  “Could be worse,” he said, peering down at the slash that yelped in pain with every brush of the dawn breeze.

  “Best see to it soon as you can.”

  “Let’s just damn well get these guns reloaded,” Bass growled, not wanting to look again at that torn flesh.

  “You do that, then you take the scalps.”

  Wagging his head, Titus quietly said, “Leave the goddamned scalps.”

  “We gonna take the scalps,” McAfferty prompted wearily, rising to his knees. “They’re ours now.”

  “I don’t give a damn,” Scratch replied. “I don’t ever figger to be back here—”

  “You don’t take your scalps,” McAfferty blurted out as he snatched hold of the front of Bass’s half-damp war shirt, “the ghosts come back for you one day.”

  “Ghosts?”

  His icy blue eyes squinted half-closed as they slowly volved down to stare at the half-naked bodies there among them in the rocks. “You don’t take this hair—the ghosts come back for you.”

  With a snort Bass shook his head. “Of all the softheaded, schoolchild—”

  McAfferty jerked down on Scratch’s shirt, shutting him up. “You listen,” he rasped, his dark eyes filled with terror. “Only one scalp I never took, Mr. Bass. Only one. The hair of a Ree medicine man.”

  “Hatcher told me …” and then his voice trailed off as he watched how pale his partner’s face became.

  Asa’s blue eyes had gone to slate as they flicked left and right, as if he were expecting to catch something more hurtling at them out of the gray of dawn’s light. “Should’a took the hair of that’un … but I didn’t. And now the old bastard’s ghost is gonna come for me.”

  Scratch swallowed hard. “You don’t believe—”

  “One day he’ll come for me.”

  19

  They
had waited out that short autumn day there beside the river, watching for more Apache.

  Better to fight them here, Bass thought, than have them catch you out there on the desert. Here—where a man at least had water, and a few rocks around him, along with a little shade slanting down off the rocky bluff once the sun began its dip into the last quarter of the sky.

  By the time Bass turned to move back toward the animals so he could retrieve some bear grease to smear on his tender belly wound, he sidestepped through the rocks to watch one of McAfferty’s packhorses go down. Its knees buckled as the animal snorted, kneeling into the sand clumsily. Arrows bristled from its neck and front flanks. More shafts quivered from the other animals, their packs, and saddles.

  He quickly counted—finding one of them missing.

  Dropping to one knee, Scratch peered under Hannah’s legs, finding his saddle mount already down, on its side and unmoving—more than a dozen arrows sticking from its bloody ribs and belly, all of them fired from above where the three warriors had crawled along that narrow shelf.

  With a groan he let his head sag between his shoulders.

  Right then the two of them had tougher problems than Asa’s goddamned ghost.

  For a while Titus brooded on just what they could do with all the plunder and supplies without adding to the burden the animals were already carrying. To put any more weight on Hannah and the last of McAfferty’s horses was unthinkable—not with the heat and the desert and all that distance still to go before they would reach Taos.

  Another option would be for him to walk those hundreds of miles, wearing out one pair after another of his moccasins. But even in the cool of that desert morning, Titus doubted he could ever accomplish that journey on foot.

  Their only choice lay in separating wheat from chaff: packing only what was absolutely necessary on Hannah’s back, caching the rest here beside this river—as if they would one day return to reclaim what they would abandon.

  Bass knew he never would.

  “I ain’t digging no hole for it,” he growled at McAfferty. “Let the Apache have it all.”

  Once the sun rose high enough to warm the air, Scratch settled back against the side of the bluff to wait out the rest of the morning. He simply didn’t have enough strength left to work any longer in the immobilizing heat. By midafternoon, when the sun’s direct rays slid behind the sandstone butte—bestowing a little shade upon their side of the hill—the dead horses had already begun to bloat. Now and then expanding gases whimpered and hissed from the arrow wounds and anuses.

  In the cool of twilight, after an entire day with no further sign of more Apache, Bass felt confident enough to stand and move around in the dimming light. Managing to free his saddle from the carcass of the dead mount, he propped it atop the boulders while he went to work pulling the supply packs from the dead packhorse. After removing the last of the packs from Hannah and McAfferty’s second horse, Titus began to tediously go through all that they possessed—setting aside what was essential. That done, he put everything else in two stacks: what they would readily put to use, and what was more luxury than necessity. This last pile they would leave here in the shadows of the bluff, beside the Gila, come nightfall.

  Titus stood and looked down at the rest when he was done, wagging his head at how pitifully small was what they could carry away from this place. Without those two extra animals and their four packs—why, what they were taking along now might just outfit a small band of Digger Injuns. No more than that.

  But he and Asa had their lives back in their own hands, and that was a damned good feeling for a man who had no hankering to turn over his fate ever again to another, nor to the desert. His life was back in his hands, and his hands alone.

  As soon as it was nearing full dark, Bass was already strapping the rebuilt packs back on Hannah and on Asa’s packhorse. Kneeling, he nudged McAfferty awake, and together they hauled themselves into the saddle and reined away from the boulders, following the river toward those mountains looming in the distance. Swinging loosely from the ropes lashing both bundles carried by Asa’s packhorse were the nine Apache scalps. Every bit of the long black hair, and the tops of the ears too. Titus wasn’t about to let any hoo-doo haunt him from here on out.

  With the arrival of dawn Bass was half dozing in the saddle. McAfferty lay asleep, slumped forward against the withers of his horse. It wasn’t until some time after the sun came up that Scratch found them a place out of the light among some small but shady paloverde trees.

  Another day out of the sun, followed by another long autumn night of relentless riding—pointing their noses northeast, keeping the North Star at the corner of his left eye. Pick out some feature of the land in the dark and ride right for it until they got there. Then select another landform in the distance and make for it. Again and again while the stars continued to wheel overhead and the night turned cold enough to turn their lips blue and cause their teeth to chatter.

  Night after night of riding. Waiting out each day, keeping a rotation of watch between them, their eyes constantly searching the horizon for pursuit until sundown again marked the hour for them to pack up and remount.

  How much longer? he had often wondered. How much farther did they have to go? … Until he scolded himself and forced his mind to think on something else. Day and night Bass tried hard to remember the look of Taos from afar, remember the smell of the rutted streets littered with refuse and offal. Were the women really as pretty as he remembered them? Was the village as gay as his memories painted it? Or had he only grown so sick and lonely for the sight of another human face, desperately yearning for some sign of those whitewashed walls, that the Taos he conjured up was far more than it really was?

  “How ol’t a man you be, Mr. Bass?” Asa asked early of a morning after they had snuffed out the moon and rolled into their robes to sleep out the frosty day.

  He thought a moment, tugging at the figures the way a man might tug at the strings on his moccasins to knot them securely. “I’ll turn thirty-six this coming birthday.”

  “When will that be?”

  “First day of the year.”

  “A noble day, that,” McAfferty replied. “Meself, I’ll be turning thirty-six next year too. Late of the year, howsoever.”

  Bass turned in the growing light and pulled the edge of his robe from his face to peer over at his partner. “You’re younger’n me?”

  “’Pears to be.”

  “S’pose it’s that white hair of your’n,” he said finally. “Makes you … seems you’re older’n me.”

  “My years out here make me a old man to some,” Asa confessed. “But I’m a young’un to others.”

  “Never asked where you come from.”

  McAfferty hacked at some phlegm, then answered, “I was bred and borned in North Carolina.”

  “I ain’t never been there. Was down along the Natchez Road, clear to the Muscle Shoals—but never got that far east.”

  “A purty country, so my pappy said. He come to America back in eighty-nine. He always told folks he got here when this here country got its first president. I be full-blooded Scot, you know. A Scot I am—and most proud of that. Though I was borned this side of the east ocean, I’m a Scotsman like my pappy’s people.”

  “My grandpap was a Scot his own self,” Bass announced. “You come west to the mountains from Carolina country?”

  “By the heavens no,” McAfferty snorted. “I was on the Mississap when it come time to point my nose for these shining hills. Wasn’t too old when my family up and moved west from the Carolinas, clear across the Mississap to the Cape, south there from St. Louie.”

  “I know of the Cape,” Scratch replied. “So you was the firstborn to your mam and pap?”

  “My folks had three boys awready to bring along with ’em when they come to America. The family come in from the coastal waters, on to the deep forests where my pappy started off trading with the wild Injuns for their skins. He brung to the villages blankets and axes and
mirrors and paint, goods like coffee and sugar too. It was a hard life, but a good one for my folks. After them three boys, they had ’em three girls. Then I come along there at the last.”

  “If you was a young’un when you come to the Cape, it must’ve been a wild place back then.”

  “Not many a white man had come across the Mississap to settle. Oh, there was folks up around St. Louie, but only a few French farmers down at the Cape. Good, rich ground that was too.”

  With no school within hundreds of miles, McAfferty had come to learn his reading and writing as most did on the frontier, if they were fortunate: studying at his mother’s knee, copying words every night, following supper, from their old Scottish Bible, by the light of the limestone fireplace.

  “By summer of 1810 more and more folks was coming in, so my pappy itched to move us on to a crik near the Little White River—a place more’n a week’s ride on west of St. Louie.”

  “That was the fall I left home,” Bass admitted, watching his words drift away in hoarfrost. “Run off and ain’t ever been back.”

  “You was sixteen then—a time when a boy figgers he’s just about done with all his growing,” Asa confided. “Likely you figgered you was man enough to set your own foot down in the world.”

  Scratch turned to his partner. “You ’member the day the ground shook so terrible the rivers rolled back on themselves?”

  “I do,” McAfferty said. “I was turned seventeen that fall. By the prophets, I do remember the day the earth shook under my feet. ’O Lord, be not far from me!’”

  “I was working on the Ohio—a place called Owensboro. Where was you?”

  “On the Little White,” Asa replied. “That first day the shaking started early off to the morning, afore the sun even thought to come up. I woke up, me pappy yelling at me, ’Asa! Asa! Get up, boy! Fetch the dogs! They under the floor after a coon, boy! Fetch them dogs out!’”

  Titus inquired, “Them dogs of your’n was chasing a coon under the house that very morning the earth was shaking?”