The Wild Girl

by Jim Fergus

  “No, Tolley,” said Albert, smiling. “As a matter of fact, in our worldview the missionary position is a deviation.”

  21 MAY, 1932

  From our camp in the foothills

  Billy Flowers came calling today, strode into our camp like the day of reckoning itself. At the sight of him, the girl cried out, terrified, and looked as if she was going to run away, but Joseph took hold of her and led her into the wickiup.

  We offered Flowers a cup of coffee. He sat down, fixing us with his bright blue eyes that seem to bore holes into whomever he is looking at. He told us that he had been watching us, and that now that the girl had recovered, our time here was nearly up. The expedition was scheduled to leave Bavispe in three days, and we must prepare to move deeper into the mountains.

  “We shall need to resupply before we depart, Mr. Flowers,” Tolley said. “The cupboard is nearly bare.”

  “Run out of French wine already, have you, Mr. Phillips?”

  “You should have made yourself known,” Tolley said, “rather than spying on us. We’d have invited you to share a glass.”

  “The elixir of the devil, sir,” said Flowers. “‘Look not upon the wine when it is red,’” he quoted, “‘when it giveth his colour in the cup … At the last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder.’”

  “Oh, nonsense, Mr. Flowers,” Tolley said with one of his little dismissive flutters of his fingers. “Those biblical people you’re always quoting were swilling wine at every opportunity. When they ran out during the wedding feast of Galilee in Cana, didn’t Jesus Himself help out by turning water into wine? ‘Wine is as good as life to a man, if it be drunk moderately,’” he quoted, amazing us all. “‘What life is then to a man that is without wine? For it was made to make men glad.’ Ecclesiasticus.”

  Flowers, too, seemed suitably impressed at Tolley’s knowledge of Scripture.

  “One of my father’s most notably unsuccessful schemes to save me,” Tolley explained. “As a boy he insisted I become an honor acolyte in our church. I went to confession every week.

  “‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,’ I would confess to kindly old Father McClellan, a dear family friend.

  “‘And what sins have you committed, my son?’

  “‘I have had impure thoughts, Father.’

  “‘And did you touch yourself while you had these thoughts, my son?’

  “‘Yes, Father.’

  “‘Are you touching yourself now, my son?’

  “‘Would you like me to, Father?’”

  Billy Flowers’s face registered a look of growing astonishment and disgust at Tolley’s absurd performance. Margaret and I made the mistake of looking at each other in that moment, and, like children, we both dissolved into a fit of involuntary laughter, until tears ran from our eyes and snot spewed from our nostrils.

  “Blasphemers!” Billy Flowers hissed in a low voice. “Satan’s spawn.” Which only made us laugh more convulsively.

  “Well, it’s hardly my fault that so many of the clergy are pederasts, Mr. Flowers,” said Tolley. “Indeed, I was only a child, an innocent victim of the old buggerer.”

  Without another word, Billy Flowers rose and left our camp the way he had come. Later that day we heard the haunting tones of his horn in the distance and we knew that he must have taken his dogs out for a hunt.

  23 MAY, 1932

  From our camp in the foothills

  And so just when we thought we had seen the last of Billy Flowers for a while, he was back in our camp again today, but in a considerably less comic appearance this time. It has become chillingly clear to us that not only is he an eccentric and a religious fanatic, but quite possibly insane.

  He carried an enormous bullwhip coiled in his hand, a braided leather instrument as thick at the handle as a man’s wrist. He told us that we must leave here tomorrow, and then he made a strange request. He invited us back to his camp in order “to attend the trial of the dog named Tom.”

  “Ah, a sporting-dog trial,” said Tolley. “A demonstration of tracking skills, perhaps? Splendid, Mr. Flowers! And a fine gesture of reconciliation on your part. Why, we’d love to come.”

  “No, Mr. Phillips,” said Billy Flowers. “Not a sporting trial. A jury trial.”

  Intrigued, Tolley, Albert, Margaret, and I followed Billy Flowers back to his camp while Joseph, Jesus, and Mr. Browning stayed with the girl. As we went, Flowers explained that the other day after being in our camp, and in order to “cleanse himself of our filth,” as he put it, he had taken his dogs out for a hunt. He “cut country” for a full day and all through that night, looking for a “varmint trail,” when he came upon the sign of a young black bear. It was fresh sign and Flowers and his dogs tracked that bear for nearly six hours. They were just closing in on him when the lead dog, the dog named Tom, up and quit the trail. “Just like that he lost his heart and stopped hunting,” Flowers said sadly. “It is the law of the pack to conduct a trial to determine the appropriate punishment for such an offense.”

  At our approach, Flowers’s hound dogs began barking and straining at their chains, but at one word from their master—“Silence!”—they all stopped instantly, flattening themselves against the ground, their bony ribs heaving.

  The accused, the dog called Tom, was tied to a twisted oak tree off by himself. He stood with his head hanging, his tail tucked tightly between his legs as if his guilt had already been established.

  Flowers directed us to sit, and then he went over and stood before the dog. He cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury …” he began. His dogs watched him attentively as if they had attended such proceedings before. “We have before us a hunter who yesterday failed miserably in the performance of his duties, who gave up on a trail, betrayer to his species, to his other fellows in the hunt, a coward and a slacker. I believe that this crime of sabotaging the work of good dogs—of you his fellows in the hunt—demands the death penalty and I ask you to see justice in this sentence.”

  “The death penalty?” Margaret said. “What in the world are you talking about?”

  “Silence!” Flowers commanded.

  Now he turned to the condemned dog and spoke to him in an oddly gentle tone, with no trace of anger in his voice. “I trained you myself, Tom,” he said, “brought you up from a little pup, taught you the path of godliness and hard work. You are like a son to me.” He lowered his head, genuinely saddened. “Oh, you have disappointed me mightily, Tom.” Now Billy Flowers uncoiled his whip, and with a flick of his wrist laid its length out, over twenty feet; it landed in a perfectly straight line on the ground ahead of him with a little whuumfp sound and a slight raising of dust. “‘Whatsoever a man soweth,’” he said softly, “‘that shall he also reap.’”

  “Whooooaaaaa,” whispered Tolley under his breath. “This is very strange.”

  “Wait just a minute.” Margaret spoke up. “Who said he was guilty? I thought this was a jury trial. Aren’t we supposed to vote now?”

  Billy Flowers turned and stared at her, as if Margaret had breached some cardinal rule of courtroom protocol. “The verdict has been reached, young lady,” he said. “A jury of his peers has convicted the accused and voted unanimously for the death penalty.”

  “But we didn’t vote,” Margaret said.

  “Because you are not members of the jury,” Billy Flowers said. “You were invited here as witnesses. And if you cannot be silent during the carrying out of sentencing, I shall have to ask that you remove yourself from the courtroom.”

  “Quiet, Margaret,” Tolley whispered. “Can’t you see that the man is insane?”

  Flowers turned back to the dog, raised his whip, and with another smooth levering of wrist and elbow, a nearly supernatural strength, he had it in the air; like false-casting a fly line, it shot backward, unfurling with a sinuous, hypnotic grace. Then he brought it forward and cracked the popper at its tip an inch above the dog’s head, a report like a clap of thunder, like the voice o
f God himself, that caused the dog to whimper pathetically and drop to his haunches, his eyes averted, as though, if he were not watching, this would not happen. “‘WHATSOEVER A MAN SOWETH,’” Billy Flowers repeated now in a louder, evangelical voice, “‘THAT SHALL HE ALSO REAP.’” The whip was still aloft, shooting backward again, hissing as it cut the dry air, accelerating, and Margaret muttered, “Oh, goddammit, the crazy bastard,” and she turned her head away, unable to watch. But the rest of us sat as if paralyzed, unable to avert our eyes as the next forward cast came down upon the dog, wrapped neatly around his throat, slicing like wire through hide, muscle, and vein so that the poor beast had only time for a mercifully short squeal of pain as he was lifted off the ground and jerked violently backward, his windpipe and jugular severed with a spray of bright red blood and a hiss of escaping air; he collapsed in a heap, twitching and convulsing in his death throes.

  Without a word, Margaret left Flowers’s camp ahead of us, and when we caught up to her, she turned on us angrily. “You big, brave men,” she said. “Not one of you so much as opened your mouth to intervene in that horror.”

  “It wasn’t our business, Mag,” I said lamely.

  “Yeah, plus he scares the shit out of me,” Tolley said. “Did you see what he could do with that damn whip?”

  “My grandfather says that Billy Flowers is a di-yin,” said Albert. “That he has big Power. That all creatures fear him.”

  We sent Jesus down to Bavispe this afternoon to pick up some supplies before we head for the higher country. We expect him back in the morning and plan to depart as soon as he arrives. We will all be happy to be under way again.

  31 MAY, 1932

  A week of hard travel in increasingly rough country, climbing, climbing, climbing. The steep mountainsides are gashed with deep arroyos, and precipitous gorges. The horses, mules, and burros clatter and scramble over the rocks, slipping and sliding, the trail so narrow in places that we frequently have to dismount and walk them through the passes. Yesterday we had an accident involving Tolley’s pack mule, which was more heavily loaded than the others. The panniers bounced against a boulder in one of these tight spots, and the mule lost his balance, the weight of the load tipping him over off the trail like a top-heavy cabinet. Down he rolled, over and over down the hill with increasing speed, cargo spilling from the packs as he went; the mule must have fallen two hundred feet before his descent was checked finally by a large tree. We thought surely that the animal could not survive such a fall, at least would have broken a leg and need to be destroyed. But after he came to a halt at the base of the tree, the mule struggled back to his feet, and other than scrapes and abrasions to his hide, he was not seriously injured. Of course, Tolley was mostly worried about his precious wine supply, but miraculously only one bottle was broken. Still, it cost us most of the day to recover the spilled goods, and to get the mule back up on the trail and repacked.

  From thickets of scrub oak and scattered pines we have finally gained the true pine forest of the Sierra, a region so quiet and pristine that we have the sense of being the first human beings ever to set foot in it. We fall silent ourselves in its midst, as if conversation in a place of such primeval solitude would be like talking in church. Deer fade into the timber like ghosts at our approach and I think we each secretly wonder if they might be Apaches.

  Everything seems exotic and oversize in this country. Many of the trees are over a hundred feet tall and pale gray squirrels the size of cats chatter at us from the branches above. A strange giant woodpecker, nearly two feet long, drums on the tree trunks, creating an eerie echo through the forest that joins up with others of its kind to form a kind of somber percussion orchestra. Large flocks of enormous gray pigeons as big as hawks flush from their roosts in the trees as we ride beneath, startling us with their noisy wingbeats.

  We have seen bear sign, great mounds of scat, and although we have had no further contact with him since our departure, we know that Billy Flowers is still trailing us, and we worry for the bears.

  After all these years, Joseph Valor seems still to have an infallible sense of the country, and he picks our route through this vast and rugged terrain as surely as if he had been here last week rather than nearly a half century ago. When I ask him how he can navigate without a map, he answers: “Only White Eyes need paper maps.” He taps his chest with a finger. “We carry maps in our hearts.”

  The girl herself has become more and more animated and attentive as we move deeper into her homeland. I’ve made a number of negatives of her as we go, and although I have no way of developing these out here, I hope that when I do, they will seem like a kind of time exposure; the images I have in mind will show her opening up in posture and demeanor like a blooming flower. She seems to become prettier all the time as she regains her strength, her tawny skin and deep brown eyes taking on a new luster. Oddly, the farther away we get from civilization, and the deeper we enter this strange, wild country, the less wild la niña bronca begins to seem, as if she is a natural and essential element of the landscape. Perhaps because I’ve spent more time with her taking her photograph, I feel that she and I have formed a particular bond in the past days. Although communication remains difficult, I’m more than ever certain that she has a memory of my being with her in the jail, because there is between us a kind of unspoken familiarity.

  Even Jesus has now lost his fear of the girl and they converse easily in Spanish. She speaks a bit to all of us now, a few words of Spanish, a few of Apache, and now even a little English, which Mr. Browning is teaching her. “The young lady may as well learn the King’s English,” he sniffs, “rather than the adulterated American version.” And, in fact, it’s amusing to hear the girl speak her broken English with a British accent. Without the slightest provocation she will utter a string of non sequiturs: “right-o, toodle-oo, cheerio.” And she will parrot Mr. Browning by saying such things as “Very good, sir.” And, “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  For his part Mr. Browning, who calls her “little miss,” dotes on the girl as if she is his long-lost daughter. “Could I make the little miss some breakfast this morning?” he will say cheerily each day.

  For all our nosy prying while we’re sitting around the campfire at night, we have still not learned a great deal about Harold Browning, other than the fact that Tolley considers him to be an excellent valet, and we all agree that he’s the best camp cook among us. Despite both Margaret’s and my best interview techniques, the man remains famously taciturn, always managing to deflect any personal questions.

  “You’d make a good Apache, Harold,” Albert observed one night when we were being especially relentless. “We find most White Eyes to be very impolite, the way they’re always asking questions, always wanting to know about our religion, our culture, our ceremonies, our history, our family relations. What business is it of theirs anyway? We Apaches have learned to answer with silence.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mr. Browning said, smiling slyly, “that’s an old butler’s trick as well.”

  And it occurred to me then that for all Margaret’s questioning of others, and mine, too, for that matter, neither one of us has been very forthcoming about our pasts, either. I have never told the others about my parents’ deaths, for instance. I suppose that somehow I am ashamed of the way Pop died. “What about you, Mag?” I now asked. “You mentioned your father the anthropologist, and the fact that your mother died. Is your father still alive? Do you have any other family?”

  “No, I’m an only child,” she said. “And as far as I know, my father is still alive.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that I don’t have any contact with him any longer,” she said coolly. “Last I heard he was still alive.” And then she quickly changed the subject.

  Margaret, too, is taking extensive notes now. “It would be interesting to compare our notebooks, wouldn’t it, Neddy?” she said one evening around the fire. “One from the point of view of an artist, the other from that of a
scientist.”

  “I’m not an artist, Mag,” I said. “I’m a journalist. A workingman, as Big Wade puts it. My photographs and my notebooks just tell what happens.”

  We had found level ground on the summit of a cordón and there we were camped for the night, with a view out over the closely timbered mountains, superimposed one upon the next, pine-covered hills and plateaus, the sharp, serrated rock crests of the sierras, looming overhead now, as if they might fall down and crush us.

  “Just out of curiosity, Mag,” I asked, “are your notes all scientific data? Or do you make personal observations?”

  She thumbed through her notebook. “Not unless you consider notes on verb morphology to be personal, sweetheart,” she said.

  “God, give me that,” Tolley said, pretending to lunge for her notebook. “Verb morphology is my passion.”

  Margaret ignored him. “I’m mostly trying to learn enough Apache from the girl and from Joseph to understand how the language and the culture have evolved differently among this isolated band than among the reservation Apaches over the past half century,” she said. “I’m hoping to make that the subject of my doctoral thesis.”

  “Oh, please, Margaret,” Tolley said. “Do you expect us to believe that you haven’t made a single entry about your lover boy here? ‘Dear Diary,’” he said, adopting his most mincing tone, “‘It’s official, I’m in love with A.V. …’ We always use initials in our diaries,” Tolley said in an aside, “in case our parents ever read them. ‘He is such a darling boy. I just get all squishy inside when I’m around him.’”

  Margaret smiled with tolerant amusement. “These are my professional notebooks,” she said. “I keep them separate from my personal life.”

  “Oh, who are you kidding, darling?” Tolley said. “You’re supposed to be studying the Apaches, not doing it doggy style with one.”