Heaven Is a Long Way Off

by Win Blevins

  In twenty minutes Flat Dog had coffee bubbling. Julia rejected it angrily, and glared and cursed her husband. The others were grateful for the tin cups of hot, steaming brew.

  Grumble was warming his hands on the cup when Sam and Hannibal came treading softly into camp. Sam said, “They’re here.”

  Nine

  “WE CAN DEFEND this spot,” said Hannibal.

  It was a low rise between the river and the creek, which here ran almost parallel. A hundred paces below, the creek crooked hard left into the river, just below the camp. Just below our people.

  The banks of the river and of the creek had plenty of cover, trees and bushes. This rise had almost none.

  Sam and Hannibal crowded behind the one low tree on the rise. Flat Dog squatted behind a boulder that barely hid him. Galbraith lay in some high grass, the best he could do.

  Coy kept prancing out from behind the trees and sniffing the breeze.

  “How many?” asked Flat Dog.

  “At least a dozen,” said Sam. He was holding the field glass on them. They were strung out, dipping up and down on the hillocks, and he couldn’t see them all at once.

  Galbraith kept silent.

  “Rubio there?”

  “Out in front.”

  “He is some sumbitch,” Flat Dog said from his boulder.

  “They’re on our tracks,” said Sam.

  “Leading them right to this spot,” said Hannibal.

  “And if they get by us,” said Flat Dog, “leading them straight to the boat.”

  Sam’s fantasy called up a crying newborn, and the child’s cry floated like a croon to the murderers.

  Sam surveyed the area. “I hate to give up the high ground,” he said, “but…”

  “No choice,” said Hannibal.

  “A cross fire,” said Sam. “Right here, a cross fire.”

  Galbraith nodded once. Quick to act and slow to speak, he crawled off the rise, bent low, and took cover on the slope. The other three looked at each other. Flat Dog started after Galbraith, probably to be closer to Julia.

  “Flat Dog,” called Sam. “Leave Rubio to us.”

  His friend looked back and nodded.

  Sam and Hannibal ducked down toward the creek. The cover was poor all the way to the willows along the bank. “In those cottonwoods,” said Hannibal, indicating the far bank.

  The men were sloshing through the water when Coy stopped at its edge. His spine hair rose, his tail pointed, and he growled.

  Sam saw it. “Cub!”

  Hannibal looked sharp, but could see only wiggling leaves of bushes. “Black bear or griz?”

  “Couldn’t tell.”

  They both watched the shrubbery where the cub disappeared. “Berry patch,” said Sam.

  Where there was one cub, there were probably two. Where there were any cubs, there was a sow. It was the sow who would be dangerous, very dangerous if you got between her and one of the cubs.

  “Griz,” said Sam. “Just saw her hump.” A grizzly had a shoulder that, compared to a black bear’s, tented up.

  Coy snarled and gave a short, sharp bark.

  The silvertip rose on her hind legs. The cub rumpety-rumped past her. Mama pivoted and padded along behind the cub.

  “Hightailing it,” said Hannibal.

  Sam watched the spot. “I hope so. Sure gives me the willies,” he said.

  They picked shooting stations behind cottonwoods. Their barrels rested on limbs. The shots were a reasonable distance, wide open, and there was no wind. But the mist, which thickened and cleared from moment to moment, could ruin visibility.

  “I don’t like these odds,” Sam said. The fur men had four rifles, which would take a minute or so to reload after the first volley. Rubio’s men had a dozen or more rifles. Both sides had pistols.

  Sam watched the rise. Turning his back to the berry patch made his skin tingle. Coy kept looking that way.

  “Any strategy?” said Sam.

  “Yeah. Blow hell out of them.”

  No need for the field glass now. Tense, Sam and Hannibal chewed their lips, rubbed their fingers, and stamped their feet. They watched for death to approach above. They listened nervously for the first sound of life arriving below. And the damn griz is behind me, thought Sam.

  The lead rider came into view. From glassing him earlier, Sam knew it was Rubio. He looked along his sights.

  “Take Rubio down with the first shot,” said Hannibal, “so Flat Dog won’t have to.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll hold fire.”

  TWO WORLDS FOR Julia, one black and one gray. In the black world she was a mote of dust spinning in a whirlwind of agony. She saw the whirlwind in ultra-clarity, the riffles of wind wild and glittering. Compared to any in real life, it was monumental, gargantuan, as big as the reach of the Milky Way across the night sky. Within this cyclone of energy the dust mote known as Julia Rubio Flat Dog gyrated around and around in unbelievable fury. And on this terrible power she rose up and up and up and up…

  Then, abruptly, it set her down into the gray world, here on the ground, in this day of mist, on this soggy ground, in these wet blankets, with these two good, pitying people, Reina and Sumner, holding her hands on each side.

  Julia knew she would die. The next time the whirlwind snatched her up she would break open, she would fly apart, and the life would spray out of her in bloody droplets into the savage air.

  The baby will live, she thought. She didn’t understand that, but the baby would live. She was glad.

  And she was glad to die. Eager to die. Anything except…

  The black world took her again. In an instant she was screaming upward into the whirlwind.

  SAM KEPT HIS eyes on the riders. Coy pointed like a bird dog toward the berry patch where the griz disappeared. Damn, I hate this. Rubio was enough to worry about.

  The foremost horse and rider loped into range. Rubio was reading the sloppy tracks himself. His mount cantered forward steadily. The shot was still long.

  Rubio slowed his mount to a walk. Dammit. If the don was good at reading sign, he’d see the tale soon enough—horses cutting suddenly downhill toward the river, without any sense—moccasin prints among the horse prints.

  It was time. Sam told himself, Mexicans can’t outshoot mountain men, no way.

  He squeezed the trigger, thinking clearly, Surprise better be the trump card.

  JULIA FLAT DOG, born Julia Rubio y Obregon, made the supreme effort of her eighteen years. She gathered all her thoughts, all her juices, all her muscles, all her force, everything she was and a lot more, and—Madre de Dios—pushed! Once! Twice! Reina and Sumner were exclaiming, cheering her on, but her fierce concentration made her deaf. Only the urge and the effort existed.

  A third time! She teetered on the edge of success and fell back. Immediately, with a force she never dreamed she had, Julia made a huge fourth push and—blessed virgin!—she expelled the cursed, awful, alien thing from her body. It felt like excreting a melon.

  “You did it!” cried Sumner.

  Grumble, sitting at her head, applauded.

  “Es en muchacho!” exclaimed Reina. It’s a boy.

  Robber joined in Grumble’s applause.

  Beaming, Sumner wiped and dried the baby.

  Reina held Esperanza close to the new child. “This is your cousin,” she said.

  The new fellow roared out a protest at this strange world. He roared another one at the cold and the damp. Everyone chuckled.

  Grumble cut the cord, and Reina put the baby to his mother’s breast.

  Julia was swimming back toward the surface of the ocean of awareness. She noticed a weight on her chest. She felt it with her fingers, and her mind rose toward the light. She held the weight where she could see it.

  A baby. Her baby. A child, a human being. A living union of her and Flat Dog. A boy. He glowed with an angelic light. He was the most beautiful creature she’d ever seen.

  Emotion lifted her on a huge wave, a
swell of ecstasy. She clutched their creation to her bosom.

  After a long while, she managed to say, “He is Azul Flat Dog. After Flat Dog’s brother, Blue Medicine Horse, who died.”

  Happily, she unsnapped her blouse and put Azul’s mouth on her nipple. As she felt the first suck at her milk, a rifle boomed.

  CESAR RUBIO STOOD up in his stirrups to see the tracks. Then three waves crashed on him almost simultaneously—he felt an agony in his hip, he heard an explosion, and he crashed off his mount to the ground.

  “Hell,” said Sam, “he moved and it hit him low.”

  Two shots boomed from the direction of the river.

  Rubio’s men wheeled, looked, milled, raised their rifles, and saw nothing to shoot at.

  One man was on the ground, another sagging and bleeding in his saddle.

  A rider decided the creek was better than the river and charged down the short slope into bushes and trees.

  All followed him.

  Hannibal shot one man out of his saddle.

  Hearing the blast and seeing the smoke, the line of riders angled upstream.

  Rubio’s mount came last in a jerky gait. The don’s boot was caught in the stirrup, and his body dangled like an effigy, bouncing across grass, rocks, and mud.

  Just as the riders disappeared into the cover, Sam shot again. The last rider flinched and grabbed but kept his seat.

  “They’re into the berry patch,” he said, looking wild-eyed at Hannibal.

  They both reloaded fast, fingers flying.

  For long moments they heard nothing and saw nothing.

  From the corner of his eye Sam saw Flat Dog and Galbraith crawl across the top of the rise, half-hidden in the grass, rifles ready.

  The griz roared.

  “If hell has church bells,” said Hannibal, “they sound like that.”

  Eight or ten riders burst out of the thicket like a flock of ducks shotgunned by hunters.

  Flat Dog and Galbraith fired from the high ground.

  Sam heard an answering shot and saw the smoke, but the barrel seemed to be pointed straight up in the air.

  More riders burst out of the berry patch. They wavered, gathered, and flew back north, the way they came, toward the pueblo, toward home. Anywhere gunfire and grizzlies might not tear hell out of them.

  Rubio’s horse came last, awkwardly, with Rubio’s weight flopping along on one side. The don thrashed desperately to get his boot free. Suddenly, in a paroxysm of effort, he wrenched the foot loose and collapsed onto the muddy earth. His horse abandoned him at a gallop.

  Sam looked at his enemy, now brought low.

  Flat Dog started down the hill toward Rubio.

  “Let him be,” called Hannibal.

  All four trappers waited. They watched. Coy grew rigid, pointed, and growled.

  The sow griz approached the injured don with mincing steps. She was curious but wary. She stopped and looked. She sniffed the air, and the trappers felt glad to be downwind of her. She took several minutes getting to the crumpled figure.

  She swatted it a couple of times, in a testing way.

  Rubio flung an arm up in a half circle and back to the ground.

  The griz roared and tore his shoulder with her teeth.

  The two cubs crept close.

  The griz roared louder. She whacked the body with her snout. She snuffled. She growled, bit, and waggled her head.

  An arm came away in her mouth, hand up, accepting the rain.

  Sam and Hannibal walked up the rise to join their friends. They looked at the bleeding bodies of the fallen. They looked at each other. They wanted to share their amazement, but there were no words.

  They trotted away from the griz, toward camp. Not a man of them wanted to see more of what was happening with the griz and…

  “Just before the first shot,” said Galbraith, “I thought I heard a baby bawl.”

  Flat Dog ran toward Julia.

  Ten

  THERE ON THE bank of the river Hannibal took charge of telling the sisters. “Your father is dead.”

  “How?” said Julia, her voice shaking.

  “It’s strange,” he said. “It’s beyond strange. We fired at your father’s party. They fled into a berry patch along the creek.” He hesitated. “A grizzly bear attacked him and…It was almost beyond belief.”

  All of them looked at each other, wide-eyed.

  “The others rode back where they came from. Fast.”

  Reina and Julia looked at each other. “Do you want me to go look?” said Reina.

  Julia kissed Azul’s head and then looked up at her sister.

  “No.”

  THE CAPTAIN OF the Madison, glad to have the gold coins for the passages, welcomed Sam’s party to the harbor in San Pedro and his ship. “I was seeking you,” he said, but did not yet explain.

  The partings at San Pedro were brief and bittersweet. Reina wanted to return to her home, to rejoin her husband and children and see to the burial of her father.

  All but Reina—Sam, Hannibal, Grumble, Flat Dog, Sumner, Galbraith, Robber, Julia, and the two infants—set forth on the evening tide on the Madison to San Diego.

  Sam and Hannibal stood near the penned horses. The night was windy and the seas high. Coy watched the poor animals, who could do nothing but try to maintain balance as the boat switched from tack to tack and rocked from wave to wave. Sam was worried about Paladin, and the captain required that some one of the party watch the horses continually.

  Sam looked westward upon the dark waters. China, he supposed, was out there somewhere. “I set out to find a home,” he said to Hannibal. “I found it—Crow country. And now I’m as far from it as I can get. Hell, I’m even off the continent.”

  “Think about it. These waters began in Crow country. They came down the mountains and across the desert and joined this ocean. On the water you’re always home.”

  Now Captain Bledsoe emerged out of the darkness. “I bring you a letter from Captain Jedediah Smith.” He handed it to Sam, who passed it to Hannibal.

  “Will you read it to me?”

  Hannibal did.

  To Samuel Morgan—

  Dear Sir, and your companions Mr. McKye and Flat Dog,

  I write in strong hopes that your fortunes have been better than mine. Leaving two days after you, I rode to Saint Joseph Mission, where I found in charge one Father Duran, a melancholy and thoroughly disagreeable man. He would not hear my request to pass through to the governor’s residence in Monterey, and thus I could not join you there. Instead he put me in the guardhouse and told me that an officer would come from San Francisco to try my case. During the intervening days he made no provision for feeding myself or my men, and we were obliged to throw ourselves on the kindness of the elderly overseer.

  It proved that an Indian had accused me of claiming the country on the Peticutry River. When the commander arrived, however, one Lieut. Martinos, instead of punishing me in accordance with the wishes of Father Duran, he sentenced the Indian to an undeserved flogging.

  After two weeks the governor finally wrote from Monterey, bidding me to come there under guard.

  In Monterey Governor Echeandia proved as difficult as ever. He gave me the liberty of the town, but no satisfaction with my problem. The town I found quaint, but the inhabitants too free and careless in their ways. There I received word of your difficulties at the mission and your journey southward to rejoin Flat Dog’s wife and your daughter. I hope that effort has proved successful.

  Through many discussions here the governor maintained his position that I am an intruder in the country, and my status can only be resolved by a journey to Mexico City. After some inquiries I determined that he meant for me to pay for my own passage to Mexico, and expressed my outrage that a man should be expected to take himself to prison at his own expense.

  The governor further insisted that my men come in. I suggested that they were closer to San Francisco and wrote Mr. Rogers to proceed there.

  The capt
ains of four ships in port then kindly vouched for me and promised to be responsible for my conduct. Upon that event Echeandia gave me three choices, to go to Mexico, wait for instructions to come from Mexico, or leave the country by the route by which I entered.

  More than eager to rid myself of California, I chose the latter. The governor signed a passport which enables me to purchase provisions. I am soon, therefore, to travel to San Francisco on the Franklin, equip myself, and leave the country.

  In these circumstances there appears to be no opportunity for you, Mr. McKye, and Flat Dog to take your places as employees of Smith, Jackson & Sublette. I have therefore discharged you as of the date you left our camp on the Appelaminy. I hope that we shall all greet each other gladly at the rendezvous next summer.

  Believe me

  your sincere friend,

  Jedediah S. Smith

  Sam gazed out at the dark sea, stretching all the way to China. He turned and studied the wavy black line made by the coastal hills of California. He walked to the lee rail and looked at the country. Hannibal followed and stood beside him. Coy rubbed against the other leg. The men propped their hands on the rail and leaned out. Here you could hear the prow cutting through the water.

  “A country of troubles,” said Sam. “For me.”

  The memories were too fresh to be spoken. Meadowlark had died there. Sam had killed men there. “The authorities are probably looking for me too.”

  “Hell, the Mexican constabulary probably wants you, me, Flat Dog, Grumble, Sumner, Jedediah Smith, every American who’s set foot in the province.”

  Sam felt the wind at his back, its scent strong with something…

  Flat Dog walked up. “Time for my watch.”

  “I can stay longer,” Sam said.

  The Crow shook his head. “Look in on Julia, will you?”

  Flat Dog’s wife was facedown on the bunk in the small cabin, sobbing. Her sobs racked her whole body, and her cries drowned out the wind, the seas, and the noises of the rigging and sails.

  Suddenly Julia twisted violently onto her back. She convulsed with sobs, over and over and over.