Apache Country

by Frederick H. Christian

  Easton quartered warily across to where Kuruk lay, the arrow like a skewer through his throat, flies already buzzing around his head. Ironheel soundlessly joined him and stood looking down at his enemy, his expression dark and brooding. Neither triumph nor sadness showed in his eyes.

  “Aal bengonyáá,” he said quietly. “His power was gone.”

  For a moment Easton didn’t know what he was talking about, then remembered what Grita had told him.

  “I say it again, patrón. Apache is different. He believes unearthly things are just as real as a horse or a tree. Lightning, thunder. Love, hate. All these things have bigo’dih’ingó – power. To deal with danger Apache need to draw upon this power. If he does not have it, or if he loses it, he will die.”

  “The bow,” Easton said, remembering how Ironheel had looked when he saw it hanging on the wall in the cabin. “I knew damned well there must be something special about it.”

  “Ha’ah,” Ironheel replied, as if nothing else needed to be said. If there was more to the story, it was quite clear he wasn’t going to tell it now. If ever.

  They heard a sound and saw two men clambering up out of the gully. They came apprehensively across the scree, their hands raised fearfully in front of them as if they expected to be shot.

  “Kuruk’s men,” Ironheel murmured.

  Easton kept the duo covered with the Winchester but it was obvious there wasn’t an ounce of fight in either of them. One was short and stocky, dark haired and Latin looking. He had on a black leather jacket and tan pants. The other was thinner and taller, with receding sandy hair. He had an apologetic, shamefaced look, like a housewife caught shoplifting.

  “Look, listen, you guys,” he gabbled nervously, “it’s over, okay, you got our guns, we don’t want any trouble, okay?”

  “Well, you’ve got it, you goddamn apology for a human being!” Easton said angrily. “This is the second time you’ve tried to kill us.”

  “Second time?” the man said, frowning. “What in the hell you talkin’ about, mister?”

  “I’m talking about Whitetail, mister!” Easton said angrily. “Or have you forgotten trying to wipe us out a couple of nights ago?”

  “You got the wrong sow by the ear, friend,” the Latin-looking one said, spreading his hands in what he clearly hoped was a placating gesture. “This the first time we ever laid eyes on you people, and that’s the truth.”

  “You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you in the ass,” Easton retorted scornfully. “And I’m not your friend.”

  “Look, listen, we didn’t want any part of this,” the other man whined. “All we signed up for was to find you guys. But Kuruk threatened to kill us if we didn’t help him. We had to do what he said.”

  “Not any more you don’t,” Easton said and stepped aside so they could see Kuruk lying face down on the ground, the arrow sticking through his throat, the blackening blood seeping into the heedless dust.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” the stocky one whispered faintly, staring hypnotized at the still figure on the ground. His lanky partner’s eyes rolled up in his head and his eyelids fluttered. He looked like he was going to faint.

  “Aw, shit,” he said, his Adam’s apple working. “Aw, shit.”

  Ignoring them, Ironheel went over to where Kuruk lay. He knelt beside the dead man, took off the belt-pack and tossed it to one side. Sliding Kuruk’s knife from its sheath, he jammed the blade between two rocks, snapping it with a metallic twang. He lifted the automatic pistol out of its holster, ejected the magazine, and hurled both away into the scrub. Then he stood up, swinging the pump-rifle over his head and smashing it against a boulder until the stock broke off and the barrel was bent almost double.

  “What the fuck is he doing?” the thin airman whispered to Easton

  “He’s making sure Kuruk never reaches the Happy Place,” Easton told him. The man stared at him blankly, as if he’d spoken Arabic.

  Now, Ironheel set the Apache bow over his knee, bent it until it snapped, then tossed it on to the recumbent body. One by one he took the arrows from the quiver, touched Kuruk’s body with them, then snapped them and threw them on the ground beside him. Then, reaching beneath the body, he tore off Kuruk’s painted buckskin medicine bag, scattering its contents over the body before throwing it into the rocks. Finally, he grabbed Kuruk’s feet and turned the body until it lay face down with the head pointing east.

  “N’zhoo,” he said, as much to himself as anyone else. “Aal begonyáá. It is done.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” the stocky one said again.

  Ironheel looked over at Easton and then up at El Marcial. The message needed no words: the sun was up high now and it was time to go.

  “Which of you two is the pilot?” he asked the two men. They were both still staring at Kuruk’s body as if somehow they expected it to come back to life. The stocky one turned slowly around.

  “Me,” he said. “Name’s Frank Dixon. This here is Allan Alvares.”

  “You say you weren’t flying this machine a couple of nights ago over Whitetail?”

  “That’s right, mister. We only got this assignment yesterday.”

  “Who hired you? Kuruk?”

  “Ahuh.”

  “You know who was flying it two nights ago?”

  Dixon shrugged. Alvares shook his head. “Could have been anyone.”

  “Who owns it?”

  Dixon shrugged again. “No idea.”

  “Don’t shit me!” Easton rounded on him harshly. “You’re driving a high spec whirlybird worth what, coupla million bucks? You expect me to believe you don’t know who it belongs to?”

  “On my mother’s grave, it’s the truth,” Dixon insisted shrilly. “Look, listen, I’ll tell you exactly what happened. I’m in my office, I get a call from Kuruk. Go down to El Paso, pick up the bird, fly it up here, do surveillance. He was offering good money, so I think, why not?”

  “You just turned up at the airport, got in, and took off, is that what you’re telling me? Nobody talked to you, nobody gave you keys, no flight plan, no paperwork?”

  Dixon shook his head. “I was told to wait in the airport lounge, someone would contact me. I went, I waited. Finally this guy comes in, has the flight plan, paperwork, whole thing ready to go.”

  “Okay, this man you met in El Paso. Was he a big guy, German accent, looks like a bodybuilder?” Easton asked.

  Dixon looked surprised. “Hey, yeah, how’d you know that?”

  “He have a name?” Ironheel asked.

  “He said his name was Carl. That was it.”

  “You got a number for him?” Easton said. “Address? Anything?”

  Dixon shook his head again.

  “Who was Kuruk working for?”

  “He never said. We figured law enforcement. Sounded like that was who he was talking to.”

  “But you didn’t ask who?”

  “Listen, mister,” Dixon said. “If Mose Kuruk says don’t ask questions, you don’t ask questions.”

  “What was he paying you?”

  “Five hundred a night.”

  “Try and collect it now,” Easton said.

  He looked across at Ironheel, who had gone back to stand looking down at his dead enemy. He hadn’t heard Easton’s conversation with Dixon. Probably hadn’t been interested, Easton thought. He walked over to stand beside him. Kuruk’s bum bag lay where he had tossed it. He knelt down and opened it up. It held a cellphone and a box of ammunition with the words Extreme Shock on each vertical side. Inside were six cartridges that looked much the same as the 5.56 NATO round, but were in fact very different in many deadly ways.

  “Jesus,” Easton murmured. “So that was what he was using.”

  Manufactured in Nevada, and selling for something like five dollars a shot, the Extreme Shock 30-06 High Velocity round was probably the most destructive anti-personnel ammunition on the market. Delivering 2747 foot-pounds traveling at 2714 feet per second, it could slice through anything it encountered
en route to target and still deliver a devastating disintegration on body-contact.

  He shivered. If it could put a hole the size of a fist in a metal fuselage, God alone knew what it might do to a man’s body. Without knowing quite why, he put the six-pack in his pocket. Removing the SIM from the cellphone, he tossed it aside and stood up.

  “Ready?” he said to Ironheel.

  “T’alkodá,” Ironheel nodded.

  Dixon realized they were about to be left behind. “Hey, wait a minute,” he protested. “How we supposed to get out of here?”

  “Nanohwinltl’ogí,” Ironheel said coldly. “Your problem.”

  “Listen, whatever your name is,” Dixon said desperately, gesturing toward Kuruk’s sprawled body, “All this is serious shit, man. You can’t just walk away from it.”

  “If that’s a bet,” Ironheel said, “you lose.”

  He turned away and Easton matched his pace as they started down the long gully on the far side of the saddle that led to the trail below. When they were about halfway down, he looked back. The two men had come to the edge of the saddle and were standing there, watching their descent. They looked forlorn, like dogs left out in the rain.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The rocky trace – more watercourse than track – that led down from El Marcial to the head of Pancho Canyon dropped twenty three hundred feet in three miles. It would have been a tough hike even if they had made it, but Ironheel declared it too open, too visible from the air. Off-trail – no trail at all, in fact – their progress was taxing, hazardous, and painfully slow. As they made their way down, yard by punishing and often dangerous yard, Easton formulated a new maxim: anyone who tells you coming down a mountain is easier than climbing up has never done either.

  After leaving the comforting canopy of the tall timber, they found themselves among undulating hills stippled with scatters of sagebrush, scrub oak, greasewood and stunted piñon, as vulnerable as two bugs on a tablecloth. Two damned hungry bug, Easton thought; apart from the last few strips of cold deer meat and some stale cheese, they hadn’t eaten since sunup and were pretty well out of water.

  “There are farms at Agua Azul,” he suggested, but Ironheel shook his head.

  “Better wait.”

  He was right, of course, but it didn’t take the hunger away. They pushed on, fighting through the unfriendly scrub, moving steadily downhill. Around mid-morning they swung east, always on guard because there was another danger now: unlike the old days, a lot of the land in this part of the country was fenced-off, and the last thing they needed was for some irate farmer with a shotgun to mistake them for rustlers.

  Heading to their left now Easton could see the conical tip of Pacheco Mountain. As there was no trail worth the name he gladly left the navigation to Ironheel, who seemed to have a built-in compass in his head. They climbed a long rise and came down the other side into a deep-cut dry watercourse with ragged clusters of buckthorn along its banks. Ironheel Stopping under a gnarled old black walnut overhanging the cut, Ironheel lifted an arm.

  “Shiba’ síndaa,” he said, “wait for me here.”

  “Yassuh, boss,” Easton muttered, and sprawled not ungratefully in the shade of the tree. The unceasing buzz of the cicadas was soothing. A light south wind moved majestic banks of cloud across the sky in slow and stately procession. A lizard flickered into sight, froze on a rock, vanished.

  He looked at the cellphone they had taken from the cabin in Peachtree Canyon, wishing now he had allowed himself to call Grita and talk to Jessye. He saw her in his mind’s eye, the slender, dark-eyed freckle-faced child who would one day ask him questions for which he had no answers. He imagined her sitting, elbows on the table, chin propped on her hands. Where did Daddy go, Grita? When is he coming home?

  Soon, baby, soon, he promised her silently.

  He must have dozed. A shadow fell across his legs and alarm surged through him like electricity. He looked up to see Ironheel standing over him, his reappearance as silent as his departure.

  “You have to keep doing that?” Easton said, unable not to sound peevish. Ironheel ignored him and emptied maybe a pint of small round brown pellets out of his shirt on the ground. They looked like animal droppings.

  “Eat some,” he said. “They’ll give you strength.”

  “What is it?”

  “Ni’yú be’ísts’óz. Ground beans.”

  “Where did you find them?”

  He waved an arm. “Prairie vole dens.”

  All Easton knew about prairie voles was they were small rodents that lived in holes in the ground. He decided not to let his imagination dwell on how they collected and stored the beans, just put a couple in his mouth and chewed. They tasted of nothing much, but Ironheel was right, food was food. He glanced at Ironheel, squatting on his haunches and munching away like he was eating truffles. Maybe ground beans were an Apache delicacy.

  Easton glanced at his watch: 2:34.

  “How long do you reckon it will take us to get down to the Brio?” he asked.

  Ironheel stuck out his lower lip and thought. “From here? Two hours.”

  “We have till six,” Easton said. “Tell me about the bow.”

  It was direct and unequivocal, the way he meant it to be; he knew now that subtlety was a waste of time. Ironheel was silent for a long moment, looking away. He might have been carefully considering exactly how to tell the story. Or whether to tell it at all, Easton thought. There was no way of knowing.

  “You married, Easton?”

  “Was,” Easton said, puzzled a little by the non sequitur. “My wife died.”

  Ironheel nodded thoughtfully but made no expression of sympathy. It was as if he had at some point chosen not to subscribe to convention. For instance: in all the time they had been together, Ironheel had never, as far as he could recall, used the personal pronoun. It was as if he was acting as an observer of his own life.

  “Kids?” he asked.

  “A daughter. Her name is Jessye.”

  “She like her mother?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Sometimes she could break his heart with just a single look, a turn of the head, a smile, and suddenly there was Susan. Yes, sometimes.

  “You know Apache customs?” Ironheel asked.

  “Some,” Easton said, “but not many.” It was a white lie, but he wanted Ironheel to open up in his own way and in his own time.

  “When he gets married Apache leaves his own home and goes to live with his wife’s people. Ní’ítsaakaii. He becomes like a son to his new family, with all the responsibilities of a son. Even if his wife dies, he still belongs to them.”

  “You were married?”

  “Her name was Irene,” Ironheel said, a faraway look in his eyes. “She was eighteen when we got married. We had nothing, no money, no place of our own.

  “So you lived with your wife’s people.”

  “For about five years. Got a job driving a truck. Spent a lot of time on the road. Came back one night from Colorado someplace, and the old folks told me, Irene ran away. That was a great shame for them, a daughter who had run away from her husband with another man. And worse still … a white man.”

  Easton wondered what kind of shame that would have been for Ironheel, but decided not to ask. Ironheel looked up at the sky, and then let out his breath slowly.

  “Apache way is to punish the man who steals your wife,” he said. “Maybe kill him, even. But they were gone, nobody knew where. And after a while, the anger died.”

  Easton nodded. He knew about how anger died. And how long it took.

  “Now I had to look after the sá’yé, the old people,” Ironheel continued. “It was hard, but that was what was expected. And then after five, six months, Irene came back. The man she had run away with ditched her, she had no place else to go. Her people let her stay. Maybe they were hoping we would patch things up.”

  “And did you?”

  Ironheel looked grave. Never interrupt the storyteller. />
  “Sorry.”

  Ironheel nodded and lapsed into silence, as if he didn’t know how to continue. Easton waited. Ironheel sighed.

  “No,” he said. “It was over. But her family were still my responsibility. And now Irene as well. It was like I was caught in a trap, there was no way of getting ahead, just a grind to stay in the same place. And not wanting to be there anyway.”

  He looked up at the sky again and Easton thought he saw lingering regret in his eyes. He waited, relaxing in the warm sun. Let him tell it his own way. There was no hurry.

  “Things started to go wrong. I got a citation for D&D, then another for petty larceny, then the trucking firm let me go, my car was repossessed. There was no way to keep things together. And then … Kuruk.”

  He said it as if the word was a curse.

  “Figured,” Easton said, as much to himself as Ironheel.

  “Kuruk had a place up in the hills, there was gambling, some women. He let me stay up there. In those days he bootlegged hooch on to the Reservation. Tequila, whiskey. When things got really bad he loaned me money to look after Irene and her family. And then there was the gambling and the booze. Pretty soon …” He sighed again.

  “You were in deep.”

  He nodded. “There was no work, no way to pay him off. Then one day he said, Maybe there’s a way.”

  “Break-ins?” Easton guessed.

  Ironheel nodded again. “Kuruk would pick the place, the time. We’d do two, sometimes three a night, run the stuff down to this fence he knew in Las Cruces, cellphones, i-Pads, laptops, TV’s, whatever. One day we got there, the cops were waiting. While we were awaiting arraignment Kuruk cut a deal, gave them the fence, told them everything. He was released on parole.”

  “And you went to jail,” Easton said, remembering the details he had seen on Ironheel’s stats. He recalled Grita telling him the worst thing anyone could do to an Apache was lock him up in a cell. He waited as the silence lengthened again. Ironheel seemed to think about it a long time before he decided to continue.