The Wild Girl: The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932

by Jim Fergus

  Two of the girls came over to our table and pulled chairs up beside us.

  “Unless you have a brother, sweetheart,” Tolley said to the girl beside him, “I’m afraid this is going to be a very short relationship.”

  The girl next to me was real pretty. She had a broad face and high cheekbones, smooth brown skin, and shiny black hair pulled back from her face. She had large dark eyes that seemed to shine in the candlelight. She leaned against me so that I could feel the softness of her breasts on my arm … she smelled like flowers. She whispered something to me in Spanish.

  “I’m afraid I don’t speak Spanish,” I said. “But I’m going to learn.”

  “For five dollars I will make you very happy,” the girl said in English.

  I have to admit something: I’ve never been with a girl before … not that way. Annie and I talked about it plenty of times, but she wanted to wait until she was married, and so all we ever really did together was kiss, and touch each other a little. And though some of my college buddies used to go down to the red-light district in Chicago, I never really liked the idea of paying money to make love to a girl. I guess I’m kind of a prude that way. And now suddenly I got real shy. “Maybe we could just dance first,” I said to the girl. I stood up quickly and offered her my hand.

  I could tell right away that the dance steps I know from back home … like pretty much everything else from my “old” life … were just not going to work with this music. But I like to dance and I wanted to learn. The band members nodded and smiled at me as they played, amused by my clumsy efforts to follow the girl’s steps. “Hey, I think I’m getting the hang of it,” I said.

  The girl laughed and rearranged my hands, drawing me closer. I could feel the fragrant heat radiating from her body like a warm spring wind, her softness. “Yeah, I definitely think I’m getting the hang of it. Don’t you?”

  The girl stopped dancing and I felt her grip tighten on my arm. “I am new here,” she said. “If no men take me to my room, the patrón will turn me out. Please, would you come with me after this song? For five dollars I will make you happy.”

  So, at the end of the dance, I followed the girl out the back door of the cantina, which opens onto a courtyard. On the far side of the courtyard was another low adobe building, with a number of doors all painted different colors. She led me through the door painted yellow, and into a tiny room where she lit an oil lamp on a green wooden table. In the dim smoky light of the lamp I could just make out a single iron bed frame with a thin straw mattress covered by a rough woolen blanket and a lumpy pillow covered in a gunnysack. It was not exactly a romantic setting. The girl sat down on the bed and gestured for me to sit beside her.

  “I don’t even know your name,” I said.

  “Magdalena.”

  “That’s real pretty. I’m Ned.”

  “You must give me five dollars now, Ned,” she said. “And I must go to give it to the patrón, and then I will come back.”

  “All right.” I handed her a five-dollar bill and she left the room and I sat alone on the bed. When she came back, I stood up and she reached behind her back and began to unhook her dress. I guess I got shy because I put my hand on her arm. “No, that’s all right,” I said. “Let’s just sit here and talk for a minute. Then maybe we’ll go back in and dance some more.”

  “You do not find me pretty?” she asked.

  “Sure, I do, I think you’re real pretty,” I said. “But I just thought we could talk first for a few minutes. How is it that you speak such good English, Magdalena?”

  And so we sat side by side on the bed and began to talk. And soon the girl was just a girl again instead of a whore. And I was just a fellow instead of a customer. And then we were just a couple of kids talking. She told me that she had grown up outside the small village of Bavispe in Sonora. She told me that her family were peons on a hacienda whose hacendados spent most of their time in Paris, which, she explained solemnly, was a city very far away across the sea. The hacendados had survived Pancho Villa’s sacking of their hacienda in 1913 because they were out of the country for the duration of the revolution and President Obregón had restored their property to them in 1920, although their land holdings had been greatly reduced in size by the new laws of the government. But they were still very important ranchers in the state and their lands had steadily increased again since the end of the revolution. The current hacendado was a son who had come back from Paris to live in the hacienda with his French wife and run the family ranching operations. All this the girl told me, and that she had three brothers and four sisters. She said that her father worked as a blacksmith in the village and her mother as a domestic in the hacendados’ house. That from the time she was a very small girl she had worked with her mother in the house, and that there, due to the kindness of the hacendado’s wife, she had learned to speak both French and English. There was not always work on the hacienda for all the children of the peons, and when they reached a certain age, the girls were encouraged to marry or to move into the cities or border towns to find work. One day the padre came to the hacienda and the girl’s parents told her to pack her bags, the padre had found work for her. The priest took her away, brought her here to Las Primorosas. Money changed hands. Of course, her parents did not know what kind of work she was doing in the border town, and the girl would never tell them. In this way, the priest had brought a number of village girls here over the years, their shame assuring their silence. Magdalena told me that she had only been here a few weeks, and she was afraid that the proprietor was going to put her out because she did not do as much business as some of the other, more experienced girls.

  “Oh, I bet you’ll get the hang of it,” I said, and then I realized how stupid this sounded, as if we were still discussing my dancing. “You’re real pretty.”

  She blew out the lantern and kissed me on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said. “Are you certain that you do not wish to lay down with me?”

  “No, that’s all right. Maybe another time.” And I gave her five dollars more to keep for herself.

  “Don’t think I didn’t see you slip out the back door with the little puta,” Tolley said when I got back to the table. “Damn, Giles, you don’t waste any time.”

  “She’s not a whore,” I said. “She’s a nice kid. And we were just talking.”

  “Not a whore?” Tolley said, incredulous. “Just talking? Good God, old sport, don’t tell me you didn’t do the dirty deed?” He laughed. “Why, you’re even more naive than I thought. And I’ll bet you paid her anyway.”

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” I said. “Double. You know, Tolley, you’re a rich kid, you’ve always had everything you’ve ever wanted. It’s probably never occurred to you that some people are forced to do things against their will in order to make a living.”

  “Oh, isn’t that sweet?” Tolley said mockingly. “Young master Giles to the rescue of the damsel in distress. But please, spare me the class lecture, would you? We all have our crosses to bear, old sport, even rich kids such as myself.”

  We had a couple more shots of mescal, and then I left Tolley in the cantina and headed back over to Douglas. It had been a long day, and I was tired and suddenly quite drunk. Outside the night air was cold and a waning moon rose late over the mountains, flooding the plains so that the sparse greasewood bushes and mesquite trees cast thin shadows across the desert. As I left the yellow lights of Agua Prieta behind me, the coyotes took up their moon song, a high warbling pitch that seemed to accompany the tinny cacophony of music from the cantinas.

  I walked unsteadily back to the hotel with the strange, giddy, exhilarating, drunken sensation that the door from my childhood had swung closed forever behind me tonight, and that nothing would ever be the same again.

  LA NIÑA BRONCA

  BILLY FLOWERS TURNED TO PULL A SHIRT FROM HIS SADDLEBAGS IN order to cover the heathen girl’s nakedness, and when he turned again to see what had so suddenly agitated his dogs, who had begun whining
and barking and straining at their chains, she was gone. He could not see or hear her running, no rustle of her tattered dress, for it lay now in a pile on the ground as if she had simply vanished within it.

  He thought, but only for the most fleeting moment, that perhaps she had, after all, been some kind of spirit being. But Billy Flowers was no great believer in supernatural manifestations, preferring to believe that both God and Satan worked more quietly in the souls of men.

  Flowers knew instantly from the dogs’ posture what direction the girl had taken. He quickly scanned the surrounding country, catching just the slightest movement in the rocks above the river bottom, a movement so fleeting that it was little more than the memory of a movement. But it was enough. He considered but quickly rejected the notion of releasing the dogs, for he knew that if they caught her, they would certainly kill her, and that knowledge would as surely make of him a murderer. Instead, he unhooked a small liver-spotted bitch named Queenie and secured her chain to his own belt. Then he picked up the girl’s ragged dress, which stank of her wildness, and he rubbed it in the dog’s nose. “Now, Queenie, you are going to trail this heathen girl,” he said. He picked the dog up by the collar and with a rattle of chain swung her up onto the pommel of his saddle, where she balanced herself deftly. Accustomed to having dogs as passengers, John the Baptist did not flinch. Flowers climbed up behind.

  He knew that with her head start, the girl could easily outrun him on foot. Nor did he attempt to ride into the steep rocks where she had fled, for it would clearly be impassable to the mule. Instead he followed the river bottom, until they came to the first dry arroyo that spilled down out of the hills, and up this he rode.

  John the Baptist was the best mule Billy Flowers had ever owned, seemed to know where they were going even before his rider, as well as the best way to get there. He was an athletic animal and understood his limits, pushed himself as far and fast as he knew he could safely go, sometimes farther and faster than Billy Flowers would ever have expected or attempted himself. And he let his rider know, in no uncertain terms, when he could go no farther. Flowers respected the animal’s courage and judgment and had never asked him to do anything that he said he could not do.

  The arroyo was so steep where it topped out on the ridge that the mule took the last few steps as a series of grunting lunges, trying to keep forward momentum in order to avoid sliding back down on the slick rock. Flowers leaned forward in the saddle, holding the dog splayed tight around the mule’s withers, trying to keep their weight as neutral as possible. “That’s my boy, John,” he whispered like an entreating lover in the mule’s ear, “that’s my good John, almost there now, yes, my John.”

  With a final lunge, dog chain rattling like the mail-clad mount of a medieval knight, John the Baptist gained the level ground of the ridgetop, trotted a few paces, snorted, his sides heaving. “Well done, John,” Billy Flowers said, patting the mule’s lathered neck. “We’ll leave you here now.” He dropped the dog Queenie to the ground and dismounted behind her, hobbled the mule’s front legs, and from behind the saddle untied the thongs that held his lariat on one side, and his coiled bullwhip on the other. “You wait right here for us, John, and we’ll be back shortly with the heathen child.” Caught up now in the excitement of the hunt, a thrill that had not paled for him in better than sixty years, Billy Flowers had not yet even stopped to ask himself why it was so important that he capture the girl.

  Flowers knew that he was above her now, and that she would probably move laterally in the rocks, looking for a crevice or a cave in which to hide. He did not think that she’d come right away to the top, but would first find a place to lay up, a place where she’d feel safe from the dogs, and where she could stop and listen to see if they pursued her. Prey does not run unless chased—a central law of the hunt. Had he pursued her from below, or had she heard the dogs trailing her again, she would almost certainly have kept climbing. As it was, Billy Flowers believed that he had preempted her next move, forced her to seek a secure hiding place, the natural instinct of animals. She would wait until after dark before she traveled again, which gave him nearly two hours of daylight still to find her.

  The girl lay crouched in a shallow cave in the rocks, listening. She could hear the dogs barking distantly where they must still be chained, for the sound did not come closer or change direction. She heard the clattering hooves of the mule climbing the arroyo, striking rock, reverberating through the earth all the way down to her hiding place, and from there entering her bones. She heard the chain rattling, a sound which she would forever after associate with dogs. And she knew from all this that the old White Eyes was after her, had ridden up the canyon to the top of the ridge, was now on foot himself above her and that he must have at least one dog with him.

  She was naked now, but for her moccasins and a breechclout that covered her sex. She had lost her small ration of roots. She knew that she could survive the night here; it was a small enough space and well protected, although it would be very cold. She did not think that the old White Eyes would find her, at least not before dark. The rocks themselves did not betray footprints and she had been careful to sweep away the little bit of sand and pebbles that she had disturbed at the entrance to the cave. But the dog would eventually find her, and if she waited until dark to move, she would be exposed to the night cold with no way of covering herself. All this she considered.

  The cave smelled faintly of cat urine and she found beside her in the dark a small piece of dried scat, so that she knew a she-lion must have denned up here to give birth, the scat left by one of her kittens. The girl hoped that the lion wasn’t coming back here tonight, although she was far less afraid of that right now than she was of the old White Eyes. She lay curled in the cave, exhausted now beyond the point of simple tiredness. She slept.

  It had been the one they called Indio Juan who had brought the Mexicans down upon the People once and for all. He who had been bitten in the face by a rattlesnake when he was a boy, so that he had the snake sickness, the madness, his face grotesquely disfigured. It was Indio Juan who would ride boldly with his warriors in full daylight into the tiny mountain villages and announce from astride his horse, “Yo Indio Juan.” And he would laugh as the villagers in the street fled screaming in all directions, and he and his men would kill them all, entire towns thus depopulated.

  It had been Indio Juan’s idea to steal the Huerta boy, although the girl’s grandfather, the white Apache named Charley, tried to talk him out of it. The Huertas were a powerful ranching family and Charley knew that such an act would do nothing but further enrage the Mexicans. He and Juan quarreled over this, but Juan was loco and no one could tell him what to do, and the more Charley told him not to steal the boy, the more determined Indio Juan became to do so. Knowing the trouble this would cause the People, Charley finally took his own small band and moved farther south, to another ranchería deeper into the Blue Mountains.

  The girl was sorry to see her grandfather leave and she wished that she could go with him. Her own father had been killed by Mexican soldiers some years before and her mother, Beshad-e, had married Indio Juan’s cousin. And because her sister was married to Indio Juan, she had no choice but to stay with his band. So it was among the People.

  They had taken up their positions in the hills above the Huerta ranch, waiting patiently, as is the Apache way, watching for weeks until they knew the daily habits and rhythms of the ranch, knew all who lived there, who came and went. They knew on what day the family went to church in the village, at what hour they departed, knew that Geraldo’s mother always drove the one-horse buggy with the boy on the seat beside her, that his father always rode his horse alongside, carrying their infant daughter on the saddle in front of him. They knew that where the trail narrowed in a small pass between the rocks, the man had to drop back to allow the buggy to pass first. And it was in this place that Indio Juan planned to abduct the boy.

  Because she was nimble and small enough to operate in t
he close confines of the buggy, Indio Juan gave the girl the job of taking charge of the reins and the boy, while he himself cut the woman’s throat. The two of them crouched together on the rocks above the pass, waiting for their moment, while the others stayed with the horses farther up the trail. And as the buggy passed beneath, they fell upon it, dropped soundlessly from the sky with nothing but the faintest rush of displaced air to warn the hapless churchgoers. Maria Huerta looked up in that instant and it must have seemed as if enormous birds of prey were stooping upon her from the heavens, blocking out the sun. Her eyes were wide with terror as Indio Juan fell onto her back, took hold of her hair, snapped her head backward, and drew the knife across her throat. In the same instant, the girl dropped onto the buggy seat beside her and gently took the reins from the woman’s yielding hands as if Maria Huerta were herself complicit in the abduction. She remembered how the Mexican woman had looked at her in that moment, the surprise and terror in her eyes, how she had tried to cry out for her son, but nothing came forth but a final rush of escaping breath from her severed windpipe to which she raised a futile hand to stem the geyser of warm blood that spilled flowing down her breast. The girl had seen a great deal of violence and death already in her short life, and she had been brought up to consider all Mexicans her enemies. Yet as she looked in the woman’s dying eyes all she saw was the heartbreak of a mother taken from her child.

  As the woman tumbled lifelessly from the buggy like a limp child’s doll in her Sunday dress, Indio Juan climbed onto the back of the buggy horse and cut the traces of the harness. The girl gathered up the screaming boy, holding him tight, and leaped nimbly on the horse behind Juan, and they rode off down the trail to join the others. Behind them, the husband and father, Fernando Huerta, bellowed in rage and anguish, but as they had counted on, he did not dare ride forward in pursuit, for he still held his baby daughter in his arms.