by Jim Fergus
“Well, hell,” said a fellow named Kent Sanders, a young banker from Greenwich, Connecticut, and one of the biggest blowhards of the bunch. “It’s just a Mexican kid. He’s hardly worth dying for.”
“Yeah, but what about the woman and Phillips’s butler?” said another man. “Are we just going to abandon them to the savages?”
“They’re staff members,” said a third. “It’s a personnel problem. Let Chief Gatlin deal with that.”
“That’s what the Mexican army is here for,” said another man. “It’s their country, let them solve their own Indian problem. We took care of ours fifty years ago.”
And so the sports debated the level of their responsibility and their dwindling commitment. The fact that they’re each paying thirty dollars a day to participate made it an easy decision for some. Clearly, the Great Apache Expedition has ceased to seem like such a good value for their money.
After dinner, Tolley came to see me in my tent. He seemed somehow sheepish and uncomfortable. “You know, old sport,” he said, unable to look me in the eye, “I’ve given it a great deal of thought and I really feel that I should be getting home. Fall semester is right around the corner, you know.”
“Fall semester?” I said, stunned. “No, I don’t know. What are you talking about, Tolley? You’re not thinking about leaving?”
“Senior year and all that rot …”
“Fuck senior year!” I hollered, incensed. “You can’t just quit. We can’t just abandon Margaret and Mr. Browning up there.”
“Yes, well, we’ve already done that, haven’t we, old sport?”
“Only to go get help.”
“And so we have done, Giles. You heard what Stewart said. It’s really a personnel problem. Very little I can do about it personally. Up to Carrillo and the army now really, isn’t it?”
“A personnel problem? Jesus, Tolley, those are our friends up there. We promised them we’d come back for them.”
“Just a bit over two months before classes begin,” he said. “I’ve got a monstrous number of things to do …”
“What kind of things, Tolley? You have to pop into New York and get your new fall wardrobe at Brooks Brothers?”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, that is among the things on my list. Wouldn’t do a bit to appear at Princeton in last year’s frayed collars.”
“Who cares about Princeton and your fucking frayed collars?” I asked. “If you quit now, you’re just going to prove your father right about you. It’ll just give him another opportunity to say you’re not a man, you’re just a sissy.”
“Well, actually, old sport, I am a sissy.”
“I think you like disappointing your father, Tolley,” I said. “Look, I know you were scared up there. Who wouldn’t have been? I was scared, too. So was Albert.”
“Let me tell you something about scared, Giles,” said Tolley. “When they hung me upside down off that spit, I pissed my pants I was so scared. And when they built the fire under my head, I shat myself. Upside down. That’s how scared I was. I realized that I’m not ready to die in order not to disappoint my father.”
“Forget about your father, Tolley,” I said. “If you go home now without seeing this through, you’ll disappoint yourself for the rest of your life.”
“I guess I’ll just have to live with that, old sport,” Tolley said. “Colonel Carrillo has already agreed to spare half a dozen soldiers to escort those of us who choose to leave back to Bavispe. We’ll be met there by American representatives from Douglas, who will see us over the border. We’re scheduled to depart first thing in the morning. I just wanted to pop in and say good-bye, Giles. Damn fine adventure we’ve had together, hasn’t it been? Say, if you’re ever on the East Coast …”
I refused Tolley’s outstretched hand and turned away from him. “Get out of here, Tolley.”
25 JUNE, 1932
I made my decision before I went to sleep that night of Tolley’s defection, and I only slept for a few hours, getting up well before dawn, quietly leaving the tent and walking down to the corral. The same kid, Jimmy, had the night watch, and this time he wasn’t asleep. On the contrary he was so jumpy that he almost shot me first and asked me to identify myself later. Obviously, the proximity of the Apaches had him on edge.
“Damn, Ned, you ought not to sneak up on a fella like that,” he said. “That’s a good way to get yourself shot.”
“I wasn’t sneaking, Jimmy,” I said. “That’s why I was whistling while I walked up. I didn’t want to make too much noise and wake the others or spook the stock. So I whistled so you’d know I was a friendly party.”
“Don’t you know nothing, Ned?” Jimmy said. “That’s just how the injuns communicate. By whistlin’.”
“Yeah, well, they don’t whistle ‘I Got Rhythm,’ Jimmy.”
“What are you doing out in the middle of the night, anyway, Ned?”
“I need a mule.”
“I got no orders to let you have a mule, Ned,” Jimmy said.
“I know you don’t, Jimmy,” I said. “But I’m asking you to give me one anyway.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Sure, you can.”
“What do you need a mule for in the middle of the night, Ned?”
“I have to go back, Jimmy.”
“Back where?”
“Back up the trail a ways,” I said. “I accidentally left my camera bag sitting by a spring when we stopped to water the horses the other day. I don’t want Big Wade to find out that I lost it. I just need to borrow a mule for a couple hours, Jimmy. That way I can be back here before sunrise. And no one will be the wiser.”
“If you’re just going for a couple hours, Ned, why you packing a bedroll and those saddlebags?”
“I just like to be prepared, Jimmy, that’s all.”
“Ain’t you worried about runnin’ into the Apaches?”
“They never attack at night, Jimmy,” I said. “They’re real superstitious about that. They might steal horses at night but they’ll never kill a man, because at night his ghost will get lonely and attach itself to whoever killed him. And they’ll never be able to shake it.”
“Damn,” Jimmy said with a little shiver. “Is that so? How do you know about that, Ned?”
“Because I was with them, Jimmy, remember?”
“I give you a mule, you promise to bring him back before daylight?”
“Scout’s honor. It won’t take more than two hours to make the round-trip. You’d really be helping me out, Jimmy.”
“Awright then, Ned, I guess I can let you have one,” Jimmy said. “But you’re gonna run into guards on the edge of camp. After all that’s happened, the colonel’s got the place buttoned up pretty tight.”
“Yeah, well, they’re trying to keep the Indians out, Jimmy,” I said, “not keep me in.”
The waning moon had been late rising, but still cast plenty of light. I led the mule out to the main trail, where I identified myself to the guard, a Mexican vaquero named Estevan. As I suspected, he didn’t object to my leaving, although he, too, seemed to think I was loco to be riding into Apache country in the middle of the night.
And I have to admit it was a strange and somewhat eerie feeling to be headed back alone toward what we had been so anxiously fleeing a few days before. The air was dead calm, the high, razorback peaks of the sierra flat black against a pearly gray sky, and each tree and rock I passed seemed to stand out in bold relief and perfect focus in the moonlight.
Even for a city boy, it wasn’t hard to follow the trail left by the soldiers the day before, the same trail we had ridden in on. Just over an hour out of camp my mule suddenly raised his head and flared his nostrils. He snorted and balked, stopping dead in his tracks, refusing to go farther. Something had spooked him. I dismounted and coaxed him along by the reins and he followed me nervously.
I saw first the dark outlines of the roosting buzzards; enormous hunched-backed creatures like a congregation of hooded black-robed mo
nks praying, they squatted atop the corpses and on the backs of the dead horses. As I approached, they lifted their wings proprietarily, holding them out at their sides like unholy angels, their vile red beaks agape. One by one they sprang into the air, their wingbeats making a heavy nauseating whoosh. They did not fly far, just a short loop before setting back down, unwilling to give up their prize of carrion.
Obviously fearing another attack, Carrillo hadn’t sent out a detachment yet to bury the dead. I counted thirteen of them altogether; twisted in grotesque postures, stripped and scalped, they glowed a ghostly alabaster white in the moonlight. They looked so inhuman, so abstract, even more so for the fact that the buzzards had been working on their eyes and mouths, their scalped heads. I remembered experiencing the same sense of unreality when I found Pop dead in the bathroom of our house, the back of his head blown out. And it occurred to me that our mind creates this sense of abstraction and unreality in order to protect us from the sheer horror. I was unable to imagine these men only a day before, as living, breathing human beings, and I tried not to look too closely at their faces for fear of recognizing those among them that I knew, and whom I had seen last time around the dining table at camp, joking, laughing, and boasting. All the tack had been stripped from the dead horses, so that they, too, looked naked, their tongues swollen and mouths locked in grotesque death masks. I imagined how I would have composed a photograph of the terrible scene if I’d had my camera; in this way, even without it, I hid behind it; I imagined that the image I would make might look something like Goya’s The Disasters of War, which I had studied in a university art class. But my dead men and horses seemed considerably less epic, even more violated.
The trail was completely blocked by the carnage and I had no choice but to descend into the arroyo on foot, leading the mule, trying to pick our way through the rocks and around the boulders. The mule was patient and I let him choose his own way. It was a long way around and over three hours before we found a place to climb out again and regain the trail, or at least what I hoped was the trail. By then I was afraid that I was lost; nothing looked even remotely familiar to me any longer and it occurred to me how foolish I had been to attempt this passage alone. Maybe I should have asked Albert to come with me, after all; he would be furious when he discovered that I’d left without him. But I knew he was better off with the expedition. As the girl’s “husband,” I was staking my hopes on the belief that I might still have safe passage among the bronco Apaches, but clearly Albert would not. And so I had chosen to wander around out here alone, pretending to know the way, lost in this labyrinth of canyon and arroyo and impassable mountain trails, in the shadows of moonlight. Those had been real men back there, real dead men, their eyes plucked out by buzzards.
“Do you know the way?” I asked the mule suddenly, the sound of my own voice startling both of us. The mule seemed relieved to be back on the trail, or at least a trail, and he stepped along steadily now, almost briskly, as if trying to put distance between us and the corpses, fleeing death. “Why were you so afraid back there?” I asked him, because after the initial shock of hearing my voice, which seemed strangely disembodied, I decided that it was comforting to talk to the mule. “Did you know those horses? Were you afraid of the smell of death? Or are you just afraid of your own death? Did it make you think that you might be next? That anyone of those dead horses could have been you? Did you think about how lucky you were that you hadn’t been chosen to be ridden yesterday morning? Remember when they rode out? The soldiers on their eager, prancing horses, their coats glossy with currying, the sports a bit self-important with the gravity of their mission, having some trouble controlling their skittish polo ponies. Those horses probably thought they were better than you, a lowly mule, half donkey, half horse. And you probably thought so, too. Yet now they are nothing but carrion. Not that Colonel Carrillo or Billy Flowers would have asked me, but I’d have gone along if they had, and maybe Jimmy would have assigned you to be my mount, because my own mule, Buster, is pretty beat up. Maybe we would be lying back there right now with the others, buzzards roosting on us, feasting on our eyes and tongues. We would taste just as sweet as the rich men and their polo ponies. I’ll bet that’s what you’re thinking about. What’s your name anyway? Jimmy forgot to tell me.”
I understood now that I did not after all remember the way back to the ranchería, that I was just following the trail we were on, or rather letting the mule follow it. What else was there to do? We were gaining altitude, that much was true, and I kept looking for familiar landmarks, a particular tree or a specific rock formation that I might remember. The moonlight was already bleeding into dawn. I was lost. What a hopeless fool I was.
I saw the movement this time out of the corner of my eye and barely had time to be afraid in that flashing white moment of surprise to which I could do nothing but surrender, a kind of willing relinquishment. Had it come from behind or above? It hardly mattered. The mule, too, shied, his ears cocked back, undecided yet as to whether or not the situation warranted a full-fledged blowup. Then I knew, felt the light warmth of her like a wind enveloping me, leaping, vaulting behind me on the mule, just in the way that I always seemed to encounter her, never quite able to fix her in place. Had she come from behind or above? Floating, hovering like a bird. More than a different race, she was a different species than I. And her scent, like the smell of the mountains after the monsoons.
I felt her arms around my shoulders and one hand grasped me lightly by the throat. She laughed and I realized that it was a kind of practical joke, the memory fresh of the last time she had fallen upon me like this, with a knife at my throat.
She swung around in front of me, in the same way that she had cut capers on the burro, a litheness that seemed to defy gravity, so that she was facing me now, her slender brown legs over mine. She seemed to weigh nothing at all.
“I knew you would come back to me, my husband,” she said.
“Did you kill those men back there?” I asked.
“No, it was Indio Juan’s war party,” she said.
“And you ride with him.”
“They were coming to kill us,” she said.
“They just want the boy back. And the others. ¿Mataste a esos hombres?” I asked again.
“No, I was not there,” she said. “But if I had been, I would have killed the Mexican soldiers. And the White Eyes, too. They are our enemies.”
“Then so am I.”
“No, with you it is different.”
“How?”
“You are my husband.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“You are lost,” she said. “I came to find you.”
“How do you know I’m lost?”
She laughed. “Because you are going the wrong way.”
“How did you know I was coming?”
“We know everything that takes place in these mountains,” she said, “and all who pass. I knew you would come back to me.”
“Is Margaret okay?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Mr. Browning?”
She averted her eyes.
“What’s the matter?”
She shook her head.
“Tell me. Did something happen to Mr. Browning?”
“He went to the Happy Place,” she said.
“Oh, no …”
The girl slipped around to ride behind me, her slender brown fingers light at my waist. We descended off the trail and through a dense pine forest and out into the valley of a small river. A trail ran along a low bluff above the river and we followed it for some time, twice coming down off the bluff to cross the river and follow the trail on the other side. The mule did not like these crossings because the river was swollen and muddy with the recent rains and he could not see the bottom, and also because mules, in general, though they are more sure-footed on the rocks than horses, do not like getting their feet wet. But the girl clucked to the mule and spoke to him in her tongue and they seemed to re
ach some kind of agreement, because he crossed, the muddy water lapping his stomach. I remembered that the girl had power over horses. And I suppose this extends to mules and burros as well.
After a while we came to a place where the river widened into a small meadow. On the bluffs on one end of the meadow were a series of ancient cave dwellings. It was a beautiful spot and you could see why the “first” people had chosen to live here. Beneath the bluff and the caves were several pools formed by a spring and here we dismounted. I unsaddled the mule and hobbled him, turning him out to graze contentedly in the meadow. The girl led me to one of the pools; I could smell the faint sulfurous odor of it and realized that it was a hot spring. She sat down on a rock and removed her high moccasins, her warrior’s breechclout, and the loose gingham cloth shirt she wore, and without any trace of self-consciousness she stood naked before me, this perfect brown being with small feet and slender muscled legs, her mound of dark pubic hair, and the smooth taut breasts of a girl just become a woman. She entered the pool.
I suppose I’m a bit of a prude myself because I was shy about undressing in front of the girl and I turned my back and took off my own clothes, and when I stood, I covered myself with my hands. I must have looked ridiculous to her with my skin so pale beneath my brown neckline and above my arms where I rolled up my sleeves. But then I remembered that her own grandfather was a white man and so perhaps I didn’t look so foreign to her after all. She looked quizzically at me as if she didn’t altogether understand my shyness.
