Leaving Yuma

by Michael Zimmer

  Del kicked his mount past Davenport’s chestnut, and I could tell he was mad. “What the hell are you trying to do, Latham?” he hollered, his question rolling on down the cañon in repeated echoes until it finally petered out several miles away.

  “You might want to keep your voice down, hoss,” I replied mildly. “Bandits use these barrancas as hideouts. So do Yaquis, for that matter.”

  “What’s going on, Buchman?” Davenport demanded. He was sitting his saddle loose as a goose, his face beet-red from the heat, his canteen dry since morning.

  Del wasn’t in much better shape. I don’t know if he had any water left, but I’d seen him hitting his whiskey bottle a couple of times that day, and alcohol can take a heavy toll on a man in that kind of heat.

  “I’ll tell you what’s going on,” Del rumbled, jutting his chin toward a bald knob rising above the deep barranca at our side. “We passed that rock three hours ago, heading in the opposite direction. This little son of a bitch is leading us in circles.”

  Davenport’s gaze narrowed. “Is that true, Latham?”

  “Yeah, it’s true,” I replied, trying to act nonchalant, but still ready to dive clear of my saddle if Del started shooting.

  “By God, you admit it?” Del exclaimed hoarsely.

  “No point in lying about it now.”

  If possible, Davenport’s already red face turned a shade or two darker. “You’d better have a good reason for this misdirection, Latham, or I’ll be tempted to leave your carcass on the side of this mountain to feed the vultures.”

  I raised my wrists, then pulled them apart to tighten the links between the cuffs. “I want these things off, and I want to see my pardon.”

  “You’re hardly in a position to be making demands,” Davenport said softly.

  “I figure I’m in about the best position I’ll ever be,” I replied. “You’re out of water, Mister Davenport, and the rest of us nearly are. Twenty-four hours from now, men and mules alike are going to start dropping like flies.”

  “Yourself included,” Del growled. “I’ll see to that.”

  “Yeah, myself included, but I figure I can last longer than either of you. When you’re dead and withering away, I’ll still be walking.”

  “Not with a bullet in both knees,” Davenport pointed out.

  “Then I guess I’ll be dead, too, but, either way, you won’t leave these cañons alive.”

  Davenport licked tenderly at his dry, chapped lips. He was thirsty and starting to suffer; so was Del.

  “I thought we were in a rush,” he said after a moment.

  “We are. Every minute we lose in this cañon puts your family that much closer to Soto’s thugs.”

  The old man came to a swift decision after that. “Release him, Buchman.”

  “If I pull them cuffs, Mister Davenport, we lose all control over him,” Del said.

  “If I intended to run, I could have done it a dozen times already,” I replied. “Don’t forget, I know where the water holes are out here, champ.”

  “Enough,” Davenport said sharply. “Buchman, free the man.”

  Del swore mightily, but there wasn’t much he could do. He dug the key from his vest pocket and tossed it to me. I snatched it deftly out of midair and had my wrists free in less time than it takes to tell it. After rolling my shoulders to stretch the muscles in my back, I held my wrists up where a barely noticeable breeze could soothe the badly chafed flesh.

  “The water, Latham,” Davenport said.

  Grinning at Del, I gave the handcuffs a mighty heave. They sailed out over the edge of the cliff, the polished links glinting briefly before they disappeared into the barranca below.

  “You son of a bitch,” Del said.

  I sent the key in a different direction, then said, “I want to see that pardon now, and I want my rifle back.”

  “That rifle ain’t yours,” Del countered.

  “Show him the pardon,” Davenport snapped, “then return his rifle.”

  Del swung to the ground with a curse, then dug the bent and partially crumpled envelope from his saddlebags. Sliding the pardon into the open, he unfolded it where I could see it from the back of my horse, the official seals like twin thumbprints at the top of the page.

  “Sign it,” I demanded.

  “Go to hell.”

  “Sign it,” Davenport instructed.

  “Mister Davenport, that document’s all we’ve got …”

  “Sign it!” The old man gave me a smoldering glare. “But Del’ll keep it with him until our mission is accomplished.”

  “Fair enough,” I agreed, although I’d already decided that if I got the chance, I’d steal the damned thing, and to hell with the consequences.

  “There’s one last matter to discuss,” Davenport said while Del rummaged through his saddlebags for something to write with.

  “What’s that?”

  “This will be the last time I’ll be held hostage to demands from anyone in this crew, and that especially means you, Latham. Attempt a stunt like this again, I’ll kill you.”

  A chill like an Arctic wind cut through me. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Davenport meant it. Before that day, I’d never known how seriously to take the old man’s threats. Like, would he really shoot Pedro in the foot if the Moralos hostler allowed someone to steal a little gas or oil from his automobile? Spence, I recalled, had believed him, and after that day in the barranca, so did I.

  “I want your word, Latham. Your spoken word. If you ever try this again, for any reason, I’ll have Buchman gun you down where you stand. Is that understood?”

  “Yeah, it’s understood.”

  “All right.” He glanced at the lawman. “Sign the pardon.”

  Grumbling under his breath, Del flattened the sheet of paper against the hard leather of his saddle and scratched his John Henry across the bottom in pencil. He even dated it, and I couldn’t help a quick, relieved smile as I watched him return the document to his saddlebag.

  “The water, Latham,” Davenport said. “How far is it?”

  “Not far. A couple of hours at most.” Reining my horse over to Luis’ pack mule, I loosened the Savage from where Del had lashed it atop one of the ammunition crates. Although Del had left the scabbard with me that day in Moralos, I don’t know if he was ever aware of the cartridge belt filled with .303s that I’d kept hidden beneath my bedroll. I slid it out and strapped it around my waist, then checked the Savage’s chamber. It was empty. Sliding four bottle-necked rounds from the back of the belt, I pressed them into the magazine from the top, listening to the brass cartridge counter inside the action rotate to full. After closing the action and setting the safety, I returned the gun to its scabbard just as Del swung back into his saddle.

  I didn’t waste any time after that. A couple of miles upcañon we came to a break in the lower wall that would take us down to the next level. It was a narrow crack, treacherous with scree that had collected there over the eons, but we made it through without injury, then reversed direction until we came to an arroyo, cutting through the rocky surface of the cañon’s bench. Reining into the shallow gulch, I dragged the Savage from its scabbard and butted it to my thigh. Seeing me preparing like that, the others quickly did the same. I’m not suggesting the country we’d come through previously had been safe, but we were getting into a land frequented by both bandits and Indians, and were going to have to be doubly careful about our fires, or making any unnecessary noise.

  I would have liked to have seen the faces of the men behind me as the arroyo deepened and became narrower. Soon the sides were towering above our heads, the walls closing in until there was barely enough room for the pack mules. Within a hundred yards, the cañon’s sides seemed to fold in overhead, blocking out the sky, and the air turned unexpectedly cool and moist. The occasional clank of a stirrup or some piece of ge
ar from one of the mule’s packs scraping the sandstone walls seemed to grow louder in the cramped arroyo, echoing faintly before me as if scouting the way.

  And then, abruptly, the cañon widened. The ceiling curved over us like a cavern and the floor turned to sand. Ahead in the dim light lay a pool of water nearly thirty feet long and a dozen across. From past visits I knew this little mere would be several feet deep in its middle. A shallow trough exited the far end, and beyond that was a second pool, almost as large as the first. To the right, a steady trickle of water fed the upper pond from a narrow slot in the cañon’s wall.

  This was my secret. This was what had made me so successful as a trader and smuggler. This was Yaqui Springs, the Cañon Where the Small Lizards Run. To the south, less than twenty-four hours away, lay the town of Sabana.

  Excerpted from

  Sonora’s Delightful

  Landscapes

  by Alice Sanchez-Harper

  Ocean Front Publishing, 1938

  Although a rarity in Sonora, slot cañons do exist … [they] usually lack the vivid colors and fantastical shapes found in many slot cañons in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico.

  * * * * *

  [They are normally] formed by the rushing waters of summer thunderstorms, cutting through sandstone over countless eons of time, but have been found in other rocks, such as granite and limestone. Creeks or streams are seldom the cause of a slot cañon’s formation.

  * * * * *

  These slots can be as narrow as two feet, yet rise as much as one hundred feet above the cañon’s floor overhead. Occasionally near-perfect caverns can be formed … like that at Lizard Run Cañon State Park, north of Sabana.

  Session Eight

  I’d barely brought my mount to a stop when Davenport practically tumbled from his saddle in his haste to reach the pool. I grabbed the chestnut’s reins and led it away.

  “Keep the horses and mules out of the water,” I warned the others. “There’s a second pond just below us where they can drink.”

  Although Del was nearly reeling in his saddle from dehydration—the last few hours had been especially hard on him—he stubbornly kept his seat. I dismounted to strip the saddle from the bay’s back, then the chestnut’s, dumping both rigs in the sand close to the side wall. With lead ropes on their halters, I led the thirsty beasts to the second pool, then stood by patiently while they drank. One by one the others came up with their stripped-down animals, the muleteers handling both their saddle stock and pack mules.

  Although it had been my intention to slake my thirst at the upper pool, I guess Del and Spence couldn’t wait, and the Perezes didn’t care. Glancing at Luis, I shrugged, then squatted between my two animals, hanging onto the lead ropes with my left hand while I scooped up water with my right.

  You might wonder why I didn’t just flop down on my belly like Del and Spence and dip my face directly into the pool, and the answer is because I’d been trained not to. With a lot of desert tribes, bellying down to drink was not only considered unseemly, it could be dangerous in a land where your enemies might be lurking nearby, waiting for you to lower your guard—and your guard doesn’t get much lower than burying your face in a pool of cool water.

  Luis and the Perez boys drank as I did, the three of them being desert-born and attuned to their wilderness surroundings in ways I’d never be, not even if I spent a lifetime living with the Yaquis.

  When the horses and men had taken the edge off of their thirst, I handed the lead ropes on my bay and Davenport’s chestnut to the Perez boys.

  “Hang onto them,” I said. “I’m going to check out that side cañon before we get too comfortable.”

  Del scrambled to his feet, water dribbling from the short stubble of his beard as if from a kitchen sponge. I don’t think any of us had shaved since leaving Moralos.

  “You don’t need to worry about checking that side cañon,” Del blustered, as if, cool and quenched, he planned to regain some measure of his earlier authority. But hell was going to freeze over—not likely in that part of the country—before I allowed that to happen.

  “If you’re still worried about me cutting my picket pin, you can tag along,” I said.

  Del hesitated, then nodded. “All right, but leave the rifle with your gear.”

  “I reckon not,” I replied flatly. “In fact, grab your own while you’re at it. If we run into trouble, we’ll need long guns more than revolvers.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Del asked, frowning.

  “This is a Yaqui watering hole, and they consider it sacred. If they find us here, they’ll kill us, or die trying.”

  Swearing, Del tossed his lead rope to Luis. “Take care of my horse,” he growled, then stalked back to where we’d left our gear. I retrieved my Savage, while Del yanked a bulky 1895 Winchester from his saddle. “You lead, Latham. I want you in front of me the whole way.”

  Well, no one ever said Delmar Buchman wasn’t a complete asshole. Or maybe it was just me that said it. Sure as hell, that was my opinion of the man—had been ever since he’d slipped below the border to arrest me in Jorge Archuleta’s cantina.

  I paused beside the upper pool, where Davenport had finally crawled out of the water and was resting at the mere’s edge on his hands and knees. He looked green around the gills, for a fact, and I said, “If you’ve got to puke, don’t do it in the water.”

  The old man raised his head high enough to glare in my direction, but he was hurting too much to put a lot of heat into it.

  “I mean it,” I said. “We’ve all got to drink from that pool for the next few days.”

  He just waved me away, and I went. I didn’t feel like standing over him, watching out for him like some papa watching out for a toddler. He should have known better than to drink too much, too fast.

  I’ve already mentioned that the side cañon was narrow, no more than three feet across at its mouth—like a cleft hacked into the wall by a sharp ax. It was steep, too, and in the wet season you’d be wading runoff all the way to the top, a series of short waterfalls littered with small branches and other debris from upstream.

  The branches were still there, which I considered a good sign, since it seemed to indicate that nobody had been through there since last winter’s rains, looking for firewood, but the stream was barely ankle-deep and no more than a foot across.

  I climbed swiftly, stepping over what jams I could, pausing to clear away those I didn’t think the horses could easily jump because of the slick stone bed. It was here, too, that Del began to fully appreciate the Yaqui name for the place. The scurrying claws of the brightly banded geckos and smaller whiptails sounded like the rustling of old newspapers on every side. I saw several dozen slipping into the litter along the stream bed, and figured we’d both be lucky if we reached the top without some little spine-backed reptile dropping down on top of us. I hadn’t seen any of the small creatures in the main cañon, but figured that would change once they became used to our presence there. Give it a day or two, and they’d start creeping back, curious as cats.

  Del stayed close behind me all the way, and I could tell from the way his bloodshot eyes were darting that he was growing more and more uneasy the farther in we ventured. He probably thought it was because of the tight confines of the fissure and the vulnerability of our position in case of an attack, but I figured it was something else, and I’m not talking about Yaqui Indians or skittering lizards. I didn’t say anything until we reached the top, though.

  After fifteen minutes or so we came out in a box cañon maybe a quarter of a mile long and a hundred yards across. The stream spilled from a tangle of broken rocks at the far end of a grassy meadow, forming a series of shallow pools along the length of the cañon before flowing into the narrow slot to the lower cañon. There were trees in here, feather-leafed mesquite and alders growing along the stream’s banks. The grass was green and lush and belly-h
igh to a tall horse. I didn’t see any evidence that it had been grazed in a long time, maybe a year or more.

  It didn’t take Del long to spy the object of his uneasiness. He jerked to a stop and started to shoulder his rifle, then uncertainly lowered it. “What the Christ!” he grunted.

  I was staring at it, too, an ancient pictograph painted high on the cañon’s south wall. Part bird and part man, it gave off an air of nearly palpable malevolence. There were smaller drawings around it, and more on the opposite wall, but none that commanded our attention like the predatorial demeanor of the ancient Thunderbird.

  “I don’t know his name,” I said softly, almost reverently. “The Yaquis call him the big bird from Otam Kawi, that used to eat the people of their villages until he was killed. Now he guards the path to the other side. Or this path, at any rate.”

  “The other side of what?”

  “Life, death. Your choice, I guess.”

  “With something like that guarding the entrance to hell, it’s no wonder everyone’s afraid to die.”

  “I didn’t say he guarded the entrance to hell. I said he watched over one of the paths to the other side.”

  “The redskin’s path, you mean? It sure as shit ain’t guarding the entrance to our heaven. Not some heathen symbol like that.”

  I glanced at him wonderingly. “You prefer Saint Peter and pearly gates watching over your entrance, Del?”

  “Don’t make fun of what you don’t know,” he replied stonily.

  I shrugged and turned away. With everything else going on, I didn’t see a need to drag religion into the fray. “Well, whoever he is, he can watch over our horses while we’re here.”

  “There ain’t no other way out?”

  “Nope. I’ve never seen antelope or mustangs down here, either, although that’s probably because they’d have to come in through the slot to reach it.” I nodded toward the cliffs on the north side of the cañon, more broken than those to the south. “I’ve seen desert bighorns up there, but never down here. I don’t know if they can’t reach the floor, or if your ol’ buddy from Otam Kawi keeps them away.”