Leaving Yuma

by Michael Zimmer

  Leaving the Cañon Where the Small Lizards Run, we rode more east than south for several hours, winding through narrow, rock-strewn cañons and over sharp-spined ridges, their flanks thick with cactus and scrub. Around midmorning the land began to level off into gently rolling hills. There was more grass, too, although I’d hate to think how many acres it would take to feed a single head of beef over the summer.

  I wasn’t following any particular trail that day, and never did when I could help it. Not even approaching the few water holes that dotted that harsh desert environment. Even Yaqui Springs had more than one approach if you knew where to look. Despite our meandering route, I wasn’t worried about becoming lost, not with the Sierra Verdes rising so tall on the southern horizon. I’d spotted our destination over the mountains that morning, a low hogback ridge with twin knobs protruding from either side like the stubby horns of a two-year-old steer. The locals called it the Devil’s Crown, and considered it an unlucky peak to hunt on; it was just a landmark to me, and I thanked my lucky stars that the locals were so superstitious.

  The sun was just past its apex when we came to a wide, flat valley—our last barrier to the distant mountains. I pulled up, then leaned forward in my saddle to ease my sweating, aching shanks. At my side, Luis was peering about curiously.

  “There is water here?” he asked.

  “None that I’ve ever found. That’s why there aren’t any ranches or villages out this way.”

  “And the sierras?”

  “Another three hours’ ride, but we won’t attempt it in this heat.”

  There was some tall chaparral off to the west. Its shade would be minimal, but better than sitting out in the open, and a lot easier on the stock than trying to cross those flats in that heat. There’s a reason the Mexicans believe in the siesta, and it’s a practical one. Spend a day or two out in that hot Sonoran sun and you won’t have to ask what it is.

  We rode into the chaparral and dismounted. Slipping Del’s binoculars from their case, I moved to the very edge of the flats for a closer look at the sprawling wasteland. Heat waves shimmered like burlesque dancers above the earth’s surface, creating a surreal landscape where rocks seemed to float ten feet above the ground, and a trotting coyote appeared as tall as a man, its tongue lolling as it disappeared into the scrub.

  To be on the safe side, I tracked backward with my glasses from where I’d seen the coyote, concerned that something might have disturbed it from its den during this hottest part of the day, but the llano appeared uninhabited. It wasn’t, of course. Even the harshest environments can support all manner of life, but it was the human kind I was searching for, and I didn’t see any sign of it.

  Slipping back into the chaparral, I said, “Let’s pull the headstalls and loosen the cinches, but leave them saddled.”

  Luis nodded. He didn’t ask about the pack mule. Like me, he would have preferred to ease the animal’s burden, but we both knew that loosening the packs would invite disaster as soon as the brawny jack shifted his weight, or hooked a rope on a branch. And removing his load altogether would leave us too vulnerable if bandits or Indians showed up.

  “I’ll take the first watch,” I volunteered, an offer Luis readily accepted.

  Taking my rifle, a canteen, and Del’s binoculars, I left the chaparral and made my way to the top of a nearby hill, where I’d have a better view of the terrain. Coming to a patch of bare, flinty soil surrounded by …

  Session Nine

  I can see now why you warned me about your recording machine coming to the end of a disk. It makes a hell of a racket, and I don’t doubt that others have complained about it. I don’t know how many people you’ve interviewed for this writing project the government is sponsoring, but, if they’re like me, they were probably pretty deep into their memories when the damned thing squawked like that.

  Anyway, getting back to my story, we were still about twelve hours shy of Sabana when we came to some chaparral at the edge of a wide flat and decided to hunker down for a while. We did that for two reasons. One was because it was hotter than the bottom of a skillet out there, and the other was that I didn’t want to cross that open plain during the daylight hours, when we might be spotted from the Sierra Verdes. I’m not saying there was anyone up there to see us, but those are the kinds of precautions you learned to take in my old line of work.

  Just sitting alone in the desert like that can get a man pondering, and that’s what I was doing—thinking about my future and what I wanted to do with it. I was remembering how I’d gotten into the business, and from there it was just a hop and a skip to the conversation Spence and I had shared that first evening in Moralos, about Geronimo’s capture and exile to Florida.

  I hadn’t mentioned this to Spence at the time, but seeing old Geronimo and his warriors outside of Holbrook that day was what inspired me to jump my own reservation—so to speak. I don’t think we’ve discussed this yet, and maybe it isn’t “germane to the plot,” as the literates say, but I’m going to tell it anyway, because if it wasn’t for Geronimo, I’d likely never have become a trader, or spent three years living among the Yaquis, which is what eventually led me to the Cañon Where the Small Lizards Run.

  I wasn’t born into an adventurous family, although I was hatched in the Prescott Valley of Arizona Territory in 1875, which I guess is somewhat better than a Connecticut farm for wild and woolly—no offense meant, in case someone from rural Connecticut ever listens to this recording, or reads a transcript of it.

  Anyway, I was born near Prescott in 1875, but my family moved to Holbrook during the winter of 1882 or 1883 to open a grocery there on Central Street. I’ll confess it was a shock for me to leave what is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful spots in all of Arizona for the flat and nearly featureless landscape surrounding Holbrook, a railroad town on the Little Colorado River and a place of perpetual wind and dust and, for some, I think, hopelessness, although it was all new when we got there, the tracks only recently laid.

  It was the newness that attracted Pa. He felt there was money to be made in such a raw community, although I don’t think they ever did as well there as they had in the valley. New ain’t always better, if you ask me.

  What made Holbrook even more miserable for me was a lack of friends my own age to run around with. Hot and lonely, it wasn’t long before I began to resent the town and its people. I dreamed nightly of escaping its isolation, my goal in those tender years of my youth to become an army scout like Al Sieber or Tom Horn. I envisioned myself leading cavalry charges against renegade Apaches and outlaws alike, wearing fringed buckskins and wide-brimmed sombreros, instead of the cheap cloth caps my parents forced on me.

  Those scouts were my heroes, and their exploits, brought to life in newspaper articles and cheap dime novels, provided the illusional reality I clung to when the years of stocking shelves and keeping books stretching before me became too much to bear.

  And then, when I was eleven, Geronimo surrendered, and my dreams of heroism turned to ash. Barely a decade into life, and I was already a has-been, a relic of another age.

  You’re smiling, and the way things turned out, I know why, but you’ve got to remember that I was just a starry-eyed kid at the time. Still, I think I knew even then that I wasn’t cut from the same bolt of cloth as my pa. I yearned for something more—adventure and danger, fast horses and fancy guns. Anything except a damned clerk’s apron.

  The Apaches had been the last hold-outs of the Indian Wars. The Sioux, the Cheyennes, and the Comanches had already succumbed to white encroachment, and manifest destiny had smothered the rest of the nation under a mantle of civilization. It was as if something wild and free within me was boarding that train to Florida, leaving behind a kid’s spirit, high, dry, and windblown.

  It’s selfish and probably insulting, although I don’t mean for it to be, but when I got a look at Geronimo and his men on the day the army loaded th
em into railroad cars for the eastern seaboard, the expressions on their faces jelled with the feelings in my soul. For months afterward, when I wasn’t in school or delivering groceries, I roamed the streets of Holbrook in a desolate frame of mind. And then, in the spring of 1887, the Apache Kid cut loose on a bloody rampage that threw the entire territory into a frenzy of terror.

  In looking back, I have my doubts about a lot of the atrocities we laid at the Kid’s feet, but at the time we were all quick to blame just about any misdeed—including the theft of Mrs. Qualtmeyer’s raisin pie from her windowsill—on the nefarious murderer and his gang of wildcats, which rumor estimated in excess of thirty blood-crazed cutthroats. (Editor’s note: Haskay-bay-nay-ntayl, otherwise known as the Apache Kid, was born circa 1860, and may have died in either 1894 or the 1930s, depending upon the source used; his “war party” during his 1887 flight from military authority never numbered more than four followers, all of them ex-scouts like himself.)

  By early summer, the army had several detachments of the Fourth Cavalry in the field to hunt him down, and I thought, Hot damn, Dolly, here’s my chance!

  It was a hot June night just after reading about one of the Kid’s alleged crimes—I’m calling it “alleged” now, but figured it for a fact at the time—that I packed a cheap pasteboard suitcase with a few clothes I thought suitable for a scout’s life, snuck my pa’s little .32 pump-action rifle and a box of cartridges from the closet, and slipped out my bedroom window about thirty minutes before the 2:00 a.m. train to Winslow was scheduled to arrive.

  I’d been watching trains roll in and out of Holbrook for several years by then—that being about the only entertainment a guy too young to visit a saloon or dance hall had in that dreary environment—and already had my escape planned. I’d hide in the shadows west of the depot, behind a pile of crossties that had been sitting there since the first rail had been laid through town in 1882, and, when the train pulled out for Winslow, I’d make a dash for one of the cars toward the middle of the line and climb aboard.

  I figured once I got away from Holbrook—meaning out of reach of my ma and pa and maybe the sheriff—I’d head south to Fort Bowie. Don’t get me wrong, I never thought they’d hire a kid like me for anything, let alone a frontier scout, but I was determined to make my presence known, to hang around the men who were scouts, and to learn everything I could about the craft of guiding men in the field. Having just turned twelve years of age a few weeks earlier and still so wet behind the ears it’s a wonder I didn’t drown whenever I laid down, I’d decided that was the quickest way to earn my feathers.

  As you might imagine, nothing worked out as I’d planned. Oh, I made good on my departure from Holbrook, and didn’t go back again until I was eighteen, but I never scouted for the army, or even made it to Fort Bowie.

  I was in Phoenix when I ran out of money and had to start sleeping in barns or under porches, which I don’t recommend in that country on account of snakes and scorpions and such. I finally got a job, and it probably won’t surprise you to learn that it was delivering groceries. The pay was one dollar a week, but the position included two meals a day and a place to sleep at night—granted, it was just a few blankets in a corner of the storeroom, but better than sharing cold dirt with a garter snake looking for something warm to curl up against.

  Providing food in lieu of a higher wage may have seemed like a good idea to the pot-bellied Dutchman who ran the place, but I believe he soon came to regret the decision. A kid my age can pack away a fair amount of grub after a full day of running errands, and it wasn’t long before the old skinflint wanted to put a cap on the amount of food I could have at a meal. Fortunately his wife was more kind-hearted.

  Although I ate good in Phoenix, I was never really comfortable there. It always felt too close to Holbrook, so after a couple of months I drew my wages—less than two dollars after personal expenses had been deducted—and hitched a ride south with a muleskinner named Henry Toomes.

  Henry was an independent, meaning he contracted for his own loads that he’d haul just about anywhere a man wanted to pay to have his merchandise delivered. He drove one of those twenty-mule jerkline rigs, with two huge freighters and a water wagon hitched on back. The reason Henry consented to let me tag along was because his regular swamper had broken an arm in a saloon brawl, and he needed a man to handle the brakes on the downgrades, and to help take care of his mules in the morning and evening. I guess I did OK, because, when we got to Gila Bend, he offered me a temporary job until his regular swamper was mended.

  This, finally, was the kind of work I’d been dreaming of. It wasn’t scouting, but it was a close … well, a close fifth or sixth, I guess. Mostly it was outside, where both of us went armed, and there was the threat of real danger around every bend. Man, I loved it, and there wasn’t anyone in Arizona more tickled than I was when we returned to Phoenix a couple of months later to discover that Henry’s old swamper had taken a job cooking for a cattle ranch up near Flagstaff.

  I had some concerns that one of Henry’s contracts might eventually take us to Holbrook, but they never did. I stayed with him through my fourteenth birthday, and saw a good bit of southern Arizona and northern Mexico in that time. We even got down to Hermosillo once or twice. I’ll tell you, it was grand ol’ time, but it didn’t last. We were coming back from Hermosillo, just outside of Magdalena and on our way to Nogales, when a war party of Yaquis jumped us as we were breaking camp one morning. I got a club upside my skull early in the fray, and didn’t see what happened to Henry or his mules, but I heard about it afterward. Listening to the gory details and the eager way in which it was told, I was glad I’d been knocked senseless for the few hours it had taken them to kill poor old Henry Toomes.

  Back then, the Yaquis of the Dead Horse clan were a cruel people, and torturing their enemies meant a lot to them. Like a lot of other tribes, it was almost a part of their religion, as if they took spiritual strength from watching a strong man die bravely. I’m not going to relate the methods they used to extract Henry’s powerful spirit, but they must have been highly satisfied with the results by the time they were finished. It’s always sobered me to realize how lucky I had been to have my own life spared. It could have easily gone the other way, and I probably would’ve died right there alongside of Henry if I hadn’t been knocked unconscious during those first minutes of the attack.

  Old Toad, whom I’ve already mentioned, took me in. His Yaqui name was a stretch to pronounce, and I won’t even try to spell it, but it meant something like the Wise Toad That Lives Along the Big River, which to the Dead Horses, meant the Río Concepción.

  I don’t know if it was a coincidence that the wily old butcher so closely resembled his namesake that it could almost make you laugh to think about it. Nor do I mean to imply that the Toad was anything like a father to me. Despite the fact that he had a son about my own age, I don’t believe that cold-blooded prodigy of Satan’s loins had a shot glass worth of compassion in his whole body. Not for his own son, and sure as blazes not for some peach-fuzzed roustabout plucked from a freighter’s camp …

  I was still thinking about Toad and my years among the Yaquis when I spotted Luis coming through the chaparral. He paused briefly at the edge of the scrub, then came up to where I was sitting, keeping low to the ground like the smart man he was. Dropping down beside me, he said, “Madre, it is hot, my friend. Like trying to sleep in an oven.”

  “It’ll be no cooler up here.”

  He nodded agreement. “True, but I thought I would take over for a while.” He glanced at the sky. “When do you wish to leave?”

  “Sundown, I reckon. If the trail I want to use over the Verdes is still open, we ought to be in Sabana before dawn.”

  “A couple more hours, then?”

  “Yeah, but wake me before that.”

  “Sí, I will.”

  Staying low, as Luis had coming up, I returned to the chaparr
al where my bay and the two mules stood listlessly. Despite the broiling warmth, I managed to doze a little, yet came instantly awake when I heard the clatter of branches from behind me. I rolled onto my stomach while pulling the Savage to my shoulder, but it was only Luis, making his way through the thick brush to my side. He smiled when he saw my saturated shirt and the sweat dripping from my forehead.

  “I told you,” he said simply.

  “I believed you, too,” I replied, rising. The light was softening in the east, and the sun had already dropped below the western horizon. “Did you see anything?” I asked, and, when Luis shook his head, I said, “Let’s get started.”

  We paused again at the edge of the flats, and I took another few minutes to glass the land between us and the mountains. Not spying anything worrisome, I returned the binoculars to their case and nodded to Luis. We pushed out into the wide flat like skiffs cutting into the surf of a tawny ocean. Luis was keeping a tight lead on the pack mule, and I had my rifle across the saddle in front of me. The light drained from the sky as if tethered to the sun, and a cool breeze soon picked up. My shirt dried quickly and my flesh pimpled in the chill. Draping my reins around the bay’s saddle horn, I twisted in my seat to retrieve my coat from under my bedroll and pulled it on without stopping. At my side, Luis unfolded his frayed serape and draped it over his shoulders like a blanket.