Black Apache

by Clay Fisher

  “Oh, hell, reverend,” Crench said, “we don’t jail Mexes, we shoot ’em.”

  To which Deputy Belcher testified gravely, “Matter of record, padry. You’re the fust greaser been in here.”

  Taking evasive measure, I demanded forcefully to see the doomed black man who had asked for a priest. For answer, Belcher, who seemed senior to Crench, said he would need to talk to the marshal about that. This he did by turning to a closed door and bawling, “Karper, come out! We got us your mackerel snapper priest hyar!”

  The door flew open but no man emerged.

  From the oblong of brighter lamplight within the revealed office, a strident voice fell, however.

  “Damn you, Belcher,” it stated. “How many times must I tell you it’s Marshal Karper.”

  “Well, marshal, I reckon nobody knows better’n you that it ain’t easy to remember it.”

  “Ha, ha!” Deputy Crench guffawed in support. “It sure ain’t. Easier by a site to recollect otherwise!”

  The voice of the marshal of Tombstone came again in menace. It held itself in that thin control that madmen affect, which of course renders them so dangerous. When the voice paused in its quiet violence, the senior deputy said, “Sure enough, marshal. You want to see this runt Mex padry we brang in?”

  “No, the nigger wants to see him, you fool.”

  “He still in the pit? The nigger?”

  “No, I had to move him. The dog was at him too much.”

  “Where’s he at, then, the nigger?”

  “I’ve got him safe, don’t fret it. Just shove the padre in any cell you can. I got to get this thing figured out. That mob is set to batter in here any minute.”

  Belcher frowned into the oblong of light from the marshal’s office. “Thought you wanted them to bust in,” he said, “so’s you could feed them the nigger.”

  “Yeah,” Deputy Crench recalled. “You said that-away it wouldn’t matter the nigger had maybe recognized you.”

  “I didn’t say he had maybe recognized me; I said he gave me a funny look. It twinged me somehow.”

  “Funny looks don’t mean nothing,” Belcher frowned. “Nigger didn’t say anything, did he, marshal?”

  “No, not a word. No name, nothing. Wouldn’t talk.”

  “And you don’t recollect him? Not from nowhere?”

  “Never saw him before in my life. But it was funny, no matter. Like he’d never seen me either, but knew me anyhow.”

  “Well, then, play it safe,” Belcher said. “Let them drunks out in Allen Street have the black bastard. We got too good a thing going hyar, marshal. Ain’t nobody ever going to think to look for you wearing a lawman’s star.” Belcher tightened his grip on my arm. “What you want did with the padry? Hadn’t we oughter quieten him, too?”

  The deputies could see the man to whom they spoke, but I could not. Yet I felt a deepening fear of that voice, a fear out of the past. Who was this lawman in the inner office who was afraid that Flicker might know who he truly was? And whose cold voice stirred memories of terror in me?

  Dear God, could it be the one ghoul of hell with cause to remember both the black deserter and myself?

  I rejected the possibility.

  Yet the voice twanging on in converse with the deputies would not permit me the escape.

  It held an undeniable Mexican accent to its Tejano nasals. I was a master of tongues. No man could deceive Nunez on the dialects of the monte. This marshal, whatever his Texas speech or even breeding, had been born in Mexico.

  I thought it again. My God it could be him. Still, it must not be. He was dead, and ten years dead.

  Deputy Belcher leaned farther into the opening of the office door. “All right, marshal,” he said, “but you ain’t said what you want did with the padry here. Not sensible, you ain’t. Shoving him in one of these front cells won’t shut his mouth, nor his eyes neither.”

  “I got to think,” Marshal Karper snapped.

  “How about putting him in with the dog?” Belcher suggested. “Mebbe he could faith heal the mutt.”

  Something bothered me in this dog proposal. What was a dog doing in the prison’s punishment cell? Here was a second mention of the dog business, and I didn’t care for it.

  Crench helped me out. “Aw, you couldn’t do thet,” he objected. “Put the little feller in the pit? With that there slobber-sick dog? Thet ain’t funny, Belcher.”

  “No, by God, it isn’t!” cried Marshal Karper. “But it’s a hell of an idea. Pitch him in there, Belcher. And for Christ’s sake don’t let the goddamn dog slip out past you. Doc Flett hasn’t been over to see him yet. Happen he gets loose on the camp, and—well, just watch sharp you don’t let him out. Hydraphoby isn’t something you want spread around.”

  “Maybe he ain’t got it,” Crench offered helpfully.

  “You fool,” answered Karper. “That’s why I got Doc coming over to look at him. I’m not going to blow his head off ’fore I know he’s rabbied for certain.”

  “Hell no,” Belcher agreed. “He’s the best dog we done ever had to warn the gang of strangers or thieves.”

  “Yeah,” said honest brute-man Crench. “We didn’t never lose a single sack of hair with old Loafer guarding our fire. And him a cripple like you, reverend.”

  Karper’s voice raged at the fool to be still, but it was too late. Hair? Sacks of hair? Quita! These were scalpers parading as lawmen in Tombstone, Arizona. And not just any scalpers. God save me; it was him in there beyond the oblong of brighter lamplight.

  But memory is a street upon which men walk both ways.

  As my mind went back, so did his in the office.

  I saw his shadow move in there. Then his voice came to me. “Padre?” he said, in his hard-accented Spanish of the monte. “Padre Jorobado?”

  It was the moment. I wrenched free of Deputy Belcher.

  “Yes,” I answered him. “The crippled priest of Casas Grandes. And that is you, Santiago. The bastard son of your bastard father.”

  He was coming to the office door now. I heard him moving. I saw the gaunt figure framed in the oblong of lamp shine made by the partially opened door. He was there, staring out at me. From some unknown well of forgotten courage, I drew a reckless draft of anger against him. Perhaps God spoke through me.

  “Damn your soul to eternal basting in the winds of hell, Santiago Kifer,” I said to him. “You need have no fear that the black man will disclose you. I, Nunez, will do it for him.”

  He was emerged from the lamp shine, then, standing over me in the outer corridor of the cells, menacing as the shade of Satan that he was. I marked the skeletal features. The disfigured face where Allison’s pistol ball had shot it partly away. The remnant of the right ear, mummified. The long black coat, the black string cravat, and the narrow-striped pantalones of American design did not cover the horror of my remembering. Nor did the star of pewter metal snagged on the flowered vestlet hold ought of decent meaning for me. This was no brave Arizona marshal, no duly employed mining camp officer of the law. I knew this harpy eagle of the monte. He was who he was.

  The devil eyes flamed at me. There was death in them. He knew I threatened his place here, perhaps his very life. He half drew the great pistol at his belt, and I believed he would sunder me with shot where I stood defying him. But he stayed the trigger’s pressure.

  The cells had come alive. The discussion of Crench and Belcher and the marshal’s harried answers had caught the attention of the brute fellow prisoners of the vanished Flicker. Caged or not, these were witnesses. To ignore them—after what they may have heard of my charge to the lawman they knew as Tombstone marshal Henry Karper—was not Santiago Kifer’s skulking way. He would kill me and still my tongue, yes. But not in front of witnesses whose number must contain camp citizens of good repute when sober. Kifer’s hand fell away from the Texas pistol.

&n
bsp; “Padre,” I heard him say, “my deputies brought you here for a noble purpose, to ease the last moments of one of your faith. I can’t let you in to see him now, for you are surely drunk, or daft, or both. I have not heard the name you call me, while my own good name is known from the Pecos Valley to San Diego. Henry Karper has a reputation beyond reproach. Ask these beauties back of the bars how many of them Henry Karper has sent to Yuma Prison!”

  There was an animal growling of hatred from the cells. Its nature affirmed what the marshal had said. These men, some of the more desperate of them, knew Henry Karper to be what Santiago Kifer said he was: a law officer of hard but certain repute in that abandoned land. Nonetheless, I was determined that this terrible mistake in a man’s true identity should not be continued where Alvar Nunez might yet shout I accuse! against him.

  Somewhere, somehow, in the intervening years, Kifer had changed himself in outward form. His air, his dress, even his crude speech of former times had been elevated. The alteration was amazing. The man was more than merely dangerous; he was a consummate artist of evil. But I knew him still—and he seemed to read my threatening thoughts.

  His instant solicitude for a poor priest of Casas Grandes was a masterstroke of mummery. “I will tell you what, good father,” he said to me, deliberately loud enough to reach the listening prisoners. “There’s a cot in the corner of my office. Come in and sleep it off, then we’ll talk.”

  He took my arm, but I whirled free of him to cry out to the pitiful wretches beyond to remember the name I had called this murderous masquerader—Santiago Kifer—and to bear it to the good people of the camp. “They will remember him,” I shouted. “They must; this man is not Marshal Henry Karper!”

  The prisoners shouted back angered, it seemed to me, but I could not be certain if in agreement or derision.

  “Take him,” snapped Kifer to Crench and Belcher, but again I managed to elude immediate silencing arrest.

  “Brave friends!” I cried once more to the prisoners. “Find and free the poor black man. He will tell you that I say the truth. This man is Santiago Kifer. He is own-son to Dutch John Kifer. Bear this news to the camp on your release. Announce it on every street corner. Advertise it in each cantina, each tent of fallen woman.”

  Kifer lunged for me and missed. My wrongly shaped spine gave me a spider’s deceiving speed of scuttle.

  “Goddamn it!” he hissed at the deputies. “Take him!”

  Crench and Belcher leaped for me. I went sideways as some tarantula in the robes of a Franciscan, another benefit of the humpen bones. The hulking deputies came together with a rattling crunch of their big bodies. I had an instant’s freedom remaining.

  “Bear my message to the people!” I exhorted the now shouting and threatening prisoners. “If you do, it will not be an innocent black man they rope upon that monstrous gibbet the devil built in Allen Street. It will be this one, this murderer who is not Henry Karper but Santiago Kifer, the Scalper of Sonora! Hang him high—!”

  Now my time was done. Kifer hurled the deputies aside with his enormous sinewed power. He had me like a poor crippled rat. One hairy paw sealed my mouth, the other gripped my habit at the nape. He was arage.

  “Fling open the pit!” he hissed at the stupefied deputies, keeping his voice in a white-faced whisper so that none of the cell-caged witnesses might hear. “Don’t you understand yet that this damned hunchback could get us all swung?”

  Crench and Belcher leaped belatedly for the door of the pit. This was a separate cell. It had no bars. Only a slab door similar to those of the animal pits beneath the Colosseum of Rome. The barrier, grating on rusted hinges, was wrenched back. Into its blind maw I was flung as a bag of shelled corn. The deputies slammed the door so forcibly and so close behind me that I was hurled by it against the far wall of the noisome hole.

  The impact dizzied me; for a moment my mind ranged away and I did not recall the condition of my danger.

  Then I heard it.

  It was a low slobbering growl, the most terrifying sound of a life’s experience on the frontier. The hoarseness of it, the fearful strangling in the throat, the unnatural croaking, all were classic. We saw too much of hydrophobia in my parroquia not to know the dread sound of it when manifested.

  Particularly in a sealed pit but five feet in circumference and airless as the crypt of Lazarus.

  My throat spasmed. The breath would not move within me. The carotid vessels of my neck swelled as to burst in rupture. It was sheer human terror.

  And then the brute thing licked me.

  13

  I FIND OUR WATCHGUARD

  When the dog licked me, my heart stopped.

  I knew the saliva of a rabid animal was as deadly as the bite itself. Even more, in that it might enter some tiny scratch or pinprick of the skin, causing later death to some poor wretch who imagined he would survive. Such things were not in the general knowledge of the times, of course. But it must be remembered that we Franciscans were the patron order of the animals of the earth. And so we knew much of them, as we did of medicine, thank God and Saint Francis.

  However, that is the calmness of memory.

  In the dread fact of the moment, I felt the animal’s fetid breath and drooling jaws come against my face. I remembered at the same time that past night on the mountain trail over the Dragoons. I winced again to the slash of the sharp branch that had laid open my cheek. The same cheek now laved by the mad creature’s slathering tongue.

  Fear almost broke my mind.

  But the Saint of Assisi was by my side. The teeth of the brute did not rend my flesh. The hoarse growl and strangulated breathing receded for a skipping of three heartbeats. In their place came a sound that lit the dungeon as by a candle to Saint Francis.

  The dog whined.

  And its frightened weight pressed against me there in the blindness of the pit, its paw sought and found my hand, and it whimpered again, pleadingly. I felt the movement of its tail and heard its weakened thumping on the earthen floor. God’s name, this dog was not crazed, except that he was driven so by hurt. Into my physician’s mind came the one possible condition that might simulate the terrible disease of hydrophobia.

  In writing of the symptomology centuries gone, Hippocrates had noted that the victim’s behavior was the same as if the animal had caught a bone in its throat which then caused its growl to issue with that hollow fearsomeness, that lobar hoarseness, so dreadly familiar to the physician experienced in the actual disease itself. Once this pronounced croaking is heard, death is the only and imminent end.

  The great physician of the island of Cos might have added, if indeed he did not: unless, of course, the poor brute did verily lodge a bone in its bedeviled throat.

  Gathering myself, I addressed the dog.

  “Friend Loafer,” I said to it, recalling the cognomen from outer mention, “be you of good faith, and do not bite me. You may yet be restored of life, as was Lazarus from among the rocks of Calvary.” I felt for the jaws and forced them carefully apart. “This is my hand I give you in trust. Use it well.”

  With that, I was down the agonized throat of the animal, and, the power of my order being with me, I found the obstruction with the last, desperate straining of my reaching fingertips. Hooking the object, I was able to turn it and bring it forth only because of a vast expelling urge by the animal itself. The big fang teeth raked my arm unavoidably. My blood mingled with that of the pitiful creature’s torn throat. But the gasp of its life flooding back into the wasted body was a fee greater than any ever paid ordained doctor.

  I threw both arms about Loafer and held him to my breast. He could not even whine now, so violated were the tissues of his gullet and voice box. But he could still speak to me. I heard clearly the grateful thumping of the tail, weakly spasmodic, yet, but telling Father Nunez that friend Loafer would live.

  And so would Father Nunez!

>   “Perro,” I said to him, “could I but thump my tail, its joy would outdo yours. Let us both pray.”

  The dog mumbled something from its tortured throat and relaxed its great head upon my shoulder. I cast up my eyes to the blackness above but do not recall what prayer I framed, if any. Sleep, the mother of all restorers, claimed us two travelers from afar.

  I do not know what thoughts Loafer dreamed of me.

  But I knew a fact of him before slumber drugged my weary bones and Morpheus eased my pain.

  Among the company manifest or list of members needed for the dangerous, distant journey to seek the gold of El Naranjal, I had found my dog to guard our camp.

  14

  A LIFE FOR A LIFE

  I must have dozed but briefly.

  When I awakened, it was to sounds of clamor beyond the oak-and-iron door of the pit. Where the light would not filter nor the air of life enter but tricklingly, it seemed the noises of the outer jail seeped into the pit alarmingly. At first, my companion and I shared a common wonderment, I am certain. The dog woofed and sniffed. The priest of Casas Grandes sniffed and all but woofed. What the devil? Were they at last hanging poor Flicker? Had the outer juzgada fallen? Was the mob within the gates? Would its frenzied members release the little cleric in the solitary-punishment dungeon? Or might I be permitted by oversight in the excitement to languish my life away in that foul pit? Quita!

  Well, I had the dog.

  I clung to the animal as if he presented some connection with life greater than my own. Loafer responded by burying his heavy snout beneath my arm. It was as if he didn’t care to listen. Or, even in that darkness, to see.

  But another sense would not so easily be covered.

  Suddenly, the dog was snorting like a frightened horse and snuffling at some alien odor that had come into our stale-aired hole. Then even I could smell it.

  Smoke.

  Dear Jesus, the idiotas had fired the jail!