Black Apache

by Clay Fisher

  Again suffice it, however, that Flicker and Kaytennae swore to us that they were “back there.” It is to be believed, amigos, that this silent stalk of nearly seven hundred torturous miles put more fray to our poor nerves than any amount of the predicted harassment of Yaqui “buffalo wolves” herding us by cutting down our strays.

  The secret was of course that Santiago wanted the gold. It happened that he herded us more to protect us—and our map!—than to decimate us.

  Our other fear, that of the savage Tepehuane, proved equally as delayed. We had seen not one Indian of that reputedly fierce band who, again as the legend went, were the bronze guardians of all Catholic-stolen gold mines in Mother Mexico. That is to say, of that part of Mexico lying north of Zacatecas and south of Sonora and Chihuahua. Even so, and in the same way that the invisible broncos lobos of Pretty Boy haunted us to our final campfire, so, too, did the unseen Tepehuane Indians stand increasing guard of our presence in their forbidden land.

  As we made camp that night below Mount Huehuento, we were all in a state of apprehension compounded by weariness and a growing fear of the unknown. One could feel the ghosts of the Spanish and Indian past. They were all about our fire. Just out there beyond the light of its flames, waiting. Was it revenge they sought? Justice? Some accounting for the crimes of Cortez?

  We did not know.

  One must know that ghosts cannot leave footprints. And the footprints that Flicker and Kaytennae and Packrat found next morning out beyond our fire most assuredly must have been those of Tepehuane Indians. Yet we had not seen those Indians. And did not see them now in the sunlight.

  As a priest, I had one explanation for this strangeness which I did not voice to my comrades: Those Tepehaunes out there in the dark may have been very old, may have been even two hundred years old, as was El Naranjal itself. They may have been the same Tepehuane Indians who slaved in the torchlit pits and abysses of the Spanish mines, burrowing out the golden metal that made their whipmasters wealthy beyond the dreams even of Don Hernán and his Conquistadores—those rapers of my red ancestors who confessed to the Aztecs that they were sick with the disease that only gold might cure.

  Ghost guards for ghostly gold?

  A priest would never deny such things. He would only clutch his cruz a bit more tightly and be ready to use it in exorcism of bronze avengers from the dark past.

  But Flicker cheered us over the breakfast fire and said that this day we would go up the mighty Huehuento and, from its snowy loft, draw our course for the land of El Naranjal.

  “Hombres, mujeres, compañeros,” he said, “no hay tiempo que perder, there is no time to waste. Vamos!”

  We climbed the mountain by the old mule trail that Kaytennae somehow knew was there. From a place on the shoulder of the vast peak, Flicker made his calculations from consultation with Kaytennae’s memory of the Apache directions. We set out in a northwesterly path, a course that would take us more toward Culiacán than Mazatlán and would bring us in any event to the tropic jungles and vast barrancas—yawning chasms—of that strange land.

  The path must be recounted for future legend-seekers.

  In three days, following a trail as faint in places as milkweed hair, we came into this canyon jungle country. We could scarce believe that Kaytennae would so many times lose but always refind the ancient roadway committed to him by memory alone from the old Nednhi Apache keeper of the secret. There was something ethereal about the young American Chiricahua’s performance. We all felt more powerfully even than we did when high on El Huehuento the mystic and frightening “something” that was in the very air.

  We went on. The nature of the terrain was that of a barranca-cut wilderness where frequent rages of flood-water washed away entire mine dumps and caved in the tunnels behind such tailings of the gold and silver ore. Even whole sections of the ancient trail itself had been undercut by barranca water and had been reclaimed over its dislodged surface by the verdant jungle (so near the mighty Pacific Sea) that seemed to grow almost while the canyon slides were still moving. How in the name of the great God might we ever find least trace of El Naranjal in such a place?

  Well, the answer was in part Kaytennae’s uncanny ability to smell out the renewal of the trail beyond these monstrous disturbances of the old land—of the way that it lay two and more centuries gone, when the Franciscans were there. There was also some help, I blush to say it, from my trained priest’s mind and its sharp eye for history’s footnotes.

  In this regard, our Apache guide’s instincts and tribal memory were virtually useless. Even Flicker was on the point, that fifth day of terrible travel through the jungled canyons, of giving up. The trail had vanished totally, and we were now convinced that the instructions of the legend, both Apachean and Franciscan, were false, perhaps deliberately so. But then it was that Father Nunez saw the rock.

  I had crept off to one side of the halted company to sneak the last dram of encouragement from my many times refilled hollow Bible. I was about to drain the flask when I saw something on the rock face of the barranca wall just beyond my resting rock. Espíritu Santo! What was this?

  I went to the place, but three paces distant, brushing aside the superficial moss and lichened growth that covered what I thought to have seen on the face of the barranca wall. Ah! Cristo dulce! Yes, there it was, the road-sign rock of the Franciscan legend: the rock! And, upon its oblong man-hewn surface, there was an unmistakable cruz of the church, rendered in the equally identifiable Franciscan style of Far Eastern orthodox origins. And more, before God. Beneath the cross were words cut into the oblong stone in a manner to absolutely determine the nature of this marker: It was an ancient directional sign posted by the Department of Roads, over two hundred years ago.

  It appeared thusly to my incredulous eye:

  Departmento de Caminos

  Camino a las

  minas de Arco

  y Naranjal

  AD

  1673

  Trying to be calm, I understood that I was gazing at a sign put up by the Mexican Department of Public Thoroughfares, which sign read, “Road to the mines of Arco and Naranjal.” Por Jesús y María, this was the true way to the treasure of my order. For one of the persistent anchors of the legend in Franciscan accounting was that El Naranjal lay nearby another great mine, the Juana Arco—the Joan of Arc—abbreviated for stone carving into ARCO.

  My mind was not in this instant so much boggled as bedazzled.

  I let out a great chillido, a screech or scream of superhuman kind, for Flicker to come running. “Nombre Dios, hombre, I have found it. Aquí, aquí—!”

  Not alone black Flicker but all the others charged up through the thick barranca bottom growth.

  “By God, padre,” the big Negro said, deep voice stirred to a growl of excitement, “you have stuck your thumb in the real pie this time. You can pull out a plum and call yourself a good boy.”

  “Gracias, jefe de soldados,” I saluted him. “God has only selected me. It means He is with us.”

  But was He?

  We went on, utterly restored of energy and the hunger for gold now. All about us the jungle thickened. Everywhere we saw the birds and beastlings of the land. On all sides of us flashed the startling colors of the gorgeous imperial woodpecker. Its cries echoed from as far as a mile distant, seeming directly to hand. Finches, parakeets, small great-billed true parrots, even, were seen. The barranca constantly deepened.

  Late in the twilight of that day we heard the thunder of rushing water. It seemed the very walls of the canyon shook about us. “Far enough,” Flicker said. “We camp here tonight.” He paused, staring with the rest of us into the gathering gloom and toward the roaring of the nearby—yet unseen—river. “We may be here,” he said softly. “The sun tomorrow could show us Rio Naranjas.”

  All of us were too whelmed over by the darkness and the power of the past to answer him.
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  We slept little that night.

  41

  RÍO DE LAS NARANJAS

  We were all up and huddled to the fire before the sun came. “Did you hear anything last night?” Flicker asked us.

  “Some wolves howling,” Kaytennae answered him. “Only that.”

  Flicker grimaced, nodding. “Doesn’t that say a peculiar thing to you, cousin?”

  “What is that, Mirlo?”

  “There are no wolves that we have seen in this barranca country.”

  I interrupted. “What are you saying?”

  “The Yaqui have caught up to us,” Flicker replied.

  “Santa! How could that be?” I asked. “We ourselves cannot find even our own trail five minutes after we have made it.”

  “Could be you’re right.” Flicker conceded the point, as anxious as any of us to be off to where the strange river roared. “Everybody look sharp today. Holler if you see a wolf—a real one. Let’s go.”

  “I don’t know.” Kaytennae hesitated. “We have seen only foxes and a few coyotes, far off. Nothing down in this barranca. What would wolves hunt here?”

  “Us,” Flicker answered him succinctly. “Vamos, amigos.”

  We went then rapidly around where the barranca turned abruptly inland, to our right, as we went northerly. There before our astounded gazes, a second barranca, enormously greater than the one we followed, entered from the east. Where it joined our barranca, the combined chasm angled again to the left, westerly, and so to the Pacific Sea. Down this new cleft roared the stream that came out of the great dark canyon we saw yawning before us. None of us could speak, only gape and stare.

  It was Kaytennae’s moment.

  The slender Apache, sweeping his bronze arm toward the issuance of the water from the towering cliffs, announced a single name into our silence.

  “Rio Naranjas,” he said.

  And the inward sucking of our breaths sounded like the hissing of human snakes.

  Flicker recovered first.

  “Wait,” he said. “If that’s River of the Oranges, where’s the trail? There’s no road going into that chasm, friends. Look at those rock walls. Right up from water’s tide. Sheer. And they rise a mile. No break in the first thousand feet that a cliff-darter could build a nest on. It’s black as the pit in there.” He pointed, as dramatically as had our Apache guide, into the yawning maw of the river’s canyon. “And God alone knows where that pit leads to. Naranjal, you say, Kite? You will have to prove it to me.”

  Naturally, our letdown of the spirits was considerable. What Flicker had pointed out was indisputable: No human thing could enter the black canyon and live. Not from this barranca bottom that Kaytennae’s legend and my discovered roadway sign said was the trail to El Naranjal. In any and certain event, it seemed our grand expedition and great expectations were both come to road’s ending, so near and yet so far from the legendary orange grove and its Mina del Naranjal.

  As I mourned, Kaytennae did not.

  His dark eyes had never ceased their search of the inland canyon and its rushing green tide of clear mountain water that thundered opposite our halting sight.

  “Mira, hombre!” he cried suddenly to Robert Flicker. “Naranjas, naranjas—!”

  Not alone black Flicker, but all of us weary comrades of the ended march to Nunez’s dream, glanced resignedly across the waters. Instantly, our resignation vanished. Our tired bodies held the strength of youth. Our defeated spirits arose in flight once more.

  Three round and golden globes had bobbed out of the black canyon on its flooding tide, and they eddied now in the backwash pool of the pebbled and rocky beach before us.

  Milagro de Dios.

  Those were fresh and fragrant oranges bobbing in the eddy at our feet.

  Kaytennae was right; that was Ghost Canyon yonder, and he had found the River of the Oranges.

  42

  BLOWUP IN NORTH BARRANCA

  “The map, padre,” Flicker commanded me.

  I gave it over to him. We were regathered at our breakfast fire around the turn of North Barranca from the issuance of Rio Naranjas.

  Studying the wrinkled paper, the Negro once sergeant of the United States Cavalry frowned. He put the document on the earth at our feet and copied from its lines a much larger map in that same fireside earth. Suddenly, we saw him brighten.

  “I’ve got it, padre!” he cried. “Look here where I’ve expanded it.” I leaned to peer at the larger map in the dirt, and the others pressed in. “You see?”

  “No, it looks like the scratchings of the mission chickens in my garden at Casas Grandes. What do you see there, Flicker?”

  “When the Franciscans built this road,” he answered me, the gold fever burning within him, “it was to lead on whoever might come this far looking for El Naranjal. Then they would be left ‘northed,’ just as we were, staring up yonder hell-deep canyon, convinced that the road to the orange grove had once led through it but had since been washed away.” He looked at me, dark face afire. “Well, bullshit, padre,” he said. “It never did lead in there.”

  He glanced toward the higher walls of North Barranca.

  “It’s up there somewhere,” he said. “And I think, by Christ, that I know where. Padre, remember back yonder where you found the stone sign? There was a side barranca coming in from the east.”

  “The east!” I exclaimed. “The direction of El Naranjal.”

  “Exactly,” Flicker nodded. “That was the road to the orange grove.”

  My heart bounded, then settled. “Impossible,” I lamented, recalling the jungle-choke of the side-cleft. “An ordinary dog could not find passage of that eastern barranca.”

  “You’re wrong, padre. That’s why the Franciscans put that damn road sign just where they did. They alone knew what it really meant: Turn right here for El Naranjal. It’s the other mine, the Juana Arco, that must lie on down North Barranca.”

  The vision of possibility in the black soldier’s reasoning rekindled the fever in me, also. “What must we do, Flicker?” I said, trembling.

  “What we must do,” Flicker replied, “is get our people and pack mules up that damn vised-in slot, back yonder. Start praying, Nunez. We will need the extra shove.” He whirled from me to Kaytennae. “Let’s go, Kite!” he shouted. “Vamos al Naranjal!”

  But the Apache guide did not go.

  Instead, he held up a hand, staring over our heads.

  “There is a problem,” he said quietly.

  “The Yaquis,” Flicker groaned, not even looking up.

  Too late, we all wheeled from our map-drawing and grand planning at the breakfast fire in big North Barranca. Too late, we saw what Kaytennae had discovered and Flicker guessed at so intuitively.

  The broncos lobos, a filthy company of twenty in their besoiled rurale uniforms, stood up-barranca not fifty feet from us. A rock rat could not have squeezed past them to come again to the stone sign and the true road to El Naranjal.

  Yet a worse sight stood in the van of the Yaqui wolf pack.

  The gaunt figure in torn, trail-fouled coat and gray-striped trousers of the sheriff of Tombstone, Arizona, removed his wide-brimmed hat. He swept it in a gallant bow that bent his belly to the horn of his double-cinched Texan saddle. The gesture went to our women, where they had gathered with Stella Allison resolutely to their fore.

  “Good day, ladies,” said the remembered flat and deadly voice of Santiago Kifer. “I trust that we are not too late for coffee.” His eyes ran past the women. “Gentlemen,” he added, hatred writhing the leaden pockmarks of the shotgun pellets buried in his face, “would you be so kind as to join me? I believe we have some business to arrange.”

  We all looked to Robert Flicker.

  Our black chief of soldiers permitted the stillness to extend itself.

  Think of our situation, now. />
  Even though the enemy outnumbered us four to one, they could not ignore our armament. But for Zorra and myself, each of our company was heavily armed and must be considered quite dangerous. Five of us—Flicker, Kaytennae, Packrat, Young Grass, and Charra Baca—were of Apache quality. The sixth, Stella Allison, would be the unquestionable superior of most frontiersmen with rifle, knife, or pistol. It was, in the classic sense of the monte, a Mexican standoff. Kifer knew it; Flicker knew it; we all knew it.

  The Negro deserter was the first to break.

  I, Nunez, could not believe it.

  Flicker afraid?

  It was impossible, yet there he was palming the pinks of his black hands to Heaven, smiling in defeat at Santiago Kifer, and betraying us.

  “Well, now, friend scalper,” I heard him say, “we do have a map for sale, and you, I believe, possess title to an important roadway, passage of which we require to reach our real estate.”

  “True enough,” said Santiago Kifer, and he held there.

  Again Flicker let the silence multiply itself.

  As he did, I studied the remarkable twain of sub-commanders flanking Kifer. Niño Bonito, the beautiful child, we already knew of course. But this was the first time to see the fabled Monkey Woman, Dios forbid the sight. Not to squander charity, she appeared to be a human simian. A female ape in the trappings of a Yaqui Indian squaw. She looked even to sit her runted pony like some dressed monkey. Indeed, in the uneasy moment I had to examine her that morning in North Barranca, she was engaged in picking fat gray lice from her rancid hair and cracking them in her teeth. To note that the creature then munched on the unspeakable body vermin—as one might on seed of sunflower or pine nut—seemed but expectable. Qué mujer mugrienta, what a vile and greasy woman. And worse, God save Nunez.

  At the very last, catching my eyes remarking her, she, in fair return, examined me. Doing so, she clapped her monkey’s paws in delight and barked something in Yaqui to son Santiago. I could not translate her speech, but Kifer could.