Black Apache

by Clay Fisher

  “I can still pray,” I reminded him stiffly.

  “Yes, but who listens?” he said.

  I replied to his insulting with silence.

  At sundown, we still had not come out of East Barranca, and we had to make a cold camp. Very cold. Flicker and I and our Apaches, all old mountain men, guessed our altitude to be seven thousand feet. Eight, possibly. Teeth chattered, bones ached, bladders cramped. But Flicker would permit no fire. Neither did we see any fire in the night below us. If the Yaqui survivors were coming on, they played their game as craftily, and shivering, as did Flicker.

  We had not gone an hour next morning, however, when we broke out of the narrowing barranca. Halting, we gasped at the mighty Sierran panorama.

  East Barranca had led us within one thousand feet of the crest of a tremendous old man of a mountain. The great mass dominated the country that spread before us fifty miles in all directions. Yet there was a single direction that we all seized upon, as one. Kaytennae put a name to our wonderment, pointing in hushed awe.

  “Mira, look,” the Apache said. “Cañon Espectros.”

  We all saw it. It lay off to our left, to the north. It came from the west, cutting inland to the east. An impossibly deep and wild chasm, five miles distant.

  “Santa!” Zorra cried. “The Ghost Canyon.”

  “Listen,” Kaytennae admonished. “Do you hear that?”

  We all held intently still, and we did hear what the Apache had heard—the unmistakable muted thunder of big water falling swiftly. “Rio Naranjas,” Kaytennae whispered.

  “Jesus!” Flicker breathed, the fever in him.

  “Wait, listen some more!” I implored them. “Don’t you hear that other sound? The bells! Can’t you hear the bells far off?”

  They all cocked their heads, paling. And all heard it as had I: the distant ghostly ringing of the mission bells, far, far off, and as the legend told it.

  “God,” Flicker said, “we’re there. Come on, amigos. We can be at the rim yonder in two hours. She’s all down hill from here.” He shaded his eyes against the morning sun. “My God, padre,” he said to me, “I can see where the pack mule trail goes over the edge!”

  “Prepare yourself for a sight perhaps no other man has seen before us in these two centuries,” I told him. “Below that point, where the mule path goes down the face of the cliff into Ghost Canyon, lies the hacienda. It will be on the canyon floor, on the far side of the river. Behind it will be the mission and the mine. The legend describes it. I could tell you where every orange tree stands. How each acequia, each irrigation ditch, runs from the river. God’s name, feel the history, Flicker!” I cried. “We are five miles and two hundred years from the house of Don Blasco Salazar. The hacienda, Flicker. The Mission of the Bells. The orange grove. Sweet Christ, the mind dizzies!”

  Packrat, standing by my side with Zorra the whore, yawned in my face. “Are you done with your speech, Padre Jorobado?” he asked. “I’ve got to empty my bladder pretty bad.”

  “De ahí, rascal!” I cried happily. “Come on, compañeros. Five miles to the gold of El Naranjal—!”

  We laughed like loons on a lost lake. All of us raced ahead of the pack mules, crazily. Loafer ran around in circles wheezing his ancient bark. The women chattered in the manner of so many mountain jays robbing the eggs of other birds. The men joked mindlessly. Brainless Crench let out a roar called a “rebel yell,” which could have been heard, given the right wind, in Culiacán. Even Mazatlán. No one cared. Flicker himself threw back handsome black head and echoed the shrill American chillido of the lead-witted deputy. We were all crazed.

  And, before Christ, why not?

  We had found the lost Naranjal!

  45

  AND A RIVER FAR, FAR DOWN

  As we neared the great rim that had been visible from high on El Quebradero, the trail went into a cleft in the solid rock. It deepened and narrowed constantly. Soon, the pack mules could not go forward without unloading. We sent them back out of the cleft, with Young Grass, telling her to wait for us “on top.” The old squaw was happy to go. She was feeling the spirits. So, indeed, were our other Apaches, but they went on with us. As did another, unasked, member of the company: the old white bell mule.

  For some reason, this disturbed Flicker. He didn’t like being followed, he said. The old white devil made him spooky. But, while I shared some of the same uneasiness, I saw no great harm in it. Sweet Thing carried no packs and could scramble among the rocks like a marmot born to these heights. I believed she came along out of an attachment for Packrat, our campmaster.

  This didn’t convince Flicker, but the gold fever was upon him. Nothing mattered now save to gain the edge of the great canyon ahead—to gain the edge and get to its legendary switchback mule trail down the sheer face of the canyon of the River of the Oranges.

  At last, after what seemed a far longer time in the cleft than we expected, we saw ahead a glimmer of light.

  “The rim!” Flicker shouted hoarsely, and he began to run. All followed him. Men cursed at rocks that cut them. The women fell and were trod upon if in the way. We elbowed one another to be first out of the cleft, to be first to rush to the fabled “rim above Naranjal” and to see over it, far, far down, the white adobe hacienda and the mission with their ghostly grove of golden citrus. It was a madness, of course. The same sickness that had afflicted Hernán Cortez and his plumed conquistadores. As with his time, so with ours; there was no cure for it.

  None but the gold itself.

  I remember, strangely, in this headlong stampeding to break out upon the rim, not the human figures of my comrades pushing and shoving all about me, but the old white bell mare coming along behind us. I can still see her there. The homely head bobbing. The ragged ears at measured flop. The rheumy brown and ancient eyes seeming yet to smile at our insanity. The music of the bell about her neck tinkling its eerie rhythm to her unhurried pace. It was as if she knew each separate stone and footing place. Had made her way among them not one time, but many. As if she knew, above all, that there was no hurry to reach the rim that lured us human fools, and as if she knew why there was not.

  The thought disturbed me, but I put it from my mind.

  Ahead loomed the U-notch of the trail’s opening out upon the canyon’s rim. My silhouette pursued the shadows of my comrades, racing to be free of the dark cleft. I remember that I was not last to reach the overlook of the great canyon. Only Flicker was there before me. Together, we flung ourselves on our bellies, the better to hang over the dizzying height and peer below.

  Nombre Dios, there it was!

  Four thousand feet straight down the wall of the canyon went. The mile-wide flat of its verdant bottom was a mixture of roughly jumbled stone, native trees, and wild grasses, through which looped the Rio Naranjas. Against the base of the far canyon wall, enfolded entirely in a wide circle of the stream, we saw what no living man before us had seen. Or, what no man of our time, before us, had lived to tell of seeing. It was Naranjal.

  There was the rectangle of different, brighter green; that must be the Valencian orange trees. There, the walls of slave-cut stone and white-plastered adobe that were Don Salazar’s storied hacienda and the mission beyond it. There, the geometric traceries of acequias, dug to water the grove two centuries gone and appearing to do so still. It was a sight to steal the breath, to isolate the mind in warp of time and space beyond human imagining.

  It was there, it was all there.

  Except for a single thing.

  A thing that Flicker was first to note and Nunez to realize only when the black man’s deep voice cried out the agony of his discovery.

  “The trail, padre! The mule trail down the cliff. It’s gone; it isn’t there anymore—!”

  We stared in common disbelief into the abyss.

  Where once ran the switchback pack mule trail of the legend, the trail up whi
ch had climbed ten thousand mule loads of the fabled orange-balled ore of El Naranjal, there was nothing now. The ancient rock of the great cliff had split away, as the slice from the loaf. Below us lay nothing but four thousand feet of straight down.

  Naranjal was there, and would remain there for all of the days of our years. Neither mortal man nor living mule would reach it by that cliff.

  We had found the lost Naranjal, yes.

  And lost it still.

  46

  WHERE NARANJAL WAS

  Our immediate reaction was to rush about the rim seeking another way down into the great canyon. Flicker reasoned there must be such another way. I insisted the good God would not have given me the map and not have conducted us safely all this way to find only a blind four-thousand-foot drop-off. “Keep looking!” was our company shout. But we did not find any other way.

  Indeed, the only thing we found, on returning to the issuance of the cleft upon the rim, was that our old white bell mule had disappeared. “She’s gone back up the cleft to the other mules,” Flicker said. “And we might as well do the same.”

  No one disagreeing, the disheartened company turned to depart the rim. But only turned.

  There, in the mouth of the cleft, stood Santiago Kifer and his evil survivors of North Barranca. With him, in addition to the half dozen Yaqui rurales, were both Monkey Woman and the abysmal Pretty Boy.

  “Amigos,” said Robert Flicker very quietly to our group, “there is going to be a dogfight to see who goes over the edge.”

  We did not need to ask him what the edge meant.

  We had all just been looking over it.

  And he was right, of course. Even as his words fell among us, Santiago gave an order in Yaqui, and the rurale wolf pack rushed snarling upon us.

  We had laid aside our weapons, the better to explore the rocks and brush of the rim for that “other” way down to El Naranjal. These same weapons were in fact leaning on the rock of the wall of the cleft’s opening, much handier to Santiago’s people than to our own. The Yaquis all had, as was the custom of the Western Slope natives, huge machetes. These two-foot-long blades were of the ultimate viciousness in fighting arms. Run and dodge as we might, in the narrow confines of the rocky rim, we would be cut to stew-meat pieces within moments.

  But, God be knelt to, I had hired the proper and magnificent chief of soldiers.

  As the rurale pack charged, led by Pretty Boy’s teniente, Buzzard, our small flock was huddled in some rocks to one side of the trail’s approach to the rim. Flicker instantly roared out an Apache mother-of-insults directed at the Yaqui, which they plainly understood. He then leaped into the trail and ran limpingly for the rim. The Yaqui uttered a chorus of their wolf howls, altered course to go after him. Their fury to bring Flicker down was not reduced by Santiago shouting to them that the black man was the devil who had made the plan to blow apart their brothers in North Barranca.

  More than that, though, they went after Flicker, by-passing us, for the fact that our poor leader was so badly crippled. We had not ourselves seen him take the wound, but now we assumed he had hidden his pain as any good Apache would. Quarry and pack were but a stride from the rim, and we knew Flicker must double hard to right or left, or plunge over into eternity. To our horror, over the edge he went.

  Also to their horror, the howling Yaquis went over the edge after him, assuming that where the black devil would go, there would be a good trail for them to follow him. We all heard the fading eerie screaming of their four thousand feet of falling. Then there was the most terrible of silences, until I heard a hissing whisper from “eternity” and ran to the edge to find Flicker cursing my name and reaching up one black hand for me to haul him back from the yawning death below.

  What he had done was to remember that a few feet down from the lip of the chasm, where the broken trail ran over it, grew a small but stoutly gnarled cedar bush, the sole sign of plant life on the cliff’s riven face. To this he had clung while his pursuers leaped over the rim hot on his black quarters. So rapidly had all this occurred that, glancing below as I pulled Flicker back to the rim, and to life, I could see the diminishing, fly-small bodies of the Yaquis falling still toward the canyon floor nearly one mile down.

  Now Santiago understood that tragedy had struck his forces. He knew, with those instincts of hell that were his, that he must kill or be killed himself. He raised his rifle. Monkey Woman and Pretty Boy did the same. “Stay where you are, all of you,” he said.

  We did as bid, black Flicker nodding and in his so quiet manner advising us to obey the mad scalper.

  “Priest!” snarled Kifer, “hand over the map. If you harm it, or throw it over the edge, you will follow it.”

  Even in the image of death that stalked there, I could barely suppress a priestly smile. What good was the Franciscan map to anyone now? Santiago was welcome to it. But I must give him something more with it.

  I slowed my walk toward the monster, making a business of getting the map carefully from my travel pouch. Then, when I drew up to him, as I extended the map and he reached to take it, I seized the brim of his wide hat and pulled it down over his eyes. At the same time I kicked him in the cojones and leaped to escape into the nearby rocks. It was sufficient of maneuver that both Pretty Boy and Monkey Woman missed their shots at me. And sufficient also of tactic that, with one of his great lion’s bounds, Flicker was able to come at Pretty Boy.

  In the same moment, our women descended in a screeching pack on Monkey Woman. There was hell’s own scramble there against the rock faces of the cleft, and Zorra the whore of Fronteras single-handedly battered the head of the screaming Monkey Woman so hard on the rocks that the Yaqui squaw was helpless but to lie paralyzed and moaning on the rim. Charra Baca, Apache blood up, was going to “boot” Monkey Woman on over the edge to join her loyal departed troops, but I—a priest of God yet, remember—forbade her on point of purgatory, and she desisted for the moment.

  Flicker was having his hands full with Pretty Boy. They were rolling on the ground locked in a blurred ball of white teeth, fanging and gouging; ripping with fingernails; fighting like bears or wolves.

  Stella Allison had seized a fallen machete and, followed by Zorra and Charra, run with it to stand over the furious combat of Flicker and Pretty Boy, seeking opening to swing the deadly knife into the leader of the vanished broncos lobos.

  This left me alone with Santiago. Or rather left Santiago alone with Father Nunez, a far more sinister event.

  I made here the lethal error of hesitating to shoot him with the Winchester rifle I had picked up. I thought the sombrero jammed over his eyes and my sandaled foot driven into his aching manhood parts should be sufficient to hold him helpless. At least until Flicker or our Apaches might come to my succor. Well, at very least, until the two Apaches would race to save me. Quita! The rascals.

  I saw Packrat scurrying promptly to seek political refuge in the nearby rocks, and I observed brave Kaytennae to have chosen to rush, with Ben Allison’s sister, to Flicker’s aid, there trying to get in a rifle shot that would release the battling Mirlo from his deathlock with Niño Bonito.

  Suddenly, then, I realized my utter aloneness.

  We had sent Crench back to stay with Young Grass and the mules. All my comrades, stout and cowardly, had deserted me. Santiago had the sombrero ripped away from his blazing eyes and had straightened from holding his wounded crotch. With a foul obscenity, he wrested the rifle from me and struck me a terrible blow with its barrel. Sick with pain, I went to my knees, dropping the map, which I still held foolishly extended in my hand.

  Santiago recovered the map and seized my fallen body up in one continuing swoop of his long arms. He had the map now, and I, Nunez, represented all of the ill that had befallen Santiago Kifer since I uncovered his true identity to the good folk of Tombstone, Arizona.

  Unmindful of all save revenging himself on Alvar Nu
nez, he whirled me high over his head and tottered with me thus upraised toward the brink of the awesome chasm.

  It was then—actually it was in the moment that he struck me down with the rifle—that the forgotten member of my beleaguered flock flew into rightful rage.

  Limping out of the rocks, where he had taken the refuge of long experience when the fight began, now came the old crippled dog, Loafer. It was my cry of pain that alerted him, that lit the fires of vengeance in his own noble heart. He owed me his life, and he owed Santiago Kifer for a lifetime of brutal mistreatment.

  It was only in the last eye-flash before Kifer flung me into the abyss that I saw old Loafer coming in his wobbling charge to rescue his friend and fellow cripple.

  His single snarl of warning was heard by Kifer.

  The scalper whirled about on the brink.

  The ragged old wolf dog launched himself at the scalper’s throat. All that Kifer had to defend himself was the small priest of Casas Grandes still in his grasp. He hurled my body then into the face of Loafer, and the old dog and the hunchbacked black robe collided and went down, as one.

  The black robe stayed down, dizzied from the impact.

  The old dog did not stay down but staggered once more to his remaining three good feet. On these, he charged Santiago Kifer, just as Kifer took first stride to flee the rim’s dizzying edge. The sight yet burns in memory.

  The dog caught him full in the chest, driving him back the one step to the edge. Then, as Kifer hurled the old dog once more from him, Loafer came in a last writhing effort from the rocks where he fell. And his yellowed stumps of canine fangs caught the twisting Kifer in the hamstring of his right thigh, ripping that vital tendon apart.

  With a lingering scream, Santiago Kifer took one lurching crippled step—backward—into the ages that awaited him four thousand feet below.

  Somehow I found myself lying bellied on the rim with the panting old dog, watching downward as the tiny form of Santiago Kifer turned over and over in the clear air of that sunbright morning. We watched thus together until the body struck the outward bulge of the cliff at two thousand feet. It bounded outward, then vanished forever from our view, hidden by the outbulge for the last two thousand feet of its fall. But we knew where he must land.