Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Lozen watched them until the sun started its journey down the slope of the sky. Finally the last of them vanished into the same nothingness that had swallowed the others. The drums stopped. The sound of hooves and boots ceased. Silence rang in her ears like a gun barrel struck against the big metal cylinders the miners abandoned in their journeys through The People’s country.

  She stood up slowly, but sparks exploded in front of her eyes, anyway, and dizziness caused her to sway. She wrapped her blanket around her waist and started off at a trot. Night arrived at the encampment before she did. Long Neck and his people had come in her absence. Long Neck’s wives’ Mexican slaves were clearing away the remains of the feast scattered about on hides and blankets. Lozen heard laughter from the big fire near their lodges in the center of the camp.

  Red Sleeves sat on Long Neck’s left side and Cheis on his right. Victorio, Loco, Broken Foot, and Geronimo sat beside them in the places of secondary honor. The other men took places according to rank, with the apprentices behind them. The women and children sat or stood at the rear.

  Lozen spread her blanket next to Cheis’s wife, Dos-teh-seh, who was nursing her youngest boy, the one they called Mischievous. She handed Lozen a gourd of water and a piece of dark, crisp bread. The Mexican traders’ wives made the bread from toasted cornmeal ground four times on successively finer stones. It had a rich, smoky taste, crunchy outside and a little softer inside. Lozen ate it slowly to get her stomach used to the idea of eating after four days without food.

  Dos-teh-seh had had no trouble finding Cheis when the Bluecoats let her and her sons go. Cheis and his men had watched the execution of Ox and the others from an overlooking crag. The fact that Cheis could not risk the lives of his men to save his brother and nephews added to the anger that consumed him.

  Cheis was no longer the man who had laughed and joked with Lozen. Rage had darkened his spirit. People avoided contact with him. He had always found time to play with the children, but now they dared not go near him. Lozen caught a glimpse of his face silhouetted against the fire’s light. She could see that not even Broken Foot’s jokes and stories would bring a smile to it. That would be like trying to make the wind-carved rocks in the canyon smile.

  When Broken Foot stood up, the new gold chains he had gotten from the traders glittered in the fire’s light. He had fastened them with thread through the holes in his earlobes, and they dangled past his shoulders.

  “I’m going to tell a very funny story,” he said.

  One of the youngest warriors and a woman about his age stood up. Those around them laughed and reached up to tug at their clothes as they left. They were sweethearts, and they were heeding Broken Foot’s hint. A very funny story was certain to be too embarrassing to hear in the presence of one’s new love. Broken Foot waited until they had disappeared into the darkness, in opposite directions.

  “This is a story of Old Man Coyote. You must only tell stories of Snake and Old Ugly Buttocks the Bear in the winter, the time of Ghost Face. Snake and Ugly Buttocks hibernate then, so you won’t make them mad, talking about them. And when you finish a story about them, you must trick them by saying you were talking about fruit and flowers and other good things.” He thumped a sleeping child on the head to wake him, then steered a meandering course back to the fire.

  “Long time ago, they say, Coyote was watching the young Prairie Dog Women play the stave game. They were pretty, those Prairie Dog Women, and Coyote wanted the prettiest one. Coyote is always after pretty women. Some men are still that way because he showed them how.”

  Everyone laughed. They knew which men he meant.

  “Coyote said to Gopher, ‘See that Prairie Dog Woman sitting there? She won’t have anything to do with me, so I’m asking you a favor. Tunnel over there and make a hole right up under where she’s sitting.’ The Gopher, he said, ‘All right, I’ll do it.’ And he began to dig. You could see the earth humping up where he went. Then he dug under the Prairie Dog Woman. Coyote went into the tunnel and looked up that hole and saw another little hole. His penis grew as hard as a log. He pushed that penis through the hole to make love to her. The Prairie Dog Woman felt something bumping against her. She looked down and saw Coyote’s penis jumping up and down like a rabbit trying to get out of a deep hole.

  “Prairie Dog Woman picked up a big rock, and she dropped it on his penis. ‘Make love to this,’ she said. Then she and the other Prairie Dog Women laughed and ran away.” Broken Foot added the usual disclaimer. “I’m talking about flowers and cactus fruit.”

  Broken Foot’s stories would go on until dawn, but about midnight exhaustion overcame Lozen. She curled up on her blanket. She pulled the end over her so Broken Foot wouldn’t see her there and thump her on the head or tickle her to wake her. She fell into a dreamless sleep.

  When she woke up, she felt as though her bones and muscles had turned to mescal paste. She poked her head out, eyes still closed, and yawned.

  “The turtle is emerging from her shell,” Victorio said.

  Victorio, Broken Foot, Talks A Lot, and Loco sat smoking their cigarillos. They looked as though they had been waiting for her to wake up. The rest of the meeting ground was empty. The men sat with their backs to the sun, and Lozen narrowed her eyes to see them.

  “She must have gotten turtle magic,” Broken Foot said. “She looks like a turtle now with her eyes all squinty.”

  Lozen wrapped the blanket around her. She felt a weariness in her bones, as though her encounter with the spirits had drained the strength and will from her. She didn’t want to tell Broken Foot and her brother what she had seen. No one would believe her when she told them from which direction the Bluecoats had come.

  “The council will start soon,” Broken Foot said. “You should attend.”

  “What use would I be?”

  “You can tell us what you saw while you were gone.”

  With her blanket still cocooned around her, she sat across from him and Broken Foot. “I saw Bluecoats.”

  “How many?”

  “More than I could count. They passed by all day, row after row of them. Some of them walked and some rode horses. They were not headed here, though. I think they’re coming to our country.”

  “They have to march through the pass near the stone house where we stole the mules.”

  “And where you didn’t steal the big red horse,” Broken Foot added.

  Victorio rolled another cigarette. “We can wait for them and kill them there.”

  “These Bluecoats came from the west, and they marched east, into the rising sun.”

  “The west, my daughter?” Broken Foot had been absentmindedly rubbing his lame ankle, and he looked up in surprise.

  Someone in the group nearby laughed. Lozen could hear them murmuring some jest. They would add this preposterous tale to the story of her falling off the big roan. She sighed. Sometimes the spirits’ gifts were burdensome.

  “Yes. From the west.”

  She could tell that Broken Foot and even Victorio were skeptical. She couldn’t help that, though. She had seen what she had seen, whether anyone believed her or not. These enemies did not come from the east like all the other Pale Eyes did.

  They came from the west.

  Chapter 27

  THE DIVORCE

  Bill’s estate looked like a castle built by lunatic elves. It always reminded Rafe of the old bedtime story about the three little pigs and the big, bad wolf, only this house was built of sticks and straw and iron. The iron boiler rose like a rusty donjon from a welter of bowlegged arbors, swaybacked tents with shreds of canvas fluttering like banners in the fitful wind. There were huts of spavined mesquite limbs, scrap lumber, and mangy grass thatch. Open-front shelters put the lean in lean-to.

  Silver seekers had expended enormous amounts of money and labor getting the boiler this far a few years earlier, and then they had abandoned it. The bones of the twelve oxen who had died hauling it lay heaped not far away. It stood ten feet tall and eight fe
et in diameter. It was a formidable patchwork of square plates riveted together, with iron reinforcements where the pressure valves, pipes, tubes, and fittings would have connected. There it loomed, like a stray lighthouse, in the desert country between Tubac and Tucson.

  Bill’s salvage flowed outward from it—grindstones, a pianoforte genuflecting on two broken front legs, and a small herd of Franklin stoves with lizards, snakes, pocket mice, cotton rats, and ground squirrels nesting in them. Bill had steamer trunks, wagon parts, picture frames with the gold leaf peeling off, old wheels, harnesses, hames, singletrees—all of them scavanged from the litter left by the gold rushers. Rafe thought it safe to say that anything that came into Bill’s possession never left it.

  Now, in mid-May, squash and gourd vines were well on their way to covering it all in a lumpy green carpet. Bill did keep a small area clear for a garden. The only plants he grew there were more varieties of chile peppers than Rafe had seen in all his years.

  A palisade of flowering ocatillo cactus ten feet high threaded through the sprawl in no particular plan that Rafe could see. Bill had a name for each hut, jacal, tent, and bower. Rafe didn’t know what half the words meant, but he could locate the portico and piazza, the vestibule, conservatory, office, library (though Bill couldn’t read), great hall, salon, pantry, forge, scullery, boudoir, and refectory.

  The refectory consisted of a brush arbor next to an array of fire pits, circular stone hearths, and iron rods with slabs of wild pigs’ ribs perpetually charring over glowing goals. Rafe deduced that refectory meant eating place because that was where Bill always carried the iron stew pot, its outer surface shiny black with soot and grease. He set it on a wagon’s tailgate laid horizontally across two barrels, and the men dipped their gourd spoons into it and ate standing up.

  The pot’s contents varied each time Rafe visited, but he suspected that it never ran completely dry. The chiles provided the one constant. Bill added new ingredients as he dug them from the ground, ran them into the ground, lured, shot, garroted, bushwhacked, or snared them. This evening Rafe detected snake, jackrabbit, and he was pretty sure that the foot floating in the broth in his spoon had once belonged to a rat, possibly a former inhabitant of one of the potbellied stoves.

  They lowered the level on this edition of the stew and retired to the “veranda,” the arbor next to the door Bill had gotten a blacksmith to cut into the boiler and then set in place with the hinges inside. Rafe sat in the big rocker, his favorite of Bill’s many chairs, and Patch lay by his feet. Red had finished his bucket of corn, and he watched with interest while Rafe drew the book out of its bag.

  Bill occupied a buggy seat with a whip still standing upright in the boot on the left side. His thin legs and moccasinclad feet splayed in front of him. He laid his head back so the smoke from his cigarillo wreathed his lumpy nose like clouds about a mountain peak.

  Rafe read aloud from Romeo and Juliet each time he stopped here. He could have recited it from memory, but Bill preferred being read to. Both Bill and Red listened intently now as Rafe read the sorrowful scene in the crypt where the two young lovers died. Bill’s eyes were closed, but his lips moved, silently forming the words. Through the years of Rafe’s visits, Bill had memorized all the lines and the stage directions and the asides.

  “‘For never was a story of more woe / than this of Juliet and her Romeo.’” Rafe closed the book gently. Men had offered him as much for this book as they had for Red.

  Bill snuffled and wiped his eyes on his sleeve, as though to get the sweat out of them. Rafe slipped the book into the pouch of soft leather smoked to the color of tupelo honey to make it waterproof. He folded down the long neck of it and tied it with its rawhide thong. Some woman had chewed this leather to a supple softness. Her hands had fringed and beaded the pouch and sewn cowrie shells and bits of turquoise onto it. He sometimes wondered whose hands they had been and what had happened to her.

  More than two years had passed since he had scattered the pollen from this bag onto his old Packard, but traces of it still collected in the bottom corners of the pouch. It worked its way inside the book, too, and sometimes fell in a golden shower like fairy dust when Rafe opened its pages. It seemed fitting to him, that Shakespeare should be connected to pagan magic, though Romeo and Juliet contained no Caliban, no Puck, no Bottom or Titania.

  He stuck the book into his trousers at the back. He rocked slowly in the chair and thought about Titania the fairy queen, dressed in gossamer and spider webs. Titania, a midsummer night’s dream, indeed. He felt a pang of regret that he had no woman to love, to hold, to cherish.

  “Women,” Bill said.

  With his eyes still closed, Rafe waited for him to expand on the subject. Bill had never disclosed anything about his past, and Rafe was curious to see what the jug of whiskey he had brought might jog loose, like mud off a wagon axle.

  “They bring you to grief every time,” Bill confided.

  They sat in silence while Bill rolled another cigarillo of the tobacco Rafe had brought. “I had me a honest woman once’t,” he said. “When I was a rich man in Californy.”

  Rafe tried to imagine Bill a married man, and a rich one at that, but couldn’t.

  “Then one day she ups and says she wants a dee-vorce. She got her a Philadelphia lawyer, and he tells her she must have half of everything we owned. So I give it to her.” He chuckled. “I pulled her dresses out of the wardrobe, and I cut every one of them in half with this hyar blade.” He held up a bowie knife as long as his knotty forearm, the steel edge honed thin as paper. “I ripped my pantaloons down the middle, and my waistcoat, shirts, and coats.”

  The most amazing thing to Rafe about Bill’s story was that he once had owned more than one suit of clothes. A waistcoat? Rafe tied to conjure up the image of Bill in a waistcoat.

  Bill winked at Rafe. “You’ve heard of cuttin’ a rug? Well, sir, when I finished with the duds, I did cut the rug. I broke up the stove and all the pots and pans and put the fragments in two equal heaps. I took an ax and commenced to divide every piece of furniture in two, and every lamp and faldeerol, while she danced around screaming like someone was jabbin’ her with her own hat pin.” He sighed with contentment. “She followed me outside, still hollerin’ like a stuck pig, and whilst I was trying to figure how to split the house in two with that ax, the police arrived to quell the riot.”

  Silence followed while Bill relived the joy that true justice can bring, as opposed to the courtroom variety. “And now here I am. Happy as if I had good sense.”

  “Have the Apache bothered you lately?”

  “Naw. Cochise and his merry band, they think I’m crazy, and they believe crazy people are holy. Besides, once’t the ‘Pache stole my horse and mule, I hadn’t nothin’ left they wanted. They used to pay social calls now and then, and we’d share smokes and a tipple or two, but now when I sees ’em, I goes inside and bolts the door.” He leaned back and knocked on the iron plating with his knuckles. They made a dull ringing that persisted, like the sound of a hummingbird’s wings. “Gets a might hot in there in summertime, though.”

  “That’s why they call them boilers.”

  Rafe rocked, the motion soothing, like being in a cradle, while he, Bill, Red, and Patch watched the sun set in a silence as comfortable as an old pair of moccasins. When night fell good and hard and dense, Rafe would saddle up, whistle for Patch, and ride on. He did most of his traveling at night. Safer that way.

  “Everything has its point, don’t you know. Even Apaches.” Bill broke the surface of the silence. “Men, now, the Good Lord put them on earth to eat, drink, and stay awake a leetle while at night.” He sank back into the silence and let it close comfortably over his head.

  “And women?” Rafe asked finally.

  “Women, they was a-made to cook the vittles, brew the booze, and help the men stay awake at night.” Bill winked at Rafe.

  They saw the dust cloud coming from the north. Bill primed and loaded his musket, and Rafe capped
his Sharps and laid it across his knees. The riders wouldn’t arrive for a while, but the weight of the carbine was a comfort, anyway.

  Darkness arrived about the same time the six soldiers did. John Mott, the sergeant that Rafe had met at the beleaguered stage station a year before, was in charge of the company. While his men watered the horses at Bill’s well, he dipped out a ladleful of stew. He sank into a ladder-backed chair, put his boots on a keg, and tilted the chair’s front legs up.

  “The rebels fired on United States soldiers at Fort Sumter last month,” he said.

  “Where’s Fort Sumter?” Rafe asked.

  “On an island off Charleston. South Carolina. War has been declared.”

  “I could smell this divorce coming,” Bill said. “Which is more than I could say for my own. I reckon they mean to cleave the country in two, don’t they?”

  “The army will stop the secessionists in a few weeks.” Mott sounded certain of it.

  Rafe didn’t comment, but he doubted that. He knew Southerners. They didn’t understand the meaning of defeat. You could cut them off at the knees, and they’d fight you from the ground, their teeth set like a badger’s in your ankles.

  When Mott’s men had eaten and filled their canteens, they mounted. Mott called back over his shoulder. “The rebels have elected Jefferson Davis as president of their government.”

  Rafe listened to their hoofbeats fade in the darkness. “Jeff Davis.” He grunted. “Too bad the rebels didn’t make him general. The war would end soon then.”

  “You know ’im?”

  “Heard of him. After his Mississippi Rifles won the day at the Battle of Buena Vista, they say Jeff took on airs. Considered he had a head for strategy, when what he has is luck and pluck.”

  “So you’re for the Yanks, and you from Texas?”

  Rafe thought about it. His answer surprised him. “Maybe so.”

  Rafe realized that the army won out with him over Texas. But then, the army had done more for him than Texas ever had. Besides, Southerners as a species annoyed him. Their main goal in life was to prove that they could whip anything that moved, and some things that didn’t. He could imagine the arrogance that had led Davis and the others to start a war with a foe many times stronger and better equiped and trained, with far more resources.