City of Widows (16 page)

Somewhere during that trip—I think it was the third day, shortly after we broke camp at the base of a dead volcano still steeped in the stench of sulfur—I turned over another year. I wondered how many other forty-year-old men were still traversing unknown territory on horses that hated them in the company of men who would never be their friends. It seemed that by the halfway point a fellow should have more to his name than he can carry away in two hands.

That afternoon we struck Indian.

There had been signs, although no more than one would expect of a people who drifted along the ground like chaff, leaving little behind to prove they existed: a thread of smoke scratching a faded exclamation point against naked sky, a wrinkle of movement atop a distant butte. It was a big country but not as empty as it looked, and they had been there long enough to know when something as unnatural as Man interrupted the pattern of its days. Tiny fleeting impressions of activity, and then they were there, fifteen of them strung out in a ragged line across an open space without sufficient cover nearby to conceal a moccasin. It was a trick I'd have given much to learn, but I suspected it wasn't something that can be taught, only known.

Of course they were Apaches, as ugly and toadlike as the terrain they ruled. Naked but for breechclouts, they sat hollow-hipped pintos and carried Springfield rifles with the barrels upright, some of them trailing feathers from the ends. It was a lot of firepower in one place for a tribe with nothing worth trading. This was no ordinary raiding party, I decided, but an escort of some kind. As unobstrusively as possible I reached behind my saddle and loosened the Winchester in its scabbard.

There was no movement on their side except for their mounts' nervous heads and the wind stirring their hair, unfettered and without decoration. A mile above them an eagle—I hoped superstitiously it wasn't a vulture—hung suspended from its broad wings, painted there. The three Mexicans conferred. Then Miguel Axtaca kneed his sorrel forward. In one hand he held his reins high while he lifted the other with the palm out to show he had no weapon. He'd advanced ten feet when one of the Springfields spoke.

The barrel came down, the butt went up to the Indian's shoulder, white smoke puffed from the muzzle and slid sideways with the wind. Something tugged at the dry earth several yards in front of Axtaca's horse. He drew rein, Francisco and Carlos hoisted their carbines and worked the levers. Six or seven days later the sound of the shot reached us, a hollow
plop
like a frog jumping into a pond. Axtaca dropped his hand and pushed the palm back, stopping the others from returning fire. It had been a warning shot.

At the end of another week the Apache mounted at the center of the line raised one hand and made a sign. After a moment Axtaca responded. Then—it had to be for my benefit—he spoke his first words of English since the night we had met in the Mare's Nest.

“He wants all of us to come.”

A pause. The vaqueros lowered their Winchesters.

Once, in Dakota Territory, I'd ridden ninety miles with a Cheyenne arrowhead between my shoulder blades to Yankton and the nearest doctor. The arrowhead was poisoned with toad spume and human manure and I lay for three weeks in delirium. From start to finish the experience wasn't as long as the half-mile we crossed that afternoon. The Apaches made no move to shorten the distance, remaining as impassive as foothills.

When we were about fifty feet apart the Indian in the center barked. A linguist might have made something of the guttural syllable, but it was the closest approximation to the sound a big dog makes when its hackles are standing as I had ever heard from a fellow human. Its meaning was clear enough and we stopped.

During the conversation that ensued, carried on entirely between Miguel Axtaca and the Apache who seemed to be in charge in a language completely unrelated to the one the Aztec had been using for days, I had plenty of opportunity to study the other side. They were all males and mostly young, one or two barely old enough to have passed whatever test for manhood that tribe observed, and in general they were lean almost to the point of emaciation, their rib cages standing out like umbrella staves beneath burnished flesh. Here was a predatory people, half-starved like wolves and therefore dangerous. Many were scarred—one in fact had come close to having his head split open from the way the new hair stood out like quills from a crescent of fresh pink skin on the right side of his head, as wide as the spread fingers of a man's hand. Despite their alien features, the broad flat faces, slit eyes, sharp noses, and mouths like razor cuts, there was about them that grim weary faithless air of the veteran killer that I had breathed in more places than I could count, from Shiloh to Adobe Walls to the massacre at Sand Creek. It observes neither race nor creed and jumps all the barriers between.

All of this and a good deal more was present in their leader. He was easily the oldest of the band, nearly three times the age of its youngest member, with iron gray in his relatively short hair and deep creases crosshatching every square inch of his face. His eyes, small and close-set, smoldered steadily in the deep shadows of his brow like embers in a cave. There was no decency in them, nothing that passed for mercy, no capacity for any emotion but hate. Somewhere I have a photograph that was taken of him much later at Fort Sill, and after forty years the raw hostility in those eyes has not lessened; it spans the decades like a scar on the land. At the time I had barely heard his name, but its four syllables have come to sum up my experiences in the Great Southwest of 1881 in a way that no whole book or paragraph could.

At one point during the conversation, the Apache gestured toward the medicine bag tied across the pommel of Axtaca's saddle. Don Segundo's foreman touched it with the ends of his thick fingers and said something in a tone softer than any I had heard him use previously. On the other side, the harsh flame in the eyes belonging to the granite head altered, then became pitiless once again. The head nodded slightly. More talk followed, punctuated by hand signs on both sides. At length the line of Indians turned, collapsing upon itself like a cotton clothesline, and moved off toward the east. Not one of the riders looked back.

“What did he say to them?” I asked Francisco. I was sure some trick was involved. The Apaches knew no prayer but Death to the Enemy, and they had no enemy they despised worse than Mexicans. Since 1840 the State of Chihuahua had issued a bounty of one hundred dollars for each male Apache scalp and fifty for each female.

Francisco rearranged his thick shoulders. “I do not speak Apache.”

Axtaca turned in his saddle and fixed his obsidian gaze on me. He had neither looked at me nor acknowledged my existence since San Sábado. In that desert glare his face looked like something shaped by erosion.

“I lived with the Chiricahua Apaches from the time I was six until I turned fourteen,” he said. “I am the only man not a Chiricahua who is allowed to display their symbol upon my traps. I know the secret name of God. Geronimo is a Chiricahua. All these things I told him and he wished me good medicine on my journey.”

“That was Geronimo?”

“It is the name by which the Mexicans and the Americans know him. I addressed him by his warrior name, which your
norteamericano
tongue could never manage.” He pitied me that.

“I thought he'd be taller,” I said.

16

W
ITH TWO HOURS
of light remaining we passed a longhorn skull polished white and set on a flat piece of shale. The Diamond Horn brand had been burned into its forehead above letters in faded red paint reading
PROHIBIDA LA ENTRADA.
It was the only indication that we had entered the region acknowledged by two governments to belong to Don Segundo del Guerrero, the White Lion of Chihuahua. Here and there across that rocky plain, knots of surly beeves stood around munching the short tough grass that did nothing to fill out their hollow hips and exposed ribs.

Another hour went by before we came within sight of ranch headquarters, an adobe oblong with a thatched roof and the long veranda unique to the Spanish gentry, as if shade itself were the special property of the wealthy. But for that it might have been any one of a thousand such structures you saw down there and scarcely noted. Whatever pretensions the old man might have inherited from his noble ancestors had apparently been leeched from him by the dirty stuff of revolution.

We dismounted before the porch and tied up at the rail. My legs felt as stiff as uncured leather. One of those yellow dogs of indeterminate breed that proliferate in that country lifted its chin from its paws on an ancient glider, growled, and went back to sleep. Its coat was tattered with mange and glittered with flies.

The front door was opened by a bell-shaped woman in a print blouse and a dark skirt whose hem swept the floor. Her gray hair was caught with combs behind her head, tight enough to pull the creases out of her face, which held no expression. I assumed she was the housekeeper, but at sight of her the two vaqueros removed their hats and Miguel Axtaca addressed her as
Señora
Guerrero. On further study I realized too that she was a good deal younger than she at first appeared. That raw land was full of women whose youth had been burned away by the struggle to survive both the climate and the force of their men's character.

After a brief exchange in Spanish, and with barely a glance at me, she stood aside and we entered. Francisco and Carlos paused to cross themselves before an impressive carved wooden crucifix mounted on the wall opposite the door, but Axtaca went on through the shallow room and out the open door on the other side.

It was a pleasant room, running nearly the length of the house and elegantly furnished in contrast to the building's exterior. There were bright rugs on the oiled floor, tasteful religious paintings in ornate frames, camelback sofas upholstered in wine-colored velvet, and silver everywhere, twinkling in the late-afternoon light sliding through the small curtained windows. The place was well ventilated and noticeably cooler than the veranda. That was its chief luxury and the thing that spoke loudest of the old don's position in the community.

Outside, a shot rang out.

The vaqueros and I caught up with the foreman on a back porch as long as the one in front just as another report sounded. There, a very old man in a wicker wheelchair with a Hopi rug spread across his lap sat at a long bench facing the open plain. In spite of the heat he had on a heavy brick-colored sweater with a shawl collar and all its buttons fastened and a straw hat that had seen all its best years, sunlight dappling his face through gaping holes in the broad floppy brim. His hair was white, startlingly so against the deep brown of his skin, curling over his collar, and he wore the spade-shaped Castilian beard and a pair of those elaborate moustaches that required suspension in a special hammock when their owners slept; trimmed, waxed, and coiled at the ends. His long hands were spotted and clawlike, but the fingers were dextrous as he laid a rifle with a long brass barrel on the bench and accepted another from the man standing at his side. There were eight rifles lined up on the bench, including three Hawkens, a Sharps, a pair of large-bore Remingtons, a Springfield, and a foreign make I couldn't identify. They were all single-shot and long-range. Sharpshooter's guns.

The ungainly hands, shriveled and plainly rheumatic, came alive when they gripped a rifle—in this case the Springfield—drew back the breech to inspect the load, and slammed it home. Resting his elbows on the bench, he socketed the buttstock in the hollow of his right shoulder and sighted down the barrel with both eyes open. The rifle pulsed when he squeezed the trigger, but his grip remained as steady as a sunken post. He said, “Bah!” and laid the Springfield next to the gun with the brass barrel.

The man standing next to him lifted and proffered one of the Hawkens. This was a plain-faced Mexican nearly his age, but in full possession of his legs, dressed in sandals and the white cotton uniform of the peasantry. He had a fringe of white hair around a bald head and a pair of moustaches that had never known a hammock, drooping like tired wings to cover his mouth and chin. Houseboys come in all ages.

Don Segundo—the old man in the wheelchair could be no other—was raising the Hawken to firing position when Axtaca cleared his throat.

“
Sí,
Miguel.” The don fired. I searched for his target but could detect nothing worth spending ammunition on as far as the Sierra Madres. I had been to Mexico before and had never seen anything to equal the price of an ounce of powder in the entire country; but that was just me. People as different as Cortéz, Louis Napoleon, and Montezuma the Great had chosen to gamble their fortunes on the place without taking me into their confidence.

An exchange of Spanish followed between rancher and foreman, too rapid for me to catch anything beyond an occasional reference to cattle, while the old man inspected the Hawken's hammer, working it back and forth. Apparently he was taken with the rifle. At length he laid it aside and sat back, fixing me from under the ruined straw brim with eyes as blue and clear as matched terrestrial globes.
“¿Yusted?”
It was less a question than a command.

“No español, jefe.”
It was the only phrase I'd acquired that had any use for me.

“A grave error. In my eighty-one years I have spent a total of only six months in your country, and yet I took the trouble to learn the rudiments of the language.”

His accent was heavy, but I suspected this was due not so much to ignorance as to lack of practice.

“My range is Montana Territory,” I said. “I'm a good deal closer to Canada than I am to Mexico.” I told him my name.

It meant nothing to him. “Are you a hunting man,
Señor
Murdock?”

“Elk, a little. And men.”

“Man, bah! As quarry he is truly overrated. He lacks instinct. His senses are inferior to the armadillo's, who flees his own shadow. There is no sport in hunting men.”