El Paso: A Novel (47 page)

LATER, BY A LOW CAMPFIRE, BOB RESUMED
the conversation with Arthur that he’d left off earlier before they climbed the mountains.

“It must’ve been some shock when they took you out of that orphanage to the Colonel’s place, huh?” Bob was wiping down his pistol with an oily rag.

“Big one,” Arthur replied.

“So what was it like? Did he have a nice house?”

“Still does,” Arthur said. He didn’t so much mind the small talk, but he had other things to think about.

“You ever been to England?” Bob said.

“Several times, but only once on my own. London’s an interesting city. Then I went to Ireland. Tried to look up my father’s family, but there were so many Shaughnessys I didn’t have much luck. We’d sort of lost touch with them.”

“When did your people come over?” Bob asked. He offered Arthur the rag, and Arthur began wiping down his pistol, too.

“In 1861. My father’s father came right when the Civil War broke out. But he really wasn’t my grandfather. I don’t know who I am,” Arthur said. “I might be a Jew, for all I know.” He thought about how much he disliked Strucker’s unceasing remarks about the Jews. Bob must have been thinking the same thing, because he chuckled and patted his thigh.

“My grandfather came in 1868,” said Bob. “Went to work when they were building the southern railroad. That’s how we came to be out West. Our names are Sheen, so I reckon we’re from the same race of people as yours.”

“Same business, too,” Arthur told him. He tossed another log on the fire.

“What’s that?”

“The railroad business.” Arthur smiled. Bob did, too.

“Do you ever see anybody from when you were at the orphanage?” Bob asked

“No,” Arthur said. He had been rolling that thought around in his head for days, trying to make at least some sense of it. Earlier it came back to him, the time he’d seen Mick making up to his girl Betty on the Common. It hadn’t struck him then as a betrayal; it wasn’t as if he’d been in love with her or anything. At the orphanage he and Mick had shared practically everything. But looking back, he realized there most certainly had been a betrayal, and that Mick had been that kind of fellow all along. After Arthur’s adoption, the Colonel had drummed into him all his notions of loyalty and honesty. “If everything else is stripped away,” the Colonel said, “that’s all you will have left, your honor, the most important thing in a man’s life.”

“Don’t you ever wonder what happened to any of them?” Bob asked.

“No,” Arthur told him. He also remembered the time he’d fixed Mick up with Harriet Quimby, and the strange and sudden cooling of their relationship. Something she’d said when he’d asked her about it began to make sense. It had been the day before the air show where she was killed, and Arthur was taking them all for lunch at a seaside place in Gloucester.

“Do you want me to see if Mick wants to come?” he’d asked.

Harriet started, and her lips pursed; she quickly shook her head, as if she were shaking off something malevolent or foul.

“Something go wrong between you two?” he’d said cheerfully.

“Not our sort of person,” she replied icily. She’d said
our
sort, not
my
sort, which, looking back on it, conveyed an implication different from what he’d taken at the time. And there had also been that hardened expression in her eyes and voice that for a moment gave him a chill, but he’d brushed it off. Whatever had happened between Mick and Harriet Quimby, now, he expected no one would ever know.

“I reckon sometimes it’s the best thing to put the past behind you,” Bob was saying. Arthur handed him back his gun rag.

“Whenever possible,” he said.

The next day, the weather suddenly turned pleasantly warm again, a kind of balmy Indian summer all knew wouldn’t last. They moved out at daybreak with three Indian guides hired on to track Villa’s band. From what the old Indian had told Slim, they knew Villa was headed for the canyons. The Indian guides traveled on foot but, being runners, soon outranged the Colonel’s party.

Arthur sometimes would become an outrider, moving far to one side or the other of the main body, paralleling on the flank to scout for possible ambushes or other signs of danger. Arthur had begun to take a lively interest in the sights along the trail, the alpine meadows, the craggy mountain peaks, the tall firs and pines. Once he even spotted an eagle soaring thousands of feet above a steep, wooded valley; yet the eagle was still below Arthur, who was on an even higher ridge. For a while the view made him forget his feelings of gloom and anger over the children and Mick Martin, but presently it all returned with renewed fury. Arthur would let himself sink into the gloom and anger as if the moods were old friends, and got some kind of perverse satisfaction from them.

Three great things had happened in his life—being taken from the orphanage, his marriage to Xenia, and having the children—and he resolved never again to let anything stand in the way of those gifts. He couldn’t help but think that the incident with Mick might never have happened if he had been more attentive, less reclusive, less occupied with the business; fewer days in Chicago. He wished he could have told Xenia that, but he couldn’t, of course, and turned his horse and rode away.

Each evening the Rarámuri Indians returned with scouting reports, and everyone, Arthur, the Colonel, Bob, and Slim, was satisfied they were as close to Villa as they needed to be for the moment: far enough behind not to be discovered, but close enough to be ready for action if the occasion presented itself. Bob and Slim queried the Indians each day on whether they thought a tactical advantage could come to the Colonel’s party, based on terrain or other things, but the Indians had no opinions on that matter.

One morning Arthur invited Crosswinds Charlie to go outriding with him. The tall pines were enveloped in thick mist and the damp ground muffled the sounds of their horses’ hooves. Even in the almost balmy weather, little patches of snow remained from a previous storm, unmelted in the shadows of the tall trees.

They’d been discussing flying, the perverse nature of air currents near mountains. As they plodded deeper into the forest, Charlie was expanding on the need for aviation to develop a reliable odometer-type device—something similar to a taffrail log on vessels—that accurately told the pilot how far he’d come, because, as weather and water currents can with ships, air currents can badly skew a pilot’s positioning.

Suddenly Arthur held up his hand and reined in his horse. Charlie rose up in his stirrups and craned his neck forward. They were both hearing a strange sound, something like a rushing river or waterfall. Slowly, they crept along through the forest mists. Arthur stopped several more times, and each time the sound was louder. He turned to Charlie.

“Stay here and stay alert,” he said. “Let me go see what this is.”

Arthur nudged his horse slowly forward until he disappeared into the mist. Charlie had been sitting there in his saddle for nearly twenty minutes when Arthur reappeared with a look of tremendous excitement on his face.

“What was it?” Charlie asked.

“Have you ever heard the sound of butterfly wings?” Arthur said, his eyes vivid with energy.

Charlie looked at him, puzzled.

“Millions of them,” Arthur muttered under his breath. “Millions, I tell you, all over every tree! It’s the great monarch migration some people have talked about but nobody’s ever seen, as far as I know. At least not in these mountains. It’s something you’ll never witness again in your life. Come on!”

Charlie shrugged and nudged his horse after Arthur’s. They rode through the misty pine forest for ten or fifteen minutes, the noise stronger and stronger—a thin, high-pitched beating of the air—and then Charlie began to see the butterflies. At first there were just a few of them, big orange, yellow, and black ones fluttering in the low bushes, and then more and more, until the trees nearly came to life. The butterflies thickly carpeted the forest floor, too, so much so that the horses couldn’t step without setting foot upon them. The forest somehow reminded Charlie of a cathedral, with the trees forming Gothic arches and the sunlight streaming in.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Arthur gawked.

“It certainly is,” replied Charlie. “I’ve never heard of anything like it.”

“They’re on their way south,” continued Arthur, “some from as far north as Canada, I expect. The warm spell must have caused them to rest here. And then the cold came. Maybe they came too late, or somehow got off course. They’re all freezing to death.”

“Too bad we don’t have a camera,” Charlie said. His horse suddenly tossed its head and did a nervous little sidestep, as if it had picked up an unwelcome scent. Arthur’s horse snorted and danced, too, and laid back its ears. He figured it was being spooked by the butterflies.

“A camera,” said Arthur. “Exactly! Look, why don’t you ride back and get one from Ah Dong and tell the others, too? I’ll stay here.”

Charlie nudged his horse off in the direction of the Colonel’s caravan. Arthur turned and said happily, “God, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” Charlie’s horse neighed in the background and he could hear Charlie saying, “Whoa, there, whoa.”

Arthur sat on his horse for a few minutes, then decided to amble through the butterflies. He had only ridden a dozen yards when he heard a wild and chilling roar and immediately the scream of his horse rising above it. He wheeled around just in time to avoid the full brunt of a full-grown brown grizzly, which had charged out of a thicket, hell-bent on breaking the spine of his mount. The bear’s enormous paw slashed the rump of Arthur’s horse but couldn’t bring enough force to break its back. The horse reared suddenly, and Arthur, taken totally by surprise, slid off the saddle and onto the ground; the horse, still screaming, took off through the forest.

The huge beast lunged after the horse for a moment and almost caught it, but, realizing the race was lost as the horse gained speed, the bear stopped and turned in Arthur’s direction. He could see it clearly through the mist. He was standing in a clearing beside a large oak tree that was cloaked in butterflies, but Bob had told him bears climb a lot faster than humans. At least he had his pistol, but against something like this it was of dubious value. He drew it from the holster and pulled back the hammer, cocking it. The bear was coming at him slowly, inexorably, with horrible grunts and snarls.

About twenty feet away, the beast stopped and reared up so high it seemed to blot out the sun; the bear’s neck was pushed forward toward Arthur, and its head was moving snakelike from one side to the other, studying him with its small glaring eyes.

Arthur fired twice, hitting the bear in the chest, but instead of going down, it lunged forward. It was about halfway to Arthur when it faltered and lurched sideways into some thick brush. It made a few more grunts from the brush and then was quiet. Arthur stood stock-still and dumbfounded, with the pistol still pointing in the direction he had fired it, the whiff of gunpowder in the air. Right then, a party from the Colonel’s group, including the Colonel himself, appeared out of the mist, coming on the double after encountering Arthur’s bloody horse and then hearing the shots.

Cowboy Bob and Slim both had their rifles out and at the ready; Strucker, the Colonel, and Crosswinds Charlie brought up the rear. “I shot him twice but he still came at me,” Arthur said shakily.

“It’s a wonder he didn’t eat you,” Bob said. “You can’t kill one of them things with a pistol.”

“That weather must’ve got him out of hibernation,” Slim said. “He was probably movin’ kind of slow.”

“Not when I saw him,” Arthur said.

“
Gott!
Look there!” Strucker exclaimed.

In the swirling mist Arthur saw an enormous brown lump poking out of some bushes.

“I’ll be damned,” Bob said. He nudged his horse prudently toward the lump, rifle at the ready. He circled it at a distance, then dismounted and went up to it, the rifle at his shoulder, pointing. Satisfied the bear was dead, Bob grabbed his horse’s reins and walked back toward the group that had gathered around Arthur.

“Partner,” Bob said to Arthur, “you musta aimed right at his heart and hit it, ’cause that’s the only way anybody’s gonna drop one a these things with a pistol.”

“Well,” the Colonel said. “Well.”

Arthur’s fingers were clutching the pistol so tightly he felt his hands begin to cramp.

“I should have read the horses; they were spooked; they could smell it,” Arthur said, to no one in particular.

“Ain’t your fault,” Slim said. “Could have happened to any of us, anytime. Still might.”

“What’s all this on the ground, here?” Crosswinds Slim asked.

“Butterflies,” Arthur answered.

“There must be millions of them,” the Colonel said.

“There are,” Arthur told him. “It’s a migration.”

“But what are they doing way up here?” wondered the Colonel.

Arthur shook his head. “It’s the place they come to breed, I think, but they’re dying,” he said, but he didn’t feel like conversation.

“Got about as much business up here as we do, I reckon,” Cowboy Bob said finally.