Heaven Is a Long Way Off (11 page)

“This creek is feisty,” said Robber. “When we flow into the Los Angeles River, it might turn into a monster.”

“I've never seen the Los Angeles River aroused,” said Grumble.

“You ain't seen it after this much rain.”

Julia denounced the curse God put on women in the Garden of Eden, the pain of bearing children, never to end, never to end. She cursed God himself, who was just another male. And she cursed His Holy Mother—
I don't give a damn why, I'm just cursing her.
At the start of every labor pain, or when she couldn't think of anyone else to curse, she returned to execrating Flat Dog.

Grumble heard oaths that were new on the horizon of his personal experience.

“Here comes the river,” said Robber, gesturing to the right. He rowed the boat toward that bank. Where the new current plunged in, the water roiled, the waves tossing into the air. It reminded Grumble of a horse herd stampeding, their manes flying—it was as loud and scary as a stampede.

Robber heaved the boat through the roiling where the two currents met. The new, big current seized the small craft and turned it backward.

Robber yelled at the river, pulled fiercely on the oars, pivoted, and got himself faced downstream again. The boat rocked and bounced on the bucking river.

Everyone got splashed head to toe, as though they weren't already wet enough.

Then the water eased off to mere jostling, and full speed ahead, lickety-split.

Reina and Sumner patted Julia, held her, arranged the wool blankets tight around her. “They can't keep you dry,” said Sumner, “but they'll keep you warm.”

Julia swore bitterly.

Soon Robber warned his passengers, “The Zanja Madre dam is coming up.”

“Dam?” said Grumble, Sumner, and Reina in one voice.

Robber looked at them. “How do you think the fields get irrigated? This dam makes the ditch.”

“What are we going to do?” cried Grumble.

“Pull the boat out and portage it around.”

Julia spewed out imprecations.

Grumble said, “Just tell me what to do.”

Robber nodded, as though to say,
Good man.

He stood up at the oars and peered downstream. “I can't see it.”

They all looked downstream. The rain thinned, and the sound of the river blocked out…

“Oh, shit,” said Robber.

He dropped to his seat and rowed like hell for the left bank.

“We're not gonna make it!”

Julia shrieked.

Now they all saw the dam of mud and brush. In a sheen of light the river thrummed straight over it.

Robber stood up and stared frantically at the dam. Frantically, he maneuvered, remaneuvered, got them a stroke this way and a stroke that way. “I don't see the best spot to go over,” he hollered. “We may flip!”

The bow jutted into space. The bottom scraped.

“Oh, God,” yelled Robber.

“Madre de Dios!”
bellowed Julia.

Sitting in the stern, Grumble felt the waters swamp that end of the boat. “We're sinking!” he shouted.

Robber heaved on the oars, and the bow tilted downward.

They teetered over the dam.

Julia screamed.

The bow dived into the river several feet below. The undertow grabbed it.

The stern swung around the bow.

Robber rowed furiously, trying to jerk the stern downstream. Current boiled over the dam and into the boat.

Robber roared as he made a mighty heave.

With a sucking sound the bow popped out of the undertow.

All of a sudden their craft was small, flooded, and low and wobbly in the water.

“Bail!” shouted Robber.

The passengers bucketed water from the boat to the river. Bucket by bucket the boat floated higher. Soon it was on the water and not in it.

Finally, Robber could row to shore. He jumped out and held the boat with the painter.

Julia cursed Robber.

After Grumble, Sumner, and Reina clambered out, Reina holding Esperanza, Robber lifted Julia from the boat and set her on the ground.

She didn't protest. She was silent for the moment, her face grim and fixed, her mind riding toward the agony to come, plunging on the wild and stampeding stallion of pain.

Robber turned the boat upside down, then righted it, and pushed it back into the river. They got in, helped Julia get balanced in her squat, and headed downstream.

Grumble muttered to himself, “Heaven is a very, very long way off, and hell is hounding our heels.”

 

T
HE WIND PICKED
up and the rain fell harder.

“Look sharp,” said Sam.

In Indian country you knew where enemies might be. In the underbrush along the creek. In the timber. Behind the ridge. Here they could come from any direction.

They turned the horses away from the river, along the irrigation ditch, to avoid giving the boat away.

Here on the eastern edge of the pueblo he could see too many hiding places. Crooked tracks led away from the bank, and hovels dotted the byways. A few structures were adobes. Any wall, any pen, any bush could hide an enemy.

No call for an honest fight here. Ideal spot for an ambush.

He didn't know whether he was chill from the rain or from fear.

An old woman came out of a hovel hunched over, a multicolored blanket draped over her head. She looked at the four riders passing along the river. Her mouth dropped into a U and she hurried back inside.

Sam strained his eyes down every track, around the edges of every building and fence, behind every tree, and saw nothing or everything. In the rain—streaming down, whipped by the wind—in the rain everything moved. Or nothing.

Long after the pueblo was behind them, his skin prickled. Turning in his saddle, he could see only hints of the village, dark shadows in the rain.

 

T
HE RAIN WAS
the backdrop, unnoticed. Grumble paid it no mind, and the other boaters stopped grousing about it.

Though Julia's protests were unrelenting, Grumble accepted them as he accepted the rain and cold. Reina said, “The pains are coming closer together.”

Grumble was tired. He couldn't remember, ever, being so tired. “How far?” he asked.

Robber didn't answer.

“How long to the harbor?”

“I don't know. By road from the pueblo, twenty-five miles. By river, I don't know. Longer.” He looked at the current. “The river's going godawmighty fast, but it's a long way.”

For an hour or so, the ride had been fast and uneventful. Grumble thought wearily,
Just the way I want it.
He grimaced.

“Will we make it tonight?”

“If we do, it will be way, way after dark.”

“Julia's not gonna wait that long,” said Sumner.

The men looked at each other. In the rain and the mud it would be one miserable night.

And the baby?
Grumble wondered.
Can the baby survive?

“The other river's coming up,” said Robber.

“Other river?”

Robber smiled slightly. “The Rio Hondo.”

Robber was a man of the waters, Grumble knew. He understood swells and tides, storms and following seas. It was no surprise that hills and the rivulets they formed, rains and the currents they created, these would be within his ken. People who didn't understand such things, well, Robber probably thought them a little silly.

Grumble didn't mind.

Robber pointed out the Rio Hondo coming in from the left, another lift to a current that was already bounding. “I'm going to hug the left bank,” said Robber. “We want to feather into this new force as silky as possible.”

Grumble was collecting Robber's jargon of the waters.

“It won't feel like a feather, though,” said Robber.

It felt like they hit a rock. The bow bumped up and sideways. Julia yelled, and followed that with a spew of Spanish babble.

The river jabbered louder, and nattered and gabbled, and gurgled. It whacked the gunwales and slashed its waves over and into the boat, drenching the occupants. It slapped and jiggled the boat, squirreled it sideways, and teeter-tottered it. Robber was furious with trying to keep it straight. After a jigger-jerky ride, they slid into water that wasn't quite as rough.

Robber spun the boat sideways, so he could see upstream and down. His eyes rounded, his lower lip trembled, and he said, “Oh, shit!”

Grumble looked up the little
rio.
Toward them roared a wall about two feet high, a wall of churning water.

“Flash flood!” cried Robber.

Every eye was fixed on the roaring wall. They gasped for the last breath they might take on this earth.

The waters fell like an avalanche on the stern of their boat. The bow tilted toward the sky. The undertow grabbed the back end and ripped it sideways. The boat corkscrewed, the bow shot upward, and everything and everyone in the boat pitched into the tumult.

Grumble thought of nothing but grabbing Julia. He seized her under the arms and kicked like hell. Water ripped them, it rocked them, it buried them, it threw them high—it pummeled them and somersaulted them—it flung them like dirt from an explosion.

Yet being flung aside and whirled around meant…Grumble lay on his back and kicked like hell. “Kick!” he hollered at Julia, and felt her motions down below. “Kick!” He thrashed on his back, sometimes with his head underwater, Julia on top of him, faceup.

The eddy grabbed his shoulders and jerked them upstream. He made his last cry sound epic: “Ki-i-ck!”

Waves tumbled and flummoxed him. He kicked. Then suddenly he was sure they were going upstream instead of down. He fought for his breath, for his sanity. They bobbed along like corks. By God, they
were
going upstream. The current blasted downstream like a train of runaway wagons, and this eddy mildly eased its way the other direction.

He turned them toward the bank. In a few minutes he could actually stand up. It seemed like a miracle.

He took inventory.

Ten paces above them was Sumner, on his hands and knees in the shallows.

Another twenty paces above Sumner stood Robber, hip deep in water, his arms wrapped around Reina, her arms wrapped around Esperanza. They all had expressions of absolute stupefaction on their faces.

Reina fussed furiously with the blankets around Esperanza's face. The child sneezed, and everyone laughed.

Only the boat was missing.

 

T
HE ROAR OF
wild waters, then the shouts—the four riders looked at each other, then whipped their horses down the grassy slope toward the river.

“Help!” Grumble yelled.

Flat Dog jumped off his horse on the fly, sprinted to the bank, and plowed through the water to Grumble and Julia. In a jiffy he had his wife on grass above the bank, resting.

“Blankets!”

“They're soaked,” called Robber, who was holding Reina's hand and pulling her out of the river.

“Blankets anyway!”

Sumner staggered toward the bank.

Sam saw one dark shadow in the water. He jumped in and found the water was only waist deep. An arm's length beyond him it was raging. The shadow turned out to be a blanket, and he ran to Julia with it.

Ignored, Grumble crawled out of the water, crawled to Julia, and sagged to the ground.

Everyone hovered over Julia.

She said in Spanish, “The baby's coming now, the baby's going to come now, the baby's coming now.”

 

T
HEY MADE CAMP
right there. In a few minutes wet canvas was tented to make a sort of shelter, and Flat Dog had a small fire going.

Robber found the boat a quarter mile downstream, caught on some brush, and brought it back.

Sam and Hannibal staked the horses and went on foot to scout. Rubio or not, the party had to stay right here. Though the air felt swollen with moisture, the rain had eased off. They topped the rise behind the camp and looked up their back trail. Mists hung low. Sam's eyes swept the grasses, bushes, and trees with his naked eyes. Then he lifted the field glass and swept them again. Coy cocked his head, as though listening.

Reina and Sumner made Julia comfortable near the fire. Grumble mumbled the prayers left from a Catholic boyhood in Baltimore.

In twenty minutes Flat Dog had coffee bubbling. Julia rejected it angrily, and glared and cursed her husband. The others were grateful for the tin cups of hot, steaming brew.

Grumble was warming his hands on the cup when Sam and Hannibal came treading softly into camp. Sam said, “They're here.”

“W
E CAN DEFEND
this spot,” said Hannibal.

It was a low rise between the river and the creek, which here ran almost parallel. A hundred paces below, the creek crooked hard left into the river, just below the camp.
Just below our people.

The banks of the river and of the creek had plenty of cover, trees and bushes. This rise had almost none.

Sam and Hannibal crowded behind the one low tree on the rise. Flat Dog squatted behind a boulder that barely hid him. Galbraith lay in some high grass, the best he could do.

Coy kept prancing out from behind the trees and sniffing the breeze.

“How many?” asked Flat Dog.

“At least a dozen,” said Sam. He was holding the field glass on them. They were strung out, dipping up and down on the hillocks, and he couldn't see them all at once.

Galbraith kept silent.

“Rubio there?”

“Out in front.”

“He is some sumbitch,” Flat Dog said from his boulder.

“They're on our tracks,” said Sam.

“Leading them right to this spot,” said Hannibal.

“And if they get by us,” said Flat Dog, “leading them straight to the boat.”

Sam's fantasy called up a crying newborn, and the child's cry floated like a croon to the murderers.

Sam surveyed the area. “I hate to give up the high ground,” he said, “but…”

“No choice,” said Hannibal.

“A cross fire,” said Sam. “Right here, a cross fire.”

Galbraith nodded once. Quick to act and slow to speak, he crawled off the rise, bent low, and took cover on the slope. The other three looked at each other. Flat Dog started after Galbraith, probably to be closer to Julia.

“Flat Dog,” called Sam. “Leave Rubio to us.”

His friend looked back and nodded.

Sam and Hannibal ducked down toward the creek. The cover was poor all the way to the willows along the bank. “In those cottonwoods,” said Hannibal, indicating the far bank.

The men were sloshing through the water when Coy stopped at its edge. His spine hair rose, his tail pointed, and he growled.

Sam saw it. “Cub!”

Hannibal looked sharp, but could see only wiggling leaves of bushes. “Black bear or griz?”

“Couldn't tell.”

They both watched the shrubbery where the cub disappeared. “Berry patch,” said Sam.

Where there was one cub, there were probably two. Where there were any cubs, there was a sow. It was the sow who would be dangerous, very dangerous if you got between her and one of the cubs.

“Griz,” said Sam. “Just saw her hump.” A grizzly had a shoulder that, compared to a black bear's, tented up.

Coy snarled and gave a short, sharp bark.

The silvertip rose on her hind legs. The cub rumpety-rumped past her. Mama pivoted and padded along behind the cub.

“Hightailing it,” said Hannibal.

Sam watched the spot. “I hope so. Sure gives me the willies,” he said.

They picked shooting stations behind cottonwoods. Their barrels rested on limbs. The shots were a reasonable distance, wide open, and there was no wind. But the mist, which thickened and cleared from moment to moment, could ruin visibility.

“I don't like these odds,” Sam said. The fur men had four rifles, which would take a minute or so to reload after the first volley. Rubio's men had a dozen or more rifles. Both sides had pistols.

Sam watched the rise. Turning his back to the berry patch made his skin tingle. Coy kept looking that way.

“Any strategy?” said Sam.

“Yeah. Blow hell out of them.”

No need for the field glass now. Tense, Sam and Hannibal chewed their lips, rubbed their fingers, and stamped their feet. They watched for death to approach above. They listened nervously for the first sound of life arriving below.
And the damn griz is behind me,
thought Sam.

The lead rider came into view. From glassing him earlier, Sam knew it was Rubio. He looked along his sights.

“Take Rubio down with the first shot,” said Hannibal, “so Flat Dog won't have to.”

“Right.”

“I'll hold fire.”

T
WO WORLDS FOR
Julia, one black and one gray. In the black world she was a mote of dust spinning in a whirlwind of agony. She saw the whirlwind in ultra-clarity, the riffles of wind wild and glittering. Compared to any in real life, it was monumental, gargantuan, as big as the reach of the Milky Way across the night sky. Within this cyclone of energy the dust mote known as Julia Rubio Flat Dog gyrated around and around in unbelievable fury. And on this terrible power she rose up and up and up and up…

Then, abruptly, it set her down into the gray world, here on the ground, in this day of mist, on this soggy ground, in these wet blankets, with these two good, pitying people, Reina and Sumner, holding her hands on each side.

Julia knew she would die. The next time the whirlwind snatched her up she would break open, she would fly apart, and the life would spray out of her in bloody droplets into the savage air.

The baby will live,
she thought. She didn't understand that, but the baby would live. She was glad.

And she was glad to die. Eager to die. Anything except…

The black world took her again. In an instant she was screaming upward into the whirlwind.

 

S
AM KEPT HIS
eyes on the riders. Coy pointed like a bird dog toward the berry patch where the griz disappeared.
Damn, I hate this.
Rubio was enough to worry about.

The foremost horse and rider loped into range. Rubio was reading the sloppy tracks himself. His mount cantered forward steadily. The shot was still long.

Rubio slowed his mount to a walk.
Dammit.
If the don was good at reading sign, he'd see the tale soon enough—horses cutting suddenly downhill toward the river, without any sense—moccasin prints among the horse prints.

It was time. Sam told himself,
Mexicans can't outshoot mountain men, no way.

He squeezed the trigger, thinking clearly,
Surprise better be the trump card.

 

J
ULIA
F
LAT
D
OG,
born Julia Rubio y Obregon, made the supreme effort of her eighteen years. She gathered all her thoughts, all her juices, all her muscles, all her force, everything she was and a lot more, and—Madre de Dios—pushed! Once! Twice! Reina and Sumner were exclaiming, cheering her on, but her fierce concentration made her deaf. Only the urge and the effort existed.

A third time! She teetered on the edge of success and fell back. Immediately, with a force she never dreamed she had, Julia made a huge fourth push and—
blessed virgin!
—she expelled the cursed, awful, alien thing from her body. It felt like excreting a melon.

“You did it!” cried Sumner.

Grumble, sitting at her head, applauded.

“
Es en muchacho!
” exclaimed Reina. It's a boy.

Robber joined in Grumble's applause.

Beaming, Sumner wiped and dried the baby.

Reina held Esperanza close to the new child. “This is your cousin,” she said.

The new fellow roared out a protest at this strange world. He roared another one at the cold and the damp. Everyone chuckled.

Grumble cut the cord, and Reina put the baby to his mother's breast.

Julia was swimming back toward the surface of the ocean of awareness. She noticed a weight on her chest. She felt it with her fingers, and her mind rose toward the light. She held the weight where she could see it.

A baby. Her baby. A child, a human being. A living union of her and Flat Dog. A boy. He glowed with an angelic light. He was the most beautiful creature she'd ever seen.

Emotion lifted her on a huge wave, a swell of ecstasy. She clutched their creation to her bosom.

After a long while, she managed to say, “He is Azul Flat Dog. After Flat Dog's brother, Blue Medicine Horse, who died.”

Happily, she unsnapped her blouse and put Azul's mouth on her nipple. As she felt the first suck at her milk, a rifle boomed.

 

C
ESAR
R
UBIO STOOD
up in his stirrups to see the tracks. Then three waves crashed on him almost simultaneously—he felt an agony in his hip, he heard an explosion, and he crashed off his mount to the ground.

“Hell,” said Sam, “he moved and it hit him low.”

Two shots boomed from the direction of the river.

Rubio's men wheeled, looked, milled, raised their rifles, and saw nothing to shoot at.

One man was on the ground, another sagging and bleeding in his saddle.

A rider decided the creek was better than the river and charged down the short slope into bushes and trees.

All followed him.

Hannibal shot one man out of his saddle.

Hearing the blast and seeing the smoke, the line of riders angled upstream.

Rubio's mount came last in a jerky gait. The don's boot was caught in the stirrup, and his body dangled like an effigy, bouncing across grass, rocks, and mud.

Just as the riders disappeared into the cover, Sam shot again. The last rider flinched and grabbed but kept his seat.

“They're into the berry patch,” he said, looking wild-eyed at Hannibal.

They both reloaded fast, fingers flying.

For long moments they heard nothing and saw nothing.

From the corner of his eye Sam saw Flat Dog and Galbraith crawl across the top of the rise, half-hidden in the grass, rifles ready.

The griz roared.

“If hell has church bells,” said Hannibal, “they sound like that.”

Eight or ten riders burst out of the thicket like a flock of ducks shotgunned by hunters.

Flat Dog and Galbraith fired from the high ground.

Sam heard an answering shot and saw the smoke, but the barrel seemed to be pointed straight up in the air.

More riders burst out of the berry patch. They wavered, gathered, and flew back north, the way they came, toward the pueblo, toward home. Anywhere gunfire and grizzlies might not tear hell out of them.

Rubio's horse came last, awkwardly, with Rubio's weight flopping along on one side. The don thrashed desperately to get his boot free. Suddenly, in a paroxysm of effort, he wrenched the foot loose and collapsed onto the muddy earth. His horse abandoned him at a gallop.

Sam looked at his enemy, now brought low.

Flat Dog started down the hill toward Rubio.

“Let him be,” called Hannibal.

All four trappers waited. They watched. Coy grew rigid, pointed, and growled.

The sow griz approached the injured don with mincing steps. She was curious but wary. She stopped and looked. She sniffed the air, and the trappers felt glad to be downwind of her. She took several minutes getting to the crumpled figure.

She swatted it a couple of times, in a testing way.

Rubio flung an arm up in a half circle and back to the ground.

The griz roared and tore his shoulder with her teeth.

The two cubs crept close.

The griz roared louder. She whacked the body with her snout. She snuffled. She growled, bit, and waggled her head.

An arm came away in her mouth, hand up, accepting the rain.

Sam and Hannibal walked up the rise to join their friends. They looked at the bleeding bodies of the fallen. They looked at each other. They wanted to share their amazement, but there were no words.

They trotted away from the griz, toward camp. Not a man of them wanted to see more of what was happening with the griz and…

“Just before the first shot,” said Galbraith, “I thought I heard a baby bawl.”

Flat Dog ran toward Julia.