Maria's Trail (The Mule Tamer) (14 page)

As she shook the head dry, she heard someone
coming and stood, one hand on the grip of her six shooter and the other holding
the head by its long hair. She looked like Perseus standing there.

The prospector seemed to know the story, as he
averted his eyes from the head, looked down at the ground and held up his hands
in surrender.

“Howdy, Miss.”

“Hello.”

He was a gringo and the first one Maria had
met, other than the priest. He wore heavy work clothes of canvas and pulled a
mule along behind him. He did not expect to find another human being out here,
let alone a beautiful female holding a severed head.

Maria returned to her task and wrung out the
burlap bag. She put the head in and tied it off.

“That fellar’s seen better days.”

Maria smiled and liked the little joke. She
liked the prospector right away. He had an old six shooter hanging precariously
from his waist, but he was obviously not in the bandit trade. He looked as if
he was just a hardworking man looking for gold or silver or some other things,
anything really, to keep his belly full.

She invited him to eat with her in the cave and
he offered some of his own food for the pot. They sat down together and he
began muttering words in English. She made out most of the words. He did not
cross himself and she thought that was interesting.

“What is this religion of yours?”

He grinned. “I’m a Christian.” He began eating
and hoped that would be an end to it, but he could tell it was not. Maria had
something on her mind.

“You did not make the sign of the cross.”

“I’m called a Lutheran, ma’am.” He went back to
eating.

“What’s this Lutheran?”

“Oh, pretty much the same as a Catholic. Just a
few changes. It’s all the same, really.” He grinned. “All the same God.”

“I am doing His work.” She looked at the head
lying near the fire. “When God doesn’t do His job, I do it for Him.”

“Hmm.” The man didn’t look up from his meal.

“What’s this, hmm?” She demanded. He was giving
responses the way Juana had and it was starting to make her a little angry.

“Nothing.” He smiled and then became serious. He
could see she had a lot of anger and it was sad to see in such a young and
beautiful woman. He decided to continue. “It’s a cruel world, Miss. It’s a
cruel, cruel world.”

“Yes.” She stood up and remembered the last
bottle of good French wine. She liked this man and he knew some things she
didn’t know so she thought she’d loosen his tongue and try to learn something.
He still wouldn’t talk, so she probed.

“Why do you think God makes such a cruel world,
Mister?”

“Oh, He doesn’t.”

She flashed with anger. “Oh,” she pointed at
the head, “you know this hijo de puta? You know what he did? He abused a little
girl. You say that is not cruel?”

“No, that
is
cruel. I said God doesn’t
make it cruel.”

“Huh!” She got up and poured for him again. He
was disarming, this prospector and she was not necessarily angry at him now.

He thought he should clarify. Go ahead and just
say it all and get it over. She wasn’t going to let it go and his cryptic
answers were just going to exacerbate the situation.

“Ma’am. Look at it this way. In the animal
world, there is no cruelty. The animals eat other animals, that is true, but it
isn’t in malice. Only humans can act cruelly. So, if God made all of the
universe and the animals, both human and non-human, and He didn’t make any of
the other creatures of the world cruel, and only humans can be cruel, then how
can we say God is responsible for cruelty?”

She’d not thought of it that way.

“But He made that pig cruel.” She pointed to
the head.

“No, no ma’am. He made the man, but the man chose
the cruel and wicked path. God is not like a manipulator of the marionette…”

“What’s this marionette?”

“A puppet. You know, puppets, the kind on a
string, the manipulator is the one holding the strings, making the puppets
dance or whatever they do. That is not God.”

She sat quietly and got cigars out. They smoked
and she looked into the fire. This man was very interesting. She thought of
something else. “So, when a person, when a person has many bad things
happening. That’s not God punishing them or making them have a bad time? That
is what you are saying?”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s what I am saying. We have a
great gift. We have something the other animals in the world do not have.”

“A soul?”

“Well, yes, we have that, but that isn’t what I
was going to say. We have a thinking, reasoning brain.” He pointed at his head.
“We have free will.”

“Free will?”

“Sure, you know, the ability to pick and
choose. You can be good or you can be bad. You can sleep all day and not work
or you can get up and make something of yourself, make something for yourself.
You,” he pointed at her and she suddenly remembered the old woman showing her
the reflection in the mirror. “You can make the world as you wish.”

He shrugged, “Of course, there are some things
out of our control. If I get struck by lightning, or fall off a cliff by
accident, or get wiped out by a bandit or an Indian,” he smiled, “no offence, I
can’t help that. But I can control a lot of my life. And that, I think, is
God’s plan.”

He poked at the fire and continued. “It’s like,
God kicked it all into motion, but then He stepped back, left us alone and let
us figure it out. We can make good choices or bad and, of course, bad things do
happen to good people and it’s not their fault, it’s just bad luck, but we need
that in order to be really free. We can’t have it both ways, we can’t be free
and then expect God to come in and intervene and make the bad things not happen
to us. That’s not possible.”

She thought a lot about that. The old woman was
very wise and now this prospector was saying a lot of the same things. She
wondered why the padre was not so smart as them. He had more book learning. It
was as if his teaching was a sort of opposite teaching to this: That we were
powerless. That only through the faith in the church could we survive. Like we
were forever children who just had to sit there and take it and pray to the
statues in the church and hope that God and Jesus would be merciful to us.

She liked the prospector’s take on it a lot
better. She felt grown up, like a grown woman thinking this way. She had free
will. She could manipulate her own world as she saw fit. Not be some puppet, a
marionette, like the prospector said, with the padres or God or the church
holding the strings and making everyone act a certain way.

She suddenly felt energetic, excited. She got
up and wiped the dust from her pants. “You are a very smart man!”

He blushed and looked at the fire. “Oh, no
ma’am. If I was smart, I wouldn’t be out here, in the middle of nowhere with a
mule, looking for bits of rock.”

“You
are
smart, Mister.” She grabbed him
by the hand. “Come with me, Mister. I want to show you something very nice.”

She took him to a spring she had discovered
when she was here with Juana. The water bubbled out of the ground hot and
further down there were pools that mixed with cooler water. They formed a
comfortable warm bath. She stripped down to her underwear; she did not want to
distract the man or give him any ideas and she was not interested in anything
more than a warm swim in the pool. He smiled and did the same and they were
soon swimming together and soaking and Maria could tell that it was good on his
old, stiff joints.

She lit a cigar for him and stuck it in his
mouth then one for herself and they smoked together and soaked and tried not to
fall asleep.

Maria lay back and blew smoke at the clouds and
watched the smoke drift away. “Mister, someone once told me that gringos are
all assholes.”

The prospector sat up to avoid choking on his
smoke. He laughed out loud.

Maria continued. “But you are not an asshole at
all.”

“Thank you.” He got himself under control and
stopped laughing. He wiped the tears from his eyes. “Ma’am, assholes are
everywhere. No one country has cornered the market on ‘em. There’s gringo
assholes and Mexican assholes and even Canadian assholes. I’m sure there’s
assholes all over Europe. They’re everywhere.”

She thought on that. Of course he was right.
She reached over and kissed him on the forehead and then regretted it. He was
falling in love with her and she felt sorry because she could not, like with
the lady fence, oblige him.

He knew it too and resolved to take a deep
breath and wait for the flutter to subside. He leaned back against the silt
bank and soaked. “Ma’am, I will tell you, this is living.”

She sold the head to the prospector as he had a
use for it and she was tired of carrying it around. He didn’t have much money,
so she sold it to him cheap. It did have the gold in the tooth, and that was
likely the only gold the fellow was going to get any time soon. He just could
not find enough in the region to pay for the expense of extracting it.

She resolved to go and would leave him at the
cave. He seemed to like it there and she welcomed him to all she’d done. She
smiled at him as she rode away, “Adios, Mister.”

It felt good to tell him to be with God, it
didn’t anger Maria so much anymore and she knew it was because of the man that
she felt this way. She looked back and could see he was crying and she wanted
to stop. She continued on and then did stop and ride back.

“What’s wrong, Mister?”

Tears ran down his face and he rubbed them away
with the palms of his hands. He smiled and moved his head from side to side.
“Nothing, ma’am, nothing at all. God be with you, ma’am. God be with you.”

Maria found herself in a lively town that she’d
not visited before. She found some Indian women there selling beautiful silver
jewelry and decked herself out accordingly. She let them pierce her ears and
she got some pretty earrings to go with the bangles on each arm. She looked
stunning in her new finery and decided that she would begin collecting pretty
ornaments and wear them wherever she went. This would be more confounding to
men and would help her maintain the upper hand.

She looked into her mirror and was pleased and
thought that she’d better not wear these around the lady fence as that might
break her heart further. She felt a little wicked and proud at that thought.
Not that she wanted to hurt the lady, but it was a nice feeling to know that
someone loved her and desired her so much. She thought about the prospector,
too. It was something Maria would have to be careful about from now on. She
broke hearts everywhere and she didn’t intend to do that. She didn’t like
making good people sad.

She wandered through town and nearly ran into a
stately looking man, a gringo with long white moustaches and white hair. He was
tanned dark by his time in the Mexican sun and he was dressed impeccably in
hunting clothes. He stopped Maria and arrogantly put a hand to her face, then
looked at his entourage of fellow hunters.

“My, my, and my New York friends wonder why I
love Mexico so much.”

The men all laughed and Maria stood still and
looked the man in the eye. She held her face still as he patted her cheek and
waited for the men to walk away. She looked back and one of the men sneered and
tried to impress his little party by commenting that he didn’t know that
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show was in Mexico. That elicited a great laugh and
Maria thought that these men needed a lesson.

They were all in the big saloon eating steak,
their horses tied outside. They hired a peon boy to guard the horses and he sat
in the shade and dozed and waited for the men to return.

Maria walked up on him and handed him a cigar.
“How much are they paying you, muchacho?”

“Un centavo, Miss.”

“Hah.” She looked the horses over and noticed
that one had a fancy scabbard with a queer looking rifle in it. It was not like
anything Maria had ever seen. She looked back at the boy and smiled and handed
him a pile of coins. He looked at them, astonished. It was more money than he’d
ever seen.

“Do you know magic, muchacho?”

“No, Miss.”

“Well, it is time you learned. I’ll give you
all this money if you disappear. You know how to disappear, don’t you, little
one?”

“My mother says I disappear all the time, lady.
I know how to disappear.”

Maria smiled. “You are a smart boy. She waved
her hands in the air, like a magician. “Poof, boy. Disappear.”

He stood up and held the money in his hand. He
began to trot off. “Lady?”

“Yes, my little one?”

“If you ever talk to them,” he pointed at the
saloon, “those gringos. Tell them that I said for them to go to hell.” He was
gone.

Maria surveyed the horses. They were very fine
animals. She wished she could steal them all but knew this was impossible.
Instead she walked to each and cut the cinches on every saddle. She took the
fancy rifle, scabbard and all, and tied it to her saddle. She mounted up and
rode down the street. She turned and, tapping her mount’s sides, got him into a
canter, than a full gallop. She pulled her six shooters and fired through the
saloon’s windows and kept going. She was gone.

The gringos came after her. They all, every one
of them, put a foot in the stirrup and ended up on their backsides in the dusty
street with a saddle in their laps. The colonel was red-faced and angry. He’d
not yet fired his new rifle, and now it was gone.

Maria rode and laughed and was so happy that
she thought she’d burst. The men paid dearly for their little joke and now
they’d be paying the harness maker to put new cinches on their saddles. She
stopped and pulled out her prize. It was an odd looking contraption. She played
about with it and pulled on a handle and made the action open. It had a cartridge
in the chamber and she took it out and examined it. It was huge. It was more
than twice the size of the bullet her Winchester fired and she wondered at the
gun’s power. It had a long brass tube attached to the top of it and this, she
surmised, must be some kind of sight. But she couldn’t see through it and the
whole thing just made no sense to her. She put it back in the scabbard and
looked through the pouch sewn onto it. It held many more bullets. At least
she’d have ammunition for the rifle; she just needed someone to show her how it
all worked.

She continued riding south. She knew the
gringos well enough to know they’d not let this go. They’d use her as quarry
instead of some silly deer and they’d track her and find her and there’d be no
telling what their punishment would be. This pleased her no end. She was
excited to be the hare for a change. She was never the hunted and she was keen
to match wits with this old American colonel.

She was initially disappointed as it took them
two days to get even remotely close to her. She left a trail a blind man could
find and she watched with satisfaction as they never got within a mile of her.
They were constantly stopping and camping and she was growing bored. She’d have
to stop as well, so they could catch up.

She ran them through a great thicket of scrub
and mesquite thorns and the posse got torn to pieces. She wasn’t more than
thirty yards from them at the time, but they couldn’t even see her. She made
certain they could hear her, though, and she taunted them as they cried out
like little school girls when the sharp stickers got them.

At one point, she was afraid she’d gone too
far. One of the men, the young one who commented about Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
show, was blubbering, crying and having a little tantrum and Maria actually
felt sorry for him. She could hear the pain and frustration and panic in his
cries and decided not to do that to them again.

Some of the men fired in the direction of her
voice and Maria laughed at them. They couldn’t touch her and were nearly driven
mad by her jeers. She was impressed when the colonel made them stop. He did not
want the hare killed, only captured. She developed a little respect for him
because of that.

She eventually left them to work their way
through the little thorn forest and rode quickly to a high spot and watched
them from a quarter mile away finally drag themselves through and regroup. They
were disoriented until she called out. “Yoo hoo, boys. Over here!” She waved
and gave them just enough time to pull their guns. She turned and rode over the
hill and out of sight.

Finally, after five days with no progress, the
loss of two horses to horrible terrain and not an insignificant amount of skin
and blood from many of the gringos, they decided to send a scout out alone.
They had a pretty good one. He was a former army scout, a Chiricahua, and he
did a good job finding her. Maria watched him from her false camp, she’d made
lots of false camps so they could track her, then she’d actually camp a
distance away, in the brush where she could ambush anyone who tried to attack
her.

The Chiricahua was fascinating. Maria had not
seen one before. He was from up north. He was smallish but stout and wore a mix
of army and white man’s clothing. He had a scarf tied neatly around his head.
He wore a kind of breechclout which would have covered his private parts, yet
he also wore trousers. It all looked very odd to Maria. He had soft moccasins
on his feet that extended up to his knees. Maria was impressed with him until
he dropped his trousers. Nature had called and he defecated near her mock fire
ring. She threw a rock and clobbered him and he sprawled on his back, lying in
his feces.

She walked up to him and poked him awake with
her foot.

He looked around and then spotted Maria and
smiled. It was the first time he’d gotten a look at her in a week. She held out
a water gourd and he drank. She wet a rag and placed it to the knot she’d
raised up on his forehead. She wasn’t worried about him at all, she knew he’d
do her no harm or try to take her captive.

Maria smiled as she watched him recover. “And
you call yourself an Indian?”

He smiled sheepishly. “You are a good rock
thrower.”

She sat down beside him, lit two cigars and
stuck one in his mouth. “What’s your name?”

“Joe.”

“Really? I thought you’d have some long Indian
name.”

“I do.” He looked at the end of his cigar. He
was enjoying it. He pointed off in the distance. “They can’t say it, so I’m
Joe.”

She held out her hand. “I am Maria. Welcome to
my camp.”

They smoked together a while and Maria went to
her horse and dug some mescal out of her saddle bag. She offered it to him. It
would make his head hurt less. He thanked her and drank.

“You know, Maria, they will stop chasing you if
you give the rifle back.”

“Hah!” She spit on the ground and smiled at
Joe. “Anyway, this is too much fun. I don’t want them to stop chasing me. They
cried like little girls coming through the stickers. That was more fun than
I’ve had in a long time, Joe.”

 She regarded him. “I hope you didn’t get hurt.”

He grinned. “I know how to travel in the
desert.”

“Well, what do we do now, Joe?”

He wasn’t certain. He couldn’t go back. He’d be
dishonored and humiliated. He couldn’t capture her and he didn’t want to,
anyway. He hated the colonel. Hated all of the arrogant bastards.

“I know.” Maria grinned. “You will be my
hostage, Joe. You can always say that your horse fell and it was on top of you
and I was able to capture you. Then you will not have been captured by a woman
and your honor will be saved.”

He grinned at the irony of being captured by a
woman. It was preposterous even if he had been. He was most certainly her
captive.

He looked behind him and doubtfully sniffed the
air. “First thing is to get the shit from my back.”

They rode all that day and the next and Maria
let Joe keep his guns and big knife. He respected her for that. She slept
soundly but every time Joe moved, Maria would raise up, head resting on an
elbow. She was a pretty good Indian herself. She’d watch him and determine what
had awakened him and then turn on her side and go back to sleep.

As they rode, Joe had a thought. “We could run
them through the worst of the Sonoran. We might kill a few that way.”

“I don’t want to kill any of them, Joe.”

He regarded her. He didn’t expect such compassion.
She read his mind and shrugged. “I only kill bad men. These men were just rude
to me.”

He shrugged. “You have not heard of the Indian
Wars.”

They rode on. She took a deep drink and handed
her gourd to him. He had another thought. “We could run them across the Rio
Grande, way up east, near Matamoros. It’s near the Gulf and I hear there are
sharks in the river there.” He bared his teeth and made chomping motions with
them.

“What are these sharks?”

He smiled at her and wondered at her innocence.
“The great fish with the sharp teeth. The posse would hate that.”

“But they might get killed.” She drank again
and then lit two cigars. “Come on, Joe. You are wanting too much blood.”

They rode on and then had to wait for the
lumbering posse to catch up. Maria did like Joe’s idea though and turned north.
She’d not travel so far east, but she did have some ideas about the Rio Grande.

They’d slept another night as the posse had to
bed down again and they didn’t want the hapless men to lose their trail. Maria was
getting tired of doubling back to leave enough clues so that they wouldn’t get
lost.

She made a fire in a low arroyo and they
settled in for the night. Joe had killed a chicken and they added that to their
meal.

“Who are all these men so worried over this
gun, Joe?”

“Oh, the colonel, you know. He’s a big ass. Was
in the Great War, back east where the white men were trying to rub each other
out. Then when that was done he came out here to kill Indians.” He poked at a
fire and Maria gave him some mescal. “Then there’s the Russian. Kosterlitzky.
He’s a rurale and he’s with the colonel. He was having a lot of fun watching
the colonel get angry about you. He doesn’t really want to catch you.”

“What’s this Russian?”

“A man from way on the other side of the world.
He came here and now he is turning into a Mexican. He’s very odd. Very smart,
but very strange. He left his country, they say, because he loves this place so
much.” He looked around and wondered how terrible the man’s homeland could
possibly be.

Maria lay back on her blanket and regarded Joe.
He was good company and he was not a bad looking man. He was tough enough. She
noticed him looking at her differently this past day and was waiting for him to
make his move. He didn’t disappoint her and she was impressed with his
boldness.

“Why don’t you bed down over here tonight,
Maria?” He looked her in the eye.

“Oh, that’s a nice idea, Joe, but no.”

He shrugged. “You don’t rut with Indians?”

She laughed out loud. “Well,” she held up an
arm, comparing her complexion to his. “That would be hard to avoid.” She got up
and adjusted her blankets. “No, Joe. And it’s not you, I just don’t want to.”

He let it go.

They had to wait nearly until noon to get
moving and Maria hated the prospect of traveling in such heat. She’d surely
kill some of the gringo posse now and she felt sorry for them. She and Joe
traveled north and eventually made it to the Rio Grande. It was swift and deep
where they finally crossed and their horses had to work a little to get through
the moving water. They made it and rested and dried off on the other side.