The Wild Girl (17 page)

BILLY FLOWERS RODE DOWN THE DUSTY MAIN STREET INTO THE
nearest village, Bavispe, Sonora, trailing the Apache girl on a length of dog chain. The girl’s hands were bound with rope, the chain fastened around her waist and a bandanna knotted across her mouth to keep her from biting. Flowers had fixed a pair of mule hobbles between her ankles so that she had to take short, quick steps in order to keep up. He had not liked having to bind her like this, but she had tried repeatedly to escape and it was the only way that he could manage to bring her into town.

The girl was dressed in one of Flowers’s shirts that hung past her knees, and she still wore her high moccasins, the insides of them all the way down to her instep stained dark with dried menstrual blood, so that she was not only terrified and exhausted, but humiliated.

Curious townsfolk came out of their
jacales
to watch the procession, and they questioned Flowers about what kind of prisoner she was, and when he answered, simply, “Apache,” the dreaded name of their ancient enemy ran through the crowd like a wind.
“Apache.”
The crowd grew, and the more brazen boys among them ran up to touch the girl, as if counting coup, so that they could boast that they had touched a real Apache. They laughed and mocked her.
“Hediendo a chica apache,”
the boys hissed,
“la hija del diablo, la salvaja mugrienta.”
The girl kept her eyes cast to the ground. She understood enough Spanish to know what insults the boys were speaking to her but she could not elude their grasping fingers, for it required all of her attention to keep up with the mule and to avoid falling down. Half a dozen thin, mangy town dogs slunk behind her, raising their noses to sniff her scent on the air. Now and then one of them made a quick feint forward to snap at her heels, as a dog chases a car tire without actually engaging it, then falling proudly back with his confederates.

Billy Flowers rode directly into the town square, ignoring the growing crowd who followed behind. He dismounted and fastened the end of the girl’s chain to the hitching post, where she fell to her knees, exhausted.

Flowers spoke sharply in fluent Spanish to those who crowded around her.
“No la desate,”
he warned the spectators.
“La pagano muerde como un perro.”
He rolled his sleeve back and held up his arm as proof; it was lacerated with teeth marks.

Flowers found the sheriff sitting behind his desk in the jailhouse, his feet up, his chair tilted back. He was a heavyset, indolent man with sleepy, hooded eyes; in fact, he may have been asleep. Flowers explained that he had caught an Apache girl up in the mountains and was now delivering her into the sheriff’s custody because she was completely wild and he did not know what else to do with her.

The sheriff sat looking dumbly back at him, blinking somewhat vacantly, as if he didn’t fully comprehend what had just been said to him. Finally, he took his feet off the desk and tilted heavily forward. “Is this Apache girl guilty of a crime?” he asked.

“None that I know of,” Flowers said. “Other than the crime against God of living in heathen darkness.”

“That is a sin, señor,” said the sheriff, “not a crime. And I’m afraid that God has no jurisdiction in my jail. Perhaps you should consult the padre about taking the girl in at the church.”

“What about the reward for Apaches?” Flowers asked.

“The reward is for Apache scalps,” the sheriff said. “One hundred pesos for the scalp of a man, fifty pesos for that of a woman, and twenty-five pesos for a child’s hair. Is the girl a child or a woman?”

“Somewhere about in between,” Billy Flowers said. “What shall I do then, scalp her?”

The sheriff shrugged as if he didn’t particularly care. “She is without monetary value alive,” he said.

Before Flowers could respond, a great commotion arose outside, a thin, terrified screaming and much excited hollering among the people. The sheriff pushed back from his desk and he and Flowers went outside.

Despite Billy Flowers’s warning, some kind townsperson had tried to give the girl a drink of water, and in so doing had untied her hands and removed the gag from her mouth, and now she lay atop one of the boys who had been tormenting her, her teeth clamped on his neck, shaking her head like a dog. The boy screamed and screamed, a high-pitched wailing that sounded something like the cry of a terrified rabbit in the jaws of a predator. His friends and some of the women were trying to pull the girl off, but she held on to him so savagely that they could not be separated.

“¿Qué piensa usted ahora, alguacil?”
Billy Flowers asked the sheriff over the commotion. “Would you consider now that you’ve apprehended the heathen in the act of committing a crime?” Flowers took hold of the girl’s hair, wrapped it once around his fist, and with one quick yank snatched her off the boy, in the same decisive way that he sometimes broke up fights among his dogs. The boy, wild-eyed, clutched his bloody throat, still screaming and sobbing hysterically, crabbing backward away from the girl, which Flowers took to be a positive sign that his wounds were not fatal.

Now he held the girl by the hair at arm’s length. She did not even attempt to struggle against him, knowing the futility of it all too well. “I have to say I’m getting mightily tired of you, missy,” he said. “I’ll be glad to be free of you.” When he released his grip, she sank back to her knees.

“I’m leaving her right here, Sheriff,” Billy Flowers said, mounting his mule. “I caught her, now you may do with her as you will. Let her go if you like. It’s all the same to me. But I would caution you to watch out for her. As you have witnessed, like any other wild creature, she will kill when cornered.” Flowers took one last look at the girl where she knelt in the dirt, her head downcast. He was not a sentimental man but he felt a certain grudging respect for her, just as he respected the lions and bears that he hunted. And he felt, just for a moment, as he occasionally did with these animals, a pang of something like pity for her. He turned the mule and spurred him into a quick trot back down the street the way he had come.

THE NOTEBOOKS OF NED GILES, 1932
NOTEBOOK III:

La Niña Bronca

HEATHEN SUN GOD RESTORES LIFE TO DYING GIRL

12 MAY, 1932

Bavispe, Sonora

How quickly the “summer camp” atmosphere has come to an end, and after the terrible events of this day, I’m embarrassed by the flippancy of my last entry. Where to begin . . .

I woke early this morning, as I have every day since our arrival here, to the sound of roosters crowing in the village. I decided that I would walk into town and make some photographs.

I dressed and loaded film in the Leica, and stepped over Jesus, who lay wrapped in a blanket on his sleeping pad by the tent opening.

He sat up. “I come with you, Señor Ned.”

“No, it’s early, go back to sleep, kid. I’m just going to take a little walk. I won’t be long.”

It was cool outside and smoke from the chimneys in the village had settled like a low fog over the valley floor, the hills above the river a pearly gray, not yet colored by sunlight, a sheen of dew coating the grass in the river bottom so that everything seemed sheathed in a pale icy silver.

Our camp is pitched on a broad grassy bench and is like a small village itself, with crisp white canvas tents of various sizes neatly laid out in separate neighborhoods for volunteers, staff, and commissary. Smoke curled from the morning cook fires in the mess tents, and the stock grazed on the lush meadow grasses, whorled by dew.

Bavispe is a typically poor Mexican village of dirt streets lined by mud adobe
jacales
. Chickens pecked in the yards, dogs barked, and people peered out at me through drawn curtains and shuttered windows. Although the residents are accustomed by now to seeing me around town with my camera, they remain guarded. A pretty girl swept a doorway on the edge of the plaza, but ducked shyly back inside when she spotted me.

Indian men dressed in serapes, the women in colorful dresses and shawls, were setting up tables around the plaza, unloading baskets of produce from donkeys and mules. I realized that it was Saturday and they were setting up the market. I exposed some film of the scene, and for the most part, the merchants were friendly and cooperative, although one old woman waved her cane threateningly when I pointed my camera at her.

An enormous, incongruously ornate adobe brick church dominates the plaza. Built in the past century by Franciscan missionaries, or rather by the Indian slave labor they employed, it seems to loom threateningly over the little village. Inside, it was cool and dark, lit only by candles and wall sconces. I could hear the priest saying morning mass from the altar, but I could barely make him out in the dimness. I had not yet seen this man who sent village girls off to a life of prostitution in the border towns and I sat down in a pew in the rear of the church, waiting for my eyes to adjust. But there was something hypnotic about the low, echoing incantations of the mass, the dim candlelight, and I think I must have dozed off sitting there. The next thing I knew someone slipped into the pew beside me. It was Jesus, breathing heavily.

“You must come with me, Señor Ned,” he whispered urgently.

“What’s going on, kid?”

“They caught an Apache. A real wild Apache.”

I followed the boy out of the church. A crowd had formed on the other side of the plaza and we pushed our way through it. There I witnessed a sight such as I have never before seen. An Indian girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, was tethered by a rope to a hitching post in front of the jailhouse. She sat on her haunches in the dirt, peering out at the crowd through fiercely tangled hair. An overturned bucket lay beside her, and several uneaten tamales that had been thrown to her, as to a dog. The girl was filthy, streaked with dirt, sweat, and blood, dressed in a soiled man’s shirt and high moccasins. Even from a distance I could smell her.

“You see, Señor Ned?” Jesus said in a low voice of wonder. “A wild Apache. A
real
wild Apache Indian. A gringo lion hunter caught her with his dogs in the mountains.”

“Why do they have her tied to the hitching post?” I asked.

“Because she is so dangerous,” said the boy.

“She’s just a girl, for Christ’s sake.”

“She bit one of the village boys,” Jesus insisted. “She nearly killed him. You must take her photograph.”

The boy’s words snapped me out of my state of shock. “Yeah, you’re right, kid.”

It is both disturbing and at the same time comforting, the sense of detachment that overcomes me when I look through my camera lens. Suddenly I was all business and the girl became a subject now, fodder for the camera, a photographic problem to be solved rather than a suffering human being to be pitied. I shot her from several different angles and then I moved in closer. The crowd buzzed excitedly.

“Be careful, Señor Ned!” Jesus said. “Do not go too close. She is very dangerous.”

The girl’s eyes followed me from beneath the tangle of hair, and from her throat issued a low warning sound like a growl.