The Wild Girl (34 page)

“Where did you go last night?” I asked her in Spanish.

“I took some of the young girls to hide in the caves,” she said. “When it is like that, no one is safe, bad things happen.”

“Do you know where Joseph is?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Jesus?”

“He has run away with the others.”

“You know that Ned and the others are gone?”

“Yes, I saw them before they left.”

“Did you know that Mr. Browning is dead?”

The girl looked away from me with a sudden frightened look in her eyes. I remembered that the Apaches are terrified of death; to even mention the word is enough to conjure up the dead person’s ghost. I should have said that Mr. Browning was “gone.”

I took her face in my hand and turned it toward me and made her look me in the eye. “Mr. Browning is
dead
. Your people killed him when they hit him over the head with the rock. Do you understand me? He was your friend. He was kind to you. He was a good, gentle man. And now he is
dead
.
Murdered
. For no reason.”

The girl nodded and tears welled up in her eyes. “My mother, too, is dead,” she whispered. “And my sister . . .”

“That’s right, sweetheart,” I said. “And they, too, were murdered by bad men for no reason. Ned and the others are going to bring the Mexican soldiers and the Americans back here. They just want the boy, Geraldo. If you do not give him up, more of your people will die. Please, I must speak to your grandfather.”

A woman tended the fire in front of the white Apache’s wickiup. A cradleboard in which was strapped a cheerful smiling baby was propped up beside her. The girl spoke to the woman, who answered crossly, and gestured for us to enter the wickiup, as if she was completely disgusted with its occupants and wanted nothing to do with them herself.

The air was dim and rank inside, and as our eyes adjusted I saw that Joseph and the white Apache, Charley, both lay asleep, sprawled atop the blankets. A not quite empty bottle of mescal lay on its side between them. Seated cross-legged in the rear of the wickiup was the old blind woman Siki; she stared straight ahead out of milky eyes. The girl spoke to her softly and the old woman smiled and returned the girl’s greeting.

I gently shook Joseph’s shoulder until he opened his eyes. He looked at me blankly for a long time, as if trying to place me in his memory. Finally he dragged himself into a seated position, his eyes hollow and sick. “Where is my grandson?” he asked.

“He is safe for now,” I said. “But while you were drunk last night, they strung him up over the fire. If it hadn’t been for Ned, they’d have cooked his brains.”

“I have not had a drink of alcohol since the last time my friend Harley Rope and I got drunk at his shack in White Tail,” Joseph said. “That night Harley went outside to take a piss and when he finished he walked out to the highway and lay down and fell asleep. He was run over by a truck just before dawn. Harley was my last friend from the old days. We had ridden together and scouted together and had been in Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma together. Once a week, I walked to his shack, or he to mine, and we got drunk together. But after Harley died, I decided that I would not drink alcohol anymore.”

“What made you drink last night, Joseph?” I asked.

He didn’t answer for a long time, just stared hollowly into space. Finally he nodded and said, “I was feeling pretty bad.”

“How are you feeling now?”

He smiled wanly. “Not too good.”

“What were you feeling bad about?”

“It was a very long time ago . . .”

“Tell me.”

He looked at the white Apache, who still slept heavily. “This man’s name is Charley,” Joseph said. “Charley McComas. I caught him when he was a boy.”

“Yes, I heard you say so yesterday,” I said. “I’ve read about little Charley McComas. Kidnapped by the Apaches outside Silver City, New Mexico, when he was six years old. His parents were killed during the abduction. The boy was never found.”

“That’s because he is here,” Joseph said.

“And you’re sure it’s really him?”

“Of course,” Joseph said. “I caught him. I killed his mother.”

Here then, Neddy, is the story that I have cobbled together about little Charley McComas, both from that which Joseph has told me about that long-ago day of his abduction, and what Charley himself, his Apache mother, the old woman Siki, and the girl, his granddaughter, your wife, Chideh, have all related to me in bits and pieces during my days here. Of course, like so many native cultures theirs is a strictly oral history, the stories passed down through the generations, subtly altered and elaborated upon in the retellings until it’s hard to say exactly where the truth leaves off and the legend begins. Further adding to this difficulty is the fact that I myself have taken some creative license in order to fill in the blanks, which, to be sure, is poor science, but I hope at least makes for interesting reading for you. And although I would be drummed out of my profession if I ever admitted it to any of my colleagues, in the little time that I have spent among these people, I am increasingly of the opinion that one can more accurately describe them with an act of imagination than with the strict facts. Therefore, without further ado . . .

Little Charley McComas and his parents were traveling in a buckboard wagon on the way to Lordsburg from their home in Silver City. It was late March of the year 1883, and the McComases had stopped to have a picnic under a walnut tree. For dessert they were having a cherry pie that had been baked by the nice woman at whose inn in Mountain Home they had stayed the night before, and with whose children Charley had played. The pie had still been warm when they left Mountain Home that morning and Charley had been able to smell it in the wagon all morning long.

They had stopped to eat their picnic under a walnut tree. It was a lovely spring day and his mother had taken the picnic basket out of the back of the wagon and laid all the food out on a red-checked tablecloth that she had spread on the ground under the tree. They sat cross-legged on the tablecloth, just like Indians, Charley remembered thinking, and they ate cold fried chicken and hard-boiled eggs and fresh bread that Mrs. Dennis had also baked for them. Charley’s father was a judge, a stern, severe man of whom Charley was a bit afraid. His mother was pretty and gay, vivacious, a good tonic to her sometimes dour husband. They were having a fine time at their picnic. The cherry pie was set out under a white cloth napkin. Charley could hardly wait to eat a piece for dessert. He’d been looking forward to that pie all morning.

But Charley McComas never got to eat his pie. Because at that moment a hole tore open in the universe and his old world began to rush out of it, like water swirling down a drainpipe. The horses in their traces suddenly raised their heads and nickered softly and Charley and his parents looked up to see the Apaches thundering up the arroyo toward them, like some terrible vision from hell, riding hard and yipping in a way that would eventually become very familiar to Charley, but at the time sounded so strange and savage.

A cloud of dust roiled up from the Apaches’ horses’ hooves, which made it appear as if they were riding out of a misty dream, and Charley wasn’t so much afraid at first as he was fascinated at this spectacle of
real
Indians riding down upon them.

His father said: “Get in the wagon.
Now!
” And his mother snatched Charley to his feet, her own terror washing over him like a stink; she ran with him, stumbling, to the back of the buckboard, where she half lifted, half threw the boy in. She screamed at him in a high thin voice he had never before heard, ordering him to lie down. His father picked up his Winchester repeating rifle, and both his mother and father climbed into the front seat of the wagon. His father took the reins and slapped the horses’ rumps with them, hollering them into motion. Why did his father think that he could outrun mounted Apaches in a buckboard wagon? Later, after Charley grew up and became an accomplished Apache warrior in his own right and the People told the story of his abduction, he would think less of this White Eyes man who had been his father for this terrible lapse of judgment. It would have been far better to release the horses from their traces, to cut them out if necessary, or even to shoot them where they stood and take cover behind the wagon. His father could have held the Apaches off for a long time with his Winchester, and with his Colt pistol, at least killing a few of them, and possibly aborting the attack or at least slowing it, buying time until help came.

Before they had gone fifty yards in the wagon, the first bullet struck his father in the arm. He cried out and handed the reins over to Charley’s mother, taking the Winchester from her.
“Go!”
he said. It was the last word Charley would ever hear his father speak.
“Go!”
and his father leaped from the wagon to the ground and began running toward the approaching Apaches, firing his rifle. Whether he had initially panicked or not, it was a courageous, if futile move on Judge McComas’s part, to try to divert the Apaches while his wife and son escaped. Charley watched solemnly, trancelike, from the back of the wagon as more bullets struck his father until finally he stopped running and fell to his knees, still jacking shells into his rifle and firing, even as he was dying. In their retelling of the story, the People always said that Judge McComas had been a brave man and had died honorably, and for that they did not scalp him or mutilate his body.

Charley and his mother did not make it far. A bullet struck one of the horses and it fell dead in its harness and the wagon came to an abrupt halt. The Apaches approached on their horses, surrounding them, yipping and waving their rifles overhead in triumph. His mother leaped from her side of the wagon and tried to come to Charley, who sat up now in the back of the wagon, but they blocked her way and one of them, the man called Goso, struck her mercilessly in the face with his rifle butt, knocking her to the ground. Charley hollered and tried to jump from the back of the wagon and go to his mother’s aid, but one of them stepped off his horse onto the back of the wagon and held the boy there. He struggled fiercely against the man, which caused the others to laugh at the boy’s feistiness—there was nothing that the Apaches admired more than the display of courage—but he was only six years old, after all, and the man easily subdued him.

His mother’s face was bleeding from the blow of the rifle butt, and she was unconscious, and the Apaches stripped the dress from her body, careful not to tear it. The warrior Goso would give that dress to his young wife, Siki, who would wear it, with some modifications, for years to come. And for a long time, the boy Charley would think of his White Eyes mother every time he saw Siki wearing that dress, until eventually the memory of her faded, and the dress had no more significance than any other which his Apache mother wore.

Wielding their knives as precisely as surgeons, the Apaches cut the shoes from his mother’s feet, cut the stockings from her legs, cut the corset from her torso; these articles they did not care about preserving because no women among the People would wear such things. Because he was the leader of the raid, Goso took Charley’s mother by the hair and raised his breechcloth and, laughing, mounted her from behind the way that Charley had seen dogs do, although he did not yet understand why exactly they did this. His mother had begun to regain consciousness and she uttered a terrible moan that made the other Apaches laugh. Goso was finished with her in a very short time, and the next man mounted her, and the next. And when they had all finished with her, his mother weeping softly, begging for mercy, begging not for herself but for her son’s life, the man named Goso struck her two sharp blows to the back of her head with his rifle butt, crushing her skull, a heavy dull cracking sound like a gourd splitting open. All of this Charley watched as the Apache held him on the back of the wagon. He did not cry.

The warriors now turned their attention to the boy. The one holding Charley and the man named Goso began to quarrel. The one holding him pulled his knife and held it to Charley’s throat. Charley was not afraid. He himself had rushed out the hole that had opened in the universe and through which his old life was pouring and it seemed now as if he was floating in space, detached, light as a feather, weightless.

Later, when the story was told, it was always said that the boy Charley never cried; even when the warrior held the knife to his throat, he did not cry, he showed no fear. The Apache intended to cut the boy’s head off; by prior agreement, no captives were being taken on this raid of vengeance through White Eyes country. So far they had killed every man, woman, and child they had encountered at the isolated ranches and in the small settlements through which they had swept, stealing stock, stealing guns and ammunition, stealing whatever they could carry off and burning the buildings behind them. As the fires blazed, they had ridden off yipping like coyotes, carrying off the infant babies of the White Eyes they had killed, swinging them overhead by one leg, like twirling a lariat, flinging them away, to spin through the air and crash to their deaths on the hard, rocky ground. All this the Apache raiders had done to avenge the wrongs done the People by the White Eyes in a world gone mad with vengeance.

The boy Charley was not afraid. He looked in the eyes of the man who held the knife to his throat and he did not cry, he did not beg, he did not whimper. He looked straight in the warrior’s eyes and he did not make a sound. Charley had the Power. The warrior named Goso spoke sharply again to the man, who finally lowered his knife.