The Wild Girl (44 page)

“How does he know he can trust you?” Joseph answered.

So we untied the white Apache, and in that simple act of trust everything was suddenly equalized, leveled, so that no one holds any advantage over anyone else. Just as Charley is no longer our prisoner, so, with his freedom, is Margaret no longer his slave. And in this new democratic arrangement, the tension has been greatly relieved. Margaret and Charley’s wife, Ishton, seem to have grown quite fond of each other and putter around the wickiup like equals now. (Clearly that well-placed roundhouse punch also helped level the playing field.) Margaret, who has always professed to have no interest whatsoever in children, even dotes on Ishton’s baby, cooing and gurgling at it. We all continue to be astonished by Margaret’s command of the Apache language; although I’ve learned a few words and phrases that I use when I communicate with the girl in our particular patois, Margaret, on the other hand, chatters away almost like a native.

Tomorrow we head out to find the expedition. I don’t know about the others, but I am filled with dread.

11 JULY, 1932

Charley has elected to bring the rest of the band with us. We rather expected that he would leave the women and children at the
ranchería
rather than risk exposing them to the soldiers. But evidently he wishes to keep them close at hand. All that stayed behind were two old women too feeble to travel, one of whom is the blind old woman Siki. The Apaches are so private that Joseph has barely spoken to us of her, and in their own stoic fashion, there were no sentimental good-byes. The two old women were simply left sitting outside the wickiup. They had provisions and firewood.

“I don’t understand,” I said as we were preparing to ride out. “Are they coming back for them?”

“Siki and the other are too old to travel,” Albert explained. “It is the Apache way for the old, the injured, and the sick to step aside for the good of the tribe. Everyone’s time comes. This is understood.”

“Just like that?” Tolley asked. “Don’t they even say good-bye?”

“Good-bye is a White Eyes concept,” Albert said. “They have said all that needs to be said.”

And without a look back, the white Apache, astride a small dappled gray horse that looks like a child’s pony beneath his giant frame, rode out of the
ranchería,
his red hair and beard long and wild, his skin sun- and windburned the color of old mottled rust. Behind him followed his ragtag band of mixed-blood women and children, some mounted, others on foot, trotting to keep up; they put me in mind of Lilliputians following Gulliver. Old Joseph Valor rode with them on his quickstepping donkey, his long gray braids bouncing, his ancient wizened face cut as deeply by time as the canyons and arroyos of this strange wild country.

I had ridden on ahead so that I could expose some film of Charley and his people as they approached. No one in America will believe that such a race of man exists, and when Big Wade asks me the inevitable question—“Did you get the shot, kid?”—I want to be able to say with certainty that I did.
The Last Wild Apaches,
I’ve decided I’m going to call it.

I rejoined the others, and we rode spread out along the trail behind the Apaches: Margaret, Albert, Jesus, Tolley, and I; sometimes Chideh rode beside me, sometimes she joined her people; we rode abreast in twos or threes whenever the trail opened up to allow it but mostly keeping single file, down the rocky, winding slopes, traversing the canyon and arroyos, through the solemn pine forests, across the lush creek bottoms. The summer rains have brought out the season’s brief, intense flash of color, so that the formerly sere slopes of the Sierra Madre are a bright green, tufts of grass sprouting even from the rocks themselves.

Without our even being aware of it at first, Charley has led us on a different route than that which we have taken from the
ranchería
before. Tonight we are camped for the night in a spectacular setting, on a high plateau at the head of a waterfall. We arrived just as the sun was setting, lighting the mountaintops purple all around. Here the stream has cut a deep channel into the hard conglomerate rock, before falling off into a nearly straight-walled canyon, perhaps a hundred feet to the bottom. It’s a spectacular sight and we crept to the edge of the chasm and watched as the water dropped in silent sheets through the air, gathering itself again at the bottom to rush down a narrow gorge with a faint distant roar. I didn’t have enough light left to find my way down to the base of the canyon, but I intend to rise early and do so in the morning.

We pitched camp some distance back from the canyon at the edge of the pine forest, built fires, and made our dinner. The Apaches camped a bit off by themselves, and after dinner, Tolley, Albert, Margaret, and I went to speak with Charley, to see if we could get a sense of why we had taken this route and where we were headed tomorrow.

“Charley sent two boys ahead this morning to scout,” Joseph explained as we sat around their fire. “They report that the lion hunter has led the soldiers a different way, and so Charley has taken this trail in order to intercept them.”

“And did the boys see Indio Juan?” Albert asked.

“Yes, they report that Indio Juan and his men are following the expedition,” Joseph said. “At night they steal stock and whatever provisions they can from the Mexicans and the White Eyes. They have killed two guards so far.”

“How long before we reach them?” Margaret asked.

“They are less than a day’s ride from us,” Joseph said. “We will find them tomorrow.”

Chideh and I have camped a little away from the others. Some have hung blankets or pieces of oilcloth between the trees or bushes to make rough shelters for the night. But we are sleeping in the open. The night sky is clear and moonless with so many stars visible that it’s difficult to identify the constellations, vast masses and dizzying swirls of them. We lie on our backs, huddled under a blanket, looking up at the stars. We don’t have enough language between us to have much of a conversation about astronomy, and I don’t know what her people think about the stars, or what myths and superstitions they have devised to explain the heavens. I wonder if they make her feel as small and as insignificant as they do me; I sense by the way she holds on to me that the sheer enormity of the universe, the cold indifference of the stars, frightens her . . . as it does me. I wonder if they give her the same sense of vertigo, the same hollow pit in her stomach, as if the night sky threatens to suck us off the earth and absorb us like specks of dust.

A shooting star blazed across the sky, its long tail burning bright, and just as suddenly extinguished. The girl raised her hand and traced the trajectory of it with her finger, running it all the way down to earth.

“There,” she whispered, pointing. “The enemy is there.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is why the stars fall at night,” she said. “To show the People in what direction our enemies lie.”

UNDATED ENTRY

In fact, the shooting star did point to the location of the expedition. We departed our campsite by the waterfall at dawn and traveled hard all day, keeping up a punishing pace, mostly downhill through increasingly rough country. By late afternoon we had reached the eastern foothills of the sierra, which looked out over a broad plain. Down below we saw them, moving along the edge of the plain like tiny toy soldiers, their passage marked by a small raising of dust. Billy Flowers and Colonel Carrillo must have thought that they would make better progress in the flats than they could in the mountains and had elected to go the long way around, to approach the
ranchería
from the south. They had obviously not bargained on the Apaches coming to them.

Shortly after we spotted the expedition, Indio Juan met us on the trail with his small band. The Apaches all dismounted for a tense conference. Juan swaggered and postured in his maniacal way, proudly displaying two fresh scalps he claimed to have taken off soldiers. He remained intractable about giving up Geraldo Huerta and he and Charley exchanged heated words. We stood some distance off and kept silent, trying not to even look at Indio Juan. He is so crazy and volatile that just a glance can set him off. At one point he walked over to Margaret and put his face up close to hers and whispered something the rest of us couldn’t hear. Margaret colored and clenched her teeth. Albert immediately stepped toward her to intervene, and Indio Juan whirled on him with his knife drawn, smiling wickedly, as if he had just been looking for this excuse. Charley spoke sharply, and in that same moment Tolley, who was still mounted, drew his rifle from the scabbard and cocked it. Only then did Indio Juan back down. He spoke derisively to Charley.

“What did he say?” I asked Albert.

“He said now that Charley rides with White Eyes, he has grown weak.”

Indio Juan remounted and wheeled his horse around, and he and his people galloped off.

It was decided that Tolley, Margaret, and I would ride down to make contact with the expedition. We would take Jesus with us and leave Albert and Joseph with the Apaches. We asked Charley if we could take little Geraldo, in order to show his good faith.

“You bring back six strong horses,” he said, “and the word of their chief that in return for giving up the boy, the soldiers will leave our country. Only then will we give them the boy.” Charley doesn’t seem to understand that the Mexicans don’t think of this as the Apaches’ country.

And so we rode down out of the foothills to the plain below, which lay like a great undulating sea at dusk, the shadows of clouds scudding in dark patches across the pale green summer desert. The expedition had pitched camp for the night out in the open, rather than up against the foothills, which seemed odd to us at first. But then we realized that they had probably done so in order to be able to see all who approached from any direction. We carried a white flag of surrender to alert the guards that we were friendly. Anyway, who could mistake Tolley’s white buckskin getup.

“You were a regular gunslinger back there, Tolley,” I said to him. “The way you pulled that rifle on Indio Juan.”

“My hero,” Margaret added.

“You know, when you wear the clothes,” said Tolley, “you have to fill them. That’s what I love about fashion. It can make a new man out of you. I thought to myself, ‘Now what would the old injun fighter Buffalo Bill do in this situation?’ And, of course, the answer was instantly apparent.”

As we approached, we called out to identify ourselves to the guards, who recognized us and called back, waving us in.

The Great Apache Expedition has clearly lost a considerable amount of its luster and is a far more spartan affair out here in the middle of the Chihuahuan desert. All but a handful of the American volunteers have dropped out by now, and those who remain are no longer the polo crowd but a few of the more hard-core retired military men. Gone, too, are the days of catered dinners and full bars; everyone has the lean, grizzled, dusty look of subsistence about them. Morale is low, and the fear level high. Besides the nearly nightly pilfering and theft of stock by Indio Juan and his warriors, no matter what precautions are taken, two soldiers, whose scalps Indio Juan so proudly displays, have been murdered, and the constant harassment is clearly taking its toll on everyone. The enemy has come to seem like a ghost who strikes in the twilight of dawn and against whom there is no defense.

We were taken directly to see Colonel Carrillo in his tent, and moments later were joined there by Chief Gatlin, Billy Flowers, and Señor Huerta. Gatlin was unshaven and hollow-eyed; the expedition has hardly turned out to be the promotional bonanza for the city of Douglas that the Chamber of Commerce had envisioned, and as its chief architect, he will certainly be held responsible for the fiasco. Even the resplendent peacock Colonel Carrillo, so generally elegant and immaculately attired, appears frayed and harried. Only Billy Flowers looks unchanged, his bright blue eyes undimmed. A man clearly accustomed to a life of hardship and deprivation, he seems, within the hard shell of his severe biblical stoicism, entirely impervious to the reduced circumstances of the expedition.

Fernando Huerta wept and thanked us profusely when we told him that his son was nearby, alive and well, and that the Apaches were willing to trade for him.

“You will bring the renegades here tomorrow morning,” Carrillo said. “Unarmed. They will give up the boy and at that time we will accept their unconditional surrender.”

“That’s not exactly the arrangement, Colonel,” I explained. “They want six good horses and assurances that you won’t pursue them. And they want the bounty on Apache scalps lifted.”

Carrillo took this in for a moment, and then in a very low voice he said: “Young man, after all this, do you think that I am going to allow the Apache devils to dictate the terms of the boy’s release to me?”

“Yes, sir, if you want the boy back, I think you would do that.”

“Why risk the boy’s life,” Margaret asked, “when the Apaches are willing to give him up for six horses?”

“For God’s sake, Colonel,” Señor Huerta said angrily, “I will give them the horses myself.”

Carrillo wheeled on Señor Huerta. “No, señor, you will
not,
” he snapped. “May I remind you that you came to the
presidente
for his assistance after your own efforts to rescue your son failed. This is a Mexican federal military campaign. And our government does not negotiate with criminals. They return the boy and surrender unconditionally. Those are
my
terms.”