Apache Country (27 page)

“Nah,” Ironheel said, more like he was trying
to convince himself than anyone else. “It was just búh.”

“The Happy Place, is that like what we call
Heaven?”

Ironheel shook his head. “Yaaká’ isn’t a
location. No God, no angels. Just somewhere, up ahead, maybe a four
day journey, beyond that ridge, around that mountain. When you get
there you are reunited with all those who have gone before. That is
why it is called the Happy Place.”

Apache deaths were surrounded by much
ceremony, he said. As the body looks in death, so it remains for
eternity, so the dead were always dressed in their finest clothes.
For those who had no horse, there was the Death Pony to ride to the
Happy Place. There was no guarantee of admission. Really bad people
could not go there immediately, but had to be reincarnated in the
body of a bear – sometimes more than once – before being
admitted.

“You think maybe that owl was someone from
the spirit world who wants to talk to you. To us?”

Ironheel shook his head, like he was trying
to get rid of a disturbing thought.

“It was only búh,” he said again, gruffly
this time. “Just an owl.”

Easton yawned cavernously: he hadn’t realized
how tired he was. The warmth of the fire and the inner glow of the
tea were having their effect. He looked at his watch: almost
midnight.

“We covered a few miles today,” he said.

Ironheel nodded. “Tomorrow will be harder,”
he warned. “We’ll have to do some serious climbing.”

“You really know how to cheer a fellow up,
don’t you?”

“Better sleep,” Ironheel said, ignoring the
remark. “We want to be on our way by sun-up, before it gets too
hot.”

Without further ceremony he curled up on the
floor and within moments was snoring gently. Wonderful, Easton
thought sourly. Now I can sit up all night listening to him sawing
wood. He stared into the red embers of the fire, thinking about
Susan, the way he always did when it was late and he was alone with
his thoughts. He pictured Jessye curled up in her bed far away,
with Boople snuggled next to her on the pillow, and wondered what
he was doing here and why the hell he had gotten himself mixed up
in all this.

He piled some more sticks on the fire,
looking glumly at the hard bare boards of the cabin floor, sure he
would never be able to find comfort on them the way Ironheel had.
He rolled up his body-warmer for a pillow and laid down to give it
a try.

He was asleep as soon as he closed his
eyes.

Easton was awakened by a strange, atonal
sound. Pale early-morning sunlight was streaming in through the
grimy windows. He sat up. Framed in the open doorway, naked except
for a loincloth, stood Ironheel. His head was thrown back, his arms
upraised toward the sun. As he chanted in Apache he seemed
oblivious to the thin, chill morning air. It was like a scene from
the Stone Age.

Easton remained still and silent, listening
to the arrhythmic, unmodulated sounds Ironheel was making. The
musicology experts called them vocables, somewhere between a
musical note and a word. After a while Ironheel lowered his hands
and turned around. When he realized Easton had been watching him
his mouth turned down.

“Shi’okaah,” he said and turned away.

An apology would probably make things worse,
Easton thought, and didn’t make one.

“A prayer to the morning,” he said.

Ironheel turned on his heel and once again
Easton saw surprise, as always quickly masked, in his eyes.

“You know about that?” he said.

“Yusn gave us this land,” Easton recited,
silently blessing Grita. “Through our forefathers it has come to
us. It was our land before the White Eyes came ... How does the
rest go?”

“Nowhi’ní,” Ironheel said, as if reluctant to
speak. “It is still our land.”

They were both silent for a moment. For the
first time since Easton had been with the Apache, he sensed some
kind of empathy between them. It felt good.

“You don’t add up, Ironheel,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“Which one is the real you? The petty thief I
met in the Riverside jail, or the one who prays every morning to
the Apache God?”

“Can’t the same man be both?”

Easton shook his head. “You’re different out
here.”

“Maybe the change is in you,” Ironheel said.
It was a good answer. There might even have been truth in it, but
Easton didn’t let that sidetrack him.

“What happened, Ironheel?” he persisted.
“What was it knocked you sideways? There was something, wasn’t
there? Somewhere, something.”

Ironheel looked away, toward the hills. “Same
things that knock everyone sideways. Life. Bad luck. A raw deal.
Take your pick.”

“I’d guess raw deal,” Easton said. “That
would account for the attitude. And the anger.”

“Pinda’lick’oye say Apache all got attitude,”
he replied. “Why should this one be any different?”

“This isn’t just about attitude,” Easton said
confidently. “It goes deeper than that.”

Ironheel made no reply.

“Was it white men?” Easton said. “Or your own
people?”

Ironheel’s face remained blank, his eyes
unreadable.

“What did they do, Ironheel? Did they steal
from you? Cheat you? Shame you? What was it?”

Still no answer. It was like talking to a
rock. But Easton wasn’t about to let go now.

“Let’s say it was shame,” he said. “Shame
because you were helpless, maybe. You’d hate that, being you. Or
maybe you could get no redress for something that had been done to
you. That kind of shame cuts deep. So deep you decided you might as
well be what everyone thought you were, another badass Apache,
right? Then what? You started hitting the bottle, is that it?
Picking fights? Petty theft and all the rest of it? How am I
doing?”

“Enough of this,” Ironheel growled. He made a
chopping motion with his hand. “N’zhoo!”

“Sure,” Easton said. “Whatever you say.”

“You think you understand,” Ironheel said,
biting hard on the words. “But you understand nothing. Doo nt’é da!
Nothing!”

“Maybe I would if you told me about it.”

“No,” he said emphatically. “No.”

“It’s hard to come back, isn’t it?” Easton
said, softly. “To climb out of the hole. Believe me, I know.”

The words clearly struck a chord. The angry
frown creasing Ironheel’s forehead disappeared. Again Easton saw
what might have been a hint of surprise in his dark eyes. At least
he put it down to surprise. He didn’t want to flatter himself into
thinking it might be respect.

“When a man can no longer be what he was,”
Ironheel said. “He becomes what he has to be.”

Easton nodded. “Go on.”

Ironheel looked away and waited a while
before replying.

“Each morning I ask Yusn for the courage to
face whatever may come,” he said, the words coming slowly, as if he
was reluctant to speak at all. “And to thank Him for the help he
has given me in the day just gone.”

“Your people and my people say the same
things. We just talk to a different God. Or maybe, the same God
with a different name.”

Ironheel looked away again, as if seeking
inspiration from the sky. For a moment Easton felt he was going to
say more, but if he had intended to, he changed his mind.

“Perhaps we will speak of this another time,”
he said. Then he turned away abruptly and went outside. The
stronger the reaction, the closer you are to the truth, Easton
thought. Ironheel was a man carrying a hurt. Takes one to know
one.

Ironheel was gone long enough for Easton to
begin wondering whether he was coming back at all, then he silently
reappeared in the doorway carrying a plump sage hen by its
feet.

“Slingshot,” he said, in answer to the
unspoken question. “Best I could do.”

“Looks good to me,” Easton said.

While Ironheel coaxed the fire back to life,
he plucked the quail and quartered it. They broke dry branches from
one of the trees near the house and used them as skewers to roast
the meat over the flames, then ate it hungrily. The meat was strong
tasting and juicy.

“All we need now is coffee and an English
muffin,” Easton said.

“Zhá’yugo,” Ironheel replied.

Easton took that to be the Apache equivalent
of ‘dream on’ and concentrated on the food. Nothing was said about
their earlier conversation. It was as if it had never taken
place.

Half an hour later they put out the fire,
cleaned out the fireplace and doused the embers thoroughly with
water to kill any possibility of recombustion. That done, they set
off across open country toward the Marcials. Both knew they would
be sitting ducks if a State Police helicopter happened their way.
The morning sun was already bright and warm and the going soon got
tough. Easton’s back was stiff and his legs felt like an elephant
had slept on them.

Even down in the lush green irrigated fields
of the Pecos valley, crossing open country on foot wasn’t easy. Up
here in the mountains where the air was thin and the terrain was
hostile, it was damned hard work. Ground that looked level from a
car was almost always rough and broken, undulating scrubland
interspersed with stretches of soft sand that horses could have
trouble floundering through.

It was impossible to travel in anything like
a straight line – clumps of staghorn, cholla, prickly pear, juniper
and mesquite forced them to duck, weave, stoop, and constantly
zig-zag. Outcrops of stone or boulders had to be carefully
negotiated: where in normal circumstances a sprained ankle would be
no more than an inconvenience, in their case it could literally
prove fatal, so you chose your foothold rock by rock. More than
once when loose shale moved away under his feet, Easton slid down a
cut or a gully on his backside.

“Alright?” Ironheel would say.

“Okay,” he would reply and they would move
on.

After about an hour, they quit making any
attempt to avoid the reaching branches of mesquite or cholla, just
pushed on dully through them, ignoring the scratches, not even
thinking about poisonous spiders whose bite could numb your arm or
leg for half a day, or the darting insects feasting on their sweaty
bodies. And always as they walked there was the tension of knowing
that if they were to run into a juiced-up rattler among the rocks,
light jeans and low-top work boots didn’t offer much
protection.

After another hour, Easton’s whole body was
aching dully. A cross-country trek like this one required a
particular mind-set. This was not a summer mountain excursion, this
was not fun. This was about endurance, something you needed to quit
thinking about and just do. It wasn’t even walking, it was more
like tunneling, weaving now into deep shade under arching branches,
next zigzagging through interlaced scrub beneath the scorching sun.
The land, the creatures in it, and the very vegetation were
hostile.

It became a sort of mantra: just keep up a
steady pace. Don’t push too hard going uphill, be careful of going
faster down. Forget about distance. Forget your mouth is dry.
Forget your back hurts and your thigh muscles throb. Just keep
going, praying your wounded side will hold out. Just get there.

He knew this part of the country. They were
heading roughly northeast, following an old trail that paralleled
the Rio Lindo. It would take them through the hills and on up to a
point on the maps known as Buena Vista. Once they got up there the
close-growing trees would provide plenty of cover.

They moved steadily higher into the hills,
leaving the rough scrubland behind. Now and again they moved
through cool woodland into open grassy glades, but most of the time
the big trees crowded close. After maybe two hours more they
crossed the last gully, passing a couple of creaking windmills on
their way down the hill to the highway. Easton figured they must be
two or three miles east of the village of Marcial. The road
interrupted the trail they had been following, which crossed Salado
Creek and continued up the hill parallel to a dirt road that led to
the Marcial Gap.

They came warily out of the screening trees,
watchful for people or traffic: the last thing they needed now was
to run into a patrol car. The highway lay before them like a river.
On the far side, between it and Salado Creek, stood a small adobe
cabin with a corrugated iron roof shaded by a couple of
miserable-looking cottonwoods. To get where they wanted to go they
had no alternative but to pass it. Easton looked a question at
Ironheel, who nodded, keep going.

As they crossed the wide highway and started
toward the creek, two wild-looking black dogs about the size of
coyotes uncoiled from the shadows in the backyard of the cabin and
ran along the wire fence and back again, barking furiously. A
gray-haired man appeared in the doorway of the house. He appeared
to be in his sixties. He wore only an undershirt and work pants
held up by broad suspenders. His uncombed gray hair looked like a
rat’s nest.

“Blue!” he yelled. “Lucy! Leave off that
goddamn racket!”

The pale-eyed dogs quit barking, but kept on
running wildly along the fence, left to right, right to left,
panting audibly, teeth bared, tongues lolling. The gray-haired man
standing in the yard stared at Easton and Ironheel for maybe twenty
seconds. Then he turned round fast and went inside, slamming the
door.

“Maldito!” Ironheel growled angrily. The old
man had figured out who they were. You didn’t need to be a genius
to guess what he was doing now. Hell, they could almost hear him
dialing.

As Ironheel led the way in a walking jog,
Easton did some rapid thinking. The old man’s 911 call would be
automatically routed to the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office in
Junta, but he knew they didn’t have the manpower there to mount a
convincing pursuit, so it was a safe bet they would pass it on to
the State Police and to SO in Riverside. From what he knew about
their response times, Easton reckoned they had maybe an hour’s
grace before the law came smoking.