The Wild Girl (40 page)

“How?”

“You are my husband.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“You are lost,” she said. “I came to find you.”

“How do you know I’m lost?”

She laughed. “Because you are going the wrong way.”

“How did you know I was coming?”

“We know everything that takes place in these mountains,” she said, “and all who pass. I knew you would come back to me.”

“Is Margaret okay?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Mr. Browning?”

She averted her eyes.

“What’s the matter?”

She shook her head.

“Tell me. Did something happen to Mr. Browning?”

“He went to the Happy Place,” she said.

“Oh, no . . .”

The girl slipped around to ride behind me, her slender brown fingers light at my waist. We descended off the trail and through a dense pine forest and out into the valley of a small river. A trail ran along a low bluff above the river and we followed it for some time, twice coming down off the bluff to cross the river and follow the trail on the other side. The mule did not like these crossings because the river was swollen and muddy with the recent rains and he could not see the bottom, and also because mules, in general, though they are more sure-footed on the rocks than horses, do not like getting their feet wet. But the girl clucked to the mule and spoke to him in her tongue and they seemed to reach some kind of agreement, because he crossed, the muddy water lapping his stomach. I remembered that the girl had power over horses. And I suppose this extends to mules and burros as well.

After a while we came to a place where the river widened into a small meadow. On the bluffs on one end of the meadow were a series of ancient cave dwellings. It was a beautiful spot and you could see why the “first” people had chosen to live here. Beneath the bluff and the caves were several pools formed by a spring and here we dismounted. I unsaddled the mule and hobbled him, turning him out to graze contentedly in the meadow. The girl led me to one of the pools; I could smell the faint sulfurous odor of it and realized that it was a hot spring. She sat down on a rock and removed her high moccasins, her warrior’s breechclout, and the loose gingham cloth shirt she wore, and without any trace of self-consciousness she stood naked before me, this perfect brown being with small feet and slender muscled legs, her mound of dark pubic hair, and the smooth taut breasts of a girl just become a woman. She entered the pool.

I suppose I’m a bit of a prude myself because I was shy about undressing in front of the girl and I turned my back and took off my own clothes, and when I stood, I covered myself with my hands. I must have looked ridiculous to her with my skin so pale beneath my brown neckline and above my arms where I rolled up my sleeves. But then I remembered that her own grandfather was a white man and so perhaps I didn’t look so foreign to her after all. She looked quizzically at me as if she didn’t altogether understand my shyness.

The water of the spring was warm and soft, oily with minerals, and I sank gratefully into it. People must have been bathing here for thousands of years and all along the edge of the pool there were well-worn rocks that looked like they had been placed to provide seating. These were sculpted smooth by time and the action of the minerals and perhaps the gentle friction of a millennium of naked buttocks. No wonder the first people had settled here in this little valley, with its river and hot springs, good grass for stock and rich soil for crops, protected on one end by the high bluffs with their network of caves to provide lodging. It was a paradise. What more could you want than this?

I lay back against the rocks beside the girl and fell almost instantly asleep, as if all the exhaustions and terrors of the last days had been suddenly released by the soothing waters. I don’t know how long I slept, but I woke to a distant roll of thunder, and I felt truly rested for the first time since I could remember. It was late afternoon, and the sky was darkening with colossal storm clouds building to the south. The girl was gone. I looked into the meadow to see that the mule still grazed placidly and then I scanned the bluffs and saw smoke rising above one of the caves. I got out of the pool and sat on the still sun-warmed rocks to let myself dry for a moment. I dressed and picked up my saddlebags and followed the path up the bluff.

The girl had made a campsite in the cave, with a sleeping place of pine needles and grass, covered with blankets and deer hides. She had a fire burning and meat roasting, a tin pot of beans bubbling and another with what looked like some kind of corn mush. She had an iron skillet on which a stack of fresh-made tortillas were warming. And she had a tin coffeepot.

“Where did you get all this?” I asked.

“We cache provisions in this place,” she said.

It occurred to me that this was the same place I had flown over with Spider King, and now I wondered if some of the gear had come from the raid on Colonel Carrillo’s party. “Did you kill those men back there?” I asked her again. I wonder why it even matters to me. Am I trying to civilize the girl, who sees nothing morally wrong in the butchery of her enemy? Do I need to be reassured that she is somehow incapable of such an act, this slender fierce warrior girl, even though she clearly is not? And what difference does it make, finally? The elegant, beautifully educated Colonel Carrillo, with his fine dress uniform and pomaded black hair, would certainly kill her given the chance, would take her scalp as verification in order to collect the bounty. Both my own people and the Mexicans have been butchering our natives for centuries. How many Apache babies have been slaughtered by our soldiers? Yet only the atrocities of the conquered are referred to as criminal acts; those of the conqueror are justified as necessary, heroic, and, even worse, as the fulfillment of God’s will. What difference, finally, between the civilized man and the savage?

“It was Indio Juan’s raid,” the girl repeated, not defensively but as a simple statement of fact.

“Okay,” I said, and I did not ask her again.

We ate our meal sitting in the entrance of the cave, looking out over the valley as the blue-black storm clouds, lit by sustained flashes of lightning, moved across the mountains, pushing gray undulating curtains of rain ahead of them, the deep rumbling closer and louder, sounding as if it issued from the belly of the earth itself. I had the strangest sense then that we were the last human beings on earth, that the others all lay dead back there on the trail, consumed by buzzards, and we were all that was left, the last and the first people, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, an Indian girl and a white boy. We would stay right here and begin our own race of man. We would do better this time.

But then someone would come along and try to take away our poor possessions, or our home, and we would have to defend it and ourselves; we would have to kill them or be killed and the wars would begin all over again. What had become of the “first” people who lived here thousands of years ago? I had once asked Margaret. She said that scientists didn’t know exactly, but indications were that for some reason or other their economy and social structure had broken down, possibly as a result of some sort of climatological shift or event, until they descended into chaos and internal strife, and finally self-destructed. But it was also quite possible that their land had simply been invaded by a more powerful race of man, and they had been killed off or absorbed by the invaders.

The sky went black and the rain came all at once with a thunderous crash of lightning. We moved farther back in the cave to lie together on the sleeping place. I took the girl’s clothes off, and my own, and covered us with a blanket, and put my arms around her and held her, breathing deeply of her scent, the scent of the mountains and the rain and the faint ozone scent of the storm. We were warm, dry, and snug here with the roaring deluge outside. Every few moments a flash of lightning illuminated the inside of the cave.

There was no sense of urgency this time and we took our time exploring each other, sometimes shyly, sometimes wantonly. I don’t know if she’d ever been kissed before as a woman, because she didn’t seem to even know how to do it. And maybe this is how it begins, this is how new races are born, a couple of kids together, touching each other, putting their hands and their mouths on each other, learning to love all over again, with no memory of the carnage of yesterday, and no thoughts of tomorrow.

We lay together like that all night. We slept and woke to love again and fell asleep holding each other. And we talked a little in our new language, part Apache, part Spanish, part English, a language of our own creation that only we would understand.

We rose at dawn this morning and bathed again in the hot spring and built a small fire to warm some food from the night before. We don’t have to talk about it; we both know that we have to go back to the
ranchería
today. Last night existed in that perfect all-consuming limbo time, the pure uncomplicated space carved out by love and desire when there is nothing else on earth. I wish we could live forever in that moment, or at least just a little longer. But in the real world, I have Margaret to worry about. And, in any case, neither of us can walk away from our old races just like that, not just yet. It is far too complicated by the light of morning; we have friends and family and responsibilities to attend to. Our respective armies prepare to march against each other, and though we are powerless to prevent this, neither can we ignore it.

We packed some food for the trail and cached the cooking utensils and the staples, the dried beans, some dried corn and jerky, the flour and coffee in a niche in the rear of the cave. We covered it carefully with rocks so that animals couldn’t dig it up and you’d have to know where to look for it. Maybe we will come back here when everything is over, or someone else who knows where to look will stop here for the night, uncover the cache and appreciate it for giving them sustenance, treat it respectfully and perhaps even add to it. In this way the girl tells me the People have lived for a long time.

In a few minutes we will saddle the mule and ride up out of the valley. We both have the sense that things are coming to an end and will have to begin again.

28 JUNE, 1932

We rode into the
ranchería
at midday yesterday. Of course, the Apaches had been alerted by the scouts and all knew we were coming. Some of the children had run out to meet us on the trail and escort us in, and as we entered, others came out of their wickiups to watch us pass. I saw that some of the men wore new Mexican army hats and coats, others the hats and clothes of our dead volunteers, the spoils of war. No one molested me; for the time being anyway, it seemed that I could come and go among worlds with impunity.

I wanted first to see Margaret, and the girl led me directly to the white Apache’s wickiup. Before we had even dismounted, Margaret herself came out of the wickiup. She was dressed in Apache fashion, in moccasins and a brightly patterned, loose-fitting blouse and skirt of Mexican fabric. We looked at each other for a long time before speaking.

Finally I said: “I came back to get my camera.”

“I figured you would,” she said, smiling. “Why do you think I hung on to it? I knew you weren’t going to come back just for me.”

I slid off my mule and we embraced.

“Are you okay, Mag?”

“I’m alive, little brother.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I’m alive and I’m not living in Indio Juan’s wickiup,” Margaret said. “In this world, that’s okay.”

“What happened to your face?” I asked.

“A little unpleasantness early on.” She shrugged.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that once I accepted the fact that I’m a slave, things have been better. Mostly I do chores, fetch water, gather firewood, that sort of thing. And as long as I do what I’m told, they pretty much leave me alone.”

“A slave?”

“They’re just like us that way, Neddy,” she said. “Despite all the vast cultural differences, it seems to be common human nature to turn the weaker sexes and races, not to mention conquered peoples, into servants.” She laughed bitterly. “That’s been one of my great anthropological discoveries of the past week.”

“Tell me about Mr. Browning, Mag.”

Margaret looked away from me. She shook her head and tears began to well up in her eyes. “I tried, little brother,” she said. “I tried to keep him alive.”

“I know, Mag,” I said. “I know you did.”

“He was so brave and strong, Neddy.”

“Joseph?”

“Joseph is okay,” she said. “Thank God he’s been here with me. Without him I’d certainly be dead.”

“We never should have left you here, Mag,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I thought the girl would be able to look after you.”

“She did, Neddy,” Margaret said. “She did everything she could. It was my choice to stay. I couldn’t have lived with myself if we’d left Mr. Browning to die here alone. I’m glad I was with him at the end. I think I brought him a little comfort. And I’m okay, really I am. And to answer the big question that’s on your mind, and that you’re too damn polite to ask, no, I have not been ravished by the savages.”

“That’s a good thing, Mag,” I said. “Where’s Charley?”

“He left here this morning with Joseph,” she said. “I don’t know where they went.”