Valley of Fire (11 page)

The only baseball game I ever saw occurred the summer before last down in Silver City. A local saloon sponsored a team and give its players uniforms with beer mugs embroidered on their shield-front shirts. Every boy on the saloon team's starting nine topped two hundred pounds. Called themselves the Fat Fellows, they did, and that they was. Fat. The game I attended, the Fat Fellows was playing a bunch of boys who championed those newfangled velocipedes. I doubt if any of them weighed much more than Sister Geneviève. They called themselves the Slim Jims. Wasn't much of a game. The Fat Fellows trounced the Slim Jims, 20-6, then bought beer for all the spectators and even them bicycle pedalers.

The reason that game comes to mind is on account that most of them hailstones that pounded us was the size of baseballs.

Not at first. The first stones come down by the thousands, stinging my shoulders, bending the brim of my hat, bouncing off the ground, off the roan, but no bigger than a thumbnail. Before long, those stones looked like white walnuts, only harder than a walnut shell. The roan lowered his head. When the stones kept getting bigger, I eased Sister Geneviève to the hail-covered ground, moved her and me underneath the roan's belly.

When that hail had reached baseball proportions, even over the noise of the stones pounding the earth, the wind roaring, and Sister Geneviève's praying, I heard Blanco screaming. It was hard to see, what with me under a horse and trying to shield a nun, and hail coming down like the walls of Jericho, but I could just make out Demyan Blanco, standing by the black's side, trying like the dickens to get that Winchester Centennial out of the scabbard. Then he went down, knocked to the frozen earth by a hailstone.

Didn't think I'd get a better chance. Couldn't see the big farmer, but even that giant would be smarting after getting cannonaded by hail.

“Stay here!” I told the nun, eased my tied hands over her neck, and leaned into the storm.

Hail bruised my back and almost knocked me to my knees. I slipped on the icy earth. The wind tried to blow me down. It did once, but I got up, prying the pepperbox from my pocket. The crown of my hat absorbed blows that otherwise would have cracked my skull. Still, one ball slammed into my shoulder, and down I went to my knees, groaning, fighting back pain, as more stones pelted me. One glanced off my forehead, and fire shot through my head. I saw orange dots. Hadn't been knocked that silly since Tin-Nose George give me a concussion with a bung starter whilst I wasn't looking.

I knowed I couldn't keep on seeing orange dots. I made myself stand. Made myself look. Made myself walk.

The black was gone. Without a rider on his back, without a man holding its reins, Blanco's horse skedaddled. I dropped into a crouch, trying to see, trying to protect myself, trying to find Demyan Blanco in order to draw a bead on that sorry excuse for a horse trader.

Just like that, the hail stopped. Like someone had turned off the spigot. But the storm wasn't over. Far from it.

Rain fell in icy, smarting, abysmal streaks. Those drops weren't the size of baseballs, but they stung something fierce. My clothes got soaked. Water cascaded off my hail-battered hat brim like I was standing under a waterfall.

I tripped over Demyan Blanco.

I stopped myself from planting my face in the frozen ground with my hands, which still gripped the Continental .22, pushed myself up, and turned.

Blanco's forehead, just above his right eye, was bleeding. Even with all that cold rain, I could see that. Cold rain falling in his face, and he wasn't moving. That's how out he was. Or maybe . . . maybe he was dead.

The Winchester wasn't near him. I didn't know if the horse had run off with that big rifle still in the scabbard or what. But it didn't matter. Blanco was out.

I brought up the pepperbox. Aimed at his throat.

Something groaned beside me, and it wasn't the wind. Seeing something moving, I turned, flinched, and just managed to avoid Jorge de la Cruz's boot. Instead of knocking my teeth down my throat, his heel caught my shoulder. The little popgun fell onto the icy stones the rain was quickly melting.

I fell the other way.

But didn't stay down. I rolled, heard a gunshot that the storm's wind and rain muffled. Maybe I heard the bullet slam into the ice, or maybe I just imagined that. Didn't matter. I rolled and rolled. Another bullet come close, so close I felt I could smell, even taste, the sulfur.

Diving behind a clump of bush, I quickly came up, wiped rain from my eyes and face, tried to breathe, tried to see.

I couldn't see nothing. The rain had turned into a wall, and the sky got blacker than the ace of spades. Couldn't hear. Couldn't see. But I knowed this monsoon wouldn't last.

Storms like these had a tendency to bleed out real quick, like that fellow who got his neck sliced by Big Tim Pruett in that dram shop up in E-Town back in '79.

There was another shot, I think. Couldn't tell for sure. I knowed I should have been counting bullets, but didn't think to do that when somebody was trying to gun me down. I was cold, wet, and miserable, and then it started thundering.

Lightning flashed so close that I squeezed my eyelids tight and saw orange again. The thunder accompanying it came instantly. Before my ears stopped ringing, I was moving, low in the rain, back toward where I thought Demyan Blanco was still laying, where I thought I'd find that .22.

I got there, but stopped. It seemed to be the place, had to be, and then I knowed it was the spot because I found the Continental. What troubled me was that I didn't find Demyan Blanco.

After cussing, I moved for the .22. Almost got to it, then the big farmer caught me from behind, grabbed my shoulders and pulled me up, leaving the .22 in the rain. He whipped me around, sent a fist into my stomach that practically drove all the way to my spine.

Breath whooshed out of my lungs. I gagged, spit out rainwater, and felt myself being hurtled back toward that clump of shrubbery.

Another flash of lighting ripped across the sky, and I spied de la Cruz, his face and hair wet, eyes wild. For a moment, I thought of myself as Jack and the farmer as Goliath. No, that ain't right. Jack wasn't the name. I think it was Daniel.

Didn't matter. I was in the den with a couple lions and a giant. And I didn't have no slingshot.

“Kill him!”

There was a moment, just a moment, when the wind quieted, and it sounded like a gentle rain shower. That's when I heard Demyan Blanco shouting. I saw him. He had that Centennial and was running toward me.

“Kill him!” Blanco shouted again.

I coughed and gagged, and I tried to tell them fools that if they killed me they'd never find the gold, even if that was a lie.

Can't figure fools. Either they decided this gold-chasing was fool's play, or maybe they come to the conclusion that they could find the gold without me, maybe even without the nun. I'd hate to imagine what those two boys would do to Sister Geneviève if that was the case. Maybe they was just idiots to begin with. Or perhaps the rain and hail and wind and desert had driven them to madness.

The Centennial roared. I saw the flame and smoke in the dark and through the rain. The bullet didn't come close to me, but it struck something solid. That much I could hear. That and whatever it had hit was falling to the ground.

Blanco worked the lever, came to a stop. I was running, but the brute named de la Cruz ran into me. Knocked me to the ground. The farmer's momentum kept him going, and he slipped in mud or ice, and plowed a furrow in the ground as he slid a good five or ten yards.

Still short of breath, still cold and tired and aching all over, I managed to come up, but only into a crouch, and I froze, knowing I was too late. Blanco had stopped, maybe ten, fifteen yards in front of me, and he was bringing that rifle to his shoulder.

Something roared, and my eyes exploded. My face felt blistered. Heat. All around me was heat. My ears started ringing. I smelled something awful.

Figured that Lucifer was welcoming me to Hell.

Rain—cold, blessed rain—brought me back to my senses. I pushed myself up into a seated position. I'd been knocked to my back more than a rod away from where I'd been waiting to get blowed apart by a .45-70 shell. The rain had slacked, and I blinked till I could see clearly. Aching all over, somehow I stood, weaving in the rain and wind. I saw something over in the distance, not moving, but big. The roan. The roan horse. I couldn't tell if Sister Geneviève was still hiding under his belly.

My hair felt wild, full of electricity, and my face was hard, my ears stinging, my body numb. And there was that smell. Part metallic. Part brimstone. Mostly like . . .

Burned meat.

Blanco was gone. At first, that is. I didn't see him. Then I did, and wished I hadn't.

That rifle barrel was mostly melted, and Blanco lay on the earth, still holding what was left of the Centennial, sticking up like a dead cholla. No, that ain't right. It was more like the rifle's ruins had molded itself into his arms and hands and fingers. His whole body kept smoking in the rain, blackened, his eyes empty holes, his face black and red and purple. The only thing white was his teeth, and some bone showing beneath the blackened body.

Now, I have seen many bad things, many things that had turned my stomach, but I ain't never seen nothing like that. I stared, my lungs working like crazy, the rain washing over my body but not cleansing a thing. I just stared at what was left of Demyan Blanco. Didn't want to see, but couldn't look away.

Then Jorge de la Cruz knocked me back into the muck and cold.

Just as the rain stopped, he stood over me. He had found the Sister's pepperbox, which looked like an extra little finger as he aimed it at my head. I kept hoping lightning would kill him, but, well, there's that saying about lightning never striking twice.

It didn't.

He pulled the trigger. Tried to, anyway. And I learned something else. I learned why Sister Geneviève hadn't tried to gun those boys down. She had bluffed old man Evers back in the Las Vegas jail, she had bluffed me as bad as I'd done Sergeant Sadler.

That gun's hammer was busted. It wouldn't fire. Wasn't good for nothing other than a paper weight.

With an enraged curse, he flung the gun at me. Even if the .22 had hit me, it wouldn't have hurt, not a gun that tiny, that worthless. But it landed a good yard to my right.

I came up. The farmer charged me. I didn't know what had happened to his English-revolver, but I figured either he had fired all five rounds, or the Dean and Adams, being an old cap-and-ball relic, had gotten its powder or percussion caps all fouled, and he'd dropped it.

Crouching, I waited for de la Cruz to reach me, then I dived at his knees with my whole body. It knocked the breath out of me, but the farmer went flying, landing, cussing. I was up, running at him. As he pushed himself into a seated position, I kicked him full in the mouth. Blood and teeth—what few he still had—went into the air.

He fell back, and my right boot came down, but he turned his head and all I crushed was the remnants of hail. His arm connected with my calf, and now it was me going down. Before I could move, that big cur was atop my chest, spitting blood and bits of teeth into my face, then them hams he had for hands grabbed my throat.

The storm had blowed over us. The air became pleasant, and I didn't even smell Blanco's burned body no more.

Jorge de la Cruz cussed me in Spanish, in English. He cussed God. He cussed his dead cousin. Again, he cussed me, and his miserable luck. His fingers wrapped around my throat, the tree trunks he called thumbs pressed against my Adam's apple.

I couldn't breathe. Couldn't move. Couldn't do nothing but close my eyes and die.

Here's the moment I fell in love with Sister Geneviève Tremblay.

My eyes was open, and her face slowly come into focus. Light brown eyes staring down at me, all pitiful like, but all forgiving, too. Her slender fingers brushed back my wet hair. Her own hair was heavy and flat from the rain, but the sun was shining just behind her head, and she smiled at me. An angel's smile, part sad, but mostly lovely.

She wasn't wearing that makeshift bonnet, and her black dress was soaked from rain. She didn't look like a nun. We had just endured a couple days of hell, so she just looked like a tired but beautiful young woman. Well, it ain't every day that you wake to something like this, your head resting in a woman's lap, her stroking your forehead with perfect hands, the air smelling fresh from rain, the sun coming close to setting, and you realizing that you ain't dead.

That is what I said. “Hey . . . I ain't dead.”

She almost laughed. “No. . . .” Her voice trailed off.

I started remembering things. Lightning striking Blanco. Jorge de la Cruz strangling me. I turned my head and saw the giant lying on his side.

The Sister, kind soul that she was, pushed my head back so that I looked into her eyes. “Don't look at him. Please don't look at him.”

Her voice didn't sound like an angel, didn't sound perfectly French, nor did it sound like that always angry Colorado madam who was a walking whiskey vat. This angelic girl's voice sounded slightly nasal, but with a charm to it. I obeyed her. I adored her. I didn't look at the big farmer. I just stared at her.

“Where you from?” I asked.

It was like she had to think, not coming up with a lie, or nothing like that, just trying to remember. “Carbondale,” she finally answered. “It's in Illinois.” Her hand stopped stroking, and she reached for something beside her. “And you?”

I didn't have to remember. I was an orphan. I could only shrug.

“Oh, That's right. Here.” She held a canteen, opened it, lifted my head so that I could drink.

And drink I did.

“Not too much.” She took the canteen away, corked it, and set it on the ground.

See, that's another thing that made me love her. She knowed things, things a nun might not know, although the Sisters of Charity did run the hospital in Santa Fe. I guess she had probably done her share of nursing and maybe even doctoring some.

“What's your name?” That's a rude thing to ask, but . . . well, I had always been known for rudeness.

“You know that,” she said.

“I know it's Geneviève, but I don't think you was always a nun.”

“Tremblay.”

That's not only when I fell in love with her. It's when I learned her name, too.

“I like that name.”

She almost giggled. “Well, I like Micah Bishop.”

“Really? I had been considering finding another handle to go by.”

“Like what?”

I shrugged. I had used John Smith, but, hell, who ain't? And Big Tim Pruett, after the real Big Tim got rubbed out. For a while, after that incident with that egg-sucking dog I'd killed in Sedalia, I'd gone by Wichita Eddie Colter till I reckoned the law had lost interest in Micah Bishop and had forgotten the man he had killed in Missouri.

“Ben Franklin,” I said.

She smiled again. “And what does your almanac say about today, Mr. Franklin?”

I didn't answer. Didn't know what she meant. Still don't. One of these days, though, I might learn. Well, no, I reckon I won't, since I'll be hanging by the rope till I'm dead in a few hours.

Our conversation played out. I went back to staring. She went back to rubbing my head and hair.

“I'm—” She stopped herself, looked up, not at de la Cruz or even toward Demyan Blanco, what was left of him, just stared in the distance, toward Perdenal Mountain, but I don't reckon she saw anything. She was just thinking, remembering. Still not looking at me, she said, “I'm sorry I got you into all this.”

I give her a short chuckle. “You didn't get me into nothing. You got me out of a hanging.”

“Yes . . . well. . . .” She give me the canteen, and I drank again, set the container down my ownself, and pushed myself till I was sitting beside her, though I guessed I could have laid in her arms the longest while.

The dizziness passed quickly. The wind blew, cool, calm. The hail had melted.

I didn't want to ask her. You know what I mean. How come I wasn't dead? How come Jorge de la Cruz lay on his side beside me, the back of his head a bloody pulp? I ain't the sharpest knife around, but I ain't as dumb as Blanco and the big farmer had been. I knowed things. Or I could make good guesses. While the farmer was choking me to death, she, the good Sister, had come up behind him, holding a rock. She had slammed it down against his head.

Slowly, I took her right hand in my own, and looked at those fingers, scratched and skinned. There was even a small scratch on her palm. She had struck de la Cruz more than once.

She let me hold her hand.

Reluctantly, I let it slip out of my grip. I wet my lips. “You all right?”

Her smile held no humor, but warmth. “I fear I might be sick.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

Truth of the matter is, I'd felt sick after I'd sent Gomez to meet his maker, even if he had been trying to deliver my soul to Satan. I had lost my supper after I'd killed that drover, but had he gotten his knife a little closer to my stomach, it would have been me who was killed. And that bad man in the Indian Nations who had tried to bushwhack me—me, carrying only sixty-three cents and riding a stolen burro—he sometimes still visited me in nightmares. It hadn't been me who had killed Blanco. I looked at that as the Good Lord's doing. But seeing him fried and burned and that Winchester destroyed made my stomach do some dancing right then.

She taken a deep breath, let it out slowly, and I seen the lips start trembling, felt the weight of the world on her shoulders, and next she was crying, just bawling. It taken me a moment before I could make my arms work. They wasn't tied no more. I reached over, took her shoulders, pulled her close, and let her sob and heave and moan and pray close to me.

“It's all right. He would have killed me. Then he would have—” I knowed enough to stop. “You cry. Cry as long and as hard as you want, Sister.”

“This . . . wasn't . . . supposed . . .” The words came out between gasps and tears. “It wasn't . . . it wasn't . . . sup . . . supposed to be . . . like . . . this.”

“It's all right.” It became my turn to stroke her hair. “It's all right.”

But as I looked around, I knowed that wasn't true. Not by a long shot.

Her blue roan still stood, head down, heart broke, sides ripped and bleeding from hail. That bum leg of his was swollen and ugly. The mule and de la Cruz's big buckskin was long gone, and I had figured out what Blanco's shot had struck, recalling the sound of something falling somewhere behind me. He had killed his own black. Accidental, of course, but the horse was lying in the dirt, dead.

The sun would be down in another hour, maybe less, and we was both soaked to the bone. No way I could get a fire going, not with everything wetter than a fish in the ocean. I could see forever, and forever was a big emptiness. More than forty miles to the railroad and what might pass for civilization along the Rio Grande, and that included the Manzano Mountains blocking the path. East was even worser, desert and rough country, no water, and anybody we'd meet was like to kill us rather than save us. North . . . well north was probably Felipe Hernandez. South . . .

My head shook. I closed my eyes. I pulled the nun tight.

“God,” I said, mostly a whisper and to myself. “God, Sister, why did you give me that water. What was I thinking?”

Don't rightly recollect how long the Sister sobbed, but eventually, I laid her down, still sniffling, and went to work. Gagging, eyes watering, I dragged the remnants of Demyan Blanco maybe ten rods before giving up. Made no headway with the late Jorge de la Cruz, and eventually left him where Sister Geneviève had dropped him into that eternal sleep.

I went through the saddlebags on the horse Blanco had killed, but all I found was tobacco, which I don't use, and a couple boxes of .45-70 shells, which was worthless as that melted Winchester still sticking up on the prairie like a marker for the dearly departed idiot. There was a canteen, maybe half full, and I got the bright idea to loosen my bandanna and squeeze a few drops of rainwater into the canteen's opening.

The other bag had only an extra shirt, undergarment bottoms, and a folding knife. I pocketed the knife, started to leave the clothes, but thought better of it and took them, too.

Corking the canteen, I rose and studied the horizon.

The problem with country like this is that it don't often hold water. Ground soaks up rain like a sponge. I didn't know how long I'd been unconscious, but there wasn't no mud holes, certainly no puddles.

Walking back, I happened upon the Dean and Adams five-shot. I wiped the sand off the cylinder, cocked the piece, and found it still worked. 'Course, there was no caps on it, and I knowed the rain had fouled any powder in the chambers. But it was a gun, even might fire, so I went back to the late de la Cruz. In one of his pockets, I found a tin of percussion caps, as well as a powder flask, even a handful of lead balls.

That was a start. I pocketed them things, too.

By that time, the sun had disappeared behind the Manzanos. Sister Geneviève was sitting up, staring at me.

I handed her the shirt and unmentionables. “It's going to get cold. These are dry. You should get out of them wet duds, put these on. It's gonna be a long night.”

“What about you?”

“I'll manage.”

She stared at the clothes, finally sighed, and stood, looking around at the barren country.

“I won't spy on you, Sister.” I headed to the blue roan.

That about broke my heart, too. I pulled off the saddlebags, put the caps and balls and flask in one of them. The good Sister had stuck the crucifix I'd broken in one side, as well as her hollowed-out Bible, some food. The other had grain for the horse, so I dumped it all out on the ground. The roan didn't eat.

After loosening the cinch, I stopped, paused, considered breaking my word and just sneaking a peek at that nun. But I couldn't do it. Just couldn't. I finished with the saddle, and pushed it off the roan's back. Then removed the bridle, which I dropped, too.

The horse eyed me again with those pleading, tired eyes.

I stroked the side of its head with my knuckles. “I'm sorry, boy. I just can't help you.”

That Dean and Adams wouldn't fire, not yet anyway, perhaps not ever, and I just didn't have the guts to try to cut the roan's throat with a pocket knife.

“You may turn around, Mr. Bishop.”

Hefting the saddlebags over my shoulder, I obeyed my true love's command.

She'd had to roll up the muslin underpants, and had wrapped a sash of some kind around her to keep them pants from falling down. She still wore her shoes. Blanco's green and white checked shirt fit her like a prairie dress blowing in the wind.

“Dressed for the Easter picnic,” I said.

She smiled.

I walked over to her, pulled off my hat, and handed it to her. “You'll need this, too, come tomorrow.”

“What about you?”

“I'm used to the sun,” I lied. Gamblers and horse thieves don't spend much time in the daylight hours.

She had shown the good sense to have picked up one canteen. I had the other. We looked at each other, then she turned southwest while I studied northeast.

“I think . . .” we both began.

We stopped ourselves and looked away, but we wasn't laughing.

When she looked back at me, I pointed toward Anton Chico. “Best chance would be to head back where we come from.”

“What about Felipe Hernandez?”

“He'd help you. And there's water that way.”

Her head shook. “Gran Quivira,” she said, stubborn again.

“That's—”

“Where help is,” she finished for me, but it wasn't what I was going to say.

I wet my lips. They was already drying out, unlike my soaking clothes. “How do you know?”

“I have faith.”

I didn't. “It's between twenty and thirty miles. And this”—I sloshed the water in my canteen—“won't get us there.”

“Gran Quivira,” she said. “Then the Valley of Fire.”

“You'll think we're already in the Valley of Fire come tomorrow.”

She stared at me. I met her eyes. Finally, we both shrugged.

“Which way?” she asked at last.

“Away from here,” I told her, and started walking, like a damned fool, southwest.