Valley of Fire (18 page)

“I do not know how long I lay there, unconscious,” Rocío told us. “Hours perhaps.
¿Quién sabe?
When my eyes opened, Cortez was gone. I was alone. The other young Sisters . . .” She crossed herself and bowed her head.

“All of them?” Geneviève asked softly. “Dead?”

“Sí. So young. So innocent.” Rocío's gnarled finger rose to brush a tear before it fell into one of the crevasses of her ancient face.”

“The mules?” Fenn asked. “They were dead, too?”

“Not mules, my son,” Sister Rocío corrected. “Burros. But, sí, they had died, too. Except one, whose front legs were broken. He was braying in terrible pain and would die before nightfall.”

“Cortez?” That was what interested Fenn right then. “How many mules did he manage to save? How many didn't fall into that gorge?”

“Only three. I did not see this, for I was busy falling and being knocked unconscious, but it is my belief that our guide managed to slice the rope that bound our burros together at the last second, thus saving the three with which he fled.”

“He didn't try to save you?” Geneviève asked angrily. “He didn't even check on you or the others? He just left?”

“Likely,” Rocío answered, “he thought we were all dead, or soon would be, and he had much fear. He thought the banditos would come soon.”

“Three burros.” Fenn done some ciphering hisself, trying to figure out how much weight they could've taken in gold.

Rocío grinned because she knowed exactly what he was doing. “One of the burros carried water,” she told him. “Not gold. Another carried food. Only one burro was loaded with the weight of the devil.”

Fenn spit. It sizzled in the fire. “You expect me to believe that this Cortez just left all that gold down there?”

“It was freezing. It was terribly windy. And there were two dozen banditos behind us. I think it was prudent for him to do as he did, but he should have kept going south for El Paso. Alas, he was found frozen to death in the Capitan Mountains. He must have turned east, unsure of where he should go. Perhaps he was lost. It was very white, very foggy, terribly cold.”

“What about the gold with him?”

She laughed. “I have always imagined this burro, wandering around in the Capitan Mountains, chewing on grass in the spring, drinking from the bubbling rivers, just packing ingots with him, oblivious to the fortune he carried. It is a good vision, is it not?”

“It is very good.” Geneviève reached over to pat Sister Rocío's thigh.

The Pockmarked Man refilled everybody's coffee cups. Sean Fenn went back to ciphering how much gold was left behind. Corbin brought up the question about those two dozen banditos. “You were the only one left alive—”

“Except for the poor burro with the two broken legs,” Sister Rocío interrupted him with a correction.

Smiling, nodding, Corbin said, “Except for the poor burro with the two broken legs.”

“But he was dead soon,” Rocío said, and crossed herself.

“Yes. I'm sure he was.” Corbin sipped some coffee. “But there were bandits coming your way. And they would find you, the dead mules, the dead nuns.”

“That is what I thought,” Rocío said. “It is what I feared.”

“So you moved the gold.” Fenn had figured it all out.

Rocío let a sly grin crease her face.

“All of it?” The Pockmarked Man didn't seem to believe it. I mean, he was looking at Rocío as a seventy-three-year-old blind woman, forgetting that this had happened back in 1848.

“One finds strength to do what others find impossible,” she said. “The Blessed Mother guided me.

“I dragged the bodies of my young, beautiful, gold-hearted nuns away from the rocks. I blessed them. I kissed their foreheads. Many ingots had fallen out of their packs. All I needed to do was pick them up, follow the canyon—”

“Over lava rocks?” Fenn asked.

“No. The lava had not flowed here. That is why there was a canyon. This was earth, though covered in great sheets of ice. I looked up. I saw Mount Ararat.”

“Ararat?” Fenn asked, interested again. “Where's that?”

Even I remembered that much from all them Bible readings and talks and sermons at the orphanage. “In the Old Testament,” I told him.

“
Sí
,”
Rocío said. “I saw the Ark. It was my beacon. I went down a canyon, then another. I found what passed for a cave. The cave, of course, was in the great bed of lava. The ingots could be placed there, into the darkness. I went back to the burros and the packs and those poor, dead, pitiful nuns. It was very sad.”

“Yeah,” Fenn said, who wasn't grieving none of nuns dead and gone for thirty-eight years. “That had to take you a good long time.”

“
Es verdad.
I worked well into darkness. By then it was very cold. By then my fingers had . . . how is it said?”

“Frostbite,” I said.

“Sí.”

“But what about the bandits?” Fenn asked.

With a shrug, Rocío said, “Perhaps they never showed up. Anyway, I never saw them. Poor Cortez. Had he not fled when we were all pulled down from the trail, he could have helped me bury all the gold, and he could have returned to find it and dig it up and become very wealthy instead of very dead in the Capitan Mountains.”

“So once you got the last of the ingots in that cave,” Fenn said, “what happened next?”

“I had to seal the cave's entrance. I did not think of it as burying a treasure, but sealing a tomb. Keeping those dear, grand nuns away from vultures, ravens, and coyotes.”

“Lava rocks are heavy,” Fenn pointed out.

“Not as heavy as gold. One was loose. I thought if I could pull it down, other stones would follow, and, if such was God's will, return at some point. Find the nuns. Bring them home. They deserve a fitting burial. That is my wish now.”

“After forty years?” Fenn asked, getting all snide again.

“Thirty-eight,” Rocío corrected.

“We'll come back to that point,” Fenn said. “You sealed the cave with the gold and dead nuns in it.”

“And almost myself.”

She kept talking, this time without interruption for a long, long while. This here is more of what she told us.

 

 

 

“Good God!” Corbin gasped. That was the first interruption.

“
Sí
,”
Sister Rocío said. “God is good.”

“How did you do it?” Geneviève asked.

Sean Fenn was too dumb to figure out what it was that Sister Rocío knowed she had to do.

“The machete was nearby. God's mercy is infinite.”

“But”—The Pockmarked Man's lip trembled—“you just couldn't hack it off.”

“Not the way I was pinned,” Rocío said.

“Then . . . how?” But it wasn't that I really wanted to know.

“I bent my forearm backward, away from the rock. I screamed, of course. Never had I endured such agony, and never had I imagined that I possessed the stomach, the ability to afflict such pain on myself. I just kept bending my arm, yelling, crying, wishing I were dead, until the bone cracked.”

I slid down a bit. Poured my coffee onto the ground. Along about that time, my stomach didn't feel too good.

“So once you broke that bone, you used the machete to cut off your arm.” Fenn shaken his head and let out a part-sigh, part-laugh.

“It was not so simple,” Rocío said. “It took a good two hours before I had the strength to move. I cupped some of the melting snow—melting because the sun was out, not because it was no longer freezing—and I drank some. Drank more. Wiped my brow, which was heavy with sweat that did not freeze. And then, after I had prayed and pleaded for strength—”

“You sawed off your own arm,” Fenn finished for her.

But he was a damned fool.

“Feel your arm, young man,” Rocío said, and then waited patiently for Fenn to feel his arm, which, of course, he wasn't about to do.

“Do you feel the two bones in your forearm? I had broken one. I had to break the second bone, too.”

Corbin twisted the ends of his mustache. “The ulna and the radius.” That man was full of wonders.

“The names I do not know. So again, I screamed and prayed and begged and bent back my arm. This one was more painful. This time, I knew just how badly breaking a bone in my arm hurt. It took me three times as long before the bone snapped, and I blacked out.”

I was rubbing my arm. So was Geneviève. So was Benigno. The Pockmarked Man just stared with his mouth agape. Corbin tucked in his neck and bent his head down real low. I didn't care to see what Fenn was doing.

“Then I picked up the machete.”

 

 

We sat silent for a long while before Rocío resumed talking.

“After I cut off my arm, I made a tourniquet, began walking, down the path, climbing over the lava, crossing the Malpais. It snowed again, turning the world white.

“The Mexican War had ended. On the next day, a patrol of
soldados norteamericanos
happened upon me. A surgeon was with them.”

“You must have been delighted to see them,” Geneviève said.

Rocío's head shook. “I mentioned that it had snowed again, did I not? By the time the
soldados
found me, I saw nothing. The snow had blinded me. I have not seen anything but blackness since.”

We studied on that some.

“But the surgeon with the
norteamericanos
saved me. He removed more of my arm, and took me back to Santa Fe. It became my home. For years, I helped the priests, the bishops, the people in need. I tried to forget what had happened in that terrible valley of snow and ice and rocks and death.”

Again, we got silent. Geneviève handed Sister Rocío another cup of coffee. “And you joined the Sisters of Charity?”

“Not until they arrived in Santa Fe after the War of the Rebellion was over in the east.” The old nun smiled. “But yes, the Sisters of Charity gave me a new purpose. As they have given you, my new friend.”

Them words hurt Geneviève. Her face paled, her lips trembled, and she like to have busted out in tears.

“But you went back to being a nun,” Fenn was saying, sarcastic, inconsiderate as hell. “Living the good life. Not thinking about that gold for close to forty years.”

“Oh, no, my son. I thought of it daily. I waited until the right person came into my life, a person strong and wild and wily enough to find that gold.”

Everybody, even that blind old nun, faced me.

“Micah Bishop became my eyes when he was fourteen years old.”

“Do you remember Mount Ararat?” Sister Rocío asked.

“Maybe.” I liked things a whole lot better when not everybody was paying me all this mind.

“And the Temptation in the Wilderness?”

“Uh . . . was that Luke?”

The hand walloped me. “Matthew,” she snapped. “Four. One through eleven.”

“Right. I knowed that.”

“He is my eyes,” Sister Rocío said proudly. “I knew that when he arrived at the orphanage. You see, he was found wandering in the Valley of Fire, a poor waif in rags. An Army patrol found him, brought him to the railroad, and a kind seamstress in Socorro sent him by train to Santa Fe, to the Sisters of Charity. You remember all that, don't you, my son?”

Yeah, and I even knowed why I'd been wandering in them lava rocks. I was hiding from the law and the storekeeper in White Oaks who'd gotten tired of me stealing his bread and apples and assorted sundries.

The nun kept on talking, bragging about me. Made me feel kinda proud.

“I knew he would grow up to be wild and stubborn and independent, that he would possess courage and heart, that he could find the resting place of those poor nuns. He could bring them back to be buried as they should. He could deliver the gold to the Indians, the poor slaves who deserve it.”

Well, everybody was staring at me by that time, and I didn't feel too popular. I wanted to sneak into a hole and stay there for about two hundred and sixty three years.

“But he ran off when he was sixteen.” Sean Fenn had figured things out. “Is that wild and stubborn and independent enough for you, Sister? Is that how he showed his heart and courage?”

“God's will be done,” Rocío said. “He returned.”

“Yeah.” Fenn slapped his knee. “He returned to Las Vegas. To kill a guy in a saloon brawl. To get sentenced to hang.”

“But God intervened.”

“I intervened.” Fenn was standing now. “I'm God.”

“You will not speak with such sacrilege,” Rocío told him.

But Fenn wasn't listening. “So where's the gold?” he demanded. He wasn't talking to the nun no more. He stared right at me, and I knowed I was in for a sound thrashing.

“I don't rightly know,” I said, and that was honest.

Fenn pulled his Colt.

“He doesn't know that he knows,” Rocío said, “but he knows. I know he knows. For he has the Cross of Lorraine.”

Here's the point where things got ticklish, and my heart started beating and I knowed I was sweating. Usually, I can run a pretty fair bluff, better than fair if you want to know the God's honest truth, but I was having a bad day. Rocío might have thought she knowed some things that I knowed, but what I really knowed was right then and there, Geneviève Tremblay held my life in her hands.

There I was, betting on a woman who wasn't a nun, and who had been intimate with the biggest son of a bitch I'd ever knowed. There was a silver cross beneath her torn green and white checked shirt that once belonged to a dead man, and beneath a real fancy chemise that probably had belonged to a Mexican woman who'd been killed and scalped because south of the border her hair could pass for an Apache's.

“The Cross of Lorraine?” Corbin said.

“Lorraine was the name of one of the nuns killed in the Valley of Fire, in the Malpais,” Rocío said. “I took the cross from her body and kept it for years. It was a Cross of Lorraine. Are you familiar with that style, young man?”

“Well . . .” Corbin wasn't that educated.

“It's French,” Geneviève said, and everybody was looking at her. Everybody but me, because I knowed better, having played cards long enough to know you never tip your hand. My right hand, though, was beginning to inch down my left leg just in case everything I figured was dead wrong.

“The Knights Templar used it in the Crusades, and the French Jesuits brought it to America.” Yes, by grab, Geneviève did know a right tidy amount when it come to French crosses and all. “It is a two-barred cross. Two bars on the top. The Catholics used one version of the Cross of Lorraine to represent the archbishop.”

Fenn chuckled. “You really did almost become a nun, didn't you, Gen?”

I wet my lips, and then Fenn swore, and leaped off that rocky bench. “Wait a minute!” he snapped, remembering as I figured he would, and then he charged to me, and before I could straighten or get to that boot, he jerked me to my feet, shoved me against the rock wall, and yelled. “I know that damned cross.”

He ripped my shirt, just tore the front all the way in two, but the only things he seen was a bandage of a myrtle green stocking, some sunburn around and below the collar, some scars, and hair and dirt. All I'd really done was wash my face and shave. I wouldn't have called myself presentable.

“Where is it?”

Before I could answer, Fenn loosened another tooth with a mean backhand, and I was laying on the ground.

Sister Rocío was pleading, “What is going on? What is happening? What is that young man doing to my Micah?” But nobody was answering her on account they was all preoccupied watching me get the bitter hell beat out of me . . . again.

“Where is it?” Fenn demanded.

“I ain't got it no more!” I hoped he could hear me, 'cause I'd covered my head and mouth with my folded arms, praying that he wouldn't punch me or kick me no more.

Naturally, he booted me in my stomach. I rolled over and vomited.

“Liar!” he yelled. “You had that cross when we rode into Deming five years ago. You said you'd never get rid of it. Said it brought you luck. Where the hell is it?” He bent over, lifted me up.

Sister Rocío kept right on wailing, begging, pleading for mercy, but Sean Fenn was riled, and he had never listened to nothing when his dander was up. Again, he shoved me against the wall, and weren't no way I could reach my bum leg.

The plan I'd thunk up was turning out about as bad as Cortez's had done thirty-eight years earlier.

“Where is it?”

“It's out in the desert, most likely,” I said.

He swore, grabbed a handful of hair, slammed me against the wall. That opened the cut in my forehead and gave me a matching one on the back of my skull.

“Where is it?” Fenn roared again.

Sister Rocío was speaking in tongue, or it might have just been Latin. Corbin was considering intervening. Benigno and The Pockmarked Man wasn't doing nothing. I was hurting, and Fenn was screaming. Then Geneviève was yelling for Fenn to stop, to leave me alone, that I was the only chance they had at finding that gold.

Finally, I heard her say, “He doesn't have that cross, Sean!”

Fenn stopped kicking me and punching me, while Sister Rocío kept on praying in Latin. Through blurred vision, I seemed to see Geneviève standing there—an angel or devil, I wasn't certain—but I knowed her next words would either leave me dead or not. I figured they'd leave me dead.

She said, “He must have lost it in the desert.”

I swear, if I hadn't been gasping for breath and crying with pain, I might have breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn't betrayed me.

Well, not yet.

“You”—Fenn waited till his heart slowed down a mite—“saw it?”

Her head bobbed.

“Of course, you did,” Fenn said, all jealous, all bitter and ugly again.

But Geneviève told him, “Sean. He had it when we were on the train, and in the jail. Remember?”

Fenn likely didn't remember none of that, but he nodded as if he did. He swore, cussed his luck and his stupidity. “We should have just killed the son of a bitch and grabbed the cross.”

“We didn't know about the cross then,” she reminded him.

“You're sure he had it? Do you know when he lost it?”

“I'm sure he had it when we were crossing that furnace. But it was just extra weight, Sean.”

She must have been listening to me, or maybe I'd said something about such things to her. Who the hell knew?

“We were walking, and fighting to stay alive. It's out there.” She gestured off to the north and east. “Lost. Unless you want to go find it.”

“Find it?” He cussed hisself again. “Out there? Fat chance.”

“Then leave him alone,” Geneviève said. “He's the only chance we have of finding those ingots.”

That stopped Rocío from talking Latin. She raised her head, lowered her one arm, and said, “He is my eyes. He knows.”

I pushed my way past Fenn, made it to Sister Rocío, helped her up, guided her back to where she'd been sitting.

“What happened to the cross, my child?” she asked.

I hated lying to her, but figured she, Mary, Jesus, and God would understand. “Guess I just tossed it off while crossing the desert.”

She popped me hard on the top of my head with her knuckles. “Imbecíl!”

Corbin snorted, but nobody else found it funny, not with that much gold at stake.

“What's so important about the cross?” Fenn asked.

“It was a map to the graves of those poor nuns,” she said.

“Wasn't no map,” I told her. “Just a bunch of words. A poem or something.” ”

Them knuckles popped me good again.

“Jar his memory, Sister!” Corbin said, and I think he was joking, but that got Fenn asking about the cross, the poem, the words, and the map on that cross of Lorraine.

“If he can remember what was engraved on the back of the cross, we will find those poor nuns,” Rocío said. “We will return them to be buried in hallowed ground.”

About here is where I figured Geneviève would show her greed, because that was a hell of a lot of gold. I expected that she'd show Fenn that cross I'd give her, and her and Fenn would ride off and live happily ever after, richer than likely the entire population of New Mexico Territory combined, and I'd be feeding the ravens and turkey buzzards and coyotes that seemed to be following me around that summer.

But what Geneviève said was “He is Sister Rocío's eyes. We need him. He's our only chance. He can remember.”

Like a million banshees, the wind wailed. Fenn rubbed his chin, then turned on his heel and stormed away, disappearing behind one of the walls. He yelled to The Pockmarked Man, “Tie him up. Tight. If he gets loose, you die. We leave for the Valley of Fire at first light.”