Valley of Fire (6 page)

The Río Pecos usually ain't that deep, but winter had been hard and the snowmelt was still running off the mountains, so she was running higher than normal. The Pecos ain't that wide, neither, so the Lord must have been watching over us. Or over Sister Geneviève, anyway.

I come up, breaking the surface, spitting out water. Yep, the river was up, and flowing good, and I heard the nun screaming. She was being carried downstream, toward them rocks. I had to save her. I had—

Hell's fire. I said I'd set the record straight in this here account. Tell the truth.

All right, if you must know, I didn't come up, spit out water, swim over to save the nun from getting drowned. Truth is, after hitting the water, I didn't remember a thing till I was coughing out water on the banks. On top of me, Geneviève Tremblay dug her knees into my back and pushed down hard with her small hands, forcing water from my lungs. Don't ask me how she'd done it, but she'd grabbed my arms and dragged me out of the Pecos.

It was her who'd saved my life, which was damned embarrassing, but that's the gospel truth.

Once she was sure I wasn't dead, she toppled off me, crawled a few rods, then sighed.

“Any other brilliant plans, Mister Bishop?” she asked after the longest while.

Couldn't answer. Couldn't move. My body was numb from cold, my head was splitting, and it's a miracle I hadn't broke no bones. After I started breathing normal, I rolled over, groaning, the rain still pelting my face.

“Well,” I said after an eternity. “Sean Fenn, them railroad boys, Felipe Hernandez . . . they'll never find us here.”

Then I fell asleep.

 

 

Dawn came, and still we slept. When I finally woke up, the sun was warm, drying, merciful, and so was the wind. Figured it must be nine or ten in the morning, which was early for me, but way late to be getting up when you're dodging the law. My muscles was stiff, but slowly I managed to sit up. It taken a good long while before I recollected everything that had happened, and realized why I was laying on the riverbank watching a nun wash her feet and legs in the Pecos.

Sister Geneviève pulled down that black wool, reached over for a stick, and pushed herself off a rock. She limped toward me, using a chunk of juniper as a crutch.

“You all right, Sister?” I called out.

“I'll be fine, Mister Bishop.” She hobbled toward me.

Staring at the trestle over the river, she shuddered. When I looked at the bridge, I almost threw up. That had been a long drop. At least, it looked way up there from where we was. A wonder we hadn't gotten killed.

“Are we near Rowe?” she asked.

“No, ma'am. Not even near Fulton. The Santa Fe crosses the Pecos at San Miguel, but there ain't much to it.”

She sat on a fallen tree and started massaging her right calf.

“You sure you're all right?”

“Pulled a muscle,” she said. “What's in San Miguel?”

“Just a telegraph repeater, some railroad equipment. A few farms.”

“You know a lot about the railroad.” She pulled off her hood, and looked into the sky, letting the sun bathe her face with warmth. Her matted hair needed ten minutes with a curry comb, and her hand holding the makeshift crutch was cut and bruised.

“Helped build it,” I said. “Grading.” About the only honest job I'd ever really had. I didn't bother telling her about the time Sean Fenn and me planned on robbing the train between Springer and Raton. We hadn't gone through with it, though we had come up with a mighty good plan. Fenn had chased after a petticoat bound for E-Town high in the mountains, and I'd gotten drunk and passed out in the livery. By the time he come back, he couldn't find me, and the train had gone on to Raton and into Colorado. Them railroad boys never knowed how close they'd come to being victims of a holdup that would have made Jesse James and Sam Bass envious.

Even with her hair tangled so, Sister Geneviève looked mighty fetching.

I still couldn't come to terms with the fact that she was a nun. Maybe she wasn't one. “You sure you're a nun?”

“I pulled you out of the river last night, Mister Bishop.”

Good answer. Most women I'd knowed never would have done that. I reckon she was with the Sisters of Charity. She'd even saved my hat, which was drying on a rock beside me. We just sat there in silence, getting warmer, drier, me sneaking a peak at her every once in a while.

Finally, she pushed herself up, leaning on that stick. “What now, Mister Bishop?”

I made myself stand, took a few tentative steps toward her, turned around, picked up my hat, studied the railroad tracks and the river, upstream, downstream, then wet my lips with my tongue. They was cracked considerable.

“Which way to the Valley of Fire?” she reminded me.

I nodded in the general direction. “From here, it's almost direct south. As the crow flies, I'd say maybe a hundred and twenty miles.” I give her a hard stare, just so she wouldn't get some fool notion. “But we ain't crows.”

She got some fool notion, anyway. “But neither the railroad detectives nor the law nor Sean Fenn would look for us if we took this most direct route.”

I sniggered. “Oh, it's a direct route, all right, Sister. Straight to Hell.” I motioned toward the river. “The Pecos goes another way. It's nice and cool here with plenty of shade. But after a few days, it turns hot and miserable and deadly. You won't find no water till Piños Wells, if there's any water there. Farther south you get, you're around what the Mexicans and Spanish used to call
Jornado del Muerto
, which means—”

“I know what it means, Mister Bishop.”

“Well, you sure ain't walking there. Not with a bum leg.”

She give me a direct look into my eyes.

God, they was beautiful, dark eyes.

“I thought you have a certain way with horses, Mister Bishop.”

I choked back some fine cuss words. She was tempting me to steal horses, which I was mighty good at.

“Why?” I demanded. “What in tarnation has you so jo-fired to walk or ride better than a hundred miles through the worst country in the territory to dig up something in a valley of black rocks?”

“Don't you know?”

“No.”

“Sister Rocío never told you?”

“She never told me nothing, excepting who Jesus's disciples was, how many Hail Marys I needed to say, and that I'd better eat all the posole in my bowl, or else.”

“Maybe it'll all come back to you when you see the Valley of Fire.”

Silence. Then, “It's worth your while, Mister Bishop.”

That got me to figuring some more. It was also worth Sean Fenn's while. I mean, it's one thing for a nun to rescue a condemned man from the gallows. There was a story in the territory that one of them Sisters of Charity, Blandina had been her name, had helped out Billy the Kid in Trinidad. Not that it did the Kid any good seeing how Pat Garrett shot him down some years later. But Sean Fenn wouldn't have lifted his little finger—the one on his left hand that this fellow in Denver had cut off at the second knuckle, clean as you please, with a Bowie knife four years back—to save my hide. So maybe whatever was in them lava flows was worth my while.

But getting there . . . ?

I gave up. I couldn't win no argument with a nun. “Come on, Sister.” I started walking downstream.

Two or three miles later, we come upon a little farm. Corral. Lean-to. Couple shacks. And a jacal. Didn't see no smoke from the chimney, but there was two mules in the corral, and a burro and a bunch of stinking goats. The problem, naturally, was that this outfit was on the other side of the river.

“We'll have to cross here, Sister,” I told her.

She looked around for a bridge. 'Course, there wasn't one. She turned to me. “You're stealing . . .
those
animals? We'll drown for those?”

“We won't drown, and those animals can get us to Anton Chico. Pickings should be better down there. Then we can take off south, through the desert, toward your Valley of Fire and our graves.”

She didn't move.

“I'll hold your hand.”

She limped to the bank and stepped into the water. Sighing, I followed her. Stubborn. Her head was harder than mine. Frigid water took our breath away. It had been deeper up by the trestle, but it was wider here.

The nun slipped once, but caught herself before I could. She kept moving, making a beeline for the bank. The stones on the bed got slippery, but the water didn't get no deeper than my boot tops, at first. About midstream, Sister Geneviève stepped into a hole. That dropped her only to her waist, but she turned, and the color drained from her face. Next thing I knowed, her juniper crutch was flowing downstream without her, and her eyes rolled back into her head.

I lunged for her, but she splashed into the water before I could save her. Me? I went down and under, came up holding onto my hat, moving for her as she floated after her crutch. Like I said, it wasn't deep, but bitterly cold. I caught a handful of black wool, pulled her close to me, then heaved her up over my shoulder. Even sopping wet, she was light as a deck of cards.

Moving through the water, I carried her, climbed out of the river, and left a trail of water to the lean-to. There, I laid her on straw, then pulled off my boots, added to the water trail, and knelt beside her. She was breathing, but out cold. One of the mules brayed. I rubbed the stubble on my cheeks, trying to figure out what to do.

Finally, I spotted the blood, and gently lifted the black cloth of her dress.

I swore. Quickly, I removed my bandanna, wrung it out, whipped and rolled it as thin as I could make it, and wrapped it just under her knee. Spying a little branding iron in the corner, I grabbed it, tied the bandanna into a knot, then put the branding iron's stem atop the bandanna, tied the iron to it, started twisting until the bleeding had stopped.

Ain't no doctor, but I have had plenty of experience treating things like knife cuts and gunshots, dislocated shoulders, busted knuckles, and hangovers—things like that.

Way I figured things, she must have cut her leg on a rock when we fell off that bridge. She'd fashioned a bandage of sorts, but hadn't done nothing else. I reckon whatever rag she had for a bandage had washed off when she'd stepped into the river, the cold water just shocked her, and she'd passed out.

Good thing, too. Likely, she would have bled to death before she'd have asked me for help, and I hadn't been looking for some blood trail.

“Hey!” I called out to the jacal. “I got a nun here who needs help!”

Nothing.

I shouted out, “Help me!” My echo was the only reply.

Her crucifix reflected sunlight. I reached down for the silver cross. It was actually a pin, fastened on a rawhide thong. Plain and simple. I unfastened it from the rawhide, pushed up the pin.

One of the mules brayed, and I got me this idea.

Leaving the nun, I left the lean-to, ducked inside the corral, and eased myself to the nearest mule, whispering to it like I'd known him all my life. I put my hand on his neck, rubbing in circles, moving down to his rear end. I snatched me a hair from the tail and hurried back to the lean-to.

Beside the unconscious nun, I worked on that stickpin, bending it back and forth till it broke off from the underside of the crucifix. I hurriedly tied one end of the hair to the big side. Wetting my lips, I pushed the skin on the sister's calf together with thumb and forefinger, then pushed the pin through.

First time, it didn't work. The hair slid off.

Did the same the second time. I started to think that I might have to find a knife, heat it up somehow, and cauterize the cut. But the fifth time, the horsehair went through like it was suture thread and the stickpin was a surgical needle.

Taken me twelve stitches, but I made them tight so she wouldn't have no ugly scar. I tied it off, bit off the hair-thread, and looked down at my handiwork.

Actually, I stared at the nun's leg. It was a work of God. Pure. Slim. Beautiful, even with the blood and bruises. I pulled down the black wool.

She moaned a bit, turned her head. I felt her forehead, but she wasn't feverish. Still, I fetched a saddle blanket off the corral post, and covered her with it. Then I ran to the jacal.

Someone lived here, that was a fact. A man. I could tell.

The bed in the corner was unmade, and the place stank of dirt, man-sweat, and tobacco. The skillet by the fireplace was full of bacon grease, and the coffee left in the cup looked thicker than blackstrap molasses. Finding a trunk next to the bed, I opened it. One of the shirts looked passably clean, so I ripped off the sleeve and tore it into strips. I smudged one in the bacon grease, then found a twist of tobacco on the table, bit off a chunk, and started chewing. On my way out the door, I spied something else, so I picked up the jug, and ran in my bare feet back to the lean-to.

Geneviève still slept. I lifted up her dress, saw she was still bleeding a mite between them stitches. I spit tobacco juice on it. Spit three or four more times to get that cut good and juicy because I knowed that the best thing you could do for a gunshot wound was to spit tobacco juice into the hole. It would fight off any blood poisoning. Big Tim Pruett had told me that, right before he died, and Big Tim had been one to ride the river with. Next, I slapped the bacon-greased rag over those stitches, and used the rest of the strips to fashion a bandage. I tied them good and tight, but not too tight, as I didn't want to cut off all the circulation.