Firechild (31 page)

La niñita’s
blessed voice!

“El pobrecito Panchito!”

She was floating in the air above him, a white-shining light with a shape he had never seen. Perhaps an angel’s shape. Her high child-voice was tenderly kind. She had felt his pain and come to ease it.

Her bright-shining wings brushed his face with a coolness that soothed the burning of the sun. Shining fingers of her light reached deep into him, feeling what was torn and was broken. Troubled by what she found, she spoke to
El Doctor
Sax.

He was still far away, where they had had to leave him, lying nearly dead on a bed in the gringo prison. A gringo
medico
was dripping a poison of the brain into his blood, while angry gringos in the uniforms of soldiers shouted demands for all he knew about about
la bruja.
The witch. That was their name for
la niñita.

The gringos got no answers, because they had poured too much of their poison into his brain. The
medico
was begging them to stop, because he said Belcraft was dying, though not yet entirely dead.
La Maravilla
found life left in his mind, and slowed his dying, and brought him with her back to the
avión,
where it lay broken in the dry
laguna.

Working together, they swept away the pain. Belcraft guided her fingers of light, reaching deep to teach the pieces of broken bones how to creep back into place and knit together again. He helped her cause the dying cells to remember the life they had almost lost. Together, they made him live again.

“El pobre querido!”

She felt sad again for the Sax, because when they were done, she had to leave him once more in the far gringo prison. She had reached, however, to help his hurt body heal, and the
medico
was soon amazed at the way his life signs had returned. It hurt her to see the soldiers still demanding what he knew about how
la bruja
got away.

When Pancho Torres woke,
el dolor
was really gone. He could breathe with no pain. Working with whatever she had called from Belcraft’s faraway mind,
La Maravilla
had healed him. The dried blood was hard on his face, but the flies were gone, and the blindness of the sun. His head could move. He found his voice and called
la niñita’s
name.

Los cuervos
squawked and flapped, but he heard no sound from her.

The day was ending, the air no longer so hot. The crows still cawed somewhere near. When he turned his head, he found one of them standing on the bloated belly of the gringo called Frankie, tearing at the face where the eyes had been. One of Frankie’s hands seemed to be reaching for the pistol he had tried to fire at the Scorpion while they were still in the sky, but the purpling fingers no longer moved. Frankie was entirely dead.

The sun went down. The crows squawked and flapped away. He called again for
La Maravilla
to speak to him. If she could speak. All he heard was the crows. A sad thing, he thought, if she had given
toda la vida
to restore him, saving no life for herself. At last he slept again, a healing sleep without pain or dreams or any wonders.

The engine sound of
un carro
woke him. Hunger had come upon him in the night, and a great thirst. He thought kind people must have come at last, with water and help for
la niñita.
A jagged fragment of the broken
avión
lay across his legs, but he rolled his head to look.

A pickup truck came jolting across the rough
laguna
floor. It stopped. A man got out. A lean, quick man in greasy jeans, wearing a ragged straw
sombrero.
He raised a grimy hand to shade his eyes from the low sun and stood a long time squinting into the wreckage.

Torres tried to call out when he saw the man turning back to the pickup. In a moment he was breathing
gracias a diós
that his croaking call had not been heard, because the man had come back with a rifle. Crouching a little, he peered uneasily around him again and stopped to aim the gun at Frankie’s head.

Frankie’s face was hard to look at where the crows had torn it, but the man fired two careful shots into it before he came on to roll the body over and rip a thick billfold out of the hip pocket. Squinting into that, he looked up and crouched back from something else.

He had seen
la niñita.
Pancho moved his head enough to find her. She lay very still on the hard-baked clay beside a broken seat from the broken
avión.
Her long hair was spread on the ground, golden where the sun struck it. Her body was thin and small, nearly bare, the same golden color as her hair. Her face was down. She was not moving.

Qué
lástima!
He thought she must be dead.

The man was not so sure. He aimed the rifle.

Pancho Torres moved. His legs came free of the broken metal on them. One finger reached Frankie’s pistol to drag it toward him through the dust. Lifting it took all his strength, but he was able to swing it toward the man aiming at
la niñita.

“Panchito,
no!”
He heard her small child-voice, screaming faintly in his head.
“For favor, no matanza!”

Sick and shaking, he pulled the trigger. The pistol kicked itself out of his hand and spun away across the dust. The man’s head came apart, as ugly as Frankie’s. The body crumpled down beside
la niñita.

He thought he heard her voice again, scolding him for killing, yet he couldn’t be sorry. Sweating and trembling, he had to lie flat again until he felt strong enough to stand. He limped to
la niñita
and dropped on his knees to touch her, wondering if she could really be alive.

Her body felt cold, but it had not stiffened. He saw no blood, felt no broken bones, but she had been hurt inside. There was no movement of breath, but he found a pulse in her tiny wrist, very weak and very slow. Perhaps, if he could get her to a
medico,
she might yet live.

Pero
no!

He must hide her. The gringos would be hunting then, alerting
la policia,
publishing pictures, offering rewards. Any
medico
would have to inform
los autoridades.
They would soon know that he was a convict who had waited to die for one killing in
el Norte,
and who had left two more dead men here in the wreckage.

He must keep her safe, keep her sheltered, hope she could heal herself as she had healed him. Perhaps there could be aid from the big gringo called
El Escorpión.
Or had he died? Pancho walked around the wreckage, searching, and found footprints in the dust. Tracks of
El Escorpión,
limping and stumbling, wandering away.

Had he gone for help? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps he was dazed, lost in the desert, perhaps already dead. In no case was he a friend worth trusting. No aid would come from anywhere. If one man had found the wreck, another surely would, but none would be a friend. Honest finders, quick to call
la policia,
would be no better than
El Escorpión.

Desperate as he had been for any chance at freedom, he had never understood the man, who seemed strange and deadly as his name. In the messages Frankie brought, he had promised far too much. He was going to guide them to friends of his own beyond the reach of the gringo law, perhaps
bandidos
he knew, or to Columbian dealers in
narcóticos.
That had never been clear.

Asking Frankie why
El Escorpión
wanted to rescue them, he had never liked the answers. They wanted to save
la niñita
from the torture, so Frankie said, because she was a holy being sent by the mother of God to open the way to paradise. Meeting
El Escorpión
only when they were in the air, he had found it hard to see him as a lover of the saints.

Searching for any way to safety, he picked up Frankie’s billfold, where the dead man had dropped it. American dollars made a thick sheaf in it. Twenties, fifties, hundreds; he didn’t wait to count them. In the dirty jeans, he found a switch-blade knife and a big wad of crumpled pesos. Nothing with any name; he wondered if the dead man had been another convict in flight.

The fenders on the old pickup were broken and much paint was gone, but the tires looked strong. There was oil and
gasolina.
A big plastic bottle in the cab was full of good water. He gulped at it till he felt sick again, and went back to
La niñita.

“Adónde?”

Where could they hide? San Rosario? In his dreams of escape, back at the prison, he had always taken her there, but those were only dreams.
En verdad,
his mother and father were dead, his brothers and sisters scattered.
El tio Eduardo
would report him to
la policia
for any reward or for no reward at all.

La Madre de Oro?

The Mother of Gold? The great mine men said the old
conquistadores
had found and lost again in
las sierras altas.
So
los viejos
said. His brother Hector had learned about it from a rich gringo who hired him to fly for a search expedition. Following the map far up toward the high peaks, they had found the timbered tunnel dug long ago, but no gold at all.

They had flown above it when Hector was teaching him to be a pilot for
los marijuaneros.
Hector pointed out the twisting mountain road the gringo had repaired, and the little wooden
bohio
he had built outside the black tunnel mouth.

Perhaps the tunnel could hide them until
La Maravilla
healed herself. If they could reach it. But it was far away, among mountains too sharp and dry and bare for farms or even goats. The road might be hard to find, and it might be too bad for the old pickup. Yet it seemed
la mejor esperanza.

Their best hope. The mine was well known to yield no gold, except perhaps to those who sold maps and went to guide those foolish gringos. It would be a place where few people came.

He carried
la niñita
to the pickup. A tiny burden to him since her holy power had restored him, she hung limp and cold in his arms. Too large for her thin little body, her head sagged back against his heart, her long golden hair streaming loose and bright as the halo of a saint.

The pickup cab had a space behind the seat, where he found a roll of odorous blankets on a clutter of worn tools, cans of oil, and a box of ammunition for the rifle. He laid her there, covered with a tattered blanket, where she would not be easy to see.

He drove away at once, picking a way out of the dry
laguna
and on through hummocks of brush and cactus and yucca toward a highway he remembered. Noon had passed before they reached it, and hunger had become a giddy weakness in him. A few kilometers down the pavement, he pulled off again to rummage under the blankets where
la niñita
lay so very still.

He found a slab of hard dry cheese and a little stack of stale tortillas wrapped in an old newspaper whose torn headlines spoke of
ENFIELD, LA CIUDAD DEL TERROR
. The water in the plastic bottle had grown hot, but he drank and drove on again, gnawing moldy cheese wrapped in a dry tortilla.

Farther down the lonely pavement, he slowed when he saw the skeleton of a car that lay upside down in the ditch, stripped of wheels and glass and engine. It still had license plates. Nobody else in sight, he stopped to change them for the battered plates on the pickup.

When he had to stop for
gasolina,
he paid with the dead man’s pesos. To keep
la niñita
from being seen, he got out of the cab and spoke of seeking work he never found in the city of Chihuahua.

He drove till his eyes began to blur, and stopped at last to sleep in the cab until daylight. When they came to another
pueblito,
he stopped again to spend more of the dead man’s pesos for bags of rice and dry beans and other things they might need at the mine.

He had been working a smelter in Chihuahua, he told one of the clerks. He was buying these items for the family he had left on his little farm down in
la tierra caliente.
He bought tools and cans for spare
gasolina.
Filling the cans at a Pemex station, he said they were for his water pump, down on the
ejido.

They were four days on the way to the mine. One whole day was lost when he searched for the beginning of the road. Floods must have come since the gringo repaired it to go there for gold, because new arroyos were slashed deep across it. He had to move rocks and dig the tops from high clay banks to help the old pickup climb them.

Sometimes
la niñita
drank a little water when he held the bottle to her lax lips, but she ate no food. Her eyes were never open. That feeble pulse still beat when he felt her limp wrist, so slow he always thought the next beat would never come again, but he found no other sign of life.

When at last they came jolting to the door of the mine, the gringo
bohio
outside it had burned, but the tunnel was still .open. He cleared the rubble from a place on the floor down inside its cool dimness and cut juniper branches to make a bed for
la niñita.
He spread blankets on it and laid her there, wondering sadly if she would ever wake at all.

A pile of timbers inside the tunnel had not been burned. He parked the pickup against a cliff, leaned timbers over it, and spread juniper branches to hide it from searchers in the air. Aching with fatigue when that was done, he stood a long time looking back down the ridges and canyons they had followed.

The rocky slopes rolled and folded down forever, toward the flat brown desert they had crossed. A far thundercloud towered toward a flattened anvil, draping thin blue curtains of rain that dried up before they reached the barren ground. Here and there, he could trace the dim brown line of the road. Scanning it uneasily, he saw no dust, no hint of any follower.