The Bells of El Diablo Read online

  The nun had turned her attention to a man lying in a bed on the small room’s right side. Her voice was gentler but still admonishing. The man lay with his back against two pillows propped against the far wall, to the right of a window of animal hide scraped thin as waxed paper; it rippled in the wind, tossing dull javelins of gray light around the otherwise dark room.

  This hombre’s bald head was bullet-shaped, with tufts of wiry gray hair sticking out on the sides, with more wiry tufts protruding from over his eyes and from out of his overlarge ears. His face was long, angular, and craggy—at least what James could see of it below the white bandage that had been wrapped around the top half of it, covering his eyes. Over his eyes, the bandage was liberally spotted crimson.

  In one big, gnarled hand he held a clear bottle. In the other, he held a loosely rolled corn-husk cigarette. The smoke curled up from the lit end of the quirley, unspooling in the air above his head. He was holding his own with the nun in Spanish before suddenly turning his head toward the door and saying in English weighted in the lush, rolling accents of the American South: “Visitors? I have visitors? Who is it—that bastard Salsidio again? What’d he come for now? My balls?”

  He dropped the cigarette on the heavy quilt covering him, reached under the bedcovers, and hauled out an enormous Colt Patterson revolver. His thumb ratcheted the hammer back, but he did not get the big popper leveled at the newcomers before the sister shoved it down with one hand while retrieving his cigarette with the other.

  “It is not Salsidio, Jack. These people said your brother sent them! Pablo brought them!”

  “Pablo?”

  “Sí,” the boy said, adding a few sentences in Spanish.

  Apache Jack jerked his chin up and called, “Who’s there? Name yourselves.”

  Vienna moved into the room and said her name.

  Apache Jack’s lips spread with a faint smile. “A girl…” He held up his right hand, curling his thumb and index finger until the tips of each were half an inch apart. The nun slipped the cigarette between them, and Jack drew the quirley to his lips. “Who you got with you, girl?”

  “James Dunn,” James said, moving into the room as the nun stepped back away from the bed, making room for the visitors. “And this here’s Crosseye Reeves.”

  “I like the sound of your voice, son. Southerners. But I’ve been expecting a man named Ichabod McAllister.”

  “My uncle,” Vienna said, adding, “He’s dead. I’ve come in his stead.”

  “How’d he die?”

  “He was killed by a man named Stenck.”

  “Stenck?” Apache Jack said, his tongue flicking along his leathery lower lip. “Stenck’s the other man I been expecting. My brother told me to expect them both at the head of a good-sized party of seasoned shooters.”

  “They were indeed due to come together with a company of men,” Vienna said, “but my uncle Ichabod grew suspicious of Captain Stenck’s motives. There was no better validation of his suspicions than Stenck’s bloody murder of my uncle’s entire family as well as a maid.”

  Apache Jack was nodding slowly as he puffed the cigarette lodged in one corner of his mouth, as though he was surprised by none of what he was hearing. As though he’d almost expected such a grim turn of events.

  “What about you?” Jack asked.

  “I was my uncle’s secretary. I witnessed the murders but made away with the map. I’ve spent the last year hiding from Stenck and his men, biding my time, waiting for an opportunity to come here in my uncle’s place and locate you and secure the gold for the Confederacy.”

  “I’ll be damned.” Jack continued to puff the quirley, absorbing the information. “Your voice sounds sweet as pecan blossoms, but your words wear pants, girl.” Smoke jetted from his nostrils as he worked the quirley to the other side of his mouth. “Tell me about the two you got with you—this Dunn and Reeves.”

  “They’re from home. Both soldiers in the Confederacy.”

  James noted how she used the present tense.

  “Ah,” Apache Jack said with approval. “How is the Confederacy these days? Have we kicked Grant’s drunken ass back to Washington with his consarned tail between his legs? Got that ole tyrant, Abe, tarred and feathered and run back to Illinois on a greased rail?”

  Jack laughed at that, rocking back and forth and nearly losing his cigarette.

  James and Crosseye shared a look. “Not quite,” James said. “In fact, when Crosseye and I left, the federals were marching toward Atlanta.”

  “Devils!” Jack took a pull from the bottle. “That’s likely why I ain’t heard from my brother in a while. He’s gonna need money for rifles, new cannons, maybe mercenaries from Europe, to drive them yellow-fanged Yankees back up north where they belong.”

  “That’s why we’re here, Jack,” said Vienna, brushing his chest with her right hand, lending comfort. “Can I call you Jack?”

  Jack smiled and lifted his chin, ran his tongue along his thin, dry lips sheathed in gray-brown beard bristles. “Honey, you can call me anything you like. You’re purtier’n a speckled pup. I can hear it in your voice.” Jack took a deep breath. “And you smell like woman!” He paused, smiling almost ethereally, then spoke with mock furtiveness behind his hand. “Sister Larena has taken a shine to me, but she smells like candle wax!”

  He cackled like an old woman. Sister Larena lowered her chin, color touching her cheeks.

  Jack broke into a coughing fit. When it had passed, he said, “But I do answer to Apache Jack. The Mescins gave me that handle on account o’ how I slip in and out o’ them mountains to the south—a spur range of the Mother of Mountains, the Sierra Madre—silentlike. Silent as a damn, wild-assed, savage Apache!”

  That last fairly exploded out of Apache Jack’s chest, his face swelling up and turning beet red, his brown hand closing around the bottle so tightly that James thought he’d shatter it.

  Sister Larena gasped. “Settle down, Jack! Don’t get yourself all heated up again, or you’re going to give yourself a heart seizure for sure!”

  “’Paches done this to me,” Jack said, when he’d settled down, his voice quiet but heavy with remembered misery. “Last time I was out there, two months ago, they run me down finally. After all these years of me headin’ up into the Shadows, the Lipan Apaches’ sacred range, they finally caught me. Must have figured I was up there for a reason, searchin’ for the bells. And they was right. And they figured they could keep me from showin’ anyone else the way to the canyon them three beauties are in by searin’ my eyes out with stone arrows heated till they glowed like little suns over a hot fire.”

  Apache Jack gritted his teeth between quivering lips, as though reliving the agony of the Apache torture. He drew a breath, kept his voice pitched low with foreboding. “Didn’t kill me. No. They wanted me to show others what happens to them that go trampin’ around up there in the Shadows—Las Montanas de la Sombra—their sacred range. Sons o’ pagan bitches! So they throw me over a horse, ride me right up to the edge of Cordura, dump me in the dirt, and ride away.”

  “What were you doing up there?” Vienna asked, shaking her head. “You already knew where the bells were. You’d drawn the map.”

  “Oh, you look at those bells once, twice, even three times, and you can’t but wanna look at ’em again!” Jack laughed, cackling madly, causing the hair at the back of James’s neck to rise. “They’re beauties. All three. Sittin’ there in that cave just like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost on a cracked black boulder!”

  The nun lurched forward, dropped to a knee beside Jack’s bed, and wrapped both her hands beseechingly around his forearm clad in the sleeve of a threadbare underwear shirt. “But they’re not, Jack. You know they’re not. There’s nothing holy about them. They’re the devil’s work! The Apaches themselves have cursed them!” She whipped her brown eyes around, fixed them on James. “Anyone who goes near them dies the most horrible death imaginable!”

  She gained her feet, and her stare
became even more piercing. “And that’s just the start of their misery!”

  Chapter 22

  “Well, I’ll be hanged,” Crosseye said when Sister Larena’s tirade had finished reverberating around Apache Jack’s tiny room. “I think I’m ready to go home now.”

  “Hold your water,” James told his partner, turning to Sister Larena and then to Apache Jack. “What’s all this about? The devil’s bells, Apache curses…”

  “That’s the legend,” Jack said. “Don’t listen to the sister. She’s just superstitious, that’s all. And for some reason she’s got it in her head she’s gotta watch over me. Maybe I’m better lookin’ than I thought I was.” He snickered, shoulders jerking, and took another pull from the bottle.

  “The devil is not a superstition,” the nun said softly, still down on her knees and staring at Jack. “And while the Apache curse might be, the Indians themselves are still a force to be reckoned with. You found that out for yourself, Jack.”

  “That I did,” Jack said with a long, ragged sigh.

  “Hold on, now,” Crosseye said from the open doorway. “If Apache Jack’s been blinded by them Apaches, there ain’t no way we’re gonna get back to that canyon in them Shadow Mountains to where the bells is at. Ain’t that right?”

  James and Vienna looked at Jack.

  “Pablo still here?” Jack said, then repeated the question in Spanish.

  “Sí.” Holding his sombrero against his chest, Pablo slipped between James and Vienna to stand next to the bed, right of the nun. Sister Larena merely shook her head in defeat, rose, and, crossing herself, strode out of the room, muttering a prayer.

  “Pablo knows where the gold is,” Jack said, placing a hand on the boy’s head. The hand was gnarled and long enough to nearly cover Pablo’s entire scalp. When Jack repeated the sentence in Spanish, the boy looked at the blind man gravely and nodded once, nearly dipping his chin all the way to his chest.

  James shook his head. “No way. We can’t put the boy through that kind of danger. Look what happened to you.”

  Pablo had tipped his head far back, staring up at the tall ex-Confederate, wide-eyed, trying to fathom what he’d said.

  Jack took a deep drag on his cigarette. Ashes drifted down to his narrow chest, and Vienna brushed them away.

  “Pablo is full-blood Apache. His grandmother married a white man. She runs the cantina the boy works in. Pablo’s father was killed fighting the Apache’s fiercest enemy, the Yaqui. That gives Pablo a certain cache.” Jack shook his head and turned his blind eyes toward the boy, smiling fondly. “They won’t hurt him. They’ll hurt us…if they find us…but they’d most likely haul Pablo back home to his grandmother with their blessing.”

  Crosseye’s voice sounded like the slow scrape of stone against stone. “While they roast the three of us slow over low fires. Yeah, I’ve heard how they work.”

  “They’ll likely do worse than that,” Jack said. “If they find us.”

  Vienna said, “Pablo’s grandmother might have something to say about Pablo traipsing into the mountains with us…on so dangerous a mission.”

  Jack shook his head. “Pablo goes his own way. His grandmother doesn’t keep him tied to her apron strings. He’s his own man—ain’t ya, Pablo?”

  “Wait,” James said. “You said us?”

  “You don’t think I’d let you go out there by yourselves, do you? Hell, I don’t even know you. Now, the girl sounds like a she-saint in flowered silk, and I’m cursin’ every second I can’t lay my lusty ole eyes on her. I’m sure she’s as pure as a Virginia rain. But you boys…” Jack shook his head cunningly. “You might just rob me blind, take that gold for yourselves when it’s meant to go to Richmond.”

  He snorted and then took another pull from the bottle.

  “So, what’s it gonna be?” Jack said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand holding the bottle. “We gonna go after the gold…together…or we gonna leave it up there for the Apaches, who won’t do nothin’ with it but steer clear of it and keep everyone else away, to boot?”

  James looked at Crosseye. The old frontiersman turned his dark, wary gaze from Apache Jack to James. “Injun curses aren’t nothin’ to mess with, Jimmy.”

  James looked at Vienna, who kept her own eyes on Apache Jack. “If we find the bells, how will we get them all the way to Richmond?”

  “Don’t have to,” Jack said. “There’s a Confederate mint in New Orleans. It kills me to say it, but we can get them purty ladies melted down into coins there, and a company of Confederate soldiers will make sure they get back to brother Jeff in Richmond—hopefully not too late to do some good.”

  Vienna looked at James. “I’m in,” she said.

  James hadn’t come all this way to let a couple of curses, one Christian, one pagan, detour him. In fact, all of this smacked of just the kind of adventure that kindled his inner fires…though he hoped that was the only kind of fire that got kindled, and none that the Apaches kindled themselves under his naked ass.

  James looked at Crosseye. “If you’re scared, I reckon you could find a fat whore to hole up with till we get back.”

  “Ah, shut up,” Crosseye grumbled, hitching his pistol higher on his hips and flushing. “It’s the curse I don’t like. Them Injun curses ain’t nothin’ to mess with, and you can fun me all you want!”

  Apache Jack held out his bottle and they drank to their partnership.

  “When do we go?” Vienna asked after she’d gotten the rotgut down and was keeping it down.

  “Early bird gets the worm,” Apache Jack said, grinning. “Is tomorrow mornin’—oh, say around four—too late?”

  James felt as though he’d chugged some secret elixir brewed by the old Scottish mountain people near Seven Oaks—a concoction that didn’t so much inebriate him as touch him with a raw, powerful energy and optimism. Something with sweet sicily in it. Maybe some partridge berry and Indian pipe thrown in. And camel’s hump. God knew what else—maybe the dust from a raven’s wing.

  The concoction liberally scooped into a cup of piping black coffee.

  It wasn’t so much the prospect of gold that had his blood up, but of riding off tomorrow into the craggy, dark mountains that Apache Jack had pointed out from his own window in the mission house. The windblown sand made them appear even more mysterious than their formidable shape and their distance from Cordura.

  James watched them now in the periphery of his vision as he, Crosseye, and Vienna followed Pablo back toward Cordura, not retracing their previous furtive steps but taking a more direct route while avoiding the cart trail. The Bells of El Diablo. He liked the way the phrase rolled off his tongue as he whispered it to himself, the wind keening too loudly for the others to hear.

  He’d always heard that a man couldn’t run from his problems. Hog tripe. He didn’t think he’d ever feel alive again after Willie’s death, but down here in Mexico, on a trek to seize three gold bells and haul them out of the Shadow Range, he felt the hunger of living awakening once more. The Apaches considered the range their sacred home and would fight tooth and nail to protect it from interlopers.

  Of course, Crosseye didn’t see it the way James saw it. He respected Indian curses, as he’d respected Negro legends and hoodoo lore back home in Tennessee. But Crosseye wasn’t running from anything. James was running from his brother’s murder, running as fast as he could until he could forget that horrific night altogether.

  He didn’t see anything wrong in what he and Apache Jack and the others were doing. They merely intended to take three gold bells that the Apaches had no use for—treasure that was there for the taking by anyone brave or crazy enough to take it—and send them back home to help the Confederates defend themselves against the scourge of Yankee imperialism.

  What about Vienna?

  He looked at her now as they tramped into the outskirts of Cordura, her hair blowing behind her as she walked with her head down, sombrero flopping down her slender back. She was so different now in this
foreign land so far from home that somewhere along the trail he’d ceased thinking of her as Willie’s. Now she was her own woman. And if she decided again to give herself to James, he’d take her.

  Vaguely, he remembered the tattoo nestled between her breasts, and just then she glanced at him. As though reading his mind, she gave a faint smile, blinking slowly, and he felt the pull of her down deep in his loins. He spat to one side to distract himself but couldn’t help yearning for the next time they’d be together.

  When Pablo returned to his grandmother’s cantina, James, Crosseye, and Vienna found another cantina on the other side of Cordura—one where they hoped no more trouble would find them. It was nearly suppertime, and dusk was falling over the windblown town.

  Apache Jack had told them they could secure trail supplies farther south, in another pueblo nearer the Shadow Range. There, they’d also purchase pack mules for hauling out the bells.

  James pushed through the batwings of the cantina whose name Vienna had translated as the Carnival of Happiness and removed his hat, sand immediately sifting off the crown. He swiped it against his breeches and looked up to see, to his surprise, a blonde in a skimpy pink dress and a matching choker smile at him from where she leaned against the bar.

  Her blue eyes roamed across the breadth of James’s shoulders, then up and down before she waggled a knee under her skirt and said, “Well, look what the wind blew in.”

  Crosseye and Vienna filed in behind him, stomping their boots and dusting the sand from their clothes. Vienna tossed her head, causing her hair to fly in a delicious black cloud, and it became obvious that despite the male attire, she was very much a woman. Her rich black hair danced about her shoulders as she shook her head again, dislodging the grit from the storm, then threw it back, her gray eyes meeting those of the blonde regarding her incredulously.

  “Just pulque will do, honey,” Vienna said, hooking her arm around James’s elbow and heading for a table to the left of the bar.