Merging Paths Page 2

  That unplanned nap turned out to be another grace of sorts. Curtis awoke at dusk, refreshed and with a clear enough head to take stock of his circumstances. He sipped from the plastic jug that Leon had rinsed out and filled with water for him. Half of the life-sustaining liquid was already consumed, which was more than troubling. After supplying him with the water and two stale tortillas purloined from the mess hall, Leon had pointed Curtis eastward, advising that there were some truck farms and small ranch communities lying at the southern foot of the Pinaleños, some thirty miles away. Simple math told him the water would not hold out for that distance if not rationed more carefully.

  The clarity that the nap had brought also presented him with a strategy. The relative cool of the early evening air made him realize that nocturnal travel and diurnal rest would use less water and energy on a desert march. He knew that to be true; it was James Garner’s approach when presented with a similar predicament in a first-season episode of Maverick. In addition, night movement was less likely to be detected if any search for him had yet been launched.

  He arose, stretched, and nibbled a few bits of the stale flour tortillas that had crumbled in his pockets. The illuminating remnants of sunset allowed him to make out the looming shapes of the Pinaleños in the gathering gloom, giving him his bearings. He broke a long-dead lower branch from his leafy host to use as a walking stick and then resumed his eastward march with a newfound vigor.

  The living desert at twilight took on an entirely different character from its austere, sunbaked counterpart. The granite and mica expanses twinkled under the rapidly waning light like jeweled carpets. Stimulated by the cool promise of dusk, tiny kangaroo rats and collared lizards hungrily pursued their insect prey. They darted to and fro between the wispy clumps of creosote brush. Diamondback rattlesnakes buzzed out their warnings from time to time, shaking their beaded buttons like miniature maracas at the sound of Curtis’s crunching footsteps. He shook his walking stick in a defiant answer at each encounter.

  “Piss on you, snakes—you don’t scare me!” he cried out repeatedly to bolster his own bravery as much as to provoke their cautioning rattles for reference to their whereabouts. But a singular sense that the darkened desert might serve up other perils besides serpents played on the boy’s deepest fears.

  The evening trekker soon began to question his travel tactic as the glow in the west became more and more muted and his route between creosote bushes became less and less well defined. The deepening darkness confounded his navigation, and he tripped over annoying tufts of brush and exposed roots. Before long, Curtis finally halted and propped himself beside a stout paloverde tree that stood guard at the edge of a wide wash. He reckoned that he’d hiked for about an hour since leaving the mesquite tree. An intuitive guess told him that he’d covered approximately a mile and a half at the pace he’d maintained. It was not anywhere near the goal he had set himself for a comfortable lead on the pursuit he assumed would soon be mounted for him. He had to press on, despite the debilitating darkness.

  He resumed the eastward march, slowing his pace and scanning the land in front of him with his walking stick, much like a blind man would. For all intents and purposes, he was a blind man, for the black velvet gloom that descended like a drapery of India ink upon the desert air rendered him so. In fact, the boy’s progress was so dramatically hindered, he considered abandoning his night-movement plan after a couple hours of stumbling along. At the rate he was moving, he would burn more time and gain considerably less ground than during the previous morning’s march. Was James Garner’s invincible Bret Maverick character wrong? Was that even possible?

  His dark eyes flashed about, searching for some semblance of cover to hide in until dawn, when a wink of brightness beaming from the east attracted his attention. There, between two peaks of the Pinaleños, the teasing glint of light began to grow, throwing out a blanket of soft illumination over the desert floor. It was, of course, the natural time and place for a moonrise, but Curtis deemed it a miracle. In a short span of time, he could see even better than before, and he quickened his step to resume his earlier sunset pace.

  Curtis enjoyed his relief from discouragement for a couple of hours, until a troubling tickle from his sixth sense could no longer be ignored. It was a sense that he was not alone in the desert that night—that another presence was watching from a well-kept distance. That disquieting notion caused Curtis to halt momentarily and ponder. He closed his ebony eyes, and the image of the Ezra, the old Aravaipa chieftain, once again surfaced briefly. The boy shuddered but continued his trek undeterred.

  He had traversed nearly ten miles of desert without incident before the moon finally settled behind the Galiuro Mountains a couple of hours before dawn. Rather than blindly thrash through the brush as before, Curtis laid himself out in the soft sand of a broad wash and napped for an hour before resuming his eastward trek as the glimmer of predawn once again illuminated his path. The troubling sense of being surveilled and stalked seemed to evaporate with the dawn. He’d covered another two miles before the heat of the morning sun drove him to the cover offered by a copse of paloverde trees. There, satisfied with his progress, he napped, nibbled, and sipped the entire sunlit day away.

  The desert sojourner awoke from the last of multiple snoozes about a half hour before sunset. It seemed a bit too soon to strike out again, and the interlude provided a needed opportunity to once again consider his precarious circumstances. His tortilla bits had run out during the course of the day. More critically, his water supply was down to less than a pint. He would have to refrain from drinking any more than a few miserly sips from the plastic jug on the upcoming leg of the journey if he was to ultimately survive the desert.

  Then what? Whatever the fields beyond the desert held in store was still a troubling matter that he sensed would be crucial. But that concern was easily eclipsed by the immediate survival challenge that was testing his resolve at every turn.

  He rose to set out before sunset, knowing he’d have to cover considerable ground before complete nightfall. He had learned enough from Randy about the erratic behavior of the moon to know that he could not depend on it to rise at the same time it did the night before—maybe sooner, maybe later. He could no longer recall the gist of the lesson in lunar behavior that Randy had shared with him.

  As he rose to move on, his right calf, then his left, cramped painfully—a sure sign that dehydration was setting in. The pain from the muscular convulsions was excruciating, and he whimpered a bit as he massaged each leg vigorously through his jeans with heavily muscled hands. No one was there to detect the plaintive little cries of weakness—of mounting desperation—and yet…

  He reluctantly broke the vow he’d made just a few moments earlier, and took a swig of water. Conservation tactics would not help if they crippled him. In time, the cramping of each calf subsided, and he struck out on what he hoped would be the final leg of his crossing.

  The night’s march netted Curtis several more miles without incident, though the haunting sense of being followed from afar resumed around midnight. For Curtis, that nagging perception conjured the illusory image of a coyote loping behind him in the darkness but never closing the gap. Once again, that foreboding image faded with the coming of a faint glimmer in the eastern sky.

  It was nearly dawn when an obnoxious humming took up residence in Curtis’s head—no doubt a symptom of dehydration that was growing louder by the minute as the weary sojourner stumbled forward in a fugue state. The buzz grew steadily along with a dull ache in his brow, another sign of critical thirst. The water had run out several hours earlier, but the boy clung stubbornly to the handle of the empty plastic jug, flirting with the desperate notion of saving his own meager production of urine to stave off the inevitable. His eyesight blurred intermittently, but he did not veer off course as he plodded toward the lavender band of predawn light in the east. Daybreak was imminent. Curtis halted his resolute march and cast his gaze about in search of cover to shelter him from the looming sunrise. His hazy vision focused on several dark blots on the glowing horizon. Trees, and big ones by his best reckoning, pierced the edge of dawn some distance away.

  Striking out again toward the promise of shade, the boy tried to shake off the dread of enduring an entire day without as much as a single sip of precious water. But after a minute or so of hiking toward the trees, a curious sound seized his attention, and he halted once more. He listened intently. The irritating hum had built once more with his advancing steps until it had evolved into a shrill whine, much like the metallic whirring of a cicada song. It suddenly occurred to Curtis that the sound was not emanating from his skull. It seemed to come from the direction of the line of trees for which he was bound. He struck out again with some enthusiasm in his step. As the whine increased in volume, it signaled a vague sense of the familiar. It was only a teasing hint, but one thing was certain: the sound indicated some human mechanism, and Curtis began to imagine that the tree line that was coming into view held something more than the promise of mere shade.

  Then, as he drew nearer, it registered that the abnormally large trees were not of the desert variety. What he saw was a neat row of cottonwoods—trees that grow in river bottoms, in flood plains, and on ditch banks. The familiarity of the whirring sound suddenly made sense. He’d heard it dozens of times before when he and his friends had gone swimming in the canals near Jacobs Well the previous summer. It was the sound of a deep-well turbine pump. It was the sound of life-saving water!

  Curtis tried to restrain himself, but his quickened gait soon developed into an ungainly trot as clumps of salt cedars drew into view. He closed the distance between himself and the tree line in a matter of minutes, and, as he trudged up the incline of a raised berm, the scene that unf
olded was as he had imagined it would be. The pump was the first sign of civilization to grace Curtis’s senses. The sight of it buoyed his spirit—a cylindrical apparatus, about six feet tall and two feet in diameter, perched upon a concrete pad like a mechanical Buddha. But it was the sound of it—the whine had built into a turbine-fed banshee wail—that stirred his association of the shrill noise with water. As he topped the raised berm, the sight did not disappoint: as expected, the screaming electric Buddha was fully engaged in drawing a bountiful twenty-five hundred gallons of precious water from below the desert surface with every passing moment.

  The gurgling water spewed and splashed from twin ten-inch outlet pipes, each of which diverted the spillage to a concrete catch basin situated on either side of a concrete diversion wall that doubled as a footbridge. From each of the basins, the water flowed in opposite directions—north and south—via identical shotcrete canals.

  Curtis successfully quelled an urge to jump in and swallow great drafts of water. Oblivious to the fact that he was crossing a gravel service road at the top of the berm, he approached the canal bank, knelt reverently at the edge of the southernmost basin, dipped his plastic jug until it was half-filled from the bubbling flood, and raised it to his dry, cracked lips. The water was warm, having been drawn from a hot subterranean mineral spring, but its life-sustaining succor pleasured him to the core. As much as he wanted to, he kept himself from gulping to avoid regurgitation.

  After a few moments of imbibing, as the sips of refreshment began to quench his desperate thirst, he indulged himself in a long-overdue bath. He plunged, fully clothed, into the warm, chest-deep water with a broad Curtis Jefferson grin. The buoyancy of the water gave utmost rest and relaxation to his weary limbs as he settled in up to his chin and planted a foot on the smooth concrete bottom to keep from drifting with the current. Drinking and bathing. Not surprisingly, these simplest of physical pleasures erased all concerns regarding the hardship and suffering of the previous hours and days. For Curtis, life was good again. All that was lacking was a bar of soap and a rubber duck.

  That was a more-than-well-deserved relief from Curtis’s ordeal and a victory lap. After all, he had won. He had beaten the vast, uninhabitable Sonoran wasteland with all of its unbearable heat, its spiny plants, its insect denizens, and its ravenous predators. He had kept his wits through the fog of confusion. With a little help from James Garner, he had devised a strategy and maintained it through shifting tactics and sheer perseverance. For once, the boy who had always depended almost solely on his physical strength and speed to get by could take pride in knowing that his cerebral acumen had done much to preserve him as well.

  Curtis grasped the bill of his Dodgers cap and dunked his head under the swirling pool as if being baptized in the enjoyment of his own glorious triumph over the desert crossing. He broke the surface, cleansed of desert dust and the patina of salt from dried sweat that had coated his skin.

  It was a revival of sorts—one that was, however, doomed to be short-lived.

  The physical relief from the drudgery of the three-day trek and the comforting massage of the warm, bubbling cauldron were rudely interrupted by a thunderous wave of sound that instantly obliterated any hope of continued rest and relaxation—a sudden crescendo of rumbling and rattling that surged in volume so that it overwhelmed even the deafening scream of the turbine pump. Although the earthen canal bank blocked his view of the service road above, Curtis immediately recognized the unmistakable sound of a fast-approaching set of wheels chattering over a washboarded travel path. Fortunately, the same steep bank that obstructed his view of the unanticipated intruder conversely concealed his own presence from the sight of that nameless driver. Nevertheless, the boy instinctively slid downward in the swirling pool until his head was again completely submerged.

  The sounds traveling through the underwater world were completely transformed from those above. The shriek of the turbine pump became a muted whir, and the rumble and rattle from the car on the road above became a gentle timpani roll—one that was dying away.

  In any event, the boy had submerged himself reflexively without taking the obligatory deep breath that would sustain him. Though his lungs were well conditioned for a lengthy holding period, they burned almost immediately, and Curtis surfaced as quietly as possible, but more from the burn of curiosity than from the carbon dioxide fire in his chest. He gazed upward and beheld the typical cloud of dust that would follow in a traveling car’s wake. More to the point, he could hear the idling of a motor whose sound was not traveling. The car had stopped there at the pump.

  Had he been spotted already, or was it just some zanjero—a ditch boss checking the flow of the irrigation water? Either way, the boy-fugitive could not afford even an innocent chance encounter. He drew in a deep draft of air, lifted the foot that held him against the current, and slipped once again beneath the surface, allowing himself to be taken up by the strong downstream undertow—to be whisked away from the eyes of the unwanted presence by the swiftly coursing water.

  Haunted Taunt

  “C’mon, Kenny,” Ezra implored, “open your eyes. I brought a friend who wants to visit with you.”

  Kenny huddled on the padded floor of his cell, tucked in his usual fetal position, eyes slammed shut.

  “I know you can hear me,” the old brujo persisted. “Every time your handlers do that sadistic shock treatment on you, it makes it easier for me to get onto your wavelength. It’s getting so I can almost call on you at will, although walking through walls and bars still requires a lot of psychic energy—twice as much when I bring a comrade, like now. For that effort alone, you should pay me the courtesy of a warm welcome. Besides, aren’t you the least bit curious about who it is that’s come to see you? Such a good friend should not be ignored like this. It’s bordering on rude, Kenny. It’s just not like you.”

  The heap on the floor that was Kenny Armenta began to shudder. It wasn’t enough that he was falsely accused of murder and locked away in a mental institution. The mute, defenseless Native American was also being tormented by his mortal enemy. He squeezed his eyelids shut all the more to counter Ezra’s tempting entreaty.

  “Well, if you can’t see him, I’m pretty sure you can smell him, at least.”

  Indeed, the sickeningly sweet smell of smoked meat filled the air of Kenny’s cell. His stomach began a slow crawl up his throat.

  At length, the ancient chieftain sighed. “Okay, Kenny, have it your way. C’mon, Eduardo, let’s go. We can tell when we’re not wanted.”

  Predictably, the reference to Kenny’s friend and ally was the lure that could not be resisted. His eyelids flew open like spring-loaded window shades, and the sight that the old Pima jewelry maker beheld made him wish he’d continued his stubborn refusal. Ezra stood before him in his quasi-human form, a twisted grin blooming across his face. He wrapped his remaining arm around the torso of what appeared to be an inanimate corpse in such a way as to support the stiffened body in a standing pose alongside his own. The naked cadaver’s skin appeared to be mummified, though it was actually the charred remains of Officer Cruz. Kenny’s stomach muscles began to convulse.

  “See, Kenny? I brought Eduardo to see you, although he’s not very talkative right now, is he? Speechless, maybe—at the occasion of seeing his old friend again, I suspect. Are you surprised at his transformation?” The ancient Apache chuckled maniacally. “I knew you would be. He’s really quite the crispy critter. I bet you wonder how he got this way, don’t you?”

  Kenny began to sob. His gaze was frozen on the horrifying sight of his friend’s defiled corpse. He tried to convince himself that he was hallucinating, but the image being burned into his brain appeared all too real. He sobbed harder.

  “Okay! Okay! I’ll tell you. You don’t have to cry about it.”

  A few weak little yelps escaped Kenny’s quavering mouth as Ezra continued his loathsome monologue.

  “Did you ever play that kid’s game where a blindfolded player searched for something you hid? Hucka-bucka-beanbag, it was called—or something like that. No?”