The Storm

The Storm

by

James Whitesell

PUBLISHED BY:

James Whitesell on Smashwords

The Storm

Copyright © 2013 by James Whitesell

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Chapter 1 Anno Domini MCMLXXXIII

Chapter 2 Tombstone

Chapter 3 Dancer Canyon

Chapter 4 Metamophosis

Chapter 5 Zachary

Chapter 6 Colonel Redding

Chapter 7 Maria Alarcon

Chapter 8 Tony Parelli

Chapter 9 Skarp

Chapter 10 Sierra

Chapter 11 The Mine

Chapter 12 The Locker

Chapter 13 Epilogue

Chapter 14 The Elvis Chronicles

The Storm

Chapter 1

Anno Domini MCMLXXXIII

It's a crime against humanity!

So thundered a fire eyed President Ronald Reagan from his imperial seat in the American Century White House. President Reagan was damn well serious about it. And also dead-on right in the eyes of much of the world. Most were calling it an unjustified and brutal Soviet shoot down. And not without good reason. On this one even the creaky old somnolent Gods peering down from their Olympian perches would have cast their votes with the Gipper. The Soviet action was flat out coldly brutal. And a gloomy adumbration for what was to be a month full of brutality and violence. The month. September. The year.

1983.

A Matrix

It began in the nascent baby steps of the month. The Soviets provoked the world into a eyeball-to-eyeball international crisis when they shot down a civilian airliner, Korean Air 007, killing 269 people. Bad enough in itself. But among the dead was a rabidly anti-communist U.S. congressman from Georgia named Lawrence McDonald who was a cousin of the famous WWII General George Patton. President Ronald Reagan's political blood pressure skyrocketed and the always shaky cold war international nerves got even shakier. Later that month, though very few people knew about it, things got really scary when the Soviet satellite missile defense early warning system malfunctioned and falsely gave a pair of incoming missile warnings. A quick thinking Soviet officer named Petrov recognized the error and alerted his bosses before they hit the buttons to launch their by-the-book mandated nuclear retaliation. The earth was saved from blundering into a nuclear war. It was a close one. Way too close--even though the world remained ignorant that it came within a nuclear whisker of being incinerated.

But the world did know what happened when another international incident that bloody month of September exploded. Literally exploded. Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal's bloody thugs turned on their own to extort protection money when they set off a bomb in Arab owned Gulf Air 771, killing all 112 on board. The bastards got their money. And in the same month the obdurate Catholic rebels of Northern Ireland caught the Brits with their punitive pants down when they pulled off the biggest prison escape in British history. Thirty nine hardcore IRA prisoners broke out of Britain’s maximum security Maze Prison and were gone like Druids' smoke into the murky world of the Irish resistance. It was one hell of a turbulent month, September of 1983. And not just human caused turbulence. Tropical Storm Octave hit the arid state of Arizona with a biblical deluge that created utter chaos the length and breadth of U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater's home turf. The whole state had an environmental nervous breakdown. It was, as one meteorologist put it...

....one hell of a muddy mess.

The heavens were in churning cyclonic tumult. The cause was a meteorological shotgun wedding of a pair of colliding weather events. A Pacific weather system slid down the rugged California coast from the north and began moving inland into Arizona. To the south a tropical storm named Octave petered out off Mexico's Baja coast. Octave might have been out of steam but he sure wasn't out of water. There was moisture aplenty left in this old man of the sea. The California storm front sucked that moisture up like God's own vacuum cleaner and pumped it east into Arizona with such force that Arizona experienced the costliest natural disaster in the state’s history. The rain continued for days on end. Fourteen people died as a direct result of the storm, the Prescott railroad was permanently washed out, the Gila River bridge at Yuma was left high and dry when the flooding river cut a new channel, and Interstate 19 south from Tucson to the Mexican border was washed out. Severe flooding hit almost everywhere. Roads were closed, communities isolated all over Arizona and the paranoid bibliophiles were dusting off their ark building blueprints. It wasn't just the storm of the century. It was the Granddaddy storm of a whole bunch of centuries

And a tiny group of terrified desperate people found themselves fighting for their lives plumb in the middle of that Granddaddy Arizona storm of the centuries.

The Ancient Matrix

In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

It was somewhere in the piney Animas Mountains of Hidalgo County. What's today the 'boot heel' of the state of New Mexico, but was then briefly part of Old Mexico after the long dark centuries of foreign Spanish rule. John James Johnson, a rugged Kentucky born adventurer of the self reliant and hard bitten sort loosed on the expanding western frontier by Anglo America, was among the sprinkling of Americans living among the Native Americans and Mexicans of the Mexican southwest. In 1835 and 1837 the besieged desperate Mexican frontier states of Chihuahua and Sonora, forced to the edge of financial and cultural ruin from increasingly destructive Native American depredations, took the gruesome step of initiating a bounty system on the scalps of Apache Indians. The bounty grabbed the interest of a lot of people, including John James Johnson. He just was one among many. At first. But, unlike the many, Johnson was one of the few who made the sanguinary leap from mere interest to action.

Bloodily premeditated action.

In 1837, posing as traders with a pack train of laden mules, Johnson and a group of Missouri adventurers invited a band of Mimbreno Apaches into a trade parley. In a startling contrast to the complicated ancient blood feud with the Mexicans, Apaches had been on mostly good terms with the Americans. The Mimbrenos cautiously came in to trade. After a day or two of haggling and bartering, when the beguiled Indians were clustered together mulling over trade goods, the Americans let loose on them with rifle fire and a small hidden canon filled with scrap metal. At least twenty of the Indians died, including their chief, known by the Spanish name of Juan José Compas. Johnson scalped the dead Apaches, then quickly fled to Chihuahua City where he showed up at the doors of the State of Chihuahuas's bounty office with the blood hardly dry on his grisly trophies. The Mexicans paid John James Johnson for the Apache scalps.

One hundred pesos.

Apache retaliation was quick and brutal. A party of trappers on the nearby Gila River, led by a man named Charles Kemp, was murdered, as were a dozen men on a luckless passing wagon train. Tit for lethal tat. Was it then over? No. It wasn't the end. Only the beginning. The Apache had a long memory.

Far longer and beyond anything that even they could imagine.

Jesús Teran

Jesús Teran could plainly see the United States from his humble sun bleached adobe cottage on the hungry side of the border in the dusty little border town of Naco. The jaggedy peaked mountains radiating off to the north were all in the U.S. But it was the San Jose Mountains just south of Naco, barely five miles in length but rising to tower three thousand feet above the town at a cool 7500 foot elevation, that drew Jesús Teran. The steep mountain slopes were home to a succession of habitat zones, each with its own home boy resident species of trees. Teran was a wood cutter who ranged the slopes to cut wood for marketing across the border to the wood hungry stoves and backyard barbeques of the Americans. On the middle slopes he cut oak and pinyon. Higher up he cut ponderosa pine. On the lower slopes he cut mesquite. Some of the mesquite he sold for fireplace wood. But most of it he burned down into charcoal to sell to the Americans for their barbecues. It was not a fat life, but a man had to do something to eat, and wood cutting was as good as most things open to a Mexican not lucky enough to be one of the few born into the privileged world of the Mexican elite. At least he, and his large family, had enough to eat. And there was no strutting patrón's butt that he had to kiss. He might be poor. But he was free. Jesús Teran was a man of dignity and self respect.

Jesús stood amidst a scattering of manzanita and black oaks heavily laden with ripening clusters of bitter tasting acorns. Teran and most of his compadres found them impossible to eat. Not so the gray squirrels and other critters of the mountains that dined with relish on the drooping bounty of the black oaks. And no one denied the graceful beauty of the oaks, bitter though their fruit may be. This was one of Jesús’ favorite spots to linger and look and muse, a bluff a thousand feet above the browning expanse of the San Pedro valley. Below him the desert grasslands of the valley spread off into the distance to disappear over the rim of the horizon. Looking to Jesús’ whimsical mind like a last minute addition by the Almighty, clumps of soaring mountains seemed like they were plunked down haphazardly all around the San Pedro Valley. And far beyond. The scientific minded used the geologic term of 'basin and range' to describe the topography of alternating broad valleys and towering sky island mountain ranges. Such words were alien to Jesús and as barren as the womb of his octogenarian grandmother. This place? Basin and range? Those were just words, hopelessly inadequate to describe what lay before his eyes. This was God’s country. Jesús did not neglect to be grateful for it.

Teran stared off to the north. There were the American towns of Bisbee and Sierra Vista, the filthy smokestacks of the copper smelter at Douglas and the little moving flashes of silver light that were automobiles on the American highways that seemed to be continually in motion. Like a mechanical ant hill. Teran shook his head slowly. So many Mexicanos, especially those poor souls from deep in the downtrodden stagnant innards of the country, were obsessed with getting to the United States. Not Jesús Teran. He’d been north and he didn't like it. Why were the stressed out Americanos always in such a hurry? Life was too fast, too complicated, the culture too foreign, the pressures on the family too fragmenting. Was America efficient? Yes. English was the language of the engineer. And, Spanish? It was the loving tongue. The flowing vibrant river of the lover and the poet and the mystic. In his days of exile in the mechanical soulless Yankee north Jesús realized the urgings of his inner self. He didn’t belong there. Jesús had to live in a Spanish speaking place with ancient roots bound up in both the land and the people. He went back home. And there he stayed.

Jesús was content to eke out a living as a woodcutter in Mexico, where he could raise his children in the traditional ways and not see them turn into some kind of strange mutant--such as had happened to the children of two of his older brothers who had gone to Phoenix. He shook his head again. What was he to say to swaggering nephews who sported vulgar tattoos, flashed gang signals and spoke in a gutter patois that was neither good Spanish nor good English? It was those same nephews who tried to get Jesús to join the growing numbers of border Mexicans who supplemented their meager incomes by backpacking bundles of marijuana over the border. Teran flatly said no. He was an old fashioned man who wanted no part of drug smuggling of any kind. He considered it to be dishonorable. Jesús would remain a simple woodcutter on the slopes of the San Jose Mountains. He fed his family, there was not an ounce of fat on his body, his muscles were as hard as the ironwood he sometimes cut and he always had enough money for a cerveza or two at the cantinas in Naco or nearby Cananea. It was good enough. Yes. Good enough for a simple man of the earth like Jesús Teran.

Jesús shrugged, shouldered his axe and turned to move up the slope. He instantly froze in utter astonishment. Looming right behind him, barely three feet away, was a tall and lean weather beaten gringo. The long-haired man was holding a knife, but what really struck Jesús Teran in those last few terrible moments was the man's eyes. They were like a wild animal’s. The razor-sharp knife flashed in the sun.

Jesús Teran was not quick enough with his axe.

Chapter 2

Tombstone

She'd been a knockout once. No doubt of that. A chesty head turner of a looker. And her aging face was still strikingly pretty. But it was reigning over a body gone waddling over the caloric hill to flab. It was a story too often told in overfed modern America. A once gorgeous woman who hadn't come to terms with the changes time had brought to her body. The doughy woman was dressed in a skimpy tank top and too tight shorts. The woman pushed her way through the crowd in the Crystal Palace, her huge breasts bouncing sloppily as she walked straight for Riley. He had a sinking feeling in his stomach when he saw her coming.

"Are you a real cowboy? The woman demanded in an eastern accent, staring at his sweat stained straw cowboy hat, faded blue jeans, western shirt and scuffed cowboy boots. Or are you one of those Chicago transplant phonies?" Riley looked at her expressionlessly.

Peoria, actually, he said,

Hrumph!, the woman grunted, then disappeared back into the crowd to recommence her search for the real thing in the wannabe larded modern day tourist trap of Old Tombstone. A second man reached over and poked Riley on the shoulder.

Peoria? Jim Garret said, grinning. You are quick when you need to be, you mangy dust eater. Riley grinned back at his old friend with a mischievous twinkle.

I was in Peoria once. Couldn't stand it. People kept asking me if I was a real native or just one'a them phony Tombstone transplants. Then he threw his old friend an uneasy look. You sure this is a good place to talk, what with all these tourists? Garret glanced around him at the noisy hubbub in the Crystal Palace. It looked like a set out of an old western movie, but the place, tourist drenched though it was, still was the real thing, a genuine 19th Century saloon with a room-long scarred mahogany bar and high zinc ceiling deeply patinated with age. Old West history oozed from the walls of the place. The tourists loved it. So did the locals--after the tourists left.

Couldn't be better. There's too much commotion for anyone to notice. Besides, the ones we don't want overhearing us aren't too likely to be coming in here till the visitors thin out after dark. Just then a pair of passing tourists from Bavaria stopped to snap pictures of local color--in the person of the western dressed Riley. He ignored them. Other things were on his mind.

All right, Jim, Riley said, his sun darkened rancher’s brow lowering and a serious expression settling on his weathered face. So just what the hell is this all about? There was a touch of humor lingering in Nub Riley's face as Jim Garret began spinning his tale. Despite their differences, Nub was a bedrock solid friend of Jim, no little because Jim's fertile mind and crazy schemes both amused and bemused him. That's the way it had always been, ever since they were boys growing up in the grassy, mesquite studded San Pedro Valley that began just a few miles south in Old Mexico. Garret was a natural born hustler and as far back as Riley could remember he had been trying to talk Nub into joining in with his schemes. Mostly Riley had just politely said no. But as he listened to his old boyhood buddy, the amusement at Garret's wild ideas faded. Riley's brow furrowed. Nub had caught on to just what Garret was up to. His posture abruptly straightened bolt upright out of the conspiratorial semi-slump over his beer like he'd just been hit with one of the cattle prods some of his neighbors still used. His voice was low. Close to a whisper. The kind of whisper volcanoes emit before they begin to blow.

"What? You want to sneak onto federal land and steal some old Indian pots? Damn it, Jim, don't you know they've been coming down on that hard lately? They send people to prison for that nowadays!" A nearby table of tourists from the deep snow country of the upper peninsula of Michigan heard a word or two of the conversation and looked over at them curiously. Both men dropped their voices, glancing uneasily around at the tables of tourists nursing drinks and soaking in the Old West ambiance of the place.

Mostly just probation, Garret countered lamely.

Now, look, Jim Garret, Nub Riley sputtered heatedly. Most of your crazy ideas are harmless enough, but when you start talking about something that's downright criminal, then you're no friend of mine. Why.... Garret leaned forward and spoke in a soft, but very clear, voice with an eloquence of specifics that stopped Nub stone cold. Twenty thousand specifics, to be exact.

$20,000 minimum. Yours and yours alone. That'd save the ranch and that little business of yours, wouldn't it? He leaned so close to Riley that Nub could smell the salty beer on Garret's breath. Don't you think that your way of life is worth a small risk or two? With a dramatic flourish Garret pulled a thick envelope from inside his shirt and shoved it at Riley over the table. Here's the first half. Ten thousand bucks. Just for openers. He nodded at the thick envelope. Go on. Open it. Riley hesitated. Take it, Nub, Garret said, watching his friend's face closely. It's yours no matter how things work out. Garret leaned back, noticing with a touch of synchronous unease that the Tombstone Marshal was just walking by on the board sidewalk outside the saloon's swinging doors. He returned his attention to Riley, but Riley was gone, in thought if not in body, his mind wandering off somewhere in the mysterious crevices of the pondering human brain struggling with making a decision.

Nub Riley was speechless. How had Garret known just how bad things were? He wasn't more than a month away from foreclosure on his excavation business, maybe two or three on the ranch. He looked up slowly at Jim Garret, then quickly shot a glimpse inside the envelope. Sweet Jesus! It was money, all right. A lot of money. His eyes darted nervously around the room to see if anyone noticed what was going on. No. The swinging doors were pushed open towards Allen Street and the curious Michigan tourists were on their way out the doors and to a long snowy winter ahead. To everyone else in the Palace, busy either in rapt conversation or gawking at the historic trappings of the saloon, Nub Riley and Jim Garret weren't much more than wallpaper.

Which is exactly what they wanted.

Well, Nub, Garret said. What’s it to be? Stay on at the old home place or lose it and move up to Tucson or Phoenix to spend the rest of your life busting your ass to make some rust belt carpetbagger get rich? Nub Riley locked his eyes with Garret's and held on like the stubborn bulldog he could sometimes be. His fingers stayed on the thick envelope of money. A few feet away an aging barmaid with rheumy eyes and a hefty bosom threatening to momentarily break loose from a low-cut 19th Century-styled blouse was softly humming her latest favorite Rolling Stones tune, Start Me Up.

Damn you, Jim Garret, he muttered. Damn your eyes anyhow! Garret leaned back in his chair, a smug smile spreading across his handsome rugged face. There was no doubt of it in his mind. He had him, whether Riley was ready to admit it yet or not.

Yep. He had him.

In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

Galeana

James Kirker was an Ulster Scot, the same sturdy anti-English folk who came to America early on in the ax and rifle pioneer days and volunteered in bloody eyed revanchist ardor to fight the damned English and become the iron backbone of George Washington’s rebel Revolutionary Army. Kirker sought his fortune in America like many another young adventurer of the time. He wandered down to the wild and lawless southwestern frontier and got wrapped up in the crazy anything goes spirit of those nebulous times, including dabbling in illegal trading with the Apaches.

When the floundering governments of Chihuahua and Sonora resumed offering bounties for the scalps of Apaches, the promise of easy money seduced Kirker. Whatever scruples the wandering Ulsterman might have had went out the easy money window. In 1846 he lured some Apaches to a parley near a northern Chihuahua town called Galeana under the protection of a peace treaty and a flag of truce. Alcohol was one of the Apaches' few vulnerabilities, which Kirker knew full well, having himself traded with them for liquor, firearms, ammunition and whatever other officially prohibited goods he could get his entrepreneurial Scots Irish hands on. All night long the liquor flowed freely. By morning many of the Apaches lay in a drunken stupor. Kirker and his diverse band of allies, some American, some Mexican, others non-Apache Native American, fell on the camp and bludgeoned scores of groggy Apaches to death. Men. Women. Children.

And then they scalped the dead Apaches for the bounty money.

Silas

Silas Oakes was the prototypical Yankee of fact and fiction. Tall, lean, dour. Craggy faced, with dagger sharp blue eyes that seemed to slice right through you. His was the kind of granitic face you might see in a dramatic painting of a Civil War Yankee officer exhorting his troops on to charge the damn Confederates and ‘whip their Rebel butts’. And in fact his great grandfather was an infantry captain in a Massachusetts regiment that lost half its men on the Little Round Top at Gettysburg. Great grandpa got a minie ball in the thigh but survived to become a Massachusetts state senator and the progenitor of a large tribe of descendants. He was a no nonsense sort of man and his great grandson Silas inherited the dubiety gene set full blown. If you were talking to Silas Oakes, you’d damn well better be prepared to back up your statements with hard facts.

Silas’ sharp tongue and confrontational and skeptical nature did not make him a popular man among his co-workers and neighbors in his adopted home of Tucson. But the sharp mind that went along with the sharp tongue did made Silas a small fortune in real estate investments in Tucson and beyond throughout southern Arizona. Which was why he drove the seventy miles down to Cochise County in the southeastern corner of Arizona on this pleasant late September day. He was checking out investment opportunities in the little tourist trap town of Tombstone whose name was nearly synonymous with the fabled Wild West. But he was more interested in the open grassy country near the Mexican border on the eastern slopes of the Huachuca Mountains.

That Tombstone wild west hype is all bullshit, Oakes confided with a sarcastic snicker to his assistant, Manny Arzola, after they left Tombstone and drove down close to the border. Those days are as long gone as the horse and buggy. Silas passed the Naco turnoff on Highway 90 and headed his Cadillac Fleetwood towards the southern end of the Huachuca Mountains looming to the west. South of the highway was the border town of Naco and the truncated but towering adjacent San Jose range in Old Mexico. He reached over to tap Arzola on the shoulder. This country might have been the wild west years ago. No more. Look at that landscape, Manny, he said. Perfect for a subdivision." Silas Oakes had a genius for spotting demographic trends and he was certain the growing small city of Sierra Vista would soon stretch out to the south along the oak sprinkled flanks of the mountains. Silas already envisioned the gated community subdivision he would build there.

He even had a name for it. And why not? A man had the right to a touch of hubris now and then. Seeing as how the place had plenty of oaks dotting the landscape, why not call the subdivision The Oakes? He reached over to tap on Manny’s shoulder a second time. No more wild west here. It’s as quiet and peaceful as a Sunday school church picnic. A ray of sunshine bounced off Silas’ windshield and a half dozen miles away a sepulchral buckskin clad linear figure on a bluff overlooking the sprawling valley saw the glint of sun flash off the distant windshield.

At his feet lay the bloody corpse of the woodcutter Jesús Teran.

The Man With The Cold Eyes

The strange lean gringo stood on the Mexican mountainside, the southerly wind blowing his long, loose hair in undulating light brown waves around a dirty red bandana headband. He was wearing filthy homemade buckskins, faded and scratched by a rough outdoor life. Hard, emotionless eyes that seemed drained of color looked down at Jesús Teran's sprawled corpse. It was a very old quarrel, with the Mexicans, and there was no room for either mercy or remorse. The weather bronzed face of a young man who looked as old and hard as the rocks he was standing on turned from Teran's body to stare towards the north. The American settlements were plain to see across the wide valley, with their smoke and haze and pollution. He spat violently at the ground. Mexicans were not the only ancient enemies!

He began to walk back to the border.

Chapter 3

Dancer Canyon

Riley calmed down enough to listen to what Garret had to say. Jim Garret was a complicated man of sometimes crazily clashing parts. Border blend descendant of Native Americans, Spaniards, Basques, Mexicans and a bunch of hillbilly Anglos that he was, Jim Garret had an abiding interest in all of his ancestry, including a long time amateur’s interest in local archaeology. An interest not always legal. Jim was not averse to slipping over the legal archaeological line into the murky world of gray market artifact dealing. He'd been indulging that not-always-legal interest one sunny autumn afternoon and was out snooping in a foothill canyon in the nearby Huachuca Mountains when he stumbled on an old Indian ruin. There was nothing about the ruin that was unusual, and it sure wasn't an unknown one. The locals had known about it for years. The exposed rock at the edge of the small canyon was cratered with fist sized holes that Native Americans had laboriously pounded into the rock long before Christopher Columbus's daddy's spermatozoa scored a direct hit on his mama's fertile egg.

Some said the natives used the holes to grind corn they grew along the nearby stream. Others said the holes were there to collect moisture from the morning dew in times of drought. Most said they didn't give a flying fig one way or the other. Who cared? It was ancient history. A generation earlier the surface artifacts had been examined by a survey team of research archaeologists from the University of Arizona and their studied conclusion was that it was a small and uninteresting bit of prehistory from just before the Spanish Contact. The pottery fragments and crumbled stone masonry were from a tribe of Native Americans known as Sobaipuri, a branch of a people the outsiders called Pima or Papago but who called themselves the O'odham.

Thousands of O'odham still survived on the huge Delaware-sized reservation along the border south and west of Tucson, some of their people still living on the Mexican side of the border in Sonora. But the Sobaipuri O'odham of the San Pedro River had been victims of an invading host. Not the conquering Spaniards. Nor their heirs, the equally bloody minded Mexicans. Not even the steamrolling Manifest Destiny-bent Americans. After the first Spaniards wandered through in their epochal heavy handed search for gold and whatever else they could loot and scrounge and purloin from the locals, another group of invaders came stealthily into the Sobaipuri country. This group stayed. The newcomers eventually drove the Sobaipuri west to the Santa Cruz River Valley near what would one day become the Arizona city of Tucson, where they were absorbed by other O'odham. It was the beginning of a long and bitter bloody struggle between the O'odham and the invaders. Who were these invaders? They called themselves the Nde. But the outsiders had a different name for them.

Apache.

Jim Garret was familiar with terms like paranormal and extra sensory perception and the concepts behind them. He was not an ignorant or uneducated man. But those were bloodless two dimensional words that he wouldn’t use to describe himself. What he did know was there was something in his bones---always had been ever since he was a little kid--that spoke to him of other worlds and other dimensions that he often sensed, usually only distantly but sometimes so strongly immediate he was stopped cold in his mental tracks. He had heard it called it the 'veils between the worlds' and that image pretty much fit. Jim divined something else, some unseen presence, at the little pile of Sobaipuri ruins in a narrow infrequently visited shady canyon near the Mexican border at the southern end of the Huachuca Mountains. Something that lay beneath the surface of what was known. Jim Garret had long ago learned to pay attention to these peculiar sensings welling up from the caliginous innards of his subconscious. He hastened over to his rugged old Ford pickup and pulled out a shovel and a trowel he kept hidden under a heavy canvas tarp. Then he hurriedly retraced his steps back to the ruin.

And he began to dig into it.

Down he dug. Two feet. Three. Four. Five. As he dug, the hard packed earth transmuted in his hands, became animate, prescient, speaking to him, beckoning Jim to dig deeper. He dug deeper, to below where the archaeologists of a generation earlier had stopped their dig. And there it was. An older occupation layer underneath the Sobaipuri one. Garret switched from the muscular shovel to a cautious trowel. Hardly more than a minute later he uncovered a large fragment from a bowl, cleaned it off and stared at it. A gust of wind suddenly rustled the leaves in the huge Fremont cottonwoods crowding a nearby trickling streambed. He blinked. And he blinked again. He almost reached up to rub his eyes to clear his vision. Was he seeing what he thought he was seeing? A finely painted mule deer, done in black on a white background. Very precise, even elegant, brush work. The awareness came slowly, like a bowl quietly filling with water until it reached the lip and began to flow over. Only then did the recognition seep into his consciousness and Garret realize what he had found. Astonishment slowly spread over his border-blend face.

Mimbres! This site, buried hidden under a later occupation layer for hundreds of years, was Mimbres. And the Mimbres made some of the most prized pottery of all prehistoric Southwestern peoples. His curious adventurous spirit began throbbing with excitement at the promise of discovery in the ancient dirt and its concealed traces of vanished humans. Garret continued to dig. Slowly. Carefully. Like tending to one of his new born babes back in those sweet early days of a long gone happy marriage. Very, very gently. There might be something of value below. Maybe even a pot. A Mimbres pot. Now, Garret thought in hopeful blooming excitement, wouldn't that be something!

With a gaggle of colorful blue gray pinyon jays noisily chattering nearby in the mixed junipers and live oaks and pinyons of the canyon, and his tanned face flushed almost ochre with the excitement, Garret dug deeper into the old Mimbres occupation site. In two hours he pulled out a growing jumble of artifacts, mostly potsherds but also a handful of complete shell and stone necklaces and bracelets. Then he suddenly stopped, his trowel flash frozen motionless in midair. A pot! Before him was that most coveted of all southwestern pottery, a Mimbres black on white painted pot.

¡Dios mío! Good God Almighty! It was intact! And with no kill hole! Garret gingerly removed the dirt around the pot and then from a second one closely abutting it, scraping away the stringy vestiges of a decayed organic material that some ancient hand had long ago placed there with a judicious care. An adjacent third pot was so cemented into the surrounding dirt that he didn't dare disturb it.

Then the sound of a distant truck going through the gears climbing a mountain grade brought him back to his senses. Startled, he looked up from his secret little dig, realizing that he'd better cover up the site before someone stumbled on his digging. He hurriedly covered over the site, reburying most of what he'd found, concealing the spot with bits of forest detritus, juniper twigs, oak leaves and dead bunch grasses, taking the practiced outdoorsman's care to very precisely note the site's exact location. Then, walking with slow and deliberate steps and a mind riveted to the value of what he had in his hands, Garret carried the two pots, a handful of potsherds and the half dozen shell and stone necklaces he'd kept over to the tough old half ton Ford pickup he drove when he went out wandering in the boondocks.

Nub, he thought to himself as he fired up his truck, the engine roared to life and he headed back out the little used rutted old ranch road that led out of the mountains. I'll get ol’ Nub up here with his Bobcat and we'll really clean up. A week later he was staring at Nub Riley over a table and a couple of cold Buds in the Crystal Palace and trying to talk his friend into just that. The two men eyed each other warily. Both were just a touch under six feet, Nub leaner from the rancher’s rugged life, Jim with a powerful combination of a outdoorsman's fitness and the indoor muscles of a man who took his home gym seriously. Nub had the reddish hair and twinkling light blue eyes of his distant Scots-Irish ancestors. Jim was a handsome dark haired border blend of a man with eyes the color of time worn pewter. Neither man looked like someone you’d want to take on in a fistfight. Not that they were not the kind to start fights. They weren't. But they did know how to finish them.

While they sat eyeing each other at the table in the Crystal Palace, a man came swaggering through the door looking as though one of Wyatt Earp’s deputies had just slipped through a time warp and popped out a hundred years into the future. The guy's outfit was complete right down to the shiny black Colt .45 Peacemaker hanging on his hip. Riley stared at him. He’d never seen the guy before. Where did these people come from? Looking at the real pistol with real bullets draped on the guy’s hip, he had to wonder just what went on the minds of these peculiar Old West wannabes that regularly materialized out of nowhere in Tombstone. He was about to say something about it, but Garret derailed Nub from his detouring train of thought and back to the point of their meeting.

I know I'm a hustler, Nub. I exaggerate sometimes. Nub couldn't help laughing. Loud enough that a pair of good looking thirtyish women at a nearby table looked over at him. One of them tried to catch and hold Nub's attention. He didn't even notice. But he did notice the latter day Wyatt Earp clone at the bar loudly ordering a drink. A Diet Coke. It brought a quick smile to Nub’s ruddy outdoorsman’s face. Then he turned to look at Garret.

"Jim Garret? Exaggerate? Sometimes?" Garret put his hands up beseechingly.

O.K. O.K. Don't rub it in. But this is something big, Nub, Real big. Even if the damn thing busts out we still ought to be able to pull in at least $50,000. Riley was skeptical.

50,000 bucks? How? For what?

"I told you, Nub. I already found two of the Mimbres pots and I'm certain there's a third one there near where I found the other two. I'm talking about what we already got, not what we might find. There's the pots and all the other stuff I found. He reached over to slap Riley's arm lightly. And you get $20,000 just for riding along. You got nothin' to lose." Riley scowled, muttering softly.

Except maybe a stint in the slammer.

Busily cleaning off a nearby table, the aging blond barmaid with the plunging cleavage bent so far over the table that one of her ample boobs threatened to slip loose from its moorings. Garret saw it out of the corner of his eye. He had to force his eyes back to Riley. Look, Nub, Garret continued in a fervent but low voice, reaching over to clutch Riley’s forearm. "I need you and your equipment to move some of that dirt. It'd take forever to do it by hand and someone would eventually come by and see what was happening. This has to be done quick." Garret's face took on a flinty hard set expression. His hand detached from Nub's forearm to reach over and dramatically pat the envelope of money.

The nearby plunging neckline barmaid wasn't looking directly at them, but she knew there was money there. She could sense it. Her eyes narrowed with interest. But she kept her mouth shut. She'd learned the hard way to mind her own business in the nubilous world that was the real Tombstone underneath the histrionic fascia of the tourist town. She pulled her mind away from whatever it was the two men were doing and walked back to the bar. But she didn't forget to swing her hips suggestively as she walked. That, and her bulging public cleavage, went a long way towards fattening her tip jar. She needed the bucks. She was a single mom with three kids whose father was a meth tweaker doing a hard dime at the prison in Florence. Behind her, Riley looked grim. Garret still looked insistent. Outside a half dozen weekend bikers from Phoenix on Harley hogs went roaring across Allen Street and temporarily ended all attempts at conversation both inside and outside the Crystal Palace. Then they were gone. Garret resumed what he'd been about to say before being drowned out by the throaty roar of the Harleys.

Are you in or not? Riley stared into his beer. The $20,000 would save his way of life, and Garret damn well knew it. He had to accept. What would there be for Peg and the kids if he lost everything? But before he left for the site, just in case they did get caught, he would take the $10,000 in the envelope in front of him and pay up his mortgages so that Peg and the children would at least have something. His voice came out low and shaky, and the words seemed to echo inside his mind for a long time after he said them.

I'm in, he said, softly at first, fatalistically, a touch apprehensively. Damn your eyes, Jim Garret. He thumped his fist on the table. I'm in!

He said it with such emotive force that the pair of women again looked over at him. He still didn't notice. But Jim Garret did. He smiled at the women. After all, Jim thought, Nub would be going home to his wife soon enough. And, looking again at the two women, the thought danced into his mind that the evening was just beginning. A man had to be ready to grab onto muliebral opportunities when they popped up. He was wondering what it'd be like to go to bed with two women at the same time. He looked over at the women and flashed them one of his patented charming Jim Garret smiles. They smiled back. One of them turned sideways enough to profile a handsomely well endowed female form. Jim's gonads paid immediate and undivided attention to the sight.

It could turn out to be a real interesting evening.

In The Fading Light Of A Doomed People

Goyahkla

In March of 1851 numerous Nde from different bands came riding and walking in from their mountain rancherias to trade with the Mexicans at the town of Janos in far northern Chihuahua. In the confusing and convoluted on again/off again blood feud between the two peoples there was a local truce between the two peoples and both were honoring it. They were. Others weren't. A small army of several hundred Mexicans under Colonel José Maria Carrasco came furtively over the border from Sonora and fell on the Nde encampment when the Apache men were off trading in Janos. Scores of Apache women and children were murdered by Carrasco's soldiers. Others were carried off to a dismal slavery in Mexico, lost to their people--and to themselves--forever.

One of the