Arroyo
By Gretchen Rix
Copyright 2011 by Gretchen Rix
Published by Rix Café Texican
Smashwords Edition
Cover design by streetlightgraphics.com
This is a work of fiction. No character or incident has been based on any actual person living or dead.
I would like to thank Roxanne Rix, Rose Carrisalez, Dianne Stevenson, Mike McGregor, Billie Rix, Bertha Martinez and Jeanna Trejo for their help preparing this novel. GR
TABLE OF CONTENTS
More eBooks and stories by Gretchen Rix
Chapter One
Texas 1893
Ramona turned her head just in time to avoid busting her nose in the dirt when she fell. The side of her face took the brunt of the spill instead, setting her teeth rattling. “Madre de Dios, proteger tu nino,” she gasped, spitting blood. For a moment she was eye to eye with a horned lizard. It raced across her head and over her back as she shuddered, helpless with her hands bound as they were.
Though he had been far ahead in the arroyo, striking a path through the boulders and cactus, in no time the Rajput was back pulling her up to her knees, jabbering at her in some alien tongue, and shaking her to death. His fierce black face stared into hers. He was very angry.
But suddenly he laughed. It was an ugly sound made uglier by his sneer. The Mexican woman sprawled at his feet had a wooden Indian chained to her back. She looked like she carried a large, obstinate child who refused to get off after a piggyback. And even after that fall she was gamely crawling away from him. He stopped her with a vicious jerk of her chain.
Daniel caught up to them while the Englishman gloated. “Wouldn’t be too pleased with myself,” Daniel growled at the turbaned princeling while looking to the east. “We’re going the wrong way.” He gave the wooden Indian a cursory glance while he waited for his traveling companion to process this information. Ramona didn’t merit his attention this very minute.
“What?” Sinjin McIntosh Narendra reluctantly tore his gaze from the panting woman and took a good look at their surroundings. He stood in a draw, a dried-up riverbed that stretched to either side of him farther than he cared to walk. Small boulders and shrubby thorn plants were its main features, apart from the dust and dirt.
Foppish, foolish and comical he’d been called many a time, but Narendra had never felt stupid until now. He couldn’t tell one part of the American West from the other. He’d ordered Ramona to take them west toward California. Were they in New Mexico right now, or was it Texas?
“Where are we, you witch?”
“If you kick me again, señor, I’ll cut you. Te voy a castrar,” she hissed.
Struggling to stand and failing, she glared up at him with blood in her eyes. He watched with mouth hung open and astonishment on his face, but quickly the Rajput in him rose up. “With what?” He sneered and grabbed at the sword in his belt. “Do you mean this little knife?” he asked, whipping it out and settling it near her throat.
Sinjin whirled the blade around between his hands for show while she kept still, then seeing no threat in her, he carefully looked at the barkeep Daniel who was turned away from them. Daniel also was harmless. He replaced his blade reluctantly.
Seeing that, Daniel sidled up to him and spoke. “Better get out of this riverbed. I’ll help you pull her out. Here,” he said, squatting at the girl’s head and reaching for her shoulders. “Damn it. Take the chains off her or get down here and pick her up,” he ordered.
Narendra snapped to attention like the British soldier he was, but then he looked down on her and forgot himself. Ramona Cervantes no longer bore any resemblance to the beautiful Mexican girl he had captured in El Paso months ago. The long, lustrous black hair that was her crowning glory now hung in greasy clumps tangled in the chains draped along her back.
“Ah,” he said, finally, sadness in his voice at the change in his prize. “Get back. I’ll take care of her.”
Then when Daniel didn’t move, Narendra leaped forward. “I said now, you white trash cracker!” He kicked up red dust from the arid earth until it got in his eyes. In another minute he’d be waving his ridiculously decorated sword again.
At this point the Rajput was truly dangerous, and Daniel knew it; he pulled his hands off the girl immediately, as if she were piping hot. Then with his yellow hair dangling in his face, Daniel lumbered away from the pair. He didn’t dare go too far. As he used his dirt and sun-blackened hands to clear his eyesight, Daniel’s lanky, tall body cast a narrow shadow that nevertheless reached Ramona. He heard whispering. Couldn’t make out the words.
“Get it off me! Sinjin, please!”
Against all logic and faster than Daniel thought possible, Narendra grabbed the keys dangling from his belt and used them to unlock her bonds. Like a wild animal escaping its cage, the woman reared from under the wooden Indian’s dead weight and shouldered it aside, only to stagger uncertainly at the unaccustomed lightness of her body. She couldn’t stay on her feet. When Daniel rushed back to save her from falling he found himself face to face with the Rajput’s captive witch and not the innocent victim of the Rajput’s insanity. She bared her teeth. The wooden Indian that was the focus of all their recent mishaps lay unnoticed in the dirt, for now. It gave off menace like a cloud of dust.
“Are you going to bite me, girl?”
His fetid breath and body odor filled her nose, but Ramona refused to flinch from him again. Daniel deliberately blocked her view of Narendra. It was safer that way. She had worn the wooden Indian on her back for weeks and clearly did not know how to move without it. But staggering away from Daniel’s helping hands, she whirled unexpectedly onto the damned thing and lost her balance. Up she went, standing on it with both her feet, and then over. This time it was Narendra who caught and held her from further injury. For the moment his rage was contained.
The three of them, or was it four, she thought, presented a bizarre tableau out in the Texas desert arroyo she’d marched them into. A black prince from India by way of the United Kingdom, a young Mexican woman, and Daniel, whatever he was; this was their triumvirate.
“Tejas,” she said, deigning to finally answer the black Englishman’s earlier question. “Big Bend,” she whispered unheard. Without paying attention he slapped her lightly across her face. She bit her tongue and again tasted blood.
The very next moment the three of them watched in horror as the wooden Indian idly rolled down the incline where it eventually was stopped by a big rock. They stared at its progress, shaken into speechlessness; it shouldn’t have moved.
Narendra was clearly more nervous than the others, Ramona noted triumphantly, but she trembled uncontrollably herself. Was it possible the poisonous spirit trapped inside was again going to exert its power over them? Without warning the Rajput abandoned his attentions to Ramona and ran down to it. It didn’t move anymore so he stuck out his foot and flipped the Indian idol over. It gave a sharp crack that made him jump away. When nothing else happened Ramona and Daniel walked down to him.
In a few minutes, when it did nothing else of interest, Narendra looked around him sullenly and seemed to lose interest. “What’s this?” he loudly exclaimed. “We’re going east. We’ve been going the wrong way.”
Ramona ignored him. He was repeating himself. Even Daniel snorted, rolling his eyes heavenward. Daniel then spat in the wooden Indian’s direction before backing away from his two companions. “Where are we?” Narendra demanded, his prissy, sing-song British accent evidently grating on Daniel’s nerves as well as Ramona’s who abruptly decided to tell him in English. “Texas,” she replied. “West Texas.”
She should have lied. She could almost read his mind, but before she could stop him, the Rajput rushed from her side and skipped quickly back up the gully. She figured he planned to chain her again and force her to continue their original quest, as that was where he was headed. The chains she’d worn were still twisted on the ground where she’d last fallen. Ramona followed his progress while also keeping an eye on the seemingly inert Indian statue almost at her feet. It was a dizzying task. The Indian or the uncontrollable Englishman dancing behind her back with the chains in his hands? Where was the true danger?
Before everything got out of control again, Daniel stepped up to handle the situation, this time braining the Rajput with a rock, creeping back from behind while Narendra danced in the dust and crowed about the chains. Before Ramona understood what she’d seen, the barkeep was at her feet pulling the wooden Indian idol away from her grasp. The unconscious Rajput lay up the trail behind her. With no hesitation, Ramona took her one chance and ran. With her long, black hair hanging in clumps down her back she rushed the far opposite embankment. She didn’t look back to see what Daniel was doing, or wonder if Narendra was alive, but kept running shakily to the freedom the plateau at the top represented. Then she began the climb. One handful of bristly, skin-shredding brown grass at a time got the buxom woman up the ridge, but near the top she lost all her strength.
She looked backwards as she lost her balance, sliding, and then falling down into the basin. Things had changed in the past few minutes. It was Daniel who now had dominance, standing with the Indian statue propped against his hip, calmly watching her. They’d followed her. In his shadow was the Rajput, almost drunkenly coming to. Ramona ended face down in the dirt. Playing for time and breathing shallowly, she pretended to be senseless. She cursed the day she had first coveted the Indian statue standing so proud and dignified in front of the general goods store in her town.
“Stop playing possum,” Daniel demanded, lightly prodding her with his boot.
Ramona continued to think. She needed to recoup. How had all this happened to her?
All the money the village women had given her for cloth and buttons and thread to make their clothes had somehow made it out of her pockets and into the store’s cash register without her ever taking her eyes off the wooden Indian. When she got it back to her village, they took one look at what she had, and then tossed her out of her own home with only the clothes on her back; and then they threw the wooden idol after her. They, at least, could recognize demonic possession when they saw it.
Ramona took a deep breath of the soil, and then she coughed. “If you’re coming, you’d better get a move on,” Daniel advised. She heard him dragging the Indian away. Her mind again veered back to where her life had changed so murderously. It had all gone so bad so quickly.
From the first, the wooden Indian had forced her to its will. The Rajput, busy pursuing a beautiful opera singer across the country, had crossed paths with Ramona almost immediately and was helplessly drawn into her trap. The dirty, foul-mouthed and frightening man she called Daniel attached himself to them after a fight at his bar near the tiny town of Marathon in Texas. Ramona still didn’t know if they were a group of three, or four. Or if the wooden Indian was really sentient.
After another deep breath of dirt, Narendra’s witch-woman finally pulled herself to her feet. Not too far away, Daniel dragged the wooden Indian behind him with the Rajput trotting wearily alongside, both men barely avoiding the cactus pods infesting the trail and just as carelessly leaving her behind. Despite the cuts on her hands, the bruises on her body, and the dirt in her hair, Ramona felt relieved to see them go. The damned wooden Indian was no longer chained to her back. Its poisonous whispers no longer filled her ears. Sinjin McIntosh Narendra’s outrageous British-Indian accent no longer polluted her mind.
But she wasn’t going to survive out here by herself.
After silently cursing her fate, Ramona limped and staggered her way to catch up to them. Finally she broke into a run. “Leave it here,” she cried. “Let it die.”
It fell to Narendra to clumsily circle back and accost her with his opinion. “So some other blighter can come by and take it up?” he said belligerently. “No. The devil you know, and all that,” he added. “I mean you!” he barked. “At least if I see you waltzing up to me with a sharp object in your hands I know to protect my balls.” Giving her a half-contemptuous glance he added, “I can handle you.”
But what about the thing masquerading as Daniel, she thought, shivering uncontrollably? Narendra misunderstood and looked abashed. All his bluster vanished; he became contrite. “Didn’t mean to scare the gal,” he muttered. Ramona picked up the pace, gave the Rajput a wide berth, and soon drew abreast of Daniel and the Indian artifact. Looking around while she waited for Daniel to notice her, Ramona suddenly realized there was no reason to have walked them all the way into Texas; any of the arroyos they had traversed earlier would have served just as well.
What? Where had that come from? Frightened, she sneaked a look at the wooden Indian. Was the damned thing getting to her again?
Daniel abruptly stopped. Ramona ran herself up onto the idol and screamed which brought the Rajput scampering over rocks and bushes to reach her. She beat frantically at her arms and then her clothes. “Se esta quemando! Burning!” she cried. She jumped and wiggled and shook her arms violently.
Daniel was closest. He grabbed Ramona by her voluminous skirt and jerked her free from the wooden Indian idol, throwing her onto the ground. As Narendra stopped to help her, Daniel kicked the idol far away from them and onto the rocks. Then he picked up one of the larger rocks and began systematically bashing the statue to bits. Narendra watched in consternation as Daniel pummeled the wood almost into toothpicks, but there was nothing he could do. He carelessly patted at Ramona’s shoulder.
After realizing her injuries were imaginary, Ramona recovered some of her sense of humor. These men had no idea what they were dealing with. She snorted. “No good, señor,” she told them. She pointed to make herself clear. What had been smashed into pulp moments before was now reassembling itself into the red, green and yellow demon-infested albatross they’d inherited through her. Daniel gave her the evil eye as he backed away from the magical malevolence of its regeneration.
His bluer-than-the-sky eyes shot daggers at her. He knew she’d only pointed out the obvious, but still the barkeep pulled himself up to his full, gangly height and screamed his incomprehensible insults.
“You incompetent daughter of a whore!” he yelled. “You demon-infested pestilence on two legs! God!” he cried. “Deliver me from this woman!”
Silly curses, she thought. Silly man. Ramona watched with a smile on her face until the Rajput suddenly pushed past them again and headed for the idol a second time. “No!” she yelled, throwing out her arms to pull him back, but there was nothing she could do to stop him. He bowled her over and kept on going.
“God damn you two!” Daniel cried. Then he marched up to Ramona and kept her from interfering as the Rajput brutally kicked at the statue. This time it came apart in splinters as long as her forearms that went flying everywhere.
Narendra stooped suddenly over the mass of mangled timber and picked up a handful of slivers, unexpectedly shoving them into his pockets. Ramona’s eyes grew wide—surely he had impaled himself. But she heard him laugh. The splinters ripped through his pants and came out on top of his pointy-toed slippers. “God damned country!” he exclaimed, after hopping on one foot right into a cactus pod. “Ouch!” Then Narendra fell flat backwards right into it. Ramona saw the slivers of the wooden Indian shaken off his ridiculous shoes and out onto the sand. She remembered her premonition: a mass of curly hair spreading on the surface of the water, gurgles of unmanly panic and pain, and a bloody groin.
Daniel was first to see the rattlesnake hidden in the shade.
Chapter Two
The snake propelled itself away from the side of the gully in a leap through the air that sent it directly on a collision course with Sinjin McIntosh Narendra’s throat. The Rajput shrieked, threw up his hands to ward it off, and then suddenly remembered just who and what he was. Without taking his eyes off the certain death diving at him, the Rajput pulled his sword from his pants and sliced upwards.
Ramona heard a whoosh and then a clump. She couldn’t look. Daniel saw the snake’s head severed from its body and go in the opposite direction from the rest. Narendra experienced fractured time that abruptly changed back to normal as he reached up to catch at the head. Daniel got to it first, knocking it out of the way. “Don’t touch it you fool. It can still bite.”
Narendra jerked his hand back. Then he saw the rest of the snake, still coiling and uncoiling onto itself. “It’s five feet long!” he gasped.
Daniel gave it an unconcerned glance before agreeing. “Yep,” he said. The Englishman bent to the ground to touch the snake which was in the grip of its death dance. It took two hands and several tries to manage the severed body. As the Rajput finally raised it from the ground, the snake casually wrapped itself around his waist. “Good God in Heaven!” he exclaimed, letting go, but the snake clung to him. Down and down he frantically pushed it.
His pants came off with the snake now puddled at his ankles. Narendra shrieked.
Without ceremony Daniel bent down and jerked the dead snake from Narendra’s pointed-toed shoes and then kicked it aside. “Where’s the head?” he asked calmly, as if he didn’t see the man’s nakedness right in front of him.
Ramona answered by pointing. “Por ahi,” she added. She could not contain the smirk on her lips at Narendra’s unexpected exposure. After marching her for weeks with the statue chained to her back she felt he deserved no pity. The man was black from head to toe, she noted. Uninterested in naked men, she turned then to look at the idol.
The snake head rested snugly atop the wooden Indian statue as if it were a hat. The idol had reconstituted itself for a third time and lay murderously waiting for them in the rocks. Ramona stared at it in religious awe. “Windigo,” she whispered.
Daniel snapped his head around. “Don’t name it,” he warned. “You know better than that. And keep away from it.”
Damn, he thought. Windigo this far south? By naming it did the witch create it? He glanced at her. Did she have this kind of power?
As Daniel watched, Ramona crept closer to her former burden, telling herself she only wanted to see if the chains were broken and unusable. She didn’t want to admit that it was talking to her again. “Nieta,” it hissed. The snake head moved its dead jaws with the greeting. “Me muero de hambre. Hungry,” it said. She stood hypnotized.
“There it is!” Narendra galloped right up beside her, breathing heavily from his run. He broke the spell. Ramona quickly reared back in horror. It had nearly taken her again, she realized. The Rajput used his sword and ran it gingerly through the reptile’s mouth to get it off the wooden Indian statue, all the while gently nudging Ramona aside. Immediately the snake head clamped its fangs onto the steel; just as abruptly the Rajput screamed, swung the sword high through the air, and tossed the head far ahead of them on the arroyo floor.
While he stood stunned by what he’d just accomplished, Ramona came back to herself. The Englishman had broken the spell. Needing to thank him, she pried the sword from his rigid hands and proceeded to clean it, first with the dirt and sand at their feet, and then with the folds of her skirt. “What the hell are you doing?” Narendra cried. He grabbed his possessions back from her.
“Gracias, señor,” she said. “Gracias.” She kept her eyes lowered and backed slowly away from him.
Narendra looked bewildered for a moment, then proud. “There,” he announced. “I’ve taken care of it.”
The snake head was gone, but the demon in the wooden Indian remained. Ramona knew this. Daniel knew this. They exchanged wary glances. Why didn’t the Rajput realize this as well? What did Narendra think he had really accomplished?
Narendra recovered himself. “Nothing,” he said loudly and evidently to no one. He shook his head, then with a stern look both at Ramona and the idol at their feet, he finally nodded to the girl. “Gracias, señorita,” he said. Then with much more intelligence than she’d given him credit for he said, “By gad, the thing’s unstoppable! How do we kill it?”
Without thinking she answered. “Fire, señor. Or water. Earth, tal vez.”
“I say we just leave it behind.”
Sinjin McIntosh Narendra and Ramona Cervantes turned as one to stare down the third of their party. The barkeep didn’t flinch. For a moment Ramona saw something that wasn’t there, something bright and shining. And true, she was thinking. Then just as suddenly it was only their dirty and miserable Daniel standing before her.
Narendra repeated his earlier command. “We will not leave this obscenity for anyone else to find. It’s not honorable. No British gentleman would consider it for a second.”
This time it was Ramona and Daniel turning as one to stare at the third of their group. Ramona didn’t understand what Narendra was babbling about, but agreed the Indian could not be abandoned. Not until after the arroyo, she thought. When the English is dead.
Though the woman barely noticed her afterthoughts, she immediately felt ugly and soiled. Why had she thought that, she wondered. Narendra dead? To distract her, Daniel laughed long and hard at the Rajput’s naked legs. He needed her to get back on track. Gesturing finally to the pantless, turbaned, pointy-shoed former soldier in their midst, he said, “You’re no Britisher. You just think you are. Put your damned pants back on.”
With studied dignity the Rajput re-dressed. And to make his point, Narendra also took the time to re-dress his hair. It was a painstaking task, but he removed his turban with the care of a woman tending her best frock, and then he brushed out his long, tangled, black and curly hair. It reached his waist when he was done and shimmered in the sun.
Ramona had seen this meticulous grooming before; it didn’t impress her this time. While Narendra entertained himself, she took a chance they weren’t watching her and studied the Indian statue in the foreground. There was a power building in the idol; clearly Daniel should feel it just as well as she.
But Daniel was captivated by something other than the danger they were in. He stared at Narendra in wonder.
All this hair, Daniel whispered to himself. Just which one of these avatars was which? He looked around them. And what damage have I done already? He shook his head. Why did I get dropped on my head, for God’s sake? I can’t remember which is which.
Almost too soon the Rajput finished his routine and tucked and smoothed all his hair back under his red turban. “We’re going the wrong way,” he announced. He had returned to his obsession with the opera singer.
From the near distance came the unexpected: a second voice, none of their own. “Starving,” the voice hissed. “Hungry,” it said. “Get me food. Or I’ll get it. You’ll be sorry.”
Before Ramona even formed the words, Daniel jumped at her. “Don’t say it,” he ordered. “Don’t even think it. Get you mind on something else or I’ll knock your brains out.”
She paid no attention. Staring intently into the arroyo shade she saw a skeleton-thin man-shape stretched out in the dirt and slobbering onto its own shoulder. “Hungry,” it cried. It wasn’t slobber; slobber isn’t red, she realized. It was biting into its own flesh, tearing a hole up near its clavicle.
“Windigo,” she gasped, reaching out to it but not walking any closer.
Daniel struck her down with a single punch. “Damn it!” he cried. “Don’t name it. Don’t you ever name it.”
But he was too late. No longer a wooden Indian statue, the mannish thing slithered right to the trio of travelers. The Rajput was closest. It attached itself to the Rajput’s legs with skeleton fingers and toes dripping flaccid flesh. Upwards it dragged itself, climbing Narendra as if he were a pole set up to fly a flag. “Hungry,” it hissed, its face, its mouth almost to the Rajput’s crotch before either of the other two thought to stop it.
“No!” Ramona yelled, absurdly remembering her own threat to neuter the Englishman. She threw herself with almost supernatural strength at the unnatural obscenity. It was over in seconds. Narendra collapsed under the weight of her charge, a high moaning squeal escaping his lips as the Windigo nestled closer to his thighs. Then it scuttled from his legs to his chest and then over his head like some sort of giant brown scorpion running from the crush of a boot heel.
When Narendra raised himself to look, the thing was back where it had been; a chitinous, scrabbling thing hovering over the wooden Indian on the rocks before disappearing in waves of scratchy sighs and moans. Belatedly Narendra checked himself for missing parts, grinning hugely after his inventory. “All here,” he announced, unable to contain his relief, needing to tell them so.
“And so is that thing,” Daniel added, waving desultorily at the wooden Indian that barely contained and controlled the Windigo spirit within. “I say we bury it.”
Daniel had no sooner made his suggestion than both Narendra and Ramona felt the gasping, choking sensation of being covered by six feet of dirt and rocks in a box so small they couldn’t move their limbs. The illusion did not go away. Narendra grabbed at his throat, his already blackish skin turning deep blue, his eyes rolling back in his head. Ramona fainted dead away. Daniel smiled slightly.
“I say we burn it,” he said to the air, knowing whatever unpleasantness came from his actions that both Narendra and Ramona had many adventures before them yet unlived and would not be permanently harmed. He wanted to see what the Windigo would do next.
Ramona remained unconscious, but smoke curled from under her feet and it swiftly wafted from one companion to the other. Narendra came to with smoke in his lungs. Barely recovered from the anxiety of being buried alive, the Rajput panicked at the smell of smoke. As Narendra coughed and hacked and turned blue, Daniel decided he’d had enough. “I say we leave it here,” he announced.
Only he saw the Windigo emerge to grin maliciously with its emaciated face. Ramona must have regained consciousness and named the damned thing again, he thought. And if she had stopped it the first time she could stop it now. Stepping forward, he dragged the dazed witch-woman to her feet. He spoke directly into her ear. “Make it stop. Right now. Do you understand me?”
Pulling itself clear of the wooden Indian disguise, the Windigo skittered down into the sand, biding its time while watching all of them with hunger in its eyes. Ramona stood transfixed by the primitive, overwhelming desire to eat that radiated in waves from the being. She knew what she wasn’t supposed to do: Don’t name it, don’t think about it, and don’t give it a physical presence by your belief. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do.
A fully recovered Narendra walked carefully through the sand, rocks and brush of the arroyo floor toward Ramona, unwisely keeping his eyes always on the Windigo. When he stumbled at the last and lost one of his pointy-toed shoes off his feet, he fell onto his hands and knees right in front of her. Before she could scream, the Windigo leapt the full distance to them and attacked her right over the back of the Rajput. It knocked her yards away. Jagged bones clawed for her face, but missed as Ramona reacted. For a moment she kicked it clear away from her.
As Ramona reared back to escape its repeated attack, the Rajput scrambled through the sand like a crab and took her down with a clumsy tackle. Then he used his own body to shield her from the Windigo’s ravenous grasp. She couldn’t breathe. Narendra pushed her face into the earth before he turned around to fight it off himself. Ramona inhaled dirt.
Whack!
Daniel smashed a big rock into its head. The Windigo loosened its grip on Narendra, rearing up to meet Daniel with bloody claws extended. The two rolled away from the Rajput and Ramona, the Windigo scratching, biting, clawing and digging at the man as they bounced further down the draw. Abruptly they disappeared.
Narendra saw to Ramona first: she was a woman and needed his help; Daniel could defend himself. Gently he pried her face out of the depression. She looked dead. Desperate when he could hear no sound of her breath, he put his mouth to hers and blew his own lungs’ air into her.
Behind him Daniel screamed. Narendra jerked around in horror, accidently pushing his hand into Ramona’s chest as he did. Immediately she began to cough. Bursting with emotion, the Englishman clutched the Mexican witch to his breast. “Thank God,” he exclaimed, but then Daniel cried out for help.
Ramona went into a spasm just as Daniel screamed his last. Unable and unwilling to leave the one for the other, Narendra nevertheless turned from the stricken girl in an agony of helplessness. He was too late.
Daniel was gone.
Chapter Three
The Rajput heard a low moan of pain from the mass of large rocks further down the draw where the river basin began to curve. In front of him, returned to its original form, lay the wooden Indian idol. It was the same statue he’d chained to Ramona weeks ago before forcibly marching her towards his one true love. Its bright green, vivid red, screaming yellow and black colors made the statue the whole focus of his mind. Until Ramona spoke.
“Esto es cierto,” she began, before a coughing fit silenced her voice. Through clenched fist against her mouth she forced the words out. “This is true—.” But she could manage nothing more.
Narendra waited. Nothing more came, though she looked as though she was struggling to speak. She coughed and wheezed, pressing her hands under her breasts as if that would help her communicate. Narendra gave it up finally; he turned in the direction of Daniel’s distress call and steeled himself to see what might be left of their companion, and then Ramona completed her speech. “Get behind me Satan,” she commanded.
“Behind me.”
She gurgled these last two words, sounding like someone drowning. Narendra did not know if she meant him or the thing in the wooden Indian; she’d certainly called him Satan, devil, fiend and worse during their time together.
His concentration no longer fixed on the wooden Indian, and momentarily forgetting Daniel as well, Narendra quickly checked the girl over. As best he could tell there was nothing more he could do for her. She could breathe on her own. She communicated. She could move. Ramona had recovered. He could leave her. He had to find Daniel.
Narendra quickly left the girl, ordering her to rest and wait for his return. Then he put her clearly out of his mind. This was what he was made for: going to the rescue. Sprinting far wide of the wooden idol and hopping over obstacles as fast as he could, Narendra barely missed running into the giant cactus pod infesting the arroyo basin. Underfoot and behind the rocks were other hidden dangers. Narendra stumbled and almost fell. Slowing down saved his life.
It wasn’t Daniel behind the big rock, but the Windigo.
Separated from the wooden Indian and with its claws fully extended to catch the Rajput by the throat, the evil spirit overshot its mark, tumbling onto the ground and breaking into pieces on the sharp stones. Again it was reduced to slivers, this time of bone instead of wood. Quickly and violently Narendra kicked the ravenous spirit as far as he could, each kick sending part of it in separate directions. He watched it suspiciously for minutes afterwards but saw no evidence it was repairing itself. Finally, he thought.
Proud of himself, Narendra took a minute to rest. He congratulated himself on solving what neither Ramona nor Daniel had been able to. Out loud he said, “Good show, Sinjin. Job well done and all that.” His face was a study in pride. But as he began to do a celebratory march around the perimeter, he heard a voice directed at him from the rocks.
“When you’re done preening your cock feathers, come get me down,” Daniel called, far to the right of the rock formations, his voice unexpectedly cheery for the circumstances.
Narendra jumped. Guilt and embarrassment fought with pomposity, all keeping him rooted to the spot. “I haven’t got all day,” Daniel yelled, no longer good-natured. “Get over here!”
Narendra tucked his chin into his chest and gingerly picked his way out of the Windigo’s bones now littering the arroyo floor. As he passed he didn’t see what happened as soon as he showed his back. Like water trickling down the face of an incline, what was left of the Windigo was twitching and skittering its way back to the wooden Indian near Ramona. Before Narendra was out of sight the Windigo had disappeared.
As Narendra searched for the barkeep, half a mile away Ramona watched with consternation as the Windigo gradually appeared and slowly massed all its shattered bones into the wood of the Indian statue. Eventually only the statue remained, but not before Ramona recognized what was happening. “Tierra, agua y fuego,” she called out, trying to make it sound like a threat. We’ve got to hurry, she thought. Where’s Daniel?
He’d been so frightening in his stillness she hadn’t wanted to look at him.
That had been the first time Daniel had shown her he was not what they thought he was. Three days back Ramona had created an arroyo out of nothing more than the air in her mouth and the poison from the Indian she now understood was Windigo. When first they stumbled into the dried-up stream bed, Daniel balked, refusing all their entreaties and even Ramona’s secret spells to make him move. Three hours they lingered at his side, loath to leave him behind. Then Ramona began hallucinating.
Daniel was stone. Daniel glowed in colors that didn’t exist in this world. Daniel had wings. All this she saw. All this she disbelieved.
At the end of three hours Daniel calmly spat phlegm on the Rajput’s foot and then walked right out as if nothing had happened. They followed, though Narendra had to be restrained from petty violence. “Asshole,” the Rajput muttered under his breath, darting glances Ramona’s way to see if she’d heard. “White trash,” he continued, a little louder. “Fuck-face bugger-all…whoa!” Like an attacking animal, Daniel was suddenly in front of him, Narendra’s little riding crop in his hand slicing down at the offensive words.
Daniel had stopped his arm just as the whip grazed the Rajput’s lip.
Where’s Daniel now?
With great effort Ramona shook herself free of memories. She looked toward the wooden Indian. The bones had disappeared. The artifact shone bright with color, all new again, enticing her to approach. Promises were made. Slowly she began to crawl in that direction, not entirely against her will.
Well out of Ramona’s sight, Daniel remained splayed against the west wall of the ravine, his arms and legs stretched wide in a clumsy parody of the crucifixion. Narendra well remembered the story from his schooling; it gave him the creeps. Bemused and unaccountably unafraid, he hopped around obstructing boulders and avoided nasty-looking thorns, reaching Daniel in his own good time. As he got close enough he noticed Daniel was pinned into the dirt by heavy wire. Narendra couldn’t control his mouth. “How did you get yourself in such a fix?” he blurted.
“Never you mind,” Daniel said. His voice was weary, distressed. “Get me down.”
“Is that wire?” Narendra scrambled onto the embankment high enough to get close to Daniel’s feet.
“Yes it’s wire!”
Narendra jumped back from the venomous shout. Obviously Daniel couldn’t get at him, trussed to the wall as he was, so he relaxed, squinting into the sun, assessing the twisted wire around Daniel’s arms and legs. He muttered to himself as he worked it out. “If I get the legs loose first, the wire will cut through his shoulders. Damn.”
“Don’t be such a dolt!” Daniel cried. “Just cut me down.”
Narendra stared at Daniel some more, ignoring his cursing and advice. “If I cut the shoulders free he’s going to fall right over and pop his feet right off,” he continued.
“Just cut the damned wires, you idiot!”
Daniel listened with growing anger as the Rajput postulated his feet getting pulled off his legs. Obviously Narendra was dazed by recent events-- Daniel didn’t dare think anything less. Narendra couldn’t be stupid. Not and bask in God’s favor as he did. And God had made it abundantly clear that both Narendra and Ramona were dear to Him; Daniel just couldn’t remember the rest of it. The injury to his head had made mush of his instructions.
The pain of being crucified against the dirt and stone and brush of the arroyo finally did its job—an agonized moan escaped Daniel’s throat and he found himself struggling with the novelty of tears. Before long he cried uncontrollably.
Narendra stood it as long as he could. Finally, stopping his ears with his hands he turned his back on the spectacle and began to walk away. Within a few steps he stopped. Turning around he called back to Daniel. “I’ll be back with Ramona. We’ll get you down.”
“Fuck you! Don’t leave me here. Don’t leave me!” Daniel yelled, but Narendra had already turned away. He watched him scurry over the rocks and out of sight. Soon he was alone. This seemed to be his day for being left behind. He worried at it. First the Windigo had staked him out and disappeared, but not before slavering over him, licking him and smacking, drooling into his hair as it twisted the wire tight. Then it had vanished. Narendra was in the process of abandoning him as well. Where was it now?
“What are you doing, woman!”
The Rajput shrieked at the girl who squatted lewdly over the wooden Indian. “Get away!” he cried. The damned girl had come up with the chains somehow. She was half-way to harnessing herself to the monstrosity as he rounded the bend and beheld this impossibility.
“Get it off me!” Every hour on the hour she had ordered this; he’d even grown accustomed to stuffing his ears with cotton. It eased his headache as well. “Take it away!” she cried. “Let me go!” she demanded. “I’ll curse you to Hell and back. No more. No more!” Narendra had heard the same commandments day in and day out as they’d marched together the past weeks. Once she even tried tearing herself out of her bonds. She’d been lucky Daniel had seen her at it; otherwise she would have bled to death.
And now he couldn’t believe it. She’d voluntarily put herself back in the traces. Bowed over as she was, Narendra would have taken her for an old Indian woman passing on the trail if it hadn’t been for all that beautiful hair streaming down to her hips.
Narendra shook his head and took another look. Ramona’s hair had once been her one true beauty. He remembered that. But without a bath, with no grooming at all, her tresses had bunched up into greasy rolls that turned his stomach to see. How was she transforming into the vision before his eyes right this minute?
A chain rattled close to his head, and then he realized she wasn’t. It was that entity mesmerizing him. It had hypnotized him into staying still and now she and the Indian riding her back were right on top of him.
“Señor,” she whispered, a seductive tremor in her tone. “Don’t fight me. Just come with us. A few more steps. Follow and we’ll meet our destiny, just like I told you.”
Her voice said one thing, but her eyes said something else. Narendra chose to believe her eyes. He retreated from them slyly, keeping his attention on her face as he did. “Señorita,” he called. “Did this destiny of mine involve you and some knives, or a sword perhaps? There was something about cutting off my balls?”
Ramona’s mouth curled in amusement; quickly she leapt the remaining distance separating them. The Indian over her shoulder bumped into Narendra’s head when she banked her steps. But there were her eyes again. Her eyes begged for help. “Keep still, señorita,” he coaxed. He moved one way, she moved the other. While they separated he slowly took out his saber, although he didn’t know what good his light steel would be against the heavy chains.
Fate stepped in to help him out. In their dancing around one another in the rough terrain, Ramona was led directly into a snake hole that collapsed under her weight and threw her down. “Aieee!” the Rajput cried as he rushed upon her. While she was stunned he easily pulled the chains from her; she had been careless arranging them around her shoulders and it was but a moment until he freed her from them.
Narendra stood, chains clanking from his arms. Where could he bury or destroy the damn things? Suddenly overcome with the feeling their time was running out, he dropped them where he stood. It was the wooden Indian he needed to rid them of. Ramona fought futilely against his fumbling hands.
“No, no señorita,” he protested. “I’m going to take care of it. Just let it go.” And then when one of the blows she aimed at his head hit him square in the throat instead, he roared. “Desist! Cease and desist!” And to his surprise she did. He used all his cunning to pull the wooden Indian from her grasp, but then he continued away from her, struggling with it in his arms until he reached the arroyo wall.
With all his strength Narendra hurled the wooden Indian statue at the lip of the draw; then he stood watching its trajectory with dismay. It hit halfway up and tumbled back almost to his feet, but got caught on a rock that split it in two. The earth trembled. He bent to give the statue what coup de grace he could manage with what he had, whacking at it with his sword, carving it into long shreds of painted wood.
“No!” Ramona stood tall in the distance screaming his name. “Run! Get out now! Get out!” Up and down she danced in her eagerness to get his attention. “Run!” she screamed.
Narendra only let her distract him from the entity and its demise for a moment. Whatever she wanted could wait.
But it wouldn’t.
“Too late. Too late,” his mind screamed as he saw the wall of water racing towards them down the arroyo. “Too ….”
Chapter Four
They saw the water right before it hit them. As Ramona was instantly swept towards Narendra, she reached out to hold him. “Hang on!” she yelled over the roar of thundering death as the flash flood engulfed them, but she lost her grip immediately. The two of them rose with the water in a giant wave that crested the very top of the embankment. In the heat of the moment Narendra forgot all about Daniel, who would have been helpless to save himself. In sudden panic he forgot about the wooden Indian artifact that housed the spirit of the Windigo, surely swirling in the mass of debris and foam along with them. But he did not forget Ramona. He reached for her at the very apex of the surge. “Hold on to me!” he cried.
He gathered that life-saving breath as they rose upwards, and grabbed her hands. Together they were smashed down to the bottom with all the rest of the river residue. The Rajput lost his grip on Ramona when shards of the wooden Indian impaled her shoulder and spun her away. Helplessly, he saw her wash downstream, bleeding, and ultimately too weak to catch at weeds and pull herself free. Back at the surface and gasping for air, the Rajput found himself suddenly fulfilling Ramona’s vision.
A sharp pain in his groin area nearly rendered him senseless. As he fought to regain the surface, he saw that he had been impaled by the same splinters from the wooden Indian that had doomed Ramona. Out of control, Sinjin McIntosh Narendra sped downstream on the floodwaters, alternately bleeding and drowning, his last coherent thought one of relief as his hands found his testicles intact. He sped down the river with a grim smile on his face, fighting to keep his head above water and with an eye out for the remains of his two companions, but it proved too much for him. He went under.
What Ramona hadn’t predicted and did not witness now was Narendra’s long, curly black hair coming free from his turban to waft around his head and shoulders like seaweed. As he began to die, he became irrationally uneasy about the mass of his hair as it reached out to the uprooted trees floating in the river with him, snagging in their limbs. It became imperative to the Rajput to get his hair back under his turban where it belonged, although his headgear had long since vanished and he was tumbling with the current. He struggled to pull his hair back, slipping under the surface where he breathed water and began to flail.
“Help!” he cried. “Help!” He sank from the cumbersome gravity of his clothes but his hair remained entangled in the brush. When his weight broke the debris’ hold on him, he shot to the surface, spinning in circles as his hair wended its spidery way to the woman tossing in the flotsam with him.
Ramona grabbed at it and would not let go even when he beat deliriously at her fingers to make her. Together they raced with the flood down the arroyo corridor, sometimes atop the spume, often pulled down into the depths. Ultimately they were thrown onto a pile of rocks at the river bend as the water lost all its fury and gradually vanished into the ground.
Ramona regained consciousness first, gasping for breath and fighting to get his hair off her face. She lay in the mud of the arroyo basin surrounded by broken trees and displaced boulders. The first sight to meet her eyes was that of the barkeep staring malevolently down at her from the top of the arroyo embankment. There he is. Ramona tried to speak to him. “Daniel,” she cried, breaking into violent coughing before getting her voice to him. She coughed again, and then again, unable to keep her eyes focused.
Finally she concentrated on what was closer. “Sinjin?” she asked, barely croaking his name past the pain in her chest, finding the corpse-like Indian prince in a fetal position beside her. There was blood on him. She shook him, and when there was no response turned to Daniel for help. He spat contemptuously in her direction.
Then, when she simply continued to sit and hold the Britisher, Daniel leaped down into the arroyo. Soon he was on top of her. “Let go, woman,” he insisted. He dragged the Rajput from her grasp while she beat futilely against his strength. He pushed her away. Daniel then laid their companion flat on the ground and then sat on his chest. Horrified, Ramona made a helpless gesture and inched closer.
Daniel warned her away with one fiery glare, and then he proceeded to hop on and off the dead man’s chest. Before Ramona had gathered breath to protest, the Rajput was also coughing for his life. When Daniel realized his work had succeeded he spat on him for good measure before rising to his feet.