A DIFFERENT PATH LED OUT OF THE HOLLOW, and as they took it the woman traded her kicking for hanging lifeless against El Sepo’s grip, dragging her feet into a stumble. Still, she barely slowed them, and when they arrived at the hut Mota whistled at Father Pascual and gestured for him and Fernando to join them inside. El Sepo had already taken the woman there, and Mota could hear her shouting. As they entered she turned and made her address general. “Go ahead. Rape me. See how you like it. I’m stuffed with glass and quills.”
The woman sat on a rickety stool and El Sepo stood over her, his arms crossed. Her brown skin was reddened from the sun, and her body was animal-lean save for the loose breasts that swung beneath her shift as she twisted toward each of them. She might be a quarter blood, but Mota wasn’t sure.
“Please,” the woman said. “It would be such pleasure.”
“Enough!” Mota said. “None of us will harm you.”
This quieted the woman, though she continued to tremble.
“Just a few questions and we will leave you, if that’s what you wish,” he said. “We’re looking for a mine. Do you know anything about a mine?”
“When the Yaquis came, hammers and picks in their hands, I learned.”
“Have you been to it?”
“No.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“No.”
Mota glanced about the ramshackle cabin. It was little over three varas on either side. Dried plants and a pair of rust-bitten pots hung from the ceiling. On the far side of the room slumped a narrow bed. Maize leaves and feathers wriggled from its split mattress.
“How long have you been here on your own?”
“I’m not on my own.”
Mota laughed at the thinness of her lie. “How long?”
She looked away. “Two years,” she said.
BEFORE MOTA FINISHED QUESTIONING THE WOMAN, he learned her name was Beatriz and that she had been married at fifteen to a rancher named Tómas, who had brought her here and been killed by the Yaquis — an event over which she showed little regret. She had nothing else to tell them and after they bartered with her for a string of dried sausages they rode away from her hut. Mota had offered again to take her with them, but she’d only stared at him.
That night they made camp near the top of a ridge. As Mota was talking to Fernando and examining the maps, he spotted Father Pascual with the sackcloth bag he’d had the morning they left Mexico. Throughout their journey it had remained hidden. Mota watched as Father Pascual unknotted the bag then stuck his hand inside and pulled out a bull’s horn. Fernando made to get up, but Mota reached out to stop him. Holding the horn, Father Pascual scrambled to the top of the ridge, and, once he’d steadied himself, blew. The blast shot across the dusk, echoed against the slope that faced their camp, then fell away.
Father Pascual blew the horn again. After the last echo, again from the slope, he came back.
Mota was baffled. When he asked Father Pascual what he was doing, the ex-Jesuit said he was listening for Tayopa. Mota felt a flash of sickness — they’d come all this way with a madman. He ordered Father Pascual to explain himself. “There’s a particular echo,” the man said. “One of the mountain Indians, who led Father Xavier to the mine, told him of it. Once we left the woman’s canyon, I could tell we were near. When you hear the echo, you’ve found the valley.”
“What does it sound like?” Mota asked, the sickness gone, replaced instead by something rarer, something like wonder.
The sackcloth bundle returned to the pack, Father Pascual pulled out his bedroll. “No, no,” he said. “I tell you, and then what am I worth? I don’t think so. I am not in the mood to have my throat slit.”
FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS they continued east while Father Pascual climbed every slope and promontory and blew his horn. Mota’s fascination quickly dulled, and in the length of these days his mind refused to wander. He monitored the dry passages of his bowels, thought of the slight, pinkish mound that remained on the side of his belly, where he had been stuck with the cactus needle. At times it throbbed and he touched it. Pressing it made the throb sharpen then disappear.
He’d been fingering the needle wound when he was thrown by his horse. As they were riding across a gully, the horse stepped on a rattlesnake. Bit, it reared, and Mota landed in the gully’s creekbed, his leg catching against a rock. For a moment he lay dazed, trapped still in his thoughts, thinking the fall had happened there. Then a sharp pain streaked up his leg.
The others were shouting, and as Mota tried to sit up El Sepo pinned his shoulders. Baltazar’s impassive face, a frowning moon, hovered above him. He was their bonesetter, and as he felt along the leg, a new, dizzying pain cut through Mota’s flesh.
“Is it bad?” Fernando asked.
“An even break,” Baltazar answered. “It could be worse.”
Mota ignored the pain as he listened. He wanted to apologize, but was too ashamed to speak. Had he not been distracted, he might have checked his horse or at least landed better. The last thing they needed was yet more delay. He stared up at the sky, blue, distant; at the gnarled finger of an oak where a jay chirped and twitched its head. He counted days on his fingers. Tamotchala, the nearest town, was over two weeks away, and it was half lean-tos and tents. Mota tried sitting up again. He wanted to stand on his leg, to punish it, to let the pain surge through it, but El Sepo kept his hold on his shoulders. All the while his horse snorted in mad bursts. Its tackle jangled as it shifted and danced. It thought it could cast off the snakebite, but it was mistaken. It would have to be killed.
Baltazar, who’d left, now returned with branches and rope. He knelt over Mota and worked the bone, twisting and pushing it into place: Mota bit and groaned as the pain flashed then settled then flashed again. Above him was the sky’s clean blue, the undisturbed jay. At last the bone was set, and Mota lay there a moment, sweat dripping from his skin, then said, “The search is everything.
Leave me with provisions and a pistol.”
“Don’t be foolish,” El Sepo said. “We can make our camp here.”
“This is already slow work,” Mota said, then jerked his head at Father Pascual. “He has to blow that cursed horn forty times a day. If you stay here, it’ll slow the search even more.”
“But we can’t just leave you,” Fernando said.
“I agree,” Baltazar said. “Besides, you need shelter.”
“Take him to the woman’s hut,” offered Father Pascual, who’d been silent the entire time. “It’s not far.”
At this the others paused. Their search had been slow, and they could make the hut by nightfall. Fernando and Baltazar quickly took up the idea, and as they talked Mota remembered the feel of the woman — beating, warm — as he’d dragged her from the cave. Since they’d left her, the image of her feral body in its thin shift had pulled on his mind.
WHEN THEY ARRIVED AT THE HUT, at dusk, the woman was not to be found. Mota was not surprised. He had assumed she would startle at the first noise of their coming. The others carried him from the mule they had balanced him on to the bed, then brought in his pack and a pair of crutches Baltazar had fashioned. They sat with him for an hour and played cards. Mota thought he should say something, but he’d never encouraged intimacy, rarely inquired of his companions’ lives beyond the trail. El Sepo suggested, for the third time, that either he or Fernando stay with him, but Mota shook his head. “The mine,” he said.