She was down, but before I could get to her, a figure came running toward me, covered in snow, a rifle pointed at my chest. The fur rim on the hood of the parka was coated with white, and the face within the hood was in darkness. Instinctively I backed up, my hands in the air, until I was standing behind the cart again. The shooter followed. “Get down on the ground,” he grunted.
I knew that voice!
He pushed me hard, shoving me face-first into the snow. He placed the tip of the rifle barrel on the bare skin at the back of my neck, under my hat. “Where is La Arca?” he demanded.
“I don’t have it,” I choked, my mouth filling with snow as he pressed me down into a drift with the rifle.
“You have it!” he yelled, pushing the barrel so violently into my neck that it snapped forward and my face hit hard against the ground, buried in the mound of white crystals beneath me. I felt a rent open on the inside of my mouth, and blood pooled behind my lower lip. He let up pressure with the rifle barrel and I raised my head and gasped for air.
“Where is it?”
I took another breath. “I’m telling the truth. I don’t have it.”
I felt his hand seize me by the back of my coat and pull me up fast, turning me toward him, like a puppet. The rifle barrel found the ledge of my chin and pushed hard against my jawbone, forcing my head back. His hood had fallen away from his face a little. His brows were tipped with ice crystals, and his eyes were like gleaming black glass. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“No.” I spat, tasting blood.
He laughed, threw his head back. “I should have known!” He shook his head back and forth, still laughing.
I strained to keep my chin above the rifle barrel, edging almost imperceptibly to one side. He pulled the nose of the gun away. I slumped a little in relief and used this motion to block my left hand with my body, wishing it could have been my right. The shooter tilted his head to one side, his face suddenly sober again. “I’ll find it. And when I find it, I’ll destroy it, just like I destroyed that morada back there! You’re going to die now!” he screamed.
I grabbed the ax with my left hand just as he released my coat. He shoved my chest hard, pushing me backward to the ground. He raised the rifle and readied to shoot.
As I fell, I drew back the ax and flung it as hard as I could. But La Muerte had not surrendered her hatchet to me. Instead, she flew with it-the upper half of her anyway. In the split second between the time I hurled the weapon and the moment it struck, I saw my assailant’s startled look of incredulous fear as the hideous face of Death came speeding toward him, with her irregular, oversized human teeth and shining, milky white eyes, her stream of long, black hair sailing behind her splintered ribs like a veil. The blow knocked him off balance and caused him to turn and then lurch into a sidestep. The ax had hit hard, but it had barely penetrated his parka. He fought to regain his balance and raised the rifle again, backing up to take aim.
Behind him, in the still-tilted cart, silent as the snow, Manny rose like an angel onto his one good leg, his arms extended to the sides, like wings, balancing him. He was covered completely in white and looked like a great, hovering bird. Having gained his balance, he raised up the huge crucifix, which he held in his right hand, moved the left hand to grasp it also, and drove the splintered end of it down into the back of Andy Vincent.
The two then tumbled forward toward me in a kind of slow-motion swoop. I scrambled to the left to avoid being crushed, and their fall to the earth made a soft whoomp. I hurried to Manny, who had slid to one side as he fell. I rolled him onto his back and put my hands on either side of his face. His eyes looked at me with a kind of strange joy. “I was supposed to watch over you,” he said. “I was your ángel.”
“I know. Don’t talk!” I begged him. I moved to tighten his tourniquet, the muffler now completely saturated with blood and stiff with ice crystals.
“Señorita,” he said, “you cannot keep something alive that is meant to die.”
I looked at him. “There’s help coming,” I pleaded. “Just hold on! I heard an engine on the road! Someone’s coming!”
His face collapsed in my hands.
“Manny.” I patted his cheek fervently, as if to revive him. “Manny!” I screamed. I felt his neck for a pulse, but his heart was silent.
“Jamaica!” a voice yelled from somewhere behind me. “Jamaica, are you all right?” It was coming closer.
I stood up. A Forest Service truck sat humming less than a hundred feet away, its yellow headlights like beacons of gold through which snow was driving into the clean white field ahead. The truck’s wipers beat a dull rhythm as they struggled under the weight of thick globs of ice. A familiar hat, with patches of white already beginning to accumulate on its brown brim, tilted into the driving blizzard as its wearer hurried toward me, the face beneath the hat obscured.
I turned back to Manny, who was disappearing into the snow. The figure of Christ had fallen from the crucifix and landed facedown on his chest. Beside him, a white covered mound that had once been Andy Vincent was topped with a tilted cross.
I ran to Redhead, who was lying on her side on the ground, blood draining from a hole in the front of her chest. Her eye was looking at me-a polished black globe full of fear and love. Her breathing was fast and rasped with the sound of fluid. She tried to lift her head as I came to her and threw myself onto her shoulder, my arms over her neck and head. Her neck quivered, and she tried to paw once. I lay there sobbing into her cheek as she drew her last warm, watery breath and exhaled with a deep, releasing sigh.
“Redhead!” I screamed. “No, no, nooooo!”
Hands clutched my arms and tried to pull me from her. I turned and saw Kerry’s face beneath a hat brim covered with snow. “Come on, Jamaica. We’ve got to get out of here while we can.”
I turned back to Redhead and buried my face in her mane. “I can’t leave her! I can’t leave her here!”
“Come on, Jamaica,” he said, pulling me upright. “She’s gone.”
36
There was almost no traffic on the roads of Taos on the morning of Good Friday. Snow covered the tops of buildings and cars and turned shrubs into white balls of soft cotton. The trees were heavy and silent in their thick, white coats and stood like sentient pillars, supporting the close ceiling of clouds. It was as if the whole world had fallen asleep under a blanket of white and lay there still as a child.
Kerry and I had retrieved La Arca from the lockbox at the ranger station. I held it to me and looked around before we went inside his apartment. There was not another soul in sight.
I set the bundle on the table, and Kerry helped me off with my coat. My face hurt from being roasted by fire, then frostbitten in the blizzard. A swollen knot inside my mouth just beneath my lower lip throbbed painfully. And my throat was bruised where Andy had shoved the rifle barrel against my jawbone. I was dehydrated, my lips were cracked from chapping, my back ached from pushing Manny across the morada. My whole body hurt.