My first mistake was buying that last whiskey at the Sundown Saloon. No, I take that back. My first mistake was following Donna Lambert into that roadside honky-tonk. My second through fifth mistakes involved the whiskey.
The Sundown was five or six miles from Fry, a town that had grown up around Fort Huachuca. My military career had taken me far from southern Arizona, which was how I liked it. But soldiers from the fort drank at the Sundown, and apparently during my time away, Donna had decided that soldiers—those currently in uniform, not those who had disgraced it and spent time in the stockade—were more deserving than me of having those long, dark eyelashes batted at them.
Donna had always been generous with her attention and affection, even in high school. She had grown up since I left for the war; there were now fine, faint lines at the corners of her mouth and around her green eyes, but still, all she had to do was shake that sandy hair down or cock a hip at me and I’d have gone anywhere for her.
The fact that the place I went for her was the Sundown was, as already mentioned, the beginning of a string of bad ideas.
The place was jumping. Ranch hands and cowboys, which I had been, filled the booths on one end of the room. Soldiers, which I had also been, stood at the bar and gathered near the juke, hogging the tables around the sawdust-covered dance floor.
She spotted me as soon as I passed underneath the neon sign and through the front door. She had already made her way to the military side of the room. Since men outnumbered women by about five to one, she was surrounded. She threw a scowl my way and whispered something to the gathered soldier boys. My cheeks burned when they laughed and shot me angry glances.
Not that I blamed them. I’d have done the same, a few years before.
Hank Williams wailed on the jukebox as I crossed the room, crunching peanut shells and sawdust under my boots. I wore a snap-button shirt and dungarees, and the crewcut under my straw hat was still army short.
The soldiers’ glares warned me that if I approached Donna, they’d toss me out on my ass. Instead, I squeezed close to the bar and ordered that first shot of courage.
The smoke and the chatter of conversation and the loud music and the clinking of glasses wore on me. So did the booze. The joint was hot and sweat pooled under my arms, running down my ribs. When I downed my fourth and turned to look for Donna, the floor tilted up under me and I almost lost my balance.
I decided I needed another drink, to steady myself.
The fifth one did the job. Either I was steady or the room spun at the same speed I did. I needed to talk to Donna, and I meant to do it now.
She was dancing close with one of the soldier boys. I tapped him on the shoulder.
“Marshall,” Donna said. She sounded weary, but I suspected she was just tired of me. “This isn’t a good time.”
The soldier hadn’t let her go, so I shoved him out of the way. “There hasn’t been a good time since I got back,” I said. “Y’know, what with my mom being dead it hasn’t been that great a time for me either, but I’ve at least tried to talk to you.”
“Maybe she’s avoiding you for a reason,” the soldier said.
“Are you still here? Me and the lady are talking.”
He put a hand against my chest. “Look, Mac—”
“Marsh,” I interrupted. “Marsh Sinclair. You don’t want to mix it up with me, but if you’re fixing to, at least use my right name.”
Donna said something quiet. It sounded like an insult, but I wanted to be sure. On the jukebox Kitty Wells was crying about something, for about the fifth time since I had entered the Sundown, and I couldn’t take any more of her. I staggered to the juke and yanked the plug, then turned back to Donna. The joint had gone dead quiet.
“I can hear now, if you want to repeat that,” I said.
I started toward her, but one of the biggest, ugliest GIs in the place cut me off. “That was my song,” he said, putting a big cold hand against my chest.
I reached in my pocket. “I think I got a nickel, so keep your pants on. You can play Kitty again when I’m done talking to my girl.”
“Don’t sound like she’s your girl,” the gorilla said. “Not to hear her tell it.”
“I haven’t been your girl for years, Marsh,” Donna said.
“You wrote me, in France.”
“Twice. Once to tell you we were through.”
“I figured on account of I was at war, you didn’t really mean that.” I was taking a chance, depending on what she had told her new friends about my service record.
As it happened, she had told them plenty.
“I’m surprised you brought that up,” the big man said.
Somebody else spoke too, but by then the juke had been plugged back in and the big man had thrown a fist into my gut and another soldier had grabbed my arms and pinned them behind me, and whatever was said got lost in the confusion.
When my eyes opened again, I was flat on my back in the parking lot. Deputy Brian Wallis looked down at me. The sky behind his head was littered with stars.
“That’s a lot of stars,” I said. “In New York you can’t see that many.”
“This what you came back for, Marsh? To get the crap kicked out of you in some dive?”
“Not specifically.”
“Can you move? You need a doctor?”
“Is my head still attached to my body?”
“Looks like it.”
“Then I’m probably okay. Longer I lay here, the more everything’s starting to hurt.”
Brian hooked an arm under me to help me up. Even that much activity made pain lance through me. “Easy,” I said. I took a couple of quick breaths. “Guess they did a job on me.”
“They did. Said it was self-defense. That you pushed one of them. That true?”
I wiped blood out of my eyes. I could taste it too, and my tongue fit into a slot where a tooth used to be. My hat was on the gravel next to me, crushed almost beyond recognition. The knuckles on my right hand were skinned and sore, so I must have gotten some licks in. “How many of them said it?”
“All of ’em. Including Donna.” Brian had gone to high school with us and knew our history. Like seemingly everyone else in the state, he knew my more recent history as well.
“Then it won’t matter much what I say, will it?”
“Not if it goes to court,” he agreed. “I’m gonna have to take you in, Marsh. Let’s get going.”
He helped me to my feet. My right knee buckled and he caught me before I fell, but it made everything hurt all over again. “For fighting?” I asked.
“For drunk and disorderly, to start with.”
I tried to gauge my mental state. “I was drunk,” I said. “But if I was still drunk I wouldn’t feel this much pain, would I?”
“You smell like the inside of a bottle,” Brian said. “They tell me you were knocking ’em back pretty hard in there.”
“Guess I was, then.” I shook free of his grip and walked to his patrol car under my own power. “Your place got pillows?” The army’s guardhouse had been short on such luxuries.
“You can wad your shirt up and sleep on that,” Brian suggested.
On the way over, I made Brian stop once and let me out so I wouldn’t vomit all over his backseat. I didn’t last more than about twenty minutes in the cell before I was asleep. I hadn’t taken my shirt off, since I was sure that process—not to mention bruises I didn’t want to see—would make me puke again.
From the cell, I thought I heard a telephone ringing, but couldn’t tell if it was in a dream. A little later, Brian unlocked the door and shook me awake. “Get up, Marsh!”
Remembering where I was took a few seconds, and remembering how I got there longer than that. “Why?”
“We got an emergency call,” he said. “You know George Moffat?”
I pictured an old man, hands always shaking a little, fingers starting to hook inward like claws. He had a ready smile, a few teeth short of a full set, and eyes that had almost disappeared behind folds of skin while I was still in grade school. “He still around?”
“He was. His sister called in and said he’s wandered off by himself.”
“Is that a problem?”
“He’s not right in the head, Marsh. Senile, I reckon. She takes care of him. It’s just them two on their ranch and they don’t really work that anymore. She doesn’t know where he’s gone or when he left.”
The fog in my mind began to lift. I had always liked George Moffat. Hell, everybody liked George. He was a character, a long-time rancher with roots in the area stretching back further than just about anybody’s. He always had a penny and a wink for kids he met in town, and a grin for their parents.
He had been forgetful for years, it seemed. But I hadn’t heard that he’d gone so far downhill. It was a cool night, and if he was stumbling around in the dark, he could do himself some serious damage. Over a few days, he could die of exposure.
“Sheriff says you can join the search party,” Brian said. “We need every able-bodied man we can get looking for him.”
“My head is still pretty—”
“I’m sorry for not being clear, Marsh. Sheriff says you’ll join the search party or he’ll make sure the county prosecutor throws the book at you. You’ll be charged with drunk and disorderly, assault and battery, property damage, and whatever else they can think of.”
“Isn’t blackmail still against the law?” I asked. “Or did they change that while I was away?”
Brian didn’t think I was funny. “Your call,” he said. “You coming, or am I locking you in here by yourself?”
“You got a jacket I can use?” I asked. “And water and maybe a gun? My stuff is all in my truck.”
“We’ll swing by and pick it up,” he said. “It’s on the way to the Moffat ranch.”
As Brian promised, we drove back to the Sundown Saloon. I got my denim jacket off the truck seat, my Winchester rifle from the rack, and what was left of my hat off the ground. I punched it a couple of times and made it look more like a hat, but it’d never keep my head dry again.
About thirty people had gathered at the Moffat ranch. The women would stay with Shirley, old George’s sister, who had to be at least seventy. The men had come to search. I had the feeling most of them had not just been arrested or beaten up.
Brian took a backseat to Herman Fairhope, who was fifteen years older than us and acted as if he’d been with the sheriff’s office since the days of Wyatt Earp and the unpleasantness in Tombstone. Herman handed down search rules like they were commandments from on high and he was slightly more important than God. Stay with your team, don’t get out of sight, carry water and a firearm for protection and to signal with.
I recognized a few of the men. The local faces got older but otherwise didn’t change much. Kids grew up and left the area, and like me, sometimes came back. It was hard for ranch families to keep them around, and getting harder all the time. Then the war had disrupted families everywhere.
These were hard-bitten men with leathery, rawboned faces chapped by wind and weather. They wore denim jackets like mine or canvas barn coats, work boots, and hats that they toiled in every day. Most had arrived in trucks, some towing horse trailers. The horses were turned out into a corral; we would be searching on foot, the way Shirley believed George had gone.
By the time we got underway, the sun skinning over the Dragoon Mountains was spreading pink undertones across cloud bottoms. It hadn’t rained since mid-September and Halloween had passed, so the ground was dry and hard. Old George hadn’t left much in the way of tracks, just a few scuff marks that might have indicated he had gone east. The search party broke into groups of five and set out toward the various points of the compass. My group, which included Brian Wallis—presumably so I wouldn’t escape—headed into the rising sun.
We worked our way across grassy pastures that hadn’t been recently grazed. Pigweed grew as tall as a man, as did sunflowers, their blooms long gone. Yucca stalks erupted from spiky balls and probed the sky. Thorny mesquites dotted the landscape, their leaves darker green than the creosote bushes trooping around them. Dried-out Russian thistle had stacked up against fences and more grew wild, along with yellow-tipped rabbitbrush. The scant tracks that might or might not have been George’s had long since vanished; no path showed through the overgrown fields.
Besides Brian and me, our group consisted of Lester Crain, a beefy guy who had been a friend of my brother Dayton Jr., an older rancher named Pat Griffin, and a slender, gray-haired man who looked familiar but who I couldn’t place. We had been on the trail a couple of hours when a search plane flew over, wagging its wings at us. We watched it go by, and then Brian called a rest break. I glanced at the man I didn’t know, who sipped from one of the blanket-sided canteens the sheriff’s officers had loaned us. The sun had been beating down on us, warming the day considerably.
He caught my eye as I unscrewed the cap off my own canteen. “You’re Maude Sinclair’s boy?” he asked.
I swallowed, drew the canteen away from my lips. “Yes, sir. Marsh Sinclair.”
He covered the distance between us with his hand outstretched. “Isaac Schultheis,” he said, and instantly I knew who he was. “I’m sorry for your loss, and sorry I never got to know your mother better. She seemed like a fine woman.”
Easy for him to think so, since he didn’t know her. Isaac Schultheis owned a grocery store in Fry that she wouldn’t patronize because he was Jewish. I had met plenty of Jews in the army, and Italians, Irishmen, and Negroes too, and more in New York afterward. As long as they weren’t phonies or too full of themselves, they were all okay with me.
Truth was, my mother had a mean streak, and as she got older she stopped trying to control it. She seemed to think age gave her license to make any nasty, hurtful comment she wanted, and rarely offered anything but complaint and criticism. I didn’t come home after getting out of the stockade partly because I was embarrassed to see my friends, but mostly because I didn’t want to see her. Phone calls were bad enough. You’d think once she had told me a hundred times how disappointed my father would have been in me, that would be plenty, but she wouldn’t let up.
“Were you in the war?” Schultheis asked.
“Yes, sir.” When I didn’t elaborate, he searched my face for a minute. I could tell when he remembered what he’d heard about me, although he tried unsuccessfully to hide it. I didn’t look away until he did, opening his canteen and taking another drink.
“Guess we’d best get on with it, then,” he said.
“Right.”
My mother was right about me, was what it came down to. My father, Dayton Sinclair, had served in the first war. He never talked much about what had happened there, but it was assumed because of the kind of man he was that he had been a hero. He had been dead for nine years by the time the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.
The next day my brother Dayton—we all called him Day, and that suited my mother, who had believed that the sun rose and set for him since the instant of his birth—enlisted. Day was killed at Normandy, cut in half by Nazi machine-gun fire while storming the beach. The soldier who told us that also told us that his friends blew up the machine-gun nest, as if that made it somehow less horrible.
I supposed I could have stayed out of it, since my father and brother were both dead and my mother needed someone to help run the ranch. But she didn’t protest when I told her I was enlisting. She found some Mexican workers through the bracero program and they did a good job on the ranch, and she probably liked them better than she ever had me. Anyway, I had Nazis to kill, an older brother I idolized to avenge.
Only it didn’t turn out that way.
The army was full of fakes and creeps, guys who had never ridden a horse or milked a cow, much less pulled a stubborn calf out of its mother at four in the morning in ten-degree weather. Some thought I was a dumb farm kid, which maybe I was. I thought they were too slick for their own good.
But I got through basic at Fort Hood and made it to France a few months before the end. That was where I learned that real combat, as opposed to the idea of it, scared the hell out of me. I didn’t want to be on the front shooting Germans, but behind thick, solid walls someplace.
What ended my military career was a long night in a little French town called St. Fromond-Eglise. We moved in on the town, which had been occupied by the Nazis, through fog so thick I couldn’t see three feet past the end of my rifle. We had spread out too far, and at some point I realized I had no idea where the rest of my patrol was. I couldn’t call to them, because I didn’t know where the Krauts were. I was walking blind, feeling like my ears had been stuffed with cotton, and so scared of walking into a nest of Nazis that I could hardly swallow.
I almost bumped into the wall of an old stone farmhouse before I saw it. Feeling my way to a window, I peered inside. There didn’t seem to be anyone home. Figuring I could hide out until the fog lifted, I broke the lock on the door and went in.
It was cowardly, but I had been coming to accept the fact that I was not courageous. At least not without a few drinks inside me. In the kitchen I found a couple dozen bottles of wine. I thought maybe I could pour myself some bravery, get back out there, and find the rest of the guys.
I cracked open the first bottle.
And then the second. I didn’t stop drinking. I finished that bottle, most of another, and fell asleep at the kitchen table. When I woke up, it was almost noon.
Twelve of our men had died in a firefight during the night. A battle I had missed, sleeping right through in a drunken stupor.
Still half-drunk, I stumbled outside reeking of wine. The fact that our guys had won the fight didn’t make things any easier on me when I found them. I had been AWOL, drunk on duty, and exhibited extreme cowardice under fire. The battle I had slept through would be my last. Until my dishonorable discharge came through, I spent the rest of my enlistment in the guardhouse. My military career at an undistinguished end, I bummed around the East Coast for a few years. Three weeks after my mother’s death, the sheriff managed to track me down and I came home to figure out what to do with the ranch and all her things.
Then, of course, booze got me in trouble again, and here I was, hung over and aching from the fight, tramping through the brush looking for a lost old man. So far all I had seen was a coyote, a few field mice, and about a dozen jackrabbits. Vultures circled overhead, and every time they swooped low, someone gave a shout and ran over to see if they had found George. So far, they hadn’t.
Mid-afternoon, a sheriff’s deputy in a Jeep found us, bringing bologna sandwiches and refilling our canteens. None of the other search teams, he reported, had turned up anything. The plane had flown over the whole region, farther than even a healthy man could walk, much less one as old as George, without success. We took twenty minutes to eat the sandwiches, then continued our search.
We had almost reached the San Pedro River when the sun went down. The cottonwoods lining the riverbanks had lost most of their leaves, but a few stragglers still clung, yellow and faded. We approached with the sunset at our backs, passing north of the ruins of the old Spanish fort called Presidio Santa Cruz de Terranate. It had only been occupied for five years before the Apaches drove them away, a century before the little town on the river’s far side, Contention City, had been established.
“We’re going to camp at Contention,” Brian Wallis informed us. “Supplies should already have been dropped off there, and we’ll continue the search come daylight.”
“Aw, Brian,” Les Crain grouched. “I got stuff to do.”
“We all do,” Brian said. “That’s why we asked everybody to agree before starting out that they’d be in on this until the end.”
“I didn’t think it’d go overnight. How could that old man cover so much territory?”
“Sheriff’s called for more searchers and airplanes,” Brian said. “Tomorrow I’m sure we’ll find him, but for tonight, unless you want to walk back by yourself, you’re stuck with us.”
Les’s gaze bore into me. “Stuck is right,” he said.
It wasn’t hard to figure out what he meant. He had been one of Day’s best friends. The fact that I had come home instead of Day had upset my mother tremendously, and she wasn’t alone in that regard.
In the half-light of dusk, we scrambled down the west bank and forded the river, which was only about eighteen inches deep here. Contention City rose on the east bank—what was left of it, anyway.
The town had been built as a mill site for Tombstone. Tombstone had miners and money but no wood or water, and Contention City had both, as did Fairbank and Charleston to the south. All were empty now, mostly forgotten. Ghost towns.
Contention City had been constructed mostly of local stone and adobe, with some wooden walls and floors and ceiling timbers. Little remained except a few walls, most half-obscured by mesquite. A former mill, where ore from Tombstone’s mines had been crushed, was the tallest remnant. Contention City also had the nearest train depot to Tombstone, and part of that was still standing as well.
Sure enough, someone had dropped off bedrolls and tarps, cooking gear, and some grub for dinner. Brian and Pat Griffin set to clearing a fire ring and starting a fire with downed branches. It turned out that Pat had brought a couple bottles of tequila in a knapsack he’d been toting all day, and before dinner was even cooked, people started in on one of those. Every inch of me ached, so I lowered myself gently onto a carpet of cottonwood leaves and waited for the bottle.
When I reached for it, Brian Wallis shot me a look that could have frozen the flames. I passed the bottle to Isaac, who took a swallow and handed it off. “His family lived in Contention, didn’t they?” he asked. “George Moffat’s?”
That sounded right, and I said so. I must have looked surprised that he would know.
“I’ve made kind of a hobby of local history,” he said. “It’s a fascinating region, and I like to know about the place that I live in.”
“I think there was some old story about the Moffats in those days,” I said, but the details were lost to me.
“There was an altercation of some kind,” Isaac said. “One of the participants was a Moffat, I’m sure of it. Just give me a few moments.” The bottle made it back around to me. I skipped it. Once again, Isaac took just enough to wet his throat. After his every swallow, Lester Crain stared daggers at me, folding thick arms across his chest.
“It involved a big cat,” Isaac said. His eyes were closed, like he was visualizing a page of a book he had read. “A jaguar. A white jaguar! That’s what it was.”
“Never heard of such a thing,” Pat Griffin said.
“Of course not,” Isaac replied. “This is a story, and stories have to include things that aren’t commonplace. That’s the whole point. Anyway, as I remember it, this Moffat fellow was hunting outside of town. He said the white jaguar had been attacking local livestock, and he shot it. When he returned with the carcass, townsfolk worried. To the Apaches, they said, the white jaguar was sacred, and they worried about what might happen when word spread that one of their own had killed it. The Apaches were still a real threat, given that Geronimo didn’t finally surrender until 1886. The incident in Contention City would have been a couple of years before that, maybe eighty-two or eighty-three.”
“What happened? Was there an Apache attack?” I asked.
“As I understand it, the town suffered a rash of bad luck. Fires, accidents, a mill building collapsed. Finally, something especially tragic happened…I think the drowning of a young boy in the river. That was the spark that set things off. Guns came into play. Someone took a shot at one of the Moffats. Apparently a Moffat fired back, and the battle was on.” He offered a wan smile. “The mechanics of gunfights are, I’m afraid, outside my area of expertise. Let’s just say bullets flew and a fire started, some say coming down the hill from the old presidio. When it was all over, dozens were dead and much of Contention City was destroyed. It was the beginning of the end for this place.”
The sun had gone down, the only light now coming from the fire pit. Brian passed out bottles of Coke and plates of cold carne asada and warmed beans, and conversation died while we wolfed down our dinners. When we were done, Brian poured some camp coffee he had brewed and Pat opened his second bottle.
They had barely touched it—I was sticking with coffee—when Lester Crain started in on me.
“You said the search party would be all men, Brian,” he said, staring straight at me. “Ain’t how it looks from here.”
“What are you…oh, let it go, Les,” Brian said.
“Let it go? His brother was the only one in that family worth a damn, and yet he’s the one sittin’ here. How’m I supposed to let that go?”
“Lester,” I said. “I miss Day too, you know. If I could bring him back—”
He glared at me, his jaw thrust aggressively in my direction. “Funny, I thought this was how you wanted it. You inheriting the whole ranch, not having to share anything.”
“Guess you don’t know me that well, do you?”
“Know as much as I want to. I know you’re a coward, a worthless—”
“That’s enough, Les!” Brian snapped.
From my seat I could see up the slope of the opposite riverbank, toward the old Spanish fort. A three-quarter moon didn’t do much more than paint the leaves of the mesquite and other plants with a silvery brush, but I thought I saw light flickering near the ruins. “Look!” I said.
“What is it?” Isaac asked.
“A light, up on the hill.”
Everybody watched, but it didn’t recur. After a minute, people began grumbling and hitting the bottle again.
“I’m going to take a look,” I said. Before anyone could protest, I stormed away from the campsite, across the cool, muddy river, and started up the far side. I was sure I had seen something. And I wanted to get away from Les before he started a fight. I hadn’t volunteered to investigate the mystery light because I was some kind of hero, I just didn’t want another beating.
Away from the fire and with my legs soaked, the night’s chill took on a bite. I drew leather gloves from my jacket pockets and pulled them on. Thorns snagged my clothes as I climbed the slope, but I ignored them and kept going.
The crumbled adobe walls of the presidio, most less than four feet tall, made a flat pattern among acres of mesquite, spectral in the moonlight. I paused at the edge of the ruins, listening.
There came another flicker of yellow light, like distant lightning through thick clouds. In that instant of illumination I saw a lean figure. “Hello!” I called, trying to keep my voice strong. “Who’s there?”
“You best get outta here!” a male voice responded. It was thin, barely carrying across the short distance. An old man’s voice. “Might already be too late.”
Goose bumps raised the hair on my neck. “Mr. Moffat? Is that you? It’s Marsh Sinclair.”
“Young Marsh. Seems like just last week I was pullin’ pennies outta your ears.”
I started weaving my way through the brush and adobe walls. “That’s right. You okay, Mr. Moffat? You’re not hurt?”
“I’m fine.”
“There’s a search party out looking for you. They’ve gone every which way. Flying airplanes over and everything. There’s a few of us across the river, in Contention City.”
“Never meant for anything like that,” he said. I could see him now, headed toward me. He walked with his usual lanky stride, his steps shorter than they had once been, but his head held high. One sleeve of his shirt was torn almost completely off and his pants legs hung in ribbons around his boots. He gripped a flashlight that glowed weakly, then blinked out, no doubt the source of the flickering light.
“What did you mean, too late?” I asked, half afraid of the answer.
“Let’s get your friends out of there,” he said. It didn’t tell me much, but the urgency he said it with was convincing.
On the way down the steep slope from the plateau, me holding his arm much of the time to help his balance, he started telling me what he had come for. “You know my people helped found Contention, right?”
“I’ve heard that,” I said.
“Well, it’s so. Only there’s been a story goin’ around…a lie, I believe, and I wanted to put it straight while I still could. My mind ain’t what it once was, maybe you heard.”
“I heard you were having some trouble remembering.”
“That’s the nice way to say it. I’m gettin’ old and forgetful, and reckon the time I got left is short. I wanted to find a way to prove the lie before I’m gone, even if it’s only to myself. To witnesses would’ve been better, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that.” He allowed himself a dry chuckle. “Course, we don’t get you and your friends away from here, I might have more witnesses ’n I counted on.”
“What do you think’s going to happen?” I asked him. We had just started across the river. My legs were still cold and damp from crossing it the last time.
Before he could answer, a gunshot sounded from the direction of the camp and a bullet whipped through branches above us. I swore and pushed George down in the river. I had left my rifle back at the camp.
“It’s begun,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
“What has?” I asked. But when I raised my head and looked toward the town, I knew what he meant.
The crumbled buildings still stood where they had been, faintly limned by moonlight. But around them, towering above them in some cases, were the ghostly images of those buildings as they had been in the town’s prime. Tall and proud, their doors and windows and roofs intact. People—not real ones, but apparitions—darted about. Through the people and the buildings, the trees and tangled brush remained visible.
I could hear—faintly, as if from far away—a steady pounding noise. I realized it had to be the town’s stamp mills, each with twelve to fifteen stamps driving down a hundred times a minute, crushing ore. Over that were alarmed voices and gunfire. The smells of wood smoke and gunpowder tinged the air.
“I have to get in there,” George said. He lurched up and started toward the bank. I grabbed him but caught his bare arm, slick with river water, and it slid from my grasp. He splashed through the last few feet of water, then through the reeds at river’s edge and into Contention City.
“Mr. Moffat!” I called. “I don’t think—”
He was barely aware of me. The specters of Contention City’s populace were shooting at each other from behind cover. Bullets whizzed past us—ghost bullets, I hoped, that couldn’t do any real damage. But I could also see my fellow searchers, and they had responded by drawing their own weapons, which could kill.
“I gave almost ever cent I had to this ancient bruja down Sonora way for this spell,” he said. He knew I was there after all.
“Bruja?” I repeated. “Spell?”
He tried to look in every direction at once, like a kid at his first carnival. “A witch. She said it’d only work one time, and then only because we come from here.” He held my gaze for a second. “Something like that. Her English was about as bad as my Spanish, so I missed a lot of it.”
Three men hurtled down the street, right toward us, wearing old West garb and carrying rifles. They could have stepped off a movie screen. I grabbed Moffat’s arm, tried to yank him out of the way, but I was too late. One of them passed right through Moffat, firing on the run.
“What’s going on, Mr. Moffat?” I demanded. Another shot from the camp came our way—maybe someone responding to what he thought was a threat. Or maybe not—Les Crain stood behind the fire with his rifle near his shoulder. I tried to steer George that way, figuring Les wouldn’t shoot him. “Look!” I shouted. “I found him!”
But even though the noise of old Contention City was muffled, there was enough of it that those at our campsite couldn’t hear me. I didn’t know for sure if any had even seen us.
George twisted out of my hands again. “I gotta see,” he said. He walked fast for an old man who’d been exposed to the elements for almost twenty-four hours, as if the success of his “spell” had given him renewed energy.
“See what?”
George ducked behind a stone wall without answering. I followed, figuring it would offer cover from the search party’s guns.
He strode up the hill, past that wall and the house that it had once been a part of. Excited voices, no louder than if they came over telephone lines, sounded behind us, and when I glanced back I could see through two men. From farther up the hill, a cowboy drew a bead on one of them with a revolver. He fired. I didn’t bother dodging his shot. The ghostly bullet slammed into me with the force of a thrown rock, passing through my arm and out the other side, spinning me around and bouncing me off the wall.
“Ahhh!” I cried. “That hurt!”
Down the hill, the round had struck one of the men behind us, and he fell to the ground with blood fountaining up from his throat. “I thought these were just ghosts or something.”
“Something like that, I think,” George said. He looked as clear-eyed and sharp as he ever had. “Come on, we have to hurry.”
The bullet had torn my sleeve and skin, but it hadn’t pierced all the way through—that had been part of the whole surreal illusion. I was bleeding just the same. I figured that since sights and sounds were only partly there, a little of their physical presence was as well.
Which might mean that a close range shot could be fatal.
“I don’t know where you’re going, Mr. Moffat,” I said. “But be careful!”
George nodded offhandedly, like he’d barely heard me, and continued up the hill past the cowboy. Gripping my wounded arm, I trailed behind him.
George stopped at an intersection, looking at another house, stone below but with wooden walls above the first three or four feet. There was a man in the doorway, hopping on one foot while he tugged on a boot. Behind him, watching through fearful eyes, were a woman and a boy of seven or eight.
“I knew it,” George said, watching as the man grabbed a rifle from behind the door. “It’s just like he always said, he was inside when the shootin’ started. It weren’t him.”
“Who’s that?”
“My pa. That youngster’s me.” He said it as casually as if he’d been identifying cattle. That one’s a Red Brangus. Over there, that’s a Hereford. But then, it was something he had expected to see, maybe for a long time.
“What are we looking at here, Mr. Moffat?” I asked him. “What’s going on?”
“This is the gunfight that got my ma and pa just about rode out of town on a rail. Everybody blamed him for startin’ it, but you can see for yourself it was already goin’ on by the time he got out the house.”
“That’s the way it looks, all right. But what—”
George turned away from the spectacle of his own father—less than half the age the son was right now—striding down the road to get involved in the shooting, and met my gaze. “What’s it prove? Maybe nothin’ to anyone but me. As long as my folks lived, they told me this was how it was. But to everyone else in Contention City, and most of the people in this part of the country, the whole deal—the fight, the fire, all of it, was on my pa’s head. Sixty-four people died that day, couple dozen houses burned, and everybody says Contention City never recovered from it.”
“So you wanted to see the truth for yourself.”
Gunshots punctuated our conversation—some of them echoes from the past, others loud and close, the search party reacting to an assault they couldn’t understand. “Now that you’ve seen, is there some way to end it?” I asked him. “Someone’s like to get hurt.”
George blinked a couple of times, as if it had never occurred to him. “I don’t rightly know.”
Another level of sound joined the racket that already echoed between the hills hemming in the river. More gunshots, but from farther away, accompanied by something else.
“Apache,” George said, at the same time that I realized what it had to be.
“But they never attacked Contention, did they?”
“Nope. Did Santa Cruz, though.”
He was right. The Spanish force there had been driven away by persistent Apache raids. Isaac Schultheis had claimed that the night of the big battle in Contention City, flames had swept down on the town from the presidio, abandoned for more than a hundred years by then.
None of it made sense, but it all connected in a nightmarish way that carried its own logic. Something had started in the presidio, then spread to Contention City when that became the next white settlement in the immediate area.
“If it’s gonna be stopped,” George said, “it’ll be there.”
We were relatively protected at our corner, with walls, real and half-real, beside us. The last thing I wanted was to leave that safety and go back up the hill, through a ghostly Apache raid and into a Spanish fort where the denizens were shooting at everything that moved.
But if we didn’t stop it, would it just keep going? Would the fire start again, racing through the dry brush and trees, maybe spreading to surrounding ranches and homes?
No way to know. But I hadn’t started it, and I was safe right where I was.
“You comin’?” George didn’t wait for an answer. He started back down the hill, toward the river. Toward where the ghostly bullets flew with greater frequency.
Shy of any better options, I followed.
My nightmare was complete. Another couple of slugs stung me, and I saw some hit George, staggering him. Acrid gray smoke swirled around us, thick as fog, blotting out most of the spectral buildings. George kept going so I did too, walking unarmed on unsteady legs into the thick of war. All around us people were dead or dying, and still the lead flew. I could differentiate the solid crack of real guns from the muffled thuds of ghostly ones and the booming of muskets on the hill.
We reached the river and splashed across. George walked with a determined stride, blood trickling from a gash on his temple. I trailed behind him like he was some sort of good luck charm and could keep me from being killed. As we climbed the hill, Apache warriors ran through us, some on horseback. I could feel the impacts, like someone bumping into me, hard but not too painful. The bullets hurt worse, stinging like sharp stones.
Higher up, musket balls crashed through the brush around us. One hit my leg, almost knocking me down. George pressed on. I stayed with him.
Flames began spreading down the hill toward us, warm as the desert in summer but not scorchingly hot. But as we hiked through them, I noticed fire igniting the scrub—the real scrub—in spots. If there was a way to end this, we had to find it soon.
It was harder than ever to know what was real and what was the result of George’s spell. Smoke and noise and pain and fear mingled in my head until each step was harder to take than the last. Somehow we made it to the fort’s walls (full height now, not the few inches or couple of feet they usually were, but we could step through the higher part). Spanish soldiers ran about, firing muskets over the walls. Apaches rained bullets and arrows down on them.
As if drawn toward it, George led me to an open plaza. The soldiers were at the walls; here there were only a few women and some frightened children. They didn’t seem to see us. Horribly, in the center of the plaza was what looked like an ancient Apache man lashed to an upright pole, white stringy hair covering his face. He was naked, his bare chest crisscrossed with the marks of a whip.
Worse, his hands and bare feet weren’t those of a man, but of a big, pale-furred cat. My gut lurched.
A young Spanish girl looked at us, her hair dark, her eyes wide and liquid. “Help him,” she said, her English as clear as mine. “Free him.”
George nodded once, as if he’d been expecting her command, and went to work. I joined him, trying to untie the man’s bonds. They were surprisingly solid in my trembling hands, although his form was as ghostly as any of the others. The girl helped us loosen the ropes from his ankles. As we worked, the old man changed, sleek white fur growing thick on his arms and back, then vanishing, then flickering between flesh and fur as fast as I could blink. He let out a long, low growl.
Finally, we had him untied. One of the women saw us then and started to scream. As the old Apache fell forward, he changed again, transforming into the white jaguar that I’d somehow known he must be. He looked at us each in turn, then bounded away. Soldiers came running, summoned by the screams of the women.
The little girl smiled at us as if we had done her a favor.
This was the end, I knew. When those soldiers came into close range and fired those big musket balls at us, one after another, they would kill us. We were in the middle of their fort, and they had turned their attention from the Apache attack to us.
The first soldiers into the plaza aimed their weapons, pulled the triggers—
—but even as they did, they became less material, more ghostlike. Musket balls flying toward us seemed to slow and stall in midair.
Then they were gone: soldiers, structures, muskets, and all. The ruins were as I remembered them, low mud walls worn almost to nothing. The last thing to vanish was the girl, her wide smile beaming at us until she too had faded away.
Elated whoops from Contention City split the sudden silence. “Come on, Mr. Moffat,” I said. “They’ll want to see you.”
“That girl back there,” George said on the way down. “The Spanish one?”
“The one who spoke English?”
“Sounded like Spanish to me,” he said, “but I knew what she meant. Anyhow, the strangest thing—you remember I told you about that bruja, in Sonora, about as old as Moses.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d swear, that girl had her eyes. And more teeth, but the same dang smile.”
“You think she was an ancestor of the bruja’s? That had to have happened in the 1770s, right?”
“We’ve seen a lot of crazy things tonight, Marsh. Crazier’n I’ll ever see again, for sure. But I’d swear that was the same person.”
Descending toward the river, the sharp tang of burnt brush in my nose, aching from a dozen ghost-bullets, I didn’t doubt him a bit. I didn’t know what it all meant, and he probably didn’t either.
But I knew that jaguar had given us each a blessing. For the girl, a long life and incredible powers. For George, answers to questions that had plagued him all his life, and the chance to put right his father’s mistake. And for me, a realization. I could wait around forever hoping to feel brave, but courage wasn’t some separate sensation that would well up inside me like fear or hope. It was simply understanding what had to be done, and doing it.
We had survived the night and we had borne witness. As if thinking the same thing, George offered me a weary smile. If I lived long enough, maybe I could become half the man he was.
It was a goal to work toward, anyway.