up near Pikes Peak. Lord only knows who or what they pray to after dark. But in daylight they’re taken for regular cattle folk with some Indian blood. Meanwhile nobody makes ‘em fill out forms or sends the cavalry after them every time they order a beer after a hard day in the saddle.”
She said, “I could never live like a pindah lickoyee! Could you learn to live like a N’de if things were different and we were the ones who had won?”
Longarm shrugged. “I’d have to, wouldn’t I? Given the choice of living as a grown man with longer hair and a different supper menu, or being kept as a sort of combination charity ward and museum exhibit, unless I aimed to run off and get shot up by the Fourth Na-dene Cav, I reckon I’d as soon adjust enough to get by.”
Then he said, “It’s up to you. I picked my race with more care before I let myself be born. Meanwhile we’d best get off the range of your superior kith and kin before they kill us both in some fine old traditional way you’d never want them to forsake.”
She protested she didn’t approve of all the customs of her own kind. Just the nicer beliefs, like Changing Woman, White-Shell Woman, or Rainbow Boy. She said she’d never be able to give up all her N’de ways.
Longarm said, “Let’s ride. I’ll teach you another way my own kind follow behind Queen Victoria’s back. I reckon we could call it the Hypocrisy Way. Mighty strong medicine a heap of our own gals find mighty useful. I’m sure a paid-up witch could learn it in no time.”
Folks who didn’t know many Mexicans with steady jobs tended to feel they were lazy because they took that long siesta in the heat of a sunny afternoon. Longarm knew they made up for La Siesta with a shorter spell of sleep at night. So he wasn’t surprised when they rode down on a Mexican quartet stringing bobwire by the dawn’s most early light. Their English-speaking boss didn’t seem too delighted by the sight of an armed Anglo and obvious Apache coming at him off the Jicarilla reserve. But he’d been raised by a mama of quality. So he said, “Buendias. We are not stringing this drift wire too close to the reservation line, one hopes?”
Longarm agreed they were at least a couple of furlongs east of the line, and explained they were looking for a spread that branded with either an inverted sombero or a cabeza de vaca chongo.
The boss looked relieved, and said they’d guessed right with the cow-skull brand. He said they were looking for the Alvera spread, and gave them simple directions that made Longarm cuss under his breath. For while only a total shit would abandon such a sweet pal on foot with so far to walk, getting Kinipai to her literally distant kin was going to cost him almost a full day out of his way.
But pissing and moaning about that wasn’t going to get them there any quicker, so he thanked the fence crew and rode on. Longarm had no call to ask them why they were stringing wire on public land. It would have only been rude to talk about reasons why no vaquero wanted to hunt for stray Mexican stock on Apache range with talk of an Apache uprising in the air.
Knowing the going would be easier up the east bank of the river because there’d be fewer side branches, they worked their way down to the fairly broad but mighty shallow Rio Chama to ford it.
Chama meant something like “brushwood” in Spanish, and Anglo settlers who liked to sound smart were quick to assume El Rio Chama had gotten such a name for the cottonwood, willow, and such along its floodplain. But in point of fact an ancient Spanish explorer named Francisco Chamuscado could have just as easily had that side branch of El Rio Grande named after his fool self. Greenhorns were always leaping to hasty conclusions about the West. That was why they were called greenhorns. After a dozen or more years out this way Longarm wasn’t so certain he knew everything.
Once on the coach road up the far side, they had to ride the way they’d just come, inside the reservation line. Kinipai said she was sorry she hadn’t known her kinswoman had settled that far north. He let her make it up to him during a trail break, off the trail in some tall rabbitbrush.
You saw far more rabbitbrush and wild mustard than bunchgrass and sage when riding up a valley grazed by beef stock instead of the deer the Jicarilla preferred to eat. As the alien but lush golden mustard gave way to more greasewood and tumbleweed, Longarm knew they were within easy goatherding of some settlement. The Indian gal thought it was mighty spooky to see that much bare dust at that time of year.
They found the small but thriving trail town of Vado Seguro to be a cattle ford and market town used by both Anglo and Mexican settlers off the surrounding spreads. There were parts of Texas where you might see one breed refusing to drink with the other. But Anglos and Mexicans got along better in New Mexico Territory, having far more in common with each other than with the considerable Indian population, which ranged from hostile through barely civil, with none of them anxious to dance with your gal or vice versa.
Longarm didn’t need the odd looks Kinipai was attracting as they rode in to inspire him to rein in near the market and buy her a frilly cotton blouse, a wraparound skirt of floral-print calico, and a pair of woven-leather zapatas to replace the moccasin boots she’d been stripped of. Her tough brown feet had about recovered from those ant bites by this time, and she seemed delighted as the elderly Mexican gal they’d bought them from showed her how to lace the zapatas to her trim ankles.
Longarm also bought her a small gilt cross on a fake golden chain. He wasn’t just being a sport. Lots of folks, Anglo or Mexican, thought you could tell a Mex senorita of Indian blood from a plain old Indian by such tokens of La Santa Fe. Few of them knew how many Indians used the same cross as a medicine symbol, usually representing a star or the four mystical directions.
Kinipai had learned enough about outsider ways while learning English at a mission school she’d never wanted to go to, to grasp the symbolism of a cross with one leg a tad longer. She fussed at him while they were enjoying a warm sit-down meal of chili con carne and tamales near the livery, where he’d paid some kids to curry and water their ponies while they cooled off and ate some genuine oats as reward for a job half-done.
Seated at the blue-painted table under an awning, Kinipai said she could see their colored waiter took her for a fairly prosperous Mexican gal with new shoes. But she said it made her feel funny, as if she was telling her own kind they weren’t good enough to hang about with anymore.
He washed down some lava-stuffed tamale with strong black coffee and quietly observed, “It was them who decided you weren’t the kind of gal they wanted blessing them the old-timey way, Kinipai. We live in changing times, as Miss Changing Woman warned you long ago. You can’t go back to the Dulce Agency. They drummed you out of your old regiment under a sentence of death. It’s as simple as that.”
She protested, “This food tastes funny. These fine clothes you just bought me are pretty, pretty, but they are not the sort of clothes I am used to wearing, and I feel as if I am wearing my way-chanting mask, even though my face is naked, naked!”
