Leslie Silko - Gardens in the Dunes

Suddenly Sister Salt saw fire — flames engulfed all the tents. Not only were the gambling tents and laundry and brewery destroyed; the tents the twins and Sister Salt lived in went up in oily black smoke. Fortunately Maytha and Vedna had already moved out of the tent and kept their bundles of belongings with them that terrible night.

Was the fire an accident, or deliberate? The crowd had been drinking beer since early afternoon, and the workers were unhappy about overtime work without pay. By the time the military police were summoned, the rioters ran up the ridge to the wagon town and robbed and looted until the military police fired warning shots to disperse the crowd.

The fires consumed the tent canvas and left only the smoldering skeleton of chairs, oak kegs, and planks that served for poker and dice tables. Up on the ridge a number of wagons burned and a Prescott businessman was accidentally shot, but no one was killed, and the commotion didn’t end until sunup.

At daybreak, the first question from Wylie was, where in the tents was the money kept? He passed Big Candy his silver brandy flask from the saddle. The cash boxes were fireproof, but they emptied the flask waiting for the fires to burn out and the ashes to cool off enough to search the smoldering debris.

Big Candy used the smoking remains of the gaming tables to orient himself in the ashes. With a shovel he cleared away the hot coals to the scorched sand and struck metal; the box itself was still chained to the smoking wood stub of a table leg, but the lid of seared metal was wide open; a piece of baling wire used to pick the lock was still stuck in the keyhole. Candy felt light-headed and nauseous when he saw the wire in the lock; he ran with a shovel to dig up the cash boxes from the other tents.

Wylie found him exhausted and brooding in the shattered bottle glass and smoldering remains of beer barrels, the melted remains of an open cash box at his feet. Neither man spoke at first. Wylie commented whoever robbed them knew the layout. Then Candy inhaled sharply — the dream about the exposed open coffin shaped like a safe! That had been a warning; instantly the sweat on his brow felt icy; Candy left Wylie standing there without a word and took off. He ran fast for a man his size; the white sand of the path reflected the dawn light but the willows remained in deep shadows. Candy prayed as he ran: Let the floor safe be buried deep enough!

The deep shade of the big cottonwood hid the truth until he stood on the pile of damp sand above the hole where the floor safe lay, its thick lead door wide open, empty. Candy tried to swallow but his throat was dry; he coughed until tears filled his eyes. He cried out in fury at the top of his voice; off in the hills above the river, coyotes howled in reply. Dog paw prints were everywhere in the sand around the base of the cottonwood tree, and he found one set of small wide shoe prints but no others. So the thief was that Mexican dog circus Gypsy! He knew he could catch her.

Wylie let him take his good walking horse. He took a canteen but no food — he was too upset to eat anyway. He rode south for hours searching for tracks in the sand along the river until he began to feel the horse tire. They’d lost all their savings — he didn’t want to kill Wylie’s favorite horse too. There were no traces of the dog circus woman; she might have gone any direction. He leaned away from the horse to vomit until he had dry heaves. He got off and walked to spare the horse; it was late afternoon before he got back to the ruined camp.

Big Candy was half crazy, frantic to recover the money. Sister Salt could tell by the expression in his eyes he blamed her and the twins because they were friendly with the woman. She pointed out she had lost everything too, but Big Candy’s face was rigid with anger. He didn’t look at her directly and he didn’t glance down at the baby, whose face was getting fat and cute now. At that moment he wasn’t the man she knew; he was someone different. He wanted to know what she knew about the dog circus woman and where she might have gone from here. When she shrugged, he looked as if he wanted to strike her but managed to hold his temper.

Sister told him what she knew about the uprising in Mexico, and about the crippled dog trained to sniff out cash. But she didn’t tell him Delena bragged about how much the dog circus would make for her that night. Sister remembered vividly the amused expression on Delena’s face as she said, “A dog circus like this can make more money than you might think.”

“How’s that?” Maytha had asked, and Delena only smiled and nodded slowly; just wait and see, she told them. Now they all saw but it was too late.

♦ ♦ ♦

That floor safe was so full of cash and coins, the money-sniffer dog easily located the safe’s burial spot days before the finale. The most difficult part of the operation had been to learn the safe’s combination. Though she disliked high places, she climbed the cottonwood tree above the buried floor safe to wait in the dark for the bobbing light of Candy’s lantern. Candy had been full of the boss man’s brandy by the time he brought the sacks of the day’s receipts to the safe; often he was singing and talked to himself. But the hours watching from the treetop paid off because each night she listened intently and counted the clicks of the safe’s dial. The sand stuck in the dial and some nights he had difficulty getting the safe open, and he’d get impatient and repeat some of the numbers out loud as he turned the dial again. Once she knew how to open the safe, she might have emptied it any night and fled; but she wanted to make a clean sweep.

What a night it had been! The dogs were amazing and did everything she taught them. That audience got their money’s worth all right! The banknotes, silver, and gold locked up in the airless darkness deserved to be set free, to go south where it was needed, where it would be circulated — where the little gold pieces and $5 bills would get free air and sunshine!

She dared not follow the river because searchers would go that way; so she and the dogs headed for the hills toward the southwest, in the direction of the old gardens Sister Salt used to talk about. She packed each dog with a portion of the cash and coins, but the dogs’ packs carried only water and no food, to reduce the weight of the load. She went south, along game trails in the foothills far from the river, to create a hardship for her pursuers’ thirsty horses.

She memorized the creeks and rivers from confiscated army maps before she left on her mission. In a sandy floodplain she used yucca to wipe away their tracks before she and the dogs abruptly doubled back a distance north again to reach a creek that later joined the Havasupai River, then south to the Gila River junction with the Santa Cruz. From there it would be a straight shot south to Tucson, where their group had dedicated supporters and the local merchants loved money far more than they feared the law. They would sell as many boxes of rifles and cartridges as she wanted to buy for cash — no questions asked.

♦ ♦ ♦

The disturbance and fire so near the construction site spoiled the dinner plans with Wylie’s associates; strangely this cancellation of the dinner seemed to accelerate Wylie’s replacement as site supervisor by the army officer with the troop detachment. Although the water dispute between California and Arizona farmers that initially brought the troops had subsided, the camp rampage was evidence of worker unrest and the possibility of sabotage to the new dam.

Wylie was placed on leave with full pay and benefits for the duration of his contract; an assistant to the secretary of the Interior Department wrote Wylie a letter commending his years of service on federal construction sites. Wylie looked at his dismissal as a paid vacation; besides, he’d lost much more money in the bank crash of ’93.