Gardens in the Dunes (64 page)

T
HE PERFORMANCE
of the dog circus drew a big crowd—not only the construction workers and off-duty soldiers, but miners and cowboys from outlying areas heard about it and came. The early arrivals bought beer and tried their luck in the gambling tents just as Big Candy hoped they would. A quick survey of the cash receipts proved this day to be their best by far. Even the women who worked in the wagons and the Prescott businessmen they worked for came to see. Candy estimated their number at close to two hundred, and both Wylie and Big Candy were enthusiastic about hiring the dog circus to travel with them when the construction camp moved to Twentynine Palms.

It took a good while to dress the seven dogs and to keep them from tugging at their lions' manes of horsehair and the long striped tiger tails of painted burlap. For the mother dog, who led the troop despite her lameness, Delena had fashioned a strange cape of long black horsehair, which was quite unsettling as the dog approached, so Sister Salt and the twins dubbed her the Bear.

Delena covered her dress with a long cape of burlap covered almost entirely with bits of red, yellow, green, blue, and white ribbon that flickered in the breeze, trimmed with dozens of little dangling baubles made of tin cans, which jingled as she moved. By the time Sister Salt and the twins helped Delena arrange a circle of smooth river stones for the ring and piled kindling on two sides of the circle, the sun was down. The girls took turns beating an old tin bucket with a stick to announce the performance. More and more onlookers gathered and the buzz of voices and barks of the dogs added to the excitement.

Delena called to the crippled dog, and the others followed her inside the circle of stones. She talked to the dogs constantly in a low voice Sister Salt could barely hear, but it soothed them and kept their attention on her. In
pairs, the black dogs danced together on their hind legs around and around as Delena waved her wand—a willow stick tied with strings of sparrow feathers; the crippled dog sat motionless on a keg in the center of the ring.

Delena left them dancing while she lit the oil-soaked rags wreathed around two hoops she fashioned from scraps of wire. As the crowd cheered her on, a fiery hoop in each hand, she called first to the crippled dog, who leaped off the keg and through one hoop after the other to wild applause from the audience that had consumed a large amount of beer. The other dogs followed their mother through the hoops eagerly, and barked excitedly as they raced around the ring.

Next Delena rolled in other empty nail kegs and arranged scraps of corrugated tin roofing for an elevated track around the ring, which made resounding thunder as the dogs raced over it. While the “lions” and “tigers” pounded the tin, now gaily chasing one another's cloth and horsehair tails, Delena stepped out of the ring, and the crippled black dog in the bear costume followed her into the shadows, where a moment later she returned with an old ladder, which she held upright in both hands while one after the other the dogs climbed on, until she had six dogs at once balanced on the rungs of the ladder. Later the twins and Sister Salt did recall the absence of the crippled dog in her bear costume; at the time they did not make much of it—they assumed the dog was too disabled for the ladder trick.

The last trick consisted of the dogs each sitting up on their hind legs on a keg while Delena rapidly tossed them wild gourds, which they caught and held in their mouths before dropping to catch another. When each dog had six gourds by its keg, Delena bowed to the crowd with a flourish, spreading both arms to direct their applause to the dogs on the kegs behind her. Then, while the crowd continued to whistle and cheer, Delena reached down into her gunnysack of costumes and props and brought out a strange doll almost two feet tall, made of white canvas, with a long beard of white horsehair and a matching wig topped by a paper top hat painted with stripes of red, white, and blue. The doll wore no clothing, but around his neck was a string of little round tin bells.

At the sight of the doll, the dogs became alert and some of them began to wag their tails in anticipation; Delena sternly commanded them to stay put before she took the doll's hands in her hands and began slowly to dance around and around the ring. The light from the lanterns and from the two small fires at either end of the ring trees threw giant shadows of the doll and the woman across the audience, which was drunk and disorderly now; those in back attempted to push forward to get a better view. A drunk
miner bumped a drunk soldier, who stumbled against a drunk cowboy, and a fight broke out in front of the gambling tents. Big Candy ordered the dealers to shut down until the crowd was more orderly, and halted the sale of beer for the time being to avoid more trouble.

Now as Delena whirled faster and faster with the strange doll, and her dogs danced around with her on their hind legs, barking excitedly, a drunk soldier staggered into the ring and pulled the white doll out of her hands to dance with it himself. The dogs took this as their cue to grab the white doll for their finale, and grabbed hold of its legs and arms and head. The drunk clung to the doll's torso with both hands even after the dogs pulled him facedown hard and began to tug and pull the doll and him around the circle. Once the dogs tore off the doll's hat and wig, they pulled off the beard and tugged at it between them before one of dogs grabbed hold of the drunk's shirt, and then all of the dogs were on the man, pulling and tearing at his clothing while the crowd laughed and urged them on.

Soldier friends of the drunk who tried to push their way through the crowd to stop the dogs met with resistance; the resentment many felt toward the presence of the army surfaced, and fistfights broke out. Oblivious to the disorder that spread through the crowd, the dogs gaily tore to pieces the drunk's uniform but ignored the naked man on the ground. Once the uniform was shredded, the dogs began wild tugs-of-war with their own costumes. In their excitement they tore off the horsehair lions' manes and tigers' tails and the burlap capes trimmed with tin jingles. Their mistress made no effort to stop them; in fact, Delena was nowhere in sight.

The crowd surged, then swelled like floodwater over one another to the protests and yells of those pushed and trampled. Sister Salt held the baby close to her in both arms as she ran to escape the fighting mob. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Big Candy with a shotgun cradled in his arms in front of the gambling tents. She ran a short distance downriver until she saw a dense stand of willows; with the little black grandfather safely cocooned she crawled as far back into the willows as she could. She could hear the voices—the curses and shouts, and then the shotgun blasted twice, followed by three or four pistol shots and more shouts. The little black grandfather's eyes widened at the gunfire and he waved his arms furiously but did not cry. “Yes, you were right all along,” she whispered to him, and the cards were right too—a big flood came all right, but it wasn't the river that wiped out everything.

Wylie was on his horse behind the crowd when the riot broke out; he pulled the six-shot thirty-two special out of his right boot and took the
two-shot thirty-eight derringer from the left boot. He regretted leaving his sawed-off shotguns in his tent. He could not see Big Candy for the mob that boiled around the tents, but he heard Candy's shotgun fire and then more shots. Wylie knew there were bound to be off-duty soldiers involved, so he turned his horse away and raced off to alert their commanding officer to send military police.

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.