Baja's Calling Me

  I wrote the beginning of this story in my Journaling class on Tuesday Jan. 5th for our 20 minute prompt session.  I decided to try and finish the story and see where it went to.  The part in blue was written in class.

 My body was a mess. Every inch of it ached and hurt. My hands and knees were scraped and bloody. I dragged my body across the hot yellow dust of the Sinalejo town square. My eyes burned and were caked with dirt from the desert floor. The people of the town were angry and outraged because I was trying to get to the water. They could not believe I had even got there. I was supposed to die in the desert. Every now and then a child would throw a stick or a rock at me. The adults just watched and said nothing. My throat was swollen from the lack of water. At each movement I would lift my head and beg for water. There was no response and no help. As I neared the well one man came to stop me but the town priest stepped forward and said “let him be, God will choose, not us.” I reached the well but was too weak to pull myself up to the bucket. I looked into the eyes of the priest and

they were empty. They were cold and distant. They held no pity for me. I silently begged him for mercy but his eyes were blank and showed me no compassion. I knew that he would not help. The crime had been to heinous to evoke compassion, even from a priest and this priest believed I was guilty.

Raping and killing a Nun was not a way to win friends in a small Mexican village. In their eyes I was the White Devil and any death was a good one but a slow torturous, sun baked death was perfect for the crime that had been committed.

Some of the men from the town had caught me with the naked, mutilated, dead body of the Nun. I was a gringo. She was a Mexican and a Nun. To them I was guilty. There was no trial, no jury and no judge. There was only the sentence. I was sentenced to death by desert. They stripped me naked, beat me senseless and left me in the desert to die.

I was on an extended camping in Baja, Mexico. I had retired a year earlier and decided to follow a lifelong desire to explore the Baja Peninsula in a camper. My wife had died a few years before I retired so I was alone. My kids had moved to different parts of the country so I planned on spending the winters in Mexico and the summers visiting different children. I headed down into Mexico all alone and excited about my new adventure. A few friends had questioned whether it was safe to travel into Mexico alone but I had ignored them. There is some danger in anything you do and living in a closet to be safe was not my idea of living. I had hired Mexicans my whole life and found them to honorable and courageous. No one works harder and is as honest as the standard Mexican citizen. Although I wasn’t fluent in Spanish I could speak enough to get along and by going to Mexico all alone I would have to learn to speak the language a lot better than I did before I left. I felt that if there was any danger it would be from bandits not the God fearing Mexican citizens. I felt the little danger there might be would be more than offset by the personal rewards I would receive.
 Actually I felt I would be safer alone than with someone and since my wife died I preferred being alone. I love the solitude. Being alone is not a problem unless you do not like yourself. I like myself.  I am better company than a lot of friends I have. I was in my mid fifties and in perfect shape. I walked 50 miles every week and was within 5 pounds of the preferred weight for my height. I was 5 foot 11 inches and weighed 182. I was proud of my body because at the age of fifty I weighed 265 lbs. I had worked hard to get the weight off. Another reason I wanted to be alone was I planned on writing a book about my weight loss and how I maintained that loss. Also, I planned on blogging about my trip. I could write a little, learn to paint and practice my guitar by singing to the Gila Monsters.

I had left the small town El Gorijon early the morning headed south generally towards the village of Sinalejo. I drove slow and stopped when I wanted to take pictures or just to watch the desert. I was always looking for nice place to camp. I did not have anywhere I had to be. I only needed to be where I was. When I got about a mile from Sinalejo I spotted a small gully that looked like it could be a good place to camp. There wasn’t any water but there was plenty of wood for a fire and I had filled my water tanks at El Gorijon. There was plenty of shade so I felt I could stay a day or a week. Sinalejo was close if I wanted some company or needed anything. As I drove into the trees I saw her lying on the ground. She was naked and her face was bleeding and bruised. When I got to her she was barely alive.

I held her and gave her some water. Who did this I asked?  Her face was swollen and bruised.  Both of her lip were bloody and swollen.  One of her nipples had been bitten off and it was painfully obvious that she had been raped.  There was a pool of blood crawling into desert.  The blood was coming from her genital area. One eye was swollen shut and the other barely able to open. She tried to say something but died before she could say a word. I gently laid her down and went to retrieve her habit. It  had been ripped off of her and tossed aside.  She was a Nun. I was covering her body when four men came out of the trees. They looked at her and then at me and I knew they thought I was guilty of raping and beating the Nun to death. I started to protest my innocence but one of them hit me from behind with one of those pieces of fire wood that I had been so happy to find.

I woke up sometime in the middle of the night. They had beaten me like the Nun had been beaten. My face hurt and my lips were split. My eyes were swollen shut but somehow I could see just a little from my left eye. Also they had taken my clothes. I wasn’t sure where I was but I knew my camper was no where around. Except for the rape I knew exactly what the Nun had gone through but mercifully for me I had not been awake when they beat me so badly. They left me with one other souvenir, a rattle snake bite. My good luck was that it had bitten me on the hand and the poison had not got into my blood stream the same as if I had been bitten on a fleshy part of my body. My hand was swollen and throbbed but I could do nothing about it. I pulled myself to a sitting position and tried to figure out where I was and what I was going to do. I rested for about a half an hour then did the only thing I could do. I walked. They took me a little further from town but luckily not too much further. I could see a glow in the night that I figured had to be a town. Which town I had no idea but it did not matter. It was the only chance I had. If I was correct about how far the town was I could walk there in 4 or 5 hours. I figured I was about 10 miles from town. I could walk that distance easily in 4 or 5 hours if I wasn’t injured and I had my shoes. But I was injured and I did not have my shoes. I hobbled and staggered towards the glow. I could not walk fast. I had to feel my way with my feet. There was no moon and the stars did not give enough light and my eyes swollen shut made it more like a blind man shuffling his way across the desert floor. My second piece of luck was that a rare cloud formation covered the peninsula all the next day. I will never know how but  I stumbled and crawled my way to the first building of the town by 4 in the afternoon. From there on all I could do was belly crawl. It was the small town of Sinalejo. It was the town where the Nun came from. They had seen me coming when I was about a mile from town. They came to me and started to beat me again but for some reason the priest stopped them. He said, “He has made it this far, for some reason God is smiling down on him. It is God’s will”

I looked into his eyes and he seemed strange, like he knew something but was hesitant or afraid to say what it was.

At the well I saw the same look. As I looked into his eyes I was able to say “I am innocent. I did not do that to the Nun”. The hardness in his eyes left. I am sorry my son he replied. Let me get you the water. I drank, only sips, slow sips but God it tasted so good. The people were angry but he calmed them down. “My people, he said, we have sinned. We cannot kill this man. He has had no trial. If we kill him we are no better than the snakes of the desert. We must heal him and see that he gets a fair trial”. His guilt wasn’t that he knew anything about the crime. His guilt was that he had not been following the words of God that he preached.

They took me to the town doctor and then to a small hospital that was more like a clinic. They called in the local Mexican authorities to investigate the brutal crime. They were able to determine it was two drifters living in the desert and cleared me. When I got out of the hospital my camper was waiting for me and the town had a fiesta dinner to ask my forgiveness. I drove out of Sinalejo heading north. I decided to finish my Baja camping some other time.