The Creed of Violence (10 page)

"Mr. Lourdes, if they knew what we were carting ... the bad news
for you, we'd spend eternity like some married couple in a common
grave."

They had been riding in silence since the river. Until that moment.
John Lourdes now said, "I want to know now who you are to meet,
and where."

Rawbone considered. "By tomorrow you'll be sleeping in your
own bed and maybe supping at the Modern Cafe there in the lobby of
the Mills Building."

"I want to know."

There was gunfire and the footfalls of men. John Lourdes came
about quickly, his hand going to the shoulder holster. Rawbone stayed
to the wheel. Men rushed past the truck to a fight that had flared there
by the roadside.

The son turned his attention back to the father, who'd still not even
once looked away from the road. "Who and where?"

"Is this a test of wills?"

"If something should happen to you."

"Haven't you even heard the rumor that just thinking it can bring
down bad luck? You wouldn't want that."

"My job is to see this through."

"As is mine."

"But I chose to be here. Grant me the information."

Rawbone did not answer. John Lourdes was left to wait, and wait.
Then, as if an afterthought, the father said, "Alliance for Progress. Just
up from the Customs House on September 16 Avenue. Hecht is the
man Simic told me to address."

John Lourdes wrote all this down in his notebook. As he did, from
one of the campfires came a boy in near rags running with hat in hand
up alongside the truck and begging for money. The father reached into
his pocket and asked the son, "The man's name from the roadhouse?"

The son scanned his notes. "James Merrill."

The father tossed the boy a crumpled buck and told him in Spanish,
"Courtesy of Mr. James Merrill."

The boy took the money and swung his hat in thanks.

"Before we confront this Hecht fellow," said John Lourdes, "we
have to deal with protecting the truck."

"We?"

"Where you go-I go. Where I go-you go."

"With that in mind, Mr. Lourdes. I have a place you'll find particularly fitting."

THEY DROVE THROUGH a neighborhood of blistered hovels and empty
lots along the shore. Laundry hung from lines in the starlight. The smell
of meals cooking in greased pans scented the air. Somewhere a mother
tried to calm a crying child; somewhere there was music and laughter. It
was a mirror of the barrio they could see across the streaming quiet of
the river, where they'd existed once upon a time with a woman one married and the other called mother. A moment fell through time. A moment
they shared without knowing because of the flaw in their existence.

At the end of that long, filthy street was factory row. There the
truck pulled up to a drab squat building with a rotting sign on the roof:
RODRIGUEZ FUNERARIA.

A funeral parlor.

John Lourdes asked, "You're not trying to politely tell me something, are you?"

In the gray dark Rawbone only grinned and stepped from the cab.

The door opened into what had been an entrance hall. Heavy
drapes hung from garish rodding along the walls. The oxblood cloth
was moth-eaten and smelled of must. The room was empty but for a
desk, where a man slept all bundled up with his hands tucked under his
head as a pillow. A black cloth covered a doorway and from beyond
came a dramatic overture issuing from a piano.

Rawbone dragged the sleeping man from the desk and told him in
no uncertain Spanish he was a ball-less toad and he better do as he was
damn well ordered and let McManus know Rawbone was here.

The man went out stoop-shouldered and mumbling. The father
had the son follow him through the covered doorway. As the tarp was
pulled back John Lourdes found himself at the rear of a room that had
once been for the viewing of bodies but was now a theatre for the showing of movies.

People sat on poorly nailed-together benches while an old Mexican
in a Florentine suit played an upright that looked as if it might have
made the trip over with Columbus. There was a smoky grit to the
light from the projector and on the screen came the flickering rush of
images:

BRONCO BILLY ANDERSON
IN
THE ROAD AGENTS

Father and son remained back by the entranceway. The black cutouts that were people shadows watching the movie more than likely
knew little or no English to understand the scene cards, but it mattered not at all. When the road agents thundered down on that stagecoach and robbed the payroll box, the outlaw emotion in the audience rose to the moment. Cheering wildly and screaming of revolution and
down with Diaz and the government pistols were fired into the air.
Chips of plaster and dust rained everywhere as the room stenched with
powdersmoke.

The son looked to the father. Framed in grainy illumination
Rawbone was intent upon the screen as the posse formed up for the
hunt. His eyes flashed and his mouth opened and his lips reared back in
anticipation as one bandit beat down the other over greed and rode off
with the ill-gotten gains.

Rawbone leaned toward John Lourdes and spoke behind the cover
of his hand: "I love the nickelodeon. Wished they had 'em when I was
a boy. That's a world to be introduced to. There's only one thing they
can't show right. Movies, I mean. And you know what that is?"

The son had no idea. The father held his hands together as if the
fragile and the priceless rested there. "The dyin'," he said. "They can't
get that right. The horror when a gent knows all trace of him is being
wiped out of existence. The knowing you will be no more. For that's
the only thing there is, one's own living self."

CMANUS CAME THROUGH the doorway like a wind, all hail
and hearty hellos for his friend, dragging Rawbone out into
the atrium where they embraced and cursed each other.

McManus was a great hulk of a man with a flabby nose and a
quarter-size chin. He was also missing an arm, the left one. He wore
a prosthesis up past the elbow with a shaped wooden oval wrist and
detachable wooden hand. The fingers, oddly, were spread out wide as
if in a state of perpetual surprise. And the arm itself looked to be a
few sizes too small for him, as it was at least six inches shorter than
the other. It was with this arm and hand he pointed at John Lourdes.
"What is this?"

"This ... is a Mr. Lourdes."

"Really. One of those, heh. Did you serve in Manila, Mr. Lourdes?
Is that how you came to be under the spell of this bugger?"

"Look at him, you brainless shit. He would have been a boy."

"They had boys fighting that were thirteen."

"Mr. Lourdes, would you mind," said Rawbone, "waiting by the
truck."

The tenor of the two men's talk changed immediately upon John
Lourdes leaving.

"Since when did you start running a boy's home?"

"Since I was ... engaged ... to work with a certain former railroad
detective on a ... particular matter."

McManus jerked a thumb toward the outside. "That one?"

"That one."

"If he don't look like a lightning bug trying to pass for lightning."

"I got a truck outside that needs to be parked away in your warehouse till morning. You will be neatly compensated for your charity."

"By the lightning bug?"

JOHN LOURDES WAITED by the truck. The dead from the mountain
and the river were with him in the dark, still in their assigned poses
at the moment of demise. He wondered now, did God see man as this
threadbare and vanquished figure infected with his own immorality?
Yet, with all that on his mind and soul, the single overriding principle
he clung to was-the practical application of strategy. The door opened
and both men approached.

"You can be free with my friend here," said Rawbone. "I've told
him you had been a railroad detective and . . . we were engaged in
a particular matter. And there would be money for the use of his
warehouse."

Stepping up into the cab seat, he added, "You wait here, Mr.
Lourdes. I'm gonna bed down this truck."

The night had cooled and John Lourdes grabbed an old leather
coat from the back. Rawbone drove off leaving him with McManus. They stood in the doorway shadowed together and watching the truck
gear slowly around the corner. John Lourdes looked at McManus.
McManus smiled down at the young man, but it was not a heartening
smile.

"So, you were in the war," said John Lourdes.

"Part of the Texas Battalion. Served with Rawbone. In Manila."

"I didn't know that."

"They say the best soldiers are the biggest bastards."

"That would mean he'd qualify."

This drew a genuine laugh from McManus. "Two medals, and he's
not even a fuckin' patriot."

The idea that Rawbone had ever fought for the country set off a
run of thoughts. "Do you know a man named Merrill? He served in
Manila. Was with Standard Oil in Mexico."

"No."

John Lourdes reached into his vest pocket. When McManus saw
the notepad, he commented, "I make it a habit of not remembering
names."

John Lourdes understood. "You won't even be a mention."

McManus answered, "Comforting."

But John Lourdes suspected he now wasn't so sure. The photo and
business cards were tucked away in the notepad. He handed the weathered print to McManus, who set it in the palm of his wooden hand.
Holding it close, he squinted. "I don't know this man."

"Are you familiar with the Alliance for Progress?"

SON AND FATHER walked obscure and wretched streets past beggars
in doorways and broken-down bars and past children huddled up in
makeshift boxes that were all they had for homes. Rawbone eyed the
urchins and knew himself in their deserted stares. As they made for the
appointed destination dragoons rode past in slow, watchful columns. The late-night patrols another sign Mexico was about to be taken by
nightmare. He got out a cigarette and lit it.

John Lourdes still had the photo in his hand and kept tapping it
against his shoulder holster as they went. He was making a determined
inventory of the facts at hand to try and distill what he knew into a plan
that would fulfill his orders.

"McManus said you were in the army."

"Yeah."

"He said you served with the Texas Battalion."

"Yeah."

"Were they posted at Fort Bliss or San Antonio?"

"Fort Bliss."

Rawbone was preoccupied. He blew the smoke out his nostrils
hard. He wanted this night over, he wanted Mr. Lourdes out of his life,
he wanted freedom.

"Did you spend a lot of time in El Paso during those years?"

"What is it with the questions?"

"You were asking me at the church about the barrio and did I
know families there. I just wondered-"

"Yeah." The question went right to the pitiful bits of truth he did
not want any part of tonight. Tonight was about survival. Fuck the
agony of remembered ghosts-for now. "The army wasn't much," he
said. "I needed time out of the States. The war, though. If you have the
temperament for it, war can be a blessing."

"What were the medals for?"

He tossed the cigarette away. "Killing, of course."

THE VIEJA ADUANA was a block-long building with a clocktower
above the main entryway. The facing was all Palladian windows and
the interior lit so bright the Customs House seemed to be on fire. Son
and father could see the lobby was crowded with men, so many they were spilling out into the street where frontier customs guards stood at
the watch. Most of the men, be they nationals or foreigners, were of
the business and mercantile class, suited and without guns. But there
were also rough verdaderos hombres, "real men" as the Spanish liked
to call them.

Around the entryway John Lourdes picked up on runs of conversation flush with panic. There were reports alleging Madero, the duly
elected president forced into exile by Diaz and living in the United
States, was about to declare himself president pro tem and issue a decree for the overthrow of the government. This was fed by rumors rebel
armies were already forming to the west in Sonora and Chihuahua to
the south. And from the way small armed bands of peons could be
seen riding the roads, this had more than just the feel of a rumor. One
thing was for certain, Ciudad Juarez would be put under siege. The war
would be brought to the border of the United States, for the United
States was the world. And U.S. companies, along with British companies, controlled near all the wealth from oil and mining in Mexico.

Rawbone kept on through the crowd, but John Lourdes had stopped
at the Customs House entryway. Inside that vaulted lobby booths and
tables had been set up by business organizations so concerns could be
addressed and pamphlets handed out. On a makeshift stage men took
turns speaking from a podium while others waited. Some were met
with applause, others excoriation. It was a war of words dedicated to
self-proclaimed interests.

Rawbone realized John Lourdes was not with him and went back
to the entryway where he stood. "You know what you have here, Mr.
Lourdes ... the practical application of strategy."