The Creed of Violence (18 page)

John Lourdes paid him no regard and stood where he was watching instead the curandera and the girl slowly hike past. Sister Alicia
nodded to him a thank-you and then she and the others took to the
passenger car.

Now he turned his attention to Jack B, who was still threatening
him. By then Doctor Stallings was a few paces behind and John Lourdes
said, "Doctor Stallings, before I go down there and boot this bastard,
you better take a look to the southeast."

When he stared toward those capes of rock and squinted, he understood. With an economy of purpose Doctor Stallings ordered up a
map, a signal pistol, flares, and two mounts taken from the boxcar to
be saddled and ready in five minutes. He then ordered his men to their
stations. Jack B was still staring up at John Lourdes asking, "You've
had your say, now are you coming down?"

Doctor Stallings took his officer by the arm and ordered him to
prepare the train and he asserted this command in no uncertain terms.
As much as Jack B offered himself up as some sort of barbarian, he
obeyed without argument or rancor. He obeyed Doctor Stallings not
because of the weight and privilege of his position, but because of that
other power that comes from the relentless pursuit of impunity.

John Lourdes and Rawbone were ordered from the train. When
both had complied Doctor Stallings spoke first to John Lourdes.
"Explain what you did."

"If you mean to kill something, do it on the first shot."

John Lourdes faced an unrelenting stare. "Pointed advice ... that
may well point also in your own direction."

"Understood," said John Lourdes.

Attention was then turned to Rawbone. "You hustled Mr. Hecht.
And you didn't get the truck the way you claim you did."

"That's the bureaucrat in you talking."

"You're the type that lies even when the truth sounds better."

"Now, that's the professor in you talking?"

"I'm not challenging you over this. The truck is here. And, yes ...
there are casualties. And there'll be more."

He pointed at the two horses just yards away and near saddled.
"You notice there are two horses." The map was brought to him, as
were the signal pistol and flares. He set them on the flatcar.

He stood very close to Rawbone, who leaned against the flatcar.
"I was a professor, as you seem to know, at some of the finest colleges
in America. Teaching is what I would call an unchallenging pastime.
Nothing ultimately critical happens in a classroom. The setting lacks
grandeur and, more important, finality."

He reached out and took the Savage automatic from Rawbone's
belt. He looked the weapon over carefully, handling it with a profes-
sional's interest. "There is a book, and you could have walked right out
of its pages. It is about murder. There is a devil and a Grand Inquisitor.
And there is one idea in the book that repeats itself. An idea that would
appeal to you as it does to me . . . `All things are lawful."'

Doctor Stallings replaced the weapon in Rawbone's belt.

Rawbone then reached out and brushed away bits of sand from the
shoulder of the commander's gray suit coat. "The story doesn't exactly
spark of Horatio Alger, does it?"

The mounts were brought over. Doctor Stallings handed the signal
gun and bandoleer of flares to John Lourdes. "You both will earn your
money today," he said, spreading the map on the flatbed floor.

THE FATHER AND son proceeded from the train with the sun hard
against their shoulders, watched by the commander and his company
of guards. Even the girl Teresa, from window after window, followed
the slow climb of their mounts upon an eroded hill face.

From the map it seemed the vultures marked a military garrison,
sited to protect a junction where the lines divorced into parallel tracks,
both running to Tampico and the oil fields.

"The doctor knows how to frame a warning," said the son.

"You thought his little speech a warning. I hoped it was a compliment, or at least an insult."

"He didn't have the authority for what he did, no matter. He even
ordered a picture, no matter."

"Who did El Presidente have build those tracks? Who financed
them? America and the Brits. They own the rails like they own the oil
fields. That gives him the authority. And the Mexican, he's heir to the
fuckin' sand."

They heard the heavy breathing of a mount and the chinging of
bridle metal and came about to see Tuerto chugging a mule forward to
try and catch up.

"Where are you going?" asked John Lourdes.

Tuerto pointed to the vultures.

"On whose authority?"

He held up his camera.

"Another fuckin' genius," said the father.

Through a dry and sweeping wind the mule followed in the horses'
tracks. Rawbone spoke out to the world around him, "Three wise men
tramping to Bethlehem."

The garrison was a quadrangle of mud buildings connected by
a palisade of sharpened stakes where sat an army of hunched and
drowsy-faced vultures. A loosely roped gate hung slightly open. They
dismounted and John Lourdes fired his shotgun into the air. The creatures flushed skyward and hung momentarily on the dead air and
then descended to the rooftops.

The men went forward and Rawbone pushed the gate with his rifle
and before them opened a small amphitheatre of death. They covered
their noses and mouths with bandanas. They entered the compound.
Flies everywhere, and the stench. A dozen soldiers bloating in the sun.
The buildings had been ransacked and personal possessions lay strewn
about the enclosure.

John Lourdes saw a stairwell that led up to a rooftop watchtower.
He took binoculars from around his neck and as he ascended vultures
retreated from the vigas, their steps like drunken old men. Under an
overhang the father saw a table and on it was a Victrola. He looked at
the pile of records beside it. One read Brahms' Lullaby. He set the record
on the turntable and cranked up the player. A Spanish version began.

Music drifted out over that dusty pueblo and into the desert beyond. John Lourdes had been studying the country and the trackline
and pulled the binoculars from his eyes and looked down into the enclosure. Tuerto walked amongst the dead taking photographs. And
the father-he had found a chair and was sitting in the shade by the
Victrola, the bandana shielding his nose and mouth, the rifle across
his lap and that haunting child's melody-he could well have been the
Lord of some Breugheled damnata.

This, thought the son, is what I was born from. Can this be the
man who in his youth touched my mother's heart on a trolley in the
Texas rain? Can this be the man who even for bare moments breathed
love? John Lourdes wondered, if God truly put a soul in each living being, could it be the soul was capable of flaming out so completely it no
longer existed, so all that was left was a living husk as horrible as the
enclosure where they stood?

Yet, he was not as waylaid as he felt he should have been looking
down upon this wretched scene. Did it mean that in some way his own soul was burning down to become a useless cinder that would knock
around inside his chest wherever he walked upon the earth? Or was
this some rite of passage the part of him that was the father came to
prepare him for? The father's words worked like cruel and busy claws
inside him: "This country is having at you, Mr. Lourdes ... the road
changes everyone."

Then from behind the bandana came that crackly voice. "I see you
there, Mr. Lourdes ... looking down on me."

"You better get up here," said the son.

John Lourdes sat on the roof wall writing in his notebook, and
when the father joined him the vultures again flared and fell away. The
son pointed his pencil at the binoculars set on the adobe ledge. "Tell
me what you see."

The father took the binoculars and panned over that whinstone
prairie. The land trembled with heat but there was nothing save where
the track turned out to become separate rail lines that looked to be near
burned into the earth.

"I see unadulterated nothing."

John Lourdes finished writing. He yelled for Tuerto. He tore
the page from his notebook and stood. "One of the tracks has been
sabotaged."

The father's head arched back and the son turned him about. He
stood behind him with an arm leaned over his shoulder. He was as
close now as the father had been to the son that night in the Hueco
Mountains, only now it was the son's shouldered weapon that insinuated itself.

"With the binoculars ... about fifty yards up from the turnout. To
the left. Laying off in the sand away from the tracks. You'll see it."

And so he did. It looked to be embossed in the sand. A long bulky
strip of metal. Smooth as could be.

"What the hell is it?"

"It's a fishplate ... It's what they use to bolt the rails together. You
can see it's been removed from one of the tracks. So has another one at
the other end of the rail and you can see ... the spikes are missing. That
rail is just sitting on the ties waiting for a train."

JERTO AGREED TO carry John Lourdes's note back to the train.
Doctor Stallings reviewed it with his officers and proceeded accordingly. The plan was to bring the trains on to the garrison, then wait
for John Lourdes to signal. Son and father were to scout the secondary
trackline to Tampico, spotting up the rails for further sabotage. Doctor
Stallings walked the turnout and the engineer showed him where the
fishplates and spikes had been removed. Doctor Stallings looked to his
watch, to the south. He sat quietly on the locomotive steps waiting for
John Lourdes to signal. In packs of two and three the guards asked
Tuerto about the garrison that now stood in shadow on the hilltop. He
would describe the scene and then point to the aperture of his camera
and tell them it had all been captured there and prints could be had for
a commission. Even the women, appalled by what they heard, clung to every whisper for the dead belonged to the government and that
aroused unspoken hopes.

From a craggy plateau John Lourdes and Rawbone scouted the
hills before them. A hundred miles beyond, the Gulf washed up on the
beaches of Tampico.

"You can smell the salt air from here," said the father. Then bringing his horse about, called out, "Mr. Lourdes." He pointed. To the west
of the train, tracers of dust were piling up across the benchland.

John Lourdes got out his binoculars. "It's not dragoons. And
they're coming on like religion."

"They're going to hit the train."

The bandoleer of flares was slung over John Lourdes's neck. He
shoved the binoculars back in his saddlebags. He got out the signal gun.
The father rode up alongside him.

"Before you warn them. You know what I'm going to say. Tampico
... the oil fields. You don't need them back there. If they make it, well
... and the women are not your province. Tampico ... the oil fields."
John Lourdes loaded a flare.

"You can fill notebooks till you fall over dead but what you need
to write ... Justice Knox shouldn't have entrusted you with this. You're
not the right man for it." His eyes were black and hard, the neck cords
strained. "You wanted to get there, we can get there. It ends when you
say it ends, right. There it is out there. The practical application of
strategy means you stay indifferent and take advantage when advantage can be taken. Isn't that why you ended up here, why I ended up
here? Answer me, Goddamn it."

ONE FLARE SIGNALED all was clear, two flares there was trouble and
hold back. To that John Lourdes added a third option in his note.
Three flares meant trouble, but come on quick. When Doctor Stallings, standing atop the tender, raised three fingers, Jack B ordered the trains
out and weapons readied.

From the plateau John Lourdes could see banners of gray smoke
against the haze and he knew the trains were on the move.

"You ... me ... and the truck!" shouted the father. "Alright ... I
hope the BOI taught you how to board a moving train under fire."

The trains went through a gap in the hills. Small islands of dust
with riders at the fore descended scrub ridges and rose up magically
out of distant swales. Rurales with bandoleers crisscrossing their chests
like ancient baldrics and filthy hats and straw sombreros, and they carried carbines and flintlocks and five-shot Colts and machetes and bows
and arrows and their saddlebags and stirrups winged outward and the
fronds of their hats bent back as they drove to flank the trains.

There were bursts of rifle smoke along the length of the cars and
riders crumpled out of their saddles and horses crushed down upon
their hooves and flipped over brokenly. Against a barren sky John
Lourdes scanned that tableland with binoculars to see how and where
fate might intervene for them to get back on the train.

As the lead train cleared a long shelf of battened stone, a mass of
trampling shadows surged from hiding. The men in the coal car out
front of the locomotive leaned up from their parapets and poured fire
down into the clustered features of men close enough to touch.