The Creed of Violence (2 page)

"Well," said the driver, to all this, "God has a long memory."

Rawbone said little, preferring silence, and watching the flask go
back and forth. In truth, to him, the nation meant nothing and race
even less. He was the specificity of the flesh. All survive and live, and
beyond that there was only death.

And yet, somewhere within this immoral selfishness there existed
an outlaw place that would not die no matter how he tried to destroy it. It was like some ancient rune imprinted upon his being or a halfforgotten melody coming through the darkness.

The Mexican woman he'd married and left behind without so
much as a word, the child he abandoned with one turn of a phrase.
They existed yet in the sentimental mist that murdered him with quiet
nightmares.

"Stop the truck," said the man beside the driver. "I'm feelin'
bad."

He looked it. There was a pallor to him and a sweat ringing his
temples. As the rig braked he stepped from the cab with an uncertain
motion and started off carrying his carbine by its shoulder strap so it
near dragged along the ground. His steps began to be dazed and then
he fell and Rawbone jumped from the back and was over him before
the driver could disembark.

Rawbone swept up the rifle and turned. "He's a dead man ... and
so are you, brother."

While the man lay anguishing upon the ground, something seemed
to fix in the driver's mind. He blinked as if hit by revelation and looked
down at the flask on the cab seat. He turned his stare to Rawbone, who
had not moved, nor was he pointing the carbine. He just stood there
with a steely and splayed grin as the driver, now panicking, put the
truck in gear and started off.

"Aye!" shouted Rawbone at the truck. "So there you go. But
you've already drunk your future down, and I can hear the trumpets
playing graveside."

The truck rumbled on wildly while Rawbone slung the carbine
over his shoulder then knelt and robbed the dying man of his belongings. As he lay there shuddering in the dust, Rawbone stuffed his hands
down into his coat pockets. Then whistling up a tune followed off after
the truck at a casual walk.

ABOUT AN HOUR further on amidst riven sandhills he saw the rig. It
had veered off the road and sat canted against a stretch of rock scored
by the wind.

The engine was still running as Rawbone stepped up into the open
cab. The driver was alive, but barely. A trembling saliva had accumulated at the corner of his pale mouth.

"Pardon me," said Rawbone, as he leaned past him and shut off
the motor. "Rest a while."

He then stepped down from the cab and, while he checked the
truck for damage, noticed one of the lashed crates had come loose and
cracked open beside the road.

"Ah," said Rawbone at what he saw.

He knelt over the crate. Hanging out the wood slats like the skin of
a snake was a fabric feed belt mechanism for a machine gun.

He yelled back at the driver, "I didn't know they needed these to
build an icehouse."

' E WAS BORN in the Segundo Barrio of El Paso on the day Ulysses
iS. Grant died. The barrio was blocks of squalid adobes along
the Rio Grande that the city meant to raze and rebuild in good oldfashioned American brick.

He was raised in a rank alley behind a factory where desert immigrants sewed together American flags. His mother was one of those
immigrants, from the state of Sinaloa. His father was a criminal and,
as the boy would later learn, a murderer. The father had abandoned
the family on the Fourth of July, 1893. The last he'd told his son was
that he would take him by trolley to the park on Mesa Street to see the
fireworks together and eat ice cream.

After this he watched the humble surface of his mother's face
erode with sorrow and her grief slowly bury what God had so beautifully put there. The son took the mother by wagon to the Concordia Cemetery and buried her in a pauper's grave he dug himself. The
death left him devastated and on his own at thirteen. The desire to see
his father destroyed was matched only by a string of memories born
of fonder times that left an unfathomable ache across the arc of his
existence.

The boy took to living on the roof of the factory where those at
work on the sewing machines did double shifts stitching together flags.
He was a day laborer in the Santa Fe Railroad yard that shouldered
up to the barrio. It was brutal work that drove men into the earth like
paltry nails. Yet he had not only the fury to survive but the faith of
mind to flourish.

He wore around his neck a tiny gold cross with one broken beam
that had been his mother's. It was not some holy trinket or talisman but
every wistful and nostalgic wish that had ever been.

He could read and write, and his father had taught him the creed
of weapons. He was unafraid of death, understanding it was only the
seamless moment that takes you to somewhere else.

He was not a tall young man; rather he was thin and muscled with
a huge forehead and shaded eyes. His hair was black and straight, his
skin tawny, his features refined.

His name was, for him, rife with shame, and after his mother's
death he changed it. She had always dreamed of a pilgrimage to Lourdes,
where the Virgin Mary appeared to the child Bernadette Soubirous, and
ever afterward, when asked, he said his name was John Lourdes.

He started as an oil boy in the roundhouses. He rose in the ranks
to run a yard gang. He spoke two languages fluently, and having
been weaned by a criminal, had an intuitive feel for the devilry within
men. He was moved to security, and soon after promoted to railroad
detective.

In 1908 Attorney General Charles Bonaparte organized the Bureau
of Investigation with its own staff of federal law enforcement officers. John Lourdes was invited to join. And so, at the age of twenty-three, he
became a special agent working for the federal government in El Paso,
Texas.

HE LEANED AGAINST the rail fence that flanked the Rio Grande by the
Santa Fe Bridge. He had a week's worth of beard and clothes that cried
out with wear; even his slouch hat had shear lines along the creases.
John Lourdes was an unemployed rough killing time and cigarettes
alongside a row of other roughs trying to scratch up day work at an
employment shed. At least that's how he wanted to come across so as
not to draw attention to himself, while day after day he watched the
foot traffic pass through customs between El Paso and Juarez.

The Mexican Revolution had begun in 1910 when President Porfirio
Diaz promised free elections, then proceeded to deny them. This act was
the pebble that presaged the avalanche. Mexico was decaying under
the forces of exploitation, poverty and foreign interests. One thousand
people controlled the vast majority of the nation's wealth. Illiteracy,
child mortality and peonage became the sires of violence.

El Paso and its sister city, Juarez, were the epicenter for revolutionaries, expatriated nationals, would-be saboteurs, two-dollar-a-day
undercover agents working for both sides, con men, corrupt Rangers
and an assortment of human flotsam who carried illegal fires in their
hearts.

John Lourdes had grown a mustache that was sleek and modern, to
fit the times. He ran a finger across his upper lip as he studied the foot
traffic. He possessed the intangibles of discipline and patience as well
as an eye for the particulars of people. A look or gesture often exposed
a hole right into them. He followed anyone who aroused suspicion and
he scratched out every detail in pencil in a pocket notepad.

His father had asked him once as a boy, "Do you want to know
what people are really like?"

They had been in Juarez at an open-air market overrun with shoppers. His father pointed from face to face, then knelt down, pulling his
son close. There was always a bit of fever in his father's voice when he
was excited. "Do you want to know how? So you can never be tricked
nor fooled?" The boy's eyes widened. "So no one can ever make a game
of you. Nor spin you, nor straight edge you. Like that," he said snapping his fingers, "you can know. Do you want to know? Do you want
to know how?"

The boy nodded because he saw his father so needed him to want
to know.

"Well," he whispered to his son, "be indifferent to every man ...
and you will know."

That moment, in all its profound self-interest, wrapped around him
like a strangle cord as a young girl walked past, just a shadow reach
away, and crossed back to Juarez. It was the third time in as many days
he'd noted her.

And it wasn't because she was young and lovely in a rather simple
and unassuming way. She couldn't have been more than sixteen or so
at the outside, yet there was this calming silence she emanated as she
pressed on about her business, that was in direct contrast to the nervous
and wary pen stroke of her eyes as she watched and weighed every action before her.

The first time he'd seen her, she was in the waiting line for the quarantine shed just below the bridge. The building was wind-beaten brick
with a long, fluted chimney, and there Mexicans crossing to the United
States went to be stripped down and deloused.

It was a horrible and humiliating experience. His own mother had
suffered it upon crossing. He'd overheard her once with other women,
their voices cloaked, how they'd been stripped and left to stand in waiting lines on a cement floor to undergo medical inspection, while the
workmen spared no one with their eyes.

Since becoming a federal agent he'd been in that building often when hunting criminals. He'd seen how they used pesticides
and gasoline, and sometimes a form of sulfuric acid for the delousing. The clothes too were fumigated, then put in huge steam dryers,
which sometimes melted shoes. The place was nicknamed ... the gas
chamber.

The girl walked past afterward and on into a dusty procession of
humanity up Santa Fe, and he saw how everything her eyes touched
produced this ripple of uncertainty across her features. The next day he
saw her again coming out of the quarantine shed. She passed by, only
to return an hour later.

The third day the process was repeated. But by the time she returned he'd been enlisted in conversation by two German designers.
They'd gotten permission to go into the quarantine shed. They'd done
draftmen's sketches of its interior and they were asking John Lourdes
if it was true the government weeded out the deformed and the deviant, as they too had, in their own country, problems with what they
described as "the unclean," that needed to be dealt with.

If they'd understood Spanish, what John Lourdes said in reply as he
started toward the bridge could not have been confused as an answer.

HE FOLLOWED HER down the Avenida Paseo de Triunfo. There was a
black mood about the streets. Wall graffiti insulted the regime; groups
of men stood in heated conversation. Young boys carrying rifles in a
primitive street militia marched past the Monument to the Fighting
Bulls and, holding their weapon muzzles high and cursing El Presidente,
fired into the air.

Heads turned. Birds slanted skyward down the length of the Paseo.
Only from the girl was there no reaction as she walked on. It was then
John Lourdes understood her calm silence and those wary stares-she
was deaf.

Next to a movie theatre was a two-story office building the girl
entered. A shop on the first floor had a sign in the window: TRAVEL
MEXICO. Out front were a couple of Maytag Touring Cars that had
painted on the side: WE'LL TAKE YOU ANYWHERE THE WIND CAN GO!

He followed her into the building. The hall was dark and filthy.
He could hear her footsteps on the stairs. On the second floor she went
into an office. He reached the landing as the door closed. He walked
past cautiously. He could hear voices through the open transom and see
light angling down a far wall from a skylight. He looked to one end of
the hall and then the other, where there was a stairway to the roof.

On the roof he walked a row of skylights; most were poled open
to let the dead air escape the paltry offices. When he reached the one
instinct said was it, he took off his hat and squatted down near the
opening, but far back enough not to be seen. He could just make out
the girl in a picture frame of light.

With head downcast, she stood alone. There were cloudy voices,
men speaking English and Spanish. A door opened and closed. A shadow
climbed the wall. A man spoke. He had a gritty voice. John Lourdes
could not see his face, only his trouser legs and mountain boots. An arm
stretched out holding a blanket, and the girl began to undress.

Her clothes slipped to the floor. The blanket was tossed to her. She
wrapped it around herself, while averting her eyes from the man. He
knelt down and scooped up the clothes and left.

AWBONE HAD A decision to make as he sat in the idling truck
iforty miles east of Fort Bliss. Primal simplicity would dictate
he forget El Paso. Best he swing south to Socorro or Zaragaza, then
stake his way north to Juarez. People on the verge of a bloodletting
will always pay top dollar for weapons and a truck. He had enough
gasoline to make the journey and he'd robbed both men before he
burned their bodies.