The Creed of Violence (20 page)

John Lourdes, with his palms facing down, patted at the air as his
way of asking Teresa to hold where she was. Rawbone carried that iron
monstrosity to the rear of the car. John Lourdes hooked each end of the
chain to one of the nooses. Then he had the father help him loop it over
the back platform and it landed on the tracks with an immense clang.

"When I give the order to cinch it, get inside fast and keep going.
This platform may come off and part of the wall with it."

Each link was near as big as their fists and they scarred and danged
along the rails as John Lourdes took a deep breath. The father muscled
down like a prizefighter and then John Lourdes yelled out, "Cinch it."

They roped in the chain. It tautened and caught up against the wheels.
The two men scrambled over each other getting into the car and the
sound coming off those locked wheels was like a foundry saw shearing
pure steel. There were fireworks of sparks, and the studs in the platform
and up through the rear wall began to spider with cracks and the platform ripped apart like a flimsy toy. The back wall was there one moment,
and the next, they were staring out a frame of decimated wood exposing
drab brown hills and dust-strewn daylight. The screeching went on, it
seemed, interminably. Then, in one staggering instant the cars stopped.

SECTIONS OF THE chain were ground to dust, but the remainder was
shivved up under and around the wheels and so the cars were held.

The Mastodon had not returned and they were left now to their
own resources in that silent chasm, with Tampico a century of miles
through those fluted and waterless hills.

"Now," said John Lourdes to the father, "you see why I wouldn't
leave the truck."

It was in its own way a purely orthodox application of practical
strategy. The father still remarked with a certain insight, "That's not
why you wouldn't leave the truck."

John Lourdes got out the fire ax and a set of crowbars and formed
two work gangs of women. The father took the first bunch and they
went about chopping the roof beams loose from the passenger car. The
son worked the others dismantling the flatbed siderails and truss bars.
And damn if that common assassin didn't start teaching those women
to sing in English "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" as they sweated it
in that filthy railcar.

John Lourdes meant to build a rampway jerry-rigged from an assemblage of crisscrossed timbers and truss bound together by rope and
cable and parts of chain and any clothing the women weren't wearing
right then and there.

John Lourdes walked up and down this raft with uncertainty as the
father and the women watched.

"It's no masterpiece," said the son.

"Mr. Lourdes, good manners requires me to allow you first crack
at driving the truck."

"You're a fuckin' saint," muttered the son under his breath.

John Lourdes edged the truck over the lip of the flatcar and leaned
from the cab to see if the weight could be sustained. The father acted as
traffic cop angling his hands to get those wheels a little this way or that.
When the engine was committed all the way down the ramp it started
to sag like the spine of some cartoon swayback. The women chimed
in trying to avert what they saw as a disaster, yelling for John Lourdes
to turn the wheels in direct contradiction to the father who was now
cursing their hellish mouths. Some of them took to pleading he go back,
while others urged he just come on. It was all devolving into useless jabber so John Lourdes swallowed hard to clear his throat and with one
quick to-hell-with-it decision, gassed the pedal.

The truck lurched, and as the front end touched ground the ramp
gave and the rear tires slammed upon the ties. The truck heaved to
one side under the strain of those lashed crates of ammunition and all
watched in stunned silence as the unwieldy hump piled up in the truckbed settled back in place. Then John Lourdes just footed the gas pedal
slightly and the truck started forward to a collective sigh of relief.

Y DUSK THEY drove the trackline, one wheel straddling the ties
and the other on a meager strip of roadbed. The women took
turns perched up on crates, stacked in the truckbed or walking ahead
of it. One man drove while the other rested. It was slow and dangerous
and when they reached the peak at nightfall below them was the immense void of the desert floor.

The women proceeding ahead of the truck now took to carrying
lanterns or candles to guide the way. The lights fireflied in that steep
and treacherous canyon, where their shadows walked in slow and somber order like some druidic procession moving through the vast church
of the night.

When it was Rawbone's time to turn the wheel over to John
Lourdes, he took up with the others in the truckbed, sitting on boxes of
hand grenades and machine-gun belts. And while Sister Alicia stitched the wound in his back with sewing thread, he led a chorus of singing
women in their slanted English:

Later that night John Lourdes wrote in his notebook: You helped
4,e old woman and risked yourself . . . you carried 4e C1,airs . . .
you're s44ing w,4 me now . . . He ended what he wrote with a question mark he circled.

He and Teresa sat in the truck together, wedged up amongst the
crates as they crossed all that black and windy emptiness.

She read his questions and then wrote: / I,e/ped Sis-ler Alicia because
sl,e needed l,e/p and 4 was r~W . . . l carried chains because cl,a'/is were
necessary . . . l am s44ing will, you now because forgiveness is needed.

He wrote: / am 4La4kcul you can corjtve me.

She replied: Ti,is is no4 jus4 abov4 you.

She had not fully realized how much her father was of those men
on the slope executing a child. And that her father was of the same
blood and history as the dead turned her stomach.

She added to what she wrote: / am small a.ain54 4s world . . .
bu4 4e Ci,ris4 inside my l,ear-l is 9rea4er ye-l. Wi4,ou4 forgiveness a//
of life is forsaken. / will no4 become forsaken.

John Lourdes could hear his own father's voice from behind the
steering wheel. In the cab with him were Sister Alicia and another
woman. He had them rehearsing lyrics to "Yankee Doodle Dandy."

He stared into his notebook. He absorbed what Teresa had written.
He could feel her beside him. He knew without asking, the forgiveness
extended to her own father. It was tangible as rain upon an upturned
face. I am small against this world ... These words, he knew, were true about himself, in that place, at that moment, though forgiveness was
not an option.

THEY DROVE STRAIGHT into the dawn. Limestone chasms gave way to
islands of scrub pine. The earth was sandy and the truck struggled mile
after mile. The stones of the desert began to warm with the sun. To the
north a pale outline on the horizon, a meager oasis of huts.

Near Tamuin they passed an abandoned cathedral upon the desert
floor. Magnificent it was, from the era of the Conquistadors. Red were
its stone walls and grand dome against a hot and cloudless sky. The
women blessed themselves as they drove past, for with God there was
no forgotten place.

They dined by a stream near a fallen hacienda. Amongst the trees a
rusting iron fence enclosed a few headstones. Names the wind and sun
had stolen. Rawbone watched John Lourdes and the girl Teresa walk
along the shallows. The water was cool and shiny in the quieting light
and the breeze gave the brush that soft and brittle song.

There was something about the long blue light of dusk that for
Rawbone always felt of eventuality and of being forlorn. He looked
at the fallen hacienda, then the small family of graves set amongst the
trees. He put his cigarette out in the sand and stood as John Lourdes
and the girl walked past. He tipped his hat to her gracefully.

"Mr. Lourdes," he said, "you better be careful." He smiled. "This
is how people end up with their own little Cains and Abels."

THEY DROVE TOWARD the moonlight, and it was a woman atop the
highest crates who first sighted Tampico and called to the others.
Piercing the misty Gulf air a vast spangle of lights. A mile farther they
came upon railroad tracks. Out of the smoky dark a lone freight approached with a great rattling of cars and the fierce call of its whistle.
Tankers destined for the oil fields.

The day arrived damp and muggy. They were just a dozen miles
from Tampico and had to stop to gas the truck with the last of the
reservoir they carried in drums. The women were exhausted and
filthy. As they stoked up a fire to make coffee and greased dough with
sugar, the father asked the son to walk off a ways so they could talk
privately.

"Mr. Lourdes, I buddied once with a top-floor felon. Part Sioux. It
was right here in Tampico, after I came back from that joke of a war
in Manila. He gave me advice once ... `Raw ...' he called me, `Raw
...' he said, `when things go bad, every road out of town is the black
road."'

He waited to see how John Lourdes would react. Measured silence
was the answer.

"We got all that ammunition, Mr. Lourdes. I say we bury a wallet's
worth, tell Stallings we lost it in transit. We'd have it to sell if we needed
money. You'd have it to sell if you needed to buy or bribe information.
Or if ... we find ourselves on the black road."

John Lourdes took out a cigarette. He had no matches, so he put
out a hand for the father to drop him one. He eyed Rawbone with a
quizzing stare. After he got the cigarette lit John Lourdes asked, "What
happened to this ... top-floor felon?"

"He was shot to death in his sleep."

"I'd have bet on poisoning."

"Thank you, Mr. Lourdes. Professional compliments are always
appreciated."

"Of course, at the end of this, with all your smile and good cheer, you
discovered there wasn't quite the future down here you expected-"

"You might offer me those crates as a stipend for my outstanding
service."

"I don't know when you're worse. When you're actually worse, or
when you're not."

THEIR RIG LABORED along a shipping road that was deeply rutted
from the rains and heat and heavily trafficked with oil trucks and
supply wagons and laborers on foot. They were a sight with all those
women stacked up on that stepped mountain of crates like some skirted
aviary. Men called out from truck cabs or whistled and undressed the
ladies with their eyes. As the road ascended it gave way to the Gulf and
the world of Tampico and the oil fields spread out before them. Only
this was not the vision as presented in the Diaz film John Lourdes had
watched in the dark of the funeraria.

This was a hallucinatory contradiction. A fetid kingdom of pure
commerce and profane destruction. A land stripped of life now cancered from fire and oil.

"El auge," said Rawbone.

The oil boom. The phrase encompassed everything but captured
nothing.

Tampico had been established along the Panuco River, which
flowed into the Gulf. The town was cordoned by a series of lagoons
and marshes. There was a vast railroad yard, and the river had become an oil turnpike of tugs and barges, flatbeds and tankers, paddle
wheelers; anything that could stay afloat and carry freight was on that
waterway.

The rainforests had been cut down and burned off and now grimy
wells rose up into the sky. By the Pueblo Viejo Lagoon was a place
known as Tankerville, where row after row of wood and concrete drums,
an armada of storage bins, baked in the sun. Neighborhoods had been
constructed in the marshes, with shacks of cratewood and slat for workers built on stilts as the ground beneath oozed up slime. Swamps were
drained for warehouses and pump stations and shipping terminals.

Everywhere they looked there were black pools of oil. Pits had
been dug for spills. There were lakes where wells had blown and bled
upon the earth for days that now were turning to a gloppy asphalt in the coastal heat. The high reeds along the lagoons were tipped with the
black of oil, the trees were marked with it, the roads and roofs spotted
with it, wagons, cars and trucks, their tires turned with it. The black
rolled in with the tide and tainted the sand with it.