The Creed of Violence (22 page)

On the floorboards overhead the men's boots tapped out their pacings or creaked when chairs were moved. But that black and stinking hole was near about as good as a stethoscope for picking up their
conversation.

HEN HE LEFT the hotel room Rawbone walked the streets
with his bindle slung over one shoulder like some aimless
tramp. He tried to discredit every incident, every day, every hour and
minute from El Paso to that very moment as if to deny the undeniable.

"There are times, Mr. Lourdes, when you say something and it's
like you've known me all my life."

"Or maybe all my life."

Could it be John Lourdes doesn't know I am his father? He tried to
convince himself of that possibility. That the young man in the Southern
who was his son, his blood, might somehow have eradicated a father
from memory. It was ridiculous and demanded raw stupidity to be even
remotely believed. And the fact he was reaching that far enraged him,
for it signaled weakness and fear and shame and how truly he'd been
plowed under by the truth.

He stopped and looked in a shop window. His image there tinctured by gas lamps. He removed the derby and cradled back his hair. He
was searching for his son, but his son was in that hotel room, he was a
member of the Bureau of Investigation, he was the man who had taken
him down, who he had traveled with for days, who had outplotted him,
who he'd brought to the women wracked with pain, who controlled
his fate. And who, only a faint hour ago, he had considered murdering.
John Lourdes was also the man who had never once acknowledged the
fact they were father and son. Suddenly the hearse came back to him,
when they had spoken to each other through its glass casement. He
stepped away from the window, unable to bear the sight of himself.

It was a weekend night. The streets were alive and rowdy with
horse-drawn trolleys and carriages flush with tourists. There were couples and laughter and people on balconies playing cards or listening
to Victrolas. Vendors sold ice cream and bottled mineral water and
candied treats. And Rawbone walked amongst all this alone and in the
possession of a shattering immensity.

John Lourdes had even changed his name. Probably, Rawbone
thought, for the same reason I had changed my own-shame. At least
we had that in common. The very idea of it caused bitter laughter that
verged on tears.

He walked the beach. He watched the tide roll in and foam over
the oily sand, he watched it fall away. He stood in the amber mist of the
casinos along the boardwalk.

His wife had hung that cross from a nail beneath a postcard of
Lourdes with a child standing before a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Rawbone had told her, "I hope she does a lot better for you than she
did for her own kid."

She'd been praying for her husband's conversion to goodness.
Deriding such an act, he had fired at the crucifix, shattering part of one
cross beam.

She'd picked it up from the floor and stood before him in that
smoky hovel they called home. She pointed to each cross beam. The one
that survived, the one that was shattered. "One for each thief crucified
with Christ," she said. "Which do you want to be? These are the only
choices for us all."

In a sparkflash he understood how John Lourdes had come by his
name. He turned from the Gulf. How quickly it all had gone. From
the casino an orchestra played. Through tall French doors he could see
elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen dance to the rich and soothing
strings of a waltz.

He stood on the boardwalk in unrealized bereavement, then, disregarding the obvious, he opened a set of the French doors and entered
the ballroom. He took off his derby and set it and his bindle on an
empty table.

People soon took notice of this unshaven and road-filthy vagabond
with an automatic in his belt. He looked about the room until his eyes
fell upon a small group of women standing alone and listening to the
music. They saw him approaching and whispered amongst themselves.
There was one lady amongst them near about his own age with raven
hair and Mediterranean skin.

"Pardon me," he said.

She turned and faced this strange man uncertainly.

"Would you have one dance with me?"

Her companions stared in disbelief.

"I know," he said, "how I look. But I can act the gentleman, and
am a fine dancer."

Whatever the reason, be it rebellion or reserve, she agreed. He escorted her past stares and whispers.

Then there they were, waltzing to a grace of chords outside existence. They could have been any man and any woman in the ineffable light of what's possible, but they were not. She watched his face, unhurried and without judgment. He was a depiction of personal anguish and soon tears collected at the corners of his eyes.

"Sir," she said, "you're-"

"Yes ... I saw my son for the first time today in almost fifteen
years."

"You must be very happy."

"I abandoned him and his mother. She was dark like yourself. She
has been dead since before I knew better."

This sudden and unexpected glimpse into someone's soul left her
self-conscious. She tried to say something helpful.

"Maybe your son can forgive you this?"

"No, you see ... my son also knows I am a common assassin."

The dancing stopped. He saw her confusion laced with fear. He
thanked her, then walked away.

JOHN LOURDES SAT at a cafe table outside the Southern. He had three
men under surveillance and was writing in his notebook when the father returned. He whistled and flagged him over. "Where have you
been?"

The father sat. "Dancing, Mr. Lourdes."

The son leaned toward him. "Three men by the entrance. One is
in a white suit."

The father had been studying the face of this stranger sitting next
to him in the light of the new reality. He then glanced up through a
row of candlelit faces to where three men crowded together over their
whiskey glasses.

"The one in the white suit," said John Lourdes, "is named Robert
Creeley. He is part of the U.S. Consulate here in Mexico. The men with him
..." John Lourdes referenced his notes, ". . . are named Hayden and Olsen.
They have adjoining suites to Creeley. I don't know what they do."

The father again took to staring at his flesh and blood.

"I bribed a desk clerk ... with some of your money."

"Very practical," said the father.

"Those three were at the mayor's house tonight with a number of
other men. Two of them ... Doctor Stallings and Anthony Hecht."

Rawbone sat back. Stallings. He could feel the man's presence
hovering over this very moment. The candle on the table flickered abstractly. He stared into its flame.

"Did you hear me?"

"I heard," said the father.

"What happened with Stallings?"

Rather than answer, the father asked, "What were you doing at the
mayor's house?"

"Stallings had sent the girl there with the old woman to work. I
went to see if they were alright. Men, over a dozen, were having some
heated talk. All of them together. What does it mean?"

John Lourdes had been asking himself, but the father answered. "It
means the Cains are getting ready to team up against Abel."

The statement was pointed yet cryptic and John Lourdes wanted
to question Rawbone about it when the desk clerk walked over. "Mr.
Lourdes," he said, "the phone call you've been expecting."

He thanked the man and slipped him some money. "Let's go," he
said. The father stood, finished the last of John Lourdes's beer and followed. There was a telephone off the hook at the desk. John Lourdes
answered and listened and soon he began to write in his notebook.

The father waited off to one side by the bar. From there he could
watch Creeley and the other two. He was calculating how to proceed
and whether to tell the son the truth about the conversation he'd had
with the good doctor. He knew it would be determinative for John
Lourdes.

He turned his attention to the son. All the years wondering what
the moment of their meeting would be and it had already taken place in an El Paso lobby. "Keep your eyes at gunsight level," he'd said, "if you
mean to make something of yourself ..."

John Lourdes finished the call. "Truck close by?"

"Close by."

"Get it and meet me out front."

John Lourdes was on the street with shotgun and satchel when the
truck pulled up. He climbed in. Rawbone noted the shotgun. The son
had their destination written out in his notebook. "The Arbol Grande.
Know it?"

"I know it."

He drove the tramway road. Marking their way the graying powdered smoke from the huge stacks of the Standard Oil Refinery. On the
drive John Lourdes laid out what he'd overheard from that murky root
cellar. The mayor of Tampico was receiving death threats because of
his allegiance to the present regime. He was pleading for more support
and protection. And the way he laid out these demands was no less than
a veiled threat, his survival paralleling that of the oil fields, as both were
vulnerable to acts of violence. He also insinuated the new regime might
well have a different worldview of the oil companies and how they
might be treated or taxed. He could not guarantee, under those conditions, the same kind of favorable treatment. Often, he used the phrase
"direct American intervention" as the means of security and control.

Creeley, the gentleman at the Southern, told the mayor a case for
American intervention had to be built carefully, and to that end, he
added, unofficially, an investigation on the ground could well be in the
works.

Rawbone heard it all, and cold hard reason told him no good
would come of this. It smelled of Cuba. And Manila. And the law of a
black argument. All he said was, "The shotgun."

John Lourdes glanced at the shotgun across his lap. "We're going
to meet someone tonight about the weapons."

LONG THE PANuco everything seemed touched by smoke from
the refineries. The buildings packed in along the shore as far as
one could see were shrouded in gloom. The tramway crossed a channel
that connected the laguna to the Panuco. The country there was wild
and dark. John Lourdes took the flashlight from his carryall and the
notebook in his hand flared up.

"This is the place."

The truck pulled off into the high reeds. Rawbone sat there vexed
and checked his automatic. "Who contacted you?"

"Would it make a difference what name they used?"

The question went to the very core of their being.

"No."

They sat quietly for a bit.

"Why us, for this?" said the father. "Have you asked yourself
that?"

"I have."

"And why didn't the good doctor just give us the weapons? To be
delivered right off. Have you asked yourself that?"

"I have."

"And do you have an answer in your gunsights?"

"No ... but I believe the answer may have me in its gunsights."

The son shut off the light and lit a cigarette. The father got out of
the truck. They waited.

"You were raised in El Paso, were you not, Mr. Lourdes?"

"I was."

"The barrio?"

"The barrio."

He could not see the son from where he'd walked to in the high reeds.
There was only the glow from the tip of John Lourdes's cigarette.

"There was a factory," Rawbone said casually, "that sewed
American flags. I had a place a few doors up a walking street. Do you
know it ... the factory?"

"I seem to recall it."

"It's only an alley now for telephone poles. There's a pawnshop on
one corner and a gun seller on the other where I picked up this Savage
the day before we had ... the good fortune ... of stumble-fucking into
each other."

He hesitated. There was only the sound of the water slipping down
through the channel to the river and the Gulf beyond. As a man, the
father felt completely boarded up, the shell that waited upon the wrecking ball.

"My wife is dead, but I have a son. What do you think, Mr.
Lourdes? When I get back to El Paso . . . Do I try to find him? You
know me. What I am. What do you think of the idea?"