The Creed of Violence (25 page)

They drove on through an expanding emptiness, the shadow of
their rig running an ocean of creosote. Suddenly a spire rose burning
skyward behind them.

"Mr. Lourdes, we've got the Fourth of July on us."

John Lourdes stopped the truck and came about in his seat. A trailing flare miles back, but before it died away another, well to the west,
was fired into the air.

"We're being marked," said John Lourdes.

RAWBONE DROVE WHILE John Lourdes sat with flashlight and map,
charting a new course of deceptions to cheat capture. But even in the
dark the pursuit advanced, their flares marking the coal-black heavens,
determined and absolute.

Son and father kept on through the black and wild night, hunted
like nameless migrants, climbing up through lonely miles of pinon and
chiseled rock. Along the battered remains of mining roads and mule trails, the truck managed the ascent like a slow and hulky beast toward
vested cloudbanks. Along the crest they detonated the battened passage behind them to slow the pursuit. But even so, before dawn by a
spring at the entrance to a stark plain they could see a retinue of lights
traversing the darkened rock face in steady order. From there, a flare
went up.

Son and father scanned the desert floor and in the country to their
flank there came an answering flare, followed yet by a third atop the
distant flats of a mesa. Their pursuers were closing in with the punitive
resolve of some fabled deity.

While the father filled the water bags and gassed the truck from
a drum, John Lourdes studied the map. But he saw they were beyond
remedy now, so he tossed the map in that shallow waterway where it
floated briefly before the ink ran, then paled, and the paper sank.

"It's here ... or there."

The father looked out to where a cresset light rose over a day's run
of hammered dust bordered by windless foothills.

"Take your choice, Mr. Lourdes."

"I say we make them earn our blood."

They pushed hard into an emptiness where the dark burned away
and the earth reddened and the air choked you dry. Rawbone was in
the back, mounting the .50 caliber on its tripod. He had rigged a tarp
over part of the truckbed. Removing his derby, he wrapped a bandana
around his head. John Lourdes whistled and the father turned.

To the west, thin ripples of smoke. A flare arrowed out toward
where the truck was running. From behind them another. On their far
flank another. The flares were gridding them and so the son looked
back at the father. Their faces were harrowed and stained with red
dust. It would be soon.

The first of them wheeled toward the truck. Three riders pitched
forward in their saddles. Hard cases reeking with intent. Rawbone edged around the .50 caliber so the barrel sat over the sideboard with
its AMERICAN PARTHENON streaked by the red clay of the desert floor.

Rawbone opened fire. A hail of dust and blood. The nightmare
faces of the unsuspecting men, the horses wrenching sideways as they
fell. The truck sped away, leaving this spot of earth looking as if it had
vomited up death.

Spumes of dust in a closing arc. A flare missiled at the truck, struck
the engine hood. Sparks everywhere burning John Lourdes's face and
arms. He swapt at them with a hand and hat as if they were a swarm
of torched bees.

The gunfire intensified. The .50 caliber shell casings spattered
and dinged across the steel chassis. The riders closed in one surge.
They pressed their mounts and fired at the tires. The truck zigged and
straightened, then swerved and sent up rolling walls of gritted red that
left the riders blind.

A punishing mile and the lathered mounts began to wane. The riders kept on but were falling back. Rawbone could just make out the
dusty figures of Doctor Stallings and Jack B and he screamed to them
over the barrel of that machine gun, "I'll write you ladies when I get
settled."

They pressed on with the stencil of the truck long and sleek upon
the earth. They were buying time for the hourglass when far ahead in
the melting heat a floating illusion of water damn near shimmering like
sunset. John Lourdes yelled to Rawbone to come about and he did ...
and was sure of nothing that he saw.

It appeared to be some vast standing lake that would blink and
disappear as the ground dipped, then it would liquid back up out of the
desert clay as the truck wheels climbed some hardened dune.

It was there, then gone, and then it was—

The truck braked. The men got out. They walked to the edge of
that still and seemingly endless body of blood-colored water.

"The storm that came in from the Gulf," said John Lourdes.

"Dry lagoon ... this'll be nothing by tomorrow."

Rawbone ran to the truck and grabbed the binoculars. John
Lourdes looked up shore and then down. The damn thing stretched on
for how far he could not tell. He stepped into the water to test its depth.
Rawbone scanned the desert. That body of dust had broken into two
widening wings.

"We've got just a couple of beers' worth of time before they get here."

He turned to find the son near forty yards on into that glassy red
muck.

"How deep do you think it is at the worst?"

The father understood. "We get stuck out there-"

John Lourdes hurried to shore and hustled past the father and
jumped into the truckbed.

"We're too heavy. And if the tires sink-"

John Lourdes was surveying what they carried. There were four
drums of gasoline and a few crates of munitions. "Look across that
lagoon," John Lourdes said. "You can see slips of land. It wasn't more
than a few inches where I walked."

He'd grabbed a crate and spilled out its contents. He now tossed
back in a few hand grenades, dynamite, a reel of cable, the detonator.
He slid the crate to the father. "Put that up front."

He jumped from the truckbed and ran to the cab. He was on one
side, the father the other.

"You're always one to throw around a remark," said the son.

"I pride myself on having a good wit."

John Lourdes pointed to the lagoon. "Do you think you could part
the red sea for us?"

WITH RIFLE IN hand Rawbone loped ahead of the truck. Water spilled
out through the slow-turning wheel wells and John Lourdes kept watch from the cab. Every time the truck sank or the tires spun he sweated out
the moments till the reflection of the rig on what looked to be a pan of
liquid fire rolled on.

Rawbone swung about and looked back. The advancing riders
were no longer dust but men trampling down upon the phalanx of their
shadows stretching out across the earth.

This was to be the hour. They swung the truck up onto an island of
red clay in the heart of the lagoon. They plotted their defense. They protected the tires with crates. They rolled two drums of gasoline out from
the truck until they were almost submerged. They knifed holes through
the metal casings large enough to wedge in sticks of dynamite. They set
the charges and ran the wire along the surface of the water to the detonator behind the truck. They would have the sun at their backs, and if they
could survive to see nightfall they might yet steal away with their lives.

The oncoming battery of guards reached the edge of the lagoon.
Doctor Stallings had one group under his command, Jack B the other.
Stallings focused his binoculars. The truck sat sideways on a shell of
ground. The words AMERICAN PARTHENON were streaked wet with
red cake kicked up from the wheels, and imprinted like a coat of arms
upon the water before it.

Doctor Stallings issued orders. The two wings of the assault started
forward at a slow walk, the attackers feeling their way until that slow
walk became an easy trot and Doctor Stallings lifted his arm and there
was a volley of gunfire from their ranks followed by a storm of flares.

The shells exploded against the truck, above it, in the water before
it. The air burned and stank, the sky discolored. John Lourdes huddled
with the detonator, Rawbone in the truckbed with his face against the
.50 caliber barrel. The riders veered to the flanks of the truck, closing,
firing; another assault of flares followed. That small island now under
a hellish rocket siege. Bursts of red glare, tracers spiraling off wildly on
into the lagoon, sparks falling from the sky like smoking confetti.

Upon that barren plain futures met in a blinding instant. The
shining sea around the truck erupted in a volcanic heaven of men and
mounts and red rain. Horsemen consumed in flames like something out
of an apocalyptic nightmare reached the island in the last moments of
their existence with weapons extended from scorched arms. The second
charge blew, and death's mouth opened with a force that consumed
them all. The red rain fell. It fell through blazing streamers of fire and it
fell through banks of black smoke rising in the windless air.

From amongst the carnage and the dead one man rose like an apparition without a shadow or a name. He stepped over an arm with its
inked flag floating lifelessly, and alone he walked amongst the remnants
of men and mounts scattered across the shallows and up onto that island of red clay where the truck still stood. There, beneath the words
AMERICAN PARTHENON, lay John Lourdes.

HE FATHER STAGGERED past a fallen mount and came to his
knees over the son. There was a bloody eyelet through the vest
just below the ribs on the heart side, and also a matching hole in the
back. But John Lourdes's eyes were open and he was breathing.

"Has it gone clear through?" came the halting voice.

"It has, Mr. Lourdes." Rawbone looked past the dead around him
and the desolation beyond ... survival, that's what he was searching
for. "We've got to make clock, Mr. Lourdes."

He hastened to the truck. His being tightened as he kicked over the
engine, unsure it would go. It started like a charm. He shifted gears and
it went forward sluggardly.

"Mr. Lourdes ... hear that ... Parthenon here is gonna carry you
home."

THE TRUCK CLIMBED the first altar of hills and shouldered along the
skyline with a falling sun far to their west. Before them a world as it
was at the time of creation.

John Lourdes lay on the cab seat facing a hard run of two days
with barely enough water for the truck. Rawbone drove through the
night with lanterns hung from the cab stanchions to light the way. He
drove through dust that scored his eyes, and heat that dried them to
the bone.

He watched the son weaken and yet refuse to drink. If there wasn't
enough for one, there wasn't enough for the other. The father cursed
him furiously, and John Lourdes answered, "We'll make it, or we
won't."

They labored hugely over swells of white pumice and through unreckonable granite canyons. John Lourdes's words came back to the
father: "There is no past, there is no future ... there is only you, and
me, and this truck."

Even now it was a test of wills. His mouth dry and cracking, his
eyes failing, in desperate need of water there on the seat he would not
drink, the father said, "Mr. Lourdes, should I come knocking at your
door one night in El Paso and offer to buy you dinner and drinks, what
would you think?"

"I would think ... you were paying for it with stolen money."

He had no strength to laugh, so a grunt had to suffice. "The Modern
Cafe in the Mills Building lobby. The sight of our illustrious meeting.
We'll drink gentleman's whiskey from Tom Collins glasses and toast
surviving. "

The muscles in Rawbone's body were breaking down; the night
was no cooler than the day. He had kept a rock in his mouth to foster
spit but even that was too little, too late. He remembered being a boy
with nothing in a pawny waste called Scabtown and watching a fighter
in the baking sun stalk an adversary. Even now, especially now, those battered and blood-streaked features once witnessed spoke to his fury
and resolve.

By morning the sun was striking him down. His grip on the wheel
slipped away and he momentarily passed out. He cursed himself and
pressed on again. Sometime that morning they came upon a necklace of
tiny pools. The father rushed to it desperately with a water bag only to
discover with one taste it was alkali.

Poison.

He looked back at the truck. The tarp above the cab lifted uneasily
with the breeze. His mind flashed on a funeral canopy-he killed the
thought of it quickly. But he knew. They would be dust before the day
was done.

He stared through the searing heat at the black surface of that
pool, so utterly still, and came to a moment that was absolute and
providential. He slipped the water bag into that bitter fountain and
watched the bubbles reach the air and die away. He wondered, would
the water taste of oblivion.

When the bag was full he stoppered it, then he leaned down and
put his mouth to the pool and drank. He drank like some bloodthirsty
drunk and sat with the tainted liquid spilling down his chin, and there
in the watery slicks the common assassin and the father looked at each
other for the last time.