"He doesn't know how to ride."
"Teach him."
"Rollie, do you love me?" "Of course I do." "Victor's going with me."
"And Novis," Rollie said. "Tell Victor to find him a gentle horse."
TWELVE
Virgilsaid what if they were hauled around town a few times in the wagon and brought right back to El Morro? And that's why they put the sacks over their heads.
Tyler believed this place smelled different and wasn't as close to the open sea, though it was damp and moldy and had more spiders and rats than the Morro because, Tyler believed, there weren't as many prisoners here. He had the feeling they might be the only ones. He asked Virgil if he'd heard voices last night, any screams. They had been placed in separate cells, but now were together with one water bucket and one waste bucket between them. It was as if the Guardia were saying to them: You can talk and scheme all you want, you aren't going anyplace. Look at it another way, together they'd be easier to mind.
Virgil said what was there to scheme about? They were in a cell with big goddamn iron rings on the stone walls they could be chained to and iron bars crisscrossing the door. Virgil was talkative this morning.
He said he hoped to God this was a different place and not the Morro. The day war was declared the whole goddamn Atlantic Squadron would be out there. You'd have the Indiana and the Massachusetts, first-class twin-screw battle wagons with four 13-inch guns each. You'd have the Iowa with her four 12-inchers, the Texas, the Montgomery and the New York, an armored cruiser that could go twenty-one knots. And you'd have the Terror, a double-turret twin-screw monitor, like a raft with four 10-inch rifles on her. Virgil told Tyler the Maine was a second-class battleship, but had twelve inches of armor around her hull and eight to twelve inches protecting her turrets and barbettes. If the Maine had been unarmored the explosion would've crushed her like an eggshell and probably everybody aboard would have been killed.
Anyway, Virgil said, if they were still in the Morro and there was a war, they'd be goners. The squadron could sit out in the stream, turn their batteries on this old place. Shit, a couple of salvos and it would be gone, a pile of rubble.
Something else he told Tyler: "I said I'd never been in jail before? It's 'cause I never got caught." The horse his stepfather the preacher took from him and sold? Virgil stole back. Then, he told Tyler, there were some men from Fort Gibson had insulted his mother, saying she was a whore and offering her twenty-five cents each to luck them. Virgil stole a pistol from the place where he worked, then right after he got his horse back, he held up these men who'd insulted his mother as they were playing poker in the back room of the feed store in Fort Gibson, a bandanna hiding his face. Robbed them and hit 'em over the head with his gun barrel, the dirty-mouth sons of bitches. The funds got him clear to Port Tampa, where he went to bed with a whore the first time in his life, sixteen years old, and lied about his age to join the United States Marines.
Tyler had mentioned the forty-five hundred dollars he had coming from Boudreaux. Virgil said he believed you could live a long time on forty-five hundred, Jesus, years and years. He said to Tyler it was too bad he didn't have it on him, he could bribe his way out of here. Tyler said if he'd had it he sure wouldn't have it now.
"This is a country of banditry," he told Virgil, "or for anyone bent on scala waggery He had learned from Fuentes that bandits here put up signs on the road that said MONEY OR MUTILATION. Take your pick. He said to Virgil there seemed to be mostly road agents in Cuba, highwaymen, Fuentes called them, something Tyler said he didn't understand, banks being so easy to rob.
Lionel Tavalera entered the cell unarmed. A guard came in behind him to place a canvas chair on the dirt floor for the major, and now he sat facing Tyler and Virgil, the two sitting on the ground with their legs stretched out, their backs against the old scarred stone blocks of the wall. They were together in the cell this morning so he could address them at the same time. He began by saying he was going to the captain-general's palace, where they were having a meeting about the war he believed would be declared any day now. They would discuss America's ability to raise an army. How long would that take, a few months? It was thirty-three years since Americans had the war among themselves. Then when the army was ready they would board the troop ships in Port Tampa and perhaps Key West and sail here to Cuba.
"But where will they land? Excuse me," Tavalera said, "where will this army try to come ashore?" He looked at Virgil. "Marine Virgil Webster, from a place called Indian Territory. Are you Indian?"
"That's correct," Virgil said. "And the first thing I do when I get out of here, Don, is track you down and lift your scalp, you son of a bitch."
"That's the spirit to have," Tavalera said. "If there many like you it could be a good war. But you don't answer the question. Where do you think your army will come ashore?"
"Downtown Havana with John Philip Sousa's band leading the parade," Virgil said, "once our guns flatten the Morro and all your puny harbor defenses."
Tavalera liked this marine; he wouldn't mind having about four hundred just like him to bring his 2d Corps up to strength. He had arrived with 750 men under his command, one of six Guardia Civil corps sent to Cuba, and in three years had lost more than half of them fighting in the province of Matanzas. He believed more insurgents were recruited from there than from any other province. Maybe because so many were shot in the Plaza de las Armas and showed how to die bravely.
He said, "Our fleet will be here, in the harbor."
Virgil saj, d, "You mean at the bottom of the harbor. Any ship still afloat we'll board."
Tyler said, "You come to tell us something?"
"No, nothing in particular," Tavalera said. "I thought we could talk for a few minutes, see what you think about the war that's coming." He said this because he believed he had much in common with these two.
But all they did was stare at him until the marine said, "I just told you, we're gonna give you a whipping. Now, when're you letting us out of here?"
Maybe they had nothing in common after all, or this was not a time to talk. Tavalera said to the marine, "When your country declares war you become a prisoner of war and will be sent to Africa." He said to Tyler, "And when that happens you will be taken outside and shot as a spy. If that's all you want to know, there it is."
Deciding their fate almost as he said it.
He got up and left the cell, now to see if the drunken Lieutenant Molina would like to talk.
THIRTEEN
Novis Crowe asked Fuentes if he could count. If there was three of them going riding, how come he brought four horses from the stable? They were in front of the hotel, 9:00 A.M." ready to mount.
Fuentes believed he could tell Novis almost anything. He could say, "Mr. Boudreaux's orders," and Novis would have to accept it and shut up. What Fuentes told him, the horse was green and they were getting it used to the saddle and bridle. Novis said well, what was in that pack tied to the saddle? Fuentes said it was their lunch, they were going to have a picnic. He saw Amelia looked at him with no expression on her lovely face.
Having Novis along, Fuentes had told her, wasn't going to change the plan. No, in fact, he saw a way to use Novis. Early this morning he had contacted the people he needed to make it work.
Amelia set off on the avenue heading east, the two following her past old buildings with Greek columns, past decorative stucco facades, gray ones, yellow ones, Fuentes leading the horse with the canvas pack, Novis telling them there weren't any horses to speak of where he came from, the bottom end of Lake 0keechobee in Florida; it was all swamp, no place for a horse. Telling them he believed, though, gators would like horse as much as they liked dog. Telling them he fished the lake till he went to work for the railroad up to Port of Tampa, took part in strike breaking for the railroad anyplace him and his bunch was needed and came to Newerleans where he worked on the docks and took up prizefighting, what he was doing when he was hired by Mr. Boudreaux after Mr. Boudreaux saw him knock a man out across the river in Algiers, hired him as his personal bodyguard. By this time they were riding past warehouses over by the Central railroad yards, coming past an ox cart full of coffee sacks being unloaded. Fuentes said good day to the Negro standing in the cart and nodded toward Novis, now most of a length ahead of him, Novis telling how he had won a hundred prizefights before he retired, beating opponents who came in all sizes, many of them bigger than him, as the Negro in the wagon swung a fifty-pound sack of coffee beans at Novis, caught him across the shoulders and swept him out of the saddle. Finally, to Amelia's religf, shutting him up. The Negro and another man dragged Novis into the warehouse and Fuentes dismounted to follow them inside. Amelia waited with the horses.