John Lourdes's eyes narrowed.
"We took this truck into Mexico. We are taking this truck filled with munitions to Juarez. We are together."
"I see."
"Do you, Mr. Lourdes? I'm circumspect. So just in case. Once we crossed that river and left behind everything you're built on, you became as much my field hand as I am yours. And those three," he pointed with his derby toward the shed, "seal the contract. And we'll sleep the sleep on it."
John Lourdes pushed his hat back and leaned into the cab. "Sleep the sleep, I won't forget that. No ... I won't."
"Ready to mingle it up with me? Let me remind you of something. Of a conversation Lawyer Burr had with your justice Knox about my coming. He had a name for it. A phrase. The practical-"
"-the practical application of strategy."
"There you go. That street dirt back there in the shack, they are the practical application of strategy."
"For your benefit."
"Absolute. It's a means of holding you to the cross. I don't think your justice Knox would care to see one of his own standing trial in a foreign country for a murder committed because of an order the BOI issued. That doesn't seem to me ... a practical application of strategy."
There was a grim flicker of dark accomplishment.
"How did you come to exist?" said John Lourdes.
"I came to exist in the same manner as Cain and Abel. Then I was baptized pure American for good measure."
THE LIGHTS OF Juarez stood out upon the plain. The road they were on followed the trackline. The way was lit by intermittent campfires with small groups of raggletag peons brandishing weapons. Soldiers in the making. An army of insurrection rising up out of the evening land. Their voices wild and bitter and ready to war.
"Mr. Lourdes, if they knew what we were carting ... the bad news for you, we'd spend eternity like some married couple in a common grave."
They had been riding in silence since the river. Until that moment. John Lourdes now said, "I want to know now who you are to meet, and where."
Rawbone considered. "By tomorrow you'll be sleeping in your own bed and maybe supping at the Modern Cafe there in the lobby of the Mills Building."
"I want to know."
There was gunfire and the footfalls of men. John Lourdes came about quickly, his hand going to the shoulder holster. Rawbone stayed to the wheel. Men rushed past the truck to a fight that had flared there by the roadside.
The son turned his attention back to the father, who'd still not even once looked away from the road. "Who and where?"
"Is this a test of wills?"
"If something should happen to you."
"Haven't you even heard the rumor that just thinking it can bring down bad luck? You wouldn't want that."
"My job is to see this through."
"As is mine."
"But I chose to be here. Grant me the information."
Rawbone did not answer. John Lourdes was left to wait, and wait. Then, as if an afterthought, the father said, "Alliance for Progress. Just up from the Customs House on September 16 Avenue. Hecht is the man Simic told me to address."
John Lourdes wrote all this down in his notebook. As he did, from one of the campfires came a boy in near rags running with hat in hand up alongside the truck and begging for money. The father reached into his pocket and asked the son, "The man's name from the roadhouse?"
The son scanned his notes. "James Merrill."
The father tossed the boy a crumpled buck and told him in Spanish, "Courtesy of Mr. James Merrill."
The boy took the money and swung his hat in thanks.
"Before we confront this Hecht fellow," said John Lourdes, "we have to deal with protecting the truck."
"We?"
"Where you go-I go. Where I go-you go."
"With that in mind, Mr. Lourdes. I have a place you'll find particularly fitting."
THEY DROVE THROUGH a neighborhood of blistered hovels and empty lots along the shore. Laundry hung from lines in the starlight. The smell of meals cooking in greased pans scented the air. Somewhere a mother tried to calm a crying child; somewhere there was music and laughter. It was a mirror of the barrio they could see across the streaming quiet of the river, where they'd existed once upon a time with a woman one married and the other called mother. A moment fell through time. A moment they shared without knowing because of the flaw in their existence.
At the end of that long, filthy street was factory row. There the truck pulled up to a drab squat building with a rotting sign on the roof: RODRIGUEZ FUNERARIA.
A funeral parlor.
John Lourdes asked, "You're not trying to politely tell me something, are you?"
In the gray dark Rawbone only grinned and stepped from the cab.
The door opened into what had been an entrance hall. Heavy drapes hung from garish rodding along the walls. The oxblood cloth was moth-eaten and smelled of must. The room was empty but for a desk, where a man slept all bundled up with his hands tucked under his head as a pillow. A black cloth covered a doorway and from beyond came a dramatic overture issuing from a piano.
Rawbone dragged the sleeping man from the desk and told him in no uncertain Spanish he was a ball-less toad and he better do as he was damn well ordered and let McManus know Rawbone was here.
The man went out stoop-shouldered and mumbling. The father had the son follow him through the covered doorway. As the tarp was pulled back John Lourdes found himself at the rear of a room that had once been for the viewing of bodies but was now a theatre for the showing of movies.
People sat on poorly nailed-together benches while an old Mexican in a Florentine suit played an upright that looked as if it might have made the trip over with Columbus. There was a smoky grit to the light from the projector and on the screen came the flickering rush of images:
BRONCO BILLY ANDERSON IN THE ROAD AGENTS
Father and son remained back by the entranceway. The black cutouts that were people shadows watching the movie more than likely knew little or no English to understand the scene cards, but it mattered not at all. When the road agents thundered down on that stagecoach and robbed the payroll box, the outlaw emotion in the audience rose to the moment. Cheering wildly and screaming of revolution and down with Diaz and the government pistols were fired into the air. Chips of plaster and dust rained everywhere as the room stenched with powdersmoke.
The son looked to the father. Framed in grainy illumination Rawbone was intent upon the screen as the posse formed up for the hunt. His eyes flashed and his mouth opened and his lips reared back in anticipation as one bandit beat down the other over greed and rode off with the ill-gotten gains.
Rawbone leaned toward John Lourdes and spoke behind the cover of his hand: "I love the nickelodeon. Wished they had 'em when I was a boy. That's a world to be introduced to. There's only one thing they can't show right. Movies, I mean. And you know what that is?"
The son had no idea. The father held his hands together as if the fragile and the priceless rested there. "The dyin'," he said. "They can't get that right. The horror when a gent knows all trace of him is being wiped out of existence. The knowing you will be no more. For that's the only thing there is, one's own living self."
F'IFTEEN
McManus was a great hulk of a man with a flabby nose and a quarter-size chin. He was also missing an arm, the left one. He wore a prosthesis up past the elbow with a shaped wooden oval wrist and detachable wooden hand. The fingers, oddly, were spread out wide as if in a state of perpetual surprise. And the arm itself looked to be a few sizes too small for him, as it was at least six inches shorter than the other. It was with this arm and hand he pointed at John Lourdes. "What is this?"