Rawbone swept up the rifle and turned. "He's a dead man ... and so are you, brother."
While the man lay anguishing upon the ground, something seemed to fix in the driver's mind. He blinked as if hit by revelation and looked down at the flask on the cab seat. He turned his stare to Rawbone, who had not moved, nor was he pointing the carbine. He just stood there with a steely and splayed grin as the driver, now panicking, put the truck in gear and started off.
"Aye!" shouted Rawbone at the truck. "So there you go. But you've already drunk your future down, and I can hear the trumpets playing graveside."
The truck rumbled on wildly while Rawbone slung the carbine over his shoulder then knelt and robbed the dying man of his belongings. As he lay there shuddering in the dust, Rawbone stuffed his hands down into his coat pockets. Then whistling up a tune followed off after the truck at a casual walk.
ABOUT AN HOUR further on amidst riven sandhills he saw the rig. It had veered off the road and sat canted against a stretch of rock scored by the wind.
The engine was still running as Rawbone stepped up into the open cab. The driver was alive, but barely. A trembling saliva had accumulated at the corner of his pale mouth.
"Pardon me," said Rawbone, as he leaned past him and shut off the motor. "Rest a while."
He then stepped down from the cab and, while he checked the truck for damage, noticed one of the lashed crates had come loose and cracked open beside the road.
"Ah," said Rawbone at what he saw.
He knelt over the crate. Hanging out the wood slats like the skin of a snake was a fabric feed belt mechanism for a machine gun.
He yelled back at the driver, "I didn't know they needed these to build an icehouse."
TWO
He was raised in a rank alley behind a factory where desert immigrants sewed together American flags. His mother was one of those immigrants, from the state of Sinaloa. His father was a criminal and, as the boy would later learn, a murderer. The father had abandoned the family on the Fourth of July, 1893. The last he'd told his son was that he would take him by trolley to the park on Mesa Street to see the fireworks together and eat ice cream.
After this he watched the humble surface of his mother's face erode with sorrow and her grief slowly bury what God had so beautifully put there. The son took the mother by wagon to the Concordia Cemetery and buried her in a pauper's grave he dug himself. The death left him devastated and on his own at thirteen. The desire to see his father destroyed was matched only by a string of memories born of fonder times that left an unfathomable ache across the arc of his existence.
The boy took to living on the roof of the factory where those at work on the sewing machines did double shifts stitching together flags. He was a day laborer in the Santa Fe Railroad yard that shouldered up to the barrio. It was brutal work that drove men into the earth like paltry nails. Yet he had not only the fury to survive but the faith of mind to flourish.
He wore around his neck a tiny gold cross with one broken beam that had been his mother's. It was not some holy trinket or talisman but every wistful and nostalgic wish that had ever been.
He could read and write, and his father had taught him the creed of weapons. He was unafraid of death, understanding it was only the seamless moment that takes you to somewhere else.
He was not a tall young man; rather he was thin and muscled with a huge forehead and shaded eyes. His hair was black and straight, his skin tawny, his features refined.
His name was, for him, rife with shame, and after his mother's death he changed it. She had always dreamed of a pilgrimage to Lourdes, where the Virgin Mary appeared to the child Bernadette Soubirous, and ever afterward, when asked, he said his name was John Lourdes.
He started as an oil boy in the roundhouses. He rose in the ranks to run a yard gang. He spoke two languages fluently, and having been weaned by a criminal, had an intuitive feel for the devilry within men. He was moved to security, and soon after promoted to railroad detective.
In 1908 Attorney General Charles Bonaparte organized the Bureau of Investigation with its own staff of federal law enforcement officers. John Lourdes was invited to join. And so, at the age of twenty-three, he became a special agent working for the federal government in El Paso, Texas.
HE LEANED AGAINST the rail fence that flanked the Rio Grande by the Santa Fe Bridge. He had a week's worth of beard and clothes that cried out with wear; even his slouch hat had shear lines along the creases. John Lourdes was an unemployed rough killing time and cigarettes alongside a row of other roughs trying to scratch up day work at an employment shed. At least that's how he wanted to come across so as not to draw attention to himself, while day after day he watched the foot traffic pass through customs between El Paso and Juarez.
The Mexican Revolution had begun in 1910 when President Porfirio Diaz promised free elections, then proceeded to deny them. This act was the pebble that presaged the avalanche. Mexico was decaying under the forces of exploitation, poverty and foreign interests. One thousand people controlled the vast majority of the nation's wealth. Illiteracy, child mortality and peonage became the sires of violence.
El Paso and its sister city, Juarez, were the epicenter for revolutionaries, expatriated nationals, would-be saboteurs, two-dollar-a-day undercover agents working for both sides, con men, corrupt Rangers and an assortment of human flotsam who carried illegal fires in their hearts.
John Lourdes had grown a mustache that was sleek and modern, to fit the times. He ran a finger across his upper lip as he studied the foot traffic. He possessed the intangibles of discipline and patience as well as an eye for the particulars of people. A look or gesture often exposed a hole right into them. He followed anyone who aroused suspicion and he scratched out every detail in pencil in a pocket notepad.
His father had asked him once as a boy, "Do you want to know what people are really like?"
They had been in Juarez at an open-air market overrun with shoppers. His father pointed from face to face, then knelt down, pulling his son close. There was always a bit of fever in his father's voice when he was excited. "Do you want to know how? So you can never be tricked nor fooled?" The boy's eyes widened. "So no one can ever make a game of you. Nor spin you, nor straight edge you. Like that," he said snapping his fingers, "you can know. Do you want to know? Do you want to know how?"
The boy nodded because he saw his father so needed him to want to know.
"Well," he whispered to his son, "be indifferent to every man ... and you will know."
That moment, in all its profound self-interest, wrapped around him like a strangle cord as a young girl walked past, just a shadow reach away, and crossed back to Juarez. It was the third time in as many days he'd noted her.
And it wasn't because she was young and lovely in a rather simple and unassuming way. She couldn't have been more than sixteen or so at the outside, yet there was this calming silence she emanated as she pressed on about her business, that was in direct contrast to the nervous and wary pen stroke of her eyes as she watched and weighed every action before her.
The first time he'd seen her, she was in the waiting line for the quarantine shed just below the bridge. The building was wind-beaten brick with a long, fluted chimney, and there Mexicans crossing to the United States went to be stripped down and deloused.
It was a horrible and humiliating experience. His own mother had suffered it upon crossing. He'd overheard her once with other women, their voices cloaked, how they'd been stripped and left to stand in waiting lines on a cement floor to undergo medical inspection, while the workmen spared no one with their eyes.