It was not about whether John Lourdes would die or not; for purely selfish reasons he did not want him to die. But if he did, well—
He looked back at the passenger car cradling and pitch dark. Maybe it was the women with their raven hair and Indian faces and poisonous mix of delicacy and strength. Maybe it was the smells that clung to their clothes and hair. Lemon and vanilla, the musk of candlesmoke. Maybe it was the discarded family he should never have Goddamn gone back to El Paso for, as that act had fated him to this forsaken place and hour. These moments, this feeling, he knew from other times as prison. Not where you were the prisoner, no, but where you were the walls.
The beam of a flashlight tracered across his face.
Rawbone looked up. Jack B approached while Doctor Stallings remained at the far end of the flatcar. "The kid with you. I heard he's sick bad."
Rawbone pointed his cigarette. The light swung toward the passenger car silhouetting that shawl-covered window.
"We don't pay slackers."
Rawbone did not look at Jack B. Instead he busied himself investigating the tip of his burning cigarette.
"Next stop, we're tossing him."
Rawbone smoked, then said, "Promise."
The light moved in on his face till it was more than a trifle too close. Still, there was no acknowledgment and the standoff was broken only by the warning cry of a train whistle well up the tracks.
TWENTY-FOUR
A guard on the tender shouted for Doctor Stallings and pointed a carbine as direction. Far off into the dead of night there appeared a pyre of flame. Singular and wind-taken. Doctor Stallings ordered the men to weapon up. He told Rawbone to remain on guard at the truck.
It took another quarter hour moving through the desert before they came upon a burning water depot and junction station for the Mexican Telegraph Company. A half-dozen slotted wood structures stood out in the dark like incinerated cages. The water tower had collapsed and was a smoldering ruin. The first train stood beyond the destruction. Guards from the coal car formed a protective perimeter. The second train stopped well short of the fires. Doctor Stallings and his officers moved in quick order upon the scene. The man in command of the first train waited on the tracks to report to Doctor Stallings. Rawbone leapt from the flatcar and came up the line enough to hear what was being said.
The fire was no mean accident of nature nor the foolish result of a human mistake, for there was no person nor animal, no vehicle nor wagon anywhere to be found. The man talking to Doctor Stallings pointed to a cross near three feet high made of wood slats that had been set in the sand beside the tracks. A printed sheet had been staked to it. It was a copy of a decree by the president pro tem Madero, from exile-the revolution had officially begun.
Mr. Stars and Stripes read the sheet after Doctor Stallings passed it to him and, when finished, slapped that paper with the back of his hand and said, "We got ourselves the war, commander."
The man in charge of the first train went over and pulled the cross out of the ground. He started back toward Doctor Stallings and was in the process of breaking it apart when there was a volley of rifle fire. Three, maybe four shots. Arterials of powdered cloth and blood jumped from his body and he was blown back onto the tracks still holding that crucifix, where he lay stretched out dead.
A firefight began. Flashbursts along the ravined darkness. Jack B led a group of guards to meet the attack under Stallings's command.
There was firing all up and down the line. Another man was hit and fell facedown in the sand. From the passenger car women screamed. Rawbone yelled for them to quiet and he knelt on one leg, rifle poised and ready.
He could hear the cries of horses as half a dozen riders spurred their mounts and dashed past one of the burning sheds that yawed and flared with the wind. Their shadows rose up immense and branded against the flames, there one moment and then gone.
Campesinos-the people.
They were in the midst of a war now. A shooting war. The gratification of political causes, thought Rawbone. The common assassin in him had scorn for such things.
Doctor Stallings walked past him checking the line and said, "You were right about one thing."
Rawbone asked, "One?"
"Casualties."
Once alone, Rawbone cursed his luck.
RIFLE FIRE STIRRED him. Through a waterish dim John Lourdes saw bits of flaming ash rush past the windows like some wind-riven army of stars. He thought he was back on that plat in the Hueco Mountains until he heard men outside shouting and the train begin to move.
His eyes cleared enough to see women all about him in the quietude. A hand rested on his shoulder and his eyes lifted and there was the girl Teresa sitting on the floor with her back against the wall beside him. She had in her other hand his notebook and pencil.
Of anyone he asked in Spanish, "How did I get here?"
The old crone answered and he lifted his head slightly. She, too, sat nearby, overseeing a watercan with a leather strap being heated over a bed of candles in the bottom of a clay bowl.
It turned out she was a curandera, or healer, named Sister Alicia. She was preparing teas of cayenne and Peruvian Samento. These he was given to drink and later, under watchful eyes, he slept.
With morning the trains entered the shipping yards of Chihuahua. A fog immersed the city. It clung to the earth and the trains made their slow and cumbersome way from switch to switch through a gray and otherworldly brew that floated about the wheels.
On the wall of a three-story brick warehouse someone had painted a vast but clumsy headstone with the name MAL-o on it. Standing at the edge of the flatcar urinating into that vapory murk Rawbone noticed, as he hitched his pants, Doctor Stallings atop the last passenger car surveying the yard. Both men were regarding the headstone. Rawbone used his derby as a pointer. "Not a chance, that happens!" he yelled.
He was sure Doctor Stallings spoke Spanish and knew the word malo meant "evil."
The train ferried past the roundhouse and the tooling sheds when came the sounds of cheering and gunfire. Figures began to appear out of the nothingness. Campesinos alive to the belief God was finally going to shine down his alien grace upon their lives, even if such grace were to be delivered by a little bloodshed.
They were everywhere in the mist. Rawbone could see them across the trainyard, hordes up on boxcars and clinging to the stacks of black and silent locomotives. They yelled to the men on the train and the women in the passenger cars, possessed as they were with the furious excitement of possibility.
One of the campesinos ran up to the flatcar and shouted that la rev- olucion had begun and Rawbone answered with glorious indifference, smiling, "Yes, my friend, you've got a great future ... behind you."
A woman now called to Rawbone from the landing of the passenger car. The young man, it seemed, was asking for him.
John Lourdes was pale and in pain, but the shivering had subsided and his mind steadied.
"I see the witches haven't killed you yet."
"Last night," he asked, "what happened?"
The father squatted. All around them were women watching. "War, Mr. Lourdes, that's what happened. We're right in the middle of a country that's goin' down for the count."
Sister Alicia was preparing another batch of medicinals. She poked Rawbone and told him to pass the cup to the young man. He took the steaming tin gingerly and ran it under his nose. The smell seemed to touch a nerve. Tangible it was with memories. He was torn by the moment then put it aside. "You got your magic down, don't you, you damn witch." He had a swallow himself. "Tastes of my youth," he said.