He passed the cup to John Lourdes, who sipped as he was told, "It seems our employer has a dog in this fight. I heard Mr. Stars and Stripes talking. Of course, I'm passing the information on to you as befitting our station."
The son thought on this a while. "But who is our employer? Mr. Hecht? Do you think so? I don't."
"I see your point, Mr. Lourdes."
The father stood. "Listen to me, you damn witches. Take care of the young master here. He's a true verdadero hombre." Rawbone grabbed his crotch. "Mucho caliente."
The women either laughed with embarrassment or turned away in disgust. "He's also a climber, in case you didn't know. Intends to make a name for himself. Thinks he can carry the weight of the world on his shoulders." He looked at Teresa, who was staring up at him. "You're in for a surprise."
As he started out, the son called to him. He wanted to say something but hesitated. He set the cup down, he brushed the hair back from his drawn face. "For bringing me in here ... thank you."
To see him in such discomfort at having to say the thing gave Rawbone unequalled pleasure. Yet, to his absolute dismay, John Lourdes sounded utterly genuine.
7W'ELVTY-FIVE
He had asked the girl Teresa how she came to be on the train. She wrote that after her return from Immigration, her father grew more troubled and wary over her being picked up off the street. Even being brought home by the nuns as planned did nothing to ease his suspicions, so he arranged for her to be sent to the oil fields to work with these other women. He had brought her to the depot, then left with a handful of other men for Texas. She had anticipated his return, but she believed now something had befallen him.
John Lourdes confronted having to tell her the truth. He had near forced this moment from his first question. He asked her to join him on the back landing of the railroad car, and so she did. The church spire mountains all about them were run with spare pines. They could have been any young man and any young woman as they sat there looking out upon the blue majesty of evening. He lit a cigarette and wished it were so, but it was not.
To lie through silence was his first inclination. The why of it being he wanted the girl to think well of him, to be accessible to him, and keeping silent fed into his natural tendency toward dispassion.
But fever, exhaustion and pain diminished his defenses. As he lay in that car, watched over by those women, an action or turn of phrase, the way one laughed or prayed, all became fragments of the person that had once been his mother. And the closer he got to feelings of his mother, the more her presence filled him, the more intensely aware he became of the threatening musculature that was the father living inside him.
The man on the flatcar with the derby and that Savage .32 was the one who'd asked all those years ago in that open-air market in Juarez, "Do you want to know what people are really like, so you can never be tricked or fooled? Be indifferent to every man. Then you'll know."
Wasn't dispassion a possible disguise for indifference, the kind of indifference the father taught him? Lying in that train car he asked himself over and over: As there were fragments of his mother in those women, were there not fragments of the father in himself? Had he been poisoned as effectively as those customs guards at the ferry in ways he didn't realize?
This was what drove him to tell the girl the truth and so he wrote: Your fa4er was ki(/ed i,i 4e Hueco /Yloun4ai,is where I,e 4r'ied 4o murder 4wo men.
She read this and her eyes blinked. She absorbed the knowledge in painful increments. To see sadness in such composed quiet. She looked down at her folded hands. Her hair fell long across her face. Her beauty was her simple humanness. She gazed out into the night a long time. She was melancholy somewhere in the high mountains that were home to the wolves and the heavens.
She then looked at him with apprehension and foreboding. John Lourdes felt that look would go on forever, but, even so, he set pencil to paper. As he began to write what he had done, her hand came down and stopped him. Her action and her look spoke for themselves, for now she stood and went back into the car and he was left to the night.
"You KNOW WHAT a barrel of oil sells for today? Any idea? About fifty cents. Any idea what a war will do to that price?"
Jack B was holding court by the truck with a handful of branded felons and roustabouts while Rawbone sat behind the wheel and out of the sun. With his legs stretched up on the dash and arms folded, he let Mr. Stars and Stripes pontificate to see what information might come of it that he could pass on to Mr. Lourdes.
"Doctor Stallings says we could see prices reach a dollar ... a dollar fifty a barrel by 1911. Oil stocks, that's what he's got his money in. Standard ... American Eagle ... Waters-Price. That's where his money is going and that's where," he slapped at the wallet hidden away in his back pocket.
"Mexico. You want to see what the future's going to look like, look no further than right here. You want to see a model for how the world will operate, look no further than right here. That's what Doctor Stallings tells me. And-"
"Right here and right now?" said Rawbone. He leaned up out of the seat and hooded his eyes with a hand and looked out over a passing landscape of brutal and barren contours that seemed to have no end. "So this is the future. Well, if you don't mind, it looks a lot like hell if you ask me."
This brought out a few laughs and Jack B answered with, "You'll not only die ignorant, you'll die broke."
Rawbone sat back down in the cab and began to croon in his cracked and sandy voice, "Take me out to the ball game, take me out to the park ..." He even got a few of the scurrilous guards to join in, which gave Jack B a good grinding. "Let me root, root, root for the home team, if they don't win it's a shame . . .
He took the ridicule with a strained stare and then, looking beyond Rawbone, said, "Well."
It seemed John Lourdes had quietly made his way up the passenger side of the truck and now stood by the cab.
"How was your vacation?" asked Jack B.
The son glanced at the father. "Telling."
"I don't know if you heard. But Jack B here was just educating us on the future. Of course, I know your view of the future, Mr. Lourdes. There isn't one. There's just you, me and . . . American Parthenon, here. "
"I heard Jack," said John Lourdes. He checked through his satchel on the cab floor and found an open and beat-up pack of cigarettes. He lit one and blew smoke out his nose in thin straight lines. "I think he makes a lot of sense."
Jack B turned his attention to Rawbone. "At least he won't die ignorant and broke."
"How do his employers measure it?" said John Lourdes.
"Employers?"
"Someone put this parade together," said Rawbone.
"Doctor Stallings. He's been the one commissioned."
"But someone had to checkbook all this up," said John Lourdes.
"I'm told he's got investors."
"Ah," said the son, looking toward the father, "investors."
"What was his sales pitch?" asked the father. He then winked with great pleasure at that group around the truck. "A dark alley and a loaded gun?"