John Lourdes and Rawbone were ordered from the train. When both had complied Doctor Stallings spoke first to John Lourdes. "Explain what you did."
"If you mean to kill something, do it on the first shot."
John Lourdes faced an unrelenting stare. "Pointed advice ... that may well point also in your own direction."
"Understood," said John Lourdes.
Attention was then turned to Rawbone. "You hustled Mr. Hecht. And you didn't get the truck the way you claim you did."
"That's the bureaucrat in you talking."
"You're the type that lies even when the truth sounds better."
"Now, that's the professor in you talking?"
"I'm not challenging you over this. The truck is here. And, yes ... there are casualties. And there'll be more."
He pointed at the two horses just yards away and near saddled. "You notice there are two horses." The map was brought to him, as were the signal pistol and flares. He set them on the flatcar.
He stood very close to Rawbone, who leaned against the flatcar. "I was a professor, as you seem to know, at some of the finest colleges in America. Teaching is what I would call an unchallenging pastime. Nothing ultimately critical happens in a classroom. The setting lacks grandeur and, more important, finality."
He reached out and took the Savage automatic from Rawbone's belt. He looked the weapon over carefully, handling it with a profes- sional's interest. "There is a book, and you could have walked right out of its pages. It is about murder. There is a devil and a Grand Inquisitor. And there is one idea in the book that repeats itself. An idea that would appeal to you as it does to me . . . `All things are lawful."'
Doctor Stallings replaced the weapon in Rawbone's belt.
Rawbone then reached out and brushed away bits of sand from the shoulder of the commander's gray suit coat. "The story doesn't exactly spark of Horatio Alger, does it?"
The mounts were brought over. Doctor Stallings handed the signal gun and bandoleer of flares to John Lourdes. "You both will earn your money today," he said, spreading the map on the flatbed floor.
THE FATHER AND son proceeded from the train with the sun hard against their shoulders, watched by the commander and his company of guards. Even the girl Teresa, from window after window, followed the slow climb of their mounts upon an eroded hill face.
From the map it seemed the vultures marked a military garrison, sited to protect a junction where the lines divorced into parallel tracks, both running to Tampico and the oil fields.
"The doctor knows how to frame a warning," said the son.
"You thought his little speech a warning. I hoped it was a compliment, or at least an insult."
"He didn't have the authority for what he did, no matter. He even ordered a picture, no matter."
"Who did El Presidente have build those tracks? Who financed them? America and the Brits. They own the rails like they own the oil fields. That gives him the authority. And the Mexican, he's heir to the fuckin' sand."
They heard the heavy breathing of a mount and the chinging of bridle metal and came about to see Tuerto chugging a mule forward to try and catch up.
"Where are you going?" asked John Lourdes.
Tuerto pointed to the vultures.
"On whose authority?"
He held up his camera.
"Another fuckin' genius," said the father.
Through a dry and sweeping wind the mule followed in the horses' tracks. Rawbone spoke out to the world around him, "Three wise men tramping to Bethlehem."
The garrison was a quadrangle of mud buildings connected by a palisade of sharpened stakes where sat an army of hunched and drowsy-faced vultures. A loosely roped gate hung slightly open. They dismounted and John Lourdes fired his shotgun into the air. The creatures flushed skyward and hung momentarily on the dead air and then descended to the rooftops.
The men went forward and Rawbone pushed the gate with his rifle and before them opened a small amphitheatre of death. They covered their noses and mouths with bandanas. They entered the compound. Flies everywhere, and the stench. A dozen soldiers bloating in the sun. The buildings had been ransacked and personal possessions lay strewn about the enclosure.
John Lourdes saw a stairwell that led up to a rooftop watchtower. He took binoculars from around his neck and as he ascended vultures retreated from the vigas, their steps like drunken old men. Under an overhang the father saw a table and on it was a Victrola. He looked at the pile of records beside it. One read Brahms' Lullaby. He set the record on the turntable and cranked up the player. A Spanish version began.
Music drifted out over that dusty pueblo and into the desert beyond. John Lourdes had been studying the country and the trackline and pulled the binoculars from his eyes and looked down into the enclosure. Tuerto walked amongst the dead taking photographs. And the father-he had found a chair and was sitting in the shade by the Victrola, the bandana shielding his nose and mouth, the rifle across his lap and that haunting child's melody-he could well have been the Lord of some Breugheled damnata.
This, thought the son, is what I was born from. Can this be the man who in his youth touched my mother's heart on a trolley in the Texas rain? Can this be the man who even for bare moments breathed love? John Lourdes wondered, if God truly put a soul in each living being, could it be the soul was capable of flaming out so completely it no longer existed, so all that was left was a living husk as horrible as the enclosure where they stood?
Yet, he was not as waylaid as he felt he should have been looking down upon this wretched scene. Did it mean that in some way his own soul was burning down to become a useless cinder that would knock around inside his chest wherever he walked upon the earth? Or was this some rite of passage the part of him that was the father came to prepare him for? The father's words worked like cruel and busy claws inside him: "This country is having at you, Mr. Lourdes ... the road changes everyone."
Then from behind the bandana came that crackly voice. "I see you there, Mr. Lourdes ... looking down on me."
"You better get up here," said the son.
John Lourdes sat on the roof wall writing in his notebook, and when the father joined him the vultures again flared and fell away. The son pointed his pencil at the binoculars set on the adobe ledge. "Tell me what you see."
The father took the binoculars and panned over that whinstone prairie. The land trembled with heat but there was nothing save where the track turned out to become separate rail lines that looked to be near burned into the earth.
"I see unadulterated nothing."
John Lourdes finished writing. He yelled for Tuerto. He tore the page from his notebook and stood. "One of the tracks has been sabotaged."
The father's head arched back and the son turned him about. He stood behind him with an arm leaned over his shoulder. He was as close now as the father had been to the son that night in the Hueco Mountains, only now it was the son's shouldered weapon that insinuated itself.
"With the binoculars ... about fifty yards up from the turnout. To the left. Laying off in the sand away from the tracks. You'll see it."
And so he did. It looked to be embossed in the sand. A long bulky strip of metal. Smooth as could be.
"What the hell is it?"
"It's a fishplate ... It's what they use to bolt the rails together. You can see it's been removed from one of the tracks. So has another one at the other end of the rail and you can see ... the spikes are missing. That rail is just sitting on the ties waiting for a train."
TWENTY-SEVEN