Since becoming a federal agent he'd been in that building often when hunting criminals. He'd seen how they used pesticides and gasoline, and sometimes a form of sulfuric acid for the delousing. The clothes too were fumigated, then put in huge steam dryers, which sometimes melted shoes. The place was nicknamed ... the gas chamber.
The girl walked past afterward and on into a dusty procession of humanity up Santa Fe, and he saw how everything her eyes touched produced this ripple of uncertainty across her features. The next day he saw her again coming out of the quarantine shed. She passed by, only to return an hour later.
The third day the process was repeated. But by the time she returned he'd been enlisted in conversation by two German designers. They'd gotten permission to go into the quarantine shed. They'd done draftmen's sketches of its interior and they were asking John Lourdes if it was true the government weeded out the deformed and the deviant, as they too had, in their own country, problems with what they described as "the unclean," that needed to be dealt with.
If they'd understood Spanish, what John Lourdes said in reply as he started toward the bridge could not have been confused as an answer.
HE FOLLOWED HER down the Avenida Paseo de Triunfo. There was a black mood about the streets. Wall graffiti insulted the regime; groups of men stood in heated conversation. Young boys carrying rifles in a primitive street militia marched past the Monument to the Fighting Bulls and, holding their weapon muzzles high and cursing El Presidente, fired into the air.
Heads turned. Birds slanted skyward down the length of the Paseo. Only from the girl was there no reaction as she walked on. It was then John Lourdes understood her calm silence and those wary stares-she was deaf.
Next to a movie theatre was a two-story office building the girl entered. A shop on the first floor had a sign in the window: TRAVEL MEXICO. Out front were a couple of Maytag Touring Cars that had painted on the side: WE'LL TAKE YOU ANYWHERE THE WIND CAN GO!
He followed her into the building. The hall was dark and filthy. He could hear her footsteps on the stairs. On the second floor she went into an office. He reached the landing as the door closed. He walked past cautiously. He could hear voices through the open transom and see light angling down a far wall from a skylight. He looked to one end of the hall and then the other, where there was a stairway to the roof.
On the roof he walked a row of skylights; most were poled open to let the dead air escape the paltry offices. When he reached the one instinct said was it, he took off his hat and squatted down near the opening, but far back enough not to be seen. He could just make out the girl in a picture frame of light.
With head downcast, she stood alone. There were cloudy voices, men speaking English and Spanish. A door opened and closed. A shadow climbed the wall. A man spoke. He had a gritty voice. John Lourdes could not see his face, only his trouser legs and mountain boots. An arm stretched out holding a blanket, and the girl began to undress.
Her clothes slipped to the floor. The blanket was tossed to her. She wrapped it around herself, while averting her eyes from the man. He knelt down and scooped up the clothes and left.
THREE
He smoked as he looked out toward the bladed hills that preceded El Paso. On that day in the year of our Lord, Rawbone was forty-five years old. On the truck seat was a photo he'd taken from the driver's wallet. He and his wife were posed on the platform of the Stanton Street Depot with their blank-faced kids.
He knew the depot well from that other life. He'd met his wife just blocks away on the Lerdo Tramway. Mules pulling the streetcar in the rain. Her voice like candlesmoke when he asked could he sit beside her. He swore his youth belonged to someone else, not him. Though he closed his eyes, the stillness of distance did nothing to strip the past away. It was there yet, forsaken but not forgotten.
There had been a city attorney in El Paso. A more corrupt or kinder man he'd never known. Wadsworth Burr would tell Rawbone, "Things happen that cannot be explained by any laws we know and they carry the damn secret with them all the way to our oblivion."
RAWBONE DROVE TO the barrio he'd known when married, only to find it gone. In the oppressive heat he walked a block of brick storefronts that had once been the adobes he frequented. The alley where they had lived was now a routeway for telephone poles cluttered with wire. His wife had been dead years, this much he knew. His son ... was a ghost.
He lit a cigarette and surveyed what once had been. On the corner of the alley where the sewing factory had stood was now a pawnshop; opposite was a gun seller where in one window was an ad that featured Bat Masterson with a Savage .32 automatic ... the ten-shot quickie ... A TENDERFOOT, read the ad, WITH A SAVAGE COULD RUN THE WORST SHARPSHOOTER IN THE WEST RIGHT OFF THE RANGE. In the other shop window was another advertisement. This depicted a woman in bedclothes aiming a Savage at the viewer: THE BANISHER OF BURGLAR FEAR ...
The barrio hadn't changed, he thought, it's only been dry fuckin' cleaned.
OVERLOOKING DOWNTOWN WAS the Satterthwaite Addition. There was a dreamy tranquility to those manicured estates as the sun fell away beyond the far mountains. Wadsworth Burr lived in a huge Missionstyle house near the corner of Yandell and Corto.
Rawbone was shown to the den by a young Oriental girl, who moved with an airy silence over the tiled floor. The high ceiling kept the rooms cool just as he remembered.
Burr sat at a campaign desk before a grand bay window from where one could see the Rio Grande wend its way through a withering sweep of desert.
Burr was not much older than Rawbone, but to see this once-noted attorney now was a study in startling contrasts. He had just begun the morphine shortly before that July Fourth Rawbone abandoned his family.
"You look like something straight out of Dickens, or at the very least, Hugo," said Burr.
"I'm in dire need, if that's what you're saying."
Burr motioned toward a serving cart with its chorus line of liquors. Rawbone tossed his derby aside. As he poured he saw Burr's wrists were mere belt widths and his scooped-out cheeks and boned-down jaw more likely features you'd see on a slumworn tramp.
Rawbone took a drink. Passing around the desk, he shook Burr's hand and noticed a hypodermic waiting on a white dinner napkin.
"You should have stuck to whiskey."
"But I had such an overwhelming need to express my character flaws."
As Rawbone walked over to the window, Burr asked, "What brought you out of exile?"
"I stumbled upon a business opportunity."
"Ahhh. I'll curb my curiosity."
Rawbone kept looking out the window as the earth began to tint under dusk. "I see the Addition is called Sunset Hills now."
"Yes ... it has a certain cemeterial ring, doesn't it? It seemed Mr. Satterthwaite suffered a reversal of fortune, which is something, I think, you should particularly note."
Burr reached for a sheet of letter paper and an ink pen.
"I see you still prefer them Chinese," said Rawbone.
Burr wrote something on the sheet of paper, folded it, then set it like a pup tent on his desk. "There has always been a place in my heart for deviance and passivity."