"I saw it done once, but not on an incline like-"
Framed in the far passenger door was Teresa. Most of a heavy chain was slung up on her shoulder and the rest dragged like a metal umbilicus. She was bent and straining torturously with each step.
"What in the name of madness," said the father.
She'd fashioned a reason to act, watching them haul the chains, and she'd climbed back up onto the flatcar with the women grabbing at legs and skirt to restrain her. She couldn't negotiate the door dragging all that iron and when the men reached her Rawbone took all that weight upon himself.
John Lourdes, with his palms facing down, patted at the air as his way of asking Teresa to hold where she was. Rawbone carried that iron monstrosity to the rear of the car. John Lourdes hooked each end of the chain to one of the nooses. Then he had the father help him loop it over the back platform and it landed on the tracks with an immense clang.
"When I give the order to cinch it, get inside fast and keep going. This platform may come off and part of the wall with it."
Each link was near as big as their fists and they scarred and danged along the rails as John Lourdes took a deep breath. The father muscled down like a prizefighter and then John Lourdes yelled out, "Cinch it."
They roped in the chain. It tautened and caught up against the wheels. The two men scrambled over each other getting into the car and the sound coming off those locked wheels was like a foundry saw shearing pure steel. There were fireworks of sparks, and the studs in the platform and up through the rear wall began to spider with cracks and the platform ripped apart like a flimsy toy. The back wall was there one moment, and the next, they were staring out a frame of decimated wood exposing drab brown hills and dust-strewn daylight. The screeching went on, it seemed, interminably. Then, in one staggering instant the cars stopped.
SECTIONS OF THE chain were ground to dust, but the remainder was shivved up under and around the wheels and so the cars were held.
The Mastodon had not returned and they were left now to their own resources in that silent chasm, with Tampico a century of miles through those fluted and waterless hills.
"Now," said John Lourdes to the father, "you see why I wouldn't leave the truck."
It was in its own way a purely orthodox application of practical strategy. The father still remarked with a certain insight, "That's not why you wouldn't leave the truck."
John Lourdes got out the fire ax and a set of crowbars and formed two work gangs of women. The father took the first bunch and they went about chopping the roof beams loose from the passenger car. The son worked the others dismantling the flatbed siderails and truss bars. And damn if that common assassin didn't start teaching those women to sing in English "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" as they sweated it in that filthy railcar.
John Lourdes meant to build a rampway jerry-rigged from an assemblage of crisscrossed timbers and truss bound together by rope and cable and parts of chain and any clothing the women weren't wearing right then and there.
John Lourdes walked up and down this raft with uncertainty as the father and the women watched.
"It's no masterpiece," said the son.
"Mr. Lourdes, good manners requires me to allow you first crack at driving the truck."
"You're a fuckin' saint," muttered the son under his breath.
John Lourdes edged the truck over the lip of the flatcar and leaned from the cab to see if the weight could be sustained. The father acted as traffic cop angling his hands to get those wheels a little this way or that. When the engine was committed all the way down the ramp it started to sag like the spine of some cartoon swayback. The women chimed in trying to avert what they saw as a disaster, yelling for John Lourdes to turn the wheels in direct contradiction to the father who was now cursing their hellish mouths. Some of them took to pleading he go back, while others urged he just come on. It was all devolving into useless jabber so John Lourdes swallowed hard to clear his throat and with one quick to-hell-with-it decision, gassed the pedal.
The truck lurched, and as the front end touched ground the ramp gave and the rear tires slammed upon the ties. The truck heaved to one side under the strain of those lashed crates of ammunition and all watched in stunned silence as the unwieldy hump piled up in the truckbed settled back in place. Then John Lourdes just footed the gas pedal slightly and the truck started forward to a collective sigh of relief.
TWENTY-NINE
The women proceeding ahead of the truck now took to carrying lanterns or candles to guide the way. The lights fireflied in that steep and treacherous canyon, where their shadows walked in slow and somber order like some druidic procession moving through the vast church of the night.
When it was Rawbone's time to turn the wheel over to John Lourdes, he took up with the others in the truckbed, sitting on boxes of hand grenades and machine-gun belts. And while Sister Alicia stitched the wound in his back with sewing thread, he led a chorus of singing women in their slanted English:
Later that night John Lourdes wrote in his notebook: You helped 4,e old woman and risked yourself . . . you carried 4e C1,airs . . . you're s44ing w,4 me now . . . He ended what he wrote with a question mark he circled.
He and Teresa sat in the truck together, wedged up amongst the crates as they crossed all that black and windy emptiness.
She read his questions and then wrote: / I,e/ped Sis-ler Alicia because sl,e needed l,e/p and 4 was r~W . . . l carried chains because cl,a'/is were necessary . . . l am s44ing will, you now because forgiveness is needed.
He wrote: / am 4La4kcul you can corjtve me.
She replied: Ti,is is no4 jus4 abov4 you.
She had not fully realized how much her father was of those men on the slope executing a child. And that her father was of the same blood and history as the dead turned her stomach.
She added to what she wrote: / am small a.ain54 4s world . . . bu4 4e Ci,ris4 inside my l,ear-l is 9rea4er ye-l. Wi4,ou4 forgiveness a// of life is forsaken. / will no4 become forsaken.
John Lourdes could hear his own father's voice from behind the steering wheel. In the cab with him were Sister Alicia and another woman. He had them rehearsing lyrics to "Yankee Doodle Dandy."
He stared into his notebook. He absorbed what Teresa had written. He could feel her beside him. He knew without asking, the forgiveness extended to her own father. It was tangible as rain upon an upturned face. I am small against this world ... These words, he knew, were true about himself, in that place, at that moment, though forgiveness was not an option.
THEY DROVE STRAIGHT into the dawn. Limestone chasms gave way to islands of scrub pine. The earth was sandy and the truck struggled mile after mile. The stones of the desert began to warm with the sun. To the north a pale outline on the horizon, a meager oasis of huts.
Near Tamuin they passed an abandoned cathedral upon the desert floor. Magnificent it was, from the era of the Conquistadors. Red were its stone walls and grand dome against a hot and cloudless sky. The women blessed themselves as they drove past, for with God there was no forgotten place.
They dined by a stream near a fallen hacienda. Amongst the trees a rusting iron fence enclosed a few headstones. Names the wind and sun had stolen. Rawbone watched John Lourdes and the girl Teresa walk along the shallows. The water was cool and shiny in the quieting light and the breeze gave the brush that soft and brittle song.