There was something about the long blue light of dusk that for Rawbone always felt of eventuality and of being forlorn. He looked at the fallen hacienda, then the small family of graves set amongst the trees. He put his cigarette out in the sand and stood as John Lourdes and the girl walked past. He tipped his hat to her gracefully.
"Mr. Lourdes," he said, "you better be careful." He smiled. "This is how people end up with their own little Cains and Abels."
THEY DROVE TOWARD the moonlight, and it was a woman atop the highest crates who first sighted Tampico and called to the others. Piercing the misty Gulf air a vast spangle of lights. A mile farther they came upon railroad tracks. Out of the smoky dark a lone freight approached with a great rattling of cars and the fierce call of its whistle. Tankers destined for the oil fields.
The day arrived damp and muggy. They were just a dozen miles from Tampico and had to stop to gas the truck with the last of the reservoir they carried in drums. The women were exhausted and filthy. As they stoked up a fire to make coffee and greased dough with sugar, the father asked the son to walk off a ways so they could talk privately.
"Mr. Lourdes, I buddied once with a top-floor felon. Part Sioux. It was right here in Tampico, after I came back from that joke of a war in Manila. He gave me advice once ... `Raw ...' he called me, `Raw ...' he said, `when things go bad, every road out of town is the black road."'
He waited to see how John Lourdes would react. Measured silence was the answer.
"We got all that ammunition, Mr. Lourdes. I say we bury a wallet's worth, tell Stallings we lost it in transit. We'd have it to sell if we needed money. You'd have it to sell if you needed to buy or bribe information. Or if ... we find ourselves on the black road."
John Lourdes took out a cigarette. He had no matches, so he put out a hand for the father to drop him one. He eyed Rawbone with a quizzing stare. After he got the cigarette lit John Lourdes asked, "What happened to this ... top-floor felon?"
"He was shot to death in his sleep."
"I'd have bet on poisoning."
"Thank you, Mr. Lourdes. Professional compliments are always appreciated."
"Of course, at the end of this, with all your smile and good cheer, you discovered there wasn't quite the future down here you expected-"
"You might offer me those crates as a stipend for my outstanding service."
"I don't know when you're worse. When you're actually worse, or when you're not."
THEIR RIG LABORED along a shipping road that was deeply rutted from the rains and heat and heavily trafficked with oil trucks and supply wagons and laborers on foot. They were a sight with all those women stacked up on that stepped mountain of crates like some skirted aviary. Men called out from truck cabs or whistled and undressed the ladies with their eyes. As the road ascended it gave way to the Gulf and the world of Tampico and the oil fields spread out before them. Only this was not the vision as presented in the Diaz film John Lourdes had watched in the dark of the funeraria.
This was a hallucinatory contradiction. A fetid kingdom of pure commerce and profane destruction. A land stripped of life now cancered from fire and oil.
"El auge," said Rawbone.
The oil boom. The phrase encompassed everything but captured nothing.
Tampico had been established along the Panuco River, which flowed into the Gulf. The town was cordoned by a series of lagoons and marshes. There was a vast railroad yard, and the river had become an oil turnpike of tugs and barges, flatbeds and tankers, paddle wheelers; anything that could stay afloat and carry freight was on that waterway.
The rainforests had been cut down and burned off and now grimy wells rose up into the sky. By the Pueblo Viejo Lagoon was a place known as Tankerville, where row after row of wood and concrete drums, an armada of storage bins, baked in the sun. Neighborhoods had been constructed in the marshes, with shacks of cratewood and slat for workers built on stilts as the ground beneath oozed up slime. Swamps were drained for warehouses and pump stations and shipping terminals.
Everywhere they looked there were black pools of oil. Pits had been dug for spills. There were lakes where wells had blown and bled upon the earth for days that now were turning to a gloppy asphalt in the coastal heat. The high reeds along the lagoons were tipped with the black of oil, the trees were marked with it, the roads and roofs spotted with it, wagons, cars and trucks, their tires turned with it. The black rolled in with the tide and tainted the sand with it.
The air was dense and filmy and they could taste the work of the refineries on their tongues and the scent of its rancid perfume bitter to the nostrils.
The father glanced across the cab at the son, who was behind the wheel hunting for the Agua Negra offices. "Mr. Lourdes, the American and Brit companies have a billion dollars in this. They know what packets of money and a sense of purpose can do." He threw out his arm to take in all that they could see. "By their standards ... I am just a common assassin."
They drove through the railyards. Hundreds of workers were being unloaded from freight cars and herded into lots like cattle or goats. El Enganche-the Hooking-was what the process was called. Peasants from farms and villages in the hills were recruited at bazaars and carnivals by wily agents known as enganchadors who promised transportation, free room and board and three to four pesos a day if the peasant contracted to work for a period of time. Of course, when they reached Tampico, they would be told by the companies that the contract was not to be honored and that pay amounted to one peso a day. More than they might ever make in some rural pisshole, but the cost of living in Tampico turned them into hard-working indigents.
The father tapped the dashboard with his knuckles to draw John Lourdes's attention to an array of wall graffiti defiling the Yankee and the Brit. It was not the first run of epithets seen chalked on a wall about the state of mind the people had toward the brutal realities in Tampico.
"The women up top," said the father, "are heading for the same fate as those bummers on the train."
John Lourdes knew this, though it was the first he'd ever actually contended with that fact. It was not something he should involve himself in, yet he stopped the truck and got out. He then began to explain to the women what their future held.
It was not news, he discovered. A girl not much older than Teresa summed up their response by holding out and opening a small but empty purse.
When John Lourdes started the truck back up the father asked, "Mr. Lourdes, would you say I'm an intelligent man?"
"Sadly ... I would."
"You should have left the truck in the desert. You should have left the women at the train. You should not have done what you just did. You are driving straight toward ruin."
THIRTY
Rawbone tipped his hat. "Not even a hello?" He stepped out of the cab. "Would you be so kind as to tell the good doctor we've brought the truck."
Jack B disappeared inside the shed without so much as a word.
"There goes a starved mind," said the father.
John Lourdes now stepped out of the truck and the women climbed down from the back. It wasn't long before Doctor Stallings walked into the daylight followed by a handful of officers and guards. As Rawbone expected, Stallings was not felled with astonishment but rather maintained the deadpan mask that was his trademark.