Where the kitchen light cast itself upon the darkness John Lourdes saw a crew of women at their work stations. Teresa was in a corner scrubbing pots; Alicia was at the stove. He called to the old woman through the screen door. She put out her arms in a gesture of surprise at seeing him, then looked back at the closed door to the hall. They talked for a few minutes before she went and tugged at Teresa's hair.
Teresa came forward in a leather apron tied around her neck that hung almost to the ground; her arms were dripping wet. She was embarrassed yet elated at seeing John Lourdes. He held out a piece of paper torn from his notebook.
He had written: / wan4eJ 4o make sure you were a/r~~4. /'m s4ay'/ji a4 4e 5ov4ern /-/o4e/, iS you Sind yourse/S wi4 4rouble.
He wanted her to have it, but she made a gesture with her hand for the pencil. She slipped open the screen door. She wrote on the same page: /4's jood 4o see you. This she underlined.
From back in the house a man was calling out and the door to the hall swung open. John Lourdes forced the page they had written on into her hands before retreating to the darkness. In those few moments with Teresa he had picked up some of the conversation coming from that other room. Most of it seemed to deal with the mayor and where he stood politically now that the insurrection had been authorized.
Along the side of the house John Lourdes spotted a root cellar. It was practically beneath the rooms where the men were. He went and knelt by the canted entranceway. He looked about. There were but two men down by the derricks. He could see the faint glow of their cigarettes. He worked the latch and lifted the weathered door. He bent and felt his way down a set of wobbly steps. He closed the night off and hunched there in the dark. The cellar was foul with decay and fungaled shorings, the floor was flooded with a few inches of tainted water and every cautious step he took slopped behind him.
On the floorboards overhead the men's boots tapped out their pacings or creaked when chairs were moved. But that black and stinking hole was near about as good as a stethoscope for picking up their conversation.
THIRTY-ONE
"There are times, Mr. Lourdes, when you say something and it's like you've known me all my life."
"Or maybe all my life."
Could it be John Lourdes doesn't know I am his father? He tried to convince himself of that possibility. That the young man in the Southern who was his son, his blood, might somehow have eradicated a father from memory. It was ridiculous and demanded raw stupidity to be even remotely believed. And the fact he was reaching that far enraged him, for it signaled weakness and fear and shame and how truly he'd been plowed under by the truth.
He stopped and looked in a shop window. His image there tinctured by gas lamps. He removed the derby and cradled back his hair. He was searching for his son, but his son was in that hotel room, he was a member of the Bureau of Investigation, he was the man who had taken him down, who he had traveled with for days, who had outplotted him, who he'd brought to the women wracked with pain, who controlled his fate. And who, only a faint hour ago, he had considered murdering. John Lourdes was also the man who had never once acknowledged the fact they were father and son. Suddenly the hearse came back to him, when they had spoken to each other through its glass casement. He stepped away from the window, unable to bear the sight of himself.
It was a weekend night. The streets were alive and rowdy with horse-drawn trolleys and carriages flush with tourists. There were couples and laughter and people on balconies playing cards or listening to Victrolas. Vendors sold ice cream and bottled mineral water and candied treats. And Rawbone walked amongst all this alone and in the possession of a shattering immensity.
John Lourdes had even changed his name. Probably, Rawbone thought, for the same reason I had changed my own-shame. At least we had that in common. The very idea of it caused bitter laughter that verged on tears.
He walked the beach. He watched the tide roll in and foam over the oily sand, he watched it fall away. He stood in the amber mist of the casinos along the boardwalk.
His wife had hung that cross from a nail beneath a postcard of Lourdes with a child standing before a statue of the Virgin Mary. Rawbone had told her, "I hope she does a lot better for you than she did for her own kid."
She'd been praying for her husband's conversion to goodness. Deriding such an act, he had fired at the crucifix, shattering part of one cross beam.
She'd picked it up from the floor and stood before him in that smoky hovel they called home. She pointed to each cross beam. The one that survived, the one that was shattered. "One for each thief crucified with Christ," she said. "Which do you want to be? These are the only choices for us all."
In a sparkflash he understood how John Lourdes had come by his name. He turned from the Gulf. How quickly it all had gone. From the casino an orchestra played. Through tall French doors he could see elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen dance to the rich and soothing strings of a waltz.
He stood on the boardwalk in unrealized bereavement, then, disregarding the obvious, he opened a set of the French doors and entered the ballroom. He took off his derby and set it and his bindle on an empty table.
People soon took notice of this unshaven and road-filthy vagabond with an automatic in his belt. He looked about the room until his eyes fell upon a small group of women standing alone and listening to the music. They saw him approaching and whispered amongst themselves. There was one lady amongst them near about his own age with raven hair and Mediterranean skin.
"Pardon me," he said.
She turned and faced this strange man uncertainly.
"Would you have one dance with me?"
Her companions stared in disbelief.
"I know," he said, "how I look. But I can act the gentleman, and am a fine dancer."
Whatever the reason, be it rebellion or reserve, she agreed. He escorted her past stares and whispers.
Then there they were, waltzing to a grace of chords outside existence. They could have been any man and any woman in the ineffable light of what's possible, but they were not. She watched his face, unhurried and without judgment. He was a depiction of personal anguish and soon tears collected at the corners of his eyes.
"Sir," she said, "you're-"
"Yes ... I saw my son for the first time today in almost fifteen years."
"You must be very happy."
"I abandoned him and his mother. She was dark like yourself. She has been dead since before I knew better."
This sudden and unexpected glimpse into someone's soul left her self-conscious. She tried to say something helpful.
"Maybe your son can forgive you this?"
"No, you see ... my son also knows I am a common assassin."
The dancing stopped. He saw her confusion laced with fear. He thanked her, then walked away.
JOHN LOURDES SAT at a cafe table outside the Southern. He had three men under surveillance and was writing in his notebook when the father returned. He whistled and flagged him over. "Where have you been?"
The father sat. "Dancing, Mr. Lourdes."
The son leaned toward him. "Three men by the entrance. One is in a white suit."
The father had been studying the face of this stranger sitting next to him in the light of the new reality. He then glanced up through a row of candlelit faces to where three men crowded together over their whiskey glasses.
"The one in the white suit," said John Lourdes, "is named Robert Creeley. He is part of the U.S. Consulate here in Mexico. The men with him ..." John Lourdes referenced his notes, ". . . are named Hayden and Olsen. They have adjoining suites to Creeley. I don't know what they do."