The father again took to staring at his flesh and blood.
"I bribed a desk clerk ... with some of your money."
"Very practical," said the father.
"Those three were at the mayor's house tonight with a number of other men. Two of them ... Doctor Stallings and Anthony Hecht."
Rawbone sat back. Stallings. He could feel the man's presence hovering over this very moment. The candle on the table flickered abstractly. He stared into its flame.
"Did you hear me?"
"I heard," said the father.
"What happened with Stallings?"
Rather than answer, the father asked, "What were you doing at the mayor's house?"
"Stallings had sent the girl there with the old woman to work. I went to see if they were alright. Men, over a dozen, were having some heated talk. All of them together. What does it mean?"
John Lourdes had been asking himself, but the father answered. "It means the Cains are getting ready to team up against Abel."
The statement was pointed yet cryptic and John Lourdes wanted to question Rawbone about it when the desk clerk walked over. "Mr. Lourdes," he said, "the phone call you've been expecting."
He thanked the man and slipped him some money. "Let's go," he said. The father stood, finished the last of John Lourdes's beer and followed. There was a telephone off the hook at the desk. John Lourdes answered and listened and soon he began to write in his notebook.
The father waited off to one side by the bar. From there he could watch Creeley and the other two. He was calculating how to proceed and whether to tell the son the truth about the conversation he'd had with the good doctor. He knew it would be determinative for John Lourdes.
He turned his attention to the son. All the years wondering what the moment of their meeting would be and it had already taken place in an El Paso lobby. "Keep your eyes at gunsight level," he'd said, "if you mean to make something of yourself ..."
John Lourdes finished the call. "Truck close by?"
"Close by."
"Get it and meet me out front."
John Lourdes was on the street with shotgun and satchel when the truck pulled up. He climbed in. Rawbone noted the shotgun. The son had their destination written out in his notebook. "The Arbol Grande. Know it?"
"I know it."
He drove the tramway road. Marking their way the graying powdered smoke from the huge stacks of the Standard Oil Refinery. On the drive John Lourdes laid out what he'd overheard from that murky root cellar. The mayor of Tampico was receiving death threats because of his allegiance to the present regime. He was pleading for more support and protection. And the way he laid out these demands was no less than a veiled threat, his survival paralleling that of the oil fields, as both were vulnerable to acts of violence. He also insinuated the new regime might well have a different worldview of the oil companies and how they might be treated or taxed. He could not guarantee, under those conditions, the same kind of favorable treatment. Often, he used the phrase "direct American intervention" as the means of security and control.
Creeley, the gentleman at the Southern, told the mayor a case for American intervention had to be built carefully, and to that end, he added, unofficially, an investigation on the ground could well be in the works.
Rawbone heard it all, and cold hard reason told him no good would come of this. It smelled of Cuba. And Manila. And the law of a black argument. All he said was, "The shotgun."
John Lourdes glanced at the shotgun across his lap. "We're going to meet someone tonight about the weapons."
THIRTY-TWO
"This is the place."
The truck pulled off into the high reeds. Rawbone sat there vexed and checked his automatic. "Who contacted you?"
"Would it make a difference what name they used?"
The question went to the very core of their being.
"No."
They sat quietly for a bit.
"Why us, for this?" said the father. "Have you asked yourself that?"
"I have."
"And why didn't the good doctor just give us the weapons? To be delivered right off. Have you asked yourself that?"
"I have."
"And do you have an answer in your gunsights?"
"No ... but I believe the answer may have me in its gunsights."
The son shut off the light and lit a cigarette. The father got out of the truck. They waited.
"You were raised in El Paso, were you not, Mr. Lourdes?"
"I was."
"The barrio?"
"The barrio."
He could not see the son from where he'd walked to in the high reeds. There was only the glow from the tip of John Lourdes's cigarette.
"There was a factory," Rawbone said casually, "that sewed American flags. I had a place a few doors up a walking street. Do you know it ... the factory?"
"I seem to recall it."
"It's only an alley now for telephone poles. There's a pawnshop on one corner and a gun seller on the other where I picked up this Savage the day before we had ... the good fortune ... of stumble-fucking into each other."
He hesitated. There was only the sound of the water slipping down through the channel to the river and the Gulf beyond. As a man, the father felt completely boarded up, the shell that waited upon the wrecking ball.
"My wife is dead, but I have a son. What do you think, Mr. Lourdes? When I get back to El Paso . . . Do I try to find him? You know me. What I am. What do you think of the idea?"
The ash on the tip of the cigarette branded the dark intensely but never moved, never wavered. It held steady as a star in the night sky.
"I wouldn't answer, myself, Mr. Lourdes. A Chinaman is right. Silence is golden. Except, of course, when you're broke."
They went back to waiting amongst the brittle dry weeds. Each man alone in the wilderness of his existence. From the laguna came the sound of an engine. They could hear it turn into the canal.
"Tom Swift and his motor boat," said the father, "on lake whatever the hell it was."
John Lourdes flung away his cigarette. He got out of the truck. He turned the flashlight toward the canal. A voice in Spanish called out, "Jefe."
John Lourdes answered and the engine cut off as it slipped to shore.
John Lourdes approached the canal with Rawbone a few paces off his flank. From the boat one man came ashore, another remained onboard. The man introduced himself. His name was Mazariegos. He had a pointed face and whittled eyes and he spoke the king's English. John Lourdes let the beam drift over the boat long enough to recognize the man onboard as being the mayor, and that fact he whispered to Rawbone.
Mazariegos carried a lantern. Before he started discussing an arrangement he wicked up the flame and held the light aloft. From beyond the tramway bridge three horsemen came forward out of the reeds. They disappeared into the shadowline of the canal, then lifted up out of the willows on the near shore, their horses snorting and shaking off the wet. The men were rurales and heavily armed.
Mazariegos was there to oversee the discussions, but since both John Lourdes and Rawbone spoke fluent Spanish the talks became direct and unshaded. The price of the munitions had been settled by others, this was about where and when. "Where" was determined to be the head of the laguna at the place it fed into the canal. The campesinos would bring boats, as boats would give them ample routes of escape should there be trouble.