"When" was the following night. John Lourdes was in the process of agreeing when Rawbone interceded. He wanted it to be three nights from now, as extra time was imperative to ensure a safe delivery. Both sides were adamant, so it was left to Mazariegos to bring about a compromise of two nights hence.
"THE MAYOR DEMANDS protection," said Rawbone. "So Doctor Stallings guarantees his security against the very people the mayor is dealing munitions to."
They were by the truck after all had left, son and father. What one could not surmise, the other was sure of.
"Mr. Lourdes, you're either not seasoned enough or not cynical enough."
"Given enough selfishness and disdain I'm sure I can measure up to your standard."
"You're missing the point, Mr. Lourdes."
"Am I?"
The father came to him. He took the son by the vest collar in a scornful but gentlemanly way. "Mr. Mayor . . . I can solve both our problems. I want you to put out the word. I'll get you weapons. You get those campesinos to think you're quietly on their side. Put on your best political face. After you deliver them, we'll cut their fuckin' heads off. How does that sound, Mr. Lourdes?"
"It sounds ... possible."
"If only the turkey could read a calendar, there'd be no Thanksgiving. Mr. Lourdes, you told me you heard the mayor making veiled threats out of one side of his mouth while asking for protection out of the other. He's a walking conflict of interests. I say they have the mayor in their gunsights. The practical application of strategy ... they mean to have order and they're making a case for intervention. The oil fields are too valuable to the future."
Rawbone drove back to the Southern while John Lourdes sat beside him in silent council with his thoughts. Along the tramway, when they'd pass the occasional light from some roadside building, Rawbone would study the man who was his son. The child he'd squandered had defied the crime of chance. He had not been despoiled or destroyed by the laws of a vile gravity.
They entered the Southern lobby. It was down to the nighthawks now and the couples tucked away in quiet corners. A gentleman played piano softly in the bar. Rawbone stopped halfway through the lobby and took John Lourdes's arm so they could talk a moment.
"Walk out of here. Away from this. You've done it. All that was required and more. This is a quagmire, Mr. Lourdes. And it will never end like you think. Whatever I am, I know the world."
Rawbone went to the bar and ordered 100 proof drinkin' whiskey. He sat alone in the moody dark. He had come to a place in his own life he could not have fathomed. A place he could neither admit nor exceed. The son would never acknowledge him and he would not break faith with that. He would prove himself, he would hold to it, not because it was right or wrong, but because John Lourdes had willed it and he would match him will to will.
As a water glass with a lethal dose of liquor was placed before him, money was thrown upon the bar. He looked to find John Lourdes easing onto the seat beside him. The father looked furrowed in a manner the son had not seen before.
"We could have made tomorrow night," said the son. "Why did you want the extra days?"
The father sipped at the whiskey. Then, setting the glass, said, "I was hoping to buy you time to change your mind."
The son crossed his arms on the mahogany bar. He looked at the father through the glass behind the bottles.
"Mr. Lourdes, a hundred years from now there will be two gents sitting like we are now. One may be a federal agent for the Bureau of Investigation like yourself, the other may be a common assassin like yours truly, and they'll be in another Manila, or another Mexico. And they will be facing the same poison we are.
"There are two governments now, Mr. Lourdes. There is one that controls the White House, and there is one that controls the rest."
John Lourdes half turned. He reached for the father's glass. He drank.
"Mr. Lourdes, do you think they'd actually let the munitions be delivered?"
"Not on their lives."
John Lourdes set the glass down. The father had picked up an attitude in the son's voice, a glimmer in the way he stared. Aye, Rawbone recognized it, alright. It was a piece of himself. The piece meant to defy the laws of men, it had somehow broken through the birth canal and made its way into John Lourdes's soul. "They have a name for what you're thinking ... you could call it madness ... you could call it intervention ... but it sure is not what justice Knox had in mind."
The son's fingers brushed against his stubbled chin. His mind was tracking some private reserve. "What is required ... but to do justice."
"Mr. Lourdes, take the Lord's Prayer and tie it around your neck and you'll find out it won't keep you from hanging."
The son leaned in close now to the father, so close they were near to being one. "I heard you by the canal," he said.
The father felt his guts cinch.
"And I heard you when we were sitting outside earlier slip around answering what Stallings talked about after I left."
"That."
"I'm going to hurt you in a way you could never imagine."
"Well, Mr. Lourdes, that would be a feat."
John Lourdes stood. "I'm going to put my faith in you. Not as an agent for the Bureau of Investigation ... but as a man. That's how I'm going to hurt you."
John Lourdes took the father's glass and drank it empty then set the glass upside down on the bar. "Finito, jefe."
He took up his carryall and shotgun and started out.
"Mr. Lourdes."
He turned.
"You've never once called me by my name. I've kept mark. Never once."
"And I never will."
The father nodded. "Fair enough."
THIRTY-THREE
He wore a long black slicker and his umbrella was angled against the sheeting rain. Rawbone was leaning against a post and sipping from a steamy cup when Doctor Stallings joined him. Neither man spoke. Stallings shook the wet from his umbrella and then closed it up. He asked, "Are you going to tell me about last night?"
Rawbone drank but did not answer.
The rain came down in sheets across the corrugated roof, creating that hard drum echo, and from the fires to heat the coffee and fight the damp the air was misty and flueish.
Rawbone finally answered Doctor Stallings. "Back at the train you said something that stayed with me."
"We're here to talk about-"
"Grandeur and finality," said Rawbone. "That was it. Yeah. We'll cover last night. But first ... let's talk finality."
JOHN LOURDES SAT at his hotel room desk and folded up a letter for the man who was his father. He looked out upon the riled waters of the Panuco as he awaited Rawbone's return. That morning he had taken to the motorcycle, challenging the rains. He'd driven the oil fields with their soaking and grime-stained laborers, and their women in tarpaper cafeterias and stifling warehouses, and Indians on rickety carretas and junker wagons relegated to the lowest scraps of work. They existed under the guidon of imposed fealty. A stranglehold of the futile and the feudal that was, in fact, what had brought his mother to America. It was why she'd ridden boxcars and walked bleached wastes to cross the Rio Grande and stand naked in that fumigation shed all to reach the promise of freedom and opportunity.
He was thinking of his mother as he sat on that idling motorcycle in the rain atop the same rise where Diaz and his surrogates stood in that film, and used it to lie to the world about the state of their nation. And John Lourdes, under a rolling thunder, came to see how much he was his mother's journey. He was not only the agent of her hopes but the eternal argument of her trials toward that freedom and opportunity.