The Creed of Violence

THIRTY-SIX

HE FATHER STAGGERED past a fallen mount and came to his knees over the son. There was a bloody eyelet through the vest just below the ribs on the heart side, and also a matching hole in the back. But John Lourdes's eyes were open and he was breathing.

"Has it gone clear through?" came the halting voice.

"It has, Mr. Lourdes." Rawbone looked past the dead around him and the desolation beyond ... survival, that's what he was searching for. "We've got to make clock, Mr. Lourdes."

He hastened to the truck. His being tightened as he kicked over the engine, unsure it would go. It started like a charm. He shifted gears and it went forward sluggardly.

"Mr. Lourdes ... hear that ... Parthenon here is gonna carry you home."

THE TRUCK CLIMBED the first altar of hills and shouldered along the skyline with a falling sun far to their west. Before them a world as it was at the time of creation.

John Lourdes lay on the cab seat facing a hard run of two days with barely enough water for the truck. Rawbone drove through the night with lanterns hung from the cab stanchions to light the way. He drove through dust that scored his eyes, and heat that dried them to the bone.

He watched the son weaken and yet refuse to drink. If there wasn't enough for one, there wasn't enough for the other. The father cursed him furiously, and John Lourdes answered, "We'll make it, or we won't."

They labored hugely over swells of white pumice and through unreckonable granite canyons. John Lourdes's words came back to the father: "There is no past, there is no future ... there is only you, and me, and this truck."

Even now it was a test of wills. His mouth dry and cracking, his eyes failing, in desperate need of water there on the seat he would not drink, the father said, "Mr. Lourdes, should I come knocking at your door one night in El Paso and offer to buy you dinner and drinks, what would you think?"

"I would think ... you were paying for it with stolen money."

He had no strength to laugh, so a grunt had to suffice. "The Modern Cafe in the Mills Building lobby. The sight of our illustrious meeting. We'll drink gentleman's whiskey from Tom Collins glasses and toast surviving. "

The muscles in Rawbone's body were breaking down; the night was no cooler than the day. He had kept a rock in his mouth to foster spit but even that was too little, too late. He remembered being a boy with nothing in a pawny waste called Scabtown and watching a fighter in the baking sun stalk an adversary. Even now, especially now, those battered and blood-streaked features once witnessed spoke to his fury and resolve.

By morning the sun was striking him down. His grip on the wheel slipped away and he momentarily passed out. He cursed himself and pressed on again. Sometime that morning they came upon a necklace of tiny pools. The father rushed to it desperately with a water bag only to discover with one taste it was alkali.

Poison.

He looked back at the truck. The tarp above the cab lifted uneasily with the breeze. His mind flashed on a funeral canopy-he killed the thought of it quickly. But he knew. They would be dust before the day was done.

He stared through the searing heat at the black surface of that pool, so utterly still, and came to a moment that was absolute and providential. He slipped the water bag into that bitter fountain and watched the bubbles reach the air and die away. He wondered, would the water taste of oblivion.

When the bag was full he stoppered it, then he leaned down and put his mouth to the pool and drank. He drank like some bloodthirsty drunk and sat with the tainted liquid spilling down his chin, and there in the watery slicks the common assassin and the father looked at each other for the last time.

He went to the truck, howling with good news they had water, and he drank from the bag and he tricked the son by handing him the other. The son drank the good water. "Close your eyes, Mr. Lourdes, and think of the Modern Cafe."

He punished the truck as he punished himself. Over every rise a hope that sinks in his throat with each trembling horizon. Memories threadbare with time are suddenly upon him with an emotional pull too heartrending to bear. He drives them from his mind. There is only surviving.

A flock of white-tailed doves streaks past overhead. Their presence is a promise of water. And if there is water—

They are like runes against the sky and he lets their flight guide his course as he begins to feel his body turn against him. He is counting every dusty heartbeat with each windy slope. With each mile he is being murdered, he is a mile closer to being saved. He keeps thinking of that blood-streaked fighter in the dust whose name he bears, and through a dazy heat he sees the stylus of a church spire against a flat sky and the town of San Luis Potosi that enfolds it.

IN THE SHADOW of the church was a small hospital run by nuns for the poor and dispossessed. Rawbone was already in the early throes of a convulsion when the truck crashed up on the sidewalk. This was the first moment a barely conscious John Lourdes realized something was drastically wrong.

Rawbone dragged himself to the stone wall and sat with his back against the hot brick, fighting for air. John Lourdes was in the arms of nuns and campesinos but he pulled and pleaded and finally broke loose as if they were somehow his captors and he crumpled up on the street beside the father. He grabbed his shoulders. "What ... ?"

Rawbone tried to make words out of broken syllables or breathless sound, but could not. In his hand was the pocket notebook and, wracked and dying, he held it out for John Lourdes to see what he had written hours ago: Soh {or3we me

John Lourdes was beyond the knowing, beyond asking, "How?" He was clinging to a furious history that was his life, desperate suddenly for what was inseparable and lost, trying to contain or hold back death, to overpower it with his heart.

But the father kept breaking apart. There was no will, no earthly force that can measure up, even the blood-streaked fighter in the dust could not ultimately stand against that most inevitable of adversaries.

John Lourdes pulled his father to him, grasping the hand with the notebook, and in that ephemeral moment with the blazing sun around them, they were one. The son whispered, "Yes ... yes, I forgive you."

He could feel his father's face against his own and this choking sound through clenched teeth like, "Yes." Then the son put his lips to his father's ear, "Can you still hear me?"

The father squeezed his son's hand, answering that he could and his son told him, "Father ... save a seat in the truck for me."

Somewhere in that poisonous fever the father filled with those words and then, through what seemed this twilight tunnel, he could have sworn he heard the truck engine and the gears shifting and the steel musculature picking up speed and he was riding with the son through a land that was neither desolate nor forsaken ... and then he was no more.

THIRTY-SEVEN

HERE WERE JUST unanchored moments after that-being lifted from the sidewalk and the body against that ageless brick, the smell of ether and shadows upon an operating room wall. How long he was unconscious he did not know, but he came to in the dark, feeling as if he were on a train. His eyes followed a trail of light back to a kerosene lamp. A nurse sat nearby in the storage car, reading. She was Mexican and middle-aged and there was a solitary peacefulness about her. As she smiled at him, a figure leaned over the cot. It was Wadsworth Burr.

"Where are we?"

"You're on a train, John. I'm taking you to the military hospital at Brownsville. It was your notebook. The nuns saw my address and notified me."