“Good night, now we are finished,” Dobbs said, and swore.
“Wait here,” Howard ordered. “I’ll go over alone first and see what they want. You stay here with the burros. Maybe I can square things with them better alone. I can make them think I’m a Baptist preacher from an abandoned mining town.”
“He’s right as always, the old man is,” Curtin admitted. “That’s why I’d never try to play poker with him. Okay, go over and give them a good look at your honest face and tell them the story of Jonah in the whale or maybe Elijah flying a plane up to heaven.”
Howard crossed the plaza and walked over to the officials. “Buenas dias, senores. What can I do for you? Que puedo ofrecerle?”
“Lots you can, senor,” one of them answered. “You come from the mountains, senores?”
“Yes, we do. And it’s a goddamned hard journey. We’ve been on a huntingtrip. Got quite a few hides, and we hope to get a good price in San Luis Potosi.”
“Are you all vaccinated?”
“Are we what?”
“I mean have you got with you your certificado de vacunacion, your vaccination certificate? It’s the law that everybody in the republic has to have been vaccinated inside of the last five years to prevent smallpox epidemics.”
“Oh, caballeros, we were vaccinated back home when still kids. But, of course, we don’t carry our vaccination papers with us.”
“Of course not, gentlemen, and who does? Not even I do.” The officer laughed. So did all the other officials. “You see, we are the Federal Health Commission, sent out by the government to vaccinate everyone, especially the Indians, who suffer most from the smallpox. It’s a hard task for us. They run away from us whenever we come to a village. They are afraid. We’d have to bring along a whole regiment of soldiers to catch them. They hide in the mountains and in the bush and don’t go back to their homes until we have left the district.”
“Yes,” said another official, “look here at my face, all scratched up by women who defended their babies whom we wanted to vaccinate. But you know our country. Look at the thousands who have lost their eyesight on account of the ravages caused by smallpox epidemics. Look at the thousands and hundreds of thousands of pretty girls and women whose faces are scarred.”
“And when we come to these people to help them,” another of the officials broke in, “they fight us and even stone us as if we were their greatest enemies and not, as we really are, their best friends. They don’t have to pay a cent. Everything is done without any charge. The government only wishes to save them.”
Now the man with the eyeglasses spoke up. “See here, my good friend, I know you and your companeros over there are all vaccinated. But we would like you to do us a great favor. Let your friends come over here voluntarily and get vaccinated once more, please. ‘'Vhat we need is to show all these ignorant people that you, white men, are not afraid of what we are doing and that you come to get the scratch as if you were going to a dance. In all those huts behind the saplings there are families watching us. We have been here four days, offering vaccination for nothing and persuading people to come and take it. What makes things worse for us, the church is set against vaccination because it was not ordered by the Lord, just as this same church is against educating the children, because they might read books written against the church and write sinful love-letters. Well, you know all this without my telling you more about it. Now, won’t you, please, help us?”
“Why not? Of course,” Howard replied. “We are pleased to help you and the government.”
“I thought so when I saw you coming,” the doctor said. He laid before Howard his book with blanks. “Now, just write your name and your age on this line. After the vaccination you receive this slip, which is good for the next five years. If officials at a railroad station or in a town bother you about vaccination, all you have to do is just show them this slip. All right, let’s have your left arm and clean first with alcohol. Okay, friend, there are the few scratches.”
“Gracias, doctor.” Howard meant his thanks in more than one way.
“Now, please, tell your friends when they come over here to roll up the sleeve of their left arm while crossing the plaza so that the people watching from their huts can see what they are doing and that they are not a bit afraid of the medicine. We’ll put this table farther out in the open to make it a great show. To have you three white men, Americans, coming here of your own free will to get the scratch, or the medicine, as these Indians call it, is a great help to us. They’ll see that we don’t mean to poison them, and they’ll have more confidence in our work. So, please, let your friends put on a great show for the benefit of the villagers. Thank you, and have a pleasant trip home.”
“Gee, I got scared,” Dobbs said when Howard returned to the waiting train. “Seeing that feller take out a book and make you scribble in it, I was sure everything was lost. Huh, of course we’ll make them a great circus. Just watch me, how I handle a big show.”
So Dobbs and Curtin rolled up their sleeves and shouted in Spanish from where they were: “Si, doctor, what a pleasure to get that sweet vacuna in our arms! We’ve been waiting for it for ten years and couldn’t get it. In town the doctors charged us fifteen pesos for each little scratch, and you give it away for nothing. Yes, we are coming.”
As the officials had expected, the plan worked fine. The villagers, first mostly men and the bigger boys, came out and stood in the opening of their huts, watching the show Curtin and Dobbs were offering them. When Dobbs held his arm toward the doctor, he laughed out loud. Curtin whistled a jolly tune.. Men and boys came closer to see the procedure. The doctor smiled and the officers persuaded one of the men standing nearest to come and have the same thing done to him. Curtin pushed him closer jokingly, as the man was still frightened. But after he had the few scratches and felt nothing, he pushed his two boys forward and ordered them to hold still and have it over. When the partners finally left the plaza, the officers were so busy that they had to line up the people waiting for their turn, and among them now there were already women offering the arms of their babies to the officers.
After passing the last hut of the village, Dobbs said with a laugh: “Hey, Curty, you’re a funny mug.”
“What the hell is so funny about me?”
“You see ghosts like an old woman. If you see a guy with a rusty gat on his hip, right away you think the goods are gone. Anyone could have told you that these guys didn’t want anything from us. You could have seen that the guy with the specs was a doe. Couldn’t you see that right away from the table with a white sheet spread out on it? What else could a table with a white sheet on it serve for?”
“You’re telling me, wise mug!” Curtin grinned. “Anyhow, joke or no joke, I like it better this way.”
“So do I,” Howard threw in.
Chapter 19
That night the partners pitched camp not far away from the village of Amapuli. An Indian meeting them on the trail had assured them that the next water was too far off to be reached before nightfall, so they decided to pass the night there by a brook, although it was still early in the afternoon.
While sitting by the fire cooking their supper, they were surprised to see four Indians on horseback coming into their camp. The visitors greeted them courteously and asked permission to sit down by the fire and rest a little.