Cape Hell (6 page)

He was the eldest of eleven, not counting one miscarriage, two stillbirths, and a sister who died of diphtheria at the age of two weeks. His mother took in washing, and his father had spent a total of six hours with his children, leaving their one-room hut before sunup and chipping bits of color out of granite until the coal-oil ran out around midnight.

“We had a good working system,” he said. “Mama would take a turtle from a trap in the river and I would stand on its shell while Felipe applied pliers to its jaw, pulling out its head, Alessandro chopped it off, and Delores snatched it by its tail and threw it into a boiling kettle. You know turtle soup?”

I nodded. “In San Francisco. They called it terrapin in the Bella Union.”

“Snapper, we. I learned to avoid the severed head at an early age, when a hen pecked at it out of curiosity and it locked onto the bird's throat. They will hold on, you know, until sundown, or until the brain gets the message that it is no longer connected to the body. Pass the bottle,
senor, por favor.

“Ah! To have discovered such nectar years ago would have been worth my liver. It was an important moment in my passage when I was declared old enough, first to use the pliers, then to swing the axe. What I would not give to eat turtle soup once again. The river was fished out long ago.”

“And what of Felipe, Delores, and the rest?” I asked.

He set a matchstick to use, igniting a cigarette he rolled himself in brown paper. The smoke from the scorched grain made me lightheaded, an argument in its favor; liquor benefited no one but the drinker.

“
Quien sabe?
The soldiers came for Alessandro to help them fight for Maximilian; we never heard from him again. Then more soldiers came for Felipe to help them fight for Juarez. We heard he was shot for desertion. Delores became pregnant by the son of a don and was sold to a brothel. I do not know what became of the child. The
rurales
arrested me when I trespassed upon the don's ranch. They took away my rifle, which was fifty years old and did not work anyway, and I was sentenced to labor in the same mine that claimed my father's life when it fell in, along with those of a dozen others.

“I served with the crew that excavated it. I do not know which of the skeletons we uncovered belonged to my father. I would be working there still if a man representing railway interests in
Los Estados Unidos
hadn't come looking for a fireman to replace the one he'd lost when a boiler exploded near Chihuahua; he was blasting tunnels for a line to be owned jointly by the Oklahoma, Texas, and Missouri Railroad and the government in Mexico City. I had just started as an engineer when
El Presidente
Diaz nationalized the railway in the interest of the Republic.
Lo mismo, senor, por favor
.”

I refilled his glass. He'd drunk half a bottle to two drinks on my part without affecting either his speech or his reflexes.

He sipped, sighed. “When we were grading track not far from my old village I chanced to look in upon the home where I grew up. Strangers were living there, and knew nothing of the former occupants. It is a trial,
Senor
Deputy, to visit a bordello and not know if one is lying with one's own niece.”

I had nothing to offer in comparison with his experiences. I'd been shot, almost burned to death, lured into traps by evil women, and spent a season as a slave with Cheyenne renegades, but I had nothing to match his loss.

That is, if he was telling the truth. If I had a cartwheel dollar for every Mexican whose sister had been raped by a Spanish don, I could have spent my life traversing the continent in a private railway car.

Joseph was a puzzle of another sort. I doubt we exchanged more than fifty words total, most of them monosyllabic and unrevealing, but even before we left Montana Territory I was convinced he was some kind of Judas goat, leading us toward a slaughterhouse. He spent all his time in the locomotive when he wasn't foraging for fuel—not overlooking the merest scrap of driftwood on the shore of the Great Salt Lake or mesquite twig in the Painted Desert—crunched down cracked corn by the handful, chasing it with water from a goatskin bag, and crossed himself before he ate, clutching the carved-stone crucifix suspended from the rosary around his neck. For all his show of Christian conversion, I pictured him more easily offering morsels to a beast-headed god squatting in some undiscovered ruin, praying for our destruction.

The
Ghost
passed through city and plain, leaving no more evidence of its passage than would its namesake. Most unscheduled journeys by rail fostered a host of gossip, and questions at every stop. The endless chain of Marthas set before me bowl after bowl of chicken and dumplings—scrawny prairie hen, and blobs of mealy flour swimming in grease—with only the usual tinned cheer and no apparent curiosity as to where I was bound and why. There was nothing furtive about it, only a complacency I'd never witnessed before. No one asked me about the news from up north, yet I sensed no hostility, no reticence. I was a piece of furniture, and nothing so interesting as a piano or a new kind of plow.

Out of duty I put in to post offices along the way, in case Blackthorne had wired further instructions or calling for a progress report, only to meet blank faces and shaking heads. Either I'd been forgotten—written off, as a bad debt—or the Judge was laying the groundwork for a plea of ignorance when the mission went sour. I was as much an orphan as Hector Cansado, whose brothers and sisters had been taken from him as by the unfeeling wind.

No, nothing so substantial as an orphan. I was a phantom, like the train I rode, drifting through human bodies, constructions of wood, brick, and adobe, like a mist, only without the chill that came with it. There was no evidence that I existed. Outside Yuma, an antelope grazing next to the cinderbed didn't raise its head as the train swept past within inches. As the animal dissolved in a wave of heat I put my hand to my mouth and bit hard into the tender flesh between my thumb and forefinger, and waited for the blood to come to the surface. When it did, proving something, I knew not what, I cracked open my Bible and read:

Yet he shall perish forever like his own dung; they which have seen him shall say, Where is he?

He shall fly away as a dream, and shall not be found; yea, he shall be chased away as a vision of the night.

I slammed the book shut. Who wrote this thing, anyway?

I worked my way back to the stock car, bracing myself against the arid wind that struck me like a sheet of superheated iron on the verandah; it stood my skin-cells on end and crackled the hairs in my nose. The wheatgrass stretching to the horizon laid down in the opposite direction the train was headed, making me dizzy. The world was spinning away from me, the ultimate rejection.

The bay lifted its wedge-shaped head when I came through the door, studying me first with one eye, then turning to confirm what it had seen with the left, like a bird on a perch. I strapped on its feedbag and stroked its neck; it lunged, trying to bite me through the canvas. I found that reassuring. Horses still hated me; proof that I was flesh and not air.

I had a strange sensation—a waking dream, like the wisp of unreality that told you you'd been dozing, even when you were struggling with sleeplessness—that I was looking at Lefty Dugan, the friend I'd killed in Butte.

Is that what you thought?
he seemed to be saying.
It's the other way around, Page. I killed
you.

Nothing had changed: Shoot one old partner to death and he never let you forget it.

 

NINE

“
The time has
come,” the walrus said, “to speak of rules.”

The walrus in this case being Hector Cansado. I'd drunk myself into an Aberdeen stupor, with
Alice in Wonderland
splayed facedown on my chest and a touch of malaria, and awoke to a visage that lacked only whiskers and tusks to fulfill the dream.

“
Senor,
” the engineer said, “We are in Mexico. But where we go, there are no
fiestas,
no
pinatas,
no pretty
senoritas
dancing barefoot upon tables. Nothing you have learned from the past applies to the place we are bound.”

“I've been to Mexico before.”

“I am sure you had your picture struck in Mexico City, wearing a sombrero and sitting upon a stuffed burro. Where we go, they know nothing of cameras or the telegraph. Men have been slain there for their watches; not to sell, but to take apart and see how they work. They mark the passage of time by the sun and the seasons. The sun sets early in the mountains and rises late, and what happens in between wears the cloak of night. It is no mystery how grotesque stories flourish there.

“Trust no one, least of all your friends. That is rule number one.

“Trust not yourself. Reason and insanity are not so easy to separate in the Mother Mountains: Down is up, dark is light, crooked straight. That is rule number two.”

“How many more are they?” I asked. “Should I take notes?”

“Ignore all rules. That is rule number three, and the last I shall give you.”

“Was this conversation necessary at all?”

He shrugged. His people were experts at that. “Perhaps not.
Mi madre,
rest her soul”—he crossed himself—“said you cannot know a man until you have seen him in his nightshirt.”

I sat up in my berth. “Where are we now?”

“The village of Alamos, in the Sonoran Desert. I suggest you take it in. It is the last civilization we shall encounter this side of Cabo Falso.”

I dressed and went outside. The
Ghost
snorted rhythmically, pausing between exhalations, like a stallion bred for racing champing before the gate. Joseph sat as I had first seen him, feet dangling outside the cab, foraging in his sack of corn. His black eyes were more opaque than usual, like wax drippings; either he was relieved to be back on home ground or he'd sweetened his meal with leaves from the plants that grew in lush patches on the sides of the foothills beginning just steps from the train, their distinctive five-leaf clusters stirring in the slight breeze. I remembered what Blackthorne had said about Childress and his poppies growing between rows of sugar cane. They would thrive in that climate, like the marijuana. No country was better suited for cultivating human vice.

The village, as old as any in North America, sprawled at the very foot of the Sierra Madres. It was as if one of the ancient gods had tilted the earth at a seventy-degree angle, and everything on it had slid into a jumble at the bottom. Some of the adobe structures were the oldest in appearance, the original surfaces beaten hard as concrete and covered with patches on patches, each smear a darker shade than its predecessor. The territorial movement had modified later constructions, the windows framed with pinon wood and roof poles extending two feet beyond the walls, looking like elephants' tusks sawn off blunt. Signs identifying the businesses—
CORREO, HERRERIA, CARNICERIA
—were painted directly on the adobe. More recent buildings were built of pine carted down from just below the tree line and put up green, a blessing during the hot months, when cross-breezes swept through the spaces between the boards, but a curse in monsoon season; inside they would smell of moss and mold and breed mosquitoes the size of sparrows.

A priest leaned in the doorway of the chapel, which although built of the inevitable adobe sported an outer shell of polished limestone, a gleaming white phantom in a world of brown earth. Although he wore the surplice and robes of his calling, his attitude, anticipating something he dared not hope for, a soul saved or a miracle granted, put me in mind of a butcher awaiting his next customer. His gray face brightened as I drew near, only to settle into resignation as I passed, smiling with my lips tight. His faith wasn't mine; I felt no need for an intermediary between myself and my God.

Drinking locally brewed beer in the cantina, dark and damp as a grotto, I heard a loud plop and rescued a woolly caterpillar from drowning among the hops floating in my glass.

I didn't tarry. In winter, gringos would migrate to that climate like swallows, but with the heat rising in twisting ribbons from the beaten earth of the street, mine was the whitest face in the room, and I was still burned as dark as cherry from riding the width of Montana Territory and back. The bartender—a full-blooded Yaqui, judging by his flat features and eyes like shards of polished coal—kept a machete slung by a sinew thong from the wall above the taps, and it didn't strike me as just a decoration.

I tossed some change on the bar, but as I made my way out I saw a rectangular sheet posted next to the door, as brown and wrinkled as cigarette paper, with a woodcut reproduced in black ink of a man in the uniform of a Mexican
federale
: khakis, Sam Browne belt, knee-length boots, schoolboy cap with its shiny leather visor, tearing the clothing from a terrified-looking
senorita,
and a legend I preferred to translate into English when I wasn't among witnesses. I pretended to stumble, bumping against the wall, and held up a hand to my audience, reassuring them of my welfare, as with the other I tore the sheet off its nail and stuffed it into a pocket.

VOLUNTEERS WANTED! [It read]

TOP WAGES!

FIGHT FOR FREEDOM, FAMILY, LAND

SEE PROPRIETOR FOR DETAILS

OSCAR CHILDRESS, MAJOR,

THE ARMY OF LIBERTY

I showed it to Cansado when he reported to the coach for his regular session with Scottish skullbender. He stared at it, said:

“This same picture accompanied
El Presidente
Juarez's leaflets at the time of the revolution. Alas, I was pressed into service before I learned my letters.”

I made him a beneficiary of my incomplete Spanish. He nodded.