The Creed of Violence (15 page)

'E SWEATED OUT that other bull crabbing through the son's
pockets, pulling them up and out one by one till they hung there
in the daylight. But in the end, the damn notebook was nowhere to be
found.

"You can both come around now."

The father eyed the son while he nonchalantly pushed the pockets
back in place. Both men were tossed their wallets and personals. Jack
B took security cards from his shirt pocket and handed one to each
man. John Lourdes looked the card over. Rawbone wasn't the least
interested and couldn't get it in his pocket quick enough. The card, as
John Lourdes read it:

AGUA NEGRA

PRIVATE SECURITY

"The truck is your responsibility. You'll stay on the flatcar with it.
You'll sleep there with it. Unless and until you are ordered otherwise."

Jack B was yelling orders now to the hoist crew about the truck
when Rawbone asked, "Hey stars and stripes, where's this parade
goin'?"

"What does it matter to you?"

Rawbone pushed his derby back and leaned casually against the
truck. "If I knew I could write my dear old mom and tell her what kind
of dresses she should send me to wear."

John Lourdes did his best to seem like he had not heard that. Jack
B, on the other hand, said, "This ain't Texas."

He walked away to Rawbone whistling "I'm a Yankee Doodle
Dandy." Then, the father's attention turned to the son. "The
notebook-"

The son strode past the father and leaned down and reached in
under the back of the cab. When he stood he had the notebook in his
hand. He held it up, then slipped it back in his pocket. He'd hidden it
away before they left Juarez as a precaution.

Rawbone leaned over the hood now and called to a roustabout
who was carrying over a set of chains to hook to the chassis for lifting
the truck. "Hey, gent, where's this parade goin'?"

The man wiped a gloved hand across his heavily bearded chin.
"You're here and you don't know?"

"I'm here and I don't know and how much of an offspring of morons does that make me?"

"The Zone, brother. That's where we're bound."

"Aye. Thank you, gent. And be so kind as not to tell anyone you
just talked to a buffoon with an empty boot for brains."

"That's our secret, brother."

The father spit. Both men grew quiet. They knew what the Zone
meant-oil country. The Gulf Coast from Tampico to Tuxpan.

The Golden Lane is how it was described in newspapers or defined
on maps. But if you'd been there and seen, you damn well knew it
was an unreckonable sweep of devastation and fires, black rain and
poisoned earth. The father had been witness to the place; he'd done
time on the streets and in the bars and oil fields of Tampico and Puerto
Lobos and Cerro Azul and case-hardened as he was, he wanted none of
it. "Next stop, one thousand miles," he said.

"Yeah."

"Talk about a blackened scrap of meat."

John Lourdes wiped at an unusual amount of sweat coming off his
forehead.

"Mr. Lourdes-"

"We're going."

"Going does not mean getting there."

"We'll get there."

"Take a look at yourself."

The son wiped at the sweat again.

"You look like a pile of salt sitting out in the noon sun." He pointed his
derby at the young man's back. "You're leaking blood, Mr. Lourdes."

The son wiped at his face. He looked around. He walked over to
the last passenger car and climbed the steps judiciously. He peered into
the door window. Rawbone turned up at his elbow. The sunlight that
fell across the window helped tell the story. His face was drained of
color alright and the cheeks were close to the look of skimmed ice.

His glance went from himself to the father's, and like the night
before in the hearse glass when the two were side by side, there was
not even the slightest recognition from the father that a few demarked
features of each were so much alike. Maybe the resemblance was too
quiet, or some nameless trait inside the man who was Rawbone made
such moments impossible. The son grinned and the father grew suddenly uncomfortable.

"I'm bleeding alright. But ... we're going on. You will not use me,
against me."

"Why should I bother, Mr. Lourdes, when you do such an exemplary job on yourself? I'll just stand here and beat the drum."

As they stood and argued the father picked up on a figure stepping
from the shadows of the tent. "Mr. Lourdes, I believe you have attracted someone's attention."

With that he angled his head toward where the son should look.
There Teresa was, stepping from the tent's shadow. She was with the
women and she arced a hand over her eyes to cut off the sunlight and
be sure.

He could not fathom it any more than the girl. She put out her
hands uncertainly as if to ask what he was doing here. Realizing the
danger, he quickly gathered himself and came down the train steps
scrambling for his notepad and pencil. He began to write furiously.
Then he tore the sheet of paper from the pad and handed it to her: You
mus4 say no- L ij abou4 wl,o / am, or I,ow you know me. /4 is ompor4a114.
14 m~i4 mead my /Se, if you do. / wd( explain /a4er.

Rawbone watched as the girl regarded the note wide-eyed and
frightened. She wanted to ask questions, for she pointed to the notepad
and pencil and scribbled on the air, but John Lourdes motioned no, and
pointed to the word-/a4er-.

He took the page he'd written on and tore it up as he started back
to the train. Climbing the steps, he tossed the pieces in the air. He
stood with Rawbone as Teresa was taken in tow by another woman
and prodded back to work. John Lourdes was decidedly troubled.

"That wouldn't be the girl you told me about, would it?"

"It would."

"The one whose father you killed?"

"The same."

"Well, I hope she takes the news as well as her father did."

BY LATE AFTERNOON the great Mastodon whistle blew. Along the
creek birds struck from the treetops skyward in a frenzy. The battalion
of roustabouts and thugs ran along the rail line and jumped the car
steps or leapt to the flatbed. The truck had been chained down and
braced to the last flatcar.

John Lourdes sat with his back against the cab tire facing the sun,
hoping it would ease the chills and fever that were beginning to overcome him. Rawbone stood nearby, arms folded, and watched Doctor
Stallings and his committee of security officers pose for a last photo
before they embarked. The Mexican with the camera was animated
and lively as he posed the men before the steaming wheels of that black
monster engine. They then boarded and the photographer ran to the
first flatbed and put out a hand and was hauled up with legs kicking
wildly.

The boiler chest flooded with steam that entered the cylinders
through valve sleeves and the pistons were driven backward and the
wheels began to turn. That metal and wood chain of hulls groaned and
creaked and steam escaped through the exhaust port and there was a
long low huff followed by another and then another and the train labored forward. The trek to the Gulf and what awaited had begun.

3E PLACE FROM whence they came disappeared in the heat like
a mirage. John Lourdes still sat with his back against the cab
tire. He was trying to write down all that had transpired since the funeraria, but fever left his hands trembling and eyes unclear. He looked
toward the passenger car coupled to the flatbed where all the women
traveled together.

He once saw the girl Teresa in the door window like a lonely portrait, watching him. In the paling light she put a hand to the glass and
with a finger traced a cross with rays coming from it. He remembered
that was what she had written in his notebook that night at the church
and he pulled that notebook from his coat pocket and opened to the
page and held it for her to see.

The night winds came with the dusk. The men bundled up in their
coats to contend with the cold desert dark. The one with the camera was making the rounds from car to car flashing a business card and
trying to hustle up commissions. John Lourdes whistled to him and
weakly waved the man over his way.

He leapt to the car all lithe and smart. He wasn't much older than
John Lourdes and spoke in a blaze of Spanish and sawed-off English
and he flashed his business card.

TUERTO
FOTOGRAFIA EXTRAORDINARIA

John Lourdes pointed up to the truck cab. "The gent up there
brooding." Tuerto glanced at Rawbone. "He saw you posing Doctor
Stallings today and it got him pretty jealous 'cause there's nothing he'd
like better than having a photographer primp him while he had his picture taken. I'll even pay for it."

The father, in fact, had been brooding, till Tuerto overwhelmed
him with compliments about his verdadero hombre features. It was
an inspiring hustle and he let Rawbone handle the folding pocket
Kodak. As part of his pitch he began to instruct him on its use. He
showed how to open it, explained what the maroon leather bellows
was for, demonstrating the metal tool to steady it for longer horizontal exposures.

Tuerto pulled out a deck of Kodak penny postcards. "The newest
rage," he said in English. "Take a picture, Kodak will have it printed on
a penny postcard. Mail it anywhere in the world, to anyone you want.
A loved one, perhaps?"

Rawbone went through each, looking them over as if they were
charged relics from the time of Christ. Tuerto explained about how
he studied photography in Mexico City and wanted to be a great picture postcard artist. "Tuerto," he said, "means one-eyed." He ran a
finger around the single lens opening in the camera's black frontpiece.
"Tuerto," he repeated. He had taken it as a sort of nom de plume, for
his given name was Manuelito Miguel Tejara Flores.

"If I wanted to get pictures of this train," said John Lourdes, "you
could do that?"

"Of course."

"And of the people on it?"

"Of course."

"And you could have them delivered somewhere. El Paso, say. If I
gave you an address?"

"Of course."

"And if I wanted to buy from you copies of pictures you'd already
taken, could I do that?"

Tuerto thought that a most unusual request.

"He's a most unusual fellow," said Rawbone.

"I guess," said Tuerto, "for a fee."

John Lourdes put his head back and closed his eyes. His head began to swim. "You have been commissioned."

Tuerto thanked both men enthusiastically. Rawbone then climbed
down from the cab seat and squatted beside John Lourdes.

"You hustled him."

The son did not open his eyes.

"I'm trying to accumulate information and possible evidence that
pertains to this investigation any way I can. So I can go home. And you
can earn your immunity."

"That's why you called him over."

"Who told me once to keep my gunsights at eye level?"

Rawbone continued to regard John Lourdes, who without opening
his eyes, moved his head slightly.

"You're blocking what little light there is," said the son.

The father remained as he was, clicking his jaw left, then right.
Finally he admitted, "There's times, Mr. Lourdes, you've said things.
Like to that photographer about me jealous wanting my picture taken.
It was like you knew me all my life."

The son opened his eyes. "Or all my life."

"Exact."

His eyes shut now in spite of him. The father continued to block
the light and the son shifted a bit more.

"Mr. Lourdes, did you ever have something you wanted to do with
your life more than anything else?"

"I'm doing it now."

"Ah. Me ... if I was your age and could start over, I'd go where
they make those moving-picture shows. I would gent up and ..."

"With a smile and good cheer ..."

"Goddamn right. That would be me up there."

The son's eyelids fluttered, the pupils now barely visible. The face
before him blurred into a landscape where the last of the sun bled away
everything before it and the endless clackety-clack of the train wheels
became that of the film tailing wildly through the sprockets. The image suddenly fever rushed up of the father as this terrifying wonder in
flickering black and white adorned with near heroic indifference to life.
He leaned forward shivering horribly and grabbed hold of Rawbone's
coat. "Think how you'd ... be able to ... help them get ... the dyin',
right." John Lourdes grinned and the father stared down at him confounded and the son grinned yet and tried with a falling voice to sing,
"You're a Yankee ... Doodle ... Dandy, a-"