The Second Son: A Novel (24 page)

Hoffner stared out through the windscreen. It was a road incapable of holding its line for more than thirty meters at a time. Now, with the light gone, he was strangely aware of the smell of manure. He hadn’t smelled it before but knew it must have been there.

“You know the road?” he said.

Gabriel’s left hand was resting on the steering wheel in a pose far too casual for the speed. Mila sat sleeping between them.

“Let’s hope.” Gabriel lit his next cigarette. He set it on the edge of his lip and tossed the match out the window.

Hoffner said, “It seems very peaceful.”

“It does.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

“I don’t.”

“You do know you’re winning the thing.”

“Yes, so I’ve heard.”

“Tell me,” said Hoffner. “What is it that makes me so lucky to have found the one group of anarchists in Spain who can’t enjoy the taste of victory?”

Gabriel fended off a smile. “Common sense?”

“That’s never it.”

“Then an instinct for your own kind. You wouldn’t know what to do with it either.”

A curve forced them to the left, and Gabriel brought his full focus to the road. He ground the gears until the cab hitched at the loss of speed. Hoffner gripped the dashboard and placed an arm across Mila. She continued to sleep.

Hoffner said, “I think this is different.”

“Then you’d be wrong. It’s never different. Not when you’ve been through it before.”

Hoffner waited for more. Instead, Gabriel reached his hand down to a small tin box on the floor. He flipped open the lid, pulled out a Coca-Cola, and handed it across to Hoffner. For the fifth time in the last two hours, Hoffner opened a bottle and handed it back. This was the last of the stash Gabriel had brought.

Hoffner said, “A Spanish anarchist and his dedication to the American capitalist dream.”

“It tastes good. That’s all.”

“I’ve seen this stuff take the rust off a tire bolt in twenty minutes.”

Gabriel nodded and took a swig. “Just think how clean my insides must be.”

For the first time since Hoffner had met him, Gabriel pulled a healthy cigarette from his mouth. He held it in the hand with the bottle. He was thinking something through. Finally he said, “You know Asturias?”

Hoffner had never been to the northwest of Spain. He shook his head.

“Very beautiful. My family has been there a long time. Gijón. On the coast.”

Gabriel set the cigarette back on his lip and placed the bottle between his legs on the seat. He downshifted as the road began to climb.

“Two years ago we had a miners’ strike. Very bloody. Strikes weren’t popular back then. Right-wing government. The miners tried to take the capital. They marched on Oviedo. They were gunned down. Three thousand killed, another twenty-five thousand thrown in prison. And the man the government sent to break the back of Asturias? Franco. The same Franco who now sits in Morocco and waits to do the same to Spain. Not so different.”

Gabriel spat something out the window, and Hoffner said, “You were there?”

“In the streets, at the barracks, in the hills—of course.” Gabriel took the bottle from between his legs. “I told my wife to spit on my picture when the
asaltos
came looking to arrest me. I haven’t been back since. Now I go home.” He drank.

“And she knows you’re coming?”

Gabriel remained quiet for nearly half a minute. “Yes,” he finally said; if there was regret in his voice, he refused to admit it. “She knows.”

Hoffner watched as Gabriel tipped the bottle all the way back before setting it on the floor.

Gabriel said, “I hear our doctor pulled a gun. Impressive.”

Mila was now leaning against Hoffner’s shoulder, the heat from her back and neck full against him. She had shivered once or twice in sleep—from a dream or a memory—but now lay perfectly still.

Hoffner said, “I’m sure Aurelio was impressed.”

“She’s too slim for Aurelio to be impressed. You’d think he’d like them that way—little as he is—but he never does.”

“I was talking about the gun.”

“Anyone can pull a gun. It’s the shooting that makes the difference.”

“And you think she can do that?”

“What? Shoot a gun?” Gabriel took a pull on the cigarette. “Why not? Don’t worry. She’ll get through. She’s a doctor. Everyone needs a doctor.”

“If they believe her.”

“Why shouldn’t they believe her? It’s you they won’t believe.” Gabriel was baiting him.

“You think I’m going with her?”

Gabriel tried a laugh, but the pain in his cheek got the better of him. “No, of course not. You’ll be letting her slip into Zaragoza all by herself. By the way, did she sleep alone last night?”

Hoffner let Gabriel sit with this one before saying, “I’ve no idea.”

Again Gabriel snorted, and again the pain was too much. “I imagine she likes them older.”

And Mila said, “I imagine she does.”

Her eyes were still closed, her arms folded gently across her chest. Gabriel was lucky to have the road in front of him; Hoffner stared out as well and tried to piece together the last half minute. There was a chance he had made an ass of himself. Cleverness was never much of a virtue in his hands.

Mila said, “Where are we?” Her eyes were open now as she straightened herself up.

Gabriel said, “Coming up on Barberà.”

She peered out. “And he likes a bigger woman, something to grab onto?”

Hoffner expected a look of embarrassment from Gabriel, but all he saw was the smile underneath the mustache. The cheeks rose and Gabriel suddenly coughed through a laugh. This, evidently, was worth the pain. “Something like that,” he said.

She looked at Hoffner. “Would you have guessed that, seeing how little he is?”

She was giving him a way out. She might have been giving him more, but Hoffner knew not to take it. “He’s keen on guns,” he said. “A girl like that—more space to hide one.”

Gabriel’s laugh became a throaty growl, and Mila said, “What happened to the headlights?” It was only now that she seemed to notice.

Again Gabriel spat something out the window. “Not so good to advertise through here.”

“I thought it was safe up to the Durruti line?”

“It is—mostly. Just not through here.”

“And they won’t hear us?”

Gabriel downshifted and the truck began to climb. “They’ve been hearing us for the past ten minutes. Hearing, seeing—either way it’s not so good, but why take the chance? Even a blind pig finds the mud sometime.”

“This is Republican territory,” she said.

“Is it? My mistake. I must have missed the day they brought the mapmakers out, pictures for everyone nailed to the doors. You be sure to tell the boys guarding the church up ahead that they’re breaking the rules.”

The road leveled off and the truck took on speed. There were lights somewhere in the distance—candles, judging by the flickering—but most impressive now was the moon. It was directly in front of them, its glare spreading out across the fields like foam on lifeless waves. It was only a momentary pleasure.

“Duck down,” Gabriel said. “They won’t hit anything, but just in case.” He tossed his cigarette out the window and accelerated.

Without thinking, Hoffner pulled Mila close into him and the two slid low on the seat. Gabriel held the wheel with two hands and angled his head back against the cab wall as far as he could take it. Hoffner imagined them caught like a rat in a lantern’s beam, scurrying toward the darkness and helpless against the naked light. Then again, a rat has an instinct for survival: not much chance of finding that in a truck heading west to the hills of Zaragoza.

The first
ping
came from behind them, then beyond, then in a wild series that seemed to stretch out in all directions. Hoffner’s eyes darted aimlessly with the shots until he found himself fixed on a spot outside Gabriel’s window. It was off in the distance, turrets, ancient and stone, clawing at the sky like raised talons. He felt Mila’s body against him. She, too, was staring out.

Gabriel swung the truck hard to the left and the turrets vanished. A last wave of shots flew by and then fell away. Hoffner waited another half minute before pulling himself up. Mila sat with him.

“What was that?” he said.

Gabriel tried his best not to mock. “Boys with guns?”

“No,” said Hoffner. “On the hill. The turrets.”

Gabriel flipped on the headlights, and Mila said, “Montblanc. The old city wall.”

“And they don’t mind the shots at night?”

Gabriel said, “No one’s shooting at them.” He downshifted, and the gears ground out with a sudden kick.

“Besides,” said Mila, “they’ve had worse. They say it’s where Saint George killed his dragon. You live through that, you live through anything, don’t you?”

A MAN IN THE GROUND

At just after midnight, Gabriel shut off the engine. Three jars of gasoline remained, but he knew he would have to keep a watch on them. Gasoline had a tendency to go missing with so many militiamen roaming about. Not that they had much use for it—a fire burned better with wood, a kerosene lamp might explode from the added heat—but these were anarchists. They had spent a lifetime scavenging. Why should a bit of freedom get in the way now?

Truth to tell, Osera de Ebro was not the most logical place to have set up the front. Zaragoza was still another thirty kilometers on, but this was as far as the weapons had taken them. Even so, Buenaventura Durruti—the great anarchist leader, the man who had given them Barcelona and would send Franco back into the sea—was insisting he could mop things up. The rebels had at most fifteen hundred troops inside the city. They were
requetés
—beret-wearing, priest-toting Navarrese monarchists who saw this as a last holy crusade—but why be daunted by that? Truth and fashion stood in equal measure on either side of the line. No, it came down to discipline and experience and weapons, and while these were all firmly in the hands of the
requetés
as well, Durruti still had one card to play. He had numbers, twice as many men—four times that by the end of the week—each fighting with something perhaps even more essential: a sense of the inevitable. Barcelona had proved that God had forsaken His own. Discipline and weapons be damned.

Remarkably, even the
requetés
knew this of their foes. In fact, the only person who seemed unaware was a Colonel José Villalba. Sadly, Villalba was the leader of the Republican forces and spent most of his time shuttling back and forth between Barcelona and his Aragón headquarters in Bujaraloz. Bujaraloz was another thirty-five kilometers behind the Osera line; in order to reach it, Villalba chose to take the train. The railroads were still under the workers’ control, and he reasoned that he could use the time to study maps and charts and piece together what little information he had on the men who might be dying for him. Had he decided to look out the window he would have seen that the fighting along the way was more skirmish than full-on battle, but Villalba kept the curtains drawn. It was better for the heat, he said. Reading his reports, he decided it was too early to bring the other Republican columns up to the front. He told Durruti—a colonel telling a man who disdained rank, commissions, an equal among equals—that, valiant as he was, he had plowed on too quickly. They would have to strategize together. And so Durruti began to spend much of his own time shuttling back and forth between Osera and Bujaraloz in order to convince the colonel that the time was ripe. There were no trains this far out, which meant that, with all the driving, Durruti needed to get his hands on some gasoline.

Gabriel decided to sleep in the back of the truck.

*   *   *

The smell of day-old flesh woke him at just after six. Gabriel looked over at the dead German nearer him and noticed that a string of flies had made camp below the right eye. Odd that they would have begun there, he thought. The back of the head was so much easier a way in.

He hoisted himself up and pulled back the flap. The heat had yet to take root, but it was already stale enough to bring a sheen to the face. Outside, the small square proved only slightly better in daylight. A few cars and motorcycles stood in a not-terribly-convincing line; two large guns—French 75s, he guessed—sat on the back of trucks, looking as if they hadn’t been fired since the last war; and surrounding it all was a huddle of two-story buildings, hunched and leaning toward defeat. It might have been the burden of insignificance or the thought that they might actually be called upon to serve some larger purpose, but either way they carried their future like the weight of an unwanted boon: Why us, why now—why?

Gabriel saw a bit of movement across the square. It was inside the house that had promised beds for the German and the woman last night. He hopped out of the truck and headed over.

*   *   *

As it turned out, the beds were nothing more than a few flat sections of floor with a collection of equally disappointing straw mattresses laid over them; the word “mattress” might have been kind. There were perhaps eight of them placed at odd angles, with men strewn across in various states of sleep.