The light moved in on his face till it was more than a trifle too close. Still, there was no acknowledgment and the standoff was broken only by the warning cry of a train whistle well up the tracks.

TWENTY-FOUR.

-HERE CAME A second, longer warning call and the men began to lean out the car windows and crane their necks or stand at the edge of the flatcars, looking to where the trackline reached well into the black. Even in the women's car faces were hard-angled against the gla.s.s that steamed with their breath. The fleeting whistle soon fell away and there was only the sound of the Mastodon moving into that vast and murky landscape.

A guard on the tender shouted for Doctor Stallings and pointed a carbine as direction. Far off into the dead of night there appeared a pyre of flame. Singular and wind-taken. Doctor Stallings ordered the men to weapon up. He told Rawbone to remain on guard at the truck.

It took another quarter hour moving through the desert before they came upon a burning water depot and junction station for the Mexican Telegraph Company. A half-dozen slotted wood structures stood out in the dark like incinerated cages. The water tower had collapsed and was a smoldering ruin. The first train stood beyond the destruction. Guards from the coal car formed a protective perimeter. The second train stopped well short of the fires. Doctor Stallings and his officers moved in quick order upon the scene. The man in command of the first train waited on the tracks to report to Doctor Stallings. Rawbone leapt from the flatcar and came up the line enough to hear what was being said.

The fire was no mean accident of nature nor the foolish result of a human mistake, for there was no person nor animal, no vehicle nor wagon anywhere to be found. The man talking to Doctor Stallings pointed to a cross near three feet high made of wood slats that had been set in the sand beside the tracks. A printed sheet had been staked to it. It was a copy of a decree by the president pro tem Madero, from exile-the revolution had officially begun.

Mr. Stars and Stripes read the sheet after Doctor Stallings pa.s.sed it to him and, when finished, slapped that paper with the back of his hand and said, "We got ourselves the war, commander."

The man in charge of the first train went over and pulled the cross out of the ground. He started back toward Doctor Stallings and was in the process of breaking it apart when there was a volley of rifle fire. Three, maybe four shots. Arterials of powdered cloth and blood jumped from his body and he was blown back onto the tracks still holding that crucifix, where he lay stretched out dead.

A firefight began. Flashbursts along the ravined darkness. Jack B led a group of guards to meet the attack under Stallings's command.

There was firing all up and down the line. Another man was. .h.i.t and fell facedown in the sand. From the pa.s.senger car women screamed. Rawbone yelled for them to quiet and he knelt on one leg, rifle poised and ready.

He could hear the cries of horses as half a dozen riders spurred their mounts and dashed past one of the burning sheds that yawed and flared with the wind. Their shadows rose up immense and branded against the flames, there one moment and then gone.

Campesinos-the people.

They were in the midst of a war now. A shooting war. The gratification of political causes, thought Rawbone. The common a.s.sa.s.sin in him had scorn for such things.

Doctor Stallings walked past him checking the line and said, "You were right about one thing."

Rawbone asked, "One?"

"Casualties."

Once alone, Rawbone cursed his luck.

RIFLE FIRE STIRRED him. Through a waterish dim John Lourdes saw bits of flaming ash rush past the windows like some wind-riven army of stars. He thought he was back on that plat in the Hueco Mountains until he heard men outside shouting and the train begin to move.

His eyes cleared enough to see women all about him in the quietude. A hand rested on his shoulder and his eyes lifted and there was the girl Teresa sitting on the floor with her back against the wall beside him. She had in her other hand his notebook and pencil.

Of anyone he asked in Spanish, "How did I get here?"

The old crone answered and he lifted his head slightly. She, too, sat nearby, overseeing a watercan with a leather strap being heated over a bed of candles in the bottom of a clay bowl.

It turned out she was a curandera, or healer, named Sister Alicia. She was preparing teas of cayenne and Peruvian Samento. These he was given to drink and later, under watchful eyes, he slept.

With morning the trains entered the shipping yards of Chihuahua. A fog immersed the city. It clung to the earth and the trains made their slow and c.u.mbersome way from switch to switch through a gray and otherworldly brew that floated about the wheels.

On the wall of a three-story brick warehouse someone had painted a vast but clumsy headstone with the name MAL-o on it. Standing at the edge of the flatcar urinating into that vapory murk Rawbone noticed, as he hitched his pants, Doctor Stallings atop the last pa.s.senger car surveying the yard. Both men were regarding the headstone. Rawbone used his derby as a pointer. "Not a chance, that happens!" he yelled.

He was sure Doctor Stallings spoke Spanish and knew the word malo meant "evil."

The train ferried past the roundhouse and the tooling sheds when came the sounds of cheering and gunfire. Figures began to appear out of the nothingness. Campesinos alive to the belief G.o.d was finally going to shine down his alien grace upon their lives, even if such grace were to be delivered by a little bloodshed.

They were everywhere in the mist. Rawbone could see them across the trainyard, hordes up on boxcars and clinging to the stacks of black and silent locomotives. They yelled to the men on the train and the women in the pa.s.senger cars, possessed as they were with the furious excitement of possibility.

One of the campesinos ran up to the flatcar and shouted that la rev- olucion had begun and Rawbone answered with glorious indifference, smiling, "Yes, my friend, you've got a great future ... behind you."

A woman now called to Rawbone from the landing of the pa.s.senger car. The young man, it seemed, was asking for him.

John Lourdes was pale and in pain, but the shivering had subsided and his mind steadied.

"I see the witches haven't killed you yet."

"Last night," he asked, "what happened?"

The father squatted. All around them were women watching. "War, Mr. Lourdes, that's what happened. We're right in the middle of a country that's goin' down for the count."

Sister Alicia was preparing another batch of medicinals. She poked Rawbone and told him to pa.s.s the cup to the young man. He took the steaming tin gingerly and ran it under his nose. The smell seemed to touch a nerve. Tangible it was with memories. He was torn by the moment then put it aside. "You got your magic down, don't you, you d.a.m.n witch." He had a swallow himself. "Tastes of my youth," he said.

He pa.s.sed the cup to John Lourdes, who sipped as he was told, "It seems our employer has a dog in this fight. I heard Mr. Stars and Stripes talking. Of course, I'm pa.s.sing the information on to you as befitting our station."

The son thought on this a while. "But who is our employer? Mr. Hecht? Do you think so? I don't."

"I see your point, Mr. Lourdes."

The father stood. "Listen to me, you d.a.m.n witches. Take care of the young master here. He's a true verdadero hombre." Rawbone grabbed his crotch. "Mucho caliente."

The women either laughed with embarra.s.sment or turned away in disgust. "He's also a climber, in case you didn't know. Intends to make a name for himself. Thinks he can carry the weight of the world on his shoulders." He looked at Teresa, who was staring up at him. "You're in for a surprise."

As he started out, the son called to him. He wanted to say something but hesitated. He set the cup down, he brushed the hair back from his drawn face. "For bringing me in here ... thank you."

To see him in such discomfort at having to say the thing gave Rawbone unequalled pleasure. Yet, to his absolute dismay, John Lourdes sounded utterly genuine.

7W'ELVTY-FIVE.

-HEY EXISTED NOW in a state of war and so guards were stationed on the car roofs. Through a country that changed from lush canyons and fertile cropland to hills of boned and caking pumice, there was only that island of a train infinitesimal in a landscape marked by the eternal. Came nightfall they entered the Sierras, its remote and silent peaks rising toward a rind of moon. The tide of John Lourdes's bleeding had been stemmed and his reservoirs of strength were beginning to return.

He had asked the girl Teresa how she came to be on the train. She wrote that after her return from Immigration, her father grew more troubled and wary over her being picked up off the street. Even being brought home by the nuns as planned did nothing to ease his suspicions, so he arranged for her to be sent to the oil fields to work with these other women. He had brought her to the depot, then left with a handful of other men for Texas. She had antic.i.p.ated his return, but she believed now something had befallen him.

John Lourdes confronted having to tell her the truth. He had near forced this moment from his first question. He asked her to join him on the back landing of the railroad car, and so she did. The church spire mountains all about them were run with spare pines. They could have been any young man and any young woman as they sat there looking out upon the blue majesty of evening. He lit a cigarette and wished it were so, but it was not.

To lie through silence was his first inclination. The why of it being he wanted the girl to think well of him, to be accessible to him, and keeping silent fed into his natural tendency toward dispa.s.sion.

But fever, exhaustion and pain diminished his defenses. As he lay in that car, watched over by those women, an action or turn of phrase, the way one laughed or prayed, all became fragments of the person that had once been his mother. And the closer he got to feelings of his mother, the more her presence filled him, the more intensely aware he became of the threatening musculature that was the father living inside him.

The man on the flatcar with the derby and that Savage .32 was the one who'd asked all those years ago in that open-air market in Juarez, "Do you want to know what people are really like, so you can never be tricked or fooled? Be indifferent to every man. Then you'll know."

Wasn't dispa.s.sion a possible disguise for indifference, the kind of indifference the father taught him? Lying in that train car he asked himself over and over: As there were fragments of his mother in those women, were there not fragments of the father in himself? Had he been poisoned as effectively as those customs guards at the ferry in ways he didn't realize?

This was what drove him to tell the girl the truth and so he wrote: Your fa4er was ki(/ed i,i 4e Hueco /Yloun4ai,is where I,e 4r'ied 4o murder 4wo men.

She read this and her eyes blinked. She absorbed the knowledge in painful increments. To see sadness in such composed quiet. She looked down at her folded hands. Her hair fell long across her face. Her beauty was her simple humanness. She gazed out into the night a long time. She was melancholy somewhere in the high mountains that were home to the wolves and the heavens.

She then looked at him with apprehension and foreboding. John Lourdes felt that look would go on forever, but, even so, he set pencil to paper. As he began to write what he had done, her hand came down and stopped him. Her action and her look spoke for themselves, for now she stood and went back into the car and he was left to the night.

"You KNOW WHAT a barrel of oil sells for today? Any idea? About fifty cents. Any idea what a war will do to that price?"

Jack B was holding court by the truck with a handful of branded felons and roustabouts while Rawbone sat behind the wheel and out of the sun. With his legs stretched up on the dash and arms folded, he let Mr. Stars and Stripes pontificate to see what information might come of it that he could pa.s.s on to Mr. Lourdes.

"Doctor Stallings says we could see prices reach a dollar ... a dollar fifty a barrel by 1911. Oil stocks, that's what he's got his money in. Standard ... American Eagle ... Waters-Price. That's where his money is going and that's where," he slapped at the wallet hidden away in his back pocket.

"Mexico. You want to see what the future's going to look like, look no further than right here. You want to see a model for how the world will operate, look no further than right here. That's what Doctor Stallings tells me. And-"

"Right here and right now?" said Rawbone. He leaned up out of the seat and hooded his eyes with a hand and looked out over a pa.s.sing landscape of brutal and barren contours that seemed to have no end. "So this is the future. Well, if you don't mind, it looks a lot like h.e.l.l if you ask me."

This brought out a few laughs and Jack B answered with, "You'll not only die ignorant, you'll die broke."

Rawbone sat back down in the cab and began to croon in his cracked and sandy voice, "Take me out to the ball game, take me out to the park ..." He even got a few of the scurrilous guards to join in, which gave Jack B a good grinding. "Let me root, root, root for the home team, if they don't win it's a shame . . .

He took the ridicule with a strained stare and then, looking beyond Rawbone, said, "Well."

It seemed John Lourdes had quietly made his way up the pa.s.senger side of the truck and now stood by the cab.

"How was your vacation?" asked Jack B.

The son glanced at the father. "Telling."

"I don't know if you heard. But Jack B here was just educating us on the future. Of course, I know your view of the future, Mr. Lourdes. There isn't one. There's just you, me and . . . American Parthenon, here. "

"I heard Jack," said John Lourdes. He checked through his satchel on the cab floor and found an open and beat-up pack of cigarettes. He lit one and blew smoke out his nose in thin straight lines. "I think he makes a lot of sense."

Jack B turned his attention to Rawbone. "At least he won't die ignorant and broke."

"How do his employers measure it?" said John Lourdes.

"Employers?"

"Someone put this parade together," said Rawbone.

"Doctor Stallings. He's been the one commissioned."

"But someone had to checkbook all this up," said John Lourdes.

"I'm told he's got investors."

"Ah," said the son, looking toward the father, "investors."

"What was his sales pitch?" asked the father. He then winked with great pleasure at that group around the truck. "A dark alley and a loaded gun?"

"You'll die ignorant and broke," Jack B prophesied again as he walked off.

"But not soon."

It wasn't long after that gathering broke off into their own private schemes, leaving father and son alone.

"Well, Mr. Lourdes, what did you hear?"

"Someone else's version of the practical application of strategy."

"Aye. You know what I heard. Cuba ... Manila ... I've lived it. It's called military intervention. It's those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds back at the Customs House. That's why all the Yankee Doodles at Fort Bliss. This is a sh.e.l.l game, Mr. Lourdes."

Silently the son a.s.sessed and reflected and then agreed. He continued to think and once or twice the father caught him looking back at the pa.s.senger car.

"Did you tell her?"

When he'd left, she was sitting on the floor of the pa.s.senger car in a profound sadness and could not, or would not, look at him. He went to Sister Alicia to thank her. He called her abuelita, which meant "grandmother," and told her she would never find him wanting if a time came and she were in need.

"I told her," said John Lourdes.

"Mr. Lourdes, in matters such as these, it is best to remain ... indifferent."

THE FOLLOWING DAY they came upon the first train stopped in the white noon of sand hills. Three campesinos were being held at gunpoint by the guards. Two were young men, the third still a boy. Doctor Stallings and his command officers went from the train and were informed these three had been caught trying to sabotage the tracks. The captured, of course, swore to their innocence.

Along the line of the second train the guards came out from the cars or took up on the landings and roofs to watch. Even the women stood in the sun with their heads covered and eyes hooded, to see. Only Rawbone showed no interest and remained in the truck cab with his legs up on the dash.

After much condemnation and many denials Doctor Stallings issued a series of quick orders. The three were marched to a bare and blackened tree surrounded by ocotillo that stood on a slope near fifty yards from the track. A rope was brought and Jack B flung it over what looked to be the st.u.r.diest, though partly broken-off, branch. Doctor Stallings called to Tuerto.

"It's pictures you want."

He nodded, of course.

"It's pictures you'll have."

John Lourdes watched from the forward edge of the flatcar and from time to time he glanced back at the women. The girl Teresa alone had not come forward.

Doctor Stallings proceeded back up the slope followed by the photographer. John Lourdes noted how he went about the business at hand with mechanical clarity. He walked with his hands behind his back in a calm and studious manner, never raising his voice. It surprised John Lourdes when he thought how similar in methodology the Doctor was to justice Knox.

The two older campesinos were ordered to their knees and when they refused Doctor Stallings nodded. Jack B quickly stepped behind both men and a single halo of powder exploded around their heads as a bullet was put into each of their brains. They lay side by side as if they intended to crawl away and the hot sand crackled where their blood threaded and then pooled.

The women were aghast and banded together, while some turned away in disgust. But this was not the last, nor the worst.

The boy had rushed to his compadres but was grabbed by the guards. He was then ordered taken to the tree. He fought the rope circling his neck like something crazed, but a force of pure strength proved too much and they had him leashed and lifted before he could even let out a cry.