They came up out of a ravine. The ground before them was clouded with dust. They dashed past a howling band of outriders making for the train. They were in the midst of gunfire now, charging toward a shaly ridge with their weapons drawn. A pack of rurales swept off after them in pursuit. One of their mounts was shot from under him and the man was flung to the earth and his own compadres trampled over him with stunning disregard.

Rawbone had not come unprepared and he took from his shirt a grenade and flung it back at their pursuers. A rain of metal shards ended the pursuit. Men and mounts were torn asunder with ruthless efficiency. Belts of flesh and leather marked the earth where they once had been.

The great Mastodon thundered toward the smoking gauntlet that littered the tracks. Doctor Stallings stood in the locomotive with the engineer while Jack B was atop the tender hunched down as he fired and fielded orders. There were men in the cars trying to hold back the blood from their seeping wounds. There were men dead. There were riderless mounts with their wild manes charging alongside burning railcars. The dust and smoke from this nightmare frieze rose up out of the earth for miles.

The engineer looked to Doctor Stallings. "She won't get through," he said.

"Throttle it," came the order.

"We'll wreck."

"Throttle it."

"We'll wreck."

"Then we'll wreck."

The engineer did as he was ordered. They could feel the pure force of the speed as the huge wheels began to reverb against the rails. The hammering of the pistons driving steam through the valves grew to near deafening.

A horseman with a bow and arrow rode upon the locomotive's shadow. Tethered to the shaft was a lit stick of dynamite. Doctor Stallings turned and fired. The horseman was taken from the saddle just as the arrow left the bowstring. It rattled between the engine and the tender and exploded just beyond. The first car shook, windows shattered, men were thrown to the floor.

The distance between the train and those scorched and battered remains that formed a breastwork along the rails closed with fiendish speed. Doctor Stallings heard the engineer asking the Almighty to remember him in heaven seconds before h.e.l.l arrived on impact.

Across that barren pan, above the rifle fire and the shouting and cries of the wounded, were the crushing grate and shrill of steel on steel unlike anything the mind could conjure sending a shock wave down the length of the couplings such that the women in the last car were flung over and atop each other.

Son and father reached the mouth of the canyon and were leading their mounts on foot up a screed hill face that looked down on the tracks. Like some foundried Atlas the Mastodon shouldered the brunt of the wreckage. The huge steamer rocked and shunted and slowed and the wheels locked and lost traction and were skidding uselessly. But when the wheels caught and the valves opened, driving the rods forward, the savaged hull of that coal car got screeched from the tracksthe train was through.

The engineer was pale and shaken. He looked to Doctor Stallings and nodded and Doctor Stallings leaned past him and pulled the train whistle. Across the plain a call of defiance.

The train was minutes from the ledge where John Lourdes leaned over and looked down at the tracks.

"We'll jump from here," he said.

Rawbone was behind him and glanced at the rails and saw if things went bad it was a chasm and the rocks and an inauspicious end.

"Mr. Lourdes," he said, "China looks closer."

The train pa.s.sed through a cut in the rock. Jack B stood on the tender firing down at the last cadre of riders whose mounts had not failed them or fallen back in exhaustion. The train was close enough now John Lourdes could make out the flag inked into the muscles of that shooting arm.

The ground dropped and rose with outcroppings of rock, and the riders drove their mounts over this tortured masonry to the point of death. As the train pulled away one rurale on a raw and maneless beast got off an arrow before the forelegs buckled and the withers fell.

The arrow lifted and turned as John Lourdes leapt to a pa.s.senger car roof. It descended, picking up speed in a long whoosh as Rawbone followed suit, cursing the world all the way back to creation but making sure the one thing he didn't lose was his derby. The arrow embedded in the deckboards of a flatcar. The fuse to the dynamite lashed to the shaft hissed and sparkled as both men jumped the couplings from car to car where guards lay dead as the train hiked it up through that causeway along the rimrock.

They stood beside the truck exhausted. Dust streaked where it had caked to the sweat running down their faces and for a few moments they were neither son and father nor federal agent and common a.s.sa.s.sin, but two men swept up in the machinery of wholesale slaughter who had momentarily escaped with their lives.

The father put the barrel of his rifle to the barrel of the son's as if to acknowledge their surviving. Just then the spark of the fuse along the shaft of the arrow bottlenecked with all that packed graphite and blew the deck of the flatbed in front of them to pieces.

TWENTY-EIGHT.

-HE PURE FORCE of the concussion lifted John Lourdes onto the truck hood. Rawbone was tumbled down the length of the flatcar only to come up on his knees gritting his teeth in pain. A spike of bracing protruded from the back of his shoulder blade.

He knelt on the deck trying to reach around and pull it out, but he couldn't get a hold and it was left to John Lourdes, clearing his head and staggering over, to jimmy the stake loose while the father growled and cursed the vile thing out.

Standing, he said to the son, "Mr. Lourdes, for a moment I thought it was you putting a shiv to me."

"Yeah, seeing you on your knees . . . I thought you took up religion."

The flatcar ahead of them, from its screw block to end beam, was pure wreckage. Part of the deck smoldered, part burned. Guards rushed from the cars ahead to blanket the flames. John Lourdes pulled a tarp from the truck to attack the fire and the father, with blood seeping down the back of his shirt, moved to help him when came a terrible jolt that froze both men. What followed was the deck beneath them as it hitched and sidled.

The father was confused, but John Lourdes, with absolute and unequivocal knowledge, understood what this meant. He dropped the tarp, rushed to the edge of the flatcar and, kneeling, looked over the buffer. The coupler of the flatcar ahead had been torn from its screw block. It hung there, attached to the coupler of their flatcar like the dead claw of some iron monster.

John Lourdes stood.

"Mr. Lourdes?"

"We've been cut loose."

The train cars were moving forward through a sweeping pa.s.sway toward the ridgeline, but it took only a few moments for their section to slow and the one ahead to pull away. The guards trying to tamp down the flames stopped and just stared dumbly.

John Lourdes knelt again and leaned out over the end beam, craning his neck to check the undercarriage.

The father, in pain and bleeding, called to him and John Lourdes steadied back up, his face strained. He stared down into that decline of hills from whence the train had come, trying to calculate how far-at least a mile he thought-before that first turn up from the desert floor where the track was cut through the rock face.

"Mr. Lourdes?"

"The air brakes should hold ... if they haven't been damaged. But if they have-"

The women were on the landing and called out trying to understand. The father came up slowly, favoring his wound, so the son lent him a hoist. The train reached the sun line and soon there was only the faint trailing of its engine smoke.

"They'll come back."

John Lourdes was waiting, feeling, listening-would the brakes hold? "You know what it takes to stop a train on the downgrade? It's like keeping back an avalanche. And reversing it back uphill ..."

"They'll not leave the munitions."

"Neither will we. Get the women up here and off this train, but ahead of it."

John Lourdes crossed to the pa.s.senger car landing and pushed past the women and their questions and ran on through the car as the father cursed out orders for them to get over and be quick. Rawbone helped them with a hand or caught them when they jumped and he herded them to the front of the flatbed while he d.a.m.ned their womanly souls.

John Lourdes surveyed the bracings under the back landing and knew there were extra chains on the flatcar for the maneuver he had in mind. When he turned, he saw Teresa standing off alone watching him. But the wary eyes and the collected silence were now clouded with fear and confusion. He went to her and as he put out a hand, his boots had the first hint the cars were slipping backward. The air brakes were failing.

The last of the women jumped from the train and crowded up on the tracks. John Lourdes brought Teresa and, with Rawbone, lifted her down from the flatcar. The train was inching backward and stopping the car became imperative before it picked up speed. By the side railings were piles of heavy chain. John Lourdes dragged one loose and hoisted it up on his shoulder, then ordered Rawbone to bring another as the brakes were giving way.

John Lourdes was at the rear of the pa.s.senger car kicking off the door when Rawbone dumped a coil of chain at his feet.

"What are you trying?"

John Lourdes was gasping and his shirt soaked through. As he started to explain, the father went down on one knee and favored his scored shoulder.

The son intended to swing one chain through the door and out a landing window and noose it. He'd do the same on the other side of the door with the other landing window. Then they'd get enough chain and hook it to both nooses and drop it over the landing platform and onto the tracks and up under the wheels to form a kind of wedge braced to the car.

The father looked about and questioned, "Will it work?"

"I saw it done once, but not on an incline like-"

Framed in the far pa.s.senger door was Teresa. Most of a heavy chain was slung up on her shoulder and the rest dragged like a metal umbilicus. She was bent and straining torturously with each step.

"What in the name of madness," said the father.

She'd fashioned a reason to act, watching them haul the chains, and she'd climbed back up onto the flatcar with the women grabbing at legs and skirt to restrain her. She couldn't negotiate the door dragging all that iron and when the men reached her Rawbone took all that weight upon himself.

John Lourdes, with his palms facing down, patted at the air as his way of asking Teresa to hold where she was. Rawbone carried that iron monstrosity to the rear of the car. John Lourdes hooked each end of the chain to one of the nooses. Then he had the father help him loop it over the back platform and it landed on the tracks with an immense clang.

"When I give the order to cinch it, get inside fast and keep going. This platform may come off and part of the wall with it."

Each link was near as big as their fists and they scarred and danged along the rails as John Lourdes took a deep breath. The father muscled down like a prizefighter and then John Lourdes yelled out, "Cinch it."

They roped in the chain. It tautened and caught up against the wheels. The two men scrambled over each other getting into the car and the sound coming off those locked wheels was like a foundry saw shearing pure steel. There were fireworks of sparks, and the studs in the platform and up through the rear wall began to spider with cracks and the platform ripped apart like a flimsy toy. The back wall was there one moment, and the next, they were staring out a frame of decimated wood exposing drab brown hills and dust-strewn daylight. The screeching went on, it seemed, interminably. Then, in one staggering instant the cars stopped.

SECTIONS OF THE chain were ground to dust, but the remainder was shivved up under and around the wheels and so the cars were held.

The Mastodon had not returned and they were left now to their own resources in that silent chasm, with Tampico a century of miles through those fluted and waterless hills.

"Now," said John Lourdes to the father, "you see why I wouldn't leave the truck."

It was in its own way a purely orthodox application of practical strategy. The father still remarked with a certain insight, "That's not why you wouldn't leave the truck."

John Lourdes got out the fire ax and a set of crowbars and formed two work gangs of women. The father took the first bunch and they went about chopping the roof beams loose from the pa.s.senger car. The son worked the others dismantling the flatbed siderails and truss bars. And d.a.m.n if that common a.s.sa.s.sin didn't start teaching those women to sing in English "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" as they sweated it in that filthy railcar.

John Lourdes meant to build a rampway jerry-rigged from an a.s.semblage of crisscrossed timbers and truss bound together by rope and cable and parts of chain and any clothing the women weren't wearing right then and there.

John Lourdes walked up and down this raft with uncertainty as the father and the women watched.

"It's no masterpiece," said the son.

"Mr. Lourdes, good manners requires me to allow you first crack at driving the truck."

"You're a f.u.c.kin' saint," muttered the son under his breath.

John Lourdes edged the truck over the lip of the flatcar and leaned from the cab to see if the weight could be sustained. The father acted as traffic cop angling his hands to get those wheels a little this way or that. When the engine was committed all the way down the ramp it started to sag like the spine of some cartoon swayback. The women chimed in trying to avert what they saw as a disaster, yelling for John Lourdes to turn the wheels in direct contradiction to the father who was now cursing their h.e.l.lish mouths. Some of them took to pleading he go back, while others urged he just come on. It was all devolving into useless jabber so John Lourdes swallowed hard to clear his throat and with one quick to-h.e.l.l-with-it decision, ga.s.sed the pedal.

The truck lurched, and as the front end touched ground the ramp gave and the rear tires slammed upon the ties. The truck heaved to one side under the strain of those lashed crates of ammunition and all watched in stunned silence as the unwieldy hump piled up in the truckbed settled back in place. Then John Lourdes just footed the gas pedal slightly and the truck started forward to a collective sigh of relief.

TWENTY-NINE.

-Y DUSK THEY drove the trackline, one wheel straddling the ties and the other on a meager strip of roadbed. The women took turns perched up on crates, stacked in the truckbed or walking ahead of it. One man drove while the other rested. It was slow and dangerous and when they reached the peak at nightfall below them was the immense void of the desert floor.

The women proceeding ahead of the truck now took to carrying lanterns or candles to guide the way. The lights fireflied in that steep and treacherous canyon, where their shadows walked in slow and somber order like some druidic procession moving through the vast church of the night.

When it was Rawbone's time to turn the wheel over to John Lourdes, he took up with the others in the truckbed, sitting on boxes of hand grenades and machine-gun belts. And while Sister Alicia st.i.tched the wound in his back with sewing thread, he led a chorus of singing women in their slanted English: Later that night John Lourdes wrote in his notebook: You helped 4,e old woman and risked yourself . . . you carried 4e C1,airs . . . you're s44ing w,4 me now . . . He ended what he wrote with a question mark he circled.

He and Teresa sat in the truck together, wedged up amongst the crates as they crossed all that black and windy emptiness.

She read his questions and then wrote: / I,e/ped Sis-ler Alicia because sl,e needed l,e/p and 4 was r~W . . . l carried chains because cl,a'/is were necessary . . . l am s44ing will, you now because forgiveness is needed.

He wrote: / am 4La4kcul you can corjtve me.

She replied: Ti,is is no4 jus4 abov4 you.

She had not fully realized how much her father was of those men on the slope executing a child. And that her father was of the same blood and history as the dead turned her stomach.

She added to what she wrote: / am small a.ain54 4s world . . . bu4 4e Ci,ris4 inside my l,ear-l is 9rea4er ye-l. Wi4,ou4 forgiveness a// of life is forsaken. / will no4 become forsaken.

John Lourdes could hear his own father's voice from behind the steering wheel. In the cab with him were Sister Alicia and another woman. He had them rehearsing lyrics to "Yankee Doodle Dandy."

He stared into his notebook. He absorbed what Teresa had written. He could feel her beside him. He knew without asking, the forgiveness extended to her own father. It was tangible as rain upon an upturned face. I am small against this world ... These words, he knew, were true about himself, in that place, at that moment, though forgiveness was not an option.

THEY DROVE STRAIGHT into the dawn. Limestone chasms gave way to islands of scrub pine. The earth was sandy and the truck struggled mile after mile. The stones of the desert began to warm with the sun. To the north a pale outline on the horizon, a meager oasis of huts.

Near Tamuin they pa.s.sed an abandoned cathedral upon the desert floor. Magnificent it was, from the era of the Conquistadors. Red were its stone walls and grand dome against a hot and cloudless sky. The women blessed themselves as they drove past, for with G.o.d there was no forgotten place.

They dined by a stream near a fallen hacienda. Amongst the trees a rusting iron fence enclosed a few headstones. Names the wind and sun had stolen. Rawbone watched John Lourdes and the girl Teresa walk along the shallows. The water was cool and shiny in the quieting light and the breeze gave the brush that soft and brittle song.

There was something about the long blue light of dusk that for Rawbone always felt of eventuality and of being forlorn. He looked at the fallen hacienda, then the small family of graves set amongst the trees. He put his cigarette out in the sand and stood as John Lourdes and the girl walked past. He tipped his hat to her gracefully.

"Mr. Lourdes," he said, "you better be careful." He smiled. "This is how people end up with their own little Cains and Abels."

THEY DROVE TOWARD the moonlight, and it was a woman atop the highest crates who first sighted Tampico and called to the others. Piercing the misty Gulf air a vast spangle of lights. A mile farther they came upon railroad tracks. Out of the smoky dark a lone freight approached with a great rattling of cars and the fierce call of its whistle. Tankers destined for the oil fields.

The day arrived damp and muggy. They were just a dozen miles from Tampico and had to stop to gas the truck with the last of the reservoir they carried in drums. The women were exhausted and filthy. As they stoked up a fire to make coffee and greased dough with sugar, the father asked the son to walk off a ways so they could talk privately.

"Mr. Lourdes, I buddied once with a top-floor felon. Part Sioux. It was right here in Tampico, after I came back from that joke of a war in Manila. He gave me advice once ... 'Raw ...' he called me, 'Raw ...' he said, 'when things go bad, every road out of town is the black road."'

He waited to see how John Lourdes would react. Measured silence was the answer.

"We got all that ammunition, Mr. Lourdes. I say we bury a wallet's worth, tell Stallings we lost it in transit. We'd have it to sell if we needed money. You'd have it to sell if you needed to buy or bribe information. Or if ... we find ourselves on the black road."