John Lourdes took out a cigarette. He had no matches, so he put out a hand for the father to drop him one. He eyed Rawbone with a quizzing stare. After he got the cigarette lit John Lourdes asked, "What happened to this ... top-floor felon?"

"He was shot to death in his sleep."

"I'd have bet on poisoning."

"Thank you, Mr. Lourdes. Professional compliments are always appreciated."

"Of course, at the end of this, with all your smile and good cheer, you discovered there wasn't quite the future down here you expected-"

"You might offer me those crates as a stipend for my outstanding service."

"I don't know when you're worse. When you're actually worse, or when you're not."

THEIR RIG LABORED along a shipping road that was deeply rutted from the rains and heat and heavily trafficked with oil trucks and supply wagons and laborers on foot. They were a sight with all those women stacked up on that stepped mountain of crates like some skirted aviary. Men called out from truck cabs or whistled and undressed the ladies with their eyes. As the road ascended it gave way to the Gulf and the world of Tampico and the oil fields spread out before them. Only this was not the vision as presented in the Diaz film John Lourdes had watched in the dark of the funeraria.

This was a hallucinatory contradiction. A fetid kingdom of pure commerce and profane destruction. A land stripped of life now cancered from fire and oil.

"El auge," said Rawbone.

The oil boom. The phrase encompa.s.sed everything but captured nothing.

Tampico had been established along the Panuco River, which flowed into the Gulf. The town was cordoned by a series of lagoons and marshes. There was a vast railroad yard, and the river had become an oil turnpike of tugs and barges, flatbeds and tankers, paddle wheelers; anything that could stay afloat and carry freight was on that waterway.

The rainforests had been cut down and burned off and now grimy wells rose up into the sky. By the Pueblo Viejo Lagoon was a place known as Tankerville, where row after row of wood and concrete drums, an armada of storage bins, baked in the sun. Neighborhoods had been constructed in the marshes, with shacks of cratewood and slat for workers built on stilts as the ground beneath oozed up slime. Swamps were drained for warehouses and pump stations and shipping terminals.

Everywhere they looked there were black pools of oil. Pits had been dug for spills. There were lakes where wells had blown and bled upon the earth for days that now were turning to a gloppy asphalt in the coastal heat. The high reeds along the lagoons were tipped with the black of oil, the trees were marked with it, the roads and roofs spotted with it, wagons, cars and trucks, their tires turned with it. The black rolled in with the tide and tainted the sand with it.

The air was dense and filmy and they could taste the work of the refineries on their tongues and the scent of its rancid perfume bitter to the nostrils.

The father glanced across the cab at the son, who was behind the wheel hunting for the Agua Negra offices. "Mr. Lourdes, the American and Brit companies have a billion dollars in this. They know what packets of money and a sense of purpose can do." He threw out his arm to take in all that they could see. "By their standards ... I am just a common a.s.sa.s.sin."

They drove through the railyards. Hundreds of workers were being unloaded from freight cars and herded into lots like cattle or goats. El Enganche-the Hooking-was what the process was called. Peasants from farms and villages in the hills were recruited at bazaars and carnivals by wily agents known as enganchadors who promised transportation, free room and board and three to four pesos a day if the peasant contracted to work for a period of time. Of course, when they reached Tampico, they would be told by the companies that the contract was not to be honored and that pay amounted to one peso a day. More than they might ever make in some rural p.i.s.shole, but the cost of living in Tampico turned them into hard-working indigents.

The father tapped the dashboard with his knuckles to draw John Lourdes's attention to an array of wall graffiti defiling the Yankee and the Brit. It was not the first run of epithets seen chalked on a wall about the state of mind the people had toward the brutal realities in Tampico.

"The women up top," said the father, "are heading for the same fate as those b.u.mmers on the train."

John Lourdes knew this, though it was the first he'd ever actually contended with that fact. It was not something he should involve himself in, yet he stopped the truck and got out. He then began to explain to the women what their future held.

It was not news, he discovered. A girl not much older than Teresa summed up their response by holding out and opening a small but empty purse.

When John Lourdes started the truck back up the father asked, "Mr. Lourdes, would you say I'm an intelligent man?"

"Sadly ... I would."

"You should have left the truck in the desert. You should have left the women at the train. You should not have done what you just did. You are driving straight toward ruin."

THIRTY.

-HE AGUA NEGRA offices were on the Fiscal Wharf. A dredger was docked beside a pile hammer punching at the river bottom. The wharf was crowded with traffic for the tankers. Jack B was out in front of the rolling doors of a two-story shed having a smoke when he spotted this flock of women riding atop a truck. He was a figure of astonishment when John Lourdes pulled up in front of him.

Rawbone tipped his hat. "Not even a h.e.l.lo?" He stepped out of the cab. "Would you be so kind as to tell the good doctor we've brought the truck."

Jack B disappeared inside the shed without so much as a word.

"There goes a starved mind," said the father.

John Lourdes now stepped out of the truck and the women climbed down from the back. It wasn't long before Doctor Stallings walked into the daylight followed by a handful of officers and guards. As Rawbone expected, Stallings was not felled with astonishment but rather maintained the deadpan mask that was his trademark.

He looked to John Lourdes. "Your note ... it may well have made the difference for us."

Doctor Stallings ordered Jack B to get the women organized. He then asked John Lourdes how they managed the Sierras. He walked around the truck while John Lourdes explained. The father watched Doctor Stallings intently. When finished, as an afterthought, John Lourdes said, "We lost a few crates before we had the cars braked."

The doctor listened silently. He told Jack B to get the women to the field cafeteria. "Except this one and this one." He singled out Alicia and the girl Teresa.

He then ordered both men into the truck and joined them. As John Lourdes slipped behind the wheel, Teresa signaled him as if to say goodbye. Doctor Stallings directed them to drive up along the Panuco. He sat with arms folded and offered no conversation until he began to point out the tank farms that lined the river. The Aquilla ... National Petroleum ... Waters-Price ... Standard Oil ... East Coast Gulf ... The Gulf Coast ... The Huasteca ... and those were only the northern fields.

"Gentlemen," he said, "this has become its own nation."

Amidst an array of boiler stacks and paraffin plants and refineries was a garrison of long, low huts and a corrugated warehouse. A sign posted above the gate read: AGUA NEGRA.

OIL FIELD SECURITY.

The men there were of the same lot as those on the train and they drew up and became attentive when they recognized it was Doctor Stallings in the truck. They pulled up to the warehouse garage. Rawbone and John Lourdes followed Doctor Stallings to his office. It was Spartan: a desk, a half-dozen phones. Both men were asked for their security cards. When Doctor Stallings had them in hand, he tore them up.

"You no longer work for Agua Negra."

He waited for either man's response. Something seemed to pa.s.s between the father and son. An unspoken sense to remain silent. Doctor Stallings took petty cash from a drawer. He slid the stack of bills toward John Lourdes. "You're cut loose. Go to the Southern Hotel. Get a room where the both of you can bunk. Take the motorcycle. If anyone asks, you're not working for us."

John Lourdes took the money and pocketed it. He glanced at the father.

"He's staying," said Doctor Stallings.

When they were alone, Rawbone took out a cigarette and lit it. He removed his derby and set it on a wood filing cabinet. He went and sat in a chair by the window.

"Those oil fields," said Doctor Stallings, "they're not as big as Texas, but they stand to have a lot more influence. The companies here will be thought of as a country in the near future. And they are beginning to learn how to be one. The practicals and priorities."

Rawbone set a leg up on the chair and rested an arm on his knee. "You made a point of referencing Texas."

"Your legal situation."

"As Mr. Stars and Stripes is fond of saying ... this ain't Texas."

"And that is the point."

They heard motorcycle gears shifting and an engine whine. Rawbone could see out the window and past the wire fencing John Lourdes taking to the road through burned and trampled weeds.

"Do you fully trust him?"

Rawbone laughed inwardly. "I fully trust myself."

"You will ultimately have to come to a decision about that. You'll be given the truck. You can hire out. Someone I know will contact people on your behalf. I'll tell them they can reach you at the Southern Hotel. You're an independent contractor now."

"To what end?"

There was not a blank in his thoughts, nor a gap in the response. "An a.s.sa.s.sination," he said.

Rawbone walked out into the f.u.c.king light with the foretaste of death thick in his mouth. He knew, now, with an absolute clarity that Doctor Stallings meant to see him and John Lourdes dead.

TAMPICO, THE OLD town, was built during the time of the colonial viceroys. Arches and wrought-iron balconies, French scrollwork and imported English brick. The town reminded Rawbone of New Orleans, right down to the pure honey of satisfying the most private of pleasures.

The Southern Hotel was a five-story affair with elevators. It was a money house with a mahogany bar and cafe tables where you drank c.o.c.ktails from real Tom Collins gla.s.ses. Businessmen stayed there, politicos, reporters from magazines like Colliers and Sat.u.r.day Evening Post, men from the Klondike gold rush who came to wildcat for oil along the Panuco.

A key had been left for Rawbone at the hotel desk. When he entered the room, he was intensely troubled. The room was empty, but he could hear the shower running. He threw his bindle down on a bed. On the other was John Lourdes's shoulder holster, his carryall, his clothes ... and that notebook.

In a flash of anger and resentment at having been gamed he grabbed the notebook and flung it. He did the same with the holster and carryall, even John Lourdes's clothes.

He realized that John Lourdes was besting him without even being in the room, without even being aware, just by being, just by ...

His silhouette in the lamplight stiffened. He could hear himself warning: Remain indifferent, dammit. Lay it out for him. Doctor Stallings ... all you sense. Mr. Lourdes could write it all down in that sorry notebook.

He gathered up John Lourdes's things and put them back on the bed as they were. Walk away from this and everything that went with it, that was one possibility. Or find a way, a swift, sure way, to sacrifice John Lourdes and so save himself.

As he threw the pants on the bed, the wallet fell from the back pocket to the floor. He cursed as he bent to retrieve it. Spotting this sliver of gold visible from between the leather flaps, he spread the wallet open to be contemptibly sure it was what he thought it was. What lay on the cracked and dry leather surface-an insignificant trinket of a crucifix with one broken cross beam.

How long had it been since anything had savaged his being or left him bare? But there it was.

Was it possible- He slipped the cross back and closed the leather flaps and put the wallet back in the pant pockets. He stood in the midst of upheaval knowing ... he had been undone by his own hand.

IN THE ROOM, alone, John Lourdes dressed in clean clothes. He took his wallet from the other trousers. He made sure his mother's cross was there before tucking it into his back pocket. He slipped on his shoulder holster. He sat at a desk and prepared a wire to justice Knox, then a letter to Wadsworth Burr.

Night had come and he motorcycled back out to the Agua Negra field offices to find out what had happened to Rawbone, but no one knew. While he was there John Lourdes did learn the women had been taken to a cafeteria for the guards down the road. That was to be their station. There he was told that Teresa and Sister Alicia had been brought to the mayor's house to work as part of the kitchen crew. He motorcycled to that address, which was by the Laguna del Carpintero.

The turreted house stood three stories in the moonlight. It was an ill-conceived spectacle of iron grillwork and marquees and Moorish porticos. In the huge lot behind it were two oil derricks, and where the ground declined toward the laguna was a foul black soup. There were piles of rotted lumber and a wrecked barge at the edge of the sh.o.r.e and supply shacks and chalans and a rusting truck with a fence around it for horses and mules and a battery of goats.

The house burned with light when John Lourdes rode past. In the great room with sconces and braided scrollwork were a dozen men. They were deep in conversation while drinking. One of the men was Doctor Stallings, another Anthony Hecht. John Lourdes parked the motorcycle against a tree and shadowed the darkness to get a better view.

The mayor, who was of Mexican descent, seemed to have much of the conversation directed at him, though there was one other man who appeared to be of central importance. He wore a near-white suit and favored a mustache much like John Lourdes. He was older and had a cultured face and often he would clip his thumbs inside his suspenders when he spoke.

Where the kitchen light cast itself upon the darkness John Lourdes saw a crew of women at their work stations. Teresa was in a corner scrubbing pots; Alicia was at the stove. He called to the old woman through the screen door. She put out her arms in a gesture of surprise at seeing him, then looked back at the closed door to the hall. They talked for a few minutes before she went and tugged at Teresa's hair.

Teresa came forward in a leather ap.r.o.n tied around her neck that hung almost to the ground; her arms were dripping wet. She was embarra.s.sed yet elated at seeing John Lourdes. He held out a piece of paper torn from his notebook.

He had written: / wan4eJ 4o make sure you were a/r~~4. /'m s4ay'/ji a4 4e 5ov4ern /-/o4e/, iS you Sind yourse/S wi4 4rouble.

He wanted her to have it, but she made a gesture with her hand for the pencil. She slipped open the screen door. She wrote on the same page: /4's jood 4o see you. This she underlined.

From back in the house a man was calling out and the door to the hall swung open. John Lourdes forced the page they had written on into her hands before retreating to the darkness. In those few moments with Teresa he had picked up some of the conversation coming from that other room. Most of it seemed to deal with the mayor and where he stood politically now that the insurrection had been authorized.

Along the side of the house John Lourdes spotted a root cellar. It was practically beneath the rooms where the men were. He went and knelt by the canted entranceway. He looked about. There were but two men down by the derricks. He could see the faint glow of their cigarettes. He worked the latch and lifted the weathered door. He bent and felt his way down a set of wobbly steps. He closed the night off and hunched there in the dark. The cellar was foul with decay and fungaled shorings, the floor was flooded with a few inches of tainted water and every cautious step he took slopped behind him.

On the floorboards overhead the men's boots tapped out their pacings or creaked when chairs were moved. But that black and stinking hole was near about as good as a stethoscope for picking up their conversation.

THIRTY-ONE.

-HEN HE LEFT the hotel room Rawbone walked the streets with his bindle slung over one shoulder like some aimless tramp. He tried to discredit every incident, every day, every hour and minute from El Paso to that very moment as if to deny the undeniable.

"There are times, Mr. Lourdes, when you say something and it's like you've known me all my life."

"Or maybe all my life."

Could it be John Lourdes doesn't know I am his father? He tried to convince himself of that possibility. That the young man in the Southern who was his son, his blood, might somehow have eradicated a father from memory. It was ridiculous and demanded raw stupidity to be even remotely believed. And the fact he was reaching that far enraged him, for it signaled weakness and fear and shame and how truly he'd been plowed under by the truth.

He stopped and looked in a shop window. His image there tinctured by gas lamps. He removed the derby and cradled back his hair. He was searching for his son, but his son was in that hotel room, he was a member of the Bureau of Investigation, he was the man who had taken him down, who he had traveled with for days, who had outplotted him, who he'd brought to the women wracked with pain, who controlled his fate. And who, only a faint hour ago, he had considered murdering. John Lourdes was also the man who had never once acknowledged the fact they were father and son. Suddenly the hea.r.s.e came back to him, when they had spoken to each other through its gla.s.s cas.e.m.e.nt. He stepped away from the window, unable to bear the sight of himself.

It was a weekend night. The streets were alive and rowdy with horse-drawn trolleys and carriages flush with tourists. There were couples and laughter and people on balconies playing cards or listening to Victrolas. Vendors sold ice cream and bottled mineral water and candied treats. And Rawbone walked amongst all this alone and in the possession of a shattering immensity.

John Lourdes had even changed his name. Probably, Rawbone thought, for the same reason I had changed my own-shame. At least we had that in common. The very idea of it caused bitter laughter that verged on tears.

He walked the beach. He watched the tide roll in and foam over the oily sand, he watched it fall away. He stood in the amber mist of the casinos along the boardwalk.

His wife had hung that cross from a nail beneath a postcard of Lourdes with a child standing before a statue of the Virgin Mary. Rawbone had told her, "I hope she does a lot better for you than she did for her own kid."

She'd been praying for her husband's conversion to goodness. Deriding such an act, he had fired at the crucifix, shattering part of one cross beam.

She'd picked it up from the floor and stood before him in that smoky hovel they called home. She pointed to each cross beam. The one that survived, the one that was shattered. "One for each thief crucified with Christ," she said. "Which do you want to be? These are the only choices for us all."

In a sparkflash he understood how John Lourdes had come by his name. He turned from the Gulf. How quickly it all had gone. From the casino an orchestra played. Through tall French doors he could see elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen dance to the rich and soothing strings of a waltz.

He stood on the boardwalk in unrealized bereavement, then, disregarding the obvious, he opened a set of the French doors and entered the ballroom. He took off his derby and set it and his bindle on an empty table.

People soon took notice of this unshaven and road-filthy vagabond with an automatic in his belt. He looked about the room until his eyes fell upon a small group of women standing alone and listening to the music. They saw him approaching and whispered amongst themselves. There was one lady amongst them near about his own age with raven hair and Mediterranean skin.

"Pardon me," he said.

She turned and faced this strange man uncertainly.