Semana Santa rolled around, and nobody worked that week, so Frank and Ewball had a chance to wander the town in search of trouble they hadn’t tried yet. Because the streets were narrow as alleyways and ran between high walls, most of the town was in some kind of shadow. Looking for sunlight, they headed uphill and soon, rounding a corner, Frank was gripped by the strangest feeling of having been there before. “I dreamed this,” he said.
Ewball narrowed his eyes some. “What’s up there?”
“Somethin to do with Deuce.”
“He’s here?”
“Hell, just a dream, Ewb. Come on.”
They climbed up the red-brown mountainside, into sunlight and purple artemisia, where wild dogs wandered the roofless stones, till they were high enough to see, beneath the harsh radiance of the Good Friday sky, where cirrus clouds were blown to long, fine parallel streaks, the city below, spread east to west, stunned as if by mysterious rays to a silence even Frank and Ewball must honor—the passion of Christ, the windless hush . . . even the stamping mills were silent, even Silver itself taking its day of rest, as if to recognize the price Judas Iscariot received. Sunlight in the trees.
Just as it seemed some revelation would emerge from the tensely luminous sky, they were taken into custody by men in frayed, soiled, not even all that official-looking uniforms, each packing the same-model Mauser—unwilling to meet their eyes, as if not certain how protected they were by the opacities of their own.
“What—” Ewball started to ask, but the rurales were making lip-buttoning gestures, and Frank remembered it was a Catholic practice to stay dummied up on Good Friday between noon and three, these being the hours Christ had hung on the cross. In devout silence they took away Frank’s revolver and Ewball’s German self-loader, and conducted them amid impenetrable sanctity to the juzgado, just off Calle Juárez, where they were thrown together into a cell deep below ground level, hewn out of the primordial rock. Water dripped and rats took their time crossing open areas.
“Mordida problems,” supposed Ewball.
“Don’t figure your Company boys’ll come get us out sooner or later?”
“Long odds. Being gringo hereabouts is not always the selling point you take it to be.”
“Well but I’m th’ one’s telling you that all the time.”
“Oh. And I’m the one that’s just whistling cheerfully down the trail here, figuring nothing will ever happen.”
“Least I know where the safety is on that Broomhandle, Ewb.”
“‘Was,’ I think you mean. Those pistoles are long gone, in my opinion.”
“Maybe these boys’ll get confused with yours, too, just give up on it and let you have it back.”
Sometime in the middle of the night, they were awakened and bustled down a series of corridors and eventually up some stairs to a street neither of them had noticed before. “Not too happy with this,” Ewball muttered, walking funny because of a tremor in his knees.
Frank took his unhandcuffed hands out of his pockets and flashed him a thumbs-up. “No esposas, I think we’re O.K.”
They turned on to the widest street in town, which both northamericans knew led straight to the Panteón, or city cemetery. “You would call this O.K., huh,” Ewball looking miserable.
“Hey, we could make a bet on it.”
“Sure, great for you, you wouldn’t have to pay off.”
“Got no money anyway. Why I suggested it.”
At the foot of the Cerro del Trozado, almost able to make out the cemetery walls at the top looming in the partial moonlight, they entered an opening in the hillside, nearly invisible behind a screen of cactus. “¿Dónde estamos?” Frank saw no harm in asking.
“El Palacio de Cristal.”
“I’ve heard of this place,” Ewball said. “Whatever the charge against us is, it’s political.”
“Sure got the wrong cowboy here,” said Frank, “I don’t even vote.”
“La política,” nodded one of the rurales, smiling.
“Felicitaciones,” his companion added.
The cell was a little roomier than the one in the juzgado, with a couple of corn-husk mattresses and a slop-bucket and a huge, unflattering cartoon of Don Porfirio Díaz charcoaled across the wall. “Seein ‘s they wouldn’t shoot us till sunup,” Frank said, “guess I’ll go snuggle in with the chinches here for a while.”
“How logical is that?” Ewball objected. “If we’re going to be sleeping for eternity. I mean . . .” But Frank was already snoring.
Ewball was still awake an hour later when they were joined by another northamerican, who introduced himself as Dwayne Provecho, drunk but not very sleepy, who commenced a monologue, inviting Ewball’s attention more than once to his knowledge of secret tunnels, there since the ancient silver-mining beneath Guanajuato, that were sure to lead them out of this place. “End of the world is coming soon, you see. This last time across, riding out of Tucson, you could hear it in the air, all the way to Nogales and over the frontera, it never quit. Kind of roar, beasts overhead, bigger than anything you ever ran into, wings moving against the moon like clouds, suddenly it all goes dark and you’re not sure you want it to pass too quick, for when the light comes back, who knows what you’ll see up yonder?”
“Real obliged,” Frank opening one eye to assure him, “but maybe if we could all just get some sleep—”
“Oh—no no no, not a minute to waste, for it’s the Lord on his return journey, you must see that, he started to go away, and then he slowed down, like he’d had a thought, and stopped, and turned, and now he’s coming back for us, can’t you see that light, can’t you feel that heat radiating from him the closer he gets,” and so forth.
Despite the presence of a larger-than-expected number of religious bores, as time passed, this Mexican hoosegow would turn out to be not nearly the hellhole of bordertown legend but a flexible and now and then even friendly arrangement, due in great measure to the money that Ewball’s pockets were all at once mysteriously full of. “Where’s this coming from? Ewb, it’s starting to make me nervous, now. . . .”
“No say prayo-coopy, compadre!”
“Yeahp o’ course, but somebody keeps bringin it over here all the time, somebody you know.”
“Regular as payday and safe as the Morgan Bank.”
Ewball was trying to strike the carefree note, but Frank felt less chirpy. “Sure. And when’ll they be wanting it back?”
“Someday, maybe, after we get out of here, but who’s in any hurry for that?”
Tell the truth, neither one of them. This place was just a dream, so peaceful, compared to what they’d been brought here down out of, peaceful as the city above looked from great distances, but never, up close, managed to sound—no drunken miners or unannounced blasting, the beating of the stamp mills all night coming through the rock here muted, in polyrhythms as persuasive to sleep as the constant flow of sea to a crewman bunking below the waterline—at the edges of sleep’s blessed vegetable patch. . . . Down here workaday anxieties were brushed away, while opportunities for recreation went ever unfolding, in a parade of subterranean attractions—a cantina complete with music and fandango girls, a small nickelodeon theater, or actually centavodeón, roulette and faro, grifa peddlers and opium joints staffed by elements of the Chinese community topside, suites of guest rooms luxurious as any in town, with the underground equivalent of a balcony from which one could view, it seemed for miles, the smoke-darkened walls and iron-riveted watchtowers and the brown corridors, often roofless, of this increasingly cozy captivity, with few of your usual knifers and drunks and mining-town riffraff—no, given the national politics at the moment unfolding, the other detainees here seemed more like, what would you call them, honest working stiffs with a dangerous light in their eyes. Outspoken professors, rogue científicos as well. Nor did certain hoosegow dynamics, such as those to do with one’s rectal integrity, even seem to apply here, which did simplify the day for the two northamericans.
Another
surprise came when the turnkey on the night shift proved to be a pleasant-looking young woman in an untypically squared-away uniform, named Amparo, or, as she preferred, Sergeant, Vásquez. A closely connected relation of somebody higher up, Frank imagined. She was seldom observed smiling, exactly, but then neither was she ever 100 percent jailhouse business. “Look out, now,” muttered Frank, not entirely to himself.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Ewball. “I think she likes us.”
“Likes all ‘em hidalgos you’re throwing around, ‘s more likely.”
“Damn. You’re really consistent.”
“Thanks. Or do I mean, ‘How’s that?’”
“Women. You ever run into one that no money changed hands?”
“Give me a month or two, I could probably come up with somethin’ ran under a dollar somehow.”
What the Sergeant made clear right away was that they could do anything they had the payback for, as long as they remembered to ask her about it first. Short of walk out, of course, though she daily brought down repeated promises of a speedy resolution to their case.
“Well, would you happen to know what it is we’re in here for, ‘cause nobody’s exactly tellin us?”
“You look just a corker today by the way, your hair up in that silver concern and all.”
“Ay, lisonjeros. They say it was something one of you did a long time ago, back on the Other Side.”
“But then why run both of us in?”
“Yehp and which one of us is it?”
She only gazed back at them one at a time, boldly and not at all ill-disposed, the way women will tend to do in the Capital sometimes.
“Must be me they want,” Frank guessed. “Can’t be you, Ewball, you’re too young to have any history with the law.”
“Well I have been party to some bribery activities. . . .”
“You wouldn’t be in here for that.”
“Shouldn’t you be looking more worried, then?”
Frank awoke very early in the morning from a dream of voyaging by air, high in the air, in a conveyance whose actual working principles were mysterious to him, to find the molten-eyed Sergeant Vásquez at the door, with a breakfast tray of chilled papayas and limes, already cut up to avoid any chance of knife-related mischief, bolillos freshly baked, sliced, and spread with beans and Chihuahua cheese and put in some oven till the cheese melted, a kitchen salsa featuring the energetic local chili known as El Chinganáriz, a pitcherful of mixed orange, mango, and strawberry juice, and Vera Cruz coffee with heated milk and chunks of unrefined sugar to go in it.
“You boys sure eat good,” commented Dwayne Provecho, choosing that moment to pop his head in the door and exhibit a string of drool running off his chin and down his shirt.
“Sure Dwayne, you want to dig right in there.” Frank noticed the Sarge giving him the eyeball heliograph from out in the corridor. “Be back. . . .”
“Maybe you don’t want to get too friendly,” she advised. “That one goes in the shadow of the paredón.”
“Why, what’d he do?”
She let it wait for a minute. “Running errands north of the border. Working for some . . . dangerous people. You know of”—lowering her voice and fixing him with a gaze beneath which self-delusion became impossible—“P.L.M.?”
Uh-oh. “Let’s see, that’s those Flores Magón brothers, ¿verdad? . . . and that Camilo Arriaga too, local fellow if I’m not mistaken . . .?”
“Camilo? he’s a potosino. And el señor Provecho’s employers—they might consider the Flores Magón a bit too . . . you say, delicate?”
“Well but look at him in there. Porkin away—ain’t that pretty cheerful for a man’s about to be lined up against the wall?”
“There are two schools of thought. Some would like to release him, follow him, keep a record, see what they can learn. Others only want to remove a troublesome element, the sooner the better.”
“Well but there’s people in here tons more of a threat than old Dwayne, muñeca, some in for fifty years so far, why’s time all of a sudden so important? Something big in the works, maybe?”
“Your eyes,” as she was in the habit of whispering when they were alone, “I never see eyes like this.”
Oh well. “Sergeant now you tellin me you never had time to gaze in a gringo’s eyes before?”
She kept silent, doing that thing with her own unreadable black-irised eyes that reliably set him to wondering. She had warned him today, that was the limit of her commission—and when finally Dwayne did get around to blurting all, Frank wasn’t too surprised.
Dwayne smelled like tequila-and-beer caldereros y sus macheteros in unknown amounts, though Frank wasn’t sure how much had actually got inside of him—there was too much clarity around his eyes, which had grown incandescent. “Here on a mission,” was how he described it, “specifically to offer you some contract employment, it being widely believed, down here as back the other side, that you, sorry if I’m bein too direct, ‘re none other than that Kieselguhr Kid of Wild West legend.”
“Heck of an assumption, Dwayne, seems like that you’d somehow know better, man been up and down the territory and so forth.”
“You’re . . . just a mine engineer and that’s all.”
“Yehp but there’s plenty know their way around the dangerous substances ‘t’s on your mind who’d be happy for the action, too, so when you get out of here, what you need to do’s you pick out any mine in the Veta Madre, head for the first cantina downtrail of it, and you’ll be up to your ears in qualified demolition folks before you figure out who’s buying the next round.”
“With half of ‘m, brother, depending for their jobs on this ol’ Porfiriato here keepin on forever, and all’s I’ve got to do is guess wrong just once about that.”
“Maybe you just did.”
“Then I’m at your mercy, ain’t I?”
“I wonder if you’d be this jocular with the real Kieselguhr Kid . . . wouldn’t you be showin more respect, hell I don’t know, some fear, even?”
“Kid, if I may so address you, I’m afraid all the time.”
“What I meant was, there must be some room there in your mind for the chance you got the wrong fella?”
“Federales’ve got photos, I’ve seen ‘m.”
“Nobody ever looks like their ‘mug,’ you ought to know that by now.”
“Also talked to Brother Disco up in Telluride. He predicted you’d be down here, and whose company you’d be in, too.”
“Ellmore thinks I’m the Kid?”
“Ellmore says it’s the only reason Bob Meldrum didn’t just drill you the first time he laid eyes on you.”
“I frightened Hair-Trigger Bob?”
“More like professional courtesy,” opined Dwayne Provecho with a certain practiced avuncularity. “And just to show you all’s on the up and up, tonight we break out of here.”
“Just when I was gettin to like it. Why don’t you go on ahead by yourself.”
“Because everybody here thinks you’re the Kieselguhr Kid and they’re expectin a breakout.”
“But I’m not.”
“But someday some local bad-ass who thinks you are will be unable to resist plungin his cuchillo into your heart, just for the glory it’ll bring him.”
“Tactfully put,” said Ewball, joining the conversation, “though it really is time we were on the trail, Frank.”
“You too? Thought your people ‘s gonna buy our way out.”
“So did I for a while.”
“Uh-oh.”
CARRYING DARK-LANTERNS, they entered a smooth-walled, vaulted corridor. Shadows bobbed, white shapes emerged ahead. “Oh boy,” Ewball said.
“Ain’t fixin’ to be sick, are you?” asked thoughtful Dwayne. “Fellas, meet the momias.”
There were about thirty of them, hanging on pegs, in two long rows it was going to be necessary to pass between. The bodies were concealed by sheets—only the heads were left uncovered, angled downward, faces in diffe
rent states of mummification, some in the lanternlight without expression, others twisted in terrible agony. They all seemed to be waiting for something, with a supernatural patience, their feet a few inches above the floor, thin and distracted, keeping dignity and distance, serenely believing themselves in, but not inescapably of, Mexico.
“The Panteón is short on space,” Dwayne was eager to explain, “so these boys get five years curing in the ground, then if the families don’t pay the what they call grave tax, they get dug up again and hung there till somebody antes up.”
“I thought it was something religious,” Ewball said.
“You could call it that, it all gets turned to pesos and centavos, water to wine you might say, during the day they charge visitors to see it, we’re gettin the three A.M. rate here, though from the looks on these faces we must’ve . . . interrupted somethin.”
“All right, Dwayne,” Frank muttered. They reached spiral steps at one end of the crypt and ascended into moonlight.
Making their way down the canyon to the old Marfil station, they boarded the train there a little after sunup, and rode all day into the afternoon, Frank submerged in silence, refusing to drink, to buy drinks, to smoke, or even share the cigarillos he didn’t smoke with his hoosegow buddies, who began to grow concerned.
“Hope you’re not in love, compinche.”
“You’re being haunted,” Dwayne explained. “Every sign of it. Something in your notorious past, needs to be taken care of.”
“You know, Brother Provecho, in jail this Kid refrain was one thing, but out here it’s just tiresome, ‘s all. Sorry I’m not your man, actually Kid, and you’re way better off right now needling somebody else might appreciate it more.”
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