Melpómene told him how the Indian women of Palenque captured the beetles and tamed them, giving them names which they learned to answer to, putting them into little cages to carry like lamps at night, or wearing them in their hair beneath transparent veils. Nights were populated by light-bearing women, who found their way through the forest as if it were day.
“Do all these critters here have names?”
“Most of them,” giving him a look of warning not to make fun of this. “Even one named after you, if you’d like to meet him. Pancho!”
One of the fragments of light detached itself from the tree and flew down and landed on the girl’s wrist, like a falcon. When the tree went dark, so did Pancho. “Bueno,” she whispered to it, “pay no attention to the others. I want you to light up only when I tell you. Now.” The bug, obligingly, lit up. “Ahora, apágate,” and again Pancho complied.
Frank looked at Pancho. Pancho looked back at Frank, though what he was seeing was anybody’s guess.
He couldn’t say when exactly, but at some point Frank came to understand that this bearer of light was his soul, and that all the fireflies in the tree were the souls of everyone who had ever passed through his life, even at a distance, even for a heartbeat and a half, that there existed such a tree for each person in Chiapas, and though this suggested that the same soul must live on a number of trees, they all went to make up a single soul, really, in the same way that light was indivisible. “In the same way,” amplified Günther, “that our Savior could inform his disciples with a straight face that bread and wine were indistinguishable from his body and blood. Light, in any case, among these Indians of Chiapas, occupies an analogous position to flesh among Christian peoples. It is living tissue. As the brain is the outward and visible expression of the Mind.”
“Too German for me,” Frank mumbled.
“Consider—how is it that they all go off and on at once?”
“Good eyesight, fast reflexes?”
“Always possible. But recall that there are also tribes up in these mountains who are known to send messages routinely across hundreds of miles, instantaneously. Not at the finite speed of light, you understand, but with a time interval of zero.”
“Thought that was impossible,” said Frank. “Even wireless telegraph takes a little time.”
“Special Relativity has little meaning in Chiapas. Perhaps after all telepathy exists.”
Perhaps after all. Frank meant to bring it up with Melpómene next time he was in the Quetzal Dormido, but she beat him to it.
“There’ll be a little disturbance tonight,” she said.
“Caray, your novio’s back in town!”
She flicked cigar ashes at him. “It’s those Mazatecos again. A gang of them are getting together right now to march over here. They should arrive a little after midnight.”
“Mazatán, that’s fifteen miles away. How do you know what’s going on there ‘right now’?”
She smiled and tapped herself lightly on the center of her forehead.
Around midnight there was some hollering and explosions and a number of gunshots, moving into town from the west. “¿Qué el fuck?” Frank, a little sleepy by now, inquired—“Oh, beg pardon, querida, meant ¿Qué el chingar? of course.”
Melpómene shrugged. Frank looked out the window. Mazatecos without a doubt, disposed to mischief.
Political experts tended to label the resentments expressed regularly by Mazatán against Tapachula as another “Vazquista” rebellion, though people down here understood it more as one of those town-against-town exercises that had been simmering in Chiapas since long before the Spaniards showed up. Lately, perhaps further aroused by the climate of national rebellion, elements in Mazatán had clearly been spending idle days and nights preoccupied with plans to attack Tapachula, clean out the contents of both banks in town, and kill the local jefe. But their planning somehow always failed to include Tapachula’s volunteer self-defense force, who were there waiting for them every time, now and then chasing them all the way back down to Mazatán, and occupying the town to add to the humiliation. “Almost as if they knew in advance,” Frank puzzled. “But who warns them? you? Who tells you?”
Which got him an enigmatic smile and little more. But Günther had been giving it all some thought.
“It is like the telephone exchange,” he declared. “Not even ‘like’—it is the telephone exchange. A network of Indians in telepathic communication. It does not seem to be sensitive to distance. No matter how far any of them may wander, the single greater organism remains intact, coherent, connected.”
Winter arrived on the calendar, though not in the tierra caliente. But something like a shortening of days, a defection of sunlight, was occurring in the spirits of everybody at the cafetal. Something was on the way. Indians began casting strange looks at one another and avoiding everybody else’s eyes.
One evening Frank was sitting near Melpómene’s fig tree, watching the cucuji put on their show, and at some point, the way you drift into sleep, he fell into a trance and without hikuli this time he found himself back again in the same version of ancient Tenochtitlán that El Espinero’s cactus had once taken him to.
His mission was a matter of life and death, but its details were somehow withheld from him. He did know that he must find his way to a part of the city hidden from most of its inhabitants. The first step was to pass beneath a ceremonial arch—which he understood would one day be obliterated, as the Spaniards had once obliterated all the Aztec structures of Tenochtitlán. The Arch was of pale limestone, with a triumphal sculpture on top, a sinister figure, all curves, tresses, wings, drapery, standing in a chariot. He recognized the gold face of the Angel of the Fourth Glorieta on Reforma, but understood this was a different Angel. As a gateway the structure seemed to define two different parts of the City as incommensurate as life and death. As “Frank” passed beneath it, it was seen to take on a ghostly light and to grow taller and more substantial.
He found himself in a part of the City where savagery prevailed and mercy was unknown. Robed figures passing by stared at him with a searching sort of hatred. Artillery fire and gunshots were audible, both close and more distant. Blood was splashed against the walls. There was a smell in the air of corpses and gasoline and burning flesh. He desperately wanted a cigarette but was out of smokes. He looked behind him for the gateway, but it had vanished. Now and then a pedestrian would look fearfully at the sky, cry out or run for cover, but when Frank looked up, he could see nothing beyond a shadow which approached from the north, like a storm, covering more and more of the field of stars. He knew what it was but could not find its name in his memory.
He arrived at the edge of a great plaza, which stretched away into the lightless midwatch, all but empty of pedestrian life, lying between two official but unnamed structures, faced with local volcanic tezontle and tepetate—both these monuments, despite modest height and emotional illegibility, as intimidating, perhaps as cruelly intended, as more ancient pyramids of this valley. There was gunfire now, more or less unremitting, and Frank could not see how to proceed. Neither of the two enigmatic structures provided any safety. He saw before him the mortal expanse of dark hours he must pass here, until the roosters started in and the sky slowly retained more and more light, perhaps revealing in silhouette, on the jagged rooftops, human figures who might have been there all along, attending to the hostilities.
When Frank returned to the indicative world, there was Melpómene with news from the Capital of the Huerta coup, and it slowly became clear to him that the two mysterious buildings in his vision had been the Presidential Palace, where Madero had taken refuge among forces loyal to him, and the arsenal known as the Ciudadela, a mile and a half to the west, where rebels headed by Félix Díaz, the nephew of Porfirio Díaz, were dug in. Between was the center of the Capital, a place of warfare and thousands dead left where they fell, under the open sky, which would go on for ten days that February and become known as the Decena Trágica. T
he shadow overhead, all these centuries in pursuit of the Aztecs and their generations, southward in their long flight, came at last to hang in the sky over the Valley of Mexico, over the Capital, moving eastward from the Zócalo to gather itself above the penitentiary called “el palacio blanco,” and condense at last one by one into the .38-caliber rounds that killed Madero and Pino Suárez and put Huerta into power, and despite the long and terrible struggle, and the people’s faith so misplaced, had after all allowed the serpent to prevail.
Deciding not to stick around to see what kind of a price if any the new régime might have put on his head, Frank left Mexico aboard a coffee boat out of Vera Cruz, concealed in the hold beneath several sacks of cargo. By the time he got to Corpus Christi, he was so cranked up from breathing coffee dust that he was ready to run all the way to Denver on foot. “Stay in Texas,” pleaded a fandango girl named Chiquita as he was speeding through San Antonio.
“Darlin ordinarily I’d love nothin better on account of how Mexico once my other land mi otra tierra as we say down there has made me more than usually aware of San Antonio home of the Alamo cradle of Texas independence and so forth without getting into the details of who stole what from who I’m sure you can understand that sooner or later somebody in some saloon’ll bring the matter up maybe no more’n a slide of the eyeballs in the mirror back there yet a promise of business to be transacted in the near future that could range anywhere from the price of a beer to one of us’s life you see . . .” by which time in any case he was out the door again and halfway to San Angelo.
Soon as he got to Denver, he went to the bank to see if any of the money he’d been sending back had actually made it out of Mexico, and to his amazement found a nice piece of change in the account. Besides the salary from Günther and one or two heavy-machinery commissions, there was the ten dollars a day in gold that Madero’s people had been paying him back in 1911 in Chihuahua, which seemed to include a falling-off-your-horse bonus added in there as well. It was the first time he was aware of getting paid for being stupid. Could there be a future in this?
FRANK WAS IN A BAR on Seventeenth Street one night when who should he run into but Dr. Willis Turnstone, onetime disappointed beau of Frank’s sister Lake, just off his night shift at the hospital nearby.
“Notice you’re favoring that leg, there,” the Doc said after a while.
Frank told him the tale. “Somethin you can do for that?”
“If I can’t, my partner sure can. Chinese fellow, cures everything by sticking you full of gold needles. Lay there looking like a porcupine, next thing you’re up doing the fox trot all night long.”
“Needles. Have to give that some thought.”
“Here’s our card. I’m just around the corner, come on by sometime and we’ll have a look.”
After a few sociable rounds, the Doc said, “You notice I didn’t once ask about your sister.”
“Appreciate that. Guess you’re over it. Wish I could say I was.”
“Over it and how. I am engaged to marry the most perfect of angels. I can’t begin to describe her. Oh Frank she is adorable in every way. Mother, muse, and mistress, all in one, can you imagine? Of course you can’t. Say, you seem a little peakèd, all of a sudden.”
“Lookin for a spittoon to throw up in?”
“Can’t here, there’s a house rule.”
DOC TURNSTONE’S OFFICE was a block and a half from Mercy Hospital, and three flights up. “Weeds out the malingerers!” chuckled his partner Dr. Zhao. “Let’s see your tongue. Aha.” He took both Frank’s wrists and attended for a while to various pulses. “How long have you been pregnant?”
“How’s that?”
“Making jokes!”
The door opened, and a young woman in one of those dark velvet chapeaux that were showing up all over town put her head in. “Hi Honey, are you— Aaahh! You!”
“Not me,” chirped Dr. Zhao. “And your fiancé had to go make a house call. Oh! You must mean this patient here!”
“Howdy Wren. Mind if I don’t get up right away?” All these needles must’ve been doing something to Frank. Ordinarily a man would be heartbroken if not totally crushed to meet an old flame again calling another man “Honey,” and a doctor, too. But what was kicking in instead was some strange town-busybody reflex that set Frank to going, well, well, Wren and the Doc, wonder how that’ll turn out, so forth.
“Frank, I hope you’re not . . .”
He had always appreciated this bluestocking awkwardness about her . . . as if jealousy were something that only characters in books knew how to deal with, and when one met with it out in the world, why, one was quite at a loss. . . . “Tell me,” he said somewhat drowsily, “how’d you two lovebirds meet?”
“Got to go brew up some Chinese herbs,” muttered Dr. Zhao. “I’m leaving this door open. Better behave!”
“I got back to the States,” Wren said, “reported in to the hospital for some insurance checkup that Harvard was insisting on, Willis happened to be on duty, we were about to pass in the corridor, took one look at each other, and . . .”
“¡Epa!” Frank suggested. He’d heard about the phenomenon but never observed it in action.
Wren shrugged, exactly like a helpless feminine victim of Fate. “Willis is good,” she said. “A good man. You’ll see. He knows your friend Estrella, too. They’re involved in some mysterious project down in the coalfields.”
All right, now she was talking. The plutes it seemed, curse their souls if they had any, were at it again, this time in southern Colorado, where it was coal and not gold that men went down underground to risk their lives and health for, and the miners tended to come from Austria-Hungary and the Balkans more than Cornwall and Finland. Since last September the mine workers’ union had been out on strike against Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company—since November the Trinidad field had been under a state of martial law. Both sides had plenty of rifles, and the state National Guard also had machine guns. The shooting and skirmishing had been nearly constant, when weather permitted—storms that winter had been fierce and deadly, even for Colorado. Families evicted from company housing had been living all winter in tent colonies outside Ludlow and Walsenburg. Stray had gone down there at the beginning of the strike and moved into one of the tents around December, against the advice of everybody who cared about her.
“Which is a sizable number of folks,” said Doc Turnstone.
“You mind tellin me what she’s doin down there?”
“There’s a sort of informal plexus of people working as best they can to help the strikers out. Food, medicine, ammunition, doctoring. Everything’s voluntary. Nobody makes a profit or gets paid, not even credit or thank-yous.”
“Sounds like Mexico all over again.”
“You’ve had enough of that for a while, I guess.”
“Hell no. Now you boys’ve got this leg workin so good.”
“There does just happen to be a small convoy heading over to Walsenburg, and they’re shorthanded.”
“I’m on the way.”
“Old associate of yours will be there too. Ewball Oust?”
“Well. Sure is my week, ain’t it?”
THEY MET UP, as arranged, in Pagosa Springs. “How’s ’at leg doin?” said Ewball.
“Still kicks up when there’s a norther headin in.” Frank nodded vaguely in the direction of Ewball’s penis. “How’s ’at third leg, or shouldn’t I be askin.”
If Ewball had been hoping the subject of Stray wouldn’t arise, he gave no sign. “Oh,” pretending to inspect a barrel hitch on one of the loads, “one more big mistake on my ticket I guess. Just never should’ve interfered the way I did.”
“‘Seemed like a good idea at the time.’”
“There you go. But now she’s all yours, pardner.” Ewball gave it a hoofstep or two, then added, “She always was.”
“News to me, Ewb.” But who, outside of Stray herself, would know any better than Ewb here? it started Frank thinking, a
nyway.
Keeping a wary eye out for mine guards, Ku Kluxers, company detectives, and other assorted vermin, they took the little convoy, mules and wagons, up over Wolf Creek Pass, down into the San Luis Valley. Nights were generally sleepless, for there were sure to be riders out scouting for them, though moonlight was on the wane.
“Another thing you should know,” Ewball thoughtfully stirring the grounds in the coffeepot with his stolen Signal Corps thermometer he liked to use to get the temperature just right.
Frank snorted. “Never, gol, durn, ends.”
“Your mother. She’s in Denver, and working for mine—”
“Well if ’at don’t take the cake.” The usual reply would’ve been more like, “Thought your mother worked on the Denver Row,” but this was well beyond trailside pleasantries.
“—and her and Stray had a nice long confabulation, too, seemed like.”
“You took Estrella home to meet your folks.”
“She didn’t even want to, I should’ve known better.”
“Should’ve been watchin your back Ewb, it’s that Bourgeois Fever creepin up on you.”
“All in the past now. Yes quite, quite ended. And another thing about Stray— Did I ever tell you—”
“Ewb.”
And with no time intervening, the sun was up again and the coffee in the pot frozen from the long night.
It was a nervous passage across the San Luis Basin. In the distance, riders whose hats, dusters, and mounts blended with the terrain would now and then appear, proceeding at top speed across the treeless plain, each headed in a slightly different direction, the less thoughtful wearing dark clothes that stood out against the ashen country, for anybody at even a little elevation sooner or later would find it just too hard to resist considering these riders as rifle targets. As would the more adventuresome among the horsemen themselves, willing to gamble on the wind, the accuracy of the rifleman’s sights and size of the load, or just that the high ground was too far away—against the payoff of that well-known lift of spirit when you’re shot at and missed.
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