by Robert Hough
Late that afternoon he sought out Father Alvarez, the cantina owner, and the hacendero and asked them to come with him to his office. Though it was an unprecedented request, they each nodded grimly, and did not ask why the mayor wanted to see them. Under shimmering greenish skies, Miguel unlocked the chain that now maintained the security of city hall. They marched wordlessly up to the mayor’s office. Miguel took his chair while the other three stood. Outside, the sun shone brilliantly over the vagrants, whores, thieves, beggars, and malcontents crowded into the plaza.
The mayor let a few seconds tick by, during which he looked from amigo to amigo.
— Brinkley won’t see me.
The others did not look surprised.
— I think he knows what’s going on in our town, and is embarrassed. If you ask me, I think he’s packed up and buggered off already. I could be wrong, but I think he’s washed his hands of us.
There was a long, freighted pause.
— Compadres, said the cantina owner, — you know what we are? We’re a town of mujeres. First we got fucked by Porfirio Díaz, then we got fucked by the revolution, and now we’re getting fucked by that pendejo Brinkley. Listen to me, primos. We’re becoming a town of weak, whimpering, womanly cowards.
No one said a word, and in that extended moment of quiet there was sad agreement.
— So, Father Alvarez said with a deep, shuddering breath, — what do we do?
— I’ll tell you one thing, said the hacendero. — I won’t put up with it this time.
— No, said the cantina owner. — Me neither.
Again there was a long, drifting silence, during which the men mulled over their own, individual reasons for hating John Brinkley and the rancour he had brought to their once quiet pueblo.
Just a week and a half earlier, as he crept over to Margarita’s side of the bed, the cantina owner had been visited with renewed visions of that leering captain. Suddenly nauseated, he’d retreated from his wife’s surrender, complaining of fatigue, his face burning with frustration, his will molested. Since then he’d been forced to conclude that the benefits of the Compound Operation were temporary, if not out-and-out illusory.
The hacendero’s stallion, meanwhile, had recently started raking his ears against the earth, causing them to bleed and attract bugs. In response, the hacendero was now ridding his house of all metals, his last meal eaten with a spoon he’d carved, rather roughly, from a huizache branch. As for the father, his mood was only further darkened by the Pentecostal nonsense beaming out of Brinkley’s tower — on the way over he had passed a house topped by a metal weathervane from which he could clearly hear an evangelist ranting about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
— I have an idea, the hacendero finally said.
— What is it? grumbled the father.
— I know how we’re going to get that hijo de puta.
The men listened as the hacendero solemnly voiced his idea. It was a simple proposition, savage and brutish and alive with finality. It was the resort of desperate men, and he used few words to describe it. When he was finished, his friends looked downwards, as though afraid to see the reaction of the others. They all knew that, under normal circumstances, they would have done nothing other than play with the idea, enjoying the temptation it represented, revelling in the lushness of its timbre. Yet the mayor and the father and the cantina owner kept their eyes fixed on the knotted, splintering floorboards, their heads filled with the echoes of past humiliations. Outside, voices rose from the crowded, filthy plaza — some sort of violent commotion was occurring outside, of a sort so common now that it didn’t even occur to them to go to the window and look.
The mayor opened the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out the bottle of tequila he had bought to replace his recently looted mescal. In the drawer he kept a single shot glass; he put this on his desktop next to an empty coffee cup. The cantina owner spotted a pair of water glasses on the mayor’s filing cabinet, and he put them on the desk as well. Miguel Orozco poured four tequilas; he kept one and handed out the other three.
The men lifted their tequilas and downed them in a single, warming toss, their toast having to do with the rescue of their town, their old lives, and their sense of themselves. Then they solemnly walked down the chipped hallway staircase. Once on the street they turned left, in that way avoiding the dirt-faced throngs living in the plaza. At the next street they turned south and entered the store operated by Fajardo Jimenez, who was known to keep certain contraband items in his cellar, items that included explosives, hallucinatory roots, various models of handguns, and playing cards featuring photographs of naked Chiapan women.
Fajardo, upon seeing them, smiled through the fur covering his otherwise handsome features.
— Hola, said the hacendero. — Qué onda?
— No mucho, said Fajardo. — I heard it was thinking of raining.
— I heard that too. It’s been a while.
Fajardo looked at the men. — So. Are you looking for something?
— Sí, the hacendero said.
— Well, don’t keep me in suspense.
— Do you remember last spring, when I had to clear some stumps from that land out behind my paddock?
— I do.
— Well, I have some more to get rid of.
— So you need some dynamite. Why didn’t you just say so, hombre? How many stumps do you need to clear?
The hacendero paused, thinking. He looked to the others, who shrugged their shoulders in a way that was barely perceptible. Finally he turned to the store owner and answered.
— Pues … hundreds and hundreds?
— Hundreds and hundreds! You must have enough stumps to fill a …
Fajardo stopped, an understanding slowly dawning across his shaggy features. A series of brazen robberies at his store, coupled with the death of Laura Velasquez, had turned him against Brinkley’s tower as well. He lowered his voice and leaned towards the men, his eyes shifting in either direction.
— I hear you, hombres. I’ll have to order some more from my cousin across the border. But if you can wait a week or two, I can promise you this: I’ll sell you enough dynamite to clear every paddock in México.
{ 29 }
FEELING THAT SHE NEEDED SOME QUIET TIME TO think, Madam made the unprecedented decision to close her House of Gentlemanly Pleasures for a single night, spawning a riot that, after raging for about fifteen minutes, extinguished itself in the general clamour of the plaza. Throughout the uproar, she gazed at Brinkley’s tower through the window of her bedroom, cursing herself. For the first time since its arrival, she was beginning to feel she might have been wrong to support it so unconditionally. She put her face in her hands and fought a wave of self-pity. Her choices were obvious. She could denounce the tower, refuse to service Brinkley’s patients, and gradually win back the town’s approval. Or she could do what people inevitably do when angry, bitter, and under extreme stress: surrender all reason to the dictates of instinct. The deciding factor was her long-held vow to watch over her Marias, to care for her Marias, and to make sure nobody had the effrontery to touch a hair on their beautiful heads ever again.
She stayed awake for hours, finally resorting to an opiate draught she’d been given by an Oriental client. Her dreams were cascades, and she came awake feeling ragged. After several cups of black coffee, she dressed in her riding suit and retrieved the pearl-handled revolver she kept in a locked box beneath her bed. She placed this in the folds of her petticoat and summoned Maria del Alma and Maria de la Mañana. They came immediately, looking pink-faced and anxious.
— We are going on a little trip today. We are going to sort out this business with the town. Now go pack a lunch. Tacos al pastor. And frijoles. Filling food. Do it now. We have a long day ahead of us.
As they packed the lunch, Madam asked two other Marias to hitch her buggy to the pair of mules kept in a small corral beside the House of Gentlemanly Pleasures. By ten o’clock in the morning, Madam and t
he two Marias were heading along the same highway that Francisco Ramirez had taken during his quest to find the brother of Violeta Cruz. They rode without incident under a thin, bleached sky. Around mid-morning, they turned south off the road leading to Piedras Negras and headed into the badlands. It was around this time that Maria del Alma, a petite girl with hair the colour of straw, asked: — Where are we going, Madam?
Madam thought for a moment, debating how much she wanted to say. After a minute or two of tense silence, she figured that she might as well admit to the more digestible parts of her plan.
— I know an hombre. He used to be a client of mine, before I had the house. He’s Mexican.
— Really? said both Marias.
— Sí. It was just after the revolution ended, and the country was awash with stolen money.
— Who is he? asked Maria de la Mañana.
— I’ll explain. Do you remember when Pancho Villa got mad at the gringos and attacked that town over the border in New México?
The two Marias looked at each other.
— No, of course not. You were both little and still living down south, and for that you should be grateful. The long and the short of it is that Villa invaded New México and torched a town and killed a bunch of people. The gringos got furious. To get Villa, they sent thousands of soldiers into Chihuahua and Sonora and Coahuila. It was called la Expedición Punitiva, and of course it didn’t work, but that’s not the point. Around this time, the gringos set up camps to train hired guns to protect whatever interests they still had in México. They trained them to watch over American haciendas, to defend American businesses, and to guard American factories. They taught them to fight and use weapons, and they taught them well. When the revolutionary governments went ahead and seized control of American haciendas, businesses, and factories anyway, these men collected their paycheques by riding around and harming anyone they thought might be sympathetic to Villa or Zapata. When the revolution ended, the gringos cut them loose. They were called White Shirts.
— Did they really wear white shirts? asked Maria de la Mañana.
— Sí.
— Why?
— So people could tell them apart from the Gold Shirts and the Red Shirts.
— I don’t understand, said Maria del Alma.
— Most people didn’t. It was a time that forbade understanding. Plus, after a time their shirts got dirty and they covered them with bandoliers, so nobody could tell them apart anyway.
Madam stopped talking, as she preferred that her Marias not know the whole story: that these white-shirt-wearing paramilitaries naturally turned to the pastimes that men with their talents always resort to when released from their formal obligations — namely hijacking, racketeering, extortion, terrorism, and other acts of reckless psychopathy.
— And this hombre, said Maria del Alma. — He was a White Shirt?
— Sí.
— And you are going to hire him to protect us?
The madam let a few seconds pass.
— His name is Ramón. I do not know his last name. I hope I can still find him.
They again rode in silence. The rolling red turf of the badlands converted into a desert thick with cholla and sand the colour of rice. After a time they stopped and ate tortillas and then continued into windless heat and pockets of strange, deathly silences. A buzzard lazily tracked them. Eventually Madam turned off onto a small dirt track that wound up over a ridge and descended into a gully studded with barrel cacti and stones. Far off, next to a stream so withered by the sun it was barely a trickle, was an old settler’s cabin. They could see a brazier smoking next to it and goats tethered to thick wooden pegs. There was a smell of dirt and old clothes and toasted corn. Upon seeing this squalor, the Marias were reminded of home, and couldn’t help but feel saddened.
Madam halted the mules.
— Wait here, she said.
She climbed down from the buggy and walked along a dusty path towards the door of the cottage. Beneath her feet were scorpions and vole tracks and the cloven impressions made by goats. She rapped on the door. She waited. She rapped again.
The heavy door creaked open and Madam came face to face with the man she remembered. He was still tall and leanly muscled, with a moon-shaped scar below his right eye. His movements, she noted, still had a frightening coiled quality, as though at any second they might be unleashed fully. The only difference was that there seemed to be less of him. He was wearing an eye patch, he had lost all but a few oily strands of hair, and his right arm was missing below the elbow.
— Ramón, she said.
— Who the hell is Ramón? was his response.
— You are, cabrón. Or at least that’s the name you used to use.
He leaned a little closer, as if to inspect Madam’s face. Suddenly he grinned, revealing a mouth filled with metal and damp rot and teeth turned orange.
— Ahhh … I remember you now. You’re that puta from Corazón.
Madam shuddered, commanded herself to breathe, and answered: — I am.
— How did you find me?
— You once told me where you lived.
He chuckled and stepped outside. He put his lone hand on the small of his back and stretched, exposing his unshaven face to the sun. He then spat onto the soil.
— Why’re you here?
Madam stalled. She seriously wondered whether Ramón was up to the job, and was on the verge of saying Nothing, my mistake and taking her Marias home. But then she pictured Maria del Mampo, lying in her bed, covered from head to toe with indigo swellings.
— I have a problem, she said.
— We all do.
— The town’s turned against me. Over some business you don’t need to know about. Mostly they’re making my life as uncomfortable as possible. Throwing rocks through windows and setting fires and scaring my girls. Plus one of them was attacked.
— I know the feeling. Us White Shirts weren’t too popular once the gringos up and left.
— You still have your boys?
Ramón’s face widened into an evil, leering grin. — You’re asking me to protect your whorehouse? If that’s the case, then sí, I could round up a few. At least the ones who aren’t dead or in jail. But you know, señora, protection comes at a price.
— I know that. Money is not a problem.
He cackled and slapped his hand against his side.
— Well then, looks like you got yourself a deal.
Madam Félix and her two Marias returned without incident to Corazón de la Fuente. Shortly after entering the town, they spotted Roberto Pántelas, the grieving molinero, who was now walking with canes in both hands and taking only the most faltering of steps. Seeing this, they turned away, there being a limit to how much sadness the human spirit can process.
As they unhitched the buggy, the other Marias heard them and came running. When Madam told them that the town would soon learn to treat them with the respect that each and every one of them deserved, they all clapped and jumped up and down like children.
Two days later, Ramón rode into Corazón de la Fuente, his left hand holding the reins of his horse, the remains of his right arm flapping against his side like a spasmodic wing. Behind him rode seven men on five horses, each looking as soiled and life-worn as his commander. To announce their presence they rode slowly through town, laughing and firing pistols and attempting to spy on señoritas through shuttered windows and calling the men on the street hijos de putas. After two or three circles, Ramón pulled his horse to a stop in the middle of the plaza and dismounted. By this point, most of the drifters and vendors who now made permanent use of the square had scattered. Those who hadn’t took refuge behind benches or hid beneath faded ponchos.
But there was one homeless drunkard, sitting with his back against a wall on the east side of the square, who pointed at the desperados and said something in an unintelligible growl. This caught Ramón’s attention, and the sound of his boot steps could be heard across the plaza. He rea
ched the man, who was unshaven and half-toothless and wearing stained clothing. Ramón kicked the soles of the man’s boots, causing him to jump a little.
— You say something, borracho?
The man coughed and focused his gaze upwards.
— Ized … hoon the helleroo?
Ramón’s face screwed into a grin. — I still didn’t get that.
This time the drunkard took his time, and all of his energy, to form his words. — I said, who in the hell’re you?
Ramón pulled a rifle out of the tether strung across his shoulders. He grinned again, and swung the stock at the lower half of the man’s face. There was an eruption of red. The sky instantly seemed to darken and the winds seemed to swirl and the whole of the town was forced to listen to the drunken man’s gurgling wails.
Ramón, satisfied that he had the attention of the town, walked back towards the middle of the plaza and loudly announced: — ANY A YOU COCKSUCKERS TRY ANYTHING WITH THE WHORES, YOU’LL HAVE ME AND MY BOYS TO DEAL WITH. AND THE NEXT TIME, WE AIN’T GONNA BE IN SUCH GOOD MOODS.
When they’d all finished chuckling, Ramón and his wild bunch walked to the House of Gentlemanly Pleasures. There they were offered baths, fine liquor, cigars, and a free session with a Maria of their choice. All of it was paid for by Madam Félix, who, gazing out over the plaza, felt a gratitude of which she was not at all proud.
{ 30 }
THE SOUND OF VIOLETA CRUZ LOSING THE CONTENTS of her stomach drifted onto the street fronting the house she shared with her grievously disappointed mother. There it was heard by Ramón and his White Shirts, who were out conducting their first patrol of the day. They stopped and listened, Ramón trying to decide whether this insipid racket represented an insult to either the madam or her Marias. Not being able to imagine a way in which it was, he spurred the sides of his horse and reluctantly moved on. The others followed.