by Boston Teran
With head downcast, she stood alone. There were cloudy voices, men speaking English and Spanish. A door opened and closed. A shadow climbed the wall. A man spoke. He had a gritty voice. John Lourdes could not see his face, only his trouser legs and mountain boots. An arm stretched out holding a blanket, and the girl began to undress.
Her clothes slipped to the floor. The blanket was tossed to her. She wrapped it around herself, while averting her eyes from the man. He knelt down and scooped up the clothes and left.
THREE
AWBONE HAD A decision to make as he sat in the idling truck iforty miles east of Fort Bliss. Primal simplicity would dictate he forget El Paso. Best he swing south to Socorro or Zaragaza, then stake his way north to Juarez. People on the verge of a bloodletting will always pay top dollar for weapons and a truck. He had enough gasoline to make the journey and he'd robbed both men before he burned their bodies.
He smoked as he looked out toward the bladed hills that preceded El Paso. On that day in the year of our Lord, Rawbone was forty-five years old. On the truck seat was a photo he'd taken from the driver's wallet. He and his wife were posed on the platform of the Stanton Street Depot with their blank-faced kids.
He knew the depot well from that other life. He'd met his wife just blocks away on the Lerdo Tramway. Mules pulling the streetcar in the rain. Her voice like candlesmoke when he asked could he sit beside her. He swore his youth belonged to someone else, not him. Though he closed his eyes, the stillness of distance did nothing to strip the past away. It was there yet, forsaken but not forgotten.
There had been a city attorney in El Paso. A more corrupt or kinder man he'd never known. Wadsworth Burr would tell Rawbone, "Things happen that cannot be explained by any laws we know and they carry the damn secret with them all the way to our oblivion."
RAWBONE DROVE TO the barrio he'd known when married, only to find it gone. In the oppressive heat he walked a block of brick storefronts that had once been the adobes he frequented. The alley where they had lived was now a routeway for telephone poles cluttered with wire. His wife had been dead years, this much he knew. His son ... was a ghost.
He lit a cigarette and surveyed what once had been. On the corner of the alley where the sewing factory had stood was now a pawnshop; opposite was a gun seller where in one window was an ad that featured Bat Masterson with a Savage .32 automatic ... the ten-shot quickie ... A TENDERFOOT, read the ad, WITH A SAVAGE COULD RUN THE WORST SHARPSHOOTER IN THE WEST RIGHT OFF THE RANGE. In the other shop window was another advertisement. This depicted a woman in bedclothes aiming a Savage at the viewer: THE BANISHER OF BURGLAR FEAR ...
The barrio hadn't changed, he thought, it's only been dry fuckin' cleaned.
OVERLOOKING DOWNTOWN WAS the Satterthwaite Addition. There was a dreamy tranquility to those manicured estates as the sun fell away beyond the far mountains. Wadsworth Burr lived in a huge Missionstyle house near the corner of Yandell and Corto.
Rawbone was shown to the den by a young Oriental girl, who moved with an airy silence over the tiled floor. The high ceiling kept the rooms cool just as he remembered.
Burr sat at a campaign desk before a grand bay window from where one could see the Rio Grande wend its way through a withering sweep of desert.
Burr was not much older than Rawbone, but to see this once-noted attorney now was a study in startling contrasts. He had just begun the morphine shortly before that July Fourth Rawbone abandoned his family.
"You look like something straight out of Dickens, or at the very least, Hugo," said Burr.
"I'm in dire need, if that's what you're saying."
Burr motioned toward a serving cart with its chorus line of liquors. Rawbone tossed his derby aside. As he poured he saw Burr's wrists were mere belt widths and his scooped-out cheeks and boned-down jaw more likely features you'd see on a slumworn tramp.
Rawbone took a drink. Passing around the desk, he shook Burr's hand and noticed a hypodermic waiting on a white dinner napkin.
"You should have stuck to whiskey."
"But I had such an overwhelming need to express my character flaws."
As Rawbone walked over to the window, Burr asked, "What brought you out of exile?"
"I stumbled upon a business opportunity."
"Ahhh. I'll curb my curiosity."
Rawbone kept looking out the window as the earth began to tint under dusk. "I see the Addition is called Sunset Hills now."
"Yes ... it has a certain cemeterial ring, doesn't it? It seemed Mr. Satterthwaite suffered a reversal of fortune, which is something, I think, you should particularly note."
Burr reached for a sheet of letter paper and an ink pen.
"I see you still prefer them Chinese," said Rawbone.
Burr wrote something on the sheet of paper, folded it, then set it like a pup tent on his desk. "There has always been a place in my heart for deviance and passivity."
"I walked the barrio. Adobe Row is gone."
"It was a reasonable eventuality. All cultures prefer to replace someone else's vanities with their own."
Rawbone came around the desk again. He took from his pocket a bill of lading and handed it to Burr. "It's from an import-export shipper here in El Paso. What do you know of it?"
Burr studied the piece of paper. "I don't know the company. But I see these are items for building an icehouse." He handed it back. "You and the makings for refrigeration tests the limits of the imagination."
"There's a revolution coming," said Rawbone.
"It's here."
"Weapons will sell for a premium. As will three-ton trucks."
"Leave the city tonight," said Burr. "Go to Juarez. I'll arrange introductions to some very private people."
Rawbone's attention seemed to have drifted momentarily. "What do you know about the boy?"
Burr studied his friend carefully. "He wouldn't be a boy now, would he?"
"Is he here?"
Burr pointed to the paper tent on his desk. Rawbone took it up between two fingers and read: Wk,a4 can'4 be for-o44en, mvs4 remain forjo44en. Rawbone then folded and refolded the paper and put it in a coat pocket.
"You can take up in the apartment above the garage. I have plenty of clothes. Some will fit you. Look the part."
"Thanks, Wadsworth."
He poured another glass and reached for his derby. As he started out Burr, upon reflection, said, "Consider your options but don't get lured into some lost cause." Rawbone stopped partway across the room and looked back. "You were always at your best," said Burr, "when you were selfish and remorseless, with just a hint of humor."
"I'll note it, friend."
"Note it well. The city is not like it was. There's violence at hand. Undercover agents everywhere. More sheriffs, more law enforcement, more Rangers. And now the Bureau of Investigation."
"It's good to know we're in such efficient hands."
"There's a new law . . . the Mann Act. It gives the BOI a wide latitude when it comes to national security investigations. They have offices in the Angelus Hotel. And you know who's in charge ... Justice Knox."
FOUR
3ERE WAS A phone in the theatre next to the building where the girl was. John Lourdes called the BOI office at the Angelus Hotel. His field commander, justice Knox, was out, but an operative wrote down Lourdes's observations and requests.
The girl remained overnight. She slept on a flimsy sofa bundled up like a child. A single candle burned on a table nearby. Shadows bore out the window in that room was barred.
John Lourdes took up on the stairwell at the end of the hall so he could watch any comings and goings from that office, but there were none. He balled up his coat to use as a pillow and played the role of bum stealing a place to sleep off the street. The building grew dark and empty. Any vague and distant sound was like the fleeting tone of dreams.
As he waited for daylight to continue his surveillance, he could not get the girl out of his mind. She seemed to touch certain inarticulates within him. He a
lso found that she and the conversation with the Germans, if you could call it that, seemed entwined, as if they were part of one single experience.
He had always been at his investigative best when details were studied at a distance. He was at his most comfortable with the world when that too was experienced at a distance.
He approached what he was experiencing with the same cool eye. As for the girl, it was in great part her silence that affected him. The silence she exuded as she crossed that bridge and walked alone almost otherworldly from all that was going on around her, while at the same time being intensely on guard.
Now, the Germans and their comments about the "unclean" left him trussed up with his past openly exposed. What they said had infuriated him not only for its degrading and racist implications but because he, in fact, felt in some way "unclean."
Neither the BOI nor justice Knox had any idea the criminal and murderer called Rawbone was his father. He'd relegated that detail of his heritage to the trash heap of history, inventing a story about an Anglo father, now deceased, named Lourdes. John Lourdes had done so not only because he felt unquestioned shame, but because he was also driven by aspirations of career and betterment and knew this crime of chance would not play to his favor.
That was the term a friend of his father's used, a man his mother thought to be "unholy and unsavory." The friend was a disgraced attorney named Burr. As a boy he'd been to the great white house in the hills above El Paso with his father. Often it was at night, often the men spoke in secret, often afterward his father would disappear for days at a time.
One night, before leaving, Burr had slipped some paper money into the boy's shirt and told him, "See your father there? You can thank him; your birth is a crime of chance ... but all birth is a crime of chance."
Burr's manner was such that even the very young John Lourdes knew the statement was meant in a malicious way to taint him. And now, all these years later, beyond the restless hours and mysteries that afflicted him, beyond all aims, objectives and intentions there was this need as final as final could ever hope to be, that he, John Lourdes, would be the one to bring about his father's bloodletting, that he would be the cause hand behind his death.
As DAWN BEGAN to seep across the building doorway, there came the sound of distant and sporadic gunfire. It was not a good sign. Not much later the girl came out of the office with a man. He must have been in there all night because John Lourdes had not seen him enter. He was a small fellow, bespectacled and Mexican. He was neatly dressed and rather unassuming except for the knife sheath hanging from a pistol belt under his green felt coat.
They made straight for the Santa Fe bridge with Lourdes following, but this was no ordinary morning. The street was spilling over with people. Pamphlets were being passed out urging the citizenry to take up arms against the Diaz government. There was a rabble atmosphere of anger and retribution for the overturning of free elections. Making it through the chaotic foot traffic was near impossible. Everywhere weapons were being brandished and fired off with wanton disregard. A government flag was burned in the street, its smoking ashes singeing the air. Up ahead, at the hipodromo, the racehorses had been loosed from their stables and were being stampeded down the Paseo.
It was then President Diaz's mounted shock troops appeared far up the Paseo, their columns re-forming to become a phalanx across the boulevard. When the commander ordered lances readied, his troops answered crisply.
They held there with the sun to their backs, and their battle line shimmered in the heat. The commander demanded the crowd disperse, but it remained defiant. The Mexican with the girl in tow shouldered his way through the shouting insurrectos toward what he assumed was the safety of the sidewalk buildings. Again the commander shouted his orders and again the crowd answered in a fanfare of epithets and arms held aloft with clenched fists.
The command was given, the surge of troops immediate and brutal. Most of the citizenry fell back in a panic; some stood their ground and fired. The street became a pall of yellow dust and screams. The ensuing pandemonium swept over the Mexican and the girl. They were lost to each other. He was taken in a wave of humanity down the sidewalk while she was trampled over.
John Lourdes managed to hold ground then shoulder his way forward. He reached the girl, who lay on the sidewalk trying to protect herself. He pulled her up and into a doorway. She was bloody and frightened; she was trembling. He held her by the arms till she calmed. She thanked him with a nod and by putting a hand on his heart. His thought: Get her back across the border and somehow question her. Suddenly the Mexican punched his way through a wild frieze of bodies in headlong retreat. He had a revolver drawn and pointed. He threatened John Lourdes in no uncertain terms to be away, now, be away.
THE SOUND OF gunfire was evident as far as the Rio Grande. Word quickly spread about the noonday assault at the hipodromo. Americans gathered along the riverbank. The air above the buildings along the Avenida Paseo de Triunfo was heavy with smoke. By the time the Mexican herded the girl to the bridge, John Lourdes was there waiting.
He watched her descend the weathered planking to the quarantine shed. The Mexican kept her under steady surveillance until she disappeared within that grim-faced building. He then looked over to the American side and seemed to acknowledge someone. John Lourdes scanned the crowd along the river to see who it might be.
The girl appeared, then as usual started up Santa Fe. John Lourdes set off to follow. She hadn't gone but a few yards when a man slipped through the crowd and took hold of her arm.
He was very tall and quite lean. He was much older and wore pleated pants and a vest. He had a long, dour face and said nothing to the girl.
A trolley slowed and the man pressed the girl to board. John Lourdes swung toward the rear steps, and as the girl was being led to a seat, she noticed him. She stared so that the man with her turned to find out what had caught her attention. John Lourdes eased back into a faceless wall of passengers. They rode the line as far as the park at Oregon and Mesa. They entered the Mills Building. John Lourdes followed them and others into the elevator. The girl made sure not to look at him. She was trembling so. They took the grated elevator to the fifth floor. They went in one direction down the hallway, John Lourdes the other. The office they entered was numbered 509. The downstairs directory read: sIMIC SHIPPING-IMPORTS AND EXPORTS, ROOM 509.
There was a tobacconist in the lobby beside the entrance to the Modern Cafe. It was from there John Lourdes called in. Just across the park was the Hotel Angelus, which headquartered the BOI. John Lourdes was told justice Knox and an operative were on their way from northern El Paso. He bought cigarettes and waited by the Cafe doors. He detailed everything in his pocket notebook.
He was slipping the notebook back into his coat pocket and starting outside for a touch of sunlight and air when he walked right into a gentleman entering the lobby. John Lourdes looked up to excuse himself but could only stare.
"Now looking down as you walk along may score you a lot of loose change," said the man, "but you've got to keep those gunsights at eye level if you really mean to make something of yourself."
And with that his father offered an offhanded grin, then was on his way.
FIVE
AWBONE SAUNTERED INTO the Simic Import And Export of_ _ fices. A half-dozen men were grouped in private conversation around a desk. They grew silent with his entry. He stood there waiting in his tailored suit and crisp derby.
"May we help you in some way?" said the one sitting at the desk.
"It's the right question, for sure," said Rawbone, "but the wrong man is asking it."
He approached the desk and handed over the bill of lading from the truck. The man studied it with quiet regard as the others looked over his shoulder. His expression tightened further as he glanced up at Rawbone. He stood and walked to a door to a private office and knocked. "Mr. Simic," he said. "I need a moment."
The door opened slightly and the man entered. Through the opening Rawbone g
limpsed a young girl wrapped in a blanket sitting in the corner on the floor.
While he waited, Rawbone sat back on the wood railing that demarked the office entry. He took on the men's stares by disinterestedly fanning himself with the derby.
The inner office door opened and the man from the desk came out first. He was followed by an older gentleman with a long and dour face, who held the bill of lading. He did not bother to introduce himself.
"How did you get this?" he asked.
Rawbone gave no answer.
"The drivers?"
Rawbone crossed himself.
The men in the room took on the mood of a hunting party. Simic instructed one of the men to lock the door. As he did Rawbone opened his suit coat and reached for a handkerchief that happened to be in the same pocket where the black handle of an automatic protruded for anyone to see.
"Who are you?" Simic asked.
"Think of me," said Rawbone, "as ... Tom, the bootblack. Ah, you're not familiar . . . Horatio Alger's hero, educated at the hard school of poverty. Who with a smile and good cheer overcomes the hardships of existence to acquire ... a comfortable fortune." His grin of sarcasm disappeared. "Now, let's put our cards and our pure hearts on the table."
JOHN LOURDES CROSSED the street in front of the Mills Building. On that day in the year of our Lord, he was twenty-five years old. He stood under the shade of a great elder at the entrance to San Jacinto Park from where he could watch the lobby and wait on justice Knox. That reviled gusano of a father had walked right out of the scarred regions of memory and straight into the daylight, all suited up like a gent and with the cool arrogance of one who believes himself beyond the trappings of right and order.
But today, there would be a reckoning.
Then something, call it superstition if you will, took hold of John Lourdes. He glanced back into the park down a shadowy walkway. He had come here many times as a boy with his father. There was a pond with a stone wall around it where lived half a dozen alligators. How they'd come to be there was uncertain. But one winter night his father had persuaded a few drunken wilds to go down to the park and sack up those creatures and get them out of the cold to keep them from freezing.