The Creed of Violence

by Boston Teran

  "Where are the weapons?"

  "Why, Mr. Lourdes, they're in plain sight."

  And they were, in a manner of speaking. The father had the son follow him beyond the meeting house to a sandy incline scarred with crevasses. Then he waved the son to keep step behind as he scaled that crag following a plumb line of fist-sized stones and upon reaching the last near the apex, squatted down.

  "Notice the line of rocks. They mark the spot. Now. Stand close, Mr. Lourdes, and watch the magic."

  The father reached into the sand and his arms vanished near up to the elbows. As he pulled the sand began to ribbon and twill and the hill face moved like the back of some hidden monster coming to life.

  "Kneel down here and light a match."

  A vein of light fell upon the stacked crates hidden there in a recess beneath a tarp that had been covered by sand.

  "What all is down there?"

  "Your garden-variety arsenal. Carbines, ammunition, hand grenades, dynamite and detonators, and a .50 caliber machine gun. Mr. Lourdes, you could hold off the Holy Roman Empire with all that firepower."

  John Lourdes blew out the match.

  JOHN LOURDES HAD Rawbone move the truck far back of the meeting house and away from where the weapons were cached. He swung the shotgun strap over his shoulder. He carried rifle and binoculars loose. While he ran to a place from where he would watch the road Rawbone, alone now, slipped down under the chassis.

  Before arriving in El Paso, Rawbone had hammered a strip of flap leather to the underside of the chassis housing. He'd nailed it into the wood on three sides, leaving the fourth open to form a sort of pocket or pouch where he stashed away an automatic. When that was done he'd hammered the last side closed so the weapon wouldn't shake loose.

  TEN

  HE SKYLINE WAS settling out, the blue softening away till there was only the marked approach of nightfall. John Lourdes sat in silence near the headway of the plat. Rawbone approached and stood near, scanning the moonless world to the road below.

  "You have any idea how you intend to make this fight?"

  John Lourdes was staring up that street of crumbling foundations to the meeting house. "What was this place? Do you know?"

  Rawbone ran the back of his fingers along his cheek. "You never heard and you're from El Paso?" He set the derby back. "It was one of those ... utopias. You know what they are, right? Well ... this one was different. There was only women. Women from all over the world. Anglo women, Mexican. Women from India. China. Even Africa. They lived like a tribe. And they had ceremonies where they went about naked. Naked, Mr. Lourdes."

  The son now looked upon those forgotten remains and tried to imagine—

  The father threw his head back laughing. "Mr. Lourdes, if ever I saw an expression of pure and ridiculous gullibility." He shook his head in comedic despair.

  The son was forced to accept the moment and he took it stoically, but not without a smile that he was had. "By the way," John Lourdes asked, "did you retrieve the gun?"

  Rawbone cocked his head. "Excuse me?"

  "The automatic stashed under the chassis. I checked the damn vehicle early this morning."

  Rawbone pulled up his shirt where the gun had been tucked away. "Mr. Lourdes, the tide of opinion about you has just risen some." He pulled the weapon and held the black .32 just so in his palm and, mocking, added, "Bat Masterson swears by this gun. Or so says the ad. And another promises ... it's a housewife's best friend against burglars." He tucked the shirt back in his pants and slipped the weapon down into his belt sash. He paused to set his derby right. "Mr. Lourdes, it's a right-thinking world when they start running ads with guns and women in nightgowns."

  The son went back to considering how a fight was to be made. The father stood watch. And so the night went about its workings.

  "Mr. Lourdes, do you come from a good Christian family?"

  The son looked up at the father and in a pointed quiet said, "In part."

  "Well, you better pack that good Christian part away for a while ... because they're here."

  John Lourdes rose. He looked down into that banded decline of shadows but saw nothing. Rawbone stepped behind him and pointed, his arm resting just over the rim of the son's shoulders. There was a narrow slit of brightness, not even really a light, for one moment. "Far, far down the canyon. There! Did you see it?"

  "No."

  "I believe it's one of those flashlights with the sliding bridge slip. You know. And they're keeping it near to the ground so all you see is a bit of wash from the light."

  The father was so close now the son could feel the weapon he had tucked away pressing against his back.

  "You can't look right at a thing at night that far to see it, Mr. Lourdes. The trick is you have to look off just a bit. Use the outer ring of your eye."

  The son did as the father said and in the space of a minute there was a singular emanation so minute as to be barely made out.

  "Yes," said John Lourdes, "I see it. You're right."

  "That's a trick you learn from years of being on the hunt."

  The son turned. "You mean being hunted, don't you?"

  "That too, Mr. Lourdes. But when they're as close as you and I are now, hunter and hunted, it's all the same."

  John Lourdes studied the man he was born of. "Is that a threat, or a word of advice?"

  "I leave it to your good judgment, sir. But either way, the clock is about to expire on the quiet around here."

  THE PLAT WHERE the settlement had been was akin to a darkened lake that night. Father and son crouched on elbows. Men appeared in slow and hunched silence from the foothills. The father rose three fingers and the son agreed.

  They approached low behind their guns, totally unaware their souls might well be swallowed up. A wind sprang from nowhere and sent dust across the broken terrain. The father whispered to the son, "How well do you hear?"

  "Why?"

  The father touched his ear and held up one finger and pointed toward the rocks beyond the meeting house. The son understood.

  "I'll give that one a hello for you." Then Rawbone snaked up the ravine from where they lay in wait till there was only the faint movement of loose shale where he had just been.

  John Lourdes now stayed rigid against the earth. He had never killed before and this would be something else altogether. Those figures of the night reached the adobe foundations. They must not be thought of as men. They are just vestments really. Blackish shapes there to extinguish life. They started their slow and deadly trek up that once-upon-atime street. The night had not grown colder, yet John Lourdes was shivering. The wind moved through his clothes like the ghost of something insidious and horrible.

  These men will kill without so much as a reckoning. They will fire down till you're not even one whittled breath. One of the men put out a hand for the others to stop. He took a few cautious steps forward and John Lourdes recognized the bowed and partly lame stride as belonging to the gent at the roadhouse with the stiff mustache and cheery smile. He had seen something. John Lourdes hoped it was the bedrolls laid out like sleeping men within the meeting house walls.

  They moved ahead again with the steady assurance of those who had imperiled men before. He watched their stalk play out like a ritual. There was a stark grace to their configured tactics, a calm John Lourdes did not possess.

  The meeting house stood against the night sky. Its hollowed windows and huge gaping frame that once housed double doors the epitome of emptiness.

  John Lourdes scanned that rutted wash where Rawbone had gone. He listened with dire intensity, but there was only the wind through dry brush like flintstrikings. A vein in his temple pulsed vengefully.

  When they reached the meeting house door the men fanned out. They pressed in close to the adobe wall and near blended away. The one from the roadhouse raised a hand to make ready and as he did John Lourdes also reached out his hand where it hovered in dead space just above a detonator. He could feel the hand trembling all the way up
into the sinew of his neck.

  Even though John Lourdes was waiting and ready, their charge into the hollows happened so fast he froze. The walls flashed with the thunder light of their weapons. Arterials of smoke and powdered cloth leapt from the bedrolls. But there was not a cry, not a breath of movement that declared life was being taken.

  The bedrolls lay there like the lifeless bait they were. The men understood immediately and scattered. It was only then, at the last, before all advantage had been lost, that John Lourdes found himself. With the flat of his hand he drove down the plunger.

  ELEVEN

  OHN LOURDES HAD set the charge by the meeting house wall, burrowing dynamite into the sand, while Rawbone used a clump of sage to brush away any signs of that long run of wire to the detonator.

  There was a momentary harnessing of raw power. The front of the building was torn asunder and disappeared in an avalanche of smoke. The concussion echoed far out into the hills. The men were flung like paltry cloth dolls and from the sky a storm of adobe and rock hailed across that plat.

  John Lourdes rose now with his rifle ready and started into that smoky destruction, when far to his right there came the rapid action of an automatic. He came about and knelt, the rifle anchored up on his shoulder. Through the settling dust came a man running. He held his back and was calling in desperation to his friends. He stumbled and his boots dragged up a rising trail of dust. He collapsed to his knees and that is where Rawbone ran him down. He came out of the dark leaping from the rocks and put two more shots into the sagging body, which lurched forward at the last.

  He sprinted past the son, yelling, "Make sure they're all dead!" He kept on through the haze. "I'll take it to the road and introduce myself to any fool they might have left with the horses."

  John Lourdes walked the destruction. It was otherworldly. He could not fathom truly being there. The smell of charred clothes and flesh tainted the air and he worried it might poison him in some unknown way. He came upon the first, who lay on his side. There was nothing below the upper lip but a bloody shirt collar. Then he noted what he thought to be an odd necklace dangling down the man's face before he realized it was an eye loosed of its socket and hanging by a long thread of muscle.

  The next man lay on his stomach. John Lourdes knelt and eased the body over. The dark and lifeless face he came to see belonged to the man who'd faced him down in Juarez, the father of the girl Teresa. He stood. He stared down at this stranger on the other side of death. Questions abounded.

  Pilings of wood on the meeting house floor had caught fire. The air was singed with windblown ash. John Lourdes had to cover his face as he turned toward the last man, the one from the roadhouse.

  He sat against a backdrop of adobe and rotted timber beams. He was not dead, though he should have been as the shape of his head was hideously altered.

  From up the cart path came a headway of trampling hooves. Riderless mounts plunged headlong from the shadows hounded by gunshots and the gritty musculature of a motorcycle engine. Rawbone had herded up the horses. He yelled out as he wheeled in the motorcycle, "There was a last one down by the main road."

  Cinders from the fire were now a burning rain everywhere and Rawbone took to using his derby to swipe them from his eyes as he joined up with John Lourdes. "We better board up and be on with it. If any of these sparks find their way to-"

  The man from the roadhouse sat staring up at them. The father squatted. The man was gibbering away, yet there looked to be in his eyes a degree of consciousness and understanding. In his hand was the flashlight. Rawbone slipped it loose. He switched on the light and put it to the man's face. It mooned out of the dark. Blood seeped from a crack in the skull along the forehead. A bit of brain matter protruded from the wound, looking like the marbled head of a snail.

  "He's leaking oil, Mr. Lourdes."

  Rawbone stood.

  "It's your watch, Mr. Lourdes."

  The son understood. It was either finish him or forget him, as he was for the wolves. The father waited. He held his derby against the onslaught of scorched ash and heat.

  "The fire, Mr. Lourdes. One spark could send us off."

  He saw something pass over John Lourdes's face. A brief moment of the soul perhaps, of what had to be. It was not a look of indecision, but rather something more reflective of true human reluctance, or even a tragic pity. It mattered none. Rawbone had no place for either and hated each equally. He reached for his belted automatic, but John Lourdes grabbed his wrist and restrained him. Now, the father prided himself on strong arms, all the more so for a man his size, and he felt in the son's grip the same pure hard strength.

  "Strip each body of everything in their pockets," said John Lourdes. "Wallets, any scrap of paper. Leave nothing. Collect it for me. Saddlebags too."

  "Mr. Lourdes ..."

  The son ordered him again in no uncertain terms and the father walked off. "Why don't I do that, Mr. Lourdes. That'll give you some time to negotiate the matter at hand with your conscience."

  A moment later there was a gunshot that caused the horses to startle and scatter. The father turned. The impact had driven the man to the earth, where charred cinders blew over him. With a streak of pure mean Rawbone mocked what the dead man had said down at the roadhouse. "The way I see you by that truck, looking off to the hills ... you're a real climber, son."

  TWELVE

  FEW LAST SCATTERED sparks blew from that barren upland as the truck descended to the road. They had it rigged up and strapped down with the trappings of war. They'd even lashed the motorcycle, like some trophy from a battle of yore, to the truckbed.

  It was a matter now of the crossing into Mexico. The main bridges over the Rio Grande with their immigration agents and customs officers posed too much of a threat and so were out of the question. And finding shallows you would gamble a truck might navigate would be a marvel of stupidity. But Rawbone knew of a rope ferry south of El Paso near the old Socorro Mission. The river had changed course there near a half-century before, and was a place of isolated sandbars and lonely stretches of shoreline.

  They drove through the chilly hours before dawn. A smoky oil lamp hung from the roof frame above the son's head. The father's upturned derby rested on the cab seat between both men. It was filled to the brim with what Rawbone had scavenged from the dead as John Lourdes had ordered. Rawbone watched as John Lourdes meticulously studied each personal item, every bit of identification, holding them up to the trundling light, eyes squinting from the grainy smoke to better read ink that had faded with wear. He would then write certain details down in a pocket notebook he carried. His concentration stayed exact and his hand steady even as the truck pitched and rose on that worthless road.

  It seemed to Rawbone he himself did not even exist during these hours. He was, in fact, left to his own private maelstroms and outside the fitted plan. This fed a sense of disadvantage and that always left him uncertain and wary. "Why all the looking and writing, Mr. Lourdes?"

  He glanced up from his notebook. "I noticed," he said, "there's no paper money in that derby of yours."

  "You didn't order me to grub the dead for your salary."

  "I suppose you left it to the buzzards as a charitable donation."

  "As a matter of fact, my notion was to buy you something when we're done. In memorial of our time together."

  John Lourdes went back to his notebook.

  "You didn't answer me, Mr. Lourdes."

  "I didn't answer."

  "That much I know."

  John Lourdes looked up again. He slipped the pencil behind his ear, set the notebook in his lap. He began with the girl at the fumigation building, then following her into Mexico and sketching in a series of strange incidents that took him to that morning at the Mills Building.

  Rawbone leaned back and scratched at his cheek with the edge of a thumb. "If I ever meet her, I'll have to remember to thank her for the introduction."

  "One of the dead back on that mountain. The Mexican. That w
as her father."

  That detail was like a stone dropped into a pond of still water and the ripples it sent through Rawbone's mind. He said, "I see now."

  "Do you?"

  "If you want to get to the heart of something, cut away."

  John Lourdes had been thinking out how the dead back up on that mountain came to know about him and the truck. It seemed apparent. Mr. Simic and his associates had come upon an alternate way to resolve their unfortunate problem-they notified the people they were supplying that the truck and its cache of munitions had been taken. Rawbone leaned into the steering wheel and listened with unsettling intensity. They had to know the truck had been taken somewhere between Carlsbad and El Paso, so it was likely the munitions were hidden away somewhere not so easily discovered. With only one road between the two cities, how difficult would it be to watch for a truck painted up with lettering like the top of a birthday cake, well—

  He was staring toward the dark mesas that stood between him and his immunity when John Lourdes said, "There's something else that you ... we ... need to consider."

  "Have at it, Mr. Lourdes."

  "Any advantage you ... we ... had is gone. When some of theirs don't return and you come driving up with that truck-"

  "It will sure make for conversation, won't it?"

  "You know where we're going in Juarez and who we're to talk to. That was part of the deal. Alright. But my responsibility is to discover the names and/or identities of anyone and everyone involved or connected to this criminal enterprise. That's why I had you grab up all those men's personals." He held up the notebook. "That's what I'm writing here. That's why I'm telling you all this now. Those dead back up there in the mountains will have some say on what is going to happen when we reach Juarez."

  When John Lourdes had his say, he went back to his work without so much as another word, leaving Rawbone with a reality for which there was no apparent solution. He took a cigarette from its pack. He struck a match on the steering column. His mind was being drawn into the unseen ahead, and the survivor in him began to coolly plot what would best serve him.