Cape Hell

by Loren D. Estleman

  Out of duty I put in to post offices along the way, in case Blackthorne had wired further instructions or calling for a progress report, only to meet blank faces and shaking heads. Either I’d been forgotten—written off, as a bad debt—or the Judge was laying the groundwork for a plea of ignorance when the mission went sour. I was as much an orphan as Hector Cansado, whose brothers and sisters had been taken from him as by the unfeeling wind.

  No, nothing so substantial as an orphan. I was a phantom, like the train I rode, drifting through human bodies, constructions of wood, brick, and adobe, like a mist, only without the chill that came with it. There was no evidence that I existed. Outside Yuma, an antelope grazing next to the cinderbed didn’t raise its head as the train swept past within inches. As the animal dissolved in a wave of heat I put my hand to my mouth and bit hard into the tender flesh between my thumb and forefinger, and waited for the blood to come to the surface. When it did, proving something, I knew not what, I cracked open my Bible and read:

  Yet he shall perish forever like his own dung; they which have seen him shall say, Where is he?

  He shall fly away as a dream, and shall not be found; yea, he shall be chased away as a vision of the night.

  I slammed the book shut. Who wrote this thing, anyway?

  I worked my way back to the stock car, bracing myself against the arid wind that struck me like a sheet of superheated iron on the verandah; it stood my skin-cells on end and crackled the hairs in my nose. The wheatgrass stretching to the horizon laid down in the opposite direction the train was headed, making me dizzy. The world was spinning away from me, the ultimate rejection.

  The bay lifted its wedge-shaped head when I came through the door, studying me first with one eye, then turning to confirm what it had seen with the left, like a bird on a perch. I strapped on its feedbag and stroked its neck; it lunged, trying to bite me through the canvas. I found that reassuring. Horses still hated me; proof that I was flesh and not air.

  I had a strange sensation—a waking dream, like the wisp of unreality that told you you’d been dozing, even when you were struggling with sleeplessness—that I was looking at Lefty Dugan, the friend I’d killed in Butte.

  Is that what you thought? he seemed to be saying. It’s the other way around, Page. I killed you.

  Nothing had changed: Shoot one old partner to death and he never let you forget it.

  NINE

  “The time has come,” the walrus said, “to speak of rules.”

  The walrus in this case being Hector Cansado. I’d drunk myself into an Aberdeen stupor, with Alice in Wonderland splayed facedown on my chest and a touch of malaria, and awoke to a visage that lacked only whiskers and tusks to fulfill the dream.

  “Senor,” the engineer said, “We are in Mexico. But where we go, there are no fiestas, no pinatas, no pretty senoritas dancing barefoot upon tables. Nothing you have learned from the past applies to the place we are bound.”

  “I’ve been to Mexico before.”

  “I am sure you had your picture struck in Mexico City, wearing a sombrero and sitting upon a stuffed burro. Where we go, they know nothing of cameras or the telegraph. Men have been slain there for their watches; not to sell, but to take apart and see how they work. They mark the passage of time by the sun and the seasons. The sun sets early in the mountains and rises late, and what happens in between wears the cloak of night. It is no mystery how grotesque stories flourish there.

  “Trust no one, least of all your friends. That is rule number one.

  “Trust not yourself. Reason and insanity are not so easy to separate in the Mother Mountains: Down is up, dark is light, crooked straight. That is rule number two.”

  “How many more are they?” I asked. “Should I take notes?”

  “Ignore all rules. That is rule number three, and the last I shall give you.”

  “Was this conversation necessary at all?”

  He shrugged. His people were experts at that. “Perhaps not. Mi madre, rest her soul”—he crossed himself—“said you cannot know a man until you have seen him in his nightshirt.”

  I sat up in my berth. “Where are we now?”

  “The village of Alamos, in the Sonoran Desert. I suggest you take it in. It is the last civilization we shall encounter this side of Cabo Falso.”

  I dressed and went outside. The Ghost snorted rhythmically, pausing between exhalations, like a stallion bred for racing champing before the gate. Joseph sat as I had first seen him, feet dangling outside the cab, foraging in his sack of corn. His black eyes were more opaque than usual, like wax drippings; either he was relieved to be back on home ground or he’d sweetened his meal with leaves from the plants that grew in lush patches on the sides of the foothills beginning just steps from the train, their distinctive five-leaf clusters stirring in the slight breeze. I remembered what Blackthorne had said about Childress and his poppies growing between rows of sugar cane. They would thrive in that climate, like the marijuana. No country was better suited for cultivating human vice.

  The village, as old as any in North America, sprawled at the very foot of the Sierra Madres. It was as if one of the ancient gods had tilted the earth at a seventy-degree angle, and everything on it had slid into a jumble at the bottom. Some of the adobe structures were the oldest in appearance, the original surfaces beaten hard as concrete and covered with patches on patches, each smear a darker shade than its predecessor. The territorial movement had modified later constructions, the windows framed with pinon wood and roof poles extending two feet beyond the walls, looking like elephants’ tusks sawn off blunt. Signs identifying the businesses—CORREO, HERRERIA, CARNICERIA—were painted directly on the adobe. More recent buildings were built of pine carted down from just below the tree line and put up green, a blessing during the hot months, when cross-breezes swept through the spaces between the boards, but a curse in monsoon season; inside they would smell of moss and mold and breed mosquitoes the size of sparrows.

  A priest leaned in the doorway of the chapel, which although built of the inevitable adobe sported an outer shell of polished limestone, a gleaming white phantom in a world of brown earth. Although he wore the surplice and robes of his calling, his attitude, anticipating something he dared not hope for, a soul saved or a miracle granted, put me in mind of a butcher awaiting his next customer. His gray face brightened as I drew near, only to settle into resignation as I passed, smiling with my lips tight. His faith wasn’t mine; I felt no need for an intermediary between myself and my God.

  Drinking locally brewed beer in the cantina, dark and damp as a grotto, I heard a loud plop and rescued a woolly caterpillar from drowning among the hops floating in my glass.

  I didn’t tarry. In winter, gringos would migrate to that climate like swallows, but with the heat rising in twisting ribbons from the beaten earth of the street, mine was the whitest face in the room, and I was still burned as dark as cherry from riding the width of Montana Territory and back. The bartender—a full-blooded Yaqui, judging by his flat features and eyes like shards of polished coal—kept a machete slung by a sinew thong from the wall above the taps, and it didn’t strike me as just a decoration.

  I tossed some change on the bar, but as I made my way out I saw a rectangular sheet posted next to the door, as brown and wrinkled as cigarette paper, with a woodcut reproduced in black ink of a man in the uniform of a Mexican federale: khakis, Sam Browne belt, knee-length boots, schoolboy cap with its shiny leather visor, tearing the clothing from a terrified-looking senorita, and a legend I preferred to translate into English when I wasn’t among witnesses. I pretended to stumble, bumping against the wall, and held up a hand to my audience, reassuring them of my welfare, as with the other I tore the sheet off its nail and stuffed it into a pocket.

  VOLUNTEERS WANTED! [It read]

  TOP WAGES!

  FIGHT FOR FREEDOM, FAMILY, LAND

  SEE PROPRIETOR FOR DETAILS

  OSCAR CHILDRESS, MAJOR,

  THE ARMY OF LIBERTYr />
  I showed it to Cansado when he reported to the coach for his regular session with Scottish skullbender. He stared at it, said:

  “This same picture accompanied El Presidente Juarez’s leaflets at the time of the revolution. Alas, I was pressed into service before I learned my letters.”

  I made him a beneficiary of my incomplete Spanish. He nodded.

  “Ah. No monetary inducements were offered then. Had they been, it may not have been necessary to recruit my brother at the point of a bayonet.”

  “Correct me if things have changed since my last visit, but isn’t this evidence in favor of a firing squad?”

  “It is, perforce. But we are many miles from the capital, with many more to travel, most of them vertical, and steep canyons whose floors the sun has never reached. Many things lurk there, Senor Deputy, some with a hundred legs, and poison enough to paralyze a regiment. However, it is my observation that the danger increases as the number of legs wane, until one is left with but two, that march to the beat of General Childress’ drum.”

  I tilted my glass, pointing its rim at my companion. “Don’t be insulted, but you’re a liar. No illiterate can spout such poetry merely from the hearing.”

  The yellow bloated face showed no offense. “Is it not wise, sometimes, to feign ignorance, in order to barter time while your foe seeks to educate you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He hesitated, turning over the words; then grinned for the first time, looking like a jack-o’lantern on November first. He handed back the flyer.

  “I fail to see that this is of use. You knew of this already, from the American detective’s report. Surely you did not doubt its existence.”

  “He neglected to include a point of contact. Have you tried the local beer? The caterpillar I fished out of it seemed none the worse for swimming in it.”

  “Why drink that swill when you have—?” He paused with his glass half-raised. He set it down gently, his eyes fixed on mine. They had a strange quality, like the brother’s I’d never had.

  “This bartender,” he said, “will direct you to a lonely spot, where you will be assassinated, stripped of your clothes and skin, and dragged still living behind an oxcart, and then they will fry your entrails and serve them up with the local beer.”

  “The hell you say. Indians don’t eat human flesh.”

  “Did I say anything about Indians?”

  He was difficult to fathom. How did a man, whose entire life had been lived south of La Junta, know so much about the depths to which humans could sink? Just seeing his family decimated by continuous revolution didn’t answer. Some men are born already old in the ways of the wicked world.

  “You’re forgetting what I have to offer,” I said.

  “Dinero?” He drank, snorted Scotch out his nose, wiped his face on his sleeve. “Banditti apprehended with American gold coins are shot without trial, the gold divided among the arresting officers; these brigands would sooner handle a rattlesnake. Weapons? They will raid this car upon your death and confiscate them all.”

  He shook his head. “You Norteamericanos are all the same. You think what you own is what you are. You can take nothing from these people that they haven’t lost already, including their lives.”

  “I have one thing they can’t have, without the skills to use it,” I said, “and that, my friend, is your own ticket to life.”

  He drank, swallowed. “Now it is you who spouts poetry. What can you possibly give them that they cannot take?”

  I settled back in soft pigskin and gestured with my glass, taking in the coach, and by extension the Ghost itself.

  “As a wise man once said, no revolutionist would be caught dead without a train.”

  He set down the rest of his drink, rose, smoothed his overalls with all the care of a New York robber baron tugging down his white waistcoat.

  “I am not a slave, senor, to be sold with the machine I am employed to operate. You may make your terms with Joseph; but he knows little more about the whims of this particular conveyance than you.”

  “You picked a hell of a time to quit.”

  “No more so than the time you chose to tell me of your plan. You knew of this in Montana?”

  “I did. I had no way of knowing you weren’t aware of it yourself.”

  He sighed; he did it as well as he shrugged.

  “It is ever thus. The peon need not be consulted as to his fate.”

  I drained my glass, filled it again, and tipped the rest of the bottle into his.

  “I’m consulting you now. If you refuse, I have no choice but to turn back. A train’s no good without the man who knows how to run it.”

  “What is that to me? Your people are amateurs at war. My country has been at it since Cortes. Should I care whether Chester Cleveland or Oscar Childress is in charge of Los Estados Unidos? I have seen emperors and presidents rise and fall, and I am not yet forty years of age. I shall see many more, and yet my people will remain in the same sorry state as they were at the beginning.” He spread his palms. “What have I to gain?”

  “You’ve mixed up Chester Arthur with Grover Cleveland.”

  “No more so than those who have the privilege of voting.”

  “You’re going about it all wrong,” I said. “What more have you to lose?”

  “My life.”

  “Spent doing what? Carrying passengers from here to there and back? I saw cable cars doing just that in San Francisco. Where do you end? Where you started.”

  I stirred my drink with a finger. “Cape Hell, they call the place we’re headed. I should have asked you about that back in Helena, as an expert. I can’t think of any kind of damnation that didn’t put you back where you were in the beginning.”

  He picked up his glass, swirled the contents, looked into them, like a gypsy reading leaves in an empty teacup.

  “You make an interesting point, Senor. I cannot help but think that one way or the other leads to death.”

  I raised my glass. “To death. It’s the debt all men must pay.”

  “Por que no?” He raised his. “I for one always feel relieved once I have settled a bill.”

  TEN

  The door at the front of the car opened. Joseph in his overalls stood silhouetted dimly against the rear of the black tender, the white rectangle in his hand startlingly bright in the light of the lamps. It was a recent arrival, obviously. Nothing in his world of smoke, cinders, and grease remained unstained for more than a few minutes.

  “For him.” He pointed a corner of the envelope at me. “It came just now by a messenger.”

  He stepped forward to hand it to me. An awkward moment passed during which the engineer and I sat unmoving, waiting. Presently the fireman withdrew, drawing the door shut behind him.

  The envelope, in silk bond, was addressed to me in neat copperplate, sealed with a blob of black wax and the letters K.G.C. pressed into it, probably by a signet ring, in the center of an oak-leaf cluster. I showed it to Cansado.

  “I do not know these initials,” he said.

  “Knights of the Golden Circle. They spied in the North for the Confederacy during the war.” I broke the seal, and read, in the same tidy hand on matching stationery:

  Dear Mr. Murdock:

  I represent the legal interests of General Oscar Childress, and would consider it a great favour if you would honor me with your presence in my quarters this evening.

  A card engraved on heavier stock of the same quality was clipped to the page, replicating the name the writer had signed and his address:

  Felix Bonaparte, Esq.

  No. 9 Calle Santa Anna

  Alamos, Mexico

  “This name is French, is it not?”

  “It might explain his connection with the K.G.C.,” I said. “France sided with the rebels.”

  “It may be a trap.”

  “Probably.” I rose, rummaged among the artillery in the drawer of the gun rack, and buckled on the Deane-Adam
s.

  “Shall I go with you?”

  “No. The only thing I brought of any value is this train. If I gave them the man who knows how to run it, I’d be hailed as a hero of the Confederacy.”

  “I keep a pistol in the cab. Not even Joseph knows about it.”

  I got out the Springfield shotgun, laid it across his lap, and handed him a box of shells. “There’s no telling how many might come. If you let them get close enough, you can take out several at a time. Do you know—?”

  Before I could finish, he opened the trap-door action, poked a shell into the chamber, and slammed it shut. He smiled at my expression. “No, senor, I have never held this weapon. It is a poor engineer who can examine a piece of machinery and fail to determine how it works.”

  I spread my hands. “Then I’m away.”

  “Senor Deputy. Page.” He stood, foraged in a pocket of his overalls, and came up with an image of St. Christopher embossed in bronze at the end of a chain. “This was a gift of my grandmother, the day I left the village in which I was born. It has seen me through these many years.”

  I reached to take it. He snatched it back against his breast. His lips twisted.

  “Do you think, upon the basis of some nights spent in drink, I would give this to you?—this, of all things? I wished merely to say that I hoped you owned something in which you found the same measure of protection.”

  I grinned. “You son of a bitch.”

  “Sí.” He returned the token to its pocket. “I have this same information from the man I called my father, on his deathbed, where lies are useless. The knowledge of my bastardy by nature gives me a certain advantage over those who must earn the distinction by conduct.”

  I unholstered the English revolver, spun the cylinder, twirled it back into leather, patted my Bible, and put it in the side pocket of the frock coat I wore in civilization with the same flourish. “What the one cannot deliver, so the other shall.”