El Paso

by Winston Groom

  It was an emotional moment and Arthur felt a tear coming, which he brushed away. It was a much nicer service than he’d expected. He, Xenia, Katherine and Timmy, Beatie, Slim, Henry Flipper, Ah Dong, Bomba, Johnny and Donita Ollas, Gourd Woman, and Crosswinds Charlie sat in the front pews like family—after what they’d all been through, they all were family in a way. Even the old prospector turned up and had seated himself in the back of the church. Afterward, as they were walking down the steps of the church, a man approached Arthur.

  “Mr. Shaughnessy,” he said, “my name is John Reed, and I’ve heard of your ordeal. You might remember that I helped you back before all this, to get you gasoline for your plane in the desert. I want you to know that I was with Pancho Villa while he held your children captive.”

  “Why?” Arthur asked him.

  “Well, like I told you then, I’m reporting on the revolution for the New York World.”

  “Revolution?” Arthur repeated the word slowly, deliberately, so that it came out in four distinct syllables. “Is that what you call a revolution?”

  “The process takes many forms,” Reed responded, but felt a little uncomfortable saying it. “I lost a friend there myself,” he added.

  Arthur said nothing, but there was something icy in his gaze that almost frightened Reed.

  “I’d like to interview you for a story,” Reed said.

  “No, thank you,” Arthur told him.

  “No?”

  “I’m tired right now,” Arthur said.

  “But you rescued your children from Pancho Villa,” Reed said incredulously. “That’s a story the whole world will want to hear. It’s front-page stuff.”

  “Who cares?” Arthur replied. “I’m not in the newspaper business.”

  After they left the cemetery, Arthur was leading his party back to the hotel for a farewell luncheon. For most of them, he figured, it would probably be the last time they saw each other. Just then, the train out of Mexico was arriving. Its bell was clanging and steam was hissing as it pulled into the station, blocking their way. Arthur began to lead them around it when from out of the coal tender behind the engine a disheveled figure emerged, hobbling on a crutch. He was black with coal dust from head to toe, hair wild and eyes wide, and for all the world looked like a man in the circus who’d just been shot out of a cannon. For a moment Arthur didn’t recognized him.

  It was the Colonel.

  “Papa!” Arthur shouted, and rushed to him. The Old Man was grinning from ear to ear and gave Arthur a hug. Ah Dong, Bomba, Flipper—with Gourd Woman and Johnny Ollas hobbling after—had followed Arthur and were dancing around the Colonel; there was so much excitement that it took a while to get the story out.

  “I swapped myself for The City of Hartford!” the Colonel howled.

  “Your train car?” Arthur cried.

  “I hope you all don’t mind riding back to Boston in the coaches,” the Colonel said, chortling.

  “But how did you do it?” Arthur asked.

  The Colonel rubbed his hands merrily as he told them. “Old Villa wanted to know if I had my own car, and so I described it to him. When he learned it was right here in El Paso, we worked out a deal. He took me to a telegraph and I ordered the thing sent down toward Chihuahua. Villa says he’s gonna retire and move it onto a ranch and live in it! After a couple of days he began saying I was more of a pain to him than the children, that I was disagreeable and talked too much. He turned me loose near the railroad tracks, but since I didn’t have any money for a ticket, they let me ride in the coal car.”

  “I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch!” Arthur cried gleefully.

  “No, you won’t, and never will,” the Colonel told him soberly. “And don’t ever say that again.”

  Beatie, Xenia, and the children had also seen the creature emerge from the coal car but, like Arthur, didn’t recognize him immediately. When they realized who it was, they, too, rushed down the train platform, including Slim and Crosswinds Charlie. Everybody was talking and chattering and hugging and kissing the Colonel or clapping him on the back and pumping his hand. Arthur felt so glad that everybody was happy and together again. Between that and the hissing and clanging of the steam engine, the noise became a din, as if he’d stepped out into the rail yard in Chicago, or put his ear to a seashell. He tried to tell his father about Bob but the racket was too loud. He finally gave up. That could be later. For now, family, to him, was all that mattered.

  “Mexico,” the Colonel cried. “The hell with it.”

  “It ain’t that bad for some people,” said Death Valley Slim, “once you get used to it.”

  EPILOGUE

  The doctors pronounced that the mending of both the Colonel and Johnny Ollas was going as well as could be expected, considering the circumstances. In fact, one doctor said he’d never seen a severed limb sewn up so nicely as the job Ah Dong had done on Johnny. As for the Colonel, the doctor was astonished that his leg had been set almost perfectly by Cowboy Bob and he probably wouldn’t even have a limp.

  They remained in El Paso for a few days more, which didn’t seem to bother anyone; the reunion was bracing in itself. Arthur had to get the Grendel biplane taken apart again and put into a boxcar for shipment home.

  The morning they were to leave, Colonel Shaughnessy had a private meeting with Gourd Woman in his rooms at the Toltec. She’d asked to see him, and he suspected he knew why.

  “I suppose this is about Johnny,” the Colonel said.

  “No, it’s about you,” she told him.

  “Me, Lurie? What about me?”

  “I know you’ve been struggling with it,” she said.

  “With what?”

  “To tell him or not.”

  “You’re right, I have. It’s difficult. Why don’t you do it?”

  “He should hear it from you.”

  “Well, I don’t know why. You’re his mother, aren’t you? I’d take it as a kindness.”

  “Yes, but it would mean more to him if it was from you. After all, what could I give him? I barely make a living selling brooms.”

  Colonel Shaughnessy reflected on that for a long moment, then said:

  “You’re right again, Lurie. I was planning to bring him back to Boston with me anyway, him and his wife. Mexico’s no place for Johnny with all these lunatics on the loose, and he can’t fight bulls anymore, that’s for sure.”

  “But were you going to tell him?” she asked.

  “I hadn’t made up my mind. After all, if I do, I’ll have to tell my wife, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want him to have to live a lie. If he knows, after all this time, and then has to hide it as a secret, it wouldn’t be right.”

  “That will cause you trouble, won’t it?”

  “Of course, but I still like to think I’m an honorable man, even if I’ve done some things that everyone else, including my wife, might think weren’t right.”

  “You are honorable, John Shaughnessy. You’re one of the most honorable men I know.”

  “Say,” he said, “why don’t you come along, too? Mexico’s no good for you anymore, either.”

  “And do what?”’

  “Something better than selling brooms, I imagine.”

  THE FOLLOWING YEAR, when America entered the European war, the New England & Pacific Railroad at last got the profitable war contracts the Colonel had sought after, and Arthur finally convinced him that the only way to save the company in the long run was to take it public. When they did, the Old Man’s greatest fears were realized.

  First the new board of directors ordered him to sell Ajax, on grounds it was an extravagance, although they did let him order another private railcar, which he named The City of El Paso, even though his trains didn’t run within a thousand miles of there. Then they began reorganizing the company. Soon, speculating robber barons began moving in on the enterprise, driving up stock, trying to take it over. In the end they succeeded, and just as the Colonel had predicted, they
tossed him and Arthur out on their ears—though fortunately with enough money to keep them comfortable for the rest of their lives. The Colonel wasn’t really bitter about it. “I’d have done the same thing myself, if I’d been in their shoes,” he said.

  Johnny Ollas and Donita stayed around Boston long enough for him to get fitted with a cork leg. When he could dance as well as he used to bullfight, the Colonel gave him a job at the railroad, but he wasn’t really suited to it, and the weather didn’t much agree with the leg. Then, out of the blue, Donita wrote to Tom Mix out in Hollywood and he sent them an invitation to come out and visit. When they arrived, Mix set them up running a Mexican restaurant, one of the first fancy ones in Southern California, and it soon became the talk of the town.

  Crosswinds Charlie also became a success story—one for the books. After America got into the world war, he joined up with the U.S. Army Flying Corps. He went to France and became an ace pilot, with rows of medals on his chest after shooting down fourteen German planes. He became a colonel and was on the short list for general, but got out of the service to become the president of a large airline company.

  As for Slim, the Colonel gave him enough money to start his own musical band: Death Valley Slim and the Ghost Riders. They got a big record hit out on the radio in the 1920s—a pretty waltz called “I Love You More Than Yesterday,” in which Slim got to show off his Irish tenor and false-soprano yodel. Beatie invited him to play at one of the dances at Cornwall that she’d designed as a western theme party, complete with hay bales, western two-step dancing, and a few horses snorting around outside.

  By then, Tom Mix had become the biggest cowboy star in Hollywood, and to everyone’s surprise—and Katherine’s breathless delight—he accepted an invitation to come to Newport for Beatie’s big western party featuring Slim’s band. When he arrived that afternoon, Mix immediately visited Timmy and Katherine, and what was said between them has remained a secret from that day to this.

  Duly impressed by Cornwall, Mix informed the Colonel and Arthur that he left Pancho Villa right after the kids were rescued, figuring that one day it was “going to come down to Villa and me, and I reckoned it would probably be Villa,” so he sneaked off. He said he’d rather have done it another way, but the way it was done would just have to be good enough.

  Tom brought a lady friend with him, however, which almost broke Katherine’s heart. She’d never quite lost the crush she’d developed, and for a while it became more ardent when he began appearing in movies. She told her mother later that she noticed when he arrived he was wearing the little four-colored ascot-neckerchief she’d sewn for him. He didn’t mention it, she supposed, because the lady friend was present most of the time.

  However, at the western party that night Tom asked Katherine to dance—she had just turned seventeen—when Slim played his theme song, “I Love You More Than Yesterday.” She was radiantly beautiful in a white crinoline dress and he looked fine himself in a dark blue western-style suit with a cowboy-trimmed shirt and white silk tie. They made such a handsome couple waltzing around the floor that the other dancers not only cleared a path for them, but pretty soon couples left the dance floor entirely and stood on the sidelines to watch the famous movie star and the beautiful granddaughter of the host and hostess glide faultlessly along the dance floor, smiling and looking into each other’s eyes.

  They wound up in front of Slim’s bandstand as he sang the concluding melodic lyrics:

  This is how I love you,

  Forever and a year.

  I love you more than yesterday,

  And less than tomorrow, dear.

  Mix and Katherine exchanged bows and salutations with Death Valley Slim, who was all smiles and had grown a little mustache, and was resplendent in his fancy cowboy suit that glimmered with red sequins. Everyone at the party was applauding except for Mix’s lady friend, who remained at her table keeping a wary eye on things. As Mix escorted Katherine off the floor, he whispered to her, “Well, missy, I reckon I’ve finally saw the ocean.”

  “Yes,” she said, “and much more, I’m sure.”

  “If you ever come out to California I’ll show you something special,” he told her.

  “What’s that, Tom?” Katherine asked.

  “You remember that big cat that got after you?”

  “The jaguar,” she gasped, putting a hand to her throat, stopping just short of the family table where the lady friend sat.

  “Now he’s a rug in my office,” Mix told her. “I had him skinned, tanned, and stuffed, head an’ all.”

  “Oh, my,” Katherine said. “A rug?”

  “I wouldn’t have let him hurt you, missy,” Mix told her. “I became very fond of you two.”

  “I know that,” Katherine said. “And thank you for it.” She leaned up and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “’Bye Tom,” Katherine said, and fluttered off toward some friends from her school. There was still something there, barely definable, but suddenly it wasn’t a crush anymore. Katherine was certain of it. It was a kind of gratitude mixed with—oh, she’d figure it out another time.

  BEATIE PASSED AWAY IN 1938 AND THE COLONEL DIED the following year, but from the day she and the Colonel got back from El Paso till the day she died, she was a different woman. Maybe it was because the Colonel was a different man, too. They traveled to Europe and the South of France, and even went on African safaris. The last years were good to both of them.

  Bomba had stayed on for a while as the Colonel’s chauffeur until he proposed marriage to Lurie, the Gourd Woman. Colonel Shaughnessy set him up in a chauffeuring business in Hartford, where he acquired a fleet of big cars to haul the state’s crooked politicians around, and made a handsome living while Lurie ran the office side of the business.

  Xenia had Mick’s baby and she and Arthur adored him from the outset. Officially, he became Arthur Shaughnessy, Jr., but they called him Cowboy. Like his grandfather, he finished Harvard, but just in time for World War II. In 1943, he was killed in the South Pacific as a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps.

  After the railroad fiasco, Arthur did not return to Boston. Instead, with money from the sale of the NE&P, he and Xenia went down to El Paso and started an orphanage. Arthur asked around and found the same little piece of property northwest of the city that Cowboy Bob had once owned with the runaway wife. Bob’s description of it had been so charming that Arthur had pictured it in his mind as a golden place. He bought that and much more, in the shadows of the Franklin Mountains.

  There they built the orphanage of adobe buildings and put in trees amid the big cacti, and flowers, a lake, a school, a chapel, a hospital, fields for farming, riding trails, and livestock operations. There were baseball and football fields, a fully enclosed basketball court, as well as clay tennis courts and an eighteen-hole golf course. It was a first-class orphanage. They named it the Bob Braswell Children’s Academy, and opened it to any orphan, regardless of race, creed, or gender. For a while they took in a lot of Mexican kids whose parents had died in the revolution.

  There was a grassy spot with some cottonwood trees next to the horse corral where Arthur had commissioned a larger-than-life-sized bronze monument modeled on a Frederic Remington sculpture. It was of a cowboy riding a bucking bronco, waving his hat in his hand, and at the base was an inscription from what the priest had said at Bob’s funeral: “Greater Love Hath No Man Than This, That He Lay Down His Life For A Friend.”

  The children liked the monument because it was a place to gather around, but also because it represented action and toughness, and bravery and loyalty—what people like to think of as the old cowboy creed; the children went there during their lunch recesses. The birds liked the monument, too, and after a few years, with rains, baking heat, cold blue northers, and the birds, it took on a special patina that, if you caught it just right in the El Paso sunsets, made it glow “like an old iron skillet that’s been left too long on a fire,” the Colonel once said.

  Timmy—Tim now—finished at G
roton, and went on to Harvard, graduating summa cum laude. Taught to fly by his father, he stayed in El Paso, where he started a flying school that the army used during World War II to train pilots. He survived the war himself, flying P-38 fighters in the Pacific, and became involved in the orphanage. But he spent much of his time in adventurous traveling, too—hiking in the Alps and Urals, diving in the South Pacific, mountain climbing in South America, sailing in Australia. At one point, for a lark, he even led a gold prospecting expedition in Mexico’s high sierras.

  Katherine’s fate, however, was tragic. She had just graduated from Miss Porter’s School at Farmington when Arthur and Xenia moved to El Paso, and she went with them for the summer. Tall, beautiful, smart, and poised, she was teaching equestrian jumping to some of the older orphans when her horse nicked the high bar; a fluke. It stumbled, couldn’t recover, and she went over the top. She only lived for a few minutes after that, but Arthur and Xenia managed to rush to her. Her last words were, “Papa, I’m cold . . .”

  They buried Katherine in the corner of the field near Cowboy Bob’s monument. More than twenty years afterward, Tom Mix stopped by while traveling for promotion of his Wild West show. He was a little old by then, and somewhat bent, but people, including Arthur and Xenia, remembered that at one point he went down on a knee before the stone and hung his head for a long while.

  As he walked away, children from the orphanage, scores of them, swarmed around wanting autographs. They presented pads of lined paper from school, backs of church bulletins, paper napkins, brown lunch bags, and scraps of paper of all description. Mix put on his signature smile and signed his name, as he’d done thousands of times before.