The Mule Tamer III, Marta's Quest

by John Horst

  She eventually made it north to the mining camp, to her man. It was late and Tolkenhorn was drunk; he staggered out to greet her. The lovers were always formal around the lawyer, put on a show for him and Rebecca acted carefully this night. She wasn’t certain why, but she didn’t want Tolkenhorn to know about the army to the south. Curtin was there immediately, could not bear the thought of having Tolkenhorn so much as look at Rebecca. He did his best to make certain she did not have to talk to the drunken sot.

  “Miss Walsh.”

  “Mr. Curtin.”

  “How may I help?” Curtin stiffly, formally, helped her from her horse, eased her down and held her gently by the hand. Tolkenhorn babbled something along the lines of a greeting then turned and found his way back inside. They did not see him again.

  “Just taking in the night air, found myself up this way and thought I’d drop in.” She looked on at the encampment and it was mostly dark. “Didn’t realize the time, is it too late for a visit?”

  Curtin tried his best to play the part. He suppressed a grin, was so pleased that she would come to see him at such an hour and simultaneously worried for her safety. He bowed slightly as he gave his reply. “Not at all, Miss Walsh, not at all.”

  They wandered away from the lawyer’s quarters and were finally alone. She kissed him passionately on the lips. “Big news Robert! Emiliano Zapata and his army are at the ranch.”

  “You don’t say!” Even Curtin was a little caught up in the celebrity of the general. He looked on at Rebecca who was so excited. “Now, don’t get too friendly, you. I’ve heard he’s quite the lady’s man.”

  She kissed him again. “Stop. You’re being silly.” He suddenly gave her a thought and she wanted to ride back. Marta would be in the man’s bed if she’d get the chance and that would break Del Calle’s heart. “Robert, I can’t stay, but I want you to stay away tonight, for the next couple of days. Gringos are not popular with Zapata and his army. You understand, don’t you darling?”

  “Sure, sure.” He felt the old sting of prejudice. He thought about Rebecca and Marta. They’d certainly known it well enough.

  She smiled at him, knew what he was thinking. “It’s not you, darling, I’m sure he’d like you, it’s the oil company, it’s American business, Hearst, all the bastards who want to control this land. It’s not you.”

  “I understand.” He grinned at her choice of words, his little angel was becoming tougher by the day, or was it that she always was, and this toughness was just now becoming known to him?

  “And that’s why I love you so much, darling. You do understand.” She kissed him again. “I want you so badly.” They kissed some more.

  “What’s he doing here, Rebecca?”

  “He came to see us, Marta mostly, and me. He wants our help, wants us to help him in the revolution. Oh, he’s grand, Robert. He’s a tall man. I never knew that, he is big and nice, he jokes. He makes jokes. We’re attacking a train tomorrow and…”

  “Wait, wait.” Robert looked her in the eye. “Who’s attacking a train tomorrow?”

  “We are, Marta and I, with his army.” She looked at him and knew the look he was giving her only too well.

  “No. No. Rebecca, no! It’s no…”

  “We’re going to be with the general, we won’t be actually fighting, Robert.”

  “No. This is ludicrous. You don’t attack trains! My God, you both are insane.”

  “It can’t be helped. I negotiated that much, Robert. Marta wanted to be in the fray. I only just convinced her to stay with Zapata. There’s no real harm in it.”

  “And what’s this got to do with you?”

  “I’ve got to be with her, to keep her out of trouble. To keep her to her word. Robert, you don’t know her.”

  “Oh, I think I do, that’s what worries me. The girl who jumped on a shark’s back? Yes, I know her, Rebecca, I know her well. And you! You’re both like a pair of deranged Amazons. I won’t have it, Rebecca I swear, I won’t have it.”

  “Robert, I’m sorry.” She wasn’t angry, more amused. She continued in her most straightforward tone. “I didn’t come to ask for permission. I came to tell you what’s going on, but not to ask permission. I know you…”

  “Rebecca Walsh, I’m warning you.” He grabbed her by the shoulders and looked her in the eye. “If you do this thing, I swear…I won’t talk to you…for the next ten minutes.” And he didn’t. He sat down and sulked like a schoolboy. She poked and prodded and couldn’t get a word from him. She sat back and folded her arms. Waited and watched him. He was resolute. He could not be moved. She finally patted his vest and found his cigarette case, took one and had a smoke. She waited, smoked and blew smoke at the moon and waited. Finally he took out his watch, checked the time and looked on at her.

  “Okay, then.” He reached around and kissed her on the mouth. He held her in his arms and snuggled against her breast. “You be careful tomorrow. If you get killed, so help me, that just now was nothing. I’ll never speak to you again!”

  She kissed him again. “I love you Robert Curtin.”

  He kissed her. “What kind of world am I in, Miss Rebecca Walsh? What kind of crazy creature did I fall in love with? What happened to the obedient little woman who sat by the hearth, waiting for her man to come home?” He grinned and she understood the irony in his voice.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t want such a woman, really, would you?”

  “No.” He thought on that and looked her in the eye. “No, I wouldn’t. But it doesn’t mean that my insides won’t stay tied up in knots worrying over you. I guess I’ve got to get used to that. Living in knots, tied up in knots for the rest of my days.”

  She stood up and kissed him again. “Sorry about all that Robert. You’re running with wild Indians now, get used to it.” She reached over and touched his face. “Gotta run, gotta get ready for the battle.” She smiled and waited for the wounded look on his face. It would do him good to worry over her a little. “Stay here, don’t want the lawyer to see us when I go.” She was gone and he wondered at what just transpired. The woman going off to battle and the man staying behind.

  Tolkenhorn was still up when Curtin returned to the building that housed their apartments. He looked on at Curtin with a ridiculous, greasy, ugly expression. Barely comprehensible, he mumbled. “Quite the li’le firecracker, in’t she?”

  “Who?”

  “That Walsh girl, of course. Bedded her yet?” He hiccupped, then covered his mouth.

  “You better go to bed, Miles. You’re drunk and I might break your nose for you.”

  “Easy, lad, easy.” He held up a shaky hand. “No offence, but all these darkies. They can’t help it, too close to the land, they’re a wild bunch.”

  “You’re out of your element, Miles, and you are an ignorant and stupid man.” He looked at the lawyer and pushed him backward, off balance and the man fell into a chair. “If you ever say anything about Rebecca Walsh or Marta del Toro again, I’ll beat you ‘til you can’t see, understand, Miles?”

  “I understand.” Now it was his turn to sulk but he suddenly remembered, “Robert?”

  Curtin stopped and looked over his shoulder. “What?”

  “Are you making any progress? Any progress at all?”

  “Yes.” He turned and looked on at the old man. “I’ve got a plan, Miles. Leave it up to me, I’ve got a plan that will make all your worries go away, I promise, but you’ve got to give me time, you’ve got to have patience.” He went back and held out is hand. “I’m sorry for roughing you up, Miles.” They shook hands, “you know, I’m just a little on edge lately, those two have got me not knowing whether I’m coming or going. Never had such a time with the ladies.” He grinned and Miles smiled.

  “I trust you, boy.”

  The army was ready by sunrise. Rebecca and Marta now rode with General Zapata, his lieutenants all around them. He was in an especially good mood and looked on, smiling at Marta every chance he would get.

  Off in a dis
tance a man, mounted, could be seen standing in the road, waiting for them. Robert Curtin stood up in his saddle, he removed his hat and bowed to the general. “General Zapata, my name is Robert Curtin and I work for Señorita Del Toro. I’d be much obliged if you’d let me ride along, sir.”

  Zapata smiled, looked back at the object of Robert Curtin’s focus. He grinned. “Oh, I see.” He looked back at Curtin, then pointed to him to take up a spot between himself and Rebecca Walsh. “You ride here, Mr. Curtin.”

  They were off and in position in short order. Several soldiers disconnected a rail around the bend in the track. The train engineer would not see it in time. Now they waited and Rebecca was able to sidle up to Marta. “Zapata was in an especially good mood this morning.”

  “Uh huh.” Marta grinned.

  “Marta, you didn’t.”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “You know what.”

  “Oh, I gave him something, but it wasn’t that. Something much better.”

  Rebecca breathed, relieved. “What?”

  “A hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Oh.” She reached over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I’m glad. For Pedro’s sake, I’m glad.”

  The train careened for several hundred yards and now Rebecca was suddenly ill. Marta held her hand tightly as she just now remembered the train wreck of a decade ago, the train wreck she helped to make happen and the train wreck that Rebecca had survived.

  It was a tragic event, no matter how pure the intentions and everyone watched the awesome power of the locomotive as it drove itself into the ground. The Federale guards riding forward did not stand a chance, and the few who survived were soon dispatched by the general’s cavalry. Marta watched in awe.

  The women were especially impressive to her. They were mostly poor peasant women, the ones who greeted her so warmly the night before, wearing not much more than rags, the crossed bandoliers, the bullets for their Mauser rifles or Winchesters, each a deadly reminder of what it was all about. They were good and competent and fearless. They knew their business and knew what it was all about. It was all about killing, doing more killing than the other side, killing more than the other side was willing to lose, and they were resolute in their purpose.

  One car remained on the track and the few Federales still able to fight had a machinegun working on its roof. It was a significant encumbrance and soon many of Zapata’s soldiers were pinned down. The success of the operation seemed now to hang in the balance.

  Suddenly, Marta kicked her mount’s sides and galloped off before anyone could call her back. Zapata smiled on at Curtin and Rebecca Walsh. He shrugged. There was nothing he could do, and he would not have, really, if there was.

  Marta flanked them, was soon climbing the ladder to the top of the train, the little machinegun nest spitting its deadly fire, everyone oblivious to her actions. The Federales were terrified; they were firing to desperately save their own skins and did not have the presence of mind to guard their flanks and rear.

  She had her favorite shotgun, the pump gun, the kind her mother had used so effectively during her furious ride against Marta’s father and his gang. She soon had it spitting its deadly fire as well, and Federales now lay, dead or dying around the defunct gun. She looked up proudly at the general and his entourage. She held up the shotgun in victory as Rebecca sat, doing her best impersonation of their old severe housekeeper from the mule ranch. But Pilar would have been proud…of both of them.

  It was all over so quickly and now the ugliness of war was fully revealed. Zapata kept no prisoners. He could not, did not have a prisoner of war camp, did not even have enough food for his own army, and certainly did not for an army of prisoners. Soon several dozen Federales were lined up. They were offered two choices, join Zapata or die. Many chose the latter and were quickly obliged.

  Rebecca was especially unnerved now. It was not because of the killing, she was used to that, and expected it. But the child soldiers where almost too much to bear. They all, every one of them, looked just like Marta the day Rebecca met her in her captor’s tent nearly a dozen years ago. She remembered it so vividly. She thought of the scars Marta bore and looked on and on at the dozens of little children, all the scars, all the sad nights ahead, all the terrifying dreams and she wanted to cry and grab them up and take them from this terrible place. She wanted to build a convent like the one the mother superior took her to up in Bisbee all those years ago. She’d build a convent, a sanctuary a hundred times that size and put a wall fifty feet high around it to keep out the war and the suffering and the horrors that no child, no adult, really, should ever know.

  To Zapata’s mind, no one was too young to fight and he saw the look of trepidation on Rebecca’s face. He dismounted and walked to one little boy who was stripping a dead Federale. He patted the boy’s head and looked up at Rebecca. “This is Juan, Miss Walsh. I found him digging through a dung heap, looking for some bits of food.” He smiled at the boy who smiled back. “His diet used to consist of more shit than food.”

  He walked a few feet and put his hand on another child’s head. She was pulling bandoliers off her tiny shoulders and placing them in a pile. “Maria.” He gently kissed her forehead and she smiled up at him, then immediately went back to the task at hand. “Maria was found at death’s door. She was beaten so badly that she could not walk. Her crime was that she was dipping her fingers into a pot of raw eggs. She was hungry and could not contain herself.” He grinned cynically. “The eggs were being rubbed into the coat of a hacendado’s prize racehorse.” He looked up at her and she thought she could see tears welling in his eyes. “A shiny coat on a horse is so important, Miss Walsh.”

  Zapata remounted and rode up next to Rebecca, looked on at her and finally said, “Miss Walsh, the newspapers did get this part right,” He looked on at some others, two small boys and a girl unloading ammunition from a cattle car. “It’s better for them to die on their feet than to live on their knees.”

  She knew that he was sincere. She understood why it was all happening but could not let it go. She wasn’t trying to fight with the man, but she wanted to, had to say it. “It’s not the dying that I worry over, General. When they die, their troubles will be over. It is living that will be so hard on them.” With that, as if on cue, to prove her point, Marta galloped up on them, stopped her mount amidst them and grinned broadly. She was on the high, the high that only battle brings.

  “Well,” She lit a cigarette with trembling hands. “That sure broke up the monotony.”

  IX Breaking Point

  Miles Tolkenhorn sat and waited and trembled. He had three shots of rye to steady his nerves and wished for a fourth. He mostly never ate anything before one in the afternoon which was fine as he didn’t start drinking until five. Today he’d done it in reverse and the rye was burning a hole in his gut all the way into his back. The general terrified him and always made him wait in an antechamber that was decorated with scenes of carnage. It was always hot and no air moved in the room. After another hour he was soaked with sweat and his celluloid collar was cutting into his neck and he now felt as if he could not breathe. He tried his best to calm down.

  The general had spent the first part of his career serving the Díaz dictatorship and honed his skill as a corrupt and sadistic government official during that time. He was initially disappointed in the exile of his boss, but later realized that there might be greater profit to him in supporting the Madero presidency. He did this with great false enthusiasm, and soon he was given unfettered access to money and full control of the army.

  Madero was not the kind of man who could control the general, and soon the general was treating the new president as his puppet and after a few months, realized that his aspirations were too modest, too conservative, that with a little maneuvering, he could obtain a position far beyond that of supreme general of the Federale army. He could be the next Porfirio Díaz, and then, nothing but old age could stop him.

  This was an appeal
ing thought to him, he was just fifty years old, Díaz was still alive at more than eighty so, by his calculations, he could be the president of Mexico for the next thirty years, if his health held out and he played his cards right.

  The meeting with Tolkenhorn was just a little side project, but the idea of getting that nice bit of land was appealing to him. If the lawyer could be trusted, the yield would be in the millions, annually, for years to come and that was not including the gold, just the oil and gas. He thought about the scale of his potential earnings and it soon became easy for him to measure his success in millions, tens of millions, even more. The more he thought about it, the less appealing it was for him to be pulling in his paltry quarter of a million a year. He no longer even thought in pesos, but the international money of the world, the US dollar.

  He was an advocate of Taft’s dollar diplomacy and thought in terms of Mexico being the next United States, not in democracy of course, as a good monster and aspiring totalitarian dictator, democracy was a hateful concept to him, but as far as enriching himself and his cronies, he liked to think that he would someday make Mexico rival his neighbor to the north.

  In another hour the ambassador came in. He walked past Miles Tolkenhorn without acknowledging his presence and went into the general’s office. The odor wafted as the door opened and closed and this made Tolkenhorn nauseous. He was going to vomit now, looked desperately for a receptacle, could find none, found a vase and vomited into it. He felt better but now the air was full of his vomit odor and his sweat and the stench of the general’s office and he was certain he would die right at that very moment. He was certain he’d not survive this ordeal and they’d finally come out to fetch him to interrogate and lambast and ridicule him and it would have been just fine by him if they walked up on his sweaty corpse, slumped in the chair. He’d rather be dead than be there now.