Last Train From Cuernavaca

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Angel carried her father’s carbine on a strap across her back. Her knife rode in a sheath tied under her trouser leg. She wore one ammunition belt buckled around her waist, and two more crossed on her chest. She was looking forward to blowing the doors off a freight car with her homemade grenades, although Antonio was of the opinion that they might detach their own fingers in the process.

  Angel used her new binoculars to sight north and south along the rails. Then she shifted in her saddle and surveyed the crags and cliffs around them. She turned to Antonio.

  “Ugly, are you sure the federales won’t be joining us?”

  “They patrol this section of the track at dawn and dusk. My sister overheard the officers say so at their card game.”

  “At the gringo hotel on the zócalo?”

  “Yes.”

  “The one the English owns?”

  “Yes. Socorro says they’re bringing arms and ammunition on the train from Mexico City today. And horses in the stock cars.”

  “Maybe they wanted to trick anyone who might be listening.”

  “My sister says the officers were emptying bottles of cognac as fast as she could bring more to the cantinero. She says they were so drunk they could hardly play their cards, much less make up lies about anything except the size of their cocks.”

  They saw the smoke from the train’s stack before they heard the steam whistle, forlorn as a calf who knew he was destined to become veal. The engine rounded the curve. The engineer must have seen the tree trunk lying across the track and swung on the brake lever with all his weight. Sparks sprayed from the wheels like fiesta fireworks. The train stopped with the cowcatcher nudging the log.

  Angel and the others spurred their horses into a gallop. Most of them headed for the freight cars where the ammunition and weapons would be stored. Grenade in hand, Angel rode toward the cattle car. The last thing she expected was for the doors to rumble open and ramps to rattle into place. A young captain, saber raised, led a troop of cavalry down them with bugle blaring and rifles blazing.

  The surprise caused time to slow for Angel and she took a good look at the captain as he charged toward her. She had three rapid thoughts. One: he and his men weren’t supposed to be in that cattle car. Two: he was very handsome. Three: if she killed him, whom among her compatriots would she have to fight for possession of his magnificent horse. Then she realized it was the same horse she had seen at her first skirmish at the river a few weeks ago.

  Even if she had had time to light the fuse and pitch the grenade at him, she wouldn’t have. She didn’t mind blowing him up, but she wouldn’t risk injuring that horse. She fired off a few shots before she realized that breveted discretion now outranked valor. Most of her comrades had already scattered under a hard rain of federal lead. She held her ground until the last of her men found cover. She emptied her carbine, then reined the mare in a tight turn and fled with bullets zinging past her ears.

  She had almost reached shelter when she saw the company’s flag lying on the ground ahead. With the mare at full gallop she took her right foot out of the stirrup and slid toward the left. She hooked her foot on the pommel, leaned down, and snatched the flag as the horse thundered by. She held it high, shouting “Land and liberty” as she spurred the mare up the rocky slope.

  Antonio knew the bottomless nooks and craggy crannies of these mountains better than anyone and Angel followed him. She expected the federales to give up the chase quickly. They always had before. But the pretty captain on the big Andalusian stayed close behind and Angel resented him for it. Why wasn’t he flirting with the simpering señoritas in some small-town plaza instead of bothering her?

  She and Antonio hauled their mounts up perpendicular slopes and slid down the other sides. They finally ducked through a narrow opening not visible from the path and lost the captain. They rode until they were certain no one followed them. When they dismounted Angel put both hands on Antonio’s chest and shoved him.

  “¡Chinga!” She shoved him again. “Your sister said this train would carry horses and supplies with only a small guard.”

  “Cálma-te, Brat. Maybe Colonel Fatso changed his plans and forgot to mention it to the kitchen help.”

  Antonio reached out and took off Angel’s hat. He put a finger through the bullet hole in the brim, snug up against the base of the crown. He wiggled the finger at her.

  “God watched over you today, my love.”

  Angel stared at the finger. Half an inch to the right and she would be buzzard bait. Still clutching her company’s colors to her chest, she began to shake. Antonio put his arms around her and pulled her close. He stroked her hair and then he did something strange. He lifted her chin and brushed her lips with his own. She pulled away and wiped her mouth.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s called kissing. Gringos do it. I saw it in a movie.”

  “It’s disgusting.”

  But Angel was curious. She moved close and tilted her head back. Antonio kissed her again and shivers went through her. She kissed him back, tentively, awkwardly, then enthusiastically. This was one of the gringos’ better ideas.

  15

  All’s Fair in War and Tango

  Grace pulled her long skirt aside and slid onto the piano bench. She began to play, her fingers hitting the keys lightly.

  Lyda drifted in from the front desk. She set her elbows on the piano, put her chin in her hands, and crossed her ankles. Her latest outfit included a midnight-blue coolie shirt, pale green harem pants, and leather sandals from the market.

  “Isn’t that a song María sings?”

  “Yes. It’s called ‘Curses on the Kitchen.’” Grace sang her English version.

  Curses on the kitchen, curses on the smoke,

  Curses on the woman who loves any bloke.

  Because men, because men,

  When they know they’re loved,

  Ay caramba! They treat you like a moke.

  “A moke?”

  “Slang for donkey.”

  “Your choice of music wouldn’t have anything to do with an absent army captain, would it?”

  “Of course not.” Grace launched into a vigorous rendition of her favorite: “‘I’m Henery the Eighth, I am.’”

  “Where did a proper English dame like you learn to play honky-tonk music?”

  “My mother and father performed in music halls.”

  “Like vaudeville? Do tell! I would have placed you among the Ascot swells.”

  “Rather unlikely. I grew up backstage. I spent so much time watching the acts through the curtain, it’s a wonder I didn’t bloom into a Peeping Thomas.”

  “Where are they now, your parents?”

  “They expired in a theater fire when I was thirteen. Socorro’s age, now that I think on it. Quite a scene, really. A great deal of shouting and running about. I escaped through a sewer pipe.” Grace sighed. “The smell of smoke and sewage still gives me the shakes.”

  “Then you must be terrified all the time in this country.”

  Grace didn’t elaborate on why that wasn’t so. Mexico had been her salvation. Various performers had taken her in after her parents died, but they could hardly feed themselves. She had lived in London slums worse than anything here. If she hadn’t met Carlos while she was performing in Hyde Park one Sunday afternoon…well, she didn’t want to think about it.

  Socrates arrived in what was for him an agitated state. “A delivery just came.”

  “For whom?”

  “For you, señora.”

  “I’ll bet I know who it’s from,” Lyda said.

  Two big crates and several smaller ones sat in the courtyard like visiting dignitaries and entourage.

  “Rico must have sent them,” said Lyda.

  “Not necessarily.”

  “You know he did. Listen, darlin’, the man is smitten with you, and you’re fighting off love like it was a case of the influenza.”

  “I doubt his intentions are genuine.”

/>   “So enjoy the fling. You know what they say, ‘Amor lejos es para pendejos.’ Love at a distance is for fools.”

  “I have to maintain decorum. What sort of example would I set for the staff?”

  “Your people want you to be happy, Gracie. They all know that God does not intend for a woman to sleep alone. And they like Rico.”

  Socrates cleared his throat. “Señora, the drayman who delivered the boxes said rebels attacked the train at Tres Marías.”

  “Did he say if anyone was hurt?”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  Grace wondered if Captain Martín was on the train with the boxes.

  Annie showed up and soon most of the guests and staff had gathered to stare at the crates. Everyone but Grace speculated as to what they contained. She could only wonder if the sender was alive.

  “They’re addressed to you, Gracie,” said Lyda. “Open them.”

  “We should wait for Captain Martín.”

  The sun went behind the mountains and darkness began gathering. On the zócalo the band finished its evening concert with a flourish and only one trombone out of tune. Grace was about to ask Socrates to drive her to the station to inquire about the attack when Rico sauntered through the front gate.

  He looked surprised to see so many people assembled. He obviously had bathed quite recently, maybe at the barracks. He was freshly shaven. His hair was still wet and slicked back. He wore his dress blues with gaiters as white as egret feathers and the green collar piping and trouser stripes of the cavalry. From ten feet away, Grace could smell cologne.

  She wanted to shout at him, “We have a telephone! Why didn’t you call to tell us you were safe?”

  Instead she said, “We heard there was an attack on the train.”

  “Just a few young hotheads taking potshots. Nothing to worry about.”

  Then Grace stated the obvious and felt like a walloping great fool afterward.

  “Your parcels arrived, Captain Martín.”

  “They’re your parcels, Mrs. Knight. Why haven’t you opened them?”

  “She said we had to wait for you,” said Annie.

  “Then let’s not waste any more time.”

  Socrates and the gardener helped him pry off the lids. Rico unwrapped a gleaming brass horn as long as his arm. Its flared bell was large enough to accommodate a curious cat. He handed it to Socrates to hold while he took the wrappings off the mahogany case adorned with nickel plating.

  Annie squealed. Lyda clapped her hands. “It’s a phonograph!”

  “Edison’s Opera phonograph.” Rico screwed the horn and the crank in place and began opening packages of celluloid circles, bamboo needles, and a device that would sharpen them. “1911 model. You’ll notice it plays disks instead of cylinders. Each one contains two minutes of music.”

  Lyda murmured in Grace’s ear, “Those contraptions cost fifty dollars in the States.”

  “I can’t accept this, Captain Martín.”

  “Must you give it back?” Annie seemed about to cry. Even Lyda looked crestfallen.

  “You’re very kind, but really, it’s too expensive.”

  Rico leaned close and spoke softly so only Grace could hear. “As Wordsworth once said, ‘High Heaven rejects the lore of nicely calculated less and more.’”

  “Even so, Captain…”

  “Very well. I’ll give it to someone else here because it is not leaving the Colonial.”

  Lyda spoke up. “Gracie, why not accept Captain Martín’s kindness on behalf of the hotel? You can be in charge of it, but everyone can enjoy it.”

  Socrates had already brought a table from the kitchen and placed it just inside the archway leading to the lobby. Rico set the phonograph on it. He placed a disk on the turntable and cranked the handle. With the delicacy of an eye surgeon he lowered the arm until the tip of the needle kissed the grooves. The reedy notes of “Fig Leaf Rag” drew Grace like a cat to cream.

  When the music ended everyone applauded.

  Rico put on another disk. “The next song is called ‘La Morocha,’ ‘The Brunette.’”

  This music was nothing like ragtime.

  “Do you dance tango, Mrs. Knight?”

  “I don’t know how.” Grace had heard that tango originated in Argentinian brothels. Now she could believe it.

  “It’s all the go in Paris these days,” said Lyda. Then she whispered in Grace’s ear, “In the States women wear devices like railway car bumpers when they dance it. You can imagine why.”

  That didn’t inspire confidence in Grace.

  “It’s easy.” Rico held out a hand.

  Grace looked for an escape, but Lyda and Annie hemmed her in.

  Even María, wiping her plump hands on her apron, called from the archway, “Baile, señora. Dance.”

  “Follow my lead.” Rico slid his right arm so far around her that she could feel the strength of his fingers pressing between her shoulder blades.

  She gasped when he pulled her to him. In all those boxes there was not one bumper for her to strap on. She thought she would faint with the shock of his lean muscular body pressed against her, a line of contact from the knees, up the thighs, the hips, and chest. Even his cheek pressed against hers. He definitely had shaved before coming here and the cologne was intoxicating.

  She wanted to pull away, but she couldn’t bring herself to create a scene. Hotel guests watched from the downstairs corridors and the upstairs gallery. Drawn by the music, passersby crowded into the entryway.

  She moved like a fence post and she stepped on his foot in the process.

  “So sorry. Really Captain, we should stop before I make a cripple of you.”

  When the song ended, Lyda cranked the machine again and set the needle back at the beginning. Grace glared at her, but she didn’t look in the least repentant.

  Rico shook Grace gently to loosen her vertebrae. “Imagine that you’re a rag doll.”

  Grace didn’t so much relax as surrender, and he began to move slowly. He counted for her as he went, his cheek against hers, his breath tickling her ear.

  “It’s no wonder they banned this dance in Boston,” she murmured.

  “Don’t forget Cleveland,” he said. “They banned it there, too.”

  He moved her forward and back, his legs scissoring between hers, tautening her skirt against her legs. He whirled her until the walls began to revolve and she threw her head back and laughed. Lyda set a chair next to the phonograph and kept the music playing while Rico and Grace circled the courtyard under the starlit sky.

  Grace didn’t notice that the spectators had drifted away. She didn’t even notice that the music stopped two minutes after Lyda reset the needle one last time, yawned, stretched, and left with Annie for home. By then the rhythm had soaked into Grace’s muscles, bones, and viscera.

  When Grace and Rico stopped dancing they stood as remote from the world as if on a cay in the middle of the ocean. A breeze rustled the palm fronds and the banana leaves. The water sang in the fountain. Rico slid his fingers along Grace’s temples and into the waves of her hair.

  “Captain, I can’t.”

  “One of your countrymen said a very wise thing.” Rico laid his palms along the sides of her face and tilted it up to look at him. “Francis Bacon said, ‘Begin doing what you want now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand, and melting like a snowflake.’”

  He tugged loose the pins and set her hair free to cascade down her back. He kissed her. Her first thought was that people didn’t kiss in Mexico. She wondered if he had learned that at Harvard, too.

  Then she stopped thinking. She kissed him in return and the world revolved like a carousel. When he picked her up she rested her cheek in the hollow where his shoulder met his neck. She had not been with a man since Carlos died seven years ago. She wondered if she would remember what to do, but she decided she could depend on him. He had taught her to tango, hadn’t he?

  He carried he
r effortlessly up the wide marble stairs.

  16

  Ghosts

  In honor of the birth of Christ, revelers were setting off firecrackers in the midnight city outside Grace’s balcony. They crackled like gunfire in the distance. The reports invaded Rico’s sleep. They filled it with horse men chasing starved farmers across burning cornfields. Then the dream worsened. Rico became one of the soldiers firing into a group of women. They were the same ones he had seen getting off the train in Mexico City, except now some of them carried babies. One by one they fell into the smoldering stubble, cut down by his bullets.

  He didn’t know if the horror of the image woke him, or if the largest of the fireworks, booming like heavy artillery, did. Probably both of them caused his heart to race as he lay drenched in cold sweat next to Grace. He silently recited “Hail, Mary, full of grace.” By the time he finished “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death” for the fifth time his heart had slowed to its normal cadence.

  He rolled onto his side so he could look at Grace. The street lamps were tall enough to cast a dim light through the open door to the balcony. Earlier he and Grace had thrown off the covers, unwilling to allow so much as linen cloth separate them. Now she lay naked, as natural as if shame and embarrassment had never been thought of. Her hair was spread out on the pillow, her eyes were closed, mouth at peace. In the faint glow from the street her body was as pale and smooth as the silk kimono hanging on a peg nearby.

  Rico could have spent the rest of his life studying every line and hollow of her, but the air had turned chill. He pulled the sheet and blanket over her, tucking it around her shoulders. Her breathing continued deep and steady. Rico could see no sign of the insomnia that her people said plagued her.

  The upstairs maids and the kitchen help had confided in him that Mamacita didn’t sleep well. The night watchman had told them so and they themselves had seen it. Sometimes when one of them got up to relieve herself she would see la señora wandering the corridors and the rear courtyard. At first those who saw her in her pale kimono thought she was a ghost. They said she had given Socorro such susto, fright, that María had had to call a curandero, a healer, to get rid of it. Of course, they hadn’t told Mamacita about that.