Last Train From Cuernavaca

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Socorro was always quiet, but these days Grace detected fright in her eyes, like a deer facing a shotgun. Maybe Annie could find out what was troubling her.

  26

  Saving Grace

  When Grace tried to talk to Socorro, the girl cowered like a cornered rabbit. Annie had difficulty convincing her that Mamacita wasn’t angry with her. Grace suspected that Annie included some choice words in Nahuatl to describe Mrs. Fitz-Goring, because Socorro smiled, ever so slightly. Grace beamed back at her, trying to coax a bolder smile out into the open. A smile in Socorro’s luminous eyes and on the succulent curves of her lips could brighten the darkest day.

  Socorro claimed she didn’t know why her father hadn’t come. Grace believed her, but she detected a fear that went beyond the prospect of being sent home in disgrace.

  She decided to go to the market, talk to José, and get to the bottom of his absence. She tucked twenty pesos and some small change into the hidden pocket in her wide leather belt. She put on her long canvas duster over her everyday skirt and bodice. She laced up her oldest shoes and pinned her new straw sailor hat onto the upswept heap of her dark copper hair.

  In case the storm clouds made good on their promise of rain, she took an umbrella from the bouquet of them in the tall vase by her office door. It was of navy blue cotton with a cover of the same material and it had a stout ebony handle. It was the serviceable sort carried by a country doctor or a parson.

  As she passed the front desk she told Lyda she was going to the market to look for José. She waited for the mule-drawn trolley to pass by the front of the hotel, then crossed the tracks and set out on foot diagonally across the plaza.

  The market’s vendors and shoppers filled the narrow streets near the Governor’s Palace. They jammed in until it seemed as though the addition of one more person would make any movement, forward, backward, or sideways, impossible.

  When Grace finally reached the area on the side street where the folk of San Miguel usually sat, she was astonished to find it unoccupied. She stared at the hard-packed dirt, bare except for the market’s usual assortment of rotten produce and anonymous animal parts.

  José and his neighbors always came to Cuernavaca on Tuesday. Grace’s annoyance turned to alarm. She didn’t notice people jostling her as they passed. She asked the hard-scrabble entrepreneurs on either side what had become of the San Migueleños. They shrugged and swore they didn’t know.

  Grace didn’t think of herself as impulsive, which showed how little she knew. That going alone to San Miguel might not be a good idea didn’t occur to her. She had visited the village often in the past months and she felt as safe there as in Cuernavaca. Socrates had taken the Pierce to Tepotzlan early that morning on an errand, so Grace walked to the side of the plaza where the horse-drawn cabs gathered.

  The driver who had made the trip with her before demanded three times the usual rate.

  She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, a signal of displeasure in any language. “Why?”

  “Zapata.” He crossed himself. “The road is very dangerous.” He glanced up at the sky. “And maybe the rains will come.”

  “Bollocks,” Grace muttered.

  He probably preferred the easier run to the train station and had settled on Zapata as a bogeyman. But she had made up her mind to go and the Devil himself couldn’t turn her around.

  “I will pay you half the fare now, and half when we return to Cuernavaca.”

  He nodded, pocketed the pesos, and helped her aboard.

  The road had deteriorated since the last time Grace traveled it, but the carriage made it almost as far as the river. The sky had clouded over and thunder growled along the horizon when the driver pulled onto a level stretch of ground and looped the reins around the brake handle. He climbed down and trotted around to unfold the rickety steps. He held out a hand to steady Grace’s descent.

  She straightened her hat, pinned it back in place, and surveyed the rough trail ahead.

  “Vámanos, señor. Let’s go.”

  “I’m very sorry, but I cannot accompany you, señora.”

  “Why not?”

  With a look of regret almost genuine, he patted the battered side of the old victoria. “I must guard the coach. You know what they say. ‘Temptation makes the thief.’”

  “‘It takes a thief to know one,’” Grace muttered in English.

  She hiked up her skirts and set out for the bridge. She stopped in the middle of it and looked over the side. The river was higher than she had ever seen it, swollen by the runoff of the rains in the mountains. She took a deep breath and started up the tree-covered slope to the village perched along the canyon’s rim.

  Thirsty and dusty, she trudged the last few meters to the top of the cliff. She leaned on her umbrella to wait for her breath to catch up with her. The many fruit trees and the bougainvillea flowers cascading over the courtyard walls disguised the destruction. The impact of what Grace saw took several heartbeats to register.

  Many of the houses had blackened walls. Broken roof tiles and burnt thatch lay on the ground around them. The charred ends of ceiling beams jutted like splintered bones from collapsed roofs.

  The narrow streets were empty of people, but littered with evidence of them—torn baskets and sleeping mats, broken crockery, a baby’s hammock. Gardens had been trampled, adobe ovens smashed, grain cribs torn apart. A dead chicken floated in the village fountain.

  Grace wanted to make haste back to where the victoria waited, but she would not leave without trying to locate José and Serafina. Her heart pounded as she walked down the center of the main street. She was afraid to shatter the fragile silence by calling out, as if doing so would summon back what ever evil had visited here.

  She was relieved to reach the Perez house without incident and to find it intact. She pushed open the gate. Serafina swept the bare earth of the courtyard every day, but now leaves littered it. Grace called out to them. No one answered.

  Lightning flared. Grace jumped when a crash of thunder followed it. The first large drops of rain landed on her hat and shoulders like big wet kisses. She took cover inside.

  The two small rooms were empty. She held her palm close to the ashes of the open hearth. They were cold, but otherwise the house looked as if José and Serafina had just left and would return soon.

  She tried to think of an explanation for the attack. The most likely culprits were bandits. Rebels burned haciendas now and then, but she couldn’t believe Zapata would turn on his own people. If federal troops had done this by mistake, a few words with Rubio would clear it up. Maybe his soldiers would help repair the houses. Maybe the government would issue an apology.

  Grace heard voices outside and went to the door. “José!” she called. “What happened here?”

  But neither of the men who came through the gate was José. They both had on the grimy, ill-fitting khakis of the federal army. They wore no shoes and looked malnourished. They had the mahogany-brown faces and opaque eyes of indios. Over their shoulders they carried coarse hempen satchels. Grace pegged them as foragers.

  She doubted they understood Spanish but that was all she had to work with. “Where is your captain?”

  Neither of them responded with so much as the rise of an eyebrow. One of them carried a shovel. He began digging in the dirt of the floor.

  Not foragers, Grace thought. Looters. She couldn’t imagine what treasure they expected to find here, but then, when one was as poor as an alley cat, treasure was a relative concept.

  The digger’s comrade got Grace’s attention by leveling his bayonet at her. She stood as tall as possible under the low ceiling, and brandished her umbrella. She felt as much foolish as frightened. Where was his commanding officer? Where were the troops?

  She switched to English. “Don’t be a bloody ass. General Rubio is a friend of mine. Harm me and he will hang you.” She put one hand on her throat and pantomimed choking.

  He kept advancing, crowding her toward the doorway t
o the inner room. Grace could smell months’ accumulation of sweat and the stench of pulque. She tasted bile in the back of her throat.

  Now would be a good time to call for help, but when she tried her voice had deserted her. By now hailstones were drumming so loudly on the terra-cotta tiles of the roof that no one would hear her anyway. Rico. She screamed it silently. Rico.

  The drunken soldier seemed to exist at the other end of a telescope. Grace could see the coarse weave of his tunic and the crude eagles engraved on the pot-metal buttons. She noticed the crumbs in his bushy mustache and the black crescents of dirt under his long fingernails.

  Time stopped. Grace couldn’t move. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t believe any of this.

  What flushed her out of the briar patch of her bewilderment was a sonorous clang. As the soldier pitched forward the look of surprise that crossed his face was probably the most emotion he had shown in his life. Grace stepped aside to give him a clear trajectory to earth. He was so thin he made landfall with only a modest thud. Grace could tell from the caved-in back of his skull and the blood beginning to pool under his face that he wouldn’t get up.

  A teen aged boy stood in the patch of air he had just vacated. A faded serape covered all of him except for the bottoms of a pair of canvas trousers tied with hemp cords at the ankles. The serape filled the room with the aroma of wet wool. His big sombrero hung at his back. The shovel with which he had dispatched Grace’s assailant was the same one the other soldier had been using in his hunt for buried treasure. He threw it aside

  “Tlazocamati. Thank you.” Grace knew that much Nahuatl.

  The boy ignored her as he rifled the dead man’s pockets. He stripped off the bandolier and picked up the army-issue bolt-action Mauser and bayonet. The other soldier had had his throat neatly cut. The boy stopped to collect that man’s weapons, too, and roll them in a sleeping mat. He shouldered the mat, stepped over the second body, pulled on his hat, and headed outside where the hail had become a steady downpour. He turned in the doorway and gestured for Grace to follow him.

  Grace didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but she had no intention of going with him. She edged around the bodies, opened her umbrella and slid it sideways through the narrow door frame.

  The boy turned left at the front gate. Grace turned right. On wobbly legs, she headed back the way she had come. She glanced over her shoulder and saw, with relief, that her rescuer wasn’t inclined to chase after her.

  27

  Saving Grace…Again

  Angel rode along the rim of the canyon looking for a vantage point and shelter from the rain. She found both under two flat boulders taller than cathedral doors and leaning against each other like an affectionate pair of drunks. She reined her mare to a halt in the triangular opening between them.

  Water had collected behind the upturned edge of her sombrero’s broad brim and formed a moat around the conical crown. She tilted her head to the side to pour it off like rain from an eave.

  She knew she should keep riding and not look back, but her curiosity about the gringa got the better of her. The woman had come to San Miguel alone at a time when merely wandering into the bushes to relieve oneself exposed a person to the risk of getting shot at. Either la Inglesa lacked the brains of a burro or she possessed her own pair of mule-sized cojones.

  Angel surveyed the area with her binoculars.

  “¡Chinga!” she muttered.

  Centuries of foot and animal traffic had eroded the road below the surrounding land. Rainwater cascading from the rocky surfaces of the high ground channeled onto it and raced toward Cuernavaca in a muddy torrent. Anyone intending to travel it would need a boat. Angel was pretty sure the gringa didn’t have a boat.

  The top of Inglesa’s dark blue umbrella descended the path from the village. The umbrella vanished, then appeared again beneath the patchy canopy of cedar trees. It bobbed across the bridge and headed for the road.

  Inglesa must have arrived here in a carriage, but none was visible now. Had she been fool enough to think the driver would wait for her in this storm? If he had stayed he would have been a bigger idiot than she. His coach would mire to the axles.

  When Inglesa chose not to come with her, Angel thought she was rid of her. Her conscience had been serene. José’s daughter worked at the gringa’s hotel so Angel knew he would hear of the fray in San Miguel sooner or later. When he did, he would have to agree that Angel had saved Inglesa’s honor and probably her life, too. That was more than Angel’s comrades were willing to do for their own women.

  It was a bitter thought.

  Angel could still ride away. She could pretend she didn’t know what happened to Inglesa after she refused the offer of protection. No one would be the wiser.

  She watched the umbrella stop at the edge of the road. It turned one way and then another, as if considering its predicament. Behind it, the river spilled over its bank and rushed to meet the gully-washer in the roadway. The umbrella sought safety on a small rise of ground while the tide rose around it.

  Normally Angel wouldn’t have cared if a foreigner got her feet wet. Foreigners didn’t care what happened to Angel’s people. They came here to steal land, timber, oil, iron ore, and sugarcane. The only attention they paid to the indios was to work them to death.

  But this wasn’t just any foreigner. Inglesa had helped Antonio’s family. She had provided income to their impoverished village. She had given Antonio’s sister a safe haven. The Perez family referred to her as “Mamacita.”

  Angel loved Antonio Perez with such passion that the thought of him made her heart lurch in her chest as if tipsy on tequila. His family was her family. Their debt of gratitude was hers, but that didn’t mean she had to be gracious about repaying it.

  After seeing the devastation el gobierno had caused in San Miguel, no synonym for angry would suffice to describe what Angel was feeling. She was also cold and wet and in no mood for conversation. And though she wouldn’t admit it, she resented the affection and respect the Perez family had for the gringa. She decided to let Inglesa go on thinking she couldn’t understand Spanish.

  She dismounted, wrapped her serape more tightly around her, and led the mare down the muddy slope. They both ended up sliding most of the way and arrived filthy at the bottom. That hardly improved Angel’s mood, the color of tarnished gunmetal and stormy as the weather.

  She would take Inglesa back to camp. Once there, the woman would be José’s problem. Angel was certain she wouldn’t refuse an offer of help this time. That notion proved she didn’t know Grace.

  Grace recognized where she was, but she couldn’t remember how she got here. The day’s events had sent her into shock. The road was her link to home and the transformation of it into a river deepened her confusion. She stared at the tumbling, umber-colored water as if it had nothing to do with her. For that matter, she now occupied a never-never land where nothing had anything to do with her.

  Someone else had walked down San Miguel’s desolate street. Someone else had been attacked by a rogue soldier. Someone else had seen a man’s skull caved in with a shovel. Someone else had skirted a pair of corpses as if they had been logs fallen across her path.

  The trees and rocks around her blurred. Her mind escaped its bone box and drifted above her body. From a height she looked down at a sodden stranger standing alone in the rain, holding an umbrella as if waiting to hail a taxi on a London street corner.

  “Get a hold on yourself, Gracie old girl.”

  Her voice echoed hollow in her head, but it called back her wandering self. She took a deep breath. She flexed her toes and fingers to reestablish relations with her body. Then she got down to the task of figuring out what to do.

  This was when Rico should come splashing up the road on his big gray horse. She looked toward Cuernavaca, more than half expecting to see him. It wasn’t a completely foolish expectation. He had rescued her before.

  The rain’s tattoo on the taut hump of her umbrella provided rhythm f
or her thoughts. Being stranded on foot ten miles from the Colonial had one advantage. Her everyday pack of petty problems had been reduced to one: find a way to reach home.

  The downpour stopped as suddenly as it had started. For the first time since she had stared at the bare patch of the San Migueleños’s ground in Cuernavaca’s market, Grace felt relieved. She knew one fact about rain in Mexico. The water would soak into the thirsty soil and evaporate so fast it would seem like magic.

  Sunset was only a few hours away and she couldn’t wait for the tide in the road to ebb. She collapsed her umbrella, slid it into its case, and put the handle’s looped strap around her wrist. She hiked up her skirts and stepped off the mound.

  Using the tip of the umbrella for balance she set out along the road’s margin. The water was the color and consistency of lentil puree, and she felt her way where it was shallowest. Even so, it filled her shoes and soaked her skirts halfway to her knees.

  She didn’t hear the splashing of hoofs until the horse was almost close enough to nibble the brim of her straw boater. She whirled and saw the same boy who had killed the two soldiers. Had he decided to rob her? She had learned fencing as a teenager, as many theater people did. She took a firmer grip on the handle of the umbrella and extended it like a foil. She knew the posture was ridiculous, but it was all she had. She made a mental note to buy a pistol when she got home.

  He sat forward in the saddle and beckoned for her to mount behind him.

  Grace retracted the umbrella to her side and shook her head. “No, gracias.” Surely he understood what those words meant. Even Mrs. Fitz-Goring knew that much Spanish.

  She set out again, probing ahead of her with the tip of the brolly.