Last Train From Cuernavaca

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  “Venga.” The boy said. Come.

  Aha! He did speak a little Spanish. Grace decided that if he intended to rob her, he would have to do it here where her body would be found. She wasn’t going to ride off with him to be violated and murdered at his convenience.

  She said again. “No, gracias.” She gave a small wave, signaling that she could take care of herself, and he should go on about his business.

  She put down another foot, feeling for level ground under the mud. Was it her imagination, or had the water already gone down a bit? She should be able to reach the outskirts of Cuernavaca before total darkness. She could find some sort of transportation there. Arriving at the Colonial after nightfall would be best anyway. She wanted as few people as possible to see her in this filthy and disheveled state.

  The boy loosed what had to be a string of Zapotec oaths. He had reined his horse around, ready to ride away, when the report of a rifle sounded from the direction of San Miguel.

  “Bugger all,” Grace muttered.

  Had the rest of the army patrol found the bodies of the two soldiers? And if so would they assume she and the boy were responsible? A spate of shots accompanied by shouts indicated that they had and they did. The shouts grew louder.

  “Venga, idiota.” The boy waved her toward him.

  Grace assessed her predicament like the debits and credits in the Colonial’s ledger, except that here every option required red ink. In one column were a lot of men more interested in shooting than asking questions. In the other glowered one surly young assassin smelling of sweat, horses, gunpowder, woodsmoke, and rancor.

  “Cuernavaca?” Grace pointed at herself, then toward town. “Will you carry me to Cuernavaca?”

  He gave an abrupt nod and Grace took the hand he held out to her. She was surprised by his strength as he lifted her off her feet. Using both hands, he hauled her across the horse’s rump. He deposited her there like a sack of cornmeal with her hind end cocked in the air.

  Without waiting for her to arrange herself into a more dignified position, he kicked the horse into motion. Grace grabbed the saddle and saddle blanket to keep from sliding off the other side and landing on her head. Hampered by her long skirt, she flailed and twisted until she was sitting sideways with both feet dangling off the horse’s left side.

  The ride was bumpy. She gripped a fistful of the boy’s serape with one hand. With the other she tried to tug the hem of her skirt to within a decent distance of her ankles. When she had leisure to take note of her surroundings she realized two facts.

  One: she had lost her umbrella and hat.

  Two: this horse was not headed for Cuernavaca.

  Only a coin toss could have decided whether Angel was happier to see her comrades or to be rid of Inglesa. The moon cast an opalescent glow over the trees and rocks when she reached camp. As usual, the men lay cocooned in their tattered blankets with the bare soles of their feet close to the fire. Their bodies radiated outward from the warmth like spokes from a hub. Once the rains began in earnest they would have to sleep in the nearby caves so they were taking advantage of fresh air and moonlight.

  Angel roused them with a pistol shot. They swarmed to their feet, rifles in hand, but only Ambrozio Nuñez fired before realizing Angel wasn’t el gobierno. Or maybe he did recognize her. Angel knew he would rather shoot at her than federales, but his bullet didn’t come close.

  She grinned at him. She had called him many names over the past months, but her current favorite was cochi, pig.

  “Better luck next time, Cochi.” Then she gave him no further thought.

  Angel tried to see her comrades as they must have appeared to Inglesa. She had to admit they were a menacing-looking lot. Each man carried enough weaponry to wipe out a platoon. The moon’s light illuminated wolfish grins that exposed ranks of tobacco-stained teeth behind shaggy black mustaches. They must look terrifying to someone used to balls and picnics and tea parties.

  Angel found some small satisfaction in that thought until the woman slid off the mare’s rump and strode up to the men. As they surrounded her she asked, very politely in Spanish, if any of them knew José Perez.

  Angel made an adjustment in her assessment of Inglesa. She sat a horse like her arse was eggshell, but either she had nerve or the arrogant sense of superiority that defined gringos. Or both.

  Angel was glad to see José and Antonio weave through the crowd. José would take Inglesa off her hands, and she could spend time alone with Antonio. The prospect of seeing him had been the one sunny ray in this long, dreary day.

  He must have felt the same. When Angel beckoned with a sideways nod, he left his father listening to Mamacita and went with her. He reached for her but she held up a hand to stop him.

  She also wanted to get right to the kissing part of her homecoming, but she had business to take care of first. She glanced back at the camp. Someone had thrown brush on the fires and by their light Angel could see Inglesa deep in conversation with José. She was no doubt demanding to be returned to Cuauhnáhuac. For once Angel and English were in accord.

  Angel turned back to Antonio. “We can leave her at the train station in Ajusco tomorrow.” Angel had given this some thought. The village of Ajusco was the most remote of the eleven stops the train made on its way to Cuernavaca.

  Antonio sneaked a quick kiss before answering. “Fatso has set up barricades everywhere. We were afraid they had caught you.” He didn’t have to tell her what misery that thought had given him. “The federales pigs are watching the train stations closely, and they’re stopping everyone on the roads.”

  “We have to get rid of her, Tonio. She doesn’t know one end of a horse from another. She’ll slow us down. And when Rubio finds out we have her, he’ll send the entire army to take her back.”

  “‘Del dicho al hecho hay un gran trecho.’” It’s a long way between saying and doing.

  Antonio pushed Angel’s sombrero off onto her back. He twined his fingers into her short hair and kissed her. Bewitched by each other they did not realize they were silhouetted against the starlit sky. They did not notice Grace glance their way. They did not see her eyes widen for a split second before she went back to explaining her plight to José and the others.

  28

  Rico to the Rescue

  The gaggle of policemen in front of the Colonial should have alerted Rico that something was wrong, but he was a man on a mission. He leaped out of the station cab before it came to a stop. His plan was to sneak up on Grace, corral her with his arms, and plant a kiss of such ardor that a team of strong men would be required to pull him away from her.

  Lyda screamed at the sight of him. “Thank God, you’re here!”

  She threw her arms around his waist, leaned her head against his chest, and started sobbing. The maids ran from every corner of the hotel. They all cried and talked at once and he couldn’t make sense of any of it. Attentive guests clustered in the doorways.

  “Where’s Grace?”

  Annie was the only coherent one. “We don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “She’s disappeared.” Lyda retreated behind the front desk and blew her nose on a bandana that was thoroughly damp already.

  “When?”

  “Five days ago. She told me she was going to the market to talk to José and she never came back. We’ve looked everywhere for her.”

  “Have you seen José?”

  “No.”

  “Has anyone gone to San Miguel to ask him about her?”

  “Rubio says his men searched the village. He says that José and his family have gone. No one knows where.”

  Rico was starting to get a very bad feeling, lodged like a sharp stick just under his heart. “What does Socorro say?”

  “She doesn’t know anything,” said Annie. “She’s terrified that something terrible has happened to her family and to Grace.”

  “What about the police?”

  Lyda waved the bandana, as if to dismiss the poli
ce. “They’ve asked all over town. No one knows anything.”

  Someone knows something, Rico thought. But he won’t be fool enough to admit it to the police.

  “Jake assigned two of his company’s Pinks to work on it.” Lyda seemed to think that was a good idea, but Rico knew better.

  The men of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency specialized in putting down labor unrest. Under Porfirio Díaz’s regime American companies had hired them to do plenty of that and their methods were brutal. It had earned them the hatred of the common folk in Mexico. They would have less success than the police at getting information.

  “What was Grace wearing?”

  “Her white sailor blouse and long blue twill skirt, the canvas duster, and her new straw hat with the red band.”

  Women’s preoccupation with clothes had always seemed silly to Rico, but he was grateful for it now. The average man would not have noticed what Grace wore, much less remembered it days later.

  “Did she carry anything with her?”

  Lyda thought for a moment. “An umbrella, a dark blue one. It rained later that day.”

  Rico wanted to go straight to the market and start demanding answers, but he knew better than to question people while wearing the uniform of an officer in the federal army. He borrowed a plain brown suit and vest and scuffed brown shoes from a comrade staying at the Colonial. Even dressed as a dry-goods clerk he received only wary shakes of the head from the market’s shoppers and sellers alike.

  He walked to the plaza and caught the eye of Chucho, his favorite bootblack. Chucho always had a big smile for Rico because he tipped generously and his shoes never needed much work to make them gleam. If he was surprised to see the captain literally down-at-heels his round, good-natured face betrayed no hint of surprise or judgment.

  Chucho was a thorough professional. For ten centavos he would deliver fifty cents worth of dash and patter while he worked his magic on Rico’s borrowed footwear. Like all the boys shining shoes or selling chicle gum on the plaza, Chucho would know the comings, the goings, and the gossip within a ten-block radius.

  He unloaded his tin of brown polish and his rags from his box. Then he set the box where Rico could prop his foot up on the wooden handle. He dug the polish out with his fingers and worked it into the leather. While the right shoe was drying, he started on the left. The grand finale was the buffing. Chucho snapped the rag with a syncopated rhythm, his elbows pumping hard enough to run a small turbine.

  As he was repacking his equipment Rico leaned down and held a peso so only he could see it.

  “Did you see the English woman from the Colonial here last Tuesday?”

  “Yes, Captain.” Chucho grinned up at him. “She hired a coche and driver.”

  “Which driver?”

  “The one they call Chivo.” He pointed his chin at a thick-set man smoking a cigar on a bench nearby.

  Rico handed the boy the peso and twenty centavos instead of ten. Then he strolled over to sit next to Chivo. He extended his long legs in front of him and tilted his fedora forward so he could interlock his fingers at the base of his skull. He leaned back onto his palms as though relaxing in the sunshine.

  He glanced over at the taxi driver, whose melon-shaped head was wreathed in cigar smoke. In a conversational tone Rico said, “Where did you take the Englishwoman last Tuesday?”

  Chivo’s heavily lidded eyes went goggly, as though a snake had just crawled up his baggy pant leg.

  “I didn’t see any Englishwoman last Tuesday.”

  Rico’s silence held more menace than threats.

  “I swear on my mother’s grave.” Chivo obviously wanted to run, and he just as obviously knew it would be futile.

  “Tell me where you took her or I will break every one of your fingers. And then I will seriously hurt you.”

  Rico waited while Chivo tried to think of a plausible lie. His intellect wasn’t up to the challenge. “She wanted to go to San Miguel.”

  “Why didn’t you bring her back?”

  That had to be the question the driver dreaded most. That was why he had claimed ignorance when the police questioned him. Why had he abandoned the gringa?

  “I had to stay with the coche. When she didn’t return I went looking for her, but she had disappeared. The rebels must have kidnapped her.”

  “And you couldn’t find her?”

  “No, señor. She had vanished.”

  Rico assumed he was lying about going to look for her, but he asked anyway. “What did the people of San Miguel tell you when you went looking for her?” He could imagine the gears of prevarication spinning between Chivo’s ears like wheels in deep mud.

  “They said the rebels kidnapped her so they could demand a ransom.”

  Rico stood up. He grabbed Chivo by the front of his shirt and lifted him half off the seat.

  “If anything bad has happened to her, you will pay. There is no place on earth you can go where I won’t find you.”

  He threw him down with such force the bench tipped over backward, taking Chivo with it in a tangle of hairy arms and ankles.

  Rico was a shaken man when he left the ruins of San Miguel. Maybe Rubio would know what had happened here. The general harbored the delusion that Grace was his dear friend. Had he ordered his men to destroy the place in retaliation for her disappearance?

  Rico led Grullo slowly down the steep path from the village, searching the bushes for any trace of her. He found the umbrella in a tall clump of grass near the road. Swinging between hope and despair he mounted and rode in expanding circles, looking for other evidence. The straw boater lay in plain sight beside a trail leading up into rough country. Last night’s rain had washed away all tracks, but Rico could guess what had happened.

  He scanned the surrounding mountains. He would ask to be reassigned to Rubio’s command here in Morelos. If necessary, he would ask his grandfather to use his influence to make the transfer happen.

  He would find Grace. If Zapata’s people had harmed her he would not rest until he had killed them all.

  May 1913

  Poor things. With two centavos-worth of lard, I could fry them. (A rich man’s comment on viewing the rebels from his balcony.)

  —From Pedro Martinez: A Mexican Peasant and His Family by Oscar Lewis

  The Zapatistas were not an army: they were a people in arms.

  —Rosa King, Tempest over Mexico

  29

  Moses in the Wilderness

  The sinuous roots of a fig tree clung to the rock face around the cave’s entrance and formed a lattice in front of it. Strong, graceful, and tenacious, it was able to draw life from stone. It made Grace think of José’s people.

  The cave was just big enough for the women and children and its entrance was hard to see even from close by. After a week traveling with Lieutenant Angel’s band, Grace knew she was lucky to have it as shelter from May’s nightly rains. Usually the men slept in the caves. The women dug burrows into the high riverbanks for themselves and their children.

  Grace dreaded spending another night shivering between a flea-infested mat and an even livelier cotton blanket. She wanted to feel the clean, cool, polished tiles of the Colonial’s corridors under her bare feet. She wanted to hear the parrots chattering in the courtyard. She wondered if Lyda had gotten word of her disappearance to Rico in Veracruz, or if the letters he wrote to her twice a day were still piling up in her office.

  Most of all, she worried that she would find the hotel deserted when she finally returned. Nature took over quickly here when civilization was negligent. Grace imagined her beloved home sliding into the sort of ruin it had been when she bought it.

  This little band of Zapatistas had been moving higher and deeper into the mountains. They had been dodging federal troops and patrols, but José’s wife, Serafina, said that soon they would join Zapata’s main army. The thought of being caught in a battle between the rebels and the officers who had billeted at the Colonial made Grace’s stomach churn. So
the next morning, when José introduced her to the mule, she recoiled, but she didn’t flee.

  José beamed and held out the lead rope. “I’ve named him Moses because he will lead you to the Promised Land.”

  Moses raised his grizzled muzzle, curled his purple lips back from his stumpy yellow teeth, and greeted Grace with a bray. She jumped and retreated several steps. José led the mule toward her and she backed up again. For Grace, approaching a sharp-hooved, snaggle-toothed creature the size of Moses was like trying to make friends with an animated threshing machine.

  “Mamacita, Cuernavaca lies far from here. If you want to reach it you will have to ride him.”

  “May I go to Cuernavaca on him today?”

  “Quizás mañana.”

  Maybe tomorrow. That was the answer he gave her every day. “Then I’ll get on him tomorrow.”

  “He won’t hurt you, Mamacita.”

  Grace didn’t believe that for a second.

  José handed her a banana. “Give him this.”

  Grace stood as far away from him as she could and extended the fruit. Moses folded up his prehensile lips again and grasped the end of it in his teeth. He eased it out of her hand with surprising delicacy and chewed it up, peel and all.

  From then on he followed Grace wherever she went. She remembered one of Lyda’s observations: “Feed a man or a dog and you’ll never get rid of ’em.” Obviously that also held true for a mule.

  She asked José to tie him up, but he brayed incessantly. When that didn’t bring freedom he chewed through the hemp line and set out to look for her. If any man came near her he would flatten his ears against his head, lower his muzzle, and swing it from side to side like a snake preparing to strike.

  With the rain beating down on him, he stood guard all night outside the cave where Grace and the women slept. In the morning Grace decided that if he was indeed her means of going home, she should make her peace with him.