Last Train From Cuernavaca

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Ambrozio put on a sorrowful face. “Alas, Captain, I heard that when the men had finished with her, if you know what I mean, they cut her throat and threw her off a cliff. Such a pity. They’re brutes, those men.”

  Rico was known for his temper, but never a fury like this. Blood swelled the veins in his eyes until a red haze veiled his world. Feral rage roared in his head. Ambrozio threw an arm up as a shield, certain the captain would take a swing at him or worse.

  Rico wanted to do more than hit him. He wanted to kill someone, and the messenger was as good a someone as any. But he had no time to waste for that, nor for grief either. He would grieve later. He started at a run for the station with Juan close behind.

  Neither of them saw Ambrozio smile. He hadn’t received the ten pesos he had requested, but he had not come for his thirty pieces of silver. Captain Grandee would give him something more valuable, revenge on the perra who called herself Lieutenant Angel.

  Ambrozio pulled one of the canvas chairs back from the brink. He was surprised by how light it was. If he took it with him he doubted the captain would notice its absence. The captain owed him at least that much for his valuable information.

  He settled into it. It was as comfortable as a hammock. He would definitely steal it. He picked up the empty claret bottles Juan had left behind, upended each of them, and drank the dregs.

  31

  Evil at the Water

  If anyone had asked Angel what her people needed, she would not have thought to include “witch” on the list. Having a witch along, however, proved a boon at laundry time. Washing clothes that were mostly holes and patches might have seemed wasted effort to los correctos, but Angel knew clean rags were better for morale than dirty ones. Running water and a fragrant soap made from pounded amole roots cost nothing, but they gave even the most destitute members of the band a sense of dignity and pride.

  Before the gringa arrived, laundry day caused considerable anxiety. The more superstitious folk, and that included almost everyone, feared los aires. The airs were malevolent spirits that lurked in rivers and springs. If the nearest body of water had a reputation for being infested with them, clothes and the bodies inside them stayed dirty.

  Soon after Inglesa arrived, word spread that she could speak to the dead, but no one had had the nerve to ask her to have a heart-to-heart with los aires. Enlisting the aid of a homegrown witch was perilous enough. They had no way of knowing what powers a foreigner might possess, nor what devilish detritus might slough off onto them.

  Serafina Perez convinced a small delegation of women to come with her when she asked Mamacita to chase off los aires. That way the favor would not be for any one individual, but for the good of everyone. Any residual evil would be diluted and distributed in smaller doses among them.

  The gringa agreed to give it a try. From then on, her first task at every campsite was to clear the supernatural varmints from the water supply. Angel had to admit that she seemed to take the job seriously.

  Angel, Antonio, and the men halted their horses at the canyon’s rim and looked down at the women and children lined up a cautious fifteen or twenty feet from the river’s edge. The gringa was working her magic again. She waded into the cold water, raised her arms, and shouted her incantations. She waved her hands as if to shoo the spirits away. Then she stood stock-still for several long minutes, maybe for effect, maybe waiting to see if they really had gone. Finally she turned, smiled, and beckoned.

  The children stripped naked and ran shouting into the water. The women who had rifles leaned them against each other in proper military style and draped their cartridge belts over them. Laughing and talking they stepped out of their clothes at the river’s edge and added them to the bundles of laundry. All except Inglesa. She must have suspected the men were watching from above. She put on her sombrero and sat with her mule while he grazed in the scanty shade of a gnarled pine tree.

  Angel stared down at the hat and the long legs, demurely crossed, projecting from under it. She had to admit that Inglesa was tougher than she looked. She didn’t complain or demand special treatment. She helped with the cooking and the chores. When rations were shorter than usual, Angel had seen her pass her small portion of parched corn to whichever child looked hungriest.

  Inglesa’s broad-brimmed straw hat hid the thick braid that reached the middle of her back. Angel couldn’t see her face either, but she knew that when the gringa laughed, her teeth dazzled in her tanned face. In three weeks, hunger and hard work had begun sculpting the planes of her face into aristocratic angles that belied the rags she wore. She was taller than all of the women, and in the ragged khaki trousers, uniform shirt, and leather sandals she resembled a rebel soldier.

  She insisted on saddling her mule herself, which amused everyone, the mule most of all. He would suck in air and expand his midsection. When she mounted, he exhaled, collapsing his sides inward and loosening the cinch. The saddle would slide off and dump her onto the ground while Moses lifted his muzzle for a good laugh.

  Then José taught her how to get the better of him. Now the gringa walked her hands up Mose’s lead line until she could stroke him and murmur insults in Nahautl. In mid-caress she braced her hands on his side, cocked her leg, and kneed him in the stomach. The blow knocked the breath out of him with a satisfying “whoof.” Before he could inhale again she yanked the cinch tight with both hands and buckled it.

  Besides learning to outwit the mule, the gringa could now clean and load rifles. She could ignite tinder with a fire drill. She could hone a knife blade and pat out tortillas that were edible if not symmetrical. But although she was tanned, calloused, and trouser-clad, Inglesa still stuck out like a long-stemmed rose among the hardy cactus flowers of the women’s camp.

  Angel had heard of gringos by the dozens joining Pancho Villa’s army in Mexico’s northern states, but this gringa would never be a Zapatista. Heaven had other plans for her. Angel decided that when she came back from this foray, she would do what ever was necessary to return Mamacita to Cuauhnáhuac. The band would miss her singing and her skill at exorcism, but she had earned the right to go home.

  Angel and Antonio reined their horses around and headed for the trail, but the men were slow to leave the view at the river.

  “Vámanos, muchachos.” Angel rode back and circled them, as if herding sheep. “We’re going to pay a visit to some correctos.”

  Like Angel, her commanding officer, Colonel Contreras, came from a middling upper class family himself. He wouldn’t approve of her plan to rob a hacienda, but her people were starving and she had no alternative. Federales soldiers and their camp followers had so despoiled the villages that they had little to share. And what could he do to her other than scold?

  As they rode away Angel turned around for one more look at the river and the high rock walls rising from its banks. This was the safest campsite she had found since joining General Zapata’s forces more than six months ago. At the end of the box canyon the water rushed toward a cleft in the face of the cliff. It led to an escape route not likely to be noticed by enemies.

  Angel had assigned sentry duty to the Gonzales boy because she intended to visit the hacienda where he had worked in the stables since he was barely old enough to shovel horse manure with a small spade. He was a loyal lad, and maybe some of that loyalty to his former employers still clung to him like a cocklebur. She did not want to strain his limited mental resources with such a conflict.

  Besides, this campsite was so hidden that guarding it would not require much judgment. Everyone knew that common sense for the Gonzales boy was a rare commodity, but he was eager to please and not smart enough to fear anything. All he had to do was keep watch and shout a warning to the women and children should interlopers appear.

  His sentry post was a ledge near the top of the cliff on the other side of the river. He had rolled up his baggy white trousers leaving his brown legs to dangle from a perch so narrow it would have given a buzzard second thoughts. He balanced hi
s ancient rifle across his thighs, rolled a cigarillo, and smoked it as casually as if he were sitting on a bench in the plaza.

  Angel spurred the mare after the men. She did not see the Gonzales boy leave his post soon after to take off in pursuit of a plump iguana longer than his arm. She did not see his eyes light up at the prospect of a steaming bowl of lizard soup.

  Grace heard the hoofbeats fade as Angel and the men rode away. Soon after, the Gonzales boy left his ledge on the opposite side of the river. With the men gone Serafina waved to Grace to join her in the water. While the children splashed and shouted, the other women scrubbed themselves and their hair along with the clothes.

  Grace walked to the water’s edge with Moses trailing her as if he happened to be going that way, too. She kicked off her sandals and waded in ankle deep. She held out her hand so Serafina could put a scoop of the gelatinous amole root onto her palm. For a fraction of an instant its fragrance worked the magic that only the sense of smell possesses. It transported Grace to the high-ceilinged room behind the Colonial’s kitchen where the maids gathered before work each morning.

  The evocative powers of the amole’s aroma were so intense that Grace could see the colorful tile on the walls. She could feel the heat radiating from the big bread ovens on the other side of the wall. She could hear the women’s soft voices exchanging amenities that, spoken in Nahuatl, had always sounded deeply mysterious to her.

  In that flash of memory she saw the maids tying on their aprons. She watched them pull their hair back and rebraid it, taut and shiny as patent leather. This fragrant gel that looked, to be honest, like a palmful of snot, was what they used to wash their hair.

  The scene vanished as abruptly as it had appeared, and Grace thought about the parrots that roosted in the banana tree in the Colonial’s courtyard. They came and went each day, unmindful of the bustle and fuss of the humans below. If she were a parrot she could fly home and all this would become a nightmare.

  She amended that. The past three weeks had been frightening, cold, hungry, and exhausting, but not a nightmare. She had come to like people she never would have met among the Colonial’s clientele. She had learned skills that she would never need again when she returned to her own life. And she didn’t doubt that she would return to Rico and to her life. José had promised it, and José kept his promises.

  She was about to take off her sombrero and loosen her braid so she could wash her hair when one of the children cried one word. “Mamá.” He pitched forward and floated face down. Blood stained the water in expanding eddies around him. Bullets began spattering like hail into the water. Mothers snatched up their wailing children and what few clothes they could carry. They splashed toward the narrow cleft, black as a vein of coal in the granite wall at the head of the canyon.

  The other women grabbed their rifles and cartridge belts. They took cover under the trees and struggled into their clothes as they tried to return fire. It was like shooting from the bottom of a well. From their positions on the opposite rim of the canyon the soldiers had clear aim at their prey while they themselves could keep mostly out of sight.

  Maybe some of those men making target practice of women and children were the same gallant, rambunctious young officers who had stayed at the Colonial. In the past three weeks Grace had acquired a stone-cold dread of the Federal Army. The thought never occurred to her to wave her hat at them and shout that she was Grace Knight.

  Bullets sent up geysers of sand all around her as she bolted toward Moses. She leaped for his broad, bare back as she had seen Lieutenant Angel do. She scrambled into a sitting position and shouted for Serafina. While Moses was in motion she pulled her friend up to sit behind her.

  She grabbed the lead line on his halter, but he didn’t require guidance. He galloped along the sandy shoreline toward the opening in the wall. Grace wondered if he would fit through it.

  Between screams and rifle fire Grace heard the sound of men’s laughter overhead.

  32

  Fate Full

  Rico couldn’t have predicted that a lizard would alter the course of his life. If his men had not found the dusty indio trying to pull the iguana out of a crevice in the rock, they would not have stopped to take him prisoner.

  Rico had galloped most of the way here with his company doing their best to keep up. Had he not been delayed by this pair of rebel feet and legs he would have arrived at the Zapatista campsite before the other units did. He might have been able to prevent what happened there.

  When Rico’s men found the rebel, he was lying on his stomach with his head and shoulders out of sight in the fissure, but they didn’t have to see his face to identify him as the enemy. His straw sombrero lay nearby. Fastened to its crown was a medal embossed with a crude likeness of the Virgin of Guadelupe, the saint favored by Zapata’s fighters.

  If the rebel heard the clatter of rifle bolts and Rico’s order to surrender, the filthy, calloused soles of his feet gave no indication of it. Rico couldn’t see his face, but he could guess what was going on in his mind. A peasant would not let go of a meal no matter what the consequences.

  When this one finally wriggled out of the crevice he dragged the iguana tail-first with him. The lizard was as stubborn about clinging to the rocks with all twenty, scythe-shaped toenails as the boy was about giving him up. The sergeant had to put a pistol to his head to make him surrender his prize to a grinning private.

  Rico recognized the captive. For years the Gonzales boy had worked for his family until he disappeared six months ago. Rico wasn’t surprised that the lad seemed more upset about the loss of his supper than his own fate. He hadn’t the intellect to realize that before the sun set he would be hanging by the neck from a tree limb.

  Rico also knew that when the boy felt the noose around his neck he would beg Captain Martín, the grandson of his former patrón, to save him. Rico liked the Gonzales boy, but the probability that he had participated in the assault on Grace and in her murder would make executing him not easy, but possible.

  Rico spent most of every day fending off thoughts of what had happened to Grace. Now he faced the sullen, slack-jawed gaze of someone who at the very least had witnessed it. Rage, horror, and grief churned in his stomach and left the taste of bile in the back of his throat. While his men tied up the rebel and the reptile, Rico walked away to vomit into the crevice where the iguana had sought refuge. He had just rinsed his mouth with water from his canteen when the sound of distant gunfire reminded him of what had brought him here.

  Vengeance.

  Rico stood amid the laundry strewn along the riverbank and counted. Four women and five children. Some floated in the water. Some lay half on shore and half submerged. One woman sprawled on the sand, a hand outstretched as though begging for help.

  Rico’s company arrived after the other soldiers had ransacked the rebels’ abandoned campsite, but they hadn’t considered shovels and mattocks worth stealing. Rico ordered some of his men to use them to dig one large grave. He did not know if the children belonged to the women, but he thought perhaps they could comfort each other.

  He assigned another detail to retrieve the bodies, most of which were naked.

  “Treat them as you would your mothers and children,” he said. “If anyone says or does anything lewd or insulting, I will shoot him.”

  As the men laid the bodies in rows Rico covered them with the wet clothes. One of the women and two of the children were still alive. He wrapped them in blankets, carried them to the copse of trees, and laid them gently in the shade. Juan found him there, cleaning and bandaging their wounds.

  “The colonel left for Tres Marías,” Juan said. “He plans to hang the indio there where more people will see him.”

  Rico felt a sudden stab of remorse about the Gonzales boy. He knew that even if he had tried to save the lad he almost certainly wouldn’t have succeeded. That was far less consolation that he would have expected.

  “I would bet he’s also in a hurry to send a telegram to
General Rubio,” Rico said, “telling him how many rebels his soldiers killed here today.”

  Juan rolled his eyes. Lying about success in battle was a tradition with most of the officers in the Federal Army.

  “Rubio is also impatient to hunt down the one called Angel. He said to tell you to leave the corpses for the buzzards, and follow him with your men.”

  One of the children moaned and Rico hunkered next to him and took his hand.

  “He said to leave the wounded for the buzzards, too,” added Juan.

  Holding that small hand, Rico came to a decision he realized he should have made as soon as he heard about President Madero’s assassination. He probably would have made it then, had Grace not existed.

  He stood up and shouted at the men who were standing around watching their comrades dig. “The rest of you gather rocks to pile on top of the graves.” He didn’t have to tell them the rocks would keep feral dogs and wild pigs from digging up the bodies. They all knew about feral dogs and wild pigs.

  He used his sword to hack branches into twelve sticks as long as his arm. He walked to the river and sorted through what was left of the laundry until he found a skirt. He ripped it into strips and began lashing the sticks together two by two at right angles. Juan picked up two of the sticks and began helping him make crosses for the graves.

  Juan loved Rico as a brother. After countless hours sitting across from him at gaming tables, he could read his face like a lottery ticket. He could see that Rico had no intention of reporting to the colonel. Not today. Not ever.

  “They will shoot you for desertion,” he said.

  “They will have to catch me.”

  Juan lowered his voice. “It’s Carranza then.”

  It was not a question. Juan would have been astonished if Rico had deserted the army to join Zapata’s ragtag mob or throw in with that brute of a cattle thief, Villa. But Venustiano Carranza was another matter. He was of Rico’s class and an educated man. He was also almost the only politician with the cojones to defy Huerta.