Last Train From Cuernavaca

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  They also had replaced his saddle and bridle. Rico unwound the reins from the pommel and stuck a boot into the stirrup. He tried to swing onto his horse but blacked out again. José and Antonio caught him as he pitched backward.

  He awoke propped up in a sitting position and leaning against the front wall of a cave. Lieutenant Angel, Antonio, and José sat eating nearby. Angel was defending the decision to hang him.

  “I recognized him, José. He led the charge out of the cattle car when we attacked the train last year. His men almost killed us. And I have seen him among the soldiers at Tres Marías.”

  “He’s the man who saved my daughter from Rubio.”

  Angel shrugged. “I didn’t know that.”

  Serafina handed Rico a tortilla with a few beans rolled up in it. Rico couldn’t remember his last meal. He ate it in two bites.

  He started to ask for another, then looked around. He saw no sacks of corn nor beans. The men and women were thin. The children had the potbellied, bright-eyed, brittle-haired look of malnutrition.

  “Señora King is safe in Mexico City, Capitán,” José said. “I spoke to her the day she left on the train.”

  If Grace was in Mexico City, then Cuernavaca no longer concerned Rico. He wanted to ask José if she was well when he spoke to her. He wanted to ask if she had mentioned him.

  “Where will you go now?” asked José.

  “The capital.”

  “Permit me to speak frankly, Capitán.”

  Rico nodded.

  “Huerta’s informants are everywhere, and Rubio has posted a reward for your death. If word reaches them that you are with Señora Knight, they might imprison her as an accomplice.” José didn’t have to add what would happen to Grace in jail.

  “You’re a guacho, an orphan like us.” Angel waved a hand at the men playing cards and napping. “Huerta has screwed all of us poor people and now he’s screwing rich ones like you, Don Rico.”

  Rico ignored him. He led Grullo upstream from where the women were bathing and washing clothes. He took a wooden box from the bottom of his saddlebag and turned Grullo loose to graze.

  The box contained a pen, an ink bottle that was not quite empty, and Grace’s last letter to him. He sat in the shade of an overhanging cypress. Using the box as a desk, he wrote on the reverse side of the Grace’s letter. He wrote a lot, but it all came down to a simple message. He told her he loved her. He folded it and put it back into the envelope in which it had arrived.

  If he was killed on the way to Mexico City, maybe this would reach her. All he had to do was live long enough to find a muleteer or charcoal seller, a pulque dealer or market-bound farmer to deliver it.

  “Capitán Martín.”

  An old mule approached with Serafina and Socorro on his back. José and Antonio walked alongside. Serafina dismounted and held out a banana leaf with a handful of salve on it.

  “This is for the mark of the rope.”

  “Thank you.”

  Socorro gave him a bright red bandana. It had been freshly laundered and had that new-cut grass smell about it from the soap they had used. The aroma always reminded him of his Zapotec nurse.

  Rico tied the bandana around his neck. It would come in handy. The red mark of a noose was a badge of honor in some places, but in others it could get him hanged all over again.

  “Are you well, Socorro?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Rico had never grown a beard before. It felt like a thicket had sprouted on his face. He had developed a recent habit of rubbing its wiry nap whenever he pondered something.

  He rubbed his jaw now and surveyed the mule. The beast was spindle-hipped, sway backed, and bucktoothed, but his eyes had the wily glint of a partner-in-crime. That appealed to Rico.

  “José, I want to exchange Grullo for the mule.”

  “We are poor people, Capitán. We cannot accept such a gift.”

  “Then consider him a loan.”

  Socorro handed Rico the mule’s reins. “We call him Moses.”

  Moses. A good name. A good omen.

  Angel approached as if she just happened along. “You understand why we were going to hang you, don’t you, guacho, foundling?”

  “I’m the enemy.”

  “Enemy no more.” Angel held out a hand and after a moment’s hesitation, Rico shook it.

  It was a remarkably small hand. It reminded Rico that wars were started by the old, but fought by the young. The lieutenant didn’t appear to be more than seventeen.

  “You look familiar. When were you at Tres Marías?”

  Angel took off the wide-brimmed hat. Her hair reached almost to her shoulders. She laughed at the surprise on Rico’s face.

  “You sold candy on the train platform,” he said.

  “Your friend Juan claimed he was crazy with love for me.”

  “He spoke half the truth. He is crazy.”

  Angel threw her head back and laughed.

  It was such a melodic, carefree laugh that Rico wondered how he could have mistaken her for a man. As a rule, most people saw what they wanted to see, but Rico didn’t like to think of himself as most people.

  “I have a proposition for you.” Angel stuffed her hair back under her hat. “Come with us and we’ll help you find your Inglesa.” She held up a hand before Rico could refuse. “Fatso’s men are thick as fleas, and he’s put a lot of money on your head.” She grinned. “I’m tempted to turn you in myself.”

  “Answer this. Did your people blow up the troop train?”

  “I blew up the train.” She pointed a finger at the tip of her own nose. “It was carrying José and a hundred other men to die of starvation and hard labor in the jungle.”

  “Innocent civilians died. Women and maybe children.”

  “War is war. If they rode on a troop train they were not innocent.”

  Rico knew there was no effective rebuttal for that. When fat, pampered leaders bragged of victories, of villages occupied, of enemies killed or taken prisoner, they left out the most important statistic. How many young souls had been hardened by the brutality of it all? And more important, would they be able to regain their humanity when this was all over?

  “I will not shoot my former comrades-in-arms,” he said.

  “To hell with you then, cabrón.” But she kept smiling.

  “If God and the Devil wish it.” Rico remembered something Grace used to say. “Heaven for the scenery. Hell for the company.”

  The railroad had put a lot of mule drivers out of business, but not all of them. Rico heard the familiar jingle of a bell mare from around a bend in the high, narrow trail. Maybe he could persuade them to deliver the letter to Grace. He urged Moses into a faster walk.

  The five mules and three drivers ambled along the windswept height as if it were a broad thoroughfare. As Rico caught up with them he heard the creak of hempen ropes and leather packs over the song and banter of the men. The muleteers wore wide-brimmed leather hats, rawhide leggings, thorn-torn serapes, and dusty sandals.

  They listened to Rico’s request to deliver the letter and the offer of his last two pesos.

  “Is this for a woman?” they asked.

  “It is.”

  “Then put away your money. We will do it in the name of love.”

  Rico mounted Moses and rode on ahead of the pack train. When they had dropped back out of hearing range, Rico felt the urge to sing. He would serenade Grace with a ballad when he saw her, but what came to mind now was something totally different.

  He belted out his alma mater’s fight song at full volume. A choir of mountain echoes accompanied him.

  “‘Ten thousand men of Harvard want victory today.’”

  50

  The Bank of Pity

  Rico had always viewed the outskirts of Mexico City from a train window. He knew the streets were a maze, but he had never navigated them on foot, much less on the back of a shambling, talkative mule. He stopped to ask directions at a small general store in a tree-s
haded village that the expanding metropolis would swallow any day now and spit out in unrecognizable form.

  The store owner, with his long, thin nose, stiff bristle of hair, and skinny legs, reminded Rico of an amiable rooster. When Rico asked if he would like to buy a mule his eyes lit up.

  “God has sent you.” He looked as if he would leap the counter and plant a kiss on Rico’s bearded cheek. “My mule has just died.”

  He assured Rico that Moses would only be required to pull a delivery cart. “And not many deliveries at that,” he said sadly. “The people suffer, but what cannot be remedied must be endured.”

  Rico guessed that what they endured was President Huerta. “Por cada cochino gordo llega su Sábado,” he said. “Every fat pig ends up as a main course on Saturday.”

  Rico unsaddled Moses and turned him loose in the pasture next to the store. Moses wasn’t interested in tender farewells. He lost no time getting down to the business of grazing.

  As Rico left he glanced at his reflection in the store’s front window. He stared into the deep-set eyes of a filthy, bearded stranger wearing a beggar’s clothes. He resolved not to appear at the Mendozas’ door looking like Lazarus the leper.

  The sale of Moses brought enough money for cab fare with a little left over, and Rico decided to treat himself. He let the horse-drawn cabs pass him by and hailed a traffic-scarred Ford Model T touring car with FOR HIRE painted in black letters on the passenger-side wind-screen. He was surprised when the driver yanked and pressed the lever and pedal to brake the car and put it in neutral. If Rico had been at the wheel he wouldn’t have stopped for anyone who looked like him. He climbed into the backseat and relaxed for the first time in longer than he could remember. He had three stops to make before he could see Grace.

  “Take me to Uncle’s.”

  “Sí, señor.”

  Rico didn’t doubt the driver would know what he meant. The official name of the national pawnshop was El Monte de Piedad, the Bank of Pity, but everyone called it “Uncle.”

  The prospect of seeing Grace preoccupied Rico, and he hardly heard the blare of car horns and the clang of trolley bells. Wheeled traffic increased and the buildings loomed four and five stories high. He had become a stranger in a familiar land, out of place among the brown suits, starched collars, glossy shoes, and derby hats. The Ford chugged past the elegant restaurants and cantinas where Rico used to meet his friends. Posh was what Grace had called them.

  He stepped down from the taxi’s running board at the northwest corner of the main plaza. In front of him stood the majestic stone building that housed the Bank of Pity. Spanish monks had founded it in 1775 to help the poor, but it lent money to anyone with something to leave as collateral. The well-to-do and the middling classes came here, too. Rico and his army comrades had often gone to Uncle’s for cash to cover gambling debts.

  The Bank’s employees made swift appraisals of every sort of object imaginable, then handed over cash for thirty percent of the value. If the goods weren’t redeemed at a low rate of interest within a month they went up for sale. Tens of thousands of items, from diamonds to cellos to grindstones, filled the cavernous building.

  Rico went straight to the far corner of the mezzanine where firearms were displayed, and pawned the only things of value remaining. When he left Uncle’s he felt odd without the weight of his tooled leather belt and the Colts in their holsters.

  He would have to do his shopping in the sprawling cacophony known as the Thieves’ Market. No one there would question a bedraggled beggar with cash in his pocket. Not everything for sale in the Thieves’ Market had been stolen, but a lot of it had. Even pilfered crosses, chalices, and church vestments turned up there.

  Its apparel section encompassed several city blocks. Tiers of garments hung from lines stretched overhead, like a grove of clothes in a season of abundant rains. Rico hurried through the ranks of army uniforms, dangling in ranks as if on gravity-defying parade. Rust-colored patches of dried blood stained many of them.

  They reminded Rico of a story he had heard. Late in 1910, then-

  President Porifiro Díaz received a box from one of the Revolution’s generals. The box contained a dozen federal army uniforms, tattered and bloody, but neatly folded. The note that came with it said, “We are returning the husks. Send us more tamales.”

  Beyond the uniforms hung clusters of twills, tweeds, and herring-bones. Rico stopped to admire a handsome white linen Palm Beach suit. On the counter below, the shopkeeper had laid out a pale blue cambric shirt, red silk four-in-hand tie, crisp white funnel collar, silk socks, patent leather shoes, and a jaunty fedora.

  They tempted him, but he remembered how Grace once had described the New World’s mania for Old World fashions. “Why do Mexican gents dress like whifling Brit stiffs when they cut such a smashing dash in their own duds?” She had surveyed him in his dark blue army tunic, then kissed him. “But a uniform, my love,” she had added in her for-Rico-only voice, “a uniform is honey to ants in any language.”

  Rico couldn’t wear a captain’s uniform, but he could cut a smashing dash in the next best thing.

  Rico left the public bath clean, beardless, and with well-scrubbed teeth. Over a white cotton shirt and red cumberbund he wore a waist-length deerskin jacket with silver buttons. His tight leather trousers were open from knee to ankle at the side of each leg. Their rawhide laces exposed the loose white cotton pants underneath. The flared hems broke gracefully across the sheen of his half-boots. As for the silver buttons that marched in military order up each side of the pants, he had polished them until he could see his freshly shaven chin reflected in them. His flat-brimmed black felt hat was the sort matadors wore.

  He walked to the Mendozas’ white stucco mansion, but when he pulled the cord on the brass bell at the front gate his heart pounded as if he had run all the way. The mayordomo opened the door, went goggle-eyed, crossed himself, and looked about to faint with terror. Rico had to convince the old man he was not a ghost before he would usher him into the high-ceilinged parlor with its red velvet draperies and European art on the walls. Rico didn’t have to wait long for the family to gather.

  Grace’s former father-in-law was short and tightly packed. When he embraced Rico the top of his head easily fit under Rico’s chin. He had been one of Díaz’s científicos, and with the survival instincts of an alley cat, here he was, still alive and prospering. But then, so was General Huerta.

  Mendoza held Rico at arm’s length to get a good look at him, then embraced him again. “We heard that the rebels had hanged you. General Rubio and President Huerta certainly think so. They’ve called off the search for you.”

  “Where is Grace?”

  “In Cuernavaca.”

  “Cuernavaca!” Rico wondered how many disappointments and obstructions fate planned to inflict on him and Grace. “I was told she came here.”

  “We begged her to leave her hotel in the hands of God and come to the capital, but stubborn as three mules, she refused.” Mendoza gave him a telegram. “Before Zapata’s criminals cut the wires she sent this.”

  The cable had been sent a week ago. Rico imagined Grace in Cuernavaca’s telegraph office dictating the message: “I am in God’s hands Stop The hotel is in mine Stop.”

  Rico read it over and over. He looked so forlorn that Mendoza waved a hand, urging Rico to keep it. Rico folded it and put it into the inner pocket of his vest. It proved she existed. At times in the past weeks he had wondered if he had dreamed her.

  “Are the telegraph lines still down?” he asked.

  “Worse.” Mendoza mopped his glistening brow with a big silk bandana. “Zapata’s rabble has laid siege to Tres Marías. We believe they intend to take Cuernavaca.”

  “Why doesn’t Huerta send reinforcements?”

  “He did. Most of them deserted to the rebels.”

  “Lend me your best horse.”

  “You can’t reach Cuernavaca, Captain Martín.”

  “Yes, I can.”
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  Señor Mendoza smacked his forehead with the flat of his hand. “How could I forget? Actually, we thought you might come here.”

  “Why?”

  “Some mule drivers left a letter from Grace this morning, but it’s addressed to you.”

  Mendoza held out an envelope with Rico’s address in Grace’s handwriting. The envelope had part of a mule’s hoofprint on one corner, but otherwise it was intact. It was the note Rico had written on the back of Grace’s letter. It had arrived before he did.

  Rico put it in the inner pocket of his vest. Surely fate had no more jokes to play on him, sending him here, there and, back again. Surely God would allow him to deliver this letter to Grace.

  51

  Eating Eden

  Two hours before dawn the nightly summer rain stopped on cue, as if God had assigned a member of His staff to turn off the celestial spigot. Grace stood on her balcony and looked out at the raindrops sparkling like jewels in the light of the gibbous moon. Then she dressed and went to the kitchen.

  While she waited for the kettle to boil on the big, brightly tiled stove, she wet the tip of her finger so that the last flecks of tea leaves would stick to it. Now the tin of Sir Lipton’s oolong was truly empty. When the tea finished steeping, Grace carried the steaming cup through the rear courtyard, out a side door, and into her own little Eden.

  Four years ago, this garden had been a vacant lot hip-deep in garbage. Grace had hired a small army of men to haul the trash away and bring in wagonloads of rich dirt. Socrates had installed a door in the wall to give entry from the rear courtyard. Grace’s gardener had abracadabra’d the bare lot into a jungle of fruit trees and green bounty.

  Because of the garden, the Colonial enjoyed a reputation for fresh fruits and vegetables that diners could eat with no intestinal regrets. Foreigners journeyed from Mexico City and beyond to enjoy what the garden produced. In those prosperous days Grace had never imagined that her house hold’s survival would depend on it.