Against the Day (192 page)

Mayva brought out the baby tintypes,
Reef in a christening dress, maybe a sailor hat, all that usual deckingout, for
he was a sweet baby, his mother said, though by the time he was three or four,
Stray couldn’t help noticing, he was already halfway to the face he was always
going to have, that lopsided hammeredon look, like he’d already made up his
mind to it, even as a kid.

   
“Do
you think he’ll be back?” Mayva said.

The kitchen was dim and cool. The
afternoon was quiet for a minute, no father and son going round and round,
midday chores all seen to, Moline taking a nap someplace. Stray gathered the
older woman into her arms, and Mayva with a great dryeyed sigh rested her
forehead on Stray’s shoulder. They kept like that, silent, till somewhere in
the house there was a series of thumps and some bellowing and the day started
up again.

espite warnings from the U.S. State Department to all gringos
to get their backsides across the border immediately, Frank stayed in
Chihuahua. While his bones were knitting and he’d been attending to his
romantic and, it could be argued, spiritual life, the Madero Revolution had
moved on, specifically south to the Capital, where it lost no time in lapsing
into some urban professionals’ fantasy of liberal democracy. Old allies were
ignored when not disowned, denounced, or thrown in the hoosegow. In Chihuahua
especially there was a good deal of grumbling—actually more like
rage—among the people who knew what it had cost them to put Francisco
Madero in the Presidential Palace, who now saw the dreams they had come down
out of the Sierra Madre to fight for being disregarded and flatout betrayed.
Soon there were large groups of armed folks gathering in the towns with banners
and signs, some reading
land and justice
,
some
land and liberty
, some just
land
, but always the word
someplace—
¡tierra
!
Little
rebellions began, exMaderistas picking up their old Mausers again, and soon
there were almost too many to keep track of. Many were rebelling in the name of
disaffected exminister Emilio Vázquez, so after a while any new uprisings got
automatically labeled “Vazquista,” though Vázquez himself had fled to Texas and
by now was more of a figurehead.

Here
in Chihuahua the collection of drifters, road agents, mountain fighters and
bitterend Magonistas that Frank had been running with at the time of the Casas
Grandes battle were still around, most of them. Madero was far away now,
bewitched by his new power into a more genteel version of Porfirio Díaz. Sooner
or later that would have to be dealt with.
La revolución efectiva
was
yet to come. Toward the end of the year word came north from

Morelos that Emiliano Zapata had raised an army down there and
begun a serious insurrection against the government. Some of Frank’s old
compadres immediately headed for Morelos, but anybody who liked shooting at
federales
could still find plenty of that right here in Chihuahua.

Before long Frank found himself down
in Jiménez in southern Chihuahua, attached to an irregular unit fighting on
behalf of Pascual Orozco, once a major force in the Madero Revolution in
Chihuahua, nowadays also in open revolt against the government. Frank had
joined up in Casas Grandes, where a former Magonista named José Inés Salazar
was raising a small army. In February they combined with troops led by the
former lieutenant governor of the state, Braulio Hernández, who had just taken
the silvermining town of Santa Eulalia. By early March the combined forces
controlled Ciudad Juárez and were threatening the city of Chihuahua. The
governor panicked and fled—Pancho Villa, still loyal to the Madero
government, tried to attack the city but was beaten back by Pascual Orozco,
who’d finally made his move after months of indecision. Salazar and Hernández
recognized Orozco as commander in chief of what was now a twothousandman army,
and Orozco declared himself governor of the state.

Within weeks this army had
quadrupled, and new insurgencies, now calling themselves Orozquista, were
reported from all around the country. A march on Mexico City seemed imminent.
Madero’s war minister, former fencing coach José González Salas, was put in
command of the campaign against Orozco. By the middle of March, he was in
Torreón with six thousand troops, about 150 miles down the Mexican Central line
from the rebel headquarters at Jiménez, and the skirmishing had begun.

Frank noticed
how immoderately, and at what
length, El Espinero had laughed when he’d heard Frank was headed down to
Jiménez. Frank was used to this and had learned to wait to see what it meant.
It turned out that the country around Jiménez had been famous since the days of
Cortés for its meteorites, including those found at San Gregorio and La
Concepción, and a gigantic one known as the Chupaderos, whose fragments,
weighing in all perhaps fifty tons, had been taken away to the Capital in 1893.
Meteorite hunters combed this area all the time, and kept finding new ones. It
was like there was a god of meteorites who had singled out Jiménez for special
attention. Frank found he was using his own offduty time to ride out into the
Bolsón de Mapimí and have a look around. He remembered the giant crystal of
Iceland spar El Espinero had showed him years before, which had led him to

Sloat Fresno. It could have been out here that he saw it,
maybe even someplace close by, Frank had never made a map and couldn’t remember
now.

He found and picked up the
strangestlooking damn rock he’d seen in a while, black and pitted all over,
smooth in some places and rough in others. Small enough to keep in a saddlebag.
He was not supposed to be sensitive to such things, but every time he touched
the thing, even lightly, he began to hear a sort of voice.

   
“What
are you doing here?” it seemed it was saying.

   
“You’re
sure a long way from home to be askin that.”

One prong
of the government attack was headed
straight up the Mexican Central Railway. “Perfect conditions for the
máquina
loca,
”
it seemed to
General Salazar, this being the technical term for a locomotive loaded with
dynamite and deployed at high speed against the enemy. “Find that gringo.”
Frank, often sought out for his engineering skills, was summoned to the
General’s tent. “Doctor Pancho, if you wouldn’t mind reporting to Don Emilio
Campas, he’ll be taking some people south, and we may need your advice.”

“
A
sus órdenes.
”
Frank
went looking for an appropriate steam locomotive to modify and found a
switching engine just done making up a freight train for the Parral line, and
brought it to a siding where his crew were already waiting—a couple of
oldtimers from Casas Grandes who shared the Magonista faith in politics through
chemistry and who knew where to put the bundled sticks and run the fuzing for
the best effect, and the basic work was done in half an hour.

They moved out ahead of another train
carrying soldiers and accompanied by some cavalry, eight hundred troops in all,
headed south, toward the Durango border. The sun hammered the barren badlands.
About thirty miles down the line, between Corralitos and Rellano, they ran into
an armored train full
of
federales,
heading north. The train behind Frank braked to a stop, the riflemen
got off, the cavalry deployed to left and right. Frank allowed his own
locomotive to slow a little while he looked back and saw Salazar raise his
sword and then bring it down in a great flash of whitegold desert light that
could almost be heard.
“
Ándale,
muchachos,
”
Frank hollered, pulling out some matches and
commencing to light fuses. After throwing in the last of the coal and firewood,
and checking the gauges, the rest of the crew jumped off.

   
“You’re
coming, Doctor Pancho?”

   
“Be
right with you,” said Frank. He opened the throttle all the way and the

engine began to pick up speed. He swung down onto the step
and was just about to jump when a peculiar thought occurred to him. Was this
the “path” El Espinero had had in mind, this specific half mile of track, where
suddenly the day had become extradimensional, the country shifted, was no
longer the desert abstraction of a map but was speed, air rushing, the smell of
smoke and steam, time whose substance grew more condensed as each tick came
faster and faster, all perfectly inseparable from Frank’s certainty that
jumping or not jumping was no longer the point, he belonged to what was
happening, to the shriek from ahead as the engineer in the federal train leaned
on his steam horn and Frank automatically responded with his own, the two
combining in a single great chord that gathered in the entire moment, the
brownuniformed
federales
scattering from their train, the insane little
engine shuddering in its frenzy, the governor valve no longer able to regulate
anything, and from someplace a bug came in out of the blind velocity and went
up Frank’s right nostril and brought him back to the day. “Shit,” he whispered,
and let go, dropped, hit the ground, rolled with a desperate speed not his own,
praying that he wouldn’t break his leg again.

The
explosion was terrific, shrapnel and parts of men and animals flew everywhere,
superheated steam blasting through a million irregular flueways among the
moving fragments, a huge ragged hemisphere of gray dust, gone pink with blood,
rose and spread, and survivors staggered around in it blinded and coughing
miserably. Some were shooting at nothing, others had forgotten where, or what,
bolthandles and triggers were. Later it was estimated that sixty
federales
had
been killed instantly and the rest were at least demoralized. Even the vultures
for days were too scared to approach. The Twentieth Battalion mutinied and shot
two of their officers, retreat was sounded, and everybody hightailed it any way
they could back to Torreón. General González, wounded and dishonored, committed
suicide.

Frank
found a horse wandering in the Bolsón in only slightly better shape than he
was, and came tottering back sometime in the middle of the night to find
everybody at the Orozquista camp drunk, or asleep, or occupying some dream of
victory that even Frank in his exhaustion could see was just loco. A couple of
weeks later, three thousand of Orozco’s rebels went down to Pancho Villa’s
headquarters at Parral to finish off the last of the Maderista loyalists in the
region. Villa, greatly outnumbered, quite sensibly lit out of town before
anybody got there, but this did not prevent them from sacking Parral,
dynamiting homes, looting, killing. Frank missed out on the festivities, having
found an empty freight car down at the yards and gone to sleep, half hoping
that when he woke he’d be in some fresh part of the Republic, far from all of
this.

When
news came that Madero, despite deep misgivings, had chosen Victoriano Huerta to
lead the new effort against the Orozquistas, Frank, who was not often subject
to feelings of dread, began to grow a little nervous, remembering his brief
runin with some of Huerta’s badmen in uniform seven or eight years before. Even
with the life expectancy of a military bandit down here being comparable with a
field rodent’s, this Huerta somehow kept showing up, as if enjoying the favor
of some particularly cruel junta of ancient gods. When Huerta’s forces reached
and occupied Torreón, Frank knew that Orozco’s insurgency was pretty much
doomed. As the
federales
lingered on in Torreón, some in Jiménez began
to grow hopeful again, but Torreón was the key to any advance south against the
Capital, and without it there would be no rebel victory. Huerta had cannon, and
Orozco did not.

And sure enough, in the weeks ahead,
as Huerta slowly moved north from Torreón, the Orozquista fortunes would begin
to turn. Each time the rebels engaged, they would be defeated, desertions would
increase, until finally at Bachimba the
máquina loca
tactic would fail,
and with it all Orozco’s hopes. Huerta would return to the Capital triumphant.