Against the Day (72 page)

rank was to spend months that seemed like years traipsing to
no purpose around an empty shadowmap, a dime novel of Old Mexico, featuring
gringo evildoers in exile, sudden deaths, a government that had already fallen
but did not yet know it, a revolution that would never begin though thousands
were already dying and suffering in its name.

He
met up with Ewball Oust one night in a saloon somewhere along the— one
does not want to say accursed, exactly, but at least defectively blessed—
circuit of engagements booked for Gaston Villa and His Bughouse Bandoleros. For
the Bandoleros the border somehow was asymptotic—they might approach as
closely as they wished, but never cross. As if his father’s
charro
act
had placed an interdiction on the bloodline, Gaston understood that to enter
old Mexico would require of him something like a gift of grace for which he
doubted his soul was eligible.

Ewball
was a young fellow from Lake County, on the way down to the Veta Madre. The
family, rolling in Leadville money, had agreed to remit him two hundred dollars
a month, American not pesos, to stay down there and try to get by on his skills
in mine engineering. If he survived the drinking water and the bandits, why, he
might be allowed someday to return to the States, even to enjoy some marginal
future in Business.

   
“More
of a metallurgist that a mine engineer,” Ewball confessed.

   
Frank
had done some business in Leadville with a Toplady Oust, he believed.

“Uncle Top. Conceived in a choir loft
during a rendition of ‘Rock of Ages.’ You’re not that fellow with the magnets,
are you?”

   
“I
was. Lately obliged to seek a new line of work.”

Ewball eyed the Galandronome, started
to say something, thought better of it. “You know the Patio method?”

“Heard of it. Mexican silver process.
What us gringos’d call heap amalgamation. Said to be a little on the slow
side.”

“Usually a hundredpercent recovery
takes about a month. My family runs a couple of mines down in Guanajuato,
they’re sending me down to have a look, say they want to modernize, see if they
can speed things up.”

“Introduce em Mexes to the joys of
the Washoe process, they going to go along with that?”

“They’ve been used to taking their
time, Patio style’s traditional around Guanajuato—quicksilver’s cheap,
ores tend to be freemilling, not much reason to change except for the time
factor. So I figure what it is is, is that my folks just want me out of the
country.”

He sounded more bewildered than
angry, but Frank reckoned that could change. “Maybe they want a faster return
on investment,” he said carefully.
“It’s
understandable.”

   
“You
know the country down there?”

“No but it has been on my mind
lately, and I’ll tell you why, ’cause you’ll appreciate the metallurgy.” He
started to tell Ewball about argentaurum, but Ewball was way ahead of him.

“Sounds to me like what you’re really
interested in is that Iceland spar,” Ewball said.

   
Frank
shrugged, as if it would be embarrassing to admit how much.

“
Espato
is
what they call
it down there. Sometimes you hear
espanto,
which is something either
horrifying or amazing, depending.”

“Like looking at somebody through a
pure enough specimen and seeing not just the man but his ghost alongside him?”

Ewball regarded Frank with some
curiosity. “Plenty occasions for goose bumps down in those drifts as it is.
Espantoso,
hombre.
”

“I mean, calcite is an interesting
mineral, but basically I could use some work.”

   
“Sure,
they’re always hiring. Come on along.”

“Hate to leave my instrument,” taking
up the Galandronome, “just when I learned— Here, listen to this.” It was
a Mexicansounding tune, in some underlying march time but with those peculiar
southoftheborder hesitations and off beats to it. A couple of the Bandoleros
wandered over with guitars and began strumming chords, and after a while Paco
the trumpet player took over the solo from Frank.

Ewball
was amused. “There’s parts of Mexico they’d take you straight to the hoosegow
for just whistlin that.”

“ ‘
La Cucaracha’? It’s somebody’s
girlfriend, likes to smoke that
grifa
stuff, what’s wrong with that?”

“It’s
General Huerta,” Ewball informed him, “brutal heart, bloody mind,

and even if he prefers killing his own people you might not
want to be crossing his path, ’cause he’ll sure settle for a whistling gringo.
You won’t get the blindfold and you sure’s hell won’t get no free cigarette.”

So, iron on iron
and headlong as fate, Frank and
Ewball were borne into the Bajío on the eve of a turn in history. They crossed
the border at El Paso, came in to Guanajuato by train, Torreón, Zacatecas,
León, and changing finally at Silao, by then sleepless, apprehensive,
fieldshirts stained as if ominously with the juice of local strawberries. All
along the passage through the mesquite, beneath the soaring hawks of the Sierra
Madre, arroyos, piles of ore tailings, cottonwoods, through black fields, where
tlachiqueros
brought sheepskins slung across their backs full of fresh
maguey juice to be fermented, and campesinos in white lined the rightofway,
some packing weapons, some watching emptyhanded the train’s simple passage,
“expressionless,” as gringos liked to say, beneath their hatbrims, waiting, for
a feast day to dawn, a decisive message to arrive from the Capital, or Christ
to return, or depart, for good.

At
the Guanajuato station, the northamericans, puffing on Vera Cruz puros,
descended from the coach into an afternoon rainstorm, loping to shelter beneath
an ungalvanized shed roof that was being so battered by the downpour that no
one under it could hear or talk. Where the roof had rusted through, water
descended almost wrathfully. “Couple pesos’ worth of zinc could’ve squared this
away, ’s the thing,” Frank commented, and Ewball, unable to hear him, shrugged.

They
were approached by purveyors of chewing gum, sunglasses, straw hats, fire
opals, and shockingly young women, by children offering to carry their gear and
shine their boots, by hopefully loitering hotel trapdrivers with thoughts on
where they should sleep tonight, all of whom they were able to refuse with a
politely wagging finger.

The
old stone city smelled of livestock, wellwater, sewage, sulfur and other
byproducts of the mining and smelting of silver
. . . .
They could hear sounds from all invisible parts of the
city—voices, ore mills, the bells of the churches striking the hours.
Sounds echoed off the stone buildings, and the narrow streets amplified them.

Frank
went to work at Empresas Oustianas, S.A., and caught on to the amalgamation
work easy enough. He and Ewball had soon settled in to the cantina life, the
only uncomfortable part being what Frank imagined were

strange looks he would get every now
and then, as if people thought they recognized him, though it could’ve been all
the pulque or the absence of sleep. When he did sleep, he dreamed short,
intense dreams nearly always about Deuce Kindred. “I ain’t here,” Deuce kept
saying. “I am miles and miles away, you poor fool. No, don’t go in that
callejón.
You won’t find me. Don’t go up that
subida,
no point to it. No point
to your life, come to that. Mexico’s the perfect place for you to be. Another
fuckedup gringo.” But as dream followed dream, here was the odd thing, it was
the same intricate path, leading uphill, cobbled alleys at first, giving way to
packed earth, twisting, now and then briefly acquiring roofs and becoming
narrow passages—and stairways among dilapidated dwellings, many of them
abandoned, small, gray, dusty, crumbled, stacked roof to doorsill up the steep
mountainside. Frank woke each time convinced there was an actual counterpart
somewhere in this daylit city.

Semana Santa rolled around, and
nobody worked that week, so Frank and Ewball had a chance to wander the town in
search of trouble they hadn’t tried yet. Because the streets were narrow as
alleyways and ran between high walls, most of the town was in some kind of
shadow. Looking for sunlight, they headed uphill and soon, rounding a corner,
Frank was gripped by the strangest feeling of having been there before. “I
dreamed this,” he said.

Ewball narrowed his eyes some.
“What’s up there?”

“Somethin to do with Deuce.”

   
“He’s
here?”

   
“Hell,
just a dream, Ewb. Come on.”

They climbed up the redbrown
mountainside, into sunlight and purple artemisia, where wild dogs wandered the
roofless stones, till they were high enough to see, beneath the harsh radiance
of the Good Friday sky, where cirrus clouds wеге blown to
long, fine parallel streaks, the city below, spread east to west, stunned as if
by mysterious rays to a silence even Frank and Ewball must honor—the
passion of Christ, the windless hush
. . .
even
the stamping mills were silent, even Silver itself taking its day of rest, as
if to recognize the price Judas Iscariot received. Sunlight in the trees.

Just
as it seemed some revelation would emerge from the tensely luminous sky, they
were taken into custody by men in frayed, soiled, not even all that
officiallooking uniforms, each packing the samemodel Mauser—unwilling to
meet their eyes, as if not certain how protected they were by the opacities of
their own.

   
“What—”
Ewball started to ask, but the
rurales
were making lipbuttoning

gestures, and Frank remembered it was a Catholic practice to
stay dummied

up on Good Friday between noon and three, these being the
hours Christ

had hung on the cross. In devout silence they took away
Frank’s revolver and

Ewball’s German selfloader, and conducted them amid
impenetrable sanctity to
the
juzgado,
just
off Calle Juárez, where they were thrown
together into a cell deep below ground level, hewn out of the primordial rock.
Water dripped and rats took their time crossing open areas.

   
“
Mordida
problems,” supposed
Ewball.

   
“Don’t
figure your Company boys’ll come get us out sooner or later?”

“Long odds. Being gringo hereabouts
is not always the selling point you take it to be.”

   
“Well
but I’m th’ one’s telling you that all the time.”

“Oh. And I’m the one that’s just
whistling cheerfully down the trail here, figuring nothing will ever happen.”

   
“Least
I know where the safety is on that Broomhandle, Ewb.”

   
“ ‘
Was,’ I think you mean. Those
pistoles
are long gone, in my opinion.”

“Maybe these boys’ll get confused
with yours, too, just give up on it and let you have it back.”

Sometime
in the middle of the night, they were awakened and bustled down a series of
corridors and eventually up some stairs to a street neither of them had noticed
before. “Not too happy with this,” Ewball muttered, walking funny because of a
tremor in his knees.

Frank
took his unhandcuffed hands out of his pockets and flashed him a thumbsup. “No
esposas,
I think we’re O.K.”

They
turned on to the widest street in town, which both northamericans knew led
straight to the Panteón, or city cemetery. “You would call this O.K., huh,”
Ewball looking miserable.

   
“Hey,
we could make a bet on it.”

   
“Sure,
great for you, you wouldn’t have to pay off.”

   
“Got
no money anyway. Why I suggested it.”

At the foot of the Cerro del Trozado,
almost able to make out the cemetery walls at the top looming in the partial
moonlight, they entered an opening in the hillside, nearly invisible behind a
screen of cactus.
“
¿Dónde
estemos?”
Frank saw no harm in asking.

   
“
El
Palacio de Cristal.
”

“I’ve heard of this place,” Ewball
said. “Whatever the charge against us is, it’s political. “

   
“Sure
got the wrong cowboy here,” said Frank, “I don’t even vote.”

   
“
La
política,
”
nodded
one of the
rurales,
smiling.

   
“
Felicitaciones,
”
his companion added.

The cell was a little roomier than
the one in the
juzgado,
with a couple of cornhusk mattresses and a
slopbucket and a huge, unflattering cartoon of Don Porfirio Díaz charcoaled
across the wall. “Seein ’s they wouldn’t shoot us till sunup,” Frank said,
“guess I’ll go snuggle in with the
chinches
here for a while.”