El Paso: A Novel (10 page)

Donita had run up by now and was kneeling over Johnny and screaming profanities at Fierro. Johnny was bleeding badly from his wound but was still conscious. Fierro smiled at her, his mouth twisted in disdain.

“Big
macho
!” she spat. “Big man! You say you’re a man helping the people, huh? You’re a criminal. A bandit!”

Villa motioned for two men to restrain her.

“This your boyfriend?” he said.

“My husband.”

“Well, well.” He took a final swallow of lemonade and flipped the rest to the ground. “I think I’ll invite you to dine with us this evening, señora. We need an ornament for our table.”

Callahan’s anger overcame the fear in him.

“The lady’s just trying to help her husband. Why don’t you let the señora take care of him?”

“She called us some pretty bad names,” Villa said. “You want to defend her?”

“Look, General,” Callahan said, “we’re peaceful people here. We ain’t done you any harm, and won’t, if you’ll just let us alone.”

“Yeah, I let you alone too long, I think,” Villa retorted. “You and Señor Hearst with his millions of acres down here in Mexico and Mr. Guggenheim and Mr. Whitney and Mr. Buckley and all the rest of you Americanos that have stolen the people’s property and turned them into slaves on their own lands with your stinking mines and stinking oil wells and stinking railroads and stinking cow ranches. And now your stinking government has closed the border to us so we can’t even buy coal for our military trains or ammunition or even rations, so we go hungry, huh? And you want me to let you alone?”

“I don’t know nothing about any of that,” Callahan said.

“Well, Señor . . . what was your name?”

“Callahan.”

“Well, Señor Callahan, you don’t know nothing about that, huh? So I think maybe I’ll make you understand. Maybe I make an example of you for your gringo Señor Shaughnessy, so maybe he will go to your president Woodrow Wilson and get him to change his mind about us. Your Señor Shaughnessy is a powerful man, right?”

“He owns a railroad. A
muy
big railroad. And that boy you just cut down there, he is the Colonel’s favorite. And the Colonel don’t take to this kind of thing very lightly, either.”

“Do you value your life, Señor Callahan?”

“Yeah, I value it.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” Villa said, “because all you gringos have got to know that you are here at our pleasure in Mexico and not because you claim you own a bunch of land that those crooks like Díaz and the rest of them in Mexico City said they sold to you for a few stinking pesos. And maybe the message will finally get through that we aren’t fooling around down here.”

Villa turned to a lieutenant at his side and said something, and three or four men jumped off their horses and seized Callahan roughly. Villa gave more instructions to the lieutenant, who barked orders to the men to carry Callahan to the courtyard gate. They put a rope around Callahan’s wrists and hoisted him to the bridge of the gate so that he dangled eight or nine feet above the ground while everybody watched in fearful silence.

“Now we will have a little saber practice,” Villa said. “My men have gone too long out of battle. They’re getting rusty.” Several men, wearing sabers at their sides, fell out and backed their horses in a line some distance from Callahan, who had stopped struggling and was hanging there, with his eyes on Villa.

“God save me,” Callahan said.

“Why not let the crooked priests do that for you?” Villa replied.

The women on the balconies or under the eaves either turned their backs or retreated into the hacienda. Villa gave a nod and the first horseman drew his saber and made a gallop toward Callahan. His blow struck a leg as he passed beneath the gate and out into the open lawn. The leg was half severed by the gash and blood spurted through Callahan’s torn pants leg. The second swordsman tore a hole in Callahan’s side and part of his intestines spilled out. Callahan kicked, and his cries became pathetic and feeble. Several other riders had joined the line. After the fourth or fifth pass, Callahan fell still. They kept on, though, as if they were sabering a straw dummy. It was rare these days to have a live person to practice on.

Outside the gate, in the gathering darkness, half a dozen men were skinning Toro Malo. They took good care to do it right, too, fully aware of Villa’s high reputation when he’d been in the butchering business himself. Large cooking fires had cropped up all through the fields surrounding Valle del Sol, and other soldiers were skinning more of the Colonel’s cattle for their own dinners. But the skinning of Toro Malo took precedence and the hacienda’s barbecue pit had been lit with good-grade charcoal. They understood this was to be a very special bull-roast.

Meanwhile, Villa had allowed some of the women to carry Johnny Ollas off to a bedroom to be looked after. He was lapsing in and out of consciousness, and after they cleaned his wound they sat beside him, doctoring his wound with agave juice and pepper sauce.

Donita, however, remained in the charge of Villa’s aides. They hustled her to the long dinner table that had been set up in the courtyard, opposite the end where Villa had installed himself. When slabs of Toro Malo were served, Donita gagged at the plate and spat on the ground and glared at Villa with a look of almost unimaginable contempt.

“You know, señora,” Villa said, wiping the meat grease from his mouth and mustache with the back of his hand, “I like you. I think I’m gonna bring you along with us in the morning, just so this Colonel Shaughnessy gets the notion that I am a serious man. Maybe he’ll even make us a deal to get back the wife of his pet boy, huh?”

She wished she and Johnny hadn’t argued with each other last night. Damned old bull, she thought. Johnny could have just kept quiet. But he was still a matador, and matadors don’t get to be matadors by being cowards. As that thought struck her, she repeated it to herself with a renewed respect for Johnny Ollas:
Matadors don’t get to be matadors by being cowards
.

NINE

I
t was midmorning two days later when Arthur and his family turned down the long gravel drive to Cornwall, the thirty-six-room stone “cottage” his father owned on the Newport bluffs, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Like the naming of
Ajax
, the naming of Cornwall had been another futile attempt by John Shaughnessy to anglicize himself. As they drew nearer, Arthur could see the Colonel standing on the wide slate steps, arms folded, head back, a posture Arthur recognized too well.

The Old Man had steamed into the harbor the night before, after his aborted trip to Ireland, and Arthur knew, when he was summoned down for lunch, that a confrontation was going to erupt over Arthur’s mortgaging of the
Ajax.

When they drove up in front, the children, Katherine, twelve, and Timmy, nine, hopped out and went to their grandfather, who gave them hugs and smiles, but when Arthur got out he was greeted with a disapproving look that was just this side of a scowl. Arthur went straight up to his father.

“Shall we talk?” he asked.

“Not now,” the Colonel replied. “Bomba has set up the traps and we need to shoot before the sun moves into our eyes. We’ll be done in about an hour. I’ll see you then, in the library.”

With that, the Colonel met Arthur’s wife Xenia with a hug and ushered Timmy and Katherine around to the lawn overlooking the ocean. Xenia and Arthur went into the house, she to their upstairs room and Arthur to the library. He figured he might as well stake out his territory, and besides, there was a bar where he could fix the drink he thought he’d need.

The first thing that struck anybody entering the Shaughnessy library at Cornwall was the stuffed head of an enormous African bull elephant the Colonel had killed on safari a year after Arthur had come into the Shaughnessy household. The Colonel had taken him along on this expedition, and all the way from Nairobi to the plains of Kilimanjaro goaded him at every campsite while throwing clay pigeons from a hand trap: “Don’t flinch!” “Stick your behind out when you set up for a shot!” “Lean into the gun!” “Be flexible, you’re tensing up,
don’t flinch
!” Until, after a week or two, Arthur became a reasonably good shot, however reluctantly.

When the time came for the elephant hunt, Arthur was not allowed to go, but was instead sent out with a tall African man to shoot Thompson’s gazelles. Elephants were too dangerous, his father said, but late one afternoon a wagon pulled up in camp and a native driver told Arthur the Colonel had said to fetch him. Several miles later they arrived at the site of the elephant kill. Arthur had never seen an animal so large, not even in zoos. The elephant lay in a sitting position, its rear legs tucked beneath the massive body and its front legs splayed out in front. The elephant’s trunk had coiled on one of its sprawled legs and provided a prop-up for its enormous head and tusks. Its eyes were open and between them was a small hole from which a surprisingly tiny amount of blood oozed out. The eyes were sad and wistful, with an almost bewildered stare. Several bearers in native dress stood around while one of the half dozen hunters in the Colonel’s party set up a tripod for a photograph.

The picture itself, now hanging in the Colonel’s trophy room back in Boston, showed one of the hunters perched on the elephant’s back. Another sat on a leg, his foot on the trunk. The Colonel posed beside the elephant, his rifle crooked in one arm, with the other arm resting around a great ivory tusk. All the hunters were wearing high boots, tweed jackets, and shirts with ties. They had removed their pith helmets and held them in their hands. The Colonel insisted on proper dress while shooting elephants.

“These are dignified animals,” he said, “and we must show our respect by hunting them in a dignified way.” When they stuffed the old elephant’s head to hang on the Colonel’s wall, the taxidermist inserted artificial amber eyes that made the creature’s countenance seem glaring and fierce. It was not at all the way the dead animal looked in the photograph, or the way Arthur remembered it.

Arthur poured his drink, a gin and tonic, and stood looking out the big bay window of the room, away from the elephant out toward the sea. He watched his father setting up Timmy with a shotgun. The boy seemed reluctant to take it, but the Colonel patted him on the shoulder, talking animatedly, though Arthur could not hear what was being said.

Timmy’s learning to shoot wasn’t a bad idea, but Arthur had never pushed the boy to do anything he really didn’t want to—which was what the Colonel had done with
him
after they had taken him in at the same age Timmy was now. After Arthur had come to the Shaughnessy household, the Colonel constantly pushed for him to become an athlete and horseman and hunter and ball player, but it had backfired. He tried those things and he either didn’t like them or wasn’t good at them; later he became a pretty fair tennis player but that was about it—the New England & Pacific was the crown of his life’s work, and in what spare time he had, Arthur studied business journals—and then there were his collections: the stamps, the coins, the butterflies. And, of course, the flying.

Over the years Arthur became one of the major amateur lepidopterists in America. He had long ago observed that men of wealth generally divided themselves along two lines: the first were sportsmen and raconteurs with great country houses: the polo players, hunters, yachtsmen, mountain climbers, and explorers—or in some cases, drunks.

The second assortment, to which Arthur belonged, were more or less introverts—at least introspective—content to sit in their town houses reading, listening to music, painting, or studying art, all the while becoming collectors of everything under the sun. And because these tended to be solitary pursuits, in some cases they became drunks, too.

It had been three years since Arthur discovered flying, and it opened up an entire new world to him. Aviating was the one truly exciting thing Arthur did in his spare time; he didn’t mind at all the mechanics of it, either, coming home greasy and oil-smeared from pulling props, changing magnetos and firing plugs, pulling engine heads, cylinder rods, cowlings. In fact, he exulted in it. It was the sublime feeling of flight that mattered: loosed from the earth, that one grand thrill when the machine cleared ground, looking back to watch the other world fade away while he was in the broad sky free as a bird, free almost as God Himself, a thrill beyond anything Arthur Shaughnessy had ever imagined. Sailors and yachtsmen must somehow feel some of the same things, but Arthur was beyond that now; flying had spoiled him.

The Colonel loathed flying. He could not understand why a man would want to go up in a silly airplane when there were railroads, yachts, horses, and motorcars in his immediate life, and that, of course, was precisely the reason Arthur enjoyed it so much.

Arthur knew his father disapproved of his lifestyle, considering it bohemian, if not bizarre. Xenia often conducted a kind of salon in their home, a refuge for writers, poets, musicians, painters, and a collection of wits and free thinkers around Boston, of which there were not many, but some from New York passed through. The thing was Xenia’s idea and he just went along for the ride, though he found much of the talk interesting, to a point. There were not many Bolsheviks, anarchists, or perverts, which was a measure of outré by New York standards—just the occasional socialist, Harvard professor, or women’s suffragette—this last a volatile issue that Xenia wholeheartedly embraced.

Arthur’s main contribution, at Xenia’s behest, was to sponsor a literary review, with the help of company money, where new and controversial ideas were published that rankled the Colonel and embarrassed him in front of his friends. Arthur wasn’t particularly sorry for this; in fact, it gave him a perverse satisfaction.

But for the past couple of months, Xenia had become alarmingly distant with him and closeted herself alone after meals. Sometimes he thought he heard her crying in her room, but whenever he asked about it she said nothing was the matter, that she had been “tired” lately. She had become almost antisocial, suspending her salons, and declined many social invitations. Clearly something was wrong; and he even wondered if she was having an affair. He refused to believe this, of course, and had decided that when they returned to Boston he would insist that she see a doctor.