El Paso: A Novel (15 page)

From somewhere up the tracks a voice cried out, “’Boarrrrrrd! ’Boarrrrrd!” and the train lurched as the air brakes unlocked. Strucker, who had also ordered a double rye, had been looking around and seemed puzzled, as the Colonel stepped out on the rear platform. “Where is your son, Arthur?” he inquired.

“In Chicago, tending to company business,” the Colonel replied sharply.

“And so he is not coming with us?” Strucker asked, surprised.

“Yes, he’s coming, but in his own way and his own time. He’s
flying
down,” the Colonel spat, as though he had a mouthful of ashes.

“Flying?” Strucker repeated, as though he had not understood the answer correctly.

“In that abominable flying machine you arranged for him to get.”

“The Luft-Verkehrs?” the German said, astonished.

“None other. Arthur insists that without the guns and ammunition and extra crew member it was designed for, he can take on enough fuel cans and spare parts to stay in the air eight hours at a time and—do you know what he said? He actually said he would
beat
me to El Paso!”

“A race, between train and plane!” Strucker could hardly contain himself.

“That’s what he said,” the Colonel sniffed. “I told him he was nuts, because my train can run twenty-four hours a day and he can only fly that thing during daylight.”

“Well, that Luft-Verkehrs does have a great range,” Strucker observed. “It can stay in the air four hours at least, with a full armored load, and who knows how long when it’s lightened.”

“Arthur says eight.” The Colonel shook his head in apparent disgust and motioned for the servant to bring him another scotch. He didn’t blame Strucker for getting Arthur the plane; as a matter of fact, he was somewhat beholden to him for doing it. When Arthur first began flying, about all that was available of American aircraft were the Curtiss Jenneys, which were unreliable, slow, and prone to crash. On the other hand, the Europeans—the British, French, and Germans—had made amazing advances in aircraft production and design, since they had actually been at war with each other.

Arthur had set his eye on a sleek little Deperdussin monoplane manufactured in France, but the French War Ministry had forbidden aircraft manufacturers from selling any of their products except to the military. He had almost bought a Blériot E.2 from an owner in Spain, but it turned out to be underpowered and in bad shape.

The subject of airplanes had come up one day the previous year when Strucker was down to Cornwall for a weekend. Sensing an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the American rail baron Shaughnessy, the sly German knew that in his position he could pull strings. Four months later Arthur went to the dock at Boston Harbor and took possession of a brand-spanking-new Luft-Verkehrs, crated up on a Swedish steamer, along with an extra engine and a variety of spare parts. The manufacturer had not put the German Iron Cross on the machine. Instead, at Strucker’s direction, he’d painted it a deep candy-apple-red.

“Arthur told me he needed to get back to the company operations headquarters in Chicago and mind the store,” the Colonel went on, “but I’ll bet it was just an excuse to do this flying stunt.”

“Well, it will certainly be interesting to see who wins,” Strucker declared. “That’s a long distance from Chicago to El Paso, isn’t it?”

“It’s fifteen hundred miles,” the Colonel replied.

The whistle blew in the chilly night air as NE&P No.1, with a plume of steam roiling back over it and vaporizing along the tracks, pulled out of the Providence rail depot and plunged into the inky darkness, toward Mexico.

“He’ll be damn lucky if he doesn’t crash the thing,” the Colonel added. Strucker found himself musing over Arthur’s flight. If he could make that distance, why couldn’t the Germans power up the Luft-Verkehrs and use them to bomb the cities of England? He’d have to get a message on this revelation through to his superior in the consulate at the first opportunity.

THIRTEEN

J
ohnny Ollas had been gone only a day when his troubles began in earnest. He got lost.

Mexico was not a hard country to get lost in. Aside from a few rail tracks, main roads, and towns, that part of north-central Mexico was a trackless wilderness of desert, plains, forest, and of course the sinister and seemingly impenetrable Sierra Madre. Every so often one might come across a village of Indians or the occasional adobe hut of a farmer, but mostly the country was a waste.

After leaving Valle del Sol with his four stepbrothers, Johnny tried to track Villa and his army but lost the trail even before he left the property. The fact that one had to go more than twenty-five miles just to
get
off the property was of little consolation, because losing track of an entire army is an embarrassment, even for amateurs. The Callahans were ranch hands and bullfighters, not plainsmen or man-hunters, and the only times Johnny had been this far away from Valle del Sol he had been on a train or in an automobile.

In any event, they were lost.

Villa’s path had been easy enough to follow at first. Not only were there the hoofprints and droppings of thousands of horses and cattle, but also the residue and droppings of five hundred men: campfires, mescal bottles, cigarette and cigar butts, wrapping papers, food tins, and other discarded things. But somewhere the Callahan brothers had gone wrong. The first and second nights, they had camped confident that they were overtaking the four-day-old tracks of the kidnappers. On the third day they arose by a creek and ate the last of Señora Pardenas’s beans and by-now-stale bread.

Two hours later, they lost the trail.

The smart way, Johnny realized now, would have been to backtrack, but the path ahead looked so likely, they went on toward the northwest, hoping to pick up the tracks again, and by late afternoon they were, basically, nowhere. In the distance they spotted a settlement of sorts, graying and pinkish in the last shadows of the sun. Dejected, they headed for it.

It was a small Mestizo village, a couple of dozen adobe huts, framed by tall cacti and fica trees. The dusty street that ran through the center of the village was pitted with slime-filled watery holes, and chickens, ducks, turkeys, and a pig or two wandered aimlessly in the thoroughfare. But far from being the kind of sleepy one-horse town they had envisioned, to their surprise the place seethed with activity. At first, Johnny thought some sort of fiesta was in progress.

Then they saw the woman.

She was hobbling on a cane, followed by a donkey loaded with straw brooms strapped to its back and pursued by a crowd of men, women, and children hurling insults, stones, rotten eggs, and spoiled fruit. She was barefoot and wearing a filthy rebozo, the traditional Mexican shawl, and was obviously frightened as she plodded away down the rutted street, occasionally glancing back to see what was to be heaved at her next.

“What town is this?” Johnny asked one of the mob.

The man eyed the horseback-riding strangers suspiciously and shrugged.

“The name—what is the name of this place?”

“No name,” the man said.

“What do you mean? You live here, don’t you?”

The man nodded.

“So what is the name of this town, then?”

“It hasn’t no name,” the man said. By now several other ragged-looking men and some children abandoned their persecution of the woman and had come to see the strangers. Johnny addressed another of them.

“What is the name of this town?” he demanded. “Where are we?”

“You are here,” the man said.

“I know I’m here. Where is this?”

“It’s just a place,” the man replied. “We live here.”

“I see that,” Johnny said. “You mean there’s no name for this town?”

“We’ve always lived here. There is a river over there.” He pointed off toward some trees.

“What is the name of the river?”

The man shrugged.

At first Johnny was beginning to believe the men were making fun of him, but finally it sank in that the village didn’t in fact have any name.

“Why were you molesting that woman?” Johnny asked, which had also been on his mind, more out of curiosity than anything else.

“She’s a
bruja,
” the man said.

“A witch?”

“And a bad one, too. She makes the melons die, and little children, too. She wouldn’t leave, so we run her off.”

By this time the woman was past the place where the street stopped and was hobbling across a dusty prairie toward some scrubby-looking willows. The donkey plodded after her. The crowd had straggled back to the village and was milling around in the street among pigs and chickens.

“Have you seen an army?” Johnny said. “Pancho Villa’s army? Has it come anywhere near here?”

The man looked at him uncomprehendingly. Johnny suddenly realized that if this man lived in a town that didn’t even have a name, he probably didn’t know what an army was, either. If in fact Villa’s army
had
come through the town, the man would certainly have been impressed enough to remember it, and would have told him.

“Well, let me ask you this,” Johnny said. “Where is the nearest big town from here?”

The man shrugged again.

“What direction? Huh? How long does it take to get there?”

The man just gawked at him openmouthed. This man, and all the rest of them, most likely hadn’t been more than a couple of miles outside this village in their whole lives. Johnny was not only lost, he was lost among a whole village of lost people who didn’t even know they were lost.

He shook his head and wiped the dust from his eyes.

“Well,” he told his companions, “we might as well keep on going. See if you can buy some food from these peons. I figure we just stay headed north and maybe something’ll turn up. If Villa got to those mountains already, I don’t guess there’s much we can do anyway. But if he’s still out on the plains, there’s a chance we can catch up.”

Johnny was getting disgusted, mostly with himself, for letting Donita get kidnapped and for being so helpless in tracking her down.

He had married Donita four years ago this month, and already he had failed her. She’d pressed him to begin bullfighting in earnest up at Chihuahua City, which was a day’s train ride from the ranch. He wasn’t ready and knew it, but she didn’t. A man doesn’t just get into a bullring with fifteen hundred snorting pounds of horns and hooves unless he knows exactly what he’s up to. Not if he expects to get the kinds of ovations and praise a matador needs—let alone avoid being killed or maimed. But everybody at the ranch said Johnny was a natural, that he’d be
número uno
someday, and nobody had believed this more than Johnny Ollas himself.

He had the moves, the brains, the touch.

But there was style to consider. Style was all of it.

One wrong sweep or false move and the aficionados would have him undone. The newspapers would be full of it the next day: “This Johnny Ollas can fight a bull, but he himself is an ox.” That kind of thing. And now Donita was in the clutches of the most fearsome and legendary bandit and revolutionary general in the entire nation, a man who would line you up and shoot you with no more provocation than perhaps a gnat bite; the man who had strung up Buck Callahan and eviscerated him for mere amusement. And Johnny Ollas, himself no pistolero, and with a still-festering head wound and so followed by flies, was chasing after a whole army of Villistas with four men and no particular plan in mind for how to retrieve his wife from this monster. I must be nuts, concluded Johnny Ollas. A leading candidate for
un castañazo
.

A little way out of town, Johnny and his brothers came to a small muddy stream lined with swamp willows which looked like as good as anyplace to camp for the night. Johnny’s brothers Julio and Rigaz had purchased some beans and dried corn and bacon in the village and they set up a fire to cook on. Luis and Rafael went to the stream for water but sheep had apparently been using it for a toilet. They dipped a pot in and skimmed off the muck as best they could, then set up the pot over some rotted limbs. Everyone was uneasy, since none had the faintest idea of where they were.

But Johnny’s cuadrilla inspired his faith. More than once they had saved his skin at the risk of their own. When he had been lying in bed with the head gash they had gathered around and Luis said to him, “Whatever you want to do, Johnny, we’ll be with you.” He’d appreciated that more than words at the time could express. So here they all were: five men against an army.

ONCE THEY’D BEGUN COOKING THEIR MEAL
, they beat down the thick wiregrass to make a comfortable place to stretch out. The sun had been down for an hour when the woman appeared. They had been discussing what to do in the morning when they heard the rustling of her donkey in the brush, and then the woman emerged from some low shrubs, the firelight flickering on her face, hooded by the shawl. Her eyes were dark and hollow. Rigaz had already drawn his pistol at the sound of the donkey and he had it resting on his lap, pointed in the woman’s direction. Out here, at night and lost in presumably hostile territory, the first instinct of all five of the men had been to take cover when they heard the rustling of the animal, but just as quickly they reassessed this urge on the grounds that a completely defensive posture might tend to aggravate the situation—especially if the intruders were a larger force.