El Paso: A Novel (20 page)

IN THE DINING CAR OF
THE CITY OF HARTFORD
, just before pulling into Dallas, there suddenly arose a great commotion. The steward had set up a fine table of the Colonel’s NE&P china and was placing crystal glasses when the door to the kitchen burst open and three shouting, wide-eyed cooks and the Chinese chef named Ah Dong tumbled out into the parlor and dashed past the astonished Colonel and his party.

“What’s this?” Colonel Shaughnessy demanded.

“Bear!” hollered one of the cooks.

From behind the swinging galley doors there came the sounds of heavy snorting and the breaking of glasses and dishes.

“Bear got into kitchen!” Ah Dong said. “Got loose when Pearly went into baggage car for wine! Must have smelled roast! Chew through rope! All teeth and claws!”

“I’ll see to this,” bellowed the Colonel.

“Children, let’s go into the salon car,” Xenia ordered. “You can take your Ouija board with you. Close the door and don’t let anyone in.”

“We’ll all go to the salon car,” Beatie said. Katherine took her grandmother’s arm and helped her across the agitated, racketing steel scuttle that joined the two cars; Timmy leaped across without touching it. It frightened him, the jiggling piece of metal that seemed as if someone or something down beneath it were alive and evil. He wished he had his sister’s poise. He wished he had at least—at least her laugh.

“My, my, this is an exciting trip,” Strucker remarked, staggering to get up. “Lucky this is not on my yacht, but I keep a pistol in my suitcase. Anyone want to use it?”

“I don’t need any pistol,” answered the Colonel. “That bear is as tame as a lamb. The gypsy told me so himself.”

“The gypsy doesn’t own the bear anymore, Father,” Xenia said, to the crash of more broken dishes. “You do.”

“Yes, and I’ll deal with him,” the Colonel told her. “Besides, Bomba’s armed.” He removed his dinner jacket and hitched up his suspenders. “I’ve dealt with bears before. Shot a few in my time, too. Bomba, let’s go have a look.”

Xenia, Beatie, Strucker, and the children, along with the kitchen staff, were safely behind the door of the salon car, peering through the glass, as the Colonel and Bomba strode confidently into the galley.

“Your husband is brave man,” said Ah Dong. “But bear get crazy when smell roast beef.”

“Yes,” Beatie said, “so does the Colonel.”

Suddenly the galley door burst back open and Bomba, followed by the Colonel, fled down the aisle toward the safety of the salon, the bear in hot pursuit. Strucker quickly opened the door for them, and closed it just in time to shut off the snarling, clawing bear.

“Why, that thing’s wild as a tiger!” the Colonel panted. “I’ve been tricked by the gypsy!” The bear was pressing hard with its hind legs, its breath making big smudges on the glass door separating the cars, its teeth and claws bared.

“Why, it’s ripped out my trousers,” the Colonel growled, reaching behind, and finding his hands covered in blood. “My word, I think I’m wounded!”

“Let’s see, dear,” Beatie exclaimed, stooping to examine the situation.

“I think we will not have much of a dinner tonight,” Strucker remarked. “It’s a good thing the bar is back here.”

“Oh, be quiet, please,” Beatie said.

The German, unaccustomed to such a rebuke, plopped into his chair, incensed at being spoken to that way by a female. These Americans, to Claus Strucker, were a strange, rude people; a ridiculous people.

It turned out the Colonel was not badly injured. The bear had only scratched him, but the family and the kitchen staff spent the rest of the trip in the salon car while the bear enjoyed their dinner in the diner. At Little Rock that evening the Colonel took everyone to eat at the Peabody, a fashionable hotel. He also telegraphed the Memphis depot to locate the gypsy and place him on the next available train to come and reclaim the bear, which he had at last had removed from the dining car kitchen by men from the local sheriff’s office, and chained to a metal lamppost at the train station. First thing next morning, the party got under way again.

The bear scratches were painful enough to put the Colonel in an edgy mood, plus he worried whether Arthur was all right. His train had come more than a thousand miles from Chicago and they would reach El Paso within another long day. But Arthur was alone in a flimsy flying machine. The Colonel knew in his soul that Arthur was no “quitter,” and regretted his remark at the dinner table in Chicago, though he never apologized, since he considered it a sign of weakness.

“You would think,” Colonel Shaughnessy said, “that bunch we have in Washington—now that they’ve got us in this predicament—would have the guts to stand up to Pancho Villa. Don’t they have a duty to protect American citizens’ interests? Hellfire, if the government can regulate the rates I charge for my train transportation, then they can help protect what I transport. It’s only fair.”

“You are certainly right, sir,” Strucker agreed enthusiastically. Today he was dressed in a red silk kimono and parlor slippers, and munching on half a head of lettuce he had procured from the kitchen. In his other hand was the eternal drink. “It’s a disgrace for a country as great as the United States to be shoved around by a villainous bunch such as they have in Mexico. It makes your people look weak and silly.”

The more thievery, murders, and kidnappings the Mexicans carried out—even if they were at the expense of his old friend—the better, so far as he was concerned. War was about war, not about friendship. After all, the king of England was the kaiser’s first cousin, and look what family ties got in that case.

“Maybe your country will intervene,” the German continued, placing his platinum-rimmed monocle back into his eye. Several years earlier during a strange diplomatic tangle the U.S. Army had been sent to occupy the Mexican port of Veracruz, which nearly touched off a war.

“I wish we would,” said the Colonel. “Teach those greasers a lesson.”

By early morning they had crossed from the hill country of Arkansas into Texas and were on the seemingly endless dusty plains, with only an occasional cowboy on a horseback or a telegraph pole to remind them that they were on the same planet as the day before.

“We need to get Hearst and his blasted newspapers behind us,” Colonel Shaughnessy said. “He owns more land than I do down there! Now, that man knows how to start a war. If it’s war they want, it’s war they’ll get.”

“You’re exactly right, Colonel,” Strucker exclaimed, “War—can you imagine it!” The monocle dropped out again as the German’s eyes widened. He took out a handkerchief and began polishing it in a way that somehow annoyed Xenia.

“War’s not an answer for anything,” Beatie interjected. “If this Villa’s a bandit, why doesn’t the Mexican government just arrest him?”

“My word, woman,” replied the Colonel, “you don’t just go out and arrest someone who has an army. He might arrest you, instead.”

“Colonel,” Beatie said firmly, “now, I don’t want you going and starting any wars. I simply put my foot down. We’ve been lucky to stay out of the one in France. It’s not our affair.”

“Many times war is the only answer,” the Colonel replied.

At the other end of the car the children were playing with the Ouija board, which after repeated passes over its letters had spelled out two words that could be taken as a warning:

“BE WEAR.”

The train rolled on toward another night, while to the west Arthur was having the fight of his life in the air high above the Jicarilla Mountains in southeastern New Mexico.
Grendel
seemed unable to buck the dangerous headwinds of the only pass through the bleak treeless peaks, and darkness was also coming his way.

SIXTEEN

T
hree hundred miles deep into Mexico, Johnny Ollas and his cuadrilla were headed into the scorching morning sun, while Gourd Woman tagged along behind, prodding her donkey. Even though Johnny didn’t trust the opinion of someone who divined information from a handful of bleached bones, they had decided to go to Creel anyway because they needed both provisions and to find out if anyone there had news of Villa’s whereabouts. It was the only game in town.

Johnny stopped for a moment to get his bearings and Gourd Woman caught up with him. “So what do you do when you’re not out hunting after a man like Pancho Villa?” she asked.

“I fight bulls,” he said. He was actually glad to have somebody to talk to.

“You’re a matador?”

“Yes, and these are my cuadrilla,” he said, nodding to his brothers. People thought they were quadruplets, but in fact they’d been born each a year apart from the other, beginning twenty-four years earlier. But like twins or quadruplets, they looked and even thought alike, which kept conversation to a minimum. Johnny, on the other hand, liked to talk; it was what kept him sane.

“What’s that?”

“The men who fight with me. My picadors, my banderilleros . . . they are also my brothers.”

“Your stepbrothers,” she corrected him. Johnny was astonished.

“How do you know that?”

“Family resemblance,” Gourd Woman replied. “You don’t look like them. Anyway, why are you trying to find this Pancho Villa?” It was true; the four brothers might have been cut out of a cookie cutter: short, slim, dark brown eyes, each with little pencil-thin mustache and short black hair.

“Because he kidnapped my wife and killed the man who raised me. But why ask me this? Don’t your bones already tell you?”

“I’d rather hear it from you. They say Pancho Villa is a friend of the people. That he wants to give them property.”

“You ever hear of Pancho Villa giving anybody any property?”

“It’s what they say.”

They were crossing a broad, rolling plain and the sun already was getting hotter in the late autumn sky. But the air was so fresh and still that Johnny could almost smell the blue flowers carpeting the plain.

“I’ve never seen a bullfight,” Gourd Woman said.

“No? You might enjoy it.”

“I don’t like killing.”

“Don’t you eat meat?”

“I just don’t like the killing.”

“Well,” Johnny said, “bulls are born to be killed. If we didn’t breed fighting bulls to be killed in the ring, then they would never have existed in the first place. We do them a favor by letting them live three, four years doing exactly what comes natural to them, which is to charge around and tear things apart. Their lives may be short, but they’re happy. Besides, it makes me a good living on the side.” They stopped to cook beans for lunch.

All morning Johnny had been thinking about Donita, but also his Toro Malo. When the Colonel first brought the bull to Valle del Sol, Johnny was eight years old and could not believe how such a huge beast could be transported in only a cage on the back of a mule-drawn wagon.

Johnny had started up again and Gourd Woman went into a kind of shuffling trot to keep up with his horse. “I still don’t see why you want to kill these dumb animals, even when they win,” she said, as if she were reading Johnny’s mind.

“Wild bulls are not dumb,” Johnny said. “And it’s why they must be killed. Bulls figure out things too quickly during the fight. If the same bull were to be used over and over, the contest would soon be unequal. It’s hard enough as it is.”

“If you’re so tough, why don’t you become a prizefighter?” she offered.

“They’re not so tough,” he said.

“No? Why?”

“Because in prizefights one of the fighters doesn’t always die.”

“I used to sell cider outside the bullring in Jalpa,” Gourd Woman said after a moment of reflection. “I’d see them drag the dead bulls out. Dead horses, too. I don’t like killing.”

“Jalpa? You’re a long way from home.”

“I don’t have a home,” she said, “except where I can sell these brooms.” She nodded back toward the donkey, its baskets loaded with broomsticks.

Killing, Johnny thought. It was as if she knew something about him he didn’t know—or, worse, that he did. The killing had always been the rub with him. His work with the cape was stunning, some said. Some had compared him with a ballet dancer—an artist—a scientist, even. But he never truly enjoyed the killing, the supreme moment of placing the sword between the bull’s neck muscles and ramming it home. Why, he didn’t know. Maybe it was because he liked animals. Maybe he wasn’t a natural-born killer as some matadors were. He could do it competently enough but not quite with great gusto.

“In bulls,” he said almost absently, “the killing is the most dangerous part.”

“You’re just toying,” Gourd Woman said. “You’re playing with death.”

“Playing? Say that to the graves of a thousand matadors who’ve died in the ring.”

After Johnny’s goring last spring, when the bull caught him under the armpit and ripped through the muscle and into his lung, when they thought he would lose the lung, maybe even his life, he wondered, lying in the hospital bed, if he would ever be any good again.

At the age of eight he began by fighting calves, then yearlings and cows, and by the age of twenty had fought and killed 109 bulls.

He’d been thrown dozens of times and nicked, too, but never really gored until a bull hooked the wrong way and tossed him with the left horn nearly ten feet into the air. If he hadn’t been tossed off the horn and Julio and Rigaz, the banderilleros, had not rushed in to distract the bull, Johnny would most likely be dead.

It took three months for him to heal, and when he finally walked into the arena at Chihuahua the crowd roared their approval because everyone knew he’d been badly gored. But he could not quite seem to keep his feet still. No matter how hard he tried, his feet moved in tiny little mouse steps away from the passing bull, just the distance to give him an edge of safety. It was duly reported in the papers next day by the critics, who politely suggested that perhaps he had returned to the ring too soon. That maybe he needed to take more time off and regain his old style.

Johnny had wished that the bull that had gored him had not been killed, so that he could avenge himself. Still, each Saturday afternoon in the ring he tried to make the little tippy-toe steps more and more imperceptible, but he knew what he felt: the dry mouth, the barely noticeable trembling of fingers. Johnny feared cowardice more than he feared death.