El Paso: A Novel (40 page)

“Their cruelty is studied, reminiscent of Golgotha,” Strucker declared in his guttural Prussian accent. “Staggering, isn’t it, to believe that the same civilized and cultured people I met with in Mexico City two weeks ago are capable of this? Their mannerly airs must all be a facade.”

Arthur barely paid attention to what the German was saying; he was thinking that since the trains were running again, Xenia and his mother would also pass by this grisly scene on their way up to El Paso from Valle del Sol, and he wished for God’s sake someone would come and take these bodies down.

When the sun began to sink a few hours later, Death Valley Slim told the Colonel they had reached the closest point to the mountains where he thought Villa would be hiding. When the train stopped, they stepped out onto a forlorn waste; not a house or living thing was to be seen. The unloading of the horses, wagons, and equipment took half an hour; then the train pulled away, leaving them all standing in a desert dotted with scrub. There was still a little daylight left and the Colonel, anxious to get someplace other than this, directed them to move out—thirty-four men on horseback, thirty-one pack animals, one large and three small wagons.

As Shaughnessy’s Partisan Rangers began to move westward, someone looked into the blue and cloudless sky.

“Hey, look there!”

Everyone near him looked up.

“What is that?”

“I’m a son-of-a-gun,” cried Cowboy Bob. “It’s pelicans.”

“Pelicans—impossible,” said the Colonel.

They were three hundred miles from the nearest large body of water, but a flight of a dozen or so white pelicans soared low above them.

“What could they be doing here?” the Colonel wondered.

“Maybe they got lost,” Bob offered.

The flock of pelicans swooped overhead, then turned gracefully to the north against the deep blue sky so that the sun shone golden off their white feathers and yellowish legs.

Slim figured the pelicans were an omen but didn’t know what kind. Some others of the party talked about it that night over their campfires. Strucker didn’t believe in that sort of thing, but he didn’t like what he had seen so far. The hanging bodies had unnerved him.

ARTHUR FELT THE POWERFUL RIB MUSCLES
of the horse between his legs and ignored last night’s talk about the pelicans. In spite of everything, he was anxious to get going, too, closer to his children with every step of the animal. All day a fury had been building in him, against Villa, against Mick Martin, against his father, too, for getting them into this mess. His anger was not frustrating, however, but somehow made him feel stronger, and he suddenly thought of a line he’d learned long ago in school: “If the sun insults me I will strike it down.” Bold words, perhaps, here in the Mexican desert thousands of miles from anyplace, but the fury swooped down on him like an evil genie that would not let him be.

By the following evening, the desert country turned into rolling plains, which were covered with tall grasses that swayed easily in the light breeze. Then they came to an abandoned apple orchard where a dilapidated adobe house lay in ruins and the trees were overgrown and moldy. Far in the distance loomed the Sierra Madre, some peaks already snowcapped in the late autumn. Arthur made a point of sticking close to Bob and Slim, who were riding out ahead. Bob carried a large sinister-looking bullwhip on his saddle and Arthur asked him about it.

“It’s something I learned when I was a kid,” Bob said. “You know how it is, you’re young and you’re bored and so you just take something up.” He unlimbered the black leather whip and snapped it two or three times. “I learned to plait my own out of hides.”

“See that over there?” Bob said. He nodded to a tree about fifteen feet away with a dozen or so overripe apples on it. “Name one.”

“Name one what?” Arthur asked.

“Apple. Which one you got in mind?”

Arthur looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

“Pick a apple,” Bob told him, “on that there tree.”

“All right, the one on the top, at the left.”

Bob swung the whip in two or three long swaths to get it fully uncoiled and under control, then lashed out with a startling crack and the apple Arthur had named simply disintegrated.

“Damn!” Arthur yelped.

Cowboy Bob smiled and re-coiled his whip. “I used to snap off cigarettes from a guy’s mouth at rodeos,” he said. “Had to make a deal with him, though—he got two-thirds of the take and I got one. Seemed fair enough.”

“Think you could teach me to do that?” Arthur asked. Before they left El Paso, Cowboy Bob had already begun giving Arthur shooting lessons and teaching him the fast draw.

“I reckon so,” Bob said, “provided you apply yourself.”

Bob was still wearing his red flannel button-down cowboy shirt and Arthur asked him, “Aren’t you worried that shirt stands out too much? You might get shot.”

“I already was,” Bob told him. “Not in this shirt, but another red one. Since it didn’t kill me, I figure it brings me good luck.”

ONE AFTERNOON AS THEY PASSED ALONGSIDE A LAKE,
the Colonel took his fancy Purdey shotgun and killed a number of ducks for dinner. As he was watching Ah Dong roast the ducks, the Colonel inveighed against the British notion of sportsmanship.

“The English build the world’s finest shotguns but they’re vulgar in the use of them,” Colonel Shaughnessy announced. “Not in their own country, mind you, but when they travel to somebody else’s they’ll go out with five cheap guns apiece and shoot fowl until the barrels get too hot to handle—then just leave the birds lying on the ground for crow’s bait and ants.”

“We did the same thing to the passenger pigeons in our country a while back,” Arthur reminded him.

“Yes,” said the Colonel, “but at least we learned our lesson. When we kill something now, we eat it.”

“You didn’t eat that elephant you shot, did you, Papa?” said Arthur, unable to resist.

“Somebody did,” the Colonel retorted. “I took the head back to be stuffed, and the rest fed an entire native village for a month, I expect.”

“What’s it like, Colonel, shootin’ a elephant?” Bob asked.

“About like shooting a cow, I guess, except it’s about ten times as big and can stomp you to mush.”

Colonel Shaughnessy respected this rough cowboy but also knew the man had never dealt with anything like a bull elephant in the wild. There were various forms of courage, but he, in fact, had faced down such a beast and conquered it—which was not something to be sniffed at. Something in Bob’s tone made the Colonel wonder if Cowboy Bob was trying to make fun of him.

“Hummmm,” Bob replied, “I don’t much fancy hunting things that can hunt me back.”

The old guy was tough, Bob thought, he’d give him that, but he still couldn’t see how killing a big old elephant with a high-powered rifle made you a hero. People like the Colonel lived in a different world. But what was going to transpire over the next few days, or weeks, or months, now, that was going to be the test of the thing. That thought sobered Bob and made him wonder what he was doing here, except for the good wages, which he couldn’t spend anyway if he ended up like one of those devils swinging from the telegraph poles.

“Well, what do you think we’re doing
here
?” Arthur asked Bob in the awkward silence. “We’re certainly hunting something that can hunt us back.”

“It’s different,” interjected the Colonel. “This is a manhunt.”

There was a bemused aspect in Slim’s snaggletoothed grin. “Colonel, we kill ol’ Pancho Villa, you gonna eat
him
?” he asked tentatively.

“I might,” the Colonel grunted. “He ate my bull, didn’t he?”

FORTY-ONE

D
ays later the Colonel’s party was on the high plains and the cold had firmly set in. The mountains were more ominous now and loomed much higher as the travelers came near. Sometimes there were tall stands of ponderosa pine or groves of scrub oak, but mostly the plains were an endless stretch of desolation, with occasional wagon tracks leading nowhere in the dusty soil. During the day, Bob worked with Arthur on his pistol handling, and he was impressed; Arthur was becoming a highly competent fast-draw man, although in these days and times, the use, and art, of the fast-draw had almost vanished, except for Wild West shows.

Rifles were aimed using one eye, but with shotguns and pistols the weapon was simply “pointed” with both eyes open. Bob’s trick, which he taught to Arthur, was making it all-important to take your time and set your body and your mind right, before firing. No jiggling, no waving the pistol, a firm wrist and steady hand. It didn’t matter how fast you could get the pistol out of its holster if your shots went wild.

Arthur was a quick learner and, to Bob’s surprise, actually seemed to enjoy learning this skill, though Bob understood too well that Arthur wasn’t in this for the sheer sport of it. At one place Bob had collected a heap of dried wild sheep dung the size of small pancakes, which he kept in a sack slung around his saddle horn. From time to time he’d lag behind, then cry out, “Watch it!” and sail one of the turds into the air. Arthur had gotten quite good at hitting them.

Bob also taught Arthur the art of roping and how to keep his knife honed to a razor’s sharpness. They worked with the bullwhip, too. Bob had some spare whips in his baggage, and for hours on end, as they plodded along, Arthur would sit in the saddle snapping the whip at objects along the trail, exploding leaves and knocking small stones sky-high. Arthur said, “You ready to put a cigarette in your mouth and let me cut it in two?”

“I don’t smoke,” Bob told him.

“Well, how about a stick?”

“I don’t put sticks in my mouth, either,” Bob said casually. “Birds shit on ’em.”

“Then how am I going to find out if I’m really good?” Arthur joked.

“I’ll let you know,” Bob said, “trust me.”

At night by the campfire Slim would bring out an old guitar and sing and, to everyone’s surprise, he had a nice tenor voice. He’d belt out cowboy songs and love songs and songs about railroads and the olden days. The Colonel was delighted.

“You ought to form a dance band,” he said. “You’ve got a grand voice.”

“Takes money, and I ain’t got any,” Slim replied. But in fact a band was always a dream he’d had. Prospecting, cattle punching, doing odd jobs was all he’d known except for the army, and he was too old for that now anyway. He’d worked on a notion for years—to get a little band together and play the towns from El Paso to Deeming, New Mexico, to Las Cruces. He didn’t want much and had never featured playing in cities like Dallas or Houston or San Antone, but there along the west Texas border he figured the cowboys and soldiers might come to places to hear a little music as well as get drunk, play cards, fight, and spend money on women. And if that was so, the proprietors might pay him a nice little fee to perform.

Slim knew just what kind of band he wanted, too: piano, fiddle, dobro, and himself on guitar, and he had the perfect name: Death Valley Slim and the Ghost Riders. But like everything else, this had always been beyond his reach. Years ago he’d been in love, but she actually laughed at him and his soldier’s pay. So he quit the army and went prospecting in the Sierra Madre, but by then the American mining companies had sewn up all the ore prospects in Mexico. After eight years Slim turned up back in El Paso, busted out like a pinpricked balloon.

Singing and playing was the one thing Slim did well; he even liked to make up his own songs, which he sang by memory on dismal nights in the mountains or alone in his cheap El Paso flophouse; he enjoyed his own voice and the thoughts he put into his music but it didn’t put any money in his pocket. So for Slim, at least, this ridiculous excursion was a matter of necessity, since he was dead broke again.

As Slim’s music filled the sweet air, Strucker was resting full-length on the ground with his head propped up by his saddle, and was drinking from one of the bottles of expensive gin he’d brought along. He had no intention of lowering himself to anything as vile as tequila, mescal, or, God forbid, pulque.

“Maybe Colonel Shaughnessy can set you up when this is over,” Strucker told Slim. “You could entertain at his fashionable parties.” The German had stuck close by the Colonel since they had left the train. Riding together, they would talk about yachting, shooting, horse racing, and the latest polar expeditions. Rarely did the European war enter the conversation, and Strucker was grateful the Colonel didn’t bring it up, because he hated having to prevaricate and apologize for his country and his kaiser. Americans, it seemed, were invariably on the side of the British and French.