El Paso: A Novel (41 page)

“I might just set Slim up, at that,” the Colonel said effusively, “provided he can learn to play waltzes.”

Slim got up and walked from the fire to the edge of the darkness to relieve himself. He’d listened to these two big shots talk about him, and for a moment it seemed like something real. Then he came to his senses. I can play waltzes; I can play damn good waltzes you two old goat-ropers would have trouble dancin’ to. That was what he thought.

EARLIER, THE COLONEL HAD MADE A REMARK
Strucker found interesting. The talk had turned to the general situation of Villa and the children, when the Colonel recounted his conversation with the president.

“He’s afraid of starting a war down here,” the Colonel announced contemptuously, “and so he lets murderers and bandits abduct innocent Americans while our own army squats at the border drinking whiskey and visiting prostitutes. I gave that man twenty-five thousand to ensure Roosevelt’s defeat, and this is my reward? I wish I had that money back.”

“Then what if Mexico should attack America?” Strucker suddenly asked. The idea came to him seemingly from the thinness of the air around them. His theory so far had been to work Mexico into a position where it might provoke the United States into attacking
Mexico
. But here he saw the reverse; a novel plot.

“They wouldn’t dare,” Shaughnessy said. “They’re content attacking defenseless U.S. citizens right here in their own country.”

Arthur thought the conversation was something of a joke; there was no diplomacy associated with kidnapping the children. It was sheer thuggery, and the worst kind of cruelty for the parents.

“Yes, but what if they did?” Strucker went on. “What if for some reason Pancho Villa decided to attack American positions at the border? Wouldn’t your President Wilson then commit to an act of war?”

Arthur looked closely at the German. He could almost see his mind racing, ticking, drawing conclusions—if this happened, thus and so would follow. He could tell a plan of some sort was forming. Strucker was devious, and might even be dangerous, of that Arthur was sure.

“I don’t see how he could help it,” the Colonel replied. “But I don’t think Villa’s fool enough to do that.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Strucker said. “When I was on the train from California I read a news story that quoted Villa as saying the Americans were now his enemies. That he was going to confiscate their properties, that he would brook no interference from them.”

“So what? He’s been saying that for a while.”

“Suppose somebody could get to him? Persuade him that he must also attack the Americans in America, because if he does, and the American army enters Mexico, the Mexican government would feel compelled to fight them. And that this would be an impeccable stroke of luck for Villa because his enemies would then be fighting the Americans and not fighting him, correct?”

“I suppose so,” agreed the Colonel.

Arthur could scarcely believe his ears. The German was actually forming a scheme to draw the United States into a war with Mexico.

“And for you, too, perhaps a stroke of luck,” the German continued, “because it would then get the American army down here in Mexico, and if they find Villa, they would probably also find your grandchildren.”

“Theoretically,” said the Colonel, slightly confused. “But who could convince him of such a thing?”

“Me, perhaps,” Strucker replied.

“You? Why you?”

“Because I am a disinterested party,” the German replied. “He would have no reason to distrust me. I also have, let us say, some resources which I could put at Villa’s disposal. That might tip the scales.”

Arthur somehow doubted the German’s veracity.

“Well, I don’t know,” the Colonel said hesitantly. It sounded like a complicated—almost crackpot—scheme and difficult to comprehend.

“It may be you’re on to something, Strucker,” the Colonel said, “but we need to try to find the bastard first.”

NEXT DAY AROUND DUSK, THE COLONEL’S PARTY
came upon a small village of widows and orphans. Some of Pancho Villa’s soldiers had swung through it days earlier and the villagers, thinking they were bandits, made the mistake of firing shots at them at first. For this they paid a high price. Almost all the men and some of the women had been ridden down, captured, and killed in the typical mayhem: flayed alive, hung, shot, stabbed, sworded, burned, dragged through the streets behind horses, thrown headfirst into wells. The Apaches did as much a generation or two earlier and Villa’s Chihuahua Mexicans had merely refined their techniques.

Many of the bodies remained unburied and the stench hovered as an unholy fog. Even so, they all noticed that this village seemed fairly prosperous compared with others they’d seen: the roofs of the houses were made of corrugated zinc instead of straw and the foundations were sturdier. There were large livestock pens—empty now thanks to Villa’s band—which had obviously held sheep, pigs, cattle, and horses. The reason for such affluence, they soon learned, was that a large mining smelter was located nearby, where the men once worked for good wages, but Villa had shut this down, too, and run off all the American engineers.

Even after the horrors he’d witnessed on the train trip, Arthur was appalled by what he saw in the village.

“It’s worse than the French Revolution,” the Colonel gasped. “These people kill everybody, not just the rich or landed. They murder their prisoners, then they go for the poor. At least in America we knew how to throw a revolution. We were never savages.”

“Nothing I’ve seen in Europe remotely compares with this,” Strucker agreed, breaking his rule of silence on the European war . “It’s odd, isn’t it, that all these Mexicans claim to be fighting for a republic?”

The Colonel wiped his nose with his bandanna. The stench hung so heavily he could almost grab it with his hands. He was tired but this also made him sick. Not only that, the scene struck a new dagger of fear in him for the fate of his grandchildren and made him feel guiltier. Back along the train tracks, he’d borne witness to what the Federals would do to soldiers, but if Pancho Villa would condone this grossness with civilians, then he was madman as well.

The Colonel shook his head and said to Strucker, “If these people can ever govern themselves, then our whole theory of democracy must be wrong.”

As Arthur reflected on this, a small dirty girl came up beside his horse—little more than a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair, her eyes brimming with tears. She looked up at Arthur and began talking, and there was something so pathetically earnest in her expression that he motioned for Cowboy Bob to come over, since he savvied Mexican as well or even better than Slim did.

“What’s she saying?” Arthur asked.

Bob leaned down to the girl and said, “
Qué dice, señorita?
”

She responded in a bewildered, sorrowful tone. Bob nodded and turned to Arthur. “She says, ‘Why don’t I have a ma?’”

Arthur let out a breath and looked away toward the darkening distant mountains. The girls words stung him like a hot needle; he felt an instinct to get down and take her up into his arms and hug her; tell her it was going to be all right, even though he knew it wasn’t, and never would be. Instead, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a five-dollar gold piece and handed it down to the child. As if that would do any good. She looked at it, then back at Arthur.

“
Gracias
,” she said, clutching the coin against her breast.

He gave a little wave and eased his horse away, feeling, with everything else that was upon him, as if he were trapped in some lurid nightmare. He turned in the saddle; she was examining the gold piece, which was American, and, Arthur thought, she probably didn’t even know what it was.

They rode out of the village soon afterward. Arthur, Bob, Slim, and Crosswinds Charlie set out to find a suitable spot for the Colonel’s main party to camp for the night, away from this charnel place. They had gone a short distance along a road out of town when they began to smell a foul aroma. Presently they came upon a band of Mexican men camped in the woods, afraid to return to the village.

These men had found half of a rusty oil drum to use for a cauldron, placed it on some rocks, and lit a fire beneath it. The fire consisted of anything that would burn: old shoes, leaves, sticks, corncobs, tattered and bloody clothes, empty cartridge boxes, along with cow, sheep, and goat patties and what looked like the dismembered parts of a corpse—all of which they kept in a nearby pile to keep the blaze going.

Crosswinds Charlie rode over and peered into the cauldron. The dull, compliant, and utterly wretched Mexicans gaped up at him, their dirt-streaked faces flickering with the orange glow of the fire. He looked closer and saw a filthy brown liquid was boiling. Every so often Charlie saw what he took for a root or part of an onion or pepper; then, to his revulsion, the cauldron’s main ingredient boiled to the surface.

By then Arthur and Cowboy Bob had ridden over and were staring into the cauldron as well. The Mexicans had apparently caught for their supper a large armadillo. Bob saw the fleshy reddish claws and tail and scaly shell as the thing bobbed slowly to the surface, sank, then boiled back up again, roiling slowly in the liquid before it disappeared yet once more. They had apparently boiled it alive.

Wanting to be polite, Bob asked the men in Spanish, “What are you fellows having for dinner?”

“Stew,” one of them replied sullenly.

“What
is
that thing?” Charlie asked.

“Armadillo,” Death Valley Slim answered him. “It lives in holes with owls and snakes.”

“They mean to eat it?”

“Or starve,” offered Bob.

They rode on. Arthur felt his stomach turn once more. To him it seemed like they had somehow stepped out of the bounds of civilization. He pulled his hat down lower on his forehead. So this is what comes of glorious revolutions, he thought. He looked back. One of the Mexicans seemed to be giving him a dirty gesture.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, ALL THE WHILE
climbing higher through the foothills, Shaughnessy’s Partisan Rangers finally reached the mountains. They had entered a broad and deserted valley sandwiched between towering peaks covered with pines and firs, while at the lower altitudes there were aspens and birches that still had a few orange and gold leaves clinging on.

A pretty little brook meandered down the center, babbling between rocks. It looked like it might contain trout. The valley floor consisted of a golden brown sedgelike grass reminiscent to the Colonel of quail hunting plantations in southern Georgia. None of it reminded him much of Mexico at all. It was more like Wyoming or Montana in autumn, or, for that matter, southern Georgia in February, without the mountains.

He saw deer darting at the edges of the trees, and flocks of doves flushed skyward as his men passed by in columns of twos and threes down a wide dirt path in the center of the valley. The path seemed to lead directly into the mountains, now unfolded as sinister peaks grasping up toward a darkening blue sky; at their base, several miles distant, were enormous rock piles of boulders from long-ago slides that, from a distance, took on the appearance of shattered teeth.