El Paso: A Novel (42 page)

“Let me ask you something, Arthur,” Bob said. “What’s it like growing up rich?”

“Beats me,” Arthur told him. They were riding side by side in the lovely valley. There was not a cloud in the sky and the place seemed almost enchanted.

“C’mon, I’m curious. I mean, did you go on big steamship trips and have a private railroad car and everything?”

“I’d rather hear about you,” Arthur said. “We can talk about me later. Where’d you grow up?” Arthur didn’t feel much like talking about himself. He’d been so preoccupied with his worries about the children and Xenia that talking about almost anything was a chore. He’d rather just ask questions and listen.

“Amarillo,” said Bob. “It was just an ol’ cow town; still is.”

“What did your father do?”

“Punched cows till he got killed by a wild horse he was tryin’ to break. He would’ve lived, except it throwed him over the fence and he landed headfirst on the only rock within a hundred feet of the corral. It was buried pretty deep in the ground and I guess they decided it was too much trouble to move. After Pa got killed, they moved it, though.”

“That must have been hard.” At least he had never had to face the death of a parent.

“I was just six, so I don’t much remember him. Mama said he’d gone to God. It was a comfort at the time.”

“What about your mother?”

“She didn’t do well after that. Took in washing and did some piecework. We had to move in with my grandma. Then she got sick with consumption. Died when I was nine. That’s when I went to work.”

Arthur felt himself wince. “Doing what?” They were crossing the little stream that meandered back and forth across the valley floor. Arthur and Bob stopped in the middle to let their horses drink.

“Cleaning out stalls and livestock pens. I imagine I’ve shoveled more shit in my day than most.”

“Did you go to school?”

“Up till then I did. Afterward, there wadn’t no time, I guess.”

“Well,” Arthur said, “I’ve always noticed you reading when we get to camp. You must have been taught pretty well.”

“Yeah, I read all the time. Trouble is, it’s the same ol’ books. I ain’t got but four. Mostly I read ’em over and over. I’m partial to that one called
The Virginian
, but when you think about it, it’s mostly a lot of crap.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, for one thing, it skips over the rough parts of a cowhand’s life. But that’s okay, a cowhand don’t need to be reminded of most of it anyway, I guess. Sort of makes it seem glamorous, even.”

“It’s probably a lot more glamorous than growing up rich,” Arthur said.

“I wouldn’t know. Say, you still ain’t told me about that.”

“What?”

“Growin’ up rich. How was it?”

“I wouldn’t know, either,” Arthur said. “I grew up in an orphanage.”

“You what?”

“That’s right. Until I was nine; then the Colonel and his wife came and got me.”

“Well, if that don’t beat everything! Same age as I was made a orphan, you got yourself a family!”

RIDING ALONGSIDE STRUCKER, THE COLONEL
returned to the subject of an American war with Mexico, about which he had some notions of his own. Before leaving El Paso, he’d sent a confidential wire to William Randolph Hearst telling him the situation in hopes the Hearst newspapers would kindle a fire under President Wilson to intervene. He had not, however, told Hearst of the kidnappings or of his plan to go after Villa personally, since for obvious reasons he didn’t wish that news to become public. Instead he relied on Hearst’s sense of greed, telling him he was in danger of losing his own vast Mexican holdings.

“Hearst got us Cuba,” the Colonel continued. “Now let’s see if he can get us Mexico, too.”

“I didn’t know a man could be so powerful who just published newspapers,” the German remarked. “It’s not that way in my country.”

“Well, he is, the old parvenu,” the Colonel responded disingenuously. “Why, my father was a United States senator when his family were digging up worms to sell.” In fact, the Colonel’s father had made his fortune not much earlier than the Hearsts, but it made him feel better telling it his way. “Still,” Shaughnessy said, “I give it to him, he’s built an empire on gossip and slander and the fear of the people.”

Strucker was taken aback by the Colonel’s contempt of the famous publisher, but tried not to show it. “Is he not an honest man?”

“Oh, yes, he has integrity, of course. He’s actually a decent sort, too, but pompous. He believes his own bullshit and when he doesn’t get his way he throws a tantrum like a child, except that in his case he throws it in front of twenty million readers.”

Integrity or not, Hearst had broken Colonel Shaughnessy’s confidentiality request immediately after getting his telegram. He sent one of his reporters to El Paso to find out more, and when the reporter informed Hearst that the Colonel had gone after Villa’s band because they’d kidnapped his grandchildren, Hearst correctly smelled a sensational story.

THEY RODE ON IN SILENCE FOR A WHILE
and the Colonel became preoccupied with thoughts of long ago. This valley was a place such as he would have liked to take a girl; Beatie in the old days. She was lovely and smiling then, adventurous, too; now she’d become tiresome and a scold. He wondered how that had happened. He figured it had somehow started when she stopped going to baseball games with him. He didn’t think he’d changed much himself, except to get a little wiser and a lot richer. Yes, he’d had other women, including the showgirl Beatie had found him out on, but it had meant nothing—a fling. He wished he could bring Beatie back to her old self. He didn’t need beauty anymore; at his age he’d settle for real companionship.

ARTHUR’S THOUGHTS, TOO, WERE INFLUENCED
by the pastoral wilds of the place. He regretted not having more time with Xenia before all these troubles began. He hadn’t been a very good husband, being so much in Chicago, and he knew he had sulked around her salon to the point of peevishness.

He determined to change that, once this was over and he had settled with Mick. He looked back at the column of men and horses winding along behind them, which suddenly reminded him of a host of pilgrims, even crusaders on a sacred quest: the most vigorous cowboys, rovers, and mountain men available in El Paso, plus a few oddities like Crosswinds Charlie and Ah Dong. But all in all, Arthur thought, they were a sturdy bunch, men who rode tall in the saddle; men to be proud of. Armed and dangerous.

As the afternoon wore on, a strange black storm cloud rose without warning over the mountains to the west and lowered on the valley ahead with distant bolts of lightning and thunder. Arthur pointed it out to his father, who’d been riding behind them.

He cast his eyes upward and intoned, “Deliver us, please, from immoderate weather!”

The sky directly above remained clear as the storm from the west bore down, and the riders picked up their pace to a trot. Then dark thunderheads began to build to the east as well, towering high over the mountain peaks, and it wasn’t long before these, too, began boiling into the little valley so as to converge with the tempest racing toward them from the west. Stranger still, the sky overhead was bright and blue as the tempests closed in on them from opposite directions. Soon they became bathed in a strange orange glow.

Bob said to Arthur, “I don’t like the looks of this. Never seen nothin’ like it, but they say anything can happen in these mountains.” He began motioning for everyone to hurry up. “Big storm comin’! Run, now!” Cowboy Bob yelled, pointing to a narrow gap in the boulders ahead.

Just then the two storms collided and mingled overhead with tremendous fury. Lightning lit up the sky while thunder crashed and echoed up and down the mountain walls. Breathtaking bursts of frigid air and electricity raised the hairs on men’s necks.

Horses began to rear and plunge and the men had trouble controlling them. The pack burros balked and screamed. One of the wagons overturned. Then huge flakes of wet snow and bites of hail burst down upon them, too. Arthur thought it was like entering the maw of a netherworld. He looked behind for a moment, back to where they had come from. The storm was closing in fast there as well, but the sun was still shining, and to his amazement a big rainbow arced across the valley floor.

If this was an omen, Arthur didn’t know what to make of it, but he wasn’t a man of omens anyway. One thing he’d learned so far, though—in this land, peace and beauty could vanish as soon as they appeared.

FORTY-TWO

T
immy’s gila monster bite was worse than they’d feared. It wasn’t just a fang bite that a snake might make; instead, while injecting its venom, the monster had gnawed and chewed Timmy’s arm, leaving deep gashes and a septic wound. Villa’s doctor abraded the lacerations, pared away the torn flesh, and administered some kind of antiseptic powder, plus a native remedy extracted from a cactus plant. The doctor poured some ether on a cloth and placed it over Timmy’s face during the procedure, and when he woke up he was both nauseated from the anesthetic and in pain from the bite.

Villa had Timmy placed in one of the little ammunition wagons and told the doctor to ride with him. Katherine was in the wagon, too, and Tom Mix rode behind. As Villa’s troop wound its way through tall forests of pines and upward across rolling meadows and steep ravines, Timmy developed a fever, and after a few days his swollen arm had turned from pink, to red, to grayish purple. The doctor periodically pared away more flesh when he changed the bandages, so much so that finally he was forced to loosely stitch up the wounds.

Katherine held Timmy’s good hand and wiped his tears and perspiration and clenched her teeth. The doctor was a young Mexican of Spanish extraction and had graduated from medical school in Mexico City only two years earlier. He was sympathetic toward Katherine and devoted all his energies ministering to Tim, but Katherine was not placated. She had begun for the first time to think that Timmy might actually die and, for that matter, herself, too. All this time she had remained convinced that any day her father and grandfather would come to their rescue, but as time went by this hope faded. She said her “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayer every night and the words began to take on a new but hollow meaning. At one point the doctor said, “He may have to lose that arm, you know.”

Katherine merely stared at him with a steely look in her eyes. At night, when they camped, Mix and Villa spent time with Timmy, and so did Reed and Bierce.

“He needs to be got to a proper hospital,” Bierce said one evening.

“Well, there’s not any around here,” Villa replied, “but he’s in good hands.”

“He’s out in the open air,” Bierce responded. “That’s bad enough in itself. How far is the closest hospital?”

Villa was gazing upward at the tall purplish brown mountains that had darkened in the gathering gloom of night. He shook his head. “He’s better off here with us. It’s too far.”

“Well, where is it?” Bierce persisted.

“Up over the border, in the United States. El Paso is the closest that I know of with a hospital.”

“Well, can’t somebody take him down to where there’s a train? He might die.”