El Paso: A Novel (46 page)

EVER SINCE THEY HAD LEFT THE RARÁMURI INDIAN VILLAGE
, a plan had begun to take shape in Johnny Ollas’s mind. One thing he knew for sure was that with every passing day the time for action was getting short. So tonight, while Villa and the others were dining with the treasure hunters, Johnny laid out his scheme for the rescue of his wife. It’s said the best-laid plans always have the beauty of simplicity, but Johnny’s plan was about as complicated as the inner workings of a pocket watch.

“There is something he is afraid of,” Johnny reminded them again. “That day Rigaz was killed he said something very strange about an old man on a gray horse, with a white beard and a rifle. He said this man was trying to kill him.”

“To kill the general?” Julio asked.

“Yes, it was very strange, like he’d had a vision, maybe.”

“Visions often come true,” Gourd Woman offered.

Luis and Rafael sat on a log eating beans and beef spiced with peppers and onions. The campfire flickered in their faces.

“Well, I can’t wait around for that,” Johnny said. “I’ve been working on something and maybe pretty soon we can pull it off. Now, one of these riders who came back today for some beefs told me we are gonna start down into the canyons tomorrow. That might be our chance, because what I have in mind wouldn’t work up here on the canyon rims—its too close for visibility, and you can’t jump over canyons. But down there, just maybe . . . and this thing he has about the old man with a rifle, that, too . . .” Johnny understood as a matador the advantage in knowing your opponent. Before a bullfight he often spent hours on the rails of the bullpens, watching and studying the animal he was to fight.

“What you have in mind?” Luis asked.

“Like I said before,” Johnny continued, “I’ve got to make his ear twitch, make him nervous, see which way he hooks, then we know what he’s gonna do. And when we get him jumpy, he’ll go into his
querencia
, scared, confused, and only looking for one thing, and he will not be expecting us. But we can only stick him a couple of times, you know, ’cause anything more, he’ll catch on.”

Julio, Luis, and Rafael nodded obediently, just as they did before the bullfights, absorbing each detail Johnny gave them, since they knew all their lives depended on it, then as now.

“First we need two things we don’t have,” Johnny said. “And we are going to steal them.” The eyes of the cuadrilla widened.

Johnny said, “I noticed there are two small wagons at the very end of the ammunition train. I just got a glimpse, but in one of them are some rifle cases made out of leather that hold rifles with telescope sights. They are marked. We need to steal one of these. And in the other wagon there are electric torches. We need to steal two of those—maybe three, if it’s possible.”

“Stealing is immoral,” Gourd Woman declared. The others looked at her like she was crazy.

“What, are you a priest now, too?” asked Julio.

“No, but I think it will be a bad omen to begin by stealing.” Her hands were in the pocket of her dress, fooling with the bones.

“We are dealing with murderers and kidnappers,” Johnny said. “Stealing is hardly a mortal sin in the face of that.”

“The bones tell me it’s the wrong way to go about it.”

“Same bones that told you Villa was in Creel?” said Luis. “Don’t make me laugh.”

“Same ones,” she said. “Laugh if you want.”

AFTER DARK, LUIS AND RAFAEL MADE THEIR WAY
through the long encampment up to the ammunition train and, just as Johnny had described, the two smaller wagons were there. Luis stepped into the firelight and asked if anyone had a cigarillo, while Rafael sneaked around between the wagons and managed to locate the flashlights in one of them. He put two into his jacket and stepped into the dark of the tall trees. Next evening they reversed the scam, Rafael stepping into the camp of the teamsters to ask for a tin of salt, while Luis slipped one of the cases with a telescoped rifle out of the wagon. The ploy almost blew up in their faces when Luis disturbed the fighting cocks and hens and they set up a squawk in their cages, but nobody paid much attention and he vanished into the woods with the gun.

Next morning, Villa’s detachment began the long and perilous descent into the canyons. The descent came not a moment too soon, Johnny thought, because as dawn broke it began to snow, and this time it was heavy: big wet flakes at first, then smaller ones that swirled in the air and sometimes reduced vision down to a few yards. Within half an hour everything at the top of the mountain was covered in powder. The wagons creaked and groaned and sometimes skidded on the mushy gravel and dirt down the prolonged trail that wound to the floor of the canyon.

By midmorning, Katherine’s party was below the snow and the leaden sky was now filled with rain. Winds whipped through the canyon, sometimes with such ferocity that it threatened to knock the wagons off the cliffside. It was a slow struggle and those riding on animals, Katherine included, often closed their eyes and trusted the horses or mules or donkeys to pick their way down the steep rocky trail. To look down into a canyon bottom more than a mile below would fill all but the boldest, or craziest, with sheer, icy terror.

It didn’t help that they saw a team of mules slip off the edge. Something had made one of the animals balk or shy and the others pulled the wagon around so it slid partially over the precipice. The teamster was walking in front of the mules, leading them, and he jerked at their harness and tried to get the wagon pulled back on the trail, but the wheels stuck and the mules panicked. They backed up to get better purchase, but the whole wagon slipped off, pulling the mules right along with them, into the rocky gorge without a sound, at least not one that could be heard in the back of the caravan. The mules went down as they had pulled, in the harness traces, but on their backs and with their legs straight up in the air and not kicking at all, as though they were lifeless already before they hit bottom.

FORTY-FOUR

A
rthur Shaughnessy was riding at the front of his party with Cowboy Bob, Crosswinds Charlie, the Colonel, and Strucker when Death Valley Slim came cantering back toward them over a rise in the high mountain plain.

“There’s Indians just over that hill there!” said Slim, pulling up on a lathered horse.

“Wild Indians!” the Colonel exclaimed.

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly say that. It’s Tarahumaras—or Rarámuris, is what they call themselves—them’s ridge-running Indians. And they said Villa and his bunch passed through there not two days ago.”

“Were the children with them?” Arthur asked anxiously.

“Villa camped his people a ways from the village. But they did see a little boy about nine or ten that came to their camp about dark. Way they described him, it sure must be your boy.”

“Thank God,” Arthur said. The rush of relief and elation brought chills to his body. They weren’t going on a wild goose chase after all, and Timmy—and in Arthur’s mind it stood to reason Katherine, too—was unharmed for the moment.

“There!” cried the Colonel. “That’s fine news!” He slapped his saddle with his hand.

Arthur suddenly had a renewed respect for the Old Man; somehow, of course with Bob and Slim’s help, he had put them hot on the trail. Just being closer, and knowing it, was enough, for the moment.

“What’s more,” Slim said, “I think I know where they went. Before they left, they hired on a couple of Indians as guides to lead them down into the canyons—which figures, ’cause it’s gonna start to get pretty cold up here.”

“So you think we can find them?” Arthur asked tentatively.

“Yeah, I think so. I expect we ought to hire a couple of Indians ourselves. They know these canyons pretty good.”

“And what, when we do find them?” asked Cowboy Bob, as if he’d been reading Arthur’s mind. Bob had been silent and even distant most of the last couple of days. He had no illusions about their chances against a reinforced military detachment led by Pancho Villa.

“We’ll cross that river when we come to it,” said the Colonel. “The main thing is we’re close.”

Yes, but . . . Arthur thought. Until now they’d been tracking Villa’s progress only by signs of a large party moving through the mountains—cigar and cigarette butts, cast-off food tins, what passed for toilet paper—and were never positive it was him. Now that they knew it was, what could, or should, they do? Arthur had tried to formulate plans ever since they had left El Paso. He could offer Villa the meager ransom he might be able to raise; they could somehow swoop down on the unsuspecting Mexicans and rescue the children; they might even abduct Villa himself and hold him for a reverse ransom. All of this seemed improbable, but Arthur felt he had to keep the wheels turning, even if he was wrong.

They followed Death Valley Slim to the village of the Rarámuris, who were waiting for them. Because it was getting dark, the Colonel encamped just outside the village, much closer than Villa had. The old Indian who had spoken earlier with Lieutenant Crucia greeted them with a pleasant nod, but Slim didn’t know enough Indian language to communicate with him as Crucia had. To solve this, they both squatted down in the dirt and made themselves known in a language drawn on the ground with sticks. The Indian indicated he hadn’t seen a girl; only the boy. He said that Villa’s party needed goats and sheep but that he did not part with any. He said that one man had bought a dog from them, which, along with everything else, led the old Indian to believe that Villa’s party was, if not starving, probably low on food. This was useful information to the Colonel, because he knew hungry men would not be in the best mood to put up a fight, if one became necessary.

And when the Colonel’s troops arrived, the Indians brought out dinner for their new visitors. There were bowls of hot soup and tortillas and large trays of strange-looking batter-fried things that were especially tasty. After eating a handful, Crosswinds Charlie inquired what they were. Slim received a reply from the old Indian that they were eating butterflies.

“Butterflies!” Arthur exclaimed. “What kind of butterflies?” he asked.

“He says he doesn’t know, but there are many of them in the mountains this time of year,” Slim told him. Then the Indian added something else.

“He says the butterflies are the souls of their dead relatives.”

“You mean he’s serving us up old Grandma Juanita and Uncle Pablo?” asked Cowboy Bob.

“That’s about the size of it,” Slim said. “They believe it puts a restorative into their bodies.”

Butterflies, Arthur marveled, and damn tasty, too.

Meantime, Strucker had been examining the caves dug into the sides of a ridge and when he returned to camp pronounced the Indians “troglodytes.”

“What’s that?” Cowboy Bob asked.

“A lower form of life,” the German informed him.

“From what?” Bob asked, not liking the German’s answer. He always seemed aloof and snobbish and treated Bob, Slim, and the others like they were servants. Perhaps Strucker’s idea of “a lower form of life.”

“From ours, of course.”

“Why? Because they don’t have railroad trains or telephones?” Bob said. His distaste for the German grew from moment to moment.

“That’s part of it. But they have no culture, either,” Strucker shot back.

“Oh, they got a culture,” Bob replied. “It’s just different. Do you know that these people are descended from a civilization that’s two thousand years old? Reason I know so is that back at El Paso they got a whole museum full of their pottery and things—you ought to visit it. Beautiful stuff.”

“I’m sure,” the German responded, “but does it compare with Fokker or other of the great aircraft makers, or what the ancient Orientals were doing? I hardly think so.”

“I dunno,” said Bob, “but I sure thought it was pretty.” He barely knew what Strucker was talking about, but wasn’t about to let himself get outtalked.

“Pretty, perhaps, but if that’s the pinnacle of their cultural advancement, I’d say it’s fairly low on the scale.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Bob said. “I guess a higher advancement is what you people are doing to each other over there in Europe. What is it by now, two million killed just in France alone, last I read?”

Strucker gave a wave of dismissal and walked off. Bob felt like jerking him back into the woods and whipping his ass.