El Paso: A Novel (52 page)

“Who the devil are
you
?” Villa asked, puzzled.

The German introduced himself and for once told the truth.

“I am representing His Imperial Majesty, the kaiser of the German Empire.”

“Is that so?” Villa said. “Well, what do you want here?”

“I’ve been trying to find you since Chihuahua City,” said Strucker. “It was an unfortunate reverse for you, I’m sure.”

“We gave as good as we got,” Villa told him curtly. “It didn’t seem smart to hang around.”

“No doubt,” Strucker said. “I wonder if there is somewhere we can go and talk. I have come on official business.”

“Are you hungry?” Villa said.

“Yes, I am,” replied Strucker.

“Well, there’s food on the fire. Someone will get you a plate. By the way, how in hell did you find me?”

“I have followed your trail from Chihuahua City,” said the German.

“Are you a tracker?”

“No. I had guides to the Indian village you visited in the mountains. From there the Indians helped me. I’m sure I’d be wandering around out here for years without them.”

“That’s most likely true,” Villa observed. “I should have killed those Indians before I left.

“Anyway,” he continued, “there is a piece of entertainment this morning. There is going to be a bullfight. After that, you can state your business.”

“A bullfight,” Strucker remarked. “What an odd place to hold one.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Do you do it often?”

“No,” Villa replied. “It’s a special occasion.”

FIFTY-ONE

T
he Rarámuri guides told Colonel Shaughnessy they were just a day behind Villa’s party and might overtake him at any time. The Indians also informed him they were going home now. They had reached the limits of their range, they said, and the extent of their knowledge of the canyons. The Colonel didn’t like this, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He was stewing over this late in the afternoon when catastrophe struck. The Colonel had been riding across a stream when his horse stumbled on a submerged log. The animal pitched forward, throwing the Colonel, and then, in a flailing scramble to get up, it kicked him in the leg.

Arthur and Slim witnessed the whole thing and were close enough to hear the
crack
when the leg broke, as if somebody had snapped a large stick in two. They got the Colonel out of the water and carried him to the sandy bank. Slim cut off the Colonel’s trousers leg and was alarmed by what he saw. The leg above the boot was already beginning to swell and had turned an ugly bright red.

“It’s broke for sure,” Slim said. “We need for somebody to go find Bob. He knows about these things.” Bob was somewhere up ahead scouting. Arthur stayed with his father, who was in fierce pain.

“Tell Ah Dong to come up here,” Arthur shouted. He knew the Chinaman had sedatives and other painkillers in the chuckwagon. By the time Ah Dong arrived, the Colonel was white-faced, grimacing. Taking only a quick look, the cook rushed back to his wagon.

“Papa, it’s going to be all right,” Arthur said. He was cradling his father’s head in his lap. But he wasn’t sure it would be all right. A broken leg under these conditions was no trifling matter. The Colonel looked at Arthur with pleading eyes but was speechless. Arthur knew the Old Man was fighting the urge to scream.

It didn’t take long for Cowboy Bob to be located, and he returned at a gallop.

“It’s broke,” he said after examining the leg. “Just lucky the bone didn’t poke out through the skin. Then we’d really have a problem.”

“Can you set it?” Arthur asked.

“Set it? Me?” said Bob. “I ain’t no doctor.”

“Well, we have to do something,” Arthur replied. “What do we do?”

“Well, I reckon I’ll have to try,” said Bob, “’cause it’s gonna keep swellin’, and then it’ll be impossible. But I don’t guarantee no results. If it don’t set right, there’s nothing more I can do.”

Ah Dong came back with a bottle of laudanum, an opiate. It wasn’t as good as chloroform or even ether for the process of setting the broken bone, but it would have to do. They put the bottle to the Colonel’s lips and he managed to get some down. It took a while to get enough in him to take effect. By the time the Colonel was semiconscious, Bob was ready to do his work.

They sat the Colonel up so his legs were sticking out straight. Bob had used his hands to even out the sand so it was level. The break was in the tibia, just below the knee. It would have been good to remove the Colonel’s boot, but Bob didn’t want to disturb the leg any more than necessary. With Arthur, Slim, and Ah Dong holding the Colonel up straight, Bob began to slowly pull and turn on the leg. The Colonel let out a moan. Obviously the laudanum had not killed all the pain. Using both hands, Bob felt for the break, trying to align the tibia and the fibula with the femur and the ankle bones, too, so the leg looked as normal as possible. Then he told Arthur and Slim to pull one way while he turned the other. The Colonel groaned pitifully.

“I think I got it,” Bob said, running his hands along both sides of the leg. “I don’t know how good, but it looks about as straight as I can tell. I helped a guy to do this during a rodeo once, but the feller always walked with a limp after that. Now we got to fix up some kind of cast to put it in. Otherwise, it’ll just separate again.”

Ah Dong produced some muslin from his wagon and fashioned a sort of loose stocking to go over the leg. Then he packed it with sand from the riverbank. They made some splints by pulling plank pieces out of one of the wagons and lashed them together around the leg with rope and pieces of a spare bridle. It was a crude affair, and when they were done the Colonel looked as if he’d stepped into a tall wooden garbage can. The laudanum had finally put him into a restive sleep. There was nothing else to do but camp there for the night, falling farther behind.

“Well, now what?” Arthur asked as they sat around the fire. “I guess we’d better get him to some kind of hospital.” His head was spinning at the complications—his children, his father—this threw the whole plan out of whack. They’d come all this way and now a silly horse accident had put the thing into serious jeopardy.

“Now, how you gonna do that?” Bob said. “There ain’t no hospitals unless we climb back across those mountains, and it’s gonna be snow and ice and God only knows what else before we get back down the other side. I don’t know that we could make it. Only other thing I can think is keep on going the way we are. Sooner or later we’re gonna run out of these canyons and be where there’s some civilization.”

“But what about Father?” Arthur said. “He needs medical attention.”

“Ain’t none,” Bob said. “Look, don’t worry, Arthur. I know he’s your old man, but people been breakin’ legs out here for thousands of years. He’s luckier than most—we was here to set it, such as it is, and he’s got a wagon to ride in. It’s a sure thing he can’t ride no horse. But he’s a tough old bird. He’ll make it.”

“You think Villa’s got a doctor with him?” Arthur asked. “The man must have some compassion in him, doesn’t he? This is an old man who’s badly hurt.”

“What would you say to him? We come after you with a bunch of gunmen to get back those kidnapped kids and now you gotta help us with a doctor? I hardly think so,” Bob said.

“You don’t know Villa like I do,” Bob continued. “Sure, maybe he’ll lend you his doctor and even help carry the Colonel to safety. On the other hand, he might just murder us all. Depends on whether he’s having a good day or not. You want to take the chance?”

“It was a thought,” Arthur in a low voice. He walked off a distance, kicking stones in the sand, mad at himself for not thinking clearly. It was the one thing he needed to do now. Who knew what would happen? The Colonel had been the glue that held everything together, as he had been all of Arthur’s life. Some of the things he did were crazy, but he’d always been the one in charge. Now they were deep in a place so wild and remote that all of them could be killed to the last man and probably nobody would ever find their bones or know what had happened to them.

Cowboy Bob was a good man, but in the end he was a hired hand with no stake in the outcome. So somebody had to take charge and mean it, and Arthur understood who that had to be. After all, it wasn’t anybody else’s kids, and out here you played the hand you were dealt.

Arthur stood by himself in the canyon looking up at the hard bright stars that were beginning to appear in the late autumn sky. A shiver ran through him. Despite everything else, he and Xenia had raised two good children and had become a family that, like the millions of other families when all was said and done, was alone in the world, like a little island adrift.

For all his preoccupation with the trials of the railroad company and the search for profits and security, during these last long days on the trail Arthur had begun to understand with devastating clarity that the most valuable thing a human can do is commit to another human, or humans—in this case, his family. The bleak despondence he sank into after Xenia told him about Mick Martin had turned to black despair when the children were kidnapped. Until this moment he hadn’t been able to shake it off, but now something different was happening.

There was a stone in front of him and he kicked it so hard his toe stung. All his life Arthur had never really hated anybody, not even the bully Hawkins who tormented him at Groton. But suddenly there began to well up in him such a hatred of Pancho Villa and Mick Martin that he thought his head would blow off. For others who over the years had treated him poorly, Arthur had felt either fear or apathy, but never hatred. Yet that’s what he was experiencing now, raw and undiluted, so that it actually pushed out the anxiety and despair. From childhood he’d been taught the difference between good and evil, but just knowing what evil was didn’t protect you from it. He considered that if Katherine and Timmy were somehow free and he came upon Villa face-to-face, he’d willingly sacrifice his own life just for the satisfaction of snuffing out that cruel, wicked son-of-a-bitch. In this last, he was responding to an instinct he didn’t quite comprehend, but one that he suddenly trusted unconditionally.

Finally he walked back to the fire.

“Okay, we go on,” he said. “We’ve lost time with this and we’ll probably lose more with my father and his condition. So I think we’d best get moving right after we fix some dinner. At least the canyons are easy to navigate, even at night. From now on, we’ll break for sleep four hours a day and keep on pushing.”

Slim glanced at Bob, who said to Arthur, “So what happens when we catch up to Villa?”

“I don’t know yet,” Arthur said. “I guess I’ll figure it out when I see the lay of the land. Any more questions?”

“Nope, boss. No questions. I’ll tell the men,” Bob said.

FIFTY-TWO

J
ohnny Ollas sat staring into the low flames of the campfire and contemplating his fate. Donita was next to him, hugging his arm. Rafael and Luis were nearby perched on logs, and Gourd Woman squatted in the shadows. Mix hadn’t put on any extra guards; there was no need to. Where could they go if they escaped?

Johnny had talked it over with Luis and Rafael earlier. He was badly handicapped from having his cuadrilla cut in half by the deaths of Julio and Rigaz. Besides, he was pretty sure Villa wasn’t going to let Luis and Rafael ride horses in the fight, if he even let them in the ring in the first place. Actually, Johnny had tried to persuade them not to fight at all—the little band of brothers was already reduced enough as it was. But it appeared Villa would shoot them otherwise, so they might as well go down fighting. Villa had not said what he would do if Casa Grande was killed and they survived, but at least he
hadn’t
said they would face the firing squad anyway.

“What were you thinking, coming after us like this?” Donita said. After they had taken Johnny to her, she was so glad to see him that she’d thought of nothing but embraces and gratitude. Finally the grave truth of his predicament had sunk in.

“I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit around and wait.”

“Better than this,” Donita said. She knew enough about the bullring to understand the desperate situation Johnny was facing. Since people began recording the history of bullfighting about half of all matadors had ended their careers by being crippled or gored to death—and that happened in regular rings with a fair fight.

“Well, whatever I do in the morning, I guess it will have to be pretty quick,” Johnny observed. “I’m not going to be out there trying to please the crowd.”

THERE WAS NO SLEEPING THAT NIGHT
for Johnny Ollas and the others. Dawn arrived above the canyon rim with a hellish glow that quickly turned to gray. Exotic birds began to squawk high in the trees, while all around was the din of Villa’s soldiers awakening—low muffled curses, the snorting of horses, the rattle of utensils, the sounds of hawking, spitting, pissing, and coughing—a strange and mournful cacophony to greet another day.

Except that it wasn’t just another day for Johnny Ollas. His was to be a trial by fire, or, rather, trial by
el toro
.