El Paso: A Novel (56 page)

“Put on your war paint, did you, Bomba?” The Colonel chuckled. It was the first time he’d laughed since his leg had been broken.

“Saw children this morning—they all right,” said the Samoan. “Maybe eight, maybe nine hours.” He pointed north down the canyon.

“Bless your heart,” Arthur told him. He didn’t know quite what yet, but with Bomba here, he felt he had a better chance to do something. Bomba had always been there since Arthur was a little boy; Arthur always felt protected when he was around; in fact, Arthur had once thought that if Bomba had stayed there with him at Groton, nothing bad would have happened. In any case, in Arthur’s mind, Bomba now added up to major reinforcements.

“How many men you got?” Flipper asked.

“Two dozen,” Arthur said, “more or less.”

“Well, Villa’s got himself a couple of mounted companies—maybe more—plus some cavalry. I expect you’d have trouble in a fight.”

“You got any idea where he’s headed?” Arthur said.

“No, but from the look of it he’ll be out of the canyons pretty soon,” Flipper said, “and I’d expect he’ll be trying to link up with the rest of his army—provided it hasn’t disintegrated. Say, you boys don’t have any morphine or something, do you? There’s a boy over behind them rocks got pretty bad hurt in a bullfight this morning. He’s gonna die, but it might ease his pain.”

“A
what
, did you say?” Bob asked.

“That’s another long story,” Flipper answered.

Some of the men removed the barricade of logs that led to the box canyon entrance and the Shaughnessy party circled up inside. It was sort of cozy and gave them a little break from a chilly wind that had begun to blow down the main canyon. It was the first cold they’d felt since they’d left the mountaintops and started north. Before dark Bomba and some others had dug graves for Luis, Raphael, and Julio. Casa Grande’s carcass they left for the
zopilotes
.

They had parked the Colonel’s ambulance wagon not far from Ah Dong’s kitchen, and presently four men appeared with a flat board that they were using for a stretcher. They laid it gently on the ground a few yards from the Colonel, and when he saw who was on the stretcher it rendered him momentarily speechless.

Ah Dong was examining Johnny’s leg, along with Cowboy Bob and Henry Flipper. Gourd Woman was mopping Johnny’s brow with a damp cloth.

“That boy there, do you know who that is?” the Colonel finally exclaimed.

“Who?” Arthur said, alarmed.

“That’s Johnny Ollas. Arthur, you met him years ago when you were kids and you came down to the ranch. Buck Callahan raised him. He’s like a son to me.” Gourd Woman looked up at him strangely.

Arthur vaguely remembered: the little boy at Valle del Sol with the bright personality and dark shining eyes who’d taught him a little Spanish.

“He’s gonna die for sure if that leg don’t come off,” Flipper said. “It’s startin’ to fester already.”

“The leg—what happened?” asked the Colonel. Arthur told him.

Ah Dong had carefully removed Johnny’s bandage and was studying the wound. “I think maybe I can,” he said.

“Can what?” Arthur asked.

“Cut leg,” the Chinaman replied.

“Amputate it?”

“Only way. We don’t, he die, huh?”

“My God,” murmured the Colonel.

“How’re you gonna amputate a leg?” Arthur asked.

“I have meat saw. It cut through beef and pork bones. I have needle and string to sew up chickens and turkeys. Maybe it work—maybe not.”

“Well, one thing’s for sure. He won’t live with that leg on,” Bob said.

“It’s his only chance?” asked Arthur.

Ah Dong nodded. Cowboy Bob and Gourd Woman voiced their agreement. The Colonel put his hands to his head and took a breath. They took his silence for an affirmation.

“All right,” Arthur said, “let’s get some light here. We’ve got a battery light in the wagon, too.” Ah Dong poured water into a kettle and put it on the fire, then went to get his saw.

“Well,” Slim remarked, “I heard of doctors that become butchers, but never a butcher that become a doctor.”

Ah Dong performed the operation by lanterns and flashlights beneath a three-quarter silver moon that also helped to illuminate the little canyon. Villa’s doctor had already performed the most delicate and dangerous task by tying off Johnny’s artery. Sawing off the leg took no longer than sawing off a dead steer’s leg. The sawing made a harsh grating sound, like chalk scraping a blackboard, that gave chills to everybody near enough to hear it. Ah Dong made sure he’d peeled back enough extra skin to sew over the stump. He told Gourd Woman to wash the wound carefully and put disinfectants on it, since he was sure the bull’s horn had been dirty. When the cook finished his suturing, Johnny Ollas was alive and breathing, but he’d fought his last bull.

Bomba carried Johnny’s leg out to the grave he’d dug for him earlier and buried it there, next to Luis, Julio, and Rafael.

Everybody drifted back to their various encampments except for Gourd Woman, who stayed around to help Ah Dong clean up. She seemed exceedingly grateful to him.

“Now, I don’t understand what a woman is doing out in this wild territory,” remarked the Colonel. “How did you end up with Johnny?”

She told him her story and the Colonel told her his. Ah Dong kept his fire going brightly and they basked in its warmth and light. Shaughnessy was glad to have the company of a woman, even if she was a Mexican. His own leg had stopped hurting as much, now that they were off the jolts and jostles of the trail. He explained who he was and why he was here, but Gourd Woman seemed remarkably unsurprised. He got an odd feeling that she already knew. She told him about selling brooms and how she had met Johnny and his brothers, and then about following after Villa and joining his army, and about Rigaz being killed and the failed rescue attempt.

Still, Shaughnessy had a haunting intuition that he knew her from someplace. From a campfire not far away rang out the melodious sounds of a guitar and Death Valley Slim’s pure, high-pitched warble, singing “Oh Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” The sad musical notes danced around the canyon’s walls as though it were an opera house.

“You really feel something for that boy.” She made it a statement instead of a question.

“Of course I do. He’s like my own.”

“He ought to be.” There was a funny tone in her voice when she said it.

“Well, he was found on my place. Wasn’t much more than a day old. Born in a ditch, they said. We took him in.”

“You should have,” she told him.

“Of course we did. The only proper thing to do. Buck and Rosalita Callahan raised him like their own.”

“I thought you said he was like
your
own.” Something in the way she said it made the Colonel uncomfortable.

“I did,” he replied.

“Well, he is.”

“Is what?”

“He’s your own. But you know that already, don’t you?”

“I don’t.”

“Yes, you do, Señor Shaughnessy.” She said it so flatly that he was shocked.

“What makes you say something like that?” he asked uneasily. There was something . . .

“Because there was a woman at your Valle del Sol, a long time ago. A young girl. Just after you bought the property. You and she—”

“No,” cried Shaughnessy. The eyes, the voice, suddenly came together. “Lurie? Lurie? But how can this be? I thought . . . ?”

She looked at him intently from beneath her rebozo. Suddenly she swept it back from her head and smiled, while the firelight flickered softly on her face, the handsome nose, the piercing eyes, the full lips, the full lustrous hair.

“Lurie Ollas,” he gasped under his breath.

“After my parents found out, they disowned me and I went to live in a little hut out on the llanos. It was okay. There was a stream and I could pick corn from your fields down in the valley.” She spoke deliberately and in a faraway voice. “That was where it happened, one day after I was coming back with a basket of corn and there was no time. Just like that, he came. And then the rain began and a big windstorm came up and I got down with him into the ditch. Señor Callahan found me there that afternoon.”

“But Buck told me you were dead,” he said in an intense whisper.

“It’s what I asked him to say. You see, they took me in and let us stay there with them. For a while I wasn’t well, and Señora Callahan, she was so good with him. I hadn’t even named him—they did that afterward. I was just eighteen, and what future could I give him? So what was I going to do? No place, no home for the little one. All I could do was steal corn and beg. They offered to take him in as one of theirs.”

“And after all these years. It would have been 1890 . . .”

“I went south to Zacatecas, then Jalisco, and worked as a maid for a while. But it wasn’t so nice. Then I got a job selling apples on the street. That was better than a maid. Then I just sort of wandered around. Time really goes fast, doesn’t it?”

“Lurie.”

“I tried to keep up with him,” she continued. “Señora Callahan would write me from time to time. When I learned he had gone into bullfighting, sometimes I went to the arenas if they were near. I wouldn’t go in to watch, though, because I was frightened for him. But I could see through the gates when they came in. I was so proud of him, but I hate killing. I always read the newspaper accounts afterward. That time when he was gored . . .”

“Lurie,” he said. He reached out and she came over to him and let him stroke her face. “I’m sorry, oh, I’m really so very sorry.” She was surprised to see tears well up in his eyes.

“I would have taken him back to the States with me, you know. I considered it.”

“You don’t have to explain,” she said gently, touching his side. “He’s gonna live now, I think. And that’s all that’s important. Your cook did a pretty good job, far as I can tell. Sewed him up like a goose.” The moon had dipped over the canyon rim but still washed the walls in a thin patina of light. Colonel Shaughnessy was gnawing on his thumb and trying to keep control of himself. Strange things had happened today.

She took something out of her dress pocket and handed it to him. “Hold on to this tonight, it will make you sleep well.”

“What is it?” He held the object up for a better look.

“It’ll make you invisible,” she said.

FIFTY-SEVEN

“G
eneral, Señor Reed tells me you are a socialist,” Bierce said. “Is that true?” Four days had passed since the bullfight and they were riding abreast in the late afternoon along a broad stretch of canyon rimmed by dark green trees. Earlier Villa held a powwow with his leading officers and, shortly after that, Fierro took a small party and rode on ahead. The German Strucker was on Villa’s left, erect and superior-looking on a horse that he informed everyone was named Blucher. Reed was riding on Bierce’s right.

“How could I be a socialist?” Villa replied. “I have just accepted an offer of ten million German marks from this man’s government, which is one of the great imperialist governments of the world. Does a socialist do business with capitalist-imperialists?” Strucker was so startled Villa would reveal their transaction that he barely caught his monocle as it fell out.

“My appreciation of socialists,” Bierce responded, “is that they’ll do business with the devil himself if it accomplishes their ends.”

“Not me, Señor Robinson. It’s been said I am a man of low character and no morals, but that’s not entirely true. I have morals when it comes to who I take money from.” Villa seemed remarkably cheerful.

“Would you accept money from the Americans, if they offered it?” Reed asked.

“Not anymore. They betrayed me. I don’t need their stinking money.”

“This money that Herr Strucker here has offered—what’s it for?” Bierce asked.

“To make war on your country,” Villa answered bluntly.

“On the United States?” Reed was aghast. “Whatever for?”

“Ask Señor Strucker,” Villa told him.

Strucker was completely nonplussed at what he was hearing. He’d assumed the agreements made between him and Villa were top-secret.

“My country was simply making an offer to assist General Villa in his revolution,” Strucker said, flustered.

“You told me it would be in my best interests to attack the United States, at El Paso or some other place, didn’t you?”

“I don’t believe it is in your best interest, or mine, to discuss our private conversations with these two Americans,” Strucker said.

“Why not? They’re friends. They been with me a long time. I trust them, why shouldn’t you?”

“Nationalism does not make good bedfellows,” said Strucker, “at least not in my experience.”

“Señor Reed here is a socialist,” Bierce interjected. “They’ll get in bed with anybody.”

“Well, I won’t,” said Villa. “And Señor Strucker has promised that these ten million marks are going to be placed in a bank of my choosing, in gold, within two weeks. And he is of course going to remain with me until I can go and retrieve them, isn’t that correct, señor?”

“Well, yes, of course,” Strucker said. He suddenly seemed further shaken. “But first I must communicate with my government. And I don’t know how long it will take to get the money transferred. These are hard times for all of us, and banking routes are interrupted.”

“Oh, we’ll get you to a telegraph depot pretty soon. But you did tell me in two weeks, didn’t you?” Villa asked. “Surely the imperial government of Germany that wages big wars all over the world can accomplish something as easy as this.”

“I believe so,” Strucker said darkly. His mouth went dry and he felt himself starting to break out in a sweat.

“You better be right,” Villa informed him. “I don’t like to be delayed or go out of my way over false promises from a bagman.”

Scheisse!
Strucker realized; he wanted to slap his forehead. I am kidnapped, too.

“So where are we headed now, General?” Bierce inquired. “I understand we’re about to get out of these wastelands.”

“We are,” Villa said. “And we’re going to a stinking Federale outpost at a town called Agua Prieta and wipe it out. I have already sent General Fierro to bring up the rest of the army.”