El Paso: A Novel (63 page)

Arthur heard the noise, looked up, and saw what had happened. He whipped out his pistol and cracked the lieutenant on his head, and the man tumbled down the staircase. Then Arthur rushed back up toward the room.

Bob was emerging with a wild-eyed Timmy in his arms and Katherine by the wrist and a hairless dog snapping at his leg. When Katherine saw Arthur, she started to shout, but Arthur put his finger to his lips. Timmy saw this, too, and was silent, but the dog wasn’t. It began to bark frantically and went for Arthur’s leg the moment he approached them. Arthur waved his arms for somebody to shut the dog up, but nobody knew how.

“Pluto, no!” Timmy hissed, but the dog continued to bark. Arthur grabbed Katherine by the arm and began pulling her toward the staircase. Bob followed with Timmy; the dog continued its furious barking that was certain to wake people up. They had just reached the upstairs landing when another of the doors opened and Tom Mix appeared in the hallway in his long johns. He ducked back into his room as the rescue party fled down the stairs. They had just gotten to the dining room when they heard shots fired. Mix had retrieved his pistol and sounded the alarm, and was rushing down the stairs after them. Suddenly the doorway was blocked by soldiers, dumb and sleepy-eyed, but there nonetheless.

Arthur turned off into the dining room, startling a dozen Mexicans who were still celebrating with toasts.

Bob saw an open window and made for it. He hoisted himself to the sill, still carrying Tim, and let himself through. Arthur followed, lifting Katherine to the window and letting her down before scrambling through it himself. Outside, somebody was shouting in Spanish, “Stop them, stop them!”

It was hopeless. Scores of soldiers were jumping up, grabbing guns, squinting into the dim light. Arthur, Bob, Tim, and Katherine had landed in bushes beneath the window, but there was no way out beyond this; the Mexicans were rushing toward them. Bomba had come up, too, and took both children in his arms. But Arthur made a split-second decision.

He hugged Katherine and Timmy for an instant and said, “I’m sorry, stay here. We’ll be back.” Then he, Bob, and Bomba ran off into the darkness, with rifle shots ringing and splintering in trees all around them. If they had tried to take the children with them, they would have all been killed.

“GODDAMN DOG!” BOB WHEEZED AS THEY RAN.
“We had ’em! We almost had ’em!” Behind, they could hear shouting and the sounds of more shots. Slim and the Mexican teamster who’d been holding the horses were waiting when they came up. The other teamster was there, too, after drifting back from the hacienda.

“Let’s get out of here now!” Arthur said. His heart was still pounding but he knew it was over. At least the children were still unharmed, and for the moment, so were he and his companions. There wasn’t time for second thoughts.

The original plan had been to take the children back to the lettuce patch, put them on the plane, then scatter in different directions, meeting up later at the railroad tracks to the east. Now they had to return to the patch to tell Charlie to take off empty-handed. When they got there the place was lit up with torches Charlie had set out; the plane’s engine was running and Charlie was sitting in it. In the glare of the torches Arthur saw Mick Martin was still there, too. They galloped up to the plane.

“Didn’t work,” Arthur said, “and they’ll be right behind us. Dammit! I told you to get going!” he spat to Mick.

“I thought I might be able to help here,” Mick replied.

“You get back in that damn plane and go with Charlie!” Arthur ordered.

“Look, Arthur. If I can ride double with one of you guys, I might still—”

“Get in the plane now!” Arthur screamed. Just then shots began singing around them. The plane’s engine was so loud they couldn’t hear most of them, but they could actually
feel
them whiz by. Mick clambered into the rear seat of the plane. Charlie gave a thumbs-up and throttled high, and the plane began to move.

“Let’s go!” Arthur shouted. As planned, they split out in five different directions. As Arthur galloped through a large open cow pasture, he glanced back in time to see the Luft-Verkehrs lift into the air, its shiny red underbelly lit by the burning torches. Arthur cursed himself, not just over the children, but because he hadn’t had the guts to leave Mick Martin to Villa’s tender mercy.

SIXTY-FOUR

V
illa got everyone moving at dawn and they had been on the trail all day, headed north toward Agua Prieta. He himself was furious.

“It seems like everybody in Mexico is after me,” he remarked to Bierce and Reed, who were riding with him at the head of the column. “I’ve never had so much trouble kidnapping people in my life. I get sniped at, my drovers are murdered, guards get killed, people start breaking into my quarters.”

Lieutenant Crucia had led the interrogation of Katherine and Timmy after he recovered from the bump on his head from Arthur’s pistol. He was even angrier than Villa, but got nothing from the children. Katherine had made Timmy swear not to tell that it was their father who had come to get them. All anyone knew was that it was somebody with an airplane and that the plan appeared to have been well thought out. Tom Mix received some of the blame, although no one was sure exactly why.

Bierce had been irritable ever since Villa decided to burn down the hacienda of El Padrino. It had made a spectacular fire after being drenched in coal oil by the soldiers, and after they left they could still see the smoke from miles away. Finally Bierce asked him about it.

“Why did you find it necessary to destroy that beautiful home?” he said. “It must date back to colonial times.” It was not the opportune moment to ask such a question.

“So what, Señor Robinson? The people can rebuild it if they want to.”

“Rebuild what it took centuries to build?” Bierce asked.

“Who cares how long it took?” Villa growled. “It was constructed by stinking Spaniards who enslaved my people.”

“Doesn’t history matter to you?” said Bierce.

“We’re making history now, señor.”

“No matter who it hurts?”

“War’s no tea party, Señor Robinson.”

“Yes, I think I used that line once myself,” Bierce told him.

“I think the general has a point,” Reed chimed in. “This El Padrino ruled that valley like a feudal serfdom and lived in splendor while the people were famished.” Reed didn’t object to the immolation of the hacienda, but he did have second thoughts about Villa’s treatment of El Padrino himself. Under the revolutionary rules Reed understood, El Padrino would have been given a trial, then shot or hung if found guilty.

“It seems to me,” Bierce said, “that a revolution ought to be orderly. Not going around indiscriminately burning things down and killing people.” Bierce hated disorder, and anarchy certainly didn’t suit him. He needed the things in his life to be meticulous because, he’d decided, his mind was so chaotic that if his surroundings were, too, it would probably drive him insane.

Villa told him, “The very nature of revolution is disorderly.”

“Not ours,” Bierce retorted. “We enlisted an army and fought the British man to man. If anybody burned down buildings, it was them.”

“Maybe you should have tried it, too,” Villa said. “Might have shortened the war.”

“But they were our own buildings,” Bierce countered.

“Listen, Señor Robinson, the English antagonized your country with taxes and so you rebelled with your tea party. But that was child’s play compared with what the stinking Spanish have done to us for three hundred years. And their stinking descendants and associates still control ninety-five percent of all the land and wealth in Mexico. We’re going to put a stop to it, and if killing’s necessary, it won’t stand in our way.”

“Sometimes the best intentions give way to murder,” Bierce remarked.

‘Why give them a second chance?” Villa said. “Then their sons will come after you. This time there’ll be no going back.”

Villa was getting angry and felt the hairs on his neck begin to stand up, but it was too soon to go into another rage. Rages gave him headaches. He wished he’d never brought this old coot with him; who needed a ration of shit from some worn-out gringo? Señor Jack Robinson was insubordinate and, like everyone had predicted, had seriously begun to get on Villa’s nerves. He began to wonder if Sanchez’s ghost had somehow transformed itself into this hoary old man.

KATHERINE AND TIMMY WERE STILL TRYING
to comprehend what had happened the night before. Their father! She had known someone would come, but had never expected
him
. It had happened so suddenly that when she woke up this morning, she thought it had been a dream. Timmy wasn’t even sure that it wasn’t. He’d been half asleep the whole time. And also, they hadn’t been able to talk about it much between themselves because they hadn’t been alone all day.

“Seems like you have got friends trying to help you out,” Mix told her, trying to make conversation.

“Maybe they weren’t friends, maybe they were enemies,” Katherine said deceptively.

“Why would you two have any enemies?” They were riding now in a strange new terrain. The green of El Padrino’s valley now turned into a dusty wasteland of low scrub and volcanic rocks. To the west a yellowish sunset framed a row of huge black mesas that stretched as far as the eye could see. They reminded Timmy of a fleet of steaming dreadnoughts he’d once seen in a picture.

“Maybe they were just more kidnappers, like you are,” she replied.

Ever since she woke up, Katherine had been confused about her feelings for Mix. Yesterday it had been wonderful talking with him in the garden. She sensed kindness, and vulnerability, too. She’d pictured the two of them walking along the cliffs at Newport and going down the path to the little secret place she had, a small cave with a ledge where they could sit on rocks and watch the ocean swells crash below. He would be a movie star by then and wealthy, and would waltz with her that night at the Colonel’s ball.

Reality had struck Katherine when Mix joined Lieutenant Crucia in the interrogation later in the morning. Mix had been more gentle and seemed to believe her when she said she didn’t know who the intruders were. But then, Mix hadn’t been knocked in the head by a gun butt like Crucia had, which had raised a large lump. Still, it came back with undeniable clarity that she was his prisoner and there wasn’t any way to argue herself out of that.

“Whoever they were,” Mix said, “it was the most foolhardy thing I’ve ever heard of.”

“Maybe it was brave,” she countered.

“Maybe, but it was stupid, too.”

She had to bite her lip to keep from retorting.

“You still want to teach me to dance?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered after a long pause.

“You’d have to grow about a foot to make us even,” he told her.

“Maybe I won’t grow,” she said. “Maybe this is as tall as I’ll get.”

“That might come true, if you don’t stop pouting.”

“I’m not pouting, I’m thinking.”

“What about?”

“About my father—and my mother,” she said.

“You think your father had something to do with what happened last night?”

“No,” she said. “Father’s not a kidnapper.”

“He might be if it was his own kids,” Mix said.

To that she had no reply.

“I’d kinda like to see that ocean you talked about,” Mix told her, increasingly embarassed.

“Maybe someday you will, if you set us free.”

“Yep, maybe someday I will,” he said.