Cape Hell (10 page)

“Veterans of the revolution.” Joseph spat and rubbed his spittle into the rug at his feet. “Bandits.
Tio
Benito could hardly pick and choose when killers were required.” I couldn't tell if the avuncular reference to Juarez was genuine or marinated in sarcasm.

“My horse needs exercise.” I shook my head when he stirred himself. “As do I.”

He noted the wobble when I rose from the chair where I'd been resting, excused himself, and returned to the car a moment later carrying a crooked stick. “I was told to tap the wheels with it whenever we stop.”

“Why?”

“
Quien sabe?
Cansado I think did not know either.”

I took the stick. “What was the tribal remedy you treated me with?”

“The powder of the cinchona bark. This area is rich in the tree.”

“I did you a disservice. Cansado said I couldn't trust you and I believed him.”

“I trusted neither of you until he showed his hand. I am Aztec, after all, born with the earned wisdom of those who passed before. One traitor is to be expected. Two, they—” He faltered, made a gesture with his fists together, the thumbs turned away from each other.

“Cancel each other out.”

“
Sí
. A double betrayal leads to faith.”

The statement made as much sense to me as that entire business. I never did trust him entirely. It was like taking up with the woman who'd thrown one man over to take up with you.

The guards stood motionless, their eyes alone following me as I led the bay by its bit, as long as my steps took me no closer to the locomotive. Neither Joseph nor I was a prisoner, but their orders would be to prevent us from moving the train at any cost. Pressure was up; the fireman had seen to that while he nursed me, but every moment he stayed away from the tender was a loss of steam. Soon, keeping the train where it was would be no more than a formality. Without fire and water it was so much dead metal.

I walked alongside the tracks toward the caboose, then back, as much to restore strength to my muscles as to stretch the horse's sinews, supporting myself on the stick. Just for diversion I tapped a couple of wheels with the end, but if there was a crack in one it didn't sing out. In time that stick came to sum up the whole of my use to the federal court in Montana Territory. Judge Blackthorne abhorred the thought of any of his pistoleers lying idle. If not a Childress, then something else would have had to be trumped up to justify my time. The whole Mexican affair was nothing more than tapping a stick against an endless succession of wheels.

“Why not?” I said aloud.

“
Senor?
” The guard nearest me sent a blank expression my way.

“When was the last time you ate?” I asked.

“
Que?
”

I made a scooping motion toward my mouth. He shrugged. In all the years since I left Mexico I've never tried to imitate that gesture. Mexicans alone are educated in communicating through body movements; the roll of a shoulder, the lifting of an eyebrow, can out-debate William Jennings Bryan in the full cry of his eloquence.

I jerked my chin toward the parlor car. Not a muscle moved in his face, but after a glance forward and back he took a step that direction. I hung back to let him board first, but he planted his boots in the cinderbed and motioned with his carbine's barrel. I mounted the steps and turned to clear the doorway. He had one foot on the plush rug when something moved in a swift blur. There was a thump and the guard teetered backward, falling away from his sombrero. Moving from instinct I caught him before he fell outside the train, swiveled my hips, and let him slide to the floor, snatching hold of the Winchester on the way.

Joseph stood on the other side of the open door, still holding the Springfield shotgun, butt foremost. The curtains across from me were drawn, blocking the view from the guard posted on that side. The Indian read my expression.

“This was your intention, no?”

“I was going to get him drunk, but I guess this is faster. What now?”

“I at least thought beyond the moment. The man who stands at the front of the train has a bladder the size of a
cucaracha
's, but has trouble emptying it. He steps to the side every ten minutes and spends five minutes in the effort.”

“How do you know?”

He reversed ends on the shotgun. My tin shaving mirror was lashed to the barrel with a bootlace. “I thought it best not to lean out the window.”

“When did he make the trip last?”

“I cannot say. I was involved in waiting for this man.” He gave him a stiff kick in the ribs. The guard grunted without stirring.

I used our prisoner's machete to cut the plush rope attached to one of the curtains and thrust it at him along with the crooked stick. “Tie him up and make sure he doesn't sing out.”

He gave me the shotgun and looked wistfully at the Winchester, but I shook my head and leaned it in a corner. “I said keep him quiet, not silence him forever.” He accepted the stick with a sigh. The window nearest the front of the car on the left was open. I poked the barrel outside, turning it until the guard near the locomotive was visible in the mirror. He yawned once, patting his mouth with the back of a hand; apart from that he was as immobile as a carved chief in a tobacco shop.

“Ten minutes, you said?”

A shoulder moved. His eyes remained on the man tied up at his feet, holding the stick in both hands poised to swing. “
Poco más o menos
. I do not own a watch.”

“He seems to have cured himself since the last time. How long will that head of steam last?”

“Not long. I stoked the fire as hot as the gauge would stand to give me time to tend to you—as much and then some—but each moment lost—”

“Are you always this cheerful?”

He uncased two rows of tobacco-stained teeth in a ghastly grin.

The air was stifling; in that climate an open window brings no respite from the heat. The shotgun grew slippery in my grasp. I wiped one palm on my shirt, then the other. Steam drifting from the boiler condensed on the mirror in droplets that evaporated one by one before my eyes, and with them the life's-blood that kept the locomotive alive. The man in the glass showed no more life than an image in a tintype. The man on the floor groaned again; clothing rustled as Joseph prepared to silence him with the stick. I was about to put down his report as a beggar's wish when something rippled beneath the parched flesh of the man's face, a distinct surge of discomfort. He lowered his weapon and slid out of the mirror's range, walking rapidly with his toes turned inward, pigeon-fashion.

“Go!” I swept the mirror to the floor and traded the shotgun for the crooked stick. In a flash the Indian was out the door, feet crunching through the cinderbed as he made a dash for the engine.

Everything was against it, least of all the guard at the rear of the train stepping out far enough to see one of his charges making for the front. One well-placed shot and I'd be that most useless of creatures, a man with a contraption he didn't know how to run. Try selling that to a man like Harlan A. Blackthorne.

The guard he'd struck opened his eyes, saw me standing over him, and dropped his jaw to cry out. I swung the stick, catching him along the temple. His eyes rolled over white and his head fell back to the floor.

In the next moment I nearly fell myself. The floor lurched forward, my ankles turned, and I flung my shoulder hard against the wall, dropping my stick. Then as the train continued to pull, the floor slid the other way, resisting the pull of the hitch, but by then I had a grip on the frame of the door Joseph had left open and kept my footing. I snatched my hand away just as the door swung shut, sparing my fingers. The boiler chuffed steam, a live cinder from the stack flew through the open window, sizzling when it landed on a rug. I stepped over to crush it out with the toe of a boot, then went back to grasp the senseless guard by the collar, swing the door back open, and heave him outside before we reached lethal speed. At that he struck on his hip and shoulder and rolled three times.

As I pulled the door shut, something split the air by my left ear and knocked a piece out of the mahogany molding near the ceiling in the far corner, exposing raw yellow wood. I heard the report a quarter-second later, a shallow pop in the open air. Another slug starred a window, but had been fired at too shallow an angle to penetrate the glass. Through another window I saw Vigía Férreo running our way from the direction of town. He stopped, watching the train pick up speed. The face under the neat straw hat showed no emotion. The mathematics tutor–turned-policeman might have been calculating our rate of travel.

There was a thud overhead. I followed the sound to the window Joseph had left open, but laid aside the shotgun in favor of the machete I'd confiscated from the guard he'd struck. I waited with it raised, staring at the opening.

It took a week for a bone-handled Colt to come through it, clenched in the brown corded hand belonging to the man on the roof. I curled both hands around the machete's handle, hesitated to make sure of my grip, and swung it down with the force of an axe. Something hot splashed my cheek. Someone screamed hoarsely. The revolver, still attached to the hand, fell to the floor and slid across it, spraying blood from the stump of the wrist. The trigger finger tensed. The report was deafening in the enclosed space, but the bullet plowed a harmless path across the rug, burrowing like a mole. A moment later something flashed past the window: the rest of the guard I'd crippled, falling to the earth.

The adobe buildings sped past in a brown swipe. Just then the whistle brayed: a long and a short, followed by two longs, an impudent farewell. I thought that unnecessary. Adding train robbery to my employment history seemed enough without Joseph rubbing salt into an open wound. We were manufacturing enemies the way they cranked out machine parts in Chicago, and we hadn't even begun the climb into the Sierras.

 

FOURTEEN

A
dead hand
would make a fierce opponent at arm-wrestling. Luckily for me, this one came without an arm.

I pried the Colt loose, picked the hand and wrist up by the fingers, and pitched it out the window to rejoin its master in whatever afterlife awaited him. The fingers were warm and a little moist. They opened as it fell, like a crumple of paper losing tension or a supplicant asking for mercy.

I see that hand in dreams. At times it pleads, at others beckons. If the damned thing would just strum a guitar, or play a few bars of “Old Dan Tucker” on the piano, I might be rid of it; but it refuses to erase itself by becoming ludicrous.

I thought about packing the Colt along when I left the coach, but like the Winchester it was a Mexican copy of an American original made with inferior parts and unreliable, so I left them there and balanced myself out with the Deane-Adams and Bulldog revolver. The shotgun was too unwieldy and might pitch me to my death, so I left it as well and stepped out onto the car's verandah.

A steel ladder bolted to the back of the tender led to the top, but it was open, filled as recently as our stop in Alamos, rounded over with uneven chunks of mossy-smelling wood, and offered shifting and treacherous footing aboard a moving train. I climbed halfway up, gripped the top with both hands, and made my way around the corner, scrabbling with my feet until they found tenuous purchase on a nearly nonexistent ledge.

The
Ghost
was approaching forty miles an hour, but from where I stood it might have been going a hundred. Hatless, in my shirtsleeves, I clung to the tender, the hot wind buffeting my ears and snapping the ends of the bandanna around my neck. Given the choice I'd have turned around and gone back to the safety of the coach, but a train needs a fireman and the man assigned to that post was busy operating the locomotive.

Inch by inch, my fingers growing numb from the desperate tightness of their grip, I crept forward. I glanced down once, when my boot slipped, and saw the land dropping off nearly vertical to the piles of rocks at a base that seemed a mile below; and these were only the foothills. The mountains themselves shot straight up on the other side of the car, their peaks piercing the clouds like the tines of a fork.

I wasn't so much afraid of losing my grip as I was of surrendering it. In a flash—as if the train had turned a corner square into the sun—burning Mexico became frozen Nebraska, five years ago. I'd been either collecting or dropping off a prisoner, in a city I've forgotten the name of, when the clanging of the bell belonging to the pump-wagon, the town's pride and joy, brought my attention to the half-finished steeple of the Methodist church, where a carpenter clung to the remnants of a scaffold that had collapsed beneath him. The ladder just reached him, but as the volunteer stretched to take his hands, the carpenter let go, plummeting without a cry to the street below. He didn't die immediately, but lingered on, succumbing to pneumonia on his third day on the cot in the doctor's back room. My business was finished, but I stayed on to hear the end of the story. The Methodist pastor declared his passing the work of Satan during his services, but in his quarters later told me that Death was a siren, whose call was sometimes more strident than the will to live. At the thought, I felt the backs of my knees tingle with the thrill of instant release. That made me tighten my hold. I would not be ruled by my joints.

I was nearly to the cab when we swung around a bend, the train seeming to lean out from the shelter of the hill forty-five degrees. My feet swung clear; I was like a shirt on a clothesline blown out straight by a gust of wind. An image flashed into my mind, a photograph I'd seen in a book, of a train lying full on its side, the hollow V-shaped underside of the cowcatcher exposed like the tender flesh under a man's chin.

I lost my grip, scrabbled wildly at the smooth side of the tender, but some infernal force had pulled the edge of the top beyond my reach; the car seemed to have increased in height. Groping in panic, I came to a rod of some kind mounted horizontally, and threw my other hand up beside the first just as the train entered a bend in the opposite direction. I didn't know the rod's purpose; probably not to encourage some reckless fool to suspend himself from it. For what seemed an hour I hung loose as a broken shutter, my legs dangling free two hundred feet above an earth made entirely of broken stones like eggs hatched by some extinct bird. I hung that way, arms dead to the shoulders, until we straightened out. A toe found the ledge. I groped with my other foot, placed it beside the first, spread my legs, braced myself, released and flexed each hand in turn until circulation came tingling back, grasped the rod again, bounced on my knees three times, counting, and hurled myself forward through the opening at the rear of the cab.