El Paso: A Novel (13 page)

“They’ve never done this before. They’re aware of our assets.”

“Maybe you have assets, but I don’t,” Arthur countered. “And you told me to handle it. They wanted to examine the company books. My action avoids that,” Arthur said coldly.

The Colonel just looked at him, the contempt slowly draining from his face. He, too, realized what failure to get the loan would mean: Word leaking out all over the country of the precarious condition of the New England & Pacific Railroad. Vultures swarming in; people whispering, maybe even the newspapers getting hold of it—contracts canceled, creditors alerted. The Old Man shook his head. “Well, I don’t want this hanging over us. I’m going to pay the thing off myself.”

“From your personal funds?” Arthur asked cheerfully. “Well, it’s what made the Rothschilds so successful—they pledged their own fortunes.”

“Hell with the Rothschilds,” the Colonel spat. “Besides, I don’t have any personal funds anymore.”

“What?” Arthur said. In fact he’d wondered over some of the remarks his father had made during the past year, but he’d always been careful not to be too inquisitive about the Old Man’s private affairs. Still, he found it astonishing.

“Do you mean that you’re broke?”

“It’s too true,” the Colonel replied. “There’ve been some reverses in my investments. I’d counted on company profits to make them good, but then these past few years . . .”

“Completely broke?” Arthur asked, alarmed.

“Well, no, of course not. But I’m in a pinch and it’s getting pinchier by the day. It’s expensive to run all this, the houses, the yacht, my place down in Mexico . . .”

“Well, how broke, then?” Arthur pressed.

“I stopped giving money to the charities six months ago,” the Colonel said by way of explanation.

“But Father, how on earth then could you have planned to take all those people to Ireland or wherever? That must have cost—”

“Because I’m borrowing money from some of them,” the Old Man cut him off. “I can go to Harriman or Whitney or Vanderbilt and ask for a little personal loan, you know? A friendly private matter. But I can’t appear to be indigent. Besides, I wasn’t going to take them to Ireland if they protested. It was just a little joke.” He jabbed his finger at the message. “And then when this thing came, I was made to look like a fool. We were way out in the ocean when they woke up, while I was supposed to be taking them up to Boston! Now they laugh and say I can’t even navigate my own yacht!”

Arthur looked out the large bay window to where a few sailboats were negotiating their way through the rolling, windy seas. He rubbed his forehead and reflected with dismay on how his father had refused to take the NE&P public all those years when it had made a stunning profit. Now it was a sticky question because the company was operating nearly in the red. Still, it was crazy in this day and age for a railroad to be run by a single owner.

The Colonel had collapsed into a chair. He seemed deflated.

“Listen, Arthur, we need to talk a moment. While you were in Chicago and I had all these people on
Ajax
,
s
ome of them are in our same fix down in Mexico and I had to give them disturbing news.”

“What’s that, Papa?”

“This Pancho Villa fellow. That country’s in a hell of a mess. They change presidents every month or so and every time more fighting or revolution or whatever they call it breaks out. We’ve got some pretty large investments down in Chihuahua, but so far, Villa’s stayed out of our affairs.”

“We’ve been lucky,” Arthur said, perplexed at his father’s change of subject.

“Well, what I’d been thinking was that I can sell off some of the cattle in Mexico, maybe all of them,” his father continued. “Which is why I bring up this matter. There’s close to two million and a half dollars in beef on the hoof at Valle del Sol. Enough to put NE&P on some kind of footing until we can get the company back on track. Just one of those munitions contracts from the English or French will do it. I’ve been working on it.”

“I considered the cattle myself,” Arthur said. “But I was worried it might not be a good time, with all that’s going on down there.”

“Well, you better start worrying more,” the Colonel told him, “because Villa’s talking about nationalizing everything or just plain stealing it, and kicking all the foreigners out of Mexico and giving it back to the Indians and peons or something. I don’t know if he can do it. I don’t even know who’s in charge down there and nobody else does, either. Anyway, it’s created a situation.”

“I can only imagine,” Arthur said. He suddenly felt a peculiar pang of something like fear rush through him from his gut to his brain. All these years he’d felt financially secure, not just because of the railroad, but because of what he thought was his father’s wealth—the family fortune. He’d simply assumed that, whatever happened, the Old Man had stashed away enough to keep everyone comfortable. It had never occurred to him that the Colonel could actually go broke.

“You know,” the Colonel said, “I met Pancho Villa once when he was running a butcher shop in Chihuahua City and came to the ranch to buy a few cows from us. He seemed pleasant enough, but I don’t put it beyond him to impose some sort of sanctions.”

“What did the others say when you told them?” Arthur wanted to know.

“Took to strong drink,” said the Colonel. “Then they wanted to know how to handle it. My word, together we own most of Northern Mexico. Old Man Guggenheim almost dropped his false teeth on the floor. He’s got millions tied up in those silver mines. Harriman, the same; he owns railroad right-of-way franchises for six thousand miles of track. And there’s Hearst, with all his ranching operations.”

“Was anything decided?”

“We can’t reach Valle del Sol by telephone; the lines must be down. The only way we’re going to get a handle on this thing is to go ourselves and get a look firsthand.”

“Mexico?”

“Exactly. I haven’t been to Valle del Sol in nearly a year. And you haven’t been at all. We need to find out what’s going on. Get a good feel for the situation,” the Colonel said conspiratorially. “I think it will be instructive. And if the situation looks clear, we can drive the cattle up to Chihuahua City and load them into stock cars and bring them across the border at El Paso. That ought to solve our sticky little financial problems for a while. Hell, Arthur, a cattle drive, one that big! Can you imagine it?”

“But Papa, We can’t leave the railroad to run itself. Not now. We’ve got a major problem that’s beyond just short-term patch-ups with cash. We need to talk about this—about the whole business.”

“We can talk about it later,” said the Colonel. “On the trip.”

Arthur saw where the conversation was going to lead, and knew in the end he would not win, and that in fact it might even be a good thing for him to go to Mexico and do his own surveying of the assets down there.

Arthur had known for a long time that the Old Man was not quite balanced; that he was mercurial and sometimes rash. Even though the Colonel called him son, had given him his name and all that went with it, Arthur had always felt subservient, far more than most sons with their fathers—real fathers—and with his sense of gratitude, mixed with an apprehension he could never articulate, Arthur almost always deferred to his father’s wishes and demands, even when he believed them wrong. The
Ajax
business was an exception. But this . . . this seemed a reckless. He didn’t want a part in one of the Colonel’s grandiose schemes. What he had heard during the past few minutes had done more than startle him.

“With all you’ve just told me,” Arthur said, “don’t you think it might be dangerous to go into Mexico now?”

“Oh, hell, no. We’re not going to get any kind of trouble from Villa and his bunch. They know where their bread’s buttered. I’ll write him a check for five or ten thousand or something—been thinking about doing that anyway. That’ll keep him happy,” the Colonel said with calm assurance.

“But that’s a war they have on down there,” Arthur said. “War is . . .” Arthur was getting that nervous feeling he always got when he saw his father becoming wrought up about something—there was often no stopping him. It had been that way ever since Arthur could remember. His childhood had been an unbroken string of jolts and fears of what the Colonel would come up with next; when Arthur was thrown by a horse, his father traumatized him by making him get back on. In Maine his father once took him deep into the woods and left him there alone, telling him he must learn to find his way back home. For his first swimming lesson the summer he arrived at the Shaughnessy household, the Colonel simply brushed him off a dock into icy water that was over his head. Looking back, Arthur realized his father hadn’t meant to be cruel; he’d only meant to be instructive.

But all these impressions were indelibly stamped in Arthur’s mind.

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said the Colonel. “They’ve never had fighting anywhere
near
Valle del Sol.”

“WELL, HOW WOULD ALL OF YOU
like to take a vacation down in sunny Mexico?” the Colonel announced. They were seated for lunch at the elaborate rosewood dining table in the dining room overlooking the sea. The Colonel sat at one end in a huge ebony chair carved like a throne, and Beatie sat at the other. Next to her was Timmy, and opposite was Katherine. As the older, at twelve, Katherine exerted a kind of supervisory position over Timmy, who, at nine, followed her around like a puppy when she wasn’t out riding or fencing or playing field hockey. He wasn’t frail, but somehow he seemed lost, though Katherine attributed that to his age. He could talk to her about things, and did, and she knew he was no dummy. Xenia sat to the Colonel’s right and on his left was Bomba, dressed in a tuxedo that everyone knew had half a dozen throwing knives hidden inside.

“What did you say?” Beatie asked. “A vacation? In Mexico?”

“You’ve never even seen Valle del Sol,” the Colonel said. “After twenty-five years, it’s high time you did.”

“All of us?” Arthur asked, incredulous. “I thought it was just you and me.”

“I’ve never been to Mexico,” Katherine said innocently.

“Papa, I didn’t know this was to be a family excursion,” Arthur said. “They’ve been having a war in Mexico for three hundred years. It’s not a war like what’s going on in France,” he continued, “but it’s a war.”

Xenia broke in. “I’ve never seen the ranch,” she said. “I think it might be nice.”

Arthur was stunned. For weeks she hadn’t said much of anything at all, let alone something positive. Xenia gazed across the table toward the ocean with a wistful expression, which to Arthur was when she looked the most beautiful. He didn’t know whether to be glad, but if her melancholy might be cured by a trip to Mexico, he’d certainly go along with it.

THE COLONEL’S SUGGESTION ABOUT GOING TO MEXICO
had set off a spark in Xenia’s soul. Until that moment, sitting at the Shaughnessys’ dining table, with the vast ocean and all the trappings of grandeur spread out around her, Xenia had been utterly miserable. She was carrying a secret darker than she could ever have imagined, and carrying it deep inside herself. She was pregnant, and not with Arthur’s child.

To explain such a thing was beyond her, but she knew she must, because she loved Arthur without compromise. There was no denying the fact, however. The doctor had said she was two months gone.

What problems they’d been having before, between Arthur’s long business trips and the sort of gentle lassitude they’d slipped into during the past year, foreclosed any possibility she could convince him it was his child. She thought about ending the pregnancy, but though she’d heard whisperings of doctors who might perform such an operation, personally she knew no doctors who would. That would have been the easiest way, but it was also something completely against Xenia’s own sense of self-respect and honor. When the Colonel mentioned Mexico, something clicked inside her. Somehow there was a ray of hope—a new country, far away from Boston and the disgrace and humiliation the very name of its society implied.

“But Father, really,” Arthur said. “After all, we should at least think this out.”

Xenia cut in, “It’s going to be fun.” Her eyes seemed suddenly alive and bright; she was even smiling.