El Paso: A Novel (14 page)

Arthur again was floored that such a change that had come over her.

“There’s the spirit,” the Colonel chimed in. “You’ll see deserts and prairies and mountains—it’s a big country. Why, Valle del Sol is nearly the size of Belgium!”

Turning to Tim, who’d been silent during the conversation, the Colonel enthused, “Why, you’ll even get to meet my young compadre Johnny Ollas, who’s going to be a great matador someday. And old Buck Callahan, my ranch manager—who will show you how to carve a Toltec idol out of a piece of cottonwood, or teach you how to rope and tie a steer one-handed. You’ll see things you never dreamed of,” the Colonel said.

ELEVEN

T
he morning after Pancho Villa’s butchery at Valle del Sol, General Vargo Santo looked in on Johnny Ollas. He found him semi-delirious from the saber gash but his color was good and he looked like he would live. He was surrounded by several women, who changed his oozing bandages every few hours.

“Well, amigo, you seem better than when I last saw you,” Santo remarked.

“Where’s Donita—my wife?” Johnny asked weakly.

“She’s with the chief. She’s in good hands.”

“What do you mean?”

“General Villa wants to take her with us for a while. Sort of an insurance policy.”

“Insurance? What insurance?” Johnny put his hand to his temple and looked up at Santo blankly.

“You’re lucky to be alive,” Santo told him. “It’s unwise to try to attack the chief.”

Johnny’s memory of the evening before began to return. The head of Toro Malo on the paving stones. The sneer of Fierro.

Johnny looked at the women. “Where’s Buck?” he asked. The women looked away.

“Where is he?” Johnny said again. “He needs to deal with this.” Two of the women immediately left the room.

“That is your ranch manager?” Santo asked.

“Buck is my . . . my father. He raised me.”

“I see,” Santo said. “I just wanted you to know about your wife. Many difficult things will happen during this revolution, you know. We are not kidnappers. We are soldiers. I wanted to tell you personally not to worry so much. I hear you are a matador, huh? I enjoy the corrida myself.”

“Donita . . . where is she?” Johnny repeated. The remaining woman looked darkly at Santo. “You ought to leave him alone,” she said.

“
Adi
ó
s
,” Santos said, and abruptly left the room.

Johnny turned to the woman. “Please go get Buck,” he said. “Something’s happened.”

THEY HAD ALREADY BURIED BUCK CALLAHAN
when Johnny Ollas finally felt up to getting on his feet. He had been told what had happened but for three days lapsed in and out of consciousness as his wound slowly healed, leaving a nasty reddish slash from his right ear to the crown of his scalp. Johnny’s adoptive brothers helped him to the grave site, where a small wooden cross had been erected. It was under a big oak on a sharp knoll near the ranch.

Buck’s widow, Rosalita, accompanied them. A blue-gray thunderstorm was gathering down the valley and lightning flashed against the looming Sierra Madre foothills. Johnny’s four younger brothers stood on one side of the grave with their sombreros in their hands as the storm spread over the foothills. Little gusts of wind spun dust devils over the fresh mound. Even though his companions were only stepbrothers, they were Johnny’s closest family and insisted on helping in his bullfights.

Johnny stood over Buck Callahan for a long moment.

Finally he said, “I guess there’s nothing left but to go on.”

“Go on where, Johnny?” asked Rosalita Callahan.

The rumble of thunder echoed and Johnny shook his head. “Somebody’s got to go and get this finished.”

“Finished?” Rosalita said. “It
is
finished. Buck’s dead.”

“And Donita’s been kidnapped.” Johnny Ollas had no clear idea of what to do, but he had to do something; this he knew. It wasn’t just Donita, though that was most of it. The rest had to do with the fierce Mexican pride instilled since the time of the Aztecs; the more they were beaten down—by the humiliations of the Spanish conquest, by the rapacious Americanos, by the unrelenting hand of their own corrupt government—the prouder, the more defiant the people had become.

Johnny Ollas was no different from anyone else.

“Johnny, Pablo goes every day to the telegraph office. Colonel Shaughnessy will come as soon as he hears.”

“Well, then he hasn’t heard, has he?

“Villa’s cut the lines, they say, but they’ll be fixed,” Rosalita told him. “And we also sent a man up to Chihuahua City with a message yesterday. They’ll get it through, and even if they can’t, we sent a man with instructions to go all the way to El Paso. Why don’t you wait and see what happens?”

“No time,” Johnny said. “Villa can disappear, maybe in those mountains, and nobody can catch him. What happens to Donita then?”

The evening sun lit up his face, and he squinted beyond the wooden cross that marked the grave. Johnny was delicately built, somewhat like a lady’s wristwatch, thin and slight, yet his wrists were thick with muscle from so much practice in the bullring with the sword. A bullfighter needed strong wrists to drive the blade deep into the big hump on the bull’s neck.

Johnny’s hair was straight and black but his eyes were blue and deep-set. His nose was straight, too—not flat like an Indian’s; his chin was somewhat pointed and dainty, his lips thin, and his canine teeth large and pearly white, all of which gave him a lean, wolfish look.

“Oh, Johnny,” Rosalita said, “Buck wouldn’t have wanted you to do this. Buck was a practical man. He’d wait for the Colonel. Buck always did what the Colonel wanted.”

Johnny stared down at the mound of dirt. A few drops of rain fell.

“Look what it got him,” Johnny said.

TWELVE

T
he Colonel’s private train, NE&P No. 1, sat huffing on a siding in Providence, Rhode Island, under the curtain of night when Bomba drove them up beside it in a black Mormon motor coach. The headlights reflected on the glistening dark green cars and polished black engine, their sides emblazoned with the big salmon-and-gray NE&P emblem. Another automobile followed with baggage.

“Splendid, splendid!” cried the Colonel, rubbing his hands together. “Just look how she shines!”

The train was made up of the engine and five cars—collier, baggage, diner, salon, and sleeper—plus a special car Arthur had added. Bomba and two other men from the baggage auto began loading everything aboard. Through the windows of the dining car they could see white-jacketed cooks working inside in the galley and smell the fresh aromas of supper wafting out on the cool night air.

The engine’s bell clanged and every so often fantastic clouds of white steam belched onto the siding as the engineer eased off his boiler pressure. A dark-skinned porter helped Beatie and Xenia onto the salon platform, then ushered Timmy and Katherine aboard. The Colonel started to go forward to speak to the engineer when Claus Strucker turned up in a taxi. He was dressed in a black three-piece suit set off by a gold watch chain, and his hair was slicked back like a New Orleans bartender’s.

“Well, well, Colonel,” said the German, “what a fine-looking train.” He ran his fingers over the glistening side of the Colonel’s private salon car, which was named
The City of Hartford
. It was painted in the company’s colors: a deep lacquered gray with a salmon stripe down the length of the car.

“Good to see you, Strucker,” replied Colonel Shaughnessy. “Glad you’re coming along. I’ll have my people bring your bags.”

Three days earlier, Strucker had called the Colonel to thank him for the voyage on the
Ajax
. More than the others, Strucker had gotten the joke, and when he learned the Colonel was headed to Mexico, Strucker immediately asked to come along. The Colonel was glad to accommodate, grateful to have the company of someone other than women and children on the long trip. Besides, the German’s presence reminded him of some wild times of yore.

It was just the sort of break the German had been waiting for. Strucker wasn’t sure how it would play out, but going down to Mexico under cover of accompanying a man of Colonel Shaughnessy’s stature could offer endless opportunities.

Everybody in the family had met Strucker at one time or another, so there was no need to reintroduce him around. Presently they were all aboard and snug in the elegant leather-and-velvet-clad parlor car.

For his part, Strucker was secretly contemptuous of the kind of American democracy that produced such bourgeois creatures as Colonel Shaughnessy and his family. His supreme value was the Prussian hierarchy, in which one kissed ass upward and defecated downward, and even though he enjoyed the company of the Colonel, Strucker actually despised Americans in general, the same way he despised anyone in his own country who was subservient to him.

“This feels good,” Xenia remarked to Beatie, “a trip into the night to a foreign land.”

“Yes, I imagine,” she replied, “provided we don’t get tangled up in their war.” Beatie chanced a look at Strucker, who was seated at the end of the car near the bar. She didn’t like the man, mainly because in the old days he was always around when the Colonel seemed to be, well, up to something, though she couldn’t prove it. Nevertheless, he was an old friend of her husband’s, and it would do no good to protest now anyway.

Colonel Shaughnessy had overheard the exchange between Xenia and his wife and interrupted with a gravelly roar: “Now, Mother, Chihuahua’s a huge state and all the papers are saying now that Pancho Villa is all the way over in Coahuila. It would be like me saying I’m afraid of going from Boston down to New York just because somebody’s fighting a war way out in St. Louis.”

The children, Timmy and Katherine, had already opened the game locker and were setting up a Parcheesi board, while the Colonel headed back to the end of the car to speak with Strucker. Neither of the children liked the mannered Teuton, though they would be hard-pressed if asked to say why. There was something officious in his manner toward them, as if they were an impediment in his company. Katherine especially didn’t like the way he looked at her; almost, but not quite, a leer.

The Colonel told Alvin, the salon porter, to bring him a scotch and sparkling water. At this, Beatie launched into her familiar diatribe, scolding him for drinking in front of the children, and, in fact, for drinking at all. She was still at it when the servant returned with the cocktail.

“Now, now, Beatie,” the Colonel said, shaking his head and waving his hands. “We don’t want any of that on this trip. If people want to drink on this train, I don’t want them to have to go skulking around out of sight.”

“Just as you always do, I suppose,” Beatie said sourly.

“That is all too true,” replied the Colonel, “because of those carping temperance women whom you associate with.”

“And without regard to my feelings, either.”

“Well, if your feelings are hurt by seeing a man having his drink before dinner, I imagine they will just have to stay that way,” replied the Colonel. “My word, woman, we are descended from Irish warriors!”

“You might be, but I’m not,” Beatie huffed.

She settled into the plush rear sofa of
The City of Hartford
while Xenia hovered over the children, who were engrossed in their game at the other end of the car. The dimmed electric lamps gave the polished-mahogany-and-velvet decor of the car a warm, friendly glow, the kind of glow the Colonel liked to get from his whiskey.

Katherine looked up from the Parcheesi board and caught Strucker watching her. He stood now by the door to the observation platform, drinking a double rye and taking in this scene. No German would ever put up with his wife bickering at him that way; in fact, no German wife would even think of such bickering. These Americans were a weak people, despite their material wealth and the vastness of their lands and resources. If Germany owned this country, it would rule the world—and might just wind up doing so anyway, depending on the outcome of the war. Katherine ran her fingers through her hair and offered a quick smile at the German, before wrinkling her nose and returning to the game, which left Strucker looking puzzled. These Americans! he thought. Even the children are weird.

“It all comes from the liquor,” Beatie continued resentfully. “From the moment you took up with that wretched woman. And, of course, it was your drinking that caused it!”

“She wasn’t wretched,” the Colonel corrected his wife, “she was perfectly nice, but you have continued to assume the worst. We were simply acquaintances.”

“Wasn’t
wretched
!” Beatie huffed. “Why, she ran stark-naked through the lobby of the hotel following the Belmont Stakes!”

“She was merely returning to her room,” the Colonel answered dismissively.

Strucker was appalled at being a witness to this conversation, but was not surprised by it; once, long ago, he and the Colonel had taken a pair of women on the yacht then owned by Strucker and sailed them out to Bermuda. Oh, the things that went on! In recent years, however, Strucker was left with the impression that the Colonel had reformed himself, though Strucker couldn’t see any reason why he himself should.