Against the Day (74 page)

“The Panteón is short on space,”
Dwayne was eager to explain, “so these boys get five years curing in the
ground, then if the families don’t pay the what they call grave tax, they get
dug up again and hung there till somebody antes up.”

   
“I
thought it was something religious,” Ewball said.

   
“You
could call it that, it all gets turned to pesos and centavos, water to wine you
might say, during the day they charge visitors to see it, we’re gettin the
three a.m. rate here, though from the looks on these faces we must’ve
. . .
interrupted somethin.
”

“All right, Dwayne,” Frank muttered.
They reached spiral steps at one end of the crypt and ascended into moonlight.

Making their way down the canyon to
the old Marfil station, they boarded the train there a little after sunup, and
rode all day into the afternoon, Frank submerged in silence, refusing to drink,
to buy drinks, to smoke, or even share the cigarillos he didn’t smoke with his
hoosegow buddies, who began to grow concerned.

   
 
“Hope you’re not in love,
compinche.
”

“You’re being haunted,” Dwayne
explained. “Every sign of it. Something in your notorious past, needs to be
taken care of.”

“You know, Brother Provecho, in jail
this Kid refrain was one thing, but out here it’s just tiresome, ’s all. Sorry
I’m not your man, actually Kid, and you’re way better off right now needling
somebody else might appreciate it more.”

“Too late.” Dwayne nodded out the
window. “As I estimate maybe five more minutes for you to brush up on those
legendary dynamite skills
. . .
Kid.”

The train was braking to a stop, sure
enough, and Frank began to hear commotion close by. He looked out the windows
and saw, riding escort, a couple dozen men who looked to be under some oath of
sobriety as to personal display—shaven upper lips, modest hatbrims no
charro
’d
be caught dead in, cotton
shirts and workers’ trousers in a range of earth tones, no insignia, no
evidence of any affiliation to anything.

   
“All for
me, huh?” said Frank.

   
“I’m
coming along,” Ewball announced.

“Wouldn’t have it otherwise.”
Someplace in the last few hours Dwayne had obtained a pistol it seemed.

After a few seconds, Ewball said,
“Oh. Ransom money? ’S that it, that’s what you’re counting on, the legendary
Oust fortune? Not a fruitful plan,
vaquero.
”

“Hell, they’ll be happy ’th whatever
they get. They’re happy folks. What you see out there’s so far just a smalltime
endeavor, one day to the next, no hostage too insignificant, long as it’s
bourgeoisie that can pay somethin.”

   
“Ay,
Jalisco,” muttered Frank.

“Oh, and you’ll want to meet El
Ñato.” An energetic presence had entered the carriage—officer’s jacket
from the defunct army of some country not too nearby, smoked lenses, steel
practicalities where you might have expected sil

ver ornaments, and perched up on one
epaulette a very large tropical parrot, so out of scale in fact that to
converse with its owner it had to lean down to scream into his ear.

“And this is Joaquín,” El Ñato
smiling up at the bird. “Tell them something about yourself,
m’hijo.
”

“I like to fuck the gringo pussy,”
confided the parrot.

“How’s that?” Ewball blinking at the
bird’s theatricalBritish accent, recalling somehow vaudeville Shakespeare and
profligate nights.

A hideous laugh. “Got a problem with
that,
pendejo?
”

El Ñato beamed fretfully. “There,
there, Joaquín, we mustn’t give our guests the wrong idea—it was only
that one housecat, one time, up in Corpus Christi, long, long ago.”

   
“
Sin
embargo, mi capitán,
the
adventure has haunted me.”

   
“Of
course Joaquín and now gentlemen, if you wouldn’t mind . . .”

There were horses saddled and waiting
for Ewball and Frank, which it was now indicated they mount. “Not coming along,
Dwayne?” Frank swinging up into a black leather saddle rig, built onto a
militarystyle tree, he noticed, little unexpected this far out of town, free of
carving or stamping or anything fancy except for the Mexican curb bits and
“taps” over the stirrups. “Keep smart boys,” Dwayne called back from the carriage
doorway, “and maybe we’ll be seeing you down ’em rails again someday.” As the
train began to move, El Ñato tossed him up a leather sack, small but with some
heft to it, got his horse to rear dramatically, wheeled about, calling
“
¡Vamonos!
”
to his riders.
The parrot flapped his wings as if signaling to a confederate in the distance.
Surrounding the Americans, the
guerrilleros
moved off, alert, silent,
picking up a trooping gait, until soon the train behind them seemed just one
more chirring summer insect in the distant brush.

“
Ridin
with anarchists now
, gotdamn never thought I’d be doin this
. . . .
”

“What’s the matter,” needled Ewball,
“you’d feel more comfortable with just some everyday bandits?”

“Bandits may shoot, bandits may cut,
but at least they ain’t blowin things up every chance they get.”

“We never blew nothin up!” protested
El Ñato. “Nobody here knowss nothin about no explosives! Steal a li’l dynamite
from the mines maybe, throw a stick here, stick there, but now all that’s
changed, now
you’re
ridin with us,
¡el Famoso Chavalito del
Quiselgúr!
—now we get respect!”

They
rode till well after dark, ate, slept, struck camp, moved out hours before
dawn. The escort were a humorless bunch, and any thoughts of even a
companionable
copa
now and then were soon abandoned. Days went by like
this, as they rode deeper into Mexico than Frank had ever believed anybody
could without hitting a coastline, Ewball meantime acting less and less like a
hostage and more like a longlost brother who was trying to charm his way back
into a family he thought was his own. Stranger than that, El Ñato and his
lieutenants appeared to be falling for this routine, and soon even encouraging
Ewball to join up and ride with their guerrilla unit. “You’ll have to travel
fast, keep up. But we don’t always get to eat, or find a town to requisition,
and the rule in the outfit being that first to find anything is first to enjoy
it,
pues
. . .
you’ll keep up,
I believe.”

They rode down smalltown boulevards
lined with ancient palm trees, through precipitous canyons, the indigo
mountains fanned like paper cutouts into the miles of haze. One day, looking
down off a high ridge, Frank saw a rustcolored city spilling up and down the
sides of a deep gulch. Piles of tailings loomed everywhere, which Frank
recognized as spoil from silver mining. Rambling between the high uninflected
walls of the town, alleyways were apt to turn to stairsteps.

They pitched camp outside of town,
near a bridge over an arroyo. The wind funneling down the ravine never quit all
the time they were there. Streetlights came on early in the dark brown
afternoons and sometimes stayed on all the next day. Frank, seeming to enter a
partial vacuum in the passage of time, found half a minute to ask himself if
this was really where he ought to be. It was such an unexpected question that
he decided to consult with Ewball, who was squatting next to a Maxim gun broken
down into bits and pieces on a blanket and trying to remember how to get it
back together.

“Old
compinche
— say, you
look different somehow. Wait, don’t tell me. The hat? maybe all those ammo
belts there full of machinegun bullets ’t you’re packing? The tattoo? Let me
look—
¡Qué guapa, qué tetas fantásticas, ¿verdad?
”

“These folks knew it all along,” said
Ewball. “Just took me awhile to see it, was all.”

“Hey! Tell you what. Don’t be hasty.
We, we’ll switch. Yeah! Yeah, you can be the Kid, and I’ll be the sidekick.
O.K.? They never believe a thing I tell ’em, but maybe they will believe you.”

   
“Who,
me? Be the Kid? Aw, I don’t know, Frank
. . .
.
”

“Five minutes and I can teach you
everything, Advanced Blasting course on the cheap, all the latest
thinking— here, for instance, you ever wonder which end of these is the
one you light?”

“Dammit
now Frank now get that thing away from me—”

   
“Why
it’s this one here, see—”

“Ahhh!” Ewball was out the tentflap
faster than the muzzle velocity of any known firearm. Frank placed the smoking
cylinder, which on a closer look might’ve been no more than a giant Cuban claro
in a Partidos wrapper, between his teeth and strolled out among the
tropa,
who,
under the impression that he was actually smoking a stick of dynamite,
scattered from his path muttering in admiration. The only one willing to engage
him in conversation was the parrot Joaquín.

“Ever
wonder why they call it Zacatecas, Zacatecas? Or why it’s Guanajuato,
Guanajuato?”

Frank,
fallen by now into the doubtful habit of Conversation with a Parrot, shrugged
in irritation. “One’s a city, one’s a state.”

“
¡Pendejo!
”
screamed the parrot.
“Think! Double refraction! Your favorite optical property! Silver mines, full
of
espato
doublerefracting all the time, and not only light rays, naw,
uhuh! Cities, too! People! Parrots! You just keep floating along in that gringo
smoke cloud, thinking there’s only one of everything,
huevón,
you don’t
see those strange lights all around you.
Ay, Chihuahua.
In fact,
Ay,
Chihuahua, Chihuahua.
Kid engineers! All alike. Closed minds. Always been
your problem.” Giving in at length to parrot hysteria, sinister in its
prolonged indifference.

“Here’s
your
problem,” Frank
approaching Joaquín with his hands out in strangling position.

   
The
comandante,
sensing psitticide in the air, came hurrying up.

   
“Apologies,
Señor Chavalito, but with only a few more hours to go—”

   
“Few
more hours, um, till what, Ñato? “

“
¡Caray!
Did I forget to tell
you? sometimes I wonder why they even let me lead a unit. Why, your first
commission, of course! We want you to blow up the Palacio del Gobierno tonight,
¿O.K.? Give it, you know, that special El Chavalito punch?”

   
“And
you’ll be on hand for that?”

El Ñato grew evasive, or, as he would
have termed it, selfconscious. “To be honest, it isn’t really the primary
target.”

   
“Then
why?”

   
“Can
you keep a secret?”

   
“Ñato—”

   
“All
right, all right, it’s the Mint. While you’re creating a diversion—”

Later
Frank couldn’t remember if the word
loco
had come into the discussion,
though its Mexican euphemism
lucas
might have. His point, simple

enough, really, being that silver coinage in any quantity
would weigh a great deal. At twentyfive grams to the peso, a good mule might
carry five thousand pesos, a jack maybe thirtyfive hundred, but the question
was how far before the mule fell over and had to be replaced. Even with a
string of mules long enough to make a Mint robbery worth the trouble, they
would be sitting ducks for any federal posse.

   
“I
knew that,” said El Ñato. But Frank could tell his feelings were hurt.

It
got no further, actually, than trying to steal the dynamite they would need
from one of the silver mines on the slopes of Monte el Refugio, southeast of
town. Before anybody could shout a warning, they found themselves in the middle
of a firefight, maybe with mine guards, maybe
rurales,
hard to tell in
the dark.

“Ain’t like we blew into town all
that quiet,” Ewball muttered between squeezing off shots. “What’s he expect?”

They got back to camp to find more
shooting there, with El Ñato somewhere out on one flank, holding off what
seemed to be a halfhearted assault. Nobody wanted to be shooting at night,
though the clear suggestion was that daylight would be different and it might
be wise to be gone by then.

“
¡Ay,
Chavalito!
”
screeched
the parrot Joaquín, in some inaccessible dark frenzy from his cage, which was
being loaded onto a pack mule, “we are in some
mierda, pendejo.
”

“Huertistas,” said the comandante. “I
can smell them.” Frank must have had an inquisitive look, because Ñato glowered
and added, “Like Indian blood. Like burned crops and stolen land. Like gringo
money.”