Air and Fire (44 page)

He looked up at her. ‘Apparently somebody piled wood inside the building, then set fire to it – '

The Señora's head swung sideways and she spat.

‘I don't know anything about that,' she said.

The clock on the roof of the company store began to strike. Wilson had never expected to learn the truth from her, but that sly smile spilling from her mouth intrigued him. She smiled so rarely. Had Monsieur Valence been justified in his suspicions? For the first time, it occurred to Wilson that she might actually have poisoned the Frenchman. Deliberately.

As the twelfth note died away, Pablo stood up and walked to the cupboard where he kept his liquor. His eyes lifted to the landing; the vulture was still up there someplace, shuffling its feathers in the gloom.

‘It's ever since the riots,' he said. ‘Can't seem to keep them off the streets.' He brought a bottle over to the table. ‘Talking of streets, have you heard the latest? They're thinking of naming a street after Montoya. The place where it happened. They say it'll be a kind of memorial.'

Wilson had to slow him down. ‘Where what happened?'

Pablo took Wilson through the events in detail, as Wilson had known he would. Montoya was returning from Frenchtown after another round of discussions with de Romblay when he was ambushed by a crowd of Indians. Such was the Indians' fury that they tore the carriage to pieces with their bare hands. They stripped Montoya of his uniform and nailed
him to one of the wheels. For more than an hour they dragged him through the streets. They believed his suffering would act as a kind of poultice, drawing out the suffering of their people; his anguish would replace their own. Afterwards they took him to the park. There, on the dark corner where the Calle Majore met Avenida Aljez, not two blocks from the hotel, the Indians got out their knives. Montoya was still conscious when they cut him open and threw his intestines on the ground. It was their version of a crystal ball. Nothing like the guts of a Mexican aristocrat to give you an idea of the future.

Wilson grimaced. ‘How did it look?'

‘Peaceful. Or so they said.' Pablo uncorked the bottle and poured two shots of liquor. He pushed one across the table.

Wilson drank it down.

Pablo offered him another, but Wilson shook his head.

‘It took him two hours to die.' Pablo poured himself a second drink and swallowed it. ‘People who live on that corner, they can still hear the groaning.'

Wilson leaned back in his chair. He did not want to think about Montoya. He followed a crack as it meandered up the pale-green wall. The square of sky at the top burned white.

Later that afternoon, the two men made their way to the bakery. Along Calle 3 and then right, up Avenida Cobre. People were sitting on their porches, faces slackened by the heat. The mood in the streets was leaden. It reminded Wilson of oceans after storms. All that exhausted water. Spaces had opened in the town's young memory. For some they would be grotesquely detailed, graphic – food for nightmares; for others, blank. He was not sure he would have called it peaceful. More like numb.

His eyes lifted to the graveyard on the hill. Montoya. Some soldiers from the garrison. And then the Indians, too many to be counted. In 1879 he had spent a few weeks in Virginia City. People always used to tell him that the first twenty-six bodies buried there were murdered men. Life was furious in a new town; nobody had time to die of natural causes.

In the bakery Jesus was sitting with Luis Fernández. Wilson and Luis shook hands. Pablo arched an eyebrow at his younger brother, then leaned against the wall and picked his teeth. Over glasses of black coffee and angel cakes baked fresh that afternoon, Wilson learned of Luis's appointment to the post of customs officer.

‘So they killed him too,' he murmured.

‘Ramón was asking for it,' Jesús said, ‘hiking import duties like he did.'

‘And all those bribes he took.' Pablo shook his head.

Luis kept silent.

Wilson noticed how slim Luis was, and how there were no pockets to his pants.

‘Just the same,' Jesús was saying, ‘I wish they'd found some other way. That was a full day's baking – and I never got a penny for it.'

Medically speaking, José Ramón had suffocated. The Indians had held him down, and forced cake into his mouth and nose; they had done such a thorough job that, during the autopsy, Dr Bardou found icing in the customs officer's lungs. Not only that but they gouged out his eyes and filled the sockets with marzipan. Then they chopped his hands off at the wrist so he would not be able to accept any bribes in the afterlife. As Jesús said to Pablo. ‘Imagine what they would have done with a baguette.' But he had only made the one at that point, of course, his first –

Wilson interrupted. ‘I think I saw you, the day I rode back into town. You were waving something.'

‘That was the day he did it,' Pablo said.

Jesús nodded. He had heard the guns that afternoon, but he had assumed it was fireworks – some festival which he had, in his excitement, forgotten all about. He did not realise the truth until he dashed out into the street waving his baguette and promptly lost the end of it to a Mexican lieutenant's sabre.

He led Wilson over to the row of shelves behind his counter and drew the cloth off the glass case where he always used to keep his doughnuts. And there it was, resting on green velvet, tapering and golden at one end, brutally truncated at the other: the first baguette.

Nose close to the glass, Wilson examined it. He tilted his head one way, then the other. Then he nodded and stepped back.

‘The doctor must be pleased,' he said.

‘Free medical treatment for life.' Jesús beamed. ‘Not just me, either. The whole family.'

Putting on another pot of coffee, he asked Wilson what his plans were now that he was well again. Wilson told him about the balcony that he was going to build for La Huesuda.

Pablo smirked. ‘He'll get it for nothing from now on.'

‘That's a relief,' Jesús said. ‘We won't have to pay for him any more.'

The three Mexicans roared with laughter.

‘I'm not interested in that,' said Wilson, grinning.

‘No,' Pablo said, ‘of course you're not.'

For the remainder of the month Wilson worked on La Huesuda's house, starting at daybreak every morning. Monsieur de Romblay was most amused when he discovered the purpose to which his materials were being put.

‘And she's a friend of yours,' he said, ‘this prostitute?'

Wilson demurred. ‘More of an acquaintance.'

‘An acquaintance?' Monsieur de Romblay smiled. ‘In France, of course, it's an art, to be accomplished in love.'

‘In America,' Wilson said, ‘we don't generally talk about it.'

He had to keep love in mind, though, as he laboured: love's requirements, love's demands. He cut stairs that would be wide enough for any drunken sailor's boot. He reinforced the handrail; it would not give, even if someone leaned against it, vomiting. And the balcony could take the weight of half a dozen men with ease (for those nights when La Huesuda entertained the garrison).

She still could not believe it. Most days she walked into the middle of the street and stood there staring up, her hands spread on her hips, jaw dangling. Then, as she got used to the idea, even thrilled by it, she began to reward him with glimpses of her skinny body; robes fell open by mistake – or sometimes she would just forget to dress. These were the favours that Pablo had predicted. When Wilson politely turned her down, she laughed. ‘What's the matter, American? Afraid you might break something else?'

From where he was working, two storeys up, he could watch her go about her business. Out along the waterfront, with her wishbone legs and her eyes like avocado skins gone bad. One hand thrown up in front of her, the fingers splayed, her body tilted at the waist, she would taunt the crews of ships that lay moored along the quay, then swirl away, her bones rolling and jumping inside her dress. La Huesuda.

‘So tell me, Wilson. What kind of women do you like?' Suzanne's voice. Softened by white wine from underneath the house.

‘You, Suzanne.' He must have blushed.

He looked inland, towards the ruined church. Its fire-blackened walls, its windows emptied of their glass.

‘You.'

A slow smile had spread across her face. ‘You're a gentleman,' she said. ‘Really. You are.'

He shook his head. She thought that he had seen her question as a chance to pay her a compliment, and she had been genuinely flattered by what he had said. She had not realised. It was not a compliment; it was a declaration. It was the torture he had inadvertently devised for himself, that he could never allow her to understand him.

At the time, in the impotence of knowing that he loved her, it had frustrated him. Now, though, he could only see her simple absence of resentment, a touching gratitude. Life had been too watery, too grudging – too meagre altogether. He stared at the blackened walls, the spire leaning to one side. If he had been her husband, he would have built a church, not for some remote god, but for her, in her honour, to her glory, and would have considered it no blasphemy at all.

He put in long hours on La Huesuda's house. His hands blistered and then hardened. He could feel his body strengthening. The details gave him pleasure: a dovetail joint, an edge planed level. The steps climbed steadily heavenward.

Some mornings Jesús would stop by with a baguette. When Wilson snapped the bread in half, steam drifted upwards from the soft interior. Other times the Vum Buá girls would visit. They had not forgotten his story, but he was still lost for an ending. One day they came to him with a proposal: suppose the beautiful woman decided to marry the poor man, not for money or for jewels, but simply because he made her happy. Wilson thought this an admirable solution. The girls promptly invented a new game: the wedding. Wilson had to be the poor man, of course, and he was told to kneel on the ground throughout the ceremony. The girls took it in turns to be the beautiful woman, standing at his shoulder. First always played the priest, since only she knew the words. For confetti the bridesmaids used sawdust, which there was plenty of. In the middle of one wedding, just at the moment when the rings were being exchanged, long shadows fell across the bride and groom. Still on his knees, Wilson looked round. La Huesuda's brothers stared down at him, their foreheads dented in the sunlight. The girls scattered; Wilson reached slowly backwards for a hammer. But the two faces opened, and rows of stained teeth showed. ‘No hard feelings, mister.'

July slipped by, and his thoughts began to move northwards. There was a kind of nostalgia lodged in the wood itself. The scent that it released into his nostrils as he worked put him in mind of Upper California. He
could see forests of fir trees climbing the slopes behind a town, the tip of each tree sharp, the sweep of the forest even in the glittering fall light. He could hear the deep tolling of the surf at night as the ocean rolled shorewards, and the absolute silence between each breaking wave. He could feel the tug of the land in his blood.

Wilson sat on the doctor's veranda sipping tea from a china cup. When he had told Bardou, the day before, that he would soon be leaving (Monsieur de Romblay had secured him passage on a steamer bound for San Diego), the doctor had insisted on a full medical examination. Wilson had spent most of that afternoon reclining on a bed in the surgery while the doctor peered into his throat, tapped his kneecaps, scrutinised his pupils, measured his pulse, took his temperature and listened to his chest. After almost an hour, Bardou stood back. His hair, his waistcoat and his teeth conspired in an effortless display of brilliance.

‘You are healthy,' he declared. ‘You have my permission to leave town.'

Wilson helped himself to another slice of lemon sponge, then turned to Madame Bardou. She was pouring him a second cup of the almond infusion which, according to the doctor, was not only refreshing, but extremely beneficial to the liver.

‘This cake is delicious,' he said.

Madame Bardou's wide forehead lowered. Her smile had scarcely reached her lips before it was gone.

The doctor echoed Wilson's compliment, then steered the conversation from cake to bread. Since Señor Pompano had mastered the baguette, the doctor's life had become, he said, a model of contentment. In fact, things were looking up generally. Only yesterday, five of his waistcoats had been recovered. In poor condition, admittedly, but what could you expect when Indians had worn them into battle? Wilson asked him what he proposed to do with the waistcoats.

The doctor did not hesitate. ‘I will frame them.'

When Wilson suggested this might be a little gruesome, the doctor disagreed. He argued that it was his duty to preserve the waistcoats.

‘After all,' he said, tilting his face towards Wilson, the tips of his fingers joined beneath his chin, ‘they have become a part of history, have they not?'

Wilson pictured the brocade. Punctured, ribboned, stained with blood. The brutal evidence of musket-shot and sabre-blades. Men had believed
in that glittering cloth. It had betrayed them. Maybe the doctor was right. It was a kind of lesson. History.

He shifted on his chair. ‘That reminds me,' he said. And, reaching into his pocket, he took out a piece of malachite.

Looking at the crystal, he had to smile. He could remember how the gold had looked when he first found it. Large pieces, in a perfectly smooth, pure state. Stream-rounded, almost. He had forgotten about it until the day he was discharged from hospital and he was handed his possessions. When he undid the straps on his knapsack and reached inside, his hand emerged with a piece of malachite. He reached inside again. Some copper ore. He shook the contents of his knapsack out on the hospital veranda and sat back on his heels. At first he thought he had been robbed – but what thief would have bothered to replace gold with rocks, let alone with malachite and copper? Besides, the nurse assured him that his possessions had been kept under lock and key. No, his eyes had played a trick on him that afternoon. The sun, slanting low across the desert, had lit both the crystals and the ore with a deceitful yellow glow. Some would make fine beads if they were carved and drilled. Others would turn the flames of a fire green. But they were not what his father had been looking for.