The Creed of Violence

by Boston Teran

  The first of them wheeled toward the truck. Three riders pitched forward in their saddles. Hard cases reeking with intent. Rawbone edged around the .50 caliber so the barrel sat over the sideboard with its AMERICAN PARTHENON streaked by the red clay of the desert floor.

  Rawbone opened fire. A hail of dust and blood. The nightmare faces of the unsuspecting men, the horses wrenching sideways as they fell. The truck sped away, leaving this spot of earth looking as if it had vomited up death.

  Spumes of dust in a closing arc. A flare missiled at the truck, struck the engine hood. Sparks everywhere burning John Lourdes's face and arms. He swapt at them with a hand and hat as if they were a swarm of torched bees.

  The gunfire intensified. The .50 caliber shell casings spattered and dinged across the steel chassis. The riders closed in one surge. They pressed their mounts and fired at the tires. The truck zigged and straightened, then swerved and sent up rolling walls of gritted red that left the riders blind.

  A punishing mile and the lathered mounts began to wane. The riders kept on but were falling back. Rawbone could just make out the dusty figures of Doctor Stallings and Jack B and he screamed to them over the barrel of that machine gun, "I'll write you ladies when I get settled."

  They pressed on with the stencil of the truck long and sleek upon the earth. They were buying time for the hourglass when far ahead in the melting heat a floating illusion of water damn near shimmering like sunset. John Lourdes yelled to Rawbone to come about and he did ... and was sure of nothing that he saw.

  It appeared to be some vast standing lake that would blink and disappear as the ground dipped, then it would liquid back up out of the desert clay as the truck wheels climbed some hardened dune.

  It was there, then gone, and then it was—

  The truck braked. The men got out. They walked to the edge of that still and seemingly endless body of blood-colored water.

  "The storm that came in from the Gulf," said John Lourdes.

  "Dry lagoon ... this'll be nothing by tomorrow."

  Rawbone ran to the truck and grabbed the binoculars. John Lourdes looked up shore and then down. The damn thing stretched on for how far he could not tell. He stepped into the water to test its depth. Rawbone scanned the desert. That body of dust had broken into two widening wings.

  "We've got just a couple of beers' worth of time before they get here."

  He turned to find the son near forty yards on into that glassy red muck.

  "How deep do you think it is at the worst?"

  The father understood. "We get stuck out there-"

  John Lourdes hurried to shore and hustled past the father and jumped into the truckbed.

  "We're too heavy. And if the tires sink-"

  John Lourdes was surveying what they carried. There were four drums of gasoline and a few crates of munitions. "Look across that lagoon," John Lourdes said. "You can see slips of land. It wasn't more than a few inches where I walked."

  He'd grabbed a crate and spilled out its contents. He now tossed back in a few hand grenades, dynamite, a reel of cable, the detonator. He slid the crate to the father. "Put that up front."

  He jumped from the truckbed and ran to the cab. He was on one side, the father the other.

  "You're always one to throw around a remark," said the son.

  "I pride myself on having a good wit."

  John Lourdes pointed to the lagoon. "Do you think you could part the red sea for us?"

  WITH RIFLE IN hand Rawbone loped ahead of the truck. Water spilled out through the slow-turning wheel wells and John Lourdes kept watch from the cab. Every time the truck sank or the tires spun he sweated out the moments till the reflection of the rig on what looked to be a pan of liquid fire rolled on.

  Rawbone swung about and looked back. The advancing riders were no longer dust but men trampling down upon the phalanx of their shadows stretching out across the earth.

  This was to be the hour. They swung the truck up onto an island of red clay in the heart of the lagoon. They plotted their defense. They protected the tires with crates. They rolled two drums of gasoline out from the truck until they were almost submerged. They knifed holes through the metal casings large enough to wedge in sticks of dynamite. They set the charges and ran the wire along the surface of the water to the detonator behind the truck. They would have the sun at their backs, and if they could survive to see nightfall they might yet steal away with their lives.

  The oncoming battery of guards reached the edge of the lagoon. Doctor Stallings had one group under his command, Jack B the other. Stallings focused his binoculars. The truck sat sideways on a shell of ground. The words AMERICAN PARTHENON were streaked wet with red cake kicked up from the wheels, and imprinted like a coat of arms upon the water before it.

  Doctor Stallings issued orders. The two wings of the assault started forward at a slow walk, the attackers feeling their way until that slow walk became an easy trot and Doctor Stallings lifted his arm and there was a volley of gunfire from their ranks followed by a storm of flares.

  The shells exploded against the truck, above it, in the water before it. The air burned and stank, the sky discolored. John Lourdes huddled with the detonator, Rawbone in the truckbed with his face against the .50 caliber barrel. The riders veered to the flanks of the truck, closing, firing; another assault of flares followed. That small island now under a hellish rocket siege. Bursts of red glare, tracers spiraling off wildly on into the lagoon, sparks falling from the sky like smoking confetti.

  Upon that barren plain futures met in a blinding instant. The shining sea around the truck erupted in a volcanic heaven of men and mounts and red rain. Horsemen consumed in flames like something out of an apocalyptic nightmare reached the island in the last moments of their existence with weapons extended from scorched arms. The second charge blew, and death's mouth opened with a force that consumed them all. The red rain fell. It fell through blazing streamers of fire and it fell through banks of black smoke rising in the windless air.

  From amongst the carnage and the dead one man rose like an apparition without a shadow or a name. He stepped over an arm with its inked flag floating lifelessly, and alone he walked amongst the remnants of men and mounts scattered across the shallows and up onto that island of red clay where the truck still stood. There, beneath the words AMERICAN PARTHENON, lay John Lourdes.

  THIRTY-SIX

  HE FATHER STAGGERED past a fallen mount and came to his knees over the son. There was a bloody eyelet through the vest just below the ribs on the heart side, and also a matching hole in the back. But John Lourdes's eyes were open and he was breathing.

  "Has it gone clear through?" came the halting voice.

  "It has, Mr. Lourdes." Rawbone looked past the dead around him and the desolation beyond ... survival, that's what he was searching for. "We've got to make clock, Mr. Lourdes."

  He hastened to the truck. His being tightened as he kicked over the engine, unsure it would go. It started like a charm. He shifted gears and it went forward sluggardly.

  "Mr. Lourdes ... hear that ... Parthenon here is gonna carry you home."

  THE TRUCK CLIMBED the first altar of hills and shouldered along the skyline with a falling sun far to their west. Before them a world as it was at the time of creation.

  John Lourdes lay on the cab seat facing a hard run of two days with barely enough water for the truck. Rawbone drove through the night with lanterns hung from the cab stanchions to light the way. He drove through dust that scored his eyes, and heat that dried them to the bone.

  He watched the son weaken and yet refuse to drink. If there wasn't enough for one, there wasn't enough for the other. The father cursed him furiously, and John Lourdes answered, "We'll make it, or we won't."

  They labored hugely over swells of white pumice and through unreckonable granite canyons. John Lourdes's words came back to the father: "There is no past, there is no future ... there is only you, and me, and this truck."

  Even now it was a test
of wills. His mouth dry and cracking, his eyes failing, in desperate need of water there on the seat he would not drink, the father said, "Mr. Lourdes, should I come knocking at your door one night in El Paso and offer to buy you dinner and drinks, what would you think?"

  "I would think ... you were paying for it with stolen money."

  He had no strength to laugh, so a grunt had to suffice. "The Modern Cafe in the Mills Building lobby. The sight of our illustrious meeting. We'll drink gentleman's whiskey from Tom Collins glasses and toast surviving. "

  The muscles in Rawbone's body were breaking down; the night was no cooler than the day. He had kept a rock in his mouth to foster spit but even that was too little, too late. He remembered being a boy with nothing in a pawny waste called Scabtown and watching a fighter in the baking sun stalk an adversary. Even now, especially now, those battered and blood-streaked features once witnessed spoke to his fury and resolve.

  By morning the sun was striking him down. His grip on the wheel slipped away and he momentarily passed out. He cursed himself and pressed on again. Sometime that morning they came upon a necklace of tiny pools. The father rushed to it desperately with a water bag only to discover with one taste it was alkali.

  Poison.

  He looked back at the truck. The tarp above the cab lifted uneasily with the breeze. His mind flashed on a funeral canopy-he killed the thought of it quickly. But he knew. They would be dust before the day was done.

  He stared through the searing heat at the black surface of that pool, so utterly still, and came to a moment that was absolute and providential. He slipped the water bag into that bitter fountain and watched the bubbles reach the air and die away. He wondered, would the water taste of oblivion.

  When the bag was full he stoppered it, then he leaned down and put his mouth to the pool and drank. He drank like some bloodthirsty drunk and sat with the tainted liquid spilling down his chin, and there in the watery slicks the common assassin and the father looked at each other for the last time.

  He went to the truck, howling with good news they had water, and he drank from the bag and he tricked the son by handing him the other. The son drank the good water. "Close your eyes, Mr. Lourdes, and think of the Modern Cafe."

  He punished the truck as he punished himself. Over every rise a hope that sinks in his throat with each trembling horizon. Memories threadbare with time are suddenly upon him with an emotional pull too heartrending to bear. He drives them from his mind. There is only surviving.

  A flock of white-tailed doves streaks past overhead. Their presence is a promise of water. And if there is water—

  They are like runes against the sky and he lets their flight guide his course as he begins to feel his body turn against him. He is counting every dusty heartbeat with each windy slope. With each mile he is being murdered, he is a mile closer to being saved. He keeps thinking of that blood-streaked fighter in the dust whose name he bears, and through a dazy heat he sees the stylus of a church spire against a flat sky and the town of San Luis Potosi that enfolds it.

  IN THE SHADOW of the church was a small hospital run by nuns for the poor and dispossessed. Rawbone was already in the early throes of a convulsion when the truck crashed up on the sidewalk. This was the first moment a barely conscious John Lourdes realized something was drastically wrong.

  Rawbone dragged himself to the stone wall and sat with his back against the hot brick, fighting for air. John Lourdes was in the arms of nuns and campesinos but he pulled and pleaded and finally broke loose as if they were somehow his captors and he crumpled up on the street beside the father. He grabbed his shoulders. "What ... ?"

  Rawbone tried to make words out of broken syllables or breathless sound, but could not. In his hand was the pocket notebook and, wracked and dying, he held it out for John Lourdes to see what he had written hours ago: Soh {or3we me

  John Lourdes was beyond the knowing, beyond asking, "How?" He was clinging to a furious history that was his life, desperate suddenly for what was inseparable and lost, trying to contain or hold back death, to overpower it with his heart.

  But the father kept breaking apart. There was no will, no earthly force that can measure up, even the blood-streaked fighter in the dust could not ultimately stand against that most inevitable of adversaries.

  John Lourdes pulled his father to him, grasping the hand with the notebook, and in that ephemeral moment with the blazing sun around them, they were one. The son whispered, "Yes ... yes, I forgive you."

  He could feel his father's face against his own and this choking sound through clenched teeth like, "Yes." Then the son put his lips to his father's ear, "Can you still hear me?"

  The father squeezed his son's hand, answering that he could and his son told him, "Father ... save a seat in the truck for me."

  Somewhere in that poisonous fever the father filled with those words and then, through what seemed this twilight tunnel, he could have sworn he heard the truck engine and the gears shifting and the steel musculature picking up speed and he was riding with the son through a land that was neither desolate nor forsaken ... and then he was no more.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  HERE WERE JUST unanchored moments after that-being lifted from the sidewalk and the body against that ageless brick, the smell of ether and shadows upon an operating room wall. How long he was unconscious he did not know, but he came to in the dark, feeling as if he were on a train. His eyes followed a trail of light back to a kerosene lamp. A nurse sat nearby in the storage car, reading. She was Mexican and middle-aged and there was a solitary peacefulness about her. As she smiled at him, a figure leaned over the cot. It was Wadsworth Burr.

  "Where are we?"

  "You're on a train, John. I'm taking you to the military hospital at Brownsville. It was your notebook. The nuns saw my address and notified me."

  "My father-"

  "John, just listen, right now. This is imperative. When Justice Knox comes to see you, you're to say nothing unless I'm in the room. Do you understand? Nothing."

  John Lourdes was swimmy and confused.

  "A politician in Tampico was allegedly murdered and there is a suggestion you were somehow involved."

  What surprised Wadsworth Burr was that John Lourdes laughed. It was gravelly and ironic and self-possessed, it was a laugh he had heard before.

  THE HOSPITAL WAS on the Fort Brown military post. The window in John Lourdes's room looked out toward the Resaca. At night the soldiers would play cards along the shore in the lamplight. John Lourdes spent the weeks there recuperating fundamentally alone. He had a masculine thirst for silence and used it to revisit his life and the fallen adversary that had become again his father.

  Justice Knox arrived with a stenographer. Burr was present as John Lourdes accurately detailed the events in Mexico, which were corroborated in his notes, even down to turning the munitions over to a group of campesinos. The only fact overlooked-his being the son of that common assassin.

  The front of the hospital had a long covered portico with brick archways where one could avoid the searing Texas sun. Justice Knox excused the stenographer, and he and Wadsworth Burr started down that walkway alone.

  "He'll have to resign."

  "Oh," said Wadsworth Burr, "at the very least."

  Burr took a cigarette case from his coat pocket. "The notes my client sent to you. A copy was also sent to me. I immediately hired detectives in Mexico to begin my own investigation. Cigarette?"

  Knox shook his head no. This news did not sit well. There was a bench nearby where Burr went.

  "A man named Tuerto was hired by Doctor Stallings through Agua Negra to photograph the oil fields, wharfs, river, harbor, rail lines."

  "Which sounds like a useful policy for a security firm."

  Burr crossed his legs and lit the cigarette. "I have a signed affidavit from this Mr. Tuerto that he delivered copies of the photographs to Mr. Robert Creeley, who as you know from John's notes and briefing, or your own investigation, is adjunct to the
U.S. consulate in Mexico. "

  "There is nothing extraordinary about that either. The oil companies, as well as others, have been making their case about field security since the first hints of a revolution."

  "Mr. Creeley was staying at the Southern. The same hotel as my client . . . clients. As were two other gentlemen, Olsen and Hayden. Who, as you probably know through your own investigation, as I do through mine, are information gatherers for the Department of State."

  Justice Knox had been standing under an archway, but now he went and sat at the far end of the same bench as Wadsworth Burr. "I know where you're going. The meeting at the house."

  "You have an official of the U.S. consulate. Field officers for the Department of State. An American businessman procuring illegal munitions. A former Ranger heading a security firm for the oil companies receiving that shipment of munitions."

  "Creeley, Hayden, and Olsen," said Justice Knox, "all acknowledge they were invited to a dinner by the mayor, as was Doctor Stallings. The mayor, for his part, wanted to make the case for American military protection. The oil companies are a significant tax base for him. Hecht denies being at the meeting. Creeley and the others state he was not there. As for the munitions, Hecht says he helped smooth the way for a shipment he was told was the parts of an icehouse to be delivered to the oil fields. He denies even knowing Stallings."

  "I have in my possession a film," said Burr, "one of those newsreels Diaz shot to advertise the grand achievements of his administration, though they were, in fact, a tome of aggrandizement to his royal self. It shows clearly that Hecht and Stallings were acquainted."

  "Stallings is dead."

  "You have my client's statement about what transpired."

  "I have your client's statement he delivered munitions to a group intent on overthrowing the government."

  "You don't think you're going to get to pick and choose which of these statements are fact and which are not? You're going to have to deal with the whole body of evidence."