I sat down beside him. “Impressive,” I said. “Do you think they’ll ever replace stone axes?”
“That jackanapes Roosevelt has taken over upstairs, gassing about the strenuous life on his spread in Dakota. While he was about it I watched him polish off two plates of lobsters he had packed in dry ice and shipped all the way from Maine. Then I came down here to watch two old fools play at pirates. You found all the appointments satisfactory?” He waggled the flask, but I held up a palm and handed him the onionskin sheet I’d folded and put in a pocket. He glanced at it and gave it back.
“Ghastly hand; not that it signifies. Graphology is based on the naïve assumption that when the tail of the g sweeps too low and the crown of the d climbs too high, the one represents melancholy, the other monomania; as if north is up and south is down anywhere but on a map. Poor illumination and haste are discounted.”
“You’ve seen it.”
“It was in the envelope with the letter from the attorney general. I haven’t decided whether that was deliberate.”
“Me, neither. I thought it was you. How’s your Spanish?”
“Rusty, same as my skills with a saber; although I flatter myself I could show these moo-cow millionaires a trick or two. You can ask Childress himself if he was referring to gardening or genocide.”
“I think you know.”
He unstopped the flask and sipped, swallowed.
“Great men are seldom good. Andrew Jackson murdered a man, ostensibly over an affair of honor, turned his back on the Constitution he swore to uphold, and sentenced a peaceful and assimilated tribe of Indians to an eternity in the desert; yet he’s celebrated as our greatest president since Washington.”
“Jackson never called for wholesale slaughter.”
“Didn’t he? Two thousand British dead in New Orleans might argue the point. The war had been over for two weeks.”
“He didn’t know that at the time.”
“Perhaps not. I wonder if it would have made a difference if he had. As a general he invaded Florida against direct orders from Washington.”
“You’re not making much of a case against Childress.”
“That’s your job. Or for him, if the rumors prove false. I asked you if you had everything you needed.”
“I inspected the train. You left out cannon.”
“Are you complaining that you’re overequipped?”
“Undermanned. According to Agent DeBeauclair, he’s got dynamite. I don’t think he’s blasting stumps.”
“If you’re asking how to do your job, I’m fresh out of ideas.”
“I would be, if you meant what you said about investigating the rumors. You’d send Dick Button for that. He worked undercover for Wells Fargo three years. I’m not a detective; I’m a hired gun. I just can’t figure out why you don’t have Childress brought back and do the thing proper with a rope.”
“He’d take the stand in his own defense. You know his reputation. By the time he was through testifying, the jury would nominate him for territorial governor.”
“How do you want him?” I asked. “Nailed to the wall of the president’s mansion in Mexico City or dumped down a mineshaft in Chiapas?”
“It won’t matter either way.” He looked at me for the first time since I sat down. “It’s Mexico, Page. No one cares what happens down there.”
SEVEN
I packed my biggest valise for a long stay, with plenty of changes and books for every mood, beginning with my Bible, looked around my room as if I’d never see it again—not for the first time—and rode the bay down to the railyard, where I gave a pair of roustabouts a quarter apiece to back it into a stall in the stock car and hobble it. I put my saddle and bridle, my two most valuable possessions, in the private coach with the valise. That made it seem a little more like me.
Back outside I found Joseph the fireman hurling chunks of wood from a wheelbarrow into the tender. I asked him if the engineer was back from town. He jerked his chin toward the locomotive.
A man built nearly as close to the ground, but just as wide, leapt down from inside, wiping his broad broken-nailed hands on a rag and transferring as much grease to his palms as it removed from them. I shook his hand, making sure to give as good as I got; men who spent most of their time gripping steel levers seldom throttled back for flesh and bone.
“Hector Cansado.” He had one of those deep, burring voices that came from shouting over a chugging engine. His accent was unconventional, neither Spanish nor Indian; it seemed to have been dropped by accident, borne by some strange bird from terra incognita. He wore the ticking-striped cap, faded red kerchief, and brass-studded overalls of his profession, the heavy denim pitted all over with burns from flying sparks. His broad face, similarly scarred, had a bloated quality, the skin stretched to its limit, like an India rubber balloon, and yellow-green in complexion. Mahogany-colored eyes tilted away from a flat nose, creating an impression of desperate fatigue. Even his name translated as “tired.”
He was dying; his coloring suggested advanced jaundice. That cold finger touched my spine again. I was in the hands of a fireman whose ancestors had known nothing but tragedy at the hands of the white race and an engineer who had nothing to lose by piloting a train through darkest Mexico.
His breath stank of sour mash. I asked him if he’d succeeded in finding anything to drink besides mescal and something to eat. The tight face registered annoyance. The weary eyes slid toward the Indian.
“That savage has been carrying tales. What a man does on his own time is his business.”
“I guess. I haven’t had my own time in ten years. There’s good Scotch in the parlor car and not a grain of cornmeal in sight.”
“Is this an invitation?”
“We’ve got a thousand miles to cover. I don’t want to lose my company manners out of habit.”
He leaned forward and dropped his voice to a murmur. “Don’t tell Joseph. The only time you can trust him is when he is drunk, and then you can trust him to cut your throat.”
I glanced at the man throwing wood. “Why do you keep him on?”
“I would rather have him aboard than wonder about him outside in the dark.”
“You know where we’re headed?”
“Cabo Infierno, sí.”
“Does Joseph?”
“Not from me, but he has ears to hear and eyes to see, and El Espanto is not your ordinary train. I would not put it past him to throw in with that devil.”
Under some circumstances I might have considered that a good beginning. Tragedies always start out bright, comedies grim. But life isn’t the theater.
* * *
Cansado left Joseph to his labor on the pretext of showing me features of the train I’d already seen and joined me in the coach. I tugged the cork out of one of Blackthorne’s bottles and poured two inches into each of a pair of cut-crystal glasses and we settled ourselves into the pigskin chairs. He looked around, at the paneling and the rich rugs, shook his head.
“In the village where I was born, the cost of this coach would keep us in meat for a year; beef, I mean. I have eaten so many chickens it is a wonder I do not lay eggs. I have heard they serve tortillas as far north as Santa Fe. I cannot believe this.”
“It’s worse than that. You can order green chiles in Portland, Oregon.”
“Myself, I would travel twice that far to escape them. Someday I shall don a serape and hike toward Canada, and when I meet the first person who asks me what it is I am wearing, there is the place I will settle.”
“Strange talk for a Mexican.”
Tired eyes glared at me over the top of his glass. “I am Basque. My people owe loyalty to no one but themselves.”
“It sounds lonely.”
He drank, wobbled it around his mouth, and swallowed. The played-out gaze remained steady. “I think you know this feeling.”
“I travel with friends.” I set down my drink, got up, unstrapped the valise, and took out the Bible. “Mark, Matthew, Luk
e, Ezekiel. I call them by their first names. They go where I go.”
“And should the book be lost or stolen?”
I tapped my chest with a corner. He shrugged.
“Myself, I have no friends, dead, canonized, or other. It is why I took this job. No other would accept it, once they heard where this train was bound.”
“Are all your colleagues so superstitious?”
“Demons are easy. There are spells, talismans. It is not so with men. I see you know nothing of the Mother Range.”
“I’ve climbed the Bitterroots and crossed the Divide. One set of mountains is much like all the rest.”
He drew a jagged line through the condensation on his glass with a forefinger. “You have heard the story of how Cabo Infierno got its name?”
“I have. The Spanish demanded gold; they forgot to say how they wanted it delivered. I don’t fear places named for hell or the devil or death. It’s men who named them.”
“You talk as one who never laid eyes on the devil.”
I resumed my seat, the Bible in my lap, and picked up my glass. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you have.”
“Not I. But then I have not had the privilege of meeting Oscar Childress. Have you angered your superiors, that you should be sent to the Sierras?”
“I volunteered.”
“You seek your death willingly?”
“No one has ever done that. Even men who jump off bridges must have second thoughts just before the end. Everything I hear about Childress convinces me I’d be missing something if I passed up the chance to meet him face-to-face.”
“I am certain that is what Montezuma said about Cortes.”
He doubled over suddenly, hugging himself; then just as quickly recovered, sat back, and resumed drinking. I realized then that he’d been in constant pain, and that the spasm had only been the worst in an unbroken line.
I felt a sudden rush of pity; it was probably the whisky. “What is your affliction, my friend?”
“My liver. Too much tequila and mescal, not enough grapefruit and apples. The doctor in Durango allowed me a year, the shaman in Quezalcoatl three months. I should have quit after the first.” He raised his glass. “I drink to my liver, for bringing me this far. I have never been north of La Junta.” He emptied it and stood. “Thank you for the excellent spirits. We must be on our way. I am told an express is coming through.”
“It’s not due until four o’clock. There’s time for another. Unless—” I made a gesture in the direction of his misery; or where I thought it might be. I knew next to nothing of the bodies I’d sent to the grave.
“The damage is done; I speak not of that nor of the hour. I must ask you to take care that one of us remain sober at all times.”
“We’re a long way from the Sierras.”
“We shall speak again of that subject, when I explain to you the rules. Meanwhile I cannot predict what Joseph would do if he found both of us borracho. I trust him no more than my liver.” He left me to my drink and my Holy Writ.
EIGHT
Working up a head of steam, the boiler sent a pulse the length of the train, like a horse bunching its muscles for a long gallop. The delay between the pull of the tender and the reaction by the coach was like a gasp for breath. In the weeks ahead I would come to regard that arrangement of bolts, plates, pistons, and couplers as a living thing, and when I slept—which is how I recommend traveling through most of Utah and Arizona—to fancy that I was an extension of it, my veins and arteries connected with it the way Barnum’s Siamese twins were each physically dependent on the other; the churning of the drive-rods melded with the beating of my heart, the rhythmic wheezing of steam and smoke with the function of my lungs. When Hector Cansado blew the whistle at crossings, I felt its hoarse shrill bellow in my testicles. We were one and the same, the Ghost and I.
From Great Falls to Tucson, we stopped at the same place to take on water and wood: the long low frame station, the loafers holding up its porch roof with their shoulder blades, the slouch-hatted driver handling the reins of the team hitched to a dray carrying its cargo of barrels down a cross street strung together with all the others. I manufactured names for all of them, man and beast, the closest friends I’d had in a long while. I ate chicken and dumplings twenty times in the Bluebell Café, served by a substantially built woman named Martha, drank coffee that had been boiling since dawn. One tree had provided all the apple pies, the crusts burnt in a black crescent. In each place, the talk was of a farmer kicked by a mule, a little girl drowned in a well, a midwife hacked to pieces and distributed alongside a mile of county road. The victims were interchangeable, but the mayhem followed the theme as before. A man named Gus would hang a hundred times.
I don’t know when the engineer slept, or if he did at all; maybe, aware of how little time he had left, he’d decided not to waste any of it insensible, dozing in snatches at the throttle, close enough to the surface to react to sharp bends, steep plunges, and obstacles on the tracks. Apart from that—if even that—he took his rest with me in the private car while Joseph tended the boiler at rest, drinking a hole in Judge Blackthorne’s private stock, sometimes joining me in a hand of poker, playing with matchsticks and swapping biographies.
He was the eldest of eleven, not counting one miscarriage, two stillbirths, and a sister who died of diphtheria at the age of two weeks. His mother took in washing, and his father had spent a total of six hours with his children, leaving their one-room hut before sunup and chipping bits of color out of granite until the coal-oil ran out around midnight.
“We had a good working system,” he said. “Mama would take a turtle from a trap in the river and I would stand on its shell while Felipe applied pliers to its jaw, pulling out its head, Alessandro chopped it off, and Delores snatched it by its tail and threw it into a boiling kettle. You know turtle soup?”
I nodded. “In San Francisco. They called it terrapin in the Bella Union.”
“Snapper, we. I learned to avoid the severed head at an early age, when a hen pecked at it out of curiosity and it locked onto the bird’s throat. They will hold on, you know, until sundown, or until the brain gets the message that it is no longer connected to the body. Pass the bottle, senor, por favor.
“Ah! To have discovered such nectar years ago would have been worth my liver. It was an important moment in my passage when I was declared old enough, first to use the pliers, then to swing the axe. What I would not give to eat turtle soup once again. The river was fished out long ago.”
“And what of Felipe, Delores, and the rest?” I asked.
He set a matchstick to use, igniting a cigarette he rolled himself in brown paper. The smoke from the scorched grain made me lightheaded, an argument in its favor; liquor benefited no one but the drinker.
“Quien sabe? The soldiers came for Alessandro to help them fight for Maximilian; we never heard from him again. Then more soldiers came for Felipe to help them fight for Juarez. We heard he was shot for desertion. Delores became pregnant by the son of a don and was sold to a brothel. I do not know what became of the child. The rurales arrested me when I trespassed upon the don’s ranch. They took away my rifle, which was fifty years old and did not work anyway, and I was sentenced to labor in the same mine that claimed my father’s life when it fell in, along with those of a dozen others.
“I served with the crew that excavated it. I do not know which of the skeletons we uncovered belonged to my father. I would be working there still if a man representing railway interests in Los Estados Unidos hadn’t come looking for a fireman to replace the one he’d lost when a boiler exploded near Chihuahua; he was blasting tunnels for a line to be owned jointly by the Oklahoma, Texas, and Missouri Railroad and the government in Mexico City. I had just started as an engineer when El Presidente Diaz nationalized the railway in the interest of the Republic. Lo mismo, senor, por favor.”
I refilled his glass. He’d drunk half a bottle to two drinks on my part without affecting either his spe
ech or his reflexes.
He sipped, sighed. “When we were grading track not far from my old village I chanced to look in upon the home where I grew up. Strangers were living there, and knew nothing of the former occupants. It is a trial, Senor Deputy, to visit a bordello and not know if one is lying with one’s own niece.”
I had nothing to offer in comparison with his experiences. I’d been shot, almost burned to death, lured into traps by evil women, and spent a season as a slave with Cheyenne renegades, but I had nothing to match his loss.
That is, if he was telling the truth. If I had a cartwheel dollar for every Mexican whose sister had been raped by a Spanish don, I could have spent my life traversing the continent in a private railway car.
Joseph was a puzzle of another sort. I doubt we exchanged more than fifty words total, most of them monosyllabic and unrevealing, but even before we left Montana Territory I was convinced he was some kind of Judas goat, leading us toward a slaughterhouse. He spent all his time in the locomotive when he wasn’t foraging for fuel—not overlooking the merest scrap of driftwood on the shore of the Great Salt Lake or mesquite twig in the Painted Desert—crunched down cracked corn by the handful, chasing it with water from a goatskin bag, and crossed himself before he ate, clutching the carved-stone crucifix suspended from the rosary around his neck. For all his show of Christian conversion, I pictured him more easily offering morsels to a beast-headed god squatting in some undiscovered ruin, praying for our destruction.
The Ghost passed through city and plain, leaving no more evidence of its passage than would its namesake. Most unscheduled journeys by rail fostered a host of gossip, and questions at every stop. The endless chain of Marthas set before me bowl after bowl of chicken and dumplings—scrawny prairie hen, and blobs of mealy flour swimming in grease—with only the usual tinned cheer and no apparent curiosity as to where I was bound and why. There was nothing furtive about it, only a complacency I’d never witnessed before. No one asked me about the news from up north, yet I sensed no hostility, no reticence. I was a piece of furniture, and nothing so interesting as a piano or a new kind of plow.
Cape Hell Page 4
