Stringer and the Border War

by Lou Cameron

  She said she didn’t like that much, but agreed she’d likely get in more trouble where the spiteful greasers, as she called them, could get at her blond hair.

  Stringer strapped on his gun, straightened his hat, and went out to face the music. Someone was strumming “La Cucaracha” again. He saw Hernan near the same barbecue fire as Villa. He decided to join the crowd around another one. He realized he’d made a tactical error when Hernan strolled over to join him, away from Villa’s personal supervision. From the looks on the others faces, Stringer knew Hernan had already spread the word. He nodded at Hernan, looking as poker-faced as he could manage. Hernan smiled pleasantly and asked, “Where is the lovely señorita? Doesn’t she eat anything but cock?”

  Stringer smiled back just as sweetly to reply, “I was just about to take some food to her. This meat smelled fine until just now. But all of a sudden I smell shit. How do you manage to fart with your mouth like that, Hernan?”

  The adelita carving the meat giggled. Some of the others dared to smile, not looking at either of them. Hernan could see who’d scored that point. So he tried, “Are you sure you don’t have her chained to the bed, my big Don Juan? I find it difficult to believe even a puta would give herself willingly to such an excuse for a man. Maybe I should go over and show her how a real man does it, no?”

  Stringer purred back at him, “You sound hard up for a woman. I can see why, seeing neither your sister or you mother seem to be with us this evening.”

  Hernan blanched and almost stopped smiling as he asked in a tone of deadly calm, “Was that my mother I just heard you mention? I reproach you for your manners, Gringo. Did I say anything about your mother, even though everyone knows she is a whore?”

  Stringer stepped clear of the fire as everyone but Hernan moved around to the far side with amazing speed and grace. Stringer knew it was his turn. So he said, softly, “I’m willing to call us even if you are. If you’re not, feel free to fill your fist.”

  He was hoping to throw Hernan’s timing off by bringing matters to a head earlier in the game than usual. Most guys playing ‘Tu Madre” liked to work up a full head of steam before they went for broke. But Hernan seemed made of sterner stuff, or he’d already worked up a head of steam. At any rate, he went for his gun.

  As the muzzle blast of Stringer’s .38 echoed away Hernan just lay there with that same soft smile on his lips and a wet crimson rose pinned to his shirt, just above his crossed cartridge belts. His dead hand still gripped the butt of his .45, but the gun was still in its holster. Stringer just stood there in the sudden silence, his smoking six-gun still in his fist, as he waited to see what happened next.

  What happened next was Villa striding over, his own gun out, to politely demand some explanation. The adelita who’d been carving started carving again as she announced, “Was a fair fight, Pancho. Hernan slapped leather first.”

  Another witness added, “Not fast enough. This Yanqui moves like spit on a hot stove. I have seen some quick draws in my time, but this Yanqui is quicker than quick!”

  “Was a fair fight.” The girl with the carving knife repeated, adding, “Hernan told me, earlier, to watch him teach the big-shot gringo a good lesson. To tell the truth, I wanted to warn the Yanqui, but was not my place to interfere in the business between men.”

  Villa put his own gun away, muttering, “I told Hernan not to act so dumb. Now I need a new segundo.”

  Then he smiled at the American who’d just shot his old one and said, “Bueno. You were smarter than he was before he proved how dumb he was. After we finish eating we got things for to work out, Stringer. What do you know about high explosives?”

  Stringer began to reload as he muttered, “Enough not to mess with them if I don’t have to.” But Villa insisted, “You have to. We found lots of dynamite in the mine up the hill. Look me up at sunset and we shall see what we can do about laying some land mines, eh?”

  Stringer knew this was no time to argue. So he just shrugged and as soon as Villa wandered off, he filled a heaping tin plate of roast whatever and carried it back to Bobbie.

  He told her it was beef. He wanted to be sure he had her strength up when it come time to make their move. Her dress was darker than his blue denim outfit. As the light outside got tricky, he had her lead him to the storeroom on the far side of the building. Her bicycle was still there. But its red rubber tires were flat. She started rummaging around for her air pump, making far too much noise as she turned over boxes. “Never mind,” Stringer said, “We figure to run over a lot of cactus anyway. Duck back in your room for now. I’ll see if I can wheel this off a ways without attracting attention, for now.”

  She didn’t know what he was talking about, but did as she was told. Stringer was wheeling her bike alone, as far from her as the river bank, when one of Villas’ men fell in step with him to say, “I’ve been looking all over for you. Pancho wants you. What are you doing with that toy?”

  Stringer said, “Toying with it. I just found it in a storeroom and I thought I’d see if I could ride it up the river bed a ways.”

  The guerrilla shrugged and said, “Maybe later, then. After you see what the general wants, eh?”

  So Stringer tossed the bike out of sight and hopefully out of mind in a clump of chamis and legged it back to the main building he’d just come from, with the alert but unsuspecting Mex rambling on about blowing up federales.

  They found Villa and some of the others seated in the veranda steps with a couple of boxes of dynamite and similar views on Los Federales. Villa pouted as he said, “Haven’t you had enough of that gringa, yet? We got to string some fuses, Amigo. They ought to dismount out on the edge of the site and sneak in on foot. So, if we place charges in a big circle, and wire them to one magneto plunger. ..”

  “You’ll make a lot of noise and waste a lot of dynamite.” Stringer cut in, explaining, “You want to get at least some of the leaders and rattle the rest with your first blast. Once it gets noisy, troops hit the dirt and tend to stay there ‘til someone tells them different. That’s when your men have the best chance of mopping them up. If I were you, I’d put that dynamite, all of it, under this building.”

  “Blow up my own headquarters?” Villa asked in an injured tone.

  Stringer said, “You won’t need a headquarters here if you get your hands on all those ponies and extra guns. But you just proved my point. This is the most important-looking strong point around here. Los Federales will be expecting to find the company personnel or, failing that, you, holed up here. They’ll call out a few times and then, getting no answer, they’ll storm it.

  When they find nobody home they’ll make it their headquarters at least long enough to repair that telegraph set and “Ay, carramba!” Villa cut in, “When I become El Presidente, you get to be Secretary of War! I love it! We shall station our women way up slope and dig the men in closer. I think I better post an arson squad to set fire to the water tower when this building goes on its journey to the sky and then

  “You’re the boss.” Stringer cut in with a casual yawn. Then he said, “I have to get my gringa and our bedding to a safer place. I’ll see you around the battle, sometime, maybe.”

  Then he mounted the steps and strolled the veranda back to Bobbie’s room, forgotten for the moment, as Villa started to issue his new orders. He joined the girl in her darkening room and told her, “I think we’re set. Get that canteen from your wardrobe and fill it with tap water. Tap as much water into yourself as you can while you’re at it. I’ll roll the bedding.”

  He wrapped just the top padded quilt and one wool blanket around the rifle, binding everything together with shoe laces Bobbie wouldn’t be needing. Then he joined her in the bath and forced himself to swallow five glasses of water. She didn’t ask why when he shoved the half-used roll of toilet paper in a jacket pocket. They scooped up other possibles to stuff in his pockets and he told her to put on her sun bonnet. Then he said, “Bueno. Now we’re going to walk, not run, and let me do the
talking.”

  But nobody challenged them as he strolled away into the gathering dusk with her and his modest load. They got to where he’d cached her bike. He looked around, saw it was too dark now to notice anyone else and, hoping that worked both ways, lashed the bundle to the bike frame and wheeled it down into the river bed. The mud had barely dried hard enough to walk and wheel across. He manhandled it up the far bank and told her to follow Indian file as he bulled it east through the chaparral a quarter mile. Then he swung toward the railroad line and when they got to the service road, he stomped his heels a few times and then said, “Well, asphalt paving would be better. But what the hell. Hoist your skirts and perch your sweet rump on the handlebars.”

  She didn’t want to expose her stockings. But she didn’t want her skirts tangled in the spokes any more than Stringer did. So once he had her in position, he gave a good shove and forked himself aboard behind her.

  Thanks to the soft tires, he was able to more or less follow one dust-filled wagon rut without shaking them up too much. Ahead of him on the handlebars, Bobbie asked, “What’s that clinking below us? Might something be wrong with my chain?” To which he replied with a wry chuckle, “Those are my spurs you hear. I don’t usually wear them riding a bike.”

  She giggled and said she felt awfully silly, riding like this. He asked, “How do you think I feel? This is a girl’s bike.”

  They both laughed like hell and that got them down the road a piece before his legs began to notice what a chore he’d set them. Bobbie tried to be a sport about her behind, seeing he was working hardest to save it,, but after about an hour she insisted that she had to rest it just a minute. So he stopped, let her off, but they kept walking as he wheeled the bike between them. He said, “Every little step helps when you’re running for your life. I doubt we’re ten miles out, yet and we want to be a heap further when we’re missed.

  She asked how far they had to go. He said, “Hell, I don’t even know where we’re going. The map puts us a good eighty miles from the nearest jerkwater town on the main line to Juarez. It’s just after nine P.M. now. If we can average ten miles an hour we ought to make it just after dawn.”

  She protested, “Oh, Stuart, I just can’t ride those handlebars that far! I’m sure I’m already bruised black and blue on my you-know-what.”

  He said, “If you’re not, I can promise you will be. Get back on. Bruises don’t hurt half as much as bullet holes and we’ve got us some desert to cross.”

  The next hour’s ride felt as bad as he’d expected. Stringer was cramping leg muscles he’d never suspected he owned. In hopes of distracting himself, and Bobbie as well, he mused aloud, “This reminds of my first cattle drive, when I was six or eight. I’d been riding my own pony on the home spread since I was old enough to walk, of course. But that had been kid stuff. My Uncle Don warned me his market drive to Sacramento called for more serious riding. But you know how kids are. The first day on the trail was fun. Next morning I was too stiff and saddlesore to mount up. But I did. I had to. I knew the other hands would think I was a baby if I didn’t act like a man.”

  She protested, “But you were a baby, Stuart. Surely your own uncle should have understood you were still a little boy.”

  He ignored a shooting pain along the top of one thigh as he replied, “He’d warned me not to tag along unless I was up to a man’s job. My Uncle Don was and still is one of the most decent gents I’ve ever know. But he takes herding cows serious and leaves baby notions to the women folk. I knew he and the other hands riding with us had ridden further, through rain and snow and Indians. The hell of it was, I knew they would understand if a little kid like me couldn’t keep up with them. That was why I just had to keep up with them. I confess I cried some, riding drag where the dust hid my face. By the end of that second day, I could barely stand up and I was sure I’d be crippled for life. But when the camp cook handed me a plate of beans and asked me how I was holding up, I managed to allow the cowboy life had going to school beat by miles.”

  “I can’t say as much for riding double across Chihuahua in the dark,” Bobbie murmured, “How did you ever manage to survive the next day’s drive, Stuart?”

  He grunted, “I managed. Hurting is sort of like hunger. After a spell you get sort of used to it. It’s the first few days that convinces you you’ll surely die. Since I was still alive, I saw there was little sense brooding about it and, later that day, when a snake-spooked yearling busted loose to throw its fool self into a canyon, it was me who headed it off just in time. I can still remember how I felt when my uncle caught up, stared at me sort of curious, and told me I’d done right.”

  He pumped the pedals harder as he added, “I felt almost, but not quite, as proud the first time I saw my own byline in print above a news feature I’d had published.

  “You must be very fond of your Uncle Don.”

  “I have to be. He’s kin. But that wasn’t what made me feel so good when he praised me. He praised me as one grown man praises another. I knew I’d never be a baby no more. And by the time the drive was over, I’d taught my kid’s body to do as I damn well told it to. Our bodies act sissy on us, if we let them. They try to protect themselves from our will power by starting to hurt long before we’ve done ‘em any real damage.”

  They hit a bump and she gasped, “Oh, Lord, I wish you were the one in charge of my poor derriere!”

  He chuckled, slyly, and said, “So do I.” and that seemed to shut her up as she rode on with her naked thighs spread open to the desert breezes. She knew better than to mention what the handle bar bolt was doing to her.

  They fell into a routine of walking a few hundred paces and riding a lot farther, covering, they hoped, the ten miles an hour they needed. Stretching their legs helped some. They were getting more used to the pain when, a little before midnight, they saw a glimmer of light on the horizon ahead. She asked if that could be a house.

  “More like that troop train I told you about. We’d best take a little stroll into the chaparral.”

  So they did. They were flattened out with her bike in the sand with a nice clump of cactus between them and the tracks as the troop train thundered by. He knew they were safe, but as the earth throbbed under them Bobbie seemed out to climb inside his duds with him, sobbing in terror. He held her tight and kissed her trembling lips. It seemed the natural thing to do, and she didn’t seem to mind, judging by the way she kissed back as the window lights of the troop train swept across the cactus pads above them. As the danger passed on by, it was Bobbie who first noticed where his free hand had wandered, without conscious direction on his part. She stiffened and grabbed his wrist, then she relaxed in his arms with a sigh of surrender and murmured, “You will be gentle, won’t you? It’s been quite a while and…”

  “Hold the thought.” He cut in, patting the object of his affection a reluctant adios as he explained, “We’re going to need all our strength before morning and I’m bushed as hell as it is.”

  She wouldn’t talk to him after that as they rode on for the next hour or so. He didn’t really mind. His distracted genitals helped him ignore the cramps in his legs and the thought that he’d blown that chance forever made him sore enough to peddle harder.

  But Bobbie broke her silence when they both heard a distant roll of thunder and she gasped, “Oh, no! That’s all we need, a desert cloudburst!”

  “That was dynamite,” he grunted, and stopped to cock his ear to the darkness. He could barely make out the soft rustle of the now very distant small arms fire. He told her, “We’d best walk on a piece while we have the time. I’d say both sides are sort of busy back there, now.”

  He filled her in on Villa’s planned ambush as he wheeled the bike between them for about a quarter-mile. She asked who he thought might be winning back there. “¿Quien sabe? Stringer shrugged, “Maybe the army, maybe Villa, maybe nobody. I don’t expect them to settle the matter one way or the other for years. Diaz is too tough to be overthrown. But Diaz can’t live f
orever and God knows what’ll happen once he’s gone.”

  She asked if he thought Villa would ever wind up running Mexico. He shook his head and said, “He’s too innocent to hold the top job. Tougher, or let’s say, smarter gents may use him to grab the job for themselves. Politics are played sort of like king of the mountain down here. Once they get rid of Diaz, they’ll start knocking each other off, and I, for one, don’t aim to be here when they hold the elections with bullets. So let’s see if we can get to the main line while the trains are still running sort of regular. The one thing you’ve always had to give Diaz is that he’s made the trains run by the posted timetables.”

  But along about four in the morning, while Bobbie and Stringer were still out in the middle of nowhere, they heard the troop train coming back. This time the headlight of the locomotive was a lot brighter when Stringer heard the rumble and glanced back over his shoulder. “Hang on!” he said, and rode them off the road into the brush a ways before they spilled in the sand and he dragged Bobbie and the bike behind some tumbleweed piled against the twisty trunk of a mesquite tree, growling, “Keep your head down. This is way too close but it’ll have to do, I hope.”

  The train was rolling slower, now, as if the hand on the throttle was uncertain, or as if the troops on board were looking closer at the passing scenery. “Oh, Stuart, I’m so frightened,” she moaned.

  He told her that made two of them as he drew his .38 with one hand and held her flat in the sand with the other. He didn’t know what good either gesture would really do if they were spotted, but he had to do something. “The army must have won.” She whispered, “Maybe, if we tell them we’re Americans instead of bandits…”

  “Don’t bet on it,” he told her, adding, “The official policy of the Diaz Dictatorship is to make nice-nice with El Gringo. But good help is hard to find, and all bets are off when the army or rurales get the chance to pick up some quick cash or, hell, even a pair of boots.”

  He didn’t say what the hired guns of the so-called friendly government would do to a good-looking woman of any race if they got the chance. She was already scared enough.