The Creed of Violence

7W'ELVTY-FIVE

HEY EXISTED NOW in a state of war and so guards were stationed on the car roofs. Through a country that changed from lush canyons and fertile cropland to hills of boned and caking pumice, there was only that island of a train infinitesimal in a landscape marked by the eternal. Came nightfall they entered the Sierras, its remote and silent peaks rising toward a rind of moon. The tide of John Lourdes's bleeding had been stemmed and his reservoirs of strength were beginning to return.

He had asked the girl Teresa how she came to be on the train. She wrote that after her return from Immigration, her father grew more troubled and wary over her being picked up off the street. Even being brought home by the nuns as planned did nothing to ease his suspicions, so he arranged for her to be sent to the oil fields to work with these other women. He had brought her to the depot, then left with a handful of other men for Texas. She had anticipated his return, but she believed now something had befallen him.

John Lourdes confronted having to tell her the truth. He had near forced this moment from his first question. He asked her to join him on the back landing of the railroad car, and so she did. The church spire mountains all about them were run with spare pines. They could have been any young man and any young woman as they sat there looking out upon the blue majesty of evening. He lit a cigarette and wished it were so, but it was not.

To lie through silence was his first inclination. The why of it being he wanted the girl to think well of him, to be accessible to him, and keeping silent fed into his natural tendency toward dispassion.

But fever, exhaustion and pain diminished his defenses. As he lay in that car, watched over by those women, an action or turn of phrase, the way one laughed or prayed, all became fragments of the person that had once been his mother. And the closer he got to feelings of his mother, the more her presence filled him, the more intensely aware he became of the threatening musculature that was the father living inside him.

The man on the flatcar with the derby and that Savage .32 was the one who'd asked all those years ago in that open-air market in Juarez, "Do you want to know what people are really like, so you can never be tricked or fooled? Be indifferent to every man. Then you'll know."

Wasn't dispassion a possible disguise for indifference, the kind of indifference the father taught him? Lying in that train car he asked himself over and over: As there were fragments of his mother in those women, were there not fragments of the father in himself? Had he been poisoned as effectively as those customs guards at the ferry in ways he didn't realize?

This was what drove him to tell the girl the truth and so he wrote: Your fa4er was ki(/ed i,i 4e Hueco /Yloun4ai,is where I,e 4r'ied 4o murder 4wo men.

She read this and her eyes blinked. She absorbed the knowledge in painful increments. To see sadness in such composed quiet. She looked down at her folded hands. Her hair fell long across her face. Her beauty was her simple humanness. She gazed out into the night a long time. She was melancholy somewhere in the high mountains that were home to the wolves and the heavens.

She then looked at him with apprehension and foreboding. John Lourdes felt that look would go on forever, but, even so, he set pencil to paper. As he began to write what he had done, her hand came down and stopped him. Her action and her look spoke for themselves, for now she stood and went back into the car and he was left to the night.

"You KNOW WHAT a barrel of oil sells for today? Any idea? About fifty cents. Any idea what a war will do to that price?"

Jack B was holding court by the truck with a handful of branded felons and roustabouts while Rawbone sat behind the wheel and out of the sun. With his legs stretched up on the dash and arms folded, he let Mr. Stars and Stripes pontificate to see what information might come of it that he could pass on to Mr. Lourdes.

"Doctor Stallings says we could see prices reach a dollar ... a dollar fifty a barrel by 1911. Oil stocks, that's what he's got his money in. Standard ... American Eagle ... Waters-Price. That's where his money is going and that's where," he slapped at the wallet hidden away in his back pocket.

"Mexico. You want to see what the future's going to look like, look no further than right here. You want to see a model for how the world will operate, look no further than right here. That's what Doctor Stallings tells me. And-"

"Right here and right now?" said Rawbone. He leaned up out of the seat and hooded his eyes with a hand and looked out over a passing landscape of brutal and barren contours that seemed to have no end. "So this is the future. Well, if you don't mind, it looks a lot like hell if you ask me."

This brought out a few laughs and Jack B answered with, "You'll not only die ignorant, you'll die broke."

Rawbone sat back down in the cab and began to croon in his cracked and sandy voice, "Take me out to the ball game, take me out to the park ..." He even got a few of the scurrilous guards to join in, which gave Jack B a good grinding. "Let me root, root, root for the home team, if they don't win it's a shame . . .

He took the ridicule with a strained stare and then, looking beyond Rawbone, said, "Well."

It seemed John Lourdes had quietly made his way up the passenger side of the truck and now stood by the cab.

"How was your vacation?" asked Jack B.

The son glanced at the father. "Telling."

"I don't know if you heard. But Jack B here was just educating us on the future. Of course, I know your view of the future, Mr. Lourdes. There isn't one. There's just you, me and . . . American Parthenon, here. "

"I heard Jack," said John Lourdes. He checked through his satchel on the cab floor and found an open and beat-up pack of cigarettes. He lit one and blew smoke out his nose in thin straight lines. "I think he makes a lot of sense."

Jack B turned his attention to Rawbone. "At least he won't die ignorant and broke."

"How do his employers measure it?" said John Lourdes.

"Employers?"

"Someone put this parade together," said Rawbone.

"Doctor Stallings. He's been the one commissioned."

"But someone had to checkbook all this up," said John Lourdes.

"I'm told he's got investors."

"Ah," said the son, looking toward the father, "investors."

"What was his sales pitch?" asked the father. He then winked with great pleasure at that group around the truck. "A dark alley and a loaded gun?"

"You'll die ignorant and broke," Jack B prophesied again as he walked off.

"But not soon."

It wasn't long after that gathering broke off into their own private schemes, leaving father and son alone.

"Well, Mr. Lourdes, what did you hear?"

"Someone else's version of the practical application of strategy."

"Aye. You know what I heard. Cuba ... Manila ... I've lived it. It's called military intervention. It's those bastards back at the Customs House. That's why all the Yankee Doodles at Fort Bliss. This is a shell game, Mr. Lourdes."

Silently the son assessed and reflected and then agreed. He continued to think and once or twice the father caught him looking back at the passenger car.

"Did you tell her?"

When he'd left, she was sitting on the floor of the passenger car in a profound sadness and could not, or would not, look at him. He went to Sister Alicia to thank her. He called her abuelita, which meant "grandmother," and told her she would never find him wanting if a time came and she were in need.

"I told her," said John Lourdes.

"Mr. Lourdes, in matters such as these, it is best to remain ... indifferent."

THE FOLLOWING DAY they came upon the first train stopped in the white noon of sand hills. Three campesinos were being held at gunpoint by the guards. Two were young men, the third still a boy. Doctor Stallings and his command officers went from the train and were informed these three had been caught trying to sabotage the tracks. The captured, of course, swore to their innocence.

Along the line of the second train the guards came out from the cars or took up on the landings and roofs to watch. Even the women stood in the sun with their heads covered and eyes hooded, to see. Only Rawbone showed no interest and remained in the truck cab with his legs up on the dash.

After much condemnation and many denials Doctor Stallings issued a series of quick orders. The three were marched to a bare and blackened tree surrounded by ocotillo that stood on a slope near fifty yards from the track. A rope was brought and Jack B flung it over what looked to be the sturdiest, though partly broken-off, branch. Doctor Stallings called to Tuerto.

"It's pictures you want."

He nodded, of course.

"It's pictures you'll have."

John Lourdes watched from the forward edge of the flatcar and from time to time he glanced back at the women. The girl Teresa alone had not come forward.

Doctor Stallings proceeded back up the slope followed by the photographer. John Lourdes noted how he went about the business at hand with mechanical clarity. He walked with his hands behind his back in a calm and studious manner, never raising his voice. It surprised John Lourdes when he thought how similar in methodology the Doctor was to justice Knox.

The two older campesinos were ordered to their knees and when they refused Doctor Stallings nodded. Jack B quickly stepped behind both men and a single halo of powder exploded around their heads as a bullet was put into each of their brains. They lay side by side as if they intended to crawl away and the hot sand crackled where their blood threaded and then pooled.

The women were aghast and banded together, while some turned away in disgust. But this was not the last, nor the worst.

The boy had rushed to his compadres but was grabbed by the guards. He was then ordered taken to the tree. He fought the rope circling his neck like something crazed, but a force of pure strength proved too much and they had him leashed and lifted before he could even let out a cry.

The men stood back, for the boy kicked and spun. As his hands were not tied he took hold of the rope above his head and tried to lift himself to keep from strangling as he kicked out with his legs hoping to swing them around the trunk or to reach a branch and somehow save himself from a horrid death. His shoes were nothing more than strips of tire rubber cut and lashed around his feet and ankles and they scored the rotted bark in unending desperation.

It was an Inquisitional scene of madness, with the guards like statues upon a salted plain and the photographer Tuerto framing up this nightmare of a twisting soul. The women now were overwhelmed with crying and pleading to let the boy go or allow him to quickly die. It was the crone, Sister Alicia, who came forward then up that slope in a dress like that of a nun's habit in slow and faulted steps demanding they let the boy down, or end his suffering.

The climb for the old woman was hard and soon a figure was tramping through the sand behind her. It was the girl Teresa who came and took hold of Sister Alicia's arm and John Lourdes saw in her face the same elusive quiet and intense watchfulness as he had that first day by the fumigation shed.

Sister Alicia and the girl were met by a wall of straight-brimmed and squared-up men with stares like barren mountains. That aged witch meant to fight through them and though her paper flesh and frail bones failed her, that did not stop her fire to attempt an end. John Lourdes, watching the struggle, decided he had seen enough.

He leapt up onto the flatcar and as he did, far up the line, swaths of black registered upon the thermals. But for now he was set upon one course.

He reached into the cab for his rifle. The father went upright. "What are you doing, Mr. Lourdes?"

He hammered home a shell.

"Don't, Mr. Lourdes."

He turned and aimed. The sun burned his eyes, but he used the stillness of the men to strike a mark.

Rawbone promised damnation if he pulled the trigger.

John Lourdes heard, John Lourdes saw, and John Lourdes fired.