EIGHT
AWBONE WAS BY the truck, giving it a close looking-over, when John Lourdes came out of the house. He still had on that derby, but now he wore a white Mexican shirt and canvas pants tucked into some hard-traveled boots. He had a bindle slung over his shoulder and his hands were pressed flat into a native sash around his waist. Knox and Howell flanked him and when he saw John Lourdes approach he tipped his hat and said, grinning, 'Doctor ... something or other ... I presume.'
John Lourdes walked right past and began to stow his belongings in the truck cab.
'What was his name?' said Rawbone to no one in particular. 'I remember reading about it years ago in The Herald. This gent travels all of darkest Africa looking for some famous doctor and when he finds him he's living in some shantytown with a tribe of spades and he says, `Doctor so and so, I presume.' What the hell was his name?'
John Lourdes walked past him again. He joined Knox and Howell, who stood off a few yards, and they finalized plans. While he was alone Rawbone leaned around and tried to inconspicuously look down into the back of the cab housing to see if a weapon he'd nested away was still there.
The men finished their talk and shook hands. Rawbone eased away from the cab as John Lourdes approached him and said, 'Get in the truck. I'll drive.'
'Aye, sir,' said Rawbone.
The truck rumbled out of the weeded lot, then down the driveway and past the veranda where Burr now stood watching. He had a gray stare for both men, and implicit at the heart of it was how flaws in the world so shaped human destiny.
Rawbone leaned out the cab window and called to his friend, 'When I've done my penance I'll come back and then you and I can gent up and get some sinning under our belt.'
He sat back and told John Lourdes, 'If you ever need a righteous good attorney, he's your man. That son-of-a-bitch could have gotten Christ off.'
'I can imagine,' said John Lourdes, 'as he seems to have done alright for Satan.'
THEY DROVE IN silence through the city, then turned onto a road that led past Fort Bliss. Their destination, according to Rawbone, was somewhere in the Hueco Mountains where the arms were hidden away.
The truck scaled a rutted series of low and gravel-faced escarpments from which they could look back and see El Paso. The Rio Grande Valley had become a vast keep of civilization, with the thread of roadways and train tracks etching out in all directions and on into an ocean of heat. The valley, at that hour, on that day, so perfectly marked the years of Rawbone's wandering that he quietly cursed himself.
John Lourdes noted the vexed look on the father's face but checked it off as pure self-regard.
Rawbone turned away from the sight of El Paso. 'Your name is Lourdes, right? John Lourdes?'
He eyed the father warily. 'That's right.'
'How do you like to be called?'
'It doesn't matter.'
'It'll be Mr. Lourdes then.' Rawbone reached into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. 'As befitting our stations.'
John Lourdes kept to the road. But he was thinking now, I'd forgotten the voice, the tones and inflections. He had the huckster's gift to make you feel, even as he was unfaithful to anything he said.
Rawbone looked the young man over as he lit a cigarette. The khaki pants and polished boots. The vest and cravenetted Mallory hat. He was strictly Montgomery Ward's. An escapee from that blue-collar catalogue. Except for the automatic he carried in a shoulder holster.
'Is that a Browning?'
'It's a Browning.'
'Cigarette?'
'I have my own.'
'You from El Paso?'
'I am.'
'Lourdes sounds French. Is it a French name? Are you French?'
John Lourdes leaned into the steering wheel. 'It's a French name.'
