John Lourdes walked the destruction. It was otherworldly. He could not fathom truly being there. The smell of charred clothes and flesh tainted the air and he worried it might poison him in some unknown way. He came upon the first, who lay on his side. There was nothing below the upper lip but a bloody shirt collar. Then he noted what he thought to be an odd necklace dangling down the man's face before he realized it was an eye loosed of its socket and hanging by a long thread of muscle.
The next man lay on his stomach. John Lourdes knelt and eased the body over. The dark and lifeless face he came to see belonged to the man who'd faced him down in Juarez, the father of the girl Teresa. He stood. He stared down at this stranger on the other side of death. Questions abounded.
Pilings of wood on the meeting house floor had caught fire. The air was singed with windblown ash. John Lourdes had to cover his face as he turned toward the last man, the one from the roadhouse.
He sat against a backdrop of adobe and rotted timber beams. He was not dead, though he should have been as the shape of his head was hideously altered.
From up the cart path came a headway of trampling hooves. Riderless mounts plunged headlong from the shadows hounded by gunshots and the gritty musculature of a motorcycle engine. Rawbone had herded up the horses. He yelled out as he wheeled in the motorcycle, 'There was a last one down by the main road.'
Cinders from the fire were now a burning rain everywhere and Rawbone took to using his derby to swipe them from his eyes as he joined up with John Lourdes. 'We better board up and be on with it. If any of these sparks find their way to-'
The man from the roadhouse sat staring up at them. The father squatted. The man was gibbering away, yet there looked to be in his eyes a degree of consciousness and understanding. In his hand was the flashlight. Rawbone slipped it loose. He switched on the light and put it to the man's face. It mooned out of the dark. Blood seeped from a crack in the skull along the forehead. A bit of brain matter protruded from the wound, looking like the marbled head of a snail.
'He's leaking oil, Mr. Lourdes.'
Rawbone stood.
'It's your watch, Mr. Lourdes.'
The son understood. It was either finish him or forget him, as he was for the wolves. The father waited. He held his derby against the onslaught of scorched ash and heat.
'The fire, Mr. Lourdes. One spark could send us off.'
He saw something pass over John Lourdes's face. A brief moment of the soul perhaps, of what had to be. It was not a look of indecision, but rather something more reflective of true human reluctance, or even a tragic pity. It mattered none. Rawbone had no place for either and hated each equally. He reached for his belted automatic, but John Lourdes grabbed his wrist and restrained him. Now, the father prided himself on strong arms, all the more so for a man his size, and he felt in the son's grip the same pure hard strength.
'Strip each body of everything in their pockets,' said John Lourdes. 'Wallets, any scrap of paper. Leave nothing. Collect it for me. Saddlebags too.'
'Mr. Lourdes ...'
The son ordered him again in no uncertain terms and the father walked off. 'Why don't I do that, Mr. Lourdes. That'll give you some time to negotiate the matter at hand with your conscience.'
A moment later there was a gunshot that caused the horses to startle and scatter. The father turned. The impact had driven the man to the earth, where charred cinders blew over him. With a streak of pure mean Rawbone mocked what the dead man had said down at the roadhouse. 'The way I see you by that truck, looking off to the hills ... you're a real climber, son.'
TWELVE
FEW LAST SCATTERED sparks blew from that barren upland as the truck descended to the road. They had it rigged up and strapped down with the trappings of war. They'd even lashed the motorcycle, like some trophy from a battle of yore, to the truckbed.
It was a matter now of the crossing into Mexico. The main bridges over the Rio Grande with their immigration agents and customs officers posed too much of a threat and so were out of the question. And finding shallows you would gamble a truck might navigate would be a marvel of stupidity. But Rawbone knew of a rope ferry south of El Paso near the old Socorro Mission. The river had changed course there near a half-century before, and was a place of isolated sandbars and lonely stretches of shoreline.
They drove through the chilly hours before dawn. A smoky oil
