You'll sleep there with it. Unless and until you are ordered otherwise.'
Jack B was yelling orders now to the hoist crew about the truck when Rawbone asked, 'Hey stars and stripes, where's this parade goin'?'
'What does it matter to you?'
Rawbone pushed his derby back and leaned casually against the truck. 'If I knew I could write my dear old mom and tell her what kind of dresses she should send me to wear.'
John Lourdes did his best to seem like he had not heard that. Jack B, on the other hand, said, 'This ain't Texas.'
He walked away to Rawbone whistling 'I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy.' Then, the father's attention turned to the son. 'The notebook-'
The son strode past the father and leaned down and reached in under the back of the cab. When he stood he had the notebook in his hand. He held it up, then slipped it back in his pocket. He'd hidden it away before they left Juarez as a precaution.
Rawbone leaned over the hood now and called to a roustabout who was carrying over a set of chains to hook to the chassis for lifting the truck. 'Hey, gent, where's this parade goin'?'
The man wiped a gloved hand across his heavily bearded chin. 'You're here and you don't know?'
'I'm here and I don't know and how much of an offspring of morons does that make me?'
'The Zone, brother. That's where we're bound.'
'Aye. Thank you, gent. And be so kind as not to tell anyone you just talked to a buffoon with an empty boot for brains.'
'That's our secret, brother.'
The father spit. Both men grew quiet. They knew what the Zone meant-oil country. The Gulf Coast from Tampico to Tuxpan.
The Golden Lane is how it was described in newspapers or defined on maps. But if you'd been there and seen, you damn well knew it was an unreckonable sweep of devastation and fires, black rain and poisoned earth. The father had been witness to the place; he'd done time on the streets and in the bars and oil fields of Tampico and Puerto Lobos and Cerro Azul and case-hardened as he was, he wanted none of it. 'Next stop, one thousand miles,' he said.
'Yeah.'
'Talk about a blackened scrap of meat.'
John Lourdes wiped at an unusual amount of sweat coming off his forehead.
'Mr. Lourdes-'
'We're going.'
'Going does not mean getting there.'
'We'll get there.'
'Take a look at yourself.'
The son wiped at the sweat again.
'You look like a pile of salt sitting out in the noon sun.' He pointed his derby at the young man's back. 'You're leaking blood, Mr. Lourdes.'
The son wiped at his face. He looked around. He walked over to the last passenger car and climbed the steps judiciously. He peered into the door window. Rawbone turned up at his elbow. The sunlight that fell across the window helped tell the story. His face was drained of color alright and the cheeks were close to the look of skimmed ice.
His glance went from himself to the father's, and like the night before in the hearse glass when the two were side by side, there was not even the slightest recognition from the father that a few demarked features of each were so much alike. Maybe the resemblance was too quiet, or some nameless trait inside the man who was Rawbone made such moments impossible. The son grinned and the father grew suddenly uncomfortable.
'I'm bleeding alright. But ... we're going on. You will not use me, against me.'
'Why should I bother, Mr. Lourdes, when you do such an exemplary job on yourself? I'll just stand here and beat the drum.'
As they stood and argued the father picked up on a figure stepping from the shadows of the tent. 'Mr. Lourdes, I believe you have attracted someone's attention.'
With that he angled his head toward where the son should look. There Teresa was, stepping from the tent's shadow. She was with the women and she arced a hand over her eyes to cut off the sunlight and be sure.
