and silent locomotives. They yelled to the men on the train and the women in the passenger cars, possessed as they were with the furious excitement of possibility.
One of the campesinos ran up to the flatcar and shouted that la rev- olucion had begun and Rawbone answered with glorious indifference, smiling, 'Yes, my friend, you've got a great future ... behind you.'
A woman now called to Rawbone from the landing of the passenger car. The young man, it seemed, was asking for him.
John Lourdes was pale and in pain, but the shivering had subsided and his mind steadied.
'I see the witches haven't killed you yet.'
'Last night,' he asked, 'what happened?'
The father squatted. All around them were women watching. 'War, Mr. Lourdes, that's what happened. We're right in the middle of a country that's goin' down for the count.'
Sister Alicia was preparing another batch of medicinals. She poked Rawbone and told him to pass the cup to the young man. He took the steaming tin gingerly and ran it under his nose. The smell seemed to touch a nerve. Tangible it was with memories. He was torn by the moment then put it aside. 'You got your magic down, don't you, you damn witch.' He had a swallow himself. 'Tastes of my youth,' he said.
He passed the cup to John Lourdes, who sipped as he was told, 'It seems our employer has a dog in this fight. I heard Mr. Stars and Stripes talking. Of course, I'm passing the information on to you as befitting our station.'
The son thought on this a while. 'But who is our employer? Mr. Hecht? Do you think so? I don't.'
'I see your point, Mr. Lourdes.'
The father stood. 'Listen to me, you damn witches. Take care of the young master here. He's a true verdadero hombre.' Rawbone grabbed his crotch. 'Mucho caliente.'
The women either laughed with embarrassment or turned away in disgust. 'He's also a climber, in case you didn't know. Intends to make a name for himself. Thinks he can carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.' He looked at Teresa, who was staring up at him. 'You're in for a surprise.'
As he started out, the son called to him. He wanted to say something but hesitated. He set the cup down, he brushed the hair back from his drawn face. 'For bringing me in here ... thank you.'
To see him in such discomfort at having to say the thing gave Rawbone unequalled pleasure. Yet, to his absolute dismay, John Lourdes sounded utterly genuine.
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,
