about the enclosure.
John Lourdes saw a stairwell that led up to a rooftop watchtower. He took binoculars from around his neck and as he ascended vultures retreated from the vigas, their steps like drunken old men. Under an overhang the father saw a table and on it was a Victrola. He looked at the pile of records beside it. One read Brahms' Lullaby. He set the record on the turntable and cranked up the player. A Spanish version began.
Music drifted out over that dusty pueblo and into the desert beyond. John Lourdes had been studying the country and the trackline and pulled the binoculars from his eyes and looked down into the enclosure. Tuerto walked amongst the dead taking photographs. And the father-he had found a chair and was sitting in the shade by the Victrola, the bandana shielding his nose and mouth, the rifle across his lap and that haunting child's melody-he could well have been the Lord of some Breugheled damnata.
This, thought the son, is what I was born from. Can this be the man who in his youth touched my mother's heart on a trolley in the Texas rain? Can this be the man who even for bare moments breathed love? John Lourdes wondered, if God truly put a soul in each living being, could it be the soul was capable of flaming out so completely it no longer existed, so all that was left was a living husk as horrible as the enclosure where they stood?
Yet, he was not as waylaid as he felt he should have been looking down upon this wretched scene. Did it mean that in some way his own soul was burning down to become a useless cinder that would knock around inside his chest wherever he walked upon the earth? Or was this some rite of passage the part of him that was the father came to prepare him for? The father's words worked like cruel and busy claws inside him: 'This country is having at you, Mr. Lourdes ... the road changes everyone.'
Then from behind the bandana came that crackly voice. 'I see you there, Mr. Lourdes ... looking down on me.'
'You better get up here,' said the son.
John Lourdes sat on the roof wall writing in his notebook, and when the father joined him the vultures again flared and fell away. The son pointed his pencil at the binoculars set on the adobe ledge. 'Tell me what you see.'
The father took the binoculars and panned over that whinstone prairie. The land trembled with heat but there was nothing save where the track turned out to become separate rail lines that looked to be near burned into the earth.
'I see unadulterated nothing.'
John Lourdes finished writing. He yelled for Tuerto. He tore the page from his notebook and stood. 'One of the tracks has been sabotaged.'
The father's head arched back and the son turned him about. He stood behind him with an arm leaned over his shoulder. He was as close now as the father had been to the son that night in the Hueco Mountains, only now it was the son's shouldered weapon that insinuated itself.
'With the binoculars ... about fifty yards up from the turnout. To the left. Laying off in the sand away from the tracks. You'll see it.'
And so he did. It looked to be embossed in the sand. A long bulky strip of metal. Smooth as could be.
'What the hell is it?'
'It's a fishplate ... It's what they use to bolt the rails together. You can see it's been removed from one of the tracks. So has another one at the other end of the rail and you can see ... the spikes are missing. That rail is just sitting on the ties waiting for a train.'
TWENTY-SEVEN
JERTO AGREED TO carry John Lourdes's note back to the train. Doctor Stallings reviewed it with his officers and proceeded accordingly. The plan was to bring the trains on to the garrison, then wait for John Lourdes to signal. Son and father were to scout the secondary trackline to Tampico, spotting up the rails for further sabotage. Doctor Stallings walked the turnout and the engineer showed him where the fishplates and spikes had been removed. Doctor Stallings looked to his watch, to the south. He sat quietly on the locomotive steps waiting for John Lourdes to signal. In packs of two and three the guards asked Tuerto about the garrison that now stood in shadow on the hilltop. He would describe the scene and then point to the aperture of his camera and tell them it had all been captured there and prints could be had for a commission. Even the women, appalled by what they heard, clung to every whisper for the dead belonged to the government and that aroused unspoken hopes.
From a craggy plateau John Lourdes and Rawbone scouted the hills before them. A hundred miles beyond, the Gulf washed up on the beaches of Tampico.
'You can smell the salt air from here,' said the father. Then bringing his horse about, called out, 'Mr. Lourdes.'
