The last of the women jumped from the train and crowded up on the tracks. John Lourdes brought Teresa and, with Rawbone, lifted her down from the flatcar. The train was inching backward and stopping the car became imperative before it picked up speed. By the side railings were piles of heavy chain. John Lourdes dragged one loose and hoisted it up on his shoulder, then ordered Rawbone to bring another as the brakes were giving way.
John Lourdes was at the rear of the passenger car kicking off the door when Rawbone dumped a coil of chain at his feet.
'What are you trying?'
John Lourdes was gasping and his shirt soaked through. As he started to explain, the father went down on one knee and favored his scored shoulder.
The son intended to swing one chain through the door and out a landing window and noose it. He'd do the same on the other side of the door with the other landing window. Then they'd get enough chain and hook it to both nooses and drop it over the landing platform and onto the tracks and up under the wheels to form a kind of wedge braced to the car.
The father looked about and questioned, 'Will it work?'
'I saw it done once, but not on an incline like-'
Framed in the far passenger door was Teresa. Most of a heavy chain was slung up on her shoulder and the rest dragged like a metal umbilicus. She was bent and straining torturously with each step.
'What in the name of madness,' said the father.
She'd fashioned a reason to act, watching them haul the chains, and she'd climbed back up onto the flatcar with the women grabbing at legs and skirt to restrain her. She couldn't negotiate the door dragging all that iron and when the men reached her Rawbone took all that weight upon himself.
John Lourdes, with his palms facing down, patted at the air as his way of asking Teresa to hold where she was. Rawbone carried that iron monstrosity to the rear of the car. John Lourdes hooked each end of the chain to one of the nooses. Then he had the father help him loop it over the back platform and it landed on the tracks with an immense clang.
'When I give the order to cinch it, get inside fast and keep going. This platform may come off and part of the wall with it.'
Each link was near as big as their fists and they scarred and danged along the rails as John Lourdes took a deep breath. The father muscled down like a prizefighter and then John Lourdes yelled out, 'Cinch it.'
They roped in the chain. It tautened and caught up against the wheels. The two men scrambled over each other getting into the car and the sound coming off those locked wheels was like a foundry saw shearing pure steel. There were fireworks of sparks, and the studs in the platform and up through the rear wall began to spider with cracks and the platform ripped apart like a flimsy toy. The back wall was there one moment, and the next, they were staring out a frame of decimated wood exposing drab brown hills and dust-strewn daylight. The screeching went on, it seemed, interminably. Then, in one staggering instant the cars stopped.
SECTIONS OF THE chain were ground to dust, but the remainder was shivved up under and around the wheels and so the cars were held.
The Mastodon had not returned and they were left now to their own resources in that silent chasm, with Tampico a century of miles through those fluted and waterless hills.
'Now,' said John Lourdes to the father, 'you see why I wouldn't leave the truck.'
It was in its own way a purely orthodox application of practical strategy. The father still remarked with a certain insight, 'That's not why you wouldn't leave the truck.'
John Lourdes got out the fire ax and a set of crowbars and formed two work gangs of women. The father took the first bunch and they went about chopping the roof beams loose from the passenger car. The son worked the others dismantling the flatbed siderails and truss bars. And damn if that common assassin didn't start teaching those women to sing in English 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game' as they sweated it in that filthy railcar.
John Lourdes meant to build a rampway jerry-rigged from an assemblage of crisscrossed timbers and truss bound together by rope and cable and parts of chain and any clothing the women weren't wearing right then and there.
John Lourdes walked up and down this raft with uncertainty as the father and the women watched.
'It's no masterpiece,' said the son.
'Mr. Lourdes, good manners requires me to allow you first crack at driving the truck.'
'You're a fuckin' saint,' muttered the son under his breath.
