John Lourdes edged the truck over the lip of the flatcar and leaned from the cab to see if the weight could be sustained. The father acted as traffic cop angling his hands to get those wheels a little this way or that. When the engine was committed all the way down the ramp it started to sag like the spine of some cartoon swayback. The women chimed in trying to avert what they saw as a disaster, yelling for John Lourdes to turn the wheels in direct contradiction to the father who was now cursing their hellish mouths. Some of them took to pleading he go back, while others urged he just come on. It was all devolving into useless jabber so John Lourdes swallowed hard to clear his throat and with one quick to-hell-with-it decision, gassed the pedal.
The truck lurched, and as the front end touched ground the ramp gave and the rear tires slammed upon the ties. The truck heaved to one side under the strain of those lashed crates of ammunition and all watched in stunned silence as the unwieldy hump piled up in the truckbed settled back in place. Then John Lourdes just footed the gas pedal slightly and the truck started forward to a collective sigh of relief.
TWENTY-NINE
Y DUSK THEY drove the trackline, one wheel straddling the ties and the other on a meager strip of roadbed. The women took turns perched up on crates, stacked in the truckbed or walking ahead of it. One man drove while the other rested. It was slow and dangerous and when they reached the peak at nightfall below them was the immense void of the desert floor.
The women proceeding ahead of the truck now took to carrying lanterns or candles to guide the way. The lights fireflied in that steep and treacherous canyon, where their shadows walked in slow and somber order like some druidic procession moving through the vast church of the night.
When it was Rawbone's time to turn the wheel over to John Lourdes, he took up with the others in the truckbed, sitting on boxes of hand grenades and machine-gun belts. And while Sister Alicia stitched the wound in his back with sewing thread, he led a chorus of singing women in their slanted English:
Later that night John Lourdes wrote in his notebook: You helped 4,e old woman and risked yourself . . . you carried 4e C1,airs . . . you're s44ing w,4 me now . . . He ended what he wrote with a question mark he circled.
He and Teresa sat in the truck together, wedged up amongst the crates as they crossed all that black and windy emptiness.
She read his questions and then wrote: / I,e/ped Sis-ler Alicia because sl,e needed l,e/p and 4 was r~W . . . l carried chains because cl,a'/is were necessary . . . l am s44ing will, you now because forgiveness is needed.
He wrote: / am 4La4kcul you can corjtve me.
She replied: Ti,is is no4 jus4 abov4 you.
She had not fully realized how much her father was of those men on the slope executing a child. And that her father was of the same blood and history as the dead turned her stomach.
She added to what she wrote: / am small a.ain54 4s world . . . bu4 4e Ci,ris4 inside my l,ear-l is 9rea4er ye-l. Wi4,ou4 forgiveness a// of life is forsaken. / will no4 become forsaken.
John Lourdes could hear his own father's voice from behind the steering wheel. In the cab with him were Sister Alicia and another woman. He had them rehearsing lyrics to 'Yankee Doodle Dandy.'
He stared into his notebook. He absorbed what Teresa had written. He could feel her beside him. He knew without asking, the forgiveness extended to her own father. It was tangible as rain upon an upturned face. I am small against this world ... These words, he knew, were true about himself, in that place, at that moment, though forgiveness was not an option.
THEY DROVE STRAIGHT into the dawn. Limestone chasms gave way to islands of scrub pine. The earth was sandy and the truck struggled mile after mile. The stones of the desert began to warm with the sun. To the north a pale outline on the horizon, a meager oasis of huts.
Near Tamuin they passed an abandoned cathedral upon the desert floor. Magnificent it was, from the era of the Conquistadors. Red were its stone walls and grand dome against a hot and cloudless sky. The women blessed themselves as they drove past, for with God there was no forgotten place.
They dined by a stream near a fallen hacienda. Amongst the trees a rusting iron fence enclosed a few headstones. Names the wind and sun had stolen. Rawbone watched John Lourdes and the girl Teresa walk along the shallows. The water was cool and shiny in the quieting light and the breeze gave the brush that soft and brittle song.
There was something about the long blue light of dusk that for Rawbone always felt of eventuality and of being forlorn. He looked at the fallen hacienda, then the small family of graves set amongst the trees. He put his cigarette out in the sand and stood as John Lourdes
