father: 'There is no past, there is no future ... there is only you, and me, and this truck.'
Even now it was a test of wills. His mouth dry and cracking, his eyes failing, in desperate need of water there on the seat he would not drink, the father said, 'Mr. Lourdes, should I come knocking at your door one night in El Paso and offer to buy you dinner and drinks, what would you think?'
'I would think ... you were paying for it with stolen money.'
He had no strength to laugh, so a grunt had to suffice. 'The Modern Cafe in the Mills Building lobby. The sight of our illustrious meeting. We'll drink gentleman's whiskey from Tom Collins glasses and toast surviving. '
The muscles in Rawbone's body were breaking down; the night was no cooler than the day. He had kept a rock in his mouth to foster spit but even that was too little, too late. He remembered being a boy with nothing in a pawny waste called Scabtown and watching a fighter in the baking sun stalk an adversary. Even now, especially now, those battered and blood-streaked features once witnessed spoke to his fury and resolve.
By morning the sun was striking him down. His grip on the wheel slipped away and he momentarily passed out. He cursed himself and pressed on again. Sometime that morning they came upon a necklace of tiny pools. The father rushed to it desperately with a water bag only to discover with one taste it was alkali.
Poison.
He looked back at the truck. The tarp above the cab lifted uneasily with the breeze. His mind flashed on a funeral canopy-he killed the thought of it quickly. But he knew. They would be dust before the day was done.
He stared through the searing heat at the black surface of that pool, so utterly still, and came to a moment that was absolute and providential. He slipped the water bag into that bitter fountain and watched the bubbles reach the air and die away. He wondered, would the water taste of oblivion.
When the bag was full he stoppered it, then he leaned down and put his mouth to the pool and drank. He drank like some bloodthirsty drunk and sat with the tainted liquid spilling down his chin, and there in the watery slicks the common assassin and the father looked at each other for the last time.
He went to the truck, howling with good news they had water, and he drank from the bag and he tricked the son by handing him the other. The son drank the good water. 'Close your eyes, Mr. Lourdes, and think of the Modern Cafe.'
He punished the truck as he punished himself. Over every rise a hope that sinks in his throat with each trembling horizon. Memories threadbare with time are suddenly upon him with an emotional pull too heartrending to bear. He drives them from his mind. There is only surviving.
A flock of white-tailed doves streaks past overhead. Their presence is a promise of water. And if there is water—
They are like runes against the sky and he lets their flight guide his course as he begins to feel his body turn against him. He is counting every dusty heartbeat with each windy slope. With each mile he is being murdered, he is a mile closer to being saved. He keeps thinking of that blood-streaked fighter in the dust whose name he bears, and through a dazy heat he sees the stylus of a church spire against a flat sky and the town of San Luis Potosi that enfolds it.
IN THE SHADOW of the church was a small hospital run by nuns for the poor and dispossessed. Rawbone was already in the early throes of a convulsion when the truck crashed up on the sidewalk. This was the first moment a barely conscious John Lourdes realized something was drastically wrong.
Rawbone dragged himself to the stone wall and sat with his back against the hot brick, fighting for air. John Lourdes was in the arms of nuns and campesinos but he pulled and pleaded and finally broke loose as if they were somehow his captors and he crumpled up on the street beside the father. He grabbed his shoulders. 'What ... ?'
Rawbone tried to make words out of broken syllables or breathless sound, but could not. In his hand was the pocket notebook and, wracked and dying, he held it out for John Lourdes to see what he had written hours ago: Soh {or3we me
John Lourdes was beyond the knowing, beyond asking, 'How?' He was clinging to a furious history that was his life, desperate suddenly for what was inseparable and lost, trying to contain or hold back death, to overpower it with his heart.
But the father kept breaking apart. There was no will, no earthly force that can measure up, even the blood-streaked fighter in the dust could not ultimately stand against that most inevitable of adversaries.
John Lourdes pulled his father to him, grasping the hand with the notebook, and in that ephemeral moment with the blazing sun around
