Bullshit, the Ford…I was thinking about the girl.
I wondered if she’d been in the car just now. I remembered her look under the traffic light, how it caught me flatfooted for one big heartbeat and got me rankled for some damn reason. Which, it occurred to me, probably had something to do with my edginess the rest of the evening.
The realization agitated me all the more because I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it earlier. Not much ever got under my skin, but when something did I damn well knew what and why and I knew how to get rid of it.
Little chippy. What’d she think she was trying to pull?
She had to be the one Gregorio had mentioned, the one at the party, the goddaughter of Avila’s aunt and uncle. All the way from Brownsville, Gregorio said. Had they just now been getting an early start on the long drive back? They sure as hell weren’t going to the movies at five in the morning or to a picnic on the beach. How far to Brownsville? Way more than three hundred miles, probably closer to four. All-day drive and then some—especially in that old T.
Christ’s sake, I told myself, who
Some face on her, though.
Yeah, right—but there were pretty faces everywhere, hundreds in this town alone.
Not like that one.
Bullshit. It wasn’t
Not likely.
For all I knew she was married.
A married woman came to Morales’ party with her
What’s sense got to do with anything? Besides, the old man said Avila’s cousin had come too. For all I knew he was her beau…
So it went, while I lay there staring at the ceiling and the New Year slowly dawned.
The great house stands on a long low bluff, and the balcony affords a vista beyond the mesquite woods along the north wall of the hacienda compound. To the northeast Don Cesar can see the meander of the shallow Rio Cadenas whose origin is high in the dark sierras and whose flow through a venous array of irrigation ditches nurtures the estate’s tenacious pasturelands and its meager gardens. He can see all the way to the Cienaga de las Palmas, glinting like a little glass sliver five miles away. In truth the cienaga has no palms at all and is but a muddy marsh where the river drains and quits. Almost forty miles beyond the cienaga, in the blue-hazed distance, lies the hard road from Escalon to Monclova. The surrounding country is dense with cactus and thickets of mesquite, and the mountains at the horizons are long and blue.
The years have not lessened Don Cesar’s admiration of the natural beauty of this estate set on the border between the states of Durango and Chihuahua, a beauty the more remarkable for being at the southern edge of a vast desertland that includes a portion of the Bolson de Mapimi, perhaps the meanest desert of the earth’s western side. The hacienda’s beauty is as remarkable as the fact of its having survived the rage of the Revolution.
The bastard Revolution! A year before its outbreak, Don Cesar had been a thirty-five-year-old captain in command of a company of Guardia Rural—the fearsome national mounted police of President Porfirio Diaz—and he had earned the lasting personal gratitude of Don Porfirio for his company’s heroic rescue of the president’s niece and her party of travelers besieged at a desolate Durango outpost by a band of Yaqui marauders. Captain Calveras and his men had killed a dozen of the savages and captured ten, including their chief. But one of the travelers had received a fatal wound and a pregnant woman among them had miscarried. Hence, rather than send the captives to the henequen plantations in the Yucatan as was customary, Captain Calveras hanged them in the nearest village square—all but the chief, whom he executed by tying one of the Indian’s legs to one horse and the other leg to another and then lashing the horses into a sprint in opposite directions. He telegraphed his report to the headquarters office at Hermosillo and by day’s end he received notice of Don Porfirio’s appreciation and of an immediate promotion to the rank of comandante.
Two months later, in still another battle with still other Yaquis, Comandante Calveras took an arrow through a thigh and up into the hip. It was three days before he could present himself to a surgeon and by then the infection was so deeply rooted that the surgeon spoke of amputation of the entire leg. The comandante rejected that procedure with a promise that if he should awaken from the surgery without his leg he would hang the doctor. He survived the operation with the leg intact but the hip was in permanent ruin. He would evermore walk with a limp and he could no longer sit a horse for more than a few minutes before the pain became excruciating. He was offered the command of a regional rurales headquarters but he disdained desk jobs and instead chose to retire. Though the decision delighted his wife and children, it was a difficult one, for he had been in the rurales since the age of sixteen, when he had turned his back on his father’s patrimony—a hacienda and vast cattle ranch in Zacatecas state—and enlisted in the national police.
On the day of his retirement he was received in the National Palace by Don Porfirio himself, who presented him with an unexpected prize—the title to La Hacienda de Las Cadenas, an estate which until recently had belonged to a political rival of the Porfiriato. The president slid the ornately embossed paper across the polished desktop and told Comandante Calveras to consider it a spoil of war, the sweetest of life’s possessions. But a man with title to a hacienda, Don Porfirio said, should of course have the means to maintain the place, and so he also awarded the comandante a trunk filled with silver specie, a prize of such weight that it required three strong men to load it onto the transport wagon. Comandante Calveras had by then already amassed a considerable sum of money by means of the rurales’ right to confiscate the assets of fugitives and of killed or convicted criminals—a sum which, together with el presidente’s cash award, now amounted to a small fortune.
But eight months after Don Cesar’s retirement, there came the Revolution—and before another year passed, Porfirio Diaz was exiled in Paris, never to return.
The memory of the Revolution taints Don Cesar’s tongue with the taste of blood. The name of “Revolution” was entirely undeserved by that lunatic decade of national riot and rampage by misbegotten Indian brutes and primitive bastard half-castes. The shit-blooded whoresons had razed his father’s hacienda and crucified the man on the front door of the casa grande before setting the house aflame. A few months afterward they murdered Don Cesar’s own family as well. By means of an exorbitant bribe, Don Cesar had secured passage for his wife and three children (his angelic trio of blond daughters!) aboard a federal troop-and-munitions train bound for Juarez, from where his beloveds were to cross the river to refuge in El Paso. But just south of Samalayuca, a bare forty miles from the border, the track under the train was dynamited.
The handful of survivors told of the slew and crash and tumble of the railcars one upon the other, the hellish screams, the great screeching and sparkings of iron, the explosions of the munitions that the rebels had desired for themselves but in their incompetence destroyed along with the train. (“Viva Villa!” they shouted—“Viva Villa!”— even as they looted the wreckage and the dead and robbed the survivors.) Don Cesar had traveled to Samalayuca and was able to identify his daughters’ remains by their diminutive forms and take them back for burial at Las Cadenas, but his wife was unrecognizable among the array of charred and mutilated corpses and she was interred with the others in a mass grave.
In the years to follow he had endured the loss of his family as he endured the abuses and indignations of one raiding pack of mongrels after another, each calling itself an army of the Revolution and each claiming the sanctioning ideal of liberty—a word not one in every hundred of them owned the literacy to recognize in print. He had withstood the sudden emptiness in his life as he had withstood the degradations to his estate, his great house, his fields, his person, the spit in his face, the ridicule of his crippled leg. He endured their insults, their laughter, the ceaseless threats to shoot him, hang him, quarter him, burn him alive, endured it all with indifference. How could their threats of death make him afraid? Only a man with desire to live could be made afraid of death.
But one of them had perceived the truth of his lack of fear—the leader of one of the first gangs of invaders to arrive at Las Cadenas, the one they called El Carnicero and whose revolver muzzle had pressed to Don Cesar’s forehead as the man asked if he had a last word. A large man whom he would hear described by some as
