Country of the Bad Wolfes

That evening he detrained into the cacophonous swarm of the Mexico City terminal. Amos Bentley materialized from the crowd and came striding toward him with his arms open wide and a great grinning bellow of “John, old friend! Here at last!” His Southern accent as pronounced as on the day they first met. While he had always been stocky, Amos had over the years acquired a barrel of a belly, and John Roger felt the press of it between them as they embraced in the Mexican fashion with much patting of each other’s back. Except for his greater girth, Amos, now in his late forties, seemed little changed. His round face was unlined, his sandy hair ungrayed but for traces at the sideburns. On their way out to the waiting carriage, John Roger gave him another clap on the shoulder for no reason but his great happiness to be with the last of his living friends.

Amos’s house was on a tree-lined street along the north side of picturesque Alameda Park. The elite residential areas of the city had in recent years shifted from north and east of the zocalo to westward of it, to the Alameda and then along the imposing Avenida Reforma—broad and tree-lined, commissioned by Maximilian in imitation of the Champs Elysees—which went all the way to Chapultepec Park. In the residential style of the Mexican wealthy, Amos’s property was shielded from the streets and his flanking neighbors by high walls whose tops were lined with embedded shards of glass. Amos gave him a cursory tour of the house before they sat to a light supper of fried eggs on white rice and a side dish of fried plantain slices sprinkled with sugar. They then repaired to the library until a late hour, smoking Cuban cigars and sipping French brandy and catching each other up on things.

Among the topics they discussed was the recent trouble at one of the silver mines at Las Nevadas. A few weeks before, nearly 300 miners had gone on strike in protest of working conditions. There were too many of them for Don Victor’s gunmen to deal with, so he telegraphed to Mexico City for help. The next day there arrived an undermanned troop of twenty-seven Rurales—the Guardia Rural, an elite force of national mounted police, unmistakable in their distinct uniforms of big sombreros and charro suits of gray suede and silver conchos. In many parts of the country the Rurales were more feared than the army. They had been in existence since the time of Juarez, but it was Diaz who made them into a legendary force. He favored the recruitment of bandits into their ranks, believing that few men were as trustworthy as former criminals and that no one was better at hunting outlaws than a man who had been one himself. He gave them both incentive and license in the exercise of their duty. They were permitted to keep a portion of recovered loot, and in accord with Diaz’s directive—Matalos en caliente! was his standing order—to kill on the spot every bandit they caught. The Law of Flight sanctioned the shooting of a prisoner who tried to escape, and a dead man could not argue that he had made no such attempt. Diaz was lavish in his public praise of the Guardia Rural and hosted a sumptuous annual banquet in their honor. They were a source of national pride and the incarnate symbol of Diaz’s personal might. And as loyal to him as dogs.

Don Victor offered the Rural captain the assistance of his thirty pistoleros but the captain politely declined, simply wanting to know where the strikers were. The Rurales then rode out to the mines and reined up in a line facing the protesters, their mounts stamping and snorting. Each man of them was armed with a saber, revolver, and Remington repeater carbine. They drew the rifles from their scabbards and held them braced on their hips, muzzle upward. The Rural captain took a watch from his pocket and called to the strikers that they had five minutes to get back to work. One of the mine leaders yelled We are not bandits! We only want fairness!

The captain made no reply nor even looked at the man but kept his attention on the watch while some of the strikers shouted their grievances and exhorted the Rurales to take the side of justice, for the love of God. As the minutes ticked away, at least a third of the men broke off from the crowd and hurried back to the mine, ignoring the curses and accusations of cowardice from those who stood fast and who told each other that no two dozen goddam Rurales were a match for 200 miners, even if the only weapons they had were picks and shovels and rocks. Then the five minutes were gone and the captain put away the watch. He raised his arm and the leverings of the carbines sounded like the cranking of some implacable machine. Some of the strikers shouted Get the fuckers! and started running at the lawmen with their picks and shovels raised and they were the first to die when the captain dropped his arm.

At the opening fusillade the rest of the strikers turned and ran in the other direction. But the carbines continued to fire and fire and powdersmoke billowed and drifted as running men cried out and flung up their arms and reeled and tumbled like drunken acrobats. The Rurales kept shooting until their magazines were emptied and then they re-sheathed the carbines and drew their sabers and put spurs to their horses and charged after the strikers still on the run, slashing at them to right and left and riding over the fallen, then reining their mounts around to make another pass at those still on their feet. In ten minutes it was done. Almost half of the strikers had made it back to the mine. Witnesses would tell of ground turned to red mud, of air laced with the smells of gunpowder and shit and blood. Of the wails of the wounded and the pistolshot to the head of every man of them who could not get up unassisted and walk back to work. Of having to beat away the buzzards and crows to gather the bodies for burial, more than a hundred of them. The following morning, Don Victor put out the word that he was hiring for the mines and by sundown he had replaced every man he’d lost and turned away even more.

Amos allowed to John Roger that the incident was awful, yes, but he had to agree with Don Victor that the miners’ blood was on the miners’ own hands. “It’s a question of the national good,” Amos said. “I don’t have to remind you, John, how much a country depends on the orderly operations of its economy. A disruption of any those operations is harmful to everyone, to the entire body politic. It simply can’t be tolerated. And if the malcontents won’t yield to reason, well. . . .” He turned up his palms.

John Roger rolled his cigar between his fingers and studied its burning end. Of course workers could not be permitted to dictate to their employer the terms of their employment. But he was not sure the slaughter of a hundred unarmed men could be justified as a necessary measure to protect the national economy. It seemed to him the only economy that had been protected was that of Don Victor and others like him. But then, such men were the largest part of the nation’s economy. There was also the question of whether a man warranted treatment as a brute simply because he was as ignorant as one, or, more to the point, simply because he could not stop someone from treating him that way. John Roger had heard much about the grueling work of mining and had seen a number of men who had been crippled by it, and he believed that Amos, having lived for years near the mines of Las Nevadas, must have seen even more. Reduced to mendicants, most of them. Becrutched or blind or otherwise maimed. Legless on a little square of wood mounted on metal rollers. All of them, crippled or not, marked with the brand of the mines, a thick pale welt across the forehead made by the tumplines of the endless baskets of ore hauled on their backs up ladder after ladder from the deep torchlit pits.

Still, the issue was hardly worth an argument with an old friend. “I suppose you’re right,” John Roger said. And held out his glass to Amos’s offer of another dollop of the fine French brandy.

“Listen,” Amos said, “a few days after that trouble at the mine, I was dining with some associates and I told them about it. One of them said thank God for the Rurales. And somebody else said no, thank Don Porfirio for the Rurales.”

“Yes,” John Roger said. “A nice point.”

After breakfast the next morning, Amos gave him a walking tour of the city’s hub. They ambled along the wide sidewalk of Plateros Street, past fashionable shops and restaurants and theaters, the city’s most exclusive clubs, the headquarters buildings of the country’s most lucrative industries, including that of the Nevada Mining Company, and after a time arrived at the immense zocalo, where stood the Presidential Palace and the colossal Metropolitan Cathedral and all the main offices of the federal and municipal governments. John Roger was awed by the bluster and tempo of the city’s core, the ceaseless clatterings of wagons and carriages, the ringing and rumblings of the railed mule trolleys, the press and babble of the sidewalk throngs in their mix of business suits and peon cottons and Indian ponchos. By the nattily uniformed policemen at every street corner. Not even the Boston of his memory had been so vital nor so loud nor so well-policed. Nor had its streets been cleaner than these.

“They weren’t nearly so clean or safe before Don Porfirio became president, let me tell you,” Amos said. “Law and order, John. To have clean streets and the safety to enjoy them you must first have law and order.” He admitted that it was only the core of the city that was so well kept and secure. Many of the outer neighborhoods were still pestiferous and dangerous places.

“Nevertheless, you have to credit Don Porfirio for all the improvements to the city,” Amos said. “The police, for example. He brought professionals from Europe to train them, did you know that? He dressed them in those French uniforms not only to give them a more professional look but also a sense of pride. You can bet that he’ll now