Last Train from Cuernavaca (29 page)

Lyda's old horse, Duke, proved that what goes up does not necessarily come down. Annie led him to the top of the stairs at the end of the corridor outside her bedroom. There, he planted his front hooves and rocked back on his haunches.

He weighed almost three times as much as Annie, Lydia, Grace, and Socrates combined, so hauling on his lead line and shoving on his caboose proved futile. All of their reassurances, bribes, and cajolery couldn't persuade him to risk plummeting headfirst to the flagstones of the courtyard. He also refused to back down them.

The house that Lyda rented was a modest one made of the local volcanic stone with terra-cotta tiles on the roof. It was built in a square around a small, weed-grown courtyard. The exterior stairway leading from the courtyard to the second-floor corridor was wide but steep.

Grace assumed that if Duke had been born with two legs, he would have become a philosopher. He stood at the top of the stairs and gazed down at Lyda and Grace in that thoughtful way of his. Lyda called up to Annie.

“Send his girlfriend down. Maybe he'll follow her.”

Annie ran inside and reappeared leading the goat. Lyda waved an ear of corn at her and the goat almost fell head over hooves in her hurry to reach it. Duke looked stricken by her betrayal.

He threw his muzzle into the air and neighed as if his heart were breaking. He shifted his soulful gaze to Lyda, rolled back his lips, and whinnied so long and loudly that passersby looked in at the open gate to see what the commotion was about.

“Try putting a towel over his eyes,” suggested Lyda.

Annie shook her head. “He might fall and break a leg if he can't see.”

“Miserable damned cayuse.” Lyda planted her fists on her hips and glared up at him. “Hammer-headed, cat-hammed plug.”

“I thought you knew about horses, Lyda, you being a cowgirl from Texas.”

Lyda swiveled her gaze to Grace, then resumed her stare down with Duke. “We don't stable them in the attic in Texas, Gracie.”

“I have an idea.”

“Then have at it, because I'm plumb out of ideas.”

“Plums have something to do with it. Annie, come down here, please.”

Annie scampered down the stairs, took the handful of dried plums, and listened while Grace whispered in her ear. With food so scarce, even fruit was precious, but not so valuable as Duke.

Annie went back to the second floor to confabulate with her love. He pricked his ears forward and listened intently. Annie held a plum out over the outer half wall of the stairwell. Duke's muzzle followed until he was standing sideways on the landing and no longer looking straight down. She gave him the plum, moved down a step, and held out another, still over the edge of the wall. Duke sidestepped to put one hoof on the first step, then the other, and craned to reach the treat.

Annie moved backward and lured him down another step so that his rear hooves had to follow. Crab-stepping sideways, with his neck still over the wall, he and Annie reached the courtyard. Annie hugged him.

“What made you think of that, Gracie?” asked Lyda.

“The back stairs of the theater where my parents worked were steep and dark. When I was a very young girl I imagined hellfire and Old Scratch waiting for me at the bottom. The only way I could descend was to hold on to the rail, step sideways, and not look down.”

As Annie led Duke out into the street, Grace scanned the neighborhood. She noticed that a few other horses and mules were looking out of second-floor windows. She wondered how their owners intended to get them back down to earth.

Socrates tied Duke's lead to the back of the hired victoria cab and loaded his tack and sacks of feed into the boot. He helped Grace, Lyda, and Annie up the steps, then climbed in next to the driver. He braced the shotgun on his knee with the muzzle in the air, clearly visible to anyone with evil intentions.

Three samples of the skulking sort formed a clot on a corner and watched them pass. The wide brims of their hats shaded their eyes, but Grace could tell they were deciding how best to attack the taxi. The sight of them saddened more than alarmed her.

Grace had always felt safe in Cuernavaca, except for a brief time at the beginning of the rebel army's occupation of the city in 1911. And then she only had to go to Zapata's headquarters in the Governor's Palace and protest the rowdy behavior of some of his men toward her chambermaids. The problems ceased.

From time to time, in the back courtyard, Socrates still told the story of when
Mamacita
pushed her way past Zapata's heavily armed guards and demanded an audience. Socrates had gone with her. He said he had been sure they both would end up shot, skewed on bayonets, and carved into little pieces by machetes.

Grace wished that a word in some official's ear would make things right these days. Besides waylaying cars and carriages, the usual methods for today's thieves were armed break-ins, kidnapping, and snatch-and run. Sometimes they took their victims' money, jewelry, and clothes and let them go, but now and then the rays of the rising sun fell across dead bodies in the bottoms of the ravines.

Lyda pointed her derringer at these banditti and gave them the look she called “arsenic and chained lightning.” They ducked into an alleyway.

Lyda watched them go. “Why is it that the bad eggs tarry after the decent folk exit?”

“‘Opportunity makes a thief.'”

Annie looked ready to throw rocks at them. “Thieves aren't getting Duke!”

Lyda put an arm around her, maybe to comfort her, maybe to keep her from yelling at the men and irritating them. “You know what President Lincoln once said.”

“What did he say?”

“When he heard that Confederates had captured a brigadier-general and a number of horses, he said, ‘Well, I'm sorry for the horses.' The Secretary of War exclaimed, ‘Sorry for the horses, Mr. President!' ‘Yes,' said Lincoln. ‘I can make a brigadier-general in five minutes, but it is not easy to replace a hundred and ten horses.'”

Now that Duke was safe, Annie settled back against the seat. She had heard that the prisoners had escaped when the troop train blew up. Now that Socorro's father was safe and her horse could stay at the Colonial with her, Annie was happy.

Lyda went on chatting as though war and disaster weren't breathing down their necks, but Grace didn't relax until she saw the graceful roof of the bandstand among the greenery of the zócalo. The zócalo meant home. It was an oasis of tranquility, a remnant of gentility.

She dismissed Jake's dire predictions about the train no longer running. Mexicans would take their time about it, but they could repair anything. She wondered how long the rail crews would require to fix this latest damage.

The worst part of it was the cruel murder of so many people. She was glad that José and the others had escaped, but she had a feeling that Angel was the cause of those deaths.

In the rebel camp, Grace had seen Angel gambling, smoking cigars, swearing, and washing down dashes of gunpowder with tequila. But that wasn't her parting image of her. Grace hoped she was wrong, but she feared she wasn't. She wondered how that sweet-faced young woman could have commited such a heartless act.

The men of Angel's company had gathered in a big circle for a spirited game of dice. At stake were Rico's boots and horse, his saddle, rifle, and Navy five-shooters. They were so intent on the outcome that they seemed to have forgotten their primary chore for the day.

Rico's own troops relished hangings, so he was not surprised that the rebels did, too. What did surprise him was how heavily the noose dragged on his neck. The rope was thick enough to anchor a ship. His captors were taking no chances that it would break.

Rico wanted to scratch where the coarse hemp itched, but his hands were tied behind his back. Astride his horse, he scanned the surrounding peaks for the glint of a rifle barrel or the flash of a signal mirror. This would be a good time for Juan to arrive with a troop of cavalry. But by now Juan was probably in a cantina in Coahuila, drinking tequila and winning money from a whole new crop of second lieutenants.

Rico even would have welcomed Rubio. Fatso would be easier to outwit than the rebels.

One of the men tied a knot in the other end of the rope as weight. When he threw it, the knot arced over a limb and hit the horse's nose on its way down. Grullo half-reared, then crow-hopped. The rebels had taken Rico's saddle, tack, and weapons, so he had no stirrups. He tightened his knees to keep from pitching off backward and ending the show before it started.

Lieutenant Angel sauntered over. “If you join us,
muchacho,
you will live…” Angel shrugged. “…or at least we will not be the ones to kill you.”

“No one lives forever.”

Even though the lieutenant had called a vote to decide Rico's fate, he had the feeling that Angel wasn't in favor of hanging a possible recruit. Rico could empathize. Leading was often a case of being pushed from behind.

He tried one more time to find out where Grace was. The information would be of no use to him now, but he did not want to die without knowing she was safe.

“Mother Merced told me the Englishwoman rode with you.”

“Do you see her here,
cabrón
?”

“I think you know where she is.”

“You should save your breath to beg God to forgive you for your sins, Captain.” Angel stalked off to sit on a rock, smoke a cigar, and stare out at the valley below.

With the disposition of Rico's worldly goods decided, the rebels returned to the task at hand. He ignored their taunts and jokes as they cut switches to whip his horse out from under him. Several of them hauled on the rope, pulling the noose taut under his chin and cutting off air to his windpipe. He gripped more tightly with his knees and raised up to create enough slack to breathe.

A couple of the men lashed at the horse. Grullo fidgeted and sidestepped but he refused to run. Muttering an oath, one of them pulled his old forty-five from a tooled holster worn low, gunslinger style.

Grullo's new owner stepped in front of him. “
Pendejo,
don't kill my horse!”

The first man fired just behind Grullo's head. The bullet tore a chunk from his ear and he bolted. The horse, the earth, and everything solid and dependable shot out from under Rico. Lights exploded like pinwheel fireworks at a festival.

As the brilliance blinked out, blackness engulfed him. Pain radiated from his cowlick to his calluses. Maybe he should have used the last fraction of a second of his life to rehearse what he would say to his Maker, or to the Devil, but only one regret resonated.

He would never hold Grace in his arms again.

 

Rico couldn't convince his eyes to open, but the fingers pressing against his neck must belong to Grace. Who else would dare lay hands on him?

“My dove,” Rico murmured, “I've searched for you.”

“I lack the equipment for flying,
Capitán
. Lucky for you I didn't arrive a blink of an eye later.”

The voice arrived echoing and distorted, as if shouted down a mine shaft.

Rico assumed he lay at the bottom of that shaft. He opened his eyelids a slit, then closed them again. The sun shone too intensely for a mine, and the leaves of the gallows tree shimmered in a kaleidoscope of green and gold.

José hunkered next to him, his arm half extended from checking for a pulse in Rico's bruised and bloody neck. Rico sat up. When the landscape stopped spinning he brought José into focus. Antonio, Serafina, and Socorro stood behind him.

“Am I dead,
amigo
?”

“Do I look like St. Peter,
Capitán
?”

Rico laid his fingers on the long, curved abrasion the noose had left on his neck. He gave a jerk of his chin toward Angel's sullen, disheveled pack of ne'er-do-wells lounging in the shade and picking their teeth with their big knives.

“One look at those devils made me think I'd died and gone to the hotter place.”

Rico levered his aching body onto its feet as if just learning the knack of it. He put a hand on Grullo's back to steady himself. He must have been unconscious for quite a while. Someone had curried him until he gleamed in the sunshine.

They also had replaced his saddle and bridle. Rico unwound the reins from the pommel and stuck a boot into the stirrup. He tried to swing onto his horse but blacked out again. José and Antonio caught him as he pitched backward.

He awoke propped up in a sitting position and leaning against the front wall of a cave. Lieutenant Angel, Antonio, and José sat eating nearby. Angel was defending the decision to hang him.

“I recognized him, José. He led the charge out of the cattle car when we attacked the train last year. His men almost killed us. And I have seen him among the soldiers at Tres Marías.”

“He's the man who saved my daughter from Rubio.”

Angel shrugged. “I didn't know that.”

Serafina handed Rico a tortilla with a few beans rolled up in it. Rico couldn't remember his last meal. He ate it in two bites.

He started to ask for another, then looked around. He saw no sacks of corn nor beans. The men and women were thin. The children had the potbellied, bright-eyed, brittle-haired look of malnutrition.

“
Señora
King is safe in Mexico City,
Capitán,
” José said. “I spoke to her the day she left on the train.”

If Grace was in Mexico City, then Cuernavaca no longer concerned Rico. He wanted to ask José if she was well when he spoke to her. He wanted to ask if she had mentioned him.

“Where will you go now?” asked José.

“The capital.”

“Permit me to speak frankly,
Capitán.
”

Rico nodded.

“Huerta's informants are everywhere, and Rubio has posted a reward for your death. If word reaches them that you are with
Señora
Knight, they might imprison her as an accomplice.” José didn't have to add what would happen to Grace in jail.

“You're a
guacho,
an orphan like us.” Angel waved a hand at the men playing cards and napping. “Huerta has screwed all of us poor people and now he's screwing rich ones like you,
Don
Rico.”

Rico ignored him. He led Grullo upstream from where the women were bathing and washing clothes. He took a wooden box from the bottom of his saddlebag and turned Grullo loose to graze.

The box contained a pen, an ink bottle that was not quite empty, and Grace's last letter to him. He sat in the shade of an overhanging cypress. Using the box as a desk, he wrote on the reverse side of the Grace's letter. He wrote a lot, but it all came down to a simple message. He told her he loved her. He folded it and put it back into the envelope in which it had arrived.

If he was killed on the way to Mexico City, maybe this would reach her. All he had to do was live long enough to find a muleteer or charcoal seller, a
pulque
dealer or market-bound farmer to deliver it.

“Capitán Martín.”

An old mule approached with Serafina and Socorro on his back. José and Antonio walked alongside. Serafina dismounted and held out a banana leaf with a handful of salve on it.

“This is for the mark of the rope.”

“Thank you.”

Socorro gave him a bright red bandana. It had been freshly laundered and had that new-cut grass smell about it from the soap they had used. The aroma always reminded him of his Zapotec nurse.

Rico tied the bandana around his neck. It would come in handy. The red mark of a noose was a badge of honor in some places, but in others it could get him hanged all over again.

“Are you well, Socorro?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Rico had never grown a beard before. It felt like a thicket had sprouted on his face. He had developed a recent habit of rubbing its wiry nap whenever he pondered something.

He rubbed his jaw now and surveyed the mule. The beast was spindle-hipped, sway backed, and bucktoothed, but his eyes had the wily glint of a partner-in-crime. That appealed to Rico.

“José, I want to exchange Grullo for the mule.”

“We are poor people,
Capitán
. We cannot accept such a gift.”

“Then consider him a loan.”

Socorro handed Rico the mule's reins. “We call him Moses.”

Moses. A good name. A good omen.

Angel approached as if she just happened along. “You understand why we were going to hang you, don't you,
guacho,
foundling?”

“I'm the enemy.”

“Enemy no more.” Angel held out a hand and after a moment's hesitation, Rico shook it.

It was a remarkably small hand. It reminded Rico that wars were started by the old, but fought by the young. The lieutenant didn't appear to be more than seventeen.

“You look familiar. When were you at Tres Marías?”

Angel took off the wide-brimmed hat. Her hair reached almost to her shoulders. She laughed at the surprise on Rico's face.

“You sold candy on the train platform,” he said.

“Your friend Juan claimed he was crazy with love for me.”

“He spoke half the truth. He is crazy.”

Angel threw her head back and laughed.

It was such a melodic, carefree laugh that Rico wondered how he could have mistaken her for a man. As a rule, most people saw what they wanted to see, but Rico didn't like to think of himself as most people.

“I have a proposition for you.” Angel stuffed her hair back under her hat. “Come with us and we'll help you find your
Inglesa.
” She held up a hand before Rico could refuse. “Fatso's men are thick as fleas, and he's put a lot of money on your head.” She grinned. “I'm tempted to turn you in myself.”

“Answer this. Did your people blow up the troop train?”

“I blew up the train.” She pointed a finger at the tip of her own nose. “It was carrying José and a hundred other men to die of starvation and hard labor in the jungle.”

“Innocent civilians died. Women and maybe children.”

“War is war. If they rode on a troop train they were not innocent.”

Rico knew there was no effective rebuttal for that. When fat, pampered leaders bragged of victories, of villages occupied, of enemies killed or taken prisoner, they left out the most important statistic. How many young souls had been hardened by the brutality of it all? And more important, would they be able to regain their humanity when this was all over?

“I will not shoot my former comrades-in-arms,” he said.

“To hell with you then,
cabrón
.” But she kept smiling.

“If God and the Devil wish it.” Rico remembered something Grace used to say. “Heaven for the scenery. Hell for the company.”

 

The railroad had put a lot of mule drivers out of business, but not all of them. Rico heard the familiar jingle of a bell mare from around a bend in the high, narrow trail. Maybe he could persuade them to deliver the letter to Grace. He urged Moses into a faster walk.

The five mules and three drivers ambled along the windswept height as if it were a broad thoroughfare. As Rico caught up with them he heard the creak of hempen ropes and leather packs over the song and banter of the men. The muleteers wore wide-brimmed leather hats, rawhide leggings, thorn-torn serapes, and dusty sandals.

They listened to Rico's request to deliver the letter and the offer of his last two
pesos.

“Is this for a woman?” they asked.

“It is.”

“Then put away your money. We will do it in the name of love.”

Rico mounted Moses and rode on ahead of the pack train. When they had dropped back out of hearing range, Rico felt the urge to sing. He would serenade Grace with a ballad when he saw her, but what came to mind now was something totally different.

He belted out his alma mater's fight song at full volume. A choir of mountain echoes accompanied him.

“‘Ten thousand men of Harvard want victory today.'”