Last Train from Cuernavaca (31 page)

Artillery speaks its own language and a soldier quickly learns it. Angel had heard the cries of wounded men and the agonies of dying horses. She was familiar with the pop-pop-pop of rifles and the bone-vibrating pulse of machine guns.

She knew the crack of breaking bones and the sucking sound an abdomen made when sliced open by a machete. She was used to the keening of widows and orphans, and to the abrupt racket of grenades followed by the sigh of falling sand and the rattle of airborne rocks and debris. The only noise that could unnerve her was the screech of an artillery shell headed straight at her.

A shell posted to her most current address had a different volume and pitch than one destined to land on one side of her or the other. By the sound, Angel could gauge how far and in which direction she had to run to avoid it.

As this one whistled toward her she waved her men to scatter and spurred her horse toward a boulder. She leaned along the mare's neck and pulled her serape over her own head and the horse's. The mare flinched as the shell exploded, and Angel murmured in her ear to calm her.

When the blanket had absorbed the thump of the last falling rock, Angel spurred the mare into the open and surveyed the rock-strewn landscape for signs of her command.

“Vengan, muchachos,”
she shouted. “Come out, boys.”

Plinio rode toward her, but the others must have had their doubts. She could see the straw-colored peaks of sombreros here and there among the rocks and trees and the occasional horse's rump, but no one left what ever cover they had found.

“The boys are not used to artillery.” Plinio had a wry way with the obvious.

“Soon those guns will be ours.”

Angel looked back toward the distant roofs of Berta's village. It had become Zapata's headquarters for this assault on
el gobierno
's barracks at Tres Marías, and the sixty pack mules of the government's supply train milled about in a corral there. Their escort of federal soldiers had handed them over to Zapata and reined their own mounts in among his men. At least half of the mules had carried ammunition.

“The
federales
must be almost out of bullets,” Angel said.

Plinio shrugged. “Almost out of bullets is not the same as out of bullets.”

Angel cupped her hands around her mouth.
“El gobierno no tiene bolas,”
she shouted. “The government has no balls.”

Laughter bounced among the rocks as the rebel troop emerged, their horses' hoofs clattering on the stony ground. Once her company had assembled Angel looked for Antonio. Her own men's welfare came first, but she did not feel at ease unless she knew where he was.

Another lieutenant had been killed this morning and Antonio had accepted command of his company. Now he rode along the rim of the deep ravine that separated him from her, but no matter. He and Angel shared the rare gift of being together in spirit even when they were apart.

A wave would be seen by their men as a signal to charge, so Antonio touched the brim of his hat with two fingers. Angel returned the salute. She braced the staff of her company's guidon on her thigh, held the reins lightly in her other hand, and waited for her men to assemble behind her.

The rattle of their spurs and rifles and the creak of their saddles as they shifted their weight for the charge were music to her. When she raised the flag the wind caught it. Fluttering and snapping, it came alive like a horse eager to start a race he knew he could win. She turned to stare at Zapata sitting astride his white horse on a rise overlooking the mountainous terrain.

His arm swept forward in the signal to charge. Angel raised the flag as high as her arm would reach.

“Adelante, mis guachos,”
she shouted. “Forward, my orphans.”

With a cry of “Land and liberty,” she spurred the mare into a gallop. All she heard was the thunder of hooves and her own voice, but she knew her men were shouting, too. The charge became a series of skirmishes. Angel fired as she rode, chasing the
federales
through thorny underbrush, into canyons, and among rock falls.

The thrill of it intoxicated her. By mid afternoon the government soldiers had fled helter-skelter toward Cuernavaca. Coated with dust, bleeding from cuts and scratches, soaked in sweat, and grinning, Angel rounded up as many of her men as she could find. Together they rode back to Tres Marías. The barracks, the train station, and the village were theirs.

She watered and rubbed down her mare and tethered her in a patch of grass. Then she went to the makeshift hospital under a canvas awning. She found all three of her missing men there, and after she made sure that their wounds weren't serious, she sauntered to the camp to compare stories with Antonio.

She didn't find him. She didn't find him in the thatched shelter that served as a kitchen, or in the market near the train station. He wasn't tending to the horses. He wasn't at the periphery of the officers in conference with General Zapata. By late afternoon all of Antonio's men had returned and no one had seen him. When his horse walked in, reins dragging, Angel tried not to panic.

She stuffed bandages into her knapsack and filled one canteen with water and another with tequila. She found José and the two of them separated so they could cover more area in the search for him. She rode slowly over the broken ground, calling his name.

She saw plenty of corpses. Almost all of them wore government uniforms, but her breath caught in her throat anyway until she made sure none of them was Antonio. She hadn't time for prayers, but she made the sign of the cross over each one, barely slowing her mare before moving on.

She cursed the sun as it slid closer to the western peaks, gathering its light to take with it. She cursed herself for not having thought to bring a torch. By the time the rocks loomed like ghosts in the deepening twilight, she had strayed several miles from Tres Marías. Every hundred yards or so she reined the mare to a stop, cupped her hands around her mouth, and called Antonio's name

When his reply came, Angel thought it might be a bird or animal. She froze, listening as if her own life depended on it. The cry came again and this time she recognized the voice.

“Mierda.”

She laughed.
“¿'Tonio, donde estás?”

All she heard was,
“Malditos perros.”
Damned dogs. And she barely heard that.

She walked to the edge of the ravine and saw him lying half covered by rocks at the bottom. A fallen boulder stopped just short of crushing him, but it had wedged over his chest, making movement impossible. A pack of gaunt dogs with a lot of wolf in them were eyeing him from about ten yards away. Angel pitched rocks at them, but that didn't impress them. They continued staring at Antonio.

Angel wished she could lob a grenade in among them, but that might have harmed Antonio. Besides, she had used her last grenade to blow up a machine gun emplacement. Firing her last two rounds finally convinced the dogs to leave the larder.

She shouted for José, then walked along the rim until she found a slope gradual enough for her mare. The two of them slid down it in a riot of gravel and dust. Climbing back up would be difficult, but as Antonio often observed about her, she would blow up that bridge when she came to it.

Rocks covered Antonio's legs. He must have dislodged them when he fell off his horse and slid down the side of the ravine. Blood from a gash on his temple ran down his cheek and soaked his collar. His face was ashen, probably from loss of blood, but he managed to wink at her.

Angel wanted to sob with relief. Instead, she put her hands on her hips and shook her head as though the sad state of his uniform had failed an inspection. The disappointed wolves-in-dogs'-clothing howled not far away.

“Now you have a new nickname, Ugly.”

“What, Brat?” His voice was barely a whisper.

“Dog Food.”

She started pulling off the rocks and pitching them. Most of them weren't much bigger than a loaf of bread, but they made quite a heap. Another hour or two and they would have been his cairn. If Angel hadn't found him before nightfall he would not have lived to see the sun rise.

José appeared at the rim of the ravine. “I wondered who was making so much racket.”

He helped Angel roll the boulder off Antonio and down a slight slope. It scattered the dogs who went off in search of easier pickings. They would find plenty to eat today.

Angel allowed herself a few tears as she poured tequila on the gash on his face. It was a deep one that just missed his eye. She bound it with strips of cloth from the bottom of some
soldadera
's skirt, and then helped José clear away the last of the rocks.

José probed along his son's legs and feet. “I think the ankle is broken.”

Angel sat behind Antonio and pulled him into a half-sitting position so his back rested against her chest. She gave him a long drink of tequila from the canteen, then took one herself before pushing the cork back into it. She put her arms around him, laid her cheek against his, and held him while José pulled on his foot to straighten the ankle bone.

She kept holding him while José cut a branch from a pine tree, shaved it flat with his machete, divided it in two, and shaped it into splints. Angel folded rags to cushion the leg and José bound the splints tightly in place. They helped him stand and mount the mare.

Angel had plenty of time to think in the corpse-strewn darkness as she led the mare back to camp with Antonio lying along the horse's neck. She thought about how panicked she had been when he didn't return today. She felt the icy wind that commenced howling around her heart every time she imagined burying his lifeless body. She tried not to think about how unbearable life would be without him.

At the army's sprawling encampment at Tres Marías she wrapped her serape around her and sat by his mat while he tossed and moaned in his sleep. She murmured reassurances and covered him when his blanket slipped off. She gave him sips of water when he woke up. She laid wet cloths on his forehead to ease his fever. She dozed a little, but most of the night she stared into his face, pale in the moonlight.

The sun had been up an hour when Antonio awoke. Only after he attempted a smile and asked for breakfast would Angel believe the exhausted
medico
when he said Antonio would survive. She shared her tortillas, beans, and roast pork with him.

“You look like you'll live, Ugly.”

“I'm ready to ride.”

“That's good, because General Zapata says we'll be galloping into Cuernavaca soon.”

Leobardo rolled his belongings into his canvas hammock and tied it onto his back with one of his wife's shawls. He opened the back gate, his last official act as the Colonial's doorman. Socrates stood ready to close the gate behind him and the last two chambermaids.

Leobardo held his sombrero against his chest and waited for the weeping maids to make their farewells to Grace, Lyda, Annie, and the Colonial.

The maids had their own name for the hotel. “May God take care of you,
Mamacita,
and the Big House, too.”

“You know you are welcome to stay here at the Big House,” said Grace.

The maids looked at Leobardo, but he shook his head. Grace only recently had learned they were his nieces.

“We have relatives in a village held by the
Zapatistas,
” he said. “We can find food there.”

Socrates muttered too low for Leobardo or the maids to hear, “The Zapatistas are starving, too.”

Grace was grateful to be relieved of responsibility for three people, but she was sad to see them go. Leobardo's stories of misadventures with witches amused her. And she would miss the maid's laughter and the patter of their bare feet running on the tile floors.

She couldn't bear to watch them walk off down the narrow side street in a forlorn little procession. Lyda waved good-bye to them, but Grace headed inside. Lyda called her back.

“Gracie, looks like the Hoffmans have decided to vamoose.”

Grace and Lyda watched the landau carriage stop at the gate. Three wagons pulled up in a line behind it. Each wagon held a mountain of canvas-covered possessions. Herr Gustav Hoffman's brewery workers perched on narrow board benches along the sides. They carried rifles instead of the usual big wooden stir paddles.

With his incorrigible yellow hair and rosy cheeks and nose, Herr Hoffman looked like Bacchus in green suspenders and short leather breeches. He wrapped the reins around the brake lever and stepped down from the carriage to supervise the unloading. His men stowed their machetes, slid their rifles around to their backs, and jumped down. They unlashed the tarpaulins and lowered the wagons' tailgates. They put planks in place and trundled three oak barrels down the ramps.

After they rolled the beer into a shed in the back courtyard, they carried in a dozen sacks of grain. Grace wasn't sure how useful the beer would be, but she almost wept with relief at the gift of grain. She had faced the necessity of selling Duke and the mule or watching them starve.

“This is very generous of you, Herr Hoffman.”

“My dear lady, better you and your people enjoy my beer than it vanish into the mouths of rabble.”

“We cannot begin to thank you.”

“I do not want to boast, Mrs. Knight, but this is
bock
beer.”

While his wife signaled impatiently to him from the carriage, the imperturbable brewer made sure Grace understood what she was getting.

“In Germany we call bock beer ‘liquid bread.' In old times, the monks they brew this beer to…” he searched for the words in English “…to bear them up while fasting.”

“We surely are fasting,” said Grace.

“Bread in a bottle must've made piety more palatable for the
padres,
” added Lyda.

“This beer, he is good with food, too, like roasted beef,
yah.
Is good even with Mexican food.”

Frau Hoffman gave up trying to hurry her husband along and stood up in the carriage. Herr Hoffman translated her invitation.

“They say the road to Acapulco is safe, Mrs. Knight. Better you all come with.”

“We thank you for the kind offer, but we have seen bad times before. This storm will pass.” Grace turned to Lyda. “You and Annie should go with them though.”

“Jake said he would come back for us. We'll wait for him.”

Lyda put an arm around Grace in a show of solidarity, but as the two of them waved good-bye to the Hoffmans, she muttered, “Roast beef. I've forgotten what that tastes like.”

“Now, Lyda, he said it's also good with Mexican food.”

“When he said Mexican food, I doubt he meant bananas.”

The Colonial's larder held perhaps two weeks' supply of dried beans and rice if the five of them shared a very small portion for one meal a day. They supplemented that with bananas from the trees in the two courtyards. María served the bananas fried, boiled, grilled, poached, baked, roasted, stewed and a few other ways Grace couldn't identify.

The evening the Hoffmans left, Annie ventured across the street to hear the nightly concert in the zócalo. She returned in tears at the misery she saw there. After that neither Annie, Grace, nor Lyda went outside the Colonial's front gate unless necessary.

They could not bear to watch people search trash heaps for anything edible or dig weeds in the plazas to make into broth. In the days that followed, starving Cuernavacans stripped the fruit trees bare. Litter on the street consisted mostly of sugarcane stalks chewed into fringe. Finally, even the nightly concerts ceased.

Keeping bodies alive in a famine was one thing. Keeping spirits up was another. Herr Hoffman's liquid bread helped Grace do both. It even earned a little income.

With few choices for evening entertainment,
los correctos
and the remaining foreigner residents gravitated to the Colonial to drink Herr Hoffman's beer and the Colonial's wine, and play cards. Annie cranked up the phonograph for those who wanted to dance in the ballroom. When Annie's arm grew tired, Grace played the piano.

The explosion came during a chorus of “Jarabe Tapátio.” The shock wave vibrated the piano stool. The lights rattled in their sockets, flickered, and died. Everyone froze, waiting to see if they would come back on. They didn't.

Grace lit candles and showed the guests out. On her way back she heard Annie and Lyda call from upstairs. She joined them on the second-floor balcony. Flames from the electrical plant on the outskirts of town danced above the rooftops. They made Grace uneasy, but the plant had come under attack before when Madero's rebel forces prevailed against Díaz's army in 1910.

The glow in the nighttime sky in the mountains to the north was a different matter. The fire must be an inferno to reflect so much light off the underside of the cloud cover. Then the distant rumble of cannon fire reached them.

“Do you think the rebels have taken Tres Marías?” asked Lyda.

“Dear God, I hope not.”

Annie hung out over the rail, fascinated by the show. The girl was amiable and polite, yet Grace could imagine her riding off with Angel's band of rebels. She had a tough core, a quick intellect, and a bold spirit. She was also lovely to look at and almost fourteen years old. A chill went through Grace at the thought of what could happen to her if war entered Cuernavaca.

The nightly rain drove them back inside. No one wanted to be trapped on the second floor should a mob storm the hotel, so Lyda, Annie, and María went to bed in the rooms opening off the rear courtyard. Duke and the mule shared another room there, and Socrates took up sentry duty at the back gate.

As she did every night, Grace sat in the big leather chair under one of the arches along the open corridor. It gave her a view of the rain splattering on the paving stones of the front courtyard, the covered entryway, and the main gate. She held the big hotel guest book on her lap and leaned the loaded shotgun against the tiled column.

She kept the shotgun close at hand these days. María had told her about the rumor in town. People claimed that the Englishwoman stored tens of thousands of
pesos
in a chest under her bed. María said that lately,
Mamacita
's treasure had grown in the collective imagination to millions of
pesos.
Why else, people asked each other, would a foreign woman stay here unless her treasure was too heavy to move?

She turned up the wick in the oil lamp and opened the leather-bound guest book. Each signature summoned up a face and a personality, but Grace's favorite entry was the first one, written by Lyda. Lyda had come bursting through the doors as soon as Grace pushed them open. She had spied the book on the front desk and had written in Spanish, “May you have love, health, money, and time to enjoy them.”

Grace came to the end of the guests' remarks and turned one more page, though she couldn't have said why. She drew a sharp breath at the bold script. She could picture Rico writing it with his left hand curled over the top of the page. He said he learned to write that way so his teachers wouldn't punish him when his letters slanted in the opposite direction from the other children's.

“I will find you, if not on earth then in heaven.” He had written it in English and in Spanish, but why? Did he think she was dead? Did he think he would die before he saw her again?

It was dated May 29. Grace guessed he had made the entry in the book after he escaped from jail. Socrates said Rico had sneaked into the stable at dawn and exchanged an old swaybacked farm horse for his grandfather's gray Andalusian. He said when General Fatso discovered the switch he had gone into the worst rage any of them had ever seen.

Grace smiled. Even under a death sentence, Rico would play his pranks. She fell asleep with her hand resting on his words.

The clock in the lobby had just chimed two when the sound of rifle fire and running footsteps jerked Grace awake. With heart pounding, she put the book on the floor. She grabbed the shotgun, thumbed the hammer back, and leveled it at the front gate.

“Death to the Spaniards,” someone shouted. Then he passed on by, his footsteps fading in the distance.

Grace lowered the hammer to half-cock and leaned the gun against the pillar. Lyda arrived, yawning, and Grace moved over to make room for her and her derringer. She opened the guest book to the last page and turned up the wick on the oil lamp so Lyda could read it.

“What did he mean, he'll find me in heaven?” Grace started to cry. “Do you think he's dead?”

“No, Gracie. He's not dead. I'm sure of it.”

“And neither is Jake.” Grace pushed the corn-tassel-blond hair back from Lyda's face and kissed her on the foreheard. “He'll find a way to return to you and Annie. He'll make sure no harm comes to either of you.”

With their arms around each other the two of them cried each other to sleep while the sky wept, too.

 

The sun had been up an hour and already the buzz of flies from the zócalo sounded like a distant sawmill at peak operation. The wounded soldiers lying in ranks around the bandstand were not suffering in silence. They cried for their mothers and pleaded for water.

The larger plaza just to the south filled up, too, as more soldiers and civilians streamed into the city. The able-bodied had carried their wounded comrades twenty mountainous miles from Tres Marías. They slept, exhausted, in the midst of scattered equipment, swarms of flies, and the perpetual screaming.

The
soldaderas
did their best to wave away the flies, staunch the bleeding, and bind up the broken bones. They had torn so many ban d-ages from the bottoms of their skirts that they were close to half naked. When Grace gave them the bundles of strips ripped from the Colonial's bedsheets, they murmured thanks.

Grace and Lyda walked up and down the lines with their buckets. They lifted each man's head and held a gourd of water to his lips. Annie had a bucket, too, but she had filled it with beer. “The men might be hungry as well as thirsty,” she said. “And Herr Hoffman said his beer was good for body and soul.”

“¡Mamacita!”

Grace hung the curved handle of the gourd on the rim of the bucket and stood up. “Colonel Rodriguez! What happened?”

“The
Zapatistas
outnumbered us four to one. They have our artillery now. They have the weapons and supplies that were meant for us.”

“The rebels stole them?”

Rodriguez avoided her eyes. “The supply train's escort deserted. And some officers have gone over to the rebels and taken their men with them.”

Only a week ago the colonel had come to the Colonial to tell Grace not to worry. His men would protect the city. Now here he stood with his arm in a sling. His head was bound by a bloody strip of flowered calico that probably has served as a ruffle in its previous life.

Before he went back to the task of moving the wounded to the old monastery, he said, “We will make a stand here in the city. We will not desert you.”

Lyda put an arm around Grace's waist and asked the question her friend could not. “Do you know where Captain Martín is?”

“Dead.” The colonel studied the ground. “The rebels hanged him.”

Grace heard the words, but her brain declined to process them.

“The rebels?” Lyda asked. “Not General Rubio?”

“They say Lieutenant Angel's mob did it.”

Grace screamed and swayed. Annie came running and she and Lyda supported her to keep her from falling.

“Lo siento, Mamacita,”
Rodriguez said. “I'm sorry.
Lo siento.
”

He kept saying it as Lyda and Annie led Grace across the street and through the Colonial's front gates. They sat her in the big leather-upholstered chair. Lyda gave her several handkerchiefs, but they lay unnoticed in Grace's lap. María brought her a rare treat, a bowl of chicken-foot broth, with the foot still floating in it. Annie tried to coax her to drink some water. Grace shook her head. She sat, silent and dry-eyed, the rest of the afternoon.

As dusk gathered, Lyda laid out straw mats and blankets in the corridor near Grace's chair. Before she and Annie lay down to sleep, Lyda sneaked the shotgun and pistol away from Grace. She figured if her friend could make it through the night alive, there was hope for tomorrow.