Last Train from Cuernavaca (4 page)

Rico sat stiff as a ramrod on the front edge of a velvet sofa in one of the three overcrowded parlors of his family's sprawling hacienda. He balanced his flat-topped, duck-brimmed officer's hat on his knees and tried not to tug at the itch under his high collar. He was here to ask a favor of his grandfather, whom everyone called
El Viejo,
The Old Man, although not in his hearing.

As
El Viejo
waved his glass of cognac around and held forth from the depths of his favorite overstuffed wingback chair, he reminded Rico of a bulldog straining at his leash. Chronic choler and an abundance of alcohol had turned his cheeks and nose red. They made a startling contrast with his unruly shock of white hair. Rico wondered if this would be the day the Old Man gave himself apoplexy and died. He felt bad that he didn't feel worse about the possibility.

The Old Man was why Rico rarely came home for visits. He wouldn't have been here now if Juan hadn't wagered a ridiculous sum of money that Rico's grandfather's big Andalusian stallion could outrun any horse put against him. Rico would have preferred to forfeit the bet rather than ask
El Viejo
for the loan of the horse, but Juan needed the money to pay off gambling debts.

Rico could have given Juan the money, but he knew from experience that was the fastest way to destroy a friendship. Rico and Juan were as different as beer and brandy. They had their disagreements, but they proved that while love may be blind, friendship closes its eyes.

Thanks to exiled president Porfirio Díaz's policies of modernizing the country,
los correctos,
the upper crust, had a mania for all things European. Rico's family was no exception. The musty smell of the horse hair stuffing in the sofas and chairs made Rico sneeze. The dusty, voluminous velvet drapes suffocated him. The hulking wardrobes, bureaus, and highboys, the curio cabinets, spindly French tables, and crystal chandeliers made him feel as though the walls were closing in on him.

His mother's collection of several hundred porcelain shepherdesses and celluloid Kewpie dolls made him uneasy. As a child he had liked to stare at the bright blue walls until the pink rosebuds and gilt scrollwork painted on them began to move. He no longer found that entertaining.

His grandfather's rantings were the worst. They were like a cylinder on one of those newfangled phonographs, playing the same song over and over. Maybe it was inspiration, maybe it was a hallucination of the sort a bad headache can cause, but suddenly the Old Man's voice became no more noticeable than background noise.

Phonograph. In his trancelike state, Rico thought of a way to get
la Inglesa
's attention. On his next assignment in the capital he would buy one of those newfangled phonographs for the Colonial. He imagined dancing with Grace Knight to the music. He even knew what music he would bring.

He almost smiled, but stopped himself in time. A smile would have alerted
El Viejo
to the fact that his grandson wasn't listening.

The Old Man finished his praise of Porfirio Díaz and launched into his favorite subject—the ingratitude of
los indios brutos
in general and the most brutish of all the Indians, Emiliano Zapata.

“He demands that we
hacendados
pay him a tax to support his mob of bandits. And if we don't, the dirty thieves will destroy our sugarcane crops and burn our estates. It's extortion. They should all be hanged from a thorn tree while buzzards eat their eyes and entrails.” His anger propelled him out of the chair and set him to pacing. “General Huerta is right. Zapata and his rabble must be crushed like lice, and Rubio is the man for the job.”

Rico had heard the same crush-them-like-lice speech from Rubio himself the night he met
la Inglesa.
He didn't bother to point out that Rubio would have a hard time persuading his men to turn on their own people. That would have made his grandfather angrier. Not making
El Viejo
angry was essential if Rico was to race the stallion. He had to get the horse or the afternoon would be a total waste of time, dignity, and forebearance.

Rico had heard his grandfather's oration often enough to know that he was coming to the personal part of it.

“When will you find a woman to marry, Rico? When will you produce offspring?”

“I am looking for the right woman, Grandfather.”

“I know several young women who would marry you.”

“Don't you mean you know several women who would marry me to get your money?”

“Don't be insolent. By the time you finish with your gambling and whoring there won't be any money left.”

Rico knew he only had to sit through an assessment of his lack of ambition, and then he and the horse could leave.

“Thanks be to God that you did not continue that ridiculous pursuit of a career in medicine. Otherwise, you would be smearing salve over the rash on some peasant's buttocks and receiving chickens in payment. You should light a candle in gratitude that a word from your father into the ear of General Huerta obtained the position of Rubio's aide. You will be able to make important connections with influential people in the Capital.”

The Old Man confirmed Rico's suspicions. His family was at the bottom of his promotion. Merit had nothing to do with it.

“How many years are left in your enlistment?”

“Two, sir.”

“When your time is up you will take a law degree. Law and government service are where the power and prestige lie.”

And the bribes, Rico thought. In Mexico, justice was a commodity to be bought and sold like any other.

Rico could have recited what his grandfather would say next. He had to concentrate on not letting his lips form the words silently. That too would have propelled the Old Man to a higher level of righteous outrage.

“With your army connections you can get a good job,”
El Viejo
went on. “You're white enough to be elected president one day.”

Rico coughed to keep from laughing. Laughing would never do.

 

When Rico finally stalked toward the front door he felt as though he were breaking out of prison. Or an insane asylum. He was too familiar with the ancient, elegant magnificence of his family's home to be awed by it. Cortés had built it as one of many sugar plantations, or rather his thousands of
indio
slaves had. What ever one might say about Hernán Cortés, the man thought large.

The archways of the first floor corridors reached sixteen feet tall. The second and third floors had twelve-foot ceilings. Four hundred and eighty years of rain and wind had given the rough stucco walls the look of an Impressionist work of art. The goldfish in the fountains had grown to the size of Rico's forearms. The sinuous vines embracing the walls had had time to approximate saplings. Always the hacienda's background music was the grinding and clanking of the machinery in the sugar refinery behind the house.

Rico was headed for the stable when he encountered something that jolted him from his grandfather-induced brown study. Six men lounged under a huge
tabachine
tree. When they saw him they leaped up. They wore khaki uniforms with high, stiff collars. They hustled to form a line, as if preparing for inspection.

They looked somewhat like
indios,
with spiky black hair. They had the
indios
' golden brown skin and almond-shaped eyes, but they certainly weren't
indios
. They bowed. They bowed again. They were still bowing when Rico entered the redolent warmth of the stable. He waited a few heartbeats, then peeked out. They stood at attention as if waiting for his return.

The stableman was brushing the stallion, although his silver-gray coat already gleamed. Because of his color the Old Man had named him
Grullo,
Crane. Rico's grandfather claimed he was a descendant of the Andalusians ridden by Cortés and his men. If a creature existed more beautiful than this original Spanish bloodline, Rico had yet to see it. Even the stallions of the breed were less high-strung and more manageable. Rico could not look at Grullo and stay angry.

“Good afternoon,
Don
Federico.”

“Good afternoon, Pablo.” Rico did not want to ask information from the help, but his curiosity got the better of him. “Who are those men?”

“Japanese.” Pablo had worked for the Martín family all his life. He knew that answer wasn't good enough. He also knew the young
patron
would be too proud to ask for an explanation, so he provided it. “Your grandfather hired them to protect the hacienda. They finished fighting the Russians a few years ago. Their commander is some Frenchman.”

“The Russo-Japanese War.” Rico knew about that. The world had gasped in astonishment when the diminutive Japanese warriors whipped the Russians, Cossack cavalry and all. “It ended seven years ago, in 1905.”

Pablo grinned. “I suppose they missed fighting. So here they are.”

“Please saddle Grullo. He's going with me.”

Japanese? Rico had never studied that language. How could he have been so negligent? He had a lot of questions he would like to ask them.

 

The racetrack was laid out on the level ground behind the enlisted men's barracks near Cuernavaca's train station. Not until Rico rode the gray there did he discover how Rubio intended to make good on his promise to crush the local peasantry like lice.

New conscripts were being herded off cattle cars. They had on the same ragged clothes they'd been wearing when they were rounded up. Most of them were barefoot.

Juan's face lit up when he saw the stallion, but the horse race no longer mattered to Rico.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“Pochos.”
The word meant northerners, more specifically Yaqui Indians. It was not a compliment. “This is the second load of them in the past three days.”

Rico shouldn't have been surprised that Rubio would bring in outsiders to do his brutal bidding. Madero's high-minded revolution had become a snake eating its own tail. Peace might be boring, but this was not the sort of warfare Rico had signed up for.

The cave ended fifteen feet or so from the entrance, but Angela had a terror of being trapped in it. Lying on her side, curled up against the chill night air with the men sleeping around her, she imagined soldiers sneaking up and firing into it. When she did fall asleep she dreamed of trying to escape a hail of lead ricocheting off the cave's walls and low ceiling. She was relieved to see the early morning sunlight shining on her feet.

The gravel road from the Sanchez family's hacienda to the village of San Miguel was only five miles long, but Angela and her men could not travel it. They followed the paths made by burros and pack mules to reach tiny hamlets scattered through the foothills. The trails snaked down into deep canyons and out again. The main road wasn't laid out as straight as a
caracara
bird would fly, but Angela and Antonio's route stretched three times longer.

Angela had never used these paths, once trod by bare Aztec feet, but Antonio had. He had worked for a year as a muleteer, hauling a little bit of everything from one isolated mountain village to another.

Patrols of federal soldiers used the main road and so did the hated local police force called the
rurales.
The back trails through the thick growth of trees and bushes had their own peril, however. That was why Angela and the others had tied pepper tree branches to their saddles. The plumelike leaves of the pepper tree were the most effective for sweeping away
los aires,
the winds.

The Aztecs called the winds
yeyecatl.
They were tiny deities older, Angela liked to say, than the hated President Porfirio Díaz himself. They lived in caves and were likely to be found in wells and near water. They had brought rain to the Aztecs, but if offended they caused all sorts of trouble. Sicknesses brought on by evil winds included chills, rheumatism, paralysis, gout, and open sores. Whether they induced impotence or not became the subject of murmured discussion among the men as they rode behind Angela and Antonio.

Their route passed through tiny villages far from the main road. In each collection of ramshackle houses Angela asked if anyone had seen her mother. The answer was always “no.” But the villagers greeted them like heroes in the dusty little plazas. A few barefoot youths in frayed white trousers and shirts insisted on joining them. Angela wasn't happy to take on responsibility for more souls, but at least they brought their own mules and weapons, machetes mostly.

As the little band left each village, the inhabitants called down blessings on them. Angela couldn't have said when last she had cried, but as she rode through the shower of goodwill, tears welled up. She didn't much like crying. The tears stung as though she had rubbed jalapeño juice in her eyes.

The only blessings she had ever received were the pious mumblings and tawdry groping of the local village priest. And that was before he absconded with the pittance in the poor box. The children had called him
camopotonilitzli,
bad breath. No one had come to replace him.

The Sanchezes' old field foreman, Arquímedes, had tried to bestow a blessing on her once. She had waved away the gesture and spit to one side to avert the evil eye. Now she knew, as deep as the salty marrow in her bones, that she needed all the help, divine or otherwise, she could recruit.

A river tumbled in a series of cascades through a small canyon near the last village. When Antonio told the men about it they spurred their mounts in a race for it. They pretended not to hear Angela call them back, and she galloped her mare ahead to cut them off. Two of the reasons they accepted her as their leader was that she had the fastest mount and the finest rifle.

“
¡Pendejos!
Idiots!” She stood in her stirrups so those in the rear could see her. “Are you muleteers rushing to the river before others muddy the water? No! You are soldiers in General Emiliano Zapata's Army of Liberation. You are the wolves for whose heads the
hacendados,
the rich landowners, offer a bounty.” She paused for effect and got it. The men were hushed and attentive. They had been called a lot of things in their lives, but never soldiers. And certainly never wolves.

“Do you have lumps of clay between your ears? If I were setting an ambush I would choose a river.”

Angela had never been known for her forethought. She couldn't have said why she knew to tell them this. More than that, she was astonished that they listened to her. With the exception of Arquímedes, no one had ever listened to her before.

Angela was even more surprised to discover she had been right. From an outcrop the men looked down at a patrol composed of at least two companies of
federales,
each led by a captain. The sun glinted on the brass bars on their shoulders. She knew these weren't the men who had attacked her home. Thanks to her father, she knew about equine blood-lines. She would have recognized the beautiful gray Andalusian now drinking at the river.

That these were different government soldiers didn't matter. They were
el gobierno,
the government. Before she could decide what orders to give her own men, they charged. Those without mounts raced downhill on foot. Those with guns used them.

All Angela could do was gallop after them. As she rode, she shouted Zapata's slogan, “Land and liberty,” although her family owned land, and she had enjoyed liberty all her life. One of her men, whose father's dead body had been kicked into the irrigation ditch, felt less idealistic.

“For my father, you feces of the devil!”

In the excitement, most of the men's shots went wild. Some of the rusty, ancient weapons refused to fire at all. The blue-jacketed soldiers took orderly cover and their return fire was more accurate. As lead pinged on rocks all around, Angela's band scattered for what ever shelter they could find.

Angela and Antonio crouched behind a large boulder. With her mare's reins clutched in one hand and her father's Winchester in the other, she made her first battlefield assessment. Taking the army-issue Mauser rifles from the
federales
' lifeless fingers and distributing them to her men would give her great pleasure. She even had a brief image of herself mounted on the big crane-colored stallion.

On the other hand, the soldiers outnumbered her band two to one and her men had little ammunition, which was just as well. They were terrible shots and were as likely to hit each other as
el gobierno
. Besides all that, Angela was scared.

Antonio didn't know she was scared, but he agreed with her about the other points. The two of them ran at a crouch from man to man.

“Scatter into the underbrush,” they said. “We will meet under the big waterfall downstream from San Miguel.”

 

As the attackers fled up the slope away from the river, Rico saw flashes of the white cotton shirts, trousers, and big straw hats, that all peasants wore. He could also tell there weren't many of them. He was content to let them go, but he knew Juan would feel differently. Anytime someone shot at Juan he took it personally.

“Don't lower yourself by chasing farmers.”

“They tried to kill us.” Juan vaulted onto his horse and raised his rifle to signal his men to follow him.

“They're armed with a few machetes and some rust that's shaped like rifles. Let them go.”

Before Rico finished the sentence Juan had galloped off in pursuit with his company behind him. Rico mounted and led his men after them. When they all arrived at the end of a blind canyon with no quarry in sight, common sense prevailed. Keeping an eye out for the glint of a gun barrel in the rocks above them, they headed across country toward the main road.

As far as Rico and Juan were concerned, the cavalry was the only army unit to belong to, but Juan never looked at ease in the saddle. He was a city boy who had had almost no contact with the peasants in the countryside. Until two years ago he had rarely left Cuernavaca and had seemed intent on making a career of attending college and flirting with women on the plaza every evening.

His family belonged to the middle class that constituted ninety percent of Mexico's bloated bureaucracy. Like most lawyers, teachers, and intellectuals in the provinces, Juan saw little hope of advancement under Díaz's regime. He and his friends were eager for a change in their own lives, and Francisco Madero promised it. As a bonus, he had discovered the allure an army uniform held for women. He gave little thought to the exploited mine workers in Cananea or the impoverished farmers of Morelos.

“What do the
indios
want?” he asked.

“They want their land back.”

“President Madero has said they can settle their claims in court.”

Rico didn't bother to answer that. Everyone knew the judicial system was still packed with Díaz's appointees, all of whom were either big landowners or their friends. The two rode in silence for a while.

This inept little attack by a gaggle of farmers had convinced Rico that General Huerta was right about one thing. They had to stop Zapata. If he managed to restart the revolution the country would descend into chaos.

Uneducated idealists like Zapata could fight and they could rally followers, but they couldn't govern. Governing depended on intellect and compromise. Rico knew Zapata was angry that Madero had passed him over as governor of the state of Morelos. He hoped the president would come to his senses and give him something equally important to do. He owed him that much. Zapata had won the war for him in this state, and in spite of the current unrest, he was probably the only leader truly loyal to the president.

The closer they came to Cuernavaca the faster the pace Rico set. Juan noticed it.

“
La Inglesa
has put a spell on you.”

“She has not.”

“Then she has paid someone to put a spell on you. I know a curer who can blow a counterspell into your ear and clean you of it.”

“You're an educated man, my friend. How can you believe such nonsense?”

“Books don't contain all the knowledge that exists. There remain some mysteries that scholars cannot explain.”

Rico let it rest. He knew better than to try to talk anyone out of their superstitions. Even the sensible Mrs. Knight held séances in a corner of the ballroom from time to time. Although Rico was pretty sure Grace staged the table-tapping sessions only for the amusment of the hotel guests.

Rico had never retreated from anything in his life, except his grandfather and, as a child, his nurse. Now that he'd verified the futility of a frontal assault on Grace Knight, he preferred to think of his next strategy as a flanking movement rather than a retreat. Until he could obtain leave and take the train to the capital to order his secret weapon, the phonograph, he would play a cool hand where she was concerned.

In the meantime, he would make it his duty, his mission, his passion to create diversions that would keep Grace Knight from finding out how bad things were in the mountains and valley surrounding Cuernavaca.

He decided to start with a
burrada.
If that didn't distract her and melt her English reserve, nothing could. He smiled at the thought.