Saffire (23 page)

Harry gave me a long examining look. “So you're asking questions for Goethals, but you didn't get protection from Goethals. What exactly is going on?”

“Harry,” I said, “I sure wish I knew.”

I
n midafternoon sun, I stared at a stretch of lonely train track near Pedro Miguel, parallel to the construction of a single set of locks on the Pacific side of the canal, not nearly as massive as those in Gatún. Here, much of the lock work had been completed, and I was alone except for two small Panamanian boys a hundred yards down the track whose job it was to throw the switch for the occasional locomotive.

I was here out of curiosity, alone in person but not alone in wondering what manifestation had come from the sky to knock down assorted laborers over the last few weeks. Twice already, I'd heard Goethals and Miskimon refer to the troubling matter of men who had been found unconscious here. I'd heard the same thing once from Harry Franck.

The stories from Miskimon and Harry matched in details and peculiarity. It was a spot along the line where men walking the track from a job site back to their camps—those paid in silver, because gold men were either given coupons or had extra money to spend on train fare—would be found in comatose states, needing a day or two in a hospital in Ancón or Colón before waking up with no memory of what had knocked them down.

The switch boys were the only possible witnesses to what was happening and could offer no guesses. They were the ones who would watch a laborer walk past them and, shortly after, see him in convulsions along the tracks.

I tilted my hat downward to shade my eyes as I looked up and down the straight tracks. Nothing out of the ordinary. As I stood there, staring at the tracks, other images overpowered my determination to ignore them. I saw a different set of straight tracks, equally ordinary, except for a train collision just after three in the morning on October 29, 1901. The site of the Buffalo Bill accident, where over a hundred horses had been killed or put down.

I'd been asleep, snuggled against my wife in a passenger compartment.

Fifteen hours before the head-on collision between two locomotives, in a restaurant in downtown Charlotte, she had interrupted my dining experience with a southern belle interested in transient cowboys and delivered the single punch that broke my nose.

Thirteen hours earlier, we'd stood in front of a justice of the peace and exchanged wedding vows in a civil ceremony.

Ten hours earlier, she'd shyly announced that she was three months pregnant with our child.

My life to that point had been such an ugly tangled web of youthful callousness that in the years since Winona was born, I had spent many hours of contemplation and regret, alone in the gullies of the Little Missouri, thinking about the woman who broke my nose. During our time over the years as employees of Buffalo Bill, she had loved me with a loyalty as beautiful and eternal as the open plains where she had been born. A loyalty that compelled her to purchase for one of my birthdays the Girard-Perregaux watch on my wrist and engrave her name and mine on the back. And I had wasted those years by not loving her in return.

I had never been unfaithful to her, because I had never pledged faithfulness to her. Indeed, she was younger than I, and for the first years in the show, she was a teenager with minor roles in the arena. I found her adoration as amusing as it was irritating. She well knew that I led an adventurous life, in various cities and countries, with women who enjoyed the illusion of a romantic evening with a cowboy. But she held fast to the belief that one day I would come to my senses and understand that she and I were destined for each other.

Then came a single moment when the two of us were alone, watering horses to be led onto a train, when I realized she was no longer a child. In that moment of clarity, I understood the beauty of her love and devotion to me. Even then, however, I did not pledge faithfulness. However, in the weeks that followed, I reciprocated her fierce loyalty, content in a peacefulness I had never understood before, happy that temptations placed before me were not tempting in the slightest. Oh, if only I had told her that instead of guarding my feelings out of fear that if I uttered my love, I risked losing it.

The southern belle across the table from me in Charlotte was a newspaper reporter asking questions about the show. The occasion had been innocent, but she had a habit of reaching out and touching my arm as she laughed at my stories, and I understand why it might not have appeared innocent from the window at the street.

The woman I loved marched in with imperial fury. I stood with a smile, knowing how easy it would be to explain the misunderstanding, and midway through my smile, I received that single punch. Pain mixed with bewilderment at such a volcanic reaction from someone customarily patient with me. In the restaurant, as she walked away, and as I held my face in my hands, blood from my nose freely running through my fingers, I realized that if I lost the woman who punched me, I would lose the one thing in life that mattered most to me. I reached her at the sidewalk, pleaded my case convincingly enough for her to understand I had not once been disloyal since we had begun to share nights together, and dropped to my knees to beg for marriage.

When she announced on the train that evening that she was pregnant, I finally understood her reaction at seeing me in the restaurant with the reporter, and we giggled as she fell asleep. I watched the ceiling of the passenger compartment, trying to ignore the throbbing of my nose.

I was still awake at the moment of collision, unable to comprehend the violence, how our world shifted, the horrendous noises, the spinning of the passenger car, and then the horrible screaming of injured horses.

Buffalo Bill Cody was correct in announcing that no human lives were lost in the accident, but the woman I loved would never recover from her injuries, and week by week, she slipped away from me as Winona grew inside her. The woman I loved fiercely fought against the end, knowing that the longer she lived, the better chance her child had of surviving.

All I truly had left to mark her loyalty and love was the watch on my wrist, a reflection in a mirror to show me the long-term damage to my nose, and our daughter, waiting for me to return to the Little Missouri.

I turned from the memories of that night, trying to shake off my melancholy by thinking of Winona and picking out fragments of time with her to watch in my mind with gratefulness to God for sparing our unborn child from the worst of the train accident.

As I came out of my reverie, I noticed that I had spent some of it walking in the direction of the boys at the train switch.

They had a bucket of water with a dipping handle.

As I neared them, I pointed at the water.

“Twenty-five cents,” the taller boy said with a heavy Spanish accent. “Americano dollars.”

An hour of paid labor for a drink of water. Highway robbery. But it was a capitalist system. I didn't have to pay if I didn't want to, and I wasn't that thirsty.

“Too much.” I gave them a smile.

“Where else you get water?” the second one said. “Long walk.”

“Not that thirsty.”

I looked closer and saw that a thin wire was draped down from the dipping handle and was almost invisible on the ground as it continued away for a few feet to where it was attached to a broom handle.

“Last chance, señor,” the first boy said. “Long walk to water otherwise.”

I shrugged and walked beyond them to where the tracks joined the main line, and continued on to the train station at Pedro Miguel.

At the request of William Nelson Cromwell, I had a party to attend.

Ahead, outlined against the sun, was the figure of a man, as if he were waiting at the end of the track for me. I stumbled over an upraised rail as I squinted to see if I could recognize him, and that took my eyes away from the figure.

When I looked up again, he was gone.

An hour before sunset, I arrived by carriage at the ranch Cromwell had informed me was in joint ownership with Sandoval. It had taken roughly thirty minutes of travel from Ancón at the edge of Panama City, going north along the east side of the canal route, with the mountains on my right rising from the narrow and almost nonexistent lowlands, showing a beautiful glow of green in the long rays of light at that time of day.

Because I was early, I arrived in the last light of the day, and from a distance, I could see the large tile-roofed villa and a collection of buildings around it. The hack took me up a tree-lined drive to a circle at the front of the villa. After I disembarked, he took the carriage to the stables. All the hacks would remain until the party ended and then, with lanterns, begin a procession back to Panama City.

During my travels with the Wild West show, I'd been to castles in the mountains of Austria. The main doors to this mansion matched the finest European entrances in grandiosity and size. With both doors open wide, a carriage with a team of horses could have driven into the entranceway of the villa.

The butler—a Panamanian of medium size and medium mustache, wearing a tuxedo—opened only one door for me and gave me a shake of his head, but with a hint of a smile.

“Mr. Cromwell warned you about me?” I asked.

“He said you would need a polish.”

I followed the butler down wide, cool hallways decorated with watercolor paintings. By the lack of pretentiousness, I guessed Cromwell had little to do with the decorating, and instead had let Sandoval make the choices. The butler opened a door for me, revealing a large bathroom suite with all the amenities of modern plumbing.

“Of particular note,” the butler said, “is a shaving brush and razor. I have been requested to stress this convenience for you.”

He stepped into the bathroom with me. It was cavernous, so I did not feel cramped by his presence, but I was curious.

“Privacy is not a Panamanian custom?”

“I have also been instructed to take your clothing and have it laundered and waiting for you at the end of the evening inside your carriage.” He pointed at a suit hanging from the hook, with black polished shoes beneath. “Lastly, I've been requested to oversee the accessories. Bow ties can be delicate.”