The Creed of Violence (26 page)

He went to the truck, howling with good news they had water,
and he drank from the bag and he tricked the son by handing him the
other. The son drank the good water. "Close your eyes, Mr. Lourdes,
and think of the Modern Cafe."

He punished the truck as he punished himself. Over every rise a
hope that sinks in his throat with each trembling horizon. Memories
threadbare with time are suddenly upon him with an emotional pull
too heartrending to bear. He drives them from his mind. There is only
surviving.

A flock of white-tailed doves streaks past overhead. Their presence
is a promise of water. And if there is water—

They are like runes against the sky and he lets their flight guide his
course as he begins to feel his body turn against him. He is counting
every dusty heartbeat with each windy slope. With each mile he is being
murdered, he is a mile closer to being saved. He keeps thinking of that
blood-streaked fighter in the dust whose name he bears, and through a
dazy heat he sees the stylus of a church spire against a flat sky and the
town of San Luis Potosi that enfolds it.

IN THE SHADOW of the church was a small hospital run by nuns for
the poor and dispossessed. Rawbone was already in the early throes of
a convulsion when the truck crashed up on the sidewalk. This was the
first moment a barely conscious John Lourdes realized something was
drastically wrong.

Rawbone dragged himself to the stone wall and sat with his back
against the hot brick, fighting for air. John Lourdes was in the arms of
nuns and campesinos but he pulled and pleaded and finally broke loose
as if they were somehow his captors and he crumpled up on the street
beside the father. He grabbed his shoulders. "What ... ?"

Rawbone tried to make words out of broken syllables or breathless sound, but could not. In his hand was the pocket notebook and,
wracked and dying, he held it out for John Lourdes to see what he had
written hours ago: Soh {or3we me

John Lourdes was beyond the knowing, beyond asking, "How?"
He was clinging to a furious history that was his life, desperate suddenly for what was inseparable and lost, trying to contain or hold back
death, to overpower it with his heart.

But the father kept breaking apart. There was no will, no earthly
force that can measure up, even the blood-streaked fighter in the dust
could not ultimately stand against that most inevitable of adversaries.

John Lourdes pulled his father to him, grasping the hand with the
notebook, and in that ephemeral moment with the blazing sun around
them, they were one. The son whispered, "Yes ... yes, I forgive you."

He could feel his father's face against his own and this choking
sound through clenched teeth like, "Yes." Then the son put his lips to
his father's ear, "Can you still hear me?"

The father squeezed his son's hand, answering that he could and
his son told him, "Father ... save a seat in the truck for me."

Somewhere in that poisonous fever the father filled with those
words and then, through what seemed this twilight tunnel, he could
have sworn he heard the truck engine and the gears shifting and the
steel musculature picking up speed and he was riding with the son
through a land that was neither desolate nor forsaken ... and then he
was no more.

HERE WERE JUST unanchored moments after that-being lifted
from the sidewalk and the body against that ageless brick, the
smell of ether and shadows upon an operating room wall. How long
he was unconscious he did not know, but he came to in the dark, feeling as if he were on a train. His eyes followed a trail of light back to
a kerosene lamp. A nurse sat nearby in the storage car, reading. She
was Mexican and middle-aged and there was a solitary peacefulness
about her. As she smiled at him, a figure leaned over the cot. It was
Wadsworth Burr.

"Where are we?"

"You're on a train, John. I'm taking you to the military hospital
at Brownsville. It was your notebook. The nuns saw my address and
notified me."

"My father-"

"John, just listen, right now. This is imperative. When Justice Knox
comes to see you, you're to say nothing unless I'm in the room. Do you
understand? Nothing."

John Lourdes was swimmy and confused.

"A politician in Tampico was allegedly murdered and there is a
suggestion you were somehow involved."

What surprised Wadsworth Burr was that John Lourdes laughed.
It was gravelly and ironic and self-possessed, it was a laugh he had
heard before.

THE HOSPITAL WAS on the Fort Brown military post. The window in
John Lourdes's room looked out toward the Resaca. At night the soldiers would play cards along the shore in the lamplight. John Lourdes
spent the weeks there recuperating fundamentally alone. He had a masculine thirst for silence and used it to revisit his life and the fallen adversary that had become again his father.

Justice Knox arrived with a stenographer. Burr was present as John
Lourdes accurately detailed the events in Mexico, which were corroborated in his notes, even down to turning the munitions over to a group
of campesinos. The only fact overlooked-his being the son of that
common assassin.

The front of the hospital had a long covered portico with brick
archways where one could avoid the searing Texas sun. Justice Knox
excused the stenographer, and he and Wadsworth Burr started down
that walkway alone.

"He'll have to resign."

"Oh," said Wadsworth Burr, "at the very least."

Burr took a cigarette case from his coat pocket. "The notes my client sent to you. A copy was also sent to me. I immediately hired detectives in Mexico to begin my own investigation. Cigarette?"

Knox shook his head no. This news did not sit well. There was a
bench nearby where Burr went.

"A man named Tuerto was hired by Doctor Stallings through Agua
Negra to photograph the oil fields, wharfs, river, harbor, rail lines."

"Which sounds like a useful policy for a security firm."

Burr crossed his legs and lit the cigarette. "I have a signed affidavit
from this Mr. Tuerto that he delivered copies of the photographs to
Mr. Robert Creeley, who as you know from John's notes and briefing, or your own investigation, is adjunct to the U.S. consulate in
Mexico. "

"There is nothing extraordinary about that either. The oil companies, as well as others, have been making their case about field security
since the first hints of a revolution."

"Mr. Creeley was staying at the Southern. The same hotel as my
client . . . clients. As were two other gentlemen, Olsen and Hayden.
Who, as you probably know through your own investigation, as I do
through mine, are information gatherers for the Department of State."

Justice Knox had been standing under an archway, but now he
went and sat at the far end of the same bench as Wadsworth Burr. "I
know where you're going. The meeting at the house."

"You have an official of the U.S. consulate. Field officers for the
Department of State. An American businessman procuring illegal munitions. A former Ranger heading a security firm for the oil companies
receiving that shipment of munitions."

"Creeley, Hayden, and Olsen," said Justice Knox, "all acknowledge
they were invited to a dinner by the mayor, as was Doctor Stallings.
The mayor, for his part, wanted to make the case for American military
protection. The oil companies are a significant tax base for him. Hecht
denies being at the meeting. Creeley and the others state he was not
there. As for the munitions, Hecht says he helped smooth the way for a shipment he was told was the parts of an icehouse to be delivered to
the oil fields. He denies even knowing Stallings."

"I have in my possession a film," said Burr, "one of those newsreels
Diaz shot to advertise the grand achievements of his administration,
though they were, in fact, a tome of aggrandizement to his royal self. It
shows clearly that Hecht and Stallings were acquainted."

"Stallings is dead."

"You have my client's statement about what transpired."

"I have your client's statement he delivered munitions to a group
intent on overthrowing the government."

"You don't think you're going to get to pick and choose which of
these statements are fact and which are not? You're going to have to
deal with the whole body of evidence."

Justice Knox looked into that pale stare. Burr was frail. The way
he crossed his legs seemed at times effeminate. But he was not subject
to intimidation.

Burr sat quietly for now. He looked out upon the Resaca and a line
of troops going about their drills on the dusty parade grounds. He blew
on the tip of his cigarette, which pulsed intensely while he considered,
then considered further, before he spoke.

"I'm going forward on the basis that you're an honest man.
Knowing full well honest men, sometimes the most honest, are in positions of default. The evidence, even as you lay it out, favors two possibilities. Because the munitions themselves can never be separated from
the facts.

"One possibility . . . the men at the meeting were part of an attempt to make a case for military intervention. Possibly heightening or
exaggerating the evidence to make such a case. We might even conclude
that Doctor Stallings was a rogue element working independently for
such an end.

"The other possibility ... in that meeting they were not making a
case for intervention, they were creating a case for intervention. And
they were not beyond using the most nefarious of methods to achieve
such an end. And you know what that can lead to. Coup d'etat .. .
assassination."

Burr rose and walked to the archway. His sunken features were
intently grave. "I do not envy your position. The public discussion of
such matters would put you at the center of a controversy. That is the
perfect battlefield for an attorney, but not the head of the B01, who
represents not only his organization, but the government of Texas as
well."

While they faced each other a nurse pushing a wheelchair passed by.
The patient, missing an arm and a leg, wasn't much more than thirty. He
saluted both men in an offhanded manner. The wheels definitely needed
oiling and when that sound was far down the shaded walkway, Burr
said, "I've been told many of the permanents here served in Manila and
Cuba. Was that war worth it?"

"We're not discussing that war."

"But we are in discussion."

Justice Knox acknowledged that with a nod. He took off his glasses
and rubbed at the pinch marks the frames left on his nose. Burr already
recognized from previous meetings the gesture meant he was troubled
and needed time to think.

"I should never have sent John."

"The practical application of strategy," said Burr.

"It's not a question of his courage or dedication."

"I know your worldview. The practical application of strategy has
its place. But taken to an ultimate end do you know what else it can
be?" Burr paused for a half breath to accent his point. "It's Washington
not crossing the Delaware ... it's Lincoln not freeing the slaves."

Wadsworth Burr took a last quiet draw on his cigarette then
crushed it under the heel of his finely made shoes. "I will wait to hear
where your thoughtful and, I'm certain, difficult deliberations take you
before I determine a course of action for my client."

JOHN LOURDES AND Wadsworth Burr returned to El Paso by train a
month later. John Lourdes had received word he would be given a letter
of commendation for "his dedication in uncovering the illegal shipment
of arms to a foreign country." On that day, at that hour, the commendation and all it said and did not say was, to John Lourdes, mere dust
in the wind.

They drove in Burr's Cadillac from his home to Concordia
Cemetery. Burr had taken it upon himself to have Rawbone brought
back to Texas and buried beside John Lourdes's mother. The headstone
was simple. It had his name and a bookmark of dates. The cemetery
was on a flat plain, rough and with a few trees. The sky was crisp
blue that day but the cemetery seemed so much more spare than John
Lourdes even remembered.

He stood there thinking, long and hard, on the deeply flawed and
tragic history that was his father. A sweep of feelings went through
him. Feelings he would have sworn unimaginable this lifetime. Loss
above all, loss unfathomably raw, that reached to the very roots of his
blood.

"There was more of him in me," admitted John Lourdes, "than I
ever imagined. Or would have ever believed."

Burr nodded, then after a brief consideration, said, "It appears there
was much more of you in him, than he might ever have imagined."

With that, they started from the gravesite. Upon reaching the car,
John Lourdes took a moment and glanced back at the grave, then toward the Rio Grande and the red cut mountains beyond.

N 1913 THE U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson, was
involved in plotting the coup d'etat that overthrew the Madero government and installed Victoriano Huerta and a government more favorable to business. He did this, it was claimed by President Wilson,
without the authority or compliance of the U.S. government or any of
its surrogates.