Arthur was a quick learner and, to Bob’s surprise, actually seemed to enjoy learning this skill, though Bob understood too well that Arthur wasn’t in this for the sheer sport of it. At one place Bob had collected a heap of dried wild sheep dung the size of small pancakes, which he kept in a sack slung around his saddle horn. From time to time he’d lag behind, then cry out, “Watch it!” and sail one of the turds into the air. Arthur had gotten quite good at hitting them.
Bob also taught Arthur the art of roping and how to keep his knife honed to a razor’s sharpness. They worked with the bullwhip, too. Bob had some spare whips in his baggage, and for hours on end, as they plodded along, Arthur would sit in the saddle snapping the whip at objects along the trail, exploding leaves and knocking small stones sky-high. Arthur said, “You ready to put a cigarette in your mouth and let me cut it in two?”
“I don’t smoke,” Bob told him.
“Well, how about a stick?”
“I don’t put sticks in my mouth, either,” Bob said casually. “Birds shit on ’em.”
“Then how am I going to find out if I’m really good?” Arthur joked.
“I’ll let you know,” Bob said, “trust me.”
At night by the campfire Slim would bring out an old guitar and sing and, to everyone’s surprise, he had a nice tenor voice. He’d belt out cowboy songs and love songs and songs about railroads and the olden days. The Colonel was delighted.
“You ought to form a dance band,” he said. “You’ve got a grand voice.”
“Takes money, and I ain’t got any,” Slim replied. But in fact a band was always a dream he’d had. Prospecting, cattle punching, doing odd jobs was all he’d known except for the army, and he was too old for that now anyway. He’d worked on a notion for years—to get a little band together and play the towns from El Paso to Deeming, New Mexico, to Las Cruces. He didn’t want much and had never featured playing in cities like Dallas or Houston or San Antone, but there along the west Texas border he figured the cowboys and soldiers might come to places to hear a little music as well as get drunk, play cards, fight, and spend money on women. And if that was so, the proprietors might pay him a nice little fee to perform.
Slim knew just what kind of band he wanted, too: piano, fiddle, dobro, and himself on guitar, and he had the perfect name: Death Valley Slim and the Ghost Riders. But like everything else, this had always been beyond his reach. Years ago he’d been in love, but she actually laughed at him and his soldier’s pay. So he quit the army and went prospecting in the Sierra Madre, but by then the American mining companies had sewn up all the ore prospects in Mexico. After eight years Slim turned up back in El Paso, busted out like a pinpricked balloon.
Singing and playing was the one thing Slim did well; he even liked to make up his own songs, which he sang by memory on dismal nights in the mountains or alone in his cheap El Paso flophouse; he enjoyed his own voice and the thoughts he put into his music but it didn’t put any money in his pocket. So for Slim, at least, this ridiculous excursion was a matter of necessity, since he was dead broke again.
As Slim’s music filled the sweet air, Strucker was resting full-length on the ground with his head propped up by his saddle, and was drinking from one of the bottles of expensive gin he’d brought along. He had no intention of lowering himself to anything as vile as tequila, mescal, or, God forbid, pulque.
“Maybe Colonel Shaughnessy can set you up when this is over,” Strucker told Slim. “You could entertain at his fashionable parties.” The German had stuck close by the Colonel since they had left the train. Riding together, they would talk about yachting, shooting, horse racing, and the latest polar expeditions. Rarely did the European war enter the conversation, and Strucker was grateful the Colonel didn’t bring it up, because he hated having to prevaricate and apologize for his country and his kaiser. Americans, it seemed, were invariably on the side of the British and French.
“I might just set Slim up, at that,” the Colonel said effusively, “provided he can learn to play waltzes.”
Slim got up and walked from the fire to the edge of the darkness to relieve himself. He’d listened to these two big shots talk about him, and for a moment it seemed like something real. Then he came to his senses. I can play waltzes; I can play damn good waltzes you two old goat-ropers would have trouble dancin’ to. That was what he thought.
EARLIER, THE COLONEL HAD MADE A REMARK Strucker found interesting. The talk had turned to the general situation of Villa and the children, when the Colonel recounted his conversation with the president.
“He’s afraid of starting a war down here,” the Colonel announced contemptuously, “and so he lets murderers and bandits abduct innocent Americans while our own army squats at the border drinking whiskey and visiting prostitutes. I gave that man twenty-five thousand to ensure Roosevelt’s defeat, and this is my reward? I wish I had that money back.”
“Then what if Mexico should attack America?” Strucker suddenly asked. The idea came to him seemingly from the thinness of the air around them. His theory so far had been to work Mexico into a position where it might provoke the United States into attacking Mexico. But here he saw the reverse; a novel plot.
“They wouldn’t dare,” Shaughnessy said. “They’re content attacking defenseless U.S. citizens right here in their own country.”
Arthur thought the conversation was something of a joke; there was no diplomacy associated with kidnapping the children. It was sheer thuggery, and the worst kind of cruelty for the parents.
“Yes, but what if they did?” Strucker went on. “What if for some reason Pancho Villa decided to attack American positions at the border? Wouldn’t your President Wilson then commit to an act of war?”
Arthur looked closely at the German. He could almost see his mind racing, ticking, drawing conclusions—if this happened, thus and so would follow. He could tell a plan of some sort was forming. Strucker was devious, and might even be dangerous, of that Arthur was sure.
“I don’t see how he could help it,” the Colonel replied. “But I don’t think Villa’s fool enough to do that.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Strucker said. “When I was on the train from California I read a news story that quoted Villa as saying the Americans were now his enemies. That he was going to confiscate their properties, that he would brook no interference from them.”
“So what? He’s been saying that for a while.”
“Suppose somebody could get to him? Persuade him that he must also attack the Americans in America, because if he does, and the American army enters Mexico, the Mexican government would feel compelled to fight them. And that this would be an impeccable stroke of luck for Villa because his enemies would then be fighting the Americans and not fighting him, correct?”
“I suppose so,” agreed the Colonel.
Arthur could scarcely believe his ears. The German was actually forming a scheme to draw the United States into a war with Mexico.
“And for you, too, perhaps a stroke of luck,” the German continued, “because it would then get the American army down here in Mexico, and if they find Villa, they would probably also find your grandchildren.”
“Theoretically,” said the Colonel, slightly confused. “But who could convince him of such a thing?”
“Me, perhaps,” Strucker replied.
“You? Why you?”
“Because I am a disinterested party,” the German replied. “He would have no reason to distrust me. I also have, let us say, some resources which I could put at Villa’s disposal. That might tip the scales.”
Arthur somehow doubted the German’s veracity.
“Well, I don’t know,” the Colonel said hesitantly. It sounded like a complicated—almost crackpot—scheme and difficult to comprehend.
“It may be you’re on to something, Strucker,” the Colonel said, “but we need to try to find the bastard first.”
NEXT DAY AROUND DUSK, THE COLONEL’S PARTY came upon a small village of widows and orphans.
Some of Pancho Villa’s soldiers had swung through it days earlier and the villagers, thinking they were bandits, made the mistake of firing shots at them at first. For this they paid a high price. Almost all the men and some of the women had been ridden down, captured, and killed in the typical mayhem: flayed alive, hung, shot, stabbed, sworded, burned, dragged through the streets behind horses, thrown headfirst into wells. The Apaches did as much a generation or two earlier and Villa’s Chihuahua Mexicans had merely refined their techniques.
Many of the bodies remained unburied and the stench hovered as an unholy fog. Even so, they all noticed that this village seemed fairly prosperous compared with others they’d seen: the roofs of the houses were made of corrugated zinc instead of straw and the foundations were sturdier. There were large livestock pens—empty now thanks to Villa’s band—which had obviously held sheep, pigs, cattle, and horses. The reason for such affluence, they soon learned, was that a large mining smelter was located nearby, where the men once worked for good wages, but Villa had shut this down, too, and run off all the American engineers.
Even after the horrors he’d witnessed on the train trip, Arthur was appalled by what he saw in the village.
“It’s worse than the French Revolution,” the Colonel gasped. “These people kill everybody, not just the rich or landed. They murder their prisoners, then they go for the poor. At least in America we knew how to throw a revolution. We were never savages.”
“Nothing I’ve seen in Europe remotely compares with this,” Strucker agreed, breaking his rule of silence on the European war . “It’s odd, isn’t it, that all these Mexicans claim to be fighting for a republic?”
The Colonel wiped his nose with his bandanna. The stench hung so heavily he could almost grab it with his hands. He was tired but this also made him sick. Not only that, the scene struck a new dagger of fear in him for the fate of his grandchildren and made him feel guiltier. Back along the train tracks, he’d borne witness to what the Federals would do to soldiers, but if Pancho Villa would condone this grossness with civilians, then he was madman as well.
The Colonel shook his head and said to Strucker, “If these people can ever govern themselves, then our whole theory of democracy must be wrong.”
As Arthur reflected on this, a small dirty girl came up beside his horse—little more than a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair, her eyes brimming with tears. She looked up at Arthur and began talking, and there was something so pathetically earnest in her expression that he motioned for Cowboy Bob to come over, since he savvied Mexican as well or even better than Slim did.
“What’s she saying?” Arthur asked.
Bob leaned down to the girl and said, “Qué dice, señorita?”
She responded in a bewildered, sorrowful tone. Bob nodded and turned to Arthur. “She says, ‘Why don’t I have a ma?’”
Arthur let out a breath and looked away toward the darkening distant mountains. The girls words stung him like a hot needle; he felt an instinct to get down and take her up into his arms and hug her; tell her it was going to be all right, even though he knew it wasn’t, and never would be. Instead, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a five-dollar gold piece and handed it down to the child. As if that would do any good. She looked at it, then back at Arthur.
“Gracias,” she said, clutching the coin against her breast.
He gave a little wave and eased his horse away, feeling, with everything else that was upon him, as if he were trapped in some lurid nightmare. He turned in the saddle; she was examining the gold piece, which was American, and, Arthur thought, she probably didn’t even know what it was.
They rode out of the village soon afterward. Arthur, Bob, Slim, and Crosswinds Charlie set out to find a suitable spot for the Colonel’s main party to camp for the night, away from this charnel place. They had gone a short distance along a road out of town when they began to smell a foul aroma. Presently they came upon a band of Mexican men camped in the woods, afraid to return to the village.
These men had found half of a rusty oil drum to use for a cauldron, placed it on some rocks, and lit a fire beneath it. The fire consisted of anything that would burn: old shoes, leaves, sticks, corncobs, tattered and bloody clothes, empty cartridge boxes, along with cow, sheep, and goat patties and what looked like the dismembered parts of a corpse—all of which they kept in a nearby pile to keep the blaze going.
Crosswinds Charlie rode over and peered into the cauldron. The dull, compliant, and utterly wretched Mexicans gaped up at him, their dirt-streaked faces flickering with the orange glow of the fire. He looked closer and saw a filthy brown liquid was boiling. Every so often Charlie saw what he took for a root or part of an onion or pepper; then, to his revulsion, the cauldron’s main ingredient boiled to the surface.
By then Arthur and Cowboy Bob had ridden over and were staring into the cauldron as well. The Mexicans had apparently caught for their supper a large armadillo. Bob saw the fleshy reddish claws and tail and scaly shell as the thing bobbed slowly to the surface, sank, then boiled back up again, roiling slowly in the liquid before it disappeared yet once more. They had apparently boiled it alive.
Wanting to be polite, Bob asked the men in Spanish, “What are you fellows having for dinner?”
“Stew,” one of them replied sullenly.
“What is that thing?” Charlie asked.
“Armadillo,” Death Valley Slim answered him. “It lives in holes with owls and snakes.”
“They mean to eat it?”
“Or starve,” offered Bob.
They rode on. Arthur felt his stomach turn once more. To him it seemed like they had somehow stepped out of the bounds of civilization. He pulled his hat down lower on his forehead. So this is what comes of glorious revolutions, he thought. He looked back. One of the Mexicans seemed to be giving him a dirty gesture.
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, ALL THE WHILE climbing higher through the foothills, Shaughnessy’s Partisan Rangers finally reached the mountains. They had entered a broad and deserted valley sandwiched between towering peaks covered with pines and firs, while at the lower altitudes there were aspens and birches that still had a few orange and gold leaves clinging on.
A pretty little brook meandered down the center, babbling between rocks. It looked like it might contain trout. The valley floor consisted of a golden brown sedgelike grass reminiscent to the Colonel of quail hunting plantations in southern Georgia. None of it reminded him much of Mexico at all. It was more like Wyoming or Montana in autumn, or, for that matter, southern Georgia in February, without the mountains.
He saw deer darting at the edges of the trees, and flocks of doves flushed skyward as his men passed by in columns of twos and threes down a wide dirt path in the center of the valley. The path seemed to lead directly into the mountains, now unfolded as sinister peaks grasping up toward a darkening blue sky; at their base, several miles distant, were enormous rock piles of boulders from long-ago slides that, from a distance, took on the appearance of shattered teeth.
“Let me ask you something, Arthur,” Bob said. “What’s it like growing up rich?”
“Beats me,” Arthur told him. They were riding side by side in the lovely valley. There was not a cloud in the sky and the place seemed almost enchanted.
“C’mon, I’m curious. I mean, did you go on big steamship trips and have a private railroad car and everything?”
“I’d rather hear about you,” Arthur said. “We can talk about me later. Where’d you grow up?” Arthur didn’t feel much like talking about himself. He’d been so preoccupied with his worries about the children and Xenia that talking about almost anything was a chore. He’d rather just ask questions and listen.
“Amarillo,” said Bob. “It was just an ol’ cow town; still is.”
“What did your father do?”
“Punched cows till he got killed by a wild horse he was tryin’ to break. He would’ve lived, except it throwed him over the fence and he landed headfirst on the only rock within a hun
dred feet of the corral. It was buried pretty deep in the ground and I guess they decided it was too much trouble to move. After Pa got killed, they moved it, though.”
“That must have been hard.” At least he had never had to face the death of a parent.
“I was just six, so I don’t much remember him. Mama said he’d gone to God. It was a comfort at the time.”
“What about your mother?”
“She didn’t do well after that. Took in washing and did some piecework. We had to move in with my grandma. Then she got sick with consumption. Died when I was nine. That’s when I went to work.”
Arthur felt himself wince. “Doing what?” They were crossing the little stream that meandered back and forth across the valley floor. Arthur and Bob stopped in the middle to let their horses drink.
“Cleaning out stalls and livestock pens. I imagine I’ve shoveled more shit in my day than most.”
“Did you go to school?”
“Up till then I did. Afterward, there wadn’t no time, I guess.”
“Well,” Arthur said, “I’ve always noticed you reading when we get to camp. You must have been taught pretty well.”
“Yeah, I read all the time. Trouble is, it’s the same ol’ books. I ain’t got but four. Mostly I read ’em over and over. I’m partial to that one called The Virginian, but when you think about it, it’s mostly a lot of crap.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, for one thing, it skips over the rough parts of a cowhand’s life. But that’s okay, a cowhand don’t need to be reminded of most of it anyway, I guess. Sort of makes it seem glamorous, even.”
“It’s probably a lot more glamorous than growing up rich,” Arthur said.