El Paso

  “What did you do?”

  “I went down to the river with some friends and we caught crawfish, and my ma boiled them up for us with corn and potatoes. It’s still my favorite dish to eat.”

  “Did you know I’m teaching General Villa to read?” she asked.

  “I wasn’t sure what you two were up to, but I kind of expected it might be something like that.”

  “He’s my first student, and a good one, too.”

  “The general’s a smart man,” Mix said.

  “Are you always going to stay with him?” Katherine asked.

  Mix looked at her. She seemed somehow changed, and not just because of the dress she was wearing. It ran across his mind that she was going to be quite a beautiful woman. But suddenly she didn’t seem to be so much a child anymore, either; there was a difference in her attitude that made him a little uneasy, the way he usually got when he was in the presence of beautiful women.

  “Truth is, I ain’t sure what I’m going to do,” Mix said. “This war can’t last forever—although it’s got a pretty good start on it.”

  “So then what?” The bright sunlight made her blue eyes sparkle, and it caused Mix to feel protective of her.

  “Who knows? Sometimes I think about going out to California.”

  “Whatever for?” Katherine asked. Mix sensed disappointment in her voice.

  “To be in the movies, maybe.”

  “The movies! Really? Do you think you can?”

  “I don’t know why not,” he said. “I reckon I’m just as good a cowboy as the next feller. And I hope I’m not any worse-lookin’, either.”

  “Worse-looking! Why, you’re the most handsome man I’ve ever met.” She’d blurted it out before thinking and caught her breath when she realized what she’d just said.

  “Why, that’s . . . mighty nice of you to tell me that,” Mix replied uncomfortably.

  Katherine felt herself beginning to flush, and she gulped. She hadn’t intended to say anything to Mix that was so forward, but now that she had, she decided to go on.

  “Maybe my grandfather can help you,” Katherine told him, “to get in the movies.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, he knows everybody, you know. I mean, he can just call up the president of the United States whenever he wants to.”

  “Anybody can do that,” Mix replied.

  “They can’t, either.”

  “Sure they can. But it don’t mean he’ll answer the phone, though.”

  “Well, he talks to Grandpapa.”

  “I appreciate it, young lady,” Mix told her. He was beginning to feel fidgety with the conversation. Here he was, charged with holding these people hostage, and now one of them, a child, was offering him help to get into show business.

  “Can you read?” Katherine asked.

  “Sure I can read. Read all the time.”

  “I’ve never seen you.”

  “That’s because I don’t have anything to read. There ain’t exactly any libraries out here.”

  “I’ll teach you, too, if you can’t,” she said.

  “Well, I can. But thanks for the offer anyway.”

  “Can you dance?” Katherine asked.

  “Me, dance? Sure.”

  “What kind of dance?”

  “Whatever kind. I’ve been to dances.”

  “I don’t mean like square dances or those western things. I mean real dancing.”

  “You mean toe-dancing, like in a ballet or something?”

  “Of course not, silly, I mean waltzes, where they have an orchestra.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. I never heard an orchestra before except over the Victrola.”

  “Grandpapa has orchestras for his parties at Cornwall.”

  Mix asked what that was.

  “His cottage. It’s in Newport.”

  “Sounds kinda peculiar, having an orchestra in a cottage.”

  “Oh, it’s not actually a cottage. They just call it that. It’s real big and it looks out over the ocean.”

  “I never saw the ocean,” Mix replied.

  “Never saw the ocean!” Katherine exclaimed. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Well, now, where would I have ever seen the ocean?”

  “It’s all over the world,” Katherine informed him.

  “Look, I was raised in the state of Arizona and there ain’t no ocean anywheres near there.” Mix was getting annoyed. He wondered if she was trying to make a fool of him.

  “If you come to Cornwall sometime,” she said, “I’ll show you the ocean. There’s a special place along the cliffs and I’m the only one who knows about it.” Katherine began forming the picture in her mind. Tom might have been a rude cowboy, but there was something else in him that she saw. She saw possibilities.

  Mix stood up. “I reckon we better go on back inside the house,” he said. “I think I smell those chickens roastin’.”

  SIXTY-THREE

  It was nearly dark, and Arthur was studying the hacienda through field glasses. Bob, Slim, and Bomba were by his side in a clump of bushes about a hundred yards away from the main house. The two Mexican teamsters had been sent into the encampment to see what they could find out. Arthur scanned across the lawns littered with soldiers whose drunken cries filled the air. He swung around to the house, and through the open doors could see people milling in the foyer, and through the windows he saw others eating and drinking. It seemed like every light in the house was burning. Then his heart caught. Two people were walking up the broad steps to the hacienda: an American-looking cowboy and a young girl.

  Arthur had in his pocket the letter from Xenia that Mick had tried to hand to him earlier. He’d picked it up off the ground. The letter had nearly unnerved him when he read it, but he’d managed to collect himself and proceed with his scheme.

  Xenia was earnestly frightened for the children’s safety by Arthur’s proposal to try to rescue them. Had he thought of the seriousness of the consequences if he failed? It had struck a note with Arthur and made him wonder if he had. All these days he’d been working himself up to do this, letting the anger and the rage push the notion of failure out of his mind. But reading Xenia’s letter, he realized he was now holding reality in his hands.

  “I cannot even imagine how you must feel right now,” she wrote, “but I agreed to let Mick go out and try his skill at releasing the children. Whatever else he might be, he is known as an expert in this dreadful business. I can’t believe that if this man Villa is confronted with an offer from the mother of her children to be paid money for their release, that he will not listen to reason.”

  What money? Arthur had closed his eyes when he read the line. Yes, it was conceivable that Mick could negotiate Villa down to some workable sum, but what would that be? By borrowing and selling off what he could, Arthur might be able to raise fifty or sixty thousand. But Villa had demanded a million. And what if Villa refused to negotiate, which he probably would? Even getting Mick into Villa’s camp would be problematic; they couldn’t just send him marching up tonight out of the blue; they would have to concoct some additional scheme for that. And all the while the opportunity they had been waiting and planning for would slip away. No, Arthur decided. They were here. The plane was here. The children were here. And Villa suspected nothing.

  Arthur had folded the letter, put it in his pocket, and had shaken his head.

  “I’m going on. What time is it?” he said absently, barely looking at Mick, who’d been waiting for an answer.

  “Arthur, you really must listen to me. Negotiation is the only safe way. Anything else will be putting your kids’ life on the line.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Arthur snapped savagely.

  “But then why?”

  “Because there’s nothing to negotiate. We don’t have any money. Father’s broke and so is the company.”

  “What?” Mick had said, stunned.

  “Look, I don’t have time to go into it. You??
?d better start walking like I said, because chances are, when we get back here they’ll be coming after us, and there aren’t any spare horses. If they catch you, they’ll kill you.”

  Mick had stood on the edge of the lettuce field and watched Arthur and the others ride away. He’d felt his heart sink, not just for the children and for Arthur and Xenia, but for himself, too, because he’d somehow hoped that if he could pull this off, he’d be forgiven. At least he’d hoped so, until he’d felt the loathing and disgust in Arthur’s voice and eyes, which had hit him harder than Arthur’s fists.

  THE MEXICAN TEAMSTERS RETURNED WITH THE NEWS that they’d seen a young boy through the dining room window of the hacienda. And they’d seen the girl, too, with an Americano. It looked as though the only guards posted were two by the front door.

  Arthur told one of the teamsters to go back and see if he could find enough articles of clothing among any of the passed-out soldiers to make himself fit in, and then to get positioned in such a way as to keep an eye on the children. They all believed the children were being kept in the house, probably upstairs, and would most likely be put to bed soon. When the festivities died down enough, Bomba would deal with the guards, and Arthur and Bob would sneak to the house and make the rescue. Slim would remain at the hiding place with the other teamster, who was holding the horses.

  Arthur had a deep gash on his right knuckle from hitting Mick in the teeth. Unfortunately, the wound was on his trigger finger, and the finger was getting stiff. Arthur shook his head. If it came down to gunplay, would this trip him up in the rescue? So many things were hammering though his mind he had trouble concentrating.

  Cowboy Bob had been in some tough scrapes in his life, but nothing quite like this. He thought about some of them while they were waiting for the festivities to quiet down. He’d been trampled in a stampede, all but drowned in a river, nearly burned up in a prairie fire, and almost frozen to death on the range one winter and had to eat his horse. He’d been shot at, knifed, and once thrown in jail for beating a man to death in a fight. The man had deserved it.

  Without a woman in his life, there wasn’t much to do except hang out around saloons and sign on with the drives or go out on the ranges punching cattle.

  When he’d been thirty years old he decided to go back to El Paso and try to find a woman to keep him straight.

  He’d found one, all right, but in hindsight he’d made a hasty choice. She was just a saloon girl, but Bob thought she had possibilities. They’d gotten married by taking out a certificate at city hall, and Bob spent his savings on a little shack and about sixty acres, where he intended to raise a few breed cows. It wasn’t much, but to him it was the prettiest place on earth. He plowed to plant feed corn and to his disgust had to fence most of it in, the days of the open range having all but vanished. In the space of six weeks a blue norther came through and killed half the cattle, rains washed out all the corn he’d planted, and his wife ran off with a pots-and-pans salesman. After that, Bob sold the cows that were left and the land, too, and as a parting gesture set fire to the shack and watched it burn. He vowed then and there he’d never own another thing in his life he couldn’t carry with him on a horse, including a woman. In fact, he decided, if he could find a shoe store that would agree to it, he’d even rent his boots.

  “Some of them lights are going out upstairs,” Slim said. Arthur looked at his watch; it was just after ten. A lot of the singing and shouting from the drunken soldiers had died away and many of their fires had gone low.

  “Well, boys, I guess it won’t do to wait till the sun comes up,” Arthur said.

  Bob nodded. They might as well get on with it. For some reason he felt hungry. It occurred to him suddenly to wonder if he had eaten his last breakfast.

  “There’s one last thing I’ve been thinking about,” Arthur continued. “I want you guys to be absolutely certain that you still want to go through with this.”

  They all looked at each other, and finally Bob broke out in a nervous chuckle under his breath.

  “I think that’s the question that’s been on our minds to ask you.”

  “Let’s do it,” Arthur told them.

  ARTHUR, BOB, AND BOMBA STOOD UP, and checked their guns. “Good luck,” Slim said.

  The three men walked slowly, casually, toward the hacienda. There were still a few loud voices coming from inside, but the mariachi band had stopped playing. When they got to the edge of the lawn, Bomba, carrying his blowgun, split off and maneuvered himself into some shrubs alongside the house by the door. This time Bomba had put enough frog poison on his darts to ensure that the guards would not wake up.

  Arthur and Bob waited for several minutes and saw one of the guards slap at his neck and then keel over. The other guard went to him and bent down to look but quickly slapped at himself, too, and collapsed on top of the first. Arthur and Bob went forward between the campfires of passed-out, snoring soldiers until they reached the big steps to the house. Bob waited on the lawn while Arthur stepped up to the portals of the house. Suddenly from bushes beside the gallery a hushed voice said, “Psssssst!”

  It was the Mexican teamster. He had found a set of cross bandoliers and was wearing the big sombrero of one of Villa’s men. Arthur didn’t start, but turned slowly and sat down on a stone wall that framed the steps.

  “Señor,” the teamster whispered, “they took the children upstairs, as you thought. I follow them.”

  “Where?” Arthur said quietly.

  “Up to the top, then you turn right. Fourth door, I think.”

  “Muchas gracias,” Arthur told him under his breath. He sat there for a few moments longer, then nodded for Bob to come forward. When he joined him, Arthur nodded to go inside. He had decided not to take Bomba into the house, since his presence would obviously be noticeable. Passed-out Mexicans lay all over the foyer, on the sofas and benches and the floor. Someone in the dining room was making a toast: slow, drunk, and, from the sound of it, vulgar. Arthur and Bob went by the open double doors unnoticed. The stairs creaked and they walked up slowly, hands in their pockets, trying to look at home. At the top Arthur turned right and counted four doors. He tried the handle but it was locked. He looked at Bob.

  Bob shrugged. He didn’t know what to do next. He motioned to Arthur with his leg, to suggest kicking it in, but Arthur shook his head violently. One false move now, and it would all be over. They’d come too far for that.

  Arthur signaled he was going downstairs to find some kind of jimmy. Bob looked at him and let out a breath of resigned exasperation. He was fairly certain they’d overstayed their welcome already. Arthur waved him off and started back down the stairs. He’d only gotten halfway down when a man began staggering up from the other direction. He was dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant and wore an odd necklace made of shriveled things that looked peculiar. He held on to the balcony with one hand and grinned drunkenly. Just as Arthur was passing him, the man stopped him with an arm.

  “Who are you, señor?” he demanded.

  Arthur tried to act drunk, too, and swayed and smiled, then started back down the stairs again. The man grabbed him by the collar.

  “You! You answer me!” the man slurred.

  That was enough for Bob, who’d been watching nervously from above. He turned and kicked in the door to the room with one huge crash. The door flew open and Bob rushed in. It was dark and he saw nothing at first. Suddenly a dog began barking.

  Arthur heard the noise, looked up, and saw what had happened. He whipped out his pistol and cracked the lieutenant on his head, and the man tumbled down the staircase. Then Arthur rushed back up toward the room.

  Bob was emerging with a wild-eyed Timmy in his arms and Katherine by the wrist and a hairless dog snapping at his leg. When Katherine saw Arthur, she started to shout, but Arthur put his finger to his lips. Timmy saw this, too, and was silent, but the dog wasn’t. It began to bark frantically and went for Arthur’s leg the moment he approached them. Arthur waved his arms fo
r somebody to shut the dog up, but nobody knew how.

  “Pluto, no!” Timmy hissed, but the dog continued to bark. Arthur grabbed Katherine by the arm and began pulling her toward the staircase. Bob followed with Timmy; the dog continued its furious barking that was certain to wake people up. They had just reached the upstairs landing when another of the doors opened and Tom Mix appeared in the hallway in his long johns. He ducked back into his room as the rescue party fled down the stairs. They had just gotten to the dining room when they heard shots fired. Mix had retrieved his pistol and sounded the alarm, and was rushing down the stairs after them. Suddenly the doorway was blocked by soldiers, dumb and sleepy-eyed, but there nonetheless.

  Arthur turned off into the dining room, startling a dozen Mexicans who were still celebrating with toasts.

  Bob saw an open window and made for it. He hoisted himself to the sill, still carrying Tim, and let himself through. Arthur followed, lifting Katherine to the window and letting her down before scrambling through it himself. Outside, somebody was shouting in Spanish, “Stop them, stop them!”

  It was hopeless. Scores of soldiers were jumping up, grabbing guns, squinting into the dim light. Arthur, Bob, Tim, and Katherine had landed in bushes beneath the window, but there was no way out beyond this; the Mexicans were rushing toward them. Bomba had come up, too, and took both children in his arms. But Arthur made a split-second decision.

  He hugged Katherine and Timmy for an instant and said, “I’m sorry, stay here. We’ll be back.” Then he, Bob, and Bomba ran off into the darkness, with rifle shots ringing and splintering in trees all around them. If they had tried to take the children with them, they would have all been killed.

  “GODDAMN DOG!” BOB WHEEZED AS THEY RAN. “We had ’em! We almost had ’em!” Behind, they could hear shouting and the sounds of more shots. Slim and the Mexican teamster who’d been holding the horses were waiting when they came up. The other teamster was there, too, after drifting back from the hacienda.