I packed my biggest valise for a long stay, with plenty of changes and books for every mood, beginning with my Bible, looked around my room as if I’d never see it again—not for the first time—and rode the bay down to the railyard, where I gave a pair of roustabouts a quarter apiece to back it into a stall in the stock car and hobble it. I put my saddle and bridle, my two most valuable possessions, in the private coach with the valise. That made it seem a little more like me.
Back outside I found Joseph the fireman hurling chunks of wood from a wheelbarrow into the tender. I asked him if the engineer was back from town. He jerked his chin toward the locomotive.
A man built nearly as close to the ground, but just as wide, leapt down from inside, wiping his broad broken-nailed hands on a rag and transferring as much grease to his palms as it removed from them. I shook his hand, making sure to give as good as I got; men who spent most of their time gripping steel levers seldom throttled back for flesh and bone.
“Hector Cansado.” He had one of those deep, burring voices that came from shouting over a chugging engine. His accent was unconventional, neither Spanish nor Indian; it seemed to have been dropped by accident, borne by some strange bird from terra incognita. He wore the ticking-striped cap, faded red kerchief, and brass-studded overalls of his profession, the heavy denim pitted all over with burns from flying sparks. His broad face, similarly scarred, had a bloated quality, the skin stretched to its limit, like an India rubber balloon, and yellow-green in complexion. Mahogany-colored eyes tilted away from a flat nose, creating an impression of desperate fatigue. Even his name translated as “tired.”
He was dying; his coloring suggested advanced jaundice. That cold finger touched my spine again. I was in the hands of a fireman whose ancestors had known nothing but tragedy at the hands of the white race and an engineer who had nothing to lose by piloting a train through darkest Mexico.
His breath stank of sour mash. I asked him if he’d succeeded in finding anything to drink besides mescal and something to eat. The tight face registered annoyance. The weary eyes slid toward the Indian.
“That savage has been carrying tales. What a man does on his own time is his business.”
“I guess. I haven’t had my own time in ten years. There’s good Scotch in the parlor car and not a grain of cornmeal in sight.”
“Is this an invitation?”
“We’ve got a thousand miles to cover. I don’t want to lose my company manners out of habit.”
He leaned forward and dropped his voice to a murmur. “Don’t tell Joseph. The only time you can trust him is when he is drunk, and then you can trust him to cut your throat.”
I glanced at the man throwing wood. “Why do you keep him on?”
“I would rather have him aboard than wonder about him outside in the dark.”
“You know where we’re headed?”
“Cabo Infierno, sí.”
“Does Joseph?”
“Not from me, but he has ears to hear and eyes to see, and El Espanto is not your ordinary train. I would not put it past him to throw in with that devil.”
Under some circumstances I might have considered that a good beginning. Tragedies always start out bright, comedies grim. But life isn’t the theater.
* * *
Cansado left Joseph to his labor on the pretext of showing me features of the train I’d already seen and joined me in the coach. I tugged the cork out of one of Blackthorne’s bottles and poured two inches into each of a pair of cut-crystal glasses and we settled ourselves into the pigskin chairs. He looked around, at the paneling and the rich rugs, shook his head.
“In the village where I was born, the cost of this coach would keep us in meat for a year; beef, I mean. I have eaten so many chickens it is a wonder I do not lay eggs. I have heard they serve tortillas as far north as Santa Fe. I cannot believe this.”
“It’s worse than that. You can order green chiles in Portland, Oregon.”
“Myself, I would travel twice that far to escape them. Someday I shall don a serape and hike toward Canada, and when I meet the first person who asks me what it is I am wearing, there is the place I will settle.”
“Strange talk for a Mexican.”
Tired eyes glared at me over the top of his glass. “I am Basque. My people owe loyalty to no one but themselves.”
“It sounds lonely.”
He drank, wobbled it around his mouth, and swallowed. The played-out gaze remained steady. “I think you know this feeling.”
“I travel with friends.” I set down my drink, got up, unstrapped the valise, and took out the Bible. “Mark, Matthew, Luke, Ezekiel. I call them by their first names. They go where I go.”
“And should the book be lost or stolen?”
I tapped my chest with a corner. He shrugged.
“Myself, I have no friends, dead, canonized, or other. It is why I took this job. No other would accept it, once they heard where this train was bound.”
“Are all your colleagues so superstitious?”
“Demons are easy. There are spells, talismans. It is not so with men. I see you know nothing of the Mother Range.”
“I’ve climbed the Bitterroots and crossed the Divide. One set of mountains is much like all the rest.”
He drew a jagged line through the condensation on his glass with a forefinger. “You have heard the story of how Cabo Infierno got its name?”
“I have. The Spanish demanded gold; they forgot to say how they wanted it delivered. I don’t fear places named for hell or the devil or death. It’s men who named them.”
“You talk as one who never laid eyes on the devil.”
I resumed my seat, the Bible in my lap, and picked up my glass. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you have.”
“Not I. But then I have not had the privilege of meeting Oscar Childress. Have you angered your superiors, that you should be sent to the Sierras?”
“I volunteered.”
“You seek your death willingly?”
“No one has ever done that. Even men who jump off bridges must have second thoughts just before the end. Everything I hear about Childress convinces me I’d be missing something if I passed up the chance to meet him face-to-face.”
“I am certain that is what Montezuma said about Cortes.”
He doubled over suddenly, hugging himself; then just as quickly recovered, sat back, and resumed drinking. I realized then that he’d been in constant pain, and that the spasm had only been the worst in an unbroken line.
I felt a sudden rush of pity; it was probably the whisky. “What is your affliction, my friend?”
“My liver. Too much tequila and mescal, not enough grapefruit and apples. The doctor in Durango allowed me a year, the shaman in Quezalcoatl three months. I should have quit after the first.” He raised his glass. “I drink to my liver, for bringing me this far. I have never been north of La Junta.” He emptied it and stood. “Thank you for the excellent spirits. We must be on our way. I am told an express is coming through.”
“It’s not due until four o’clock. There’s time for another. Unless—” I made a gesture in the direction of his misery; or where I thought it might be. I knew next to nothing of the bodies I’d sent to the grave.
“The damage is done; I speak not of that nor of the hour. I must ask you to take care that one of us remain sober at all times.”
“We’re a long way from the Sierras.”
“We shall speak again of that subject, when I explain to you the rules. Meanwhile I cannot predict what Joseph would do if he found both of us borracho. I trust him no more than my liver.” He left me to my drink and my Holy Writ.