Part 13

"I don't mean that." She poured herself water.

He got up and drank his coffee standing. "Have to go," he mumbled. "I hear the cattle in the court. Goodbye."

Raul overtook the cattle outside the hacienda gate: Esteban had the group in front, Manuel worked the rear, and other cowboys covered the sides, to pick up strays and keep them moving.

Raul and Manuel rode side by side a while.

"Have we got them all?"

"So far, so good. A fine bunch," said Manuel. "Are we sure of railroad cars?"

"General Matanzas promised cars. He gets a cut."

"Engines too?" joked Manuel.

"Well, they're going through to Guadalajara."

The cattle followed a narrow road through palmera, fronds roofing the trail, dumping dust and dirt on the riders. The hoofs drummed a hollow insistence, hollower in rocky places, where boulders towered. Between houselike rocks lay the ruins of a temple, ancient limestone walls in stubble, weeds and bushes, a circular platform partially terraced. Years ago, Raul had planned to dig there. What for? he asked himself as he rode by. Bones, old pots, an idol? Let the temple keep its secrets.... A young doe, crouched among stones, eyes shifting, ears up. Raul liked this route to Colima, seldom used because it was too rough for carriages and wagons.

In Colima, the promised cars lay on a siding and, after checking the cattle into the loading pen, Raul and Manuel rode to the Hotel Ruiz, a shabby white stucco building overlooking the plaza. The town heat was oppressive, and when Raul had eaten in the flyspecked dining room, where not a breath stirred, he sought the square. There, the iron swans spewed water through misshapen beaks into a mossy fountain; dried bougainvillaea flowers blew about from little piles left by the gardener. The clock--pasted in the Presidencia wall--bonged the hour.

On a bench, Raul smoked and listened to Colimans argue: a bearded fellow was peeved over domino rules. He clacked a domino up and down at his rustic playing table under a laurel tree. His fat partner scowled and talked back. Across the plaza, in the house of Doña Camila, somebody struggled with a guitar.

Colima--he had been here so many times!

Colima--narrow streets, simple one- and two-story homes, red-tiled roofs, whitewashed fronts, patios with banana, breadfruit, coco palms, bamboo and mango. A little town that fought earthquakes and hurricanes, a sugar-cane town with a few coffee plantations nearby.

He smoked and listened to the badly strummed guitar (the domino players had gone); he thought of Angelina.... Kindness, could that help?

He loved Lucienne for her auburn beauty, her even temper, her grace, her humor.

He strolled down a shady street and circled back to the plaza and noticed a band of armed men alongside the church, sitting on the curb, leaning against the wall; most of them had carbines. At first he disregarded them, and then felt concerned.

In the hotel, he mentioned the band of men to Manuel and Esteban, and the three talked it over with the manager. He was a huge, high-strung Spaniard, sallow, fish-eyed, egg-chinned; he said that the hoodlums ought to be strung up and that if they entered the hotel he'd shoot them "one by one." Manuel winked at Raul.

During the night Raul heard rifle shots but in the morning no one had any information. "Drunkards," the manager conjectured.

Raul paid a call on Federicka. In her shady bamboo-slatted living room, he read a letter Lucienne had written him, telling him why she had gone hastily to Guanajuato, her handwriting more of a gardener's scribble: "They say the trains will start running regularly in 1912.... I think I had better find a lead mine, for bullets...." Her humor was there, even in her concern.

"What a foolish thing, to go to Guanajuato at this time," he said.

"I begged her not to go," Federicka said.

She gave him a venison lunch and then they went to see Vicente, at his school, where the sisters and students were blissfully unaware of Mexico's impending disaster. Federicka, too, shrugged a provincial shrug.

Raul, alone for a moment with Vicente, thought: My God, the boy resembles Angelina, face, body, her posture even! Putting a rough arm about him, he hugged him close.

Late in the afternoon, the postmaster showed Raul a newspaper from Guadalajara, brought in by a horseman. It reported street fighting. Raul found many Colima friends who were sorely distressed, who predicted tragedy, who blamed foreign governments and the _hacendados_.

Raul described a cartoon, in the Guadalajara newspaper, to Manuel, as they rode out of Colima, for Petaca.

"It showed a butterfly of death hovering above an hacienda," said Raul.

"How does the song go about the butterfly of death?" asked Manuel, hitching his gun belt, kicking his horse with his spurs.

"I don't remember," said Raul.

"I should remember," Manuel laughed. "I used to sing it to you."

Raul chuckled. "That was quite a time ago."

"It's a Chiapan song about a loco butterfly that went after men, poisoning them on the trail ... 'A touch of the wing, just a touch of the wing,'" Manuel sang.

Outside Colima, children played ball in the yard of a Jesuit school; a priest--robe flung open--drowsed on a swing. Workers trudged along one side of the yard, toward town, bunches of green bananas suspended between them. White oxen wandered by.

Raul's cowboys came up behind them, riding at a leisurely pace, some of them singing, one playing a harmonica.

Raul and Manuel trotted down a long hill and began to climb. Suddenly, Chico drew close to Manuel's mare. He reared, throwing himself on his hind legs and hurled Raul to the road. The blow knocked the wind out of him and pain wired his shoulder to the ground. He thought of his bullet wound. For a few seconds he lay motionless but by the time Manuel reached his side, he was able to stagger to his feet. Chico was standing calmly under a tree.

"Are you hurt?" asked Manuel.

"No ... just stunned."

"That damn' Chico! You cabrón!" Manuel cried, rushing angrily toward the horse, whip in hand. "God damn you!"

"Leave him alone," commanded Raul. "You can't teach him by beating him. He's too old to change. No, Manuel!"

Manuel, helping Raul mount, thought of the Petacan beatings, the men, even boys ... now all that had been stopped by Raul. Teach a horse. Maybe not one as old as Chico. Teach people, maybe so! But it was too late to change the haciendas. The butterfly was over Petaca.

16

A bullet crashed through a front window, as Angelina wrote a letter to Estelle. She had been having trouble with her pen point and was picking at it with her fingernail. At the thud of lead and crackle of glass, she dropped her pen and stared about her as if she had never seen the room before. A second bullet smashed another pane and embedded itself in a wall. Snatching her brass desk bell, she clanged it frantically. Her letter fluttered to the floor. Another bullet shattered glass. Sliding from her chair she began to crawl toward the wall where there were no windows. Servants screamed in the patio. Single shots became a volley, then silence.

She remembered childhood stories of bandits, sordid crimes; all kinds of fears crosshatched her brain; she hunched herself forward on hands and knees, certain she was going mad. When she reached the wall she stood, then sank, crumpled, doll-like, her legs of no use. She reached for the cross on her gold neck chain, but found she had forgotten it. Closing her eyes, she prayed.

A shot spanged prisms off the chandelier, and pieces of glass thumped the wall near her. Opening her eyes, she picked up a fragment of glass with shaky fingers; as she stared at it she saw Raul.

"Raul!" she screamed.

"Stay on the floor!" he shouted.

"Raul ... what's happening?"

Raul and Manuel paused a second in the patio doorway. Raul held his Mauser. Manuel had a carbine. With a rush, bending low, Raul made for the front windows, telling Manuel to get close to the door so he would be protected by the wall. Raul fired out the broken window, then squatted to reload. Manuel aimed and fired; he was slower, steadier, searching for someone on top of the wall. Smoke choked the room.

"What's wrong?" Angelina cried. "Who is it?"

"We don't know who it is," Raul yelled. He crossed the room and knelt beside his wife. "Stay here by the wall. I have men all around the house. Somebody got on our wall and fired down on us, maybe several men. We'll drive them off. Listen ... the shooting has stopped."

"There goes somebody--along the wall," Manuel shouted, and fired through window glass, fragments flying about him.

Like a wraith, Fernando pushed through the patio entrance in his wheel chair, shoving with one hand, groaning. Manuel saw him in the direct line of fire from the wall and scuttled toward the chair, grabbed it and rolled it near Angelina and Raul.

"Father!" said Raul. "You shouldn't be here."

"You want them to come in my room and kill me. Who is it? What is all this? I, you ... why...." His white face and eyeglassless eyes shocked Angelina and she knelt beside him. "You should have stayed in your room," she said. "Who helped you?"

"Who's out there?" Fernando asked. "What's happening?"

"There are a lot of men. Pedro ... many men ... I don't know just who they are."

"So Pedro has turned against me, the god-damn' bastard. I--"

A volley of shots tore into the house, and Raul and Manuel returned the fire. Rifle bullets cracked above, sounding steadily.

"Our men are shooting from the roof," Raul said to Manuel.

The old man coughed and tried to see; he blinked and tugged at his chair.

Raul, tormented by the firing, his father's presence, the destruction, fired recklessly.

"Take it slow, Raul," Manuel said. "First thing you know, you'll be taking chances."

Raul nodded.

Crawling to the far end of the room, he opened a French door and aimed carefully at a man on the wall; as he shot, he noticed one of Petaca's guards firing from the corner turret.

"Some of our men are in the turrets," he said.

Esteban soon appeared in the patio door.

"We're driving them away!" he shouted. "Our men are on the roof. They're leaving Petaca ... we've got them on the run!" He pointed his pistol at the walls.

"Good--we've got them on the run," said Raul to Manuel,

"Kill them!" cried Fernando.

"You must be quiet, ssh," said Angelina, shoving his chair nearer to the wall and sitting beside it.

Other Petaca men took over the outside wall, firing. Raul, at one end of the room and Manuel, at the other, watched and waited. The quiet was strange. Holding on to the wheel chair, Angelina began to cry. Raul, flattened against the wall, stared at her, hating her lack of courage and control. Why wasn't she in Guadalajara?

Raul checked his supply of bullets and then wheeled his father to his bedroom and with the help of Angelina and Chavela, got him into bed. Fernando was silent, very weak.

Mounting the defense wall, Raul learned that twenty-five or thirty men had attacked the hacienda; the appearance of some rurales--a handful of them--had discouraged the attack. But Raul could not be sure the report about the rurales was more than a rumor. Esteban insisted that the firing from the roof had driven off the attackers. Two men had been killed and Raul ordered them buried ... two men in white, one young, one middle-aged. Several of Raul's people had been wounded and Velasco dressed their wounds in the small patio.

Gabriel rode in later and seemed less astounded at the attack than anyone. Limping about the patio, helping the wounded, he said Pedro had not led this attack.

"What if he was with the men who attacked us! He didn't supply those guns, we know that. Raul took his guns. The hacienda of Primavera has been burned. I saw it in the Ciudad Guzman newspaper. Did Pedro do that, too? He can't be everywhere."

"I saw him here," said Raul.

"It's a good thing you had guards posted," said Velasco.

"We'd have lost the place without them," said Raul, rolling a bandage. "I'll have to hand out more guns. There are still some in the game room."

"Keep men on the walls and in the turrets," said Gabriel.

Dr. Velasco's goatee quivered over a wounded youngster. "Can't you hold still? Damn you!" he grumbled.

Instrument in hand, the thin wrist swiveling, he probed for a fragment.

"I feel it," he said.

The youngster moaned.

"Shut up," Velasco said, on edge. "Somebody light me a cigarette."

Back of all this mess, Raul saw his father. Full of bitterness, he walked to the living room and examined the smashed windows, the pocked walls, the damaged chandelier. He asked a scared maid to sweep up the smashed glass. Together they knocked out damaged panes. That job done, he sat down, but he had scarcely caught his breath when Gabriel came in, looking beaten.

"Let's both have a brandy," said Raul. "I was thinking..."

"No, not now. I..."

"What is it?"

"Two of our people were shot, a few minutes ago."

"I heard no shooting. Where?"

"Behind the corral."

"Who got shot?"

"Teresa and María Eugenia. They're dead."

"Two women--the scum ... to shoot women!" Raul exclaimed. The last time he had seen María and Teresa they had been preparing food in the kitchen.

"So somebody shot them," Raul said, barely opening his lips.

"It was no accident," said Gabriel.

"Deliberate."

"Yes."

"My Petaca is taking a beating."

Gabriel turned to go.

"What can I do?" asked Raul.

"Nothing now. I want to see their families. Perhaps..." But he did not bother to finish; instead he read Raul's face, the pain, the struggle for hope.

Shortly after Gabriel had gone, Salvador tramped in, boots clacking. A ricochet bullet had hit him in the head and he had a bloody rag around his skull. A bandolier x'd his chest; he carried a Winchester; his trousers, ripped on the side, sagged over his stomach.

"I have two men at each turret now," he said. "They all have extra bullets. We're ready." He grinned, obviously enjoying himself.

"That should be all right," said Raul. "I wish we could spare a few men and go after Pedro."

"Where would we find him?"

"A couple of men might turn up information."

"Spies?"

"Why not? Let's also find out where the attackers went. We've lots of friends; let's use them. We can't wait for the rurales."

"I'd like to get Pedro, you know that," said Salvador.

"See what you can learn. This may be revolution. We've got to know how things stand." He smelled Salvador's sweat and liked it.

"I'll see what I can find out," said Salvador.

"If you can, contact the rurales; get some of them here."

"Hell, they ran off," he scoffed. Settling his belt over his shoulder, he stalked away. His hat, dangling from a cord around his neck, banged the doorframe as he went out.

When Raul went upstairs he found Angelina in bed, a tray of untouched food on the side table; two maids were with her; one of them was offering her a cup of tea.

"How's everything?" she asked quietly.

"We have men in the turrets and there are men at the gate," he said, making an effort to be calm.

"Will they come back?"

"It's not at all likely."

"Tomorrow anything can happen," she murmured, refusing the tea. "I'm worried about Vicente. What's happening in Colima?" Her nervousness increased the huskiness of her voice. "All this mob, all these killings."

"Vicente's probably all right. The revolutionists won't harm Colima."

"Then what? Is it truly revolution, Raul?"

He sat by the window, bent forward, trying to puzzle it out. He did not answer her because he did not know the answer.

The servants left the room.

"Just as soon as I can, I'll go with you to Guadalajara, just as soon as the railroad operates again. They'll be running cars soon. You'll be all right there, with María. You mustn't stay here." He remembered the newspaper account of street fighting, and asked himself where she should go to be safe.

"Can I take Vicente with me?"

He wanted to encourage her as much as possible. "If you want to, take him," he said.

"Surely the troubled times won't last long," she said, hoping.

She wanted to sob into her pillows: she peered at shadows created by the evening lamp, curious forms on the ceiling: she separated the forms: evil faces, women's faces, Estelle laughing at her, everyone ridiculing her for being so weak. She buried herself in her pillows.

"Raul, Raul," she whispered. "Chavela told me what took place at Refugio.... Take me away."

17

Morning sun polished one of the wooden dragons on Fernando's wardrobe.

"... I can remember Andrea. As blind as I am, I can see her. I wanted to marry her, but you know all that folly. That was the year we got almost no corn at all." Bitterness and rotten teeth and food left over from breakfast clogged his speech and yet Angelina understood him and listened because she felt sick and lonely.

"What a stupid man I was." He chuckled. "I sold her, sold my Andrea. Slave ... I was her slave and I sold her. What if she loved somebody else? I still wanted her. Can you remember a beautiful face?" He stirred painfully on his bed. "I was nineteen--that was the year I killed my father. Out of my head ... I sold her." His voice had slowed, the gravity of those days pressing him. "God, that was a dreadful year...."

"What ever became of Andrea?" Angelina asked, taking a piece of toast from his tray. They were having breakfast together.

"She died in Manzanillo ... typhoid."

He felt the weight of Angelina's body on the bed and groped to touch her.

"My eyes are worse today. Those glasses haven't helped much. I'll have to have another pair made."

Angelina forgot to listen; Chavela came for the dishes, rattling things and talking at the same time. "There's no beef to eat today," she said. "Marcelino says there's been no slaughtering."

"We must have some eggs," said Angelina. "Chickens lay eggs even when there's shooting. I suppose you could have someone kill a chicken or two."

Chavela inspected her tray of soiled dishes blankly. "An omelette," she suggested.

"Better a hen," said Angelina.

"Chavela ... cigarette," said Fernando.

Chavela gazed questioningly at Angelina.

"Give him a cigarette, Chavela."

"Sí ... right away."

Chavela's bare feet retreated soundlessly, the dishes rattling. She wondered if all of them were to be killed at Petaca, ignominiously, falling about the fountain, bleeding on the cobbles, moaning. She tripped on a crack, hurt her toe and swore furiously.

Angelina lost herself in reverie. She saw the rays of sun, the bedroom, a picture on the wall; she saw Petaca as a fort and imagined herself stealthily opening the gate, fleeing across fields to the lagoon; she would cross it in a dugout ... on the other side it was dark; she was alone, weeping. She felt her way through the bush and a hand reached toward her, the fingers transparent, evolving into a dog's paw ... finally, a dog trotted beside her.

"Mona, la Mona," she whispered.

"What did you say?" Fernando asked.

"Nothing," she said.

She walked to the door and went slowly toward the serpentine fountain and leaned over it and stared at the fish that huddled under greenery. Sloshing water with her hand, she gazed about her. The dog was there. It followed her upstairs, to her door.

Breathlessly, she slammed the door.

Breathing fast, she opened her wardrobe and removed her fur; she stroked it and kissed it and laid it on the bed. Lying beside it, she said:

"We'll be going to Guadalajara soon. We'll be going there to stay. We'll be at María's. I'll be all right there.... You'll see. What a fine time we're going to have...."

Raul found her there, asleep. Sitting beside her, he gently woke her.

"It's time to eat," he said.

"What?" she asked.

"Lunch is ready."

"Oh ... I've slept all morning."

"Let me help you up."

"Everything's so quiet," she said.

"Everything's all right."

"I'm glad," she said.

"I've heard from General Matanzas. Troops are all around the country; a number rode by Petaca this morning. They'll protect us, Angelina."

She sat at her dressing table, blinking. Taking her powder puff, she began to powder her throat and neck, wanting to waken gradually.

Raul stood near her, thinking of other years, time by the window, time in the garden, time to play games, to sit with a baby in his lap. Nothing would recapture those days.

"Vicente is downstairs," he said, knowing how pleased she would be.

"He's downstairs! Darling, why didn't you tell me?" she cried happily, holding her puff motionless. "How did he come?"

"He came with Octavio."

"Who's Octavio--a schoolmate?"

"Yes."

"They rode here on horseback?"

"Yes."

"They might have been shot," she murmured, thinking of those who had died at Refugio.

They were facing one another in the mirror.

"They followed the back roads. They knew how to manage."

"Good for Vicente," she said.

"He wants to stay at Petaca," Raul said.

"You mean he won't go with me to Guadalajara? I need him."

"I think we can change his mind."

She called Vicente from the door and he came leaping upstairs, his hair badly combed, his tropic clothes in a mess. He kissed his mother dutifully, then turned to his father and said:

"Tell me about the shooting, the fight here." His energy flashed into his gestures. "It must have been exciting. And to think that you drove the soldiers away!" He beamed proudly.

"They weren't soldiers," said Raul.

"They were rabble," said Angelina.

"I'll tell you all about it later," Raul promised.

"I'm so glad you and Octavio got through safely," said Angelina.

"It was easy, Mother," said Vicente.

"Did anybody bother you?"

"No, Mother. And now everybody in Colima knows that Petaca beat off the--the others. We're safe here."

"You and Octavio get washed for lunch," said Raul. "Aren't you hungry?"

"Sure we're hungry."

Octavio was an older boy, with pained saddle-leather face and down-twisted mouth. "Is it going to be a revolution?" he asked, at lunch.

"I don't know," said Raul.

"People in Colima say no," said Octavio certainly.

Raul served macaroni and chicken to the boys, helping them bountifully.

"The men who attacked Petaca weren't soldiers, were they?" asked Octavio.

"Just peons with guns," said Angelina, wishing she could forget.

"But, but ... then it is revolution. They're sore at us," said Octavio, rolling his eyes.

"In Colima they say the rurales will finish off the peons quickly," said Vicente.

"Federal troops are moving to Colima from the new garrison at Ciudad Guzman," said Octavio. "General Matanzas issued a paper or something. It's on the door of the..."

The rest of his words were garbled by macaroni, but Raul understood them. He felt his appetite die; these boys were trying to talk like men; chaos was a man's business not a boy's. He poked at his food and said:

"Vicente, I'm sending you to Guadalajara with your mother. She needs you there, for an escort. You and she and some of our servants will go together. I can't get away now that things are so bad at Petaca. You'll be helpful in Guadalajara, and you can continue your schooling there."

No one spoke.

Unable to eat, Raul wondered what kind of solution Guadalajara would prove to be: no further bad news had appeared in the papers that he had seen. He wondered what might have occurred in other cities: Tepic, Celaya, Guanajuato? Was Lucienne involved in this same nightmare? He had sent men to Palma Sola and Colima, but she had not returned. Nor was there any letter.

After the others had finished, Raul went into the garden and smoked. Ducks paddled and fed in the pool, their white bottoms twitching. Overhead, buzzards patrolled. Men guarded the wall. The volcano, in the cloudy atmosphere, wore a pall of gray and straws of light sucked at the farthest slope.

He did not see Angelina, watching him from the doorway.