“Who is Nepomuceno?” Magdalena asks, hesitating to leave.
“You get out of here if you don’t want them to send me packing. Scoot!”
Magdalena leaves, the last thing she wants is for “the señora” to get the sack. She waits a prudent moment or two in her room. Her feet return her to the kitchen with no intent other than asking questions. Josefina is alone again. Magdalena bombards her (“Who is Nepomuceno? What’s this about a camp?”) and doesn’t stop till she understands everything.
Dan Print writes in his notebook — words very different from those Elizabeth Stealman has been writing:
The Rancher—the local paper in Bruneville, city on the southern frontier — has been publishing stories, peppered with local flavor and adventures, about some guy named Nepomuceno. The bandit caught my boss’s attention, surprisingly, because although he has a reporter’s instincts, as a good New Yorker born and bred in Boston he has no interest whatsoever in anything south of the Hudson. To say no interest isn’t, strictly speaking, correct, because he does flip through The Rancher to keep a finger on the pulse of the frontier, but mostly to have a good laugh at the Texans. The fact is he senses there’s a good story in the bandit, which might or might not be of interest to me, because he called me into his office “urgently.”
“This one is made for you, Dan,” he said. “Go cross the Rio Grande and interview him for me. I want a story on this bandit, Neepomoo-whatever. Put it together however you need to, with different points of view. I don’t want his autobiography and I don’t want your opinion. (I can already hear it!) Show us how his people see him, what his enemies think of him, his family, see if he has a wife and if you can get her to talk (there’s nothing like a wife to tear down a hero). Don’t stand there looking at me like that! Scram! Get outta here! You got lead in your shoes?”
I left his office dragging my tail between my legs, like some devilish eagle had shat on me. Finally, an interesting assignment … but … it ain’t a piece of cake! I read in The Rancher that the bandit’s in hiding. American law enforcement is after him, the Mexicans are too (although The Rancher conjectures that they’re covering for him, but they could be making that up). It’s clear that it’s not the best idea to take a boat to Bruneville or Matasánchez and start asking around for him.
I overcame my low spirits, and remembered what the Mexicans say (that if a bird shits on you it’s good luck) and set out to visit my “contacts”—not that I have many, I’ve only been at the paper six months, and I’ve only covered stories about city life.
Four appointments and six drinks later, I found myself at a guesthouse where a Mr. Blast, a freebooter by occupation, was staying. I found him through a stroke of luck, it was like I won the lottery — or another eagle shat on me. Two hours later I set sail with him, aboard the Elizabeth III, bound for Galveston. The opening for my article couldn’t be better.
We’re spending the trip drinking and talking, or talking and drinking. To tell the truth, he’s given me more than enough raw material for an article, what with his stubborn conviction that Texas is still an independent republic, his expansionist fanaticism that took him to Nicaragua with Walker a few years ago, then to Cuba in some failed enterprise I didn’t completely understand, and then to Mexico during the war — he kept calling it “the conquest”—and now setting out to forge an alliance with Nepomuceno. Blast is convinced Nepomuceno will whet his appetite for adventure. The truth is I can’t make heads nor tails of it, neither his ideology nor his interest in Nepomuceno. “I’ve had a clear vision for a long time now: the Republic of Texas should stretch from Bogota to the Nueces River, there’s no other way.”
“But, excuse me for saying so Mr. Blast, what does it matter to you? You’re not Texan.”
“No, I’m not, I’m telling you it’s not for my own good, I’m not thinking of myself; it’s just the only answer for the region. What they call Mexico is a failed endeavor, all it’s good for is producing lazy servants. I could say the same about Nicaragua and Colombia, they’re failed endeavors too, and I could go on. Only us, our country, America, can give them direction, a reason for existence. Alone, separate from the United States, they’re bedbugs without a mattress.”
“I don’t understand. Nepomuceno is fighting because they took away his land, that much is clear to me, but why do you, Mr. Blast, feel the compulsion to make an alliance with Nepomuceno and join his banditry? It seems to me you’re like oil and water …”
To every dog his bone: I’m going for my interview. In any case, the quote about bedbugs and mattresses strikes me as a good headline for the article — though I don’t know if my editor will agree.
The Bruneville administration has done this a number of times in the past, loading all the penniless and crazy folks in town—“homeless greasers”—onto the barge with the livestock (which is the origin of the song, “The Madmen’s Journey,” one of many tunes attributed to Lázaro:
If you’ve got a screw loose,
or you’re a cross-eyed guy,
or you’re missing a leg,
don’t worry, don’t cry,
come ride the river,
we’ll take you away!)
Three days after the incident between Shears and Nepomuceno, the first voyage of the barge that now belonged to Stealman is made for precisely this purpose: deporting as many crazies and poor folks as possible from the streets of Bruneville to Mexico, and not just Mexicans and poor folks — as a bonus they throw in a few outlaws, too.
This is, in part, to clean up Bruneville and get rid of problems, and in part to benefit Stealman: the Town Hall paid him to transport these passengers, and the contract enabled him to replace the tug that some idiot had allowed to float away, “So many men guarding the dock and not one of them noticed it drifting away, that’s idiots for you.”
All the crazies were dumped at the New Dock. They dispersed as best they could. The majority ended up in the center of Matasánchez. Since they had made friends on previous deportations they hung around the market, like the rats and other creatures that live off what others throw out. The luckiest found work as day laborers, struggling to get by, but they weren’t reliable jobs — the cattle drives and the arrival of the livestock in town weren’t what they used to be — so they had to settle for eating one day but not the next, and sometimes not at all.
When they went without work for long stretches, they slept with their buddies beneath the arches of the Market Square or in the streets adjacent to the Town Hall, if you could call it sleep. They got their hands on cheap booze that had the same effect as gunpowder, making them behave explosively, they were shattered during the day but at night they didn’t stop, coursing through the streets like the madmen they were, and when dawn arrived, and folks began to come out of their homes into the streets, they fell like sacks of sand on the cobblestones. The hardhearted kicked them or spat on them as they passed. Women looked away — they often got erections while sleeping, “Which no lady should have to see.” Kids peed on them, sometimes accidentally, because they blended into the ground, all filthy and ragged.
Outlaws, on the other hand, always figure out a way to get by. They can settle anywhere.