“No. Just luck.”
Brando wanted to know what chiquita we were talking about, how come he didn’t know about her.
“If you’d pull your head out of your ass every once in a while,” LQ said, “you might catch some of what’s going on.”
“Catch this,” Brando said.
I told about having breakfast with her at the Steam Whistle and then about our swim in the gulf that night. The part about the hammerhead knocked them for a loop.
“I’ve heard tell about Black Tom since I was a kid,” LQ said, “but I never believed he was no damn twenty-foot long. I still don’t.”
“Well I didn’t put a measuring tape on it but it was like a train going by.”
“Goddamn, man!” Brando said. “She saved your ass.”
“I’m not ashamed to admit it.”
LQ said, “She took a kick at that thing, no lie?”
“No lie.”
“That’s some girl.”
“Yeah.”
“Then what?”
“I took her home.”
“Well now,” LQ said, cutting a look at Brando, “what I can’t help but wonder is, did you and this ladyfriend have the pleasure of, ah, doing the deed, shall we say?”
“Yeah,” Brando said. “That’s what I can’t help but wonder too.”
“None of your goddamn business, either of you.”
They grinned right back at me. “Thought so,” LQ said.
We got back aboard and the train rolled out of San Antone. For a while we just stared out the window at the changing landscape. The grass thinned out and the trees got scrubbier and there was more dust and rock. The sky enlarged as the country opened up.
Then LQ said, “So what’s the plan, Kid? I mean, we just gonna go knock on his door and ask him to hand her over, or what?”
“I’m not asking him a damn thing,” I said.
They both smiled.
“So? What’s the plan then?” LQ said.
“Don’t know yet. A guy’s meeting us at the border with the kind of information we need for a plan.”
“This rich guy,” Brando said, “he’s bound to have some muscle on the payroll, right? Maybe more guys like the two he sent to snatch her?”
I said I didn’t know, but Daniela had told Rocha the place had cattle, so the guy had plenty of ranch hands for sure.
“Cowboys, shit,” LQ said. “If all he’s got is cowboys, I don’t care if he got a hundred. I never met a cowboy any damn good with a gun.”
“Jimmy here’s a cowboy,” Brando said.
“Not since we known him he aint,” LQ said.
That afternoon we reached the border at Del Rio. A dapper and neatly barbered Mexican named Lalo Calderón was at the station to greet us. He spoke good English and wore a white suit, dark sunglasses, and a mustache as thin as a line of ink. He smelled strongly of a flowery perfume. My face had healed up pretty well except for the shiner, and he gave it a look but made no remark on it. The only thing Rose had told me about him was that he was “a former associate” and very efficient. He now owned an import company with offices in Del Rio, Laredo, and San Antonio. I figured Rose hadn’t told him anything more than necessary about us.
We went into a café and took a table in a front corner by the window and ordered a round of beers. Calderón handed me our passports—mine in the name of Michael Chavez, LQ’s and Brando’s identifying them as George Thompson and Leon Buscar. He also provided a roadmap with a route marked for us in red ink all the way from Villa Acuña to a small town called Escalón, and a folded sheet of paper with a hand-drawn map of the way from Escalón to La Hacienda de Las Cadenas, a distance noted in pencil as about twenty miles. He said the estate was deeded to one César Calveras Dogal. On another sheet of paper was a diagram of the hacienda itself, with several notations in Spanish.
“What about police?” I said.
“The nearest station of police is in Jiménez. That is fifty miles from Escalón. At Las Cadenas, Calveras is the police.”
He gave us directions to Sanchez’s filling station across the river in Villa Acuña and said a car would be waiting for us there. He stood up and apologized that he could not stay longer but he had another pressing engagement. He hadn’t touched his beer except to toast our health.
“Good luck with your business, gentlemen.”
He went out and crossed the street to an idling Chrysler waiting at the curb and got into the backseat and the car took him away.
“You get a good whiff of that fella?” Brando said. “About like a whorehouse parlor.”
It was an altogether different smell when we walked over the bridge and caught the Rio Grande’s ripe stink of shit and dead things.
“Fall in there and you’re like to die of poisoning or some godawful disease before you can even drown,” LQ said.
The town was a tangle of rutted dirt streets flanking a large plaza. Dogs and chickens dodged rattling burro carts and honking jalopies and grinding trucks. We went past an open marketplace full of hagglers and snarling with flies, hung with the butchered carcasses of calves and pigs and what Brando was absolutely sure was a dog. One stall held a row of skinned cowheads. The air was hazed with the smoke of cooking fires. Street vendors hawked sticks of meatstrips roasted on charcoal braziers. The sidewalks were full of squatting old women beggars in black rebozos.
“We damn sure aint in Galveston no more,” LQ said. “Sweet Baby Jesus, look at this goddamn place.”
“Wish all I had to do was look at it and not smell it,” Brando said.
The Sanchez filling station consisted of a small tin-roofed garage and two gasoline pumps. The ground all around the building was black and pungent with drained motor oil, littered with torn tires and rusted car frames and half-gutted engine blocks. Sanchez was a little guy in filthy overalls. I told him my name was Chavez and he said yes, yes, he had been expecting us. We followed him around to the back of the garage and there stood a black Hudson sedan. Gleaming from a fresh washing, it was the cleanest-looking thing in town.
Sanchez beckoned us to the rear of the car, saying, “Hay una sorpresa para ustedes en el portaequipaje.”
He worked the key in the trunk lock and took a squinting look all around, then raised the lid and gestured grandly into the trunk. It contained a pair of lever-action Winchester ten-gauge shotguns and a huge rifle of a sort I’d never seen.
“Son of a bitch,” LQ said. “That’s a BAR.” He took out the weapon—and Sanchez had another nervous look around.
A Browning Automatic Rifle, LQ said, U.S. Army issue, .30-06 caliber, with a magazine holding twenty rounds. He said he’d fired one many a time during his army days. He detached the loaded magazine and showed us how the weapon’s action operated, then snapped the magazine back in place and worked the slide to chamber a round and then set the safety.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said, patting the rifle, “this here’s about half of any plan a man will ever need.”
There was also a shoulder-strap canvas packet holding five more loaded BAR magazines and a couple of cartons of ten-gauge shells.
I asked Sanchez who provided the weapons. He didn’t know, but Don Lalo had instructed him to be sure to show it to us. I told LQ and Brando what Sanchez said and LQ wondered how come Calderone would do us such a kindness.
“Rose is how come,” I said.
We went into a restaurant and had chicken enchiladas and beer and fought off the flies while we ate our supper and studied the roadmap. La Hacienda de Las Cadenas wasn’t on the map but its approximate locale had been marked with an X and we figured its distance from Villa Acuña at roughly 400 road miles. The only town of size on our route was Monclova, which lay almost due south about 200 miles. The map showed only a few scattered placenames along the way—all of them little villages, the waiter had told us, and none with electricity. At Monclova we’d turn west into what looked like even rougher country.