When the Owl Cries Part 44

"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 s.h.i.+fting, 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 Dona 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 G.o.d, 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 b.u.t.terfly of death hovering above an hacienda," said Raul.

"How does the song go about the b.u.t.terfly 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 d.a.m.n' Chico! You cabron!" Manuel cried, rus.h.i.+ng angrily toward the horse, whip in hand. "G.o.d d.a.m.n 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 gla.s.s, 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. s.n.a.t.c.hing her bra.s.s desk bell, she clanged it frantically. Her letter fluttered to the floor. Another bullet shattered gla.s.s. 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 gla.s.s thumped the wall near her. Opening her eyes, she picked up a fragment of gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s, 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."