The Creed of Violence - Boston Teran [2]
ABOUT AN HOUR further on amidst riven sandhills he saw the rig. It had veered off the road and sat canted against a stretch of rock scored by the wind.
The engine was still running as Rawbone stepped up into the open cab. The driver was alive, but barely. A trembling saliva had accumulated at the corner of his pale mouth.
"Pardon me," said Rawbone, as he leaned past him and shut off the motor. "Rest a while."
He then stepped down from the cab and, while he checked the truck for damage, noticed one of the lashed crates had come loose and cracked open beside the road.
"Ah," said Rawbone at what he saw.
He knelt over the crate. Hanging out the wood slats like the skin of a snake was a fabric feed belt mechanism for a machine gun.
He yelled back at the driver, "I didn't know they needed these to build an icehouse."
TWO
' E WAS BORN in the Segundo Barrio of El Paso on the day Ulysses iS. Grant died. The barrio was blocks of squalid adobes along the Rio Grande that the city meant to raze and rebuild in good oldfashioned American brick.
He was raised in a rank alley behind a factory where desert immigrants sewed together American flags. His mother was one of those immigrants, from the state of Sinaloa. His father was a criminal and, as the boy would later learn, a murderer. The father had abandoned the family on the Fourth of July, 1893. The last he'd told his son was that he would take him by trolley to the park on Mesa Street to see the fireworks together and eat ice cream.
After this he watched the humble surface of his mother's face erode with sorrow and her grief slowly bury what God had so beautifully put there. The son took the mother by wagon to the Concordia Cemetery and buried her in a pauper's grave he dug himself. The death left him devastated and on his own at thirteen. The desire to see his father destroyed was matched only by a string of memories born of fonder times that left an unfathomable ache across the arc of his existence.
The boy took to living on the roof of the factory where those at work on the sewing machines did double shifts stitching together flags. He was a day laborer in the Santa Fe Railroad yard that shouldered up to the barrio. It was brutal work that drove men into the earth like paltry nails. Yet he had not only the fury to survive but the faith of mind to flourish.
He wore around his neck a tiny gold cross with one broken beam that had been his mother's. It was not some holy trinket or talisman but every wistful and nostalgic wish that had ever been.
He could read and write, and his father had taught him the creed of weapons. He was unafraid of death, understanding it was only the seamless moment that takes you to somewhere else.
He was not a tall young man; rather he was thin and muscled with a huge forehead and shaded eyes. His hair was black and straight, his skin tawny, his features refined.
His name was, for him, rife with shame, and after his mother's death he changed it. She had always dreamed of a pilgrimage to Lourdes, where the Virgin Mary appeared to the child Bernadette Soubirous, and ever afterward, when asked, he said his name was John Lourdes.
He started as an oil boy in the roundhouses. He rose in the ranks to run a yard gang. He spoke two languages fluently, and having been weaned by a criminal, had an intuitive feel for the devilry within men. He was moved to security, and soon after promoted to railroad detective.
In 1908 Attorney General Charles Bonaparte organized the Bureau of Investigation with its own staff of federal law enforcement officers. John Lourdes was invited to join. And so, at the age of twenty-three, he became a special agent working for the federal government in El Paso, Texas.
HE LEANED AGAINST the rail fence that flanked the Rio Grande by the Santa Fe Bridge. He had a week's worth