The Creed of Violence - Boston Teran [56]
"When I give the order to cinch it, get inside fast and keep going. This platform may come off and part of the wall with it."
Each link was near as big as their fists and they scarred and danged along the rails as John Lourdes took a deep breath. The father muscled down like a prizefighter and then John Lourdes yelled out, "Cinch it."
They roped in the chain. It tautened and caught up against the wheels. The two men scrambled over each other getting into the car and the sound coming off those locked wheels was like a foundry saw shearing pure steel. There were fireworks of sparks, and the studs in the platform and up through the rear wall began to spider with cracks and the platform ripped apart like a flimsy toy. The back wall was there one moment, and the next, they were staring out a frame of decimated wood exposing drab brown hills and dust-strewn daylight. The screeching went on, it seemed, interminably. Then, in one staggering instant the cars stopped.
SECTIONS OF THE chain were ground to dust, but the remainder was shivved up under and around the wheels and so the cars were held.
The Mastodon had not returned and they were left now to their own resources in that silent chasm, with Tampico a century of miles through those fluted and waterless hills.
"Now," said John Lourdes to the father, "you see why I wouldn't leave the truck."
It was in its own way a purely orthodox application of practical strategy. The father still remarked with a certain insight, "That's not why you wouldn't leave the truck."
John Lourdes got out the fire ax and a set of crowbars and formed two work gangs of women. The father took the first bunch and they went about chopping the roof beams loose from the passenger car. The son worked the others dismantling the flatbed siderails and truss bars. And damn if that common assassin didn't start teaching those women to sing in English "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" as they sweated it in that filthy railcar.
John Lourdes meant to build a rampway jerry-rigged from an assemblage of crisscrossed timbers and truss bound together by rope and cable and parts of chain and any clothing the women weren't wearing right then and there.
John Lourdes walked up and down this raft with uncertainty as the father and the women watched.
"It's no masterpiece," said the son.
"Mr. Lourdes, good manners requires me to allow you first crack at driving the truck."
"You're a fuckin' saint," muttered the son under his breath.
John Lourdes edged the truck over the lip of the flatcar and leaned from the cab to see if the weight could be sustained. The father acted as traffic cop angling his hands to get those wheels a little this way or that. When the engine was committed all the way down the ramp it started to sag like the spine of some cartoon swayback. The women chimed in trying to avert what they saw as a disaster, yelling for John Lourdes to turn the wheels in direct contradiction to the father who was now cursing their hellish mouths. Some of them took to pleading he go back, while others urged he just come on. It was all devolving into useless jabber so John Lourdes swallowed hard to clear his throat and with one quick to-hell-with-it decision, gassed the pedal.
The truck lurched, and as the front end touched ground the ramp gave and the rear tires slammed upon the ties. The truck heaved to one side under the strain of those lashed crates of ammunition and all watched in stunned silence as the unwieldy hump piled up in the truckbed settled back in place. Then John Lourdes just footed the gas pedal slightly and the truck started forward to a collective sigh of relief.
TWENTY-NINE
Y DUSK THEY drove the trackline, one wheel straddling the ties and the other on a meager strip of roadbed. The women took turns perched up on crates, stacked in the truckbed or walking ahead of it. One man drove while the other rested. It was slow and dangerous