The Creed of Violence - Boston Teran [62]
Along the side of the house John Lourdes spotted a root cellar. It was practically beneath the rooms where the men were. He went and knelt by the canted entranceway. He looked about. There were but two men down by the derricks. He could see the faint glow of their cigarettes. He worked the latch and lifted the weathered door. He bent and felt his way down a set of wobbly steps. He closed the night off and hunched there in the dark. The cellar was foul with decay and fungaled shorings, the floor was flooded with a few inches of tainted water and every cautious step he took slopped behind him.
On the floorboards overhead the men's boots tapped out their pacings or creaked when chairs were moved. But that black and stinking hole was near about as good as a stethoscope for picking up their conversation.
THIRTY-ONE
HEN HE LEFT the hotel room Rawbone walked the streets with his bindle slung over one shoulder like some aimless tramp. He tried to discredit every incident, every day, every hour and minute from El Paso to that very moment as if to deny the undeniable.
"There are times, Mr. Lourdes, when you say something and it's like you've known me all my life."
"Or maybe all my life."
Could it be John Lourdes doesn't know I am his father? He tried to convince himself of that possibility. That the young man in the Southern who was his son, his blood, might somehow have eradicated a father from memory. It was ridiculous and demanded raw stupidity to be even remotely believed. And the fact he was reaching that far enraged him, for it signaled weakness and fear and shame and how truly he'd been plowed under by the truth.
He stopped and looked in a shop window. His image there tinctured by gas lamps. He removed the derby and cradled back his hair. He was searching for his son, but his son was in that hotel room, he was a member of the Bureau of Investigation, he was the man who had taken him down, who he had traveled with for days, who had outplotted him, who he'd brought to the women wracked with pain, who controlled his fate. And who, only a faint hour ago, he had considered murdering. John Lourdes was also the man who had never once acknowledged the fact they were father and son. Suddenly the hearse came back to him, when they had spoken to each other through its glass casement. He stepped away from the window, unable to bear the sight of himself.
It was a weekend night. The streets were alive and rowdy with horse-drawn trolleys and carriages flush with tourists. There were couples and laughter and people on balconies playing cards or listening to Victrolas. Vendors sold ice cream and bottled mineral water and candied treats. And Rawbone walked amongst all this alone and in the possession of a shattering immensity.
John Lourdes had even changed his name. Probably, Rawbone thought, for the same reason I had changed my own-shame. At least we had that in common. The very idea of it caused bitter laughter that verged on tears.
He walked the beach. He watched the tide roll in and foam over the oily sand, he watched it fall away. He stood in the amber mist of the casinos along the boardwalk.
His wife had hung that cross from a nail beneath a postcard of Lourdes with a child standing before a statue of the Virgin Mary. Rawbone had told her, "I hope she does a lot better for you than she did for her own kid."
She'd been praying for her husband's conversion to goodness. Deriding such an act, he had fired at the crucifix, shattering part of one cross beam.
She'd picked it up from the floor and stood before him in that smoky hovel they called home. She pointed to each cross beam. The one that survived, the one that was shattered. "One for each thief crucified with Christ," she said. "Which do you want to be? These are the only choices for us all."
In a sparkflash he understood how John Lourdes had come by his name. He turned from the Gulf. How quickly it all had gone. From the casino an orchestra played. Through tall French doors he could see elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen dance to the rich and