Chapter 6
The Mexican Central was a new railroad and it ran like one. The track was still settling in places, obviously not enough ballast in the track bed, and the cars swayed far too much, the joints uneven, the grades imprecise. But it moved and it moved south, which was the only thing that mattered.
Isum watched the Chihuahuan desert come up around them and thought it was the most honest country he had ever seen.
Nothing was hidden here. The land went flat in every direction to where the mountains came up brown and bare on the horizon as if covered in a thin veil of smoke.
Between the train and the mountains there was nothing but rock and scrub and sky.
No trees worth speaking of. No water visible anywhere.
Just the ocotillo, the yucca, creosote bush and the occasional hawk turning slow circles overhead looking for a snake or a rodent.
The first water stop was at a place called Villa Ahumada, a small station with a single adobe building and a water tank. The stop was brief but several passengers boarded and some got off. The fireman worked fast and the train pulled out quickly.
The priest across the aisle had a breviary open in his lap and read from it in a low continuous murmur that Isum could not quite hear. After a time the priest looked up and caught Isum watching him.
"?La Ciudad de Chihuahua?" the priest asked.
"Further south," Isum said. "Jiménez."
The priest nodded as though this was not surprising. "Business?"
"No, just taking in the country, tourists."
The priest nodded again and went back to his breviary without further comment, which was the kind of discretion Isum appreciated in a man of the cloth or any other kind.
Will was asleep against the window. He had slept perhaps three hours in El Paso, and he slept now. Isum let him sleep and watched the country and thought about what they were riding toward.
He'd been in situations like this many times, though never this far from home and never with a deputy's wife and child as part of the problem.
The wife and child changed things. You couldn't move fast with a six-year-old boy.
You couldn't leave him behind, and you couldn't ask Elena to be anything other than what she was.
A woman who would not be rushed and would not panic and would do exactly what needed doing when the moment came.
That part didn't worry him. Elena Cole was not a woman who panicked.
Chihuahua City arrived around the middle of the afternoon, bigger than Isum had expected, a proper capital with wide streets and a cathedral that rose above everything else.
The train rolled into a real station here, high ceilings and a broad platform and vendors moving through with food and water.
They had a two-hour wait for the southbound continuation and Isum woke Will as they came into the station, and they got off and found food at a stall near the station entrance.
Tamales and black beans and strong coffee. They ate on a nearby bench and watched the street outside. A regiment of soldiers passed at the far end of the block, moving in good order, rifles at the shoulder. Porfirio Díaz's army, keeping the peace the way Díaz wanted it.
"Rurales dress better than that," Will said.
"Rurales dress to impress," Isum said. "Regular army just show up."
They checked on the horses in the stock car and found them settled and eating the abundant hay without complaint. The dun mare had drunk most of her water. Isum refilled the bucket from a trough on the platform and the mare drank again without hurry.
"Good horse," Isum said.
"Castillo knew what he was doing," Will said.
"Most liverymen do. It's their business to know."
The southbound pulled out at half past three, a shorter train now, fewer passengers. The Anglo miners had gotten off at Chihuahua City. The priest was still aboard, apparently bound for somewhere further south. A rancher and his wife and two teenage sons took seats near the back.
South of Chihuahua City the desert was different.
More broken, more color in the rock, the mountains closer and more complicated in their shapes.
The track followed a shallow river valley for a long stretch, the water brown and low but present, which was more than could be said for most of this country.
Cottonwoods grew along the banks, the only big trees Isum had seen since El Paso.
The water stops came regularly. The locomotive had no tender and had to stop every seven to ten miles for water.
Each stop was a version of the same thing.
A tank, a shed, a man or two to work the spout, twenty minutes of steam venting and then the whistle and the slow gathering of momentum once more.
Isum and Will got off at each stop, walked the platform and looked at the country.
At one stop, a town called Las Delicias, a boy of about twelve approached them with a tray of pan dulce, sweet bread in half a dozen shapes. Isum bought four and gave the boy an extra centavo and the boy said something in Spanish too fast for Will to follow.
"What'd he say?" Will asked.
"Said God bless you and your friend and may your journey be without trouble," Isum said.
"That's a lot of words."
"Mexicans are generous with words." Isum handed Will two of the rolls. "Del's the same way in Spanish. More words than in English."
"Del barely uses words in English."
Isum chuckled. "That's our Del alright."
They ate the pan dulce on the platform and got back aboard.
Jiménez came up as the sun was going flat and red in the west. The station was modest, the platform packed dirt, the depot a long low adobe with the Mexican Central name freshly lettered above the door.
A few men stood around watching the train arrive with the idle interest of men who have seen it before but haven't grown entirely tired of it.
Will and Isum were the only passengers who got off with horses. They ran the dun and the gray down the stock car ramp and stood with them while the train built steam to continue south. "We need a place to sleep and a place to ask questions," Will said.
"Sleep first," Isum said. "Questions in the morning when people are more willing to talk."
"Agreed."
They led the horses down the main street of Jiménez and found a stable and a hotel within two blocks of each other, which was about what you could expect from a town this size.
The hotel was clean and the proprietor, a stout woman named Se?ora Garza, fed them supper without being asked.
A soup with chiles and hominy that cleared out whatever the train had left in their lungs.
"Ciénega del Norte," Will said to Se?ora Garza after dinner in Spanish. "How far from here?"
She considered. "By horse, a hard day south and a little west. Maybe more depending on the road. The road is not always a road this time of year. Sometimes it's one gully after another."
"Is there a priest in San Vicente?"
She looked at him with slightly more attention. "Padre Morales. He has been there twenty years, maybe more. Why do you want the priest?"
"A man who has been somewhere twenty years knows things," Will said.
Se?ora Garza thought about this and apparently found it acceptable. "Padre Morales is a good man," she said. "He will talk to you if he thinks it wise."
They were on the road before sunup, the horses fresh from a night's rest and moving well in the cool morning air.
The road south from Jiménez was a track of packed dirt and rock that ran through country that reminded Isum of West Texas except drier, if that were possible.
The brush was different, the cactus taller, the arroyos deeper.
Every few miles a ranch gate appeared on one side or the other, always closed, suggesting the people inside had learned to be careful about strangers.
They rode mostly without talking. The horses settled into a steady ground-eating lope that covered the miles without much drama.
At midmorning they stopped at a shallow creek and let the horses drink and ate from what Se?ora Garza had packed for them without being asked, tortillas, dried beef and two oranges, the skin a vibrant, lime-green, typical of Mexican oranges when fully ripe.
Isum peeled his orange and ate it while looking at the creek. It was barely a creek, more of a seep, but something grew along its banks that grew nowhere else in sight, a thin line of green bushes in the brown.
"Del told me once that Elena said the country down here has its own kind of beauty," Isum said. "Said you had to look at it on its own terms, not compare it to somewhere else."
"She's right," Will said.
"Yeah." Isum looked at the mountains to the west, which had been there all morning and hadn't gotten any closer. They mounted and rode on.
San Vicente appeared in the late afternoon, a cluster of low adobe buildings around a central plaza with a whitewashed church at the north end.
The church was the tallest structure in town by a considerable margin.
A few children stopped and watched the two riders come in from the north road.
A dog came out from somewhere and considered them and decided they were not worth the trouble and went back.
Isum looked at the church. "That where you want to start?"
"You got it," Will said.
They tied the horses at the rail in front of the cantina across from the church and Will went to find Padre Morales.