Rojas knew how to read faces.
“Back this out of here,” Rojas ordered.
“You drive it,” Dillinger said, putting on the hand brake and getting out of the car.
“I don’t know how to drive, you idiot!” Rojas yelled. “Get back in here.”
“Put the gun down in the driver’s seat. Gently.”
Rojas was livid, but when he turned to face the mob, he knew that however many people he might shoot, before he could reload they would be at him like ants, choking him, stomping on him, then stringing him up. Carefully, he put the gun down in the driver’s seat. Dillinger picked up the gun as he slid behind the wheel and slowly backed the car away from the mob, then turned. He sped out of town, holding the wheel with his left hand, the gun aimed at Rojas in his right, and at the top of his voice singing the song that was on the Hit Parade when he left home, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”
Ortiz rode hard for almost half an hour before reaching an encampment of five wickiups grouped beside a small pool of water in a horseshoe of rock that sheltered them from the wind.
The carcass of a small deer roasted over a fire on an improvised spit, and three young Indians squatted beside it smoking cigarettes.
Ortiz dismounted and tethered his pony. He gazed at the men impassively for a moment, then went into his wickiup, lay on his face, and closed his eyes.
In the darkness there was only a deep satisfaction and a hate that burned like a white-hot flame, so pure that it was an ecstasy, a mystical reality as great as any the Fathers at Nacozari had told him about.
Ortiz decided what he must do. He left the peace of the wickiup and assembled his warriors.
He said, “I have worn a priest’s cassock in the hope that I would one day be received as a man of God. Today, I saw Father Tomas, a man of God, shot in the head by that butcher Rivera. Before everything, I am an Apache,” he said, and with one rent of his powerful hands ripped the cassock from his body and flung it aside. Underneath he was wearing the breech clout, and on his head he now put the headband of an Apache warrior.
He continued, “This is what we must do. Chato and Cochin, go for those of our brothers who would join us in this thing. Ride to the north pasture, break down the fences, and slaughter some of the cattle. You will not harm the herdsman. He must be spared to carry the news to Rivera.”
He turned to the third man. “You, Kata, get as many rifles as we have hidden and come back here to me.”
They moved to do his bidding, and within a few minutes he was alone listening to the sound of them vanishing into the dusk.
He stood for a while, thinking, then picked up a handful of dust and tossed it into the fire. In his veins, he felt the fire of vengeance.
Ten
As he drove, Dillinger was lecturing Rojas. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I learned that some people have big fists and small brains. Other guys have lots of brains, but their fists are useless. And some have brains and fists and know how to use them both. I been trying to pigeonhole you, Rojas, and I figure you for the first kind, big fists, small brains.”
“Gringo, I will get you to the Federalistas, sooner or later, just as Senor Rivera wants.”
Dillinger applied his right foot to the brakes so hard that Rojas went flying into the windshield, hurting his nose and forehead. “Sorry,” Dillinger said. “I thought I saw a snake in the road.”
“You drive this car like a crazy madman.”
“Then I guess you’d better just get out,”
Dillinger said, waving Rojas’s gun at him. “Out!”
“You can’t make me get out here. Take me to the hacienda.”
“I can take you back to town, how about that?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s where I’m going, Rojas. Out!”
“Suppose no one comes by?” Rojas said, getting out of the convertible.