Mercenary Page 5

  “Hotel Lefebvre,” said Lee, before pointing to himself. “Me, Lee Christmas.”

  He looked at Lee; then he smiled, pointing to the last words on the page. “Una bebida, no. Muchas bebidas, sí.”

  Lee laughed along with him, wondering what the hell he’d said. He turned to face the room and noticed a louder crew in one corner, a table crowded with sweating foreigners. Taking a big swig of his drink—which tasted something like rum, close enough anyway—Lee made his way over.

  “I see you figured out the credit system.” One member of the group rose to shake his hand.

  He smiled. “Just gotta figure out some darn way to pay the tab.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lee,” he said. “Lee Christmas.” He raised his glass and drained it in one go. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.” He almost yakked the last word. “Sorry, guys. Not used to the local hooch.”

  “You just get here?”

  “Fresh off the boat,” he said. “And I think I might be here for a while.”

  17

  His new acquaintances set him up with a job right away, working for the Honduran National Railroad, ferrying ice down from the provincial capital, San Pedro Sula. Some sixty miles inland down a single line of narrow-gauge track, the city was home to the only ice factory in Central America. The train was an old wood-burner, about the only thing that pleased him about set-up. Three times a week, he would make the round trip, hauling bananas up to San Pedro Sula and carrying several two-hundred pound blocks of ice, along with empty banana cars, back to the plantations on the coast. Each time, Lee pushed that tiny train to the limit—full throttle, all the while furiously puffing away at a puro clenched between his teeth.

  When he wasn’t working, he propped up one of the many cantinas and estancos of Puerto Cortés, aguardiente never far from his lips. Despite its diminutive size, the town was never short of the kind of action Lee liked. It was enough to keep him thinking of home, right up until Boyd’s letter arrived. It didn’t say much, just supplied Mamie’s new address, as requested, and wished him luck. He was hoping for more, but he remembered that Boyd was never one for flapping his gums.

  In response, Lee spent hours trying to write Mamie a letter, burning through most of the stationery he’d cajoled off the hotel manager. In the final draft, he kept it to current events, leaving all mention of the past where it belonged—in the trash can. Apologizing to Mamie for his silence, he explained how he’d found himself on a steamer bound for Central America, and how long it had taken him to get her address. He promised the enclosed twenty dollars was just the beginning, and that he was back at the throttle in a place that didn’t care if he mixed up his colors. He wrote at length about the opportunities in Honduras. The rapidly expanding banana plantations along the Caribbean coast. The coconut trees that lined the beach. And his little toy train, which hauled all that cargo to the steamers.

  He got no reply, but he was never one to give up easily. He wrote a second letter, and then a third. Each tale grew a few inches in the telling. Each lucrative opportunity sounded more and more like a sure thing.

  Between the letters, he kept hauling ice down from San Pedro, filling his train up with bananas, and loading American steamers with cargo until they were fit to burst. He sent home as much money as he could with each letter, his nightly carousing limiting what he could salt away.

  But he couldn’t take the silence. Less than a year after he first stepped onto that banana steamer, Lee was back in Louisiana, hauling cane in Burnside. He telegrammed Mamie, letting her know where he was, and she surprised him four days later by arriving with the three children.

  “The job is only temporary,” he was forced to explain. “I … I didn’t think you would turn up immediately. There wasn’t room in the telegram for all the details.”

  The light in her eyes was extinguished right away.

  “I’ll have something real soon, Mamie,” Lee tried to explain. He even tried to convince her to move to Honduras with the kids, telling her all about the job he had waiting for him in Puerto Cortés.

  Mamie nodded, mumbling something about the children, but he was too focused on her face to hear her words. She didn’t believe him; it was plain as day. He had thought to argue the case, but even he saw the pointlessness. Instead, he insisted on escorting them back to the station.

  He hung on in New Orleans for a few months, working a stretch at the New Basin Charcoal Yards. But after a month without any reply from his wife, other than a curt note reminding him of his financial obligations, he decided to return to the banana plantations of Puerto Cortés.

  Lee got his job back with the Honduran National Railroad right away, and he spent even more time in the cantinas. He tried to save money to send home again, he truly did, but every time he sat down to write a letter back to Memphis to accompany it, the missive ended up curled in a ball on the hotel room floor. Scooping up the money instead, he would head out, trying to impress the regulars by ordering whiskey cocktails for everyone within earshot—now that he’d convinced the bartender to order in a shipment of his favorite tipple. Lee felt the pull of politicking once more as the bars filled with talk of customs duties and inspectors on the take, of Honduras’s fate, sandwiched between the jealous lovers of Nicaragua and Guatemala, and of how things should change, and could change, with the right man at the helm.

  This new excitement was broken by news from home: Mamie formally requesting what she had frequently threatened. A divorce.

  Lee crumpled his latest letter and flew out of the hotel in a fit of rage. He walked into the nearest cantina and punched the daylights out of the first guy to look at him the wrong way. Then, he finally succumbed to the temptations of the putas working the cantinas, his reserve cracking when one of them bandaged his hand. Lee’s lust rose as he gazed on her long, dark hair and lithe figure, his conscience numb with aguardiente and regret.

  Time and again after that, he’d fall into the arms of a puta, drunk and cursing the name of his wife, blaming Mamie for the guilt he felt in failing to keep his promises, for abandoning his family, and for reneging on his commitments. In February 1897, Lee finally agreed to release Mamie from her matrimonial vows. He wrote offering to pay the costs of the divorce and pledging to support their children.

  A new game was coming his way.

  18

  At dawn on April 14, 1897, a sentry watched the morning’s first cayuco, piled high with fruit, exit the Chamelecón River into the bay of Puerto Cortés. The native paddled his way to the banana wharf, signaling his arrival with the customary cry. “Plátanos.”

  The watching sentry licked his lips and turned toward the cuartel on the other side of the railway tracks, cupping his hands. “Plátanos,” he yelled. “Vamos amigos.”

  Half the garrison poured out of the cuartel in various states of undress, bleary-eyed but smiling—some not even bothering with footwear. Their unofficial inspection regime always took the edge off the invariable hangover; their ever-rumbling stomachs rarely sated by government rations.

  The soldiers dashed across the railroad track, chasing the sentry, who was already on the other side of the gardens and approaching the waterfront, beckoning the cayuco to draw alongside the banana wharf. The natives were so used to this informal taxation system that the soldiers didn’t even have to bring their weaponry anymore; the uniform was enough to compel obedience. The sentry saw that the native looked worried, probably because his unusually large bounty of plátanos was about to be defiled by his ravenous colleagues, now arriving at the pier. As the first soldiers reached down, though, the mountain of fruit erupted and thirteen armed men—banditos—emerged from beneath the shelter of large banana leaves and ordered the stunned soldiers to kneel.

  With half the garrison captive at the pier and under the care of two men, the other eleven raced toward the cuartel to surprise the remainder. The comandante surrendered in his hammock—consumption, rather than laziness, confining him so—and the rest
of his men followed suit. In twenty short minutes, the banditos had captured Puerto Cortés. Their leader, José Manuel Durón, readily accepted the enlistment of half the government soldiers, pleased he now had an army for his twelve generales to command. Once he had taken stock of the armory—a Hotchkiss gun and two old muzzle-loading cannons, as well as rifles and munitions—General Durón sent a party of men out past the edge of town to block the trestle bridge; then he sat down to celebrate his victory. Meanwhile, after retrieving what fruit he could from the waters around him, the terrified native paddled back to the sanctity of the Chamelecón River, saving his commerce and his plátanos for another day.

  Though their town had been captured by rebels, the civilian inhabitants of Puerto Cortés merely shrugged and got on with their business. Most had seen enough revolutions roll through to know how these things went. The cantinas filled up early, speculation centering on who had armed the rebels, with Guatemala the chief suspect. Puerto Barrios, just forty miles east along the Caribbean coast, was a notorious meeting point for mercenaries and soldiers of fortune. The townspeople continued to debate the revolution’s chances until sundown—all except for Lee Christmas.

  Unaware of the drama unfolding in his adopted hometown, Lee was chugging along happily in his toy train. Smoking a puro. Making the return journey from San Pedro with his usual haul: a line of empty banana cars strung out behind him, with two boxcars of ice at the back.

  Heading right into an ambush.

  19

  Lee pulled into the siding just shy of Puerto Cortés, eyeing a rough-looking pair standing on either side of the rail. That itself wasn’t particularly unusual; locals often tried to hitch a ride in the empty cars, and everyone turned a blind eye. He eased up on the throttle, allowing the engine to coast a little before applying the brakes. As he came to a halt, six more men sprang from the bushes, rifles drawn and bayonets fixed, jabbering in Spanish.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Lee emerged from the cab, his hands raised, noting with some amusement that he was a good foot taller than most of them. “Tranquilo, amigos,” he said. “Tranquilo.” He could only make out some of what they were saying, but he knew they would understand that.

  One of the banditos approached, waving his rifle, the bayonet getting a little too close to Lee’s neck for his liking. Another removed his only weapon, a knife at his belt. Their yammering got more intense.

  “What do you want?” Lee addressed one of the men—he looked like the leader—in broken Spanish.

  The leader ordered his men onto the flatcar.

  He tried again. “Where do you want to go?”

  The bandito raised his rifle, aiming at Lee’s head. “Puerto Cortés.”

  He smiled, replying in English. “I was going there anyway.” He got into the cab and the bandito squeezed in beside him, pressing the bayonet to his neck once more, making it quite plain that he was to try nothing. Lee fired up the engine, wondering what the hell he had gotten himself into now.

  When they had made the short trip into Puerto Cortés proper, Lee noticed an eerie calm in the streets. There were no natives hawking the usual array of plátanos and papayas and cassavas; in fact, the only people wandering around the town’s single thoroughfare were groups of armed men, some dressed in the uniform of government soldiers, others looking altogether more ragged—like the banditos who had commandeered his train.

  He was marched through the town at gunpoint, toward the cuartel, looking for any familiar faces to explain what the hell was going on and what was about to happen to him. He spotted the American consul on the other side of the street in a heated discussion with one of the banditos, and called out to him.

  The consul turned away.

  Lee wasn’t having that. “Allen! Where are these sons of bitches taking me? What’s going on?”

  The consul avoided his eyes.

  “I’m an American citizen,” he protested, before being jabbed in the back with the tip of a bayonet. “An American citizen!”

  One of the banditos grabbed him around the neck, standing on tiptoe to do so, and Lee had to stifle a chuckle.

  “Vamos, yanqui.” He shoved Lee again.

  Not wanting to feel another prick of that damn bayonet, Lee resumed his forced march, occasionally looking over his shoulder, trying to catch the consul’s attention. Embarrassed by his own powerlessness, the consul soon disappeared into one of the cantinas.

  When they reached the cuartel, Lee was pushed inside. Once his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he noticed a mustachioed man sitting at a table, a near-empty bottle of aguardiente in his hand. He took one more swig and stood, swaying. Lee noticed he must have drunk most of that bottle himself.

  “I am General José Manuel Durón.” He brushed his hands on his sweat-stained shirt while he sized up the gringo in front of him. “You must be the yanqui engineer.”

  Despite his slurred speech, the general spoke a little slower and was easier to understand. “Yes, sir,” said Lee.

  “News of my capture of Puerto Cortés is making its way to the capital. I must take San Pedro Sula before the government forces can come down from Tegucigalpa.” The general paused for a moment before bearing his teeth. “At dawn, you will transport my men in your little train. Either that or…”

  Lee raised an eyebrow. “Or what?”

  The general thumped the table, upending the aguardiente. He swiped the bottle clear, dashing it against the wall, and fixed Lee with a steely gaze. “Muerte.”

  Lee was of half a mind to smack him just for the hell of it, consequences be damned. Instead, he drew himself up to his full height. “If you are going to make me a target, General, then at least give me a gun so I may kill some sons of bitches.”

  The room fell silent. The general stared at him, his moustache twitching. Then he began to laugh. “This gringo, eh?” He looked at his men and was just about to speak when Lee interrupted him.

  “General, sir, that train is a death trap, especially for anyone upfront in the cab—which is me, I suppose. But if I get shot, you have no one to drive the train. If any of your men could do it, I wouldn’t even be here, right?”

  The general nodded, seemingly intrigued.

  “We have some time,” he continued. “There’s plenty of old scrap up at Laguna. If you give me some men, we can put a flatcar in front of the cab and armor it. You’ll have some shooters at the front, in case we hit any trouble along the way.”

  The general considered the proposal for a moment before barking orders at his men. He turned back to Lee. “You have until dawn. And no tricks, or—”

  He waved a hand. “I know, I know. I’ll be shot.”

  * * *

  Lee was up half the night, but he was happy with what he had rigged up—a little traveling fort in front of his cab. The Hotchkiss cannon captured at the cuartel was mounted at the head of the flatcar, and the sides were walled in with three-quarter-inch scrap iron fronted by a row of sandbags—enough protection for a line of marksmen on either side. He examined his handiwork. An armored train, he thought, chuckling, and turned in for what was left of the night.

  Unbeknownst to Lee and the revolutionaries, the comandante of the San Pedro Sula garrison had decided to put down their little rebellion before it got underway. Deciding not to wait for official orders from the capital, the comandante took a company of men and rode through the night, down toward the coast. The following morning, just as the rebels were readying to board, scouts brought word: the federales would be upon them shortly. The train was stationed at the far end of a large lake, and the likely point of attack was across the trestle bridge that bore the single line of narrow-gauge rail inland to San Pedro. General Durón, showing few signs of his night of carousing, sprang into action, ordering the mouth of the trestle barricaded with the only thing to hand: the gigantic 200-pound blocks of ice, slowly melting in the back of Lee’s train.

  Behind their icy fortifications, rebels took position. The armored flatcar afforded th
e sharpshooters both protection and a vantage point. And the federales—instead of waiting for the ice to melt in the sweltering tropical heat—forsook prudence and charged into battle across the trestle bridge, toward the revolutionaries. Lee sat in his cab, watching the spectacle unfold. The rebels had given him a rifle, but despite his bravado the night before, he had no intention of joining the battle. He was just hopeful that his “side” would be victorious—else he’d have some real explaining to do. A potshot ricocheted off the side of the cab, snapping him back to attention. Something stirred inside him. He grabbed his weapon and jumped down from the train.

  When Lee looked back on this moment of his life, he could never quite explain it. His father had been a military man—a veteran of President Polk’s Mexican campaign—who had stormed Chapultepec with General Scott. Maybe it was in his blood. Or maybe he was plain crazy. Whatever it was, Lee raced to the icy barricade and took position right beside Durón.

  His first shot flew high and wild, his arms shivering involuntarily when they rested on the ice.

  Durón turned to him and smiled. “Frio, no?”

  As Durón resumed shooting, Lee took position again, letting the cold burn through his arms. He took aim. His first target hit the deck before he could even curl his finger around the trigger. Someone else must have beaten him to it.

  Lee took a breath and carefully picked another. The comandante—Lee could see him now, urging his men forwards. “Just like shootin’ rabbits,” he said as he squeezed the trigger.

  The comandante went down with a desperate cry, first to his knees, and then slumped forwards onto his face. The enemy charge faltered almost immediately. Some threw themselves to the crossties, others turned tail altogether, seeking out the sanctity of the other side.

  The rebels cheered, firing the occasional shot as the government troops retreated, before fleeing altogether. Durón embraced Lee and promoted him to captain on the spot. He insisted on calling off their planned assault on San Pedro Sula, so their victory could be properly celebrated.