When the Owl Cries

by Paul Alexander Bartlett

16

A bullet crashed through a front window, as Angelina wrote a letter to Estelle. She had been having trouble with her pen point and was picking at it with her fingernail. At the thud of lead and crackle of glass, she dropped her pen and stared about her as if she had never seen the room before. A second bullet smashed another pane and embedded itself in a wall. Snatching her brass desk bell, she clanged it frantically. Her letter fluttered to the floor. Another bullet shattered glass. Sliding from her chair she began to crawl toward the wall where there were no windows. Servants screamed in the patio. Single shots became a volley, then silence.

She remembered childhood stories of bandits, sordid crimes; all kinds of fears crosshatched her brain; she hunched herself forward on hands and knees, certain she was going mad. When she reached the wall she stood, then sank, crumpled, doll-like, her legs of no use. She reached for the cross on her gold neck chain, but found she had forgotten it. Closing her eyes, she prayed.

A shot spanged prisms off the chandelier, and pieces of glass thumped the wall near her. Opening her eyes, she picked up a fragment of glass with shaky fingers; as she stared at it she saw Raul.

"Raul!" she screamed.

"Stay on the floor!" he shouted.

"Raul ... what's happening?"

Raul and Manuel paused a second in the patio doorway. Raul held his Mauser. Manuel had a carbine. With a rush, bending low, Raul made for the front windows, telling Manuel to get close to the door so he would be protected by the wall. Raul fired out the broken window, then squatted to reload. Manuel aimed and fired; he was slower, steadier, searching for someone on top of the wall. Smoke choked the room.

"What's wrong?" Angelina cried. "Who is it?"

"We don't know who it is," Raul yelled. He crossed the room and knelt beside his wife. "Stay here by the wall. I have men all around the house. Somebody got on our wall and fired down on us, maybe several men. We'll drive them off. Listen ... the shooting has stopped."

"There goes somebody—along the wall," Manuel shouted, and fired through window glass, fragments flying about him.

Like a wraith, Fernando pushed through the patio entrance in his wheel chair, shoving with one hand, groaning. Manuel saw him in the direct line of fire from the wall and scuttled toward the chair, grabbed it and rolled it near Angelina and Raul.

"Father!" said Raul. "You shouldn't be here."

"You want them to come in my room and kill me. Who is it? What is all this? I, you ... why...." His white face and eyeglassless eyes shocked Angelina and she knelt beside him. "You should have stayed in your room," she said. "Who helped you?"

"Who's out there?" Fernando asked. "What's happening?"

"There are a lot of men. Pedro ... many men ... I don't know just who they are."

"So Pedro has turned against me, the god-damn' bastard. I—"

A volley of shots tore into the house, and Raul and Manuel returned the fire. Rifle bullets cracked above, sounding steadily.

"Our men are shooting from the roof," Raul said to Manuel.

The old man coughed and tried to see; he blinked and tugged at his chair.

Raul, tormented by the firing, his father's presence, the destruction, fired recklessly.

"Take it slow, Raul," Manuel said. "First thing you know, you'll be taking chances."

Raul nodded.

Crawling to the far end of the room, he opened a French door and aimed carefully at a man on the wall; as he shot, he noticed one of Petaca's guards firing from the corner turret.

"Some of our men are in the turrets," he said.

Esteban soon appeared in the patio door.

"We're driving them away!" he shouted. "Our men are on the roof. They're leaving Petaca ... we've got them on the run!" He pointed his pistol at the walls.

"Good—we've got them on the run," said Raul to Manuel,

"Kill them!" cried Fernando.

"You must be quiet, ssh," said Angelina, shoving his chair nearer to the wall and sitting beside it.

Other Petaca men took over the outside wall, firing. Raul, at one end of the room and Manuel, at the other, watched and waited. The quiet was strange. Holding on to the wheel chair, Angelina began to cry. Raul, flattened against the wall, stared at her, hating her lack of courage and control. Why wasn't she in Guadalajara?

Raul checked his supply of bullets and then wheeled his father to his bedroom and with the help of Angelina and Chavela, got him into bed. Fernando was silent, very weak.

Mounting the defense wall, Raul learned that twenty-five or thirty men had attacked the hacienda; the appearance of some rurales—a handful of them—had discouraged the attack. But Raul could not be sure the report about the rurales was more than a rumor. Esteban insisted that the firing from the roof had driven off the attackers. Two men had been killed and Raul ordered them buried ... two men in white, one young, one middle-aged. Several of Raul's people had been wounded and Velasco dressed their wounds in the small patio.

Gabriel rode in later and seemed less astounded at the attack than anyone. Limping about the patio, helping the wounded, he said Pedro had not led this attack.

"What if he was with the men who attacked us! He didn't supply those guns, we know that. Raul took his guns. The hacienda of Primavera has been burned. I saw it in the Ciudad Guzman newspaper. Did Pedro do that, too? He can't be everywhere."

"I saw him here," said Raul.

"It's a good thing you had guards posted," said Velasco.

"We'd have lost the place without them," said Raul, rolling a bandage. "I'll have to hand out more guns. There are still some in the game room."

"Keep men on the walls and in the turrets," said Gabriel.

Dr. Velasco's goatee quivered over a wounded youngster. "Can't you hold still? Damn you!" he grumbled.

Instrument in hand, the thin wrist swiveling, he probed for a fragment.

"I feel it," he said.

The youngster moaned.

"Shut up," Velasco said, on edge. "Somebody light me a cigarette."

Back of all this mess, Raul saw his father. Full of bitterness, he walked to the living room and examined the smashed windows, the pocked walls, the damaged chandelier. He asked a scared maid to sweep up the smashed glass. Together they knocked out damaged panes. That job done, he sat down, but he had scarcely caught his breath when Gabriel came in, looking beaten.

"Let's both have a brandy," said Raul. "I was thinking..."

"No, not now. I..."

"What is it?"

"Two of our people were shot, a few minutes ago."

"I heard no shooting. Where?"

"Behind the corral."

"Who got shot?"

"Teresa and María Eugenia. They're dead."

"Two women—the scum ... to shoot women!" Raul exclaimed. The last time he had seen María and Teresa they had been preparing food in the kitchen.

"So somebody shot them," Raul said, barely opening his lips.

"It was no accident," said Gabriel.

"Deliberate."

"Yes."

"My Petaca is taking a beating."

Gabriel turned to go.

"What can I do?" asked Raul.

"Nothing now. I want to see their families. Perhaps..." But he did not bother to finish; instead he read Raul's face, the pain, the struggle for hope.

Shortly after Gabriel had gone, Salvador tramped in, boots clacking. A ricochet bullet had hit him in the head and he had a bloody rag around his skull. A bandolier x'd his chest; he carried a Winchester; his trousers, ripped on the side, sagged over his stomach.

"I have two men at each turret now," he said. "They all have extra bullets. We're ready." He grinned, obviously enjoying himself.

"That should be all right," said Raul. "I wish we could spare a few men and go after Pedro."

"Where would we find him?"

"A couple of men might turn up information."

"Spies?"

"Why not? Let's also find out where the attackers went. We've lots of friends; let's use them. We can't wait for the rurales."

"I'd like to get Pedro, you know that," said Salvador.

"See what you can learn. This may be revolution. We've got to know how things stand." He smelled Salvador's sweat and liked it.

"I'll see what I can find out," said Salvador.

"If you can, contact the rurales; get some of them here."

"Hell, they ran off," he scoffed. Settling his belt over his shoulder, he stalked away. His hat, dangling from a cord around his neck, banged the doorframe as he went out.

When Raul went upstairs he found Angelina in bed, a tray of untouched food on the side table; two maids were with her; one of them was offering her a cup of tea.

"How's everything?" she asked quietly.

"We have men in the turrets and there are men at the gate," he said, making an effort to be calm.

"Will they come back?"

"It's not at all likely."

"Tomorrow anything can happen," she murmured, refusing the tea. "I'm worried about Vicente. What's happening in Colima?" Her nervousness increased the huskiness of her voice. "All this mob, all these killings."

"Vicente's probably all right. The revolutionists won't harm Colima."

"Then what? Is it truly revolution, Raul?"

He sat by the window, bent forward, trying to puzzle it out. He did not answer her because he did not know the answer.

The servants left the room.

"Just as soon as I can, I'll go with you to Guadalajara, just as soon as the railroad operates again. They'll be running cars soon. You'll be all right there, with María. You mustn't stay here." He remembered the newspaper account of street fighting, and asked himself where she should go to be safe.

"Can I take Vicente with me?"

He wanted to encourage her as much as possible. "If you want to, take him," he said.

"Surely the troubled times won't last long," she said, hoping.

She wanted to sob into her pillows: she peered at shadows created by the evening lamp, curious forms on the ceiling: she separated the forms: evil faces, women's faces, Estelle laughing at her, everyone ridiculing her for being so weak. She buried herself in her pillows.

"Raul, Raul," she whispered. "Chavela told me what took place at Refugio.... Take me away."