El Diablo

By Tom Bartel

El Diablo is the story of Ben Smith, a young man who witnesses the murders of his family members and embarks on a journey of revenge. On the road, though, he learns that all the things he thought he knew are not exactly as they seemed, and that sometimes hate can be overwhelmed by love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom Bartel
• Release date: Jun 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465852977

Tom Bartel

Tom Bartel was a publisher, editor and writer in Minneapolis for over thirty years. He was the founder of two publications, City Pages and The Rake. Since 2013, he's been publishing a travel blog, Travel Past 50, at https://travelpast50.com. He's also the publisher of a blog about Minnesota travel at https://mntrips.com.

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El Diablo

By G. A. Bartel and Tom Bartel

Copyright 2011 Tom Bartel

Smashwords Edition

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Dedication

When my brothers and I were young, the typical family vacation consisted of throwing a baby mattress in the back of the station wagon for the three of us to wrestle on, packing too much gear in a top carrier, and heading west from Council Bluffs to the mountains of Colorado for a week of camping, horseback riding, and a non stop stream of stories from my Dad.

The stories revolved around two themes: Art Bartel, the One-Man Division, which was about his exploits in World War II, and When I was a Cowboy, also based upon Dad’s over stimulated imagination.

The yarns usually were spun as we rolled down the highway with the windows open both to cool us off and to expel the cigarette smoke. The radio was no good. It was before the days of FM, and certainly before we ever had air conditioning in the car. It was loud from the 50 mile per hour wind, but we three boys moved up from the back end to the back seat and managed to stop wrestling long enough to listen.

One summer, the story was El Diablo, and it was pretty similar to what you have here. Of course, we had to wait to the end of the trip to actually learn that Dad was El Diablo, and that Mom was Pilar, and that our grandfather was El Patrón. I’m not sure that my youngest brother Matt has ever gotten over the shock of learning that the big old man he though of as Pa Pa had been a famous outlaw.

So, here is Dad’s story, with a little embellishment, punctuation, and Spanish color from me.

Thanks to my wife, Kristin, for reading, editing, and commenting on the manuscript. Thanks to my niece, Carly Bartel, who conceived and painted the cover art, and to my sister-in-law Sandy Bartel, who did the typography. Thanks to my own children, Matt and Jane, for putting up with the stories I concocted for their benefit over the years. And especially, thanks to my mother, Colleen, for putting up with all my Dad’s lies—I mean stories—for fifty-nine years.

And thanks to Dad for being the best. He died last year. I miss the hell out of him.

Tom Bartel

June 2011

Ben Wayne sat on the front porch of his cabin staring out over the slow moving brown water of the Rio Grande. His short black boots rested on the log railing and his hands were idly fingering his watch chain. He was wearing his typical boot cut Levis and a plaid wool shirt. His black Stetson was tipped back on his head to reveal a shock of thick black hair, which was beginning to show a little silver above the ears. On the table next to him was a pipe, which showed the marks of where he had chewed it since he quit smoking a few months ago. There was half a cup of cold coffee in a ceramic mug, forgotten as he pondered his current dilemma.

Chris Edmonds had written him at the city house in San Antonio last week and told him that Ben’s son Matt had called to ask a few questions about some documents he’d found among his mother’s personal items in the Oberto family home near Lajitas in the Big Bend country. Matt, it seems, had found his grandfather’s diary and his ledger books. Chris told Ben that he’d deflected the questions as well as he could.

I told him that, if there were any more information about El Patrón, it would be buried deep in old files at Ranger headquarters in Austin, Chris told Ben. But I don’t think that’s going to stop him checking into it. And I hear your other son Tom has been at the University library going through oral history documents to see if anyone had any stories about El Patrón or El Diablo. I understand he’s found a couple of references in the transcripts from some old Rangers and an Indian or two. You should have never let that kid be a nosy newspaperman, Ben. I’m pretty sure his next call is going to be Cap Reasoner.

Ben got to Cap first.

Cap Reasoner was now on his way to Ben’s cabin. Ben was sure Cap would keep his knowledge of El Diablo and El Patrón to himself, but he also knew that Tom and Matt had assembled quite a bit of information from pawing through Señor Oberto’s diaries and the library archives to fuel their questions. And he knew that Tom didn’t stop until he got the story he was after. He didn’t always publish everything he knew—no good reporter did—but nevertheless Ben wasn’t sure that this story wouldn’t be bigger than either of them could control.

It took Cap a day’s train ride and another two hours on horseback to reach Ben’s cabin. Ben saw the dust whirls kicked up by Cap’s horse just as he heard the older man holler, Hello the house.

I knew you’d seen me before I yelled, said Cap as he dismounted, but I wanted to make sure you knew I was friendly. I have some recollection of you when you ran into fellows who weren’t. His eyes, wrinkled almost shut by 75 years of sun, still sparkled with his smile. The upturned corners of his mouth though, were hidden behind that big moustache he’d had since Ben had first met him so many years ago.

Coffee? offered Ben.

No thanks, said Cap. I never thought coffee was much good for washing down road dust. But, I’ll take a beer if you’re not too much of a sissy to have one in your cool cellar.

Ben got Cap the bottle, opened it and set it on the table. There you go, you old grouse, said Ben.

Didn’t Pilar come with you? asked Cap.

No, laughed Ben. "She took great pleasure in reminding me that I’d got myself into this mess by being such a hard case, and now I was going to have to get myself out of it. I thought of telling her that she had a lot of nerve calling me a hard case, but I thought better of it. It’s one thing I’ve learned in the last thirty years: Don’t challenge Pilar Oberto to a duel of wits. I always feel like I’m completely unarmed.

So Cap, put your feet up and tell me what I should do. You’re almost as good at that as she is, as I recall, Ben continued.

I shouldn’t have had to come all the way the hell out here to tell you what you already know, said Cap. Pilar is right. You did some hard things, and, until now, only a couple of people know about them, and we’ve all kept our mouths shut. The only written records I know of are a couple of reports I noted long ago of some bodies we’d found lying around this part of Texas that we couldn’t explain. Of course, a couple of them carried some reference to El Diablo. Whoever he was, he wasn’t very subtle, at least until later.

Yeah, whoever he was, he must have been pretty stupid as a young man, said Ben. It’s amazing he didn’t get caught.

You know your boys, and you know they love you and their mother. You also know that they’ve got to be what they are because of the way you both are—stubborn as hell. On top of that, they got their mother’s intelligence. You might as well tell them the story for a couple of reasons: they’re going to find out anyway is one of them. The other is that they will understand what happened. You raised them. You can trust them.

Ben didn’t answer Cap right away. He removed his hat and dropped it on the porch and walked inside to get Cap another beer. When he came back out, he carried Cap’s bottle in his right hand, but with his left he was still fingering his watch chain and the gold nugget attached to it.

I guess you’re right, Cap, he said. We’re scheduled for our annual get together in Colorado next month. I’ll tell them then.

1

Our piece of west Texas wasn’t very big, but it was enough for us. Us was my mother, my brother Bill, and our hired man, Álvaro. My Dad died when I was four, so I really didn’t remember him that well. We didn’t really know how he died. He always came home at dusk for supper, but one day he didn’t. After an hour or so, Mom and Bill went out to look for him. They found him around midnight. They told me he’d fallen off his horse, which was odd, Bill said, because Dad was such a good horseman. Bill told me the horse was still standing near Dad when they found him. Could have been his heart gave out, or the horse could have been spooked by a snake, or something like that. But Bill said Dad was just lying there peacefully, like he was sleeping. He might have had a broken neck, but we didn’t really ever know.

Bill was three years older than I, so, for as long as I recall, he was the one doing the bossing. Mom wasn’t much of a boss. She just quietly told both of us what needed to be done and expected that we’d do it. And if we wanted to eat, we did.

Álvaro had joined us a couple of years earlier. He was riding through from Juárez on a sad looking mule, wearing an even sadder looking straw sombrero. He stopped to ask for water and ended up staying. I had no idea how old he was—other than he looked a lot older than Mom. That was because he looked as though the sun had been at his face with a sharp chisel; the lines radiating from his eyes looked about an inch deep.

Our house was quite handsome. When my parents had first come to this land, wood was too scarce to use for building materials other than doors and window frames. But over the years, whenever they’d got a little ahead by selling some cattle, Dad took the heavy wagon into Saragosa and came back with a load of timber. Over the years, he’d built quite a nice—but small—house. There was one big room in front that served as the parlor, dining room and kitchen. On one end there was a fireplace and a stove that both fed into the same brick chimney. In the back were two more rooms. The smaller was Mom’s bedroom, and the larger was Bill’s and mine. The only things on the walls were some rough shelves for the dishes, some hooks for pots and pans near the stove, and some pegs that had been stuck above the door to hold Dad’s Henry rifle. In our room, I’d thrown a board over two stacks of bricks to serve as a bookshelf.

Álvaro slept in a lean-to he’d attached to the back of the barn. He had decorated it himself with a few saints’ images he’d carved out of cottonwood root. He’d stuck them into niches in the mud wall and he occasionally burned a candle or two in front of them. He also had an odd skeleton statue he’d made from creek bottom mud and fired hard in a mesquite fire. He had painted it white with a ghastly red-lipped smile. He called it Catrina and told us that it was to remind him that death was coming to us all, and every now and then you had to remember to laugh about it. Mexicans are strange sometimes.

Most nights, Álvaro would sit in his room, pluck at his guitar, and sing sad songs we didn’t understand. When he had a little money, he’d ride into Saragosa and come back with a jug of mescal that he called El Suicida. He got kind of a silly grin on his face when he said that, but then he’d disappear into his lean-to and the sad guitar would start and we wouldn’t see him until morning.

We had a few dozen steers, a bull or two, and a couple of milk cows meandering around our hundred or so acres. Since there weren’t any fences except for the corrals around the barn, we didn’t really know or care exactly how much land was ours. We had a boar and a sow and a new litter of piglets in the sty out behind the barn. We also had a few dozen chickens that kept us supplied with eggs and chicken dinners on Sundays. Most of the work around the place consisted of milking, herding the steers from patch to patch as the grass wore out, and taking the occasional shot with the Henry at coyotes that were bold enough to come around the chicken yard or pig sty.

A stream ran out of the mountains, through our range and past our front porch. It widened out into what could generously be called a lake about a mile down the hill from the house. The lake provided come catfish and bass when we had time to catch them. Bill wasn’t much for fishing, but I enjoyed it. Or at least I enjoyed sitting in the shade of the cottonwoods that lined the lake and watching the ripples spread as the bass jumped for flies in the early evening. Every now and then, I was able to coax a few onto my line for Mom to dredge in

Reviews for El Diablo

[stahl2ricco · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A short, fast paced book! A man watches as his family is killed, then vows to kill the men who did it, all 8 of them. He becomes "El Diablo" and rides out to exact his revenge! It's a western tale if vengeance, set in the old days along the Texas/Mexico border. A nice read!