[August 12th] [The Alamo (1960)] Diamond in the Rough, scene 2 (and Interlude)

[insaneladybug.livejournal.com]

Title: Diamond in the Rough, scene 2
Day/Theme: August 12th - More than a box full of icons
Series: The Alamo (1960 film)
Character/Pairing: Emil Sande, Graciela "Flaca", Davy Crockett (in flashbacks)
Rating: T/PG-13

Despite my leeriness over writing for real people, Davy Crockett has turned up. But heck, I figured his portrayal in the movie was probably mostly fictional anyway. And I just couldn't resist having him interact with Emil some more. Their banter in the movie is gold.

I debated over whether this segment should timeskip so much. But somehow I felt this was really how I wanted it and how it should be. Things from before will be revealed in flashbacks, as depicted here.

EDIT: I've finally decided to insert that Interlude I wrote after everything else was finished. It needs to be included, and it doesn't seem to fit anywhere, but I'll have to make do with putting it here, in this entry.


By Lucky_Ladybug

Interlude

There were so many people.

They had gathered to . . . to what? To mourn him? Never. To scorn and scoff? Quite possibly. To steal from him? Almost certainly.

Their voices echoed oddly and far away, although they were near. He sensed them more than saw them. When he did see them, the images were distorted and wavy and foggy.

And he felt them. He felt their hands on his forehead, touching his cheek, bothering his chest.

The pain was excruciating. He was fatally wounded; no one could survive a wound from a knife that size. But death was slow in coming. It teased him, tormented him, making him believe it was taking him and then leaving him a while longer.

And always with the people.

They knew he was dying, too. And they lingered, vultures that they were, waiting for him to die, waiting to take everything away from him as everything had been taken from him before.

"How is he today?"

"Very bad. He won't last beyond today, I'm afraid."

"He looks dead now."

"He's not."

Yes, that was a pity, wasn't it? They were so impatient for him to be gone.

But . . . it wasn't as though he could stop them if they stole from him now. Why were they here? Why were they waiting for him to die? What manner of cruelty was this?

They wanted him to know they were there. They wanted him to know what they were going to do. That was the only logical explanation.

"If you want to administer the Last Rites while he's still alive, Father, you'd best do it right away."

"I'll wait a bit longer."

Father? The village priest was here? Was he in on the scheme? Or was he an innocent bystander, unaware of what the other people were planning?

"What a wretched, twisted man. It's a fitting ending for him."

"Oh no. No, I feel sorry for him."

"You would, Father."

"He's so bitter and angry. He's suspicious of the entire world. What he was crying out last night, about everyone being against him and out to steal from him? Oh, I feel so sorry for him."

He didn't need anyone's pity. He had lived his life as he had seen fit. He had fought and he had clawed and he had struggled against everyone who was out to get him. And until he had been taken down by that knife, he had succeeded.

He had no regrets. No regrets.

Graciela. . . .

No, not Graciela, either. She had betrayed him, just as everyone had betrayed him.

People were cruel and people were false and people were heartless. All people, everywhere. Kindness was a fraud. Everyone was always only out for themselves. He had learned that the hard way before bitterly taking the philosophy to heart and proving that he was not a naïve dog to be trampled on and kicked. He had fought back. He had always fought back. Anyone who had tried to take advantage of him from that point on was sorry.

Why did these people stay? Why were they changing the bandages and bathing his skin and seemingly trying to get his temperature down?

Why were they keeping him alive?

They wanted something else from him. They wanted him alive so that they could demand favors. Or maybe so that they could present themselves to the town as being such good, pious citizens. Self-service was the real motive behind any apparent good will.

He stayed suspicious. He snapped and snarled and growled and demanded. If he pushed long enough and hard enough, they would reveal their true colors. They would show him that all of this seeming mercy was an act and stop torturing him with a fantasy that could never be real.

But they never showed him. Their patience stretched and occasionally shattered. Their tempers cracked and now and then broke. Yet still, their kindness lingered and never faded.

Either they all knew how to bide their time and wait for what they wanted to the lengths of which he had never seen . . .

. . . Or possibly, unbelievably . . . their goodness was genuine.

And that was something he had long ago given up on ever seeing from anyone.


Scene Two

The man with the butter-colored hair leaned against the glass counter on one elbow, thoughtful, finding it surreal.

He should have died, really. Everyone knew it, most of all him.

He had teetered between life and death for days, the delirium twisting and warping his senses. After Graciela had left him that one evening, he had slipped into an unconsciousness so deep everyone had assumed he would never emerge from it.

And yet, some time later, he had. And ever since then, he had slowly but steadily improved.

News of his recovery had not been kept quiet. In a small area, that would have been impossible. Rumors had been flying all over the place, every day. This was the first time he had been out, but he had taken care not to encounter anyone along the way. He was not ready for that as yet. He needed this time alone to reflect.

His shop was just as he had left it. It was clean and well-kempt; nothing was missing. He had been certain he would come and find it an utter disaster area. Thieves and looters were often on the loose. He had had to defend his belongings against the likes of them in the past.

He was unsure what to make of any of this. For weeks Paco had looked after the store, making certain it was tended to. And at home, Emil had been cared for by people who had not expected payment.

Father Fuentes had brought some of them, but others had come on their own. They were people from the town or from neighboring villages. A couple were nuns, but the rest were common citizens. Emil knew some of them, while others had been strangers to him.

Emil was not generally liked in town. Some feared him, while others outright hated him. And some were quite indifferent. It stunned him that anyone had come without even needing a push.

There must be something they wanted, the suspicious part of his mind insisted. He had demanded several times to know what their price was for helping him, if not monetary. Certainly he had not been an easy patient to deal with. He had been very difficult. No one would endure what he had put them through if they did not want something in return.

But the answer he had been given was that if the Good Lord wanted him here a while longer, they were willing and wanted to help bring it to pass. One or two of them had admitted that while they did not like him, they assisted because they knew it was the right thing.

“Perhaps,” Father Fuentes had told him on one of his visits, “this is meant to change your outlook on life and on your fellow man.”

Emil had scoffed at the time. “Come now, Father, you know I’ve seen too much of the sordid side of human nature. And I’ve committed more than my share of sins. It’s too late for me to change. I don’t even know that I could anymore.”

But the Father had been undaunted. “You’re alive, my son,” he had replied. “When there is time, anyone can change. Even men who have committed far worse acts than you.”

At the time, Emil had had no answer for that.

Perhaps it was true, Emil thought to himself now. Perhaps he could change. But did he want to? Being cynical and bitter wasn’t fun, but it was realistic. He did not want to fall into the trap of naïveté and trusting people again. People were cruel and selfish by nature. They would betray their closest friends or even their family if they could make a profit on it. That had been drilled into him time and again by false friends until he had been left so crushed that he had hardened himself against it, becoming one of them.

Then into his mind came the memory of the people who had stayed with him, nursing him back to health. Even Paco had stayed, and he had certainly been under no obligation to do so. None of them had asked for anything in return, only for Emil to get well.

Alright, so now he was well. But right now he was also more confused than anything else. What was he going to do with himself now? The experience had left him sobered. Somehow he could not see himself getting right back to work as though nothing had happened. And yet of course that was the most logical thing to do. That was what he should do.

A gasp outside the window brought him up sharply. He turned, coming face-to-face with Graciela. She was white as a sheet.

She was the one person whose reaction he had heard nothing about. She had not been in town, he had been told. She had been trying to work with her family’s property outside the town limits.

The property he had given back to her.

That had certainly been a foolish thing to do. As a businessman, he could not help thinking that. And part of him regretted the loss. He surely would not have done it if he had thought there was any chance he would live.

But the other part, well . . . he wondered if he regretted it so much after all. Particularly when it was Graciela.

What a ridiculous thought.

Slowly she opened the door and advanced into the room. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I realize there must be some mistake. For a moment you looked so much like someone I knew, I believed it was true.”

He pushed back the wide-brimmed hat casting shadows across his face. “I was never officially declared dead, Graciela.”

She rocked back. “No. . . .” She shook her head. “You can’t be him. I’ve been away from town, tending my family’s land, but I would have heard . . .”

“I was never officially declared alive, either,” Emil interrupted. “No one has seen me out until now. Of course, knowing how people gossip, they’ve been imagining up all sorts of nonsense. I think some of them are saying I’m dead and buried in my own house to keep the secret of my demise.”

She still seemed to half-believe she was in a dream—or a nightmare. She took one step forward, then another. “But you truly are . . . ?”

“Very much alive.” He spread his arms. “The only sign anything even happened is an unsightly scar in the middle of my chest.”

He was still vain enough to detest that scar. But at least no one would see it, in that location.

“And how do I know you are not just a figment of my imagination?”

“Easily. Just take my hand.” He held it out to her. “Although I have to wonder why you think you’d be imagining up phantoms of me.”

Slowly, hesitantly, she grabbed his hand. At the feel of flesh and bone, she jerked away. Pain flashed through her eyes.

“What is it?” Emil asked, raising an eyebrow. “Is it too much for you?”

“Yes,” she retorted. “It is. So many men died defending what they believed in. They valued their lives, but were willing to lay them aside for a higher cause.

“But you . . . you squandered the time you had here on Earth. Now you’ve been given more of it and it means so little to you! You talk about it so flippantly. And I . . . I don’t understand why you were spared when a man like Davy Crockett perished!”

She spun around, shaking, her heart shattering into pieces. Emil stood at the counter, staring at her. She did not want to speak and he did not know what to say.

It was tempting to just dismiss her, to say something further callous that would make her leave. In the past, he would have. But this experience had begun to work on him, to change the way he had been, even if he had not really shown it to her. He was in such a bewildered muddle over it all that he was not sure how to think or how to act. He had fallen back on something familiar, the old reactions he knew how to handle.

“. . . I . . . honestly don’t know why I’m alive, Graciela.”

Her eyes flickered at his sobered tone, but she did not turn.

“As far as I’m concerned, Crockett and those others foolishly gave up their lives for nothing. But . . . on the other hand, I almost did the same thing.

“I don’t feel flippant about my life at all. I’m grateful to be alive. I don’t want to do anything to endanger it; I never really did.”

He stepped a bit closer to her. “I don’t know if I believe in God, Graciela. If there is a God, I have as hard a time as you, believing that He would want me to stay around. Unless He just didn’t want to have to deal with me in His realm right now.” This was said with a bit of his wry sense of humor.

Graciela finally turned to face him, her eyes searching his. “That, I could believe,” she retorted. “You’re not fit for Heaven.”

“Am I fit for Hell then?”

She frowned. “I don’t know.”

“Well, it has to be one or the other. Unless there actually is some sort of netherworld in between.”

She let out a sigh. “You are impossible.”

“Are you still upset that I survived?”

Again she turned away, gripping her arms. “I don’t know that, either. I never wanted you to be dead. I thought what a waste it was, for you to die when you hadn’t even accomplished anything other than to be successful with money. But I suppose that now you will simply go back to what you were doing before.”

“I can’t say what I’m going to do.” Emil meant it. He needed time to think, to decide what he could do. “But I imagine that’s true. Accumulating wealth is what I know how to do. It would be a waste not to do something with that knowledge.

“You know,” he mused, “you never did give me your answer on whether you would marry me. Not that it’s important, now that you have your property back.”

She froze. “If I had said Yes, it would have been for logic only, as you surmised.” She looked over her shoulder. “I don’t love you. I could never love a man such as you.”

“Well, that’s alright. I don’t know that anyone really loves anything other than money and themselves.”

Something about his words made her pause. “. . . In the condition you were in before, you would have said you knew it.”

Emil paused too. “Yes,” he said slowly. “I suppose I would have.”

Graciela tilted her head to the side. “Something has started to change in you.”

He folded his arms. “Good or bad?”

She shook her head. “I can’t say.”

“Well,” Emil returned, “I can’t either.”

Graciela nodded. “. . . I suppose now I know why I haven’t heard from Paco.”

“Paco?” Emil raised an eyebrow.

“I offered to let him work for me when you were dead.”

“I see. Yes, that would be why you haven’t heard from him then.”

“Is he well?” She searched his eyes.

“He’s fine,” Emil assured her. “I don’t mistreat him.”

“It wouldn’t be good for your business, I suppose,” Graciela said with a sardonic smirk.

“No, it wouldn’t,” Emil retorted. “He can’t work if he’s ill.”

Graciela sighed and turned to leave. “. . . I’ll wish you well,” she said. “I should be going.”

“I could escort you,” he offered.

“No, thank you.” She walked to the door and opened it. “Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.” Emil watched her depart, then leaned on the counter once again.

That had been a strange and unexpected conversation, albeit not as odd as some he had had previously.

After he had sunk into a coma, he had conjured up Davy Crockett’s ghost to converse with. He had no idea why; maybe his subconscious had just tried to pester him in whatever way possible.

Or maybe the ghost had been real, he thought with dripping sarcasm. Maybe Crockett had decided to pester him in whatever way possible, feeling that almost killing him with that blasted knife had not been torture enough.

In any case, Crockett had greeted him with, “Well, you’re holding your own. I thought I’d killed you for sure.”

Annoyed, Emil had answered, “You almost have by now. Have you come to gloat?”

Davy had held up his hands in protest. “Nothing doing. Actually, I came to check on you, being responsible for your condition and all. And I was right surprised by what you did for Flaca.”

“Flaca?!”

“Oh, sorry. Graciela. She said her friends call her Flaca.”

“A silly, childish name. Graciela is a name with class and breeding. There’s no need to call her anything else.”

“Maybe you’re just jealous because she never told you her special nickname.”

Crockett had smiled mischievously as he had said that, and Emil had only been further irritated.

“Don’t be ridiculous. She means nothing to me. She’s merely part of a business deal I was transacting.”

“But you are close enough to her to call her by her Christian name instead of her surname. I wonder what that means.”

“Nothing! It means nothing!” Emil had tried to calm himself, but Crockett seemed determined to push his nerves.

“And you were awfully anxious to get her here about those papers. You didn’t have to give them to her yourself, after all. Did you feel like you couldn’t be all nice and peaceful unless you tidied up that business before the end?”

“That isn’t it at all. It was simply more efficient that way.”

“You know, maybe Flaca doesn’t care at all for you, but I wonder if you have just the teensiest smidgen of caring for her. And come to think of it, maybe Flaca cares more for you than I realized. She did tell me she wasn’t in any danger being around you. And she cried when I told her I’d killed you, even though she figured it was just because of how so much had been happening to her.”

“You’re talking nonsense. No one would cry over me.”

“Well, probably not. But now I’ve got to wondering.”

“Start wondering on someone else’s time.”

“Right now, time is all you’ve got, Friend.”

“I’m not your friend.”

“I did sort of get that impression.”

Mercifully, Emil had passed into complete oblivion at times, hearing and seeing nothing. But every now and then he had risen back to the in-between stage, and he almost always found Crockett waiting, or observing, or whatever it was he was doing.

“You’re still here?” he remembered having said at one point.

“Seems I can’t rest in peace until I know what’s going to become of you,” Crockett had answered. “I guess because I put you in this mess.”

“I guess,” Emil had grunted.

He did not want to say that he had gotten used to it, but he had at last sunk into a state of resigned acceptance. Crockett had been like a nagging conscience, prompting him of things he had long forgotten or abandoned. Even now, what he had said continued to live in Emil’s memories and trouble him.

Almost the last thing he recollected before finally reviving in the real world was something Crockett had told him.

“Now, see here, Emil. If you do pull through this, don’t give Flaca any more trouble, you hear? You did maybe the only decent thing you’ve done in years by giving her that property back. Don’t spoil it.”

Emil could not even remember what he had responded, if anything.

He stayed in the shop until after dark, thinking. At last he pushed himself up, crossed to the back door, and slipped out into the cool desert night.

It might take him a long time to sort through his confused and conflicted feelings. There was his old bitterness towards people in general. His doubt on the existence of God. The reawakening of long sealed, naïve ideas that at least some people were basically good. His concerns over the direction his life had taken.

He had done the only thing he could, he told himself in frustration. He had been left for dead by the men who had betrayed and killed his family on the road to their proposed settlement. And he had fought and clawed his way back to civilization, taking over his father’s merchant business with a ruthlessness his father never would have dreamt of. He would not allow himself to be tricked and killed as his father and mother had been.

And yet, he had almost been killed anyway.

He paused at the edge of his property, one hand on the gate. What was the right thing to do? He honestly did not know any more.

“Señor Sande?”

He looked up with a start at Paco’s voice. The boy was standing on the porch, uncertainty in his eyes and his stance.

“Are you coming in, Señor?”

Not sure whether he was relieved or annoyed at the interruption, Emil came through the gate. “. . . Yes.”

“. . . Are you alright, Señor?”

“Yes!” Emil barked in response, but frowned and hesitated. No one had asked him that, and meant it, in years.

He looked to the boy, who was shrinking back. “. . . Thank you, Paco,” he said, quieter. “I’m alright.”

He passed through the door and into the house, leaving the kid staring after him in amazement.