Imperial Dreams by Tim Gallagher

Author:Tim Gallagher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

Only a month after my last trip to Mexico, my plane landed again in El Paso. Bobby, John Hatch, his wife Sandra, and I met up, loaded our gear into their van, and headed south to their home in Colonia Juárez, about three hours away.

Instead of taking our usual route west through Columbus, New Mexico, John drove to the nearby international crossing at Santa Teresa. After filling out the paperwork at the Mexican border station, we headed south through the harsh dry lands of the Chihuahuan Desert. Soon the mighty Sierra Madre Occidental came into view on the right—its distant ramparts covered with a fresh layer of snow. Heavy snowfall a few days earlier had closed all the passes. Mexico only has road graders to use for snow removal in the Sierra Madre, which are completely inadequate, so all the mountain roads usually just close whenever a decent amount of snow falls. I might have been pushing my luck going there a second time in winter, but at least it wasn’t prime drug-growing season.

When we got to John and Sandra’s house, John gave us each copies of a book his father, E. LeRoy Hatch, had written years earlier entitled Medico: My Life as a Country Doctor in Mexico, which provided a fascinating look at this area in the 1940s through ’60s and also gave us insights into John. Bobby was especially taken with the story of Lofty Loftus, an old-time desperado who supposedly robbed a bank in the United States in the 1930s and fled south on the “Old Outlaw Trail” into Mexico, where he holed up in a cave in the Sierra Madre for the rest of his life. Lofty paid for everything with old gold coins he kept stashed somewhere in the backcountry. John’s father was the local doctor and always cared for Lofty when he was ill. One time when he thought he was on his deathbed, Lofty confessed to Dr. Hatch that he had murdered his bank-robbery partner years earlier in a scene straight out of Treasure of the Sierra Madre—both men were afraid to fall asleep all night for fear that the other would kill him. When his partner reached for a tin cup, Lofty thought he was going for his gun and blasted him to eternity. He then pushed the dead man into a nearby gully and covered him with rocks. Lofty carried several heavy bags of gold coins—which they had hauled south on mules—and stashed them in a pit the ancient Indians had dug there, high on a rocky hillside, and covered it with dirt and rocks.

Well, apparently Lofty wasn’t quite ready to die yet and rallied from his illness, but he was still in bad shape. He denied the story he had told about the robbery and murder. But Dr. Hatch kept pestering him about it, and eventually Lofty said he would take him to the spot. By this time, Lofty was bedridden, so Dr. Hatch and a friend took him on a stretcher in the back of a truck on the incredibly rough back roads of the Sierra.

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