I handed him my passport, and he looked at it.
I had plenty to give him from the usual pockets. But I was heading for a crisis with the money belt. Not only was the money absolutely essential to my ability to follow Mensinger and get the story and find my way to an American telegraph to file it, but all of my American credentials were in that money belt as well. That was the real danger, and it was severe.
I thought: I am a dead man, so I might as well go down fighting.
The Villista before me checked my face against the picture, which I knew was fine, and as for the rest, I didn’t think he was actually reading. He thumbed the passport looking for flags or symbols or perhaps a few words he recognized. I hoped Vogel had no American visits stamped in the back pages of his passport. He probably didn’t, given what he was doing. And the German Imperial Eagle grandly spread its wings on the front cover of the document. But the passport wasn’t the real problem.
This might be the end of things now, I thought. Even if I could overpower the man in front of me, there were horsemen right behind him. So I lifted my eyes away from the Villista, away from the sombreros on the horses, I turned my eyes to the distant jagged line of mountains, their flanks going buttery in the long-angled late-afternoon light. I thought of my mother. I wished I could think of her now on the stage. Think of her accepting her age. Playing Gertrude or Volumina or even Lady Bracknell—my mother could play with the lightest of touches as well. Storyville fell like cloud-shadow upon my mind, wiping away that lovely afternoon sunlight before me. But last mortal thoughts could rightly focus on any moments of the life that was passing away, and so I would think of her—as I could, for there were many such moments even well into my teens—I would think of her when she was still convincingly Juliet or Antigone or Kate. She played Kate ever so lightly.
My Villista was pushing my passport back into my hand. “Your valuables now,” he said. “Do not hold out. You saw what happened.” He motioned my attention to a mere boy of a Villista, sombreroed and bandoleraed but no older than I was when I watched from the backs of theaters as the great Isabel Cobb brought sobs from the audiences as she nightly died as Juliet Capulet. This boy held an open canvas bag.
I took my Elgin from my pocket and dropped it showily into the bag.
I pulled a wallet—with money only—from my other inside coat pocket and I opened it for the bandit before me, to reveal all the pesos inside. A great thick wad. And I dropped it into the bag.
I was going too slow for my Villista. His Mauser was slung over his shoulder and both his hands leaped into my coat pockets now, outside pockets, inside pockets, ambidextrously working through my coat, finding my passport again and replacing it, finding my Waterman fountain pen—chased black rubber with a sweet extra-fine, flexible nib—no worry about my holding out a utilitarian thing like that—but he tossed it into the bag anyway, which got my goat—and his hands were arrogantly assuming I would stand here and do nothing till he was finished with me, which, of course, would normally be a safe bet, given the firepower backing him up, but he would frisk me next and that would be that.
His hands moved under my arms and started to pound their way down my sides, my money belt awaiting about three more strikes. Strike one—the center of my rib cage—and I could hear a horse directly behind him nickering, its rider perhaps noticing this special, aggressive treatment and shifting in his saddle, lifting his rifle a bit, ready to back up his comrade. Strike two—below my rib cage and taking my breath away for a brief moment—and now there was the dust-muted lollop of hooves from off to my right, another horseman coming up, and I knew my Villista’s next strike would be in the center of the plate and I had to at least swing the bat.
He pounded his hands down at my hips, right on the money belt, and his eyes flared wide and his pistol hand started to pull away from me and now his eyes flared wide again as I leaned into him and kicked hard, straight up and centered, and I crushed his balls with my shinbone. He crumpled onto his knees and I could hear rifles clattering up, bolts being thrown, and I cried out as loud as I could, “This man is ill!” and I was about to fall to my own knees and grab his pistol and use him for cover and take out a few of these sons of whores and donkeys but another voice bellowed, “Hold your fire!” and the lollop of hooves I’d heard a moment ago scuffled loudly to a stop, the shadow of the horse and rider falling over me and over the gasping Villista whose pistol I was, nevertheless, still grasping for.
And the bellowing voice bellowed some more. In English. “Jesus H. Christ! I know you!”
And leaping off his horse in black shirt and black sombrero and bandolera and striding toward me was Tallahassee Slim.
37
I stood up straight and stepped away from my crumpled Villista and squared around to face Slim.
If his brown eyes seemed, upon my first meeting in Corpus Christi, to be the color of mountain-lion shit, they were now the eyes of the critter itself. Cool and ravenous. And he gave off not even a first-glance impression of gaunt anymore, unless you’d call a steel cable on the Brooklyn Bridge gaunt.
We clearly both had the notion to shake hands, but given the context, we also both thought the better of it for the time being.
“What the hell are you doing out here?” he said, lowering his voice, acknowledging our little bond, but speaking Spanish. There was no doubt that everyone knew he was an American, but soldiers of fortune had no fixed nationality. Slim was smart. He was doing this for me. He knew I couldn’t have gotten this far on a train as an American.
“I’m after a story,” I said.
“What the hell have you done to my man?” he said.
My Villista was now on all fours, making vaguely sexual-sounding, feminine sounds.
“Kicked him in the nuts. He was about to shoot me.”
Which reminded Slim of the body he had just ridden past. He glanced at it. “What the hell has my man done to this one?”
Slim and I both knew that was a rhetorical question.
I said nothing.
Slim shrugged. “I’m sure he deserved it.”
“Who am I to judge?” I said.
“Are you trying to get to my boss?”
“Villa?” I asked, also rhetorically.
“Villa,” he said anyway.
“Yes.”
Slim nodded. “Wait here. I’ve got something to deal with.”
Slim jumped back up on his horse and shot his Mauser twice in the air, paused for a beat, and then shot once more. All the Villistas stopped what they were doing and turned his way. He clearly was, as I’d assumed, in charge. “Compañeros!” he cried. He had the pipes-power of Caruso. “Work quickly now and do not damage the train!”
And he nudged his horse forward. I thought he was going to say something to me, but he looked past my shoulder, at the ground. I turned to see. The man I’d put down was sitting now, clutching his crotch, looking very unhappy.
“Hernando,” Slim said sharply. My Villista looked up. Slim said, “Do nothing to this man. Is that clear?”
Hernando lowered his head and cursed softly.
Slim spurred his horse along.
I looked to the right, past the first-class passengers, who were still in the process of being robbed, and I did not see Mensinger. I was daring to hope Slim would take me with him. If I could get to Villa without trying to follow Mensinger out of La Mancha, that would be very good. But it took a moment to absorb Mensinger’s absence and I thought: This was why Slim had hurried his boys along and wouldn’t burn the train. He knew who the German was, knew he was expected. I’m sure Slim offered Mensinger what I thought he would offer me, to ride with the train-tax company to Villa’s camp. Would Mensinger take him up on it? Would he let himself become a protectorate of a gang of bandits, even if they were under Villa’s command? Or if I was right about his reasons for getting off
in La Mancha, would he excuse himself with Slim—whom he did not expect and may not trust—and stick to his own plan? Would he insist on making his entrance on his own terms?
And who was I, either way?
Soon Slim rode back to me, leading a chestnut stallion saddled up with an empty rifle holster and bags. He motioned me over and I knew we needed to say more private words. I moved to him and I stood in his shadow and looked up.
He was still speaking Spanish, but low. “Who were you pretending to be in order to get here?”
“A German.”
Slim nodded very faintly. “Interesting. Got another German on board.”
“To him I was a Canadian.”
Slim laughed. “Canadian newsman?”
“Coffee merchant.”
“You ready to go back to what you really are?”
I didn’t answer instantly, but I didn’t hesitate more than one slow blink of the eye, and Slim jumped in: “If you want some kind of story, you pretty much have to.”
“Will that work?”
And Slim was speaking English now, though still low enough for just the two of us. “Don’t know. He likes his publicity. No doubt about that. But he blows hot and cold. And I’m the only American fighting for him that he hasn’t sent packing. If I bring you in, I’ll know as soon as I look in his eyes. If he’s in the wrong mood, I’ll have to make like you’re my prisoner. Which, I have to tell you, is what you’ll be.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Mount up,” he said. “Courtesy of one of the last stubborn hacendados around these parts. Put your stuff in the saddlebags.”
He handed me the reins. “I’ll be back for you as soon as we finish with our tax collection.” And he rode off.
I moved to the chestnut, who shook his head at me but let me stroke his muzzle. I leaned near him and exhaled heavily into his nostrils, just to introduce myself. He dipped his head and muttered a little and I knew we’d be all right.
Repacking was tough. Fortunately, the saddlebags were big, and though I had to lose its nifty carrying case, I was able to squeeze in my Corona. Sadly, though, volume XVI of the Scribner’s monogrammed New York Edition of Henry James simply could not fit and would have to be abandoned a long, long way from Washington Square. About as far away as I was feeling at the moment from Michigan Avenue.
38
We rode hard into the plateau, into the mesquite and the greasewood, racing against the fading of the daylight into twilight, the mountains going black against the sky. We were trying, it seemed, to get somewhere specific, and to keep up I was soon riding like the Mexicans, with stiff legs and constantly flapping them to urge my horse on. There were no sounds but our hooves and all of us panting, horses and men alike. The night threatened—the moon had not yet risen—and though we still could see around us, it was clear that we soon would be blind.
So we rode even harder and then someone yipped. Perhaps a mile ahead we could see the yellow smoke of evening fires and now we were on a dusty road, and a stone fence was running with us. We were in the lands of a sizeable hacienda, the dueño long since fled or dead. Slim and his boys all seemed not to be seriously wary here. I took the place to be their staging area for raids on the trains.
At a half mile from the fires, someone among us shot two quick rifle rounds. Shortly, from up ahead, came one Mauser reply, a beat, and then a second. And soon we all arrived through a man-high stretch of the stone wall, a wide, iron-gated portal guarded by half a dozen more Villistas, and we slowed for another few hundred yards up a desert rise to the casa grande.
It was dark now, but as I climbed down from my horse, a little shaky and aching from the ride, I sensed off to the west and below us the vastness of the plateau. And the casa was grande indeed, porticoed like the city hotels, one-storied but high-roofed, built around a courtyard large enough to set a wealthy Veracruzano’s house fully inside.
We ate in one of the casa’s lofty salas, stripped of its furnishings, only a tattered brocade on one wall—custom-made with cattle and mountain peaks, images of this very ranch no doubt—and an empty mahogany sideboard on another. There were women shuttling in and out to serve Slim and me and his core group lounging on the floor and other women serving the rest of the men in the courtyard. I didn’t know if these were peon women left to make a life in their adobe huts on the ranch after the owner had gone or if they were the mated women of the Villistas, though from what I saw of this culture, from the perspective of any low-bred and poor Mexican woman, there was little difference: She existed to do this, to cook and feed and give sex and whatever comfort she could to whatever men claimed her.
We ate goat meat and corn and tortillas, and Slim and I ate without speaking much at all while the men around us laughed and progressively elaborated on the tales of their day’s exploits and got drunk on pulque and on sotol, a local drink made from wild-growing Desert Spoon, closer to beer than to pulque, which made the stuff okay for me while I was eating, but I knew Slim had a bottle of looted anisette, and as soon as we finished our food, he gave me a little head-nod toward a door into the far wing of the house.
We wound up in the kitchen. At one end were the large adobe stoves and ovens and a vast fireplace with a spit and the goat carcass picked almost clean. Several women—older ones, stouter ones—were still working there, cleaning up. Slim told them all to vamoose and they did, quickly. Smoke still hovered around the high ceiling, adding to its greasy dark layer from years of meals, and we pulled a couple of stools over to the doorway that led outside. Slim opened the door, and we sat in the place between the stars and the sharp chill of the high-country night on our one hand and the goat-flesh and tortilla-saturated warmth of the kitchen on our other.
“We doing this straight?” I asked, nodding at the bottle of anisette he was opening.
“Sure. We’ve ridden fast enough already.”
The times I’d had anisette, it was mixed with cold water and it turned milky and sweet. Palomita. But even if we had the water, Slim was right. We’d take it straight and strong and slow tonight.
“Glasses,” he said. He stood up and moved past me into the kitchen. Under the circumstances, the glasses were a nicety that surprised me in him. I’d have been happy to pass a bottle with any insurrecto who earned the name of “Slim.”
I looked out at the stars. I was content for the moment. I was on my way to Villa. I would make my own kind of entrance. When we both got to where we wanted to go, Mensinger was going to end up learning who I really was anyway. I still had to finesse the story out of someone, but sitting in the doorway of this hacienda kitchen with a profusion of stars before me that were progressively invisible now in any big American city in this still young but electrified twentieth century, and with a bottle of good liquor on its way across the room to me, I would not try to plan my next move.
But I did have things to learn. And the man who might know some of them was back on his stool beside me. He handed me a tin cup. He had one of his own. “Sorry for these things,” he said. “All I could find. But if we don’t want to burn the shit out of our gullets, we each need to bridle our own pace.”
I nodded at his reasoning. He poured me half a cup of anisette, which I figured would last me most of the night. He poured himself likewise and put the bottle on the floor beside us. He lifted his tin cup and offered it toward me. I touched it with mine.
I brought my cup to my mouth, and I paused to take in the anisette smell that was already grabbing at me. It was the smell of licorice. A half-eaten stick of licorice going soft in the Chicago summer heat and draping over my knuckles and stuck in my teeth and I wished I could find a mirror to see my tongue gone black and I was straight off the Van Buren Street steamer and walking by the lagoon of the Great White City of the Columbian Exposition, and I was lately nine years old, and I was surrounded by the immensity of the domes and col
umns and vaulting roofs, and my mother was on one side of me and there was a hand on my shoulder from the other side. Even with the smell of anisette in me, I couldn’t remember which actor he was, some leading man or other. He was a good man, was all I remembered, one I was still young enough at the time to hope would stick around, to hope would find roles to play with my mother forever. But of course he didn’t. Of course we were off to New York, just my mother and me, by the end of the summer and he was off to tour the Midwest, and all that remained of him now was the smell of licorice, and that was a hell of a thing to suddenly get stuck on in the presence of a hired gun called “Slim.” I took a quick bolt of my drink and it was like sunburn going down my throat, and for the moment that was okay.
Slim took what looked like too big a hit of the anisette as well, and he squared his stool around so he was at a right angle to me and to the night both, and he and I watched the sky while our throats cooked for a while.
“This is better than the stuff we drank together in Corpus,” I said.
He nodded. “That wasn’t the best whiskey I ever had.”
“What was?”
Slim laughed softly. “We ain’t even drunk yet and we hankering for the past, are we?”
“About your best whiskey ever? You can hanker sober.”
“You’re probably right.”
“So?”
“Well, like with a woman, there’s something about your first one.”
He paused. I didn’t know if he was still on my question or thinking about his first woman.
“But it’s not usually the best,” he said.
“So, the best,” I said.
Slim didn’t look at me but back at the sky. I’d been mostly joking. But from his present manner, I believed him about this being a serious matter of hankering for something passed. He said, “A sixteen-year-old Green River, which I had down in Panama where my dad was causing some trouble more or less on his own and I got him out of a scrape and we sat down together in a bar where you wouldn’t expect to find anything but rotgut. They had that nice old Green River. Mr. J. W. McCulloch of Owensboro, Kentucky, do certainly know how to make him some sweet-oaked whiskey.”
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