The Hot Country

by Robert Olen Butler

  I let Slim sit with his memory for a bit.

  I didn’t begrudge him his whiskey with his badass insurrecto daddy, but I was sorry I brought it up.

  Finally he turned his face away from the sky and sipped minutely at his anisette.

  “I’ve never had a Green River,” I said.

  “Pity.”

  “You were right in Corpus,” I said.

  “I been right in everything I said in every bar I ever sat in,” he said, straight-faced, though I heard the elbow-nudge in his voice. “But what thing in particular?”

  “About Woody going to war over a chaw of tobacco.”

  “If war you want to call it.”

  “Well, didn’t we pretty much figure that too?”

  “If we didn’t, we could’ve.”

  “So,” I said. “Knowing what would transpire ahead of time, what brought you back to fight for the Mexicans?”

  “Not for the Mexicans,” Slim said. “For Villa.”

  I heard a thing in Slim’s voice like respect. “Why him?” I asked.

  Slim took another bolt of anisette, since I was apparently asking him to loosen his tongue some more. He rested his tin cup on his thigh. “What if a guy in my line of work had a chance to sign on with Napoleon? Villa fights like him. He takes advantage of his opponents fighting stiffly, by the book. He’s relentless and fast-moving and secretive. He’ll come at you at night and he won’t stop coming at you. He’s always changing what he does to fit the terrain and his men. And he’s very close to those men. No saluting. No nonsense. They know in their bones he’s the jefe, but they also feel like he’s one of them. And he knows how to make his legend and get it out to the people he’ll come up against. You news boys help him there. You let the world believe he’s living by some lucky star. That nobody can kill him. That his army can’t be beat. You boys treat that like truth and then it’s as good as being true. And it all comes natural to Pancho Villa. He didn’t even know how to read till a couple of years ago, which he insisted on learning even though he was already the commander of ten thousand troops. That’s the guy you sign up with.”

  “How’d you find him?”

  “He found me. During his exile in El Paso early last year. Big guy—a real big guy—is pounding on me in a bar for some little old thing I said to him, a thing which was right, incidentally. I try my fists and my legs and I got nada working for me and he has me up against the rail and the bartender is just letting it go on. So I find a heavy glass beer mug with my right hand and I crack this Johnny in the left temple and he goes down like he took a Mauser bullet to the brain. Villa and a couple of his pals was there watching. I think he liked my tactics.”

  “Can Villa be the next president of Mexico?”

  “Some think. He talks like he don’t care about that. But he’s the only leader out there who’ll do the thing that he wants the most. Which is give all the land to the peons. So he’ll be president if he has a chance.”

  “You think he’ll ever come after us?”

  “Us?”

  “The U. S. of A.”

  Slim didn’t give this a moment’s thought. “Much as I think he’s a hell of a military man, I’ll retire from his service if he does.” Slim didn’t sound defensive. He was just objectively pointing out the terms of his employment.

  “I don’t doubt it,” I said.

  “He’d fight us in ways we’re not used to.”

  “I was just wondering if he’s capable of attacking us.”

  “Pancho Villa is capable of anything,” Slim said.

  I nodded. I waited. Sometimes you simply wait long enough and somebody thinks he’s got to say some more and then he says more than he should.

  But Slim didn’t seem to have any news in him to spill. He said, “You know he’s pledged to do Carranza’s work. Villa never calls him anything other than his jefe.”

  “Pledged, is he?”

  “Like I say, he’s capable of anything.”

  I humphed a little.

  “Including unpledging,” Slim said.

  “That going to happen soon?”

  “Any old day. Our Pancho’s an emotional man. A very warm man. Warm either way. He’ll hug you and kiss you on the cheek if he’s got his feelings for you right. But if he gets some reason in his head otherwise, he’ll turn around and shoot you dead.”

  At this I took a sip of anisette.

  So did Slim. Then he said, “He let himself be Carranza’s general before he actually met the man. He laid eyes on him and he hated him instantly. Carranza’s a sharp-gilled, dead-in-the-eyes, coldwater catfish.”

  I sipped again, too soon, at the anisette. I let it burn. Mensinger was smart about hitching Wilson to Carranza. And he was even probably right.

  Slim said, “Carranza’s afraid of Villa. Always has been. Really is now. Afraid we’ll head south from Torreón and keep on going to Mexico City. So the Primer Jefe’s insisting we campaign pretty near two hundred miles due east and take Saltillo.”

  “That so?”

  “Yup. Probably Monterey after that. Probably run us on over to the border and set us there.”

  “Will Villa do it?”

  “Take Saltillo? He’s gone partway already. Slow going, having to re-lay track torn up by the Federales.”

  I nodded. The trains carrying his cavalry to targets were crucial to Villa’s tactics. For him this was a war fought within twenty miles of railroad tracks. I said, “Well, he’s got time to think.”

  Slim laughed. “Plenty. Thinking and cockfighting and cock-dipping while he’s creeping east with his track layers. That’s his life right now.”

  The cock-dipping twisted hotly in me, much to my surprise. Up popped Luisa running off to her goddam bandit rebel leader. It made me irritable. I blamed Slim for even mentioning it. I said, “And train robbing.”

  Slim looked away. I hit the nerve in him I expected to hit. I was still trying to get Luisa out of my head, and all I could think to do was needle Slim, like punching a pal in a bar for telling me my girl was opening up for some other guy. “Was there bullion on the train today?” I said. It didn’t come out sounding like a question. I was challenging him over his previous excuse.

  Slim didn’t say anything.

  This wasn’t his fault. I tried to clear my head by making it up to him, giving him new excuses. “It’s the nature of a revolution,” I said. “He’s got to find a way to pay for it.”

  Slim still didn’t speak, but I could sense a little letting-go in him. That was how he’d already rationalized it for himself.

  Not that this stopped the squirming in me. I heard myself say, “Plenty of women always around for the cock-dipping.”

  “It’s the damnedest thing,” Slim said, happy to change the subject. “Every army in every war has got their camp girls, but down here they got that beat. You can bring your own woman or grab one along the way and they’re like your own personal cook, nurse, and whore.”

  “Does Villa have women fighting for him?”

  “Not really. Not like I hear Zapata does.”

  Okay. Maybe Luisa wasn’t even with Villa. Maybe she’d heard this about Zapata and went south.

  “But Zapata’s meaningless in this whole thing,” Slim said.

  Which put an angry big-dreamer like Luisa right back here. I really needed to get away from this line of thought. I needed to focus on what I was doing here, who I was. The story.

  I didn’t know how to play this one, whether or not to bring Slim in on the essentials of what I knew and what I was after. For now I simply asked, “So who was the German in the Pullman?”

  “I been thinking about that too.”

  “And?”

  Slim looked at me and I bet he was making the same decision I was, about confiding
. Him first. Maybe only him.

  Slim shrugged. “I was told there might be somebody on one of the trains we hit. A German official. His name would be Mensinger.”

  “Somebody you’d make sure the train keeps running for?”

  Slim looked at me like how the hell did I know. But I’d heard him revise his orders to his boys in the middle of a pillage, and I thought he suddenly remembered this. “Right,” he said. “He was cleared all the way to Villa himself.”

  “So why isn’t he sitting here with us, having some anisette?”

  Slim shrugged again. “Arrogant prick of a Hun, I guess.”

  “You offered to bring him?”

  “Yup. Was told to. He declined. Said he had some things to do. Said he’d ride in on his own. I just told him where.”

  I needed to be quick about suppressing it but I managed to keep the smile off my face. I figured it was like I’d figured. I said, “Any idea what his business is with Villa?”

  Slim took a pull at his tin cup, let the anisette slide down, relaxed with the burn, looked out at the night beyond the door, and without looking back to me, he said, “Don’t know.”

  All that preamble. A real “Don’t know” would’ve come quick, it seemed to me. “What is it, Slim?”

  “I don’t like the Huns,” he said.

  “What do they want with Villa?”

  “Don’t know.”

  I believed him this time. I said, “But you worry.”

  “You see those boys in Europe and the guy they got rattling their sabers?”

  “Not a Woody Wilson,” I said.

  “The Kaiser could even provoke Woody Wilson into being somebody he ain’t. Not sure how good Wilson would do at that.” Slim was still talking into the night.

  “If Vera Cruz is any indication…” I let Slim finish the thought in his own head.

  “Like I say.”

  We drank. We burned. We watched the stars. I finally decided I might need some help in Villa’s camp.

  So I said, “I talked to Mensinger along the way up here.”

  Slim turned to me.

  He waited. I let it rest for a moment.

  “About coffee?” Slim said.

  It took me a moment to remember I’d told him about the Canadian. “Sure. I sold him a bag of beans.”

  “What’s with him?”

  “I got no proof but a bunch of little things that makes for pretty good guesses.”

  “Which are?”

  “I think the Germans will bankroll Villa if he goes after Funston and the boys. Make a big show of kicking the gringos out of his country.”

  “Why would the Germans get involved?”

  “To put their chips on the next presidente. They see a move like that uniting the country behind Villa. All these divided loyalties in Mexico have one thing in common, thanks to our man Wilson: Every­body hates the United States. The rebel leader who can grab that issue, make it his own, defeat El Diablo del Norte, that guy can finally get some traction in the civil war. Then he can throw out Huerta on Mexican terms and rule the country.”

  “Is this what he said?”

  “Enough that these are good guesses. But they’re guesses. If I had more I’d be at a telegraph office across the border about now.”

  Slim nodded.

  “Does this make sense to you, though?” I asked.

  “Might could,” Slim said.

  “So we’d end up with Mexico and Germany latched together,” I said. “And there are lots of good guesses about bad things from that.”

  We drank some more and then some more, and we stayed silent for a long while.

  The stars started to jitter around in the sky. I was watching this phenomenon pretty closely when Slim flopped his head in my direction.

  He looked me in the eyes as best he could. I focused my eyes on him as best I could. And he said, “Me, I’m just a goddam train robber.”

  39

  Anisette or pulque or sotol, it made no difference. There was plenty of it in the casa and in its courtyard and out on the perimeter, and at the main gate and in the corrals. There was plenty and there was a hard day’s ride to Carlos yesterday for most everybody in Slim’s gang and the stress and strain of a lot of robbing and a little killing and then an even harder ride back to the hacienda on the plateau at night and there was plenty of food and there was the anisette and the pulque and the sotol. And so, as I have reconstructed it, when the sun came up, there was clearly no one to notice the cloud of dust out on the plain and no one to notice the front-gate guards having their sleeping heads beat in with rifle butts and no one to notice the nickering of horses and the metal slip of gun bolts and the creaking of saddle leather coming up the high ground toward the casa and it wasn’t till some Villista had the good but bad fortune—bad for him, good for the rest of us—to step out in front to take a bleary-eyed, pulque-stinking piss that any of us knew there was a band of colorados about to lay siege on all of us.

  The pisser only barely got his dick out when he knew something was up and, being a shrewd bandit, did not take the time even to put his dick away before drawing the pistol from his belt, which his shrewdness always had him carry around no matter how focused he was on mundane matters, and he shot once—probably to warn us all just before the colorados breached the top of our high ground—and we were most of us rushing awake while two or three of the bad boys under their red flag and with red bandanas around their necks were plugging the pisser in several places about his body.

  I was fully awake very quickly after that first shot and I found myself on the kitchen floor, curled over in the shadows beneath the fireplace where I guess I came to draw a little heat for sleeping, and there was shouting now and scuffling feet from the front of the house and gunfire and I was on my feet looking for Slim and he burst in through the kitchen door and found me and he threw me a pistol belt pretty near across the whole length of the kitchen and I caught it and he motioned me to follow as he headed for the back door and I did, strapping the belt around me as I went, not even thinking yet what it was I was putting on exactly, and I was behind him and he had his Mauser in one hand and his bandolera draped over his other arm and we cut along the back of the casa with serious gunfire going on inside.

  Slim stopped just this side of another rear entrance to the house and he looked in quickly and drew back. He put on his bandolera and began strapping it and he was saying, “Colorados. Don’t know how many, but we’ll try to flank them. Sorry for the pistol. Just kill one of them and grab his rifle.” He winked. From covering a couple of wars, I knew two things about a guy who winks when the shooting starts: You’re glad to have him on your side, and you don’t want to be following him around.

  “Good plan,” I said.

  “But it’s an excellent pistol,” he said and he was cinching up and almost ready to go.

  I looked down to see what I had to work with.

  I was wearing a beat-up belt, but in the holster and now in my hand was a very up-to-date Browning-designed Colt Model 1911.

  “One in the chamber already, seven in the clip,” Slim said.

  This was the standard issue for all of Funston’s troops in Vera Cruz. I was glad to have it. On my other hip was a magazine pouch. I had no time to do anything but pat it once and feel something in there. Slim said, “Let’s go,” and we were slipping past the doorway and I gave a quick glance through an empty room and an open door onto the inner galleria and the courtyard beyond where I saw a couple of bodies but at least some live Villistas were crouched behind a fountain and a couple of overturned tables returning fire toward the front of the house.

  We made the edge of the casa and Slim held up a hand. I stopped beside him, pressed back against the wall. He set himself, and then, as he looked quickly around the corner, my thumb made sure the
safety was off on my pistol. I’d handled these. Fired one that was the proud possession of a Greek officer at Kilkis. It had a sweet little punch and a nice flat trajectory from about home plate to the center fielder. I just wished I was a better shot with a handgun.

  Slim flipped his head and we went around the corner. But we angled off away from the house, sprinting for a big side-yard garden that was no doubt the prize of the hacendado’s wife, with pomegranate trees and pepper trees and Mexican fig and with the roses and asters and calla gone wild now. And most important, the woman had a pretentiousness very useful to Slim and me as we heard the gunfire clustering from the front of the house and we sought cover: Running parallel to the house was a long row of fake Greek fluted columns holding up nothing.

  And we were behind these and we were crashing through the flower beds to get to the front end of the garden where we could have an angle of fire on the colorados on the attack. Slim went to the farthest column and set himself. I stopped at the column next to his and crouched and looked.

  Eight or ten untethered but well-trained saddle horses were calmly backing off in a loose pack to wait as their riders banged away inside the house. But half a dozen colorados in front-pinned sombreros and red neck-scarves were in the next wave pounding up and they stayed mounted and they split up and spurred their horses, obviously to circle around back, and of the three who turned in our direction, the center guy, a big guy, a fat guy with a major mustache, this fat guy lifted up from both shoulders and he went wide-eyed and the center of his chest bloomed red and he lifted up from his horse and I’d just heard the crack of Slim’s Mauser and the fat guy was flying back and the other two colorados were pulling up on their reins and Slim’s Mauser popped again and the fat guy’s boot-bottoms were flashing in my sight and the colorado on the left jerked his left shoulder but just a simple jerk-back and the third guy’s rifle was coming up from pointing toward the ground to passing the horse’s shoulder, and all of this was going way too slow and I was going too slow, I realized I was just watching, and I had to move, I had to act, I raised my pistol and I pulled the trigger and the pop recoiled into my arm and shoulder and I didn’t know where that bullet went but certainly not anywhere useful, though the guy on the right started to shift his face toward me as his rifle was up where he wanted it now and though he was glancing at me I thought his rifle had a bead on Slim and I was telling my hand to hold still and to pull off another round and I did and I realized what I’d done, pulled the trigger of my Browning twice now when pull was the wrong thing for me to do and that was where I’d always gone wrong in the times I’d shot a handgun, not doing the same as I did more easily with a rifle because I could lay the rifle against me and hold it with both hands and the pistol was all in my one hand and stretched outward and it was not so easy but I needed to squeeze the trigger not pull it, and things were still going as slow as a bad dream, and I was bringing my other hand up to my pistol hand to steady it and the muzzle of the rifle of the guy on the right flared even as his horse was rearing a little and he missed Slim I was sure he had to have missed with his horse moving like that and I was trying just to focus on what I had to do, focus on the chest of the guy on the right as his horse settled and I pulled the trigger again and my Browning popped and nothing happened to my target because I’d pulled again and another pulse-beat of nothing and then the man’s throat exploded as if it was his red bandana that was full of blood and had suddenly popped, and this was not from me it was from Slim’s Mauser and the colorado was flying back and I looked to the guy on the left and he was bringing his winged shoulder around bringing the shoulder with a jagged red chunk out of it back around so he could shoot but it was his bad arm that he was using to hold on to the reins and he lost his grip and the horse was spooked anyway so it veered right even as the man tried with his other arm to aim his rifle and I swung my pistol in his direction but Slim shot again and this one caught the wounded colorado in the side of the chest and he was going down and Slim cried “Now!” and I looked and he was motioning toward the front door of the casa and I rose and I was running forward and Slim was beside me and I angled toward a lever-action Winchester on the ground near a dead colorado as a riderless horse flashed past nearly running over me and I reared back and I needed to watch these other things going on, I felt myself too single-minded and that was okay when I shot but not when I ran, and Slim was angling the other way.