The Hot Country

by Robert Olen Butler

  And eventually Slim made a point of dropping back and riding by my side. Slim and I rode together through the high-plateau desert of estado Coahuila, and we didn’t say a word to each other. We rode together because I saved his life and he saved mine.

  42

  On the second day, we passed through the laguna country, the bed of a vast, ancient lake, vanished eons ago into the air, and we turned east and began to climb the ascending peaks curling through Coahuila, a stray plume of the long tail of mountains that started as the Rockies and ended as the Sierra Madre, and as the sun verged low behind us we came over a rise and found, half a mile off, the small town of Hipolito. Stretching out from its center were a dozen trains with hundreds of cars, most of them strung farther than we could see back along the single eastward-bound track, and eight thousand cavalry troops and four thousand infantry were living in the boxcars or camped now for the coming night without shelter in the chaparral.

  We’d been pushing hard since the hacienda, at first even more intensively because of the two men who needed serious medical attention. We buried them both along the way but we kept pushing, and now we paused, strung along the rise, and we rested for a long moment, leaning on our saddle horns, and there were no yelps of joy, no words at all, but we were glad to be at the end of our journey.

  And I became acutely aware of how I was thinking. We buried our dead. We buried. Our dead. This was the end of our journey. The past forty-eight hours had lifted me from the life I was leading into quite a different life, a life that was familiar in many ways but one that I’d always viewed from the outside. I was inside the war now. I’d become part of it. Who was I as I sat here on this horse? Was I a Villista now? The Villista Hernando Soto, who barely more than two days ago was robbing me and then was about to draw his pistol and shoot me dead, shared his canteen with me an hour ago, wordlessly, riding up as I drained the last bit of mine and he offered me his and I drank and I nodded at him and he nodded at me. And the men who lately would have killed him—technically soldiers of the Federal Government of Mexico—would also have killed me, and these men he had lately killed, I had killed as well.

  And now, without any one of our band of Villistas giving a command or seeming even to be the first one to take up his reins, we all moved forward together as one and descended into the mountain valley and we rode toward Pancho Villa’s army. Our army. And only now was my other self reawakening. Christopher Marlowe Cobb. Kit Cobb. Byline, Christopher Cobb. He thought of Friedrich von Mensinger. I thought of Friedrich von Mensinger. I wondered if the German agent had arrived. I assumed he had. I felt confident I’d correctly figured out his plan of arrival, and he had time to execute it. But perhaps only barely. He went up the train line ahead of us and he no doubt quickly secured his horse and he rode hard to cover himself with trail dust and sweat. This man carried some serious promises that could well shape the decisions of the man that I, too, must now impress. Impress enough so that I could discover and confirm what was going on so that I could then vanish from the camp and find a telegraph and write a story so that my readers—and the country they were part of—knew what was happening. That is who I am, I reminded myself. I am a reporter.

  And we were moving among the soldiers, a thousand small fires beginning, their horses nibbling whatever was near, some of the lucky men camped next to mesquite, where they could hang their serapes and dry their meat. Some were even luckier to have women, who were beginning to cook the tortillas and the jerked beef. And they all watched us, and many of the men nodded at us as we passed, and some of the men stood as we passed, and many were confused at first glance to see me, but I rode at the front beside Slim, and I had a serape thrown around me now and I wore a sombrero and my bandaged left arm was exposed and the upper remnant of the sleeve of my white shirt was red with my blood and I had a place at the head of our band, and all these things made the first confusion vanish quickly and I received special nods and one man took off his sombrero to me and another reached out and patted my boot as I passed.

  And we neared the trains and we moved along them, some of our men splitting off now to take care of the riderless horses and the spoils from the train, to find a place among the other fighters preparing for the night, to find their way to their women. The flatcars and the roofs of many of the boxcars were full of the soldaderas—the name seeming entirely ironic in this camp, the women shouldering children and not arms, cooking on small fires, waiting to service the men. I could not keep from looking at the faces of the younger women, the women of the right size, to see if one of them was Luisa. None was.

  We approached a box car painted with a white cross, one of forty such that Villa brought with him to the areas of engagement. They were enameled inside and outfitted for medical care and he had doctors and he had nurses, a thing this untutored man had decided for himself to make part of his army, with no other army in Mexico, including that of the Federales, having anything like it.

  Slim broke off from me and rode back to the four wounded men who had survived our journey and he made sure they went in now for treatment, and he returned to me and he said, “They should look at your arm.”

  I said, “Hernando the tailor has done a good job.”

  I said it loud enough for Hernando, who was nearby, to hear me. He turned his head away and flipped his chin.

  “They should see it,” Slim said.

  “Are you going to Villa now?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll do it after.”

  “All right,” Slim said. “No use wasting the medicine if he’s going to shoot you for a gringo at first sight.” And he said this without a wink, without a flicker of anything on his face.

  “That’ll be my final little contribution to the cause,” I said as gravely as I could.

  Now the wink. But he did that going into battle as well. I was starting to grind in the chest a bit as we rode on forward along the tracks. Not from fear of Pancho Villa shooting me. That was the least suitable, certainly, of a range of things that he could do that would make it impossible for me to get the story I came here to get. But I was happy to find that it was the story which was my main concern.

  By the time we neared the engine of the penultimate train, there were only three of us left. Hernando, it seemed, was Slim’s lieutenant. I was glad to have him able to vouch for me now. We passed the engine. And before us, at the end of the lead train, was a classic red caboose, the paint faded and peeling, all but one of the windows of the crow’s nest shot out. This was where Slim and Hernando pulled up and so, then, did I. We dismounted.

  The windows of the main cabin were hung with chintz curtains, the flowers faded almost beyond recognition, and behind them the place was full of male laughter, the voices of many men. Slim and Hernando looked at each other and then Slim turned his face to the west, noting, I think, the time of the day. Then he said to me, “Wait a moment.”

  I did. Hernando appeared beside me and waited also as Slim went up the back steps and stood in the open doorway. He did not go in but almost instantly the laughter stopped. From the abrupt silence I heard a single voice, a faintly nasal voice at once commanding and barroom-friendly, speaking loud enough for me to clearly hear it but giving the impression of casual conversation. The voice told his muchachos to get the hell out now. And there was a scrambling sound full of the ringing of spurs and the clacking of boots on the wooden floor. Slim stepped out of the doorway and to the side and a dozen muchachos streamed out and they were not, as I imagined, a group of Slims and Hernandos, veterans, officers, but rather a group of young men, muchachos indeed, awkward in their flight, pretty clearly privates and corporals of Villa’s army.

  When the stampede was over, Slim motioned us to come up, and Hernando and I climbed the stairs and I took off my sombrero and I stepped through the door and into Pancho Villa’s field office. On the left-hand wall was a rough-hewn wood desk, and beyond was a
long, built-in bench seat with stuffed green leather cushions. On the right-hand wall was another, even longer bench, and at the far end, a potbellied stove. The walls were hung with magazine-page chorus girls. What were those chintz curtains doing there? Patterned with what I could make out now as trellised roses.

  And in the center of the room, sitting near the desk in a wooden swivel chair, clad in a shiny-cheap, frayed brown suit and a buttoned-up gray cardigan, was Pancho Villa. He was facing us. He abruptly leaned back in his chair at the sight of me. His eyes were wide-set—but not separated widely, just wide, their inner edges normal in their nearness to the bridge of his nose but the outer edges extending even beyond his thick, matinee-villain mustache—and they were dark, his eyes—and they were, for all their width, rather narrow, as if in a perpetual squint, with an almost Oriental feel to them—and they were very dark—and they were restless even as they were commanding you, jittering ever so slightly and you got the feeling that if no one was in the room they’d be paranoid in their restlessness, checking the door and the windows constantly. A Smith & Wesson .32-caliber top-break revolver lay within Villa’s easy reach on his desk. Farther back on the desk lay a British thrust-optimized cavalry sword with a honeysuckle hilt.

  Instantly, Villa said, “Put that back on.” His voice was soft-edged, almost diffident in tone. Which somehow made it all the more commanding.

  I began to lift the hat and he said, “No clicking your heels either.”

  I settled the sombrero on my head once more and I was beginning to figure out what the last remark was all about.

  “Who do you think I am?” he said. “President of Mexico?” He threw back his head and laughed.

  And we all laughed. Just enough.

  He thought I was Friedrich Mensinger. Of course he did. I was the man he expected to arrive with Slim and the boys. Which meant Mensinger had not yet arrived.

  Villa stopped laughing. We all stopped.

  His restless gaze fell on my bandaged arm and bloody sleeve.

  “Did they drag you here?” Villa asked with a smile.

  “Jefe,” Slim said. “This isn’t the German.”

  Villa looked at Slim and his dark eyes grew even darker.

  Slim said, “The German did not expect us. He had some business to do at his destination. He will ride in.”

  At mention of the riding-in, I saw the slight nod and pinch of the mouth in Villa that said Mensinger knew his man. Villa liked that the German was riding in on his own. He looked back at my wound. Then searingly into my eyes.

  “Who are you?” Villa said.

  “I am Christopher Cobb,” I said.

  “A gringo?”

  “Yes.”

  “A hostage then?” Villa said to Slim.

  There was a beat of silence. I was standing between Slim and Hernando, but half a step behind, and in my periphery I could see the two exchange a quick glance. They did not want to anticipate Villa’s attitude toward me, but any answer to this question would carry an implication. They both looked back to Villa and this had all been done in only a tick or two of a watch but I could see that Villa’s eyes did not miss a thing and he had taken it all in and those eyes of his suddenly had the narrow alertness of a predatory animal deciding whether to pounce.

  Slim said, “The hat he wears belonged to the colorado he killed.”

  Villa’s eyes moved instantly to me. The flexing to pounce vanished. He looked back to Slim.

  Slim said, “We were quartered at the Guerrero hacienda, after the train, and a band of colorados came in while we slept. They killed our guards quietly. We fought. Their company is dead. To a man. We lost ten.”

  Villa rose from his chair.

  His mouth was set in rage. His eyes were filling with tears.

  He looked at me.

  “The colorado he killed would have killed me,” Slim said.

  Villa’s eyes slid on past me to Hernando. I had a sudden sense—though I could’ve been wrong—that in spite of Slim being in charge of the company of train bandits, in spite of Slim having a second tour of duty with the Villistas and the Army of the North, Villa still was quite aware that it was Tallahassee Slim, not Chihuahua Slim. And the two Mexicans in the room looked at each other and, to my surprise, Hernando said, “He killed two more colorados who would have come through a door when I was facing still another one of them. He saved my life as well.”

  I did not look at Hernando. He did not look at me.

  Villa turned his face to mine. “Are you a soldier?”

  “I am a newspaper reporter.”

  Villa’s eyes widened, and then he laughed. He laughed and he strode across the floor and he threw his arms around me and clasped me to him and hugged me, his right arm squeezing tight on my wound and sending a shock of pain running up my shoulder and down my arm. But I bit off any sound and put my arms around Pancho Villa in return and we pounded each other on the back and he reared away abruptly and then he lunged to kiss me on the cheek, and I thought of Slim’s observation about this very thing, that it did not exempt me from later being shot dead by Pancho Villa.

  He let me go and he took a step backward and he seemed to remember something and he looked at my arm and at my blood, which had soaked through the bandage that he’d just pressed to his arm, and he looked at my blood on his own sleeve and he laughed again. And the laughter stopped and he looked at my sombrero. And his face seemed to collapse toward the center in thought for a moment, and then it opened again in a smile and a nod and I was having trouble keeping up with this man and the flow of his feelings. He was living very fast. But he was still looking at my sombrero.

  And I said, “Jefe, may I take this off once again? I would like to give you the sombrero of your dead enemy.”

  He straightened sharply. His face went blank. I was afraid I’d made some sort of mysterious, terrible mistake. But his eyes filled with tears yet again. He was waiting.

  I lifted my hands and removed the sombrero and I held it between us.

  He took it and he turned it and he lifted it to his head, quite slowly—given the speed at which he was living, quite slowly—as an improvised ritual between us. And he put it on. “Viva Mexico,” I said.

  “Viva Mexico,” he said.

  43

  Pancho Villa sat us down on the horsehair cushions and he went to the far end of the caboose and returned with four unlabeled bottles. We each took one and he sat in his swivel chair. “One plant,” he said, “grows fifteen years to make one bottle.” He did not say its name but it was sotol in our hands, nearly clear, perhaps with a little tinge of yellow. Neither did he draw, from his observation, any lessons about lives or wars or revolutions or governments. We simply lifted our bottles to each other and we drank and it went down smooth and dangerous and it tasted like a field of something green that had been burned to the ground but still tasted green and also tasted like smoke.

  And Villa listened intently to the details of the train raid and the fight at the hacienda. He wore the sombrero I gave him. The German on the train, the man Villa expected me to be, wasn’t mentioned again. And when Slim and Hernando finished speaking, Villa did not comment on any of this, but his eyes, which had grown still and grave, suddenly became animated again and he spoke of the afternoon cockfight and how he lost much money on his best bird, who, bespurred and seasoned though he was, showing the scars of a dozen other successful fights, suddenly spread his wings and managed to fly over the heads of the tight ring of spectators and make a break for freedom in the desert. Villa, though he was tempted to wring the bird’s neck for betraying him, took compassion on him and let him go.

  Just as I’d been told that Pancho Villa drew on no book knowledge whatsoever, no theory, that his military and political acumen was totally based on instinct, I sensed, in his conversation, that there was no metaphor in him eith
er. All that he said simply was what it was. He moved from one moment of the body to another. One intense engagement to another. One fight, one death, one drink at a time.

  He looked at me now and said, “Though you are a brave man who has done me good and who has made my enemies your enemies, I do not think this is why you are sitting here now. You have not enlisted to be a Villista, I do not think. And you were not kidnapped by Tallahassee Slim and Hernando Soto.”

  “I want to write a story,” I said.

  I waited.

  He waited. Then he prompted. “About Pancho Villa?” he asked.

  “About what is happening now in your country,” I said.

  He smiled. This was the right answer. Then the smile was gone. “About what is happening in your country, as well,” he said.

  “Yes. That’s why I have traveled here at great risk from the Federales and why, along the way, I have come to fight at the side of these two good men.”

  “I have often taken a train car of newspapermen to my battles,” he said.

  I found myself about to say that the people of the United States knew him well for that, even about to say how they admired him. I sensed he could be flattered. I sensed he’d be happy for a sympathetic ear. But I also sensed he was attuned to bunk, and I was feeling also that I was full of that, that I was becoming a goddam bunco artist. Killing some enemies of Pancho Villa in such a way as to win his trust, making a sentimental show of giving him the colorado’s sombrero: All this, too, felt like consummate bunk. It would have been better just to walk out in the middle of a field of fire in a pitched battle and put my Corona Model 3 on a tripod and write the feel of the bullets zinging past my ears. That would have been better than this. But this was what the world had come to. This was the role I was cast in. There was another kind of story in another kind of time that I needed to write. Nevertheless, I bit my tongue about all the admiration people would have if he talked to me. I just nodded at his invoking the train cars full of newsmen.