The Hot Country

by Robert Olen Butler

  “Help me retrieve my horse.”

  “I’ll find the boy.”

  “I’ve got a map and compass,” I said. “It looks like Laredo.”

  “Okay. Probably best, if the U. S. of A. is your intention. Take you three days if you don’t want to kill your animal.”

  “Much trouble along the way, you figure?”

  “I’ll get you a Mauser just in case. But no. Not if you stay at least twenty miles away from the railway till you get to the Salado River. You could lead your horse over the train bridge there, and you’re good the rest of the way to the border.”

  We were approaching the postal car.

  “I’ll get my saddlebags,” I said.

  “Horse and rifle,” he said. And as an afterthought: “And a phial of iodine and clean bandages.” He headed off up the tracks.

  I stepped into the car and Mensinger was still out cold. I’d checked his pulse after quickly pulling my things together and before I’d gone after Slim. The pulse had seemed fine.

  He was drooling a bit now. His fingers were starting to twitch. There was some incipient movement under and around the closed eyelids. He had a knot in the center of his forehead, as if all his secret plans were being drawn into the open.

  I put the bags over my shoulder and sat for a moment on the chair. I needed to wait. I was ready to give Mensinger another tap if he suddenly popped back awake. But before I had to do that, I heard Slim on the steps. I rose and I moved toward the door and I stopped when Slim stopped, framed in the door, a Mauser in his hand and a bandolera draped over his arm, and his face had an expression as close to true wondering surprise as Tallahassee Slim’s face had probably ever come. He was staring at Mensinger.

  “My breakthrough,” I said.

  Slim looked at me with every bit as much admiration as he’d showed when I saved his life.

  I said, “If he has his way, you’ll need to leave Pancho’s employ. He’d like you all to take back the Alamo.”

  Slim shook his head, once, like didn’t that beat all. And he thrust the Mauser straight out into the air between us. “Go tell ’em,” he said.

  50

  I woke as if I’d just fallen asleep and begun to dream. I floated on a felt-stuffed mattress, and above me a four-blade ceiling fan spun like the sleep-slowed propeller of an aeroplane approaching me, but I just drifted before it, unfazed, serene, and since I was softly held now, I was free to lie once again on a bed of stone and it was soft there too, and this dream veered, as dreams sometimes do, into a thing so deeply wished for that only in this way can it happen and it feels real but you know even as you go through the motions of it that it is impossible. Luisa returned to me now like this. She fit herself upon me and rose above me, and beyond her the aeroplane slowly rushed at us both, but we were safe, joined like this we were safe, and then she was gone and I was in the Hamilton Hotel on the corner of Convent and Matamoros in Laredo, Texas, but as in a dream you can know where you really are and still dream on, I saw my mother and she was singing in a brothel in New Orleans and I sat up in the bed and put my feet on the floor.

  I was in Laredo, Texas, in the United States of America. Last night I sat beside a telegraph operator whom I paid handsomely to stay late and I wired the scoop of a lifetime, the king beat of king beats, to Clyde Fetter in Chicago, and now I waited. I waited for Clyde and I also waited for Bunky Millerman and the great Isabel Cobb, both of whom I also wired as soon as I got to town and located the telegraph office, even before I started writing the story. To Bunky I said: Got him. In Laredo writing stories. How are you? How is the boy? Wire care of Hamilton Hotel. Kit

  To Mother I began: The third act is full of sound and fury and signifying something. I spent more time struggling with the next sentence, what to say and how to say it, than I later would in the whole of the massive news story about an active and advanced German plan to instigate a Mexican invasion of the U.S.A. starting with San Antonio and the Alamo. Finally I set aside Shakespeare and Marlowe and Ben Jonson and Sophocles and Homer and Henry James and Montaigne and all the rest and just said straight out what I wanted from her.

  Where are you? I wrote. I almost asked, as well, What are you doing? but I did not. One thing at a time.

  And I drank my coffee black in the hotel restaurant, which was on the corner and looking into the zócalo. Ah, I was in the United States now. The plaza. Jarvis Plaza. But I was looking through glass and sitting with a tablecloth under my hands and this was the United States now. I found myself missing the portales. Even if the open air was to stink, it would be the open air. But I always had odd feelings of displacement after returning from assignments. I was known to get nostalgic over the smell of cordite.

  And the only news of Mexico in the Laredo newspaper was an Associated Press scoop that an American private who went missing in Vera Cruz and was thought to be insane was in fact captured by the Mexicans and was now thought to have been executed but, if true, the event was “unlikely” to provoke a larger military encounter between the Americans and Mexicans. Of course, the private could have been both insane and executed, a possibility I was surprised the AP reporter didn’t explore since he obviously had too much time on his hands and not enough news.

  Today I would write about Gerhard Vogel, his service to his country and his murder by a German military officer from the Vera Cruz consulate, to run as a stunning background revelation for the big story of the day before. And then I would write the story of a Post-Express reporter who found himself riding with the Villistas. I would not tell all of the details of that story, however. The men I killed. They would not be part of the public record.

  And my coffee cup was empty and I looked across the restaurant and the waiter was already heading my way, a plate in one hand and a coffeepot in the other. He arrived and set my eggs and rasher of bacon before me and as he poured my coffee, he asked, “Are you Mr. Cobb?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “The front desk has received a Western Union delivery. I’ll fetch it for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He moved off briskly and I was feeling American again, surrounded by briskness.

  I took a sip of coffee, watching, as I did, the tiny, innocuous birds flying in a delicate little flock over the plaza. I looked sharply away. If I was getting nostalgic about the zopilotes, then I was in serious trouble. I barely got a taste of egg and bacon before the waiter brisked back to me and I gave him a dime for his trouble and his haste, and I laid two telegrams before me. One was from Vera Cruz. One was from New Orleans. None was from Chicago. But of course not. Clyde was only barely beginning to look at the story right now.

  Bunky first. I opened the wire, and he said: Vera Cruz gets cleaner and cleaner. The boy does not. My hand is steady, since you are wondering. Otherwise, we’re fine. Bunk

  I was wondering, of course. He sounded so like the authentic Bunky in the wire that I actually believed him. As for the boy, I found myself inordinately pleased. Not only that he was fine but that he was no cleaner. I realized I did not want that boy to change.

  I ate some eggs. I ate some bacon. I let my mother’s telegram lie there: I was afraid that if I did my eating afterward, she would upset my digestion. She might anyway, but at least I’d have a few minutes of American food in me without it roiling around.

  After thoroughly running a crust of bread in the last bit of egg yolk remaining on my plate and after drinking some more coffee and even watching the little birdies in the placid American sky, I picked up my mother’s telegram and I opened it.

  She wrote: I am full aware you know the city I am in from my clearly having said too much already in a previous wire. So for you now to ask me where I am means you ask too much. Where are you? Western Union Laredo Texas? Did you elope with that sniper girl you wrote about? Be careful. She doesn’t sound your type. But that was in another cou
ntry.

  She was angry. No signature to the wire at all. Not even an et cetera. She just threw the lines from Marlowe back in my face. At least she didn’t quote the whole thing. There was just too much going on below the surface of this telegram. I had no desire to figure it out. That may have been fornication, but there was no guilt in the thing at all. And the wench wasn’t dead.

  51

  A Laredo doctor was cleaning and rebandaging my wound and tossing me odd little looks like he’d never seen a gunshot wound before in Laredo, Texas—though it was true the stitching was a little unorthodox and maybe I needed to shave and certainly I needed to stop wearing my sombrero—and as he was doing his business, I was thinking about New Orleans. But merely to wonder which of the New Orleans papers was picking up the Post-Express syndication. I was all work. I was wishing there was a doctor who could heal my Corona Portable Number 3, who got stabbed between the 5/T/t and the -/G/g and whose wounded body I hopefully jammed into my saddlebags and carried on my three-day dash for the border. But when I arrived, my Corona refused to allow not only any “t” or “g” to be used in my story but several vowels, as well, and had thus left me stuck with a hotel-rental Underwood table model. As for the two stories I would write on that machine today, the leads were already bristling in my head. All work.

  So I wrote my stories and it was mid-afternoon, and I stopped at the hotel front desk on my way out to the telegraph office, expecting, ironically, to find a wire that had been delivered to me from that very office. Huzzah. What a story.

  Nothing. I went out. I filed. I wanted to check to make sure that, in fact, they hadn’t delivered something to the hotel, which the hotel then, obviously, misplaced. I wouldn’t complain. I just wanted the damn wire.

  It wasn’t misplaced. They hadn’t delivered.

  I wandered through the plaza on the way back to the hotel. In the center was a very odd circular brick platform, large enough to be a bandstand, but it wasn’t. It had no apparent function at all except to support, around its edge, eight brick pedestals, each of which supported a concrete column, at the top of which was a white, globular, electrically lit ball. What were they thinking in this city? Where was the band playing Cohan and Sousa? Where were the girls in summer lingerie dresses promenading around with each other before the lounging, leering boys? When Gerhard threatened to slide back into my head and start tooting his alto horn, I beat it back to the hotel.

  I squeezed at my material some more just to keep occupied, trying to cobble together a profile of Villa in the context of life in his railway-bound campsites, though I’d seen very little of it, really. I did not include the boxcar full of the recently arrived, unattached women. Somebody in Chicago would try to make that the lead.

  Then I sat in the hotel bar drinking whiskey till the night came on and I grew as dark as the view out the window. And I probably asked again at the front desk a time or two about a telegram and I probably went up the steps and I probably went into my room and took off my boots and lay down. Probably, because I had no memory of any of that when I woke with light coming through my window and I was on my bed and my boots were off.

  My head was stuffed as full as this mattress, though the gob of felt inside my head was being heated in a furnace and it was expanding plenty and I was just waiting for it to burst into flames, though it seemed somehow resistant to that obvious next turn of events. Which was probably for the best. Still, if it was not going to burst into flames, I wished it would just cool the hell down.

  But it was a new day and a new chance for a telegram from Clyde so I could receive his praise and maybe an editorial question or two and then I could figure out how best to get myself back to Vera Cruz. That was probably what was keeping him: He was going to do the huzzahing and the inquiring all in one comprehensive telegram.

  I managed to get up and get one boot on, which was enough for now, and I managed to complete a few necessary ablutions, and then I was glad to find I could get the other boot on with noticeably less difficulty, and I went downstairs. Since I would want to go straight from Clyde’s editorial inquiries to the typewriter and get this done with, I even had enough restraint to bypass the front desk and go to the dining room, and I sat in a shadowed corner as far away from the windows as I could and I ordered simply a pot of black coffee, which I drank searingly fast.

  I realized the morning was pretty far advanced. The sun was not low outside there, and I was the only person in the dining room. I was sure to have a telegram from Clyde waiting for me at the front desk.

  And I did.

  I carried it back to my room unopened.

  I went in.

  I sat before my typewriter at my small, rattly desk.

  I opened Clyde’s wire, expecting him to have composed an ardent love aria for my having produced a veritable Wagnerian opera for tomorrow’s front page.

  Instead, he wrote: Knockout story, champ. But this is something we need to talk about in person. Please take train to Chicago as soon as possible. Clyde

  “But”? Meaning it was not running tomorrow. Not running till I could get to Chicago. If I was working for Hearst, he’d run it first and then he’d be on a train, coming down here to congratulate me personally, on the spot, and to start planning how to follow this up so we could declare war on Mexico. Hell, declare war on Germany too. He’d see this as bigger than Cuba and Spain.

  Maybe this was exactly that. Maybe it was just a matter of who took the train. This was certainly big enough that Clyde kicked it upstairs to Paul Maccabee Griswold himself. This was as secure a beat as you could find. No one else would get it in the next few days. Or ever. So let’s confer about the best way to roll it out. Griswold was capable of that.

  And yet. I had a bad feeling. Knockout stories got rushed into print. No matter how secure they were. Still. I could come up with a plausibly optimistic scenario. But I’d be damned if I could dream up what the problem might be.

  Then one problem led me to another, where the dreaming up was easy. And I thought of an opportunity.

  I’d route myself through New Orleans.

  52

  So I got ready to leave Laredo. And it felt as if I were truly leaving Mexico. Not just ducking across the border. But I had no choice. I found a livery and a big general store and I sold my horse and saddlebags in the one, and the Mauser and bandolera in the other. I bought a couple of white shirts and a ten-dollar blue serge suit and a fedora. I bought an oversize cowhide traveling bag. I kept the Browning and the holster and Luisa’s knife, and before dawn the next morning I packed them away, and after staring at the sombrero lying on the center of my hotel bed for a long few moments, I folded it as best I could and wedged it into the bag.

  By noontime the International and Great Northern Railway had dropped me in my blue serge suit and fedora in San Antonio, Texas, where I cooled my heels till sunset. I did think for a time about how I just came up the train tracks that Germany was urging Villa to use in his attack on the United States. But I didn’t dwell on that. The story was written. There was no more for me to do about that for now other than ride these trains to Chicago. And I exchanged wires with Clyde, sending him my schedule and getting not another word from him about the face-to-face meeting other than I should come straight to the office when I arrived.

  And then the Southern Pacific carried me on to New Orleans Union Station. We were due to arrive there by the next sunset, but things went slow out of Houston and again out of Lake Charles, Louisiana, and it was past nine when we got in. Which was okay by me. I had a ticket on the next train to Chicago on the Illinois Central and it didn’t depart till 9:40 tomorrow morning, and my arriving late in New Orleans meant Storyville would be going strong when I got there. Before I headed out, I went to the baggage room, and there I hesitated. Should I take my Browning? I did not. But I removed Luisa’s knife and scabbard and I strapped it on my belt in the middle of my b
ack, and I stored my bag and went out.

  The air smelled of old fish and a recent rain. I got into an automotive taxicab—a Model T with a limousine body—and I told the driver I wanted to go to Storyville.

  He cranked the engine and I got in the back, and when we drove off, he tossed me a look over his shoulder and said, “Your first time?”

  “Yes,” I said. Which was a lie.

  “You in search of a sportin’ house? I can do you a good one where they’ll treat you specially nice at the dropping of my name.”

  “I’m interested in music,” I said. “High-class singers. You know anything about that?”

  “I don’t know nothing about that,” he said in a clipped tone as if he’d offered a good place to hear music and I’d asked for a whore.

  At least it shut him up, which I was happy for because the truth about my first time in Storyville slipped into me as we headed downtown on Rampart.

  I was born in this town, backstage at the Pelican Theatre in the early morning, as Mother tells it, and she opened as Shakespeare’s Juliet that night without having to add a whole new dimension to the role that the producers, however, had been only too willing to do. Not that we stayed around after the run. But whenever we toured back to New Orleans over the years, I treated the place like my hometown, and then, in 1901, her leading man in some melodrama or other—a silver-haired warhorse named Gilbert Russell Whitaker—had laryngitis such that he could make himself heard but he couldn’t emote, and he took the night off. I’d recently turned seventeen and he decided it was high time for me to lose my virginity in my own hometown. I happily agreed and he took me to Storyville and he spent a very generous five dollars on my behalf for one of Willie V. Piazza’s octoroons, an angel-faced girl wearing opera-length striped stockings—the only thing, indeed, that she was wearing when I trembled my way into her room—and she was not much older than me and she lay down on the mahogany four-poster and said, “You’re a fine, strapping boy and I don’t care it’s your first time, I want you to do me like you should and like I deserve, which is to say I want you to make me scream from the pounding.” And this I did. And the son of a bitch Whitaker, a few years later, drunk one night in his dressing room in St. Louis, squealed on my mother, revealing that the whole idea and the five dollars were from her. Of course I’d never mentioned any of it to her when I got back from Storyville that night. And she was a consummate actress. I’m certain I would have found suspicious the slightest clue in her face, a little smile, a little glance. I would have known she knew. But there was nothing. And neither did I ever speak of what I learned about her complicity.