The Hot Country

by Robert Olen Butler

  I had to remember who I was. I had to get back into character.

  Griswold was lifting his butt again—twice in two minutes—to return my presidential letter. This time Trask played go-between, taking the letter and passing it on to me while Griswold said, “Of course. The Post-Express and all of Griswold Enterprises are prepared to answer the call of our country.”

  “Thank you,” Trask said. He waited for Griswold to settle back down in his chair, and then he said, “Now if you two gentlemen don’t mind, I need to discuss some things with Mr. Cobb in private.” He paused a moment, let Griswold thrash a bit at being dismissed from the room. Griswold was showing evidence of the thrashing in jowl and mouth and eye. Then Trask said, “Per the President’s specific request.”

  Griswold rose from his chair, harrumphing and of-coursing. I looked at Clyde, who was a good soldier and stoic in his dismissal. Once on his feet, he gave me a little nod of sympathy and he headed for the door and waited there for Griswold, who grumbled at him to go on, go on. The Boss wanted to assert himself over some situation here, even if it was simply who would be the last one out the door, which he closed behind him.

  Trask reached into his inside coat pocket once again. “Smoke?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  He withdrew a yellow pack with a veiled woman’s face in the center. Fatimas.

  “You kept those next to the President’s letter,” I said.

  Trask gave me that little conspiratorial smile again. “He’s fussy about not smoking.”

  “So you’re saying ‘To hell with you’?”

  “Now, would I say that to the President of the United States?” Again the little smile.

  “Covertly.”

  “Good word,” he said.

  He wanted me to know we were private here. He wanted me to know he was operating in a world where he made the rules. This was an interesting man for the President to send.

  He struck a safety match and lit his cigarette first and then mine.

  “And your boss?” I asked. “He’s surely even fussier.”

  “He’s my boss,” Trask said, nodding at Wilson’s letter, which sat on the tabletop between us.

  “I thought you worked for the Secretary of State.”

  “Technically speaking. But in reality, the President doesn’t consult with Bryan on anything of importance. I work for the President.”

  “You get a baseball card?” I asked, nodding at the pack, which he’d placed on the table before him.

  “Fatima only puts them in the tins.”

  “Too bad.”

  “I buy the tins at home.”

  We looked at each other for a few moments in silence, each of us blowing smoke. Then Trask said, “These aren’t the questions I expected, now that we’re alone.”

  He was right. But I was taking a few moments to let him know I operated in my own world as well. I said, “You expect me to ask ‘What’s happening?’”

  He shrugged an “of course.”

  I said, “I figure you’ll tell me.”

  “But first a little ‘To hell with you’?”

  I gave him the same shrug. “You’re going to kill my story. Already have, in fact, judging from that thinly veiled exchange you had with Griswold. I’m not in a good mood.”

  Trask gave me that small smile. But this time there was a different point to it. “I like you, Cobb,” he said. “I like the curves and fadeaways you’re throwing at me.”

  “Who do you root for?”

  “The Giants.”

  “Oh brother,” I said.

  “We can get past that.”

  “So what’s happening?” I asked.

  “The President—not lightly, you understand; on the contrary, quite reluctantly and gravely—is asking that you not run this story.”

  “And Griswold, who will run, for the Senate this fall, is fine with banking some favors.”

  Trask nodded. “We’re glad you work for a rare newspaper Democrat.”

  “Grover Cleveland wing. He’ll need all the party favors he can collect. Especially from a new-breed Democrat.”

  Trask squared his shoulders to me. We’d postured enough, the two of us. He was right. “Look, Cobb,” he said. “This is a major story you’ve uncovered. And it was news to the White House as well. Now, needless to say, we all want to thwart an invasion of America by a bunch of Mexican bandits. And you’re right. Germany’s right. There’s a chance Villa could pull all the bandits of Mexico together behind this and the Federals too, all the men in arms in that country. And that is a very large number. They might indeed find a common cause in this, especially at the present moment, with us in Vera Cruz and nobody thanking us for it. Backed by German arms? This could get very nasty. And protracted.”

  “Banner headlines could stop that,” I said.

  “You’re right,” Trask said. “You’re right. It could. Villa’s first strike would have to be a surprise and the spotlight of the free press would take that away. And you’re going to make him look like a puppet of the Germans if he tries anything. Okay. Let’s say he backs off. But how does it play out from there? Europe is working up to a war. We think it could happen any time. And if it does, it will be Germany on one side and Britain and France on the other. We think it can get out of hand. If you look at all the collateral alliances, it’s hard to imagine anyone in Europe staying out of that war, on one side or the other.”

  Trask stopped for a moment. He wanted me to think about a massive, comprehensive war in Europe. He had a reasonable next point to make and I could probably guess it, but I tried to break his hold. I looked away from him, out the window, as if concentrating on the next drag of my Fatima. From where I was sitting, Lake Michigan stretched to the farthest horizon and vanished there, as if the world were flat and it dropped off the edge. From this conference room table, the lake seemed as vast as any ocean. It wasn’t. Far from it.

  Which seemed significant in the present discussion. But I sure as hell couldn’t figure out how. I was just a reporter. A news writer. I was merely toying with a metaphor. Put it in. Make it fit. Play to the balcony. But there was a real world out there. I still had Hernando’s stitches in my arm. Itching like crazy. I killed four men. Recently. Men were dying in Mexico even as I sat here fiddling around with a metaphor about how something could seem way bigger than it is.

  Trask said, “Every country loves to find an external enemy. It helps you understand who you are. You are you, as opposed—violently opposed—to them. We love that as much as anyone else, us Americans. Fifty years ago, we tried to do us versus them inside our own house. Fifty years later, we are in deep need of a viable new them. Your man Hearst knows that. He tried to give us Spain. And from how much he succeeded with as stupid a setup as that was, you can understand how deep that need must be. The Germans are perfect. There’s so much to hate about their regimented tight asses. They are very much unlike us, very much unlike the spirit of this country. And if you trumpet this story of yours about the Germans trying to stir up a Mexican invasion of the U.S.A., you will work up such widespread, mouth-foaming anti-German feeling that at the first opportunity, everyone from the senators in the capital to the boys in the bar down the street will demand we march off to Europe to make war on Germany. No President is strong enough to resist that. You publish your story, Mr. Cobb, and you will force the President’s hand. You will send our country to war when there may be some other way for us. Even if you personally think we should go to any war, any time, just let us at it, do you really want to make that decision for us all in tomorrow morning’s newspaper?”

  He stopped talking. I’d more or less watched him while he spoke, though at the moment I was looking back out at the lake. What did I want? What was my real desire, not just the conventional objective of the character I’d decided to pl
ay from the script I was improvising as I went? That this story be published because every truthful news story needed to be printed no matter what? Not exactly. That Friedrich von Mensinger and the German government should be prevented from provoking a Mexican invasion of the United States?

  I looked at Trask. “So who’s going to stop the Germans in Mexico? Mensinger’s making his case to Villa right now.”

  Trask smiled. Not the little one. A big one. He said, “You are.”

  54

  I was. By personal request of the President, no less. And who would that require me to be?

  I waited to hear. Trask took a drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke toward Lake Michigan. I stubbed my cigarette out in the table ashtray, even though it had a couple more puffs in it. And this much I felt keenly: A great, two-ton, plushly upholstered, crimson stage curtain had just fallen. It would shortly rise again, and I was in the midst of an actor’s recurring dream: I was about to go on stage and I had no clue even what the play was, much less what my lines were.

  I supposed Trask was waiting once more for me to ask what was going on. He was my dark, opposite twin. I controlled a conversation by asking questions. He controlled it by making you ask. I was not doing it and he said, “Why do you think I’ve come here to carefully explain the killing of a story that is already dead?”

  Which was a rhetorical question that simply squeezed me harder to inquire. And why didn’t I? Control, I supposed. I asked, “What does the ‘P’ stand for?”

  This stopped him for only the briefest of moments. His eyes did not even flicker. “Polk,” he said.

  “James Polk Trask,” I said.

  “My grandfather insisted. He knew a good president when he saw one.”

  “Do you ever use all three names?”

  “Never,” he said.

  I didn’t think so. Okay. I asked, “So what can I do for you?”

  “Go back to Villa.”

  “I’m not exactly persona grata down there anymore.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I coldcocked the German emissary just before I vanished.”

  Trask lifted his eyebrows and stubbed his cigarette next to mine.

  “The typewriter’s mightier than the sword,” I said.

  “Who started that?”

  “He did.”

  None of this made it into the stories I filed.

  “Why?” Trask asked.

  “He knew I was a journalist. He knew somebody’d searched his bags.”

  “That’s how you discovered the contents of the documents.”

  That wasn’t in the story either.

  “My sources,” I said, flexing my fingers in the air before me.

  Trask smiled. Then, upon further reflection, he laughed. This somehow didn’t surprise me. He said, “Tell me. When you rode with the Villistas, and the colorados attacked. Did you just watch and take notes?”

  “No.”

  “Did you fight?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at me steadily, and I had the distinct impression that something behind those dark, flat eyes had awakened. Was he going to ask the next question? I waited. He knew the answer, but I’d make him ask, if he wanted me to say it.

  “I do like you, Cobb,” he said. “You are the man for us, no doubt. Not just for me and for the President. For the country.”

  And I wondered if he could see something awaken now in my eyes, which, I suspected, were usually as opaque as his.

  “Did you respect Mr. Vogel?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you understand that he was serving his country?”

  “Yes.”

  “The thing the President would have you do will yield no public story. But it will do a great service to your country. Far more than a newspaper story would do.”

  He paused again. But he was not expecting a question now. He was choosing his words. I felt in my own pocket for a cigarette. I didn’t have one. He saw what I was doing and pushed his pack of Fatimas across the table toward me. I took up the pack and removed a cigarette and put it in my mouth. I pushed the pack back toward him. He leaned across the table and lit the cigarette for me.

  He said, “Vogel was a reporter of sorts too. All such men working for our country are reporters. But their reporting methods are more diverse—as yours have become—and their readers are very selective, very elite. Your Christopher Cobb story wasn’t killed. It had the most important life of all. It informed the President of the United States. We are already on the alert about the plot, so your work has not been in vain. Far from it. They can no longer surprise us. But it would be much better still to prevent even the attempt, discredit the Germans in Mexico and win over Pancho Villa to us.”

  “You and the President think I can do that?”

  He said, “We think you will be very good at this sort of work.” He gave me that little smile of his.

  I understood.

  And the curtain rose.

  55

  And so I was flying two thousand feet above the very ground I crossed by horse a little over a week ago, the northern desert of estado Nuevo León. I was sitting on the leading edge of the lower wing of a Wright Model B aeroplane. Behind me the four-cylinder vertical engine pounded away and the two great pushing propellers spun in near invisibility; and around me the struts and rigging wires strained to keep our wings from flying off; and below me the long fall to the desert beckoned. My legs hung out over the empty air but my feet pressed hard against the shiny nickel-plated foot bar, as that and the mere friction of the wales of my corduroy-covered chair were the only things holding me in the machine.

  Sitting to my left and constantly fine-tuning us in the air with two tall levers was Birdman Slim, Tallahassee’s old pal. His flying services, paid for by the U.S. government, and this specially outfitted Model B were the immediate gifts I was bearing to Pancho Villa, and they were a small down payment on the military supplies and logistical support I was authorized to promise. Trask explained to me in Chicago, with impeccable logic, how my mission to arm a man even as we occupied a part of his country, a man who we had good reason to believe hated us, a man who we would otherwise reasonably expect to invade us, was clever foreign policy.

  Villa was in Saltillo now, vanquisher yet again of the Federales. He was, however, still far enough away from Laredo, whence Birdman and I began to fly, that even with a special 15-gallon fuel tank in our Model B, we could expect to be using our last drops as we landed. This was something that the chill buffeting of air from our fifty-mile-an-hour rush helped to press away from my thoughts. I had to assume I would arrive safely, though we and our Model B dipped and lifted and dipped again in the eddies of air, and Birdman, a wiry-muscled mule driver of a man—he indeed once was a mule driver, he explained to me when we met in Laredo, adding that aeroplanes were different from mules, though he did not elaborate—this estimable Slim seemed anything but confident as he worked intensely and gruntingly at the rudder and elevator and wing-warp. I suspected if he had elaborated, it would turn out that an aeroplane was unlike a mule in its being very much like a bronco, and flying it was—each time—like the first time on the back of the most headstrong mustang straight from the wild. Only you rode it half a mile above the ground.

  And higher. We rose at the little outbursts of the Sierra Madre Orientals, ascending to a mile high and higher to thread a pass, the air going as cold as a corpse pressing against us, and then we descended on the other side. We did this once, and once again, and yet again before he nudged me and nodded his head forward—daring not to take hand or eye from his business of flying—and I looked, and in the distance I saw a clumping of tiny shapes that I presumed he meant was Saltillo. I hoped his Laredo declaration about the bare sufficiency of our fuel took into account these ups and downs with the mount
ains.

  We were coming in north of Saltillo, bearing southwest, and we kept our course out past the western boundary and then banked south and sharply descended to about the height of Griswold’s conference room, less than two hundred feet, which, after the last four hours, felt reassuringly low. We throttled down and flew just beyond the city’s western edge of adobe houses. And now I saw before us the familiar snake-bodies of Villa’s trains, stretching a mile or more south from Saltillo. Directly ahead were the campsites of the Villistas, full of afternoon siestistas, and as we bore down on them, I could see them lifting up, rising up, a wave swelling and rolling on ahead of us, their hands stretching upward toward us, sombreros spinning into the air at the sight of an aeroplane.

  As we reached them I looked across Birdman and down, and our shadow sprung upon the trains, familiar trains: Villa’s red caboose, the train behind, the flatcar where the men were scrambling to the Maxim guns, and the boxcar where I found Luisa. Was she still there? Had she found her way to escape from this man? That question, not the brief sputter of our engine, clenched inside my chest. Though a moment later the engine sputtered again and we banked west away from the campsite and now the engine was all that was on my mind.

  I looked at Birdman. He seemed no more concerned than at any other moment of the past four hours. So we sputtered our way west on our last drops of fuel till we were clear of everyone and we turned north and faced a stretch of desert scattered with low-growing creosote, and our engines cut off altogether and suddenly things were very quiet, with only the rush of air around us, and we were about the height of Clyde’s eighth-floor office now, and Birdman, the sensitive ex-muleteer that he was, said, “Don’t worry. We got no brakes anyway.”

  So we glided and the ground rose to us and I looked out to the mountains far away until we jolted and lifted and jolted and then we ran, no more bumpingly, in fact, than in a Model T on a potholed street, until we lost all momentum and we stopped.