Robert Butler - The Hot Country

Just as I was about to overtake the captain in charge of the detachment, I saw Luisa. She was up ahead with some other señoritas nearby but she was standing by herself and she was dressed in white and she was standing stiff with her chin lifted just a little. But I had a man’s business to do first. I was up with the captain and I slowed to his pace and he gave me a quick, suspicious look when I first came up, but then he saw I was American.

“Captain,” I said, and I lifted my arm to point up ahead. “You’ve got about two hundred Mexican soldiers waiting for you in the Plaza.”

He gave me a quick nod of thanks and turned his face to halt his detachment, and at that moment I looked toward Luisa, who was just about even with me but I passed her with my next step and my next, and I slowed down, even as the detachment was coming to a halt, and it registered on me that Luisa had been watching me closely and I felt a good little thing about having her attention but at that moment the gunfire started. The crack of a rifle and another and a double crack and the Marines were all shifting away and I spun around, knowing at once that the rifles were up above, that the Mexicans were on the roofs, and Luisa had her face lifted to see and I leaped forward one stride and another and my arms opened and I caught her up, Luisa Morales, I swept her up in my arms and carried her forward and she was impossibly light and I pressed us both into the alcove of a bakery shop, the smell of corn tortilla all around us.

“Stay down,” I said, and I put my body between the street and her and I realized I’d spoken in English. “They’re firing from the roofs,” I said in Spanish. “Don’t move.”

She didn’t. But she said, “They’re not shooting at me.”

“Anyone can get hit.”

“They’re shooting at you,” she said.

“I’m all right,” I said. “This is old news to me.”

A rifle round flitted past my ear — I could feel the zip of air on me — and it took a bite out of the wall of the alcove. I twisted a little to look into the street — I was missing the action — this was news happening all around me — and as soon as I did, I felt Luisa slip out past me and she was moving quick along the store line, heading away. Another round chunked close in the wall and there was nothing I could do about my spunky señorita and I pressed back into the alcove to stay alive for the afternoon.

It wasn’t a bad spot, actually, to watch the skirmish. The Marines did a quick job of sharpshooting the Mexicans, some of them falling to the pavement below and others going down on the roofs or beating a fast retreat.

Then it was over. I stepped out of the alcove. Bunky was coming up from the direction of the docks and he was doing his camera work. I stayed with the Marines while they regrouped and tended to a couple of wounded. The Mexicans on the roofs turned out to be poor shots and the Marine captain thought they weren’t regular troops. Meanwhile a scout came up and said Maass’s men had moved out of the Plaza and off to the west. Later in the day the Mexicans would go over the hills on the western outskirts of town to flank the battalion of Marines in the railway yards and along the Calle de Montesinos by the American Consulate. The boys on the Florida would see what they were doing and break them up with the ship’s guns and Maass and his men would all run away.

But for now the Marines mustered up and marched off toward the Plaza and I crossed onto the wide pavement in the sunlight and sauntered in the same direction. I was starting to shape a lead paragraph in my head. I passed a couple of dead Mexicans. I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies. My business is getting stories. You’re dead, and your story’s over.

Then up ahead I noticed a figure in white. I was very glad to see her. She’d gotten through the bullets okay. I headed for Luisa and she saw me coming. I was still not within talking distance and she said something to the girl next to her and moved off. I stopped. The girl Luisa spoke to looked at me with a blank face and then looked away. I’m not a masher. A little dense sometimes, maybe. I was ready to leave Luisa Morales entirely alone, if that’s what she wanted.

Early the next morning, long before the sunrise, I woke abruptly to the scratch of a match. I turned my face and saw a candlewick flare up and glide to the night table, but before I could quite comprehend it all, the business end of a pistol barrel was resting coldly on my left temple. Floating in the candlelight was Luisa’s face.

“You were working for them,” she said.

“Who?”

“The American invaders.”

I was reluctant to get into a political argument with a laundry girl who had a pistol pointed at my head. I chose my words carefully. “I’m a newsman,” I said.

“I saw you with the American officer, directing him.”

The pistol was getting heavier. If her weapon was cocked and her bearing in on me was unconscious, her tired hand could do something it didn’t necessarily intend. I tried not to think about that. There were some other pressing issues. For one thing, her attitudes weren’t adding up. I needed to talk to her about this, but I had to make the point carefully. I didn’t remind her of her hatred of Mexican priests; they were all I could think of in her culture that might speak against her pulling the trigger. But I brought up the logical next thing.

“I don’t think you’re a supporter of General Huerta,” I said.

“I hate Huerta. Do you take me for a fool?” She nudged my head with the pistol for emphasis.

“No. Of course not. But these Americans. They’re here to help free Mexico of Huerta. That’s all.”

“Did you see who was dead in the streets?” she said.

Lying sweating in my bed, a pistol muzzle to my temple, I was still unable to set aside the impulse to deal in either the literal facts or the political rhetoric that are the goods of my trade. Rhetoric would be dangerous, and I was short on facts. I hadn’t looked closely enough to identify the bodies. I wasn’t saying anything, and I felt an agitation growing in Luisa. I felt it in the faint, nibbly restlessness of the steel against my head.

“Did you see who was dead in the streets?” she said again, very low, nearly a whisper.

“No,” I said.

“Mexicans,” she said. And she cocked the hammer.

My breath caught hard in my chest and I waited. She waited too. Weighing my Americanness, I supposed. Weighing my life. Charting a path for herself.

Then the hammer uncocked and clicked softly back into place. The muzzle drew off my skin. The candle flame vanished in a puff of her breath and I lay very still as she slipped through the dark and out of the room and out of the life she’d left for me.

Not that my lead paragraphs over the next couple of days were any different from what they would have been. A handful of cadets and civilians with some fatally big cojones sniped our boys from the Naval Academy near the waterfront and got broadsided into the next life by the five-inch guns of the Chester and the San Francisco . The Marines came ashore and pummeled their way from house to house and secured the city. We had a nifty American flag raising ceremony at the Palacio Municipal and suddenly our fighting boys were all done up in clean dress whites. The local officials refused to come back and govern their city, and Vera Cruz was put under U.S. martial law with us vowing to be benevolent as hell. A 7:30 evening curfew went into effect, but we lifted it within forty-eight hours. And all the while, the Ypiranga just sat out there in the harbor. A German ship full of arms for Mexico with the Kaiser rattling his saber in Europe. I tried to hire a launch and go out to her once things settled down, but the Bluejackets intercepted me before we could even cast off. The Ypiranga was unapproachable, but she was still hanging around, and the other newshounds seemed unconcerned, expecting our Great White Fleet to finally just escort her out to sea and on her way back to the Fatherland. But if we were not going to roughride our way to Mexico City, then she still felt like the best story brewing.