Robert Butler - The Hot Country

We ate goat meat and corn and tortillas, and Slim and I ate without speaking much at all while the men around us laughed and progressively elaborated on the tales of their day’s exploits and got drunk on pulque and on sotol, a local drink made from wild-growing Desert Spoon, closer to beer than to pulque, which made the stuff okay for me while I was eating, but I knew Slim had a bottle of looted anisette, and as soon as we finished our food, he gave me a little head-nod toward a door into the far wing of the house.

We wound up in the kitchen. At one end were the large adobe stoves and ovens and a vast fireplace with a spit and the goat carcass picked almost clean. Several women — older ones, stouter ones — were still working there, cleaning up. Slim told them all to vamoose and they did, quickly. Smoke still hovered around the high ceiling, adding to its greasy dark layer from years of meals, and we pulled a couple of stools over to the doorway that led outside. Slim opened the door, and we sat in the place between the stars and the sharp chill of the high-country night on our one hand and the goat-flesh and tortilla-saturated warmth of the kitchen on our other.

“We doing this straight?” I asked, nodding at the bottle of anisette he was opening.

“Sure. We’ve ridden fast enough already.”

The times I’d had anisette, it was mixed with cold water and it turned milky and sweet. Palomita. But even if we had the water, Slim was right. We’d take it straight and strong and slow tonight.

“Glasses,” he said. He stood up and moved past me into the kitchen. Under the circumstances, the glasses were a nicety that surprised me in him. I’d have been happy to pass a bottle with any insurrecto who earned the name of “Slim.”

I looked out at the stars. I was content for the moment. I was on my way to Villa. I would make my own kind of entrance. When we both got to where we wanted to go, Mensinger was going to end up learning who I really was anyway. I still had to finesse the story out of someone, but sitting in the doorway of this hacienda kitchen with a profusion of stars before me that were progressively invisible now in any big American city in this still young but electrified twentieth century, and with a bottle of good liquor on its way across the room to me, I would not try to plan my next move.

But I did have things to learn. And the man who might know some of them was back on his stool beside me. He handed me a tin cup. He had one of his own. “Sorry for these things,” he said. “All I could find. But if we don’t want to burn the shit out of our gullets, we each need to bridle our own pace.”

I nodded at his reasoning. He poured me half a cup of anisette, which I figured would last me most of the night. He poured himself likewise and put the bottle on the floor beside us. He lifted his tin cup and offered it toward me. I touched it with mine.

I brought my cup to my mouth, and I paused to take in the anisette smell that was already grabbing at me. It was the smell of licorice. A half-eaten stick of licorice going soft in the Chicago summer heat and draping over my knuckles and stuck in my teeth and I wished I could find a mirror to see my tongue gone black and I was straight off the Van Buren Street steamer and walking by the lagoon of the Great White City of the Columbian Exposition, and I was lately nine years old, and I was surrounded by the immensity of the domes and columns and vaulting roofs, and my mother was on one side of me and there was a hand on my shoulder from the other side. Even with the smell of anisette in me, I couldn’t remember which actor he was, some leading man or other. He was a good man, was all I remembered, one I was still young enough at the time to hope would stick around, to hope would find roles to play with my mother forever. But of course he didn’t. Of course we were off to New York, just my mother and me, by the end of the summer and he was off to tour the Midwest, and all that remained of him now was the smell of licorice, and that was a hell of a thing to suddenly get stuck on in the presence of a hired gun called “Slim.” I took a quick bolt of my drink and it was like sunburn going down my throat, and for the moment that was okay.

Slim took what looked like too big a hit of the anisette as well, and he squared his stool around so he was at a right angle to me and to the night both, and he and I watched the sky while our throats cooked for a while.

“This is better than the stuff we drank together in Corpus,” I said.

He nodded. “That wasn’t the best whiskey I ever had.”

“What was?”

Slim laughed softly. “We ain’t even drunk yet and we hankering for the past, are we?”

“About your best whiskey ever? You can hanker sober.”

“You’re probably right.”

“So?”

“Well, like with a woman, there’s something about your first one.”

He paused. I didn’t know if he was still on my question or thinking about his first woman.

“But it’s not usually the best,” he said.

“So, the best,” I said.

Slim didn’t look at me but back at the sky. I’d been mostly joking. But from his present manner, I believed him about this being a serious matter of hankering for something passed. He said, “A sixteen-year-old Green River, which I had down in Panama where my dad was causing some trouble more or less on his own and I got him out of a scrape and we sat down together in a bar where you wouldn’t expect to find anything but rotgut. They had that nice old Green River. Mr. J. W. McCulloch of Owensboro, Kentucky, do certainly know how to make him some sweet-oaked whiskey.”

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.”