Robert Butler - The Hot Country

“How’d you find him?”

“He found me. During his exile in El Paso early last year. Big guy — a real big guy — is pounding on me in a bar for some little old thing I said to him, a thing which was right, incidentally. I try my fists and my legs and I got nada working for me and he has me up against the rail and the bartender is just letting it go on. So I find a heavy glass beer mug with my right hand and I crack this Johnny in the left temple and he goes down like he took a Mauser bullet to the brain. Villa and a couple of his pals was there watching. I think he liked my tactics.”

“Can Villa be the next president of Mexico?”

“Some think. He talks like he don’t care about that. But he’s the only leader out there who’ll do the thing that he wants the most. Which is give all the land to the peons. So he’ll be president if he has a chance.”

“You think he’ll ever come after us?”

“Us?”

“The U. S. of A.”

Slim didn’t give this a moment’s thought. “Much as I think he’s a hell of a military man, I’ll retire from his service if he does.” Slim didn’t sound defensive. He was just objectively pointing out the terms of his employment.

“I don’t doubt it,” I said.

“He’d fight us in ways we’re not used to.”

“I was just wondering if he’s capable of attacking us.”

“Pancho Villa is capable of anything,” Slim said.

I nodded. I waited. Sometimes you simply wait long enough and somebody thinks he’s got to say some more and then he says more than he should.

But Slim didn’t seem to have any news in him to spill. He said, “You know he’s pledged to do Carranza’s work. Villa never calls him anything other than his jefe. ”

“Pledged, is he?”

“Like I say, he’s capable of anything.”

I humphed a little.

“Including unpledging,” Slim said.

“That going to happen soon?”

“Any old day. Our Pancho’s an emotional man. A very warm man. Warm either way. He’ll hug you and kiss you on the cheek if he’s got his feelings for you right. But if he gets some reason in his head otherwise, he’ll turn around and shoot you dead.”

At this I took a sip of anisette.

So did Slim. Then he said, “He let himself be Carranza’s general before he actually met the man. He laid eyes on him and he hated him instantly. Carranza’s a sharp-gilled, dead-in-the-eyes, coldwater catfish.”

I sipped again, too soon, at the anisette. I let it burn. Mensinger was smart about hitching Wilson to Carranza. And he was even probably right.

Slim said, “Carranza’s afraid of Villa. Always has been. Really is now. Afraid we’ll head south from Torreón and keep on going to Mexico City. So the Primer Jefe’ s insisting we campaign pretty near two hundred miles due east and take Saltillo.”

“That so?”

“Yup. Probably Monterey after that. Probably run us on over to the border and set us there.”

“Will Villa do it?”

“Take Saltillo? He’s gone partway already. Slow going, having to re-lay track torn up by the Federales .”

I nodded. The trains carrying his cavalry to targets were crucial to Villa’s tactics. For him this was a war fought within twenty miles of railroad tracks. I said, “Well, he’s got time to think.”

Slim laughed. “Plenty. Thinking and cockfighting and cock-dipping while he’s creeping east with his track layers. That’s his life right now.”

The cock-dipping twisted hotly in me, much to my surprise. Up popped Luisa running off to her goddam bandit rebel leader. It made me irritable. I blamed Slim for even mentioning it. I said, “And train robbing.”

Slim looked away. I hit the nerve in him I expected to hit. I was still trying to get Luisa out of my head, and all I could think to do was needle Slim, like punching a pal in a bar for telling me my girl was opening up for some other guy. “Was there bullion on the train today?” I said. It didn’t come out sounding like a question. I was challenging him over his previous excuse.

Slim didn’t say anything.

This wasn’t his fault. I tried to clear my head by making it up to him, giving him new excuses. “It’s the nature of a revolution,” I said. “He’s got to find a way to pay for it.”

Slim still didn’t speak, but I could sense a little letting-go in him. That was how he’d already rationalized it for himself.

Not that this stopped the squirming in me. I heard myself say, “Plenty of women always around for the cock-dipping.”

“It’s the damnedest thing,” Slim said, happy to change the subject. “Every army in every war has got their camp girls, but down here they got that beat. You can bring your own woman or grab one along the way and they’re like your own personal cook, nurse, and whore.”

“Does Villa have women fighting for him?”

“Not really. Not like I hear Zapata does.”

Okay. Maybe Luisa wasn’t even with Villa. Maybe she’d heard this about Zapata and went south.

“But Zapata’s meaningless in this whole thing,” Slim said.

Which put an angry big-dreamer like Luisa right back here. I really needed to get away from this line of thought. I needed to focus on what I was doing here, who I was. The story.

I didn’t know how to play this one, whether or not to bring Slim in on the essentials of what I knew and what I was after. For now I simply asked, “So who was the German in the Pullman?”

“I been thinking about that too.”

“And?”

Slim looked at me and I bet he was making the same decision I was, about confiding. Him first. Maybe only him.

Slim shrugged. “I was told there might be somebody on one of the trains we hit. A German official. His name would be Mensinger.”

“Somebody you’d make sure the train keeps running for?”

Slim looked at me like how the hell did I know. But I’d heard him revise his orders to his boys in the middle of a pillage, and I thought he suddenly remembered this. “Right,” he said. “He was cleared all the way to Villa himself.”

“So why isn’t he sitting here with us, having some anisette?”

Slim shrugged again. “Arrogant prick of a Hun, I guess.”

“You offered to bring him?”

“Yup. Was told to. He declined. Said he had some things to do. Said he’d ride in on his own. I just told him where.”

I needed to be quick about suppressing it but I managed to keep the smile off my face. I figured it was like I’d figured. I said, “Any idea what his business is with Villa?”

Slim took a pull at his tin cup, let the anisette slide down, relaxed with the burn, looked out at the night beyond the door, and without looking back to me, he said, “Don’t know.”

All that preamble. A real “Don’t know” would’ve come quick, it seemed to me. “What is it, Slim?”

“I don’t like the Huns,” he said.

“What do they want with Villa?”

“Don’t know.”

I believed him this time. I said, “But you worry.”

“You see those boys in Europe and the guy they got rattling their sabers?”

“Not a Woody Wilson,” I said.

“The Kaiser could even provoke Woody Wilson into being somebody he ain’t. Not sure how good Wilson would do at that.” Slim was still talking into the night.

“If Vera Cruz is any indication…” I let Slim finish the thought in his own head.

“Like I say.”

We drank. We burned. We watched the stars. I finally decided I might need some help in Villa’s camp.

So I said, “I talked to Mensinger along the way up here.”

Slim turned to me.

He waited. I let it rest for a moment.

“About coffee?” Slim said.

It took me a moment to remember I’d told him about the Canadian. “Sure. I sold him a bag of beans.”