Robert Butler - The Hot Country

One potential story did come along, however, that got Luisa talking again, low and angry inside my head, even as I eventually wrote it strictly by the standards of a wrongly-assaulted, badly-misunderstood-but-still-proudly-waving Old Glory. It started to shape up soon after the last American refugee train out of Mexico City finally made it to Vera Cruz, the one safe town in the country for Americans. And there were about five hundred of our countrymen jammed into it, the most visible ones in the capital, the bankers and the major shopkeepers and most of the embassy people. The bankers who weren’t on the train were in jail and the shops had been looted and the embassy had been stoned and torched, and all of Mexico was suddenly united in its hatred for America and Americans. Even our ambassador and his wife snuck into town and ended up comfy in Admiral Mayo’s quarters on the Minnesota .

Not that any of that hatred dared to be openly shown around Vera Cruz. Nothing like an occupying army to straighten things out. Though the local Mexican government boys were lying low, after a couple more days people were free to come and go, and the shops and markets and burdeles reopened pretty quick. The band shell in the Plaza even got back to nightly business with a German band playing American tunes. The well-off Mexican couples returned to the ballrooms at the bigger hotels and they promenaded to the Cuban danzon . I thought about Luisa several more times, but what she taught me grew a little fuzzy. Not that any lesson you learn is simple. The first Mexican president of the revolution, the one before Huerta, a former big landowner, foresaw his revolutionary future in a Ouija board. And the peasants who rose up on his behalf did so because they were convinced Halley’s Comet had been a sign from God to change their government.

And maybe Luisa did affect the idle track of my thoughts once more, near the end of that first week, as I sat at my table in the portales of the Hotel Diligencias . I was facing the zócalo, and I was in nodding distance of Richard Harding Davis, who was sipping a good wine in his evening clothes as the sun was bloodily vanishing beyond the mountains to the west. There was still a bouquet of death in the air from the unclaimed Mexican bodies. A Marine swaggered by with adobe dust on his clothes from pounding down the walls of people’s houses in his search-and-clear frenzy. Though I admired the man, I did find myself being a little critical, thinking that probably going through the doors would have worked for our boys just as well. And I realized that a good many of these leathernecks were hard-ass combat veterans from what William McKinley, Jr., had called our “benevolent assimilation” of the Philippines fifteen years ago. McKinley had the foresight to have no middle name at all, but it did him nada in the end.

Bunky abruptly appeared and he nodded his thickly-silvered head at me, once, emphatically, as economical and dramatic with his hellos as he was with his news leads in his heyday. He moved the second chair around to the side so he could watch the street, as I was doing. He laid his Kodak 3A folding camera in the center of the table and it was still unfolded, with its red bellows stretched out straight from the black case.

I said to Bunky, “You know that thing looks like a dog’s dick when he’s got your leg on his mind.”

He was too much of a gentleman and too much in love with his Kodak to act as if he heard me.

“A big dog,” I said.

He reached to the camera and collapsed the bellows into the case and snapped it shut. “Down, Rover,” he said, but very quiet, almost to himself.

I’ve always liked Bunky. He was B. F. Millerman for nearly four decades, mostly when the Post was the Post and the Express was the Express and Bunky was the latter’s man at the front lines in the Franco-Prussian War and in Cuba with Teddy and in South Africa when the Brits and the Boers went at it. He did good work. I read his every word in the Express in the spring of ’98 when I was fifteen years old and Mama was dazzling Chicago as Cleopatra. B. F. Millerman was my Cap Anson, my Cy Young, and backstage at the Lyric Theater I charged up San Juan Hill with B. F. and Teddy. Bernard Francis. I finally wheedled the full moniker out of him a couple of years ago when he was drunk, and he was properly offended that I did so. Bunky took up the camera when he’d finally had a bellyfull of governments and their armies censoring and manipulating the news.

“What are we doing here, Kit?” Bunky said.

“You and me?” I said.

“You and me and all the rest of us red-white-and-blues.”

“If we all head on up the road to Mexico City. .”

“We won’t.”

The German musicians were tuning up across the street, in the band shell behind the almond trees at the center of the Plaza, and the tuba was struggling to find a B.

“I made up a postcard for you,” Bunky said, and he took out the picture of me and Luisa and the dead locals.

I looked at it. “I should send this to Clyde,” I said.

And we heard a gunshot off to the right, down La Avenida de la Independencia . The shot was nearby but oddly muffled, so I figured it was on the far side of La Parroquía, the great, gray, el Norte -blasted parish church, which also fronted the zócalo and took up the next block south along the avenida.

“Sniper?” I said.

A second shot. It sounded like a Mauser.

“Or a drunk,” Bunky said.

“It’s too early for the drunks to start shooting and there’s barely enough light for a sniper.”

Bunky shrugged.

“But still,” I said, concluding the debate with myself, “it’s enough.” I listened for another shot. There was only silence.

I stood up. “I think I’ll take a stroll to see if he got his man.”

Bunky put his hand on his Kodak.

“This enough light for you?” I said.

He took his hand off the camera. “I’ll hold the table,” he said.

I headed south on Independencia, making it more than a stroll. I hustled along pretty quick, waiting for more gunfire, though there was still just silence. I was starting to doubt that it was a sniper. But the news had slowed down pretty dramatically in Vera Cruz and I could use a little exercise.

There was a high-voiced racket all around, the zopilotes in their twilight wrangling over their spots on the roof edges and on the bell tower and even on the high cross itself, where they would settle down to sleep. But when I turned the far corner, at Calle de Vicario, and faced along the street at the south side of the church, some different, agitated voices joined the din. Fifty yards ahead was a little gaggle of women hovering around something or someone on the pavement that I couldn’t see. I strode on, expecting, briefly, to find a plugged fellow gringo, probably in uniform. But even before I arrived, I’d adjusted that expectation. The Veracruzanas wouldn’t be making over an American like this.

I gently elbowed the women into opening a space for me, and I was right about the victim. It was not an American. It was a Mexican priest in a black cassock. He was lying flat on his back on the pavement, his right arm straight up in the air, and he was grasping his right wrist hard. The palm of his hand had a major bloody hole blown in it and it had already sent the priest into shock. Or, to take up the likely point of view of everyone on the street but me, it had sent him into a state of religious ecstasy: He was staring at the hole and talking to it, saying over and over, “I’m martyred. I’m martyred. By the wounds of Christ I’m martyred.”