Robert Butler - The Hot Country

I lifted the bottle of sotol, as if that was my answer. He lifted his and laughed. “You can do both,” he said. “Drink and fight.”

We drank.

“And your women,” he said. “They are good?”

“Good,” I said. And then, on impulse: “But not as good as yours at fighting.”

Villa laughed again.

“There was a woman in Vera Cruz,” I said.

“You cross them. .” Villa said.

But the momentum of my impulse cut through his thought. “A true soldadera, ” I said.

“. . our women will scratch your eyes out,” he said.

“A crack shot,” I said.

“Like a fighting cock,” he said.

“She turned into a sniper in the first week of the invasion,” I said.

He heard me now, and his look changed to something complicated. As if I were a subordinate speaking out of turn. But I didn’t get the feeling it was about my interrupting him.

I kept going, however, thinking the rest of it would intrigue him. I said, “She shot a stigmata into the palm of a priest, the nose off a collaborating city official, and she plugged a U.S. Marine in the butt while he was cruising for a whore.”

And all this did seem to intrigue him. He wrinkled his brow and narrowed his eyes and he nodded, as if impressed.

“She’s a hell of a shot,” I said. “Then she vanished from Vera Cruz.”

I let a couple of moments of silence pass, and I knew that Villa was engaged, as he did not leap in to speak.

“I thought she might have come to join you,” I said.

“If she came to me she would find that Pancho Villa is a hell of a shot,” he said and he grabbed his crotch.

He laughed and the other boys laughed and I managed a laugh as well, realizing that I’d flown over the heads of the spectators and out toward the desert. I was not doing what I was supposed to do. And I was jeopardizing the real story, the one I had to write. So I laughed.

When the laughter faded a bit, Villa said, “And then I would give her a woman’s work to do. She would be happy.”

I took a drink of the sotol just to keep quiet and let this all pass.

“Did you have this woman in Vera Cruz?” Villa asked. From his tone and look, the “having” clearly meant the sexual taking.

“No.”

“Well, maybe she did come here. I have had some of the new women these past weeks. Do you know her name?”

“No,” I said, without the slightest hesitation.

Villa drank, and he wouldn’t get off the subject.

“If she wants to act like a man, she would be better off if she had gone to Zapata,” he said. “He does not know the difference.”

More laughter.

I was thinking of Luisa and of Villa taking her and then handing her off to the tortilla brigade on the top of a box car, and I knew I had to stop this conversation.

From the end of the caboose, in the open doorway, came a shuffling of feet.

We all turned our heads.

A finely mustachioed man with a sombrero but a vaguely military jacket, without pips or ribbons but clearly official, was standing in the doorway. “Jefe, ” he said. “The man you were expecting has arrived.”

“My German?”

“He has the letter of passage.”

Villa rose.

We all of us rose.

“Where is he?” Villa said.

“Just outside,” the man said.

“Give me a few moments,” Villa said.

“Yes, Jefe, ” he said, and I thought I even saw him repress a salute. This one had been trained under someone else. He did an about-face and went out the door.

Villa turned to us, raised his bottle. We each touched it with ours, Slim first and then Hernando and then me.

We drank and we broke from each other and we put our bottles on the table.

Villa took off the sombrero. He held it out to me with both hands. He said, “I thank you, compañero . But you were the one who earned this. And you will need it in the sun.”

“Thank you,” I said. I took the hat from him and I put it on.

Then Villa said, in the same tone he’d just used to give me back the sombrero, “You should look around for your soldadera . One of them I recently had may have claimed she could shoot straight, and she may be a Veracruzana. But I warn you she is a sour one.”

I nodded at him and I made my mind go blank at what he’d just said and I moved away, Slim and Hernando following me.

Not that it was easy.

But what was most important, I reminded myself, was the man just outside.

I feared we were about to confront each other face-to-face. But I knew that Mensinger would be thinking about making his first impression on Villa. And with my sombrero and my bloody arm and my serape and the absolute unexpectedness of the context, if I could avoid his direct look, perhaps I would not be recognizable to him. I stepped through the door onto the back platform, my face lowered. He wasn’t there. All the better.

I let myself look up briefly.

Mensinger was standing on the ground, several paces away, wearing his costume of sweat and dust and scar. He did look the part. He’d already removed his slouch hat. He was ready to click his heels. Villa would have little to bond with in this man. But Germany was a friend to Mexico, and America was Mexico’s enemy. That was this man’s message, and there would be much apparent proof of that. And Germany could help Pancho Villa fight and win and unite his country behind him. I was afraid that, for all his manly, comradely tears no German would understand, Villa would be persuaded by this.

I lowered my head, letting the dead colorado ’s sombrero utterly disguise me before Friedrich von Mensinger, and I descended the steps, and Slim and Hernando and I mounted our horses and moved away down the line of trains.

We rode only one train back and pulled up at a postal car.

Slim said, “Our boys are quartered here.” He said no more about that but he swung a leg off his horse. “Our boys” included me.

We all dismounted and a kid not much older than Diego suddenly appeared. He was wearing an overlarge sombrero and a single bandolera over one shoulder, mostly empty but with a few rounds of what looked like shotgun cartridges. He was not carrying the weapon itself. He took Slim’s reins and Hernando’s, and Slim nodded him toward my horse as well. We went up the end steps and into the postal car.

Inside, it smelled of mildew and old wood and of the complex body-and-equipment stink of fighting men in the field. At the far end were bag racks stuffed with gear and weapons. Stretching this way below the windows along one wall were sorting tables, which functioned like low-slung bunk beds — one man to sleep on the tabletop, one below. Along the other wall were a couple of little clusters of spindle-back chairs.

Slim and Hernando stepped ahead of me and started clearing bunks. Our losses from the hacienda. They were finishing up and Slim said, “We most of us sleep out in the open if the night’s good. Old habits.”

“Thanks,” I said to him, putting my saddlebags on one of the cleared doubles. Even as I ostensibly settled in with our boys, I was starting to get restless as Christopher Cobb. I could see using one of the chairs with my sorting-table bunk to break out the Corona and start serious work on writing the back end of the story.

I’d had no way to act upon this till Slim got me quartered, but I realized the story needed me to take a specific, immediate action. Villa seemed to understand the press and he used us for his own ends. He also seemed impulsive in his speech and a little naïve about international politics. But in this case, whatever would happen between Mensinger and Pancho Villa was likely to stay strictly between them until it was too late. I had to get ahead of this story. And the only way I could see to do that was to look at Mensinger’s papers.