Robert Butler - The Hot Country

I was in Laredo, Texas, in the United States of America. Last night I sat beside a telegraph operator whom I paid handsomely to stay late and I wired the scoop of a lifetime, the king beat of king beats, to Clyde Fetter in Chicago, and now I waited. I waited for Clyde and I also waited for Bunky Millerman and the great Isabel Cobb, both of whom I also wired as soon as I got to town and located the telegraph office, even before I started writing the story. To Bunky I said: Got him. In Laredo writing stories. How are you? How is the boy? Wire care of Hamilton Hotel. Kit

To Mother I began: The third act is full of sound and fury and signifying something. I spent more time struggling with the next sentence, what to say and how to say it, than I later would in the whole of the massive news story about an active and advanced German plan to instigate a Mexican invasion of the U.S.A. starting with San Antonio and the Alamo. Finally I set aside Shakespeare and Marlowe and Ben Jonson and Sophocles and Homer and Henry James and Montaigne and all the rest and just said straight out what I wanted from her.

Where are you? I wrote. I almost asked, as well, What are you doing? but I did not. One thing at a time.

And I drank my coffee black in the hotel restaurant, which was on the corner and looking into the zócalo . Ah, I was in the United States now. The plaza . Jarvis Plaza. But I was looking through glass and sitting with a tablecloth under my hands and this was the United States now. I found myself missing the portales . Even if the open air was to stink, it would be the open air. But I always had odd feelings of displacement after returning from assignments. I was known to get nostalgic over the smell of cordite.

And the only news of Mexico in the Laredo newspaper was an Associated Press scoop that an American private who went missing in Vera Cruz and was thought to be insane was in fact captured by the Mexicans and was now thought to have been executed but, if true, the event was “unlikely” to provoke a larger military encounter between the Americans and Mexicans. Of course, the private could have been both insane and executed, a possibility I was surprised the AP reporter didn’t explore since he obviously had too much time on his hands and not enough news.

Today I would write about Gerhard Vogel, his service to his country and his murder by a German military officer from the Vera Cruz consulate, to run as a stunning background revelation for the big story of the day before. And then I would write the story of a Post-Express reporter who found himself riding with the Villistas. I would not tell all of the details of that story, however. The men I killed. They would not be part of the public record.

And my coffee cup was empty and I looked across the restaurant and the waiter was already heading my way, a plate in one hand and a coffeepot in the other. He arrived and set my eggs and rasher of bacon before me and as he poured my coffee, he asked, “Are you Mr. Cobb?”

“I am,” I said.

“The front desk has received a Western Union delivery. I’ll fetch it for you.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He moved off briskly and I was feeling American again, surrounded by briskness.

I took a sip of coffee, watching, as I did, the tiny, innocuous birds flying in a delicate little flock over the plaza. I looked sharply away. If I was getting nostalgic about the zopilotes, then I was in serious trouble. I barely got a taste of egg and bacon before the waiter brisked back to me and I gave him a dime for his trouble and his haste, and I laid two telegrams before me. One was from Vera Cruz. One was from New Orleans. None was from Chicago. But of course not. Clyde was only barely beginning to look at the story right now.

Bunky first. I opened the wire, and he said: Vera Cruz gets cleaner and cleaner. The boy does not. My hand is steady, since you are wondering. Otherwise, we’re fine. Bunk

I was wondering, of course. He sounded so like the authentic Bunky in the wire that I actually believed him. As for the boy, I found myself inordinately pleased. Not only that he was fine but that he was no cleaner. I realized I did not want that boy to change.

I ate some eggs. I ate some bacon. I let my mother’s telegram lie there: I was afraid that if I did my eating afterward, she would upset my digestion. She might anyway, but at least I’d have a few minutes of American food in me without it roiling around.

After thoroughly running a crust of bread in the last bit of egg yolk remaining on my plate and after drinking some more coffee and even watching the little birdies in the placid American sky, I picked up my mother’s telegram and I opened it.

She wrote: I am full aware you know the city I am in from my clearly having said too much already in a previous wire. So for you now to ask me where I am means you ask too much. Where are you? Western Union Laredo Texas? Did you elope with that sniper girl you wrote about? Be careful. She doesn’t sound your type. But that was in another country.

She was angry. No signature to the wire at all. Not even an et cetera. She just threw the lines from Marlowe back in my face. At least she didn’t quote the whole thing. There was just too much going on below the surface of this telegram. I had no desire to figure it out. That may have been fornication, but there was no guilt in the thing at all. And the wench wasn’t dead.

A Laredo doctor was cleaning and rebandaging my wound and tossing me odd little looks like he’d never seen a gunshot wound before in Laredo, Texas — though it was true the stitching was a little unorthodox and maybe I needed to shave and certainly I needed to stop wearing my sombrero — and as he was doing his business, I was thinking about New Orleans. But merely to wonder which of the New Orleans papers was picking up the Post-Express syndication. I was all work. I was wishing there was a doctor who could heal my Corona Portable Number 3, who got stabbed between the 5/T/tand the — /G/gand whose wounded body I hopefully jammed into my saddlebags and carried on my three-day dash for the border. But when I arrived, my Corona refused to allow not only any “t” or “g” to be used in my story but several vowels, as well, and had thus left me stuck with a hotel-rental Underwood table model. As for the two stories I would write on that machine today, the leads were already bristling in my head. All work.

So I wrote my stories and it was mid-afternoon, and I stopped at the hotel front desk on my way out to the telegraph office, expecting, ironically, to find a wire that had been delivered to me from that very office. Huzzah. What a story.

Nothing. I went out. I filed. I wanted to check to make sure that, in fact, they hadn’t delivered something to the hotel, which the hotel then, obviously, misplaced. I wouldn’t complain. I just wanted the damn wire.

It wasn’t misplaced. They hadn’t delivered.

I wandered through the plaza on the way back to the hotel. In the center was a very odd circular brick platform, large enough to be a bandstand, but it wasn’t. It had no apparent function at all except to support, around its edge, eight brick pedestals, each of which supported a concrete column, at the top of which was a white, globular, electrically lit ball. What were they thinking in this city? Where was the band playing Cohan and Sousa? Where were the girls in summer lingerie dresses promenading around with each other before the lounging, leering boys? When Gerhard threatened to slide back into my head and start tooting his alto horn, I beat it back to the hotel.

I squeezed at my material some more just to keep occupied, trying to cobble together a profile of Villa in the context of life in his railway-bound campsites, though I’d seen very little of it, really. I did not include the boxcar full of the recently arrived, unattached women. Somebody in Chicago would try to make that the lead.