Robert Butler - The Hot Country

Then I sat in the hotel bar drinking whiskey till the night came on and I grew as dark as the view out the window. And I probably asked again at the front desk a time or two about a telegram and I probably went up the steps and I probably went into my room and took off my boots and lay down. Probably, because I had no memory of any of that when I woke with light coming through my window and I was on my bed and my boots were off.

My head was stuffed as full as this mattress, though the gob of felt inside my head was being heated in a furnace and it was expanding plenty and I was just waiting for it to burst into flames, though it seemed somehow resistant to that obvious next turn of events. Which was probably for the best. Still, if it was not going to burst into flames, I wished it would just cool the hell down.

But it was a new day and a new chance for a telegram from Clyde so I could receive his praise and maybe an editorial question or two and then I could figure out how best to get myself back to Vera Cruz. That was probably what was keeping him: He was going to do the huzzahing and the inquiring all in one comprehensive telegram.

I managed to get up and get one boot on, which was enough for now, and I managed to complete a few necessary ablutions, and then I was glad to find I could get the other boot on with noticeably less difficulty, and I went downstairs. Since I would want to go straight from Clyde’s editorial inquiries to the typewriter and get this done with, I even had enough restraint to bypass the front desk and go to the dining room, and I sat in a shadowed corner as far away from the windows as I could and I ordered simply a pot of black coffee, which I drank searingly fast.

I realized the morning was pretty far advanced. The sun was not low outside there, and I was the only person in the dining room. I was sure to have a telegram from Clyde waiting for me at the front desk.

And I did.

I carried it back to my room unopened.

I went in.

I sat before my typewriter at my small, rattly desk.

I opened Clyde’s wire, expecting him to have composed an ardent love aria for my having produced a veritable Wagnerian opera for tomorrow’s front page.

Instead, he wrote: Knockout story, champ. But this is something we need to talk about in person. Please take train to Chicago as soon as possible. Clyde

“But”? Meaning it was not running tomorrow. Not running till I could get to Chicago. If I was working for Hearst, he’d run it first and then he’d be on a train, coming down here to congratulate me personally, on the spot, and to start planning how to follow this up so we could declare war on Mexico. Hell, declare war on Germany too. He’d see this as bigger than Cuba and Spain.

Maybe this was exactly that. Maybe it was just a matter of who took the train. This was certainly big enough that Clyde kicked it upstairs to Paul Maccabee Griswold himself. This was as secure a beat as you could find. No one else would get it in the next few days. Or ever. So let’s confer about the best way to roll it out. Griswold was capable of that.

And yet. I had a bad feeling. Knockout stories got rushed into print. No matter how secure they were. Still. I could come up with a plausibly optimistic scenario. But I’d be damned if I could dream up what the problem might be.

Then one problem led me to another, where the dreaming up was easy. And I thought of an opportunity.

I’d route myself through New Orleans.

So I got ready to leave Laredo. And it felt as if I were truly leaving Mexico. Not just ducking across the border. But I had no choice. I found a livery and a big general store and I sold my horse and saddlebags in the one, and the Mauser and bandolera in the other. I bought a couple of white shirts and a ten-dollar blue serge suit and a fedora. I bought an oversize cowhide traveling bag. I kept the Browning and the holster and Luisa’s knife, and before dawn the next morning I packed them away, and after staring at the sombrero lying on the center of my hotel bed for a long few moments, I folded it as best I could and wedged it into the bag.

By noontime the International and Great Northern Railway had dropped me in my blue serge suit and fedora in San Antonio, Texas, where I cooled my heels till sunset. I did think for a time about how I just came up the train tracks that Germany was urging Villa to use in his attack on the United States. But I didn’t dwell on that. The story was written. There was no more for me to do about that for now other than ride these trains to Chicago. And I exchanged wires with Clyde, sending him my schedule and getting not another word from him about the face-to-face meeting other than I should come straight to the office when I arrived.

And then the Southern Pacific carried me on to New Orleans Union Station. We were due to arrive there by the next sunset, but things went slow out of Houston and again out of Lake Charles, Louisiana, and it was past nine when we got in. Which was okay by me. I had a ticket on the next train to Chicago on the Illinois Central and it didn’t depart till 9:40 tomorrow morning, and my arriving late in New Orleans meant Storyville would be going strong when I got there. Before I headed out, I went to the baggage room, and there I hesitated. Should I take my Browning? I did not. But I removed Luisa’s knife and scabbard and I strapped it on my belt in the middle of my back, and I stored my bag and went out.

The air smelled of old fish and a recent rain. I got into an automotive taxicab — a Model T with a limousine body — and I told the driver I wanted to go to Storyville.

He cranked the engine and I got in the back, and when we drove off, he tossed me a look over his shoulder and said, “Your first time?”

“Yes,” I said. Which was a lie.

“You in search of a sportin’ house? I can do you a good one where they’ll treat you specially nice at the dropping of my name.”

“I’m interested in music,” I said. “High-class singers. You know anything about that?”

“I don’t know nothing about that,” he said in a clipped tone as if he’d offered a good place to hear music and I’d asked for a whore.

At least it shut him up, which I was happy for because the truth about my first time in Storyville slipped into me as we headed downtown on Rampart.

I was born in this town, backstage at the Pelican Theatre in the early morning, as Mother tells it, and she opened as Shakespeare’s Juliet that night without having to add a whole new dimension to the role that the producers, however, had been only too willing to do. Not that we stayed around after the run. But whenever we toured back to New Orleans over the years, I treated the place like my hometown, and then, in 1901, her leading man in some melodrama or other — a silver-haired warhorse named Gilbert Russell Whitaker — had laryngitis such that he could make himself heard but he couldn’t emote, and he took the night off. I’d recently turned seventeen and he decided it was high time for me to lose my virginity in my own hometown. I happily agreed and he took me to Storyville and he spent a very generous five dollars on my behalf for one of Willie V. Piazza’s octoroons, an angel-faced girl wearing opera-length striped stockings — the only thing, indeed, that she was wearing when I trembled my way into her room — and she was not much older than me and she lay down on the mahogany four-poster and said, “You’re a fine, strapping boy and I don’t care it’s your first time, I want you to do me like you should and like I deserve, which is to say I want you to make me scream from the pounding.” And this I did. And the son of a bitch Whitaker, a few years later, drunk one night in his dressing room in St. Louis, squealed on my mother, revealing that the whole idea and the five dollars were from her. Of course I’d never mentioned any of it to her when I got back from Storyville that night. And she was a consummate actress. I’m certain I would have found suspicious the slightest clue in her face, a little smile, a little glance. I would have known she knew. But there was nothing. And neither did I ever speak of what I learned about her complicity.