Robert Butler - The Hot Country

Sitting to my left and constantly fine-tuning us in the air with two tall levers was Birdman Slim, Tallahassee’s old pal. His flying services, paid for by the U.S. government, and this specially outfitted Model B were the immediate gifts I was bearing to Pancho Villa, and they were a small down payment on the military supplies and logistical support I was authorized to promise. Trask explained to me in Chicago, with impeccable logic, how my mission to arm a man even as we occupied a part of his country, a man who we had good reason to believe hated us, a man who we would otherwise reasonably expect to invade us, was clever foreign policy.

Villa was in Saltillo now, vanquisher yet again of the Federales . He was, however, still far enough away from Laredo, whence Birdman and I began to fly, that even with a special 15-gallon fuel tank in our Model B, we could expect to be using our last drops as we landed. This was something that the chill buffeting of air from our fifty-mile-an-hour rush helped to press away from my thoughts. I had to assume I would arrive safely, though we and our Model B dipped and lifted and dipped again in the eddies of air, and Birdman, a wiry-muscled mule driver of a man — he indeed once was a mule driver, he explained to me when we met in Laredo, adding that aeroplanes were different from mules, though he did not elaborate — this estimable Slim seemed anything but confident as he worked intensely and gruntingly at the rudder and elevator and wing-warp. I suspected if he had elaborated, it would turn out that an aeroplane was unlike a mule in its being very much like a bronco, and flying it was — each time — like the first time on the back of the most headstrong mustang straight from the wild. Only you rode it half a mile above the ground.

And higher. We rose at the little outbursts of the Sierra Madre Orientals, ascending to a mile high and higher to thread a pass, the air going as cold as a corpse pressing against us, and then we descended on the other side. We did this once, and once again, and yet again before he nudged me and nodded his head forward — daring not to take hand or eye from his business of flying — and I looked, and in the distance I saw a clumping of tiny shapes that I presumed he meant was Saltillo. I hoped his Laredo declaration about the bare sufficiency of our fuel took into account these ups and downs with the mountains.

We were coming in north of Saltillo, bearing southwest, and we kept our course out past the western boundary and then banked south and sharply descended to about the height of Griswold’s conference room, less than two hundred feet, which, after the last four hours, felt reassuringly low. We throttled down and flew just beyond the city’s western edge of adobe houses. And now I saw before us the familiar snake-bodies of Villa’s trains, stretching a mile or more south from Saltillo. Directly ahead were the campsites of the Villistas, full of afternoon siestistas, and as we bore down on them, I could see them lifting up, rising up, a wave swelling and rolling on ahead of us, their hands stretching upward toward us, sombreros spinning into the air at the sight of an aeroplane.

As we reached them I looked across Birdman and down, and our shadow sprung upon the trains, familiar trains: Villa’s red caboose, the train behind, the flatcar where the men were scrambling to the Maxim guns, and the boxcar where I found Luisa. Was she still there? Had she found her way to escape from this man? That question, not the brief sputter of our engine, clenched inside my chest. Though a moment later the engine sputtered again and we banked west away from the campsite and now the engine was all that was on my mind.

I looked at Birdman. He seemed no more concerned than at any other moment of the past four hours. So we sputtered our way west on our last drops of fuel till we were clear of everyone and we turned north and faced a stretch of desert scattered with low-growing creosote, and our engines cut off altogether and suddenly things were very quiet, with only the rush of air around us, and we were about the height of Clyde’s eighth-floor office now, and Birdman, the sensitive ex-muleteer that he was, said, “Don’t worry. We got no brakes anyway.”

So we glided and the ground rose to us and I looked out to the mountains far away until we jolted and lifted and jolted and then we ran, no more bumpingly, in fact, than in a Model T on a potholed street, until we lost all momentum and we stopped.

I sat for a moment with my skin prickling away as if we were still flying.

“Birdman,” I said, “can I ask you a question?”

“Yup.”

“Why is it that the absence of brakes was supposed to take away my worry about the absence of a functioning engine?”

I looked at Birdman. It was hard to read his eyes through his goggles, but I thought that he thought I was pretty stupid to ask this. “Since we got no brakes,” he said, “I have to turn off the engines anyway to stop.”

“That makes perfect sense,” I said.

“Sure,” he said.

I stepped onto the desert floor and I looked toward the trains, and three horsemen with rifles in hand were bearing down on us in a swirl of sand and dust, and now they were upon us and they pulled up and the lead horse reared briefly and settled, and leaping from its back was Tallahassee Slim.

His landing carried him a few steps toward us and he stopped and he looked at these two men lifting their goggles, and his own eyes went wide. “If this don’t beat all,” he said.

Back on his horse, Tallahassee Slim offered a hand and I went up to ride behind him to Villa’s train. Birdman went up behind Hernando, who gave me a single, firm nod that I was surprised to find lifted me far more than Clyde’s “knockout story” or Griswold’s “surpassingly good.”

I was carrying my own leather document portfolio, though this one had the presidential Seal embossed upon it. And I was wearing the colorado ’s sombrero, which I unfolded and smoothed out as best I could and put on a few moments ago, also having removed my suit coat and tie and stuffed them into my aeroplane-light carpetbag. I was glad to see I was showing my battle ribbon: The left sleeve on my white shirt was discolored from a bit of ooze from my healing wound, the Laredo doctor having to struggle to get Hernando’s stitches out before Birdman and I took off. I thought now to untuck my shirt so as to hide Luisa’s knife, which was in its scabbard at the small of my back.

Slim and I headed off at an easy trot. “So how’s your German visitor doing?” I asked.

“It took him a couple of days to clear his head,” Slim said. “But he’s had Villa’s ear for nearly a week.”

I grunted at this.

Slim said, “I thought word of your story would’ve gotten here by now.”

We were still a good three hundred yards from Villa, but I needed to ask some more questions. I gave Slim the five-inch, single-column summary of what had transpired. It was condensed, but I got all the basics in. Trask would disapprove of my saying even this much, since he’d impressed upon me that what I was doing was secret government business intended for Villa’s ears only. But here was another little lift I found myself feeling: I trusted Slim — with my life and whatever else — more than I trusted anyone in Chicago or Washington, D.C.

When I finished, Slim whistled, low. Before he could comment I said, “What’s Villa’s mood about me?”

“I’m not sure. I told him that you and Mensinger had some kind of personal beef, but I didn’t know anything about it. He does understand personal beefs. But I don’t know what Mensinger might have said about you. Lies of some sort. So with those lies and you taking off so quick — which Jefe really couldn’t understand and I didn’t know how to explain — I don’t know what he’ll do.”