The Hot Country (21 page)

38

We rode hard into the plateau, into the mesquite and the greasewood, racing against the fading of the daylight into twilight, the mountains going black against the sky. We were trying, it seemed, to get somewhere specific, and to keep up I was soon riding like the Mexicans, with stiff legs and constantly flapping them to urge my horse on. There were no sounds but our hooves and all of us panting, horses and men alike. The night threatened—the moon had not yet risen—and though we still could see around us, it was clear that we soon would be blind.

So we rode even harder and then someone yipped. Perhaps a mile ahead we could see the yellow smoke of evening fires and now we were on a dusty road, and a stone fence was running with us. We were in the lands of a sizeable
hacienda,
the
dueño
long since fled or dead. Slim and his boys all seemed not to be seriously wary here. I took the place to be their staging area for raids on the trains.

At a half mile from the fires, someone among us shot two quick rifle rounds. Shortly, from up ahead, came one Mauser reply, a beat, and then a second. And soon we all arrived through a man-high stretch of the stone wall, a wide, iron-gated portal guarded by half a dozen more
Villistas,
and we slowed for another few hundred yards up a desert rise to the
casa grande.

It was dark now, but as I climbed down from my horse, a little shaky and aching from the ride, I sensed off to the west and below us the vastness of the plateau. And the
casa
was
grande
indeed, porticoed like the city hotels, one-storied but high-roofed, built around a courtyard large enough to set a wealthy
Veracruzano
's house fully inside.

We ate in one of the
casa
's lofty
salas
, stripped of its furnishings, only a tattered brocade on one wall—custom-made with cattle and mountain peaks, images of this very ranch no doubt—and an empty mahogany sideboard on another. There were women shuttling in and out to serve Slim and me and his core group lounging on the floor and other women serving the rest of the men in the courtyard. I didn't know if these were peon women left to make a life in their adobe huts on the ranch after the owner had gone or if they were the mated women of the
Villistas
, though from what I saw of this culture, from the perspective of any low-bred and poor Mexican woman, there was little difference: She existed to do this, to cook and feed and give sex and whatever comfort she could to whatever men claimed her.

We ate goat meat and corn and tortillas, and Slim and I ate without speaking much at all while the men around us laughed and progressively elaborated on the tales of their day's exploits and got drunk on
pulque
and on
sotol,
a local drink made from wild-growing Desert Spoon, closer to beer than to
pulque,
which made the stuff okay for me while I was eating, but I knew Slim had a bottle of looted anisette, and as soon as we finished our food, he gave me a little head-nod toward a door into the far wing of the house.

We wound up in the kitchen. At one end were the large adobe stoves and ovens and a vast fireplace with a spit and the goat carcass picked almost clean. Several women—older ones, stouter ones—were still working there, cleaning up. Slim told them all to
vamoose
and they did, quickly. Smoke still hovered around the high ceiling, adding to its greasy dark layer from years of meals, and we pulled a couple of stools over to the doorway that led outside. Slim opened the door, and we sat in the place between the stars and the sharp chill of the high-country night on our one hand and the goat-flesh and tortilla-saturated warmth of the kitchen on our other.

“We doing this straight?” I asked, nodding at the bottle of anisette he was opening.

“Sure. We've ridden fast enough already.”

The times I'd had anisette, it was mixed with cold water and it turned milky and sweet.
Palomita.
But even if we had the water, Slim was right. We'd take it straight and strong and slow tonight.

“Glasses,” he said. He stood up and moved past me into the kitchen. Under the circumstances, the glasses were a nicety that surprised me in him. I'd have been happy to pass a bottle with any
insurrecto
who earned the name of “Slim.”

I looked out at the stars. I was content for the moment. I was on my way to Villa. I would make my own kind of entrance. When we both got to where we wanted to go, Mensinger was going to end up learning who I really was anyway. I still had to finesse the story out of someone, but sitting in the doorway of this
hacienda
kitchen with a profusion of stars before me that were progressively invisible now in any big American city in this still young but electrified twentieth century, and with a bottle of good liquor on its way across the room to me, I would not try to plan my next move.

But I did have things to learn. And the man who might know some of them was back on his stool beside me. He handed me a tin cup. He had one of his own. “Sorry for these things,” he said. “All I could find. But if we don't want to burn the shit out of our gullets, we each need to bridle our own pace.”

I nodded at his reasoning. He poured me half a cup of anisette, which I figured would last me most of the night. He poured himself likewise and put the bottle on the floor beside us. He lifted his tin cup and offered it toward me. I touched it with mine.

I brought my cup to my mouth, and I paused to take in the anisette smell that was already grabbing at me. It was the smell of licorice. A half-eaten stick of licorice going soft in the Chicago summer heat and draping over my knuckles and stuck in my teeth and I wished I could find a mirror to see my tongue gone black and I was straight off the Van Buren Street steamer and walking by the lagoon of the Great White City of the Columbian Exposition, and I was lately nine years old, and I was surrounded by the immensity of the domes and columns and vaulting roofs, and my mother was on one side of me and there was a hand on my shoulder from the other side. Even with the smell of anisette in me, I couldn't remember which actor he was, some leading man or other. He was a good man, was all I remembered, one I was still young enough at the time to hope would stick around, to hope would find roles to play with my mother forever. But of course he didn't. Of course we were off to New York, just my mother and me, by the end of the summer and he was off to tour the Midwest, and all that remained of him now was the smell of licorice, and that was a hell of a thing to suddenly get stuck on in the presence of a hired gun called “Slim.” I took a quick bolt of my drink and it was like sunburn going down my throat, and for the moment that was okay.

Slim took what looked like too big a hit of the anisette as well, and he squared his stool around so he was at a right angle to me and to the night both, and he and I watched the sky while our throats cooked for a while.

“This is better than the stuff we drank together in Corpus,” I said.

He nodded. “That wasn't the best whiskey I ever had.”

“What was?”

Slim laughed softly. “We ain't even drunk yet and we hankering for the past, are we?”

“About your best whiskey ever? You can hanker sober.”

“You're probably right.”

“So?”

“Well, like with a woman, there's something about your first one.”

He paused. I didn't know if he was still on my question or thinking about his first woman.

“But it's not usually the best,” he said.

“So, the best,” I said.

Slim didn't look at me but back at the sky. I'd been mostly joking. But from his present manner, I believed him about this being a serious matter of hankering for something passed. He said, “A sixteen-year-old Green River, which I had down in Panama where my dad was causing some trouble more or less on his own and I got him out of a scrape and we sat down together in a bar where you wouldn't expect to find anything but rotgut. They had that nice old Green River. Mr. J. W. McCulloch of Owensboro, Kentucky, do certainly know how to make him some sweet-oaked whiskey.”

I let Slim sit with his memory for a bit.

I didn't begrudge him his whiskey with his badass
insurrecto
daddy, but I was sorry I brought it up.

Finally he turned his face away from the sky and sipped minutely at his anisette.

“I've never had a Green River,” I said.

“Pity.”

“You were right in Corpus,” I said.

“I been right in everything I said in every bar I ever sat in,” he said, straight-faced, though I heard the elbow-nudge in his voice. “But what thing in particular?”

“About Woody going to war over a chaw of tobacco.”

“If war you want to call it.”

“Well, didn't we pretty much figure that too?”

“If we didn't, we could've.”

“So,” I said. “Knowing what would transpire ahead of time, what brought you back to fight for the Mexicans?”

“Not for the Mexicans,” Slim said. “For Villa.”

I heard a thing in Slim's voice like respect. “Why him?” I asked.

Slim took another bolt of anisette, since I was apparently asking him to loosen his tongue some more. He rested his tin cup on his thigh. “What if a guy in my line of work had a chance to sign on with Napoleon? Villa fights like him. He takes advantage of his opponents fighting stiffly, by the book. He's relentless and fast-moving and secretive. He'll come at you at night and he won't stop coming at you. He's always changing what he does to fit the terrain and his men. And he's very close to those men. No saluting. No nonsense. They know in their bones he's the
jefe,
but they also feel like he's one of them. And he knows how to make his legend and get it out to the people he'll come up against. You news boys help him there. You let the world believe he's living by some lucky star. That nobody can kill him. That his army can't be beat. You boys treat that like truth and then it's as good as being true. And it all comes natural to Pancho Villa. He didn't even know how to read till a couple of years ago, which he insisted on learning even though he was already the commander of ten thousand troops. That's the guy you sign up with.”

“How'd you find him?”

“He found me. During his exile in El Paso early last year. Big guy—a real big guy—is pounding on me in a bar for some little old thing I said to him, a thing which was right, incidentally. I try my fists and my legs and I got
nada
working for me and he has me up against the rail and the bartender is just letting it go on. So I find a heavy glass beer mug with my right hand and I crack this Johnny in the left temple and he goes down like he took a Mauser bullet to the brain. Villa and a couple of his pals was there watching. I think he liked my tactics.”

“Can Villa be the next president of Mexico?”

“Some think. He talks like he don't care about that. But he's the only leader out there who'll do the thing that he wants the most. Which is give all the land to the peons. So he'll be president if he has a chance.”

“You think he'll ever come after us?”

“Us?”

“The U. S. of A.”

Slim didn't give this a moment's thought. “Much as I think he's a hell of a military man, I'll retire from his service if he does.” Slim didn't sound defensive. He was just objectively pointing out the terms of his employment.

“I don't doubt it,” I said.

“He'd fight us in ways we're not used to.”

“I was just wondering if he's capable of attacking us.”

“Pancho Villa is capable of anything,” Slim said.

I nodded. I waited. Sometimes you simply wait long enough and somebody thinks he's got to say some more and then he says more than he should.

But Slim didn't seem to have any news in him to spill. He said, “You know he's pledged to do Carranza's work. Villa never calls him anything other than his
jefe.
”

“Pledged, is he?”

“Like I say, he's capable of anything.”

I humphed a little.

“Including unpledging,” Slim said.

“That going to happen soon?”

“Any old day. Our Pancho's an emotional man. A very warm man. Warm either way. He'll hug you and kiss you on the cheek if he's got his feelings for you right. But if he gets some reason in his head otherwise, he'll turn around and shoot you dead.”

At this I took a sip of anisette.

So did Slim. Then he said, “He let himself be Carranza's general before he actually met the man. He laid eyes on him and he hated him instantly. Carranza's a sharp-gilled, dead-in-the-eyes, coldwater catfish.”

I sipped again, too soon, at the anisette. I let it burn. Mensinger was smart about hitching Wilson to Carranza. And he was even probably right.

Slim said, “Carranza's afraid of Villa. Always has been. Really is now. Afraid we'll head south from Torreón and keep on going to Mexico City. So the
Primer Jefe'
s insisting we campaign pretty near two hundred miles due east and take Saltillo.”

“That so?”

“Yup. Probably Monterey after that. Probably run us on over to the border and set us there.”

“Will Villa do it?”

“Take Saltillo? He's gone partway already. Slow going, having to re-lay track torn up by the
Federales
.”

I nodded. The trains carrying his cavalry to targets were crucial to Villa's tactics. For him this was a war fought within twenty miles of railroad tracks. I said, “Well, he's got time to think.”

Slim laughed. “Plenty. Thinking and cockfighting and cock-dipping while he's creeping east with his track layers. That's his life right now.”

The cock-dipping twisted hotly in me, much to my surprise. Up popped Luisa running off to her goddam bandit rebel leader. It made me irritable. I blamed Slim for even mentioning it. I said, “And train robbing.”