The Hot Country (25 page)

And I said, “
Jefe,
may I take this off once again? I would like to give you the sombrero of your dead enemy.”

He straightened sharply. His face went blank. I was afraid I'd made some sort of mysterious, terrible mistake. But his eyes filled with tears yet again. He was waiting.

I lifted my hands and removed the sombrero and I held it between us.

He took it and he turned it and he lifted it to his head, quite slowly—given the speed at which he was living, quite slowly—as an improvised ritual between us. And he put it on. “
Viva Mexico,
” I said.

“
Viva Mexico,
” he said.

43

Pancho Villa sat us down on the horsehair cushions and he went to the far end of the caboose and returned with four unlabeled bottles. We each took one and he sat in his swivel chair. “One plant,” he said, “grows fifteen years to make one bottle.” He did not say its name but it was
sotol
in our hands, nearly clear, perhaps with a little tinge of yellow. Neither did he draw, from his observation, any lessons about lives or wars or revolutions or governments. We simply lifted our bottles to each other and we drank and it went down smooth and dangerous and it tasted like a field of something green that had been burned to the ground but still tasted green and also tasted like smoke.

And Villa listened intently to the details of the train raid and the fight at the
hacienda
. He wore the sombrero I gave him. The German on the train, the man Villa expected me to be, wasn't mentioned again. And when Slim and Hernando finished speaking, Villa did not comment on any of this, but his eyes, which had grown still and grave, suddenly became animated again and he spoke of the afternoon cockfight and how he lost much money on his best bird, who, bespurred and seasoned though he was, showing the scars of a dozen other successful fights, suddenly spread his wings and managed to fly over the heads of the tight ring of spectators and make a break for freedom in the desert. Villa, though he was tempted to wring the bird's neck for betraying him, took compassion on him and let him go.

Just as I'd been told that Pancho Villa drew on no book knowledge whatsoever, no theory, that his military and political acumen was totally based on instinct, I sensed, in his conversation, that there was no metaphor in him either. All that he said simply was what it was. He moved from one moment of the body to another. One intense engagement to another. One fight, one death, one drink at a time.

He looked at me now and said, “Though you are a brave man who has done me good and who has made my enemies your enemies, I do not think this is why you are sitting here now. You have not enlisted to be a
Villista,
I do not think. And you were not kidnapped by Tallahassee Slim and Hernando Soto.”

“I want to write a story,” I said.

I waited.

He waited. Then he prompted. “About Pancho Villa?” he asked.

“About what is happening now in your country,” I said.

He smiled. This was the right answer. Then the smile was gone. “About what is happening in your country, as well,” he said.

“Yes. That's why I have traveled here at great risk from the
Federales
and why, along the way, I have come to fight at the side of these two good men.”

“I have often taken a train car of newspapermen to my battles,” he said.

I found myself about to say that the people of the United States knew him well for that, even about to say how they admired him. I sensed he could be flattered. I sensed he'd be happy for a sympathetic ear. But I also sensed he was attuned to bunk, and I was feeling also that I was full of that, that I was becoming a goddam bunco artist. Killing some enemies of Pancho Villa in such a way as to win his trust, making a sentimental show of giving him the
colorado
's sombrero: All this, too, felt like consummate bunk. It would have been better just to walk out in the middle of a field of fire in a pitched battle and put my Corona Model 3 on a tripod and write the feel of the bullets zinging past my ears. That would have been better than this. But this was what the world had come to. This was the role I was cast in. There was another kind of story in another kind of time that I needed to write. Nevertheless, I bit my tongue about all the admiration people would have if he talked to me. I just nodded at his invoking the train cars full of newsmen.

I lifted my bottle of
sotol
to him. He lifted his. Slim and Hernando lifted theirs. We drank.

“So,” I said to Villa, “I'm just curious. Who is this German I'm supposed to be?”

“A formidable man,” Villa said. “Like yourself.”

“A formidable journalist?”

Villa laughed. “I forgive that in you, because of your skills as a fighter.”

“He is a military man?”

“I am to learn more about him when he arrives. But I understand he is a fighter. It is on his face, I am told.”

“He is a man who joins you to fight, like Tallahassee Slim,” I said, as if I understood.

“No. He is a man officially representing his government,” Villa said.

I had the feeling that a good reporter cultivates: You've pushed as far as you can for now.

I drank my
sotol,
making a show of being content with his answer. But my keeping silent did prompt Villa to say one more thing: “Germany is a good friend to the Mexican people.”

As there was no metaphor in Villa, neither did I detect irony or indirection. I didn't feel as if he'd said this in order to say an unspoken thing. In this case: a friend, unlike the United States of America, who has invaded Mexico. But even if he was not trying to say this, even if he was simply speaking his feelings and thoughts of this very moment, that conclusion—not only was Germany his friend, but America was his enemy—was one he could readily come to in a future present moment.

Neither did I break my silence to say: I would not like to share a border with Germany.

I realized I knew nothing of actual military importance to Pancho Villa, so I could make an engaging offer now without worrying about consequences. I said, “I was in Vera Cruz to cover the events. I left only a few days ago. Is there anything you'd like to know about the situation there?”

There was a slight recoil of surprise in Villa. He smiled. He had bad teeth, small and separated and the color of old coffee on a porcelain cup. “I can ask a question of a man whose job it is to ask questions?”

“I've killed for you,” I said, ready once more to dole out bunk. It would be useful for me to know what questions this man had on his mind. “The least I can do is answer some questions,” I said.

Without a hesitation Villa asked, “Where will your army attack next?”

“Rats and garbage in the streets,” I said.

That sense of his face collapsing toward the center happened again. His thoughtful mood. Or confused. I explained: “I'm saying they're going nowhere and are happy now simply to bring their ideas about sanitation to Vera Cruz. Our President is staying put and trying to look humane.”

Villa's face relaxed. “What wars is he fighting inside the country?”

“The country?” I asked. I assumed he meant Mexico, but I thought I just answered that.

“America,” Villa said. “Which are his rebel states?”

He was serious.

“None,” I said, trying hard to keep any tone out of my voice that smacked of astonishment, as if he was somehow ignorant.

“None?” Villa asked in exactly the tone I just suppressed.

“We've not had rebel states for nearly fifty years.”

Villa shook his head in wonder. “How do you pass the time?” he asked. And I was almost certain he was still serious.

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.

44

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.

And the image of him standing near Villa's car snapped clearly into focus in my head. His horse and saddlebags were elsewhere. He had nothing in his hands, nothing under his arm. Okay. He was not going to play all his cards straight off his horse with the night coming on. This was the time just to register his horsemanship with Villa and have a drink. He would keep the papers to himself overnight. He would make that presentation formally. Probably tomorrow. The papers weren't left on the horse. They were in his quarters. And this might be the only shot I had at them.

“I need to step out for a while,” I said, my first impulse being to head up to Villa's car and wait for Mensinger to come out and then follow him. I needed to know where he was staying, but this plan would simply leave me waiting for him to go out again. Which he might not do.

Slim and Hernando shot each other a sly look. Slim said, “Next train back, the first boxcar behind the tender. Ask for Señora Toba-Rojas. She keeps track of the unattached women. She'll know about your girl if she came to us.”

“Use my name with the señora,” Hernando said, and he flipped his chin at Slim. “Not the
gringo
's.”

The two shared a laugh, about Slim's problems with Toba-Rojas, not about me supposedly looking for Luisa. I was content to let them think that was why I was going out. And I was glad to know how to look for Luisa, if it came to that.

I took my first step away from them and my hand fell to my side. I touched my holster. I paused. Do I want my pistol with me? Yes. And then another thought: Before I dashed off to find out something the hard way, I should see if there was an easier way. I turned back to the two men. They knew I was a reporter. They would assume I'd consider anyone fair game for my questions. And this guy was obviously interesting.

So I asked, “Do either of you know where the German will be quartered?”

Hernando and Slim looked at each other, thinking together in silence about this.

After a moment, Slim nodded, and then Hernando. As if the one made a suggestion and the other agreed, though neither of them said a word. These were two men who had fought beside each other for a long while.

“Well, not your journalist car,” Slim said.

Hernando said, “No. The journalist car is full of whores now.”

Slim shot me a glance. “Always has been,” he said.

The two laughed loud, this time at me.

I made myself laugh too.

Slim said, “There's another caboose a couple of trains back.”

“Right.”

“They'd put him there.”

“Any important visitors go there when we're on the move,” Hernando said.

I had to lead up to a suspicious question now, but I didn't know any other way.

I asked, “Does everybody in camp realize the important visitors stay there?”

Slim and Hernando were still giving my questions thoughtful consideration. They looked at each other and nodded. “Pretty much,” Slim said.

“Do the big boys get a guard?”

“Sometimes,” Slim said. “If they bring one.”

“And when they go out? What about theft?”

Slim shrugged. “If there ain't exactly honor among all the thieves here—and there is actually some of that, believe it or not—there is at least fear. Everyone knows not to mess with whoever's in there. The man who does has nowhere to run and he'd end up shot if he tried to.”

“The guy who brought him to Villa. Would he be able to ease the German's mind on that?” I asked this of Slim, in English.

Slim gave me a quick now-I-know-what-you're-up-to look, but he said, also in English, “Major Ostos. Yeah. He'd put your man's mind at ease.”

“Thanks,” I said and I took a step toward the door.

“Hey,” Slim said. I stopped and turned. “Chicago Slim,” he said. Meaning me.

I was surprised at how this filled me up like a racing tire on a Stutz. But all I could do was nod very slightly. Which was enough for Tallahassee Slim, I knew.

He said, in Spanish again, “When you're done mashing, if you want to do some drinking, we're fifty yards due south.” And he pointed very deliberately out the window of the car to show me where he meant.

I nodded again and turned and I went out the door and down the steps. I thought: Mensinger wants to keep it personal with Villa tonight. Ostos assured him of the safety of his quarters. Mensinger took the papers inside and put them somewhere out of sight. They are waiting for me. For a little while, at least.

And though I was focusing on the story now, as I headed in the direction of Mensinger's car, my thoughts of the saddlebags carried me to an image of Mensinger taking them from his horse and hiding them away, but my mind ebbed back to the horse being led off and then on to the boy who took our own horses. I thought of his
bandolera,
and then I thought of Diego, and I thought of all the children I'd seen out of the corner of my eye in the past hour or two. It was not just the women of Mexico who went off to live inside the war as it was being fought; it was the children. And my mind flowed back again to Diego. And to Bunky. I reassured myself that when I finished this story and got to the nearest safe telegraph office—and given the story's contents, that would mean a telegraph office across the border—and as soon as Clyde cleared the story and was ready to run it, I would head back to Vera Cruz.

I was passing the first boxcar after the tender on the next train. The door was open. And I thought of Luisa too. But I didn't know how long Mensinger would linger with Villa tonight. Every moment was crucial. I put aside all the peripheral people in my life. I walked faster, as fast as I could without drawing attention to myself.