The Hot Country (28 page)

47

And after a time, yes. She put her arms around me. And I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut. I was smart enough not to try to explain what I realized about how I'd said the wrong things to her. And now with the knife at our feet, I understood even more. That her country was more important to her than her own life. It was why she wanted to come and fight. That her country needed Pancho Villa. And so if he raped her, the answer was not to kill him. It was to kill herself. And for an American of all people to offer to help her kill him? That kind of obliviousness was why she put a pistol to my head in the candlelight. I was surprised she had her arms around me now, though perhaps she realized that in my offering to help her kill the man who raped her, to kill Pancho Villa, I was offering up my own life alongside hers in the act of revenge. And I was inviting her to take up a weapon again.
She
would kill him. I would simply help. I understood that perhaps even worse for Luisa than Villa violating her was Villa taking away her rifle and forcing her back to a woman's work. The man she so admired turned her back into a powerless washerwoman. All this I now knew. And I said none of it to her. Her arms were around me.

We were, in the embrace, entirely motionless for a long while. Then, as if we both knew the precise moment when it was time, we let go of each other. She looked at her left hand as if it were not hers. She was still holding the scabbard of the knife. She looked at me. I gently took the scabbard. I located the knife on the ground near us and I picked it up, sheathed it. Luisa and I both looked at the thing, and I supposed I should simply throw it as far as I could into the night. Certainly I should not give it back to her. But something made me slip the scabbard onto my belt. She watched me do this and then she turned and I stepped up beside her and we began to walk together.

We walked along the track, going forward, past the engine of Villa's personal train, past the farthest fringes of the encamping
Villistas
. We walked toward the isolated mountain peaks to the east, visible only as a vast, dark absence against the starry sky. We walked side by side but we did not touch. I did not take her hand. I did not slip my arm around her. I was determined to make no more mistakes with Luisa Morales, and though I thought I understood certain things about her and about how I'd done badly by her, I realized there were many other things about which I was ignorant. Like exactly why she had forgiven me. This was something women could do about which I was utterly ignorant. Especially this woman, in this circumstance. And I was ignorant of how a woman felt in the aftermath of what had been done to her. How she might feel about the act my body wanted very badly now. I did understand this: The way I was inclined to do that act would likely be entirely wrong for her at the moment. But I was not sure I could change.

And at last the campfires seemed as distant as the stars. The moon was rising and our night shadows stretched long before us. And somehow we silently decided to move away from the railroad track. Not far. Fifty yards or so into the desert, we found an outcropping of large, humpbacked boulders but with a broad, table-flat stretch of rock at their base. Perfect for us. We sat. We were silent for a while.

Finally Luisa said, “Why did you come here?”

“I'm following a story.”

She did not ask. And I realized I should not say. Should not raise the politics of Mexico with her. But if this had to end badly again because of who I was, then it was better for it to just end now. I said, “A German has come here trying to persuade Mexico to invade the United States.”

She did not reply for a long while.

I watched my hands lying motionless on my knees. They were white as a dead man's.

And then she said, “How were you hurt?”

She'd noticed my wound, though when she asked the question, she was looking back toward the camp. Or at the moon.

I said, “I ended up riding with some of the
Villistas
. A man I know is an officer. We had to fight a gang of
colorados
.”

She turned to me.

I realized I'd surprised her.

She said, “You fought?”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill some
colorados?
”

She trapped me before with a question. I thought it was happening again. I didn't know if she would feel better about me for killing the worst of the
Federales
. Or feel worse about me for killing Mexicans. But I answered her. “Yes.”

I'd made a mistake in sitting to her east. My face was lit by moonlight. Her face was in deep shadow. I knew she was looking intently at me, but I could not read her. Still, I kept my gaze steady on the darkest parts of her shadowed self, which were her eyes. This would have been easier if I'd not grown up in theaters. Aware of what she might be seeing in my face, I was inclined now to try to play myself. But I understood the paradox. The more I tried consciously to portray me, the less I actually was me. It was too late. I gave her my profile.

She said, “Why did you find me?”

I didn't answer for a moment. I didn't even fully know what the answer was.

She made a little sound. A quick letting go of a breath. I turned to her and she was looking away, back west.

“Not what you think,” I said.

She gave her face to me again. But she did not speak.

And what I said was true. In spite of my desire, it was not why.

I said, “I wrote a story about you.”

She cocked her head slightly.

“About a woman who fights for her country, one bullet at a time. There are many people now in America who know what you tried to say with your Mauser.”

“I don't understand you,” she said.

And for a moment I badly misunderstood her. “I write for a newspaper . . .”

“Not that,” she said, but with a gentleness that surprised the hell out of me, given the assumption I'd just made.

She waited.

I felt I was in the same position I was a few moments ago. Having to portray myself. In words this time, which shouldn't have been as intimidating, as inevitably distorted. But this was not how a reporter used words. I was stuck. But I needed to speak.

“I report,” I said. “I ask questions. I know more now than I did when you put a pistol to my head. A lot more.”

“Not that,” she said, even more gently. I didn't have a clue what she wanted. Perhaps a clue, but I dared not be wrong. So I said nothing. I looked beyond her to the waning gibbous moon. I looked away from her altogether. I stared into the night in front of me, seeing nothing. Thinking now:
I have my story
. I dared not rush with her but I had no time. I had to go. I had to write. I had to telegraph. And whatever else might follow that, one thing was certain: I could not return to a Pancho Villa camp.

And I had to go very soon.

So this was when I would, under other circumstances, take a woman.

I heard myself.

I thought it in just such terms.

And though the woman would have to be willing or readily persuadable, I suddenly could not ignore the frame of mind.

I knew more now than I did yesterday riding into Villa's camp.

I knew much more than I did three days ago sitting next to Mensinger on a bench in the train station in Mexico City. About so many things. And some of them had to be told to the people of Chicago and the people of the world. Urgently.

Without looking at Luisa I said, “I have to ride away from here. Soon.”

She did not answer.

“I won't be able to return,” I said.

Still there was only silence beside me.

I moved my face, but just barely enough so that I could see her. She was looking forward into the night as well.

I said, “Forgive me if this is the wrong thing to ask. And please understand that it is not a way to suggest what I suggested in Vera Cruz. But do you want to ride away with me?”

I was still watching her. She did not react. She did not even seem to hear me. But of course she did. The stillness in her went on. And it began to feel like its opposite. The stillness was, in fact, intense and complex activity. And this was how she was showing it. I stopped watching her.

Before my eyes and hers were the same stretch of moonlit mesquite and high-plains desert floor and train bed and darkness and stars, but we were seeing quite different things, I was sure.

I laid my hands on the tops of my legs, halfway to my knees. I scattered all the matters of my life out before me, turned them into the stars, simply watched them burn, coolly and distantly, indistinguishable one of them from another.

And I waited. I waited. And then I felt her hand fall lightly on top of mine.

I turned my face to hers.

I did not understand her. I did not understand why she might want to do this now. But I did know that I could not let myself behave as I usually did.

She was waiting and I was waiting, her hand on top of mine. And we understood each other.

She lifted her body and swung her leg over my lap and she pushed me down and I lay back upon our bed of stone and we each exposed the parts we needed for this and then we did this act in a way I could never have imagined: She rose above me against the stars and I could see her face, half lit bright in the moonlight and half dark in shadow, and I let her move for us and I let her do for us and I did not know, exactly, who I was with her, but I did know I was with her now, this Luisa Morales.

And when we finished, and she slowly let her body sink down upon mine from above, and she kissed me on the lips and I kissed her, and she moved a little downward and turned her head and laid it on my chest, when we were quite still and we were quite happy in our bodies, I said to her, “So does that mean you will ride with me?”

And she said, quite gently, with a soft quaking of regret in her voice, “It means I will not.”

48

And once again I knew nothing.

Except, with Luisa's head on my chest and me watching the night sky, the time that followed felt as if it was not time at all but a kind of death.

And then we knew we must return.

We rose and we covered the uncovered parts of us and we walked west along the train tracks. When we neared the first fringe of the thousands of soldiers billeted in the desert, we began to hear singing from the campfires, from many campfires, each group hearing only itself, but Luisa and I heard them all in soft cacophony.

And we stopped beside the boxcar where she slept with the other women who had lately arrived.

We stood before each other, searched each other's face. “Why?” I asked.

“I must do it my own way,” she said.

And she stepped into me and we kissed for what surely was the last time.

“Go,” she said. “Quickly.”

I did.

I was passing Villa's car and I was suddenly aware of something I'd not thought of since I left Mensinger's quarters: A pistol was strapped to my hip. I stopped. I looked at the lights in Villa's windows. I turned and looked back along the track. Luisa was gone.

And inside my head, maps were unfolding: Texas, San Antonio, a hand-drawn layout of the Alamo. It was time to report. I hustled along the tracks.

In the postal car I took off my sombrero and my serape. I
lit a kerosene lamp and carried it to the sorting table which was soon to be my bunk but now would be my desk. I set the lamp off center to the left. I unbuckled my pistol belt and removed it. Luisa's knife hung there next to the holster. I felt a surge of fear for her. Would this be her own way? But no. I didn't think that was in her anymore.

I rolled the belt around the holster and the scabbard. I didn't know where to put the objects in my hand. They did not feel as if they were mine. Finally I just laid them at my feet, next to my saddlebags. I moved to the nearest cluster of spindle-back chairs and I carried one to my desk and carefully positioned it.

I had not opened my saddlebags since we arrived. But for now I needed only two things. I bent to them. I removed my Corona and a packet of foolscap. I placed the typewriter before me and unfolded the carriage. I rolled a piece of paper into the machine. I sat down before it. I was happy to be in front of this machine once again. My fingertips knew me. They wired me like a telegraph to the place in my head where my reporter's voice was ready to speak what it had heard, what it had learned.

I'd type the contents of Mensinger's document portfolio straight into mid-story form. When I crossed the border I would have a large enough writing task ahead of me as it was.

I focused. I pictured the first document. Kaiser Willie's letter to Villa. I saw the Imperial Eagle spreading its wings. It would turn into words. I lifted my hands. They hung, fingers curled, over the keyboard.

And my hands snapped back as a voice suddenly filled the room. “Do you find rebellions fueled by strong coffee, Mister Chance?”

I let my hands fall to the tabletop, one on each side of my typewriter. I did not look at him.

He said, “Or is it Herr Cobb? Yes, I think it is Herr Cobb.”

I turned my face. My concentration was keen and he was quiet. Mensinger was standing barely ten feet away. His hands hung at his side, palms inward, like a gunfighter. He was not wearing his pistol, however. He was wearing his British cavalry sword. If he was planning to kill me—and he probably was—then he'd rather do it his own way, and silently.

“I think it is Herr Cobb,” he said, “the journalist turned bandit. You seem to have impressed
Jefe
Villa.”

And I considered my pistol somewhere nearby on the floor. But to bend, to unwrap the belt, to draw the pistol, to straighten up, to turn, to find him, to shoot him: He would have easily drawn his sword and run me through long before I could do all that. He no doubt knew this. He'd been quietly watching me for some minutes, I realized.

“You apparently tried to hide your tracks, but you are a sloppy man, Herr Cobb, and I have a keen eye.”

“Your clothes were quite dull, as it turned out,” I said.

I saw a flicker in him: He was not sure I'd found the documents.

“And a clothes brush?” I said. “Do you understand the scorn Pancho Villa will have for you if he finds out?”

“So will that be your big story, Herr Cobb? You will expose the Germans for keeping their clothes brushed?”

“I would only care about the one reader,” I said. A mistake, however. There was another flicker in him at what I'd just admitted: I understood he had intentions with Villa that I needed to somehow thwart.

“It is a shame he cannot read,” Mensinger said.

“He'll get the message,” I said.

“But he will forgive me, Herr Cobb, when he knows that you were a sneak thief, and an incompetent one. And when he knows I have bravely faced your pistol with a sword and defended myself.”

I understood at once: He would put my pistol in my hand and discharge it after I was dead.

But he still had not drawn. Arrogant ass.

I slowly rose, pushing the chair out from behind me with my foot. I turned to face him. It was how he wanted me. It was how I wanted to be, given Desperate Plan Number Two.

I had not moved away from the desk to face him. My right hand remained at the side of the typewriter, hidden from his sight. I worked my fingertips underneath the base of its frame. Desperate Plan Number Two featured Corona Portable Number Three.

He smiled. And he drew. He was fast and the blade was coming out quick and I grasped the Corona tight from the base and it was coming up quick too and his sword was out and angling back and he was committed to a thrust and he did not imagine anything could intervene and the Corona was heavy, very heavy, slower than I expected, and I strained hard and it rose faster and the sword started forward and Corona was up and it was before me perpendicular to the floor showing its bottom to Mensinger and I grabbed its left side and braced my arms straight out even as the sword clanged in and sword and typewriter together jumped toward me and I tensed my arms and they flexed as Corona came at me but I steeled my arms and the typewriter slowed even as the sword flashed through the type bars and my arms braced and the sword emerged and the tip plunged toward me, a foot away, nearer, and my arms strained harder against the thrust and they held now, my arms held against the push and the tip of the sword stopped not six inches from me.

And we were suspended, Mensinger and I, we were a tableau for the briefest of moments and I pushed back, with arms and legs I pushed him back, the sword wedged still in my dear Corona, whose life I feared for even as I drove Mensinger back and I had to hold fast at the base of Corona because Mensinger was pulling that way now, trying to get his sword out and he did. The tip vanished from between the key bars and I knew his jerking momentum gave me just a moment, I could see his arm flying back even as he stopped and braced to begin another thrust but I continued toward him a strong step as I flipped Corona from its exposed bottom to its strong wide back and I was inside his striking distance and he started to step back too but I strode and I raised Corona to Mensinger's face level to his forehead level and I thrust it hard forward. We were moving together in the same direction and I was not as close as I wished but the thump in the center of his forehead was loud.

And Corona went “ding.”

And I found Corona in empty air and my feet were tangling and I stumbled and he was beneath me and I sidestepped and stumbled again and I made a conscious step away, into empty floor, I planted one foot hard and firm and then the other, and I stopped.

I breathed. I thought I had not been breathing much. I turned.

Mensinger was on his back. Out cold. John L. Sullivaned. His arms sprawled wide, his sword still in his hand, though the fingers had gone slack. He would have a serious headache for his big meeting with Pancho Villa.

And I knew it was time to leave.

Now.