The Hot Country

16

When I stepped out of the pulquería, leaving Gerhard Vogel with his German buddies and his secret Scribner’s, I was not aware that something had happened one stop up the trolley line, wouldn’t learn about it till I was drinking my morning coffee in the portales. I took a few paces toward the center of the cobbled street, out almost to the trolley tracks, just to get away from the stink of the pulque, which was stronger now because I was carrying traces of it in my mouth. The more or less full moon was high, and spotted along this block of drinking joints were a few electric lamps, one of them across the street and thirty yards or so down to my right. I was lit up by the moon, with more light just down the street. And things were quiet. Even the pulquería behind me was keeping its sounds tight to itself now. Or maybe it had fallen silent in there. Maybe Gerhard chilled down his friends. I bet he had that effect.

The trolley lines suddenly sputtered and sparked above me. It happened, and it was over. Just a brief surge of electricity. The electric demons muttering in their sleep. There were no trolleys in sight. A dog barked somewhere. The night wasn’t anything you’d call cool, but its mitigation of the heat felt good and I turned in the direction of the harbor and my bed, and I started to walk.

From the first step, my mind began working on the tall man with the fencing scar, and the thought I had was that I was a war correspondent without a real war who was trying to make something out of nothing just to keep himself from going crazy. But that guy had been sitting out there on the German ship for a few days, and then he came in like a sneak thief in the night. And yet, less than twenty-four hours later, he was willing to be seen in the center of town. All right. So he couldn’t stay hidden forever. So maybe he promenaded in the zócalo so he wouldn’t seem to be a suspicious figure. There he was in the open. He came in secretly simply to avoid an association with the Ypiranga, so nobody would have a reason to think he had a special mission of some sort. Without that association, he was just another German at the consulate. Overlooked heretofore, but nobody to lift an eyebrow about.

These were quick thoughts, and with another little crackle of electricity overhead I came up out of them. I was passing the streetlamp and maybe I saw a little something in my periphery. A little bit of movement. Not enough even to make me turn my head. I kept taking steps, that next one and the next and I passed from the piss-yellow lamplight and into the moonlight white as a corpse, and it was only now that my defenses started prickling up my skin. I’d been away from battle too long. But here I was with the instinct to duck.

I didn’t. I stopped. I turned.

At first I saw no one. Because I was looking into the spill of light around the lamp. It was the area where I thought I saw movement a few moments ago, so it was where I was inclined now to look. Once again I was about to curse the jumpiness induced by inaction in Vera Cruz, but something registered on me. Beyond the far fringe of lamplight I dimly made out a figure. Facing this way. The figure moved toward me. The clothes were black: jacket and pants tucked into high, laced boots. A black sombrero. A slim young man, to my eye.

If I knew at that moment what I would know not very many hours later, that a Bluejacket in his tropical whites coming out of a bordello up the trolley line had only a short time ago been shot in his left buttock by a sniper with a Mauser, I would’ve figured out a few beats sooner who this was before me.

As it was, this slim young man reached up with his left hand to his sombrero, and the gesture made me notice that his right arm was pulled back behind him. And the sombrero came off and out tumbled lovely thick coils of a woman’s hair, falling over her shoulders, and she lifted her face a little to the light, and it was Luisa. I took a step toward her and even as I began my next step she dropped the sombrero to the ground and brought that right arm out from behind her and her Mauser went up to her shoulder and she angled her head to put me in her sights.

Her rifle was not pointed at some darkly whimsical, nonlethal, but appropriately chosen part of my body, as had been her pattern, but rather it was pointed at the center of my chest. And I had no gold-plate crucifix to absorb the round and simply knock me on my ass. I did not take that second step but planted the foot and stood straight and still before her. She’d had this chance once before and she did not take it. Since then, however, she clearly had come up with some other agenda. I could dodge, I could run, but she was a crack shot and it would do no good. But it was not the futility of evasion that kept me standing there. I found myself still trying to impress Luisa Morales. I had a strong hunch that she respected courage, even in a masher of a gringo with imperialist politics and moral indifference.

She let me stand there for a long few moments with her rifle barrel dead-still in its aim, as befitted her expertise with that instrument. I wondered who taught her, and I wondered if that would be the last thing I ever wondered. Or rather — correcting myself — I wondered if wondering about whether that would be the last thing I wondered would be the last thing I wondered. Bravery affects me like this.

Then the rifle slowly came down.

“Luisa,” I said and the rifle popped up again, right back into the killing zone, though I hadn’t even taken another step. I slowly spread my arms, palms toward her, saying with the gesture: Okay, you’re the boss. Whatever you want.

And still she did not move. The rifle was not coming down. I waited. And then, without lifting her head from her sights, she said, “Good-by, Mr. Christopher Cobb.” Adios. Adios, Señor Christopher Cobb, she said to me with her eye still sighting along the rifle barrel, and I expected to die. I expected she was bidding me farewell as she would send me on my way to whatever was next. She was not yet pulling the trigger, and I wondered if she believed in hell, seeing as she did not believe in the priests. And I wondered if that would be the last thing I wondered. Or, rather — here I went again — I wondered if wondering about whether that would be the last thing I ever wondered would be. . But I didn’t get to finish that thought. Her rifle quickly came down and she faded straight backward into the dark and was gone.

I would come to understand in the next several days, as they passed without another sniper incident, that it was her own good-bye she was speaking to me. It would make me think — and I’d feel foolish even as I thought it — that she had an affinity for me after all.