The Hot Country

18

The story I did cover the next day was for a whole pack of us to cover. A selective pack, however. The big dogs of the war correspondents. Davis and me and London. Arthur Ruhl from Collier’s and Frederick Palmer from Everybody’s. Lou Simonds from the Atlantic. A couple of the anonymous smaller dogs from the big-circulation outlets, the Associated Press, the United Press. We all ended up at the dinner table of General Frederick “Scrapping Fred” or “Fearless Freddie”—take your choice — Funston, lately installed as the man in charge of U.S.-occupied Mexico and lately installed in the house of General Maass near the Mexican barracks on the south end of town, with the Maass family stuff still around, from the piano to the matching pair of rocking chairs, from the couch-arm doilies to the white coral centerpiece on the dining table, from the bead curtains dividing the room to the dishes laid out for dinner to the parrot in the back room calling out drill orders in a man’s voice that had to be an imitation of Maass himself.

Funston’s first declaration when we all sat down was “I’m packing up General Maass’s things at the first opportunity and sending them along to him.” Like Funston needed to make it clear that our grabbing a Mexican city didn’t mean we’d grab some Mexican general’s dinner china as well. Funston paused for a moment to allow this declaration to register on us with all its ethical gravity, and in the silence, the parrot cried in Spanish, “About face. Forward march.”

We didn’t laugh. Funston was a little man, as small and thin as a teenage girl, and he was fidgety, with a little man’s exaggerated derring-do, and famous for bragging, after he made his mark as a general in the Philippines, that he personally strung up three dozen Filipinos without a trial and he suggested we do the same with all the Americans who had petitioned Congress to sue for peace in the Far East.

He laughed, however, at the voice from the other room. And he said, “As for the general’s parrot, he’ll be dead before tomorrow’s sunrise.” And he laughed again. An I-really-mean-it sort of laugh.

Richard Harding Davis laughed too, that companionable manly-man’s laugh of his. Most of the rest of us mustered an echo of it, from politeness, though Jack London just dropped his head and smirked at his dinner plate.

And we ate a meal from home — ham and cream gravy and boiled potatoes and macaroni and snap beans and pickles — and we were lectured by the general about our responsibilities to America and its righteous efforts here in Mexico. Knowing his reputation and hearing him lecture, I couldn’t help but think that it was a good thing a certain sniper I knew wasn’t aware of this man. Good for him, and good for her, too.

Later we sat on chairs in the courtyard and smoked cigarettes and drank coffee until we had the option of drinking a pretty swell Scotch, an option we all exercised, and Funston passed around editions of the big Mexico City newspapers from a few days ago. And in a collegial but grave tone he declared, “Read what your Mexican counterparts are saying, gentlemen.”

Those of us who knew Spanish translated in low voices for those around us who didn’t, creating an intense, low babble of vituperation in the room, which was no doubt part of Funston’s rhetorical plan. The headline in El Imparcial was “The Soil of Our Homeland Is Defiled By Foreign Invasion!” with a sub-head of “We May Die, But Let Us Kill!” El Independiente assured its readers “While Mexicans Were Massacring Gringo Pigs, Church Bells Rang Out Their Glory!” La Patria took a cleaner, more Hearstian approach in its headline: “Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!” And there were half a dozen more of this ilk.

After we finished with the newspapers, spending less time with each one, Funston said: “You see, boys, what you’ve got to counteract? And I have to admit, from all our own reports, these papers accurately reflect the attitude of the Mexican people as a whole. An attitude that’s typical, in my experience, of uncivilized people. Our fellow Americans need to know what the reality is down here.”

And the extra dose of reality that all us boys were hearing in these words was that our stories were now going to follow the Army’s agenda, Funston’s agenda, or they wouldn’t be allowed out of this town. We passed the newspapers back to Funston and he accepted them in silence while the parrot screamed wordlessly in the background.

When he had all the papers again, Funston said, “Not from my mouth, boys, but you can find the President on the recent record saying how the Mexicans would certainly welcome us with open arms if we ever intervened. How they’d all understand that we were actually saving them from their latest tyrant. How in no time at all they’d create their own little old democracy down here and be grateful to us for giving them the chance.”

The parrot began to sing “La Cucaracha,” the stretch of lyric he’d learned coming from the pre-revolutionary version, which was still, in fact, about a cockroach. La cucaracha, la cucaracha, ya no puede caminar. The cockroach can’t walk anymore.

Funston seemed to ignore this. “Not that these folks don’t deserve a democracy,” he said. “Everyone does. But they don’t understand what we’re offering. We learned in the Philippines that you can’t create a democracy for savages unless you have complete control over them.”

The bird started over and got farther into the lyric: porque no tiene, porque le falta, las dos patitas de atrás. Because he’s lacking his two back legs.

Funston may have been ready to spell it all out: that we were expected to rally the United States to a major military action, total invasion. Maybe not. This may have been his intended stopping point anyway. The implication was inescapably clear as it was. But after his declaration about how to bring democracy to savages, he paused for a moment, and then he said, “Pardon me, gentlemen.” He rose and vanished into the other room and very briefly the parrot fell silent. Then the parrot cried, “About face.” Then there was only the faintest sound of a fluttering of feathers. And then silence.

We did not hear the bird again for all the rest of the time we lingered, milling about the courtyard with more Scotch and more cigarettes and a more relaxed General Funston. He made a point of working his way around the room to each of us.

When he got to me, he said, “Glad you’ve come down here, Cobb.”

We were standing near a dry fountain in the center of the courtyard and the other reporters were out of earshot, talking and laughing among themselves, more than halfway vanished into a good-Scotch ground fog. I could have asked questions now, could have found out if Funston knew who the new German in town might be. But I felt certain this would be news to him. He just didn’t seem useful to me at the moment. And till I had this story, whatever it was, I wanted to keep it to myself as much as possible.

“I’m not sure I’m glad,” I said.

He cocked his head slightly at me. Why did it remind me of a parrot cocking its head? Hearing words and being interested in them but not understanding.

“Like you,” I said, “I came for a war.”

He cuffed me on the shoulder. “There you go,” he said.

We each had a Scotch in our hand. We each took a sip.

“You know, I adore your mother,” he said.

This happens to me quite often. I’ve generally gotten used to it. I learned long ago how to prevent even the first little sharp-toothed nibble of a troubling thought from getting at me, learned to assume that such declarations as this by a man are simply from an ardent fan on the other side of the proscenium. “Fearless Freddie” Funston, however, his face looking up into mine almost dreamily, his beard and mustache trimmed tightly close in what was neither a man’s shaved face nor a man’s proper beard, this man Funston troubled me. “Scrapping Fred” was an actor in his own way, and on a very big stage, and with an impressive costume. My mother could have fallen for him because of all of that.

“I saw her at the Morosco in San Francisco the year before the earthquake,” he said.

I was gone from her daily life by then. I needed to stop this line of thought or it would drive me nuts.

“What was the play?” Funston was thinking aloud.

“Were you stationed there?” I asked him, trying to divert the conversation.

“‘The Eternal Feminine,’” he said.

“The Presidio?” I asked.

“That was it,” he said. “‘The Eternal Feminine.’ Your mother was splendid.”

“You served there?”

“The Presidio,” he said. “That’s right. I was commander.”

“This is good Scotch,” I said, starting to lift my glass, intending to take the rest of whatever was in there as a quick bolt and excuse myself from him to get some more.

“My wife and I loved the theater in Frisco,” he said.

I pulled my glass down for the moment.

“But your mother was the highlight. For both of us.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“So sad, the next year,” he said. “The Morosco and all the rest were rubble.”

Mother was long gone from Frisco by then. She was back in New York.

“I took over in the aftermath, you know,” Funston said. “Ran the show.”

I’d read about the downright admiration San Franciscans developed for Funston. With the water mains broken, he created a successful firebreak by dynamiting the homes of the city’s elite. He fought the rats and disease. And he had looters shot dead on the spot.

“My task here is not dissimilar,” he said. “The streets are open sewers. Insects and vermin live with these people unchecked. For every thousand Veracruzians, fifty die each month and more than half of those are infants. It breaks my heart. They’re dying of dysentery, malaria, TB, meningitis, smallpox. I’m going to fix that. America is going to fix that.”

And I knew we would. I took the bolt of Scotch. I let this complicated little man blur before me.