The Hot Country

21

At the portales, pretty far advanced in the morning now, there was still no sign of Bunky. The waiter gave me the telegram Bunk would normally be holding for me.

It was from Clyde. This was a quick turnaround and he was only starting to inquire about Mensinger. But Hans, the tenth-floor janitor, was apparently still puttering around when Clyde got my cable, and so Clyde had sent me quick answers about the German words I was unsure of in Mensinger’s notes. Einmarsch was literally “marching in.” Kein Einmarsch, then: “not a marching in.” Not an invasion. The other phrase where there was not something: keine Eier. I’d given Clyde both words, for what I presumed was a phrase. Clyde said Hans had a good laugh. Eier was “eggs.” Keine Eier was the German way of saying somebody has “no balls.” Ningunos cojones.

Which gave me a good, though quiet, laugh. With all their posturing and militarism and Prussian blood, the German men thought of their balls, their nuts, their stones, as eggs. As fragile, easily cracked eggs. Maybe that actually explained all the posturing and militarism.

And Amboß. Anvil. Entweder Hammer oder Amboß. Either a hammer or an anvil.

So as it turned out, I didn’t need Gerhard to translate the notes. But I wondered what he’d make of them. I decided to drop back in on him at the first opportunity. But Bunky first. He was always ambulatory by now. He was on my mind. I was hoping perhaps that his writing that story about the utility commissioner deciding to work with the Americans — but with a B. F. Millerman cynical twist about the financial motives — had warmed up his reporter’s blood and he’d been working on a new lead.

However, this wasn’t the case. When I arrived at his casa de huéspedes on a side street near the docks, where Bunky’d taken a furnished room, I was met at the door by the manager, a Colombian woman with her hair so tightly knotted at the top of her head she seemed perpetually wide-eyed in surprise. When I asked for Señor Millerman, she shrugged and then pantomimed the knocking back of what surely was meant to be a stiff drink. She gave me his room number and stood aside to let me in.

I went one flight up the carpeted steps — it was one of the better boardinghouses in town — and I stood before Bunky’s door. I knocked. No response. I knocked again and called his name and he was still not making a sound and I tried the handle. It turned.

As the door moved, the smells came out first, of mezcal and of potassium bromide — from his Kodak developer — and faintly of vomit. And the door was open: the room was large and in the center was a round table with a nearly empty mezcal bottle and Bunky’s face beside it, turned toward me, his eyes closed, his mouth open.

I stepped quickly to him and my passage was buoyed by panic, but as I drew near, I heard an upsurge of scrabbly, heavy breathing, and his mouth closed and opened and closed and then opened and stayed open as the sound of his stupor receded for a time.

I found myself glad he was drunk. Simply drunk. I did not like that first impression I’d had of him, though there was no reason for it. There was no reason for Bunky Millerman — even B. F. Millerman — to fear for his life in his rented room in Vera Cruz, Mexico. He was simply knocked-out drunk. This had to have started this morning. Maybe before dawn but not long before. Bunky was too experienced not to have slept it off by now if this was from last night. But he clearly still had some gutter-time left in him. His head and his arms lay flat against the table and a beer mug’s width of his butt clung to the edge of his chair and the rest of his torso stretched between, over empty air, all in perfect balance. Perfect for the moment. But it was clear what I should do.

“Come on, Pops,” I said, and I dragged him upright. He was almost no help, barely shuffling his legs, but I got him to the narrow bed in the corner and I laid him out there on his side. I got his shoes off and his tie off and he instantly rolled onto his back to mutter and gag a few more breaths until his breathing dissolved into a rattling snore.

I took the chair he’d been clinging to and dragged it to a spot beside his bed. I sat. If there was food in his stomach, there was a chance he’d throw up. If he did that on his back — and it seemed to be his oblivious preference — he could choke to death. I was not going anywhere for a while.

It was okay. I could think some things out. But the first thing I thought about was Mother teaching me how this could happen, this thing that would keep me at Bunky’s bedside for the next few hours, though this had been an unspoken corollary lesson, not the one she was actually intending. She sat me down the night I had my first taste of beer, from an obliging rummy on the back alley steps of the Nathan Hale when I was maybe thirteen, while she was somewhere in the third act of Macbeth at the Bowdoin Square a couple of blocks away. She smelled it on my breath that night, and with all the Isabel Cobb theatrical flair she told me the harrowing tale of how a splendidly handsome leading man, whose name she withheld, died just like that in his prime, in a bed, on his back, choked to death on his own vomit, and how that man had begun with a beer in an alley as a boy. She wept what seemed to be undramatized tears.

My mother was my teacher in most things. I spent some time in formal schools as I grew up, when she did a stint of repertory now and then or took a few months off between seasons, but mostly I read my way through a thousand books. Indeed, over those learning years, it was probably closer to three thousand, from Aristotle to Shakespeare to Henry James, most of which she chose. And she sat up late with me, still smelling faintly of greasepaint, making me write and talk and write and write, and she got various actors and actresses with various bodies of knowledge or flairs or actors’ skills — Medieval history or plane geometry or bare-knuckle Queensbury fighting or fencing or whatever else — to teach me what they knew. And as the occasions arose, she would perform these intense dramatic monologues of life’s hardest-won lessons, performances for an audience of one, usually at the end of a night, by candlelight or by gaslight, or sometimes whispered in the dark.

So this little harrowing tale of the death of a leading man was not unusual. But there were certain gaps in my mother’s education of me. And this tale was harrowing in a way she did not intend. I said, almost at once, “Was that my father?”

The question surprised me as much as it did her.

Not that I hadn’t asked it in one way or another before. But over the years she worked her way from my being brought by the stork to being found in the bulrushes of a Louisiana swamp to being conceived like Perseus from a shower of gold until she simply put me off with its being a sad story that she’d tell someday and wasn’t she plenty of parent on her own. But it always seemed to take us both by surprise when it came to my mind and out of my mouth.

And this time she did what she did the last time I asked. After a moment of silence, when I presumed she was forced to think of things that to this day I know not of, she clapped a hand onto her chest and did a stagy pre-swoon.

And this time I wasn’t having any of that.

“If you don’t want to drive me to drink,” I said, “you need to tell me the truth.”

The hand unclapped from her chest and the imminent swoon evaporated and she looked at me. “What have you been reading?” she demanded.

It was true that among the near three thousand books of my life with Mother, there were some contraband titles, and I’d just challenged her from the plot in a penny romance I’d recently found abandoned in a dressing room. But I wasn’t letting her divert me.

“The book of life,” I said to her.

“Oh, balderdash,” she said. “That’s bad melodrama.”

“Our life together is bad melodrama,” I said, learning the lesson, on this very same evening, that a couple of drinks can enhance one’s argumentative powers.

The hand clapped back onto her bosom.

“You’re not going to swoon, Mother,” I said.

The hand fell once more and her face collapsed into sincere concern. “Have I lost my credibility?”

“If I were beyond the footlights, not at all,” I said. “But I am here before you in our rooms.”

“And you are drunk,” she said.

“In vino veritas,” I said.

“Vino, my dearest, not beer.”

I recognized her tricks. I had to focus. “Was that my father?”

“No.”

“Who is my father?”

“Dead,” she said, swiftly, firmly. She hesitated and I knew what her mind was searching for.

“Quote me no Shakespeare or Marlowe or anyone now,” I said. “Just tell me his name.”

“Cobb.”

“What Cobb? Who was he?”

“He is a dead Cobb. A Cobb whose kernels have been gnawed away utterly. My darling, he had some good things about him that are showing up in you and some bad things that you show not even the merest trace of, for which I am profoundly grateful and largely responsible.”

“What good traits?”

“Your devastating good looks. Some aspects of them.” And she put her two hands on my two shoulders and she is a splendid actress, but not, I think, from less than twelve inches, which is how closely she had brought her face before mine. And even from this distance she seemed to be on the verge of real tears, and she said, quite low, quite unaffectedly, “Can we please leave it at that, my darling? This is very painful to your mother and there is no reason for me to live all that over in telling you and no reason for you to carry these same painful memories for the rest of your life in that lovely brain of yours. For both our sakes, would you please trust me and leave it at that?”

I could say nothing but yes.

And Bunky began to mutter in his sleep.

Just sounds. Nonsense words.

I put a hand on his shoulder. I rustled him a little. “It’s okay, old man,” I said. “Sleep it off.”

And he grew quiet.

But he had me thinking now about Mensinger’s cryptic words, which was what I should have been focused on anyway. I could see the list clearly in my head and I started with the first words.

kein Einmarsch.

No invasion. Well, that was certainly in the minds of all us news boys down here. We invaded Mexico but it wasn’t an “invasion” and likely not to become one. As obvious as this was to all of us Americans, it may have been literally notable to a German musing on the back of an envelope. His assumption would have been the Germanic one. The logical one, in this case. Once you marched your army into a country and routed your opponent’s army locally, you did what comes naturally to armies. You continued the invasion. What seemed frustrating to those of us who understood a man — an American type — like Woodrow Wilson would have seemed baffling to our German aristocrat.

But this brief notation. Was it a “musing”? I needed to consider the purpose of the list. “Musing” had to be wrong. If he had to write to think, he’d write in a journal or some such and he’d be writing it out in full, detailing his line of thought. No. These items on the envelope were more likely a listing of things he’d already thought out. He was about to go off to estado Coahuila, almost certainly to meet up with Pancho Villa one way or another. He’d had an impulse to start organizing his thoughts; he made a list of the things he wanted to say. Talking points.

It had to be about Villa. Friedrich von Mensinger didn’t sneak into Mexico on the Ypiranga to confer with Huerta. That would have been done with an open approach. If this was a secret diplomatic mission, it had to be with a rebel. And the Germans are precise. Scrupulously so. He must have known the tactical situation, known who it was now in charge of that part of Coahuila. I assumed, for the moment, that he wanted to stress to Villa that there would be no American invasion. But wasn’t that an odd thing for a German to emphasize to a man who might someday rule Mexico? Mensinger was not here as a neutral mediator to ease the Mexican rebels’ minds about U.S. intentions. Of course not. Mensinger had the same scorn for Wilson’s timidity that the rest of us down here did. And as Gerhard pointed out, Villa had an aggressive, straightforward combat style. However outraged he might have been about the U.S. seizing a Mexican port, he’d have been temperamentally scornful about our not straightforwardly einmarsching on along to Mexico City. Mensinger expected to have a nice little bonding moment with Villa as they snorted at the American president.

Nicht nach T.

Not T. Linked to “no invasion.” If this were Nicht nach MC—or however the Germans would initialize “Mexico City”—I’d have understood. But no. After saying there’d be no invasion, singling out the capital would have been redundant. If the “T” was something specific not being invaded, there would have to be an implied “not even.” And I had that little newsman’s rush of fitting things together. Tampico. Of course. The U.S. wasn’t going ahead with the invasion. We weren’t even going to march three hundred miles up the coast to the town that had actually set the invasion in motion in the first place, the town with all the oil fields. A town presently in the hands of the Federales but that any of the competing rebels would love to control.

“Toads,” Bunky said.

I turned to him. He was still on his back, his eyes closed, still unconscious. His mouth, though, was working. Soundlessly, now that I was looking at him.

“Toads, Bunk?” I said.

“Toad shit,” he said, though there wasn’t a clue that he was aware of me other than that his words followed mine. He’d said this rather emphatically, in spite of the present impediments to his voice. And again: “Toad shit.” This time almost sadly.

I waited. Whatever he was dreaming went on, his mouth still trying to put it into words.

I said to him, just as sadly, because I wanted to be having this exchange with him sober, at our table in the portales: “So, Bunky, would that be a larger or a smaller lie than the bull variety?”

His mouth stopped working.

I patted him on the shoulder.

I turned away from him.

ENP ~ Dr.

Doctor on one side. The abbreviation was the same in German as in English. That much I got. Similar to “ENP.” I tried to run through all the figures of the Mexican revolution and then the prominent men in Germany, and I could think of no one with those initials. If these letters referred to something other than a man, with no context I didn’t even know how to start my brain to figure out what it might be. Obviously he or it was not clearly associated with doctors or Mensinger wouldn’t have to be making a note of it. So that was no help.

C u. W keine Eier.

C and W. No balls. I had a context for one of these initials. No invasion. No balls. W is Wilson. Any little zip I might have gotten from figuring this out was instantly squelched by a surge of anger. Who the hell was Herr Friedrich von Mensinger to say the President of the United States of America had no balls? It was okay for me to say something critical of Wilson. I got to vote. But to hear this Hun sneer at him made Wilson my well-meaning but pathetic Uncle Woody. The family thinks he’s off base much of the time but he’s ours. He’s family. Mensinger abruptly had another strike against him.

And who else was he talking about? I ran William Jennings Bryan through my head for obvious reasons. No C there. Secretary of War Lindley Garrison. L. G.

There was a rustling beside me. I wasn’t ready to give up on this one yet.

More rustling and I turned to Bunky.

He was trying to sit up.

“Whoa,” I said. “Take it easy.”

His head was down and I didn’t see his eyes. He braced himself with one hand as he tried to put his legs on the floor. I grabbed him by the shoulder on his unbraced side and helped him get upright. He lifted his face to me. His eyes were open but I couldn’t tell if he was seeing me or if he was seeing a dream he was in the middle of.

He had his feet on the floor now and he looked down, as if to check that out. I let go of him.

“Take it easy, Pops,” I said.

“Don’t call me that,” he said. He looked at me again and he was clearly seeing me.

“Yeah, right,” I said. “Just checking to see if you’re really here.” And now I found myself pissed at Bunky. Not Pops. Okay. My savvy but pathetically self-destructing Uncle Bunk.

“I’m here,” he said.

“I’m surprised.”

“What about?”

“You were talking about toad shit just a few minutes ago.”

“Toad shit?”

“Yep.”

“Not surprising at all.”

“You remember what that was about?”

“Hell no,” Bunky said. “But that’s how my benders go. I’m way out of it, and then after a while…What time is it?”

“About one.”

“In the afternoon?”

“That’s sunlight you’re seeing at the window.”

He turned his face in that direction. “So it is. Anyway, I’m out and then abruptly I’m not.”

I found myself impatient with him. B. F. M. keine Eier. But I had no reason to feel superior. I could hit the mezcal myself sometimes, once a month or so, to the point of a heavy, oblivious sleep. But I kept writing. Bunky needed to keep writing. That took balls. What a damn waste.

I needed to go back to Gerhard. Show him Mensinger’s notes.

“You okay on your own now?” I asked.

“Always am.”

“Now that’s toad shit,” I said.

Bunky shrugged. I cuffed him on the shoulder to make it right.