The Hot Country

36

Ah, this was a familiar sound, for it to be this close. Not since that first hour or two of our boys coming into Vera Cruz did my heart and blood and head and limbs spring to the life of nearby gunfire. But my mind caught up now. This was not a battlefield. I was not doing my classic job. I was sneaking around as a German and these were rebel bandits stopping a train to rob and to kill and I had nowhere to stand apart and I had no weapon of my own and I had only everything to lose and the doors to my right flew open and men stinking of horses and cordite and sweat rushed in and my ears pounded and rang with more shots and my skin pinged with splinters of the ceiling scattering down upon us, and the men, wearing unpinned sombreros and khaki and ammo belts crossed on their chests, were crying out orders for us all to rise and bring any bags we could carry and line up outside and we all were obeying and you could feel the wave of unvoiced fear gather and rush from the passengers’ awkward risings and bendings and bumpings and stumblings. This was a moment like moments from the Balkans and from Nicaragua that I’d been part of, civilians caught in the clash, but never in a tightly closed space, never with the civilians being the sole and focused targets, and I tucked away the feeling of this collective terror — tucked it away so I could put it into words if I got through this and wrote again — this collective terror that you could feel roll over you, like an onrushing pressure on your skin — the sense of a wave was more than a metaphor — these people were putting out a unified, undulant something, a palpable something — and I was indeed standing apart now, even as I moved, I felt very calm pulling my bag up from between the seats to cries of Andale! Andale! and more cracking in my head from the pistols — I was calm but uneasy, too, with not very many options. I was uneasy for my typewriter and I was uneasy for my Henry James — but these were things of no use to the rebels — no use to Pancho Villa — I realized now that these must be Villa’s men — we were in his range of command now surely — and I was in line going into the vestibule bumping a man before me in a spangled sombrero and being bumped from behind by someone else. And I was uneasy about the money belt of gold coins around my waist, hidden beneath my clothes, and I was uneasy that I was calm enough to be thinking of Henry James before the money, uneasy because I might be so calm as to be dangerous to myself.

And now we were all lined up along the length of our cars while sombreros and bandoleros and Mausers and brown faces were ranging up and down the long row of us, and more of the same sat mounted on horses beyond them. I knew it was very chancy to be overtly looking around, but I did let myself take one clear glance to my right, toward the Pullman, and I could see, over the heads and sombreros and rebozos, Mensinger standing tall, a horseman before him, bending to him. I did not look closely at the horseman, except to notice he was dressed in black, a Villista officer no doubt. I simply took a single snapshot in my head of the German and looked back to the front again.

I kept my face mostly forward, angled only very slightly, unnoticeably, to the right, where I let myself glance briefly with just my eyes and strained to focus on my peripheral vision. I did not want to draw any more attention to myself than I already inevitably would. The man I followed from the train was an arm’s length to my right. His mestizo face was chamois tan, light, a dangerous thing for him now, as he showed his preponderance of ancestors from the much-hated Spanish. When Villa took over the state of Chihuahua he executed key Spaniards and drove the rest of them out. One of the dark Villistas stood before the man who had Spain lingering on his skin and the rebel ripped the spangled sombrero from the man’s head and ran his fingers in the sweatband. He pulled out half a dozen large-denomination greenbacks. American money. Spain and America and wealth, a hacendado. I gently but as quickly as possible turned my face straightforward — so as not to be seen as a witness — even as the Villista drew a Colt revolver and the gun cracked loud and I heard the passenger fall heavily down.

“For holding out,” the rebel announced loudly, a lesson for all of us, and though that was no doubt part of it, I knew much more was behind that bullet. America, for one thing.

And now he stepped to me. The darkly chiseled Aztec face drew itself very near mine and his mustache was covered in dust, and he said, “Where are you from?”

“I am German,” I said.

“You are a gringo,” he said. “I will shoot you now.”

“I am a German,” I said. “Let me show you my passport and you can save your bullet for the Federales.”

This gave him a moment’s pause.

“For the next colorado,” I said. He grunted in affirmation. The colorados were the Federales who once were the private army of Pascual Orozco when he was just another rebel opposing President Madero, an army of bandits and murderers recruited from the jails, the most indiscriminately murderous of all the many rebel forces, fighting now as equally murderous irregular Federales since Orozco became Huerta’s commanding general. Villa and his men never took a colorado prisoner. They killed the killers summarily. My invocation of them made my Villista receptive to the notion that perhaps I was not a gringo. I did not take time to count, but I was keenly aware that I had denied my country more than the Biblical limit of three times now, in various ways. God forgive me.

“Inside my coat,” I said. “The passport.” I motioned and moved my hand slowly.

He let me.

I took hold of the passport, and as I was pulling it out, the man before me said, “This will only perhaps save your life. You will still owe us all your money and valuables as a railway tax for the revolution.”

“Of course,” I said.

I handed him my passport, and he looked at it.

I had plenty to give him from the usual pockets. But I was heading for a crisis with the money belt. Not only was the money absolutely essential to my ability to follow Mensinger and get the story and find my way to an American telegraph to file it, but all of my American credentials were in that money belt as well. That was the real danger, and it was severe.

I thought: I am a dead man, so I might as well go down fighting.

The Villista before me checked my face against the picture, which I knew was fine, and as for the rest, I didn’t think he was actually reading. He thumbed the passport looking for flags or symbols or perhaps a few words he recognized. I hoped Vogel had no American visits stamped in the back pages of his passport. He probably didn’t, given what he was doing. And the German Imperial Eagle grandly spread its wings on the front cover of the document. But the passport wasn’t the real problem.

This might be the end of things now, I thought. Even if I could overpower the man in front of me, there were horsemen right behind him. So I lifted my eyes away from the Villista, away from the sombreros on the horses, I turned my eyes to the distant jagged line of mountains, their flanks going buttery in the long-angled late-afternoon light. I thought of my mother. I wished I could think of her now on the stage. Think of her accepting her age. Playing Gertrude or Volumina or even Lady Bracknell — my mother could play with the lightest of touches as well. Storyville fell like cloud-shadow upon my mind, wiping away that lovely afternoon sunlight before me. But last mortal thoughts could rightly focus on any moments of the life that was passing away, and so I would think of her — as I could, for there were many such moments even well into my teens — I would think of her when she was still convincingly Juliet or Antigone or Kate. She played Kate ever so lightly.

My Villista was pushing my passport back into my hand. “Your valuables now,” he said. “Do not hold out. You saw what happened.” He motioned my attention to a mere boy of a Villista, sombreroed and bandoleraed but no older than I was when I watched from the backs of theaters as the great Isabel Cobb brought sobs from the audiences as she nightly died as Juliet Capulet. This boy held an open canvas bag.

I took my Elgin from my pocket and dropped it showily into the bag.

I pulled a wallet — with money only — from my other inside coat pocket and I opened it for the bandit before me, to reveal all the pesos inside. A great thick wad. And I dropped it into the bag.

I was going too slow for my Villista. His Mauser was slung over his shoulder and both his hands leaped into my coat pockets now, outside pockets, inside pockets, ambidextrously working through my coat, finding my passport again and replacing it, finding my Waterman fountain pen — chased black rubber with a sweet extra-fine, flexible nib — no worry about my holding out a utilitarian thing like that — but he tossed it into the bag anyway, which got my goat — and his hands were arrogantly assuming I would stand here and do nothing till he was finished with me, which, of course, would normally be a safe bet, given the firepower backing him up, but he would frisk me next and that would be that.

His hands moved under my arms and started to pound their way down my sides, my money belt awaiting about three more strikes. Strike one — the center of my rib cage — and I could hear a horse directly behind him nickering, its rider perhaps noticing this special, aggressive treatment and shifting in his saddle, lifting his rifle a bit, ready to back up his comrade. Strike two — below my rib cage and taking my breath away for a brief moment — and now there was the dust-muted lollop of hooves from off to my right, another horseman coming up, and I knew my Villista’s next strike would be in the center of the plate and I had to at least swing the bat.

He pounded his hands down at my hips, right on the money belt, and his eyes flared wide and his pistol hand started to pull away from me and now his eyes flared wide again as I leaned into him and kicked hard, straight up and centered, and I crushed his balls with my shinbone. He crumpled onto his knees and I could hear rifles clattering up, bolts being thrown, and I cried out as loud as I could, “This man is ill!” and I was about to fall to my own knees and grab his pistol and use him for cover and take out a few of these sons of whores and donkeys but another voice bellowed, “Hold your fire!” and the lollop of hooves I’d heard a moment ago scuffled loudly to a stop, the shadow of the horse and rider falling over me and over the gasping Villista whose pistol I was, nevertheless, still grasping for.

And the bellowing voice bellowed some more. In English. “Jesus H. Christ! I know you!”

And leaping off his horse in black shirt and black sombrero and bandolera and striding toward me was Tallahassee Slim.