The Hot Country

4

When I got back to my rooms I found my shirts and my dark trousers folded neatly at the foot of my bed, which led me to notice a quiet babble of female voices somewhere nearby.

I stepped out into the courtyard and Luisa and two other señoritas were over under a banana tree, hugging the shade and talking low. So she saw me looking at her and she rose and stepped into the sunlight, crossing to me but taking her time.

“Señor?” she said as she approached. “Your shirts are clean, yes? Your pants are pressed just right?”

Even in the United States of America, when a girl who works in a shop or a beanery or who does laundry, for a good example, gets a little forward, you take it in a different way than you would with a girl of money and fancy family who you meet somewhere official. I’ve had a few blue-blood girls say some pretty cheeky things in my presence in this day and age. But the shirt-washing Señorita Luisa Morales who stood before me, as beautiful as her face was — with maybe even some granddaddy straight from Castile — she was sure no sangre azul, and she was already plenty forward with me, and she didn’t have to get up and come over and ask about my laundry based on me just looking in her direction. So given all this, it was natural to think she was ready to spend some private time together.

I speak pretty good Spanish, but my vocabulary has some gaps. The few things I know to say in this situation I picked up in cantinas and a burdel or two, and though I figured she was ready for the substance of those words, I was not feeling comfortable with the tone of them. She had a thing about her that I wasn’t understanding. So trying to go around another way, I said, “Why don’t you come on in and we check out the crease in my pants.”

She put on a face I couldn’t decode. Then I said, “I speak softly and carry a big stick.”

Maybe Teddy loses something in translation. Or maybe not. She was gone before I could draw another breath. I remembered those big eyes going narrow just before she vanished, an afterimage like the pop of a newsman’s flash.

Right off, I had a surprisingly strong regret at this. Not just the missed opportunity. The whole breakdown. But I still had too much mezcal in me and the afternoon was too hot, and so I took my siesta.

By the time I saw my señorita again, it was two days later, the German ship had arrived, and so had the U.S. Navy. Bunky and I went down to the docks first thing and the German ship was lying to, just inside the breakwater, with the American fleet gathered half a mile farther out. There didn’t seem to be any serious action out there and it was only a few blocks inland to the Plaza de Armas. So I figured I had time to write a dispatch to Clyde.

I took what I’d decided would be my usual table in the portales and even had a couple of beers. Bunky was off on his own with his Kodak snapping what struck him as interesting, and he swung back to me and gave me a nod now and then. He was a former war correspondent himself, a hell of a good one, but he was taking his shots with film these days instead of words, which was a damn shame. Still, he could take a good one.

So we were well into the morning and Bunky had just checked in and was about to go off again when the local Mexican general, a guy named Maass — born a Mex but with German blood and blond, upright hair — marched a battalion’s worth of government troops into the Plaza. I figured it was getting time for the off-loading of the Ypiranga. I was also the object of some nasty looks from a major on horseback as I finished my beer while the locals were discreetly heading for cover.

Bunky and I beat it back down to the docks, and it had already begun. I counted ten whaleboats coming in, full of American Marines, which I later learned were from the Prairie. No sign behind me, up the boulevard, of Maass sending his troops to meet them. I had my notebook and pencil stub in hand and Bunky took off to find his camera angles.

It all went fast and easy for our boys and for me during the next hour or so. The Marines, who numbered about two hundred, were followed by almost the same number of Bluejackets from the Florida, and they brought the admiral’s stars and stripes with them. We took the Custom House without a shot being fired.

I was still waiting for the Mexicans to come down and put up a fight, but there was no sign of them. Meanwhile, a bunch of locals were gathering in the street to watch. A peon in a serape and sombrero called out “Viva Mexico” and threw a rock, and even before the rock clattered to the cobblestoned street twenty yards from a couple of riflemen, he was hightailing it away. The riflemen just gave him a look and the crowd guffawed and it was all turning into a vaudeville skit.

Then a detachment of Marines clad in khaki and wrapped with ammunition started to march through the street along the railway yards. They turned like they were heading for the Plaza. I signaled Bunky and took off after them. They were going down the center of the cobbled street, the zopilotes hop-skipping out of their way and giving them a look over their shoulders like these guys could be lunch. I was hustling hard and gaining on the Marines and they were passing storefronts and balconied houses. Mexicans were strung along the street watching like it was the Fourth of July.

Just as I was about to overtake the captain in charge of the detachment, I saw Luisa. She was up ahead with some other señoritas nearby but she was standing by herself and she was dressed in white and she was standing stiff with her chin lifted just a little. But I had a man’s business to do first. I was up with the captain and I slowed to his pace and he gave me a quick, suspicious look when I first came up, but then he saw I was American.

“Captain,” I said, and I lifted my arm to point up ahead. “You’ve got about two hundred Mexican soldiers waiting for you in the Plaza.”

He gave me a quick nod of thanks and turned his face to halt his detachment, and at that moment I looked toward Luisa, who was just about even with me but I passed her with my next step and my next, and I slowed down, even as the detachment was coming to a halt, and it registered on me that Luisa had been watching me closely and I felt a good little thing about having her attention but at that moment the gunfire started. The crack of a rifle and another and a double crack and the Marines were all shifting away and I spun around, knowing at once that the rifles were up above, that the Mexicans were on the roofs, and Luisa had her face lifted to see and I leaped forward one stride and another and my arms opened and I caught her up, Luisa Morales, I swept her up in my arms and carried her forward and she was impossibly light and I pressed us both into the alcove of a bakery shop, the smell of corn tortilla all around us.

“Stay down,” I said, and I put my body between the street and her and I realized I’d spoken in English. “They’re firing from the roofs,” I said in Spanish. “Don’t move.”

She didn’t. But she said, “They’re not shooting at me.”

“Anyone can get hit.”

“They’re shooting at you,” she said.

“I’m all right,” I said. “This is old news to me.”

A rifle round flitted past my ear — I could feel the zip of air on me — and it took a bite out of the wall of the alcove. I twisted a little to look into the street — I was missing the action — this was news happening all around me — and as soon as I did, I felt Luisa slip out past me and she was moving quick along the store line, heading away. Another round chunked close in the wall and there was nothing I could do about my spunky señorita and I pressed back into the alcove to stay alive for the afternoon.