The Hot Country

43

Pancho Villa sat us down on the horsehair cushions and he went to the far end of the caboose and returned with four unlabeled bottles. We each took one and he sat in his swivel chair. “One plant,” he said, “grows fifteen years to make one bottle.” He did not say its name but it was sotol in our hands, nearly clear, perhaps with a little tinge of yellow. Neither did he draw, from his observation, any lessons about lives or wars or revolutions or governments. We simply lifted our bottles to each other and we drank and it went down smooth and dangerous and it tasted like a field of something green that had been burned to the ground but still tasted green and also tasted like smoke.

And Villa listened intently to the details of the train raid and the fight at the hacienda. He wore the sombrero I gave him. The German on the train, the man Villa expected me to be, wasn’t mentioned again. And when Slim and Hernando finished speaking, Villa did not comment on any of this, but his eyes, which had grown still and grave, suddenly became animated again and he spoke of the afternoon cockfight and how he lost much money on his best bird, who, bespurred and seasoned though he was, showing the scars of a dozen other successful fights, suddenly spread his wings and managed to fly over the heads of the tight ring of spectators and make a break for freedom in the desert. Villa, though he was tempted to wring the bird’s neck for betraying him, took compassion on him and let him go.

Just as I’d been told that Pancho Villa drew on no book knowledge whatsoever, no theory, that his military and political acumen was totally based on instinct, I sensed, in his conversation, that there was no metaphor in him either. All that he said simply was what it was. He moved from one moment of the body to another. One intense engagement to another. One fight, one death, one drink at a time.

He looked at me now and said, “Though you are a brave man who has done me good and who has made my enemies your enemies, I do not think this is why you are sitting here now. You have not enlisted to be a Villista, I do not think. And you were not kidnapped by Tallahassee Slim and Hernando Soto.”

“I want to write a story,” I said.

I waited.

He waited. Then he prompted. “About Pancho Villa?” he asked.

“About what is happening now in your country,” I said.

He smiled. This was the right answer. Then the smile was gone. “About what is happening in your country, as well,” he said.

“Yes. That’s why I have traveled here at great risk from the Federales and why, along the way, I have come to fight at the side of these two good men.”

“I have often taken a train car of newspapermen to my battles,” he said.

I found myself about to say that the people of the United States knew him well for that, even about to say how they admired him. I sensed he could be flattered. I sensed he’d be happy for a sympathetic ear. But I also sensed he was attuned to bunk, and I was feeling also that I was full of that, that I was becoming a goddam bunco artist. Killing some enemies of Pancho Villa in such a way as to win his trust, making a sentimental show of giving him the colorado’s sombrero: All this, too, felt like consummate bunk. It would have been better just to walk out in the middle of a field of fire in a pitched battle and put my Corona Model 3 on a tripod and write the feel of the bullets zinging past my ears. That would have been better than this. But this was what the world had come to. This was the role I was cast in. There was another kind of story in another kind of time that I needed to write. Nevertheless, I bit my tongue about all the admiration people would have if he talked to me. I just nodded at his invoking the train cars full of newsmen.

I lifted my bottle of sotol to him. He lifted his. Slim and Hernando lifted theirs. We drank.

“So,” I said to Villa, “I’m just curious. Who is this German I’m supposed to be?”

“A formidable man,” Villa said. “Like yourself.”

“A formidable journalist?”

Villa laughed. “I forgive that in you, because of your skills as a fighter.”

“He is a military man?”

“I am to learn more about him when he arrives. But I understand he is a fighter. It is on his face, I am told.”

“He is a man who joins you to fight, like Tallahassee Slim,” I said, as if I understood.

“No. He is a man officially representing his government,” Villa said.

I had the feeling that a good reporter cultivates: You’ve pushed as far as you can for now.

I drank my sotol, making a show of being content with his answer. But my keeping silent did prompt Villa to say one more thing: “Germany is a good friend to the Mexican people.”

As there was no metaphor in Villa, neither did I detect irony or indirection. I didn’t feel as if he’d said this in order to say an unspoken thing. In this case: a friend, unlike the United States of America, who has invaded Mexico. But even if he was not trying to say this, even if he was simply speaking his feelings and thoughts of this very moment, that conclusion — not only was Germany his friend, but America was his enemy — was one he could readily come to in a future present moment.

Neither did I break my silence to say: I would not like to share a border with Germany.

I realized I knew nothing of actual military importance to Pancho Villa, so I could make an engaging offer now without worrying about consequences. I said, “I was in Vera Cruz to cover the events. I left only a few days ago. Is there anything you’d like to know about the situation there?”

There was a slight recoil of surprise in Villa. He smiled. He had bad teeth, small and separated and the color of old coffee on a porcelain cup. “I can ask a question of a man whose job it is to ask questions?”

“I’ve killed for you,” I said, ready once more to dole out bunk. It would be useful for me to know what questions this man had on his mind. “The least I can do is answer some questions,” I said.

Without a hesitation Villa asked, “Where will your army attack next?”

“Rats and garbage in the streets,” I said.

That sense of his face collapsing toward the center happened again. His thoughtful mood. Or confused. I explained: “I’m saying they’re going nowhere and are happy now simply to bring their ideas about sanitation to Vera Cruz. Our President is staying put and trying to look humane.”

Villa’s face relaxed. “What wars is he fighting inside the country?”

“The country?” I asked. I assumed he meant Mexico, but I thought I just answered that.

“America,” Villa said. “Which are his rebel states?”

He was serious.

“None,” I said, trying hard to keep any tone out of my voice that smacked of astonishment, as if he was somehow ignorant.

“None?” Villa asked in exactly the tone I just suppressed.

“We’ve not had rebel states for nearly fifty years.”

Villa shook his head in wonder. “How do you pass the time?” he asked. And I was almost certain he was still serious.

I lifted the bottle of sotol, as if that was my answer. He lifted his and laughed. “You can do both,” he said. “Drink and fight.”

We drank.

“And your women,” he said. “They are good?”

“Good,” I said. And then, on impulse: “But not as good as yours at fighting.”

Villa laughed again.

“There was a woman in Vera Cruz,” I said.

“You cross them. .” Villa said.

But the momentum of my impulse cut through his thought. “A true soldadera,” I said.

“. . our women will scratch your eyes out,” he said.

“A crack shot,” I said.

“Like a fighting cock,” he said.

“She turned into a sniper in the first week of the invasion,” I said.

He heard me now, and his look changed to something complicated. As if I were a subordinate speaking out of turn. But I didn’t get the feeling it was about my interrupting him.

I kept going, however, thinking the rest of it would intrigue him. I said, “She shot a stigmata into the palm of a priest, the nose off a collaborating city official, and she plugged a U.S. Marine in the butt while he was cruising for a whore.”

And all this did seem to intrigue him. He wrinkled his brow and narrowed his eyes and he nodded, as if impressed.

“She’s a hell of a shot,” I said. “Then she vanished from Vera Cruz.”

I let a couple of moments of silence pass, and I knew that Villa was engaged, as he did not leap in to speak.

“I thought she might have come to join you,” I said.

“If she came to me she would find that Pancho Villa is a hell of a shot,” he said and he grabbed his crotch.

He laughed and the other boys laughed and I managed a laugh as well, realizing that I’d flown over the heads of the spectators and out toward the desert. I was not doing what I was supposed to do. And I was jeopardizing the real story, the one I had to write. So I laughed.

When the laughter faded a bit, Villa said, “And then I would give her a woman’s work to do. She would be happy.”

I took a drink of the sotol just to keep quiet and let this all pass.

“Did you have this woman in Vera Cruz?” Villa asked. From his tone and look, the “having” clearly meant the sexual taking.

“No.”

“Well, maybe she did come here. I have had some of the new women these past weeks. Do you know her name?”

“No,” I said, without the slightest hesitation.

Villa drank, and he wouldn’t get off the subject.

“If she wants to act like a man, she would be better off if she had gone to Zapata,” he said. “He does not know the difference.”

More laughter.

I was thinking of Luisa and of Villa taking her and then handing her off to the tortilla brigade on the top of a box car, and I knew I had to stop this conversation.

From the end of the caboose, in the open doorway, came a shuffling of feet.

We all turned our heads.

A finely mustachioed man with a sombrero but a vaguely military jacket, without pips or ribbons but clearly official, was standing in the doorway. “Jefe,” he said. “The man you were expecting has arrived.”

“My German?”

“He has the letter of passage.”

Villa rose.

We all of us rose.

“Where is he?” Villa said.

“Just outside,” the man said.

“Give me a few moments,” Villa said.

“Yes, Jefe,” he said, and I thought I even saw him repress a salute. This one had been trained under someone else. He did an about-face and went out the door.

Villa turned to us, raised his bottle. We each touched it with ours, Slim first and then Hernando and then me.

We drank and we broke from each other and we put our bottles on the table.

Villa took off the sombrero. He held it out to me with both hands. He said, “I thank you, compañero. But you were the one who earned this. And you will need it in the sun.”

“Thank you,” I said. I took the hat from him and I put it on.

Then Villa said, in the same tone he’d just used to give me back the sombrero, “You should look around for your soldadera. One of them I recently had may have claimed she could shoot straight, and she may be a Veracruzana. But I warn you she is a sour one.”

I nodded at him and I made my mind go blank at what he’d just said and I moved away, Slim and Hernando following me.

Not that it was easy.

But what was most important, I reminded myself, was the man just outside.

I feared we were about to confront each other face-to-face. But I knew that Mensinger would be thinking about making his first impression on Villa. And with my sombrero and my bloody arm and my serape and the absolute unexpectedness of the context, if I could avoid his direct look, perhaps I would not be recognizable to him. I stepped through the door onto the back platform, my face lowered. He wasn’t there. All the better.

I let myself look up briefly.

Mensinger was standing on the ground, several paces away, wearing his costume of sweat and dust and scar. He did look the part. He’d already removed his slouch hat. He was ready to click his heels. Villa would have little to bond with in this man. But Germany was a friend to Mexico, and America was Mexico’s enemy. That was this man’s message, and there would be much apparent proof of that. And Germany could help Pancho Villa fight and win and unite his country behind him. I was afraid that, for all his manly, comradely tears no German would understand, Villa would be persuaded by this.

I lowered my head, letting the dead colorado’s sombrero utterly disguise me before Friedrich von Mensinger, and I descended the steps, and Slim and Hernando and I mounted our horses and moved away down the line of trains.