The Hot Country

46

I reached the postal car and I stopped. I walked this far expecting to walk on past. To find Señora Toba-Rojas. To find Luisa. But things had changed. I had my story. I could saddle up right now. I had a map. I had a compass. It would take me five minutes to figure out what the smart destination would be. An American border town, certainly. Just which one? Somehow I got the inkling it’d be good to get on the road as soon as possible. But I had some long riding ahead of me and some serious times just behind. I was weary. I wanted to spend a night on bedding, even in a postal car like a bag of mail. And there was Luisa. This would likely be my last chance to speak to her. If she was here at all. And after what Villa said, part of me hoped she wasn’t here and never was. I walked on.

The wide, center door of the boxcar was open. Against the left-hand jamb sat two heavyset women, side by side, quietly watching the night, gently swinging their legs. They turned their faces to me.

“Are either of you Señora Toba-Rojas?” I asked.

They said no.

“Is she here?” I asked.

One of them angled her head toward the darkness inside the car.

The two resumed their quiet watching.

I stepped to the empty part of the open doorway. Dimly I was aware of faces inside. And in a far corner, a low-burning lamp with shapes beside it. And I was filled with the smell of straw and of borax and a mix of flowery cheap perfumes and, underneath it all, the smell of bodies, but with that special musky undercurrent of women’s bodies. Even without the added scent of greasepaint and cold cream, the women’s bodies carried me out of the dark of a Mexican night and into the doorways of countless actresses’ dressing rooms in the countless theaters of my boyhood and young adulthood and young manhood.

But I returned from there quickly and I was standing before the boxcar door and I called out, “Señora Toba-Rojas.”

Nothing.

As softly as I could and yet be heard, I said, “May I speak with you, Señora Toba-Rojas? I am just arrived with Hernando Soto and we have been with our jefe and he said I might inquire with you after a woman.”

And I drew back. In absolute silence she appeared massively before me, emerging from the dark but with no sound at all that I’d heard, no scuffling, no rustling.

“Señora,” I said. “Thank you.”

Now I could hear that she was real, as she scraped and sighed a bit in bringing her heavy body down to sit at the edge of the doorway, letting her legs dangle like the other two women. She smoothed her skirts. She looked at my face, though my back was to the fires and I was sure my sombrero cast an even deeper shadow.

I lifted my hand and removed my sombrero.

She straightened a bit, unaware until now, I thought, that I was not Mexican.

I said, “I’m looking for a woman who has arrived within the last week or so. She was known in Vera Cruz as Luisa Morales.”

The señora did not answer. Perhaps she was considering if there was such a woman.

“She is a wonderful shot with a rifle,” I said.

The señora said, “Jefe sent you to me?”

“Do I look like I could find you on my own?”

She smiled at this.

She said, “You spoke Hernando Soto’s name.”

“I have ridden with him,” I said. I lifted my left shoulder a bit to draw her eyes to my bandaged arm.

She nodded.

Between the postal car and this place where I was standing, I’d removed a gold quarter-eagle coin from my money belt. It was in my pocket. It might be time.

She said, “Would you want this girl as Hernando Soto would?”

“I only ask to speak with her,” I said.

She considered this, looking at me carefully.

I said, “If I were to offer you some token for your trouble, you must understand it is not an attempt to buy Luisa Morales. It is simply a gift to you. I will treat her with respect.”

At this, the señora slowly lowered her face, keeping her eyes fixed on mine as she did, stopping only when she would have had to let go of our gaze. Perhaps there was, in this gesture, a sense of disbelief. But it felt like more than that. It felt as if she was also saying: It is too late for respect. She has lost that in a terrible way already. No woman here has this thing.

I withdrew the gold coin from my pocket and I brought my hand discreetly near hers, which lay on her leg just above the knee.

“Señora,” I said.

She lifted her face. She looked toward our hands. She turned hers and I placed the gold piece in her palm. Her eyes widened a little when she recognized it.

“I ask only to speak,” I said.

She closed her hand on the coin, put it in a pocket in her skirt, pulled her rebozo over her head, and offered me her other hand.

I took it and helped her down from the boxcar door.

She led me forward. We passed Villa’s caboose, quiet but lit brightly. We passed a flatcar with Villistas lounging and smoking, though fundamentally alert, manning three tripod-mounted Maxim guns. We passed a boxcar of soldiers, also apparently on-duty, the half dozen standing and sitting in the doorway bandoliered and holding rifles. I nodded as I passed. They nodded. And at the next boxcar, the señora stopped. The door was only partway open. I could see the car forward had soldiers as well. Given its placement, if this was the car where they were keeping Luisa, I had a sudden worry that I knew I better put into a question. It might even explain the look Señora Toba-Rojas gave me when I spoke of respect.

She was about to reach up to the door, but I touched her shoulder and she turned to me. “Señora,” I said. “Is this the car. .” I hesitated, trying to say this without saying it. I thought of a phrase and began to speak it.

“No, señor,” she said.

Even as I said, “. . of the public women.”

“No,” she said again, emphatically. “They are the newly arrived women who do not have a man. They are not for sale.”

I nodded. They were only three cars away from Villa’s quarters.

“But available,” I said, low, as if it was an understood secret between the señora and me.

We looked each other steadily in the eyes for a moment.

“Only in a very limited way,” she said, just as low.

They were Villa’s alone for now.

We looked at each other for a moment more. Then Señora Toba-Rojas bent near to me. She said very softly, “Do you love her, señor?”

I hadn’t a clue as to how to answer this question, even simply to say no.

She seemed to think she understood my silence. She touched my arm and turned to the door. She fisted two echoing knocks there.

“No,” I finally answered, though the señora acted as if she did not hear.

She called inside. “Luisa Morales.”

We waited.

I thought: I should walk away. I should ride away. She’d been disarmed and sexually taken — probably raped — by Pancho Villa. It would be all I could do to walk past his little red caboose and not go in and try to kill him.

“Luisa,” the señora called again.

“It’s all right,” I said.

And then she was standing in the door of the boxcar.

All the private fires burning in the desert behind me lit Luisa only dimly. But what I saw of her face I’d seen in women’s faces in Macedonia and in Nicaragua. And seen in other women’s faces, away from wars. And it was not necessarily specific to rape, I was sure. I’d seen some form of this in my own mother’s face late on certain nights, just a few times, but it was a similar thing, and she’d offered no words to explain. Something happened to women, I knew, and in some ways I didn’t know anything else but that. Except it was clearer for me with Luisa Morales. What she had lately been through.

She did not seem to recognize me. Or did not care.

I took off my hat.

I was aware of Señora Toba-Rojas passing behind me. Discreetly leaving us.

Luisa’s face did not change. I assumed she recognized me. Of course she recognized me. I wished now she’d yell at me. Call me a gringo bastard invading her country. Pull a pistol from beneath her rebozo and start shooting. Do something. But her face did not change. And after a moment she vanished back into the darkness, a move so quick and smooth that she seemed to have dissolved into the air. The grace of her vanishing encouraged me. It felt like her.

I should have let that be. I should have turned and gone and let myself keep this final sense of her still being who she was in Vera Cruz. But I would have been lying to myself.

I stepped to the door. I spoke into the darkness. “Luisa.”

I didn’t know what else to say.

“Viva Mexico,” I said.

I waited.

After a long moment she was suddenly standing above me. I looked up. Her face remained a mask. A woman of the chorus of some Greek tragedy.

And now she was beginning to kneel.

I took a step back from the car, gave her some space.

She folded herself down at the knees, sat on her lower legs, so I only had to lift my face a little to look into her eyes. And I was close enough that I could see the campfires reflected there.

And she lifted her right hand and she slapped me across the left cheek.

Hard.

My head flipped to the right. My cheek burned.

Somehow I understood.

I straightened my face to her once more.

She lifted her left hand and slapped me across the right cheek.

Just as hard.

I kept my head where she’d put it, almost against my shoulder, my eyes forced back to look the way I’d come. I kept my head there for a clear and thoughtful moment so that when I presented it to her again, it would not seem an act of defiance. It would be an offering.

I gave her my face once more.

She looked for a long while at me.

The fires of the desert wavered now in her gathering tears.

She lifted her right hand. As if to strike. But it paused there between us.

Very softly I said, “Once more, Luisa Morales.”

And she slapped me. Not quite as hard, but hard enough. I braced myself and I did not let my head turn.

Both my cheeks were aflame.

Luisa and I looked at each other.

The light of the desert was tracking thinly down her cheeks.

“As many times as you need,” I said.

She bowed her face and put both her hands there and she wept. Quietly. But wept.

I waited.

She wept. I would have expected, when these tears began to prevail, that she would have retreated back into the darkness. But she did not. She let me watch. And this made me inordinately happy.

I wanted to take her in my arms.

But sometimes I was not stupid with women. I waited and I let her continue to weep, even as I was ready to let her continue to strike me.

Finally, though she made no sound through all this and though she did not withdraw her hands, I sensed that she had stopped. And now she put her hands on her legs, though she kept her face bowed.

I should have waited some more, but I felt I needed to say something. I didn’t know what. Something. And I said, “Thank you for not killing me in the street in Vera Cruz.”

She did not seem to hear at first.

But then, without lifting her face, she said, “I would not have killed you.”

I said, “Thank you for not shooting off the part of me you probably wished to.”

I could see enough of her face to perceive a kind of stopping in it, and she even shook her head minutely, just to one side and back, just once, but then abruptly her hands returned and so did the tears. She wept again, and I could hear it now.

I blundered on. As impulsive as these words were, I did at least quickly look around to make sure no one could hear. “Kill him then,” I said. “I’ll help you.”

This brought her hands down and her face up. Her torso straightened and we were silent for a time: She looked at me and saw me, and she looked beyond me and saw nothing, and then she looked at me and did not see me. And now her legs were moving and she was standing up and she vanished into the dark.

Okay.

I once more thought to go. And I would have. I even turned and took a step away from the boxcar. But I stopped. I stood very still, facing down the track, immobilized now by the ways I’d said the wrong things to her yet again. I understood them all as abruptly as a slap across the face.

And behind me I heard sounds: a rustle and then a foot-thump. She had jumped to the ground from the boxcar.

I turned.

Luisa was before me. Barely an arm’s length away. She unsheathed a small hunting knife with a four-inch blade.

Something in me went: To hell with it. Let her at least make the gesture to kill me.

And Luisa lifted the knife straight up, the blade vertical, and there was a very brief moment, at the apogee of the lifting, where I expected it now to come at me, a straight thrust forward toward my chest, and I was very conscious of the blade tip, so I recognized at once — at its tiniest first impulse — that it was not meant for me. She moved the blade not slowly, not slowly, but quickly and the blade fell to the horizontal and went flat and pointed inward and I knew it was her throat she wanted to cut and already my left hand was in motion — my baseball-glove hand, which was a good reflex, I was racing her knife hand from behind — and the knife started its plunge to her throat and she was quick but I was quick too and my hand was open wide and our hands flashed and I caught her at the wrist and I had her.

And the strength of her arm vanished at once. Her arm yielded to me and my other hand came up and touched hers and I was working my fingers into her palm and under the knife handle and I was pulling and she let it go. She let me take the knife from her. I dropped it at our feet, and I let go of her wrist and I stretched out my arms and put my hands behind her shoulders and I pulled her gently toward me, in small incremental tugs, and her hands fell to her sides. She did not lift her arms to go around me in return, but she did not struggle, she did not pull away, she let me enfold her, let me hold her close.