The Hot Country

50

I woke as if I’d just fallen asleep and begun to dream. I floated on a felt-stuffed mattress, and above me a four-blade ceiling fan spun like the sleep-slowed propeller of an aeroplane approaching me, but I just drifted before it, unfazed, serene, and since I was softly held now, I was free to lie once again on a bed of stone and it was soft there too, and this dream veered, as dreams sometimes do, into a thing so deeply wished for that only in this way can it happen and it feels real but you know even as you go through the motions of it that it is impossible. Luisa returned to me now like this. She fit herself upon me and rose above me, and beyond her the aeroplane slowly rushed at us both, but we were safe, joined like this we were safe, and then she was gone and I was in the Hamilton Hotel on the corner of Convent and Matamoros in Laredo, Texas, but as in a dream you can know where you really are and still dream on, I saw my mother and she was singing in a brothel in New Orleans and I sat up in the bed and put my feet on the floor.

I was in Laredo, Texas, in the United States of America. Last night I sat beside a telegraph operator whom I paid handsomely to stay late and I wired the scoop of a lifetime, the king beat of king beats, to Clyde Fetter in Chicago, and now I waited. I waited for Clyde and I also waited for Bunky Millerman and the great Isabel Cobb, both of whom I also wired as soon as I got to town and located the telegraph office, even before I started writing the story. To Bunky I said: Got him. In Laredo writing stories. How are you? How is the boy? Wire care of Hamilton Hotel. Kit

To Mother I began: The third act is full of sound and fury and signifying something. I spent more time struggling with the next sentence, what to say and how to say it, than I later would in the whole of the massive news story about an active and advanced German plan to instigate a Mexican invasion of the U.S.A. starting with San Antonio and the Alamo. Finally I set aside Shakespeare and Marlowe and Ben Jonson and Sophocles and Homer and Henry James and Montaigne and all the rest and just said straight out what I wanted from her.

Where are you? I wrote. I almost asked, as well, What are you doing? but I did not. One thing at a time.

And I drank my coffee black in the hotel restaurant, which was on the corner and looking into the zócalo. Ah, I was in the United States now. The plaza. Jarvis Plaza. But I was looking through glass and sitting with a tablecloth under my hands and this was the United States now. I found myself missing the portales. Even if the open air was to stink, it would be the open air. But I always had odd feelings of displacement after returning from assignments. I was known to get nostalgic over the smell of cordite.

And the only news of Mexico in the Laredo newspaper was an Associated Press scoop that an American private who went missing in Vera Cruz and was thought to be insane was in fact captured by the Mexicans and was now thought to have been executed but, if true, the event was “unlikely” to provoke a larger military encounter between the Americans and Mexicans. Of course, the private could have been both insane and executed, a possibility I was surprised the AP reporter didn’t explore since he obviously had too much time on his hands and not enough news.

Today I would write about Gerhard Vogel, his service to his country and his murder by a German military officer from the Vera Cruz consulate, to run as a stunning background revelation for the big story of the day before. And then I would write the story of a Post-Express reporter who found himself riding with the Villistas. I would not tell all of the details of that story, however. The men I killed. They would not be part of the public record.

And my coffee cup was empty and I looked across the restaurant and the waiter was already heading my way, a plate in one hand and a coffeepot in the other. He arrived and set my eggs and rasher of bacon before me and as he poured my coffee, he asked, “Are you Mr. Cobb?”

“I am,” I said.

“The front desk has received a Western Union delivery. I’ll fetch it for you.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He moved off briskly and I was feeling American again, surrounded by briskness.

I took a sip of coffee, watching, as I did, the tiny, innocuous birds flying in a delicate little flock over the plaza. I looked sharply away. If I was getting nostalgic about the zopilotes, then I was in serious trouble. I barely got a taste of egg and bacon before the waiter brisked back to me and I gave him a dime for his trouble and his haste, and I laid two telegrams before me. One was from Vera Cruz. One was from New Orleans. None was from Chicago. But of course not. Clyde was only barely beginning to look at the story right now.

Bunky first. I opened the wire, and he said: Vera Cruz gets cleaner and cleaner. The boy does not. My hand is steady, since you are wondering. Otherwise, we’re fine. Bunk

I was wondering, of course. He sounded so like the authentic Bunky in the wire that I actually believed him. As for the boy, I found myself inordinately pleased. Not only that he was fine but that he was no cleaner. I realized I did not want that boy to change.

I ate some eggs. I ate some bacon. I let my mother’s telegram lie there: I was afraid that if I did my eating afterward, she would upset my digestion. She might anyway, but at least I’d have a few minutes of American food in me without it roiling around.

After thoroughly running a crust of bread in the last bit of egg yolk remaining on my plate and after drinking some more coffee and even watching the little birdies in the placid American sky, I picked up my mother’s telegram and I opened it.

She wrote: I am full aware you know the city I am in from my clearly having said too much already in a previous wire. So for you now to ask me where I am means you ask too much. Where are you? Western Union Laredo Texas? Did you elope with that sniper girl you wrote about? Be careful. She doesn’t sound your type. But that was in another country.

She was angry. No signature to the wire at all. Not even an et cetera. She just threw the lines from Marlowe back in my face. At least she didn’t quote the whole thing. There was just too much going on below the surface of this telegram. I had no desire to figure it out. That may have been fornication, but there was no guilt in the thing at all. And the wench wasn’t dead.