The Hot Country

51

A Laredo doctor was cleaning and rebandaging my wound and tossing me odd little looks like he’d never seen a gunshot wound before in Laredo, Texas — though it was true the stitching was a little unorthodox and maybe I needed to shave and certainly I needed to stop wearing my sombrero — and as he was doing his business, I was thinking about New Orleans. But merely to wonder which of the New Orleans papers was picking up the Post-Express syndication. I was all work. I was wishing there was a doctor who could heal my Corona Portable Number 3, who got stabbed between the 5/T/t and the — /G/g and whose wounded body I hopefully jammed into my saddlebags and carried on my three-day dash for the border. But when I arrived, my Corona refused to allow not only any “t” or “g” to be used in my story but several vowels, as well, and had thus left me stuck with a hotel-rental Underwood table model. As for the two stories I would write on that machine today, the leads were already bristling in my head. All work.

So I wrote my stories and it was mid-afternoon, and I stopped at the hotel front desk on my way out to the telegraph office, expecting, ironically, to find a wire that had been delivered to me from that very office. Huzzah. What a story.

Nothing. I went out. I filed. I wanted to check to make sure that, in fact, they hadn’t delivered something to the hotel, which the hotel then, obviously, misplaced. I wouldn’t complain. I just wanted the damn wire.

It wasn’t misplaced. They hadn’t delivered.

I wandered through the plaza on the way back to the hotel. In the center was a very odd circular brick platform, large enough to be a bandstand, but it wasn’t. It had no apparent function at all except to support, around its edge, eight brick pedestals, each of which supported a concrete column, at the top of which was a white, globular, electrically lit ball. What were they thinking in this city? Where was the band playing Cohan and Sousa? Where were the girls in summer lingerie dresses promenading around with each other before the lounging, leering boys? When Gerhard threatened to slide back into my head and start tooting his alto horn, I beat it back to the hotel.

I squeezed at my material some more just to keep occupied, trying to cobble together a profile of Villa in the context of life in his railway-bound campsites, though I’d seen very little of it, really. I did not include the boxcar full of the recently arrived, unattached women. Somebody in Chicago would try to make that the lead.

Then I sat in the hotel bar drinking whiskey till the night came on and I grew as dark as the view out the window. And I probably asked again at the front desk a time or two about a telegram and I probably went up the steps and I probably went into my room and took off my boots and lay down. Probably, because I had no memory of any of that when I woke with light coming through my window and I was on my bed and my boots were off.

My head was stuffed as full as this mattress, though the gob of felt inside my head was being heated in a furnace and it was expanding plenty and I was just waiting for it to burst into flames, though it seemed somehow resistant to that obvious next turn of events. Which was probably for the best. Still, if it was not going to burst into flames, I wished it would just cool the hell down.

But it was a new day and a new chance for a telegram from Clyde so I could receive his praise and maybe an editorial question or two and then I could figure out how best to get myself back to Vera Cruz. That was probably what was keeping him: He was going to do the huzzahing and the inquiring all in one comprehensive telegram.

I managed to get up and get one boot on, which was enough for now, and I managed to complete a few necessary ablutions, and then I was glad to find I could get the other boot on with noticeably less difficulty, and I went downstairs. Since I would want to go straight from Clyde’s editorial inquiries to the typewriter and get this done with, I even had enough restraint to bypass the front desk and go to the dining room, and I sat in a shadowed corner as far away from the windows as I could and I ordered simply a pot of black coffee, which I drank searingly fast.

I realized the morning was pretty far advanced. The sun was not low outside there, and I was the only person in the dining room. I was sure to have a telegram from Clyde waiting for me at the front desk.

And I did.

I carried it back to my room unopened.

I went in.

I sat before my typewriter at my small, rattly desk.

I opened Clyde’s wire, expecting him to have composed an ardent love aria for my having produced a veritable Wagnerian opera for tomorrow’s front page.

Instead, he wrote: Knockout story, champ. But this is something we need to talk about in person. Please take train to Chicago as soon as possible. Clyde

“But”? Meaning it was not running tomorrow. Not running till I could get to Chicago. If I was working for Hearst, he’d run it first and then he’d be on a train, coming down here to congratulate me personally, on the spot, and to start planning how to follow this up so we could declare war on Mexico. Hell, declare war on Germany too. He’d see this as bigger than Cuba and Spain.

Maybe this was exactly that. Maybe it was just a matter of who took the train. This was certainly big enough that Clyde kicked it upstairs to Paul Maccabee Griswold himself. This was as secure a beat as you could find. No one else would get it in the next few days. Or ever. So let’s confer about the best way to roll it out. Griswold was capable of that.

And yet. I had a bad feeling. Knockout stories got rushed into print. No matter how secure they were. Still. I could come up with a plausibly optimistic scenario. But I’d be damned if I could dream up what the problem might be.

Then one problem led me to another, where the dreaming up was easy. And I thought of an opportunity.

I’d route myself through New Orleans.