The Hot Country

56

Back on his horse, Tallahassee Slim offered a hand and I went up to ride behind him to Villa’s train. Birdman went up behind Hernando, who gave me a single, firm nod that I was surprised to find lifted me far more than Clyde’s “knockout story” or Griswold’s “surpassingly good.”

I was carrying my own leather document portfolio, though this one had the presidential Seal embossed upon it. And I was wearing the colorado’s sombrero, which I unfolded and smoothed out as best I could and put on a few moments ago, also having removed my suit coat and tie and stuffed them into my aeroplane-light carpetbag. I was glad to see I was showing my battle ribbon: The left sleeve on my white shirt was discolored from a bit of ooze from my healing wound, the Laredo doctor having to struggle to get Hernando’s stitches out before Birdman and I took off. I thought now to untuck my shirt so as to hide Luisa’s knife, which was in its scabbard at the small of my back.

Slim and I headed off at an easy trot. “So how’s your German visitor doing?” I asked.

“It took him a couple of days to clear his head,” Slim said. “But he’s had Villa’s ear for nearly a week.”

I grunted at this.

Slim said, “I thought word of your story would’ve gotten here by now.”

We were still a good three hundred yards from Villa, but I needed to ask some more questions. I gave Slim the five-inch, single-column summary of what had transpired. It was condensed, but I got all the basics in. Trask would disapprove of my saying even this much, since he’d impressed upon me that what I was doing was secret government business intended for Villa’s ears only. But here was another little lift I found myself feeling: I trusted Slim — with my life and whatever else — more than I trusted anyone in Chicago or Washington, D.C.

When I finished, Slim whistled, low. Before he could comment I said, “What’s Villa’s mood about me?”

“I’m not sure. I told him that you and Mensinger had some kind of personal beef, but I didn’t know anything about it. He does understand personal beefs. But I don’t know what Mensinger might have said about you. Lies of some sort. So with those lies and you taking off so quick — which Jefe really couldn’t understand and I didn’t know how to explain — I don’t know what he’ll do.”

We rode on for a few moments and I was quiet, thinking what those lies might have been, hoping that Villa would lay them out to me openly.

“He may try to shoot you,” Slim said.

This comment came into my head as I was deep in thought and I didn’t quite grasp it at first.

“We need to talk about that,” Slim said.

We were down to two hundred yards to go. It sank in. “Yes,” I said. “Let’s.”

Slim said, “Don’t forget. He’s been known in the heat of the moment just to draw his pistol and shoot someone. Even men he’s friendly with up to the last second.”

Slim paused. We’d talked about this much before. I believed him.

Slim said, “If I somehow can end up behind him and if he draws and doesn’t shoot instantly, I might could get the drop on him. Though I guess I’d just have to go ahead and plug him, since at that point we’d be pretty much up the Rio Mierda anyway.”

I knew Slim would be willing to do that. I said, “Thanks, but forget it.”

“You sure?”

“We wouldn’t even make it to the horses,” I said.

“We could go out in a blaze of gringo glory.”

“What’s the use? We’d never be able to tell the story in a bar.”

“In hell,” he said.

“If they got bars, it ain’t hell,” I said.

“Now, don’t go taking away my last hope in the hereafter.”

“Just see if you can bury me somewhere instead of feeding me to the zopilotes.”

A few more moments of silent riding, and the red caboose was getting close. Who expected to die in a goddam red caboose?

“He may not do it,” Slim said.

We said no more. Slim pulled his horse up. He and I both got down. “At least let me try to clear the way,” he said.

I nodded and was about to follow, but he had another thought and turned around to face me. “He’s always testing for cojones.”

“Let me go first,” I said.

Slim hesitated. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

“I know.”

I pushed past him and went up the steps of the caboose with heavy feet and I arrived in Villa’s open door.

He was standing over his desk in shirtsleeves, a map spread out before him, two of his Mexican officers on his far side, wearing ersatz military tunics. And there was Mensinger. He was ramrod-straight at the end of the desk, the only one of them facing the door, though his head was angled slightly downward, as he watched Villa point to the map. In the center of his forehead was a tomato-red welt the size of a leghorn egg. He was back in his linen suit, but without the jacket. His tie was knotted tightly.

They were unaware of me. I knocked at the doorjamb. Mensinger was slow raising his face, and as interested as I was in him and his reactions, Villa instantly turned his face at my knock and I could see nothing but him. He straightened up sharply. His restless animal’s eyes fixed on me, and I was glad I was coming into this trying to be aggressively confident, because he did know how to intimidate. He straightened without taking his eyes off me; he squared around without taking his eyes off me; he said “Step into the room” without taking his eyes off me.

Without hesitating I made one strong stride into the room, and not far from his right hand I saw the Smith & Wesson.32 lying on his desk just as it was when I first met him. I took a second step, which was still pretty firm but not quite as strong as the first, and I stopped because somewhere in that process, faster than I could honestly say I was able to notice, Villa had snatched up his.32 and was pointing it square between my eyes. He took one quick stride toward me and everything suddenly slowed down, though I was sure he was still going fast: He began another step, the muzzle growing in my sight, the very tip of the muzzle, the black hole from which I expected a bullet to hurtle as soon as he finished bringing his right leg forward, which I could see happening at the lower periphery of my sight, though I was primarily focused on the muzzle, and I was working hard to stand still so I could at least die without flinching and with my eyes open, which was what I expected, to die, momentarily, because his right foot landed and his upper body, which had remained perfectly squared toward me all this time, now had the lower body squared perfectly beneath it, now he was motionless, Pancho Villa, and everything came to a stop in this room and, as far as I knew, in the desert outside and in the wide world beyond, and I was not flinching, I was not closing my eyes, though I expected the trigger-squeeze and the flare and the end of my life any moment now, any moment.

But the moment passed, and then another, and then another. I let my eyes shift very slightly from the muzzle to the face behind the muzzle, and those dark, wide eyes of his — as dark as but totally unlike Trask’s dark eyes — these predator eyes were anything but opaque, they were clearly aware, they were seeing, they were hiding nothing.

He advanced again, quickly. The muzzle grew suddenly larger and then it vanished from my sight. It landed coldly, heavily, against my forehead. Pancho Villa’s eyes held onto me without the tiniest flicker and his pistol pressed against me only long enough for me to think once more that the end had come. Then the muzzle abruptly left my forehead and his forearm jerked upward and I felt my sombrero fly off.

He took one step back from me. Not a retreat. He was just giving himself some shooting room so he wouldn’t be spattered with my blood.

I did not flinch. I did not blink. I did not breathe.

“You ran away,” Villa said.

I breathed. Just that. No other movement.

And then I spoke: “I ran away from nothing. I ran to something.” He was listening. I kept talking. Very calmly. Taking my time. Like over a tankard of pulque. Shoot me if you want, you bandit son of a bitch; listen if you want: That had to be my attitude. Cojones. “I knew what the German would ask you,” I said, tempted to look at Mensinger when I spoke of him. But I resisted that. Better to treat him as if he did not exist. I said, “I knew what he would offer. I knew all that when I came here. I also knew my own country gave you exile not so long ago, when your entire Army of the North could fit inside this railroad car. I knew my government would do better by you than the Germans. The first proof has just landed outside. I’ve brought you a cavalry of the air. An aeroplane and the services of your old compañero, Birdman Slim. Both are gifts of the United States of America. And there will be more support for General Pancho Villa and his vision for Mexico.”

I stopped talking.

The pistol remained.

I said, “The proof is in my right hand. A real letter from the President of the United States. Not a fake, like the one given you by the man standing at your desk. He and his country held you in contempt, and that made me angry. That was why I left. They brought you a fabricated lie. Any English-speaking person would see through their forgery.”

Villa’s pistol slowly descended now. He held it at his side, pointing at the floor, his arm straight. I moved my eyes — just my eyes — from Villa’s face and past his right shoulder and across the desk to Mensinger’s. There was a faint twitching in his right cheek, affecting now that side of his mustache, now his right eye, now his mustache, now both at once. He was seething. I brought my eyes slowly back to Villa, who casually turned his head and looked over his shoulder at Mensinger.

All Mensinger could say was “Lies. This invading American swine is the liar.”

Villa looked back to me. Just as casually. Keeping a straight face.

I thought to invoke the aeroplane again. But this was no longer a matter of explanations or logic or offers made and fulfilled. Ultimately the way Pancho Villa understood the world was in his right hand. I figured since I was in this deep, I had no choice but to go in deeper.

I said, “This man tried to kill me with a sword when I had nothing but a typewriter to defend myself.”

I could tell from the flicker in Villa that this was not entirely a new thing to him but he had heard quite a different version.

I said, “Let him fight me again.”

Villa smiled. He looked me square in the face and he was smiling the way he smiled when he heard what I did to some colorados on his behalf.

Good. I felt my instinct was right about this.

He looked back to Mensinger. I looked at the German too. When I saw Mensinger smiling broadly, I felt I needed to reconsider my instinct.

“A duel?” Mensinger said to Villa. “Of course. It is a point of honor. I choose sabers.”

I knew Villa was not going for the “point of honor” crap. But a duel meant somebody dies.

So I was still trying to understand this new role of U.S. government secret agent I was playing. I had figured out where I was in this scene and the role had seemed to suggest a course of action and I took it. Right. But I didn’t quite have my instincts fully refined. I was correct in my reading of Villa’s attitudes. My mistake was not anticipating the next move: fight with what? I might even have had something like a fistfight in mind.

I was professionally stupid like this when I first became a reporter as well.

In deep. Get in deeper. Was I nuts?

I said, “Not a duel. A fight.”

“A fight,” Villa said, emphatically. I supposed it was too much to think that my semantic distinction might reopen the subject of an appropriate weapon, because Villa immediately said, “Sabers.”

“I will kill him,” Mensinger said.

No one contradicted this. In all honesty, neither could I.

Maybe a fight with sabers was better for me than a duel with sabers. But only marginally so. I thought I’d declared for something less formal. But in fact I’d invited Mensinger to try to kill me again. With his weapon of choice. And it was the saber part that I was seriously concerned about. Not that I hadn’t wielded a sword plenty in my life. As I traveled with a famous actress mother through my teens and a little beyond, the many supernumerary stage roles I played often put a sword in my hand. And I was trained in this by a couple of men who were quite adept at it. But the training involved thrusting and parrying to give the impression of a killing intent while assiduously avoiding one. I was trained to miss. I would have to make a fundamental adjustment in medias res.

But I showed no hesitation. I turned crisply on my heel. I found Tallahassee Slim standing just inside the door, and he gave me a furrow-browed look that was hard to read. I suspected it was half “You got balls” and half “You are dead.” But he also gave me a quick nod and I returned it.

I passed through the door and out onto the platform and I started to go down the steps and I stopped. A crowd had gathered. Two or three hundred. Mostly Villista fighters. But some of the women too, and some of the children. All keeping their distance and still only loosely cohering as a crowd, but all of them facing these steps I was standing on. The word had gotten out to them about the German and the American. The man of the aeroplane and the man of the scarred face. Mortal adversaries. I figured I better stop writing the damn story of this in my head if I expected to have a chance to stay alive.

There were footfalls behind me. I stepped down and moved away from the car. The crowd receded a bit but started to pull together. I turned. Mensinger was standing near the back of the caboose, severely upright. He unknotted his tie, pulled it off, threw it casually aside. He started to unbutton his shirt.

Villa was striding this way, running the show, calling for two sabers. All around me bets began. The cockfighters calling out “Gringo!” or “Alemán!” and showing their bets with hand signals and looking for others making the same bet, pairing up. Mensinger was stripping off his shirt. I figured I’d better keep the sun to our side; it would blind me reflecting off his whiteness. I was just standing here. A little apart from all this. Watching. Which could be the death of me. I was a reporter no longer. That was a German agent standing over there, preparing to kill me. I was an American agent. Standing here. In the middle of the action. Creating the action.

I straightened. I started unbuttoning my shirt. Fine. I’d show my fresh scar to remind Villa who I’d fought and killed for lately. Not that it would do any good if I was run through with a saber. I took off my shirt and tossed it aside. Villa was standing near me. He had a saber in each hand, both of them the older British-style, slightly curved, cut-and-thrust swords. He gave me one. Villa and I looked each other in the eyes as I took it. I said, “Who are you betting on, Jefe?”

“The German,” he said, showing his bad teeth in a big smile.

I said, “In the spirit of my country’s friendship with Mexico, I will cover your inevitable losses.”

Villa laughed.

I was glad I didn’t choke on the words. At the moment I was not confident.

Villa moved off toward Mensinger, bearing the other saber.

I whipped my sword in the air half a dozen times, getting the feel of it, the heft of it. It was heavier — strikingly heavier — than the stage swords. I looked toward Mensinger, who now had his saber. His heels were pressed tightly together and he was mincing his feet outward till they were at right angles to each other. He’d spent his life learning to fight with a sword on the even, stone floors of a university fencing club. He had a necessary routine. Its full effectiveness was based on his opponent fighting from the same routine.

Villa was heading back toward me, intending, I assumed, to step between Mensinger and me and give some sort of starting signal. And looking at General Pancho Villa, the bandit rebel and would-be savior of Mexico, I thought of his tactics. His men were never driven around in regimented step but encouraged to fight personally and of their free will, in contrast to the Federales, who fought stiffly, by the book. His army was relentless and fast-moving and full of tricks. He was always adapting to fit the terrain, fit his men’s skills.

I took one sidestep to the right, placing the approaching Villa directly between me and Mensinger. Villa stopped at this. He looked me in the eyes, his face pinching in thought. What was I up to? You should know, Pancho. I put my sword hand in front of me, chest high, and I rotated the saber to point to the sky. An improvised present-arms. I said, “I have learned from you, Jefe.”

And I took off in a sprint, veering right, doing an end run around Villa and then curving back toward Mensinger at a sharp angle of approach, from off to his left, and he was slow even turning his face to me and I was almost upon him and I pulled up, raising my right arm, and I was swinging the sword as he lurched toward me off balance and he lifted his sword to parry and his saber and mine clanged between us and he stumbled away.

He was quick with his hands.

I was glad I was not fighting by his rules.

My arm was doing an independent thing — since my head was simply crying for it to attack and attack and attack — my arm was swinging back to slash again, and Mensinger had caught his stumble and was straightening and my arm stopped its backward swing and I should have been thrusting now, not slashing, I was giving him a chance to recover and he was upright and trying to set his feet, still trying to establish the only rules he knew to fight by but I was slashing and my arm whipped around and he threw his own sword arm partly across his body, awkward still but he caught my sword and my arm flinched back from his blow, and I saw him doing what I should have done, setting up to thrust, recovering his arm from the stroke and making it glide right and it glided and as I tried to refocus my own arm his gliding stopped and I knew he would thrust and my legs were still at immediate call and I pushed back hard on my feet, I leap-stepped back and away and his sword rushed forward but I was propelling backward and his sword stretched for my chest but I was just out of his reach.

I stopped my backward flight and set myself and I saw Mensinger extended there — his sword stretched into empty air — and I realized I first had to close this distance from him to do what my arm wanted to do but my arm did it anyway — too soon — I thrust at him from a slight side angle and the tip of my saber ran and ran and stopped short of his chest but I did not overextend, I knew not to lunge too far even in the middle of the thrust when I recognized the gap was too big between us, and his saber flicked and parried my blade aside and he set himself for a riposte and because I withheld a little I could sidestep again to the right, I started crabbing around him and I realized I better keep him on the defensive but I was simply moving without attacking and I would look bad to Villa if I didn’t attack and I was allowing Mensinger to get his balance and keep his balance as I moved and he was deftly following my sideward movements now, waiting for me to stop, and I was looking bad, and I stopped sidestepping and I set myself and I thrust and he parried and I moved to the side as he thrust back and he was confident now and focused and I had to take some sort of stand or I’d lose Villa and I was thinking too much and I was feeling slow and Mensinger was faster than a thought and I’d stopped moving and I thrust at him and it was weak and he parried almost nonchalantly and I was even thinking about thinking now and I did not see the twist of his wrist after his parry and his blade flashed and I felt a sharp burn on my left cheek.

He was confident again, and it had kindled his arrogance. He thought he could toy with me. I’d just given him the opportunity to run me through and he hadn’t taken it. Instead, he’d given me a Heidelbergian cut to the cheek. He let his sword linger now, just a brief moment, as he happily watched me bleed. His blade pulled back ever so slightly and it dropped a little, though he thought — and he was probably right — that he could thrust it into my chest at any moment of his choosing now that he was set and I was standing flat-footed before him. My sidestepping would work for only so long since he’d regained his balance and his composure, and I was still very aware of Villa watching us, assessing us. I had to throw Mensinger off balance again and finish this.

And I thought of Mensinger’s wife. What I knew from her letter.

“Quick hands to the cheek,” I said to him, putting the sneer in my voice like a saber thrust. “Like the way you strike Anna.”

His eyes flickered at this. He was a little off balance now in his head. His wife was suddenly here with us. He was wondering how I could know this. And my thinking of Anna made me think of someone else.

But first I needed to shock Mensinger again.

Without taking my eyes off his, I took two quick backward steps, putting a little distance between us, and before he could come forward to engage me, in one smooth unthreatening gesture I lifted my sword arm out to the side, pointing the blade at a right angle away from him, and immediately I flicked the saber out of my hand. It flew off and chunked onto the ground and I was lowering my arm and empty hand, quickly, quickly, swinging them down and then continuing on, out of his sight, to the back of me, even as he shifted his eyes very briefly to my sword lying on the desert floor somewhere off to the right, and my hand moved to the small of my back and I grasped the handle of Luisa’s knife and my hand was rushing upward now — holding the knife as easily and loosely controlled as in a mumblety-peg throw — I lifted the knife upward and backward. Mensinger’s eyes were returning to me and my hand rose and I felt the leather wrapping of the handle against my palm and I even had time to realize that my outward knife-throwing manner had all my life been like a Mexican’s, starting from behind the neck, and my knife hand was ready, even as Mensinger’s eyes fixed on me once more. He did not see the knife, and though my posture may have struck him as odd, he overlooked that in order to smile me a now-you-will-die-you-Schweinehunde-American smile.

And I threw the knife. It buried itself what looked to be about three inches into his chest. A little lower, however, than directly in the heart. He did not die more or less instantly. Instead, he looked wide-eyed astonished. He dropped his sword. He staggered back. He sat abruptly down, stiff-legged. He was done, Friedrich von Mensinger.

I did not intend to go twist the knife in him or assault him further. He could die on his own. Like a Mexican bullfighter, I turned my back on him. I started to walk slowly away from him. I realized the crowd was roaring. Pancho Villa was suddenly at my side.

He handed me a handkerchief from his pocket. It was, surprisingly, brilliantly, whitely clean.

I pressed the handkerchief against my left cheek.

Villa said, “You have been a good student.” And he laughed.

And a gunshot cracked loud.

I thought, for a flicker of a moment, that now I was dead.

The crowd went instantly quiet.

I didn’t seem to be dead.

Villa and I spun around.

Mensinger, having sat down flat on his butt with his legs straight out, was having trouble falling completely over to his side. But the right half of his face, which was sharply turned our way, was a bloody pulp, and he swayed at last and fell backward, twisting to his left. As he did, his right arm swung outward, and as he settled onto the ground, that arm fell over his right hip.

And still in his hand was a pocket Mauser, which he’d drawn and was intending to use on me. Perhaps even on both of us.

I looked at Villa beside me.

He was staring intently at the pistol.

He turned his face to me and we exchanged a look I have seen on battlefields: two comrades in a moment of shared danger that has passed. And he looked beyond me now, toward the place where the shot came from.

I turned as well, and even before I saw her, I realized from an afterimage of Mensinger in my head that the bullet taking him out had entered through his right cheek. The unscarred one. A statement shot. Her signature.

And there she stood.

Her right arm was still straight out and absolutely sharpshooter-still. In her hand was an old Colt Army revolver.

She was dressed in black. A skirt of black, but I recognized the jacket from the lamplight in Vera Cruz. She had no rebozo and her hair was rolled tightly up on her head. Villa was walking toward her. I thought she would turn her arm now and shoot Pancho Villa dead.

But she did not.

As Villa neared Luisa, her arm slowly fell. He stopped before her. He spoke. She spoke. I could not hear. The crowd was murmuring. I found myself thinking she might yet shoot him. They talked. The wound on my cheek burned hotly. I’d killed another man. They talked. I’d killed another man, and this was a dispassionate thought. This was the attitude of the men I’d made a career writing about. The men who went to a place away from where they were born, away from where they were children, where they were young and had never killed anyone; and in this other place they killed, they killed in service to their country, they killed because they must or they would be killed. And eventually they did it and did not feel it. Luisa and Villa talked. I had killed and I could pass the bodies by in a street and not even glance their way.

And Villa nodded, and he turned his back on Luisa, blocking her from my sight, and he raised his hand to the crowd. They fell instantly silent. And he called out to us, “From today onward, this soldadera will ride with the Army of the North.”

The crowd cheered.