The Hot Country

57

I do not understand women.

I walked away. I did not look back.

Later, Pancho Villa stood beside me and put his hand on my shoulder while one of his doctors in one of his hospital boxcars stitched my wound, my Schmiss, and I passed his final test. I did not flinch at the pain.

I executed the details of my mission, as instructed, and Pancho Villa shook my hand with a vow of friendship for the United States of America. He put my colorado sombrero back on my head. I paid him the amount of his lost wager. We laughed together.

Some of his men escorted me across estado Nuevo León to Laredo. Tallahassee Slim and Hernando Soto were not among them, as they were off robbing a train.

I boarded a train for Chicago. A train safe from bandits.

Trask and Clyde both wanted me back.

I was finished with Mexico.

Whatever I do not understand about women began with my mother. But when I boarded that train, one thing about her seemed clear to me. She needed to be rescued.

So on the way to Chicago, I found myself in another taxi leaving Union Station on a steamy May night in the city of my birth. I did not have a clear plan. I realized, though, as soon as we headed out, that I did not want to do another walk Down the Line on Basin Street. The taxis could only work the perimeter of Storyville, so I told my driver to drop me at Claiborne and Conti, The District’s far corner. I could walk the quieter few blocks along Conti down to Basin, where the main street ran into St. Louis Cemetery Number 1. The direction Mother was heading the last time I saw her. I figured I could think a little on that walk. For all the time I’d lately spent thinking on the train, I’d come up with no plan whatsoever about how to save my mother from what she was presently doing. Save her to what? I had nothing to offer.

But I was on Conti and I was walking toward Basin and this was a mistake. I was at the low-price end of the street-level, short-time cribs. The older whores, the stranger ones, the ones who were simply used up, were on this block, and in the incandescence they all were jaundiced and most of them were mostly naked and in this first block they were calling at me and offering quite a lot for a dime, just a dime, a thin dime for a lush lady, a dime for a blow a poke a chunk a crack a flop. And I wondered where my angel-faced octoroon was now, thirteen years later, certainly no longer at Willie V. Piazza’s house in expensive striped stockings. Did she cost a dime now? If I recognized her would I rescue her instead?

And in the next street they were two bits. And from behind every incandescent-lamp-stained body in every doorway on every tiny, bed-filled room wafted the smell of lye, which they kept in a pan under the bed to throw in the face of any customer who got rough. And I stopped considering anything at all about any of these women, and they went to four bits across Marais and they were a dollar across Liberty and then I crossed Franklin and on my left began the cemetery and I was walking fast now, just needing to find my mother and take her by the arm and whisper to her, low, We have to go now, we have to go, and I wouldn’t even think about how every man in the place assumed I was her young man for the evening.

And I turned the corner onto Basin and I headed down the street and I was bumping past the strolling men and suddenly the curtain of bobbing heads before me parted for a moment and I saw my mother heading this way with some bowlered, thick-mustachioed Johnny on her arm. The curtain closed again briefly, but I stopped. I let the men flow past me and I waited for her, one moment and another and another and I didn’t have a weapon, my knife stayed in Mensinger, who was dead in another country, and my Browning stayed in my checked bag because why would I need a weapon simply to ask my mother to go home now, even if I didn’t know where home would be in this circumstance — except perhaps simply with me — and even if I didn’t know how to persuade her if she said no. But now I thought it might have been a mistake not to bring a weapon.

And the shifting bodies shifted away once more, and thirty feet before me was Mother and this man and she was looking up at him and I could not wait even a few more moments for her to be in front of me. I called out “Mother,” and it was loud, it was way too loud.

And her face turned to me and the man’s face turned and she was such a good actress, so very good, and I knew that whatever was going on, keeping her composure would be the appropriate response for whatever character she was playing now in her life, but instead, her eyes went wide and her mouth even fell open a bit, and meanwhile the man beside her — and I could see it was not just a bowlered and mustachioed face but still another oft-beat-upon face — was this my mother’s type, dear God? — was this a thing I never noticed? — this man was not astonished at the sight of me, he was pissed, greatly, and he was reaching into his coat and I took a step toward him and I wished again to have a weapon because a little damn pocket Mauser just like Mensinger’s was coming out and what an idiotic irony this would be to end up dead from that and I was taking another step and this guy was used to drawing fast and the muzzle was out and starting to swing down and I was lifting a hand that I was not sure what I’d do with and suddenly another pistol appeared over the Johnny’s shoulder, a big one, a Browning like mine and there were only so many good weapons in the world and I was caught in my head thinking of these same two pistols back in Mexico and I wondered if I was getting nostalgic over pistols and I wondered if nostalgia could get me killed now, except the Johnny’s head thumped forward a little and the Browning was stuck on the back of it and the Mauser paused in its track to a shot at my chest, and attached to the Browning was another bowler and mustache who I’d normally take to be part of the Johnny’s gang except for the gun-and-head relationship. And now my own head dipped a little forward from the steel-heavy push of a muzzle and a couple of voices were recommending a general cessation of movement and the man behind the Johnny was reaching around and taking the Mauser.

My mother piped up quick and said, “Phil. He’s okay. He’s my son.” And my own head was released and Mother hooked my arm and was guiding me insistently away from the others and across the street and into the shadow of the Southern Depot passenger shed.

She stopped me and she turned me and she looked up into my face and her eyes were vast and searching and deep dark — the eyes I could look at in any mirror, the part of my mother I carried most obviously upon myself — and her hand came up and hovered over my stitched-up cheek and she said, “What have you done?”

I said, “That’s the question I’ve come here to ask you.”

“You damn fool of a boy,” she said. “I told you to stay away.”

“Then you shouldn’t have given me so much information.”

She took a sudden, deep breath.

“You wanted me to do this,” I said.

“No. No. I just wanted an audience of sorts.”

“An audience?”

She heard in my voice now what I’d been thinking.

She said, “If my best slapping hand wouldn’t land on your stitches, I’d make you pay dearly for that tone and all that’s behind it.”

I didn’t say anything. She looked at me hard in the eyes for a moment and then she wagged her head.

She said, “It’s all because my wonderful role, to be wonderfully played, can never be truly seen.”

I didn’t understand. I waited.

“My darling,” she said, dropping her voice into a vibrant whisper, “I am working in Storyville as a secret agent for the Pinkertons.”

She paused, but not for me to speak. She was playing the revelatory scene. After holding me suspended, she said, “A large number of wanted men pass through this place. Very bad men. I identify them. I peel them off. The Pinkerton Detective Agency takes them away.”

I was, of course, tempted to speak. My mother and I grew up sharing secrets and ironies and a sense of the mad, unlikely scripts we were cast in beyond the footlights, but I found myself keeping my own counsel now, taking in the ironies, working up to giving her a kiss and walking away. So I remained silent and she played on, only too happy to float uninterrupted upon her dramatic pauses.

“Usually,” she said, “this transpires with more discretion than in the case of Solomon Ward, bank burglar and murderer, whose face I recognized and whose apprehension you so ostentatiously interrupted.”

We looked deeply into each other’s eyes for a long moment. She’d spoken her line, given me my cue. She waited. I knew how to work a silence. I have learned much from my mother.

And then I simply asked, “Do you think I’ve compromised you?”

“No, my darling. Don’t worry. I think we’ll be all right.”

“I’m sorry, Mother,” I said. “But I’m glad I’ve put my mind at ease.”

“Me too,” she said.

And I gave her a hug and she inquired after me a little bit and I told her a little bit and we hugged again and she kissed me on my good cheek and I kissed her on both of hers, her preference, in the style of the French, and I explained that I had a train to catch and she sent me off by saying, “My darling son, I know you have always felt my place was in the great body of classic literature. But this work I am doing is great work as well. It is real. It is deeply representative of our unsettled times. It is all about life and death and the struggle for the good and the true.”

I took her hands in mine and I said, “My darling mother, I could not agree more.”

And I let go of her and I walked away.

On the train to Chicago the next day, rushing along the great Mississippi River outside Memphis, the past few weeks began to settle into me. No. Not settle. Perhaps decompose. I thought of Diego. How I likely would never see him again. How there was one more papi in this world who had vanished. I thought of Luisa. And I stopped myself thinking of Luisa. I thought of my mother and I found I did not clearly know what to feel about her. I had an explanation for Storyville, but I did not fully understand. I was happy for the vibrancy of her voice and the buoyancy in her body, but I didn’t like the risks she was running. Though maybe the risks were necessary for the sense of renewed life in her. Maybe that much of it I did understand. After all, the risks of my own life were greater now, and they promised to grow greater still. And I felt strangely happy about that. As The Bard said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” I’d played at watching others play at the primary narratives of this world. I had a chance to do more now. I would do more.