The Hot Country

9

When I got back to Bunky at our table in the portales, he had a mezcal before him and I wondered how many times he’d tapped his saucer already.

But he seemed perfectly clearheaded. “Sniper?” he said.

“Yeah. Plugged a priest.”

“Dead?”

“Nope. Knocked on his ass and stigmatized.”

Bunky nodded as if this were all clear to him, which it couldn’t have been. He waited to see if I wanted to say more, and I knew he wouldn’t ask if I didn’t. He was a good man. Maybe he was picking up on my mood about this. I really just wanted to have a drink. I didn’t want to think about a female sniper in Vera Cruz, even if she wasn’t the girl who’d put a gun to my head a few nights ago.

But I said, “Bullet in the palm and one in the center of his crucifix that did nothing but topple him over.”

“Quaint little story.”

“Quaint little no-story.”

Bunky nodded again. “Surprising lot of folks down here got a beef with the Church.”

“It’s about money.”

There was a commotion off to our left. We looked.

A squat little Mexican man had entered the portales in a serge suit and a Panama hat, which was coming off in quick deference to a couple of American Army officers who rose from their table to greet him. All the Yanks nearby were murmuring their good-evenings.

“Who’s the popular local?” I asked.

“Utility commissioner, I think,” Bunky said. “I hear he’s coming back to work.”

“With us?”

“Yup.”

“Do Davis and the boys know?”

“Don’t think so.”

And sure enough, I could see Davis a few tables down and his neck was coming up out of his stiff collar to crane in the direction of the low hubbub.

“Nice, Bunky. You want to write it?”

He looked at me. “We haven’t talked about this.”

“Now we are.”

He shrugged.

I said, “How long do you want to stew about the censors? They’ll let that story through for sure.”

“The rest of my life, probably,” he said. “And yes, they probably will.”

“Listen, Pops,” I said, and we both paused a moment, as this was the first time I’d called Bunky “Pops.” “Listen, I learned this whole racket from reading you when I was a pup. You’re swell with the Kodak, but I’ve filed today and I’ve got things on my mind and you’d be doing me a favor. And Clyde would love to see you writing again.”

For a few quiet moments Bunky seemed to be looking at me closely, but I could tell he was really looking inward. “Okay,” he finally said.

“Thanks,” I said.

He stood up. “You’ve also got things to read,” he said, putting a forefinger on a couple of cables I hadn’t noticed lying by his camera. Bunky moved off toward the commissioner.

I ordered an aguardiente, a brandy they made down here out of sugar cane, which I found I was acquiring a taste for, and only after it came and I felt the sweet burn of my first sip did I draw the cables across the table and take them up.

The top one was from Clyde: How is Ypiranga doing?

It was the only story he’d asked specifically about. I’d wire him of my vigilance in the morning so as to calm his editorial ulcer.

I picked up the second cable.

It was from my mother.

I was used to her letters in perfumed envelopes and ornate hand finding me in Chicago or even out in the wider world, and I always clearly heard her speaking in my head, the nuance of every cadence, when she wrote. So it was odd to hear her voice recorded here in a strange, hasty hand, the local telegraph operator translating her words from the electrical dots and dashes. But it was her voice. No doubt.

My Christopher, she said. My Chris my Kit my darling boy. And all this excess of address — every variation of my name costing her real per-word cable money — all of it fell upon me like her leading-lady hugs, large-gestured enough to fill the Hippodrome, which was not to say they were for any audience but me. They were strictly for an audience of one, these embraces.

Accurst be he, she said, that first invented war.

This being from my namesake, who she was fond of quoting.

But war gives thee the work of words which is a good thing and it gives thee fame which wanes now in your mother’s life as you know. Thus am I returned now to the city of thy birth to sing for rowdies and watch over those who can use watching over and you should not worry about me if I am silent for a time. Trust me in this. I know you think of me and sometimes seek me but for now I am playing a dark role in my own life so please do wait a while for my sake. You are always in my mind. Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee calls back the lovely April of her prime.

She was also not averse to quoting my namesake’s better, her last sentence being from one of his sonnets.

And she ended with By heaven I do love thee. Your mother

All of which worried me greatly.

I knew my mother well. I did not have a clue about her. And both these opposite but true things came together in her telegram. She’d been in a blue funk for a few years now about what she’d long called her “waning.” When I was born in New Orleans — she’d gone back there now, it seemed — she was twenty-five and very much in the April of her prime, already one of the beautiful darlings of the American stage. Now it was thirty years later, and on a very hot day just last summer at the Lyceum Theatre in Memphis, Mother tried to play Kate in Taming of the Shrew under a thick white mask of makeup before a vocally skeptical crowd. She soldiered through to the final curtain but then refused to take a bow. Instead, she removed her makeup and walked out the stage door before anyone knew she was gone, and she vowed that was the end of her theater career. She would not be anyone other than who she had always been. She would not be anyone on a stage who was a secondary character. She would not be anyone on a stage who was not desirable and ripe for love. She would not be anyone on a stage who was fifty-five years old. She wrote all this to me in a letter that actually reached me in Sofia, with the Rumanian Army advancing and me getting a big beat on the other boys about King Ferdinand giving up. She said, The waning, my darling, is now the having waned.

And I have not been able to see her since. I have been on the road playing my own role as the crack war correspondent and unable to seek her out. Not that I even knew where she went. She wrote me but never let on what she planned to do or where she planned to go. And now I ran my forefinger over the words of the telegram. Fame, she said, “wanes now in your mother’s life.” She was precise with words. I learned much from Bunky and his ilk but more from her. The “having waned” had once again become an active “wanes.” She played a dark role, she said. But it did not sound like theater. She sang. She does sing. She has a beautiful voice. One of her lovers when I was already grown and gone from her daily life was a songwriter of sorts, and she did an early, barely post-Kitty Hawk phonograph disc of one of his songs, “Kiss me, Orville, I Am Right for You.” Not surprisingly, she passed through that boyfriend quickly, and through her separate singing career too. But she can sing. “For rowdies” worried me. Much worried me about this telegram, about her present life. Much that I could do nothing about, at least for the moment, and so I tried to set it aside.

I folded her telegram and slipped it into a front pants pocket. I took another bolt of aguardiente. Behind the trees the band was playing “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie,” and I had it in my head suddenly to get up and go back into the zócalo and ask the prettiest Mexican girl’s girlfriend to let go of her so I could take the pretty one in my arms and waltz her around the band shell, waltz her around and around and around. But I didn’t do that. For a couple of good reasons.

I tried to shoo the girl out of my head by making myself consider the song: It was a big hit in the States a few years ago, but I wondered if beneath their gold hat brims, the boys in the band weren’t thinking about their own Kaiser Willie and how he might waltz us all around one of these days. If I were to write a piece on the German band in the Vera Cruz Plaza de Armas—which was possible if Woody simply were to have his Army settle down to cleaning up the filthy streets of this town and faux-govern a few Mexicans — then I was glad to have found this dandy little kicker for the end of the story. But given the other things of the past half hour or so that were still rattling around in my head, this was cold comfort and no permanent distraction for me. I heard the clang of a bell float in over the music. An electric trolley was coming up the avenida from the south, and now I was actually on the verge of hopping on and heading up a few stops to the red-light district and finding a professional girl.

There were very good reasons not to do this either. So I was glad to have Bunky appear in the nick of time and sit heavily down.

“What’s his story?” I asked.

Bunky shrugged. “Like we said. It’s about money.”