I said, “There’s a bunch of you Slims in all this mess, it seems.”
He agreed happily, listing a few. Cheyenne and Silent and San Antonio. Dynamite and Death Valley and Deadeye. He and Birdman Slim had even spent time together with Villa last fall. Birdman was apparently Villa’s one-man aeroplane regiment, having brought his spit-and-baling-wired Wright Model B down to recon and drop homemade bombs for Pancho. The plane got plugged by ground fire over Ojinaga and crashed, but Birdman Slim walked away pretty much unscathed from the wreck and beat it back up to El Paso to lick his wounds. Tallahassee Slim, after some legitimate accomplishments as a cavalry officer in the field, was appointed a major fund-raiser for Villa. He told me this simply, with an ironic shrug, not seeming to feel it was a violation of his insurrecto tradition. But after a stint in this capacity—mostly involving the railways and particularly those trains carrying government bullion or arms but not refusing the personal contributions of private citizens who happened to be on board—Tallahassee Slim had also come north to regroup himself and dally with some white women before heading south again. He and I traded war stories and I got around to complaining about Wilson, who I took to be a lily liver.
“Not exactly,” Tallahassee Slim said, leaning a little across the table and rustling the ammunition strapped to his chest. “At least a lily liver has a straightforward position. This guy isn’t one thing or another. You hear how the man talks? Teddy would put his pistol on the table and call it a pistol. Old Woody sneaks his out and calls it the Bible. He preaches about upholding civilized values, stabilizing governments, giving the Mexicans or the Filipinos or whoever a fine, peaceful, democratic life. Not to mention protecting American interests, which means the oilmen and the railroad men and so forth. And as for the locals, you simply try and persuade the bad old boys who happen to be running a country we’re interested in to retire to the countryside. Problem is, the cojones that got those fellas into power in the first place will never let them walk away. So when it comes down to it, Woody’s going to go to war. Over a chaw of tobacco, too, when it’s time. Mark my words.”
So we drank to Teddy Roosevelt, and I did mark those words. One thing I’d learned filling cable blanks from various tierras caliente for a few years already was to listen to anybody with live ammunition who called himself “Slim.”
And I also lifted my glass that first afternoon in Vera Cruz to Tallahassee Slim. A couple of times. I drank mezcal till it was too hot to stay upright and I decided to follow the example of those who actually lived with the infernal bluster of el Norte and I took a nap.
4
When I got back to my rooms I found my shirts and my dark trousers folded neatly at the foot of my bed, which led me to notice a quiet babble of female voices somewhere nearby.
I stepped out into the courtyard and Luisa and two other señoritas were over under a banana tree, hugging the shade and talking low. So she saw me looking at her and she rose and stepped into the sunlight, crossing to me but taking her time.
“Señor?” she said as she approached. “Your shirts are clean, yes? Your pants are pressed just right?”
Even in the United States of America, when a girl who works in a shop or a beanery or who does laundry, for a good example, gets a little forward, you take it in a different way than you would with a girl of money and fancy family who you meet somewhere official. I’ve had a few blue-blood girls say some pretty cheeky things in my presence in this day and age. But the shirt-washing Señorita Luisa Morales who stood before me, as beautiful as her face was—with maybe even some granddaddy straight from Castile—she was sure no sangre azul, and she was already plenty forward with me, and she didn’t have to get up and come over and ask about my laundry based on me just looking in her direction. So given all this, it was natural to think she was ready to spend some private time together.
I speak pretty good Spanish, but my vocabulary has some gaps. The few things I know to say in this situation I picked up in cantinas and a burdel or two, and though I figured she was ready for the substance of those words, I was not feeling comfortable with the tone of them. She had a thing about her that I wasn’t understanding. So trying to go around another way, I said, “Why don’t you come on in and we check out the crease in my pants.”
She put on a face I couldn’t decode. Then I said, “I speak softly and carry a big stick.”
Maybe Teddy loses something in translation. Or maybe not. She was gone before I could draw another breath. I remembered those big eyes going narrow just before she vanished, an afterimage like the pop of a newsman’s flash.
Right off, I had a surprisingly strong regret at this. Not just the missed opportunity. The whole breakdown. But I still had too much mezcal in me and the afternoon was too hot, and so I took my siesta.
By the time I saw my señorita again, it was two days later, the German ship had arrived, and so had the U.S. Navy. Bunky and I went down to the docks first thing and the German ship was lying to, just inside the breakwater, with the American fleet gathered half a mile farther out. There didn’t seem to be any serious action out there and it was only a few blocks inland to the Plaza de Armas. So I figured I had time to write a dispatch to Clyde.
I took what I’d decided would be my usual table in the portales and even had a couple of beers. Bunky was off on his own with his Kodak snapping what struck him as interesting, and he swung back to me and gave me a nod now and then. He was a former war correspondent himself, a hell of a good one, but he was taking his shots with film these days instead of words, which was a damn shame. Still, he could take a good one.
So we were well into the morning and Bunky had just checked in and was about to go off again when the local Mexican general, a guy named Maass—born a Mex but with German blood and blond, upright hair—marched a battalion’s worth of government troops into the Plaza. I figured it was getting time for the off-loading of the Ypiranga. I was also the object of some nasty looks from a major on horseback as I finished my beer while the locals were discreetly heading for cover.
Bunky and I beat it back down to the docks, and it had already begun. I counted ten whaleboats coming in, full of American Marines, which I later learned were from the Prairie. No sign behind me, up the boulevard, of Maass sending his troops to meet them. I had my notebook and pencil stub in hand and Bunky took off to find his camera angles.
It all went fast and easy for our boys and for me during the next hour or so. The Marines, who numbered about two hundred, were followed by almost the same number of Bluejackets from the Florida, and they brought the admiral’s stars and stripes with them. We took the Custom House without a shot being fired.
I was still waiting for the Mexicans to come down and put up a fight, but there was no sign of them. Meanwhile, a bunch of locals were gathering in the street to watch. A peon in a serape and sombrero called out “Viva Mexico” and threw a rock, and even before the rock clattered to the cobblestoned street twenty yards from a couple of riflemen, he was hightailing it away. The riflemen just gave him a look and the crowd guffawed and it was all turning into a vaudeville skit.
Then a detachment of Marines clad in khaki and wrapped with ammunition started to march through the street along the railway yards. They turned like they were heading for the Plaza. I signaled Bunky and took off after them. They were going down the center of the cobbled street, the zopilotes hop-skipping out of their way and giving them a look over their shoulders like these guys could be lunch. I was hustling hard and gaining on the Marines and they were passing storefronts and balconied houses. Mexicans were strung along the street watching like it was the Fourth of July.
Just as I was about to overtake the captain in charge of the detachment, I saw Luisa. She was up ahead with some other señoritas nearby but she was standing by herself and she was dressed in white and she was standing stiff with her chin lifted just a little. But I had a man’s business to do first. I
was up with the captain and I slowed to his pace and he gave me a quick, suspicious look when I first came up, but then he saw I was American.
“Captain,” I said, and I lifted my arm to point up ahead. “You’ve got about two hundred Mexican soldiers waiting for you in the Plaza.”
He gave me a quick nod of thanks and turned his face to halt his detachment, and at that moment I looked toward Luisa, who was just about even with me but I passed her with my next step and my next, and I slowed down, even as the detachment was coming to a halt, and it registered on me that Luisa had been watching me closely and I felt a good little thing about having her attention but at that moment the gunfire started. The crack of a rifle and another and a double crack and the Marines were all shifting away and I spun around, knowing at once that the rifles were up above, that the Mexicans were on the roofs, and Luisa had her face lifted to see and I leaped forward one stride and another and my arms opened and I caught her up, Luisa Morales, I swept her up in my arms and carried her forward and she was impossibly light and I pressed us both into the alcove of a bakery shop, the smell of corn tortilla all around us.
“Stay down,” I said, and I put my body between the street and her and I realized I’d spoken in English. “They’re firing from the roofs,” I said in Spanish. “Don’t move.”
She didn’t. But she said, “They’re not shooting at me.”
“Anyone can get hit.”
“They’re shooting at you,” she said.
“I’m all right,” I said. “This is old news to me.”
A rifle round flitted past my ear—I could feel the zip of air on me—and it took a bite out of the wall of the alcove. I twisted a little to look into the street—I was missing the action—this was news happening all around me—and as soon as I did, I felt Luisa slip out past me and she was moving quick along the store line, heading away. Another round chunked close in the wall and there was nothing I could do about my spunky señorita and I pressed back into the alcove to stay alive for the afternoon.
5
It wasn’t a bad spot, actually, to watch the skirmish. The Marines did a quick job of sharpshooting the Mexicans, some of them falling to the pavement below and others going down on the roofs or beating a fast retreat.
Then it was over. I stepped out of the alcove. Bunky was coming up from the direction of the docks and he was doing his camera work. I stayed with the Marines while they regrouped and tended to a couple of wounded. The Mexicans on the roofs turned out to be poor shots and the Marine captain thought they weren’t regular troops. Meanwhile a scout came up and said Maass’s men had moved out of the Plaza and off to the west. Later in the day the Mexicans would go over the hills on the western outskirts of town to flank the battalion of Marines in the railway yards and along the Calle de Montesinos by the American Consulate. The boys on the Florida would see what they were doing and break them up with the ship’s guns and Maass and his men would all run away.
But for now the Marines mustered up and marched off toward the Plaza and I crossed onto the wide pavement in the sunlight and sauntered in the same direction. I was starting to shape a lead paragraph in my head. I passed a couple of dead Mexicans. I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies. My business is getting stories. You’re dead, and your story’s over.
Then up ahead I noticed a figure in white. I was very glad to see her. She’d gotten through the bullets okay. I headed for Luisa and she saw me coming. I was still not within talking distance and she said something to the girl next to her and moved off. I stopped. The girl Luisa spoke to looked at me with a blank face and then looked away. I’m not a masher. A little dense sometimes, maybe. I was ready to leave Luisa Morales entirely alone, if that’s what she wanted.
Early the next morning, long before the sunrise, I woke abruptly to the scratch of a match. I turned my face and saw a candlewick flare up and glide to the night table, but before I could quite comprehend it all, the business end of a pistol barrel was resting coldly on my left temple. Floating in the candlelight was Luisa’s face.
“You were working for them,” she said.
“Who?”
“The American invaders.”
I was reluctant to get into a political argument with a laundry girl who had a pistol pointed at my head. I chose my words carefully. “I’m a newsman,” I said.
“I saw you with the American officer, directing him.”
The pistol was getting heavier. If her weapon was cocked and her bearing in on me was unconscious, her tired hand could do something it didn’t necessarily intend. I tried not to think about that. There were some other pressing issues. For one thing, her attitudes weren’t adding up. I needed to talk to her about this, but I had to make the point carefully. I didn’t remind her of her hatred of Mexican priests; they were all I could think of in her culture that might speak against her pulling the trigger. But I brought up the logical next thing.
“I don’t think you’re a supporter of General Huerta,” I said.
“I hate Huerta. Do you take me for a fool?” She nudged my head with the pistol for emphasis.
“No. Of course not. But these Americans. They’re here to help free Mexico of Huerta. That’s all.”
“Did you see who was dead in the streets?” she said.
Lying sweating in my bed, a pistol muzzle to my temple, I was still unable to set aside the impulse to deal in either the literal facts or the political rhetoric that are the goods of my trade. Rhetoric would be dangerous, and I was short on facts. I hadn’t looked closely enough to identify the bodies. I wasn’t saying anything, and I felt an agitation growing in Luisa. I felt it in the faint, nibbly restlessness of the steel against my head.
“Did you see who was dead in the streets?” she said again, very low, nearly a whisper.
“No,” I said.
“Mexicans,” she said. And she cocked the hammer.
My breath caught hard in my chest and I waited. She waited too. Weighing my Americanness, I supposed. Weighing my life. Charting a path for herself.
Then the hammer uncocked and clicked softly back into place. The muzzle drew off my skin. The candle flame vanished in a puff of her breath and I lay very still as she slipped through the dark and out of the room and out of the life she’d left for me.
6
Not that my lead paragraphs over the next couple of days were any different from what they would have been. A handful of cadets and civilians with some fatally big cojones sniped our boys from the Naval Academy near the waterfront and got broadsided into the next life by the five-inch guns of the Chester and the San Francisco. The Marines came ashore and pummeled their way from house to house and secured the city. We had a nifty American flag raising ceremony at the Palacio Municipal and suddenly our fighting boys were all done up in clean dress whites. The local officials refused to come back and govern their city, and Vera Cruz was put under U.S. martial law with us vowing to be benevolent as hell. A 7:30 evening curfew went into effect, but we lifted it within forty-eight hours. And all the while, the Ypiranga just sat out there in the harbor. A German ship full of arms for Mexico with the Kaiser rattling his saber in Europe. I tried to hire a launch and go out to her once things settled down, but the Bluejackets intercepted me before we could even cast off. The Ypiranga was unapproachable, but she was still hanging around, and the other newshounds seemed unconcerned, expecting our Great White Fleet to finally just escort her out to sea and on her way back to the Fatherland. But if we were not going to roughride our way to Mexico City, then she still felt like the best story brewing.
One potential story did come along, however, that got Luisa talking again, low and angry inside my head, even as I eventually wrote it strictly by the standards of a wrongly-assaulted, badly-misunderstood-but-still-proudly-waving Old Glory. It started to shape up soon after the last American refugee train out of Mexico City finally made it to Vera Cru
z, the one safe town in the country for Americans. And there were about five hundred of our countrymen jammed into it, the most visible ones in the capital, the bankers and the major shopkeepers and most of the embassy people. The bankers who weren’t on the train were in jail and the shops had been looted and the embassy had been stoned and torched, and all of Mexico was suddenly united in its hatred for America and Americans. Even our ambassador and his wife snuck into town and ended up comfy in Admiral Mayo’s quarters on the Minnesota.
Not that any of that hatred dared to be openly shown around Vera Cruz. Nothing like an occupying army to straighten things out. Though the local Mexican government boys were lying low, after a couple more days people were free to come and go, and the shops and markets and burdeles reopened pretty quick. The band shell in the Plaza even got back to nightly business with a German band playing American tunes. The well-off Mexican couples returned to the ballrooms at the bigger hotels and they promenaded to the Cuban danzon. I thought about Luisa several more times, but what she taught me grew a little fuzzy. Not that any lesson you learn is simple. The first Mexican president of the revolution, the one before Huerta, a former big landowner, foresaw his revolutionary future in a Ouija board. And the peasants who rose up on his behalf did so because they were convinced Halley’s Comet had been a sign from God to change their government.
And maybe Luisa did affect the idle track of my thoughts once more, near the end of that first week, as I sat at my table in the portales of the Hotel Diligencias. I was facing the zócalo, and I was in nodding distance of Richard Harding Davis, who was sipping a good wine in his evening clothes as the sun was bloodily vanishing beyond the mountains to the west. There was still a bouquet of death in the air from the unclaimed Mexican bodies. A Marine swaggered by with adobe dust on his clothes from pounding down the walls of people’s houses in his search-and-clear frenzy. Though I admired the man, I did find myself being a little critical, thinking that probably going through the doors would have worked for our boys just as well. And I realized that a good many of these leathernecks were hard-ass combat veterans from what William McKinley, Jr., had called our “benevolent assimilation” of the Philippines fifteen years ago. McKinley had the foresight to have no middle name at all, but it did him nada in the end.
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