The Hot Country

by Robert Olen Butler

  “So you’re a good sneak,” I said.

  “The best.” And he held up the wallet from my left front pocket. Which, of course, he’d lifted when he touched my writing hand with his pathetic little poor-boy-wanting-to-better-himself story.

  I grabbed the wallet.

  I did need him or someone like him, I realized. To try to track the one story that felt full of real potential.

  “I want you to watch a ship,” I said.

  “Day and night,” he said.

  “That’s what I need. You’re free to do that?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Your family . . .”

  “I am free,” he said, his voice going hard in a don’t-go-there kind of way.

  “I’ll pay you a silver Liberty Head half-dollar as soon as anything but slops goes over the side or she cranks up her engines or even anything unusual happens on deck.”

  “Each time?”

  “Each time.”

  “Real silver?”

  “Real silver.”

  “Shake,” he said and he extended his hand.

  I just looked at it and said, “If I take that, will you lift my wallet again?”

  “I’m not that good. And I couldn’t even begin to steal the money belt around your waist, under your shirt, just above your pants belt.”

  This kid continued to surprise me. And these were his credentials.

  I took his hand and shook it. “I’m sneaky myself, street punk. You won’t fool me again.”

  “I won’t try.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Diego. And you are Christopher Cobb.”

  “I thought you couldn’t read or write.”

  “They talk about you in the portales. It’s why I chose you.”

  “The Ypiranga is the ship.”

  “I figured,” he said.

  “I won’t need your pickpocket skills,” I said.

  “Whatever you need, I can do it,” he said. And I believed him.

  And he made me sad. I’ve seen plenty of kids like this. This one seemed exceptional and we’d been talking light with each other, and I know how I am, moving through a world of war and human suffering with a kind of sport about it, and maybe you need to do that to keep sane. But a kid like this always brought me back to the tough truths. A kid like this—even an exceptional one with smarts and pluck and ambition and wit—hasn’t got much of a chance in the end. He grows up a thief and dead or a hardscrabble peon and dead or he’s just a kid who works for the outsiders, for the enemy, and ends up a dead kid.

  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.”

  10

  I’d had too much of the aguardiente, of course, and so it took the boy’s actually coming into my room and shaking me by the shoulder to wake me, which I’d instructed him to do.

  “Señor, señor,” he was saying to me as I struggled up from a dream about Mother, who was kneeling on the pavement on the far side of La Parroquía, her head and shoulders shrouded in a rebozo, lifting her bloody hands before her, Señora Macbeth, claiming that it would take but a little water to clear her of this deed. But with the boy’s shaking of my shoulder, she melted, thawed, and resolved herself into a dew, and I snapped fully awake. Even the hot bloat in my head dissipated as I threw on my clothes, and the boy said, “Some small boat is launching from the ship you have me watch.” I grabbed my binoculars and I followed him out the door and into the street and we beat it east on Calle de Benito Juárez, along the northern edge of the zócalo, and we were approaching the docks pretty quick.

  The harbor and the ship weren’t visible yet as we came up on the wide, stone-columned Custom House and, beyond it, the back of the massive, monolithic row of pitch-roofed storehouses along the waterfront. I reached out and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and stopped him.

  He turned to me. There was nearly a full moon, and he was a good boy, Diego, the eyes of his upturned face bright in the moonlight. He was ready to do whatever I needed him for, and not, it seemed to me, just for the money, but for the boy’s sport of it. A good boy, this one. I pulled out his silver half-dollar, and as I gave it to him, I put my forefinger to my lips. He nodded at me, my wee conspirator.

  “Another time I’ll have more for you,” I whispered to him.

  He gave me a second nod and vanished in a flash back up the calle. I turned toward the harbor.

  I figured it was best to stay out of sight: In spite of our military trying hard now to make the city seem as normal as possible, whoever was coming in from the Ypiranga had decided to do it at the most inconspicuous time possible, and they would not give up their story just because a reporter had the enterprise to be waiting for them.

  I circled the Custom House to the right and moved into the dark moon-shadow behind the storehouses. The air was full of their smells—coffee and ginger and the musky smell of uncured tobacco leaf—and I kept on heading south until I reached the building’s edge, at the back end of the Customs Pier. If the party from the Ypiranga was heading north instead, to Pier Four at the train terminal, I’d have to hustle. I came around the corner of the building and moved up slow and easy into clear sight of the harbor and the pier, keeping close to the storehouse wall.

  The Customs Pier stretched a good five hundred yards into the harbor. I lifted my binoculars, a swell pair of German Fernglas 08s I got in the Balkans last summer. It took me a few moments to locate the launch from the Ypiranga, and I was grateful for the moon or they would have gotten by me. Out beyond the pier and off to the left, crossing the broad white field of reflected moonlight, was the silhouette of a four-oar rowboat, sliding dark and quiet. I could barely make out the low hunkering of three figures. I’d seen enough and I stepped back away from view.

  By their angle, they were not heading for the Customs Pier but not for Pier Four either. They were planning to put in at the more-likely-to-be-deserted Fiscal Pier, about a hundred and fifty yards to the north. Two storehouses up the way. I jogged back inland and turned and I made good time behind this storehouse and spanked across the opening and along the back of the second storehouse, and I pulled up at its northern edge. I moved slowly to the corner and looked toward the harbor. No sign of them yet.

  I’d been winging it okay so far, but I needed to figure out my part from this point on. Given their obvious secrecy, if I was going to get a beat on what the boys from the Ypiranga were up to, I needed to do this indirectly, keep my distance and figure it out bit by bit. The shadows were deep between the two storehouses and I had a good view of the whole Fiscal Pier, so I crouched low and waited. Tonight I’d be content to follow them.

  They took their time, but two figures finally appeared halfway down the pier and I put my binoculars on them. The sight of them startled
me. Something seemed to glow there. I lowered my binoculars and cleared my sight and then raised them once more. One of the two figures was small and dark, blending into the night. The other was much taller and bright white. His size and his glow from the moon were still a little unnerving, out of proportion and startlingly visible, especially given this middle-of-the-night secrecy. But it was just a man, dressed in white. I watched as the small, dark one turned and motioned off the side of the pier to someone down below. I assumed one of the three men I first saw was left in the boat and he was returning to the ship.

  These two headed this way, and I eased deeper into the shadows. I tracked their approach up the pier, and as they drew nearer, I could see that the shorter, stouter one was dressed in a pea coat and watch cap. He was probably part of the ship’s crew, and he was hanging back half a step from the other man, in obvious deference. The bag the crewman was carrying no doubt belonged to the important man, who was quite tall and angular and whose suit should not have seemed so odd. He was a German of importance coming to tropical Mexico in a tailored white linen suit and a Panama hat. A German of arrogant importance, given his carriage, and given his white suit when he obviously intended to arrive without being observed. I couldn’t see his face in the dark, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had a monocle and a fencing scar on his cheek. In my 6-power binoculars, the two men were getting close and I suddenly had a little twist of panic. They were heading into the city and they might have been thinking to cut straight between these two storehouses.

  I rose, repressing the impulse to leap and bolt. They were close enough now that quick movement might have been seen, even in the shadows. I backed up as slowly as I could make myself to begin with, and I increased the speed as I got deeper into the shadow. Now I was matching their speed and they were passing between a couple of processing sheds that flanked the back end of the pier, and when they came into the shadows of the storehouses themselves, which they would in just a matter of moments, and when their eyes adjusted to the shadows, they might see me. I looked over my shoulder and I had only a few paces to go, but smooth movement was even more important now and I looked at them again and they were veering off south.