The Hot Country

by Robert Olen Butler

  I sat for a moment with my skin prickling away as if we were still flying.

  “Birdman,” I said, “can I ask you a question?”

  “Yup.”

  “Why is it that the absence of brakes was supposed to take away my worry about the absence of a functioning engine?”

  I looked at Birdman. It was hard to read his eyes through his goggles, but I thought that he thought I was pretty stupid to ask this. “Since we got no brakes,” he said, “I have to turn off the engines anyway to stop.”

  “That makes perfect sense,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  I stepped onto the desert floor and I looked toward the trains, and three horsemen with rifles in hand were bearing down on us in a swirl of sand and dust, and now they were upon us and they pulled up and the lead horse reared briefly and settled, and leaping from its back was Tallahassee Slim.

  His landing carried him a few steps toward us and he stopped and he looked at these two men lifting their goggles, and his own eyes went wide. “If this don’t beat all,” he said.

  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, J
efe?”

  “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.