The Hot Country (4 page)

8

The benches along the path were full of older locals, segregated by sex, some full of men with their sombreros in their laps, others full of women with their
rebozos
gathered no farther than their shoulders, their heads also bare to the cooling twilight. The local boys were mashing from the edges of the band shell as the local girls promenaded before them in their best skirts dyed in colors of the sunset that had just now faded or the Vera Cruz sky at noon, the girls in pairs with their arms around each other's waists, which was more than just girlfriendship. It was a taunting thing directed at the boys as well, which I knew from me looking at the prettiest of them and finding myself envying the arm of her friend.

And there were groups of strolling American Army boys in clean khakis, smart enough not to look at the local baby-dolls too close, briefed well by their officers to behave around the girls' Latin-tempered future husbands. The horny among our boys knew where to go later, a short ride along the trolley line for the professionals. So half a dozen of our boys were gathering as I approached and trying unsuccessfully but loudly to harmonize, “Give my regards to Broadway, remember me to Herald Square.”

I moved around the shell a bit to watch the Germans making music. They all had Kaiser Wilhelm mustaches, thick over the lips with sharp upturns at each end. They all were dressed in white band uniforms with crimson trim and epaulets and brass buttons. The biggest of the musicians was pounding the upright bass drum. The cornets were carrying the tune and the trombones were sliding their sounds in and out, pointing up the melody, and I scanned the faces of these men who might otherwise have been training to fight the French or the Serbs or the Brits or whoever else. As I did, with the faces seeming as similar to each other as soldiers under their gold hat brims, a trim but solid-looking man sitting on the near end of the front row moved his eyes to me. He was blowing an alto horn, its bell bent to point upward. He didn't look away and I nodded at him and he looked forward again.

He seemed to have recognized me. My name was certainly familiar in the American press—and my stories were even syndicated occasionally into German and Spanish—but my face was not familiar. There'd been some magazine photos of me, but only a very few. I wasn't like the celebrity-seeking Davis. He could be recognized on any number of big-city street corners, or perhaps even from a band shell in a plaza in Vera Cruz, Mexico. But not me. Maybe I was wrong about the moment of recognition. Or maybe I just needed that drink. I looked close enough at the guy with the alto horn to find him later if I needed a German for a quote, and I headed back down the path. By the time I got to the
avenida,
the band had finished with George M. Cohan and had started up
La Cucaracha,
though more in the rhythm of a polka than a Mexican folk dance, the two pieces in sequence making up a lunatic music-hall overture for this night and for this half-assed invasion and for international politics in general.

I drifted away, back toward the hotel.

Working the city beat in Chicago as a cub reporter made me very familiar with the street lowlifes, all the grafters and prowlers, the hoisters and heavyweights, the crawlers and the gonifs. Made me never take a step in public without my full attention. So I usually knew when there was somebody else's hand in my pocket. And as soon as I passed out of the light from the bandstand and into a dark stretch of the path, I saw a small, deeply shadowed shape out of the corner of my eye. It slipped very neatly and quietly up to me—if I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have known it was there—and suddenly a hand was in my right front pants pocket.

I clamped the wrist and twisted it out of my pocket and I dragged it and whatever was attached to it into the next splash of lamplight. It turned out to be a round-faced, splay-eared Mexican boy, maybe ten years old, and I was struck by the fact that he hadn't made a sound, though I was sure I'd been hurting his wrist since I grabbed him and he had to be scared about being caught. But his face was as placid as any old man's on a bench in the dark of this
zócalo
.

“What are you trying to do, kid?” I asked, addressing him as
niño,
which is actually closer to “baby” than “kid.” This he winced at.

“Okay,” I said. “Street punk.”
Chulo callejero.

He smiled broadly. “You can let my wrist go,” he said. “You started off wrong, but now I can see you're okay.”

“
I
started off wrong? You had your hand in my pocket.”

“I was just introducing myself.”

“I know a gonif when I meet one,” I said, using the Chicago street word in the middle of the Spanish.

He cocked his head.

“Pickpocket,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “But your wallet's in your other front pocket. If I wanted to steal from you, your wallet and I would be vanished already.” He snapped the fingers on his free hand. “Like that,” he said.

I touched my left front pocket and the wallet was there.

“If you let go, I won't run,” he said.

I looked at this kid. He had something about him. I let him go.

He simply dropped his arm to his side, not rubbing the wrist even once, not showing any weakness. A tough kid.

“You're a big
gringo
newspaperman, yes?”

I gave him a frown.

He read me instantly. “
American
newspaperman.” And he added in English, pointing to himself and then to me, “Even-steven. Because you call me
niño
.”

“We're not even until I pick
your
pocket,” I said, sticking with Spanish.

He laughed.

“You've got me pegged right, about the newspapers,” I said.

“I see you writing cables.” He stepped close to me and very briefly touched my writing hand, almost reverentially. “Page after page,” he said, and he backed away again. “I don't write so much. Well, maybe not at all. Watching you makes me wish I can pick your pocket and steal that from you and run off with it. Knowing how to write.”

“Don't you go to school?”

He laughed a razor-thin laugh and shrugged. “I am a poor boy. I work for a living.”

“Picking pockets.”

“I work for you. Yes? Honest work. I think a big American newspaperman needs some eyes and ears that can sneak around and find things out. I sneak very well.”

“I bet you do.”

As a matter of fact, we all paid locals now and then to find some things out that we couldn't as outsiders. Or to play courier. In the Balkans I had a good man, a Macedonian hardscrabble farmer, who would take my dispatches from the battlefields at Kilkos and Lachanos to the nearest accessible telegraph in Gallikos.

“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.”