The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler

Author:Robert Olen Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2012-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

32

When the train was moving again and I turned my face to the long, flat run of the Central Plateau that would take us to Mexico City, I found the women in the car at the back of the train lingering in my head. And I thought of Luisa. If she had gone off to do what I suspected she had, she was a soldadera of quite a different sort. I wondered who she actually went to. Zapata in the south? He just didn’t seem much motivated to campaign outside his own state. Or Carranza the alleged thinker? Obregón the tactician? Most likely Pancho Villa. She would be drawn to him for the same reasons I suspected Mensinger and the Germans were drawn to him. He was the boldest rebel of them all, clearly the strongest of them at this point, the one most likely to make a radical change in favor of the vast majority of Mexicans, the poor and disenfranchised. She would go to him.

I realized I was in danger of violating what I’d resolved about staying in the moment, about not looking ahead. Even though this matter of Luisa Morales was simple curiosity; even though I had objectively, analytically assessed her next moves, not mine; even though I had not, in that analysis, ever actually summoned up a full-fledged image of her in my mind; even though I was convinced all of this about what I’d been doing was true, now that I’d come to a conclusion and was ready to set her aside, Luisa Morales slipped quietly into me in quite a different way, as if from the shadows beyond the lamplight in a dark street. She appeared vividly, in the flesh, and she was unarmed and her hair was tumbled about on her shoulders, and she looked me in the eyes, and her eyes were as dark as the barrel of a gun. And then she vanished. And so I found myself refusing to operate in this present moment, on this train between Vera Cruz and Mexico City, and instead I was looking far ahead, to the possibility that Luisa, as well, might be waiting at the end of this trail with Mensinger. And the consequent hot twist in my chest made me feel like an incurable damn fool.

I needed to rid myself of all this. Right now. When Dr. Tejeda Llosa sat down beside me after the lunch stop in Esperanza, he rolled his shoulders a little to silently declare that there was nothing more to be said between us. Which was what I’d hoped to accomplish with my bit of willful rudeness. But at the moment I even considered turning to him and engaging him in conversation. Tell me about your time in America. I am a German with a banker uncle in Torreón and I do something or other and I am from somewhere or other.

I glanced in the old man’s direction. He was dozing, his head nodding forward and then jerking up and then nodding forward again.

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