The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler Read Free Book Online

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.
    â€œWhat’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.
    â€œSeñor, 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