Had a Good Time, page 9
“Stay down,” I say, and I put my body between the street and her and I realize I’ve spoken in English. “They’re firing from the roofs,” I say in Spanish, “Don’t move.”
She doesn’t. But she says, “They’re not shooting at me.”
“Anyone can get hit.”
“They’re shooting at you,” she says.
“I’m all right,” I say. “This is old news to me.”
A rifle round flits past my ear—I can feel the zip of air on me—and it takes a bite out of the wall of the alcove. I twist a little to look into the street—I’m missing the action—this is news happening all around me—and as soon as I do, I feel Luisa slip out past me and she’s moving quick along the storeline heading away. Another round chunks close in the wall and there’s nothing I can do about my spunky señorita and I press back into the alcove to stay alive for the afternoon.
It isn’t a bad spot, actually, to watch the skirmish. The marines do a quick job of sharpshooting the Mexicans, some of them falling to the pavement below and others going down on the roofs or beating a fast retreat.
Then it’s over. I step out of the alcove. Bunky is coming up from the direction of the docks and he’s doing his camera work. I stay with the marines while they regroup and tend to a couple of wounded. The Mexicans on the roofs turned out to be poor shots and the marine captain thinks they weren’t regular troops. Meanwhile a scout comes up and says Maass’s men have moved out of the Plaza and off to the west. Later in the day the Mexicans will go over the hills on the western outskirts of town to flank the battalion of marines in the railway yards and along Montesinos Street by the American consulate. The boys on the Florida will see what they’re doing and break them up with the ship’s guns and Maass and his men will all run away.
But for now the marines muster up and march off toward the Plaza and I cross onto the wide sidewalk in the sunlight and saunter in the same direction. I’m starting to shape a lead paragraph in my head. I pass a couple of dead Mexicans. I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies. My business is getting stories. You’re dead, and your story’s over.
Then up ahead I notice a figure in white. I’m very glad to see her. She got through the bullets okay. I head for Luisa and she sees me coming. I’m still not in talking distance and she says something to the girl next to her and moves off. I stop. The girl Luisa spoke to looks at me with a blank face and then looks away. I’m not a masher. A little dense sometimes, maybe. I’m ready to leave Luisa Morales entirely alone, if that’s what she wants.
Early the next morning, long before the sunrise, I wake abruptly to the scratch of a match. I turn my face and see a candlewick flare up and glide to the night table, and before I can quite comprehend it all, the business end of a pistol barrel is resting coldly on my left temple. Floating in the candlelight is Luisa’s face.
“You were working for them,” she says.
“Who?”
“The American invaders.”
I’m reluctant to get into a political argument with my laundry girl who has a pistol pointed at my head. I choose my words carefully. “I’m a newsman,” I say.
“I saw you with the American officer, directing him.”
The pistol is getting heavier. If her weapon is cocked and her bearing in on me is unconscious, her tired hand could do something it doesn’t necessarily intend. I try not to think about that. There are some other pressing issues. For one thing, her attitudes aren’t adding up. I need to talk to her about this, but I have to make the point carefully. I don’t remind her of her hatred of Mexican priests—they’re all I can think of in her culture that might speak against her pulling the trigger. But I bring up the logical next thing. “I don’t think you’re a supporter of General Huerta,” I say.
“I hate Huerta. Do you take me for a fool?” She nudges my head with the pistol in emphasis.
“No. Of course not. But these Americans. They’re here to help free Mexico of Huerta. That’s all.”
“Did you see who was dead in the streets?” she says.
Lying sweating in my bed, a pistol muzzle to my temple, I’m still unable to set aside the impulse to deal in either the literal facts or the political rhetoric that are the goods of my trade. Rhetoric would be dangerous, and I’m short of facts. I didn’t look closely enough to identify the bodies. I’m not saying anything, and I feel an agitation growing in Luisa. I feel it in the faint, nibbly restlessness of the steel against my head.
“Did you see who was dead in the streets?” she says again, very low, nearly a whisper.
“No,” I say.
“Mexicans,” she says, and she cocks the hammer.
My breath catches hard in my chest and I wait. She waits too. Weighing my Americanness, I suppose. Weighing my life. Charting a path for herself.
Then the hammer uncocks and clicks softly back into place. The muzzle draws off my skin. The candle flame vanishes in a puff of her breath and I lie very still as she slips through the dark and out of the room and out of the life she’s left for me.
Not that my lead paragraph the next day and the next are any different from what they would have been. The weeks go on and General Huerta resigns and is exiled to Long Island. Venustiano Carranza becomes president. I stay and write more stories and the bandstand in the Plaza goes back into business after a week off. German bands play American tunes. The Mexican couples return to the ballrooms at the bigger hotels and they promenade to the Cuban danzon. Down at the docks the marines willingly restage the taking of the Custom House for the Pathe moving picture cameras. That newsreel plays all over America as an image of the actual event and nobody is any the wiser. Seven months later the U.S. troops leave Vera Cruz with several hundred Mexicans dead. Wilson tries to control Carranza over the next few years. And then he takes us into the European war saying that the world must be made safe for democracy. Not that any lesson you learn is simple. The first Mexican president of the revolution, the one before Huerta, a former big landowner, foresaw his revolutionary future in a Ouija board. And the peasants who rose up on his behalf did so because they were convinced Halley’s Comet had been a sign from God to change their government.
But standing in Clyde Fetter’s office that cold February in 1917,I took a moment to look at the two men dead on the street.Whatever the madness on both sides, they’d died for their country, trying to help some Americans die for theirs. I gave them a little nod. As for Luisa, I suspect she went off to join up with Villa or Zapata or one of the others. She was a swell girl, and to this day, I haven’t stopped wishing I could have done something to make things good for her.
* * *
CROSSED CONTINENTON DARE
Vassar Girl Makes Biplane Ascent After Auto Trip
SAN DIEGO, CAL., AUG. 6—Miss Blanche Scott, of Rochester, a Vassar College student, arrived yesterday in an automobile which she had driven across the continent on a dare. Later in the day she made an ascent with E. M. ; Roehrig in a biplane. Roehrig and Miss Scott were in the air several min- . utes and flew a mile and a quarter.
from page 12 of the New-York Tribune Sunday, August 7,1910
* * *
NO CHORD OF MUSIC
Quanah, Texas Mrs. Frank Jobst
Nov. 29-1906 703 17th Ave. N.
Seattle, Wash.
Hello: Mrs. Jobst—
Don’t this picture recall many pleasant rides over the
Beautiful Drive Way?
No chord of music has yet been found—
To even equal, that sweet sound.
Which to my mind, all else surpasses:
An Auto engine, and its puffing gases.
—By C. M. H.
There was George, off a ways from the automobile, behind the Kodak, and the driver’s seat in front of Esther and me was empty, and it was then that I got the idea. Esther was so pretty in white and so much in love with Frank, who so preferred his horses that he had stayed on our porch in spite of the perfect day. My idea came from that too, I think. From the empty seat, but also from Frank with his arms folded on his chest, sitting on the porch, and Esther in a perfect whirl of guilt about going off with us while her husband sat there like that.
I whispered to Esther as George squinted into the camera’s peephole, “Well, Mrs. Jobst, I have an idea.”
She crossed her arms like it was an answer to me, the poor little dear. She didn’t want to hear it.
“Hush now and hold still,” George said.
Hush now and hold still. Really.
There I sat on an almost spanking-new 1906 Mitchell, model D-4, not two months off the train from Racine, Wisconsin, and its body was still ticking like a clock, calming down after its run from the house, and I was to hush and hold still. I did so, of course. I was hushing and holding still on a perfect September day—we were not, around our house, mentioning it was Labor Day, which belonged to the immigrants and the big city folk, the North for heaven’s sake—but I was keeping my own counsel on that whole subject, with a day off from my own labor, and I was out on a good, hard road—a veritable Drive Way—out among the scrub cedar and shin-nery oak, and the North Texas plains rolled away as far you could see, and I was corseted and dressed in black and I was on a backseat holding still. I cocked my head at George and wondered what was coming over me. The shutter clicked on the camera and George lifted his face and smiled and said, “Now there are three fine ladies.” The Mitchell being the third.
And we veritably flew home. I was breathless. George was hulking on the seat before me, holding the wheel straight and true and working the throttle and the spark and the change-speed lever as needed—I’d been watching all this very carefully the dozen times we’d taken a run on the auto—and I patted Esther on the arm and nodded at her and winked. She smiled back and turned her face at once into the rush of the air and the smell of the earth and she closed her eyes and I knew she was as thrilled as I. I would have to touch that special feeling that was happening in her. My plan was intended for two women. I could not do it alone, though I wished I had it in me to be truly bold.
That evening Esther and I helped Mrs. Grant layout the dinner and I’d still not had a chance to present the idea to her. The men were leaning toward each other over the table, going on about the horse auction tomorrow. George Junior was there with them, his fifteen-year-old brain working full steam, studying up what it was like to be a man across a dinner table, and his hands were fiddling ceaselessly with the silverware from the excitement of going along. After Esther and I had insinuated the bowls of new potatoes and fried chicken and snap beans in front of our husbands, barely able to press these jammering men back out of the way—I was inclined to float the gravy boat along in just such a way that George would dip his lapels in it, but I’d had that inclination before in these circumstances and I’d never done it, nor did I do it now—so after we’d put all the food on the table and sat down ourselves, Esther and I, they finally sat back in their chairs, these two men. George Junior had said thanks for putting the food out, but that impulse would soon pass.
George the Elder didn’t even bother to look at me. He launched right into the prayer, and he blessed not only the food but the quest for horses tomorrow. I caught Esther peeking over her tented, prayerful hands as George went on and on to God about the horses and I gave her a wink—a regular l’ve-got-a-secret-plan wink—and this time she lifted one eyebrow ever so slightly. She’d only been married to Frank for a year and she was young and she hadn’t started in with children yet, but she had spirit, my young friend Esther, and I was sure I hadn’t misjudged her. I smiled at her over our praying hands and George said “Amen” and then we all ate in absolute silence. George likes silence at his dinner table during the eating part, though he did give at least two separate winks to Frank which spoke loudly of their plans for the morrow. Just fine by me.
Finally, with the men smoking on the porch and the man-to-be outside with the horses and with the table all cleared, I sat Esther down in the parlor and said to her, “Now listen, Mrs. Jobst, you and me need to have a little adventure of our own.”
“It’s an adventure merely to return to Texas, Mrs. Hunt,” she said.
“Yes?” I said, not divining her tone, exactly. “And has your new state of Washington chilled all the spunk out of you, dear?”
She rainbowed her face to the window, that is to say, describing a perfect arc and showing a little color. “Perhaps so,” she said. “Life takes its natural shape, doesn’t it?”
To be honest, I had no straight answer for that. It was a new century, but a lot of past centuries tended to be alike in certain ways. I sat back in my chair and plopped my hands on my knees. I sighed a heavy sigh and took the opposite tack.I said, “Well, as the poet so eloquently put it, ‘To give thy life to him you wed / Means glory, dear, when you are dead.’“
“Who said a confounded thing like that?”
“I believe that was the esteemed Clara Lauer Baldwin.”
“What’s your plan?”
“That’s my Esther,” I said. “Tomorrow we will go for a ride in the auto. Just you and I.”
Esther drew in a sharp, quick breath. I understood that to mean yes.
Our ranch is very near the town of Quanah in Hardeman County in the great state of Texas. The town is named after Quanah Parker, who was the last chief of the Comanche on the Staked Plains, bringing his tribe into the white man’s reservation only after a protracted struggle. Then—what do you ever know?—he turned around and became a big advocate among his people for assimilation with the white folks he’d fought so hard. He himself raised some cattle the white man’s way and he invested in the Quanah, Acme & Pacific Railroad and became a wealthy man. He built himself a twenty-two-room Queen Anne up in Lawton, Oklahoma, where he lives to this day, and he’s even a good hunting buddy of Theodore Roosevelt, though they say he still eats peyote and it’s definitely known that he kept his seven wives. But just look at his mama, if you want to understand. She was a white girl named Cynthia Ann Parker who’d been kidnapped as a nine-year-old by the Comanche in a raid on Parker’s Fort. This was in 1836. Five years later all the other captives of that raid had been returned to their families, but she decided she wanted to stay with the Comanche, and she did. She later took an Indian husband and she had three children by him, including Quanah.
This is relevant because I had my eye on the Medicine Mounds, which were south of town. I could have been thinking about going north to the Red River, which was the direction we most usually went, the Drive Way being very nice the whole distance, but I wanted to take the auto to the Mounds, which were four cone-shaped hills all in a row that the Comanche thought could work good and powerful medicine. It was also the place where Cynthia Ann Parker—to her everlasting regret—was recaptured by white folks when she was thirty-three years old.
So when George and Frank and my son went off in the buggy to the auction and I’d dispatched Mrs. Grant and her husband to do some errands in town, Esther and I went out to the barn and stood before the auto. Our Mitchell was heavy and swarthy and had a broad flat nose of a radiator and its front fenders were angled up like two great eyebrows registering surprise to see me. George was unquestionably wrong. Mitchell was not a lady. Mitchell was a man.
“Oh, Catherine,” Esther said, “are you sure you know how?”
Until she asked the question, the answer would have been yes. But upon hearing these words, my chest knotted up like it was my wedding night and I’d just put up my hair and pinned it and I was ready to turn to my new husband. Certainly I knew how to do this better than I’d known how to do that. But did I, in fact, know enough? I didn’t have an answer.
So I replied to Esther, “Of course I’m sure.”
I motioned her to take a seat, which she promptly did. She sat on the first of the two rows of touring seats behind the single driver’s chair. I stepped up and slid in behind the wheel, which I grasped in my two hands.
“Don’t you have to crank it?” Esther asked.
“Yes, dear, but first I’m just getting acquainted.” I squeezed the wheel hard and took a deep breath and then I began to do all that I’d carefully observed George do. I grasped the standing change-speed lever and moved it to the second notch, which was the neutral position. I pulled the other stand-up lever back, thus engaging the emergency brake. The levers felt solid in my hand and yet they yielded at once to my touch. I was gaining confidence. I pressed in the clutch pedal and locked it in place and I found the spark lever, marked s on the inside of the steering wheel. I moved it to a spot about an inch from the forward end of the metal ring through which it slid. Then I moved the T lever, the throttle, about halfway along its metal ring.
“Ready,” I said.
I climbed down and circled our Mitchell to face him head on. I drew near and I wanted to say some sweet, encouraging thing to him, but I couldn’t find the right words. Below me was his crank and his spark was already going and his fuel was flowing and I had to act. I leaned down and took the crank in my hand and it was loose there and cool to the touch. I lifted it slightly and slipped it back a bit and I could feel it fit the grooves or whatever it was inside that would send his flywheel spinning. I’d heard George speak of the danger at this moment. He knew men whose wrists were broken or their shoulders separated by back kicks when they cranked. It was too much spark, he’d said. I thought of that particular lever setting again. It was the best I could do. So I said, low, to my sweet young Mitchell, “Be good now.”
