Read Online The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler - Free Book Online Page B

nasty little story with popular appeal that would glide through the censors pretty much untouched, given a developing theme of our boys doing the necessary dirty work of civilization for a semi-savage people. A theme that had its own smell, to tell the truth, but the Army had its message and we had our papers to sell.
    It’s funny how fast you can stop noticing a smell. Even a strong one. This is fortunate for a war correspondent. If you’re in the right places most of the time, it’s a foul-smelling job. There is always something dying or burning or exploding, and there are always newspaper-selling twists to put on stories. So by the time I got to my rooms and closed the door and found my clean laundry on my bed, my nose had calmed down, and I stepped away from my job and this town and the war, and the thought of Luisa came back to me, pretty much instantly, prompted by the American newspaper assumptions about Mexicans—how she’d hate that—but mostly prompted by my pants and shirts lying neatly folded there on my bed. It was like when I first saw her, sassing me in this room, and then a little later. I stepped to the doorway to the courtyard, half expecting to see her lounging once more under the banana tree, having reconsidered her new life, knowing I’d overlook the pistol to my head and welcome her back, even if she wouldn’t jump into bed with me.
    She wasn’t there, of course. But the other two girls were. They were curled on pallets in the shade of the banana tree and they were fast asleep. Slim, sweet-faced girls, their arms bare in their work blouses, their knees tucked invisibly up under their skirts so only their bare feet showed. One of the girls arched her feet, flaring her toes from whatever it was that she was dreaming. I stepped quietly into the courtyard and took a few steps toward them, not wanting to disturb them, just being drawn in a tender way to their vulnerable obliviousness.
    And now I was in a boardinghouse. Where? Providence maybe. Or Boston. It was noon and the sunlight was so bright outside that it illuminated the bed through the lowered, foxed window shade. Mother had a matinee in a couple of hours and she was taking her traditional fifteen-minute “goodly nap,” and perhaps on this afternoon she was playing Kate in Shrew, where the “goodly nap” comes from. Whatever the play, whatever town this was, I watched her lying there on top of the covers, clutching the pillow to her bosom, as she always did, and I was not yet a teen, not yet able even to grow chin-whiskers, but I stood beside her bed on this day for every one of her fifteen minutes of sleep and I watched her dark-stockinged right foot tap briefly in her dream, tap upon the air, though in her dream upon some floor, I thought, and I watched her foot stop and she pressed the pillow tighter against her and her eyes moved beneath her closed lids. I watched her eyes move, as she saw someone or something that I could not. And I felt very close to my mother in that moment, and I felt very distant from her. I felt I could never really know her. Ever.
    The washer girl who flared her toes suddenly opened her eyes. And they widened as she found me looking directly at her. She sat up abruptly, too quickly for having just awakened: Her eyes closed again and she tilted a little to the left, but then she straightened and opened her eyes once more and rubbed them briefly with the knuckles of her forefingers, and she looked at me steadily, clearly.
    â€œI’m sorry, miss,” I said, making my Spanish soft and precise. And I was aware now that I instinctively called these girls “señorita” and not “ muchacha, ” which was the overtly patronizing mode of address that you were expected to use with a washer girl, and I thought how my doing this was something Luisa might have found to my credit.
    â€œIt’s nothing,” this girl before me said. Her eyes stayed fixed on