The Hot Country Read Online Free PDF Page B

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