Mac thought the trip would never end. He bought peppery food and lukewarm beer from old Indian women at stations, tried to drink pulque and to carry on conversations with his fellowpassengers. At last they passed Queretaro and the train began going fast down long grades in the cold bright air. Then the peaks of the great volcanos began to take shape in the blue beyond endless crisscrosspatterned fields of century-plants and suddenly the train was rattling between garden walls, through feathery trees. It came to a stop with a clang of couplings: Mexico City.
Mac felt lost wandering round the bright streets among the lowvoiced crowds, the men all dressed in white and the women all in black or dark blue. The streets were dusty and sunny and quiet. There were stores open and cabs and trolleycars and polished limousines. Mac was worried. He only had two dollars. He’d been on the train so long he’d forgotten what he intended to do when he reached his destination. He wanted clean clothes and a bath. When he’d wandered round a good deal he saw a place marked “American Bar.” His legs were tired. He sat down at a table. A waiter came over and asked him in English what he wanted. He couldn’t think of anything else so he ordered a whisky. He drank the whisky and sat there with his head in his hands. At the bar were a lot of Americans and a couple of Mexicans in tengallon hats rolling dice for drinks. Mac ordered another whisky. A beefy redeyed man in a rumpled khaki shirt was roaming uneasily about the bar. His eye lit on Mac and he sat down at his table. “Mind if I set here awhile, pardner?” he asked. “Those sonsobitches too damn noisy. Here, sombrero… wheresat damn waiter? Gimme a glassbeer. Well, I got the old woman an’ the kids off today… When are you pullin’ out?”
“Why, I just pulled in,” said Mac.
“The hell you say… This ain’t no place for a white man… These bandits’ll be on the town any day… It’ll be horrible, I tell you. There won’t be a white man left alive… I’ll get some of ’em before they croak me, though… By God, I can account for twentyfive of ’em, no, twentyfour.” He pulled a Colt out of his back pocket, emptied the chamber into his hand and started counting the cartridges, “Eight,” then he started going through his pockets and ranged the cartridges in a row on the deal table. There were only twenty. “Some sonvabitch robbed me.” A tall lanky man came over from the bar and put his hand on the redeyed man’s shoulder. “Eustace, you’d better put that away till we need it… You know what to do, don’t you?” he turned to Mac; “as soon as the shooting begins all American citizens concentrate at the embassy. There we’ll sell our lives to the last man.” Somebody yelled from the bar, “Hey, big boy, have another round,” and the tall man went back to the bar.
“You fellers seem to expect trouble,” said Mac.
“Trouble — my God! You don’t know this country. Did you just come in?”
“Blew in from Juarez just now.”
“You can’t have. Railroad’s all tore up at Queretaro.”
“Well, they musta got it fixed,” said Mac. “Say, what do they say round here about Zapata?”
“My God, he’s the bloodthirstiest villain of the lot… They roasted a feller was foreman of a sugar mill down in Morelos on a slow fire and raped his wife and daughters right before his eyes… My God, pardner, you don’t know what kind of country this is! Do you know what we ought to do… d’you know what we’d do if we had a man in the White House instead of a yellowbellied potatomouthed reformer? We’d get up an army of a hundred thousand men and clean this place up… It’s a hell of a fine country but there’s not one of these damn greasers worth the powder and shot to shoot ’em… smoke ’em out like vermin, that’s what I say… Every mother’s sonvabitch of ’em’s a Zapata under the skin.”
“What business are you in?”
“I’m an oil prospector, and I’ve been in this lousy hole fifteen years and I’m through. I’d have gotten out on the train to Vera Cruz today only I have some claims to settle up an’ my furniture to sell… You can’t tell when they’ll cut the railroad and then we won’t be able to get out and President Wilson’ll let us be shot down right here like rats in a trap… If the American public realized conditions down here… My God, we’re the laughing stock of all the other nations… What’s your line o’ work, pardner?”
“Printer… linotype operator.”
“Looking for a job?”
Mac had brought out a dollar to pay for his drinks. “I guess I’ll have to,” he said. “That’s my last dollar but one.” “Why don’t you go round to The Mexican Herald? They’re always needin’ English language printers… They can’t keep anybody down here… Ain’t fit for a white man down here no more… Look here, pardner, that drink’s on me.”
“Well, we’ll have another then, on me.”
“The fat’s in the fire in this country now, pardner… everything’s gone to hell… might as well have a drink while we can.”
That evening, after he’d eaten some supper in a little American lunchroom, Mac walked round the alameda to get the whisky out of his head before going up to The Mexican Herald to see if he could get a job. It would only be for a couple of weeks, he told himself, till he could get wise to the lay of the land. The tall trees on the alameda and the white statues and the fountains and the welldressed couples strolling round in the gloaming and the cabs clattering over the cobbles looked quiet enough, and the row of stonyeyed Indian women selling fruit and nuts and pink and yellow and green candies in booths along the curb. Mac decided that the man he’d talked to in the bar had been stringing him along because he was a tenderfoot.
He got a job all right at The Mexican Herald at thirty mex dollars a week, but round the printing plant everybody talked just like the man in the bar. That night an old Polish American who was a proofreader there took him round to a small hotel to get him a flop and lent him a couple of cartwheels till payday. “You get your wages in advance as much as you can,” said the old Pole, “one of these days there will be revolution and then goodby Mexican Herald… unless Wilson makes intervention mighty quick.” “Sounds all right to me; I want to see the social revolution,” said Mac. The old Pole laid his finger along his nose and shook his head in a peculiar way and left him.
When Mac woke up in the morning he was in a small room calsomined bright yellow. The furniture was painted blue and there were red curtains in the window. Between the curtains the long shutters were barred with vivid violet sunlight that cut a warm path across the bedclothes. A canary was singing somewhere and he could hear the flap pat flap pat of a woman making tortillas. He got up and threw open the shutters. The sky was cloudless above the redtile roofs. The street was empty and full of sunlight. He filled his lungs with cool thin air and felt the sun burning his face and arms and neck as he stood there. It must be early. He went back to bed and fell asleep again.
When Wilson ordered the Americans out of Mexico several months later Mac was settled in a little apartment in the Plaza del Carmen with a girl named Concha and two white Persian cats. Concha had been a stenographer and interpreter with an American firm and had been the mistress of an oilman for three years so she spoke pretty good English. The oilman had jumped on the train for Vera Cruz in the panic at the time of the flight of Huerta, leaving Concha high and dry. She had taken a fancy to Mac from the moment she had first seen him going into the postoffice. She made him very comfortable, and when he talked to her about going out to join Zapata, she only laughed and said peons were ignorant savages and fit only to be ruled with the whip. Her mother, an old woman with a black shawl perpetually over her head, came to cook for them and Mac began to like Mexican food, turkey with thick chocolate brown sauce and encheladas with cheese. The cats were named Porfirio and Venustiano and always slept on the foot of their bed. Concha was very thrifty and made Mac’s pay go much further than he could and never complained when he went out batting round town and came home late and with a headache from drinking tequila. Instead of trying to get on the crowded trains to Vera Cruz, Mac took a little money he had saved up and bought up the office furniture that wildeyed American businessmen were selling out for anything they could get for it. He had it piled in the courtyard back of the house where they lived. Buying it had been Concha’s idea in the first place and he used to tease her about how they’d ever get rid of it again, but she’d nod her head and say, “Wait a minute.”