Free The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler

mine and were softly inquiring in a way that told me something I was reluctant to hear, given my recent track record. Reluctant but also eager, I realized, my eagerness likely to quickly prevail.
    â€œYou need your sleep,” I said.
    â€œI have had enough,” she said. “Are your clothes okay?”
    â€œI haven’t examined them yet.”
    â€œI am the one doing your clothes now,” she said.
    â€œI am glad it’s you,” I said. I almost asked her if she owned a pistol—in the spirit of flirting banter—I felt with some confidence now that we were flirting—but I was not sure she knew the whole story of Luisa’s departure, and if she didn’t, this would be the wrong approach altogether.
    â€œI am glad you are glad,” she said and her eyes had not moved from me for even a second, and now she smiled.
    â€œI am glad that you are glad that I am glad,” I said. It was not very original, but it survived the translation into Spanish quite well, it seemed to me.
    â€œI am not like her,” she said.
    And she wasn’t.
    I offered my hand and she took it and she rose and we went to my bed.
    I am aware that I am not a subtle man in these matters. I am far more subtle with words, though I am a man of almost no words in these matters. Something urgent and quickly commenced and not a little brutal-seeming comes over me with a woman who is willing to offer her body, and most of these bodies seem actually to appreciate the urgency and the simplicity and the ersatz violence. Not that I fail to be knocked out with a different sort of feeling by watching, from a few steps away, their eyes moving in sleep or their toes flaring. But to then get much closer to them brings on another, quite different, contradictory mood. And isn’t the stuff of my career a darker variety of this human contradiction? The men across the field in battle were often men we could, in other circumstances, clap upon the shoulder and have a tankard of ale with and sing a drunken song with and in doing so become long-sought pals. But in this circumstance, across the field, all of us on both sides being patriots, we kill them. And they would kill us. Toward the very same people we can, at turns, feel tender and we can feel hurtful. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.
    These are things I know about myself and sometimes think about and they were things I thought about even in the midst of what I was doing with this washer girl. When we were done, she and I, and when my thoughts ceased wandering, I did kiss her sweetly on the lips and I said I hoped she was all right, and she kissed me back and said she was fine. Then she rose and smoothed down her skirt and she went away.
    I too rose, and I put my pants on, but I lay back down on the bed, and I clasped my hands behind my head, and I found myself worrying about my mother. She was singing for rowdies in New Orleans. I had not let myself think past that fact, and now I was wondering which rowdies they might be. She might have been singing in a nightspot in any of several parts of town where the crowd could get rough, in any number of saloons in the French Quarter, for example, but I was suddenly worried that she was singing in Storyville, that she had somehow been drawn into Storyville and her employers were playing on her stage fame, which lingered around her, of course, playing on that and her vanity, and on her liberal attitudes about women and their bodies. For going on two decades, prostitution had been legal from Basin Street to Robertson, from Iberville to St. Louis Street, twenty square blocks just north of the French Quarter, and this place called Storyville, or by the locals “The District,” was packed not just with quick-time cribs but with fancy mansion bordellos and saloons and dance halls and cabarets, all of which featured the very best music, not only in New Orleans but pretty much in the world. They had ragtime, and even newer