Free The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler Page A

music than that, the new jazz, and there were singers, too, singing for the men packed in and drinking hard and getting rowdy, a few of them maybe there for the music but most of them just working up to sex. And not just in the bordellos but in the other places too; no matter if their front-of-the-house business was dancing or drinking or singing, they all had a covey of girls, upstairs or in the back rooms or in your lap ready to take you around the corner to their cribs.
    And Mother had said in her telegram that she was watching over those who could use watching over, and my remembering that remark made me sit up quick here in my bed in Vera Cruz, where I’d just made it rough and good with a Mexican washer girl, and I knew what my mother was talking about. She was talking about the girls upstairs in some mansion in Storyville, and of course she had a soft spot for them. She was an actress, after all. My mother was the finest actress who ever trod the boards, but every church pastor in the country who wanted to mealymouth around the word “whore” declared that the dreaded white slavers were turning girls into “actresses.” The country loved their actresses and in some intense ways admired their actresses, but at the same time most of the country had it in the back of their minds that these women were all, more or less, whores. And wasn’t that contradiction, in its own way, like the contradiction shared by both sex and war?
    And I was lying in my bed in Vera Cruz, but I was also out in the hallway where Mother had put me. I was a kid and she’d kissed me on the forehead and promised that it wouldn’t be too long and this was in a rooming house somewhere near a good theater in a big city, and all through rehearsals she’d had the leading man wrapped around her finger and finally it was their opening night. They were thumping and shouting in there, and I worried now, in Vera Cruz, for her weakness and for how she was afraid of getting old and how she was fighting that. She walked off the stage and maybe she walked into a high-class whorehouse where she sang and she took care of the girls and she felt young. Trust her in this, she’d said in her telegram.
    But I didn’t. I could only think: Sorry, mother of mine. You need to be helped, whether you are able to realize it or not. But I was out doing my job, and so I had no choice but to trust her to get through whatever this was.
    I did, however, rise from the bed in Vera Cruz and go to the rickety desk in the corner. I took Mother’s cable from the drawer. Western Union via New Orleans Central. The main office on St. Charles and Gravier. I could write her a cable care of St. Charles and Gravier, and if I couldn’t tell Western Union how to go find her, maybe she would at least think to come see if I’d sent a reply and she would find it.
    My eyes fell now to the text of her cable, and her comment about playing a “dark role” leaped up at me. This was another of her weaknesses, though it went with her profession: She saw everything she did, even off the stage, as playing a role. Everything was always bigger than life, which made everything not quite real, made everything feel familiar in a professional way, in a way you’d spent your life masterfully controlling. You were just acting, grandly, for the back row of the balcony. Always. And that made most things feel safe. Which was fine if you were just unreasonably scared of the dark. But if there was a real danger, if someone bad had slipped into the darkness of your room and was just out of sight, this weakness of my mother’s could be very dangerous indeed.
    But I needed to make things a little safer for myself now. I always did that by writing words. So I rolled a cable blank into my Corona Portable Number 3, which sat in the center of the desk. I could dash off quick stories by hand in the portales, but my real writing was done with my friend, my pal,