Free The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler Page B

my typewriter. He went to the Balkans with me. Before that he went to Nicaragua with me, when he was brand-new, new to me and new to the world. The marvel of the age, the six-pound Corona 3. With his carriage folding forward over the keyboard, he fit into a case smaller than a bread box. But he took my words and made them real.
    I put my fingertips upon his keys and I would write my mother a cable.
    I didn’t know what to say.
    I knew many things that it would be useless to say. Advice and warnings and cajolings. Many things that she would sniff at or turn from or—if I were in her presence and said them—that would cause her to take a bit of my cheek between her thumb and forefinger and pinch it hard, very hard, even though I was thirty years old. “My Kit,” she would say, “my silly sweet Kit Cobb, mind your own bloody business.”
    My fingertips sat on the keys for a long while until I thought to interpret for her a passage from my namesake. From his Jew of Malta . I wrote:
    Dearest Mother. Though he freely admits to the friar that he hath committed fornication, Barabas, who if he were not a usurer would be a rowdy man, quite easily can say “But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.” Take care you understand your unconventional audience. Love from your Kit

14
    Sundown this same day and I’d filed my corpse-burning story and I’d sent my cable to Mother and I was at my table in the portales taking my first aguardiente slow. I was also wondering if we’d hear from our girl sniper again before the day was done. Bunky showed up and sat. He and I and all the other veteran newsmen had our routines now. Your little routines are a hedge against the madness of the job. But when it’s all routine and no madness, that’s the worst for a war correspondent, when you’re in a faux war and you end up trying to create stories out of something other than real battle that you’re in the middle of, stories without real artillery and real gunfire and the movement of troops and without men dying for causes or for politicians or for both. And yes, without the possibility of your own death right there at your elbow all the while.
    â€œEvening, Pops,” I said.
    â€œThat going to become a habit?” he asked.
    â€œThe aguardiente at sundown?”
    â€œCalling me ‘Pops.’”
    â€œThat was just the second time, I think.”
    Bunky leaned toward me, which was his way of showing he was serious about something. “Twice in two days,” he said. “Three time’s a pattern. Four’s a habit. I thought I’d intervene now, if we were heading there.”
    â€œâ€˜Bunky’ then. Forever.”
    â€œBunky’s good.”
    I found myself with an odd little twist in the stomach. I told myself it was the aguardiente, not this thing about “Pops,” but I took another drink to make sure the feeling went away, and it did.
    â€œYou find out about Davis and the sniper?” I said.
    â€œHe can be sly, but from all I can make out, he didn’t file a story.”
    â€œHe wouldn’t be sly on this one,” I said. “He probably just tucked it away as local color for a magazine feature.”
    So Bunky and I drank for a little while, and I only half listened to his familiar monologue about the way the censors have ruined war, from a newspaper’s point of view, and if the government was going to lie, then the newspapers should also feel free to lie, though I knew Bunky didn’t mean that, and then I wasn’t listening to him at all so I could just drink aguardiente and not worry about a thing for an hour or two.
    Before you knew it, the night had come upon us and the near-full moon was perched on the mountaintops, bloated and yellow, and the German band had been playing beyond the trees for quite a while already. Bunky had fallen silent, the effect of his own drinking. He’d gotten