El Paso: A Novel (34 page)

Villa had little to be cheerful about, with the exception of Fierro’s triumphant return to his camp. The gold the Butcher had brought back could be turned into American dollars for soldiers’ pay and supplies.

Villa sent away most of the cattle Fierro had stolen from Valle del Sol with the main body of troops headed for the state of Coahuila, retaining only a small herd for himself. He was going to the mountains for safety with his headquarters staff and several companies of cavalry until his next plan of action became clear. He was also pleased with the arrival of the Shaughnessy children. Compared with them, the ransom value of Señora Donatella Ollas paled. Villa placed the children in the custody of Tom Mix. As soon as he got a chance, he would compose another note to that stinking old gringo.

At the head of the caravan of Villa’s army rode a young lieutenant, who was the first to encounter Johnny Ollas’s strange party.

“Is this the army of General Villa?” Johnny asked.

“What’s left of it,” replied the lieutenant. Johnny noticed that he was wearing a peculiar necklace. He could not make out what exactly it was made of, but he thought he detected a faint reek in the air.

“Well, we came to join up.”

“You picked a fine time,” said the officer. “What are your skills?”

“We ride. I guess we can shoot, too.”

“Why do you want to join us now?”

“For the glorious revolution,” Johnny Ollas answered. He felt like holding his nose. Johnny was operating on gut instinct now. Joining this army might well be his death warrant, and his brothers’ also. But he couldn’t think of any better way to get close to Donita. Certainly he ran the risk of being recognized, but chances had to be taken. He knew that from the bullring.

“All right,” the lieutenant said. He turned to a sergeant beside him. “See that they are properly enlisted and equipped. Then take them to General Santo’s adjutant. He’ll have to figure out what to do with them.”

The sergeant motioned for Johnny and the others to go with him toward the rear of the column. Gourd Woman hobbled along behind.

“What’s with her?” the sergeant asked.

“We ran into her a few weeks ago out on the llanos,” Johnny told him. “People were saying she’s a witch, but she’s okay. She just makes brooms and peddles them for a living.”

“Why is she following us?” asked the sergeant.

“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her?”

“Hey,” the soldier said, “where do you think you’re going?”

“I been with these guys all over the territory,” Gourd Woman replied. “I guess I can join up in the army with them. They been nice to me. Nobody else is.”

“Well, there’s no law against it,” the sergeant said. “We got some women in this army—but you’re limping. What’s wrong with you?”

“My foot hurts, but I can get around. I came with these men probably two hundred miles, didn’t I?”

“That’s right,” Johnny said. “She did.”

“What are your skills?” the sergeant asked.

“I make brooms and I can cook.”

“Cook?” the soldier said. “Well, maybe you can make yourself useful. This army needs all the men it can get right now.”

JOHN REED WAS FURIOUS.
He had been down among the fighting for two days and felt a tinge of neurasthenia. He was covered with the stains of battle: dirt, sweat, grime. He’d gone in with the troops who’d attacked the day before, and watched as Villa’s men fell back against the resistance of the Federales, who fought house-to-house from windows, corners of houses, rooftops, and doorways, often tossing sticks of dynamite at the revolutionaries, who’d had nothing of the sort to reply with.

“They fought magnificently,” Reed told Bierce, “but were overcome with unfair tactics.”

“Unfair?” Bierce said to him from his perch, in the twilight, atop an empty keg of gunpowder. They were sitting around the campfire of Villa’s headquarters, where they’d yet again finished a dinner of unsatisfying beans and rice. “What kind of tactic was that?”

Reed described the dynamite. “They exploded innocent people’s homes.”

“Well, welcome to war, young man,” Bierce told him. His mind raced back through the years, to the desperate slaughter at Shiloh and Chickamauga, where men ran bayonets through other men’s hearts and heads and thought little or nothing of it. To the ravine full of dead from his own regiment at Shiloh, later eaten by feral pigs, so that their corpses were unrecognizable; and to the body-strewn landscape at Franklin, piled waist-high with the dead, and . . . .

“Yes, well, you tell that to the people who are homeless and starving tonight, Mr. Robinson, that are dead,” Reed countered. “I tell you, it was brutal.”

“But don’t you think if General Villa’s troops had dynamite sticks themselves,” Bierce said, “they would have done the same thing?”

“No, in fact I don’t. These men are fighting
for
the people, not to destroy their homes and families. There were also women and children inside those houses. Some came running out set on fire. It was sheer cruelty.”

“Ask the people of the American South what General Sherman told them,” Bierce answered.

“Sherman didn’t dynamite them out of their residences.”

“No, we merely set fire to their residences,” the old man said serenely. “Believe it or not, they came out all by themselves.”

“At least they were given the chance to escape. These people were burned and exploded alive, I tell you, those were humans, ablaze!”

“It’s a new century,” Bierce answered, “and a new kind of war.”

“If that’s so,” said Reed, “God help us all.” He paused and looked at Bierce with a cold eye. “And God help you for thinking such a thing.”

Bierce disliked this naive young reporter, John Reed—too full of himself and his school-bought notions. Bierce was a pragmatist of the first order. He did not believe in God or people. And he did not believe in fate. So there wasn’t much left, except for himself, and even that was a facade.

For Reed’s part, he didn’t exactly know what to make of this fellow Jack Robinson, except for a vague feeling that he had seen the old coot before. That old men like him couldn’t or wouldn’t understand the notion of civil revolution was a source of constant astonishment and irritation to John Reed, but possibly an object of conversation—maybe even a chance for converting the old man to Marxism.

Just then Villa, Santos, Fierro, and others emerged from the commander’s tent, where they had been conferring. They were all smoking cigars and joined Reed and Bierce around the campfire. The late afternoon sky had turned a sickly yellow gray that faintly stank of gun smoke.

“You fellows get enough to eat?” Villa asked. “I’m sorry we didn’t have time to butcher one of those beefs. But tomorrow we ought to be far enough away from here to have a little rest, huh?”

“Your soldiers fought gallantly,” Reed told the general. “I was there. The brutality of your enemy is appalling.”

“Yes, I know,” replied the general. “I just wish I had thought to supply our people with a lot of dynamite sticks.” He sounded remarkably nonchalant about losing the battle.

Reed looked startled. Okay, so what if Villa would have used the dynamite, too? Reed reasoned. It was used against
him
, wasn’t it? Revolution was revolution, and once you were into it, no cost came too high, he rationalized, since the revolutionaries, if defeated and caught, would be put to death.

“So, General,” Reed asked, “where do you fight again?”

“We’ve just been talking about that,” Villa said. “But I’m afraid if I tell you my plans, I’ll have to keep you here with me for a while.”

“That’s okay with me,” Reed said. “I’d rather file a good story late than file something that doesn’t say anything.”

“And you, Señor Robinson?” Villa said. “You told me you had been a writer, too, at some point.”

“I’m just writing letters to a friend, and so far I ain’t even found anyplace to post them.” This was about true, too. Bierce had quit writing professionally several years before, following the horrendous reception of his
Collected Works
. The critics, waiting with their shovels, had buried him, as he had buried them and ten score of other writers. They had actually made a carnival of it, a unanimous humiliation, prompting Bierce to say to one of his few friends who was still alive and still speaking to him, “My work is finished, and so am I.”

“I’m not filing any stories,” Bierce told Villa.

“Good,” the general said. “Let’s keep it that way. I wouldn’t want to feel I got spies in my camp.”

“So, where from here?” Reed asked, his voice bright and eager.

“The mountains,” Villa replied. “We all need a little rest. Ain’t nobody going to follow us into there—not where I go. Then I’m going to make up a plan to get at one of the Federales’ positions I think I can lick. There are several garrisons up by the border. I’m not going to fight any more big battles unless I have the strength to win them. But I can sure pester a lot of outposts and keep those traitors down in Mexico City guessing where I’m gonna turn up next. I’ll be like a ghost.”

“Yes, that’s it!” Reed said. “I can see that clearly: ‘The Ghost Revolution.’ It’s a wonderful headline.”

“Just make sure nobody sees it before I tell you,” Villa said. “Besides,” he added, “I think I may be more like a horsefly than a ghost—a pesky horsefly that never leaves you alone.”

Bierce sat staring into the low campfire, contemplating Villa’s new strategy and watching the sparks waft up into the yellow-gray sky. He felt his seventy years but took pains not to show it, even though he’d come to Mexico not expecting to return. His two sons were gone, one a suicide, the other from pneumonia, and his wife as well. He’d lost so many friends between death and arguments that he’d thrown his address book away years ago. He sent everything to Miss Christiansen and had her forward letters if necessary.

Bierce, at length, had decided there wasn’t a place for him in America anymore, and ever since the war he’d been living on borrowed time. In his
Devil’s Dictionary
, under the letter
S
, Bierce had offered a definition of suicide: “An excellent solution, too seldom used,” he’d written—and then, years later, his son had broken his heart by killing himself. In any case Bierce himself wasn’t ready to die quite yet; there was interesting stuff happening and he wanted to stay around awhile and see how things turned out.

TOM MIX WAS AT A SEPARATE CAMPFIRE
half a mile away with the hostages. At first he’d been worried about bringing them together lest they conspire to escape, but when he weighed this against the difficulties of trying to keep them apart, he changed his mind. Besides, the children would need a woman of some sort to look after them, and that would give Señora Ollas something to do.

Katherine was shocked and frightened when Timmy told her about their mother and Beatie, but Mix assured her they were all right.

“How do you know?” Katherine demanded.

“I saw them,” Mix said. “They were hurt a little in the car wreck, but they’re fine now.”

“What about Bomba?” Katherine asked.

“That big darkie? The driver? Just winged. He’s all right, too, I guess. But he tried to run down General Fierro and his men with a car.”

Actually, Mix wasn’t sure of anything he was telling them, but justified it on the grounds it was better to keep them happy.

“Why can’t we go home?” Timmy asked.

“Because first General Villa is going to communicate with your grandfather. Shouldn’t take long.”

“It means we’re kidnapped,” Katherine said with raw hostility.

“Kidnapped, yes! That’s exactly what it means,” Donita interjected. “These people are sadists and murderers and kidnappers.” For some reason she felt she could get away with saying such things in the presence of Mix.

“Have we treated you badly?” Mix said.

“No, but it doesn’t mean you won’t. What kind of people kidnap women and children?” Donita demanded.

“Actually, it ain’t my preference,” Mix said uncomfortably, “But right now I just do what I’m told.”