El Paso: A Novel (45 page)

“He is?”

“It’s why I got him.” Mix chuckled. “I figured we got some cold weather coming. You might need him, nights.”

“We could share him, too,” Timmy said. He felt elation welling up; a dog, something of his own out here where he owned nothing but the clothes on his back; something to love him, something he could love and look after.

“We could at that,” Mix said. “We sure could.”

“So, what are you going to call him?” Katherine asked. The dog had now moved to her lap, nuzzling and licking, and she liked the way it was so friendly. It seemed remarkably clean, compared to most dogs she’d seen in Mexico.

“How about Pluto?” Timmy said.

“Pluto’s the Greek god of the underworld,” Katherine informed him.

“Whatever,” said Mix. “Then Pluto it is.”

ABOUT THAT TIME ONE OF THE HOLLYWOOD MOVIE GUYS
showed up in Mix’s camp.

“We’re getting ready to leave,” one of them told Mix, “get all this film back to California. But my boss wanted me to take some film of you Americans that are traveling with Villa’s army. Make a nice play in the newsreels,” he said.

Mix had tried everything under the sun—except asking directly—to get the movie people to take pictures of him from the day they’d arrived. He’d done horse tricks, pistol tricks, and rope tricks, and flashed his eyes and his smile, but they’d only clapped and nodded, and nobody took any moving pictures. Finally, here was the chance. He could see the other movie people bringing their cameras toward him.

“You want me to get my horse?” Mix asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Yeah, why not?” said the movie man. “Might be a nice touch.”

Mix had to stop himself from bounding off to the horse tethers.

“Please tell everybody that we are being kidnapped,” Katherine said to the movie man. “Tell the president and everybody.”

“General Villa says he is just escorting you out of possible danger,” the man replied.

“That’s bullshit,” said Donita Ollas. “He killed the manager of these children’s grandfather’s ranch and kidnapped me. Then he attacked their mother and grandmother and took them, too.”

“It’s not the way he sees it, ma’am,” said the movie man.

“Well, you put me in the movie and I’ll tell them the truth,” Donita said. Staggered by the long weeks on the trail, sunk in a fury of frustration, as if the end of this would never come, she felt a clap of doom, and at the same time the notion that she just didn’t care anymore.

The movie man looked puzzled. “Do whatever you want,” he said.

Mix had returned with his horse and somebody ordered the cameras to roll. He got his horse to rear up and waved his hat. He made the horse lie down so he could dismount. He got the horse to nudge him in the back across the campsite. He flashed teeth and eyes and fired his pistol in the air a few times, frightening the Mexican hairless dog. Presently Bierce, Reed, and Villa wandered into the scene.

“Just to get it straight,” the movie man said, “your name is Reed, Jack Reed—is that a nickname for John?”

“It is,” Reed replied.

“And you are a reporter for the
New York Telegram
?”

“No, the
New York World
—and I’m also covering this for the
Metropolitan
.”

The man squinted for a moment. “Ain’t that one of those socialist magazines?”

“Well, progressive,” Reed equivocated, “if that’s what you mean.”

“All right,” said the man, eyeing Reed suspiciously. “S’pose we get a shot of you talking to the general here. You be writing in a notepad or somethin’, like you’re getting an interview.”

Reed pulled out a pad and began to act. Next the man turned to Bierce.

“And your name’s Jack Robinson—that stand for John, too?”

“No, just Jack,” Bierce said. The cameras continued to roll.

“You a reporter, too?”

“No,” Bierce answered. He shied away from the camera.

“Look over that way,” the man said. “You don’t want your back to be in the movies, do you?”

“I’d prefer it,” Bierce told him. “I don’t want my family to know where I am.”

“You look old enough to me to make your own decisions,” the man said testily.

“I am, and I don’t want to be in the movies.”

Before letting them film, Villa had instructed the movie people not to take pictures of the children or Donita Ollas because, he said, it might upset their relatives. He had declared he was going to turn them all over to the proper authorities, when he found some. But for now, he, Villa, was the proper authority. However, while Reed “interviewed” Pancho Villa, one of the cameramen accidentally swung his lens onto Timmy, Katherine, and Donita, who were standing at the edge of the campfire. He didn’t shoot them long, but it was enough.

When the movie people had finished and were packing up their cameras and equipment, Mix asked the man where and when the films could be seen. He especially wanted to know if they would be shown in Hollywood.

“Hell, feller, we’re with Black’s Movie News of the World. These pictures’ll be shown in movie houses all over the planet—probably in a couple of weeks, providing we can get our asses to where we can catch us a train out of this hellhole.”

Mix’s heart jumped. He didn’t know what Villa had in mind for them next, but he hoped to high heaven it included someplace with a movie theater.

“And you,” the man asked, poised with a pencil and pad, “does Tom stand for Thomas?”

“No,” Mix said, “it stands for Tom.”

FORTY-THREE

T
he days seemed to spin endlessly by as Villa’s troop ascended higher into the mountains, where the air was fragrant and sweet. They rode slowly through giant pine forests and down steep trails into valleys where often there was a rushing river, then up again to the canyon rims, where they could see for miles across the reddish brown ceilings and monstrous escarpments. Days earlier they’d turned northward, and kept in that direction until Reed figured they must be as close to the United States border as they were to Chihuahua City. Late one afternoon, as they reached the rim of one canyon, they saw what they took for an Indian seated on a large rock, a black silhouette against the setting sun. He sat scratching himself and looking around the valley like a thoroughly satisfied owner.

Bierce and Reed had been riding with Villa and Fierro, and Fierro saw the man first.

“That’s strange,” Fierro remarked. “These people usually don’t go around up here alone.”

“He ain’t alone anymore,” Bierce remarked. “Now he’s got
us
to contend with.”

Fierro cut Bierce a slit-eyed glance. This meddlesome old goat was beginning to get on Fierro’s nerves, too.

“An outcast, maybe,” Reed offered. “I read up on these people a little before I left New York. Sometimes they’ll kick one of their own out of the tribe if he doesn’t do right.”

Just then the man rose and climbed off the rock, and to their surprise they saw two other men emerge from behind the rock, leading pack animals. They headed along a thin rocky trail at the rim of the canyon, a trail that would take them straight to Villa’s party if they kept on it. Fierro pulled out a pair of field glasses and studied the men as they plodded along.

“They’re not Indians—not by a stretch,” he announced, his eyes still glued to the binoculars.

“Maybe they’re tourists,” Bierce offered. “Hell of a view from up here. It’s better than the Grand Canyon.”

Fierro put the glasses down and looked at Bierce sourly.

“Señor,” he said, “we have to be suspicious. Whoever they are, if they see us here, they might report it.”

“So what?” Villa interjected. “Report to who? What’s anybody gonna do about it, anyway?”

By this time the man who had been out on the rock had climbed aboard his animal and taken a good lead on the others. Villa might have moved his party along, but he didn’t. He waited patiently until the man was within speaking distance. The man was dressed in soiled white cotton peon’s clothes and arrived on a filthy mule.

“Afternoon,” the man said politely.

“
Buenas tardes
,” Villa replied, noting that he was a gringo. “Are you lost or something?”

“Hardly,” said the man. “My friends and I are making our way back to civilization.”

“And from where did you come?” Villa asked.

“From over there.” He swept his arm to indicate the endless maze of canyons to the west.

“Sounds like you came from over in Sonora,” Villa said. “Those barrancas are a pretty good place to get lost in.”

“Tell me about it,” the man said. By now he had dismounted and was standing in front of Villa’s party. “We got lost several times, but, well, now you have found us.”

“And what am I to do with you?” Villa asked.

“We been eating nothing but beans for three weeks. Maybe you got a change of diet,” he said hopefully.

“You see many Federales over in Sonora?” Villa asked.

“Well, Hermosillo’s the only big town we went through, and we ain’t been there for six months. But there was Federales there then.”

“How many?”

“Thousands, I guess. We didn’t count ’em all.”

“Guns?”

“Yeah, they had a lot parked around town.”

Villa grunted. The other two in the man’s party had arrived by now. One was a grime-faced American and the other was an old white-haired mestizo. They halted some steps away from the man and stood holding their burros and shuffling their feet.

“Well, I guess you need some dinner and we need to make a camp. This looks like as good a place as any,” Villa said finally.

“
Gracias
,” said the man.

“
De nada
,” Villa replied.

They sat around Villa’s campfire as the sun beamed its last pink rays over the measureless expanse of canyons and mountains. The three newcomers greedily devoured freshly cut steaks and, in the firelight, their chins dripping grease, explained why they were there.

“El Dorado,” the man said. He was small in stature, yellowed by what appeared to be jaundice, and had a head bald as a split pea.

“The lost gold mine?” Fierro asked.

“No less,” said the man. He told them how he and his friend had worked their way down to Tampico on a steamer laden with oil-drilling gear, then got a job in the oil fields, and when that played out they bummed around for a while and he’d even wound up writing for an English-language newspaper in Mexico City. There they had met the old mestizo who talked all the time about this lost gold mine of El Dorado in the mountains, and the mestizo claimed to know an Indian whose tribe had worked it way back in the old days a hundred or more years before.

Priests found the Indians mining the gold, the man said, and, after converting them, made them slave in the mine for half a century to bring out gold for the Church. Then one day a party of soldiers were headed up the trail toward the mine and the priests were afraid they would report it and the government would confiscate the gold, and so they made the Indians fill in the mine and smooth out all traces of it, including planting cacti and other things around it, until nobody could ever find it again except them. Then they murdered all the Indians who had worked on it so they couldn’t tell anybody. Before they died, the Indians put a curse on the mine.

The mestizo in Mexico City said he could produce the Indian who was the son of the lone survivor of the killings and knew where the mine was. And since the revolution was starting to heat up again in Mexico City, the four of them, the man, his friend, the mestizo, and the Indian, figured there was nothing to lose and set out from Hermosillo to find the lost gold of El Dorado.

“And did you find it?” Reed asked enthusiastically.

“Hell, no,” the man replied. “We wandered all over those mountains and canyons nearly half a year, and all we found was rocks and bandits and snakes. It was probably all a bunch of horseshit.”

“Might have been the curse,” Bierce remarked. He believed in curses—sometimes.

“And what about the Indian?” Villa asked.

“Dead,” said the man. “He was about to go crazy up there anyway, but one time he got in one of our packs and found a quart of whiskey. Got drunk on it and fell off a cliff.”

“Too bad,” Bierce remarked.

“Yes,” said the man.

“I mean about the whiskey. I imagine you could have put it to better use.”

“And so where are you headed now?” Villa inquired.

“Back to Tampico or Veracruz, I reckon. Maybe the oil fields have opened up again. Otherwise I guess I’ll go to El Paso and then get on home.”

“That’s a hell of a good tale,” Reed interjected. “You said you had been a reporter; maybe you could write a book about it.”

“The hell with it,” said the man, wiping steak grease from his chin with his sleeve. “We didn’t find anything, did we?”