El Paso: A Novel (68 page)

“Of course, but we don’t have any place for women. They have special needs.”

“I’m confident I can conform to anything your army requires,” Xenia told him. “I will have my own car and driver.” Then she smiled at Patton and hoped to play on his sympathy.

“If only I can get near him,” she said, “and explain to him personally about the children. I don’t think he would murder a woman.”

“There are worse things than murder,” Patton said. “He told me that himself.”

“All these weeks I’ve been praying our government would enter Mexico and that I would have the chance to go with them and plead my case to General Villa. And now . . .” Tears formed in Xenia’s eyes. She daubed at them with a handkerchief.

“Now, now,” Patton said.

“I just can’t believe you won’t let me come along!” She put her hands to her face and burst into tears.

“Well, please don’t cry, Mrs. Shaughnessy. Let me talk to the general. He recently lost his wife and children in a fire. Perhaps he’ll be willing to listen.”

Xenia was grateful, and so confident that she went back to the hotel to pack. Crosswinds Charlie had described locating Villa and depositing Mick Martin with his army, and that, of course, was as far as his knowledge went. But it had been days ago and no word had come from Mick, though Xenia asked at the hotel telegraph desk several times a day. Either Villa was unwilling to negotiate or the negotiations were taking an exceptionally long time, which did not bode well—there was just so much that could be negotiated. She thought about having Charlie fly her out to Villa’s army, but the word had come that the army had now dispersed, and once more no one knew where Villa was.

FIERRO WAS DELIGHTED TO FIND THAT MICK
actually brought fifty thousand dollars with him. He considered stuffing five thousand or so into his own saddlebags but reconsidered when he remembered that Villa knew the figure Mick had proposed. After all, he still had the gold bars he’d withheld from Colonel Shaughnessy’s estancia. He turned the whole amount over to Villa’s quartermaster and set out to deal with Mick. For this Fierro had a treat in mind.

Fierro enjoyed tormenting people. If the condemned asked to be shot instead of hanged, he hung them. If he learned they were afraid of heights, he threw them off a cliff. If he knew somebody couldn’t swim, it delighted him to dispatch them by drowning. For Mick, who had disparaged the Mexican national emblem, he’d concocted a special surprise.

The evening after Mick’s aborted escape in the truck, Fierro visited him in his holding room in one of the adobe houses in a small village where they had stopped for the day. With him was Crucia, holding a burlap sack, inside of which something seemed to be moving.

“Well, Señor Martin, you are not enjoying your visit with us?”

“Oh, course I am. Who told you that?” Mick asked hesitantly. He looked uneasily at the burlap bag.

“Captain Mix did. Said you complained that General Villa will not deal with you.”

“I did say something like that, but it wasn’t in the nature of a complaint.”

“General Villa didn’t see it that way,” Fierro replied. “He thinks you have been ungrateful for his hospitality.”

“Do you call it hospitality to keep me captive? If the general doesn’t want to negotiate, that’s one thing. But to make me a prisoner is something else. I came in good faith. Why wouldn’t he let me go so I can see if more money can be raised?”

“General Villa negotiates on his own terms,” Fierro told him. “And because your initial offering was so low as to be insulting, he has decided you are unworthy of consideration.”

“What’s that mean?” Mick asked nervously, again eyeing the burlap sack.

“It means that you are to have a trial,” Fierro said, “but not the sort of trial you are used to as an attorney. It’s the type of trial the stinking Spaniards put us through,” he went on, “in the days of the Inquisition. If you survived it, you were presumed innocent and set free. Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?” Mick asked.

Fierro motioned to Crucia, who flung the burlap sack against the wall, and a large rattlesnake plopped out on the dirt floor. It was waving its bloody chopped-off tail, momentarily stunned from being thrown against the wall. Fierro and Crucia made a quick exit, slamming the door shut. The windows had already been boarded up to serve for a jail.

Normally rattlesnakes attacked only when they felt threatened, but the snake was in a wild rage because its tail had been cut off. There was a moment of silent menace as the snake slithered around the room, then came straight for Mick. He leaped up on the sill of a boarded-up window, but as he did, the snake struck his leg and he heard himself scream as the fangs went in. He didn’t know if it would hurt a lot when a snake bit you. It did. It felt like being stabbed by an ice pick. The snake struck again, missed, then it continued working all over the room, stopping every so often to get its bearings. After a few minutes the snake came for Mick again. He felt his heartbeat rising and was dizzy. The snake struck several times and missed; the loss of its tail was apparently throwing the snake off its mark, but it was persistent.

Mick tried to stand up on the window ledge instead of squatting on it, but when he moved the snake struck at him and he lost his balance and fell to the floor. The snake struck at his neck. He grabbed the reptile and flung it against the wall, but it bounced off and came at him again. Mick made for the sill again, but the snake bit him in the back of his leg. He tried kicking it, but it was too quick and got him on the foot. He managed to get up on the windowsill again. The snake remained right below him and every time he even twitched it would launch another strike just beneath his feet. Mick began to feel as though something were squeezing his neck, choking him; he couldn’t seem to get air; stinging perspiration poured into his eyes.

He held on to the windowsill for dear life, trying to clear his head. Damnable luck, to have fallen in with these dreadful people, Mick thought; everybody he knew up to this point, including murderous gangsters—all could be dealt with. They were at least rational. Villa’s people were instead maniacs, he thought. He wondered if Xenia and Arthur would ever find out what had happened to him, and why. He hoped at least for that—that they would one day know why.

Mick began to focus on the tiny dust motes in the air that were illuminated by thin rays of sunshine coming in through cracks in the boards that covered the window. His fingers began to cramp and his vision became blurred. At some point he felt himself falling.

Next morning, Fierro was seated in a chair outside his tent having a cup of coffee in the sunshine when Lieutenant Crucia passed by.

“Say, Crucia, shouldn’t someone go and warn this Señor Martin that there may be a dangerous snake in his quarters?”

“He already knows,” Crucia said.

SIXTY-EIGHT

A
rthur’s party had lagged behind Villa at a respectful distance after they saw that his army had reunited near Agua Prieta. It was frustrating, since there was nothing to do now but hang back and wait.

“What was it like, getting took in by the Colonel after you’d growed up in an orphanage?” Bob asked. It had been on Bob’s mind ever since Arthur had first told him.

“It was a dream come true, I guess,” Arthur told him. “We all dreamed of that.” He, Bob, and Slim were riding across the desert far in front of everyone, following the tracks of some of Villa’s horsemen, who by then had already reached Columbus and staged the raid.

“You guess?” Bob said. “You were living in an orphanage and suddenly you got everything you always wanted, and you still ain’t sure?”

“Pretty much. But I suppose it had its drawbacks,” Arthur said.

“How’s that?”

“For one thing, I was always a little scared it would end, you know? Like a dream.”

“You mean that they’d kick you out?” Slim asked.

“Something like that. It was just always a little thing in the back of your mind.”

“Does the Colonel have his own railroad car?” Bob asked.

“Yes, it’s in El Paso now.”

“I seen pictures of those, but I never been in one.”

“Well, when all this is over I’ll take you both for a ride,” Arthur told them.

“Closest I ever come to anything fancy was when I went to Denver once. I stayed in the Brown Palace. Every single room had its own toilet,” said Bob.

“Why were you there?”

“Went to pick up some stock for a feller from Dallas. He wanted to breed some a them old range mustangs to his thoroughbreds to make polo ponies out of.”

“Did it work?”

“Hell, no,” Bob said. “What they got was stupid, mean, and wild. Last I heard, he’d sold ’em for dog food.”

“You know, I’ve never been to Denver,” Arthur said.

“I can’t go back,” Bob remarked.

“Why’s that?”

“I got in trouble there. A fight.”

“Must’ve been a serious one,” said Slim.

“It was.”

“What was it over?” Arthur asked.

“He was beatin’ up a woman in the hotel room next door. I knocked on the wall, and when it kept on goin’ I busted his door in. He came at me with a shoe and he was kickin’ an’ bitin’ me, and so I grabbed a lamp and hit him with it. I didn’t mean to, but it killed him dead. They throwed me in jail.”

“In Texas they’d’ve probably given you a medal,” Slim remarked.

“In Colorado they liked to gave me a rope.”

“So what did you do?” Arthur asked.

“The guy I was pickin’ up the horses for got me a lawyer and he posted a bail the guy had given him. I was supposed to stay around for the trial, but the feller that was killed turned out to be a senator in the Colorado legislature. And it was his own wife he was beatin’ up. I decided I didn’t like the odds on that one.”

“So you’re a wanted man, huh?” Arthur said.

“Prob’ly. I ain’t seen my picture in no post offices, though, and it’s been fourteen years ago. I hope they forgot about it by now. Took me three years just to earn enough money to pay back the guy from Dallas that posted my bail.”

“Hell with Colorado,” Slim declared, “ain’t nothing there but the Rocky Mountains and the whores of Denver.”

“I’ll second the motion,” said Bob.

“Hey, look there.” Arthur pointed to a big cloud of dust that was moving across the desert away from them to the east.

“That’s a lot of horses or cows or somethin’,” Slim observed.

“That’s Pancho Villa’s army,” Bob said.

Later that afternoon they came into Los Palomas. Bob had scouted it out and found no one there but its residents, from whom he learned that Villa had used it for his headquarters during the raid across the border.

A cantina-keeper finally came out and explained what had happened. Almost everybody had shut themselves up in their houses during Villa’s visit. One man had been executed by a firing squad and another had a snake sicced on him and was lying dead in an adobe hut they had boarded up for a jail. The man said both the dead were Americanos.

They bought some dinner at a filthy hovel that served for the cantina and were sitting around a table drinking warm beer and pondering over what the Mexican had said.

“If he’s crossed over the border, there’s gonna be hell to pay,” Bob said. A piece of meat he was eating was so chewy he pulled it out of his mouth and put it back on his plate. Arthur wondered if he was going to eat it later. It reminded him for some reason of his first Christmas Day at the Colonel and Beatie’s when Mick had spit out the artichoke. Mick, he thought. He suddenly wasn’t hungry anymore.

“I reckon the army will have to do something about it now,” Slim said. “If he’s killed Americans, they can’t just sit by and watch.”

“I wonder who the two were who he killed here,” Bob said. “If he’s started killing Americans, it might pose a problem.”

Arthur knew what Bob was getting at. At least the dead had been grown men. After they’d eaten, they walked out into the street and found the spot where Bierce had been buried. A little wooden cross had been erected on the grave, etched with the name “Jack Robinson.”

“That’s a unlikely name,” Slim remarked.

“These are unlikely times,” Bob replied.

“Say, do you think that the other man might be Strucker?” Arthur asked.

They looked at each other. “I guess we ought to find out,” Arthur told them.

They went back to the cantina and asked the owner where the adobe hut was. He pointed it out to them at the end of town but warned that the snake might still be inside. They walked down to it and Bob pushed open the door. They saw no snake, but Arthur discovered Mick Martin lying on the dirt floor. Mick’s eyes were open and his face was a grimace. There were purple-bruised fang marks all over his face and hands, and his body had turned a pale shade of gray. His arms were folded across his chest and his legs were together, almost as if he’d been laid out in a funeral parlor. Arthur stumbled back outside and was sick, there in the dust of the street. When he was finished, Bob said:

“You reckon we ought to bury him?”

Arthur nodded. Slim and Bob carried Mick up to a little rise covered with the orange flowers shaped like violets. They borrowed a shovel and dug a grave next to Jack Robinson’s. The late December sun was nearly set and threw a burnished hue over the grave site and beyond, so that the desert seemed as if it had been painted in deep oranges and browns set against a sky that was azure-blue. A thin sliver of moon hung in the sky, while Venus shone brilliantly on the eastern horizon. Slim and Bob looked to Arthur to say some words after they had lowered Mick into the ground. After all, even if he and Arthur had hated each other, at least Arthur had known him, while they hadn’t.