El Paso: A Novel (69 page)

Arthur stood at the foot of the grave and spoke:

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Amen,” was all he said.

“You want us to make a marker with his name on it like they done for this other feller?” Slim asked.

Arthur shook his head. “It wouldn’t mean anything. He didn’t have any family.”

ONE PIECE OF GOOD NEWS THEY DID LEARN
from the cantina-keeper was that Villa had not gone with his army but had ridden separately back south with a small mounted guard, apparently for the mountains again, but in a more easterly direction. He had only left a few hours earlier, and the Mexican said he saw two children and a woman with him. Arthur decided to wait and let the Colonel and the rest of his party catch up. Arthur, Slim, and Bob would leave at daybreak.

They made a small camp in the desert within sight of Mick Martin’s burial place and sat around a fire waiting for Flipper to bring up the others. Slim and Bob gathered some wood for the fire. After a while, Bob said:

“You don’t mind me asking, Arthur, who was that feller we just buried?”

Arthur stared into the fire and didn’t answer. Pieces of orange ashes were floating skyward, like little fireflies.

“Must’ve been some bad blood between you two,” Slim offered. He wanted to know, too.

“I’ve known him all my life,” Arthur finally answered. “We grew up together in the orphanage.”

“But you wasn’t friends, I take it,” Slim said.

“We were for a long time. Then he invaded my wife’s privacy.”

Bob wasn’t sure what Arthur had meant, but the way he’d said it made Bob think it was something more than reading somebody else’s mail.

Arthur suddenly wanted to blurt it all out, tell them about the rape, about Xenia carrying Mick’s child. All this time he had kept it to himself. He couldn’t tell the Colonel; he couldn’t tell anybody. But for a moment he thought that if he unburdened himself now, the secret would be kept with these two cowboys. In the end, though, he just kept quiet.

“Well, it sounds like he’s got what he deserved, then,” Slim said.

“I wouldn’t have wished that on him,” Arthur said after a pause.

No, Arthur thought, Mick hadn’t deserved to die that way. Arthur would have rather done it himself. At least then there would have been a final understanding between them. He tried not to imagine Mick’s last, terrifying moments, but couldn’t help himself.

“It’s an old Indian torture,” Bob told him. “Cut off a rattler’s tail and he’ll go crazy, bite anything.”

After Arthur left Mick’s death cell, Bob had found the snake twisted onto itself in a corner, bled to death. It looked like it had been biting at pieces of wood. “I heard stories they used to do it as punishment for a man who offended another man’s wife,” Bob said. “Put him in a pit and then throw one of them things down there with him. They say they’d give the man a rock to defend himself, but the snake invariably won.”

Actually, Bob had made up the part of the story about the other man’s wife, thinking it might make Arthur feel better.

“Whatever else, he came here to help me,” Arthur said wearily. “And got killed for it.” Arthur remembered when Mick had come to his defense at Groton. He’d asked nothing for it. He’d done it out of friendship, and then the friendship grew even stronger. Arthur had often told him whatever he had was his.

“He must’ve done somethin’ to piss Villa off bad,” Slim said. “Villa’s a killer, but I’ve never known him to do it without a reason, even if it’s a bad one.”

“Unless he’s just decided to start killing Americans,” Bob told him. “In Villa’s book, that could be reason enough.”

“Let’s hope not,” Arthur said. He knew they couldn’t just keep shadowing Villa forever, and the graves behind them told him negotiation wasn’t going to work, either. Night had come, and Venus was outshining everything in heaven. “Either of you know what day this is?” Arthur asked.

“Yeah, it must be Sunday,” Slim said. “All them Mexican’s was in church.”

“You’re wrong,” Arthur told them. “For what it’s worth, it’s Christmas Eve.”

Arthur went to sleep and dreamed a familiar dream, one of a dark reverie wrought of frustration and visions of killing Pancho Villa. He woke briefly and saw the glowing sparks from the fire wafting into the dark desert night. He slept again, and dreamed again, this time of himself roped to a boulder in the canyon where the bullfight had taken place, and what he heard was his own maddening screams echoing down the endless canyon walls.

JOHN REED WAS NO LONGER WITH VILLA’S ENTOURAGE
. After the Columbus raid and the death of the old man Robinson, he said his good-byes and headed for the border. His heart wasn’t in it anymore, at least not with Villa’s army.

Before he left, he said to Villa, “General, I’m close to home now and I think my work is done. I’d like your permission to move on.”

“Is it because of Señor Robinson?” Villa asked.

“Partly,” he said evasively. “But I think my publishers will want me to start writing my story now. I’ve been out of touch for a long time.”

“Will you write nice things about me?” Villa asked.

“I’ve seen nothing to move me otherwise,” Reed told him, knowing full well that was only partly true.

“What do you suppose is going to happen to us?” Villa asked.

“Why, I don’t know,” Reed said, unprepared for such a question.

“Well, my army has just about evaporated. Carranza has fifty thousand men at his disposal to hunt me down, and I suppose the American army will march on me, too.”

“I don’t understand why you attacked Columbus,” Reed said. “Was it because of Strucker, or because of what the Americans did at Agua Prieta?”

“A little of all that,” Villa replied. “You see, Mexico is a strange place. The things we do don’t always make sense to you Americanos, but that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that they make sense to
us
.”

“And attacking Columbus made sense to you?”

“It did at the time,” Villa told him, with a pithiness that Reed never forgot. “The difference between you and us, Señor Reed, is that you are just playing with all this, and we are living it.”

KATHERINE KNEW WHAT DAY IT WAS.
Christmas morning she presented Tom Mix with a gift she’d been working on.

From some of the worn out clothing she’d won from Villa in the chess matches, Katherine selected four colored squares—blue, red, green, and white—that she stitched together into a neckerchief, which she understood as an ascot. On the white square she’d embroidered “Tom Mix” with red thread.

“Every time you ask me what day it is, I get embarrassed,” Mix complained sheepishly. “Birthdays, Christmases, and I never have any present to give you back.”

Mix was delighted with the neckerchief and put it on then and there.

Afterward, he sneaked off to see Villa.

“Did you know this was Christmas, Chief?”

“Well, what is that to me?” Villa grumbled. He’d been feeling blue about killing Robinson, and about Reed’s leaving, too—and even about Strucker’s bad luck. Worse, last night he believed he’d seen Sanchez’s ghost again, out in the desert. As he was squinting at it just before it disappeared, it seemed for a moment to transform itself into Robinson. He’d had Sanchez hung at Christmastime.

“What I mean,” Mix went on, “is the children. I expect they’ll be missing their mama and papa, and I just thought we might do something for them.”

“Like what?” Villa asked.

“A piñata,”

“A piñata?” Villa asked. “Where in hell would we get a piñata?”

“Make one,” Mix told him. “We’ve got some big water
ollas
in the wagons. We could use one of those for the piñata. And the men, I mean, I guess everybody might put something in it, just a little things, to fill it up. If they wanted to.”

Villa digested this suggestion. “Okay, Capitán Mix, have your piñata. Tell everybody I said so; that might make your gift-collecting a little easier.”

SIXTY-NINE

T
he chilly, open desert felt refreshing to Xenia after being cooped up in El Paso all this time. She’d hired a big convertible Oldsmobile motorcar to accompany Pershing’s expedition into Mexico. The general had been warm and understanding when she went to him after her conversation with Patton. He told her that she must keep out of harm’s way, but that he was confident his army was quite strong enough to protect her.

They were deep into Chihuahua by now, and Xenia was thinking of the children and wondering what, if anything, they were doing for Christmas. She longed for them to all be back home and out of this terrible place, with a blazing fire, a tree, gifts, a fat Christmas turkey, and Katherine singing and playing for them. Of course, for all she knew, they might be on their way to El Paso with Mick at this very moment, but deep down she doubted it.

That afternoon the expedition was following south along the railroad tracks and sending scouting parties to the east and west. When they stopped for a short break, Xenia noticed Patton standing beside his Packard, a polished boot up on the running board as he stared pensively at the sky.

“Are you thinking of home, too, Lieutenant Patton?” Xenia asked.

“No, ma’am, I’m thinking about catching that shameless bandit and punishing him.”

“Doesn’t the army permit you to think about home on Christmas Day?” she asked.

“It does, but I won’t. First, it doesn’t do any good, and second, I don’t want to. It distracts me.”

Just then a rider appeared and galloped up to them. The rider was a staff sergeant.

“Lieutenant, some of our scouts saw a band of men that might be Villa.”

“Where?” Patton cried. “Somebody get the maps out!”

“It’s not too far from here,” the sergeant said. “About eight or ten miles.” He got down from his horse and looked at the maps Patton had ordered spread out on the hood of his Packard.

“You see this road that we’re on?” the sergeant said. “Well, if we take it and turn off down this other road here, there’s this little rise. But there’s a river here, you see. The scouts spotted them on the other side of the river.”

“How many men?”

“They counted about twenty, maybe twenty-five,” the sergeant told him.

“That’s all?”

“Yessir. That’s all they could see. One of them Mexicans we’ve got with us looked through a spyglass and thought he recognized Pancho Villa.”

“Well, let’s get going!” Patton said. “There’s no time for horses, pile everybody into these cars.” He turned to Xenia. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to commandeer your automobile,” he said. “We need all the transportation we can get.”

“As long as I’m in it, as well,” Xenia replied.

“Now, Mrs. Shaughnessy—Xenia,” Patton said. “That wasn’t your agreement with General Pershing. He said to keep you strictly out of harm’s way.”

“I won’t be in harm’s way, Lieutenant Patton,” she told him calmly. “I’ll be with you.”

“Ma’am, please!” But Xenia opened the car door, stepped into the backseat, and sat with arms folded, chin high, looking forward.

“Oh, to hell with it,” Patton muttered. “Some of you men come and get in this automobile.” They started out in a westwardly direction, with Patton riding on the running board and holding on to the windshield. After about five miles they were out of the desert and on some rolling plains where stands of trees began to appear and the land was covered in waving sedge grass.