TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (11 page)

I listened for the sound of gunfire but heard nothing. Dawn broke as we neared Casas Grandes, pale light streaking across the desert. A few sleepy Indians watched us, crouched in the shelter of some mesquite trees. Their serapes were rags, and they were barefoot. How could they sleep? How did they survive the Chihuahua winter? God only knew.

But when we trotted into Casas Grandes, the battle was over. A haze of thin dust and bitter smoke covered the town. We had taken it. We had won—but I had missed it all!

This is how to survive the revolution, I thought, and come back whole to Hannah Sommerfeld. But it would never make me a captain and a parfit gentil knight.

At seven o’clock we were sitting on some broken cane chairs in the plaza, drinking the last of the tepid coffee we had brought in canteens from Ascensión, letting the rising sun thaw our bones. Julio told us about the battle—bloody but brief. Pancho Villa stood nearby, the back of his rough shirt salty with sweat, listening. His hair was a matted tangle; he was eating an apple and cooking pork skins in a skillet of bubbling brown oil over a drum full of burning corncobs.

Men wandered by, limbs bound in bloodstained bandages, their hollow-eyed horses following. Even as Julio talked you could hear the men recounting their exploits.

“I shot the fool right through the heart!” … “The Holy Virgin protected me, Carlos” … “
Hombre,
the barrel was so hot I couldn’t touch it” …

Villa, Julio and I rode out to a corral to see the prisoners. There were about sixty of them sprawled in the dirt, while Rodolfo Fierro pounded round the enclosure on his big sorrel stud. He punished the horse, but I could see he was a fine rider, erect and at ease, the silver spurs on his heels jingling and flashing in the sunlight. He had fought well in the battle, Julio said; he had led a charge. A group of ten revolutionists lay about cleaning their rifles and drinking tepid beer that had been looted from some shop.

A thin young man named Juan Dozal, with a great flowing mustache over a weak chin, was in command. The sun slanted more strongly now across the desert, casting a misty golden light and deep indigo shadows. This was the loveliest hour of the day, always fresh and reviving with its warmth. Dozal raised a cheer.

“Viva Francisco Villa! Viva el revolución! Viva el muerte!—hurray for death!”

Dark half-moons of fatigue were graven beneath Villa’s eyes as he faced Dozal.

“Have you searched these prisoners?” he asked.

“Yes, chief. Nothing on them but lice.”

So this was the enemy. They didn’t seem very formidable, but then no soldier did without a rifle. I wondered if any of them had been at La Perla—it hardly seemed possible. Some were boys, not yet twenty. Most wore cowhide sandals, and a few smoked hand-rolled cornhusk cigarettes. I saw one beg a real cigarette from a scrawny Villista, a youth his own age, who gave it gladly. “Take it, poor little one,” our fellow said. “Ah, you’re wounded? You can bear it? That’s good. Where are you from? Juárez? No, I’ve never been there. I’m from San Juan Bautista … it’s beautiful there. Cold in winter, yes, but… ah, you’ll never see it … poor little one!”

I turned to Julio. “Why would these men fight for Huerta? How can they try to destroy the revolution?”

“Because they’re stupid, Tomás. Drunk in a cantina, they hear some flannelmouth proclaiming that the government isn’t responsible for their suffering. Diaz was a lover of the people. Huerta is compassionate. Madero was a filthy homosexual. Villa is paid by the gringos. The Church will give them life everlasting.” He snorted. “Give them a jug of
pulque
and they’ll believe anything.”

The sun rose higher, the desert beginning to throb with heat. Julio looked unhappy at his own explanation. “Tomás,” he said, “I was lucky. I went to school for a few years. I got books from the library in El Paso. These people can’t read or write their own names. How can they think clearly? How can they know the revolution is their only hope?”

“They’re your brothers,” I said. “Teach them.”

Julio spat violently. “Did you learn that in Sunday School? There are good brothers and bad brothers. Didn’t Cain kill Abel? The man I call my brother is the one who guards my back.”

Some paces away, Pancho Villa had been thinking, and he turned to Rodolfo Fierro, dismounted now, laying a heavy arm across his butcher’s shoulder. I heard Villa clearly. He wasn’t trying to hide his words.

“Rodolfo, my friend, I’ve realized that we have a problem. It’s obvious that we can’t release these men and let them go south to Chihuahua City, where they’ll be rearmed by Orozco and free to fight again. It’s equally obvious that we can’t make slaves of them, which would mean we were no better than the hacienda owners. And I’m not going into the business of constructing prisons, because we’re going to capture so many men before the revolution’s won that I would need a whole brigade to guard them. So, what do you suggest?”

“With respect, chief,” Fierro answered, “it seems necessary to shoot them.”

“That’s what I thought you’d suggest. Do it, then. Ask Dozal and his men to help. Is there a well nearby?”

“About a hundred yards toward town.”

“Move them near the well before you begin. After they’re shot, dump them in the well.”

I had listened to all this. So it wasn’t only
they
who shot the prisoners. We did it too. Julio had said so, I now remembered. I turned to grab Julio’s arm, but he had walked away toward his horse, and a moment later he swung into the saddle. He believed it was necessary, but he didn’t want to see it.

Before I even knew I would do it, I stood before Pancho Villa. Rodolfo Fierro turned to look at me, almond eyes narrowed with curiosity. The sun had risen farther into a stainless sky, pouring its savage heat across the desert. Sweat slid down my forehead. My heart beat more rapidly.

“Chief … don’t do this.”

Villa stared at me a moment, puzzled. Then he sighed, and his shoulders seemed to sag a little. The heat beat down.

“What do you mean, Tomás?” His voice was level, not unkind.

“It’s inhuman. The Redflaggers and Federals may do it, but why should we?”

He considered a moment more. He still wasn’t angry. He was patient and very serious. Finally he said, “No, it’s a quick death. That’s not inhuman. That’s always preferable.”

His patience made me bold.

“Chief, before you do this, why don’t you ask if any of these men want to join us? Some of them are professional soldiers. They’ve had some training. Others may have fought against their will.”

“That’s true,” he replied. “And I considered it. But they fought so poorly that I decided they’re worse than useless. More important, they bayoneted some of their own officers. That’s disgusting, and it doesn’t give me the feeling that I want such men at my back. Without loyalty, a soldier is an armed animal.”

He turned to Fierro, who waited stolidly. “Shoot them, Rodolfo. I give you the order.”

He mounted his horse, a fine black with a white flag on his forehead, and as soon as he was in the saddle he looked less weary, no longer bowlegged and pigeon-toed; even in his dirty clothes he looked like a chief. His brow puckered and he squinted into the sun, then down at me.

“You spoke your mind, Tomás. I like that. Not many men have the courage to do it. They know I have a nervous trigger finger.”

Courage? I had challenged him, accused him of being inhuman. I hadn’t thought about courage. But then he was gone, trotting off toward the town.

Behind me Fierro beckoned to Juan Dozal.

“Juanito,” I heard him say—cold-blooded as a rattler with a chill— “we’re short of ammunition and this lot isn’t worth sixty bullets. Line them up in ranks of three. I think a bullet fired from five yards will go through three men without much difficulty, if you shoot straight through the heart and don’t hit bone.” Dozal nodded appreciatively.

Then yet another thought occurred to Fierro.

“Juanito, ask them to line themselves up according to height, so that you don’t have a tall man standing in back of a short man, or vice versa. You understand?”

“Yes, señor. So that their hearts are all in a line.”

“Correct. Otherwise you’ll shoot a tall man through the heart, and it will just part the hair of a little fellow in back of him. And the other way round, you’ll hit the tall fellow’s belt buckle.”

That’s how it was done.

The shadows of the morning shortened on the edge of Casas Grandes. The heat increased. The prisoners went off to the well like docile sheep, obligingly lined up as Dozal requested, and then he and Fierro and the squad of revolutionists went down the line and shot them through the hearts.

Fierro was right: the bullets penetrated three men. The boy who had begged the cigarette died silently. The boy who had given him the cigarette pulled the trigger without emotion. At least it was quick.

The bodies were tossed into the well, limp sacks of meat. I wondered about death. A flash of pain, then … nothing. No more regret, hunger or longing. No joy, but no lack of it. Put that way, it was almost acceptable. An indignity in the going, but a necessary one. In that, none of us had a choice.

The buzzards coasted aloft in the brilliant blue sky, wondering how to get at the offering. The sun rose higher, a burning yellow disk.

“You know,” Fierro said to Dozal, “next time we could try to see if it works with four.”

I mounted and turned my horse toward town, toward my friends.

That’s when I might have gone back to Texas and Hannah, separating myself from all this butchery. But a man acts, or doesn’t, for reasons that only get through to his brain a long time after. Scorpions sting. Buzzards eat dead flesh. Men ask, “Why?” I asked, but I had no clear answer.

We used to say of a man up on the Brazos that “he’d do to ride the river with,” which meant he wasn’t the sort to turn tail and scoot for safety when the water was high and frothy and the herd might sweep down on him any moment. That’s the kind of man I wanted to be. I wouldn’t kill prisoners, but I was riding the river with Pancho Villa.

The women in Ascensión beat the laundry with mesquite branches. Children howled, fighting in the dust. The gear we brought back from Columbus had been distributed right away, and it was common to see a Yaqui sprawled in the shade of a tree wearing his breechclout, red socks and an orchid-colored shirt with French cuffs, a Mauser rifle cradled lovingly to his chest. His sombrero was usually decorated with pictures of Francisco Madero and the Virgin of Guadalupe. He may never have picked any grapes in the Lord’s vineyard, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

Villa had set up his headquarters in a small house on the main square. The day after we returned from Casas Grandes he sent for me, and I found him with Rodolfo Fierro and Juan Medina, a bony, frecklefaced ex-Federal colonel. They were poring over some new military maps that Medina had brought from Torreón, where he had deserted. Villa looked dirty but cheerful, and as usual he was reclining on an unmade bed. They were talking about Casas Grandes, and I asked him who he had left in command there. He smiled faintly.

“The buzzards, Tomás.” He took a sip of coffee from a tin mug. “I’ll continue your education. At this stage of the revolution, territory means nothing. What matters is to break the spirit of the enemy, and access to supplies. I will take cities—if I have to, by the dozen—but then I don’t give a damn about them unless they’re on the main railroad lines. The railroad is like the arteries, pumping blood to the body.”

He congratulated me then on what I had accomplished in Columbus. “Hipólito told me you were clever, and you upheld their honor at Doña Margarita’s.” He was especially pleased about the extra cartridges and the second machine gun—”I didn’t say for you to do it, but you thought as if I were standing in your shoes, and that can’t possibly be bad. The red socks and purple shirts are a joke that I don’t entirely appreciate, but I suppose in war one must learn to laugh as well as cry. I’ll deliver the cattle you promised. These Jewish merchants are important to us. It’s a sad truth, but the more we Mexicans kill each other, the richer the gringos will get.”

Then he asked me what they had said about the situation in El Paso. I gave it to him word for word.

“Tell Sommerfeld not to worry. I won’t cross the American border.” He punched a stubby finger at the map on the floor next to his cot. “I’m going to take Torreón, on the railroad. I’ve told you, that’s the first key to the north.”

A woman came out of the back room—young, dark, big-breasted and pretty. She carried a tray full of hot tacos, which she set down on a small table.

“This is my new wife,” Villa informed me, waving a fat hand at her. “I married her yesterday, to celebrate our victory. Her name is Esperanza Rodriguez. Well, now it’s Esperanza Villa Rodriguez. It makes her very happy, to be married. Doesn’t it, my dove? Esperanza, this is Tomás. He is my gringo.”

With hardly a flicker of expression on her walnut face, the woman nodded. But I frowned.

Rodolfo Fierro said, “Chief, don’t forget about the silver.”

Villa told me that while I was gone Fierro had ambushed a mining train and carried off two hundred bars of silver. He wanted me to ride again with Hipólito and twenty men to El Paso, where I would trade the silver for more arms and clothing.

“And no red socks this time. I want army uniforms from the stores at Fort Bliss—thonged hats, cavalry boots and saddle blankets. Sommerfeld can arrange it. And I want more sardines and peanut brittle. Tell them all that I’m going to take Torreón. Spread the word. Let them think I have a big mouth.”

He didn’t have to ask a second time. I was furious that I’d missed out on Casas Grandes, and I wanted to fight, but even more than that I wanted to see Hannah again. The gladness showed on my face, and of course Villa took it for an eagerness to serve.

I was about to go when he motioned me back with a crook of his finger. He was silent a minute, his face puckered and his eyes nearly closed. The woman still stood by the table, while the tacos grew cold. Again I saw the mind that never abandoned anything. He said, “Esperanza, it was thoughtless of me to say that Tomás was my gringo. He didn’t like that. I could see by his face that he was hurt. He can hide nothing, this boy!” Villa smiled gloriously, widening his eyes. “It’s not the easiest thing in the world for me to apologize to someone. But I know when I’m in the wrong, and I’m man enough to admit it. He is my gringo, that’s true. But I also feel toward him like a father toward an illegitimate son.” He smacked his thigh. “When he comes back from Texas, get one of your younger sisters for him. He won’t marry her, as I did you, because one day he’s going to marry Sommerfeld’s fat daughter and become a rich businessman, but he’ll keep her warm when the winter comes.”