TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (14 page)

Of course, Candelario and the others knew I had been partying—they had trooped in during the night and immediately sniffed the aroma floating from my room—and when I ushered Carmelita out the door and appeared in the kitchen wearing my skivvies, bedraggled and scowling, they howled with laughter and wouldn’t stop sticking their knives into me. Candelario kept pounding the table and winking at me with his one good eye. I suppose he assumed that the barriers had now fallen to my reunion with the French whores.

But Yvette didn’t say a word. Sitting on a rickety chair and eating a hardboiled egg, she glanced at me for a moment with a wounded expression, then tossed her hair proudly and turned away … What could I say?
It wasn’t me, Yvette. You know I’d never be unfaithful to Hannah. It was that mean critter who hangs out down there in my pants …

I didn’t say that to her, but I couldn’t stay completely silent. I drew her outside into the shade and told her that Carmelita had been a gift from Pancho Villa, an obligation I couldn’t easily refuse. But the words sounded hollow even as I spoke them.

“You must do what you have to do,
mon chéri,”
Yvette said coolly.

I took a straighter tack. “I didn’t have to. I could have made up some excuse. I was wrong, and I feel rotten about it.”

She sensed the truth of my distress, and her hand touched me gently on the cheek.
“Tu es jeune,”
she murmured, telling me that I was young, and I didn’t understand, except that I knew in some way I was forgiven.

After that we were always friends, and it stood me well, for one day, with a casual word, she and her sister would save my life. But that was far in the future, not to be foreseen …

I bolted down some cold frijoles and lukewarm black coffee, muttered some unfriendly words to Candelario and the others, then stomped out of there and headed for the lake. I needed to cool down. All fucking and no fighting made for a hell of a peculiar revolution.

A hot morning sun baked the surface of the lake. Horses had been watered and now they boiled up the dust as they trotted out to be grazed. Goats cried out to be milked. Thousands of people camped by the lake, spreading like a squirming human stain along the shore. New men drifted constantly into the camp, and most found it unthinkable to travel without their families.

How would this army move?

Villa had better know. I was worried about other things, such as the fragile state of my apparently corrupt soul. It wasn’t much past eight o’clock and the sun was already frying my brains, so I wandered a bit past the jungle of makeshift tents and twig fires, peeled off my clothes and dove into the blue-green water. It was a little soapy, but nicely cool. I splashed about, tired, out of sorts, annoyed with myself, and at the same time, like a rutting hog, dumbly content. I left the lake about fifty yards down from where I had jumped in, swimming the Australian crawl as fast as I could, so that when I grabbed the overhanging limb of a dead jacaranda tree near the shore and hauled myself out of the slime that collected on the bottom, I was winded and puffing. I heard a hiss

“Who…?” I croaked.

I wasn’t alone.

A girl crouched there under the jacaranda tree, wearing a drab brown dress so that she blended in with the earth, which is why I had failed to see her in the first place. As I heaved myself up, buck naked, she clapped a thin hand to her mouth. I just shrugged— none of the women around the camp paid the slightest attention to a naked man swimming. As the Mexicans said, a man has two peckers, one for fucking and one for pissing, and women could look at your pissing pecker without even blinking. Your fucking pecker, of course, either turned their eyes dewy or gave them the right to whack it with a broomstick. What I had brought up with me from the lake was certainly my pissing pecker. But when this young girl saw it she collapsed in the dirt.

“Please, señor! For the love of Jesus, don’t!”

I didn’t think she could have been more than sixteen. I could have waved gallantly and gone back to my clothes farther down the shoreline, but somehow I wanted to assure this frightened child that she wasn’t in any danger, that I wasn’t a mad gringo rapist risen from the depths of Lake Ascensión. And, I thought, if I take just one more step in any direction, she might decide to scream after all, and a brother or father might come on the dead run whirling his machete, which I don’t need. So I stayed put, up to my knees in the cool shallow water.

“Señorita, I’m not going to do anything bad to you. The fact is. I’ve just got out of bed with someone else. It was a long night. We did it three times, whether you believe that or not, and I couldn’t do it again now even if I wanted to. Which I don’t.”

She was a cocoa-colored girl, far more Indian than white, and when she raised her face I saw that she had long black hair, dark-chocolate eyes, high cheekbones and a mouth that was too wide for her face. She was pretty enough, but not beautiful, although such judgments, I’ve learned, are subjective and always open to change. I also noted that her eyes were red from crying, her cheeks streaked with tears. Her hair was powdered with dust and tangled as if she had been rolling in the mud like an animal. Her brown sack of a dress was ripped down one shoulder. I felt sorry for her. She had a problem, but I didn’t know its nature.

“Listen,
muchacha,
I’m going down the shore and get my clothes, and then I’ll be right back. If you run away, I’ll come after you. I’m no damned Sonora bandit. I’m the gringo captain on Villa’s personal staff. So you stay put. And don’t worry.” I finished more kindly. “I just want to help you.”

The girl barely breathed.
“Sí, mi capitán.
…”

“And you can get up off your knees. This ain’t church, and I’m not God. I’ll be right back, you hear?”

When I reached my clothes I couldn’t see her through the mess of scrub, so I jumped into my Levi’s and stuffed myself into my shirt on the way back, arms waving like a windmill in a tornado. She was obediently waiting for me, sitting with her back against the dead jacaranda tree, legs splayed out in the dirt. Her head was bowed forlornly.

I settled down beside her on my haunches. “Come on, now. Whatever it is, it’ll turn out all right. And I won’t do anything to you, on the honor of my mother.” This was the most serious vow you could make among Mexicans, and for the moment it seemed to win her over.

“Aieee!
Help me, señor … .” She keened the words, raising her dusty head. “There is a man,” she whimpered.

Well, there almost always is.

“A boyfriend? A lover? You had a fight and he beat you up, is that it? Did he leave you for someone else?”

“No,
mi capitán.
A man here in the camp. I hardly know him.”

I was already regretting I had come up with that windy about being a captain on Villa’s personal staff, but I was stuck with it and I’d worry about that part later. I just didn’t want Villa to find out about it, particularly after his having faced me down for my tale of Joe Lane and the bullet dead center in the cartridge.

“What’s your name, girl?”

“Rosa Navarro de Guaycavo,” she said formally. “At your orders,
mi capitán. “

I told her my name was Tomás and she could call me that.

“Yes, Captain Tomás.”

“No. Just Tomás.”

“Yes, mi capitán. “

“All right,” I sighed, “if you insist. Now, what’s the problem?”

Tears leaked out again. Hadn’t anyone ever been kind to her before?

“Señor, I am from a pueblo called Tomochic, which you may never have heard of, but it is to the south. In the high sierra. We are Tarahumara. That is a tribe of Indians, very old. My father was a Mexican, an officer in the
rurales.
He left us many years ago. You know the Tarahumara?”

I admitted that I didn’t.

“It’s of no consequence. For the last year I have lived in the city of Casas Grandes with my husband—”

“Your husband?” I couldn’t hide my astonishment. “Good God, how old are you?”

“Fourteen, mi capitán. “

Fourteen, and married already. That was the Mexican way. I shook my head sadly. “You have kids?”

“No, señor. I must be barren, for we tried.”

“Well … go on.”

“My husband was from the city of Camargo, and older than I by two years. He was not Tarahumara. About a month ago he was transferred to Corralitos, to guard the railway switches there. So that we counted ourselves fortunate when we heard what happened to the men in Casas Grandes.”

Word about the prisoners had spread quickly, and I saw her point.

“Yesterday afternoon,” she said, “the Villistas came to Corralitos— it’s a distance of perhaps twenty miles from here. They attacked the Federal soldiers, who ran away, all but my husband. I told him to go, but he swore he wouldn’t leave me. I tried to convince him that was foolish, they would shoot him, but he said he would offer to join them— he didn’t care for which side he fought as long as he could be with me. So he threw down his rifle and went out with his hands in the air. They shot him before he could speak.
Aieee!
I saw it. I watched him die.”

Now a glaze came over the girl’s eyes, even though the tears had dried.

“I came running out of the barracks and fell on his body. The soldiers picked me up. They told me not to cry, that my husband was a coward to surrender, and a bad man to have fought for Huerta against the revolution. They said I must come with them to Ascensión. Before I left I begged them to let me bury my husband, and they said they would do it.”

There must have been a well handy, I thought.

She stopped for a moment to catch her breath. “On the way I began to bleed. My curse had come early. I cried and I was bleeding, so they left me alone. They were not unkind to me. But when we got here, a man came out—an officer, I think, because they reported to him, although he wore no insignia and fine clothes as real officers do. The officer looked me over, from head to ankle, very slowly, so that I became embarrassed and turned away. Then he said, ‘I will take care of the girl.’ And he took me to a house. He told me to make food for him. I cooked enchiladas and some com. But later he said, ‘Come to bed. I’ll cure you of this sadness.’ I told him, ‘No, my husband is only dead a few hours.’ He said, ‘This will help you to forget him,’ and he tried to take me by force. I screamed and kicked, but he was a big man … and then I told him I couldn’t because I was bleeding and unclean. He didn’t believe me. He tore off my dress and saw that I told the truth. Then he said, ‘Stay here, I can wait until you’re better.’ And he left. I ran away in the darkness to the lake. As you see me. I slept here.” She indicated a patch of damp ground between the jacaranda tree and the shore. “But now I must go back to him or leave Ascensión … and I don’t know which to do.”

Although it was a common enough story these days, I certainly felt sorry for her and believed that she and her young husband must have been a nice pair of lovebirds. But I didn’t understand the end of it one bit.

“What do you mean, you have to go back to him or leave Ascensión?”

“He claimed me. He is an officer. What can I do?”

That was uncommonly simple thinking, but she was just a simple Indian girl, and I could see that she believed what she had said. Still, to my way of thinking it didn’t seem right.

“Do you want to stay with this man?”

“Señor, what else can I do? I’m alone here … Tomochic is very far away. They took the horse from me. Who will feed me? Most of these people don’t like the Tarahumara. We never surrendered to the Spaniards when they came to our mountains looking for gold. We hunt wild horses. I can ride like a man, and without a saddle. We are poor, but we never go to the cities to work. The real Mexicans of whiter blood think we are lowborn mountain dogs.”

“How do they know you’re Tarahumara?”

“Señor, they know. It’s in my face, and my speech. I didn’t speak good Spanish until my husband taught me.”

I couldn’t tell one Indian from another, and to me she was just a kid; a little foolish, but reasonably pretty and in trouble, which overpowered what sensible thinking I might have done otherwise.

“Listen, Rosa. I do know Pancho Villa personally, and I’ve got some influence there. Not much, but I guess it’s enough to handle this kind of situation. I’ll find you a place to bed down tonight, and I’ll feed you. And then you can figure out what to do. You don’t have to go back to this other man if you don’t want to. You’re not a slave.”

“Do you want me as your woman, señor?”

“Now, wait … hold on there.” I felt my cheeks go hot and undoubtedly red. “I didn’t say that. Let’s do one thing at a time. You asked me to help you, and that’s what I’m trying to do. I’ll be your friend, okay? For a while, anyway. Until you … until you get over your curse … yes?”

I finished up lamely. A girl on her own in Chihuahua, where there were nothing but soldiers and people on the move, couldn’t fling out the door and get a job as a waitress or take in laundry as she would have done in Texas. She couldn’t even be a whore, because everyone else was giving it away except for Yvette and Marie-Thérése, and they were special. If she wanted to survive she had to have a man or live with her family. There was nothing in between.

“I tell you what you should do first.” It was a dandy idea, I thought, because it postponed a resolution of her dilemma. “You can go for a swim and clean yourself up.”

She hesitated, then tossed the dark hair off her face. “I don’t know how to swim.”

“Then just kind of squat. Get the mud out of your hair. With all due respect, you’re a mess. I won’t come in after you,” I promised, “and I won’t grab you when you come out. On the honor of my mother.”

A sly smile appeared. “Do you truly have a mother,
mi capitán?”

I grinned back at her. “I’ve got a mother in El Paso, Texas. And three sisters, and a fiancée.”

“But how can I bathe? I am unclean. I have my curse.”

“You won’t die. My sisters do it all the time. It’s a hot day; you’ll dry off quick. And your hair’s a hell of a lot more unclean than the other place. Go on in, girl.”

She considered all that, then finally nodded. “You don’t have to turn away. I am not ashamed.”