TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (21 page)

I spoke flatly. “You’ll be shot with the others.”

He let out his breath, one of the last he would take in this world. “I see…”

His voice was almost without expression—it held the lightest touch of scorn. He wanted to know one thing more. “May I ask the name of the officer with whom you spoke?”

“His name is Colonel Fierro.”

“And your name?”

“Mix. What difference does it make?”

He didn’t answer. He turned his back and sauntered toward the mass of silent men, huddled together for warmth, vanishing among them. At a distance you couldn’t tell one from another.

The sun still hadn’t dropped below the mountain peak. The earth was dappled with shadows. I confronted Fierro again. I couldn’t keep the hatred from my voice.

“You need my help for something?”

“Lieutenant Dozal’s men are cold,” he said, “and he’s confessed that he doesn’t think too much of their marksmanship. So—here.” He tossed me a serape he had taken from one of the soldiers. “Put this on, Tomás, or the wind will chew your bones. Pay attention. Here’s how we’ll do this.”

Fierro had decided to have some target practice that would test his skill and relieve the boredom of a simple mass execution.

A squad of soldiers guarded the two hundred thirty-nine prisoners in the first pen. Ten at a time, as Fierro had decreed, they would bring the prisoners through the narrow cattle chute into the second pen. In single file they would enter the chute leading to the third pen, where a few of Dozal’s shivering soldiers would await them with fixed bayonets. The bayonets were a cure for any reluctance. At a wave of Fierro’s hand, the ten men would be shoved into the third and largest pen and told to run for the far fence, a distance of some fifty paces.

Fierro would shoot them as they ran. If any man could reach the last fence and clamber over it without being killed, he was free. No one would chase him, and Fierro wouldn’t fire at any man who had gained the safety of the plain. Once there, a man could make his escape into the foothills of the mountains.

Each group of ten would be followed by another, until all had passed through the final pen and were either dead or escaped.

My job was to sit next to Fierro and reload his three pistols as they fell empty. The wooden box of ammunition had been splintered open so that the bullets were easily accessible. Dozal would stand by with a spare pistol in case any one of the three jammed. As for Hipólito, he could wait in the car. There was a bottle of Canadian whiskey in the glove compartment. Fierro had seen the chauffeur squirrel it there when we left the Hotel Salvador.

“What do you think, Tomás?” he asked, almost pleasantly. “Do you think I can get them all before they climb over the last fence? Or do you think some of them will manage to escape? What’s your guess?”

“Rodolfo, I ask to be excused from this detail.”

“You do? Why?”

I was in no mood to offer clever explanations. “It disgusts me.”

“But I’m not requiring you to shoot them, Tomás. I’m only requiring you to reload my pistols.”

He looked at me with great intensity. I felt an evil force flowing from the man. This was the moment he had been waiting for since I took Rosa from him in Ascensión.

“I ask to be excused,” I said again, and my voice trembled.

He considered that for a few moments, then shook his head firmly. “You’re an officer by appointment of Francisco Villa. This is part of your duty. Consider my request to be an order.”

Perhaps his eyes glinted once. If I refused, he could shoot me. He had Dozal as a witness to explain to Pancho Villa. If he pulled his pistol I would do the same, because Rodolfo Fierro was less than a whole human being, and I would take the consequences. One of us would die— or both. For if I killed him. Villa would surely have me shot. But the glint faded immediately and was replaced by his maddeningly bland look.

“Refusal would be foolish, Tomás. You think this a repugnant task, but I assure you that it’s necessary. These men will die. It doesn’t matter how.” His lips curled in the shadow of a smile. “But,” and his tone hardened, “if you fail to carry out my order—if you don’t load the pistols as I’ve instructed—Lieutenant Dozal will shoot you. Lieutenant? You’ve understood?” He didn’t even bother to glance over his shoulder.

In the gloomy light, Dozal nodded. I remembered what he had done at Casas Grandes, helping Fierro to prove his theory that a single bullet would kill three men. If there was any man who wouldn’t hesitate, this was the one.

Whatever pride I had felt before, after being blooded in the battle for Torreón, ebbed away from me in a single rush. To be brave in battle with your friends was one thing; to calmly and knowingly sacrifice your life for strangers was another. In that I was a coward. What Fierro demanded of me was loathsome, but if I didn’t do it I would surely die. He knew how I would choose. He didn’t even wait for me to nod my acceptance.

“Let’s begin,” he said to Dozal. “I don’t want it to grow dark before I finish. Tell the prisoners how it will work.”

“It’s being done, my colonel.”

A low moan reached us from the first pen, where Dozal’s sergeant was explaining the details of the game to the huge lump of Redflaggers. One naked prisoner broke from the pack, trying to leap over an adobe wall in the direction of the hospital. A volley from three revolutionists sitting on the fence hurled him to the ground.

The sergeant wasted no more time. He began to extract ten men from the formless mass, shoving them at pistol point through the chute into the second pen. I could hear him clearly now. The wind blew but made no sound.

“Don’t resist,” he cajoled. “Come on, boys. This way you have a chance.”

Fierro took up a position directly in front of the stockyard office, his back braced against the adobe wall. I knelt on one knee to his right, with the box of cartridges in front of me and the two extra pistols lying on a torn blanket that had been spread between us. To my right, Dozal slouched with the fourth pistol in his hand, ready to kill me if I abandoned my task. We were at a central point in the third pen. If the men ran in a straight line from left to right, trying to cover the distance in the shortest possible time, which would be natural, the range would vary between twenty and thirty yards.

Just then a small bird, a crow, flew overhead and alighted on the far fence, the one that would lead to freedom if Rodolfo Fierro kept his word. It sat motionless, tucking in its black wings. Fierro raised the long barrel of his pistol and fired. The report was a dry, light snap. The bullet passed harmlessly through the air, and the alarmed crow quickly fluttered up and away toward the mountains.

“Come on, boys!” Fierro smiled. His deep voice easily carried across the stockyard to the prisoners, who writhed like a mass of snakes in the gray light. “You see that I missed! I’m not such a good shot! A running target is even more difficult. So! Who’s first?”

The first group of ten bolted from the chute into the third pen. They ran like crazed goats. Fierro extended his right arm straight out and with his left hand gripped the right wrist. He fired five shots, then dropped the pistol on the blanket, where I picked it up with my left hand. With my right hand, holding the second pistol by the barrel, I slapped the butt into his waiting fingers, as a nurse delivers a scalpel to a surgeon.

“Good, Tomás,” he murmured. He fired six more times in rapid succession, and I delivered the third pistol.

He had only to fire four bullets from that one before the group of ten men sprawled all over the pen in the dust, dead and dying. One man had reached the final fence, but he was hit before he could even grip the wooden rail. Fierro smiled again. The shot at the crow had been to calculate the wind.

“Let’s have another ten,” he called brightly.

I had already reloaded the first pistol and was at work on the second one, removing the exploded caps and stuffing the steel cartridges into the chambers. Dozal bent to Fierro’s ear.

“What about the wounded, my colonel?”

“Don’t let them suffer, Juanito. Tell your men to finish them off.”

Dozal shouted the order. The soldiers who crowded to the fence of the second pen, that they might have a better view of the slaughter, raised their rifles and poured a volley of bullets into the three or four prisoners who still groaned and writhed in the dirt.

The second group of ten catapulted from the chute. This time one of them, a Federal officer whose pants flapped in rags like a rodeo clown’s, launched himself directly at us, hands raised to strangle Fierro if he could reach him in time. His face was hatred at its most pure. Fierro neither flinched nor fired at him. He remained entirely concentrated on the other nine who bounded wildly across the pen. He simply said, “Lieutenant …” and Dozal raised the fourth pistol and shot the officer in the chest when he was no more than four strides from us. The man hit the ground with a noise like that of a falling log, muttered something to himself, then lay still.

The other nine men died in the midst of their mad race. Again one reached the fence, planting a boot on the lower rail before Fierro’s bullet drilled a red hole between his naked shoulder blades and he sagged across the bar, bent double and coughing blood.

Now the prisoners realized that there was no hope of escape, that Fierro’s aim was good enough and the illusion of freedom beyond the far fence was as unattainable as their youthful dreams of riches and love and glory.

They began to sob, to wail dementedly. “Little Jesus … blessed saints … Mama!” Apparently they didn’t agree with Fierro’s thesis on death. A few refused to go, and Dozal’s soldiers quickly shot them down.

And so the rest kept coming—a third ten, a fourth ten—then more. Fierro fired in a rhythm as regular as that of a ticking clock. He saw no men in front of him, only darting, crawling targets. The prisoners stumbled over the corpses of the men who had run before them. They slipped in pools of blood, sometimes colliding with another, battering him out of the way in their frenzy to reach the gate not merely to freedom but to life itself. If it hadn’t been a carnival of death, their antics might have seemed comic. They dodged and jostled, kicked, beat on human obstacles with clenched fists. One man, incensed that another blocked his path, stopped to smash him in the face; the other man struck back, and they began to trade blows in the midst of the massacre … until Fierro’s bullets dropped them both to the earth, still feebly swinging.

The Villistas on the fences shouted encouragement at the fighters and the runners, made bets, howled with mirth when a man turned a particularly absurd cartwheel after Fierro’s bullet broke his spine.

Mounds of bodies began to grow in the yard as though some strange human plant, with a hundred heads and double the amount of out-thrust arms and legs, were pushing its way up with unbelievable speed from an earth fertilized with its own blood.

The wind still blew coldly. A flaming ball of red sun touched the bare crest of a peak that was shaped like the breast of Juana Torres. The sun’s fading light matched the color of the stockyard earth.

The yard had become a slaughterhouse. Dozal’s soldiers increased their fire into the heaps of dead and wounded, taking no chances that a man might feign death and so escape. Now and then an arm jerked loose from the pile, touching off a salvo of gunfire until it stiffened into death. The gunfire and the screams of the prisoners grew strangely distant. I felt the coldness of the bullets that I fed into the revolving chambers and the damp grip of the pistols fresh from Fierro’s hand. The barrels had grown so hot that my fingers were blistered. Each steel-jacketed bullet with its tapered, beautiful shape would soon embed its point into a man’s stomach, or his brain, or his madly beating heart, stilling it forever. I tapped them into the chambers and felt them lock into place with a dry click. Even in the cold wind I was sweating, and when I glanced at Fierro I saw that his forehead as well was beaded with the passion of his effort. But his eyes never wavered. His rhythm didn’t vary. He was a machine. He had made one of me too.

More than an hour had passed when the last group of men was finally booted through the chute. The number was uneven, and so the soldiers who dispatched them at bayonet point toward that grisly obstacle course sent a group of thirteen—an unlucky number, but for one man it would mean life. Perhaps the soldiers thought it would be the final test of Fierro’s marksmanship.

The sun had dipped below the mountain, leaving a wake of garish orange streaks against the royal blue sky. All was in shadow. If Fierro had been less proud, less vain, he would have ordered Dozal’s men to shoot the last thirteen, for the dusk would make it difficult for him. He had to be tired. But his vanity and dedication to his task made it impossible for him to give that order.

The thirteen men ran, stumbled, crawled, zigzagging forward through the heaps of dead. Fierro fired as rapidly as he could.

Three fell, then three more, then two …

Fierro leaned forward intently, sweating, left hand locked to his right wrist. The hammer clicked on an empty chamber. I handed him the pistol, and he fired. Three more men twisted to the ground, none dead but all nearly so, tears bursting from their eyes, as through their pain they realized that all hope of life was lost.

My hands were blocks of stone, and I was late in reloading. Some stubborn feeling, some final hatred of what I had helped to do, gripped me.

I let my hands go slack. The pistol slipped to the earth. Fierro glared at me.

“Lieutenant … may I?” He turned to Juan Dozal.

He was not to be denied his chance. He leaned quickly across to snatch Dozal’s pistol.

The only two remaining survivors had reached the fence, where a pile of corpses led up to it like an irregular flight of soft, yielding steps. The bodies steamed in the cold air. With a bound, both men danced to the top of the heap at the same time, gripping the fence rail in a last desperate effort to climb over. Fierro’s pistol snapped twice. Once of the men cried out, a terrible sob that pierced the twilight. He fell back slightly, reeling like a drunkard, blocking Fierro’s view of the second man. Fierro fired again, and the figure atop the pile jerked but didn’t fall. It had been pinned to the wooden post by the blow of the bullet.