TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (23 page)

With all my strength I swung the bottle at his head. It caught him on the nose, making a dull crack. Gasping, the man sank to his knees, raising both hands to check the outrageous spurt of blood from his nostrils. For a moment I held back, but if I tried to mount the horse and escape, he could easily shoot me or cry for help to his companions in the cantina, where the guitar still sounded its melancholy chords.

With my wounded right hand I plucked the sombrero from the man’s head, then smashed the bottle on the top of his skull. I felt his head split. He slumped to one side, stretched out in the dirt, drawing up his knees.

Then he lay quietly. His blood looked black in the darkness.

No noise had penetrated to the cantina. I jammed the fallen pistol into my waistband, then swung up on the horse.

I rode off at a quick trot, following the dim North Star through the windy night, along the line of the railroad tracks that gleamed a dull silver under a rising three-quarter moon. A coyote howled from the mountains.

I had killed a man for the first time in my life. It had not been difficult. I felt nothing. It made me realize what I was capable of doing, given the need and the chance. I had the need now; I would find the chance. That was my fate, as it had been the soldier’s fate to die at La Fé. In every man, as in nations, a revolution can occur, and afterwards there is no looking back other than with bitterness and hate. There is purpose without conscience.

I rode through the night to Bermejillo. Passing myself off as a Villista wounded in the battle for Torreón, I found a doctor who treated my wrist. He was afraid of gangrene and asked me to come back the next morning.

But again I rode north by night to the railroad junction of El Norte, where I let my horse go and in the evening clambered aboard a freight train bound for Juárez. I huddled in a car full of beef carcasses and slabs of melting ice, so that I shook all night with the cold. South of Juárez, as the sun broke loose from the misty Sierra del Hueso, the train slowed.

I jumped off and then walked all day in the heat of the desert toward the town of Ysleta. There I forded the muddy Rio Bravo, into the State of Texas.

As soon as I reached the far shore, five soldiers rode toward me at a trot. They were mounted on fine horses and wore the olive drab shirts, puttees and peaked scout hats of the United States Cavalry. Four were Negros, with thick lips and wide flat noses. They halted in the dust, and the one white man, an officer with two silver bars on his shoulder, said haltingly, with an awful accent:
“Quién está usted? Porque
do you … damn it, man, do you speak any English?”

“Yes. I speak it perfectly. I am a schoolteacher. A refugee from the massacre at Torreón. My name is Miguel Bosques, at your service, sir.”

“Very well. Hey … you’ve been wounded!”

“By the Villistas in Torreón.”

“Captain Boyd, U. S. Tenth Cavalry.” He saluted me, and I imitated the salute, which made him smile. He turned to one of his mounted soldiers, a man black as coal.

“Take this Mexican to the clinic at Bliss. Have the sawbones look him over. Then bring him to Lieutenant Patton and let him tell his story.”

“May I retrieve my weapons, sir?” I asked.

Boyd smiled. “I’ll take care of them for you. You’re in the United States of America now, Mr. Bosques. You won’t be doing any shooting here. And no one will shoot at you, either—not if we can help it.”

I mounted behind the sweating black soldier and rode with him at a trot to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, where I was to begin life almost as if I had been born a second time.

Fort Bliss was no longer an actual walled fort meant to fend off Indian attacks, but a compact post set on a mesa behind the town, without a single tree in sight. The wooden buildings seemed fairly new: there were barracks and stables and a parade ground where a tired-looking officer with an upraised sword was trying to teach a troop of mixed Negro and white soldiers to wheel their horses in formation. He kept shouting, “Col-ummm … right!” and then “Col-ummm wheel … left!”—with the result that the horses jammed into each other’s flanks and the troop became scattered over half the parade ground. I wondered what it had to do with war, but then I was not a soldier.

The post surgeon cleaned and bandaged my wrist with hardly a comment, except to say I was lucky the bullet had exited, and then my escort took me to an office in regimental headquarters, knocked on the door and shoved me through ahead of him.

A man smoking a pipe looked up from his desk.

“Lieutenant Patton? Cap’n Boyd sends this greaser to you, with his compliments.”

The lieutenant was a tall, slender and healthy-looking fellow with hard blue eyes and close-cropped sandy hair. The big meerschaum pipe was clamped between his teeth even when he wasn’t smoking it. He was about my age, I judged—somewhat old to be just a second lieutenant—but when he stood up to shake my hand he looked, as they say, every inch a soldier.

I noticed that he had several diplomas on the walls of his office, handsomely presented in gilt frames: one from the Virginia Military Institute, another from the United States Military Academy at West Point, his Expert Rifleman and Expert Pistol Shot certificates, and of course his commission signed by President Taft. There was also a letter from the War Department commending him for having taken fifth place in the pentathlon at the Stockholm Olympics, and a framed scroll stating that George S. Patton, Jr. was Master of the Sword in the United States Army. The scroll hung between photographs of the lieutenant, mounted on various polo ponies and with a mallet cocked over one shoulder, and on the glass surface of his desk stood two other photographs: one of a very pretty dark-haired woman in her wedding gown, and one of him as a youth standing rigidly next to what I later learned was his father, a stern-looking man in a tweed suit, with a flaring mustache.

Lieutenant Patton dismissed my escort, then offered me hot coffee and buttered toast, which I accepted gratefully. Then he asked for my story.

I began with my conscription outside the movie theater in Torréon and ended with my greeting from Captain Boyd.

When I finished he said, “Shithouse mouse! Is that what you people call a war? It’s just plain butchery!”

“It’s a revolution, Lieutenant. There’s a difference. In order to kill one’s own countrymen, one must work up not so much hatred as a certain amount of cold-bloodedness. After that, all else follows naturally.”

“Well, we had our own Civil War here. They didn’t play that one according to the rules of the Hague Conference, although I don’t recall them using prisoners for target practice.”

He thought for a while and then said, “Look, Bosques, I’ll tell you straight out—I don’t give a hoot about Mexico. It’s just another big thorn in the ass of Uncle Sam, and right now it’s tying me and five thousand other men down in this hellhole, when I’d a damn sight rather be in Washington with my wife, or getting set to go over to Europe and fight the Germans and
cherchez les femmes.
But if you’re willing to talk, I’m willing to learn about what’s going on down there. Because I’ll tell you the simple truth—we don’t know beans from pineapples about your country and all these goddam generals you people let loose all over the place. Maybe you can enlighten me.”

One thing that surprised me about the lieutenant was his high-pitched voice. It was almost like that of a woman. He was conscious of it too, for he made certain efforts to drop it lower. But when he became excited, which was often, he forgot. I was tired, but the lieutenant’s energy was infectious, and since he was my host—in fact, my potential savior—I felt I owed him an effort at the enlightenment he had asked for.

“Where are you from, Lieutenant?”

“I’m from God’s country. The State of California, in case you were wondering. You know where that is?”

“What Mexican can ever forget? It used to be ours. Is it pretty?”

“Hell, no. It’s not pretty. It’s beautiful.”

“Green and fertile?”

The lieutenant’s expression grew wistful. “Why, you can grow pears and sweet corn and two crops of wheat, and the cows are so full of milk they knock on your door in the morning and say, ‘Hurry up.’ I mean yes, hell, it’s fertile. It’s so green in summer that it hurts your eyeballs.”

“Do you have rivers and lakes and rainfall?”

“We’ve only got the Sacramento and the Merced and the Russian, and Lake Tahoe and the Klamath, and a slice of the Pacific, so I’d have to say yes. And we have our share of California dew. Not enough to drown you but enough to wet your socks, as the folks like to say in Pasadena. What’s all this got to do with the price of eggs, Bosques?”

“If you come from such a place, Lieutenant Patton, you will find it difficult to understand Mexico. Look out your window. Be kind enough to tell me what you see.”

He didn’t have to look—he had done that often enough. He shifted his pipe, and for the first time his blue eyes twinkled.

“Nothing,” he growled. “A whole lot of piss-ass nothing.”

“That’s what you will find in Mexico. As you say—a whole lot of piss-ass nothing, for nearly a thousand miles south of the border.”

“But you grow bananas. I know that for a fact. I love ‘em. Sweet as sugar.”

“Yes, bananas grow in the coastal jungle,” I said. “But a nation doesn’t live on bananas, Lieutenant. Or on poor corn that’s only fit for animals, although we pound it down to make tortillas. On the central plateau, the only part of Mexico habitable the year round, we have no rivers larger than the smallest ones in your country. We have no lakes of any size. We have no rainfall except during the summer months, so for nine or ten months of the year the land is parched. When Cortés returned to Europe after conquering Mexico four hundred years ago, the king of Spain asked him what the land looked like. He crumpled a piece of parchment and dropped it on the table. ‘Like that,’ he said. A few oases like Mexico City, Morelia and Cuernavaca, and thirty million people live there in that expanse of piss-ass nothing. Live there, starve there, die there. Death, not bananas, is our greatest crop.”

Lieutenant Patton drummed his thin fingers impatiently on his desk top. “But you’ve got oil. Plenty of oil.”

“No, sir, forgive me …
you
have our oil. You and the English and the Dutch. We supply more than a quarter of the world’s fuel, but Lord Cowdray’s Mexican Eagle Oil, Standard Oil, Royal Dutch Shell and Royal British Petroleum—the profits are theirs. It is the same with the mines, the iron and steel factories. The largest landowner is William Randolph Hearst. The rest of the country is owned by our own rich, such as Luis Terrazas. They live in Texas and New York and Paris, where they
cherchez les femmes.”

Patton eyed me keenly. “You sound like you may have fought on the wrong side, Mr. Bosques.”

“No,” I said, smiling. “I am not a revolutionist. We had our first revolution a hundred years ago against the Spaniards. They fought only briefly, to save their honor. They impaled our leaders’ heads from spikes and then left the country to us. They had taken all of the only thing they ever valued—our gold. What was left after that, you can see from your window. Why squabble over it?”

“So what’s this goddam revolution all about?” Patton asked.

I had wondered exactly what he might want from me in the way of information, and how I could best help him. Now it became clear that I could supply him with a point of view that wasn’t available to him from his fellow officers.

“The land,” I said quietly. “The poorest and most miserable Mexican loves it, even though he knows it’s useless. Given the means, he’ll fight to the death for it. That’s why the revolution will succeed, Lieutenant. In love, under arms, we are a passionate people.”

The lieutenant considered all this and seemed satisfied.

“What about your leaders? There’s Huerta—Carranza and Obregón—Villa and Zapata. Who’s the right man to take over if the revolution succeeds?”

“The one who survives, Lieutenant.”

“Christ, you
are
a cynic. Well, it’s refreshing after all the claptrap I hear around this post. All right—here’s what I really want to know. Can any of them fight?”

“Huerta is a drunkard,” I said, “who leaves the fighting to General Orozco, who leaves it to men such as General Murguia, who left Torreón in the middle of the night when things looked bad. On the other side, Carranza thinks of himself as a biblical prophet. He leaves the fighting to others. Zapata can fight, but he doesn’t like to move out of the south where the people protect him. I don’t believe he’s capable of ruling. If you don’t mind my using a classroom phrase, his political base is too narrow. Obregón controls the state of Sonora and professes loyalty to Carranza. He is said to be clever.”

He eyed me shrewdly. “You haven’t mentioned Villa.”

“The best for the last. Pancho Villa can fight. It’s everybody’s mistake to underestimate him because he looks like a fat bandit in dirty clothes. He worshiped Madero, and they say he has no ambition to become president. He is a peasant, like Zapata, and equally ruthless. The people either love him or hate him. Carranza, on the other hand, is neither loved nor hated—just respectfully tolerated.”

“Sounds like the men to watch are Carranza and Obregón.”

“If I were you, Lieutenant, I would watch Villa.”

Lieutenant Patton smiled. “But you’re not exactly objective on that score, are you?”

“I have no feeling for or against Pancho Villa. It was not he who put my brother and me into that corral. I speak only of his chance to rule.”

He leaned back in his wooden swivel chair and contemplated me for a while with his pale eyes, constantly tapping his fingers on the desk. “What are your plans, Bosques?”

“To not return to Mexico.”

He made his decision, the final one that would shape my destiny. He stood up and said, “Stick around, if you like. I want to talk to you some more. And I want to learn Spanish. Things may pop down there soon. That’s what Pershing says, and Black Jack’s always right. In fact, until you make up your mind where you’re headed, I can find quarters for you. Even employ you. And we’ll try to do something for your hand. How about it?”