TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (29 page)

Slipping the .22 back under his jacket, he turned on me. “For God’s sake, what was
that
about?”

Sweat had broken from all my pores. Bosques had kept his mouth shut, but I didn’t know what to say. I surely wasn’t going to tell them the story of Rodolfo Fierro’s massacre of the prisoners and the part I had played in it.

“Come on, Tom! They knew your name!”

I stiffened even more, deciding there was only one good way to handle this. “Mr. Ravel, it’s a long story, and not a very pretty one. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Then Hipólito stepped forth to have his say, quietly enough, but everyone heard him.

“I will tell you one thing, señores. Forgive me, Tomás, but I think it is necessary to speak. That man was a prisoner in Torreón. And, in a manner of speaking, we let him go. You see, miss? That is probably why my brother shoots them. We let that one go, and now he wishes to kill Tomás. Since he is Mexican,” he added, “he will never stop trying.”

“Fortune brings in some boats

that are not steered.”

So Torreón still haunted me. It began to seem that I would never be free.

A few days later word got through that the women had at last arrived in Chihuahua City, coming up on a special train from Jiménez. That night, guitars must have twanged and bedsprings creaked all over the city.

I needed to get down there. Rosa would be looking for me, and I didn’t want her to come north to Juárez or El Paso. I couldn’t handle that. Thinking back, I don’t see how I handled the situation
at all,
considering my youth and inexperience in such matters. It wasn’t finesse, it certainly wasn’t foresight, and I have to spring to my own defense and make it clear that I wasn’t in any sense keeping my options open. No, I was acting out of simple need. It was wartime—even if there was a long lull now in the fighting, while Villa solidified his hold in northern Chihuahua—and wartime is a poor stage for high moral decisions. The normal rules of life just don’t seem to have much sticking power.

The incident on Stanton Street had turned me nervous as a teased snake. Besides Rodolfo Fierro there was now a second man in this world, close at hand, who had reason to kill me—and for this man I couldn’t dredge up any blame or vows of bold defense. Miguel Bosques had no way of knowing that my hesitation with Fierro’s last pistol had helped to save his life. When I was honest with myself too, I knew how flimsy an argument that would have been against his rage. In his eyes I had helped to kill two hundred men, one of whom had been his brother. The shame of that act marked me, and I couldn’t help wondering if Bosques had been spared to bring about some awful form of retribution. Divine or not, I had to fight against it.

Sam Ravel did some sleuthing among his friends and told me that for his act, his attack on me, Bosques had been put in the guardhouse at Bliss for two months’ detention, which gave me about as much comfort as a barbed-wire fence gives shade. One day soon, when this was over, I would be living in El Paso—good God, it was
home
!—and he would be there.

If Ravel knew any more details about why Bosques hated me enough to shoot me down, he didn’t say. Neither did I. Hannah sulked when I refused to talk about it. I told her I’d be back in a week or two.

Let sleeping dogs lie, I thought. But make sure they don’t jump up and bite.

When I reached Chihuahua City I went straight to the Hotel Fermont, which was now official headquarters of the Northern Division’s general staff. Candelario was there with Yvette and Marie-Thérése, and he took time out from his reunion to peer out the door of his room, bleary-eyed and sweaty-haired, and tell me that Rosa was in the soldiers’ camp in the suburbs of the city called Las Granjas. He had wanted her to come to the Fermont, but she had refused.

When I asked him why, he gave me a sharpish look with his good eye and said, a little sternly, “She’s only a child, Tomás. Children don’t like to go places alone.”

“But she—she could have—”

“Go find her, you fool.” He shut the door in my face.

I took the rebuke. Poor girl, without me she had no status, no rights. And she
was
a child. I felt awful. It was nearly three months since I’d seen her and I had just assumed she was all right, that she could get by on her own. She was among her own people, so why shouldn’t she?

Because, I realized, she believed that she belonged to me, and the fact that I hadn’t accepted it as a reality didn’t make it any less true for her.

I hurried out to Las Granjas, taking a mule-drawn streetcar and then striding the last mile on a dusty road under a hot sun, so that I arrived at the encampment sweating. I found her without any trouble. She was sitting cross-legged in the shade of an adobe hut, scratching something in the dust in front of her. I stopped for a minute, before she looked up and saw me, and gazed at her. I tried to look at her for that minute as a man might who didn’t know her. She had something of the same forlorn look that I had seen when I first met her by the lake in Ascensión: head bowed, thick black hair spilling down past her shoulders. But when she raised her head I didn’t see a terrified Indian waif. I saw a nubile adolescent girl, eyes suddenly alight with pleasure bordering on joy, as if she had just come downstairs at Christmas and found her heart’s desire under the tree. A great ripe calmness seemed to flow from her, surround and infuse her.

She rose gracefully as I held out my arms. And then the sweet child jumped into them and held me tightly, body hot against mine. A little moan broke from her lips.

“Rosa…”

“
Oui, c’est moi,”
she said.
“Comment allez-vous, mi capitán? Tu m’a manque … Quand est-ce que tu est arrive?”

Then she looked up at me shyly.

My mouth hung open. “What did you say?”

“I said I missed you. I was glad to see you. I am happy to see you.” She began to laugh. “When did you get to Chihuahua City, Tomás?”

“But you spoke in French! Wasn’t it French?”

“Marie-Thérése taught me. It was such a long time waiting for you in Jiménez … there was nothing else to do. I don’t know much. A few words. I practiced what I would say. I memorized it. I won’t speak it again if it displeases you,” she said, as she saw my face growing cloudier all the time. “But if you would teach me some English,
mi capitán,
that would please me most of all. What good will French do me? Who can I speak to? Wouldn’t you like it if I spoke English to you?” Her smile had vanished. “Don’t be angry with me, please. I know I am a foolish girl.”

I wasn’t angry, and she certainly wasn’t foolish. She was wonderful. The cloud was one of astonishment. I had always seen her as a simple Indian girl who shared my bed and took care of my needs and comforted me, and who would wait for me in the docile manner of her race, even if she claimed to drink horses’ blood for breakfast. I had known that in time she would grow into a woman, although I hadn’t believed I would be around to witness it. Grow, yes. But I hadn’t known she would
change.

“Let’s go back to the hotel, Rosa. I have a room there.”

Two hours later she was in my arms again, and two minutes after that, with the shades drawn against the afternoon sun, we were peeled down to the buff and between the sheets, her fur all wet and brown belly bucking. Should that have shamed me? For one thing, I was horny. For another, after my nightly sessions on the Sommerfeld davenport and the encounter with Miguel Bosques, Rosa was an island of wholesomeness in an ocean of personal lunacy.

We stayed in that room for the better part of two days, consoling each other in the way God seemed to have had in mind all along when He tore the rib out of Adam. She never asked about Hannah and whether I had seen her in El Paso, and I never said a word. I had told Hannah I would be back in two weeks. I knew I had some thinking to do until then.

Rosa had asked me something, and I didn’t forget. One evening we were sitting in our favorite
ostioneria,
eating a bucket of fresh shrimp and oysters, when I suddenly leaned forward across the little wooden table and said:
“Este es
a plate.
Y este es
a spoon.
Aquí,
a fork. What you’re eating is an oyster.
Te gusta?
You like it?”

She nodded solemnly and repeated the words. She mixed up fork and spoon, but on the second try she got it right.

Back in the hotel I produced a notebook, a fountain pen, a bottle of ink and two sharpened pencils I had bought that morning in a nearby
librería.
I handed them to her.

“You want to learn to read and write. If I can, I’ll teach you.”

She seemed a little stunned. In Mexico you only learned to read and write if you were in school, and no one from the Tarahumara villages of the high sierra had ever seen the inside of a school, much less been enrolled in one. Moreover, if you learned, you learned from a teacher, a real teacher. If a man was fortunate enough to know how to read and write, it was considered beneath his dignity, and a waste of time as well, to teach the art to a woman. He was supposed to teach her to obey and to please him in bed; the rest would only spoil her. I knew that was why she hesitated.

“I haven’t got a book for you yet,” I said, “but next time I’m in El Paso I’ll find one. You’ll have to do most of the work on your own. The alphabet, the beginning stuff, isn’t hard for me to teach. I know you can learn it.”

Still she didn’t say anything. I think she knew it would change her life. It would make her a person she hadn’t been born to become, and that’s a frightening prospect for anyone—man or boy, girl or woman. I knew, because it was happening to me there in Mexico: I was moving further and further off the path of my life as I’d thought it ordained when I was a youth and left home to be a cowhand and rodeo rider. We all want to change and grow, but we prefer it to happen gradually, when we’re not looking. To will it, and know we will it, is like stepping off a familiar road to climb a high mountain. There may be a paradise waiting on the far slope, but you know it’s a hard journey beckoning, and you may be lost before you can ever reach that slope … if it truly exists.

“It would please me, Rosa,” I said. “If you want to, you can do it. And then you’ll have pleased yourself. That’s the best thing you can do in life.”

She picked up the notebook and with her fingers began to leaf the pages. They fell open, and she ran her fingertips on the smooth white page, empty but for the ruled lines. That was like her life. If she wanted to, she could fill it with whatever composition she liked.

Her fingertips stroked the page. She stroked it the way she stroked my body, gently and with wonder. Then she looked up. Her dark brown eyes were a little filmy, not wet but blurred ever so slightly with some soft shine.

I still remember her eyes that way, even now, full of the deepest pleasure, aglow with love, with gratitude and grave promise.

“I will try, Tomás,” she said. “Yes, I will please myself.”

The next morning, after Rosa’s lesson, the chief called me to his suite. Candelario and Urbina were there, and then Rodolfo Fierro entered, silver spurs jingling. His presence never worried me as long as Villa was in the vicinity, and today he hardly glanced at me.

“Chief, I have good news,” Fierro said. His usually mild brown eyes gleamed with excitement. “Don Luisito still claims that he has no money. But now he also says that he knows where there is some.”

“And where might that be?” Villa inquired.

“In one of the steel columns in the Banco Minero de Chihuahua. One of the columns is full of gold. The Spanish bankers hid it there when they left—it was too heavy to carry. But—and this is the problem—Don Luisito doesn’t know which column.”

“Are you sure?”

Fierro shrugged his sloping shoulders. “I had a long talk with him, while Lieutenant Dozal put a rope around his neck. Under the circumstances, I don’t think he lied.”

I knew a little bit about this matter. Don Luis Terrazas had been one of the richest men in all Mexico, and in the early days of the revolution, more than a year ago, we had rustled his beef and sold it to Felix Sommerfeld. Knowing that Villa hated him because of his wealth, he fled Chihuahua City as soon as Juárez surrendered. He was now in El Paso, where he rented the estate of Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico, whose later claim to fame would be the scandal of Teapot Dome.

One of Terrazas’ sons, Luis Jr., whom they mockingly called “Don Luisito” even though he was in his early fifties, had stayed behind. He was supposed to be slightly dimwitted and had tried to convince Villa that he was really sympathetic to the revolution and not responsible for the way his father had tortured the peasants and accumulated his millions. “In that case,” Villa said, “contribute all your money to our cause.” But Don Luisito wept and claimed he had nothing, only the silk shirt on his back and his good name.

Villa at first tried to ransom Don Luisito to the old man for $150,000, but Don Luis replied: “Not a peso.”

Don Luisito wept again when he heard that. Then Villa sent Fierro and Dozal to have that little talk with him.

“Anything’s possible,” Villa said now. “Let’s go to the Banco Minero and find out for ourselves. Get some engineers and an electric drill. If the sonofabitch is lying, we’ll shoot him.”

He picked up his pith helmet and set it at a jaunty angle on his head.

So it came about that Candelario, Urbina, Fierro and Juan Dozal, whom I knew from the Torreón stockyards and who was now Fierro’s aide, piled with me and Villa into the Packard and were driven by the chauffeur, Martin Lopez, to the Banco Minero de Chihuahua on the Paseo Bolivar.

Villa ordered the bank closed for the day. After some soldiers had herded the confused clerks and customers out the door, Dozal locked it from the inside. The soldiers were told to stay by the car.

While we waited for the engineers to arrive, we examined the huge steel columns. There were three rows of three columns supporting the high ceiling, on which was painted a fading mural showing the Spanish conquistadores, led by a fair-bearded, blue-eyed, armored Hernán Cortés driving a near-naked Moctezuma and his Aztec warriors into the lake of Tenochtitlán, which in those days was the name for Mexico City.