TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (34 page)

He gave me a chocolate-smelling hug, but when we disengaged he looked despairing again. “Why should this happen to me? I’m just a simple soldier. I want to do the right thing, but there are so many choices to make. Look, I almost had you shot! My head buzzes sometimes like a hornet’s nest.” Tears filmed his eyes. “Protect me from myself, Tomás.”

I doubted I had the wisdom and strength to do that. And I didn’t know how to comfort him.

Later that night a distraught Carranza telegraphed him from Nogales, and Villa mournfully telegraphed back with most of the details. For once they were linked in something: the revolutionary cause shouldn’t suffer because of one hacienda owner’s death, even if he happened to be a Scotsman. The First Chief instructed Villa not to permit any investigating commission to enter Mexico; that would violate its sovereignty as an independent nation. He would take the heat off, as best he could. He begged Villa not to speak with reporters, and Villa promised gladly. That was the last thing he wanted to do.

“Maybe old Don Venus isn’t so bad after all,” he murmured.

Rodolfo Fierro came back in the morning like a dog who had rolled in the mud all night. He gave a full report; he had done everything exactly as instructed. It looked to him as if Benton had been killed by the blow with the shovel—but of course he had to say that. The only problem was that rigor mortis had set in. After they managed to remove the handcuffs, they couldn’t bend the arms back to Benton’s sides without breaking them.

“Get out of here,” Villa said wearily.

But the Benton scandal wouldn’t die. Letcher wasn’t at all pleased when I visited his office and told him that an obscure law signed by Benito Juárez back in 1859 wouldn’t allow the body to leave the country.

I moved back in with Hipólito. Hannah, whom I finally visited to explain my long absence, but to whom I didn’t tell the tale of my near execution, was enraged. Bright pink spots appeared on her cheeks.

“I think,” she said, “if you’re still determined to see this through to the end, you should offer your services to Obregón.”

“Hannah! How could I do that?”

“Isn’t he a revolutionist too? And a more honest one than Pancho Villa!”

“I’m loyal to Villa.” More loyal, I thought, than you’ll ever know.

“But
why,
Tom?”

Why indeed. There was a question that needed pondering, but the answer was so simple that it brooked any sensible debate. I was loyal because I had offered my loyalty and it had been accepted. The bargain had been struck a long time ago, in Juárez, and then sealed when I had taken his captain’s commission and gone into battle at his side in Torreón. I still believed he was the only one who could lead the revolution to victory. He had almost had me shot, but I had driven him to it with my stubbornness. I had truly forgiven him. I believed in the revolution— and with all his baffling rages, I still believed in the man.

“How can you?” Hannah’s lip curled. “Everything I said about him at your birthday party is true! I know I once thought differently, but if you don’t change your beliefs when you’re faced with facts, you’re a child and a fool. I don’t care what you and Daddy say. The man
is
a beast! And a barbarian. And a murderer. When he had Mr. Benton killed, there were people in this town who wanted to cross the river and hang him from a cottonwood tree!”

“Yes,” I said with a sigh, “killing Benton was certainly a mistake.”

“A mistake?”
For a moment her mouth hung open. Her lip trembled. “To kill a man in cold blood? Tom! You talk like a Mexican bandit. What have you become?”

I wondered … then and later.

We had some fine autopsies performed in Chihuahua City, and they were printed in newspapers throughout the United States and Europe, but always with big question marks in the accompanying commentary. The furor in England began to simmer down. The Royal Navy didn’t sail, although the messages from President Wilson, relayed through Letcher, grew increasingly cooler and disapproving. All our gains with the generals at Bliss seemed to have melted away, and it appeared that we had lost an ally, one we couldn’t afford to lose. Sam Ravel didn’t like that. Neither did Pancho Villa.

He had finally arranged for the needed coal and artillery that had brought us to Juárez in the first place, promising a delivery of two million new pesos, and he had made sure that Luz Corral was comfortably installed in her new house.

“Let’s get out of here,” he cried that day, slamming his fist on the kitchen table in the caboose so that the plates rattled. But then his voice turned gloomy. “I want to win the revolution, Tomás, not play games with consuls and newspapers and doctors. Let’s go back to Chihuahua City. Then let’s go south and make war on Victoriano Huerta.” He spoke with what I thought remarkable honesty. “That’s the thing I do best. Maybe it’s the only thing I know how to do.”

And I? What did I know how to do? Stay stubborn, and play my double game with Hannah and Rosa. I suppose, if anyone had been able to dissect the pattern of my life, the way I had dissected a frog back at El Paso High, they would have quickly concluded that I was doing little more than aping the master, Señor Don Francisco Villa. I was treating Hannah the way he treated Luz Corral, and Rosa occupied the same place in my scheme of things as Esperanza and Juana Torres did in Villa’s. True or false? If you talk like a Mexican bandit, maybe you think like one too.

But it wasn’t entirely true, or entirely false, and that was the rub. I wasn’t a Mexican bandit. I wasn’t Pancho Villa. I was a youth learning to be a man. That’s rarely easy, and there are lessons that can only be learned in the doing.

One of the hardest was taught to me on the night that I went to say my goodbye to Hannah.

I was invited to the Sommerfelds for dinner, and at the table the conversation centered mostly on the new opera house planned for Houston and the state of the performing arts in Texas. It was lively talk, but I took no part in it. I was watching the rise and fall of Hannah’s bosom and occasionally meeting the unsettling glances she threw at me from beneath her dark eyelashes. Sam Ravel went home early. Felix said his liver was acting up again and dragged himself off to bed. Mrs. Sommerfeld followed.

It took me about five seconds before I crossed the room and kissed Hannah. When I disentangled from the kiss I was helpless as a cow in quicksand, and I knew if we sat there long enough we would have a repeat of an old scene, with Hannah playing soprano and me hitting the high notes in the tenor part. I didn’t want that tonight.

“Would you like to go for a walk, Hannah dear? I need some fresh air.”

In the street the chill night wind of early April blew off Shadow Mountain. Hannah took my arm, pressing her hip against mine.

“Tom, I’m going to miss you so much!”

“And I’ll miss you, too.”

We walked for a while in silence.

“Do you remember,” Hannah said, “what Daddy once told you? That he and Sam wanted you to work for them? Have you been thinking about it?”

“Yes, I have. ‘Who seeks, and will not take, when once ‘tis offered, shall never find it more.’ Does that answer you?”

“Tom, I’m so happy. Couldn’t you …” Her voice trailed off uncertainly.

“Couldn’t I what?”

“Couldn’t you stay? Do you have to go back this time? Couldn’t we get married
now?”

Just then we came to Hipólito’s house. I saw that no lights burned, which meant he was out somewhere with Mabel Silva. A wind blew, rustling among the new leaves of maple trees. Hannah shivered against me. “Can we go inside for a few minutes? I’m so cold.”

She had been there once before, in the parlor. It didn’t take long before we were in each other’s arms, and it was a short step from the parlor to my bedroom. But we had never been alone like this. A flask of brandy stood on the rickety table, and we sipped from a bathroom cup that I scrubbed free of toothpowder stains with my bandanna. The wind buffeted against the windows until glass creaked. The room had a frayed carpet and a musty smell coming from damp walls, and I saw a poorly sewn patch on the pillowcase. I hadn’t made the bed this morning.

“It’s not exactly honeymoon cottage,” I said.

She smiled nervously. “Just so long as there are no bedbugs. Give me a minute, dear.” And she faded off to the bathroom, locking the door behind her. I didn’t know what would happen; I was truly innocent. And therefore guilty. I shucked off my boots and lay down on the bed, still dressed. I stared up at the peeling paint on the ceiling.

A few minutes later the bathroom door opened. Hannah appeared—first a tentative arm; then, slowly, all of her. In the slanting yellow light of a lamp glowing on the table, she was naked.

I caught my breath—this wasn’t what I had expected. The soldier would leave for war this time with more than blessings and a silk scarf as token. She had come here to offer herself to me. I understood the gravity of the gift and how it would bind us; I didn’t doubt for a moment that she understood it too. Something in me wanted to protest, but I couldn’t find the words or the motive. Arching my head, I gazed across the room at the girl I loved. Her face turned bright red, and she flung her arms violently across her breasts.

“They hang too low,” she whispered. “Please don’t look…”

It was true. Bound by her woman’s secret undergarments, I had never noticed it before. She had never been naked in front of me.

But I cried out, “No, Hannah! They’re beautiful!”

With a sob she jumped quickly into bed, burying her head on my chest. She began to unbutton my shirt. “Turn out the light, Tom …”

“Must I?”

“Oh, yes!”

I thought of Rosa in the shadowy room of the Hotel Fermont in Chihuahua, where a candle always flickered beside the bed that I might better see the look in her eyes and the slow flushing of her lips. But the image unsettled me deeply and I banished it.

My clothes fell to the floor. I snapped off the light. How could I, how could any man, say no?

The bedsprings creaked. Hannah was uncertain, almost clumsy, and my heart went out to her in a rush of love.

“I’m so dry, Tom”

“You’re scared… .”

“But I want you. I want you
now.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t. I can wait, Hannah, if you can.”

“No, I want you!”

All that dry humping on the davenport had made the next step a difficult one. That had been wild, dangerous, a child’s adventure into a topsy-turvy world, and this was grown-up, real. I still found it hard to believe that it was happening, and perhaps she did too—I couldn’t believe that she had planned it. I understood the enormity of the thing she was doing, from her point of view, but I had lived in revolutionary Mexico for a long time, where sex was as simple as a meal.

Finally the heat of our bodies came together, she pressed my neck down hard with one forearm, shifted her thighs apart, and with the other hand gripped my pecker to guide it toward the right place.

“I’m ready, Tom…”

I had first to reach up, gasping, and unlock her arm. I was being strangled. Then I began to press.

“Ouch!”

“Are you still dry?”

“Do it, do it. Darn it! Go ahead … oh, God!”

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s killing me!”

“Hannah, we don’t have to. Let’s wait.”

“Go slower. Oh, why am I so tight!”

I licked her ear a bit with my tongue, calmed myself down, braced on my elbows and let things stay the way they were for a while. She was breathing quickly.

“What are you doing now, Tom?”

“I’m just resting, Hannah.”

“No, do it. We haven’t got all night. Just go slowly … yes, like that. That’s better . .
.oh!”
Seizing my hand, she bit into the soft part of the flesh above the wrist, the way a man having his leg amputated might bite a bullet.

“Ouch!
Don’t do that!” I cried.

“Tom—it hurts so much! It’s not
fair!”

I eased away, not that I had got anyplace, and flopped next to her side, rolling her over and drawing her into my arms. She cried for a while. I stroked her and wondered when Hipólito would be coming home, and if the rains would come early or late this year, and whether the new artillery would do the job this time at Torreón …

“Let’s get dressed. Don’t cry, darling. It wasn’t the right time. Not the right place, either. It will be better, I promise you.”

“It will, won’t it? When we’re married…”

“That’s right. When we’re married.”

“When, Tom?” Her body stopped shaking, and she sniffled. “I want that so much. Do you have a handkerchief?”

“No, but use the sheet. Soon, Hannah.”

“Why do you have to go back? Can’t you stay? We could be married right away.”

“All right. Let’s get married. I mean as soon as I come back. As soon as we’ve taken Mexico City. That won’t take long, and that will be the end.”

“Definitely?”

“I’ve made up my mind.”

She shivered, but she laughed quietly as she huddled against me. “You mean the native hue of resolution is no longer sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought?”

“Exactly.” This was the Hannah I loved. “And this enterprise of great pitch and moment—you and I—will not have its currents turned awry. Will not, by God, lose the name of action.”

“Tom, that’s marvelous!” She laughed again, but I heard the quiver in it. “And as soon as you get back, we’ll get married?”

“Right away. Why should we wait? Hell, we’ve waited long enough.”

Be all my sins remembered, I thought.

“Can I tell everybody? Can we announce it?”

“Sure, you can.”

“I’ll be good for you … you’ll see. I was frightened tonight. I want you to make love to me so much.”

“I know that, Hannah. I adore you for it.”

She wept against my cheek, the warm, salty tears sliding into my mouth. I felt confused by the rapidity of the decision. And yet, hadn’t it been inevitable, written in the stars from the day that we had met in the lobby of the Commercial Hotel in Columbus? I kept telling myself I was the luckiest man on God’s dusty earth. This is what I had always wanted, what I had dreamed of since I was old enough to dream a man’s dream. I hadn’t been trapped into it. How could you be trapped into marrying the girl you loved?