TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (52 page)

“You think you’ll come back, Tom?”

I looked up from the kitchen floor where I was packing my bag. “I’ll come back. I wouldn’t leave a fine horse like that and just forget about it. I’ll be back … if I’m still welcome.”

“You’ll be welcome,” she said huskily, then turned away toward the stove.

It was a frosty morning and the horses still had humps in their backs, so after we ate we saddled them and let them soak for a spell to forget their friskiness. Even when I forked my saddle, that roan I’d picked up in Chihuahua had to iron out a few kinks and show me he wasn’t keen to leave a comfortable barn. I knew how he felt. We wheeled to and fro in the dust outside the stables until the animals settled down. Our trunk of gold was strapped to the pack mule. A cold wind blew off the sierra, and I bundled up in my serape. Patricio opened the gate.

I had told Elisa I would be back. The meaning of that hadn’t escaped me, even though the resolution and the strength of the desire had surprised me. I hadn’t lied to her. I would do it … somehow. I wanted that badly. I loved her. I had only told it to her once, that day in the library, and she had never responded in kind—but that didn’t matter.

Francisca, shivering, waved to Candelario from the kitchen door. Elisa wore the same outfit as the morning when we first arrived, with a blue rebozo thrown over her wide shoulders to keep off the chill.

“Go well, my sweet.” She looked up at me as the horse pawed the turf.

“I won’t forget you, Elisa.”

“I hope not.”

“And I’ll be back.”

“You told me that already. Don’t promise anything, Tom. I don’t want promises.”

There was no more to say that wouldn’t be a lie. I didn’t know what the future would hold. We were going to fight a battle somewhere, and that always meant there might not be a future. But for the first time in my life I felt fully purged and at ease inside my skin. That was Elisa’s gift. I wondered if I had given her anything of equal value.

If I were alive, I would come back. I knew it. I tried to tell her that with my eyes. Not a promise. A declaration of need. Maybe love, in the end, was no more than that. No more, but no less. She smiled fondly up at me. We kicked the horses out of the gate and trotted toward the unfriendly desert stretching south of Parral.

“I see you standing like greyhounds in the slips.”

from THE SCHOOLTEACHER’S JOURNAL

Fort Bliss

March 18, 1915

To continue my chronicle of events: … Obregón’s third occupation of Mexico City, following his defeat of Zapata at Puebla, was perhaps his most memorable. Swiftly he wreaked his vengeance on the merchants who had refused to pay the twenty million pesos he had demanded on his last visit. Men disappeared in the middle of the night or were snatched openly from their offices, never to return. All schools were closed, all public transportation halted. The Catholic Church then began to reap the fruits of one hundred years of loyalty to the wielders of power. Obregón’s soldiers sacked the churches, riding their horses up the aisles and smashing statues of the saints with the flats of their swords. Drunken soldiers wandered down the street, heads bizarrely thrust through religious paintings, or draped heavy gold crucifixes round the necks of the dead rats that piled up in the garbage heaps on the Reforma. More than two hundred priests were thrown into prison and held at ransom.

Everything of value in the city was shipped by mule and train to Veracruz, which Carranza had just declared to be the new capital of Mexico for the simple reason that he was there. No food was allowed into Mexico City, not even the shipments sent by the American Red Cross. All was given to Obregón’s Constitutionalist Army, camped to the north by the great pyramids of Teotihuacán with trainloads of rifles, artillery and barbed wire—all that had come off
Ypiranga.

In order to eat, the poor had but one choice: join the army. In the space of ten days, Obregón received twenty thousand voluntary enlistments. Those men and their families were then fed.

As soon as Obregón had the men he needed to go with his arms, he headed north to do battle with Pancho Villa.

March 30, 1915

… The latest report is that Francisco Villa has joined his army at the railroad junction of Irapuato. Obregón is now in Celaya, only thirty miles to the east of them.

The two principal armies of Mexico thus face each other across a barren flat plain in the area called the Bajio. If there is to be a battle that will decide the future of Mexico, it must be now. Whatever the result, the Bajio will never be barren again. It will be watered with blood, and the decaying flesh of men will make the land bloom as never before.

“And lay the summer’s dust

with showers of blood.”

The flat plain rippled in the heat, making me dizzy.

Three months had passed since I had left Elisa Griensen in Parral. Now, through the blaze of an April morning we were advancing toward the city of Celaya, to do battle with the army of Obregón. I tried not to think of Elisa because I had learned that if you wanted something too fiercely and too steadfastly, you almost never got it.

I had almost completely stopped thinking of Rosa, and perhaps that was the reason why, sooner than I dreamed, I was able to find her. Or, more accurately, the reason she was able to find me. The battle may have been the test, the trial.

A few strawberry fields had been trampled into rags by the artillery caissons, and just ahead of us some freshly planted wheat was about to receive the same bruising. Wagonloads of shells rattled forward, the drivers shrieking, while sweating soldiers wheeled their horses to lay quirts across the backs of stumbling mules. A chorus of bugles shrilled, telling me to do God only knew what. I was mounted on a young and skittish bay.

Julio cantered up to me, his face a narrow mask of dust. His eyes raked me up and down, resting briefly on my two cartridge belts and then more intently on my saddlebags.

“Are there any more bullets in there, Tomás?”

“Just what you see.” I tapped my pistol. “This is loaded, but …”

He understood that I had no spare shells for it. “Son of a whore,” he growled. “The cannon better shoot straight today.”

“Pray,” I said.

I had faith in the cannon and our gunners, but not in the shells they were going to fire. Most of our supply of Belgian-made shells had been exhausted in the second battle of Guadalajara, which our western brigades had again lost to Treviño, and the artillery now depended on shells manufactured in a little factory Villa had built in Torreón. Last week in the few skirmishes near Celaya, most of our shells had flown wide, or long, or short—you had no way of knowing in advance—and two of them had jammed the guns and rendered them useless. But the worst blow of all was that Felipe Angeles wasn’t there to nurse them back to life.

Returning from Parral, I had found Pancho Villa in Torreón, at the Hotel Salvador, anxiously awaiting the completion of the factory that would make his cannon shells. The chief gave me a potent welcoming
embrazo,
vigorous enough for me to feel the muscles beneath his fat. But he didn’t seem terribly surprised when I told him I’d come back to stay.

He said, “War gets in a man’s blood, Tomás. He hates it when he’s surrounded by death and suffering, and a little interlude of quiet is certainly desirable. But nothing matches war. It corrupts your senses, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You would have found that out eventually—you would have thought back on this time as the best years of your life. I confess, I’m only truly happy when I’m fighting or getting ready to fight. My only hope is to wear myself out. To grow old. Or to be killed …” He sighed. “I knew that in Mexico City. That’s why I behaved so foolishly about Conchita. Love may be the only substitute for war. They’re disgustingly similar.”

“And where
is
Conchita?” I asked. I hadn’t seen evidence of her in the suite.

“Gone.” He waved a hand in a mock gesture of goodbye. “I grew weary of her tears, and all that piety. You were right, Tomás. It wouldn’t have lasted, even if I had married her. I don’t need a woman now. I’m going to fight Obregón.”

My mouth must have gaped open in astonishment, because he blushed. I hunted for words. “In that case you’re lucky that Luz said no to me. To
you,
I mean. No divorce.”

“Yes, it was lucky,” he admitted. “But I suspected that’s what she’d say. Under the circumstances I had to try, didn’t I? Was she angry?”

“Not really. She treats you like a backward child.”

“Don’t be impertinent, Tomás.”

“I didn’t mean to be. I’m just stating a fact. As you said, she’s a remarkable woman.”

He took the chest of gold from us without comment; he hardly seemed to remember what it had been for. When Candelario and I told how I had nearly lost my life and how we had dispatched Urbina in order to rescue it, he only shrugged.

“You did the right thing. That’s Urbina’s fate. He can no more stop being a bandit than a loser can walk out of a poker game.”

He was more interested in my report on the talks with Franz von Papen, and he read the German’s list carefully. But then he stuffed it into his pocket with a batch of telegrams.

“You were clever, Tomás. I’ll have to think more about this. This German is certainly imaginative, but I don’t dislike the gringos enough to make war on them. And paper is cheap. Promises cost even less.”

In that he echoed Elisa, and I knew what he meant. But I was relieved that for the time being we weren’t going to invade Texas.

After that I moved into the Hotel Salvador and marched off with Villa every morning to the telegraph office at the railroad station, from where he conducted his preparations for the campaign against Carranza. A storm had been blowing up ever since Felipe had counseled against trusting Zapata’s army in the southern campaign, and in Torreón, beginning in February, the weather grew dark indeed. Felipe didn’t rub it in, but he looked so generally mournful and disgusted that you knew exactly how he felt.

Lounging in a wooden swivel chair as reports clicked in on the telegraph key from all over the country, he said with great conviction: “Don’t be distracted, Pancho. You’ve committed yourself to gaining full control of the north. That may have been foolish when we were able to strike at Carranza, but it’s done. Keep to the plan.”

“Obregón grows stronger every day,” Villa said.

He prowled back and forth on the concrete floor of the office, chewing cigarettes more than smoking them. His shoulders were hunched, his teeth bared. “The sonofabitch has thirty thousand men. If I let him alone for another month, he’ll finish training his workers and have forty thousand.”

Angeles argued patiently that the shortage of ammunition made it foolhardy to attack. In Celaya, Obregón was closer to his supply base in Veracruz, and Villa was farther from his own in Juárez. “Make him come to you. Draw him far away from where he’s comfortable. Harass him en route. Order Zapata to attack his rear and push him northward.”

“Order
Zapata?” Villa howled. “That fucking Indian, with his tight pants and ridiculous hat? He’s worse than useless!” Villa had finally admitted it. He rolled back and forth across the little room, boots stirring up dust.

“I’ve got to attack!”

But all the reports, Angeles argued, indicated that Celaya was fortified and entrenched, that Obregón was well dug in and that his army had just received a fresh shipment of a hundred machine guns. Unlike Torreón, the open plain before Celaya was crisscrossed with irrigation ditches for cover.

“If the attack fails—”

“You talk too much of failure,” Villa said angrily. “Isn’t it true that Obregón will never fight unless he’s entrenched and fortified? That’s his style, cowardly as it may be. And it’s mine to attack.” His chest swelled; his eyes glared redly. “I’m a man who came into this world to attack. And if I’m defeated by attacking today, I’ll win by attacking tomorrow.”

Felipe wasn’t impressed. “You risk the entire Division.”

“And whose is it to risk? Do you think I sit on a hilltop,” Villa said cruelly, “with some cannon that can’t shoot straight? The Dorados will lead the attack on Celaya, and I’ll lead the Dorados. In a week’s time the church bells in Celaya will ring to celebrate our victory. If not, I’ll be dead. Then the Division is yours. You can do as you please with it. That’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it?”

Insulted, but keeping his temper in check, Angeles swung his boots off the desk and stalked out, leaving Villa to chew his cud alone.

That afternoon outside Torreón, while Angeles was testing a batch of the new homemade shells in his cannon, one of them exploded. Bitter smoke swirled round. Angeles’ horse bawled in terror, hurling himself backward so that Felipe couldn’t get clear of the stirrups. The horse fell heavily. When the men pulled Felipe free, his face was gray as ash. He had lost enough skin to make a saddle cover, and his leg was broken in two places.

When Villa heard about the accident, his eyes bulged. Sweat burst from his forehead in greasy drops.

“He did it on purpose—damn his soul! To spite me! To keep me from attacking Celaya!”

I flared at him. “You just heard that his leg is broken. The bone is sticking right through the skin.”

“Oh, my God.” Villa mopped his brow with a bandanna. “Poor Felipe. Let’s go see him.”

When we got to Felipe’s bedside, Villa went down on his knees, clutching one of his prized bags of peanut brittle and offering it as though it were the relic of a saint. Humbly he asked Angeles to forgive him for the nasty things he had said at the railroad station. Angeles, in great pain, handsomely replied that he couldn’t remember a word.

The chief issued a stern order to the surgeons. “Take care of this man as if he were me. Do you hear?”

He looked as though he wanted to leap onto the bed and give the stricken general a hug, but we could see that at the slightest touch Felipe’s face turned even whiter. So instead, Villa kissed him fervently on both gaunt cheeks.

“The battle of Celaya will be dedicated to you, my friend. It will be the decisive battle you always preach. And I’ll have crutches made for you from the bones of Alvaro Obregón.”