TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (55 page)

“And I set out again to find you.”

By then she knew there had been fighting in the south and it had gone badly for Villa. On a moonless night she dug up the trunk of gold buried behind the corral. From one of the sacks she took a handful of coins and tied them in a pouch that she put under her head scarf. All the rest she replaced, then smoothed the dirt over with a shovel.

“It was your gold, Tomás, not mine, and I had vowed to the Virgin that I would never touch it. But I needed it for the trains, and food. I decided that you would forgive me, and I would have to take my chances before God. Some risks are necessary.”

She reached Irapuato and learned how the Division had twice assaulted Celaya and twice been repulsed. By the time she reached León that battle was over too. The army of Obregón blocked her path. She had to be careful, for not only Urbina’s soldiers would offer an animal welcome to a pretty Indian girl on her own. Always a train journey behind the battles, she made her way north, to Aguascalientes and then Zacatecas, from pueblo to pueblo, stopping any stray wounded Villistas she could find and telling them that she sought her husband—a major, a gringo. Did they know him? Was he alive?

“It might be yes, señora … and then again …”

“I feared you were dead, Tomás. I feared that even more than I had feared that you had gone to Texas and married. I had to know.” She raised her head, brushing away the gossamer film of tears.

“And then I came here to Torreón. They told me the Division still held the city, but I didn’t truly believe it until I arrived. I found Julio at the Hotel Salvador, as before. He told me you were alive and in the hospital. That, indeed, you had gone back to Texas many months ago, and then returned. That you had not married. I wept for joy. And here I am. As you see me.”

I remembered that she had spoken those same words to me by the lake in Ascensión after she had told the tale of her young husband’s death. I clasped her hands. “No, Rosa, I didn’t marry her. I came close, but your shadow stood between us.”

“And have you found another woman?” she asked quietly.

“No,” I said, smiling as I lied.

I would learn from Elisa. I would make my own rules.

“Then will you have me as your woman, as before?”

“I came to Tomochic to ask you that, Rosa. You know I will.”

“The thing that happened to me in Chihuahua City—”

“You didn’t have to tell me that,” I said. “But you did. What happened doesn’t matter. We never have to talk about it. I love you.”

“It was worth everything to find you,
mi capitán. “

She pressed her head down on my chest, and I felt the flow of tears as I had felt them on the banks of the Nazas River when she cried for another lost love. I never wanted her to cry again. I wanted to hold her, and comfort her, and keep her safe from all the evil in the world.

“I think I have forgotten to speak English,” she whispered, after a while. “Although sometimes, when your presence was strong, I spoke aloud to you in your language. I made up your answers. But it was not easy. You said funny things. I would like to learn again. Can you tell me how you say
te quiero?”

“I love you.” I had never taught her that. There had been no need until now.

The doctor wrapped my ribs with fresh bandages, and I left with Rosa for the Hotel Salvador, where a room was waiting.

With my back pay I bought her a new dress and deerskin riding boots for her seventeenth birthday. Nothing had changed between us except that we were closer than ever before. And now, instead of Hannah hanging at the far side of my fantasies, there was the beckoning vision of Elisa Griensen.

I loved two women. In the dark of my mind I couldn’t lie. Elisa didn’t simply vanish because Rosa returned. It wasn’t frivolous. Greedy, perhaps. But far from being punished, I was rewarded … or so it seemed, for a time.

“What! wouldst thou have

a serpent sting thee twice?”

Pancho Villa greeted me in his suite at the Hotel Salvador.

Surprisingly, he didn’t look too bad. He had lost weight fighting in the heat of the Bajio, and his waist was almost trim. The sagging jowls had firmed. He paced the carpet of his suite in the Hotel Salvador like a man with a purpose.

“Tomás, I knew you had been wounded at León, but I didn’t know how badly. I thought you might have died. I’m glad that’s not the case.”

“So am I, chief. What are we going to do now?”

“I’m going to keep fighting these bastards. Did you ever doubt that? Did I ever lack a plan? I’ve learned a trick or two from that one-armed chickpea farmer. The next time I fight him it’s going to be in a place of
my
choosing. If it’s a city, I’ll starve him out. If it’s out in the open, so much the better. I can use barbed wire too.”

His words cheered me, for I had been wondering ever since Celaya if he could adapt to the change in battle tactics. Obregón was fighting a modern war, learning from the Germans what worked and didn’t work in the mud of France. We were still shouting,
“Adelante!”
and charging across open plains.

I realized how much faith I’d had in the chief. He had forged a strategy and followed it nearly to the end. He had said to Angeles that he was a man who came into this world to attack, and if he was defeated by attacking today, he would win by attacking tomorrow. His own bullish bravery had defeated him; his rawness of vision had shattered his morale. His imagination had faltered.

“If they hadn’t brought a curve ball into this league,” he seemed to be saying, doggedly and before every losing battle, “I’d still be hitting home runs.”

After every defeat I had thought, These are things armies have to go through. It’s a test, and we’ll weather it. The tide turns, then turns again. Obregón is ruthless and scheming, Carranza is just another Porfirio Díaz. We’ll win the next time, because we’re on the right side—or else there’s no justice. But why should there be?

When I was a boy I had believed that life was fair. If you brushed your teeth, told the truth and worked hard, you would be rewarded. You might even be happy. I knew better now—except for my life with Rosa. There I had no complaints, no doubts, no forebodings. We had spent three days together in the hotel room and on the boulevards of the city, and all was well again between us. She was no mirage, no will-o’-the-wisp. She was flesh and blood, and mine. It seemed miraculous. I told her everything that had happened to me in Aguascalientes, Mexico City, El Paso and Parral, and then on the battlefields of the Bajio — except for my interlude with Elisa Griensen.

“What will your chief do now?” Rosa asked. “Can he still win?”

“Mexico’s a big country,” I said. “There are plenty of men to fight for him. And he always comes up with a plan.”

So his words that August morning of 1915 in the Hotel Salvador gave me fresh heart. We had only to maintain our strongholds and flanks in the north—Chihuahua City, Juárez, Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo—and dig in here in Torreón.

If we could rest, he said, shore up our defenses, patch up our brigades, if we could defend Torreón successfully against Obregón’s assault, that would turn the tide. A single victory … that would do it.

“But first,” Villa said to me, “I have one thing to do. It’s on my mind, and I’m losing sleep over it. Have you heard about Urbina? And the gold?”

“I’ve heard plenty about Urbina,” I said bitterly.

“I sent him a wire,” the chief raged. “I ordered him to reinforce us at León. That bastard—he never showed up! He went down to Jiménez with his brigade, to levy taxes and find new women, but he ran into one of Carranza’s pantywaist generals named Treviño. He challenged Treviño to fight him alone,
mano á mano,
but Treviño told him to kiss his ass. Urbina was drunk, I have no doubt. When the shells started falling around his head, he retreated back to Chihuahua City.”

Villa had begun to smoke. Again he chewed the cigarettes one after another, more than smoking them, spitting out pieces of paper and tobacco.

“And then, when the sonofabitch got to Chihuahua City, he dynamited the laundry-room door in the Fermont. He took the gold from the Banco Minero—the revolution’s treasury! Now, when we need it the most, to buy new guns. He went off in a cloud of pulque to Durango. He has a hacienda there called Las Nieves, where his mother lives. The one he always tries to shoot.”

Rodolfo Fierro appeared, tall and composed, smooth-skinned and handsome, silver spurs jingling, in brown leather hip-high boots and full bandoliers over a wrinkled gray jacket. He had fought at Celaya and then at León, where they said he had been as brave as the chief, leading a charge that had almost broken the defense on the thirty-fifth day of the fighting. I hadn’t seen him since then, and I hadn’t missed him.

But I no longer feared him; he had received an order in Juárez that he could never disobey. He nodded coolly to me.

“We’re going after Urbina,” Villa announced. His round head bobbed up and down on his thick shoulders, and his eyes narrowed. “To Las Nieves. Tomás, how is your shoulder?”

“Mending, chief.”

“I want you with me. You can tell what’s there and what’s missing.”

“How do you know he took the gold with him to Durango?”

Villa laughed harshly. “He hasn’t the brains to think of leaving it somewhere else. And he’ll want to count it each morning and every night. It’s unlikely he spent it—he makes his own aguardiente at Las Nieves. Tomorrow at dawn we’ll go.”

He turned to Fierro; it seemed they had already discussed this. “Rodolfo, take a company of two hundred good men. Urbina may not receive us so graciously.”

I thought the chief had better things to do, but I didn’t say no: I had my own scores to settle.

And so, in the midst of the war, with men deserting every day, with the Division in bloodsoaked disarray and Obregón less than a hundred miles to the south, we set out the next morning across the Sierra Madres into the state of Durango. Such was the power of gold and vengeance.

August was the worst month of the rainy season, and the rain poured down throughout most of the journey, turning the mountain trails to mud. All of us were soaked, and the bandages round my ribs became so cold that when we halted for supper I had to peel them off and throw them away. A thick morning fog blocked our vision the next day; during the afternoon the sun was only a white blur behind the haze. We arrived the second night and camped a few miles from Las Nieves.

Fierro and Julio rode ahead to scout the hacienda. An hour later they came back to report that lights burned in the main house, and guitar music could be heard. All the horses were in the stables.

“He’s having a little fiesta with his officers,” Villa said. “They’re drunk, but they’ll fight well when they’re drunk. We’ll wait until dawn. By then they’ll be asleep.”

Las Nieves was more than a hacienda: it was a pueblo, and Urbina owned it. His house was huge, as warm with pigs, chickens, tame deer and children. The only store in the pueblo was at the hacienda, and the
campesinos
had to buy their corn and cigarettes from Urbina or his administrators. He owned them, body and soul, and his mother kept the books.

He was a hell of a revolutionist, I thought, and wondered what was passing through Pancho Villa’s mind. He was godfather to several of Urbina’s sons by various mothers, and between battles he had visited here for baptisms. They had been bandits together—had slept in caves, fled from the
rurales.
They had been like brothers.

Fierro must have been thinking the same thing. Wrapped in his damp serape, he approached Villa by the campfire. In its flickering light his smooth face was the color of blood.

“Pancho, I don’t want to make any mistakes. In the morning, what is it that you want done?”

Villa flicked his hand impatiently. “Urbina is a traitor. For all I know, he may be planning to go over to Carranza. There’s only one punishment for traitors.”

“I understand,” Fierro said.

Before dawn, in the milky fog, we drifted down the slope toward the hacienda. The horses’ hoofs made hardly a sound on the wet earth. The great main house of Las Nieves covered the top of a mesa, the bare mountains behind it wreathed in drifting vapor. No lights showed now. A single farmer passed by on a burro, but when he saw us he made the sign of the cross and quickly reversed direction.

As soon as some light filtered between the peaks across the yellow plain, Villa locked his feet into the stirrups.

“Let’s do this,” he muttered.

We trotted across an open dirt square past a pigpen. A tomblike silence came from the house, and then Villa raised his pistol and fired a single shot into the cold air. It boomed like a cannon, and almost immediately there was an answering barrage of rifle fire from all sides. The men yipped wildly, swooping down on the hacienda.

A half-dozen men lay around in the huge main room, slumped in heavy upholstered chairs and with their heads on the table. A few squawking chickens fluttered out of our way. Empty bottles lay on the concrete floor; the fire in a tiny grate had gone out.

Waking slowly, the men raised their gray faces to see our guns. The chill of death hung in the room, but their drunken sleep had saved their lives.

From the rear of the house came the loud sound of shots.

Leaving a handful of men to guard the prisoners, we surged down a dank hallway toward the bedrooms. We heard cursing … more gunfire … the crash of breaking glass.

An angry young man, with a gray-haired woman cowering behind him, loomed in a doorway. He carried a leveled rifle, and I shot him where he stood.

The woman fell back and began to crawl under a rumpled bed.

“That’s Urbina’s mother,” Villa said, taking time out to instruct me in the midst of the fight. “She fucks the soldiers when her son sleeps. In case no one told you, that’s why he always wants to shoot her.”

Urbina, wearing his long johns, had been sprawled asleep in a bedroom with one of his mistresses. When he snatched a pistol from under his pillow, Julio shot him once in the shoulder. Then Urbina recognized him and cried out, “For Christ’s sake! Julio, are you crazy? It’s me!”