TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (65 page)

“It’s a fourth-class army,” Patton said to me bitterly, when he woke and leaped into his baggy khakis. “But this war will turn it into a first-class one. What a chance for the cavalry!”

At that thought he brightened and rushed out shivering toward the mess hall for a cup of coffee and some toast. The night had been so cold that the water in our canteens had frozen.

The day grew warm and chaotic. Army units piled in from all directions—the Seventh Cavalry from Alamo Hueco and its machine-gun troop from Douglas; the Sixth Field Artillery from Fort Huachaca; a dozen others. Columbus was the main staging area, and from here the expedition would split into two forces. The Eastern Column of four thousand men, wagons and trucks, led by Colonel Dodd of the Second Cavalry, would strike south through the town of Ascensión to Casas Grandes. The Western Column under Pershing, with Patton accompanying him—nothing but cavalry and field artillery—would cross the border fifty miles westward at a place called Culberson’s Ranch.

Lacking the cumbersome wagons, we were expected to travel swiftly through the desert and hit Casas Grandes from the west. The idea was to catch Pancho Villa’s army between the two forces.

At noon Lieutenant Patton received orders from Pershing to take two Fords and seven Signal Corps men and drive to a place called Los Ciénagos, to pick up a Telefunken radio set which he was to deliver to Culberson’s Ranch.

“Come along, Miguel!” he yelled, sweeping a bedroll under his arm.

The cars bounced over dry tracks through the desert, passing some motor ambulances and trucks en route, the Stars and Stripes flapping on every one of them. I wondered about Patton’s words earlier that day, that it was a fourth-class army. Word had already reached us that Carranza was enraged at the nature of the expedition; we had been forbidden the use of all Mexican railroads.

Villa was rumored to have less than a thousand men, and by the time our reserve reached us in Casas Grandes we would have more than ten thousand, plus cars, trucks, artillery, even airplanes. But the deserts and mountains of Chihuahua were Pancho Villa’s home. He knew every adobe hut and stand of cactus, every cave and dry riverbed. Almost all of our soldiers, including Patton, had never seen combat, much less the unfriendly desert of Chihuahua.

We picked up the radio and reached Culberson’s Ranch shortly after eight o’clock. The Seventh Cavalry were already bivouacked in their pup tents; the Tenth were pounding tent pegs. It was very neat and orderly. I smelled the odor of five thousand horses picketed in long lines, feeding from bags of oats, snorting and stamping their feet in a darkness lit by hundreds of yellow lanterns. My fears were calmed. These were Americans—disciplined and organized, with almost unlimited resources. The men had proved at Columbus that they didn’t panic under fire, and their own marksmanship was something that Villa could only barely comprehend. He would be punished for his madness.

We ate beans and hardtack in the Tenth Cavalry mess hall. Just as we finished, Lieutenant Shallenberger trotted in. He had arrived from Columbus with Pershing and the last of the Eleventh Cavalry.

“George … Black Jack wants to see you. On the double, at the ranch house. He says to bring your striker.”

As we drove along the bumpy track through the camp in the darkness, I quietly asked the lieutenant why he thought the general wanted me along.

“Probably wants to talk about that idea I gave him.” Patton touched a finger to his lips, meaning not to discuss the matter of Colonel Mix in front of Shallenberger.

The ranch house was the center of considerable activity: by the steady light of Coleman lamps, mules were being hitched in their traces to wagons which would follow the column, and a line of Quad trucks was being loaded with sacks of oats and hay for the horses. Inside the house oil lamps and candles cast harsh shadows.

Shallenberger led us across the wooden porch and into the main room, decorated with the heads of buffalo, bear and elk. A blaze crackled in the huge fireplace.

General Pershing, flanked by two staff officers, sat at a desk, leaning forward in earnest conversation with a man seated opposite him. For a moment I didn’t recognize him. He wore the dusty faded clothes of an American cowboy, he had dark unruly hair and the back of his neck was tanned like a walnut.

After we entered, he turned. His face moved from shadow into light. His eyes flooded with worry and flicked back and forth between me and Lieutenant Patton.

It was Colonel Mix, whom I had last seen on Stanton Street as a major. My fingertips tingled, and I felt a chill run from the back of my neck down my spine.

Pershing returned Patton’s salute. “Here’s your man,” he said, smiling frostily. “Showed up in Columbus just before we left. How about it, George? Do we shoot him or enlist him?”

Mix looked more than worried when he heard that. And Patton, for once, had no reply.

“And one man in his time

plays many parts.”

Pancho Villa had decided to go fishing for gold in Lake Ascensión. With it, Felipe Angeles could buy arms, and we could recruit a thousand more men and attack one of the border towns—not head-on, as he had done at Agua Prieta, and not with an army, but from the flanks, at night, unannounced.

“Juárez,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m always lucky at Juárez.”

We were trotting in a dusty column toward Ascensión, when a band of men under Ignacio Garcia galloped out of the desert. They had been sent in an easterly direction as an advance patrol. At first, when he heard Ignacio’s report of the raid on Columbus, Villa just threw back his head and guffawed.

“I don’t believe it. Lopez probably got drunk and wandered across the border to shoot a cow. The gringos are very touchy these days, since those engineers were butchered.”

“No, my general.” Ignacio calmed his horse, still lathered with sweat. “It was a real battle. They say forty or fifty of the gringo soldiers were killed. They say we lost two hundred men.”

“We’re here, aren’t we? Do you see two hundred men missing?”

Ignacio looked around at the column straggling through the alkali haze. His lips began to move, as he began counting. Villa became impatient.

“Stop that, you fool. Tell me what you know and who told it to you.”

Ignacio related what he had heard from two separate groups of Yaquis: that the raid on Columbus had taken place before dawn, that Villa had led it himself, and that a regiment of U. S. Cavalry was riding into Chihuahua to bring him back dead or alive.

“And how long ago did I do this thing?” Villa asked, astonished.

Ignacio counted on his fingers with the same maddening seriousness. “Two nights ago, señor. Maybe three.”

Villa gazed northward at the heat rippling the horizon. “We’d better find out more about this,” he said gravely.

He ordered Julio to take five men, ride hard for Casas Grandes and see what they could learn there. We slowed our pace and moved cautiously toward Ascensión, reaching it only at dark. We camped by the lake. The night had a foul smell, as if the waters of the lake had been poisoned.

Around midnight, as Villa was pacing the turf by a little fire, Julio and his men galloped out of the darkness. One of the horses crumpled to his knees, black blood oozing from the nostrils. Like hen hawks on a setting quail, we swooped down on Julio.

He squatted on his haunches, took a deep breath and said, “It’s true, chief. Almost everything that Ignacio heard, except that everyone tells a different story about how many were killed. Columbus was burned to the ground, that’s certainly a fact. Worse, Pershing is really coming after us. But not with a regiment of cavalry. With twelve thousand men! Cavalry, trucks—even airplanes! Can you imagine? I’ve never seen an airplane.”

Villa’s face in the firelight looked blood red. “Who told you this?”

“Some Mormons were there. They just got back from El Paso. One of them had a brother in Columbus.”

“Why do the Americans think we were the ones who did it?”

“Pablo Lopez was recognized. Martín too. And the colonel of the garrison swears you led the raid. He recognized you. It was supposed to be for revenge, and to steal rifles.”

From our cut-off and lonely part of the world it seemed a ridiculous story, but we understood the implications. The gold would have to wait.

We rode south through a cloudy night to Casas Grandes, and at dawn we finally found the telegraph operator. Villa composed a denial to Pershing at Fort Bliss, and then a second message addressed to President Wilson himself.

“How will the wires get through?” I said. “They have to be routed by way of Juárez.”

“I didn’t think of that. But we’ll send them anyway. This is a crazy business. What do you think really happened?”

“Well,
someone
attacked Columbus. Maybe it was really the Lopez brothers. You said you’d shoot them for what they did at Santa Ysabel. Maybe they went over to Carranza.”

“Carranza…”

“It was dark. Anyone can yell
‘Viva Villa!’
Anyone can ride a black horse and put a pillow under his shirt to look like you.”

He shot me a look of reproof. “I’ve lost weight, Tomás.”

“Colonel Slocum doesn’t know that.”

“I still don’t understand it. Why would Carranza bother to do such a thing to me? I have only four hundred men.”

“But a hundred thousand will rise at the bugle call. That’s what you said to Von Papen. If Carranza believes it too, this is a fine way of getting rid of you. The U.S. Cavalry will do the job for him.”

He laughed. “Even twelve thousand men can’t find four hundred, not if the four hundred know where to hide. And not if they’re led by me.” He sank down on his heels in the dust. “I don’t believe Carranza is behind this. He’d piss blood at the thought of gringos invading Mexico, even if their aim is to catch me. You remember how he yelled when they landed at Veracruz?”

“Then who did it, chief? If it wasn’t us, and if it wasn’t Carranza … then who?”

Pulling at his mustache, Villa squinted into the glare outside the telegraph office. I could see that all his senses were alive. He had been beaten on half a dozen battlefields by Obregón, humiliated and reduced to a poor wandering bandit; but now he was challenged by something larger than the problem of where to water the horses or how to find enough stray chickens and tortillas to feed four hundred tapeworms—and it suited him. It made the blood move in his veins. It was as if he had been waiting for the worst to happen, and this was it; and now he could be himself again, because the worst was over.

For a moment he shut his eyes. I knew what he was doing. He wasn’t thinking. He was letting the breeze talk to him, letting it tell him how to hit the empty cartridge in the wall, and in which column the gold was hidden. I waited a reasonable length of time … perhaps two minutes.

“What do you smell, chief?”

“The German. The one you stopped me from shooting in Sonora. Do you think Lopez did this on his own? He has no reason. To solve a crime, you have first to see who it benefits. The German is the answer. This is what he hoped for.”

It was farfetched, but so was everything to do with Von Papen and his idea that Mexico recover her lost territories. He wouldn’t even have to promise that to Lopez. Von Papen was a man who kept his branding iron smooth. He would only have to pay enough cash and make some sort of oily-tongued guarantee that Lopez would be sheltered from Villa’s wrath.

“We’ll never know,” I said.

He brooded for a while, kicking his feet in the dust, picking at the raw skin of his thumbs. “All right,” he decided, “let the gringos come. Their soldiers will die in Chihuahua. They shoot well, but not if they don’t have targets. We’ll do what Zapata does—hit them from all sides, then withdraw. They’ll have to build a cemetery in Mexico as large as Fort Bliss.”

A feeling of alarm spread through my chest, almost as if I had swallowed a hot pepper. I knew that Villa meant what he said. He had nothing against the United States or the American army—it was only the government in Washington that he hated now—but if he was attacked he would fight back like a hound dog against a grizzly, slashing until he dropped.

And I realized that if he did that, I couldn’t fight with him anymore. I couldn’t put a bullet in the stomach of an American soldier who was only doing his job for fifteen dollars a month. These weren’t Redflaggers who skinned Yaqui feet or Obregonistas who shot children in Mexico City over a sip of water. These were my own kind.

They said in the old days in Texas: “Another man’s life don’t make a soft pillow at night.” I had known that at Hot Wells, after we blew up the railroad and I wouldn’t fire at Patton. I had known it even before that, after Torreón. I would have to quit Pancho Villa and the revolution, and I didn’t want to do that yet.

These last months, watching Carranza make a mess of things in Mexico City, hearing
campesinos
‘ tales of Obregón’s further cruelty, I had come to the belief that Villa had made one other mistake that none of us had understood. Despite his denials, he was the right man to rule Mexico. No one else had the simplicity of motive, the backing of the people, the ruthlessness to deal with the politicians who wanted to hack and carve up the country just as Diaz and Huerta had done before them. He had to have his chance, and I had to convince him to seize it. It might take a lifetime, but a lifetime in Mexico was short, and I had no better way to spend it. Neither did he.

It wasn’t a reckless spirit that moved me—it was stubbornness and knowing where I belonged on this earth, at least for now. The thought startled me, as true thoughts always did.

But before any of that happened, there were a few minor obstacles in the way. One of them seemed to be the United States Army.

“That wire will never get through,” I said, “but you’ve got to get word to Pershing that you didn’t raid Columbus. I met him at Scott’s house, and I don’t believe he’s the kind of man who forgets people. I’ll go up to Columbus. I’ll find out what really happened there. I’ll tell him you didn’t do it.”

“He won’t believe you,” Villa said glumly.