TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (67 page)

Patton wiped his brow with a khaki handkerchief.

“But if he doesn’t surrender, there’ll be a hell of a war. If we have a hard time finding him, a lot of Mexicans will die. Men you know well. And a lot of Americans too—men you don’t know. But if you did, and if you knew their mothers and wives and sweethearts, you wouldn’t want to be responsible for their deaths.”

He waited, and I couldn’t help but nod. I’d had a hand in too many deaths already. I had begun to sense his drift.

“You can prevent all that, Mix. You can save a thousand lives on both sides, keep hundreds of good men from being blinded and crippled and having their gonads shot off. You see where I’m heading?”

“Spell it out for me, Lieutenant.”

“I want you to help us find and capture Pancho Villa.”

My mouth hung open a moment. “That’s
all?”

Patton banged on. “You can lead us to him. If you do, you’ll have the satisfaction of saving all those lives on both sides. Besides that, we’ll grant you a full pardon. Blowing up the railroad will never have happened. And you’ll go down in the annals of your country, not as a traitor, which is what you deserve up to this point … but as a goddam fucking four-star American hero. How about that?” He smiled benignly, showing all his heroic teeth. “Now, think about it, Mix. Cogitate. Don’t answer too quickly.”

I didn’t intend to. All that flapdoodle and flag-waving had set my teeth on edge. Find and capture Villa! If I helped him do that, there would be more than one four-star hero in the future annals of the American military. They would make him a general, or at least a captain, for suckering some dumb cowboy into leading the cavalry to Pancho Villa.

But chinked among those high-pitched patriotic phrases, there had been a certain amount of good horse sense. And he had planted an interesting idea in my head.

“Lieutenant, let me take a walk. This is a big decision to make. You’re right, I need to think. I want to see if my horse is okay too.”

He was eager to please. The three of us piled into a Ford, with Bosques in back, and bounced down to the big tent where I had tethered Maximilian.

“That’s a fine quarter horse,” Patton said. “I noticed him at Hot Wells. Arizona-bred?”

“Chihuahua. Gift from a German lady in Parral. Now I’m going off to cogitate, like you said. Give me time. This ain’t easy for me.”

Alone, I led Maximilian into the cactus, where he could sniff the desert and feel more at home. He wasn’t spooked, he was too smart for that. I was the one now who shied at shadows. I was still remembering things that Villa had said to me … that the cavalry shot well, but not if they didn’t have targets.
“We’ll hit them from all sides, and they’ll have to build a cemetery in Mexico as large as Fort Bliss. ‘‘

I patted Maximilian, looked up at the stars and murmured to him in Spanish, “What do you think, old fella? Want to be a horse spy?”

He snorted comfortably, and the cold night wind blew.

“I’m in trouble,” I confessed, “but I can get out of it. That suits me, because I wasn’t cut out to be a fugitive, and one day I want to go back to Texas. But that’s not all. This gringo lieutenant’s given me an idea. He wants me to lead him to the chief. Now, you know I wouldn’t do a thing like that … I’d sooner die. But
he
doesn’t know that, and I’m not going to tell him. Listen up, Maximilian. Suppose I said yes to him? Told him I didn’t know exactly where Villa was right now, but I could ride back down and find out. And suppose that wherever I told him and the U. S. Army to ride, with all their trucks and cannons, there was …
nothing!
Nobody! Pershing would never find the chief, and Pancho wouldn’t have any decent reason to go after Black Jack and try to skin his hide. None of those wives and mothers in Texas and Oklahoma would have to see their men come back on a stretcher with their gonads shot off. That crazy Candelario wouldn’t get his other eye plunked out by a Colt machine gun. A lousy war, but no killing. Sure as hell less than if I said no and quit the revolution. Suppose I did that, Maximilian? I’d still be a kind of hero, wouldn’t I? Nobody would know it—but does that matter? What do you think? Have I lost all my buttons?”

He snorted again. He loved me to talk to him. But I didn’t quite understand his answer.

“Maximilian, I see I’ll have to be a bit more specific. First of all, am I loco?”

He snorted and waved his big gray head from side to side in the negative, eyeing me from those tear-shaped brown orbs. His forelock fluttered a little in the wind. I had a hand on his chew muscle. I hoped I wasn’t guiding him too much.

“Good. Now here’s the second question. The first answer was satisfactory. Listen up again, and think before you nod yes. Should I lead General Pershing and the U. S. Cavalry on a wild goose chase through Chihuahua? If they find out, I’m a dead colonel. If I’ve got nine lives, I may have used up eight of them already in this damned revolution. Is it worth the risk?”

He rolled his eyes, sniffing the cold air. The smell of bacon and dung floated out from the camp.

“Come on, Maximilian. I haven’t got all night. Tell me.”

I gave just the gentlest tug to his hackamore. He dipped his head and whinnied.

“Good boy. That’s what I figured you’d say.”

I led him back to where Patton waited with Bosques, leaning against the chassis of the Ford. I thought at first I would bargain with him and debate the ethics of it before I gave in—that was what any good writer would make the actor do—but when I saw how eagerly he greeted my return from the darkness I realized I could spare the theatrics and get right to the point.

“Lieutenant, I’ll do it.”

I thought he might jump up into the air and click his heels. He had spirit. I liked him a lot more than I did that German captain. He stuck out his hand and pumped mine in a firm grip.

“You won’t regret this, Mix.”

“Let’s hope not,” I replied. “If Villa finds out, he’ll hang me so high I could look down on the moon.”

“Now you can tell me. Where
is
Villa?”

“Well, he
was
in Casas Grandes. But that doesn’t mean he’s still there. I’ll have to go a ways before I find him, and I .can’t take a regiment of troopers along with me.”

“Where do you think he’ll go?”

“Anywhere in Chihuahua. Maybe even Sonora. He never tells anyone what he’s got in mind. You have to be there to know. He might split up his men.”

“How large is his force?”

“Maybe four hundred.”

“Shithouse mouse! They told us more than a thousand!”

“Well, whoever ‘they’ is, ‘they’ told you wrong.”

“Four hundred will be a hell of a lot harder to find than a thousand.”

“If they split up, it’ll be even harder. It’ll take a little time.”

“We want only Villa. And five others.”

“Which ones?” I asked.

“The Lopez brothers. They were with him at Columbus. Those two who were with you at Hot Wells—General Cervantes and Colonel Cárdenas. We believe they were at Columbus too. They’ll all get a fair trial. And that other one, if he’s alive—Colonel Fierro. A story’s got round that he was drowned in quicksand in some northern lake.”

“Almost,” I said, “but he’s alive.”“

Bosques’ face hardly changed expression, but I heard him draw a quick breath. “Is
he
going with you?” I asked Patton.

“He’s under my orders.”

I turned to him. “Bosques, there’s something you need to know and that I need to tell. That time in Torreón, at the stockyards—if I had refused to load his pistols, Rodolfo Fierro swore he would kill me. I was a week-old captain, and he gave me an order. I tried to get out of it. I just didn’t try hard enough. I’m ashamed of what I did, which isn’t going to make up for your brother getting killed, and all those other poor souls. But that’s the story. Short. Not so sweet.”

“You heard him, Miguel,” said Patton.

“I’ve made a promise,” Bosques said, nodding at the lieutenant. “I will keep it.”

“Good enough for me.” I turned back to Patton. “Where is your army headed?”

“That’s no secret. Casas Grandes, by way of Ascensión.”

“I’ll meet you there as soon as I know where Villa’s hiding out.”

“And if we move on?”

“Ten thousand gringos can’t hide in Chihuahua, Lieutenant. There won’t be an Indian between here and the Yucatán who won’t know where you are.”

Patton saluted me and said, “Good luck, Colonel,” which pleased me no end.

I rode through the night to Casas Grandes.

Julio brought me out to a canyon in the mountains west of the town, where a pleasant little waterfall coursed down into a hot bubbling pool that smelled of sulphur. The chief was bathing there and he was glad to see me; after all, we had both worried that I might be stood up against a wall in Columbus and shot. Some doves cooed in the crannies of rocks, and I stripped down and dove into the pool with him, relishing the chance to wash the dust off my hide. His brown flesh glistened in the sunlight, and he was flapping his arms, making noises like a walrus.

“I saw Pershing,” I said. “I told him you didn’t raid Columbus. He didn’t believe me.”

He seemed to accept the news. If anything, his calmness worried me—it might mean that he was looking forward to scrapping with the cavalry. So I described the camp at Columbus. I didn’t want him to think that the American army was coming with just a regiment of green horse soldiers and some broken-down Dodge trucks.

“Ten thousand men?” He whistled between his teeth. “To find just
one?
They must be crazy.”

“Well, they have a tendency to overdo things. Bigger and better, that’s the American motto. But they’re coming. That’s a fact.”

“I won’t fight them if I don’t have to,” he said. “We’ll let the desert and the mountains do the job. But if they
do
find us, and they attack…”

“Listen, chief, I’m glad you feel that way. I know you don’t want to kill gringos just for the hell of it. So here’s what I did.”

As we were drying our bodies on some rocks in the sun, I told him about Patton’s proposition. His eyes grew large.

“And you agreed?”

“Why not? If you go south, I’ll lead them east. If you ride east, I’ll make sure they’ll hunt in the south for you.”

He gave me a stinging wet slap on the shoulder.

“Clever, Tomás! I like it. Tell me more.”

I explained about Pershing’s plan to send the two columns south from Columbus and Culberson’s Ranch, squeezing our forces between them.

Villa chuckled. “That’s a good plan. It would have been a good battle too. But a bloody one. We’ll just have to disappoint them. We’ll ride south.”

That afternoon, back in Casas Grandes, our whole band of four hundred men trotted off toward the sierra in the direction of Bachinava. I figured the cavalry would have left New Mexico by then. I thought of them wending their way through the desert, stringing telephone lines behind them all the way, and wondered how they would like those Chihuahua buzzards sitting on the wires, staring down with bold, hungry eyes. With his supply lines stretched thin as a rubber band and no Villistas in sight, Pershing might just give up and go home.

When I was an old man I could rock in my chair and tell my grandchildren: “I once stopped a war. Had a little help from some lieutenant, but it was me that did it, kids.”

Whose grandchildren? Rosa’s and mine, I figured. That’s what I had in mind now when this was all over, if I could rid myself of the vision of Elisa Griensen. It kept recurring in all my fantasies, usually at the edge of things, but sometimes at the center. And sometimes I saw both her and Rosa as I had left them at the gate, waving their farewell in the brown light of dusk. For two years I had struggled, sometimes without even knowing it, between a dream of Hannah and the reality of Rosa. Now that struggle seemed to be beginning all over again, but with new combatants.

I amended that. No one was in battle except me, and I had no antagonist other than my nature. I knew that even then, at the age of twenty-four.

Villa broke into my thoughts with some of his own. We were in the mountains, on the way to Bachinava. Riding south suited him perfectly, he told me, because he had received word from a Yaqui deserter that a small Carranzista garrison had occupied the town of Guerrero, about seventy miles west of Chihuahua City. They were supposed to be guarding a stock of new Mauser rifles and bullets.

We needed arms, so we would attack them.

And then he had just heard a report that Carranza, in Mexico City, was hopping up and down like a scalded dog, furious at President Wilson.

“Maybe the gringos will decide they’re fighting the wrong man,” Villa said, with a new gleam of hope in his eye. “Especially when they realize I don’t intend to fight back. Maybe we can make war together on Carranza. I would enjoy that. I’ll let Pershing keep command. I’ll just advise him and eat his peanut brittle.”

He kept on dreaming. He was always in a good mood before a scrap.

The next night we fell like wolves upon the sleeping garrison at Guerrero. The fight was brisk and mercifully short. We captured the rifles, three machine guns, a storehouse of ammunition and a dozen cases of tequila. We had a gang of young Yaqui recruits with us, and that wet stuff drew them like flies to sugar.

Just as the sun was about cordwood high, one of our scouts reined up outside the village and yelled to Villa, who was standing near a little graveyard admiring the stones. A force of a hundred Carranzistas cavalry, he said, was riding like hell down a trail from the direction of Anáhuac.

Villa turned idly to Julio. “Do you have any men who are still sober?”

They organized about forty of the Dorados and rode off in a swirl of dust to stop the Carranzistas. After fifteen minutes we heard some distant rifle shots. Half an hour later Villa and a dozen men came cantering back, grinning through their sweat. Candelario, Hipólito and I were sharing a bottle of tequila in the cemetery, our backs propped against the gravestones.

The chief dismounted, wiping his forehead with a bandanna. “We picked them off from the top of a little hill. They must have thought we had a thousand men. They turned tail and ran like jackrabbits. Julio and the others are chasing them.”