TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (68 page)

Bullets whined off the gravestones, biting out hunks of mica and splintering the wooden crosses. The eye of a horse standing off to my left blew apart, spurting blood. I flopped down on my belly behind a stone, wishing it were a bigger one.

Villa looked more annoyed than worried. He knew, from a hundred battles, that nothing could hurt him. He didn’t bother to duck for cover.

“Some of them got away into the hills when we chased them,” he explained. “They must have circled round the town—”

He stood a moment in the blaze of the morning sun, squinting up at the forest. Then, barrel-chested, pigeon-toed, rolling from side to side, he moved toward his horse. The horse was tethered to an orange tree that grew from the cobbles in front of the storehouse.

Villa was trotting toward it when he was hit. He gave a weak cry, then sprawled forward on his face in the dirt between two wooden crosses. His pith helmet flew off his head to clatter across the cobbles.

Hipólito and I reached him first. We dragged him quickly across the street to the safety of the storehouse.

Candelario yelled at the men inside. “You drunken bastards, go out there and shoot those people!”

The wound was in the leg, and it was a bad one. The chief had been running, and the bullet must have struck him as the leg was raised. It had torn the flesh behind the knee, exiting lower down where it smashed the shinbone. The exit hole was as large as a plum tomato, oozing blood and chips of white bone. Villa, lying on his belly on the floor, slipped a bandanna between his teeth and bit down hard.

“Go outside, Tomás,” Candelario said. “See what’s happening.”

I edged out the door and found that our men had taken cover and were firing haphazardly into the hills, but now there was no return fire. By the time I returned, Villa had decided that he would leave in a wagon with Hipólito and Fierro and head south toward the mountain village of Pahuirachic, hoping to find some kind of doctor on the way.

Candelario would assume command of our forces, waiting for Julio and the missing Dorados to return. “You’ll find me,” Villa gasped, his face gone chalky from the pain.

But before we could move or do anything, another Yaqui scout came belting into town, crying out that yet another column of hostile soldiers was riding down a different trail toward Guerrero.

“Now who the hell are
they?”
Candelario said, annoyed at the interruption. “Tomás, let’s mount up and put a stop to this. We can’t let them attack us until the chief is out of here. Hipólito, don’t move him until we get back.”

Some of our boys were hauled from the different huts where they had been drinking tequila, and soon we had about a hundred mounted men milling about the square. Candelario spurred up to me and told me to ride ahead with the Yaqui scout and pick a spot for an ambush.

We galloped down an arroyo and then up a steep hogback on the west side of town. There were bluffs that extended back to the range of sunstruck mountains, and the little valley beyond was cut by more arroyos, filled with pine and juniper trees, hard to traverse. The Yaqui explained that the trail ran along the edge of the next bluff. I told him to hold Maximilian, and I crawled through the pines and then scrambled up to the bluff. I heard distant hoof beats. Half a mile, I judged.

I flopped down with my rifle cradled in my arms and peered down the narrow trail, flanked with cedars.

I saw dust rising — then khaki uniforms and flat-brimmed hats came into view. The lovely red, white and blue of the American flag flew in the forefront of the column. A pole next to it carried the blue swallowtail guidon of the Seventh Cavalry.

“Son of a whore,” I said aloud and then scrambled back as fast as I could. I hopped into the saddle, gave Maximilian a serious jab and we went haring back, swooping down the hogback into the juniper arroyo where our men were advancing at a trot.

I reined up to yell at Candelario. “It’s the United States Cavalry! Let’s get the hell out of here!”

His good eye widened. “Impossible! How many, Tomás?”

“A regiment!”

“They’re supposed to be at Casas Grandes. How did they get down here so fast?”

“Should I go ask them?”

We galloped back to the town and found Hipólito carefully loading his injured brother into a wagon with one of the captured machine guns.

“It’s the gringos,” Candelario explained. “A full regiment!”

Villa’s eyes fixed directly on me. “How is that possible?” he gasped. “Why are they this far south?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Candelario wheeled his horse, then laid a quirt across the mules. The wagon jolted off, and Villa fell back on his blankets, groaning. Six men rode with him as escort.

Hurriedly, for the U.S. cavalry would be on us any minute, Candelario divided the rest of our force into three groups. His would ride east, another group would climb westward into the sierra, a third toward the southwest. There was no way to get word to Julio, who was still pursuing the Carranzistas. I realized that Candelario had sent no one in the direction Pancho Villa had taken toward the little village of Pahuirachic. The slow-moving wagon would travel unmolested.

Candelario bent low over the withers of his horse. “Ride with me, Tomás!”

The Seventh Cavalry sighted our dust, put spurs into their horses and swooped down the trail after us, pennants flying.

I learned later that the Seventh was under the command of Colonel Dodd, who was sixty-three years old and due to retire in a year. Pershing had got word of us from some Carranzista informers, and Dodd’s men of the Seventh had covered fifty-five mountainous miles in eighteen of the last twenty-four hours. They would have found us even sooner if they hadn’t gotten lost on the trails south of Bachinava, where they had been hit by a gale and then had to hack their way through a snow slide.

The troopers had been living on frijoles and parched corn for two days, and their whiskers had grown icicles. But they were the Seventh Cavalry—they kept coming.

It became a running battle, and there was no way Candelario’s men weren’t going to shoot back. Hoofs rang and drummed on the turf. I lay flat on Maximilian’s withers and never looked behind me.

The cavalry killed and wounded twenty of our men before the big Oklahoma horses gave out, and those of us who were left plunged into a ravine and quirted our way up a slope that led to a pine forest. We trotted another two miles before we decided we were safe.

Then we reined up in the shadows to take a breath and count the missing.

Dodd, I found out later, hadn’t lost a single trooper. Only five of his men had been wounded, none of them seriously. The cavalry later claimed they had killed more than fifty Villistas and wounded twice that many.

I began to wonder why Pershing needed a spy when he had in me, instead, a dumb cowboy who would tell Pancho Villa not to worry.

“An you lie, sirrah,

we’ll have you whipped.”

Dodging the Seventh Cavalry for more than a week, Candelario and I didn’t catch up with Pancho Villa until we reached the mountain pueblo of Pahuirachic, a collection of hovels in a valley of hawthorn trees.

We were trotting through the forest about a mile west of Pahuirachic when a Yaqui scout popped from behind some dark green firs and hailed us.

He brought us to a little cave.

Hipólito, squatting on his haunches outside, told us of their flight from Guerrero.

“The trail was rough,” he said, “and there were rock slides. When Pancho woke up in the wagon, I thought he might die. We had to make a litter for him. Four men carried it, and whenever we stopped I lifted him in my arms. Each time I wiped away his tears, the men looked the other way. Then it started to snow. We couldn’t go on.
Hombre,
it was cold! We laid Pancho under a black oak tree and gave him all our blankets.”

The snow melted. The little band of fugitives pushed slowly across the sierra to Pahuirachic, and Villa himself spotted a cave on a mountainside behind some scrub. None of the others could see it until they were nearly in front of it. The chief’s leg may have been a ruin, but his eyes were those of a fox.

Once, when the weather cleared, an airplane flew overhead and circled the village. From Hipólito’s description, I knew it was one of the Curtiss Jennies of the First Aero Squadron.

Hipólito feared that some of the local Tarahumara had been paid by the Americans to spy for them, but there was no way Villa could be moved until he recovered strength and the wound stopped festering. In the village they found some permanganate of potash, and it seemed to help. Villa grew weaker every day, but still he told the men what to do; from all his years as a bandit in the Sierra Madres he knew the tricks of survival.

The cave overlooked a little cup of a valley with a good water hole. Deer and wild fowl came sometimes to drink, and Villa ordered the men to gouge out the eyes of any they caught. Blinded, the animals would stay close by the water. When the men in the cave needed fresh meat, they had only to go back at night and kill it.

Hipólito led us inside to crouch down beside the chief. His baggy pants had been cut nearly to the hip and the wound cleansed with peeled blades of the nopal cactus, then wrapped in cotton bandages. But from knee to ankle the leg had turned black. The cave smelled of coon shit, and Pancho was stretched out on a bed of blankets and pine needles. It reminded me of the first time I had seen him on the cot in the hut outside Juárez, except that then the evidence of his power was simply being held in check, whereas now it had vanished. A brushwood fire crackled to keep out the dampness.

The chief was pale. He managed a small smile, which faded as we told him the tale of our flight from the cavalry at Guerrero.

“And Julio?” he said weakly. “Did he get back?”

“We couldn’t look for him,” Candelario replied. “We were riding to save our ass.”

“So we’re all scattered …” Villa thought for a while, sweat beading his forehead. “I’m going to stay here. There’s no place else to go. If I don’t get well, I’ll die. It’s as simple as that. There’s no doctor for a hundred miles.”

“How about Parral?” I said.

“That’s the first place they’ll think I’ve gone. The
curandera
there is known throughout Mexico.”

“And Chihuahua City? You need a doctor, not a witch.”

He propped himself up on one elbow. “Tomás, even if I could travel that far, and sneak into the city, which is possible, and find a doctor who wouldn’t turn me over to Carranza, which is also possible … how would I get past the gringo cavalry? Their patrols will be covering all the roads and trails. If they catch me. their doctors may cure me, but then I’ll hang for something I didn’t do.”

He lay back, breathing shallowly.

“Listen, chief,” I said, “the cavalry still trusts me. It was just bad luck that led them to us at Guerrero. They probably don’t even know that you’re wounded. I’ll go back to them. I’ll tell Patton that I know where you are. North, or south or west—anywhere but Chihuahua City. And then, that’s where you can go.”

“All right, Tomás,” he gasped. “Do it. I may not go, but at least they won’t come to Pahuirachic. Lead them far from here, so I can get better in peace. Or die in peace.”

“You’re not ready for harp lessons, chief. In a month or so you’ll get your bristles up and go shoot some Carranzistas. You’ll feel real perky again.”

He gave me a wan smile and squeezed my arm. His revolution was over. He was the great maker of plans, and now he had run out of them. He wouldn’t be shooting any Carranzistas or sharing any peanut brittle with General Pershing. He wouldn’t build any more schools in Chihuahua. I was sure of all that … then.

I went outside, clapped Hipólito and Candelario on the shoulder by way of goodbye and hit the north trail.

Bachinava, where I found the cavalry, was jammed with vehicles, horses and men. A line of dusty disabled trucks sat at various angles on the plaza, most with broken springs and flat tires, bent suspensions and cracked oil pans. The desert and the mountain trails of Chihuahua had taken their toll. A dozen hostlers were working nonstop in the morning heat, shoeing horses and inspecting them for shinbone and other ailments. The men were camped in pup tents on the hillsides, and most of them sat around oiling their rifles, putting salve on their sun-blistered faces, jawing, playing cards or eating wolfishly out of their tin mess plates.

I saw a few reporters too, listening and busily taking notes. The smell of hot biscuits reached my nose and set my mouth watering.

Some Negro soldiers came back from where I had sent them to find Patton. He wasn’t in the camp, they said—he had gone out duck hunting. I wandered around a hillside and down toward the pup tents, when suddenly I whirled at the sound of a voice—a woman’s voice—shrilling my name.

Yvette came bounding across some rocks, holding onto her skirts, dyed blond hair flying and a big smile on her painted face. I hadn’t seen her since before the battle of León, last April—a year ago. She grabbed my hands and planted a wet red kiss on my mouth.

“Tom!
Chéri!
‘Ow are you? What you do here?”

“I might ask you the same question, Yvette,” I said, getting my wits back, “but I guess I’d have to be some kind of bonehead not to know the answer.”

“It’s
merveilleux
to see you, Tom! My sister, she is here too—but she is busy now.”

“I’ll bet. Tell me, don’t they have regulations against this?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no.
Le plus probable … qui sais?
You see how much I learn in Mexico? But a very nice major have arrange it all for us. There are five girls. The men are so bored, Tom. They try to build a baseball field, but there is no flat ground. They have nowhere to spend their money. And if we are not here, they rape the señoritas, which the major says is very bad. Ah,
chéri
So good to see you! You stay awhile,
en souvenir de bon vieux temps?”

“Another time. I’m waiting to see someone. Give my love to Marie-Thérése.”

“Je comprends.
You are married now?”

“No. that’s not it. That didn’t work out, Yvette.”