TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (7 page)

We trotted through the wilderness toward Columbus …

Candelario told me how he had lost his eye. He was from Camargo, a town south of Chihuahua City, and although he had been brought up on a ranch he began working in a potash mine when he was eleven. A twelve-hour day, six days a week. His father was a foreman there, and his mother, when she wasn’t in the final day of a pregnancy, sold tacos on the street. She had sixteen children, ten of whom had lived.

The unlucky ones, as she would say. My father, naturally, was deeply in debt, and the debt fell on his sons as well. One day when I was fifteen I came home and my father told me I was betrothed. My bride was to be my cousin Annabella, who was pregnant. ‘Not by me,’ I protested. He knew that, and she had been a maid at the hacienda, so it was all fairly clear. I married Annabella and we had our first child, a daughter. There was a fee due to the church at the time of the marriage, then another one at the christening. I couldn’t pay it, so it was paid for me by the hacienda owner, and my debt kept growing.”

“Why didn’t you just quit?” I didn’t tell him that in the past it had been my specialty.

“Under the dictator, Tomás, if you ran away from a job or debt, you could be shot on sight. There was even a bounty to whoever brought you in. I was a slave until my twenty-seventh year. My mind as well as my body. Asleep! The revolution awakened me.”

As soon as word spread of Madero’s uprising, Candelario joined a local brigade. He knew how to ride, but he learned to shoot only after he slit a Federal officer’s throat with a machete and stole his rifle. When his own captain was killed near Tecolete, the brigade was given to Pancho Villa. Camped outside Juárez, the little revolutionist army was eager to fight, and Villa sent a patrol upriver to draw fire from the defenders.

“I was in that patrol,” Candelario recalled. “I was shot in the face, and the bastards left me there. I dragged myself to the riverbank and then passed out. I assumed I was dead. It’s a strange feeling, hard to describe. Not truly unpleasant. But Villa had seen all this through his field glasses, and he knew I still lived. He sent Julio out to get me. So I owe my life to them both. I lost an eye—the bullet cracked it like an egg—but I was very lucky. And a one-eyed man, they say, brings good luck wherever he goes.”

It was in that same battle that Julio’s young wife had been captured near the railroad station and then shot.

“Poor Julio! He had married for love, which is often a mistake but in this case seemed to work. He is a serious man, and religious, although I don’t know how a revolutionist can believe in sin and Jesus and the rest of that shit the Church forces down your throat. Anyway, since she died he won’t touch another woman.”

Candelario sighed, and then his good eye sparkled powerfully, making the glass one look even deader than usual. “I, Tomás, am just the opposite. Sometimes I feel cursed. I can’t do without women, and I think of them all the time. When I ride, when I eat, when I try to sleep—why, even when I’m fucking one, I’m already thinking of the next one I’m going to fuck! Isn’t that a curse? I love them too much. Perhaps that’s my fate.” He cast a quick look at me to see if I was scandalized. “I hope you won’t be offended by this, but I like the gringo women above all. Their skin excites me. And among the gringos, especially the yellow-haired ones. The chief won’t touch a woman who doesn’t look like Moctezuma was her grandfather, but those blond pussies drive me wild, even if I know the bitches have dyed them.” His tongue flicked across his lips. “Hipólito says there’s a whorehouse near Columbus that has two blond sisters. They’re famous. They come from New Orleans and have French blood. We’ll see Do you crave women, Tomás?”

If he knew how little experience I’d had with them, he would have laughed at me, and I didn’t want that. But I was saved by the bawling of a cow that had become tangled in the chaparral. I trotted off to help her, and so Candelario was forced to wait for his answer. But not too long.

The United States Cavalry had set up shop on the western edge of Columbus, in the state of New Mexico. When we crossed the border we gave their pup tents and pine barracks a wide berth and brought the herd in well to the east, where we bedded it down behind some small buttes that humped up from the desert. The morning was hot, and there wasn’t enough grass there to chink between the ribs of a sand fly. Carrion crows wheeled lazily in a faultless blue sky.

Hipólito Villa, in charge now that we had reached our destination, decided to ride into town right away and start negotiations with the Jews.

“You have my brother’s list, Tomás?”

I tapped the breast pocket of my denim shirt where I kept my dwindling sack of Bull Durham. We rode off on the yellow plain, Hipólito in his dusty suit, with Candelario waving goodbye and chewing his lips thinking of the French whores.

Columbus was a recently built New Mexican cowtown of little importance and perhaps three hundred souls. Trying to make something of it, the good citizens had built a few hotels and a movie theater, and Hipólito told me there was a gambling emporium next to the whorehouse on the road that led north to Deming. It was a sorry place, and I had seen a dozen like it stretching from El Paso to Brownsville Old Glory drooped over the depot of the El Paso & Southwestern Railroad, and riding up the main street, which these optimistic settlers had called Broadway, I spotted a Woolworth’s and a Popular Dry Goods, and the theater, which was charging twenty cents admission to see Mabel Normand in
Race for Life.
The desert stretched like a flat brown carpet in all directions. Hipólito disappeared into the Commercial Hotel to find his man.

Ten minutes later we were sitting in Peache’s Lunch Room at a big table with a red-and-white-checked cloth, spooning up split-pea soup and making small talk with Felix Sommerfeld and Samuel Ravel. I liked both of them, which surprised me, because I’d never had anything to do with Hebrews before and had been brought up believing they all wore little black caps and had beaks that touched their chins. Sommerfeld looked much as Fierro had described him—a white-faced frog—but to be more exact, and kind, he was a man of about fifty with a hairless face, a relaxed smile and two keen pale blue eyes that gleamed from behind gold-rimmed glasses. When he laughed, his belly rippled under his white linen suit and his watch chain jingled. He was never without a Murad cigarette in his hand, and the fat pink fingers were stained brown right up to the knuckles.

Sam Ravel, by comparison, was a tall man in his early thirties who wore Cheyenne chaps, calfskin boots and a black Stetson; he had a hawk nose, dark observant eyes and an air about him that made you glad he was on your side rather than against you.

But Felix Sommerfeld, I found out, beneath his plumpness, had plenty of leather as well. They bought the whole herd from us outright, taking our word for it on the count but reserving a look-see to make sure the cattle were healthy and offering a fair price of twenty dollars a head in greenbacks. Over the pea soup I explained to them that we didn’t need cash; it was arms that we wanted. I handed them Villa’s list.^

Felix Sommerfeld studied it. “That seems reasonable, and if there’s a difference either way we’ll sort it out later. When do you need delivery?”

“Right away.”

“Next week’s more likely,” Ravel drawled. He was from San Antonio, and he had put in a few years with the Texas Rangers, which of course didn’t stop him from riding the other side of the fence now that he was a civilian. It gave him advantages too, since he knew whose palm couldn’t be greased and who would take the
mordita—the
little bite—as the Mexicans lovingly called it.

“What about transport?” I asked.

“We’ll lend you wagons,” Sommerfeld said.

I thought that was friendly of him, and it gave me an idea. I knew how badly Villa needed bullets. “Look, Mr. Sommerfeld,” I said, “we can provide you with a lot more cattle, probably as much as you can handle. It’s wandering loose over half the state of Chihuahua.” I guess they knew that was a lie but didn’t much care. “Why don’t you give us an extra hundred thousand cartridges, and one more machine gun with a hundred belts of ammunition? We’ll deliver the cattle for them in two weeks.”

Sam Ravel turned to Hipólito, who was busy tearing into his fried chicken with one hand and guzzling a cold bottle of Carta Blanca beer with the other. “I need to know,” Ravel asked in Spanish, “if this man speaks for your brother.”

Hipólito wiped grease from his mustache. “Yes, Tomás has my brother’s trust.”

That made me feel wonderful, and Ravel nodded. “All right,” he said, “I can live with the idea of another hundred thousand cartridges and a machine gun on credit.”

They were certainly fine men to do business with.

Toward the end of lunch I hazed the conversation round to matters Villa had wanted me to find out about. “I’ll tell you what you want to know,” Sommerfeld said. “President Wilson doesn’t like Victoriano Huerta, which is an attitude that Sam and I also share, in case it’s escaped your attention. Wilson was appalled by Madero’s murder. That means he won’t allow any American arms to reach Huerta, and he’s given orders to Pershing to seal off the border. That embargo applies to Villa and Carranza too, but it’s a long border. The problem is, Huerta’s being supplied by the Japanese. And I suspect the Germans as well. Did you know that?”

“No, sir.”

“Keep it in mind. Beyond that, Wilson’s most in sympathy with Carranza, because he likes Carranza’s calling himself a Constitutionalist. Isn’t that his title—First Chief of the Constitutionalist Army?”

“That’s what they call him,” I said, “when they’re being polite.”

“What Mr. Wilson knows about Mexico,” Ravel said sourly, “you could stuff into a small taco.”

Understanding the measure of their sympathy, I spoke more freely. “Villa wants to know what the Americans think of him.”

Sommerfeld puffed at his cigarette, puckering his features so that he looked more like a frog than ever. “They think he’s an illiterate bandit, a ruffian, and a hell of a man. And now, young fellow, there’s something
I’d
like to know. What in the devil are
you
doing riding with him?”

“He’s going to make me a captain,” I said, chuckling.

“With pay?”

“We haven’t discussed that yet.”

“Haven’t you any other reason?”

I was young. I couldn’t tell him the nature of a young man’s dreams. I said, “It’s a long story.”

Sommerfeld said pleasantly, “You should tell it to my daughter. She likes long stories, and she’s a great admirer of Villa’s revolution.”

‘I’d be glad to, sir”—which was a downright lie, if his daughter looked anything like Felix Sommerfeld.

“She may have a few doubts about Villa,” he explained, “but none about what he stands for. She used to distribute that newspaper for Ricardo Flores Magón.
Regeneración,
it was called. In fact, she got into a little trouble over in Juárez because of it, but that’s a story she’d have to tell you, and she’s a bit shy about it.”

He may have seen a dulled look in my eye then, because he said, “You know who Flores Magón is, don’t you?”

I nodded my head vigorously. I didn’t want to seem too much of a country bumpkin.

“I see. How about Bakunin and Karl Marx? Do they interest you?’

There was a different tone to Sommerfeld’s voice now, a kind of surgical probing that made me decide not to press my luck.

“No, sir, I never met those two.”

Sommerfeld and Ravel thought that was a witty remark, or at least they laughed good-humoredly, but then they changed the subject. Ravel was taking the evening train, the Drummer’s Special, back to El Paso to arrange the supplies and wagons. He told me that he owned the Commercial Hotel here in Columbus and he would be honored if I’d spend the next few nights as his guest. He said he hoped I wouldn’t t take offense, but I smelled as though I’d been reared in a wolfs den and could use a hot bath, and any man who’d been riding a cattle trail could appreciate a night’s sleep in a feather bed. Clean straw was tempting, but I explained that I didn’t think Candelario and my friend in the blue suit would understand, and I’d bunk down with them on the edge of town where we had sheltered the herd. We all shook hands. I promised Mr. Sommerfeld I’d meet him in the lobby of the hotel at noon the next day, to wind up our paperwork.

When Hipólito and I were riding back to the herd, he loosened his black string tie and began to chuckle.

“What’s so funny?”

“You are, Tomás. Why didn’t you take the hot bath and the bed? The ground is hard. A bed is soft. Maybe he would have found a woman for you. Then you could have told Candelario and driven him mad.

“You understood?” I asked, more than a little surprised. “You speak English?”

“Naturally. When the revolution’s over, I’m going to be a businessman. Did you think I was a peasant like Candelario and the others? The best part of business is to shut up and let someone else do the talking.”

He leaned across his saddle and patted my shoulder, and his fat face creased with a smile. “But you did well, asking for more bullets. I didn’t t think of that. You could be a businessman too. Maybe we’ll be partners. Would that interest you?”

“I wouldn’t mind that at all,” I said, feeling less like a fool than before.

“In that case,” Hipólito said, “make sure you don’t get killed, and then you’ll have a future.”

“It is the purpose

that makes strong the vow.”

That night, after we had made sure the cattle were snugged down under the watchful eyes of the vaqueros, we trotted out of Columbus on the north road to Deming. Candelario was looking forward to the evening’s entertainment, and he let out a yell that might have made a wolf hunt for cover. But when Hipólito jingled the coins in his leather purse and announced that our first stop was going to be the gambling hall, Candelario’s howl ceased and his head snapped round. His one good eye glared in the moonlight.

“What did I hear you say? You want to gamble before you fuck?”

“I’m feeling lucky,” Hipólito explained.