TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (70 page)

“I don’t know too much about that, Major. The truth is, I was too young to vote. Sleep well, sir.”

I curled in my trench, which had cooled down a bit and was nicely comfortable. Soon I would be in Parral. I didn’t much relish showing up with troops of the United States Cavalry, but once I had dispatched them to some more southerly point I could get about the other pressing business of my life. Now that I was on my way, I knew even less than before what I would do. I missed Rosa. She was the best thing that had ever happened to me, and I couldn’t imagine anything better. But I missed Elisa too. I listened to the night wind blow—it bore no messages—and worried myself to sleep.

Come morning the sky was frosty blue and the wind only ghosted through the canyon. The soldiers cooked bacon and hardtack in their mess kits and then fed and shod their horses. There were no more oats so the horses had to eat corn, which they hated. The Chihuahua corn had little pebbles in it, and each man carefully spread the feed on his blanket and picked them out before putting it in the nosebag. Once a horse bit a pebble he would snort in disgust and stop eating, no matter how hungry he was. Tompkins told me that on the march south to Bachinava the difference in temperature—sometimes seventy degrees from day to night—had killed more than fifty of the brutes. Even the ones that were left had thinned down so that their ribs and withers stuck through their skins. The mountain trails wore out their shoes, and if they stubbed their toes on the rocks they would often cast the iron free.

The third day out the troopers became grumpy. We were still in high country with gray clouds that floated past our faces and sometimes swallowed men whole. We had no coffee or sugar, only hardtack, potatoes and cowboy dough—flour, water and a pinch of salt fried in bacon grease. It was good grub for a hungry man, but all I craved were some tacos and guacamole laced with chile.

I guess my stomach knew even better than I did which side I was really rooting for.

On the fourth morning we were somewhere near Pahuirachic, and I was beginning to feel jittery. I hoped we wouldn’t run into any more tracks or some hungry Indian who thought he could pick up a good meal by telling that Villa was nearby in his cave. A gale blinded us with dust. As we passed out of a gorge onto a sheet of volcanic rock that rose toward a pine forest, we heard the sound of a sputtering engine. Every man in the column looked up.

A minute later an airplane, a Martin Model S, appeared over the mountains from the south, buffeted up and down by the whirlwind. It couldn’t have been more than three hundred feet above our heads, and I ducked mine down and got ready to hit the dirt. Just as it flew over us, bucking and jumping like a beefsteaked mustang, it shot upwards, did a somersault, then plunged toward the forest of pines. In a few seconds it vanished from our sight.

“Come on!” Tompkins yelled to his advance guard.

We had taken a good bearing, but as we spurred up the rocksheet we expected any second to hear a fearful crash and then find a mangled aviator.

What we found was the ship rightside up, uninjured, sitting prettily on a brown meadow strewn with rocks. The propeller turned over a few more times as we dashed up, then shuddered to a stop. The pilot, whose name turned out to be Lieutenant Christie, climbed out on the wing and jumped to the ground.

When he took off his goggles we saw he had the face of a cherub—bright blue eyes, ruddy lips, and he’d never had to pay hard cash for a razor strop.

Tompkins reached him first and slid off Kingfisher. “Good Lord, boy! I thought it was taps for you! How did you get out of it?”

“God had me by the hand,” Christie said.

“He sure tossed you up and down before He let go. Are you okay?”

“Got anything to eat?” Christie asked.

While we fed him he told us he had just spotted a force of about thirty armed Mexicans moving between Pahuirachic and San Nicolás on a mountain trail. That was the main function of the Aero Squadron in this campaign: to deliver messages and scout for enemy troop concentrations.

“Villistas?”

“Beats me, sir.” Christie explained he had been unable to follow them because of the downdrafts and the whirlwind.

Tompkins wasted no time. “Lieutenant, we’re going after them. Can you fly out of here, or do you want to join us?”

“I can’t leave my ship, Major. When the wind dies down, I’ll take off for Bachinava.”

“Good luck, then!” Tompkins jumped up on Kingfisher, and off he went, across the meadow and through the forest, with me thundering after.

I was more than disturbed; I was demoralized. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I knew who Christie had spotted, and if the Thirteenth Cavalry fell upon the chief while he was moving camp, he wouldn’t stand a chance. He would be outnumbered and probably being carried in the litter, which meant he couldn’t even try to escape. And I would be riding with the men who would capture or kill him. That thought made me want to howl, and it gave wings to my imagination.

We had to slow down between the pine trees, and I kicked Maximilian up to Major Tompkins.

“Sir, let me go ahead! There may be a good way to bushwhack them. If we come on them like a thundering herd, they’ll head in ten different directions into the brush.”

“What brush?” Tompkins pointed at the rocky mountain slopes.

“For Villa there’s always brush.”

Tompkins cocked an eye at me. We pounded onto the rock face. “Take Sergeant Chicken with you,” he yelled. “Don’t fire your rifle. Just locate them and report back. We’ll follow.”

“Yes, sir!”

I hoped to avoid Chicken, but Tompkins was already waving to him. The Apache jumped smoothly onto his mare and trotted over from the troop waiting on the trail. The bugler was already sounding “Boots and Saddles.” Tompkins repeated the orders, and Chicken and I galloped off together toward Pahuirachic.

There wasn’t much to know about Apaches—they didn’t let you know much—but if you were brought up on the border you understood two things about them. They hated Mexicans. and as scouts they could track a bee in a blizzard or follow a wood tick on solid rock in the dark of the moon. They could tell by twigs and bent grass just how long ago an animal had passed by, and if it were a man they could tell you the color of his hair. There was no way I was going to fool this dark old fellow galloping along at my side.

We shot through the huts of Pahuirachic, scattering chickens and pigs, and then Sergeant Chicken took the lead on his mare and veered off the trail into a stand of juniper. He raised one hand.

We stopped in the shadows. He dismounted and I followed suit.

The warm air was silky and still, and some drowsy shafts of sunlight floated through the trees. Chicken murmured to me so softly that I could hardly hear him, “Maybe fifteen, twenty men. They ride at a slow trot. Maybe two, three hundred yards ahead.”

I craned my neck around the trunk of a juniper, listening to the rustle of the leaves and peering through the green shadows. There was nothing. “You see them?” I asked.

“Saw the tracks,” he said.

I had been looking so hard for tracks I had nearly scraped my nose on the rocks. I heard a fluttering sound and snapped my head up to see some blue quail dotting the sky between the trees.

When I looked down again, Chicken was ten yards away. I had never heard him move. His mare was as silent as he was—an Apache horse.

I trotted up to him with Maximilian, breaking a few branches underfoot on the way, so that he turned with an annoyed look.

“Where we going, Sergeant?”

“Closer. Take a look. Then go back. For Christ’s sake, cowboy—clam up.”

If God had held Lieutenant Christie’s hand, He still had a spare hand to guide this sinner through the forest. We crept between the trees about fifty yards over a cushion of moss until we reached the edge of a glade and some bare rocks. Not twenty feet away, a rattlesnake coiled in a crevice, sunning itself. Its head swiveled noiselessly round, the green eyes glittering, I slid my pistol from its holster.

Sergeant Chicken saw what I was about and grabbed my arm, showing filed teeth that rightly belonged to a shark.

“Don’t kill that there snake, son. Let it live. It might bite a Mexican someday.”

He was grinning in his predatory way and thought that was the end of it, but he didn’t fathom the depth of my intentions.

“I can’t
stand
them reptiles!” I cried. “Oh, little Jesus! Look, he’s ready to strike!” I yanked my arm loose from his sinewy grasp, raised my pistol, didn’t aim, fired, and missed that rattler’s head by a good two feet. He whipped himself back into the crevice. The sound of the shot shattered the tranquil air of the forest, and the bullet whined off the rocks. Then the snake slithered out again and headed toward us.

“Fucking halfwit!” Chicken hissed.

He leaped back and ran for his horse, ground-tied to a fallen juniper branch. I yelled, “I’ll go this way!” I clutched Maximilian’s reins and jumped down on the rocks, then headed at a run toward the trail.

That rattler would need wings to catch me. And I had warned Pancho Villa.

Bullets sang above my head, and one zinged off the gray boulder where I ducked for shelter. I reached up to whack Maximilian on the rump, and he bolted across the trail into the junipers. Something tugged at my hat—it sailed off my head, cartwheeling through the dust. My scalp burned where I had been creased. Now look here, I thought—this is ridiculous. Villa and Candelario and the rest of them hadn’t recognized me: they had heard the shot, caught a glimpse of my khaki uniform and figured they were being attacked by the cavalry. It would have been an ironic conclusion to my revolution if I had led Tompkins to Villa’s hiding place in the sierra, but it occurred to me that it would be even more personally disappointing if by trying to warn them I wound up looking like a chunk of Swiss cheese doused in ketchup.

Raising my hand over the boulder, I wigwagged my pistol.

“Chief! It’s me! Tomás! Don’t shoot!”

Two more bullets chipped sparks off the stone. Then I heard the nasty rattling of a machine gun and saw little explosions of dust advancing down the coulee off to the right of the boulder, marching right past me in an orderly but blood-chilling progression. I was used to this, but that didn’t mean I liked it. Warm blood already tickled my ear. I kept the cheeks of my tail pressed tightly together to avoid my body getting more alarmed than my brain wanted it to be.

And any minute, with all this hullabaloo, Tompkins and the cavalry would come barging up the trail and fall on Villa, with me squeezed in the middle.

I looked off to the right again, to see how the machine gun might be traversing, and spotted the rattler sliding down the rock face in the sunlight, wriggling purposefully to where I hunched behind the boulder. From under cold green eyes his forked tongue darted out of a satanic mouth. I fired at him and missed. He slithered forward, and that did it for me. I shoved off hard to the left, bent low and soared down the cliff onto the trail, tumbling in the dirt like a rodeo clown. The breath flew out of me. Then pain ripped through my arm.

“Damned fools!” I yelled. “Cut it out!
It’s me!”

Just before I reached the shelter of the junipers, staggering along on all fours, bullets worrying the air all around my head, I shot a glance down the trail in a last hope that they’d recognize their lost gringo
compadre
and come loping up to give me a hug and a decent apology. I saw them clear enough.

But it wasn’t Villa and Candelario. A dozen Carranzista soldiers blocked the trail some fifty yards away, with an officer on a black horse waving a quirt and yelling at the machine gunners to kick the barrel over in my direction. I felt like God, having finally seen what was lying there in His hand, had opened His fingers and shaken it loose like some kind of bug.

I dove into the forest. Maximilian saved my bug’s life. He nosed toward me through the trees, nickering with pleasure. I jumped up and pulled a dirty trick. I had seen Geronimo do it back in Oklahoma in Mr. Miller’s rodeo when he went after the buffalo.

I grabbed the horn of the saddle with one hand and the stirrup iron with the other, stretching myself flat along Maximilian’s flank so that he was between me and the Carranzistas, who were firing wildly into the forest. With one spur I kicked his rump … off we went at a trot between the junipers. It was an uphill slope and I couldn’t see a thing, just smelled sweat and horseflesh. The low juniper branches slashed my shirt straight down the back and took half my hide with it.

He was a smart horse, and a lucky one, or else the Carranzistas couldn’t see his smoky shape in the hiding shadows of the forest. We reached the head of the slope and broke into a little sunlit glade. It was quiet there. I could only hear Maximilian’s snuffling and my harsh breath, and feel his heart, big as a coconut, beating fast beneath the hard gray hide.

I worked my way up into the saddle and jammed my feet into the stirrups. Gulping warm air, I leaned down, kissed him between the ears and thanked him.

“I’d do the same for you, amigo, if I could.”

We got out of the glade quickly, and I chose a gentle descent through some hawthorns, then came out of the forest onto a burro path. It looked to me like it wound around the mountain back in the direction of Pahuirachic. Shooting began, back where I had come from, and I guessed that Sergeant Chicken had led the cavalry back to the Carranzistas and they hadn’t yet realized they were fighting on the same side, or were spoiling for a scrap and didn’t give a damn. Not my fault. I used my sleeve to wipe the blood off my ear and cheek, and eased Maximilian into a slow trot south toward Pahuirachic.

These mountains looked more familiar to me. Villa was nearby. I decided I would drop in on him and tell him what all the shooting had been about.

It took me nearly three hours to find the cave. You couldn’t see it from a distance, not unless you had Pancho Villa’s eyes, but I remembered some stands of dead maguey in the ravine below it, and the water hole, and eventually I found them. By now my back smarted and stung from where the branches had scored it, and I thought I might have busted my shoulder when I jumped from the rattler’s path onto the trail. I sipped warm water from my canteen, changed out of my cavalry uniform, stuffed it into the saddlebags and began to climb the slope.