TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (71 page)

It was awfully quiet… no sound but crickets in the brush and a breeze feathering through the ravine. A few buzzards coasted far up above the crest of the hot blue sky. When I reached the cave I was out of breath.

The cave was empty. For a minute I thought it might be the wrong cave. Then I caught the faint smell of disinfectant and coon shit that still lingered in the dampness, and when I poked around in the dirt I found bits of eggshell and charcoal from an old fire. It was the right cave. I figured they had been gone for about a day or two.

Hunkering down at the entrance, I gazed round at the stony brown mountains struck by the afternoon sun. The silence was sweet and soothing, soft as a snowfall. It was pleasant there, and surely peaceful. A man could do much worse. Down below, beyond those distant peaks, crazy men wanted nothing but to kill each other. They froze at night, their tongues hung out by day. Up here, none of that made sense. If I stayed, I could live on the mountain, trap quail and deer, never have a care or enemy in the world, and no one would shoot at me. A hermit’s life might be the best that this earth could offer, and I even had William Shakespeare in my saddlebags for company. By the time I worked my way through to
The Tempest
and
Henry VIII,
I would have forgotten all the good parts of
Richard III
and
The Merchant of Venice
and could start all over again.

It tempted me for about five minutes, and then I understood that I was a creature of the flesh, and there were too many people back in that lunatic world whom I wanted to hug and smile at, and I came to terms with something in my nature and said aloud at the sky, “I’ll take the bad with the good … hell, that’s all there is.”

Getting shot at all the time is no tonic, but afterwards it does tend to make you think straight about why you’re pleased not to be dead. I slid down the rocky slope between the cactus plants. The skin of my back had been peeled away in the forest, my head was bloody and I thought my shoulder might be broken or out of joint.

I hoisted myself into the saddle. I knew where I wanted to go, what tempted me more than the mountain. The women I loved were in Parral. The cavalry was headed there too. I was glad to be rid of them for a while, but it might be an intelligent idea—if I wanted to keep on Patton’s good side, and if ever I wanted to live in Texas—to be there when Tompkins arrived, so I could shore up my credibility by spinning some yarn about first the rattlesnake and then the Carranzistas chasing me. Hell, wasn’t it partly true?

Partly true, in a world full of loonies, and hunters, and liars like myself, seemed like gold.

“ ‘Tis true:

there’s magic in the web of it.”

Patricio let me in at the gate of Los Flores and walked a weary Maximilian around to the stables. The lovebirds and the macaw screeched in their cages. Elisa, in denim and boots just as I had imagined her, slid out the door and spotted me standing there in her garden.

“Tom! Oh, Tom!”

I must have looked like a motherless calf that had bawled its way through a barbed-wire fence and then had a losing argument with a bobcat. She moved to embrace me, then held back. I looked over her shoulder toward the pink stone of the hacienda, hot in the morning sun, and didn’t see Rosa. But she couldn’t be far, and I thought I heard footsteps moving quickly on gravel.

“It’s all right, Elisa. We’re old friends. You can kiss me.”

She looked fine—lean, suntanned, hair yellow as fresh butter. She came into my arms and hugged me tightly, so that I felt the heat of her breasts beneath the denim. I smelled faded perfume behind her ears. I thought, this is what it’s like to come home. The vanilla orchid vines had their flowering now, in May, and the blossoms of the African tulip flowed nearby to the ground.

I often wonder, at this distance of years and space, if it would have changed things had Rosa been the one to come to the door. Because, already, my heart was being rent and tugged.

“You look like hell, Tom. Are you all right?”

“Sleep and a hot bath are what I need. Where’s Rosa?”

She came round the corner of the house in the shade of the poinciana trees, then stepped off the gravel path into a flood of sunlight. Barefoot, she wore a white cotton dress and some silver Indian bracelets I had never seen before. It had only been three months, but it was a different Rosa. Her black hair was swept up in a thick bun atop her head, and her coffee-colored skin shone as if she had freshly scrubbed. She carried a notebook and pencil. She looked thinner, but what had changed most wasn’t something you could point a finger at and say, “That’s new. That’s different.”

She was a young woman now, not a girl. I cut loose from Elisa and held out my arms. Dark eyes shining, she flew across the grass.

“Tomás…”

She smelled of Elisa’s perfume, and the musk of her black hair was even more familiar to me than those other canary-colored strands. This was home too. I had carried all that in my mind, never forgotten the sepia photograph of the two women by the gate, hands frozen in goodbye.

I looked over her shoulder and saw Elisa’s eyes still smiling, a kernel of sadness in the sea-green depths.

Rosa drew back. “Are you hurt, Tomás?”

“Hell no. I’m wild and woolly and full of fleas. Got moss on my teeth, and I hugged a grizzly bear so hard he begged for mercy. I’ve been eating eggs out of an eagle’s nest, and the eagle’s so scared she hides. I rode a panther bareback. Rattlesnakes have bit me and crawled right off and died. I just took in too much territory, that’s all.”

They both brought me to the house, where I worked off my sweaty boots, slapped the dust from the seat of my pants and stretched out on one of the leather chairs in the big cool room, full of fragrant white roses and lilacs in Chinese vases. This would be any man’s idea of heaven, once we got the sleeping arrangements sorted out. If I had my way, I realized, I’d never leave.

Elisa parked me in the room where Candelario and I had slept when we had come over the mountains from Chihuahua City with the sack of gold. She and Rosa fussed over me in a way that made me purr. I must have stunk like a whorehouse in a heat wave, but after a hot bath I was fresh as a powdered babe. They fed me veal in lemon sauce and fresh buttered spinach and black bread, and I drank half a bottle of cold white wine that made me dizzy. My shoulder wasn’t busted, but it was bruised to the bone and I was practically a one-armed man. Rosa put a paste of mustard and wild herbs on me; that took the sting away. Elisa cleaned the scalp wound and wrapped my head in a white bandage. I looked like that fellow in the Revolutionary War—the American one— beating his drum on the way to Bunker Hill, or wherever he was going.

I was glad to be alone that night. I was worn out and wouldn’t have made good horizontal company … and besides, that was a situation I hadn’t yet figured out how to handle. Rosa was my woman, but she had made no move to claim me. More to the point, I hadn’t claimed
her.

Now that I was here, a sense of well-being had descended upon me. A hasty move, I realized, could put an end to that. I wasn’t pawing around for turmoil anymore, but if Rosa had worked herself into the fabric of my life, as I had decided a long time ago, Elisa was woven in that fabric now too. I didn’t want to start unraveling until I was dead certain what was right for each of them and for me.

I slept ten solid hours and woke to the sun, feeling stiff but perky. Over a breakfast of flapjacks and coffee I told them all about my adventures and how Major Tompkins and the flying column of the Thirteenth Cavalry were due to descend on Parral looking for a man who wasn’t there.

Rosa, wearing a blue cotton dress and a silver comb in her hair, just sat quietly smiling at me. Military moves were beyond her concern.

But Elisa understood, and didn’t like it. She leaned back to tap her riding crop on the table. She told me then that Venustiano Carranza had issued an order to his garrisons to keep the Americans out of the cities—by force if necessary.

“The people here hate Don Venus. But they love Francisco Villa. If they think the cavalry’s hunting for him and about to find him, they’ll resist.”

“The cavalry can hunt all they like. He’s not here.”

“Tom, the people in Parral may think he’s hiding somewhere. They’ll resist the cavalry.”

“I’ll find Tompkins and head him off. Tell him Villa’s scooted.”

“He may not believe you. And there may not be time. They may just attack.”

“Attack? No chance. That’s not the American way, Elisa,” I said, quoting Patton and feeling proud.

After breakfast we went to the library, where I could stretch out more comfortably on a leather chair and ottoman, and when Rosa left for a while to look after one of the pintos who had a case of distemper, I asked Elisa how things had gone between them. I had noticed that notebook and pencil in Rosa’s hand when we first met in the garden.

“It was the way I thought it would be, Tom. We’re friends. You didn’t tell me you’d started to teach her to read and write. That was good of you. When I found out, I took up where you left off.”

So what I had wanted had come about without my asking. If only all things in life were so ordained!

Elisa, straddling a hardback chair, wore her tight blue denim shirt with nothing on beneath it, whipcord breeches and carved riding boots. It was the kind of working outfit that wasn’t meant to tempt a man, but it had the opposite effect on me. Every time she shifted in the chair I saw those lithe muscles press against the cloth.

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

“That’s not like you, Elisa. When were you ever shy?”

“All right. I’m not. You’re back, although no one knows for how long. What do you want here?”

I knew exactly what she meant, and I didn’t want to fudge. But I didn’t know the answer. I had come back to discover it.

“I want a little peace and quiet and harmony in my life,” I said. “And I don’t want to hurt anyone. Not Rosa, not you. Does she know about us?”

“I suspect she guesses. But I never told her.”

“If she guesses, or knows … is she jealous?”

“Tom, a woman isn’t a female man. Rosa doesn’t think that she owns your body.”

“And the rest of me? My feelings? They’re not constant, either. They never were. I love Rosa, and what I feel for you—if it’s not love, Elisa, then I don’t know what to call it.” I made an important confession then, and a discovery. “I used to think I wasn’t greedy, but now I know that’s not so. I don’t know how to deal with that. I came back to find out. You and Rosa each give me something, and whatever it is, I need it. Until I sort myself out, I can’t give equal value.”

“Did you stop loving Rosa,” asked Elisa, “when you were here with me?”

“No, I didn’t. Isn’t that the problem?”

“But you’re a warm-blooded man, Tom. You don’t love wisely, but you love well. With a whole heart. You may not see that, but I do. So does Rosa.”

I became distracted for a moment when the morning wind blew the curtains apart so that the sun burst into the room and turned her hair into fluttering gold. She had moved to share the ottoman with my feet, legs tucked beneath her black riding boots, one hand resting on the Indian carpet. I fished in my pocket for the makings of a cigarette.

“Well, Tom. There you are,” she murmured. “Divided, although that needn’t be.”

“Can I sew myself together, like a torn shirt?”

“You can try.”

“And what do I do while I’m here? Would you keep me on if I had Rosa in my bed?”

“I don’t own you, either.”

“My mama brought me up to have better manners, Elisa. I’m your guest.”

“And my house is yours. I knew you’d come back, and I knew that Rosa would be here for you.” She beckoned to my hand, and I gave her a puff of my cigarette.

“You’re aces on kings, Elisa. So tell me this. How would Rosa feel if I went off to your four-poster? Assuming, which I don’t, that I was invited.”

“Ask her,” she said, a merry light flickering in her green eyes.

“I couldn’t.”

“Tom, you may try to play the happy-go-lucky cowboy, but it doesn’t wash. You’re a clever man. You know how to get what you want.”

“Do I? No. Things just happen to me, and it seems I usually don’t have much choice.”

“Nonsense,” Elisa laughed. “You always choose. I don’t know anyone, and never did, who
makes
things happen the way you do. That’s why I know you’ll be all right whatever you turn to—in this house, or anywhere.”

She rose gracefully and began to pin her hair. “I’ve got to go. The mare’s in foal. She needs Aunt Elisa.”

She left me there with something to think about. I strolled through the orchard and listened to the wind blow across the desert. But thinking was one thing. Coming to conclusions was another.

After supper the three of us dropped comfortably into the leather chairs in front of the fireplace, sipping coffee and brandy. After a while we heard a tinkling of the gate bell… then, a minute or so later, a squeal from Francisca. I hoisted myself out of my chair and took my holstered pistol down from the peg by the mantelpiece.

A man was chuckling softly in the garden. Francisca was giggling.

I stepped outside into the cool air, and in the twilight I saw a broad shape I would have known anywhere. Setting Francisca aside, he thumped up to me.

“Tomás!”

“Candelario! What in hell are you doing here?”

“Visiting the pleasant places of my youth. What else?” He gave me a hairy embrace, and I inhaled a week’s sweat. “And you, Tomás? The same?”

“I went back to Pahuirachic, to the cave, but you were all gone. Some damned Carranzistas skinned my hide a few times with a machine gun, and I needed a hot bath. This was the nearest tub.”

“And the water here is just the right temperature. You devil!”

“Come inside,
coño.
Get warm. Say hello to the ladies.”

“Tomás! Not a devil.
The
devil.”

By then he was inside the front door. In the lamplight I saw how weary and thin he looked, black beard bushier than before and filled with gray dust. He took off his hat, smiling craftily at Elisa and then Rosa.