TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (79 page)

“What is it, Tomás? Say it.”

I don’t know how long I had been standing there.

“Julio’s dead.” I said. “Shot near Bachinava, by the gringos.”

Death was something we all faced, and no one could shake his fist and swear at God that He had tricked us. Candelario took a little walk into the hills and smoked a cigarette. Hipólito turned his back and fiddled with his saddle, tightening the cinch, then loosening it, then tightening it again.

“Shit,” he said.

Fierro spat into the dust, then looked away at the mountains.

After a while Candelario came back. He had made his peace, but his voice was flat and drained. “The others are waiting for us. Let’s go get the damned gold and split up. Come along, Tomás. This is the last thing you have to do for us.”

We approached Ascensión from the southwest. With our escort of twenty men we raised a cloud of alkali that could be seen for miles on that empty desert. No breeze blew. It hadn’t rained here for nearly a year, and the buzzards strutted, gorging themselves on dead cattle and prairie dogs. In a drought, cows went mad and broke their horns hooking trees and rocks, or went blind. The ground had cracked under the heat so that giant fissures gaped between stands of cactus. The unpitying sun coasted toward the peaks.

The usual old men squatted in the dust, and two Yaqui boys again played leapfrog on the back of a sow. I missed the sight of the old women bearing water jars from the lake. It had been seven months since we dumped the gold in the green channel between the bars of quicksand. We left the men and the wagon on the edge of town and skirted it at a trot, rifles resting across our saddles, scanning the desert in the fading light. But there were no signs of Carranzistas or the cavalry.

We trotted along a burro path past ruined adobe huts. I recognized the house where we had lived before we attacked Torreón. The orange tree that had grown through the roof was lifeless. Far off to the right I saw the derelict hut that marked the line of sight.

“Where’s the damned lake?” Candelario muttered.
“Válgame Dios!
Son of a whore!”

There was no lake.

Now I understood what I had seen when we had dumped the gold. But I had only seen it with my eyes and not my brain. The waters had been steadily receding. That was why they had looked so brown, and the smell that had filled my nostrils the night we had camped here in March had been the smell of mud and rotting carcasses. The drought had finished the job. The lake had become a stagnant bog. We could see the bleached skull and ribs of a longhorn, picked clean.

Without a thought to quicksand, we spurred down the bank into the flatland. The setting sun had turned the bog a lovely brownish-pink. The gumbo sucked at Maximilian’s pounding hoofs. Carrion crows flitted overhead, cawing insolently. A few pools of brackish water glistened in the unearthly light.

There was no gold, either. We searched what had been the lakebed until dark, when there was nothing more to see. We pounded back and forth on the stinking mud. but our curses could never bring back the waters of Lake Ascensión or the sacks of gold. Finally Candelario came drumming up beside me to clutch at my reins.

“It’s no use,” he gasped. “But who took it?”

“Someone who’s a long way from here.”

“Let’s ask the old men in the town,” he said.

They shrugged. They knew nothing.

But the boys leapfrogging over the sow in the cool darkness were eager to talk. They remembered. It had happened about two months ago, when there had still been water in the lake, but it had sunk to a level where the strange humps, like the swollen bellies of dogs long dead, had been noticed by some poor Tarahumara camped on the edge of town. The Tarahumara were too poor to own horses. They had waded out in their bare feet and discovered that the objects weren’t dogs at all. The boy who spoke knew what they were.

“They were sacks of corn, señor. Someone had stored them there. It was a very bad place to store corn, but in these times, as you know, people do foolish things. The corn must have been rotten. But these Tarahumara were so poor and so stupid that they didn’t care. They carried the corn away, one sack at a time, into the hills. It seemed very precious to them. They never came back.”

Hipólito bared his teeth. “We’ll go to every village in the sierra. We’ll see which ones look prosperous, where they’ve built new houses. We’re bound to find it if we look long enough.”

Candelario laughed grimly. “And pigs will fly. Do you know what those Indians will do with our gold?”

“Spend it. What else can they do?”

“They’ll do nothing with it.” Candelario said. “On what should they spend it? They know it belongs to someone else, and that someone will come here one day—as we’ve done. If they spend it, people will ask: ‘Where did you get it, señor? Who did you kill for it?’ The soldiers will come to ask more questions. The Tarahumara have been in the sierra for a thousand years, and they’ll be there another thousand years. They’ll bury the gold in those mountains. They’ll tell their children where it is, and the children will tell their children. A thousand years from now, if there’s still an earth and a Mexico, some fools will dig it up. I’d like to be there to see how they fight over it. I know what gold does to your brains.”

He was right, and we all knew it.

Hipólito, with Fierro, was meant to have loaded the gold in the wagon and taken the escort of our soldiers to Texas. He no longer needed company.

“But I still have to go,” he said gloomily. “Angeles is waiting for me.”

We built a little fire on the edge of town, and by its red glow I told them the tale of how I had tried to trick Patton into riding to Sonora, and how he had discovered my lie.

“You’re not as clever as you used to be,” Candelario said. “The chief was right. Too much fucking dulls the mind.” He gave me a bitter smile. “Will you ride with us to San Juan Bautista?”

“What for? Without the gold, the chief can’t buy guns. Without guns …” I shrugged. “It’s finished. Candelario. Why fool ourselves?”

Hipólito embraced each of us in turn, and I told him to give my best regards to Mabel Silva and not to make too many babies. “I’ll name the first one after Julio.” he promised, and then he rode off in his dusty blue suit with the cartridge belts wrapped around his potbelly, looking exactly the same as the first time I had met him outside the hut in Juárez. An unlikely villain, if ever I knew one. His portly figure grew dim and then vanished.

I would never see him again.

We threw sand on our fire and ground out the coals, and then the three of us trotted back to where the men camped on the southern edge of Ascensión. Huddled by their own crackling fire, its sparks arcing into the sky like June bugs, they softly sang a ballad of lost love. I had heard hundreds of them, and they always touched me.

“Let’s sleep here.” Candelario said wearily. “This has been a bad day. Tomorrow can’t possibly be worse.”

We helped grind out the soldiers’ fire and then bedded down. It was a warm night, and crickets chirped on the desert floor. As the fire died, the darkness became absolute. The stars swarmed overhead, the Milky Way thick as cream. It was a beautiful night, so calm that it seemed impossible to relate to death. And yet death lurked there—I smelled it. The very calmness was frightening. The crickets ceased their chatter. The desert was strangely silent. Fierro had withdrawn as always to a place of his own.

Candelario spoke. “So, Tomás … it’s really over for you.”

There was no barb in his voice. He knew my mind. I think he loved me deeply, as a man loves another man, and I felt the same for him.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s over.”

“We’ll miss you.”

I didn’t want to think too much about that, so I chuckled. “Don’t you have the feeling the chief can get along without my advice now? I haven’t done too well lately.”

“My friend, it was always good to ride with you. When I open my restaurant, wherever I go, you can come and have a fine meal. With wine. Shall I set two places or three?”

“What do you think? You’re the one who told me life was short. I believe it now.”

“Your luck gets better all the time—but it will never be as good as mine. You’ve got to lose an eye for that.” He chuckled in the darkness, but he had spoken with a certain wistfulness. “How will you live down there, Tomás? What will you do?”

“Horses. That’s what I’m good at. We can enlarge the corrals and breed mustangs. We’ll sell them over in Chihuahua City. Our gold will come in handy.” I sat up and looked at him; I had an idea. “Come with me to Los Flores. We’ll go by way of Tomochic. You can shave off your beard—no one will recognize you. Open a restaurant in Parral.”

“Do you know,” he said, “that under my beard I have a weak chin?”

“That’s hard to believe, Candelario.”

“But true. I was ugly. Not that I’m so handsome now. That’s why I grew it in the first place.”

“Will you come?”

“I have to go to San Juan Bautista and tell the chief what happened. Later, yes … I think I’ll come.” He thought for a while. Quietly he said, “If anything happens to me, unlikely as that may be, give my sack of gold to Francisca. She made me comfortable, and she asked for nothing.”

“What about your sons becoming lawyers?”

“Without me around, Tomás, they’ll become nothing. They’ll spend it on tequila and women. They have my blood.”

I wonder if he knew. We both ground out our cigarettes and punched a hollow in the saddlebags to make better pillows for our heads. The horses snorted on the picket line.

The next morning, fortune ceased to smile on her favorite soldier.

Before sunrise one of the men shook me awake. “My colonel, there’s something blinking in the hills. To the west. There.”

Dawn puckered the eastern sky, thin fingers of gold slanting through the mist. Darkness crumbled, the phantom shapes of cactus and stunted trees emerging in pale shadow. But enough yellow light flowed across the desert to show us the small flash at which he pointed. It might have been quartz or a patch of alkali, but then again it might have been a rifle barrel or field glasses. It was far off in the foothills that sloped toward the dun-colored mountains.

“Let’s not take any chances,” said Candelario. “Let’s make ourselves scarce.”

We shouted the rest of the men awake; they grumbled when we told them there would be no coffee. Saddling the horses, we swung up on their backs and trotted off toward the south. Our route would bring us closer to the mountains than I liked, but there was no other way. The grazing had been poor, and we needed to move onto higher ground where hummocks of stubby grass chinked between the rocks and where we knew there would be water holes. The glint of light in the foothills had vanished. As the sun crept higher, I began to sweat.

An hour later we wound our way upward along a trail bounded on both sides by rocky escarpments. Here, God knows how many years ago, the earth’s crust had heaved and fractured. The brooding, bronze mountains sheered up from slate cliffs, primeval, untenanted. The sun raged down on them, flashing off quartz, mica and limestone, then flowed across the tan plain. This was the Chihuahua I knew best, a landscape for which I felt that strange affection that one feels for a place linked with hardship. I listened to the soft footfalls of our horses in the dust. A rock fell somewhere far off, with a faint echo. I felt the flinty taste of fear … knew suddenly, certainly, what was about to happen. I put my knee into Maximilian and veered left off the trail, where it widened through a defile toward the desert, yelling for the others to follow.

Rifles cracked from the escarpment. Two horses screamed—two riders fell. I saw the peaked olive-drab campaign hats peering over the rocks, the hats with their wide brims and chinstraps; the pale faces; the spurt of bright red and curl of smoke from the Springfields. Candelario rode ahead of me, Fierro just behind. The men trailing us wheeled in confusion, trying to control their horses. Another man spilled from the saddle.

Candelario tucked his rifle under one arm and pumped bullets toward the rocks, face contorted, beard flowing in the breeze like the mane of a black lion. The horses stumbled up on a rubble of shale, ready to plunge down the slope toward the desert, where we could run clear.

I bent low, the horn of the saddle grinding into my ribs. Candelario’s cheek shattered apart in front of me—blood and bone sprayed into the air. He pitched off to one side, boots jerking from the stirrups, body flopping and twisting, the spread fingers of one hand trailing in the dust. His horse began to crumple. With both arms I reached out and gripped him, hauled with all my might to free him from the saddle. I heard his voice, muttering,
“Son of a whore .
. .’’

Then his hand clutched the thick gray ruff of Maximilian’s mane, and I swung him up in front of me like a giant two-hundred-pound rag. A mask of red dirt covered half of his face. I flew over the top of the shale and crashed down the hillside behind Fierro, whose horse’s flanks bled from the steady jab of his spurs.

Down we plunged, down into the desert, with the echo of rifles cracking off the rocks. The barren peaks were turning gold in the sun. The earth tilted. Hot sand scoured my face. I buried my head in Candelario’s body. Under me, Maximilian’s stride lengthened to a gallop.

At last I looked back over my shoulder, where a fan of thin dust trails spread over the plain … our men, scattering like spokes on a wheel from the hub of rifle fire.

I knew it was Patton. I never saw him then, but still I knew.

The desert, flanked by black humps of mountains: a land like a great knuckled paw thrust into space. The horses sweated. Gray clouds loafed along the mountaintops. The air grew oppressive, our shadows faded. A flash of lightning licked toward the cloud banks, and thunder rumbled. The first shower of rain cooled the horses, and I raised my face toward the sky. A pair of buzzards flapped to the branch of a mesquite. black wings tucked tightly down, motionless under the flogging rain. I slowed Maximilian and then dismounted, while Fierro waited.

I laid Candelario on the desert floor. Soaking my bandanna with rainwater, I tried to swab away the blood from his face. The blood, mixed with dirt, had grown dark and stiff.