TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (12 page)

He lay back on the bed languidly, nodded at me, then at Fierro and Colonel Medina. “You can go now. I want to fuck my new wife.”

So once again, sooner than I had dreamed, I rode up through that unfriendly desert with Hipólito Villa, shepherding a wagonload of silver, but this time to Texas, and this time with two extra titles stitched to my belt. I wasn’t just Pancho Villa’s scribe and cattle trader—I was his gringo and honorary bastard. I didn’t much care. It wasn’t just for Hannah’s sake that I wanted one day to wear the uniform of a captain. I would do a sight better as a businessman in El Paso or Columbus with a title to my name, and already I could see the invitations that read:
Mr. and Mrs. Felix Sommerfeld invite you to the wedding of their beloved daughter, Hannah, to Captain Thomas H. Mix, Retired.
…”

That was my dream. But Hannah was my reality. Before we reached El Paso I had the shakes, and when I went round to the Sommerfeld house on East Yarnell Street, I was as nervous as a longtailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs. What had I done to deserve her? Surely in the ten days I’d been gone she had thought it over and decided I was a mongrel and a long cut below her station. All those young officers at Fort Bliss would be sending her roses, knocking resolutely on her door day and night. They were real officers in a real army. I had seen such men when I was a boy, stared in awe as they trotted by on their fine horses, sabers at the side of their dress khakis and scout hats cocked at just the right angle. How could I compete?

But first I did my business with Felix Sommerfeld in his office downtown, ordering the hats, boots, cartridges, tins of sardines and tuna, and then Sam Ravel came by and we talked about Mexican politics and the war. They were impressed with my tale of Villa’s quick victory at Casas Grandes. I left out the epilogue about the prisoners.

“He’s expecting a lot more men. Some fellow named Urbina is bringing a brigade from Durango. You know who Urbina is?”

Ravel frowned as he lit a cigar.

“Urbina is a bandit and a drunkard.” Sommerfeld said, “Why don’t you stay here with us, Tom? Work for us as an agent. We could use a man like you in Columbus—a man Villa trusts.”

“I couldn’t do that, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Because Villa trusts me. You said so yourself. He expects me to come back.”

“I understand. Perhaps when it’s when it’s all over. You could certainly think about it. What are your plans for the future?”

“I don’t have any. That might work out fine, in Columbus … then. I could certainly think about it.”

I was pleased, and when Sommerfeld invited me to supper at his house that evening, I was delighted.

“I won’t tell Hannah,” he said, with an impish twist of his mouth. “We’ll make it a surprise.”

But when I arrived at East Yarnell a few minutes before six, the hour for which I had been invited, my worst fears were realized. Hannah was standing on the veranda with a short, stocky young man in dress khakis and shining dark leather boots, with a lieutenant’s bar on his shoulder. He wasn’t the acme of military perfection that I had conjured up in my vision, but he didn’t have to be; he only had to be
there.
Hannah’s chestnut hair caught the smoky red light of the setting sun. She wore a lemon-colored dress, and her bosom swelled toward her throat like two perfect globes covered with white silk, straining upward to break free. The lieutenant couldn’t seem to take his eyes off them.

Calmly, Hannah introduced us. His name was Martin Shallenberger. He was pleasant to me and completely correct, and I hated him.

After five minutes of inane polite conversation, he left. I glowered after him, then turned to Hannah, trying to smile.

“I’m sorry if I interrupted you.”

“I didn’t know you were coming, Tom. When Martin dropped by, Daddy called me upstairs and told me. I didn’t know…”

She flung herself into my arms and kissed me. I felt the fire of her cheek.

“Oh, Tom! I’ve missed you!”

So I knew where I stood and asked no more questions.

For the next two weeks I was two persons—the daytime man, impatiently doing the revolution’s business until the evening came; and the evening man, head reeling and heart surging in the company of that most adorable creature. Mr. Sommerfeld seemed pleased, and not once during that time of courtship did he ever bring up their being Jewish and my being a nonbeliever. I gathered from Hannah that they didn’t take their religion in too strict a manner and in fact only went to their church once a year on some special holiday called Yom Kippur. Hannah herself quoted Karl Marx, who apparently had called religion the opiate of the people. In any case she was an only child, beloved and used to getting her own way.

Mrs. Sommerfeld, a quiet and pretty woman from whom Hannah inherited most of her looks, just smiled and chatted amiably at the dinner table and, when the right moment came, said, “Put out your cigarette, Felix. Let’s retire and let the young people talk.”

I thought she was wonderful.

But it wasn’t easy. All the women I had known until then had been border whores and washed-out cowtown beanery waitresses. I’d had no experience with a girl of education and breeding. I brought her flowers and courted her in what I thought was a proper manner. Not too fast, not too wild—except I wasn’t taking one thing into account. Hannah was a hot-blooded girl.

Night after night on the davenport in the family parlor, we sparked and whispered sweet endearments in each other’s ear, and her fur grew awfully damp. One night we were huddled there as usual, holding hands and gazing steadfastly into each other’s eyes. I told Hannah then that I would be leaving for Ascensión in a few days. She had known that, but still the realization struck hard and turned her eyes dewy.

A minute later she was all over me, her mouth sliding around my lips and her hands gripping the back of my neck until it ached. Her breasts crushed my chest. The blood drained from my head, making me dizzy.

I don’t know how it happened, but the next minute my hand was inside her dress, fondling those silky globes, and her nipples were stiff as strawberries on a winter morning. That wasn’t the only thing that was stiff, but she didn’t seem to mind this intruding presence, just kept pressing herself against me and letting out moans that loosened my hinges a lot faster than I liked. And then, tangled as we were on the davenport, with Hannah crouching over me, my leg snuck between her thighs, and she was rubbing against it like a dog with fleas against a gatepost. I felt the damp heat of her private area go right through my leg to the bone. Her groans became so loud and reckless that I tried to clamp a hand over her mouth, for fear Mr. Sommerfeld would come pounding down the stairs with a shotgun to keep his daughter from getting killed … or from something worse.

“Hannah … we can’t!”

“Can’t what?” she gasped.

“Do that . .

“We’re not doing
that.
…”

“Stop it, Hannah!”

Her mouth closed over mine like a hot oven. Her hand grabbed my pecker right through my pants. She bucked and twisted, her body jerking like some poor soul in the midst of an epileptic fit.

And then she cried out: “Oh, God …
Tom!”
Her teeth hooked into my lower lip, drawing blood. In the grip of her hand I went off like a Mexican cannon, all spurt and no target in sight.

“Hannah!”

She was purring over me like a cat that’s just lapped up a stolen saucer of sweet milk, and the stain that spread halfway down to my knee didn’t seem to bother her at all. I was ready to apologize once I got my breath back and could unfasten my lip from her teeth, but I never got the chance. She nibbled at me for a while, and her own breathing eased halfway back to normal, and then she was telling me that she loved me. It was the first time she had ever said it.

“I love you too, Hannah.”

“Tom … say it again.”

I did. We smooched for a while, then I excused myself and went to the bathroom and wiped my slippery pants as best I could with a bandanna. I was in a daze, and so worn out that I would have had to lean against a building to spit. When I wandered back to the living room Hannah had rearranged herself and brushed her hair. In the lamplight she looked beautiful, aglow like a sunflower. She threw herself into my arms as if she wanted to squeeze the tallow out of me, and I gave as much—though not as good—as I got.

A few minutes later she whispered, “You’re not just leading me on, are you, Tom?” Her voice was shyer, huskier, than before. “We will get married, won’t we?”

“Of course,” I said stoutly. “I want that more than anything.”

And so when I left El Paso the Monday following, I was engaged, although we agreed not to tell anyone until the revolution was over and I had gone into business with her father or Hipólito.

But how long would that take? We still hadn’t fought anything like a real battle; Casas Grandes was too small to count. Good God, we didn’t even have an army! I suddenly wondered if Pancho Villa was only a dreamer—I knew there were men like that, who can plan marvelously but never
do.
And even if he could do, that other big question remained. Could he
win?

“How soon?” I badgered Hipólito on the ride back. “When will we fight?”

“Be patient,” he said. “Aren’t you having a good time? Pancho knows what he’s doing. We need more men, and then we need to train them. And we can’t blood a new army in the rain. When the rains are over, in September, we’ll attack.”

I yelped. “September! That’s three months from now! Listen, Hipólito, I didn’t join up with the revolution to. sit on my ass in Ascensión and run up to Texas to trade cattle and silver. It’s
dull.
I want
action.
I want to fight!”

“You’ll see plenty of fighting,” he said quietly. “More than you like. And the day will come when you’ll wish you were sitting on your ass in Ascensión in the rain, and think that trading cattle and silver is heaven on earth.”

Worn out from crossing the desert, Hipólito and I reached the camp to find that two emissaries from Carranza had also arrived. One was called Manuel Chao, a heavy-lidded, bucktoothed man; the other was a dapper little fellow named Jesús Acuña, a lawyer. When we went round to Villa’s house to give our report, they were there, dressed in natty suits and bow ties, sweating in the afternoon heat.

Villa’s appearance momentarily startled me, because he had put on a badly frayed and shiny brown suit which looked as if it had been hauled out of a ten-year-old trunk—wrinkled, dusty and coffee-stained. He smelled as usual from meat and tobacco. Hipólito had told me his brother had never owned a toothbrush in his life, just scrubbed his teeth occasionally with a finger dipped in salt. But that reddish color came from the iron oxide in the soil of northern Durango, where he had been born.

The conversation was already well under way when I poked my nose in, and from what Acuña was saying I gathered that it was the desire of the First Chief that all revolutionist forces in the state of Chihuahua be placed under the command of General Obregón over in Sonora. Carranza had great faith in Obregón, and he was sure that Villa shared it.

Villa chewed that over, in his sleepy way, and finally nodded.

“Yes, I know of this General Obregón. Of course, it’s only lately that he’s become a general, thanks to the First Chief’s appointment. I’m trying to remember … did General Obregón offer his services to Señor Madero back in 1910, when the revolution began?”

“Obregón controls the state of Sonora,” Chao explained. “Things are peaceful there. In Chihuahua there’s nothing but ferment and Federal troops.”

“And me, señor. There is also me.”

Acuña coughed discreetly. “Señor Villa, the First Chief wishes to formally confer upon you the rank of brigadier general.”

“In time,” the chief said, wonderfully casual in the face of this news. “Meanwhile, Obregón. Ah … yes,
now
I remember! During the revolution of the little Señor Madero, he was a farmer! In Huatabampo, as I recall, raising chickpeas. Chickpeas sold pretty well. Has he won any battles lately?

“Sonora is quiet,” Acuña said.

“Has Señor Carranza won any battles lately in Coahuila?”

“The First Chief is not a general. He is a lawmaker. He has no army. He has only his ideals, his unchallenged rectitude, and the loyalty of those who acknowledge him as First Chief.”

“And no one is more loyal that I,” Villa replied fervently. “But in case it’s escaped your attention, I have won battles in the past for Señor Madero. I have a little army now here in Ascension, and I command it, and I shall win battles in the future. So until the day that there’s someone who does more than sit on his ass in Sonora, I’ll keep command here. I accept the First Chief’s excellent Plan of Guadalupe—which doesn’t say much that’s new but certainly offends no one—and with all due respect I ask the First Chief to keep his snout out of my trough if he ever wants to become President of Mexico, which he says he doesn’t, but you know how these things happen. Please excuse my rough language, because I’m only a peasant turned soldier. And try to understand that there isn’t anything on earth I wouldn’t do for the First Chief, except let him tell me how to go about my business.”

Acuña coughed again; he adjusted his necktie. “It will be discussed further, I assure you, Señor Villa, and we’ll report your recommendations word for word.” He coughed. “There’s another matter that the First Chief asked us to bring up. He’s very upset by stories he’s heard about your men taking women from their homes and forcing them to stay in Ascensión. And he’s equally upset about the theft of so much cattle in the state of Chihuahua. It gives the revolution a bad name. Complaints reach the United States, and we need badly to keep the friendship of their President Wilson.”

“One thing at a time, señores.” Villa raised his fat brown hand with its broken fingernails. “First, the women. I’ve never met the illustrious First Chief, as you know, but I understand he’s been married for many years to the same woman and is a man of temperance in all respects. On the other hand, it’s well known that I’ve had more than one wife. Let me add, without meaning to boast, as it’s strictly a matter of taste, that I’ve had some experience with women in general—perhaps more than the First Chief—and it’s my observation that you rarely can take a woman under your serape with you unless she’s willing. The women of Chihuahua, they say, are born with their legs already spread. What can my poor soldiers do when these hungry creatures thrust themselves so eagerly upon their cocks? It’s too much to ask, Señor Acuña, that they should say no. Could you? No, don’t answer—that was my little joke.”