TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (2 page)

Today it struck me that there were even more white-uniformed Federals than usual, rifles at the ready, roaming in squads commanded by angry-looking officers. A few streets were barricaded, and I spotted the black barrel of a Colt machine gun poking over some sandbags. But the Mex soldiers seemed nervous, as if they were searching for something they didn’t t particularly want to find. I wondered idly what that could be.

Finally I stepped into a little
ostioneria,
a shellfood shop where Julio Cárdenas’ mother worked, peeling Tampico shrimp and soaking them in chile sauce. I found her in the back by the smelly shrimp bucket and asked where her son was. But she didn’t seem keen to answer.

“Señora Cárdenas, you remember me, don’t you?”

“It may be that I know you. Yes, that’s possible.”

“I’m Tomás Mix … Julio’s old friend. Can you tell me where he is?”

“I don’t know, señor.”

“Is he here in Juárez?”

“It might be yes, it might be no. But most probably… who knows?”

I wasn’t going to get anywhere with that Indian lady. The day was hot and I was thirsty, so I finally said to hell with it and wandered into the street. Just as I was passing Touché’s Casino, a young Indian woman stepped out of an alley. She had a baby hanging from one bare brown teat, and another naked brown-eyed kid cowered behind her. The boy was crippled, the stump of one leg swathed in filthy bandages The woman wore a torn
rebozo.

“Señor,” she whined, “just a few centavos, for the love of God. My husband is dead. My children have nothing to eat.”

Just as I reached into my Levi’s to fish for a dime, boots thudded in the dust. A Federal officer and two Mex soldiers rushed past me and grabbed the woman roughly.

“Hey!” I yelped. “Hold on there. She didn’t do anything!”

Naturally I spoke their lingo, El Paso in my formative years being more full of Garcias and Lopezes than it was of Smiths and Mixes. The officer shoved the woman and her baby into the arms of the two soldiers. Showing his white teeth, he threw up his hand to me in a sloppy salute.

“Don’t worry, señor. You go into the casino. We’ll take care of her. She’s an ignorant peasant, no doubt a whore, but she knows what it means to break the law.”

Gambling was illegal in El Paso, so the citizens of that orderly metropolis thronged regularly across the Rio Grande bridges to lose their money at Touché’s and the other casinos. One of the soldiers’ jobs was to make sure the starving women and children didn’t bother the gamblers with their begging. This was the Mexico I knew. But it’s one thing to know, and another to see it happen before your eyes.

“And what might the penalty be?” I asked.

The Indian woman began to struggle and wail, but no one on the dusty street paid any attention. The crippled boy limped away. I didn’t t know what to do. The soldiers were armed, so that even if I had been carrying a gun it would have been quixotic, perhaps even suicidal, to pull it out and threaten them. They were in their home territory. They would probably think twice before shooting me, but they wouldn’t hesitate to haul me down to the local
juzgado
and throw me in the drunk tank for a night or two. Or I might find myself on a road gang for a month with the other poor souls they collected each morning. That’s how I should have been thinking, and I admit it did vaguely cross my mind, but that’s not how I acted. I was always impetuous, for better or for worse.

By now the boy had reached the end of the alley. The Federal soldiers let him go. They were only interested in his mother. She was young, and now that the baby had been dislodged from her breast I could see a wet swollen nipple. The baby began to wail too. “Don’t worry,
madrecita
,” one of the soldiers said, licking his lips. I promise you won’t go dry…”

“What’s going on today?” I said to the officer, when the woman paused for breath. “How come there’s so many soldiers on the streets?”

“For a good reason, señor.” He assumed a graver air. “You know Pancho Villa, the bandit? The enemy of President Huerta? He is in town. We’re going to find him.”

I knew who Pancho Villa was, or at least I knew what I had heard bandied about by a dozen campfires and a score of southwestern bars.

“What’s he look like?” I asked sharply, wrinkling my brow.

“An evil-looking man, señor. I’ve seen him once, at the battle of Juárez two years ago, and I know whereof I speak. He is fat. He has red teeth. His mouth is always hanging open, so that he looks like an idiot. In actual fact, he is feebleminded.”

“Fat? Red teeth?
I’ve seen that man!”
I cried. “Here! About five minutes ago, in a grocery shop across from the Tivoli Casino! I remember his mouth hanging open, and I thought, Poor creature. But that was him! I’m sure of it. Yessir, that was Pancho Villa!”

The officer’s eyes sparked with interest. I suppose he glimpsed the possibility of promotion. “You’re certain, señor?”

“Dead certain. I’ve seen his picture in the newspaper too. That was

him.”

“What was he wearing?”

“He was dressed like a priest. That’s what fooled me. I saw a pistol under his cassock. Do priests carry pistols?”

That settled it. The officer shouted to his men. They let go of the frightened Indian woman and rushed out into the street, kicking up dust as they ran for the Tivoli.

Quickly I took the woman’s arm and pressed two dimes into her hand. It was all the change I had, but it would buy her tortillas for the week.

“Go, señora, please. You’re safe now. But you’d better scoot before they come back.”

I followed her down the alley until she caught up with her crippled son. She snatched his hand. With a weak nod of thanks, she vanished. Why should she thank me? If I had saved her from the soldiers, my presence had brought them down on her in the first place. But I had no more time to reflect on it; when I reached the end of the alley the swinging doors of a cantina creaked open and the brim of a sombrero peered over the wooden slats. A hot sun flooded the alley and the street, and the face of the man beneath the sombrero was in the blackest shade. From inside the cantina, which was called La Princesa, came the tinny music of an automatic piano playing a Mexican song. I began to hurry by.

“Tomás
…”

A hand reached out. It gripped my arm, yanking me abruptly through the doors.

“Hey!”

“Tomás! It’s me, Julio Cárdenas. Don’t you remember me?”

The gritty little cantina was hazed with cigarette smoke. At the back, near the slot machine, two bedraggled whores huddled over a bottle of tequila. I peered into a pox-pitted face that looked as if someone had mistaken its owner for a coyote and fired both barrels. The eyes were dark and intelligent, and the mouth had a sour downturn that made it look as if the man had been weaned on a pickle.

“Sure, I remember you,” I said. “In fact, I came over here to hunt you down, but you’re a hard man to find. Good old Julio! How the hell are you?”

“Well enough. Now, what happened in the street with the soldiers?”

Julio Cárdenas was a thin man of about twenty-five. Another man—huge, ugly, black-bearded and fierce-looking—slouched against the bar by Julio s side. I told them what had happened, and they glanced at each other. The big man chuckled hoarsely—he understood immediately—but Julio was more serious.

“Is it true, Tomás? Is it possible? Did you see Pancho Villa?”

“Are you kidding? I didn’t even see a priest. I made it all up. What’ll you have to drink, Julio? I quit the rodeo. Let’s get drunk.”

He shook his head at my offer. I noticed they were drinking orange soda pop. With the shutters closed against the heat it was dark in the cantina. I took an even closer look and realized that he and his large friend were wearing trail boots and spurs, their bandoliers were filled with cartridges and big horse pistols were stuffed into their belts. That wasn’t something to remark about: everyone in Old Mexico had gone armed for as long as I could remember, but there was something about these two, some kind of wary excitement, that made me rein up for a minute. They seemed a trifle nervous too, and kept glancing over my shoulder into the street.

“Julio, enlighten me. I ask for you, and your mama treats me like a leper. You’re hanging around in a bar drinking soda pop. The town’s full of Federals with machine guns, and they tell me that Pancho Villa is in Juárez. What’s going on? Is the goddam revolution starting all over again?”

“You don’t know what’s happened?” he asked, narrowing his dark eyes.

“
Hombre,
if I knew I wouldn’t ask. And I don’t even want to ask,” I added, “if it’s going to rub your fur the wrong way.”

I knew enough to be closemouthed around Mexicans when they were drunk, which was often, and I had an idea it might be wise to shut up completely when they were dead sober, which was practically unheard of.

“I thought you knew,” Julio said, “because you tricked the soldiers. It’s true. Pancho Villa is here in Juárez. He was hiding in Texas, but he crossed the border after he heard President Madero was assassinated by Huerta. That pig, Huerta, sent Villa into exile before it happened.”

“So what’s Pancho Villa going to do about it?” I asked. “Will he fight Huerta now?”

“Fight? Of course he’ll fight. Who else is there to do it? Do you think Carranza can fight? Villa will fight, and Villa will win.”

Pancho Villa was a name to stir men’s hearts, but at the time he was more of a myth to me than a reality. His real name was Francisco—Pancho was just a nickname—and his name before that had been Doroteo Arango, back in Durango before the hacienda owner’s son raped his sister (or so they said by the campfires) and young Doroteo killed him and bowlegged off into the sierra at the age of fifteen to take his new name and become a bandit.

But anything I tell you won’t make much sense unless you know what had been going on in Mexico since I had been born, and for a long time before that.

It was March of 1913, as I’ve said, when I walked—or was yanked—into that cantina, and for years Mexico had been ruled by one man, Porfirio Díaz, whom they had called “The Iron Hand.” He kept the peace with the aid of the Federal army and the red-jacketed
rurales,
his licensed thieves who pretended to be police. Diaz made a few people very rich and a lot of people very poor and miserable, which is a system you would think the majority would refuse to tolerate for very long, but from what I had read in my history books it had been successful in a great many countries for centuries. Three years ago, in 1910, Diaz had just celebrated his eightieth birthday when that scholarly little fellow, Francisco Madero, rallied the people and started a revolution.

Men either loved Madero or considered him a jackass. The fighting lasted about a year, and it could have gone either way except that Diaz developed a toothache, lost part of his jaw to a quack dentist and finally, in terrible pain, left the country on a German steamship. He took up residence in Paris, where the good dentists are. Madero was elected president.

Madero was an honest man, but apparently a man had to be more than honest in order to govern Mexico. The revolutionary generals became restless. One of them, a former mule driver named Pascual Orozco, sold out to the northern cattle barons, defecting with six thousand former
rurales.
Madero’s chief general, Victoriano Huerta, a bullet-headed, brandy-drinking Indian who boasted that his closest friends were named Martell and Courvoisier, ordered the little president confined in the national palace for his own safety.

A few nights later Madero was taken out and shot. Huerta assumed the presidency. Orozco became his commanding general.

As for Pancho Villa, when the revolution had first begun back in 1910, he decided to fight for it rather than against it—banditry, I suppose, already being a kind of natural opposition to property and the status quo. Villa was different from most of the mountain gunmen in that he came to be a true believer in the cause and a devoted follower of the one they loved to call, with weepy affection, “the little Señor Madero.” Pancho collected his share of scalps and medals, rose to the rank of colonel and won a big battle right here in Juárez, which made him famous. After Madero was elected president he retired, but then he got into trouble with General Huerta for stealing a horse from some rich hacienda owner.

At the last minute a telegram from President Madero called off his execution, and Pancho was thrown into prison in Mexico City. Disguised as his own lawyer, he escaped and made his way through the mountains to exile in El Paso. He had been there ever since, until Madero was assassinated two months ago.

If there was any revolution still drawing breath, I had heard it was led by a new star named Venustiano Carranza, an older gentleman with a distinguished white beard parted in the middle and blue-tinted spectacles that hid his eyes. He was east of here in the state of Coahuila, and there was another independent revolutionist general to the west named Alvaro Obregón.

Confusing? Sure. No American could follow the ins and outs of Mexican politics. The chiles killed each other off so fast you didn’t know from one day to the next who was on top and who was six feet under.

“Does Villa have an army?” I asked Julio, in that smoky Juárez bar. “Is he going to join up with Carranza?”

“Venustiano Carranza!” Julio snorted with disdain. “We call him ‘Don Venus.’ He smells of scent and he drinks chocolate with his pinky in the air. He makes proclamations, but he does nothing. And he has no
cojones. “

That was about the worst thing you could say of a man in Mexico, that he had no balls.

“Well,” I said, “they tell me that Pancho Villa has plenty of
cojones.
Can’t he lend one or two to Don Venus, so they can lick Huerta and Orozco together?”

Julio’s vexed expression softened a bit, and the huge man behind him smiled at me with broken white teeth out of a bearded face the color of burnt toast. He murmured something that I didn’t catch. A random shaft of sunlight touched his face. Something glittered. I realized he had only one good eye and the other one was glass. He had the kind of brutal mien that you would describe to little kids if you wanted to scare them into eating their porridge. Finally he laid a thick hand on Julio’s shoulder and rumbled, “We have to go. That other one’s not going to show up.”