TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (3 page)

Julio said, “Tomás, it was pleasant to see you again. What you did in the street for that woman was a good thing. Consider that the revolution owes you a favor.”

“Hang on a minute.” A thought finally wandered into my skull that accounted for their standing in that bar drinking soda pop and the way they kept glancing over my shoulder into the street. “Are you a Villista?” I asked Julio bluntly. “Are you going to meet Pancho Villa?”

Julio started to grin—then murmured, with obvious prudence, “Possibly.”

Looking back now, I can see more than a few times in those years when I made decisions that determined the course of my life. I almost said “… changed my life,” but from this distance I no longer believe that. No doubt I hungered for adventure, sensed big doings, glimpsed glory on the horizon—but there was surely more to it than that. I knew it, and it was never my nature to shy away from new occupations. Saving that Indian woman from the Federal soldiers in front of La Princesa may have begun the chain of events, but I don’t believe now in a fate that falls on men however they act. I believe in a fate that falls on a man
unless
he acts.

“Take me along,” I said boldly. “If you owe me a favor, I’ll collect it right now. I’d like to meet Pancho Villa.”

The bearded, one-eyed giant butted his jaw out and said, “Who is this boy?” Actually he called me
pendejo,
which is Mex for a piece of pubic hair. I bristled, but I was in no position to take offense. I introduced myself and so did he, with some reluctance, and we shook hands limply—I taking care not to squeeze too hard, because greasers don’t like that sort of Yankee pressure, having lived with it through most of their history, and simply offer their hand to show you they haven’t got a broken bottle in it.

The giant’s name was Candelario Cervantes. He had already raked me over from topknot to boots and seen I wasn’t armed, and I guess I didn’t have the look of a troublemaker. It’s no easy trick to see yourself as others do, but I’ll try: I was lean and on the tall side, with straight hair, brown eyes and a habit of sticking out my jaw to make it look firmer than it was. A callow youth, you might say, looking to be a man. I didn’t know it then, but Candelario Cervantes would become just about the best friend I’d ever had. I still think about him, and some of the advice he gave me over the next three years still governs my life. But then he had a decision to make too, and everything would have been different if he had decided otherwise. He didn’t. Perhaps, like me, he couldn’t.

Even with his glass eye, he was the boss of this pair. The one good eye gazed at me as if waiting for a message. Then, abruptly, clapping a hairy-knuckled hand on Julio’s shoulder, he grunted his approval. So we left the cantina to take a short walk, and I began the longest journey of my life.

“The eagle suffers little birds to sing.”

Indian women pounded tortillas in the doorways of scattered huts. Their eyes gazed at us without expression as we tramped through the narrow back streets of Juárez. Naked children played in the dust and the rotting carcass of a dog provided a feast for the buzzards. Candelario Cervantes’ boots rang out merrily with the music of danglers that he had added to the rowel axle of his spurs. Now and then we ducked into alleyways, where he and Julio peered out, pistols drawn, to survey the street—but apparently the Federal soldiers didn’t venture this far from the heart of the city.

After a while we came to a ruined adobe house isolated from view by some stands of cactus and sword plants. Two horses were tethered outside in the unpitying sun. I knew we had reached Pancho Villa’s lair.

A stooping man bulked out of the door; he straightened up, blinking into the glare. He was a fat, olive-skinned fellow who carried a rifle loosely in one hand, and his chest was crisscrossed with two cartridge belts, the brass tips of the bullets glinting in the hot light. What made it unlikely, and odd, was that under the bandoliers he wore a shiny blue business suit, white shirt and black string tie. The man had a large curved nose, bushy brows and mustache, and there was a shrewd look in his brown eyes. He nodded in a friendly manner to Candelario, then jerked his head inquiringly toward me.

“A friend,” Julio said.

That sufficed, and the unlikely fat guard in the business suit stepped aside. We ducked our heads and entered.

The one shadowed room of the hut smelled powerfully of tobacco, gun oil and old sweat. Rifles stood stacked against a wall. There were no chairs, only wooden boxes, a little stone fireplace, some chile peppers hanging from a frayed string, and a cot with a man lying on it. He was in an apparent state of exhaustion, one gorillalike arm dangling to the dirt floor. His eyes were open a crack, and I could swear they gleamed greenly in the darkness, like the eyes of a bobcat surprised in its cave. But he was totally still. He had a bushy reddish-brown mustache over a mouth that drooped open, just as the Federal officer had described, almost as though he were an idiot. His fleshy cheeks were stubbled with beard and his curly brown hair was matted with sweat.

I knew him from the pictures I had seen in the illustrated Sunday supplements in the
Herald,
except that in the pictures he was always heroically astride a black stallion, flourishing a long-barreled pistol. This was Pancho Villa.

The one dangling hand made a little gesture of welcome. Julio and Candelario hunkered down slowly on their haunches by the side of the cot. That was a Mex trick I’d never learned and didn’t care to learn, priding myself on knowing how to sit like a good American, so I dropped my butt down on one of the wooden boxes, instructing myself to keep my mouth shut and let things lazy along at their own pace.

Pancho Villa hadn’t even acknowledged my presence with a nod, much less asked who I was. He looked like a punchdrunk boxer taking a long count, and I wondered if he was going to drift back to sleep or whatever state of coma he had been in when we jingled and jangled through the door. He didn’t give any sign that he intended to get up from the cot.

“Forgive me,” he murmured to the others. “I’m still in mourning, and therefore I’m not myself. I keep thinking of what happened in Mexico City to the little Señor Madero.” The others made little grunts and mews of sympathy. Villa broke in, his voice rising. “To him,” he said emotionally, “I owe everything.” Remarkably, the catlike green glow in his eyes suddenly blurred with tears. “I was a bandit, and by explaining the revolution to me, he helped to make me a man with some purpose. Such a little fellow … but he had the great heart of a saint! He was a father to me, and he was a scholar. And by God, he had
cojones!”

Raising his sleeve from the dirt, he wiped his eyes. Then, like a mountain cat about to pounce, he switched those cold green lanterns on me. He spoke in a hard high-pitched voice.

“You have rifles for me, meester—yes? And bullets?”

Rifles? Bullets? I didn’t know what he was talking about. I just gaped.

“This is not the
man, jefe,”
Julio piped up uneasily. “That other one didn’t show up. The other one’s name is Wentworth. Rodolfo’s crossed the river to find out what’s happened. This is a friend”—and he nodded at me.

“A friend of whose?” Villa demanded, I think annoyed at his mistake.

I decided I had better answer for myself, for there’s no way of telling what Mexicans will do to cover up an embarrassment. I may have been Julio’s youthful friend, but Villa was his
jefe,
his chief.

“A friend of Julio’s, Mr. Villa,” I said. “And a friend of the revolution.”

Villa allowed himself a narrow, fleeting smile. “But there are many revolutions,” he said calmly. “There was the revolution of Señor Madero, who is dead for his troubles. There is Emiliano Zapata’s revolution—the Plan of Ayala. There is Venustiano Carranza’s revolution—the Plan of Guadalupe. You understand that every revolutionist has a written plan of what he promises to do—all except me. My plan is only in my head, because I don’t know how to write. I’m an illiterate, a buffoon and a killer—according to my enemies.”

He chuckled softly; so did I.

“Now, my young gringo, tell me … of which revolution do you call yourself a friend?”

I was in over my head, but the thrill of sitting there with Pancho Villa, in the flesh, pushed a speech out of me.

“I didn’t know Señor Madero. And I haven’t heard much about Zapata except that he wears a big hat and comes from the south. Huerta sounds like a first-class sonofabitch, and Julio says that Carranza has no balls. So I’m a friend of your revolution … chief. I don’t like the Federals, and I’m not doing anything important right now. If you can use an extra hand in your army, I’d like to join up.”

It was something beyond youth and having nothing better to do with my time that was moving me. There was an air about these men—Pancho Villa particularly—that made me want to be part of what they might do. They had a purpose in life, and I knew already that it had to be a more worthwhile one than mine. They were hardy and dedicated men. I wasn’t—not yet. But I wanted to be.

Villa sat up so smoothly that you couldn’t see where the leverage came from. He wore a pair of crisscrossed cartridge belts over his khaki shirt even while he had been dozing, and a Springfield rifle lay on the far side of the cot. One paw of his, the one hidden from my sight, grasped a black pistol that had probably been pointed at my belly the whole time. Villa was a big man, and when his face moved into the patchy light I saw that his eyes weren’t green at all, but more the color of mustard.

“How are you called?” he asked me.

“Tomás Mix, Señor Villa.”

“And how old are you?”

“Twenty-two, señor.”

“Tomás rides as well as Rodolfo,” Julio muttered from behind me. “And of course he speaks English. That’s useful, chief.” He had to be on my side whether he liked it or not, because he had brought me here, the wisdom of which he might now be wondering about.

“Are you prepared to die?” Villa asked me.

“I don’t see that I have any choice,” I said. “Better later than sooner, that’s all. And let it be quick.”

“You must have some Mexican blood,” Villa said. “Have you ever killed a man?”

I shook my head.

“Could you?”

That stumped me for a moment. Here I was, setting a torch to my flimsy bridges and fixing to become a revolutionist with the bandit Pancho Villa, and I knew as much about bloodletting as a hog does about Sunday. “I could learn.” I said. “I guess I could learn pretty damned fast if the man I had to kill intended to kill
me. “

“You know how to shoot?” His eyes were still locked steadily on me, but I knew he wasn’t angry anymore and he didn’t dislike me. Later I would learn that Pancho Villa usually made his decisions about men in a few seconds and rarely changed his mind. He trusted his instincts as few others had the courage to do.

“I’ve fooled around with a gun,” I told him. “I know you don’t pull the trigger with your big toe. But I don’t claim to be a Joe Lane.”

Villa frowned. “What is a Joe Lane?”

“Fellow with the rodeo up in Dallas. Puts on a shooting exhibition. He can slip a pistol bullet into an empty cartridge at twenty yards. Dead center, so that it’s all joined up again.”

“That’s impossible,” Villa said flatly.

“Impossible? No, sir. He’s the best shot in Texas.”

“At twenty yards? With a pistol?”

I didn’t want to be thought a liar. “Hell, chief,” I said, “I’ve seen him do it a dozen times.”

I bit my tongue, and now there was nothing in the world I wanted more than a change of subject, because what I had told Pancho Villa wasn’t precisely true. I had lied, then got carried away trying to prove I wasn’t a liar, and I had told a worse lie to do it, which I guess is the way of the world. The truth was I’d only heard that Joe Lane could do that stunt back in his prime, before he took to a diet of Tennessee sour mash.

Villa jumped furiously to his feet, and that made me jump up too, bewildered by his intensity. “We’ll go outside,” he said, with heat. “I tell you, it’s impossible!”

He had made a decision, and we trooped out the door into the blistering sun. I heard black-browed Candelario address the unlikely fat fellow who had been standing guard in his blue suit, calling him Hipólito; I realized then that he was Pancho’s older brother.

Pancho Villa himself, in the light, looked to be a man of about thirty-five, barrelchested but with a good spring to his rolling gait. I had always assumed he was older, but I should have realized that revolution was a young man’s game. He snappily told Julio to stay with the horses and marched the rest of us around to the back where there was nothing but barrel cactus and a busted-up stone wall. The desert of Chihuahua shimmered in a yellow light. It was hot enough to slip hair on a bear, and you would have had to prime yourself to spit. I felt uneasy. I had figured out what Villa was going to do. It would either make a fool out of him or a liar out of me.

He led us through the dust to the stone wall, where he pulled a brass cartridge from his belt, put the flat end into his mouth and began to work it loose. Under his bushy mustache I could see that his teeth were stained the color of rich topsoil. He finally separated the cap from the powder, letting it spill to the ground in a thin gray stream. Candelario farted gently. A single black buzzard sailed aloft, silent as sin, in the bone-white sky. Nothing else moved. Not even Villa, who just stood, arms akimbo, studying the shadows of the wall.

After a minute he bent, worked the empty cartridge between two stones, and with the butt of his pistol gave it a single tap. He walked back to the hut and we trooped after him—twenty long paces.

But hitting that target would still be like hunting for a whisper in a big wind. Señor Villa, I prayed, shoot straight.

He raised the pistol quickly to chest level, didn’t bother to use the sights, steadied a split second, then fired. The gun made a light, dry snap; chips of stone sparked off the wall. There was a little echo and the bitter whine of the ricochet. Hipólito Villa and Candelario ran to the wall, spurs jingling, while Pancho Villa hooked his left arm through mine and said softly, “Come on, Tomás!”