TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (48 page)

After an hour’s reading I grew sleepy and left a bookmark in my place. I wondered why an educated and handsome woman like Elisa Griensen had carved out this little oasis for herself in the wilds of northern Mexico.

They came back in the late afternoon while I was taking a siesta, and we didn’t meet again until suppertime. Candelario, although he had missed a night’s sleep, looked doggedly determined to pursue his quarry but he couldn’t help yawning from time to time, especially after we had downed a bottle of German white wine and stuffed ourselves with Francisca’s jugged hare.

Elisa Griensen had changed into a black silk blouse and her shining bundle of yellow hair was piled neatly on top of her head. By candlelight her cheekbones glowed with a coppery flush, and her eyes sparkled with the pleasure that a handsome woman usually feels in the company of two attentive men. I knew how Candelario felt about blondes, and this one was as natural as a sunset. If he worked himself between her sheets, I thought, I’d have a devil of a time getting him to heft that trunk of gold with me to Mexico City or Irapuato, or wherever Villa was by then.

Mostly to keep the conversation away from my Irish ancestors, I asked Señora Griensen the question that had sprung to my mind in the library. What was she doing here in Parral?

It turned out that she had been born in a town called Nuremberg in a part of Germany called Bavaria, where the men wore leather shorts and didn’t do much except farm and hunt and go to cantinas and stamp their feet while they drank beer. She came to Mexico when she was eighteen to visit an uncle who was ranching in Chihuahua, fell in love with the country and then with a young Mexican cattle baron named Zambrano. They had one child together, a girl, who was in school now in Berlin. Zambrano died of a ruptured appendix ten years after they were married, and Elisa Griensen inherited the hacienda in Parral as well as some few thousand acres of good grazing land to the north.

“I wasn’t meant to live alone,” she said simply, “so I married again … a bit too quickly, perhaps. He was a lawyer, a great believer in Francisco Madero. In 1911 he was shot by a firing squad at the orders of General Huerta. I haven’t married since. I think twice is enough. In any case, I have my daughter, who comes to visit me every summer, and I have the ranch and my horses. A pity you don’t like them,” she said again to me, wrinkling her nose a trifle. “You certainly smell of them.”

“I visited the stable,” I confessed, but I was annoyed. The Griensen woman smiled at me.

“Did you see Willie? That’s the Appaloosa. Isn’t he a beauty? He’s my favorite. So silly, like you, and gentle as a lamb. I named him after the Kaiser, but you mustn’t tell that to Captain von Papen when he gets here.”

“I liked the Morgan. And that gray quarter horse is a fine animal.”

From the other side of the candlelit white tablecloth that stretched across the oak dining room table, Candelario yawned. Taking it as a signal to make myself scarce, I excused myself on the pretext that I was still bone-weary from crossing the sierra. I was glad to get out of there anyway; Elisa Griensen had a way of getting under my skin.

I read
Tristram Shandy
in bed for an hour or so until the heavy wooden door opened to admit Candelario. He took off his clothes without a word and then, wearing his long johns, slipped into his bed. I looked at him.

“Tenochtitlán,” he grumbled, “wasn’t built in a day.”

“Didn’t you tell her your name was on the list written by God on her vulva?”

“Shut up and go to sleep, Tomás.”

The next day was one of those warm, crisp, blue winter days—no trace of cloud and the air rich in your lungs—that makes you fall in love with the desert if you don’t know what it can do to you when it turns mean. The sky burned so brightly that my eyes ached to look at it.

Just before lunch Elisa Griensen announced again that she was going to the
charreada,
and she invited us once again to keep her company. Candelario had already accepted; and then, so did I. I decided to have some fun, and a little innocent revenge for the way she had been digging at me.

A Mexican
charreada
is like an old-time American rodeo in some ways, and in a few other significant ways, it isn’t. Rodeos started when cowhands on roundups got to arguing as to who was the fanciest rider and the fastest roper, or who could ride that slant-eyed mustang that had already broken the trail boss’s leg. I had roamed for two years with Colonel Miller’s Wild West Show from Oklahoma City as far west as Tucson. Once you learn to rope a calf or ride a fishtailing bronc, it’s not something you forget.

But a Mexican
charreada
was a kind of free-for-all rassling show, with a lot of yelling and betting and even more tilting of the pulque jug. They had the usual saddle-bronc and bareback riding, roping and bulldogging, but there were no judges and fewer rules.

I spent most of the morning behind the stables with a pigging string and a thirty-foot coil of rope I borrowed from Patricio. It was a good maguey rope made from the fiber of the century plant—extra hard, held a wide loop and could be thrown fast. After an hour I had that loop dropping round the fence post every time. Of course, a fence post wasn’t a bawling, ridge-running calf.

Elisa Griensen came out and watched for a while. “You’re good at that,” she said. “What are you practicing for?”

I gave her a lazy smile. “Well, señora, I figured if you’d be kind enough to lend me that gray quarter horse of yours, I might try a little roping out at the
charreada. “

Tilting back her flat-brimmed Spanish hat, she looked down her nose at me as though my head came to a point. But then a playful little smile curled up from her wide mouth.

“That’s serious business, Colonel. You could get hurt very easily.”

“I’ll be careful. I sure like that horse.”

“You’re not frightened of getting up on his back?”

“Well, that’s been on my mind. I’ve got to get over that. I’m tired of General Villa making fun of me because I’m scared of horses. I should have got right back on when I was a kid and that stallion throwed me. Now’s my chance, you see, and I don’t want to miss it.”

She kept trying to talk me out of it, but the more she argued the more I turned stubborn. Finally, with a merry laugh and a toss of her blond hair, she agreed.

After lunch I saddled the quarter horse, whose name was Maximilian, tightened the cinches and then loosened them a notch to give his back some air. He felt fine between my legs; he was frisky but he responded to every touch, and by the time we reached the bullring I had the idea we were friends. The stands were already packed, for even in the midst of the revolution Mexicans didn’t give up their favorite sports.

Elisa Griensen went off for a minute to talk to some people, and when Candelario swung down off the back of the pinto he was riding, I heard a familiar jingle in his pocket. I leaned down.

“Hang on, amigo … is that what I think it is?”

“You’re going to win, aren’t you, Tomás? I thought I might make a little bet. For the two of us.”

“Candelario, I could just as soon make a jackass of myself. I’m a little out of practice.”

“It’s only a few pesos. The chief will never miss it. And if he does, we can replace it from our own gold in Tomochic, which you’re sure is still there.”

“Who will you bet with?”

“Any man from Parral will bet against a pantywaist from Juárez.”

Patricio stayed with the horses while we paid our fifty-centavo admission, squeezed into some seats next to a gang of half-drunk soldiers from one of our brigades, and then Candelario and I went round behind the barrier to the chutes. It took only a few minutes to find the man in charge, and when I told him I wanted to enter the calf roping, he agreed right away. I asked him if there was a fee, and he looked at me in a puzzled way and said, “No, señor, of course not. For what should you pay?”

I should have known right then what I was in for, but as usual I ignored the danger signs.

A band started blaring spirited music, and then the bareback bronc riding got under way. The horses were all flat-eared mustangs brought straight out of the Sierra Madres to town, and there wasn’t a single
charro
who could stay on any of them for the full ten seconds. The crowd cheered mightily as one fellow after another dropped onto the spine of his critter and then soared up to see what the moon was made of. Most of the bets, I guess, were a matter of which of the riders could crawl out of harm’s way behind the barrier faster than the last man. Everyone was having a fine time. Mexicans always do when they have a grip on a pulque jug, and can smell horseflesh, and there’s a hope of blood.

When the saddle bronc riding started they announced that roping would be next. I worked my way through the noisy crowd back to the chutes, to draw my calf. But there wasn’t any draw. There weren’t any calves.

Three other fellows had entered the event, all local boys from Parral. They had already made their choice of what they cared to rope, and they weren’t calves or trough-fed dogies. They were full-grown steers—Chihuahua longhorns.

Now I understood what Elisa Griensen had meant when she said I could get hurt very easily. I never had developed any motherly love for bovines, but these were the worst. They could run like a deer, fight like a cougar, dodge a rope like a jackrabbit and scheme like a Piute sneaking up on an Apache camp. They were long and lean, lithe as snakes, mean to the bone, half-wild and half-savage, and they had a third half that was pure crazy.

The one that had been left for me was a mottled brown beast as ugly as a tar bucket, showing a spread of dirty horn that I calculated to be nearly five feet in length, roughly the shape of a double-bladed Turkish sword.

After roping them, they had to be tied down, too. I decided this was no sport for Mrs. Mix’s wandering and not very clever son, and I’d gracefully withdraw. But then I remembered that Candelario probably had a bet down by now. It was a matter of honor. I had to try.

While Patricio checked the bit and cinches on the quarter horse, I watched my competitors do their stuff. The first man rode down on the careering longhorn in no time at all but looped his rope a shade too high and caught a handful of air as the steer switched those big horns down in the turf. The
charro
tried again with his second rope, got one horn clamped down almost to the rosebud and vaulted from the back of his pony. The steer whirled that young fellow round in a circle and set upon him. The crowd jumped to its feet, screaming.

Before half a dozen men had sprinted from behind a barrier to drag the rider away, the horn had raked him from knee to ankle and cut a furrow right through his leather chaps, spiking the tendon. Blood soaked the sand. That foolish man would limp for the rest of his life.

“Don’t worry,” I said to Maximilian. “I’ll worry for both of us.”

The next man took too slow a dally and the horse let the steer drag it halfway across the arena before the rider tumbled off. The fellow after that managed to make a nice hooleyann toss and actually rassle the beast to the ground—and then the pigging string slipped from his teeth and got swallowed up in boil of dust, so he let go.

The crowd gave only a halfhearted cheer. They must have felt cheated. No one had been killed or gored for at least ten minutes.

It was my turn then. I got my knees locked down tight and tied the rope snug on the horn. I knew I wouldn’t have much time, and I’d need a wide loop.

“You ready, Maximilian?”

Maximilian snorted that he was ready. It gave me faith that he listened to me so carefully. I hoped he was as good a horse as I thought. Wiping the sweat from my eyes, I bit hard into the pigging string.

The mean brown longhorn shot out of the box.

I kicked with my spurs and was out there on the sand faster than a rummy reaches for a bottle, whooping and bearing down on that mean critter, and taking one twirl with the rope to throw something halfway between a washerwoman loop and a hooleyann, because those horns were awfully wide and I wasn’t trying for a common head ketch like the other riders.

The steer turned nicely toward me; he had to, because I’d cornered him. I turned Maximilian until we were neck and neck galloping round the ring, with him pinned between us and the barrier. If he veered now, I would regret it. I heard the crowd roar, and I smelled that longhorn’s musky rotten breath when he whipped his ugly head round to see who was dogging him—we were that close.

I threw the rope over his right shoulder, giving it a little twist so that it landed just a shade to the right of his forefeet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a finer loop settle better on a pair of churning legs—one of them, anyway—and it snugged perfectly back against the rosebud. I yanked back on the bit, reined to the left and braced myself against the coming calamity. Maximilian planted his thin legs, took the strain with me and didn’t budge more than a foot when the steer bellowed, twisted, reversed himself in midair—then hit the ground like a boulder dropped off a mountain.

The air whooshed out of him like a busted balloon. I vaulted off, grunted from the shock and ran down the rope while Maximilian kept the slack out of it and dragged that big hunk of foundering beef right in my direction. That quarter horse was something else.

Keeping clear of those gigantic horns, I dived at the belly of the steer in not quite the most graceful move you’d expect to see in a real rodeo with just a four-hundred-pound calf at the end of the rope—Ty Cobb sliding headfirst into second base is about the best way to describe it—and whipped the pigging string round his flailing hoofs in a three-legged cross-tie before that ton of bawling wilderness knew what had happened to him.

The crowd let out a yell that could have been heard in Chihuahua City. That kind of dirty roping and mean cowbusting was something they didn’t often see in Mexico. I hadn’t done it too often up in the Brazos, either, because if you made a one-legged ketch on a steer you were apt to break its shoulder. But it was the only way I was going to survive those horns, and it had worked.