TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (49 page)

I jumped up from the dust, back on Maximilian, and let out a war whoop. I was champ of Parral. And for a whole morning I hadn’t thought of Rosa. …

By the time I had the gray cooled down and handed him back to Patricio, and worked my way back through the hot sun to where Candelario and Elisa Griensen were sitting on the shady side of the arena, I guess about two hundred people had thumped me on the back and yelled at me,
“Mucho! Mucho
!”—which was the biggest compliment they could pay a roper, or even a torero. There were no rules, and I had done the job. I was grinning like a jackass.

Candelario gave me a bone-cracking hug.

Elisa Griensen looked at me in a way that was both disturbed and disturbing.

“You lied to me,” she said quietly.

“Only a little, señora—”

Coated with dust and sweat, I was still puffing from the ride. “I was scared to death, that’s God’s truth. And I never said I couldn’t handle a rope. Anyway, that Maximilian is an animal a baby could rope with. I’ve got my courage back, señora.”

Turning to Candelario, whose smile was so wide his teeth almost bit the wax out of his hairy ears, I asked, “Did you get our bet down?”

“A hundred pesos in gold, amigo. You see my great faith?”

“Yes, but I don’t see the money. Who took the bet?”

He blushed. “No one had that kind of money to bet. Gold is very valuable. But the Señora Griensen didn’t share my faith, so she made the understandable mistake of betting against you.”

“Oh …” I frowned, then turned to her. This wouldn’t do—it was confession time. “Señora, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that. You’re right, I lied. It wasn’t fair. I don’t think it would be right to take your money.”

“I didn’t bet money,” Elisa Griensen rasped, angling a hard look at me with those eyes that were the color of winter grass. “I bet the damned horse.”

“Which damned horse? You don’t mean Maximilian?”

“Unfortunately, I do.”

I stared at her, then drew a deep breath and let it out. “Señora Griensen, I can’t take him.”

“Yes, you can,” she said evenly, and now there was a warmer glint softening that jade hardness. “A bet is a bet. I’ve lost some and won some, and I never welsh. No one’s ever ridden that quarter horse the way you did, and it may be that no one ever will. You tricked me, but that s my fault. He’s yours, Colonel. Just treat him well. Tonight we’ll celebrate.”

Clearly she meant it, and I made a decision too. I turned to Candelario.

“The chief once said you can’t divide a woman in half—we won’t go into the reasons for that. The same thing’s true of a horse. I rode him and risked my neck. He’s mine. I’ll pay you a hundred pesos in gold for your half.”

“In gold!” Candelario bared his teeth and whistled through them. “I know which gold.
Madre de Dios! Qué cojones!”

“Is it a deal?”

“Yes,” he grumbled, “it’s a deal.”

So I owned a quarter horse. I would pay for that later in a way I couldn’t foresee—and not in gold.

When Elisa Griensen made up her mind to something, I discovered, trying to stop her was as risky as braiding a mule’s tail.

That evening, with the excuse that Captain von Papen might show up at any moment, she broke out the French champagne. I had bathed in water as hot as I could stand it to keep some of the day’s soreness from working too deep into my bones, splashed on some cologne I’d found in the bathroom, and over the bubbly stuff we got right down to a first-name basis. I was still feeling a little guilty over the trick we had pulled, although it had really been Candelario’s idea so that he could get close to her calico, and I had just gone along with it for the fun … but she wouldn’t hear any more apologies.

She raised her glass of champagne in a toast to me. “When you called that stallion a Morgan, I should have known. I wasn’t born yesterday. You ride like a devil. You haven’t always been a
charro,
have you?”

“No,” I confessed, “I was a baby once.”

Francisca brought another bottle of champagne. Soon the corks were popping like gunshots on a border raid.

That tornado juice crept up on you with soft feet and I knew my tongue was getting thicker and my head full of feathers, but I kept up the pace, glass for glass. I told a few tales about riding with Pancho Villa, and when I was in the mood I guess I could color up a story redder than a Navajo blanket. Elisa was a good listener too, and had the knack of making a man think he was a descendant of Homer rather than a pie-eyed windbelly.

Around midnight Candelario just let his ears hang down. After cheering me to victory in the day’s festivities, he didn’t have enough vocal power left to bend a smoke ring.

Then Elisa coughed once, looked Candelario square in his good eye and called the turn.

“You must be tired, my friend. Don’t let me keep you up.”

Candelario muttered something meant to be cordial, made a bow of sorts and obediently vanished.

In the candlelight Elisa’s eyes looked like leaves of a tree freshly washed by summer rain. She took me by the hand and said softly, “Come, Tomás.”

In the first place, I was drunk. My head felt light and my tongue heavy. In the second place … how could I say no? And why? I had done her a wrong, cheating her out of that quarter horse, and in turn she had fed me a dinner fit for a lord and popped the cork out of her best champagne. And, whether I liked it now or not, I was free. Hannah was off my conscience, and Rosa had vanished into the Sierra and may have been lost to me forever.

And in the third place, or fourth, drunk or not, I knew I wanted her. With those green eyes and wide shoulders, her shapely breasts pressing against the white Indian blouse, she was a beautiful and bedazzling woman. I had watched her breasts for the last two days, bobbing freely under her shirt as she rode or walked, and I could swear I smelled their perfume.

She moved like a proud queen, tall and sure, and that was the way she led me upstairs, as if I were about to be crowned at her side.

Her bedroom was a big airy room with graceful antique mahogany furniture that looked more French than Mexican, an oversized four-poster matrimonial bed with carved columns, and lacy white curtains stirring in a breeze that blew through the balcony windows. Candles burned in black iron holders on the bedside tables.

When we got inside she locked the door, kissed me so that my head felt even giddier and then peeled off her clothes. She tossed them carelessly on a chair. When I did the same, she hauled me through the curtains into the four-poster. The puffed pillows and even the pale blue sheets smelled of fresh flowers. Her body was long, narrow-hipped and tanned, neatly made and strong, and her breasts were all I had imagined—small and soft, with big nipples that seemed to fill my mouth. Her unpinned hair spread out on the pillow like a shower of fine gold thread.

It was a merry frolic by candlelight. Elisa Griensen had an appetite that would have shamed a cowhand after a trail drive through a blizzard, except it wasn’t cornbread and clabber cheese she hungered for. She was all woman, that German lady, and not afraid to show it.

I wondered how long she had been without a man. She was too much of a prize, I reckoned, to stay lonely for very long, but that night she gave me the impression that she was starved. We wandered deep, unbosoming our little fears and our great pleasures in the candlelight. At the end, with a lightning cry that came first, galloping hard in our embrace, she flooded the room with song. It became a duet.

We fell asleep in each other’s arms. The next thing I knew she was whispering gently in my ear to get up. It was dawn … it would be better if our overdue visitor didn’t find me in her bed.

I staggered downstairs in the first gray light, listening to a wind moan from the desert, feeling like the frazzled end of a misspent life and wondering how Candelario would take it when he realized I had bedded the lady of his choice—the sort of thing that Mexicans don’t take too sportingly, as I had found out in Ascensión a long time ago. I didn’t think he’d go so far as swearing a vow to kill me, but after what had happened in Tomochic I’d hate to have made yet another dent in our friendship.

Our bedroom door was bolted from the inside. I gave a few light taps, then a good thump with the toe of my boot. There was some muttering. Finally, naked as a gigantic brown worm, Candelario opened the door a crack.

“Ah, it’s you … be quiet, if you can.”

I nudged into the room. From under the counterpane of his bed I saw the black hair and dusky peaceful face of Francisca, sound asleep. I smiled, rolled into bed, turned out the candle power in my brain and passed out.

“Wisely, and slow,”

I had a dream that I heard bedsprings creak, and then the sun poured in through the flowered chintz curtains, too brightly for me to ignore it. When I opened my eyes a slit, Francisca was gone and Candelario was already pulling on his boots.

I decided to try out my tongue and see if it still flapped. “How do you feel?” I asked

“I will never drink again,” he said solemnly.

“But you had a good time?”

“It was diverting. I knew already, when she served us breakfast and brushed against my sleeve, that it would happen. On the vulva of every woman—”

“You told me that before. You’re still plastered. So you were on Francisca’s list?”

“My name was written in large letters.”

“Listen, my friend”—my voice came out as a croak—”I have a confession to make—”

“Confess nothing. I know all. I was mistaken when I first looked into Elisa’s eyes. Sometimes that happens. It may have been that the sun was blinding me, or that my good eye was turned the wrong way and I misread the name. Did she entertain you in the proper spirit, Tomás?”

“She was
mucho, “
I said gravely.

“So I suspected. The man who picks the bad bull often has the luck to draw the best mount.” He sighed, then grinned evilly. “Are you still in such a hurry to leave Parral?”

I put my jaw in a sling and didn’t answer. I had to chew all this a bit finer before I could swallow it, and my head ached too much to make a decent job of it. How complicated my life had suddenly become! I had walked out on Hannah, which had freed me but still pained me. I had gone to find Rosa in Tomochic, my heart at the high tide of love, missing her, wanting and needing her, spinning a web of plans … a web that had been swept into the dust. But I had sworn to find her, no matter how long it took.

And here I was, not four days after being practically a married man, first to one woman, then to another, fluffing Elisa Griensen’s fur and loving every minute of it. No, I wasn’t in a hurry to leave Parral. The song of that German lady’s roused and cheerful passion, the friendly ways she had known to give pleasure as well as take it freely— the taste of all that was as sweet in my mouth as the champagne was sour in my belly. I was the least likely candidate I knew for the role of Don Juan, but it looked to me as if that was the man whose gluttonous shade I had become, and the Hamlet in me was long dead, buried somewhere between Mexico City and the Rio Bravo.

All brushed and curried, blond hair massed on her head like a Sunday School teacher, Elisa was waiting for us at the breakfast table, and there was a man sitting with her, drinking coffee heavily laced with milk, his pinky extended slightly into the air. He was about forty, with a long nose and mellow brown eyes, a bristling military mustache and eyebrows so bushy they looked like part of a Halloween costume that had been glued to his forehead. Dressed in a beautifully cut gray tweed suit, he made me feel like a shabby hobo from the wrong side of the railroad tracks. I hadn’t bothered to put on my uniform and was still wearing my steer-roping clothes.

“Colonel Mix, Colonel Cervantes …” Elisa said. “Permit me to introduce Captain von Papen.”

The captain shot instantly to his feet, clicking his heels like the crack of a rifle. He saluted, and it took me a moment to realize that I was the focus of his attention, since I couldn’t remember the last time anyone in the Mexican army had saluted me. I always regarded my rank as a private joke between me and Pancho Villa and my friends. To a German officer, however, it was the real thing.

I returned the salute, and in his guttural schoolbook Spanish he said, “I am honored to meet you, Colonel. With your permission, may I sit?”

“Certainly, Captain. Just make yourself right at home.”

“May I finish my coffee, sir?”

“You sure can. I need to eat and recuperate before we talk. Mind if we join you?”

“I would be honored, Colonel.”

Then he rattled off a few sharp words in German to Elisa Griensen, and she turned to Francisca, who was blushing at the stove, and in a few minutes we hunkered down to the serious matter of flapjacks and bacon and a pot of hot black coffee. The Kaiser’s business with Pancho Villa would just have to wait until I’d got rid of my hangover.

After lunch, Von Papen and I settled ourselves in the library over a brandy, with Elisa there to interpret when the going got tough. Candelario had vanished … I could guess to where.

Von Papen asked if I spoke any English, and I said, “Enough,” so he told me he would speak that language, and if I missed anything he was sure Frau Griensen would help out. That suited me, since I realized it would give me two chances to chew my cud before I spat it back in Spanish.

His English was flawless, and he spoke it like a London lord, which was natural because he had learned it there. Of course, if he didn’t want me to understand he had only to drop into German. The only words I knew in that language I had learned in bed last night, and they wouldn’t fit into this conversation any more than a whore into a white wedding dress.

The captain and I had already chewed the fat about lesser matters, and I knew now that he had gone to cavalry school in Hanover and been an officer in the Westphalian Fifth Uhlan Regiment, and then a permanent member of Kaiser Wilhelm’s General Staff for nearly two years. Washington was his base now, but he had been an observer for his government when the Americans had dropped anchor and shot up Veracruz. He had toured the port facilities there, inspected all the gunboats and cruisers, and been given a young American captain as his personal guide, a fellow named Douglas MacArthur.