TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (5 page)

Wentworth’s eyes narrowed. “Half the guns would be enough for you?”

“Do we look like we’ve got a fucking army here?” Villa, barking his high laugh, peered into the corners of the hut. “How many rifles do we talk about? Five hundred? Two hundred would be more than we could carry. You can sell the rest to Carranza, even Obregón, as you’ve arranged. Where is your warehouse?”

“Missouri Street, a block west from the railroad yards.”

“And the papers?”

“You don’t need them. It’s illegal to take guns across the border.”

“And the keys?”

For some crazy reason Wentworth’s face took on a smug smile. “I just remembered—I have an extra set in my saddlebags.”

“Excellent.” Villa turned to me. “Now I’ll teach you something, Tomás. If Rodolfo hadn’t gone to find this man, we wouldn’t have any guns. He would have sold them to Carranza—in fact, he would have sold them to Huerta if the bastard had bothered to make him an offer. But the guns had been promised to me. Now tell me. Do you think Señor Wentworth behaved honorably?”

“No,” I said. That was the obvious answer, and clearly required of me.

“Can we ever trust him again?”

Not so obvious. “Maybe he’s learned a lesson,” I said, thinking of my lie about Joe Lane.

“No,” said Villa. “But he’ll learn one now. He tried to cheat us, and what a man does to you once, he’ll do again … if you let him. Rodolfo—?”

“Yes, chief?”

“Execute this man as an enemy of the revolution.”

“Here?” Fierro asked. “Or outside?”

“Outside would be better. It’s a small room, and I have sensitive ears.”

Wentworth turned a sickly blue color. His eyes seemed to pop from behind his glasses as if he were being strangled. “Señor Villa!” His voice cracked. “Half the guns is fine! All, if you need them! I don’t want to be difficult! I have to tell you more about Felix Sommerfeld—”

Abruptly then, he turned to me, as if seeing me for the first time. He whispered pitifully in English, “Please, whoever you are—for God’s sake, help me out of this… .”

Villa asked me what he had said.

“He wants me to help him,” I explained, and now my voice shook too. My previous answer had helped to condemn him. I felt dazed by the events, but there was nothing I could do to halt them.

“Yes, do that,” Villa said. “Help him out the door, Tomás. Rodolfo, this is Tomás. He’s just joined us, and he’s a clever young man. Tomás, this is Rodolfo Fierro, who is like a brother to me. Some men call him my butcher. He doesn’t mind.”

Wentworth wobbled down on his knees; his trembling legs wouldn’t support him any longer. I saw the dark stain spreading down his trousers. “General Villa, this isn’t fair. This is a mistake!”

“I’m not a general yet.” Glancing down, Villa saw what I had seen. “Jesus! He’s pissing! And he’s going to shit in a second and stink up the room. Do it here, Rodolfo, and quickly. I’ll cover my ears.”

Before Villa had time to stuff his thumbs into his ears, Fierro slid a long-barreled black pistol from his belt and jammed it snug against the back of Wentworth’s neck.

Villa was right—the boom of the shot was like a small thunderclap echoing against the close adobe walls. My ears rang and Wentworth’s forehead splattered redly open. He plunged forward as though someone had reached up and yanked him powerfully to the dirt. The body twitched a few times, then accepted its death and lay still. A moment ago, a man … now, a corpse. Garbage. Julio Cárdenas crossed himself. I nearly vomited but managed to hold it back.

“Take him into the desert.” Villa gave the order to Candelario, who bent immediately to seize Wentworth’s limp legs. “Wait. Did he shit?”

“I don’t think so. Rodolfo was too quick.” Candelario wrinkled his nose, then looked carefully. “No, he didn’t. Should I bury him?”

“What for? We won’t be here tonight. Get the keys from his saddlebags. Give the horse to Tomás. We’re going to this damned warehouse in El Paso to get the rifles.”

Candelario got a good grip on Wentworth’s patent-leather shoes and began hauling him out the door, leaving a streak of dark blood speckled with white pulp in the dirt. I’d never seen a man’s brains before, and I noticed, as my stomach kept heaving, that they looked like oatmeal.

Rodolfo Fierro stepped to one side to let the body slide past. Putting away his pistol, he sniffed the air. “Is the food ready? I’m starving.”

Villa called out, “Manuela!”

The Yaqui woman by the fire nodded and began to stuff the meat into the tortillas. There was a cardboard box full of bent tin spoons. She handed the first chipped plate to Villa, who grunted and took it. They were all squatting in a semicircle on their haunches, and I did so too. It wasn’t as uncomfortable as I had imagined.

Villa handed me the plate of food that the woman had meant for him. “Here, Tomás. Tell me if Manuela cooks as well as your mother.”

I thought that his offering me his own plate was a kingly gesture of hospitality; I tried to forget that I had just nearly puked watching a fellow American murdered in cold blood.

“Good,” I grunted, spooning up some warm frijoles, although the sight of Wentworth’s splattered brains from the corner of my eye nearly ruined my appetite.

“Eat a taco, boy. That’s real beef, not dog.”

Villa reached over and snatched the plate that Manuela was just in the act of handing to Candelario.

It wasn’t until a long time afterwards that I realized Pancho Villa never took any food that was given him. He always made someone else eat it or else nibbled a bit from the plates of common soldiers, fearing that somewhere in this world there might possibly—just possibly!—be someone who would have reason to poison him.

There was no poison in the food that day. We six men hunkered down to our plates, nodding to one another and exchanging small talk, just like a hundred relaxed mealtimes I had passed with cowhands around campfires back in the Brazos. I kept thinking about Wentworth’s body heating up outside in the afternoon sun, and how I had just witnessed an execution, and I wondered did he have a wife?—kids?—a mother who would miss him? And then I looked around and suddenly realized I was alone in this agitation. For my new friends, Wentworth was as forgotten as the fly killed at breakfast. They had other things on their minds. They were planning to conquer Mexico. To do that they would have to destroy a Federal army fifty thousand strong. What was a single life?

And that’s how I met the band of men I would ride with for the next three years. One of them had already made my imagination a captive to his visions. Pancho Villa!
Muy matador,
as the Mexicans say— a killer. But he was going to make me a captain, and a man.

That night I sauntered up to the watchman at Wentworth’s warehouse on Missouri Street, and while I engaged him in conversation Candelario stepped up behind the poor fellow and buffaloed him with the thin end of a Colt pistol. We loaded the Mausers on the backs of mules and set off through the darkness, until at dawn we were downriver opposite the little Mex town of Ysleta.

A hot sun was cooking up above the Franklin Mountains, rising fast. A dry wind gusted out of the desert from Texas, clearing the mist on the far bank of the Rio Grande, which my
compañeros
called the Rio Bravo. Even now I remember that the river smelled of dead fish. In my saddlebags I carried twenty spare cartridges for a Mannlicher rifle, a supply of Bull Durham tobacco, a barbed-wire cutter and my leather-bound copy of Shakespeare. With Pancho Villa and Rodolfo Fierro leading us, our horses pranced through shallow water. Upriver on the mud flats, Candelario Cervantes cursed the mules, swaybacked under the rifle crates. To get those rifles a man had been killed—I could still see his brains flying past my nose.

Candelario waved his big straw sombrero and bellowed,
“Viva el revolución! Viva Mexico!”

The early morning sparkle of the river glinted off Pancho Villa’s answering grin. He wore an old cotton jacket and a dirty brown hat, and he had a paunch from drinking too much strawberry soda pop and eating too much peanut brittle. He sat his horse the way most men sink into their favorite easy chair, not a crack of daylight between his rump and the bowed saddle. I would come to know that man well. I was twenty-two years old, I didn’t have a dime in my pockets, and like most young cowhands I liked to tell folks I could gobble up centipedes for breakfast and barbed wire for supper and it wouldn’t harm my digestion a hair; but I knew that in crossing this river in such company I had never done anything in my life so reckless, so ridiculous … and so splendid. This is one thing, I swore, I won’t quit until it’s finished.

What I’m trying to say is that in those days I may have been a little crazy.

“Assume a virtue, if you have it not.”

Alkali dust boiled up from the horses’ hoofs. The desert of Chihuahua lay bone-white and dry, while to the west the craggy shoulders of bronze-colored mountains heaved up from the plain. Nothing grew but saguaro cactus and maguey. Nothing lived but the turkey buzzards aloft and the lizards below. Our sombreros cast black shadows on the baked earth. A killing sun beat down, and saddle leather creaked wearily.

The mules carried the five hundred rifles and the fifty thousand cartridges. The next phase of Villa’s plan had begun: his great trek in the spring of 1913 through northern Chihuahua to recruit his revolutionary army. From nine men, he had said, we had to become nine thousand, armed and ready to fight. How could he do that? I rode Wentworth’s horse, a mutton-headed gray with knock-knees and one rheumy eye. It had been given to me with hardly an apology. I was still an outsider.

“Where are we going?” I asked my boyhood pal, Julio Cárdenas, who rode with me through that bleak landscape.

“Ascensión,” he replied.

“Where is that, Julio?”

“To the south. Not far, but it will take awhile.”

“What’s in Ascensión?”

“Maybe a few goats. It will be our base. We’ll train our men there.”

I remembered that he wasn’t usually a talkative fellow, this poxfaced man. He had the face of a monk, with thin lips and piercing eyes under tufted black brows. To make conversation and lead up to the big questions, I asked him how he had met up with Pancho Villa.

“I fought with him at Juárez two years ago, Tomás, when we took the city for the little Señor Madero. So did my wife.”

“You’re married now? Wonderful! Gosh, I didn’t know that. Congratulations!”

His wife, he told me, had been a
soldadera.
She hadn’t fired a rifle but had cooked food just behind the front lines for the men. The position had been overrun by the Federals. She had been captured and shot.

“Shot? What do you mean, Julio?
Killed?”

He nodded, and I mumbled something about being sorry. Then I remembered the words he had used. “But you said she was captured. She was a prisoner.”

“That’s what they do,” he explained. “So do we.”

“You shoot the prisoners?”

“Tomás, they’re bad men. In Juárez with that woman, you saw something of it. But there’s worse. You’ll find out.”

Toward early afternoon we reached a little pueblo called Samalayuca, baked by the breathless sun to the color of the desert. It meant nothing to me then: I had no idea that one day I myself would be taken here to be executed. How could I know? That was far in the future, and I knew nothing. An ancient church greeted us, and then a dusty white street with adobe huts, a cantina, a few squawking chickens and a wrinkled old woman in black with a water jar on her head. Candelario pounded on doors and found some eggs, a pile of brittle tortillas and a clay jar filled with tepid water. The peasants hid from us. I had never been to Old Mexico south of Juárez. If a man died here and went to hell, I figured he would wire back for blankets. The land was dry as a tobacco box, and the people in it looked withered, with shriveled skin and bent backs. Did they know the revolution was starting again? Did they know that Pancho Villa and the rest of us were going to give them land, liberty and literacy?

I had voiced the thought aloud, and Julio answered, “They know, but they’re too weak to care. They don’t fight, so we leave them alone.”

We ate in the cantina. Two thin, knotty, brown Indian boys limped in, wearing homemade sandals and filthy breechclouts. One seemed no more than thirteen. They stared at us—our appearance, armed, unshaven, barbaric, would have frightened most grown men, and they were only boys. But Villa measured them with a friendly look, so the boys drew near.

“Señor Villa … is it really you?”

“I’m no ghost.”

“Is it true what the men say? Do you go to fight again?”

“Naturally.”

“Can we go with you, señor?”

“If you loved the little Señor Madero, and if you’re prepared to die, yes, you can come with us.”

The younger of the boys laughed shrilly. “Will you give us rifles?”

“In time,
muchachos,
when we have enough of them.”

I had been standing next to him during this conversation, but something puzzled me. I looked down at the boys’ feet. “Why do you both limp?” I asked.

The boys glanced at Villa, as if for permission, and he nodded his round head.

One of them spoke, explaining that they were Yaquis. They and their fathers had worked on the cattle ranch of a rich landowner, Luis Terrazas, who now paid Orozco’s salary. They were whipped like oxen, paid in metal disks that could only be exchanged for goods at the hacienda store. When the revolution began the Yaqui men fought for Madero. After he assassinated Madero and took power, Huerta decided that the Yaquis would be an unstable element in the north. He sent Orozco’s Redflaggers into the desert villages. The Yaqui men were shipped to henequen plantations in the south, while the boys and others like them were tied to stakes. The Redflaggers skinned the soles of their feet with bayonets, so that they could never run away and fight.

“Show me your feet,” I said, and they lifted them to reveal the wounds.

“You’ll get horses too,” Villa said. He patted the boys’ heads, dismissing them, and they limped out.

“You see?” Julio turned to me. “That’s what we fight against—men who would do that to children.”