TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (75 page)

“In a week, I’ll be able to leave. And do you know what I think?” His topaz eyes gleamed: he had shaved, and his skin looked fresh and healthy. “I think our fortunes have turned. This Pershing coming to Chihuahua was the best thing that could have happened. Who could have foreseen it? The people hate the gringo soldiers, and they love the fact that they can’t catch me. Ten thousand against four hundred! It makes the blood sing. They will rally to me even more than before! What I told that German wasn’t a lie. When I blow the bugle, a hundred thousand will rise. Eventually the gringos will leave. The people will be sick of Carranza and Obregón. The true revolution can begin again! And we’ll win.”

Oh, no. Enough was enough. He had been licked on half a dozen battlefields from Celaya to Guerrero, by Obregón and Chao and even Colonel Dodd, and he still couldn’t admit defeat. Whatever we both had wanted wouldn’t happen now—the future was in the hands of other men. If the ideas of the revolution were good, they would survive defeat. They might even survive victory. He had done his best, but he was a loser now.

“The first thing we’ll do, Tomás, when I’m well, is get our gold out of Lake Ascensión. Then we can buy rifles and bullets and cannon. We’ll attack Juárez…”

I left him there, working out his plans.

When Elisa returned she was busy with the new Appaloosa, gentling him down around the mares. Dinner was as long as a rainy Sunday. Finally, after a brandy, Rosa and the men went off in different directions. Elisa started to go too, but I caught her arm.

“Will you have one more drink with me?”

We settled down in the library, where we had spent many an evening. I coughed a few times.

“Oh, don’t look so sheepish,” she said. “I hate that. Spit it out.” There was a sharp edge to her tongue, more than just weariness, and she didn’t seem as hangdog as yesterday.

“Elisa, I got you into this, and I blamed you when I should have been blaming myself. I just wanted to say I was sorry.”

“I accept your apology. I don’t feel too well myself about the way it turned out. You can go.” She cocked a pale eyebrow at me and drew up a corner of her mouth. “Rosa’s probably waiting. Don’t keep a woman waiting too long, Tomás.”

So she knew about last night. That, I realized now, had been inevitable. She was mistress of the house and could figure out where everybody was and wasn’t. But hadn’t she given her blessing? I downed the cognac in one swallow. “Elisa, if you’re angry, tell me why. You owe that to me.”

“Not angry. Disappointed. You didn’t go to Rosa last night. You went away from me. I don’t like that.”

I let out a groan. “Elisa…”

“It was childish.”

“Maybe so. I was feeling low. Obviously, sooner or later, it had to happen.”

“What’s done is done.” Her green eyes glinted. “But now
I’m
the one who feels low. I’m the one who went out on the street the other day, and innocent people got shot because of it. I’ve been feeling rotten ever since it happened. And I need a shoulder to cry on too. If need’s the key to open that door you’ve shut ever since you got back, I’ve got plenty of it.”

Ever since I got back? Hadn’t she understood my confusion? Words, I realized, were never enough.

“Let’s go upstairs,” I said, bold as a bull firing out of the chute.

“Let’s do that.”

“Want to finish your drink?”

“I don’t need
that. “

She led me upstairs. The big four-poster gave us plenty of room to stretch and curl and tangle our limbs. She cried a little before we made love, but I think they were tears of gladness as much as sorrow for the hard time she had been through. The tears that came afterwards were from pleasure. Before my brain fogged over I had one long and unbalancing thought.

Last night, Rosa. Tonight, Elisa. No qualms, no bad feeling in the bones. What did that make me? A rake? A great lover? A cocksman like Candelario? A man who liked coffee
and
tea? Was it need or gluttony? There had to be a reckoning.

The morning after I slept with Elisa, Rosa was in a cheerful mood. She cooked a breakfast of sizzling lean bacon and fried eggs and hummed to herself all the while as Candelario boiled the coffee and I made toast in the charcoal oven. Later, in the library, she read to me in English from a school reader. She kept glancing at me warmly, and there was no sign that she knew what had happened. On balance that suited me, even though I felt a stir of guilt at her innocence—because if I had to dash back and forth calming one of them down each time I wound up in the other’s bed, I would be as miserable as a razorback hog stropping himself on a fence post. Not that I meant to continue that dangerous game—Elisa one night, Rosa the next. Oh no!

I had reached a decision. The part of me below the waist might be able to handle it for a while, but my nerves would last as long as a keg of cider at a barn raising. In the end I would lose them both, as well as my self-respect. And I didn’t care what Elisa believed—there
was
such a thing as right and wrong, at least for me. And there still is, although perhaps my definitions have changed. Started to change even then.
Especially
then.

It was a lazy day. Patricio told us that Major Tompkins and the cavalry had headed straight north, licking their wounds. Elisa and I worked with the horses, introduced the new Appaloosa to the other mare, did some shoeing and plaited some fresh maguey ropes. Villa rode around the corral for another half-hour. Candelario took a siesta with Francisca. I wondered if I should be heading back for Bachinava in order to point Patton and Pershing in some other interesting direction, but I was in no hurry. They still had a lot of scouting to do around La Bufa and El Sauz.

In the late afternoon Rosa and I went into the orchard to pick oranges so she could squeeze fresh juice for the chief. She smiled at me sweetly.

“I meant to ask you earlier, Tomás … did you have a pleasant night?”

“Did I what?”

“Did you sleep well?”

“Uh … on and off. I had funny dreams.” I bent to the basket of oranges, but from the corner of my eye I saw her grinning.

When I began to blush furiously, she gave a merry cackle. Then she said calmly. “Last night I had a dream too. Do you want to hear it?”

“I’m not sure I do. Damn it, Rosa, what are you crowing about?”

“In my dream you wandered through the hacienda. You found yourself at the door to Señora Griensen’s room. You went right through the door, as if it were made of air, and into her bed. And you told her you were no longer angry at her. It made her very happy.”

“Rosa!” I yelled. “Damnation! You had an ear at the keyhole!”

“My room is next door,” she said. “The walls are thick, but I am not deaf.”

“And you’re not angry?”

“Not if it pleased you, Tomás. And not if it pleased the señora.”

I took the risk. I couldn’t lie now. “Well … it did. Yes, it surely did.”

“That’s what my ears told me.”

“And you’re not angry? You’re sure?”

She smiled at my discomfort and laid her fingers on my cheek. “I would be a foolish girl to be angry, if the man I love and my best friend in the world gave each other pleasure. You’re not displeased with her anymore, nor she with you. It was not wrong of you, Tomás.”

This simplicity made my head ache. I had been brought up to be jealous—not that I’d had much opportunity before I left Texas—and to believe that a woman had equal rights in that department. Mexicans weren’t much different, and their women would kill for love. Rosa had to be one in a million. Well, one of two in a million. I couldn’t believe my luck, and knew enough not to scratch at it.

But that evening one question remained. Where to go? Everything had been discovered, confessed and apparently forgiven; there could be no more sneaking around in the dark. Freedom is always poorly organized, and I recalled an old maxim that the females of all species are most dangerous when they appear to retreat. And, I thought, when they appear to agree with each other. I might be able to doubletalk Urbina and Patton and Major Tompkins, but with these two women I would never get away with it. And didn’t want to. That’s what I worried about … and should have known that the worry would bear no fruit I could eat. The women were in charge here. That was hard to accept at first, but I’ve learned worse lessons in my life.

Dinner was by candlelight at the big oak table: a raucous and jolly feast. Villa, now that he was mending and making new plans, which he loved almost as much as fighting battles, reminisced about his days as a bandit and told a tale about hiding out with Fierro and Urbina in the ghost town of Las Palomas, near Bachinava—he had been more frightened of the ghosts, he said, than of the
rurales.
Wine gurgled from the bottle. The bones of Francisca’s jugged hare were picked clean.

Finally Villa yawned. Hipólito’s head was already slumping, and Candelario was ready to hunt for his Francisca, who wouldn’t be hard to find. We drank a last toast to Julio, wherever he was, and then they all bowlegged off to bed, leaving me at the table to make my way with Rosa and Elisa.

“Well …” I cleared my throat a few times. “Fine dinner. Really fine.”

Hands behind her head, Elisa leaned back, smiling sociably, showing that long white throat. “You’ve had enough, Tomás?”

“Stuffed. I truly am.”

“A cognac?”

“That might just cut a breathing hole through the meat and potatoes.”

In the library she poured three amber tumblers. Rosa, her face already flushed from the wine, waved her hand in protest.

“Not so much, señora. You know what it does to me.”

She wore a simple white cotton dress that revealed the strong swell of her bosom. Elisa was in white too—an Indian blouse and flowing skirt, so that the color of her hair by candlelight seemed even more pale and lemony. Neither of them showed any desire to quit the field and make it easy for me. I started to feel uncomfortable. I didn’t have it in me to march off with one and leave the other sitting there to twiddle her thumbs. My cowardice in this situation, which I had thought might have gone off to hibernate for a while, woke up with a vengeance and began to yell for elbow room.

I excused myself to take a leak, and while I splashed into the bowl I sorted things out as best my fuzzed brain would allow. There was only one thing to do: make some excuse and head for a cold bed. I buttoned up and wandered back to the library, starting my speech as soon as I entered the room.

“Well, I’m kind of worn out and—”

But Elisa stood by a bookshelf, alone, smiling at me, hands outstretched. I glanced around the room.

“Rosa felt dizzy and went to bed. Come upstairs, Tom. If you’re tired, we can just sleep.”

I breathed a private amen. Still, I thought, where can it lead? How could Rosa go on accepting it? How could
I?

“I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodnight to her…”

Elisa handed me the oil lamp from the table and followed me upstairs—that well-traveled route. In the shadows of her bedroom she unbuttoned my shirt and kissed me on both nipples. They popped right up through the hair, and I tingled from scalp to toes. My pecker didn’t remember that I had claimed to be worn out … it rose up quick as a poked cat. As usual, there wasn’t much connection between my supposedly finer parts and the lower region. Like Candelario, I was cursed by lust. I remembered what Rosa had told me about hearing through the walls and resolved not to make my usual ruckus tonight.

The breeze blew through the balcony curtains, and a nearly full moon stood clear in the velvet sky, casting its light across the four-poster.

“Blow out the candles,” Elisa said.

She took off her clothes, and the moonlight bathed her with a porcelain glow. She unpinned her hair—the gesture I loved. The golden storm fell about my shoulders. My pecker quivered against her belly, and she squirmed. When we stretched out on the bed and I began to kiss her breasts, she groaned loudly.

“Elisa … shhh … ! Don’t make a racket.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Rosa can hear.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes. I’m sure of it. She told me.”

“But the walls are stone. Three feet thick.” She reached up behind her over the carved wooden headboard and rapped her knuckles hard against the wall. A hollow thump resulted. Some flakes of white plaster fell off.

“Elisa … she’ll hear! That’s her room!”

My pecker might have dwindled then, except that her other hand had it in a feathery grip, one oiled finger peeling back the foreskin and gently stroking. Before I could say anything more, she pulled me up next to her and drew my lips into the warm cave of her mouth. I loved her mouth: it was wide, and the lips were full, carved, with a hardness to the edges and a softness in the inner pink flesh. Her tongue slid over my gums and then inside my teeth. I just let go, relaxed, let her thrill me.

I began to drift into a state that was half agonizing, half utter peace, the state that anesthetized your mind and made you know with total certainty—which could never last—that the mind was the enemy of all true pleasure, and this feeling that ran from earlobes to toes was a poor human’s revenge for all the conundrums that God had set before him on the dusty earth. It was a state that didn’t last long; it brought you suddenly, man or woman, to a craziness that you would not have thought possible. Here was a magic that even Doña Corazon couldn’t work.

A distant creaking sound got through to me … then the click of a latch. I heard steps on the carpet—bare feet. I wanted to turn, but Elisa’s strong hand gripped my neck and slid up to press my mouth harder into hers. Sweat popped from my forehead. Whatever I mumbled was lost between her lips. Then a third hand—gentle and cool—touched my hip, and I believe my hair almost stood on end. I couldn’t speak … not even if my tongue had been untrapped.

A garment rustled. The breeze of it falling to the carpet raised goose pimples on my arms. A body, cooler than the hand that had announced it, pressed softly against my back. I felt the fullness of Rosa’s breasts on my shoulder blades, felt her breath in my ear.

My eyes bored wildly into Elisa’s, which were half-closed—but the moonlight didn’t allow her to lie and I saw the edges crinkle. Her mouth beneath mine widened in a smile. I worked my lips loose.