TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (8 page)

“You’ll lose all the money! Nothing will be left for the women.”

“If we fuck first,” Hipólito said, “we’ll be too tired to gamble. I’m worn out already. Fucking makes me sleepier.”

I could hear Candelario’s teeth, like galloping hoofs, grinding and gnashing in his jaw. “Listen, my fat friend,” he sputtered. “Let me enlighten you as to your nature, which you should know already, but apparently you’ve forgotten. You’ll gamble all night until there’s nothing left. If you’re lucky you’ll lose it quickly. And what then? Where should I put my pecker, in my horse’s ear?”

“Whose money is it?” Hipólito demanded.

“It belongs to the revolution.”

“Is the revolution meant to pay for you wallowing in the cunt of some French whore?”

“Is it meant to pay for you at the roulette wheel?”

“Candelario, you’re a peasant. In harder times I may have been a bandit, but in my soul, as I’ve told Tomás, I’m a businessman. I think ahead. I can read the eyes of the men sitting across the poker table from me, and I can see which numbers turn up more frequently on the wheel. Don t worry so much. I’ll win the price of both those whores for the whole night.”

“Then divide the money.”

“There may not be enough,” Hipólito admitted.

“Coño!”

“Imbecile!”

Mad enough to gnaw a gap out of an axe, Candelario leaned across his saddle horn and gripped my arm with fingers that were like iron bars. “Tomás, you decide. But bear this in mind—he plays poker like a Mexican, which means he can’t believe the next card isn’t going to give him a magnificent hand. So he raises every bet. Now, choose! The gambling first, or the women first.” He snarled at Hipólito, “Does that suit you?”

Hipólito leaned close to me too, and the evening breeze brought me a full whiff of him, all stale sweat and cattle and sour river mud. “You’re sensible,” he said. “Never mind that I called you crazy. And you like money. One day you’ll be my partner. You don’t let your cock lead you around by the nose, do you?”

At the time I thought not, so I shook my head.

I said, “You’ll both abide by me?”

“You have
my
word,” Hipólito said.

“Candelario?”

“Hijo de puta!
Should I swear on my mother’s life? For the love of Christ, tell us your decision!”

That whiff of Hipólito had made up my mind. I knew that Candelario and I had to be giving off the same aroma; it would have backed a skunk into a corner.

“Every whorehouse I’ve ever been in has a big tub downstairs,” I said. “That gets my vote. A hot bath first. Then … we’ll see.”

That decision was about as popular as an ulcerated tooth, but they were both men of honor, and after they groused and complained for a while, they finally agreed. Candelario was a shade more warm to it than Hipólito, because he figured it would at least get us inside the whorehouse first, and it did. It was a quiet night, and the only other customers were a couple of beer-sodden troopers up from Camp Furlong.

The iron tub was there, just as I had predicted, and not only was it vacant and full of steaming hot water, but it was big enough for three grown men or other combinations. We stripped down and jumped in. The madam—a Mexican woman named Doña Margarita, who was said to be sympathetic to the revolution—took a quarter from each of us and then extracted a silver dollar for what she claimed was a bottle of genuine scotch whiskey. We passed it back and forth while we soaked in the big tub and discussed the state of our souls. The hot water flowed round my aching hide, smooth as molasses and soothing as a mother s touch. The whiskey heated up my insides, and the bath wrinkled my outsides a ruddy pink.

The bottle of whiskey somehow got to be empty. Another one somehow took its place. Hipólito told us a tale of his youth when he and his brother were bandits in the Sierra Madres.

“…Pancho knew that the cry of the gray dove was a warning that men were near. Usually
rurales.
…”

His voice began to falter, and soon he started to snore. Candelario had begun a song of the desert, but it faded too. His good eye rolled in his head, and it had no more expression than the one made of glass. He reached for the whiskey bottle outside the tub, but his hand never made it. His snores grew louder than those of Hipólito.

I was headed in that direction, or at least not far behind, when a door opened at one end of the cellar and the body of a handsome blond woman swished by, her yellow head atop a pile of wondrous curves. She nodded in a friendly manner to us in the tub, then took some towels out of a chiffonier at the other end of the room and then flounced back. She wore a skintight blue silk dress, and from the rear, just below her belted waist, it looked like two boar shoats fighting under a wagon sheet. I awoke in a hurry.

“Excuse me, ma’am … señorita …”I cleared my throat of the sour taste of whiskey. “You do work here, don’t you?”

“Yes,
chéri.
My name is Yvette.”

“Are you from New Orleans, Yvette?”

“ ‘Ow you know that?”

“And you’ve got a sister?”

“Ah … my sister.
Oui—si.
She is Marie-Thérése.”

“Would you mind waiting a minute while I wake my friend here? There’s some business I know he’d like to discuss with you.”

The blond and curvaceous Yvette was willing, and I shook Candelario until I thought I might rattle the glass eye out of its socket. But all he did was add some grumbles to his snores and finally slide a little farther down into the warm water. Hipólito was equally uncooperative.

“They are not very interested,” Yvette said, smiling. I could see the carved line of her lips beneath the red color. “But what about you,
chéri?
I am ready, and so is my sister.”

I thought, Get thee behind me, Satan. But if he obliged, all he managed was a hard shove forward. I asked her what we could do about my friends, as I didn’t want them to drown while I was taking my pleasure, and in that lovely French accent she told me not to worry, she would send someone down to keep an eye on them. Anyway, once the water cooled they would wake up. “They always do,
mon jeune ami, “
she said sweetly.

You could have hung all her towels on my pecker, and then some, as I followed Yvette upstairs to a second-floor bedroom. Marie-Thérése, almost a twin of her sister, bounced in a little while later to see what all the shouting and thumping was about, but it was only me expressing my feelings, and by then I was so carried away by French ways that I asked her to stay too.

I had scooped up Hipólito’s purse for safekeeping, and around two o’clock in the morning, after I had paid my debt, I limped downstairs to see how my i>compañeros were faring. Some kind soul had hauled them out of the tub and dumped them into a single feather bed where they slept in each other’s arms like two bedraggled, soapy-smelling, large brown angels. But when I shook them back to the world of the living, they had headaches built for elephants. Whatever Doña Margarita poured into those bottles of scotch whiskey surely had never crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Hipólito began to sneeze.

Candelario, as he pulled on his boots and dusty clothes, groaned. “Aaargh … what now?”

“Let’s go home,” Hipólito said, “before I get pneumonia.”

Soon we were mounted and back on the road to Columbus. The sky was solid with stars, and the night had that fine, quivering and thrilling silence that you know only in the desert. It was bitter cold, but I didn’t care. Candelario finally spoke. His voice was hoarse and sad.

“Tomás, I wish to ask you a question.”

“Go ahead.” But I was on my guard.

“Have you no shame?”

I explained that I had tried my best to wake him up, and I had a witness in Yvette. But he had passed out cold.

“You weren’t drunk, Tomás?”

“Certainly I was drunk.”

“Ah,” he said sadly, “you’re younger than we are. In that way, life is cruel.” The horses’ hoofs clopped along the road, raising puffs of unseen dust. “And so now tell me what happened.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything, hombre!
First of all, who did you fuck? Did you find either of the Frenchwomen?”

I admitted I’d found Yvette first.

“First?
Son of a whore, don’t torture me like that! Am I not your friend? Don’t we ride together for Pancho Villa? I want to know everything!”

As best I could, I told him how I had pranged Yvette, and then Marie-Thérése. I could hear his teeth gnashing again, so I kept the detail to a minimum, but that wasn’t good enough for him.

“How many times,
hombre? Válgame Dios,
be honest.”

“Yvette twice. And then Marie-Thérése … let’s see, once, I guess.”

“Ya te chingaste
!—now you’ve fucked yourself! You’re lying! Did you hear that, Hipólito? Three times, he says! By the Virgin, that’s not possible, not in your condition, in that short a time!” He growled, twisting his head toward me—but then he gave a mighty groan and gripped the pommel of his saddle to keep from falling off.

I told him I wasn’t lying, but I decided I had better leave out the last part where both women had bent on their knees, coaxing my pecker out of its doldrums and putting it between their two sets of lips to torture the last drop of jizzum out of me. He would never have believed it.

“And did they moan and groan a lot? Did they tell you they were dying? Which one was better? Describe their breasts and their private parts, Tomás. I need to know.”

“Let him be,” muttered Hipólito.

“What for? Should I be sorry for him? I’m the one who got nothing! Except you, you hairy oaf! Farting beside me in the bed, while he was upstairs fucking his brains out!” He addressed himself to me again. “So? Will you tell me?”

When I finished with a more detailed description he gave a small, pained grunt, and he was silent for a while. Then he spoke quietly. “Tomorrow I’ll find out for myself if you were telling the truth . There’s only one way to do that. Meanwhile, I believe you. And I’m proud of you. You didn’t disgrace the army of Pancho Villa.”

Satisfied, he slumped back into his saddle and closed his eyes. Soon he began to snore. Hipólito sighed into the darkness, too weary to talk.

I gazed up at the stars, glittering with such cold majesty, thinking that at least for now, this moment, the chestnut jogging comfortably under my drained loins, life was sweet. Not noble, but surely sweet. It was one more crooked and fleshly detour on the road to true love … but where in this dark world, under what far star, was the one to show me the straight and holy path?

Where indeed? I would find her sooner than I ever dreamed, but it would take me years to know her. And then it would be too late. If we had the power to see our future in advance, as in a witch’s crystal ball, we might be wiser men for it—but no happier, no better. It often occurred to me that we might even choose not to go on living.

A few minutes before noon of the next day I showed up at the Commercial Hotel to give Felix Sommerfeld a final count of the herd. The little lobby was pleasantly cool, and a pretty girl was sitting in one of the red plush chairs near the mahogany staircase. My first impression was one of lustrous brown hair, a high pale forehead, lively blue eyes, a beguiling smile. Then she got gracefully to her feet, gathered her rustling pink skirt and planted herself in my path. No, she wasn’t pretty. Up close she was the loveliest creature I had ever seen.

That was wonderful enough, but when she spoke my name I thought my heart would break right through its rib cage. It gave a heave that happens only once or twice in a lifetime.

“Is it Mr. Mix?”

“Miss …?”

“Mr. Thomas Mix?”

“Yes, miss.” With one hand I grabbed my sombrero off my head, and with the other I began scratching my chest. I didn’t itch, but I didn’t know what else to do with my hand. I tried to remember everything I knew about etiquette. Did you bow? Shake hands? Before she had opened her mouth to speak, I realized that in all my life I’d never met anyone who measured up to this girl.

“You’re here to meet my father,” she said. “I’m Hannah Sommerfeld.”

This was hard to believe, after my assumption about the unfortunate evils of heredity, but there was no way to debate it with the young lady, and I was only grateful for the fact that I knew her father at all. The only parts of Felix Sommerfeld I could see reflected in her face were her ivory skin and her blue eyes; the rest came from a provident creator.

Her brown hair, with a few strands curling above her tiny ears, was neatly coiled above a forehead that didn’t own a blemish. Her nose was gently curved—you might even say beaked if you were in the mood to criticize, which I wasn’t—and under it, her mouth was small and friendly. Her chin would have been almost too firm if it hadn’t suggested to me the proud princess of a fairy tale. Her eyes shimmered like water in sunlight. She wasn’t tall, wasn’t short, she was just right. She looked to be about nineteen or twenty. And her breath smelled of mint and rose water.

“My father will be late, Mr. Mix, and offers his apology. Can you bear the thought of entertaining me on the hotel veranda until he gets here?”

I could bear the thought, and with a strangled grunt I said so.

We walked toward the veranda, her pink dress swirling like tall grass in a high wind. I had to catch my breath.

“How do you find Columbus, Mr. Mix?”

“Oh, it’s fine. Just fine.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“No, no, I haven’t. I haven’t been here, not ever. But it… it seems like a nice little town.”

“It’s ugly, Mr. Mix. That’s the price of progress.”

“Yes. That’s so, Miss Sommerfeld. I guess … it certainly is.”

I felt like a child—an idiot child. I had nothing to say that was any better. The color rose to my cheeks; I wasn’t embarrassed, just overwhelmed. By then we had walked out the side door of the hotel to the veranda, where we had some privacy and could still observe the street. A few horses and buggies moved through the dust, and a big red Locomobile sputtered by in the opposite direction. Hannah Sommerfeld chose a wicker chair with some shade, and I stood uncertainly in a slanting bar of sunlight, shifting my weight, then leaned back against the white painted railing.