TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (84 page)

A couple of days later I strewed a few flowers on the grave of Rosa and the baby. Yes, I thought, she never displeased me. And she ruined me for everyone else, even Elisa.

I saddled my horse by the gate. Elisa had wanted to give me what was left of the gold, but I refused.

“I’d just spend it on whiskey and wild women. You keep my share. Times might be hard after the war. I came here with nothing. I don’t want to leave with anything. That would be wrong.”

“You mustn’t blame yourself. What happened wasn’t your fault.”

That was the only time she ever referred to Rosa’s death. I just nodded. Maybe it was so. I would never know. I only knew how godawful I felt about it, how hollowed out and barren. I remembered what Bosques had written: that death was Mexico’s greatest crop. Villa was still fighting, I knew, somewhere in northern Chihuahua. How many had been killed in all these years? How many were yet to die? I had grieved for Julio and Candelario. I didn’t want to count, didn’t want to know. Only one death mattered now. I saw every flower and bush that way, as a branch of someone who slept beneath the dust. That was one of the reasons I had to go.

“You’ll always be welcome here,” she said. “You know that.”

“I do know it. Take care, Elisa. I never stopped loving you. I just stopped loving life. One day I’ll start again … but not soon enough for you.”

“Go well, my sweet.”

She kissed me on both cheeks. She looked old and tired. I didn’t thank her as I had done the first time I left the hacienda. She knew my gratitude, and I think she knew my heart was broken into pieces too small to be of much use to anyone who needed a whole heart. I hadn’t lied to her.

She turned on her boot heel and strode back into the house, head high, shoulders square. She was never any good at goodbyes. She closed the door. In all my life since then—and I’ve done a lot—I never met another woman so proud.

On the way north, on a sunny March day of 1917, somewhere above Bachinava and below Casas Grandes, in that part of Chihuahua I knew so well, a band of horsemen appeared out of the desert. They cut a wraithlike trail of dust along the horizon line; then the trail narrowed and thickened, and they came riding straight for me. I made sure that my pistol was loose in the holster and checked that I hadn’t forgotten to put a fresh clip in the Mauser. If this was trouble I wanted to be ready.

The riders, about six or seven of them, wore big sombreros and carried full cartridge belts. The barrels of their uplifted rifles glittered like jewels in the sun. They rode straight up to me and wheeled their horses, tugging at the ring bit as hard as they could. That hadn’t changed. And their leader didn’t waste any words.

“Who are you, señor? Where do you come from? Where are you going?”

I remembered Candelario’s way. “Not so fast, friend. First, who are
you?”

The man who had addressed me couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, with a mahogany-brown face, eyes to match and a flowing black mustache. In my time I had seen a thousand like him. He showed his fine white teeth.

“Captain Luis Zuñiga, of the Army of the Revolutionary Convention. At your orders, señor, perhaps. Now, who are you?”

I had been away awhile, I realized. “Captain Zuñiga, help me out. Who runs the Army of the Convention these days?”

“General Francisco Villa, señor. Do you come to join us, to fight for land and liberty?” He had his rifle pointed right at my chest.

“I’ve done that already,” I said, “but I do want to see your chief. We’re old friends. My name is Colonel Tomás Mix.”

Showing a wonderful sense of trust, he thrust his rifle back into the scabbard, bared his teeth again and threw his hand up to his sombrero in a salute. I gave it back to him.

“And where might General Villa be these days?”

“South of Casas Grandes, my colonel. We ride there. We would be honored if you would join us.”

“A pleasure. Captain.”

We rode off across the dusty plain. I had never meant to leave Mexico without saying goodbye to the man for whose sake I had first come. I had known he was somewhere around here, and I had been keeping an eye skinned. Casas Grandes suited me just fine.

The new army was camped in the foothills of the mountains ten miles south of the city, which was held by the Carranzistas—about fifteen hundred men, I judged, with the usual women and kids and assorted animals. We reached there well after dark, and Zuñiga went round the campfires to make some inquiries. After fifteen minutes he came back to tell me that General Villa wasn’t in the camp. He had gone off to sleep. No one knew where.

“In which direction did he go, Captain?”

He asked the last man he had spoken to, and the man pointed to the east. I knew Villa’s habits and didn’t think they had changed. I thanked Zuñiga and then spurred my horse off in the other direction, westward.

It led me into some gently sloping hills dotted with saguaro cactus and maguey. A half moon lit the way, casting ivory shadows on the desert. I didn’t try to be quiet but thrashed my horse back and forth on the rocks and kept muttering to myself like an old man with many woes. I didn’t want to come on anyone by surprise. After an hour of this foolishness I had almost given up, but then at my back, in the black shadow of a hill, I heard the scrape of boot on rock. At first, when I turned in the saddle, I thought I had been mistaken and the green eyes that gleamed at me were those of an animal—a coyote, maybe an owl.

But then the animal, a two-legged one, gave a guttural chuckle and stepped out of the hiding shadow, pistol held loosely in his hand. It was Pancho Villa.

“I thought it might be you, Tomás. Anything’s possible in this life, I told myself. But I couldn’t be sure. You have a good nose to find me.”

“But yours is better, chief. I’m glad you didn’t think it was Carranza.”

“Carranza …” He spat into the darkness. “Get down off your horse, Tomás. Let me make sure you’re not a ghost.”

I swung out of the saddle, and he stepped forward to embrace me. He smelled of meat and wood smoke. I think he may have meant what he’d said about making sure I was real; he hugged my ribs hard until I thought they would crack, and then he squeezed my shoulders. He was his paunchy old self, and there was a lot more soft flesh on his arms than I remembered. He must have had a good supply of peanut brittle.

“You’re thinner,” he said. “I can’t see your face so I don’t know if you look older. But it’s logical that you would. How long has it been now?”

“Ten months, chief. In Parral.”

“Come around the hill with me. I have a little fire there. I put it out when I heard you, but the coals are under the sand and we’ll get it going again. Then I can see your face and learn more.”

I walked my horse around the slope with him, and he got the fire going again, blowing on the coals and adding some cornhusks. The little blaze leapt up. His own horse was hidden nearby in the hills. He wanted nothing to give away his presence, and he had his own nose for sniffing. Squatting on our heels in the flicker of the fire, we studied each other. I was right: he was fatter and his jowls looked flabby. But the yellow light in his eyes was the same—shrewd, restless, the fanaticism always tempered by that childlike gleam of hope.

“You do look older,” he murmured. “More than I would have thought. What’s happened to you? I know about Julio, and then I heard about the gringos bushwhacking the rest of you. They were very proud of killing Candelario and Rodolfo, but they said nothing about you. I should have known that no one could catch you if you were on a horse. Is there more?”

I decided it would make life simpler if I let him keep believing that the cavalry was responsible for Rodolfo’s death. I said that I had been wounded in the chase and had to recuperate a long while, and then I told him about Rosa. He didn’t speak for a while. There was nothing that would comfort me, and he was wise enough to know it.

“But you married her first.”

“Yes, chief.”

“That was good of you. That makes women happy. Perhaps you remembered I’d always told that to you. If so, I’m pleased. If not, it was still the right thing to do. And the other one, the beautiful German señora?”

“She’s still in Parral. It was over, chief. And I had to go.”

“She was
mucho.
“

“Yes. That’s what she was.”

“And your wound healed well?”

“Doña Corazon cured me. And took away the
ojo.
“

“Válgame Dios!
In that, too. we’re brothers.”

I took note that I had graduated from bastard son to brother, which meant that somehow, at least in his view, I had grown up. That’s why I had come to Mexico in the first place. Well, I did feel old—and worthy of promotion. In my time, for him and for the revolution, I had done my best. That was a knowledge no one could ever take away from me.

“You did well,” he said, for he still had the ability to read a man’s thoughts. “There was never anyone I trusted more than you. Do you remember when we crossed the Rio Bravo? I thought you wouldn’t last more than a month. How long has it been? I can’t seem to remember…”

“Four years.”

“Is that possible?”

“Yes, it’s so. Time runs even while men sleep.”

He heaped more cornstalks on the fire and looked at me closely in the rising blaze. “Have you come back to fight for me again? From the sadness in your eyes, it doesn’t seem that way. But I could still use you. I’m working on a good plan. Angeles is coming back soon. Among the three of us—”

“It wouldn’t be any good, chief. I’ve lost my taste for it.”

“I can understand that. A lot has happened. Elsewhere, too. Did you know Obregón quit? Carranza made him Secretary of War. Each day he had to approve a special allowance of five thousand pesos for Pablo González, that lousy general who couldn’t cut the railroad line at Torreón. It was for expenses. What a pack of thieves! Obregón always wrote alongside the papers, ‘By special order of Don Venus.’ So Carranza wasn’t sorry to see him go.”

“Have you read the new Constitution?” I asked.

“I’ve had it read to me. The big words give me eyestrain. It’s pretty good. Unfortunately, a Constitution is no better than the men who enforce it. And they’re a pack of politicians and curs. I don’t even know why I make the distinction.”

“And what will you do now?”

He laughed. “You always ask that, as if there’s a choice.”

“You’ll keep fighting.”

“I drove the gringos out, didn’t I?”

I think he believed it.

“Of course I’ll keep fighting,” he said, after a moment of relishing his triumph. “Zapata will too, in Morelos. He’s not so bad as long as you don’t rely on him—there are many men like that. I’m going to take Ojinaga, so that we can have a port of entry for supplies. And then Juárez. Within six months I’ll have ten thousand men. I had to give up Chihuahua City, but I’ll take it again, and Torreón too. I’ll take all the cities on the railroad. I’ll take them and lose them a dozen times if I have to. The defeats are also battles, as I’ve told you, but from now on there will be more victories than defeats. You’ll see. Help me up,” he said quietly. “I need to stretch my legs.”

I did as he asked, and he arched his body and twisted his arms to articulate the bones in his back. I heard a series of tiny cracklings. He sighed at this evidence of age.

“And what about you?” he asked, when he was done. “Candelario once told me that in your misspent youth you thought of becoming an actor on the stage in New York. It’s a foolish profession, in my opinion, but still you might do well at it, and they say there’s money to be made. Perhaps you could be in the movies. I love William S. Hart, but he’s getting old. You could do as well as he did. You can certainly ride a horse better.”

So once again he touched and changed my life. He never lacked that power.

“I might try that, Pancho. I don’t know. I haven’t thought much about it lately.”

I had never called him Pancho before, but it came naturally now, and he didn’t seem to notice. That may have been deceptive. He noticed everything, I remembered.

“Whatever you do,” he said, “you’ll always have my blessing. You’re a man who will never be at rest, Tomás. You’re like me—you need a challenge. Now go. I have to sleep. Tomorrow we’re going to attack Casas Grandes … again.”

I left him there by his little brushwood fire and rode off into the familiar darkness of the desert night. This was the only parting that hadn’t truly saddened me. He was doing just what suited him, which was more than I could say for myself. I didn’t really want to be a cowhand again; for me that was like cutting along the dotted line. I had come to Chihuahua a youth and stayed to become a man … found all I had yearned for, and then lost it. Not many, at the age of twenty-six, could say that. And not many would wish to. They looked forward, not back. That was my problem, and it still is.

A little north of Casas Grandes I let the roan out to graze, then bedded down, hands tucked under my head, gazing up at the cold stars that glittered above Chihuahua. The stunning silence of the night surrounded me—vast, impersonal, wondrous and fine. I seemed to feel myself perched on the earth’s crust, and the earth was turning in the black void.

I turned with it—I was its slave—I had no choice. I whispered, “Goodnight, Rosa. Sleep well, my love.” And I closed my eyes.

The sun woke me, and after I had boiled some coffee and swallowed a few hardboiled eggs, I felt a bit better. A distant patter reached my ears, like the sound of fingernails tapping impatiently on wood. Gunfire. The battle for Casas Grandes must have started.

I rode all day over a rocky alkali flat, dodging sword plants and chaparral, keeping the roan at a lazy walk, trying to figure things out. Pancho Villa’s words kept nibbling at the edge of my mind. “
You’re like me—you need a challenge.”
I supposed I was free to take it, if that’s what I really wanted. Black Jack Pershing and George Patton were over in the mud of France, and now that we had the Huns to hate, who would care about settling old scores with out-of-work renegade Mexican colonels?

An actor. I had always wanted that since the curtain came down in high school. I wasn’t Hamlet caliber, but I had been a pretty effective Fortinbras in my time, cleaning away the debris. I still had Shakespeare in my saddlebags—old faithful companion, he had outlasted everybody. In El Paso I could jump a Southern Railway red-ball freight and be in New York in four days’ time. But it was barely March … it would be cold up there. They’d have a good laugh when I hauled out my serape to keep warm. And I would have a lot to learn before I could tread the boards of the Shubert with any confidence and some style.