El Paso: A Novel (16 page)

“
Buenas tardes
,” said Johnny Ollas.

“You want some bread?” the woman asked.

“Bread?”

“I got some corn flour—yeast. You got a fire. I smell something cooking. Maybe I could make some bread for you,” she said.

Johnny looked at the others. They seemed none too comfortable to have a bruja in their camp, but here they were out on the desolate llanos, and she was alone and seemed harmless, and the notion of bread with their supper was appealing.

“That all you got, bread?” Julio said.

“That’s it. I thought maybe we could share a little meal. I have a long journey tomorrow.”

“You know where we are?” Johnny asked.

“Sure,” she said. The donkey had wandered into the campsite by now and began grazing on the edges of the firelight.

“Where?”

“Plain of the Winds,” she said.

“Yeah, well, where is that?” Johnny asked.

“You go west, you be in the barrancas, east is the llanos,” she said, signifying either the canyons or the barren plains. “North is the great desert. I guess you come up from the south, but I suppose you know where you come from.”

“That doesn’t tell me much,” Johnny said. “We got a compass. We know where the mountains and everything are. We need to know where is the nearest town—city, you know what I mean?” It wasn’t exactly the truth, but it saved them some face.

“Well, there is a big town, Chihuahua City. Maybe two, three days from here.”

She wasn’t telling Johnny anything he didn’t know. He’d fought in the bullring there. But, in fact, from here he didn’t have the foggiest notion of which way Chihuahua was. “Where’s the road to that?” he asked.

“There isn’t one from here. You follow the morning sun, day or so, there’ll be a road.”

“We’re looking for a man with an army,” Johnny said. “General Pancho Villa. You heard of him?”

“Of course.”

“Yes? Know where he is?”

“Yes.”

“Where, then?”

“He’s in Creel.”

“Where’s that?”

“North. On your horses, four days.”

“How do you know this?”

“The bones tell me.”

“Bones? What bones?”

The woman reached into a pocket of her dingy dress and produced a handful of some kind of bones, mixed up. Looked to Johnny like chicken and pig and sheep and maybe a cow bone or a bird’s, all bleached white as sand. Johnny had seen people throw the bones before. Fortune-telling, or some such. Just old women’s superstition.

“So what is it you’re trying to tell me? You threw those bones and figured out where Pancho Villa was?”

“I don’t need to throw them. I keep them in my pocket. Now, you want some bread with your dinner?”

Johnny looked at his brothers. The woman seemed harmless enough. Probably crazy, but she obviously knew something about what she was talking about. At least more than those ignoramuses back at the no-name village. And bread sounded good.

“Okay,” Johnny said, “let’s have some bread. The beans are almost done.” He motioned for her to join them and sit on a log. She went to a ratty-looking canvas sack on the donkey and pulled out a paper bag of flour, then pulled up a log by the fire.

“You got some water?”

“In that tin there,” Rafael said.

The woman got the tin and began mixing the flour with the water inside the paper bag, just a little at a time so the bag didn’t burst, and then took out a little tin of yeast. She took off her shawl to reveal a head of long straight black Indian hair that had an almost deep indigo sheen to it. Actually, in the firelight, she wasn’t bad-looking. She was tall, slender but supple. Maybe forty or so years old, much younger than they’d first thought. And she had strong, high cheeks and a straight nose like his own, a “Spanish” nose, not Indian at all. In fact, after a while they could see a certain ageless beauty to this woman, even if she was a witch.

“What’s your name?” Johnny asked.

“They call me Gourd Woman.”

“They also say you’re a
bruja.
”

“Maybe. Sometimes I suppose I am a
bruja
.”

“Witches aren’t very popular anymore,” Johnny remarked.

“It depends on who you’re with.”

“The people in that village said you made their children sick and their fruit die.”

“How? I was only there four days. I came to sell them brooms.”

“Brooms?”

“Yeah, I make them out of straw I pick up.” She pointed toward the donkey and the load of brooms strapped to its back. “Right time of year, you can find the straw in just about any place; just have to keep moving. The handles, I make them out of branches. Strip off the bark and polish the wood with oil. Makes a nice broom. Better than store-bought, huh?”

“Where do you come from?” he asked.

“No place. I never had a home.”

“Nobody comes from no place,” Johnny remarked, but he was on the verge of taking it back after he suddenly remembered the people of the no-name village.

“You did,” she said.

“What makes you say that?”

“Bones tell me. You were born in a ditch.”

Johnny Ollas sat up, startled. Nobody on the ranch had ever talked about this with him since they’d first explained it when he was a small boy. Gourd Woman continued to knead the flour and water inside the paper bag while she stared at the fire. Up above, the night had become dark as ink and stars were twinkling brightly. There was no moon and a chill had settled over the plains.

“Gourd woman . . .” Johnny said. “You don’t have another name?”

“Everyone called me Lurie when I was little,” she said. “And I’m not really a
bruja,
I think I’m a
curandera
—I heal people.”

“Then why do they call you Gourd Woman?” Johnny asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I sell brooms.”

FOURTEEN

T
he city of Juárez had always been an annoyance to Pancho Villa. It sat directly across the Rio Grande from El Paso, where Villa received his arms and supplies from American munitions companies. Three times he had taken the city from the Federal forces, but he couldn’t hold it and was forced to withdraw. And each time the Federal forces reentered the city they strengthened its defenses. In the past this had been a mere inconvenience, but President Woodrow Wilson had done him the discourtesy of officially recognizing his sworn enemy, Carranza, as the legitimate leader of Mexico.

Now that his arms and munitions shipments from America were cut off, Villa needed to go to El Paso and talk to his old pal, the U.S. army commander Scott, to find out what was going on and whether the situation could be restored. After due consideration, he concluded the strongest case he could present to Scott would be to recapture Juárez from the Carranza men and prove he was still in charge of Northern Mexico. First, however, Villa would have to take Chihuahua, because he couldn’t leave the Federal garrison there in his rear.

Furthermore, Juárez was more than two hundred miles away, across the largest and most hostile desert on the American continent. He had last taken the city a year ago by a trick he remembered from the fable of the Trojan horse.

A Federal train arriving at Chihuahua City from Juárez was seized by Villa’s men. Using the name of the train’s commander, and with a pistol at the head of the telegraph operator, Villa sent a message to the general of the Federal force at Juárez saying that his locomotive was broken down and he needed a new one, plus a dozen more boxcars. The new train was dutifully sent and Villa loaded nearly two thousand of his soldiers aboard. Villa now sent a second wire to Juárez, addressed to the train’s commander: “Large force of rebel troops approaching from south. What should I do?” Presently the answer that Villa was waiting for was tapped out: “Return at once.”

Juárez was duly captured next day from the stunned Federales and this feat gained Villa worldwide recognition. But that was then, and nobody was going to fall for such a ruse again, so Villa occupied himself tearing up railroad tracks, cutting telegraph wires, and moving slowly through the countryside on horseback.

It was unseasonably hot as the general’s caravan, with Donita Ollas in tow, plodded north.

At the small town of Denardo they came across the scene of a horrendous massacre Villa’s men were in the process of finishing. Some of his troops had gone there earlier and determined that many of Denardo’s citizens now favored the Federal government of Carranza—a position that had been indelibly impressed upon the villagers during a recent visit by some of Carranza’s men. A second lesson-teaching was in order, Villa’s captain in charge had decided, and now, as the travelers rode past the macabre site, Donita Ollas was sure she would be sick.

She was riding in a wagon, escorted by Tom Mix. It was a warm, pleasant morning, with gentle breezes and a pastel-blue sky. Donita was thus doubly unprepared for what she saw when they reached the village. It seemed like half the town had been wiped out. Bodies of men, women, and children lay scattered in the streets, many being picked apart by dogs or
zopilotes
. Others were hanging from trees and doorways, some flayed alive and their skin hanging down in strips. Fires had been lit under some of these, and the bodies smoldered. Small children stared in shock or wept over their dead parents or relatives. Many of the horses became unnerved by the strange sight, their ears laid back, and they became skittish and shivery.

Donita gasped. Mix himself had been looking straight ahead so as to avoid seeing the carnage.

“It’s a rough war,” Mix told her.

“You call this war?” Donita buried her face in a handkerchief. The stench of death hung heavily over the place.

“It’s the way the Mexicans fight it, ma’am,” Mix replied. “They don’t give no quarter or ask for any.”

“It is not war, it is revolution,” came a voice from behind them.

Villa had ridden up, the silver on his saddle jingling, and overtaken the wagon. “You think these people wouldn’t do the same to us if the chance came?”

Donita waved the handkerchief in front of her nose to snuff out the smell. “You must be monsters, to kill people this way,” she said.

“Revolution is different,” Villa continued. “Nobody likes this kind of thing. But it’s necessary. We learned this from the Spaniards. You got to kill people twice: once to make sure they’re dead, then to make sure their souls are dead. That’s the way the stinking Spanish started doing things here four hundred years ago. We were just taught too well, maybe.”

“To kill women?” Donita said disgustedly.

“You don’t think women kill us, too?” Villa said. “Women can shoot a rifle like anybody else. Matter of fact, somebody shot at my men as they rode into town.”

Donita knew he was right and had heard of numerous women in Villa’s army, armed to the teeth.

“The citizens must learn to understand that unwise choices of loyalty can have bad consequences. I bet next time my men come into this town they get a more polite reception.”

Villa ordered the wagon stopped. They were in front of a church where several of his men were manhandling a priest through the portals. The church was an adobe building two hundred years old with beautiful oriental-looking cupolas. The priest was a short, balding Mestizo man with tears in his eyes. They brought him before Villa.

“Well, Padre,” Villa said, “do your people see now the error of their ways?”

“Why, you’ve killed most of them,” the priest said. He looked frightened, but belligerent, too.

“Yes, I imagine you’ll have a smaller parish now. Not so many alms to collect, eh?”

“How can you commit such things in the face of God?” the priest cried bitterly. His face was a purple mask of anger.

“‘Face of God,’ you say? Why, we’ve done nothing more than re-create the murals on the walls of your own churches. This is what those stinking Spaniards brought over here with them—your Holy Inquisition. Huh?” This had been a theme of Villa’s for many years. Paintings in the churches showing people suffering horrible torture at the hands of the Inquisition, which in Villa’s view was only to intimidate the churchgoers, especially the little children. The Church itself naturally supported whatever government was in power, which Villa concluded was only so it could keep operating smoothly and keep collecting alms from the peasants.

“It is murder,” the priest said. “God will punish you.”

“It is revolution,” Villa retorted. “And don’t talk to me about God. What kind of God lets this kind of thing happen in the first place, eh?”

Villa could feel the old rage rising up in him and he welcomed it, the rage slowly encompassing everything, welling from deep within.

“‘What kind of God,’ you ask?” cried the priest. “There is only one God, and he is watching. God doesn’t forgive murder,” said the priest. “Murder is a mortal sin.”

“Don’t you worry that I will have you stood up against a wall and shot to rags for talking to me like that?” Villa asked.

“Everybody dies,” the priest replied, looking Villa in the eye.

Villa took a deep breath and sighed, looking out past the fields that surrounded the town. He stretched his shoulders and bit his lip, and slowly shook his head back and forth, as if trying to clear some evil impulse, before turning back to the priest. The rage had mercifully receded.

“Well, Padre, maybe your God answers you today, huh?” said Villa. “I was within an inch of giving the order, but I had a man hung once I ought not to have, and it bothers me still.”

He nudged his horse down the street; Mix and Donita followed in the wagon.

“He’s a maniac,” Donita Ollas said under her breath. “You’re all maniacs.”

FIFTEEN

T
he race began at precisely seven a.m.

The Colonel’s railcar,
The City of Hartford
, arrived in Chicago the night before. It had been agreed that the train would start from the Chicago yards, while at the same time Arthur would take off from a flying field near the lake. There were no rules to speak of. Whoever got to El Paso first would check into the Toltec Hotel; the desk ledger would prove the time.