TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (13 page)

Here his voice hardened a bit. “And now I want to talk to you about the cattle. The cattle, señor, belonged to the enemies of the revolution—the landowners. So it is not theft, but warfare. Besides, they are traded for guns with which to fight Huerta. This need not be discussed further.” He took a shallow breath. “As for President Wilson, I’m given to understand by my young American friend here, Señor Mix, that although Mr. Wilson occasionally thinks of me as an illiterate bandit and a ruffian, he also thinks I’m a fine fellow, and he’s considering inviting me soon to his house in Washington for tea and tacos—which of course I won’t be able to do because I’m going to be too busy taking Torreón and Juárez. Isn’t that so, Tomás?” And he turned on me, without so much as the hint of a smile.

I didn’t hesitate. “Yes, chief. That’s what I just heard in El Paso.”

Returning his attention to Chao and Acuña, Villa said, “You may tell Señor Carranza that I respect his struggle to keep order. The First Chief knows where his strength lies. In return I ask him to respect my struggle, which is the winning of the revolution. He should be informed that with our victory at Casas Grandes the revolution has truly started. I invite him to be its most illustrious spectator. For that he doesn’t even have to leave Coahuila. We’ll let him know when we’ve taken Mexico City, and he may enter in triumph.”

When the emissaries finally left, after promising to provide some badly needed artillery pieces, Villa shucked off his brown jacket, slung it on the dirt floor and collapsed on the bed, head drooping and held between his hands.

“When they arrived,” he said gloomily, “they sniffed as if they were in a pigpen, and they looked me up and down as if I were the head pig. Nothing good came of this meeting. But maybe they’ll leave me alone now and let us win the war.”

He looked up eagerly. “Tomás, did you bring my peanut brittle?”

“The web of our life

is of a mingled yarn.”

At first they drifted into Ascensión in pairs, then by the dozens—then whole mounted bands under their own commanders, all of whom knew Villa, had heard of his return from Texas and were prepared to swear their allegiance to his cause. From one day to the next, or so it seemed, the ragtag mob of volunteers became an army.

Four hundred men arrived from Coahuila, another five hundred from Chihuahua City, another three hundred from San Luis Potosí. A gang of hungry, sullen brigands appeared from the wilds of Sonora under the command of a bandit chieftain named Calixto Contreras; they looked as if they would cut your throat for the fun of it and to hell with the going rate of ten pesos.

The leaders, I learned—somewhat to my surprise—had all fought for Madero in 1910. The first among these equals was Tomás Urbina, a former bandit and Villa’s oldest pal, who rode in from Durango with six hundred of his men, well armed and well mounted on those hard mustangs that breed wild in the sierra. Urbina was a stocky man of forty, with a big mustache and small animal eyes that never quite focused on you. From so many years of outlawry, spending his winters in the damp caves of the western Sierra Madres, he had developed a rheumatism that kept him in constant pain. He was illiterate, as were quite a few of the revolution’s commanders. He made his mark by drawing a heart with a small bullet hole in its center. It seemed appropriate. He traveled with a branding iron, and wherever he went he would cut out a few choice calves, brand them and send them back to his mother in Durango. He carried three magnificent general’s uniforms that his mother had sewed for him and that he planned to wear when we rode into Mexico City, and a twelve-gallon jug of aguardiente that was never empty.

Candelario told me that Urbina had wanted to bring his mother along with him on the campaign, but she had refused. “Whenever he gets drunk,” he explained, “he tries to shoot her.” But Candelario never told me why. Matricide being impossible at a distance, Urbina dictated telegrams to her which always read, in one version or another: “Sainted Mother, I am well despite my damned rheumatism. I pray for your safety and continued good health whenever I am sober. Your loving son, Tomás Urbina.”

Villa at this time was closest to Urbina and Rodolfo Fierro. They smoked fat black cigars together, and when he toured the camp he would drape a long arm around Rodolfo’s shoulder and say, “Well, my animal, how does it look? Does it smell right?”‘

But Pancho Villa trusted no one totally. When it grew dark he would wrap himself in a serape and walk out of town to bed down in the desert, making a pillow of stones. At dawn he always returned from an entirely different direction. He had the instincts of a hunted cat.

It was a difficult time, that summer of 1913, because we all hungered for action. Villa had already announced that his first real target was the city of Torreón, five hundred miles down the railroad track from Juárez and almost halfway to Mexico City. He then planned to fight his way north to Juárez, which he had called “the real prize.” He studied Medina s military maps until they were almost in rags. Deep into the night he talked with men who had come from all over stricken Mexico and could give him eyewitness reports of the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses. We all wanted to begin, but before we could do that the army had to be sorted out, armed and trained, which meant first teaching the men to load and fire the new rifles and impressing upon them the need to follow orders given by officers.

It was a tedious and often staggering task, but Pancho Villa organized it and then accomplished it. From the look of the several thousand mustachioed cutthroats—men and boys alike—who spread in all directions on the desert and out by the lake, I don t think any other man could have done as well, or even dared to try.

Starting in early June, summer rain struck the plateau like bullets. Clouds humped over the mountains, darkening as the day wore on and then rolling toward us at almost exactly the same hour every afternoon, as if God had looked at His watch and said, “Go.” The rain swept through the streets of Ascensión, turning them to mud. After a few hours the torrents ceased, the clouds raced away and the air was fresh and blue until nightfall, which came upon us like a swiftly thrown black sheet. The rain turned the desert green, so that the horses grazed and grew sleek. But we could not fight well in it; we could certainly not travel easily through it. So we waited and filed our spurs, and got drunk and dreamed of glory. ‘

I shared an abandoned house on the main plaza with Julio, Hipólito, Candelario and the two French whores. That was an uneasy situation, but I explained to them that I was all but engaged to Hannah Sommerfeld and that my fidelity was a matter of honor. Yvette and Marie-Thérése, jolly girls, seemed to understand, although now and then I caught Yvette staring at me from under her long lashes in a way that made my mouth grow dry. I couldn’t help remembering what she and her sister had done to me out on the Deming road. Some nights, when I heard Candelario and one of the others carousing with them, and their groans and piercing laughter filled the darkness, I had trouble sleeping.

Candelario thought I was crazier than Urbina.

“Hombre,
I don’t know what you’ve got in your pants, but it must be something special. Don’t you see the way they look at you?”

“I have an obligation, you fool.”

“Your obligation is in El Paso. Yvette and Marie-Thérése are here in Ascensión. It’s a matter of geography.”

“Not geography. Honor! Jesus, you’re a Mexican, you know what i>that means.”.

He sighed and went away, but the next day he started pestering me again. I could bear that easily; what I minded was the way Yvette and Marie-Thérése brushed against me when we were in the kitchen together, or when I passed them on the way to the privy. It always seemed that a silk-clad hip would slide against mine or a strand of blond hair would float against my cheek. And it worked on me. I was as horny as the next fellow, and Hannah had waked something in me that cried for attention and wouldn’t go back to sleep.

I held firm to my virtue until a moment came when it seemed I had little choice. Or I was too weak, pitted against the adversary of my goatish nature, to make the right choice. My downfall wasn’t Yvette s fault, or even Candelario’s, although in their separate ways they tried their best to fracture my resolve. It was Pancho Villa’s. That man dominated my life.

One cool evening after the rain had freshened the air and darkened the dust, Esperanza Villa knocked lightly on our door. She was in company with a blushing, plump girl whose name, she told me, was Carmelita. Candelario and the others had gone out drinking in a local cantina with our own girls, trying to drum up some business for them in an effort to make them rich as well as happy. After I opened the door and was introduced to Carmelita, I made some noises like a jackass, trying to figure out what the visit was all about. I peered into the darkness. The chief was nowhere in sight.

“Señor,” Esperanza said, smiling, “Carmelita is my sister.”

Oh, Lord. I remembered Villa’s promise, after he had called me his gringo and then felt bad about it, to gift me with one of his new wife’s younger sisters. If I wasn’t sure, Esperanza quickly rid me of any doubt.

“My husband Don Francisco Villa says
“—she
didn’t blush, or even blink—”to have a good time, but please try not to make her pregnant. There are already too many babies in the camp. They keep him awake during his siesta.”

“Hang on there, Esperanza—”

But she left without a further word, sliding off into the darkness in her bare feet, vanishing like a shade. I was left with my mouth hanging open.

I turned to Carmelita. She was short, about twenty, and not at all bad-looking if you liked smooth young skin and an ample handful of flesh. Mexican women tend to pork up before they’re anywhere near old, but she was on the cusp. I noticed, too, that she had been freshly scrubbed and her black hair smelled of lemons. She smiled at me pleasantly, showing a missing tooth and several made of silver, and walked straight into the first open doorway, which happened to be the room where I slept. Her sense of direction was perfect.

I didn’t know how to handle this. It was one thing to say no to Candelario, another to insult the chief. He was making an offering, and it was family. How would a Mexican react if you gave his wife’s sister— offered wholeheartedly—a dry pat on the rump and said, “Scoot …”? And not just any Mexican. This was a gift from Pancho Villa, who was going to take Torreón.

A candle burned on the oak table in the main room. I carried it before me to the bedroom and shut the door softly. Then I turned to face Carmelita. I was about to discuss the matter sensibly, to see if we could come to some arrangement that would save me from the chief’s wrath and Carmelita from a loss of pride. I intended to behave like a gentleman; I had read enough books to know how gentlemen behaved.

But Carmelita hadn’t been told there would be a problem. She was already out of her rebozo and sandals, and just as I set down the candle she shucked her dress to the floor. When the cotton snaked loose and all that smooth, coffee-colored flesh shone in the moonlight, my pecker shot up into the air like a mean mustang jackknifing from the chute. I had no control over the beast. I suppose it didn’t know that it was meant only for the girl I loved. It was a matter of bad communication between brain and lower parts.

The fact that I was a coward didn’t shock me. I just hadn’t known that I was a lowlife and a man without principle, incapable of keeping to his deepest resolve. But I knew it now. It was a lesson I would learn more than once. I wondered if, like Candelario, I was cursed. In any case, my condition was beyond repair.

I looked down, gave a mighty groan, and then stripped off my clothes and climbed into bed.

For all the pleasure I got out of it, I might better have jacked off and prayed that no hair would grow on my palms. Carmelita lay flat on the ripped old sheet, just about as responsive as a large lump of dough. I kneaded it, I fondled it, but it just never baked. Twice during the night I worked myself up into a hot lather and pumped my seed onto the sheet, heeding the chief’s admonition not to make any more babies, and twice Carmelita showed her silver smile and said, “It was good, señor?”

“Awful, if you must know,” I said the second time. But I said it in English, which of course she didn’t understand.

The third time, in the cool dawn, waking from a restless sleep, I tried to get her to mount me, thinking it might give her an unexpected pleasure. She explained that she had never done it that way.

“How is it accomplished, señor?”

“I lie down on my back, like I’m doing. You sit on top of me, Carmelita.” I grasped her hips.

“Like riding a horse?”

“That’s exactly it.”

“I would feel funny doing that. But if you insist, señor, I’ll do as you wish.”

“I won’t insist, and would you mind not calling me señor? My name is Tomás. Here, we’ll try another way. Get up on your hands and knees and hunch over … like that.” This other way was one of the subtleties I had learned from Yvette and Marie-Thérése on that memorable night in Columbus. “Now, just lower your shoulders a bit—”

She twisted her head around just when I cupped her breasts in my hands for some leverage. The sight of her dark wet bush protruding between her cheeks had engorged me again. Yes, I was cursed. But there was confusion in her eyes.

“Señor, how are you going to do it?”

“Just like this…”

“Like the
dogs?”

She flopped right down on the bed, flat, squeezing her cheeks tight together, leaving my quivering pecker in the air—homeless. From the mattress, to which she pressed her forehead, she said stolidly, “I am not a dog, señor. I am a woman. Human beings don’t do it like dogs.”

A few minutes later, my flesh seeming to have a stubborn will of its own, I climbed aboard her docile body for the third time, in the missionary position, and within a couple of minutes that was that. Afterwards, as she dressed, she giggled good-naturedly.

“Are all gringos so perverted, señor?”

I couldn’t find an answer, and when a respectable time had passed I said, as gently as I could, “You can go now, Carmelita. Thank you very much.”