TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (16 page)

“I want
this
man, señor.” She inclined her head toward me.

Villa’s back arched. He wasn’t used to a female stating her preferences so clearly, particularly when she was a child, alone in the world and obviously at the mercy of the men around her, to most of whom she was considerably less valuable than a horse or even a good saddle. And of course she was implying a willingness on my part that wasn’t there. But I was in too deep, like the dog in the street—which had been an omen even more than a warning—to back out.

With bite in his voice the chief said, “There are plenty of good men in the camp. Are you so choosy?”

“It’s a matter of honor,” Rosa said flatly. “I have promised myself to this man.”

He didn’t know how to reply. You couldn’t easily spit in the face of honor. But whose honor was she talking about? Villa ground his teeth. If he let her have her way he was either going to have to contradict himself or eat crow, neither of which pleased him. He was the leader now of five thousand men, and he couldn’t let a girl bully him into a decision. He looked at Fierro, who for the first time had an expression of annoyance on his smooth and handsome face. He’s willing to give up the girl, I thought, as long as I don’t get her, but he can’t accept her choosing me over him. I could see that clearly. Villa opened his mouth to decide.

“Chief, let our Tomás have her.” The gruff voice, startling me by its closeness, came from Candelario. “We’re planning a little fiesta tonight. Life is dull when we’re not fighting. This would please us.”

Spinning around, I almost bumped into him, standing behind me with Julio and Hipólito. Absorbed in the dealings with Fierro, I hadn’t even heard them troop up through the dust. Dirty, warlike and mustachioed, legs widespread, thumbs hooked into their gun belts, they looked like an armed Praetorian guard. Guessing I might find trouble, they had ambled along to make sure I could handle it. So after all, I was their D’Artagnan.

Hipólito said, “She can cook for us. Our Frenchwomen do the other thing well, but then they lie about. Even if we kick them, they don’t move. This one is young and strong.”

Fierro’s eyes were cold now, and he looked at the three friends as if he were measuring each of them for a pine box. They returned the look with equal hostility, and I had the first inkling then of how much they despised him. He was the outlaw wolf—Villa’s animal. I had oversimplified, thinking that they were all Mexicans, all revolutionists, and therefore held each other in equal esteem.

But Villa couldn’t say no to his brother and two who served him so faithfully that they would die if he crooked his finger. Moreover, they had solved his problem.

He looped an arm about the butcher’s shoulder. “Rodolfo, it’s settled. Unless you choose to object, which I hope you won’t.”

“It’s of no consequence,” Fierro said calmly, with eyes like cold ice. “Besides, she has a foul mouth.”

“You have more sense than Tomás.” Villa wheeled on Candelario. “Are you inviting all of us to this fiesta?”

“We’d be honored, chief. If you don’t mind seeing us drunk and disorderly.”

“I’ll suffer it. You have all day tomorrow to rest, which you’d better do”—he paused dramatically—”because on the next day we’re going to ride south and fight. At Torreón.”

A hoarse murmur of approval and excitement rose from every man’s throat. We had all been waiting for this day. It was to be the beginning of the battle to conquer Mexico. I felt twin stabs of fear and expectation—and I thought it was time, in the midst of everyone’s jubilance, to assert myself.

I turned to Rosa. “Go home. We have some chickens in the back. There’s a goat you can milk.” I didn’t have to fake the sharpness. This girl had nearly got me killed.

“Yes, señor,” she said obediently, and off she went. And we couldn’t help it; we all turned to watch her as she walked through the dust, the firm cheeks twitching and rolling from side to side even beneath that shapeless brown sack. She couldn’t help it, either. Only Rodolfo Fierro didn’t watch her. He lit a cigar and stood contemplatively, gazing out at the heat shimmering above the prairie and the hazed mountains. I had an enemy now, I realized, and the wrong one.

The fiesta before the battle lasted all night. Calixto Contreras from Durango carried his own orchestra with him—eight villains in huge sombreros who played cornets and drums and trombones, so that they sounded like a Bavarian oom-pah-pah band at a barn dance in Abilene. Before the party began Esperanza came by with a pink cotton dress that she carefully explained was a gift from her husband, Señor Don Francisco Villa. When Rosa appeared in it, black hair washed and shining, a few of the men who had casually handed her over to me that morning must have had second thoughts. If she was in mourning for her husband stuffed into a well out in Corralitos, she hid it well.

Barefoot, dark eyes glinting, healthy young breasts bouncing to the beat of the drum, she danced half the night. She was a pretty child, and I couldn’t keep up with her. Pancho Villa danced with her, and she told me later that his hand slid down to her bottom and gave her little affectionate pinches every chance he got.

“Not so little, to tell the truth. This chief, he took a handful of almost everything I have. He must have been a good bandit.”

I had a minute alone with Villa during the party, while the musicians took time out to douse their heads in buckets of water and there was something resembling quiet. Unlike everyone else, Villa was sober.

If we were leaving in two days to fight, I asked, what should I do with Rosa?

He threw an arm about my shoulder. “Tomás … if you have anything of value, take it with you. You may never see Ascensión again. We’re an army now, and armies fight or die. From now on we’ll move and strike, like a fox in the chicken yard, until the north is ours. After Torreón, we’ll take Chihuahua City and Juárez. After that, Zacatecas on the high plateau. And then,” he said, narrowing his eyes, “we’ll visit Mexico City, and I’ll give an
embrazo
to Señor Emiliano Zapata, who will come up from the south with his calf eyes and his ridiculously big hat. I admire that man. I want to meet him.”

The music started again and we couldn’t talk more.

At six o’clock in the morning, as the sun began to rise, Rosa leaned against my shoulder and said wearily,
“Mi capitán,
can we go to bed?”

I eased off with her to my room and she shut the door. There was just the one narrow bed with sagging springs, the sheets stiff from my night with Carmelita. My big Texas saddle and Mauser rifle and other gear lay in the corner next to a clay jug of drinking water. The music still blared from afar, and from the same distance we could hear the voices of men and women laughing and Urbina shouting drunkenly. Rosa put her hot head on my chest, sighing. I cleared my throat.

“Rosa, I have to tell you something.”

“Yes, mi capitán?”

Retreating, I dropped down on a little cane chair that had only three legs.

“Rosa, you’re only fourteen, but try to understand. There’s this girl in Texas. I’m engaged to her. I’m in love with her.”

“You told me that by the lake.” Her dark brown eyes didn’t blink. “I heard you well.”

“It means a lot to me.”

“Did you not sleep with the other one? Carmelita, you called her. You said you did it three times.”

She wasn’t accusing me; she was just stating a fact of life.

“I did. That’s true. But … damnation! Yes, I did, but that was a mistake. I mean I had to, Pancho Villa sent her to me—”

My voice trailed off. The sun slanted through the wooden shutters into the room, and motes of dust danced in the warm morning air. My head felt suddenly heavy.

“Rosa, I can’t. That’s all there is to it. I promised to take care of you, and I’ll do that. I swear I will. But not the other. I don’t want to shame you, so we won’t tell anybody.” My hand fluttered in front of me, waving at the room. “There’s just the one bed, you can see that. We’ll have to share it. But … try to understand.”

She lowered her head. There was only one thing she thought she could offer me, and I wanted no part of it. It wasn’t merely a reward for my kindness in giving her a home and saving her from Fierro’s unpleasant clutches. From her point of view, even though she was just a girl, there was one natural act that took place between a man and woman, and that was in bed. If the rest of life was drudgery, bed was the vital center, the moment of truth. She turned around, unknotted her sash and pulled the pink cotton dress over her head, folding it neatly on the brass footboard. She was naked, and her brown back glistened with tiny pearls of sweat from the dancing. Without a word she climbed into the bed and pulled the tattered sheet over her nakedness. She turned her head to the wall. She never spoke.

I had to get some fresh air. I knew I couldn’t sleep yet, not in the narrow bed with her while she was still awake and probably getting ready to cry.

I slipped from the room and out the front door into the oven of the street, blinking at the glare. Behind me I could hear Hipólito snoring, and the blatting of trombones wandered to my ear through the still air. I walked in the direction of the lake, thinking that a swim would cool me down and clear out the ache between my ears. My boots kicked up white dust and I jabbed my toe hard at a rock, sending it skidding into a broken wall.

Damn! I thought. Why did I ever get into this? What do I need it for?

The town stank of sour pulque. As I passed beyond the chief’s house, Rodolfo Fierro stepped from the black shadow of a doorway. He was dressed exactly as I had seen him yesterday, and there was something in the neatness of his pants and dark blue shirt—as well as the thin lines graven into his olive cheeks—that made me think he hadn’t slept since then. His beard was stubbled, and I knew he was a man who shaved carefully every dawn. When his eyes checked me, I halted in the dust. Again I thought I had better get in the first words.

“It was a good fiesta,” I said. “Plenty of booze and spare women. You would have been welcome.” My voice was just a hair on the high-pitched side.

But his, when he finally spoke, was calm, steady as a boulder, smooth as blackstrap. He knew exactly what he was going to say.

“What happened here yesterday, señor, was unseemly. The girl means nothing to me—that, of course, you understand. And I would not argue in front of Francisco Villa, as you also understand.”

This was ridiculous. “Listen, Rodolfo,” I said, “we’re talking about a kid. And her husband had just been
shot!
Didn’t you understand that too?”

He went right on as if he hadn’t heard. “You shamed me, señor. But to have killed you in front of Francisco Villa and your friends would have been wrong. Nevertheless, what you did was unforgivable, and it is necessary for me to kill you. Or I have no honor among men.”

I couldn’t believe this. But then I realized the words came from the arctic depths of his soulless being. I glanced quickly down, but I knew what I would find. I wasn’t armed. I had unbuckled my holster when I walked into the house with Rosa. The sun throbbed on my bare head. I had forgotten my hat too. And then Rodolfo Fierro spun on his heel, turned his back and walked toward the house. I stood there, thunderstruck. Hadn’t he just said he was going to kill me?

“Hey, there!” I yelled angrily. “Hang on!”

I jumped after him and almost grabbed his arm to twist him round again, but he turned under his own volition and stared down at me. For the first time there was an expression on his face; he was startled.

“You can’t tell me you’re going to kill me and then just walk away! What the hell kind of a trick is that?” I demanded. “What’s the matter with you?”

His mouth gaped open and his eyes blinked rapidly. He almost smiled, and—there was a certain foolish twist to his lips. But then he became himself again, glacial and malevolent.

“Señor, you have some big
cojones.
I see that now, although I didn’t before. That’s good.” He nodded solemnly, as if to settle the idea into his head and give him breathing room. Then, quite matter-of-factly, he said, “Have no doubt that I will kill you. And it will be quick. You needn’t fear. At the proper time, in the proper place.”

I barked at him, “And when is that supposed to be?”

“We will both know.”

With that enigmatic conclusion to our conversation, he turned once more and stamped into the house. I didn’t follow him this time. I didn’t have big
cojones,
I realized; I had undersized brains. If I had touched him the first time when I chased him, he would have killed me. That’s what he had been waiting for, that’s what he needed, then or now, to satisfy his honor. That, or an order. I wouldn’t need to fight in a battle—I could get myself killed anytime I wanted by Rodolfo Fierro.

Under a sizzling sun I shuffled back down the street to our house, bumped through the front door and into the shadowed room where Rosa slept. I flung off my clothes. The brass headboard rattled when I crawled into bed behind her. She stirred, but she didn’t wake. Her black hair, with the scent of a gardenia that had wilted there during the night, flowed over my chest. Somewhere, far away, in some other cool room, Hannah also slept—but alone.

I’m a dead man, I thought, and I’ve only just begun to live.

“Courage mounteth

with occasion.”

Bugles screeched at dawn. A thundering, clicking ringing filled the cool air. Men struggled in a rising haze of dust, catching mules, cinching harnesses, leading horses to water, adjusting girths and snaffles, strapping spurs to boots, stuffing salt pork into their mouths and snatching hot mugs of coffee from greasewood fires. The lean Durango mustangs pawed the earth nervously, backs humped up until the vaqueros could cozy the ring bits into the tender roofs of their mouths.

Serapes flapped like flags in the wind, and the sunlight tilting over the eastern desert glinted off five thousand rifles. Pancho Villa’s army was ready to move.

The horsemen trotted southward. Behind each troop plodded a few dozen women, babies sucking at their brown breasts as they led mules that swayed perilously from side to side under sacks of corn. Our column stretched for five miles across the desert, a tawny line of men and beasts obscured by the brown cloud of dust that hung in the choking air. In every village groups of neutrals stood silently in the streets to watch us pass by, but next to them they had their few precious belongings wrapped in bundles, ready to flee. The army seemed to swallow everything in sight, chickens and pigs and even stray women, as I imagined a whale would do as it moved ponderously across the ocean, mouth agape for all the little fish.