TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (28 page)

General Pershing coughed politely and shook my hand with a hard grip. I could see a glint of amusement in his slate-blue eyes.

“My compliments, Major Mix. You certainly must have an interesting officer corps. May I ask how old you are?”

“Almost twenty-three,” I said.

His leathery smile grew broader. “Well, at this rate you may outrank me before you’re thirty. Try to let me know before we meet again, Major.”

“That would be my pleasure, sir.”

And then Pershing turned back to resume his conversation with Obregón, no doubt forgetting all about me … for neither of us could look into a crystal ball and foresee the future that would bring us together in the burned-out town of Columbus, and then the mountains of Chihuahua.

A few days later President Wilson lifted the arms embargo to our side. Pancho Villa, still in Juárez, grinned like an old dog having its belly scratched. He was positive he had made such a good impression on the American generals that they had immediately telegraphed their feelings to Washington. In a barber shop on my way to see Hannah I picked up a copy of the El Paso
Times
and read that the government of Germany was up in arms over Wilson’s move; their ambassador to Mexico screamed that the Americans wanted to take over all of Central America. He publicly offered to support the fading fortunes of General Huerta if that old drunk would sign a pact to confiscate the British oil refineries in Tampico.

To show good faith, three shiploads of German arms sailed from Hamburg to Veracruz, which the Huerta government still held.

Villa just chuckled. “If the Germans back Huerta,” he said, “the Americans will back us even more.”

Then came my twenty-third birthday, falling on a warm Sunday in February of 1914, and Felix Sommerfeld invited me and Hipólito to a little celebration lunch in his rose garden. We both bathed, I put on a suit and tie, and we left our pistols behind at the house. Sam Ravel brought his wife, who was dark-eyed and might have had a touch of Mex, and Hannah looked lovely in a white cotton dress with her light brown hair curling in ringlets to bare shoulders.

In the rose garden Mrs. Sommerfeld’s maids served us cold rare roast beef and red wine, and a chocolate cake with twenty-three candles. I was treated as much like a son-in-law as a newly commissioned major.

But I sensed trouble; I noticed the way Hannah tapped her long red fingernails on the tablecloth all throughout lunch. And then, after I had blown out the candles and received a polite hand of applause, as well as a blow on the back from Hipólito that nearly made me cough up my last glass of wine, she spoke up.

“I’m not to be put off anymore, Tom, like a mere woman who doesn’t deserve an honest answer … not by you or by Papa. This time I want to know about General Villa. People are beginning to call him a beast and a murderer. Is it true?”

I cleared my throat uncomfortably. “You might better ask that question to his brother, Hannah. He understood every word you said.”

“Does he speak English? One would never know. But if you’re afraid to answer, so I shall.” She turned boldly on Hipólito, and I had to admire her for it.

“Is your brother really such a beast, Colonel Villa?”

Hipólito worked that around for a while in his mind, while he refilled his wine glass. Then he shrugged and said, “Yes, miss, he is.”

That made Hannah rein up a bit. “Oh … I see. He is. Of course. How candid! Then what we’ve heard from the refugees, what we read about him in the newspapers, is all … true?”

“I don’t read the newspapers, miss,” Hipólito explained.

“Does he kill all the prisoners he captures?”

Hipólito didn’t seem at all angry. Only the tip of his big nose was red.

“No, miss. Most, but not all.”

A hard look of outrage appeared in Hannah’s eyes, although she kept her voice within the same tight octave. Her lips thinned. “Don’t you consider that brutal, Colonel Villa? Brutal and uncivilized?”

“My brother can’t afford to feed them, miss. We give the food to the people, who are hungry. And if we let these men free, they go back to General Orozco and get another rifle. Let a man shoot at you once, it makes you feel unfriendly to him. Let him shoot at you twice, it makes you feel a fool.”

Felix Sommerfeld suggested that we go into the house for cigars and brandy.

“No, Papa!” Hannah cried. “There’s more that I want to know! May I not ask questions? Is it forbidden? Am I not allowed to satisfy my interest?”

“Your interest—” But he bit off his words, and Hannah’s blue eyes glittered.

A flock of birds chirped in the coral trees, and the smell of roses was sweet.

Hipólito sat in his white iron garden chair, wearing his new suit, puffing clouds of smoke from a Havana cigar, drinking French wine and looking as if had been doing it all his life. It was hard to remember him from the battle at Torreón.

“And is it true,” Hannah pursued, “that your brother steals money from the banks in Chihuahua City and Juárez?”

“He always gives a paper, miss. He says it is a loan.” Hipólito shrugged his shoulders. “But you are right. He will never give it back to the bankers. It is stealing.”

“Then I’m right, and he’s nothing but a common bandit! And it’s said that at Torreón he ordered one hundred men shot down in a corral! Is that true too?”

Felix and Sam Ravel stirred uneasily; but Hipólito kept the same smile in place on his round cheeks.

“Miss Sommerfeld,” he said, as pleasantly as before, “for many years in Durango my brother and I and General Urbina were bandits together. This is known. We steal, we gamble, we get drunk. We spent the money—poof! Now my brother is general of ten thousand men, and he has not a peso in the bank and not a pair of new shoes. For himself, he wishes no more than to finish the revolution and learn to read better, and to have four wives who will be nice to him when he is old. In this, yes, he has much greed. Will he grow old? I don’t think so. He has one great dream — to take all the money from the bankers and give schools to the people, and to take all the land from the haciendas and give to the
campesinos,
as the little Señor Madero before him wished to do. Tell me truly … do you think this is wrong?”

Hannah regarded him sternly, for of course he hadn’t answered her question.

Then her father said in a firm voice, “The gentlemen will have brandy and cigars in my study.”

The ladies stayed in the garden. In the study, which had oak paneling and more leatherbound books than in the local public library, Mr. Sommerfeld poured out big snifters of French cognac and offered a box of Monte Cristo Havanas.

“I apologize, Hipólito—and to you too, Tom—for my daughter’s rudeness. Youth is guilty of certain misplaced … well, excess enthusiasm.”

“Miss Sommerfeld is too pretty to be angry with,” Hipólito murmured gallantly.

That subject was closed, and the talk quickly veered to politics, where I was bound to be a listener. Sommerfeld and Sam Ravel told me a lot I didn’t know. Like Hipólito, the main contact I had with newspapers was in a privy.

Apparently, according to Sam, Victoriano Huerta’s fortunes were sinking fast. After the fall of Juárez some senator had stood up in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies to denounce Huerta’s poor conduct of the war, and the next night they found the senator’s body in a ditch. The congress flew into a rage, so Huerta dissolved the whole body and carted off more than a hundred of its members in tram cars to the prison.

President Wilson didn’t like that, especially when Huerta celebrated by getting publicly drunk and then appointed an entire company of army officers to take the places of the imprisoned congressmen. Ravel chuckled. “Now, instead of rapping a gavel to come to order, they blow a bugle.”

Sommerfeld puffed out his cheeks and looked more like a frog than ever. “Tom, Huerta’s ripe to fall. The United States will move soon to recognize the revolutionary government. That will be decisive. Villa and Carranza will win, and Mr. Wilson will give them each a hug on the White House lawn.”

I smiled. “That would be fine. Then Villa can have his four wives and I can be a retired major of the Mexican army. The only problem,” I reflected, after another sip of that warming brandy, “is what Villa and Carranza will do on that White House lawn. I’d hate to see blood spilled over President Wilson’s shoes.”

Ravel spoke emphatically. “If Villa plays his cards right, Carranza will cool his heels in the waiting room. Tell him that, Tom. Don’t let him do anything foolish, like what we heard happened in Torreón.”

So they knew. What they didn’t seem to know was my role in it, and I would never tell.

After coffee Hipólito announced that he had to go over to Juárez and look in on his casinos, and he asked me to go with him. Mr. Sommerfeld decided he would drive us to the Stanton Street Bridge in his new Buick roadster, so we all piled in and headed downtown. The wives stayed home, but Hannah surprised me by saying that she wanted to come along. I would have thought she’d had her fill of Hipólito and me for the day, but sometimes girls are as hard to read as Mexicans, and she was all smiles and perky chatter.

It was such a pleasant springlike afternoon that Mr. Sommerfeld parked the car on Paisano Street and we strolled at a leisurely pace down Stanton toward the bridge, looking into shop windows. I walked with Hannah, who took my arm and murmured a soft apology for her outbursts over lunch.

She quoted Shakespeare, which always touched me.

“Do you remember, Tom, from
Richard II?
‘ ‘Tis not the trial of a woman’s war, the bitter clamor of two eager tongues …’ “

I whispered in her ear: “I love you, Hannah.”

Her father and Sam Ravel walked behind us with Hipólito, still talking politics. We had just stopped at an intersection to let an automobile pass. I wasn’t even aware of what was going on … I don’t think anyone was. Two men stood across the street from us in front of a notions store, and it looked as if they were having a hot argument. Hannah and I started walking toward them—it just happened to be the direction we were heading. At first I thought they were both American officers from the post. One of them was a tall, suntanned man with smartly creased cavalry twill trousers and a silver bar on his epaulet—a handsome devil. The other looked to be a Mexican, although he was dressed in U. S. Army summer khakis without any insignia.

Then the Mexican broke off the argument and reached into the officer’s holster. Before the officer could do a thing, the Mexican skinned out faster than an ant from a burning log and was moving rapidly toward us. The barrel of his pistol came up level in the direction of me and Hannah.

I thought, This is crazy. There’s a madman loose in town. Or maybe he was drunk.

I grabbed Hannah and tried to push her out of the way. At the same time she grabbed me, just trying to hang on for protection; so we collided and danced a little foxtrot on the sidewalk. And while that was going on, the officer, a lieutenant, came galloping with blood in his eye after this demented fellow who had snatched his pistol. A few other people on the sidewalk ducked into storefronts or behind parked cars. In El Paso, over the years, they’d had plenty of practice.

Several things happened at once. Hannah disentangled herself but didn’t scream or run away. Later she claimed that she knew the madman wasn’t looking to shoot
her.
And although he had the pistol steady now, he hesitated. She was too close to me, and she was quite right—she wasn’t his target.

Then we were both shoved roughly to one side as Hipólito and Sam Ravel stepped in front of us. Ravel had a black .22 revolver in his hand that he must have carried in a shoulder holster under his white linen jacket.

“I’ll shoot you if you don’t drop that,” he said in a piercing voice, and you’d be a fool not to realize he meant it.

Before the Mexican could digest that and react, the lieutenant reached him on the run and snapped a hand down on his wrist.

“You dumb sonofabitch!” he yelled. He wrenched the pistol from him. The man’s face seemed to twist with as much anguish as pain.

Then I recognized him … he was the schoolteacher who had approached me in the stockyard at Torreón, begging for his and his brother’s lives.

How could he be alive?

But he was there on Stanton Street in El Paso, and of course it soon got through to my numbed brain that one man in that last batch of thirteen had made it over the fence. This was the man.

Bosques, I remembered. Miguel Bosques. The name had stuck in my memory like a poisoned thorn. His words had haunted me, but now there were more than words to do that. He stood before me as a living accusation. If he spoke now, how in God’s name could I reply?

The lieutenant, his face drained of color, had his pistol pressed tightly into Bosques’ ribs. Bosques fixed me with a look of pure hatred.

Ravel stepped forward, brandishing his .22.

“What the hell is this all about, Lieutenant?”

“I apologize,” the lieutenant said, still white beneath the rosy tan. “Lieutenant George Patton, Thirteenth Cavalry, Fort Bliss. I know you. You’re Samuel Ravel.”

Then he turned, more ice than fire, although he spoke in a high-pitched voice. “Is your name Captain Mix? Do you recognize this man?” He nudged Bosques with his pistol.

If I had said I didn’t, I think the lieutenant would have taken Bosques off and staked him to an anthill.

“Yes, I know him,” I said. “I know him from Torreón.”

Lieutenant Patton’s expression didn’t match the one on Bosques’ face, but it made me feel less like a major than ever before.

“You’re a brave young lady,” he said to Hannah. “You put yourself in risk a moment ago. I’ll tell you one thing—the man isn’t worth it.” He holstered his pistol and faced Bosques. “Consider yourself under arrest. Keep your mouth shut and come with me.”

Then he clamped Bosques’ arm and marched him out of there, across the street and in the other direction from the bridge.

Hannah looked pale now, and her father had taken her by the waist and was supporting her. Ravel gazed after Bosques and Lieutenant Patton as they disappeared around a corner.