TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (82 page)

“What the hell’s so funny?

“You are,” he said, when he had quieted down. “I’m your prisoner — but what are you going to do with me?”

I hadn’t thought of that, and when he realized it he began to laugh again.

“Patton,” I said, after a while, “I’m a desperate man. So stop cackling like a goddam jackass. Just shut up and listen to me.”

I cocked the hammer of the Colt and leveled it at his chest. He stood in front of me now, hands on the hips of his ripped puttees, legs spread wide in the dust, blue eyes studying me with great concentration. I had settled down with my back against the mesquite tree next to the bodies of the horses. I had the bottle of opium at my side, and I yearned for it the way a rummy yearns for one more shot of red-eye. But I knew what that medicine did to a man’s brains.

“I’ll listen,” he said, “if you’ll put that pistol down. I know goddam well you’re not going to use it.”

I stuck out my jaw. “How come you’re so sure?”

“You shot Fierro, didn’t you? If you meant to kill me, you would have done it five minutes ago. Now put it down and speak your piece.”

He had me there, but for all I knew he might have been as full of tricks as I was.

“All right,” I grumbled. “If you give me your word as an officer that you won’t grab it. And you won’t try and knock me out or anything like that. A truce.”

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “Get on with it, man, before you drop dead.”

I laid the pistol on the ground, but I still didn’t pick up the opium bottle. I had a lot of talking to do, and I wanted a clear head. We made a comical pair. I had always admired him as a soldier, and then, for a moment, despite everything he had done, I almost liked him as a man. So I told him everything: why I had agreed to be a spy for him, why I had led the cavalry astray. I must have sounded like a whore bucking for sainthood, but I didn’t care.

“And you never worked for the Germans?”

“Go fuck yourself, Patton.”

“What about that German woman in Parral, the one who shot at Tompkins’ men?”

“Not
at
Tompkins’ men. Over their heads.”

I told him that Villa had been there all along in Los Flores, hiding out while his leg mended. A witch cured him, I said. That part didn’t exactly shore up my credibility, but at least he never called me a liar.

And I told him about my talk with Von Papen, and then the second meeting in the desert of Sonora when Villa had sent him packing.

“He didn’t raid Columbus. I swear that to you.”

He smirked, but I think he believed me about Elisa and why I had misled the cavalry all over Chihuahua. I said, “It worked, didn’t it? Tell me that it worked.”

But he shut up. He would never give me that satisfaction.

“And now let’s make a deal,” I said. “Because if we don’t, we’ll sit here until I die, which I don’t intend to do, not just yet. I’ll take your spare horse and ride to Parral. You can go back. Tell them you shot Fierro and I got away. And then leave me in peace.”

We were a fine pair of poker players — neither of us had any cards in his hand. What choices did we have? The pistol lay on the ground between us. He couldn’t pick it up because he had given his word. I could pick it up, but I couldn’t use it.

He saddled Miguel Bosques’ horse for me, and he did something then that altered not so much my life but my view of it. It wasn’t deliberate, I’m sure of that; his mind just wasn’t focusing, and so he didn’t think to hunt for my saddle but instead used the one that had been given to Bosques—and his saddlebags as well.

I was hurting too much to notice, and if I had I still might not have cared.

Before I climbed up I wet my pinky with opium and licked it lightly. I shoved the bottle into my hip pocket. I felt better right away—drowsy, but able to ride.

“Anyway,” Patton grumbled, “you’ll probably die before you get there.”

“Goddammit, is that all you can say?”

I think he misunderstood me. I was complaining about his lack of imagination, but he must have thought I meant that something more was required for the occasion. Maybe it was. And to give him credit, he supplied it. He reached out, shook my hand and said, “I hope I’m wrong. Good luck to you, Mix.”

“Same to you, Lieutenant. Don’t get killed.”

He was added to the list of people I would never see again, but in this case it was without regret. I trotted off, moaning like a banshee.

I rode all day, half asleep, and bedded down somewhere in the high sierra after I had licked the top of the opium bottle again. I had a bit more for breakfast too.

It was one of those cool and luminous Mexican mornings—blue sky, golden sun—when the world seems reborn. The forest sparkled with light. Green leaves rustled, and the air was a tonic. Fiddling around in Miguel Bosques’ saddlebags, I came across his journal.

“Hark! the land bids me

tread no more upon’t.”

I don’t remember how I got to Parral. The opium turned my head to mush and I rode in a sweet daze, dreaming of mustachioed devils, yellow-haired angels, the pounding hoofs of creatures that were part man, part horse—and yet a mellowness made it more than bearable. Leaning against a tree to piss, I was able to press my fingers through the bark into the core, feel the living sap at the heart. A heavenly choir, shimmering swaying ladies in long skirts, sang to me from a blue sky; I saw them. They were
real.
I remember some Tarahumara who fed me maize and pulque up in the sierra, and some buzzards that sat on a telegraph wire and flapped round my head with staring red eyes until I clipped one’s wing with a shot from my rifle. And I remember an owl who hooted all one night and then fluttered out of the forest to ride on the horn of my saddle.

Maybe he didn’t, but I thought he did.

I reached Los Flores early one evening and tumbled off my horse into a bed of zinnias. From that point on, for a while, I don’t remember a thing except the voice of Doña Corazon. Elisa told me later that she’d had to get down on her knees to beg the
curandera
to come to the house, and it was only when Doña Corazon realized that Elisa wouldn’t leave Atotonilco without her that she finally agreed to come. She cast a spell on me, and then a one-eyed
comadrona,
a midwife, dug the bullet out of my innards. Luckily it had passed all the way through and nearly come out the other side. Doña Corazon said that apart from everything else, I had
ojo—
evil-eye sickness. Some bad person had given it to me.

I thought of Fierro, lying in the mud and staring up at me with his calm, dead gaze. He seemed the most likely candidate.

Before Doña Corazon could cure the fever and take the infection away from my guts she had to rub a hen’s egg over my eyes, break it into a saucer and pierce it with seven sharp thorns, which blinded the one who had inflicted the
ojo.
Then she chanted,
“Isa ya! Isayal Ri ega! Bi esha! Xiyilqua!”—
and after massaging the lower part of my body with an infusion made from the leaves of the rue and pepper tree, she spat a mouthful of aguardiente into my side and sucked it from the wound until the fever broke and the peritonitis went away. I had no fear, she told Elisa, and my soul was still in its correct place, which made things much easier for her.

It took me two months to recover, and Rosa tended me most of the time, changing my dressing and reading to me slowly from
Treasure Island
and some Kipling novels, or sometimes, after the rains, just sitting with me in the shade of the garden with a cool hand laid on my forehead. I asked her to try to read Bosques’ journal aloud to me, and she did, haltingly, but when she got to the part where the men were being killed in the stockyards, I told her not to go on. Elisa came by a few times a day and brought me my meals, the kind of gruel a baby eats. I lost a lot of weight and got thin and knotty, like a birch covered with barbed wire. I slept alone.

I kept asking for news of Pancho Villa, but there wasn’t any. He seemed to have vanished. Hipólito would be in touch with him, of course, and would have told him the tale of the lost gold. He would know about Julio and Candelario from the American newspapers, which played up every victory of the cavalry, no matter how obscure, as if it were the battle of Manila Bay. Poor Pershing was still sitting up there in Casas Grandes, sending out patrols and following up rumors, and no doubt starting to wonder if he was doomed to live out his command in the wasteland of northern Mexico.

And then one fine morning I woke and asked Elisa to cook me some ham and eggs and let me try a mug of Rosa’s coffee. Youth can suffer worse wounds than age … I know that all too well now.

After that I got well quickly and fleshed out, and in a couple of weeks I moved upstairs with them. They treated me tenderly and gently for as long as it was necessary. One day I said, “Let
me
do it. I’m feeling a lot better, Elisa.”

“That’s obvious.” She fell back on the bed, exhausted.

After that they only treated me tenderly.

“Men are merriest,” Shakespeare wrote, “when they are far from home.”

But merriment as a steady diet can’t compare to tranquility salted with passion. The rains kept falling, and the desert had its short, splendid season of flowering. Poppies and blue barrel cactus bloomed everywhere; dwarf marigold sprouted where you thought only rocks could grow. The raw land of Chihuahua held me in thrall. Rosa, Elisa and I rode out in the early mornings, and then in the evening we would sit in the library and make our plans. Once we agreed we were going to breed horses, I hired two workmen and set about enlarging the corrals and stables. Rosa grew sleek and put on some weight. A few new tiny lines spread out from the corners of Elisa’s eyes.

I didn’t want anything to change in our lives, but that was a forlorn hope. In fact, they had begun to change already, although the shift was subtle and never signaled by any dramatic outbursts.

Women are nesting creatures, and I suppose each one needs to believe that she’s queen of the nest. Rosa was young and full of a vigorous energy that didn’t come quite as easily to Elisa. She knew very well that it was Elisa’s nest—we were there at Los Flores only because of Elisa’s generosity. Rosa treated Elisa with a certain deference, but I think at heart she believed that I belonged to
her
and that what took place among the three of us was in the nature of a gift – her gift, to me. Elisa began to sense it. As for me, I had been with Rosa a long time, and I began to realize that my love for her was deeper than what I felt for Elisa. I loved them both, yes—but differently. Elisa sensed that too.

And so even before the next events that befell us, our life upstairs began to take on a different character. There were fewer playful romps in the four-poster than before. Elisa would say she was tired, or headachy, and I would spent those nights in Rosa’s room. One day I found that my clothes and books and papers had been moved in there. I never had to ask why or who. Rosa shrugged. She knew too.

I think the women may have discussed it between themselves, but I wasn’t included. They were making their peace with reality. They weren’t female men.

Elisa and I bought another roan stallion from a ranch near Parral, and one hot August day we rode over to Camargo and dickered for a couple of days for six fine brood mares and two wild Durango mustangs. Just before we left, my workmen told me that they had heard news of a battle taking place near San Andrés, to the north, between Pancho Villa and General Treviño. Villa had been licked again, they said.

But in Camargo we heard more. It was Treviño who had been licked, and Villa had driven a whole division south in disorder.

Land and liberty!
Viva el revolución!

“He must have a new plan,” I said to Elisa.

Then two weeks later, we heard, with only a thousand men he attacked Treviño again in Chihuahua City. He freed all the prisoners locked up in the penitentiary, secured sixteen truckloads of small arms and ammunition, and left the city with fifteen hundred more men than when he had entered. A month later he struck audaciously in the same spot, and this time after three days of confused fighting, Treviño fled. The chief moved briefly into his old house, with Luz Corral. Pershing sat up in Casas Grandes and fumed, because Carranza still wouldn’t let him move south. The cavalry had now been in Chihuahua more than half a year.

One blue October day in that fateful year of 1916, Rosa and I rode up to Tomochic with a pack mule and dug the gold out from behind the corral. We had agreed to put her half of it into the horse business and give the rest to Francisca, as Candelario had wished—or else ask Francisca if she wanted a share in the business. We gave a small bag of gold to Rosa’s mother as a gift. That was my idea, I’m pleased to say, and that worn-out Indian lady wept and called Rosa
“mi tesora”—
my treasure.

My treasure too. I loved her with all my heart. But when we got back I thought she looked awfully tired and wan, and I asked if she was feeling sick.

“No, Tomás, not really.” She smiled at me with large eyes. “I am with child. Did you think I was just getting fat like an old Mexican woman?”

It didn’t seem possible. She had always claimed she was barren. But the evidence was there and wouldn’t go away. She said it had happened in June, just before I left for the north, after we had begun our romp in the four-poster. More than one barrier had fallen then.

“And does Elisa know?”

“Where men are blind, women have eyes.”

“Rosa, that’s wonderful!”

A father! Since coming to Mexico I had become a revolutionist, a libertine, a colonel, an assassin, a spy, even an orgiast—but never a father. I was thrilled.

“Will you marry me now?” I asked.

“It’s not necessary, Tomás. It’s not a disgrace in Mexico to have a baby and not be married.”

“I’m sure it isn’t,” I said, thinking of the dozen or more children that Villa was supposed to have fathered throughout the land—”but that’s not the point. “Are you worried about what it will do to Elisa if we marry?”

Rosa nodded. I knew it was that.

“Don’t,” I said. “She may be hurt, but that’s something that has to come. She knows I already think of you as my wife. I love you, Rosa. Won’t you marry me?”