TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border

This edition © 2014 Clifford Irving

*****

TOM MIX
a n d
PANCHO VILLA

by

Clifford Irving

*****

for Valdi

with love

this tale of her Mexico

MAPS

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Part One

Everybody follows them, but to where? Nobody knows. It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death.

—Octavio Paz,
Labyrinth of Solitude

I became a movie cowboy. I rode hard and performed my own stunts, did more than a hundred silents for Selig Polyscope and Fox and then ten sound films for Universal —my favorite was
Destry Rides Again.
My house in Beverly Hills had a seven-car garage. I wore a diamond-studded platinum belt buckle and diamond-studded spurs. I helped Mickey Rooney and Clara Bow get started. Jack Dempsey, Lillian Gish and Will Rogers were my friends.

They were good friends. But once, long ago, in another country, I had better ones. I was on top of the world, making more money than I could spend and traveling every year to London and Paris, where I put on roping and riding shows with my horse, Tony, a white-stockinged chestnut who was so well trained he could untie my hands with his teeth.

They were good years. But long ago, in another country, I had more thrilling ones.

The crash of ‘29 cost me an even million. I owed back taxes to the government. New faces like Ken Maynard and Hoot Gibson galloped across the silver screen. In 1932 I quit the movies, found a friendly banker and bought a circus for $400,000. I hit the sawdust trail around the country, until we got to Oklahoma and my new horse, Tony Jr., fell on me. My leg—and my circus—went bust. All I had left was my fifteen-minute radio program for Ralston Purina. “Made of golden western wheat … Tom Mix says it’s swell to eat.” And it was. I wouldn’t have said so otherwise.

“Don’t worry,” Jack Dempsey said to me. “You’re on the ropes, Tom, but there’s always another round.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. “The defeats are also battles.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“It’s a long story. Anyway, I’ve had a lot worse things happen to me.”

“When was that, Tom?”

“Some day I’ll tell you, Jack.”

Around that time another of my marriages broke up. Since I had come to Hollywood I had tried three times—apparently, not hard enough.

“You’re too rough on yourself,” Lillian Gish remarked to me. Do you want to know what I think? I don’t believe you’ve ever found the right woman.”

“No, Lillian. I did find her. But that was a long time ago, in another country.”

“Who was she?” she said, getting interested.

“One day I’ll tell you.”

Maybe it’s because I’m holed up here in Arizona these days, with time on my hands and a bottle of red-eye on the desk, or maybe it’s because I’ve just turned fifty and I sense a chariot has pulled up outside in the dark. But I think the time has come to answer those good friends’ questions. The fact is, I’m not the man I am because of anything that happened during my limelight days in Hollywood and on tour in Europe. All that is epilogue. The keenest days of my life—the best years, the worst time—all took place long before the name Tom Mix ever hit the bright lights and went celluloid. They took place in a part of the world that people usually associate with tiny, short-haired, funny-looking dogs. It’s called Chihuahua, the northernmost state of Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, where I was brought up. In my youth I was a cowhand and rodeo rider, and then I became a revolutionist for a gentleman named Francisco Villa.

I’m going to tell that story now. There’s no studio chief to tear his hair if I reveal my unseemly past. I want to spend this one last time with my old friends, some of them dead more than twenty years. I want to smell the desert, feel the heat: taste the poetry of another age, another world. A harsh world, and a bloody one, but one that has more meaning to me than Sunset Boulevard or Piccadilly Circus. And what the hell, it may not be
Destry Rides Again
, but it's a tale of women and gold, of revenge and revolution, and growing up … and a story about a love that's never quite died, at least in the dark of my mind.

It’s late, I know. But life is short, as Candelario Cervantes used to say. A man can do worse than relive the part of his life that’s pure Technicolor.

“I prithee, pretty youth, let me be

better acquainted with thee.”

My born name was Thomas Hezekiah Mix. My father was an undertaker who had moved from Pennsylvania to El Paso, Texas—an intelligent enough move if you consider that in those years, at the turn of the century, a great many more people were dying along the Rio Grande than in most other parts of the country.

I worked after school in his undertaking parlor, and a Mexican fellow named Julio Cárdenas, who glued the coffins together in the backyard, took a liking to me and taught me to ride. I had the usual gang of boyhood chums, but Julio was a few years older than the rest and by far the most serious; even though his skin was darker than mine I considered him my best friend. He lived across the river in the city of Juárez, which was bigger than El Paso but a great deal poorer and dirtier, being Mexican, and he had the use of some roping horses that his uncle kept by the stockyards. Even a poor Mexican had a thin-flanked, jugheaded horse of some kind, so that Julio was bowlegged enough for a yearling to run between his legs without bending a hair. That was my ambition too. I went over to the stockyards every Sunday from dawn to sundown, and I took to horses like a puppy to warm milk.

And yet even then I wanted to be an actor. That came about because in my second year at El Paso High I played the part of Fortinbras in
Hamlet.
It’s a small part, but such a burst of applause rang out in the auditorium after the burlap curtain fell—with me standing on the stage waving a tin sword among the litter of dead—that I was woolyheaded enough to think some of it was meant for me. The sound was the sweetest I’d ever heard. And what could I do? This was the first decade of our century, and I had grown up on the border among riffraff and horseflesh and corpses.

To be an actor, I believed, you had first of all to be an educated person, which I surely wasn’t, and then to live in New York, which was as distant for a boy like me as China. There was no one to guide me, certainly no one to propel me in the direction contrary to that advised by Mr. Greeley. I had to content myself with reading Shakespeare in the privy.

After Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show passed through El Paso I learned to twirl a ketch rope, and when I gave up my dream of becoming an actor I couldn’t decide whether I’d be a Texas Ranger or a champion rodeo rider. My father hoped I’d go into the cold-body business with him, my mother thought insurance would be a nice trade but I confounded everybody by quitting school at the age of seventeen, tucking my Shakespeare into my bedroll and hightailing it over to the Brazos, where I landed a job as wrangler in a cow camp. I was one of five healthy children, not the brightest and surely not the prettiest, so no one missed me to the point of grief … or else they guessed I was a quitter and would come back in my own sweet time.

A wrangler was about the most menial job you could have around a remuda, but it didn’t take long before the range boss figured out I had a way with four-legged beasts, and soon I graduated to night hawk and then full-fledged cowhand. In a couple of years I could ride the roughstrine, brand calves, throw a hooleyann and cut my way through a stampede, and not once did I confess to anyone that I was a frustrated John Barrymore. I never stayed too long at one job, for I had a restlessness big as a barfly s thirst; and I had other frustrations, the kind you can’t easily talk about. Women were on my mind, but I had no contact with them other than an occasional poke in cowtown whorehouses from Tulsa to Brownsville, which depressed me far more than it satisfied the itch in my loins. I pounded away at big-breasted ladies named Honey and Sadie and Lulu, when what I really yearned for was to worship fragile creatures named Desdemona, Juliet, and Ophelia. Reading William Shakespeare will poison any young man’s mind if he takes it seriously.

By a dozen campfires or out on lonely ranges I dreamed of dying for love, the glory of battle, noble princes and swooning maidens … and what connection did that make with my gritty life? I yearned for high adventure, true love, and fortune. But where did they exist? And how would a roughneck young cowboy know where to find them?

So I quit ranching and spent a couple of years on the rodeo circuit. From time to time I went home for a good meal of butter beans, roasting ears and Mama’s fried chicken.

Then I quit the rodeo and joined up with the Miller Brothers Real Wild West Show near Bliss, Oklahoma. They paid me fifteen dollars a month plus room and board and started me out as dragman in the horse-thief act, but after a while I earned my pay in the more legitimate rodeo events such as bu/ lldogging and bronc riding. That’s where I met Geronimo, the great Apache chief, who was let out of jail to help us stage a buffalo hunt. He was supposed to shoot a bull buffalo with a bow and arrow, but he was a shaky old man and he missed, so he started shooting up the herd with his rifle and they threw him back in jail.

It took the romance out of the show somehow, and I quit again and headed back to El Paso to hole up with my family.

That was the winter of 1913. I arrived on a Sunday, and my father greeted me at the door in his usual way.

“Back again, eh?”

“That’s right, Papa. Can I come in?”

“It’s still your home … I guess.”.

Mama gave me a big hug. She thought I looked thin, and the idea of fattening me up pleased her no end. To what avail, I didn’t t know. She treated me like a lovable misfit, and Papa generally avoided me as though whatever disease I had might be catching. I wondered what I could do with my life to make sense of it. The next day, not having any better prospects, I felt that familiar pang of restlessness which usually signaled a change in my whereabouts.

“Mama, do you know what ever happened to my friend Julio Cardenas?”

“Went back to Mexico, Tom. Probably got himself killed in that revolution. He was a nice boy.”

There had been a short-lived revolution the last couple of years south of the border, with an idealistic fellow named Francisco Madero taking over from the old dictator, Porfirio Diaz. But Madero had been shot by his own generals and a new gang of thugs had seized power and imposed a kind of peace. It was supposed to be quiet now.

“I’ll see you later, Mama. I’m going over to have a look-see at Juárez.”

“Be careful,” she said. “They’re funny people.”

“I’m still a gringo,” I reminded her, meaning that even I had special privileges on the other side of the Rio Grande.

I took a streetcar downtown and then strolled in the March sunshine across the Stanton Street Bridge to Ciudad Juárez. Gambling was the city’s chief occupation, and in the early afternoon you could already hear the clatter of chips and the shrieks of the keno players at Touches Casino. Whores roamed the boardwalks of Calle Diablo, wearing shiny red dresses that they would hike up to give you a free look at their bush. Streetcars rattled by to spray garbage on anyone who chanced too close, and you couldn’t smell anything else except the sour winds of tequila that wafted from the swinging doors of a hundred cantinas. The
campesinos,
the poor country folk, sprawled drunk and half-starved in the streets, mouths agape and covered with flies. Federal soldiers usually carted them away by early afternoon and the rest of the time they patrolled the city, ready to arrest anyone who mouthed off against the new government. They still invoked the
ley fuga,
a law that allowed them to shoot prisoners and then claim they had been killed while trying to escape. The women met another fate. In Old Mexico you rarely wondered why so many people were drunk; you marveled instead that in the midst of their misery any of them bothered to stay sober. They all drank
pulque
as though it were soda pop, and most of the Indian babies were weaned on it. There was no trick to making it—the juice from the heart of the maguey plant, which grew in the desert like a weed, fermented in less than a day to produce a sour milky-white liquid that would grow horns on a mule and make life bearable even to a man who knew he had little chance of living to the age of forty.