TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (17 page)

I rode my big chestnut gelding, and Rosa walked next to me, refusing to mount behind—it would shame me, she said, to share my horse with a woman, and later, when the men laughed at me, I would be angry with her.

But in Bachinava, where we camped one night, Candelario commandeered some horses from the local police stables. He brought round a gray and a skewbald mare with an old broad-horned saddle.

“The gray will be a good spare horse for you, Tomás. The mare is for your woman.”

I slanted an accusing look at him. He knew how I felt about Hannah and my fall from grace with Carmelita. But then I realized he meant well, and so I thanked him properly. He didn’t know that Rosa was only in my care until she could go home to Tomochic, and I had promised not to shame her by letting the men know that we lived like brother and sister. For a while I thought of trying to give her as a gift to Hipólito, until I realized how shameful it was to treat a human being like a horse or a sack of corn. Saint Peter would never have recognized me as a candidate for wings, but I figured I might make some amends for my hoggish ways if I offered that young girl some genuine kindness. Rosa mounted the skewbald as smoothly as any bronc buster I’d ever seen, riding it stiff-legged in the Mexican fashion and crooning to it all the while in order to get better acquainted. This was no Sunday horse lady out for a canter in the park.

And I kept a weather eye peeled for Rodolfo Fierro. I had told the others about our dawn meeting on the street, and this time they didn’t crack jokes. Fierro, on his part, ignored me, but whenever his big silver spurs jingled around my horse I felt my guts turning to fiddlestrings. I considered that it might possibly please Hannah in some kind of giddy romantic way that the man she loved had died fighting for land and liberty in Mexico; but it wouldn’t please me.

“Don’t worry about it,” Julio said. “The solution is simple. In the first battle, we’ll kill him.”

“You can’t do that,” I said, shocked. “He’s on
our
side.”

“He is on no one’s side,” Candelario replied. “He is not a revolutionist. Do you think he cares for anything but himself? He loves no one, except perhaps the chief, but only because the chief allows him to open the door to his destiny. He loves the killing. There are men like that, who had nothing before the revolution and will have nothing after it. The revolution gives them life, a purpose, however grisly it may be. He is
matador,
no more.”

But I made them promise it wouldn’t happen that way, that they wouldn’t shoot Fierro in the back during a battle. I might kill, but I would never murder, and to instruct others to commit it for me was no better. I would handle it myself, when the time came. And when would that be?
We will both know.
Those were Fierro’s words.

We plodded through a range of gaunt mountains to the banks of the Nazas River, close to Torreón, in a fertile area called La Luguna, filled with cornfields and big irrigation ditches flowing with cool water. Bales of sparkling white cotton lay rotting in the sun near a deserted mill; Villa had advertised that he was coming and the people didn’t doubt his word. Before that, in the pretty pink town of Bermejillo, he picked up an automobile, an open seven-passenger Dodge, and decided that he would travel in style until the gasoline tank became empty. He didn’t know how to drive, but Colonel Medina did. The Nazas was in flood, so that our artillery and heavy supplies had to be carried across on rafts.

Just as the old Dodge reached mid-river on the raft, a cable broke and the car was swept away by the powerful current. Villa ruefully watched it go, then turned to Medina with a red-toothed smile.

“You just lost your job, my friend. But don’t worry. I’m going to make you my chief of staff instead of my chauffeur.”

We camped on the Nazas, from where we would launch our attack on Torreón. Our trek to the south had taken two weeks. A nearby hacienda had been abandoned, so Villa made it his headquarters, and the army spread out for a mile along the winding river. I found a spot in the shelter of some cottonwood trees, drawing a bit away from Candelario and the others, who tended to argue and drink far into the night and then keep me awake with all their grunting and humping of Yvette and Marie-Thérése.

Rosa and I hadn’t talked much on the way south—we were too busy herding the livestock and keeping an eye out for Federal patrols. When she kindled a fire and spread our blankets by the river, I sat with her in a peaceful, brooding silence, listening to the crickets and the purl of water against the bank. I rolled a cigarette and smoked it, then leaned back, hands under my head, looking up at the stars. It was a warm night, and a thin moon shed a pearly glow. Rosa lay down beside me, keeping the distance that I had ordained as necessary. But after a minute she shifted just a bit, laid her head on my chest and began quietly to cry.

I stroked her hair. Her crying kept up for a few minutes and then gradually stopped, and I felt her breast heave as if she were shaking something loose from inside herself. She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her blouse.

“What was the matter, Rosa?”

“I think of my husband,” she said softly.

That was better than I had hoped for. I dreaded being the cause of her misery.

“What was his name?”

She took a shaky breath. “May I not tell you that? It will be easier for me if you know nothing about him, because then his shadow cannot fall in front of you. You know that there was much love between us. But he is dead, and you are alive. And I am young, and I am with you.”

With her head on my chest I started to speak, but then thought better of it. She had moved me with her words, and I didn’t have anything in kind I could respond with. And there was the problem of what she assumed and I didn’t. Only the night before I had dreamed of Hannah wearing a white wedding gown.

Rosa sat up and looked down at me, dark eyes still blurred. But I saw a lurking uncertainty. I nodded.

She said, “That morning by the lake, in Ascensión. Do you remember? You had been with another woman, which you said meant I was not to worry … you couldn’t take me because you were too tired. But I think that was not the reason. Will you tell me the real reason?”

“In the first place,” I said, a little impatiently, “I wouldn’t do that. I couldn’t force myself on anyone.”

“And in the second place?”

“I told you, Rosa. I’m engaged to a girl. I want to be faithful. When this is over, if I don’t get killed, I’ll marry her.”

“It was not that you found me unattractive?”

“You’re very pretty.”

“Truly? You believe that?”

“Well, sure. Of course I do.”

She tossed her hair back, trying to smile. But the sadness hadn’t left her eyes. The crickets began to sing a little more quickly, as the night cooled down. From afar I heard Marie-Thérése giggling, and the sounds of a guitar striking up.

Women have that special silent way of letting you know that something’s bothering them. If you don’t coax them into spitting it out, they sulk forever and a day. Even if she wasn’t my bedmate, she was traveling with me and under my care, and I couldn’t have that.

“Come on, Rosa. What is it?”

“Also that morning …” She looked down at her bare feet. “You told your chief, Francisco Villa, that you would care for me until I could go home to my family in Tomochic. Did you not say that?”

“I guess I did. I don’t exactly remember.”

“You did. And I wish to ask you one thing.” She struggled a moment or two, then crawled against me again and got the words out, muffled into my chest. “Unless I displease you, which of course is possible, I ask you not to send me back to Tomochic. There is nothing for me there. And if I displease you, tell me in what way. I am not a foolish girl.”

That didn’t seem to commit me to much, and I nodded.

“I will try to please you … even if you won’t let me in the other way. I am Tarahumara, but all that they say about me is not true. My tongue is quick, but it’s not spiteful. I will try to please you,” she whispered again.

“Go to sleep, Rosa.”

The guitar had begun to be plucked more vigorously, and we heard men singing a ballad about some forgotten battle and a lost love. Rosa curled in my arms, smelling of smoky firewood and a fresh scent that came from her flesh … it had to be the pure scent of youth. She was a child who needed to be cradled to sleep. I felt that, and I guess my pecker did too; it didn’t twitch at all. I wasn’t troubled; my love was far from here, and I was faithful. Rosa’s forehead was warm in the hollow of my neck. We were almost asleep in the heat of the night, soothed by the guitar, when she giggled, a kittenish sound that I probably wasn’t meant to hear. And then in a tiny voice, the kind children use when they deign to tell you their most precious secrets, she whispered in my neck: “I know you are not a captain. But it doesn’t matter.”

“I’m glad.”

“I’ll only call you
mi capitán
when we’re alone
… mi capitán. “

I thought about that for a minute and then whispered, “Go to sleep, Rosa. You’re displeasing me.”

The night before we were to storm Torreón, Pancho Villa called a meeting of his commanders at the Hacienda de las Lomas. He had spent a month planning the attack. He never, as long as I knew him, left anything to chance. He studied the terrain and even sent spies into the cities, disguised as peasants, to plot the enemy defenses and manpower. He organized the medical units and the placement of artillery, the food and the ammunition, the disposition of reserves. He did it without fuss, quietly, making no written notes, operating from instinct as much as knowledge—it was all balanced in his mind at once. And then, when the battles began, he himself led the men into the field.

Now, before Torreón, he had decided to organize his force in a more military manner.

“Come along, Tomás. This will be instructive.”

The big room of the hacienda, thick with cigar smoke and the rank odors of horse and sweat, was lit by candles that sent black plumes swirling through the breathless air. Pegs were driven into the walls to hang saddles and bridles, and outside the hacienda a great fire blazed. A harpist, an old albino who had been the hacienda’s caretaker, played balled after ballad, while the men gathered round the fire to sing and smoke their cornhusk cigarettes.

Sitting at the head of a big scarred mahogany table, his unshaved cheeks glowing in the fierce light thrown by the candles so that he looked like a barbaric medieval tribal chieftain, Villa held forth to the leaders.

“Señores, this will be an army now, not a rabble. We’ll start as a division, which means we must have a commanding general … brigades, with other generals … regiments and battalions. That’s how it will be done.”

“A moment, Señor Villa!”

The interruption came from Manuel Chao, the bucktoothed fellow who had first visited us in Ascensión and was once again present as an emissary from Carranza. This time he wore a uniform and carried an ivory-handled pistol in a yellow calfskin holster.

“I have a letter here from the First Chief,” he said. “It bears his signature and seal. If I may be permitted to read it aloud?”

A murmur went round the table. Chao unfolded the letter, typed on crisp blue notepaper, and began to read. It authorized him to take command of all the revolutionary forces in the state of Chihuahua. That meant us—there were no others. Villa scraped back his big armchair, started to rise, then thumped down again, his eyes popping.

“Jesus Christ! First he wants Obregón, a chickpea farmer … and now you! What did you do, Señor Chao, before you became a paper general?”

“I taught geography in Monterrey, señor. I also have studied military history.”

Villa turned to me at the far end of the table, where I sat behind Urbina, who clutched his demijohn of aguardiente on his lap. “Make a note of that, Tomás. He taught geography and studied military history. We may need something to inscribe on his tombstone. Give me that letter,” he growled.

Chao handed the blue notepaper to him. Villa held it over one of the sputtering candles—it caught fire immediately. He didn’t let go until it nearly scorched his fingers and then let it drop to the table, where it curled into black ash with a glowing edge. Chao’s jaw jutted forward. One hand dropped to the ivory butt of his pistol.

“Go ahead,” Villa said coldly. “But be sure you can bite a bullet in midair. Before you have that pantywaist pistol out of its ridiculous holster, I’m going to shoot you right between your big buckteeth.”

Chao hesitated, then raised both hands from his lap. He tented them together on the surface of the table. “There’s no need for discord, Señor Villa, just as there’s no need for insult.” He coughed nervously. “How do you propose to organize this division?”

“First we’ll vote on a commanding general. I’ll accept nominations.”

“I nominate Francisco Villa!” cried Urbina.

“Any others?” Villa asked.

Everyone shrugged. “In that case,” said Villa, “I myself will nominate Manuel Chao, the geography teacher who’s been recommended by the First Chief. That way we’ll have some kind of vote. And we’ll know who believes in what.”

Hands were raised in the smoky air. Villa was unanimously elected chief general. He didn’t vote, and neither did Chao. Villa thanked his commanders graciously; then he appointed them generals. Rodolfo Fierro, Hipólito and Candelario were named colonels. Medina became chief of staff and artillery commander. Julio made major.

“We’ll call this the Northern Division,” Villa said, “since we’re all men of the north and this is the heartland of the revolution. Is that agreed?” His generals and colonels thumped their fists on the table in unison and then drank a toast from bottles of French cognac that had come up from the hacienda’s wine cellar—first to the revolution, then to the sacred memory of Señor Madero and finally to Don Venus “… whose firm principles,” Villa intoned, “guide our minds at all times, even if they can’t do so well with our bullets.”

From the nine ragged men who had splashed across the Rio Bravo in March, we were now a force of nearly eight thousand: the famed Northern Division. Its memory, in Mexican legend, would never die. Shortly before midnight when the meeting broke up—for the next day we were going to storm Torreón—Villa’s hand settled on my shoulder.