TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (46 page)

“I can’t do that, General Urbina.”

“You can’t?” He flashed a smile that showed his decayed teeth. “Or you won’t?”

I said quietly, “With respect, the chief doesn’t want the trunk opened until we reach Mexico City.”

Urbina sniffed, then snarled like an animal. I could swear he smelled the gold.

“Fuck your respect. You sound like Fierro.” He turned to Candelario.
“Compañero,
if I shoot this gringo ass-kisser, will it upset you?”

“It will upset him a lot more,” Candelario said.

“Then you have no objection?”

Swaying slightly, Urbina once again pulled his pistol from his holster and once again spun the chamber. The brass cartridges gleamed. I don’t know if blood can actually run cold, but that’s the way it felt; an iciness that spread from the heart into the limbs. The great temptation was to reach for my own pistol, but it would have been too late.

Candelario spoke thoughtfully. “If I were you, my general, I wouldn’t do it.”

Urbina spun around. “Do you think I fear Pancho Villa? There’s no man on earth I fear,” he cried, slurring his words. “I love him like a brother, but the word
fear
isn’t in my vocabulary. Now tell me the truth, you bastard! What’s in the trunk?”

Candelario shrugged and said, “Gold.”

“By God, I knew it!” Urbina’s eyes blazed in triumph. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Candelario, what an intelligent man you are. And honest! I like that! Oh, yes, I like it a lot! Now I don’t have to shoot him, you see?
Válgame Dios!
Gold! From the Banco Minero, right? Let’s have a look!”

The big pistol swung away from where it had pointed at my belly. Leveling it at the brass padlock, he pulled the trigger. The shot boomed in the hotel lobby, echoing down the corridor, and the padlock splintered apart. Drunk or sober, Urbina could shoot straight. I took a half step forward—but Candelario’s hand lightly touched my arm, holding me back not so much by force as by suggestion.

Urbina holstered his pistol. With a grunt of pain from his rheumatism, he bent to the trunk, the bones of his bad knees creaking in protest. He wrenched the shattered padlock loose from the hasp, thrusting open the top of the trunk with such violence that he nearly unhinged it.

“Christ! It
is
laundry!” He began tossing out the towels. “Shit! But now … wait. There’s more …”

His fingers gripped the side of the sack, and he squeezed. He felt the hard edges of the peseta coins and heard the heavy chink as they slid one against another. He turned to us, on his knees now, and his eyes burned with a bright fever. Reverently he whispered, “You know, I almost thought you were joking. But it’s true! It’s the gold from the Banco Minero. I’ve caught you red-handed. What bad people you are. A pair of fucking thieves to boot! How much have you got?”

“Count it,” said Candelario. “But take off your hat first. Show some respect for gold.”

Dutifully Urbina swept the sombrero from his head and thrust his hands into the sack. He started spilling out the coins.
“Cómo están bonita!”
he murmured. “How beautiful they are!”

Candelario’s pistol appeared in his hand, then spun. Barrel extended—the way any Brazos cowhand would do it, so that he wouldn’t relinquish the grip of the handle and the possibility that he might have to squeeze the trigger to finish off the ruckus he was about to start—he laid the notched sight across the top of Urbina’s skull where the bushy hair was thinnest. Candelario was tough enough to hunt bears with a switch, and when he buffaloed Urbina the general squawked once in distress, then fell headfirst into the trunk across the gold, limbs twitching, out cold.

“Were you worried, Tomás?” Candelario asked, smiling.

“You certainly took your time.”

“It was either that or shoot him. This is the most stupid sonofabitch I’ve ever known. But we’d be even more stupid if we stayed around and waited for him to wake up. Don’t you agree that it would be wiser to leave town?”

I took my first easy breath since we had walked into the Station Hotel. “What about the escort of soldiers?”

“We don’t need them. I know the way to Parral. Doña Luisa!”

An old crone with stringy white hair and steel spectacles appeared in the doorway from the hotel kitchen. The smell of garlic and sizzling corn oil followed her.

“The illustrious Señor General Urbina has regrettably passed out,” Candelario explained. “Do you have a bed for him?”

“
Aieee!
The poor one!”

“As you can see, he fell into our trunk. If you’ll be kind enough to show us an empty room, we’ll carry him there.”

Doña Luisa led the way; Candelario, having had second thoughts, told me to stay with the trunk of laundry and gold and get it securely closed once again. He thrust his powerful arms under Urbina’s and dragged him, sword clanking against the furniture, through the lobby and down the hallway to an empty room. He was back in a few minutes, sweat dripping from his forehead. I had found some rope and tied up the trunk.

“Come on, Tomás. She’s blind as a bat, but I think she smelled the blood on his hair. Even a blind Mexican knows the smell of blood. When he wakes up, I want to be far away.”

With the trunk and the letters of safe conduct that Pancho Villa had given me, we hustled round to the military stables. From the stable sergeant we commandeered the six healthiest-looking horses and a pack mule. While I saddled them, Candelario ran out to buy a bottle of mezcal and some tamales wrapped in cornhusks. We strapped the trunk to the mule and moved slowly out of town, through the darkness, toward the pass of San Martin. This was the road Rosa had taken, a year ago, to bury our gold in Tomochic.

A sky full of icy stars glittered down on us, and a freezing wind whipped out of the sierra. I remembered the year we had spent in the desert of Chihuahua, trying to warm our bones by a hundred campfires. The underfed horses blew steam, nickering in protest as the grade began to rise, and I kicked the belly of the old roan I was riding to show him who was boss. The skinny pack mule trudged in front of us, surefooted but slow.

Once through the pass, we would have to turn south and descend into the desert, if Parral were our destination. When we reached the turnoff I slowed the roan and laid a hand on the horn of Candelario’s saddle.

“Let’s go to Tomochic first,” I said.

In the gloom of night I couldn’t see Candelario’s eyes. “Is there time?” he asked, and his voice was a shade hoarser.

“If we don’t stay long.”

“How long can it take to dig up two sacks of gold?”

“That’s not it. The gold will just get us killed. You said so yourself. We still have no place to hide it that’s any better than Rosa’s mother’s corral.”

“Then why—?”

“I’m going to get Rosa.”

He must have instantly understood the doggedness of my purpose, and sensed that it was unalterable, for after a second sigh and some muttering in the murky dark, he kicked his horse forward, toward the west. The mule had stopped. I laid a bullwhip on its back, and we moved deeper into the silent, night-mantled mountains of the Tarahumara sierra.

The drab walls of the village cut the fringe of the horizon. Between rocks pitted with huge eroded cracks, with a stream trickling below, a narrow ledge along the incline served as a mountain trail that led down from the high sierra to Tomochic.

I knew what I would do, I knew what I wanted. Whatever she said, whoever she was with, I would beg her to come back to me.

Dogs showed their teeth in welcome. The village, a lusterless collection of huts, seemed somewhat cheered by the radiance of the rising sun, but at best it was a somber place in a dreary little valley. The revolution hadn’t penetrated to these mountain pueblos, except as sons and fathers might have gone off to fight and not returned. We were a martial pair, but our weapons were sheathed and I tried to nod in a friendly manner.

The girls we passed looked dumpy and dull of eye, bowed at the shoulder from grinding corn and washing clothes. The walnut-brown Tarahumara women, wrinkled as burnt boots, wore tattered rebozos; the old men, frayed white cotton shirts that flapped in the breeze. With worried eyes, they watched us ride by.

Tomochic was another of those places that had been only a name to me. Was this where I had banished her? Rosa had been born here, lived here, but she might as well have come from the far side of the moon. I understood now what it had meant for her to live in the Hotel Fermont and then in our hideaway up on La Sierpe.

She had described the location of her mother’s house, and it was no trouble to find it—a hut much like the others, that couldn’t have contained more than a single room and a chimney. In that room a man and woman would live, make love, birth their children, grow older and die; and the children would follow suit. A pair of thin mustangs stood in the corral behind the hut, pawing the turf nervously. They smelled a gringo.

When I dismounted a Tarahumara woman came to the rude, wooden-slatted door. I saw Rosa’s face in hers. She was a woman only in her late thirties, but already the dugs of her once robust breasts hung low and her hands were gnarled like those of a crone. Her rump and thighs were thick, her brown neck corded, her face puffy. She may have been handsome once. She may have been as pretty as Rosa.

I tried to glance over her shoulder into the shadows of the hut, but I saw nothing.

“Señora…”

I introduced myself, and then, not knowing what else to say, I blurted, “Where is Rosa?”

Her eyes betrayed no recognition of who I might be, and her voice showed no emotion. She spoke Spanish with difficulty.

Rosa was not there, she said.

“When will she be back, señora?”

“She is gone.”

“But where?”

“Quién sabe?”

I didn’t want to believe it. Not after I had come this far, with such longing and resolve. “But when? How long ago? Where did she go? To Chihuahua City, or just to some village? Please, señora, I’m her friend. Tell me all you know.”

The woman shrugged her shoulders. A while ago, she said. She had come. After a while, she had gone. She had gone once before, for a long time, and come back only once, with a mule. A strange girl, Señor Colonel. She comes and goes. She is hardly of the village. It is not easy to say what she will do, or if she will ever be back.

I wanted to rage at her easy acceptance of what to me was near tragedy, but what good would it do? She wasn’t responsible. She knew nothing more than what she had told me. Rosa had come. Rosa had gone.

“Señora, please answer. Did she go alone?”

“Always alone, Señor Colonel.”

“Where should I try to find her?”

She shrugged. She tried to smile, perhaps to comfort me, and I saw decayed brown teeth.

I walked back to where Candelario waited by the horses, and for a moment I laid my cheek on the hard flank of the roan, needing to feel some heartbeat of life. When I looked up, Candelario was studying me intently.

“She’s gone?”

“Yes.”

“To where?”

“Her mother doesn’t know.”

“Alone?”

“That’s what I asked, too. Yes, alone.”

Candelario coughed uncomfortably. “And did she take the gold with her?”

“I didn’t ask.” I swung* into the saddle. “The gold is hers—she can do what she pleases with it. I don’t care if she took it or not.”

“Half of it is mine,” Candelario reminded me. “I care. I told you, Tomás—”

“Damn it,” I said, my voice rising, “what the hell do you want to do? Dig in the fucking corral, with the whole village watching? If it’s not there, there’s nothing you can do except cry. So let it be. Hope that it’s there,” I said cruelly. “Maybe that hope will get you safely through the rest of the revolution.”

He looked at me angrily. He hadn’t deserved that outburst, but I didn’t care. I jammed a knee into my beast’s flank and turned him, snatched the bullwhip and flicked it over the mule’s laidback ears.

I had left Hannah. Now I had lost Rosa.

I wanted to get to Parral, do what had to be done and then go fight. The horse and mule surged ahead, back toward the sierra, struck by brilliant yellow bursts of the morning sun, with Candelario following in silence.

Parral, in the cup of the valley southwest through the mountains, formed itself vaguely out of a cottony dawn mist. Not far from here, Pancho Villa had been born.

Cold and hungry, I stopped a ragged peasant who was leading a mesquite-laden burro into the town and asked him how to get to the Hacienda de Los Flores on Calle Chorro, which is where Villa had told me the German spinster lived and where I would find Franz von Papen. Doffing his sombrero, the
campesino
scratched the lice in his gray hair. He offered his deepest apologies: he had been born near Parral and lived there for forty years, but it had never been necessary to learn the names of the streets. Who would bother? If we could perhaps trouble ourselves by describing the persons we sought and give their occupation, he would be honored to offer his services in guiding us there.

A foreign woman named Griensen, I told him. What she did for a living, I couldn’t say.

“Una gringa? Alta? Una güera, con ojos verdes? Con muchos caballos buenos?”

All foreigners, unless they were heathen Chinese, were considered by the
campesinos
to be gringos, and I had no idea whether the old woman was tall or fair-complexioned with green eyes, or had many good horses; but I said yes, that was the one, figuring that even if it wasn’t she could still direct us to the right place.

The man led us out a cobbled side street, and just as the sun appeared weakly over the mountains and the valley was flooded with pink light, we reached the flat, rose-colored facade of a house with a huge carved wooden door and a copper cowbell hanging from a length of rope. Like the faces of Mexicans themselves, the front of a Mexican house told you little about what lay behind the blank walls. Candelario gave our guide a few centavos; he saluted us and went on his way.

I yanked on the cowbell, and it pealed richly in the thin morning air. In a few minutes a wooden slat opened and the dark brown, hooded-eyed face of an Indian porter peered out at us.