TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border (60 page)

“Then who are they shooting at?” Candelario rapped back.

“We’ll find out soon enough. They’re right up there in our way.”

He didn’t put down his rifle. Knowing the value that Mexicans put on a life, and their tendency to shoot first and figure out later who it was they had hit and whether or not it had been a mistake, I decided to ride ahead and see what was happening. I wanted to get to El Paso, but I didn’t want to kill any American citizens in order to do it. Under my sombrero and Mexican colonel’s eagles, no matter who I rode with, lived a Texan.

I nudged Maximilian over the first rise, just as two more shots snapped crisply and echoed through the hills. Ahead, in the cut, the Rio Grande twisted in a northwesterly direction, sparkling in the sun, no more than thirty yards wide with heavy bushes on both banks.

I knew the place now. There was a little settlement farther on called Hot Wells, and a big cattle ranch lay to the north. I didn’t like exposing myself this way, but I wasn’t carrying my rifle and I hoped that whoever was doing the shooting, if they had spotted me, could see that my intentions were peaceable. My uniform was stuffed into my saddlebags, and except for my Levi’s I wore the dusty clothes of a Mexican vaquero. I could see a few adobe huts baking in the heat on the far side of the river, where the railroad tracks of the El Paso & Southwestern turned southward in a glittering curve. An eagle coasted against the high arc of sky. He let out a thin scream.

A bullet whistled by, zinged off a stone, and a moment later I heard the crack of a Springfield—it made a more high-pitched sound than a Mauser, a Remington or a Mannlicher. I tumbled out of the saddle, whacked Maximilian on the rump and ate some gritty dust. Three more shots echoed among the hills. I didn’t see what they hit, but my ears told me they were aimed in my general direction.

Candelario and Julio came sliding up on their bellies, taking cover behind some rocks.

“Who are they?” Candelario hissed.

“I can’t see yet,” I said. “I think they’re on the near bank of the river. In the bushes.”

“Soldiers or cowboys?” he asked, chuckling.

“Don’t shoot, General. They may be making a mistake.”

“Hombre,
a worse mistake would be to let them kill us.”

Another volley cut loose, this time six or seven rifles. The puffs of smoke drifted up from the bushes below us about two hundred yards away. The bullets whined over our heads like a swarm of bees.

“They might be Mexicans,” said Julio, commenting on the accuracy of the gunfire. I poked my head up. Down on the far bank of the river I saw some pale brown shapes lying near the bushes—they looked like dead quail.

“They’re hunters. I’m going to show myself.” I dropped my rifle and scrambled to my feet, waving my arms over my head and jumping from side to side on the balls of my feet in case the men in the bushes decided to keep shooting. I must have looked like a nervous clown.

A moment later there was movement behind the bushes. Then four or five men showed themselves, crouching down on one knee with their rifles leveled. They wore flat-brimmed scout hats, khaki breeches and tight leggings: the uniform of the United States Cavalry.

“Hey, down there!” I yelled in English. “Don’t shoot! I’m an American!”

The soldiers began jawing to each other, until finally one of them cupped his hands to shout back.

“Who are you?”

“We’re coming down,” I called, then turned to Julio. “Get the horses and the wagon. Candelario, let’s go down and powwow.”

“I don’t like it, Tomás.”

“I speak their language, don’t I? And you’re a goddam general in the Northern Division. Lower your rifle. I’ll take care of everything.”

He sighed, meaning that he would put his fate in my hands with a bare minimum of faith, and we trudged down the hillside through the brush. The soldiers waited for us on the riverbank. Their scout hats were lowered against the sun, and a few still bent to one knee with their rifles covering us. As we got closer, more showed themselves; they were at least twenty, and I saw their horses tethered downriver in the shade of some mesquite. They raised a red and white swallowtail pennant with two stars and a number eight, which I guessed meant the Eighth Cavalry.

One of them, wearing whipcord breeches and high leather boots, lowered his dust goggles. I groaned, grasping Candelario’s arm.

“What’s the matter, Tomás?”

“I know the officer.”

“But that’s good!”

“No, it’s not.”

It was that damned Lieutenant Patton, the man who had restrained Miguel Bosques from shooting me on Stanton Street eighteen months ago. He stood apart from the others, tall and slim, legs planted wide on the earth, hand resting on the butt of his holstered pistol. His face was as tanned as a butternut. He was a fine-looking soldier; he just wasn’t one I wanted to meet. There must have been half a dozen lieutenants out patrolling this part of the border between El Paso and Columbus … why did I have the luck to run into
him?
I had to do this the hard way, so I strode right up to him.

“Hello, Lieutenant. Real nice to see you again.”

He squinted at me with the puzzled air of a man who knows a face but can’t yet place it. Then he said, “Ahhh! …” and he nodded, sticking out his jaw. “Mix, isn’t it? You’re Captain Mix.”

“Colonel Mix now, Lieutenant. And this is General Cervantes of the Mexican Army of the Convention. He’s commander of Francisco Villa’s Dorados.”

Everyone knew of the Dorados. Patton was a soldier, bred to discipline, and he couldn’t help himself: he threw his right hand up in a brief, snappy salute. Candelario knew enough to return it, in a sloppy fashion, and I did the same. Patton dropped his hand and then raked us up and down with a critical glance. Candelario—one-eyed, black-bearded, scruffy as a ragpicker—clearly wasn’t his idea of a general. And I knew what he thought of me.

“What’s all this about, General?” he said in that high-pitched voice I remembered well.

“The general doesn’t speak English.” I stuck out my own jaw and planted my hands on my hips. “Let’s back up. Godammit, I want to know why your men were shooting at us. You could have killed me.”

He looked at me in the same scornful manner I remembered from El Paso. “If we had wanted to kill you, Mix, we would have done it. My men fired warning shots. There are bandits on the border around here. We couldn’t know that you were Villista officers.”

He would have died before he called me “sir,” or even “colonel.” and what he really wanted to say was that as far as he was concerned the only good Mexican was a dead one; but he assumed from the angle of my jaw and the hoarseness of my voice that I was fighting mad, and he didn’t yet know how many men we might have on the other side of the hill. Still, he wasn’t taking any guff. That wasn’t Patton’s style.

“You’re in United States territory, and I want to know what the hell for.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, toward the border. “Your war’s down there.”

“Lieutenant,” I said, “we have a wounded officer in our wagon. He has a broken ankle, and fever. We were north of Ascensión when it happened. The nearest surgeon is in El Paso.”

Julio had appeared over the crest of the hill with the wagon and our horses.

“Why didn’t you take him to Juárez?” Patton asked.

“The Carranzistas hold it. If we went to Juárez, our officer would lose more than his leg. And he’d have company.”

“How large a force are you?”

I waved in Julio’s direction. “What you see.”

“Let’s have a look at this man,” Patton said, when the wagon jolted closer. He treated me as if he were the colonel and I were the lieutenant.

He strode over, shot a quick look at Julio and then peered in at Fierro, who was awake, propped up on one elbow and glaring at the soldiers. Fierro kept one hand under his serape, and I knew the finger would be wrapped around the trigger of his pistol. But he kept his mouth shut. His face was white except for a high flush on the cheekbones. His forehead glistened with sweat. The ankle was dark purple and swollen to the size of the calf.

Patton’s eyes locked with his. Then he turned to me. “What are the names of these two men?”

“Colonel Cárdenas and … the wounded man is Captain Garcia.”

He nodded. “The man’s obviously a soldier, and he’ll lose his leg if you don’t get him to a doctor. I’ll send a detail downriver with you to El Paso. If you try any monkey business, they’ll be under orders to shoot.”

I couldn’t figure him out. He was doing the right thing, but in the wrong spirit.

“Take it easy,” I said. “You’re not at war with us. The last time I met Black Jack Pershing he took me and Pancho Villa to a baseball game, and then we had pineapple upside-down cake at General Scott’s.”

He stared at me for a while, then smiled as if something had only just come clear to him. “When did you last see a newspaper, Mix?”

“Is there news?” I asked uneasily.

His smile faded. “Mr. Wilson finally made up his mind. Four days ago, the United States recognized the Carranza government—which means that for Mr. Wilson, and for General Pershing, and for me, Venustiano Carranza is the legitimate President of Mexico. Which also means that Pancho Villa is now a goddam outlaw. He’s had his last shipment of rifles and his last pineapple upside-down cake at General Scott’s. As for the rest of you people, you’re all officers in an illegal revolutionary army. That army is the enemy of a duly constituted government recognized by the United States. You hang around in this country after you’ve delivered your man to the doctor in El Paso, and we’ll hand you over to the Carranzista authorities in Juárez.

“In your particular case,” he said, “it will be a special pleasure. Your purpose is humane or I’d do it right now. I’ll give you and your gang of pirates forty-eight hours. Then get your ass across the border. And don’t come back.”

We reached El Paso at dusk, the soldiers trotting along behind us under the command of a tight-lipped Apache scout named Sergeant Chicken. After I told Julio and Candelario what Patton had told me, there was no more to say. Carranza, in the eyes of the United States, was President of Mexico. We were indeed outlaws.

No news could have depressed me more, other than the death of the chief. I wondered if he knew. Even if he licked the Carranzista force at Agua Prieta, he couldn’t use Douglas as a port of entry. The Americans would supply Obregón, and we would be back where we were two and a half years ago in the desert of Chihuahua, having to steal every bullet and tortilla. It just didn’t seem possible. But I knew Patton wasn’t lying.

Sergeant Chicken’s orders were to let us go when we reached the city limits. We crossed into Texas over the Borderland Bridge, and the Apache scout watched us disappear down North Mesa Street. There were a few El Pasoans sauntering along the sidewalks in the cool evening air, but when we came clopping into view they ducked into the nearest doorway or behind parked cars. I couldn’t blame them—we were a ragged, barbarous trio, and Rodolfo’s face, peering up over the sideboard of the wagon, looked like the joker’s in a pack of cards.

We brought him straight to Hipólito’s house, and I pounded on the door. Hipólito came out, jowly and red-eyed, wearing an undershirt, his paunch hanging over baggy duck trousers. He didn’t look like the man I had known.

“Tomás! But this is good! And these other two!
Madre de Dios!
It must be Christmas! What do you bring me, a wagonload of pulque?”

“A wagonload of Rodolfo Fierro.”

An hour later Fierro was in a dimly lit little hospital on Third Street in Little Chihuahua. The doctor said he could save the leg, since gangrene hadn’t yet appeared. There was nothing we could do after that except go back to Montana Street, where Mabel Silva brewed coffee and fried some chickens, and Hipólito told us all he knew.

A conference on the so-called “Mexican problem” had been held in Washington, attended by the foreign ministers of all interested parties. Carranza’s envoys hadn’t been invited, but they came anyway and hung around to assure the delegates that Don Venus would guarantee the property rights of foreigners under his new regime. It sounded like Porfirio Díaz all over again.

The only one who raised any fuss was General Hugh Scott, but no one listened. Felipe Angeles had never managed an interview with President Wilson. The American people were fed up with the Mexican rumbling and more interested in who was slaughtering whom in Europe.

On October 19 Wilson recognized Carranza as the de facto leader of his country. Patton was right. With the stroke of a pen, we had all been made outlaws.

“It’s what Wilson always wanted to do,” Hipólito said, “ever since my brother murdered that Englishman. But naturally, being a politician, Mr. Wilson couldn’t do it as long as Pancho looked to be the next president. After our garrison surrendered in Juárez, he decided that the tide had turned for good … at least, that’s what he thinks. Don Venus is back in the capital. Obregón controls the rest of the country. What’s left to us? A few pueblos, just like the old days.”

He hawked, spat neatly into a brass cuspidor, then turned to Candelario. “What are our chances in Sonora? Don’t lie to me … not too much, anyway. I need some good news.”

“We hold the Pulpito,” Candelario declared. “We’ve got nearly nine thousand men. If we win at Agua Prieta, we’ll take all of Sonora. You know your brother—he’ll never give up. He always has a plan.” Candelario’s tone turned a little cruel. “What are you worried about? You’re not going to fight. You haven’t fought in a year. You’ve lost your casinos, but you must be a rich man by now. Enjoy your good life here in Texas.”

Hipólito’s face darkened at the insult. But then a sheepish smile spread over his pudgy features.

“If that were true,” he said, “we’d be drinking champagne instead of tequila. I made a lot of money but I gambled too often at Touché’s.”

“I thought the wheel was rigged,” Candelario said, perplexed. “Couldn’t you read the marks on your own cards?”

“Pancho said the purpose of the revolution was to correct such abuses.” Hipólito laughed. “I corrected them, and the house percentage killed me. I’ll go to Sonora with you and fight.”