him.”
“What was he wearing?”
“He was dressed like a priest. That’s what fooled me. I saw a pistol under his cassock. Do priests carry pistols?”
That settled it. The officer shouted to his men. They let go of the frightened Indian woman and rushed out into the street, kicking up dust as they ran for the Tivoli.
Quickly I took the woman’s arm and pressed two dimes into her hand. It was all the change I had, but it would buy her tortillas for the week.
“Go, señora, please. You’re safe now. But you’d better scoot before they come back.”
I followed her down the alley until she caught up with her crippled son. She snatched his hand. With a weak nod of thanks, she vanished. Why should she thank me? If I had saved her from the soldiers, my presence had brought them down on her in the first place. But I had no more time to reflect on it; when I reached the end of the alley the swinging doors of a cantina creaked open and the brim of a sombrero peered over the wooden slats. A hot sun flooded the alley and the street, and the face of the man beneath the sombrero was in the blackest shade. From inside the cantina, which was called La Princesa, came the tinny music of an automatic piano playing a Mexican song. I began to hurry by.
“Tomás…”
A hand reached out. It gripped my arm, yanking me abruptly through the doors.
“Hey!”
“Tomás! It’s me, Julio Cárdenas. Don’t you remember me?”
The gritty little cantina was hazed with cigarette smoke. At the back, near the slot machine, two bedraggled whores huddled over a bottle of tequila. I peered into a pox-pitted face that looked as if someone had mistaken its owner for a coyote and fired both barrels. The eyes were dark and intelligent, and the mouth had a sour downturn that made it look as if the man had been weaned on a pickle.
“Sure, I remember you,” I said. “In fact, I came over here to hunt you down, but you’re a hard man to find. Good old Julio! How the hell are you?”
“Well enough. Now, what happened in the street with the soldiers?”
Julio Cárdenas was a thin man of about twenty-five. Another man—huge, ugly, black-bearded and fierce-looking—slouched against the bar by Julio s side. I told them what had happened, and they glanced at each other. The big man chuckled hoarsely—he understood immediately—but Julio was more serious.
“Is it true, Tomás? Is it possible? Did you see Pancho Villa?”
“Are you kidding? I didn’t even see a priest. I made it all up. What’ll you have to drink, Julio? I quit the rodeo. Let’s get drunk.”
He shook his head at my offer. I noticed they were drinking orange soda pop. With the shutters closed against the heat it was dark in the cantina. I took an even closer look and realized that he and his large friend were wearing trail boots and spurs, their bandoliers were filled with cartridges and big horse pistols were stuffed into their belts. That wasn’t something to remark about: everyone in Old Mexico had gone armed for as long as I could remember, but there was something about these two, some kind of wary excitement, that made me rein up for a minute. They seemed a trifle nervous too, and kept glancing over my shoulder into the street.
“Julio, enlighten me. I ask for you, and your mama treats me like a leper. You’re hanging around in a bar drinking soda pop. The town’s full of Federals with machine guns, and they tell me that Pancho Villa is in Juárez. What’s going on? Is the goddam revolution starting all over again?”
“You don’t know what’s happened?” he asked, narrowing his dark eyes.
“Hombre, if I knew I wouldn’t ask. And I don’t even want to ask,” I added, “if it’s going to rub your fur the wrong way.”
I knew enough to be closemouthed around Mexicans when they were drunk, which was often, and I had an idea it might be wise to shut up completely when they were dead sober, which was practically unheard of.
“I thought you knew,” Julio said, “because you tricked the soldiers. It’s true. Pancho Villa is here in Juárez. He was hiding in Texas, but he crossed the border after he heard President Madero was assassinated by Huerta. That pig, Huerta, sent Villa into exile before it happened.”
“So what’s Pancho Villa going to do about it?” I asked. “Will he fight Huerta now?”
“Fight? Of course he’ll fight. Who else is there to do it? Do you think Carranza can fight? Villa will fight, and Villa will win.”
Pancho Villa was a name to stir men’s hearts, but at the time he was more of a myth to me than a reality. His real name was Francisco—Pancho was just a nickname—and his name before that had been Doroteo Arango, back in Durango before the hacienda owner’s son raped his sister (or so they said by the campfires) and young Doroteo killed him and bowlegged off into the sierra at the age of fifteen to take his new name and become a bandit.
But anything I tell you won’t make much sense unless you know what had been going on in Mexico since I had been born, and for a long time before that.
It was March of 1913, as I’ve said, when I walked—or was yanked—into that cantina, and for years Mexico had been ruled by one man, Porfirio Díaz, whom they had called “The Iron Hand.” He kept the peace with the aid of the Federal army and the red-jacketed rurales, his licensed thieves who pretended to be police. Diaz made a few people very rich and a lot of people very poor and miserable, which is a system you would think the majority would refuse to tolerate for very long, but from what I had read in my history books it had been successful in a great many countries for centuries. Three years ago, in 1910, Diaz had just celebrated his eightieth birthday when that scholarly little fellow, Francisco Madero, rallied the people and started a revolution.
Men either loved Madero or considered him a jackass. The fighting lasted about a year, and it could have gone either way except that Diaz developed a toothache, lost part of his jaw to a quack dentist and finally, in terrible pain, left the country on a German steamship. He took up residence in Paris, where the good dentists are. Madero was elected president.
Madero was an honest man, but apparently a man had to be more than honest in order to govern Mexico. The revolutionary generals became restless. One of them, a former mule driver named Pascual Orozco, sold out to the northern cattle barons, defecting with six thousand former rurales. Madero’s chief general, Victoriano Huerta, a bullet-headed, brandy-drinking Indian who boasted that his closest friends were named Martell and Courvoisier, ordered the little president confined in the national palace for his own safety.
A few nights later Madero was taken out and shot. Huerta assumed the presidency. Orozco became his commanding general.
As for Pancho Villa, when the revolution had first begun back in 1910, he decided to fight for it rather than against it—banditry, I suppose, already being a kind of natural opposition to property and the status quo. Villa was different from most of the mountain gunmen in that he came to be a true believer in the cause and a devoted follower of the one they loved to call, with weepy affection, “the little Señor Madero.” Pancho collected his share of scalps and medals, rose to the rank of colonel and won a big battle right here in Juárez, which made him famous. After Madero was elected president he retired, but then he got into trouble with General Huerta for stealing a horse from some rich hacienda owner.
At the last minute a telegram from President Madero called off his execution, and Pancho was thrown into prison in Mexico City. Disguised as his own lawyer, he escaped and made his way through the mountains to exile in El Paso. He had been there ever since, until Madero was assassinated two months ago.
If there was any revolution still drawing breath, I had heard it was led by a new star named Venustiano Carranza, an older gentleman with a distinguished white beard parted in the middle and blue-tinted spectacles that hid his eyes. He was east of here in the state of Coahuila, and there was another independent revolutionist general to the west named Alvaro Obregón.
Confusing? Sure. No American could follow the ins and outs of Mexican politics. The c
hiles killed each other off so fast you didn’t know from one day to the next who was on top and who was six feet under.
“Does Villa have an army?” I asked Julio, in that smoky Juárez bar. “Is he going to join up with Carranza?”
“Venustiano Carranza!” Julio snorted with disdain. “We call him ‘Don Venus.’ He smells of scent and he drinks chocolate with his pinky in the air. He makes proclamations, but he does nothing. And he has no cojones. “
That was about the worst thing you could say of a man in Mexico, that he had no balls.
“Well,” I said, “they tell me that Pancho Villa has plenty of cojones. Can’t he lend one or two to Don Venus, so they can lick Huerta and Orozco together?”
Julio’s vexed expression softened a bit, and the huge man behind him smiled at me with broken white teeth out of a bearded face the color of burnt toast. He murmured something that I didn’t catch. A random shaft of sunlight touched his face. Something glittered. I realized he had only one good eye and the other one was glass. He had the kind of brutal mien that you would describe to little kids if you wanted to scare them into eating their porridge. Finally he laid a thick hand on Julio’s shoulder and rumbled, “We have to go. That other one’s not going to show up.”
Julio said, “Tomás, it was pleasant to see you again. What you did in the street for that woman was a good thing. Consider that the revolution owes you a favor.”
“Hang on a minute.” A thought finally wandered into my skull that accounted for their standing in that bar drinking soda pop and the way they kept glancing over my shoulder into the street. “Are you a Villista?” I asked Julio bluntly. “Are you going to meet Pancho Villa?”
Julio started to grin—then murmured, with obvious prudence, “Possibly.”
Looking back now, I can see more than a few times in those years when I made decisions that determined the course of my life. I almost said “… changed my life,” but from this distance I no longer believe that. No doubt I hungered for adventure, sensed big doings, glimpsed glory on the horizon—but there was surely more to it than that. I knew it, and it was never my nature to shy away from new occupations. Saving that Indian woman from the Federal soldiers in front of La Princesa may have begun the chain of events, but I don’t believe now in a fate that falls on men however they act. I believe in a fate that falls on a man unless he acts.
“Take me along,” I said boldly. “If you owe me a favor, I’ll collect it right now. I’d like to meet Pancho Villa.”
The bearded, one-eyed giant butted his jaw out and said, “Who is this boy?” Actually he called me pendejo, which is Mex for a piece of pubic hair. I bristled, but I was in no position to take offense. I introduced myself and so did he, with some reluctance, and we shook hands limply—I taking care not to squeeze too hard, because greasers don’t like that sort of Yankee pressure, having lived with it through most of their history, and simply offer their hand to show you they haven’t got a broken bottle in it.
The giant’s name was Candelario Cervantes. He had already raked me over from topknot to boots and seen I wasn’t armed, and I guess I didn’t have the look of a troublemaker. It’s no easy trick to see yourself as others do, but I’ll try: I was lean and on the tall side, with straight hair, brown eyes and a habit of sticking out my jaw to make it look firmer than it was. A callow youth, you might say, looking to be a man. I didn’t know it then, but Candelario Cervantes would become just about the best friend I’d ever had. I still think about him, and some of the advice he gave me over the next three years still governs my life. But then he had a decision to make too, and everything would have been different if he had decided otherwise. He didn’t. Perhaps, like me, he couldn’t.
Even with his glass eye, he was the boss of this pair. The one good eye gazed at me as if waiting for a message. Then, abruptly, clapping a hairy-knuckled hand on Julio’s shoulder, he grunted his approval. So we left the cantina to take a short walk, and I began the longest journey of my life.
Chapter 2
“The eagle suffers little birds to sing.”
Indian women pounded tortillas in the doorways of scattered huts. Their eyes gazed at us without expression as we tramped through the narrow back streets of Juárez. Naked children played in the dust and the rotting carcass of a dog provided a feast for the buzzards. Candelario Cervantes’ boots rang out merrily with the music of danglers that he had added to the rowel axle of his spurs. Now and then we ducked into alleyways, where he and Julio peered out, pistols drawn, to survey the street—but apparently the Federal soldiers didn’t venture this far from the heart of the city.
After a while we came to a ruined adobe house isolated from view by some stands of cactus and sword plants. Two horses were tethered outside in the unpitying sun. I knew we had reached Pancho Villa’s lair.
A stooping man bulked out of the door; he straightened up, blinking into the glare. He was a fat, olive-skinned fellow who carried a rifle loosely in one hand, and his chest was crisscrossed with two cartridge belts, the brass tips of the bullets glinting in the hot light. What made it unlikely, and odd, was that under the bandoliers he wore a shiny blue business suit, white shirt and black string tie. The man had a large curved nose, bushy brows and mustache, and there was a shrewd look in his brown eyes. He nodded in a friendly manner to Candelario, then jerked his head inquiringly toward me.
“A friend,” Julio said.
That sufficed, and the unlikely fat guard in the business suit stepped aside. We ducked our heads and entered.
The one shadowed room of the hut smelled powerfully of tobacco, gun oil and old sweat. Rifles stood stacked against a wall. There were no chairs, only wooden boxes, a little stone fireplace, some chile peppers hanging from a frayed string, and a cot with a man lying on it. He was in an apparent state of exhaustion, one gorillalike arm dangling to the dirt floor. His eyes were open a crack, and I could swear they gleamed greenly in the darkness, like the eyes of a bobcat surprised in its cave. But he was totally still. He had a bushy reddish-brown mustache over a mouth that drooped open, just as the Federal officer had described, almost as though he were an idiot. His fleshy cheeks were stubbled with beard and his curly brown hair was matted with sweat.
I knew him from the pictures I had seen in the illustrated Sunday supplements in the Herald, except that in the pictures he was always heroically astride a black stallion, flourishing a long-barreled pistol. This was Pancho Villa.
The one dangling hand made a little gesture of welcome. Julio and Candelario hunkered down slowly on their haunches by the side of the cot. That was a Mex trick I’d never learned and didn’t care to learn, priding myself on knowing how to sit like a good American, so I dropped my butt down on one of the wooden boxes, instructing myself to keep my mouth shut and let things lazy along at their own pace.
Pancho Villa hadn’t even acknowledged my presence with a nod, much less asked who I was. He looked like a punchdrunk boxer taking a long count, and I wondered if he was going to drift back to sleep or whatever state of coma he had been in when we jingled and jangled through the door. He didn’t give any sign that he intended to get up from the cot.
“Forgive me,” he murmured to the others. “I’m still in mourning, and therefore I’m not myself. I keep thinking of what happened in Mexico City to the little Señor Madero.” The others made little grunts and mews of sympathy. Villa broke in, his voice rising. “To him,” he said emotionally, “I owe everything.” Remarkably, the catlike green glow in his eyes suddenly blurred with tears. “I was a bandit, and by explaining the revolution to me, he helped to make me a man with some purpose. Such a little fellow … but he had the great heart of a saint! He was a father to me, and he was a scholar. And by God, he had cojones!”
Raising his sleeve from the dirt, he wiped his eyes. Then, like a mountain cat about to pounce, he switched those cold green lanterns on me. He spoke in a hard high-pitched voice.
“You have rifles for me, meester—yes? And bullets?”
<
br /> Rifles? Bullets? I didn’t know what he was talking about. I just gaped.
“This is not the man, jefe,” Julio piped up uneasily. “That other one didn’t show up. The other one’s name is Wentworth. Rodolfo’s crossed the river to find out what’s happened. This is a friend”—and he nodded at me.
“A friend of whose?” Villa demanded, I think annoyed at his mistake.
I decided I had better answer for myself, for there’s no way of telling what Mexicans will do to cover up an embarrassment. I may have been Julio’s youthful friend, but Villa was his jefe, his chief.
“A friend of Julio’s, Mr. Villa,” I said. “And a friend of the revolution.”
Villa allowed himself a narrow, fleeting smile. “But there are many revolutions,” he said calmly. “There was the revolution of Señor Madero, who is dead for his troubles. There is Emiliano Zapata’s revolution—the Plan of Ayala. There is Venustiano Carranza’s revolution—the Plan of Guadalupe. You understand that every revolutionist has a written plan of what he promises to do—all except me. My plan is only in my head, because I don’t know how to write. I’m an illiterate, a buffoon and a killer—according to my enemies.”
He chuckled softly; so did I.
“Now, my young gringo, tell me … of which revolution do you call yourself a friend?”
I was in over my head, but the thrill of sitting there with Pancho Villa, in the flesh, pushed a speech out of me.
“I didn’t know Señor Madero. And I haven’t heard much about Zapata except that he wears a big hat and comes from the south. Huerta sounds like a first-class sonofabitch, and Julio says that Carranza has no balls. So I’m a friend of your revolution … chief. I don’t like the Federals, and I’m not doing anything important right now. If you can use an extra hand in your army, I’d like to join up.”
It was something beyond youth and having nothing better to do with my time that was moving me. There was an air about these men—Pancho Villa particularly—that made me want to be part of what they might do. They had a purpose in life, and I knew already that it had to be a more worthwhile one than mine. They were hardy and dedicated men. I wasn’t—not yet. But I wanted to be.
TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border Page 2
