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

by Clifford Irving

  Pancho Villa detached Candelario and the Yaqui boys westward, mounted, with the mules and rifles, to Ascensión. The rest of us headed south, deeper into the desert of Chihuahua. We wandered past gutted pueblos, populated only by old crones, gaunt men, children naked in the dust. The dust was everywhere—in your hair, up your nostrils and between your teeth. As soon as the sun set like a blast furnace behind the hulking mountains, the chill struck at our bones. We wrapped ourselves in serapes up to the ears, like mummies, while the horses shivered on the picket line. Dawn came. We set out again, hunting for some stray scrawny hen or even a prairie dog. On the roads, little more than wide tracks, we passed heaps of stones topped by crude wooden crosses to commemorate some violent death. It might have taken place yesterday or a century ago. There was no telling.

  A few ragged men rode up out of the shimmering heat haze to join us. Toward late afternoon we would see small patrols of Federals, dark figures cutting a trail of white dust through the desert, but we avoided each other. I wondered what Villa was accomplishing, until it got through to me that his purpose at this stage was simply to recruit and spread word of his presence throughout Chihuahua, before we settled down to training, or whatever we would do, in Ascensión.

  Sure enough, when we reached a place called El Progreso, fifty campesinos from the nearby haciendas, men and beardless boys alike, were gathered at the edge of town to join us. Most of them were armed with only machetes. “Don’t be killed!” their women wailed. The boys cheered—they might have been marching off to a Sunday baseball game. Then in San Lorenzo a gang of nearly two hundred mine workers joined us. Their leader said to Villa, “Señor, we are at your disposal. When can we fight?”

  “Are you prepared to die?” It seemed to be Villa’s favorite question to volunteers.

  “Look at these poor souls,” the man said. Indeed, they were a ragged lot, with swollen bellies and protruding cheekbones. “The mine owners have starved them for a hundred years. Why should they not be prepared to die? They have nothing better to do in life.”

  But they had no rifles. How could they fight? Villa sent them off through the desert toward Ascensión.

  We came upon a thin steer grazing alone among the cactus, pitifully trying to nibble at the dry green spikes. A reata circled above Villa’s head and flew lazily through the dark violet air, looping neatly over the cow’s neck. The animal bellowed weakly, but it could hardly move. Rodolfo Fierro bent from his saddle, with one slash of his machete dropping the beast to the earth in a spray of bright blood. Death seemed to be Fierro’s reason for living. Julio told me that it was said he had once shot a stranger in Chihuahua City to settle a bet on whether a dying man falls forward or backward.

  “And which was it?” I asked.

  A macabre argument raged; no one could remember.

  As darkness fell an unseen horseman passed by, iron spurs ringing.

  Villa sniffed the dry air. “We can’t light a fire. I smell the Federals.”

  Fierro skinned the steer expertly, and the men ripped the meat from the carcass. They ate it raw. I had never believed I could do that, but hunger and a new life change a man’s tastes. “You like it?” Julio asked me, blood staining his narrow jaw. He chewed steadily.

  I grunted something that wasn’t either yes or no.

  “But it’s good for you, especially if you’re going to fight. When the battles start, sometimes we have no time to cook. That’s all we eat. It makes us brave. Are you brave in battle, Tomás?”

  “I’ll find out,” I said, and then began to wonder.

  At yet another dusty pueblo whose name I no longer remember, the black shadow of Candelario Cervantes appeared out of the alkali haze, leading a herd of twenty cattle. The mules and rifles were safe in Ascensión. He and the Yaqui boys had rustled the cattle from a hacienda to the north.

  “Did we do the right thing?” he asked Villa, scratching at the lice in his beard. “They wandered into our path … I couldn’t resist.”

  “You did right, compadre. The function of the rich in this miserable country is to feed the poor.”

  But this gave Villa an idea. He had some of the cows butchered for steaks, and then after the rest of the meat had been salted and hung out to dry in the sun, he detailed a force of men under Candelario to ride a few miles east to the estates of Luis Terrazas, the hacienda owner who was Orozco’s patron. Two days later Candelario’s gang of rustlers returned, driving a herd of nearly two hundred fat beef cattle, whooping like banshees and firing their guns into the air. For a minute Villa looked annoyed—we didn’t have that many bullets to spare. But then he grinned and gave Candelario an embrazo, the obligatory Mexican hug. I think, because he was a peasant himself, he understood the nature of his men better than any regular army general could have done. Aside from eating raw meat, nothing made them feel braver than hearing a little boisterous yelling coupled with the din of their own gunfire, even if their precious bullets were only watering the desert with lead.

  Then Villa explained his notion: Candelario and Hipólito were to take the herd north to Columbus, in New Mexico.

  “Hipólito, do you remember Wentworth, the one who tried to cheat us? He spoke of a man named Felix Sommerfeld. I know this man. He has a partner, another Jew trader named Ravel, who lives in Columbus. They’re in the business of selling rifles and ammunition. We have no money yet, but we have the cattle. Trade for them, Hipólito. Beef for guns. Make a good bargain.”

  Sitting hunched on a cane chair in an adobe hut in a godforsaken pueblo called Espindoleño, Villa wrote out a list of the supplies he needed. Writing didn’t come easy to him, and he gripped the pencil until his knuckles showed yellow. Twice he tore through the paper with the point—not in anger, but because he was pressing so hard, trying to translate his thoughts into these impossibly difficult squiggles. Julio and I were standing nearby, smoking some cigarettes I had rolled from my sack of Bull Durham.

  With the smoke wafting past his nose, Villa’s concentration broke. He looked up and saw me. Then his eyes widened.

  “Madre de Dios! It must have been providence that sent you to me, Tomás.” Smiling wonderfully, showing all his red-stained teeth, he thrust the note at me. “Translate this into English, and write it out neatly.” He wrapped an arm around my shoulder and moved me outside into the sunlight. “Can I trust you?”

  I wondered exactly what he meant by that, remembering with considerable unease how he had punished Wentworth for a breach of trust. So I thought it prudent to show some enthusiasm.

  “You can trust me,” I said. “I’ll never lie to you again. I’m on your side.”

  “I believe that. I want to tell you how I’m going to win the revolution, so you won’t think I’m some kind of Moses wandering in the desert, waiting for God to give him a new set of commandments. Look at this map.”

  We bent down and he dropped it in the dust between us, smoothing out the wrinkled edges. There was Mexico spread before me, from its long northern border with the United States, through the high central plateau and Mexico City, then narrowing and swinging east to the Yucatán peninsula. Pancho Villa couldn’t read, but he had studied the map so often that he knew the shapes of the names as well as the veins on his brown hand.

  “Here we are,” he said, pointing, “in the desert of Chihuahua. Carranza is to the east in Coahuila, with General Pablo González. Obregón, who is also on our side, is in Sonora, to the west. Zapata’s near Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City, in the state of Morelos. Those are the leaders of the revolution. The Federals and the Redflaggers, unfortunately, are everywhere—we’re like little islands in an unfriendly ocean. So the first thing to do is consolidate our forces, which is what I intend to do when we reach the pueblo of Ascensión.”

  His own objective, he explained, would be to gain control of the state of Chihuahua. To do that he would have to achieve three things: control of the main north-south railroad line that meandered all the way from Juárez on the border to Mexico City on the
high plateau, the capture of the major industrial cities of Torreón, Chihuahua City and Zacatecas; and finally the capture of Juárez itself.

  “The railroad is the key,” he went on, “because not only will we cut the link between Mexico City and Huerta’s garrisons in the north, but we’ll be able to move freely on it. And Juárez is the prize, because then we’ll have a port of entry for arms and supplies from the United States.”

  Once he controlled Chihuahua, he said, Mexico City would collapse like a piece of soft fruit between a hammer and an anvil, with Zapata in his small southern base of Morelos playing the part of the anvil.

  “And then,” he grinned at me, “the revolution will be won. Don Venus Carranza will be interim chief of state, we’ll elect a new president and maybe we can live happily ever after. What do you think of my plan?”

  “I think you need a big army, and rifles, and bullets, and maybe even some machine guns and artillery. And a lot of luck.

  “Good, Tomás!” He looked pleased, as if I had said something brilliant. “That’s what I think too. And that’s why I’ve given you this list. I want you to go to Columbus with Candelario and my brother. After you’ve translated it, give the list to the Jews. Tell them, if they ask, that I wrote it out myself—it’s best they don’t think I’m a barbarian.” He considered for a moment, squinting into the sun. “There are two gringo generals at Fort Bliss. Their names are Scott and Pershing. This Jew, Felix Sommerfeld, knows them both. Find out from him what they think of me, and if that pig Orozco is in touch with them. Go to El Paso if it’s necessary. Hipólito will give you the money. Is all that clear to you?”

  I nodded gravely, delighted with his trust.

  “And get rid of that fucking blind nag I wished on you. Tell Candelario to give you a decent horse.”

  Candelario found a big chestnut that belonged to one of the mine workers. He was twelve or thirteen years old and stood over fifteen hands high, with a good topline and heavily muscled hindquarters. I took the ring bit out of his mouth, slipping in a hackamore to keep him from getting cold-jawed, and I could see he appreciated it. Within an hour we had provisioned ourselves with water and jerked beef, and we set out with the herd for New Mexico—a trip that would introduce the next piece in the new jigsaw of my life. But if the first huge angular piece was Villa, this next shape—rounder by far; you might say, an hourglass figure—connected at only one narrow bridge. And it would bring me an entirely different sort of trouble for the next two years.

  The chaparral slashed my cheeks, and the cholla cactus pricked my legs and gashed the chestnut’s flanks, but he stepped along with a natural fox trot and I hardly ever had to tickle him with my spurs. Candelario quickly found out I knew more about trail driving than he did, and so he and I were the point riders while the Yaqui boys rode swing and Hipólito drew the disagreeable job of riding drag, getting the dust of the whole herd kicked into his teeth. His good blue suit was a mess. The rippling line of mountains seemed to march beside us—gray, forbidding, desolate beyond a man’s understanding. The heat turned the land into a cauldron. At night, under diamond-hard stars, coyotes howled like wounded children. I shivered under my serape, rubbing my icy feet together until sleep canceled the pain.

  Just before dusk on the second day out, the chestnut picked up a stone in his shoe and I dismounted to cut it out with a hoof hook. Riding herd here for a single year would kill a good trail horse and burn ten years of weather into a man’s face. Candelario swung down out of the saddle and tromped over to me, boots kicking up pebbles.

  “You look unhappy, Tomás. Are you all right?”

  “Candelario, this is the most godawful place I’ve ever been.”

  “Isn’t it? But let me tell you a story I heard when I was young. When God was busy making the world, He said, ‘I’ll try an experiment. I’ve given some countries rivers—to some I’ve given forests—to others, beautiful women. With this land I’m making now, I’ll give it … nothing!’ You see, God had a sense of humor then. But He repented. Nothing, after all, seemed too harsh a gift. He had to give it something. So He said, ‘I know. I’ll give it rocks. ‘ And He did, and He called it Chihuahua.”

  We trotted through the wilderness toward Columbus …

  Candelario told me how he had lost his eye. He was from Camargo, a town south of Chihuahua City, and although he had been brought up on a ranch he began working in a potash mine when he was eleven. A twelve-hour day, six days a week. His father was a foreman there, and his mother, when she wasn’t in the final day of a pregnancy, sold tacos on the street. She had sixteen children, ten of whom had lived.

  The unlucky ones, as she would say. My father, naturally, was deeply in debt, and the debt fell on his sons as well. One day when I was fifteen I came home and my father told me I was betrothed. My bride was to be my cousin Annabella, who was pregnant. ‘Not by me,’ I protested. He knew that, and she had been a maid at the hacienda, so it was all fairly clear. I married Annabella and we had our first child, a daughter. There was a fee due to the church at the time of the marriage, then another one at the christening. I couldn’t pay it, so it was paid for me by the hacienda owner, and my debt kept growing.”

  “Why didn’t you just quit?” I didn’t tell him that in the past it had been my specialty.

  “Under the dictator, Tomás, if you ran away from a job or debt, you could be shot on sight. There was even a bounty to whoever brought you in. I was a slave until my twenty-seventh year. My mind as well as my body. Asleep! The revolution awakened me.”

  As soon as word spread of Madero’s uprising, Candelario joined a local brigade. He knew how to ride, but he learned to shoot only after he slit a Federal officer’s throat with a machete and stole his rifle. When his own captain was killed near Tecolete, the brigade was given to Pancho Villa. Camped outside Juárez, the little revolutionist army was eager to fight, and Villa sent a patrol upriver to draw fire from the defenders.

  “I was in that patrol,” Candelario recalled. “I was shot in the face, and the bastards left me there. I dragged myself to the riverbank and then passed out. I assumed I was dead. It’s a strange feeling, hard to describe. Not truly unpleasant. But Villa had seen all this through his field glasses, and he knew I still lived. He sent Julio out to get me. So I owe my life to them both. I lost an eye—the bullet cracked it like an egg—but I was very lucky. And a one-eyed man, they say, brings good luck wherever he goes.”

  It was in that same battle that Julio’s young wife had been captured near the railroad station and then shot.

  “Poor Julio! He had married for love, which is often a mistake but in this case seemed to work. He is a serious man, and religious, although I don’t know how a revolutionist can believe in sin and Jesus and the rest of that shit the Church forces down your throat. Anyway, since she died he won’t touch another woman.”

  Candelario sighed, and then his good eye sparkled powerfully, making the glass one look even deader than usual. “I, Tomás, am just the opposite. Sometimes I feel cursed. I can’t do without women, and I think of them all the time. When I ride, when I eat, when I try to sleep—why, even when I’m fucking one, I’m already thinking of the next one I’m going to fuck! Isn’t that a curse? I love them too much. Perhaps that’s my fate.” He cast a quick look at me to see if I was scandalized. “I hope you won’t be offended by this, but I like the gringo women above all. Their skin excites me. And among the gringos, especially the yellow-haired ones. The chief won’t touch a woman who doesn’t look like Moctezuma was her grandfather, but those blond pussies drive me wild, even if I know the bitches have dyed them.” His tongue flicked across his lips. “Hipólito says there’s a whorehouse near Columbus that has two blond sisters. They’re famous. They come from New Orleans and have French blood. We’ll see Do you crave women, Tomás?”

  If he knew how little experience I’d had with them, he would have laughed at me, and I didn’t want that. But I was saved by the bawling of a cow that had become tangled in the
chaparral. I trotted off to help her, and so Candelario was forced to wait for his answer. But not too long.

  The United States Cavalry had set up shop on the western edge of Columbus, in the state of New Mexico. When we crossed the border we gave their pup tents and pine barracks a wide berth and brought the herd in well to the east, where we bedded it down behind some small buttes that humped up from the desert. The morning was hot, and there wasn’t enough grass there to chink between the ribs of a sand fly. Carrion crows wheeled lazily in a faultless blue sky.

  Hipólito Villa, in charge now that we had reached our destination, decided to ride into town right away and start negotiations with the Jews.

  “You have my brother’s list, Tomás?”

  I tapped the breast pocket of my denim shirt where I kept my dwindling sack of Bull Durham. We rode off on the yellow plain, Hipólito in his dusty suit, with Candelario waving goodbye and chewing his lips thinking of the French whores.

  Columbus was a recently built New Mexican cowtown of little importance and perhaps three hundred souls. Trying to make something of it, the good citizens had built a few hotels and a movie theater, and Hipólito told me there was a gambling emporium next to the whorehouse on the road that led north to Deming. It was a sorry place, and I had seen a dozen like it stretching from El Paso to Brownsville Old Glory drooped over the depot of the El Paso & Southwestern Railroad, and riding up the main street, which these optimistic settlers had called Broadway, I spotted a Woolworth’s and a Popular Dry Goods, and the theater, which was charging twenty cents admission to see Mabel Normand in Race for Life. The desert stretched like a flat brown carpet in all directions. Hipólito disappeared into the Commercial Hotel to find his man.

  Ten minutes later we were sitting in Peache’s Lunch Room at a big table with a red-and-white-checked cloth, spooning up split-pea soup and making small talk with Felix Sommerfeld and Samuel Ravel. I liked both of them, which surprised me, because I’d never had anything to do with Hebrews before and had been brought up believing they all wore little black caps and had beaks that touched their chins. Sommerfeld looked much as Fierro had described him—a white-faced frog—but to be more exact, and kind, he was a man of about fifty with a hairless face, a relaxed smile and two keen pale blue eyes that gleamed from behind gold-rimmed glasses. When he laughed, his belly rippled under his white linen suit and his watch chain jingled. He was never without a Murad cigarette in his hand, and the fat pink fingers were stained brown right up to the knuckles.