Sam Ravel, by comparison, was a tall man in his early thirties who wore Cheyenne chaps, calfskin boots and a black Stetson; he had a hawk nose, dark observant eyes and an air about him that made you glad he was on your side rather than against you.
But Felix Sommerfeld, I found out, beneath his plumpness, had plenty of leather as well. They bought the whole herd from us outright, taking our word for it on the count but reserving a look-see to make sure the cattle were healthy and offering a fair price of twenty dollars a head in greenbacks. Over the pea soup I explained to them that we didn’t need cash; it was arms that we wanted. I handed them Villa’s list.^
Felix Sommerfeld studied it. “That seems reasonable, and if there’s a difference either way we’ll sort it out later. When do you need delivery?”
“Right away.”
“Next week’s more likely,” Ravel drawled. He was from San Antonio, and he had put in a few years with the Texas Rangers, which of course didn’t stop him from riding the other side of the fence now that he was a civilian. It gave him advantages too, since he knew whose palm couldn’t be greased and who would take the mordita—the little bite—as the Mexicans lovingly called it.
“What about transport?” I asked.
“We’ll lend you wagons,” Sommerfeld said.
I thought that was friendly of him, and it gave me an idea. I knew how badly Villa needed bullets. “Look, Mr. Sommerfeld,” I said, “we can provide you with a lot more cattle, probably as much as you can handle. It’s wandering loose over half the state of Chihuahua.” I guess they knew that was a lie but didn’t much care. “Why don’t you give us an extra hundred thousand cartridges, and one more machine gun with a hundred belts of ammunition? We’ll deliver the cattle for them in two weeks.”
Sam Ravel turned to Hipólito, who was busy tearing into his fried chicken with one hand and guzzling a cold bottle of Carta Blanca beer with the other. “I need to know,” Ravel asked in Spanish, “if this man speaks for your brother.”
Hipólito wiped grease from his mustache. “Yes, Tomás has my brother’s trust.”
That made me feel wonderful, and Ravel nodded. “All right,” he said, “I can live with the idea of another hundred thousand cartridges and a machine gun on credit.”
They were certainly fine men to do business with.
Toward the end of lunch I hazed the conversation round to matters Villa had wanted me to find out about. “I’ll tell you what you want to know,” Sommerfeld said. “President Wilson doesn’t like Victoriano Huerta, which is an attitude that Sam and I also share, in case it’s escaped your attention. Wilson was appalled by Madero’s murder. That means he won’t allow any American arms to reach Huerta, and he’s given orders to Pershing to seal off the border. That embargo applies to Villa and Carranza too, but it’s a long border. The problem is, Huerta’s being supplied by the Japanese. And I suspect the Germans as well. Did you know that?”
“No, sir.”
“Keep it in mind. Beyond that, Wilson’s most in sympathy with Carranza, because he likes Carranza’s calling himself a Constitutionalist. Isn’t that his title—First Chief of the Constitutionalist Army?”
“That’s what they call him,” I said, “when they’re being polite.”
“What Mr. Wilson knows about Mexico,” Ravel said sourly, “you could stuff into a small taco.”
Understanding the measure of their sympathy, I spoke more freely. “Villa wants to know what the Americans think of him.”
Sommerfeld puffed at his cigarette, puckering his features so that he looked more like a frog than ever. “They think he’s an illiterate bandit, a ruffian, and a hell of a man. And now, young fellow, there’s something I’d like to know. What in the devil are you doing riding with him?”
“He’s going to make me a captain,” I said, chuckling.
“With pay?”
“We haven’t discussed that yet.”
“Haven’t you any other reason?”
I was young. I couldn’t tell him the nature of a young man’s dreams. I said, “It’s a long story.”
Sommerfeld said pleasantly, “You should tell it to my daughter. She likes long stories, and she’s a great admirer of Villa’s revolution.”
‘I’d be glad to, sir”—which was a downright lie, if his daughter looked anything like Felix Sommerfeld.
“She may have a few doubts about Villa,” he explained, “but none about what he stands for. She used to distribute that newspaper for Ricardo Flores Magón. Regeneración, it was called. In fact, she got into a little trouble over in Juárez because of it, but that’s a story she’d have to tell you, and she’s a bit shy about it.”
He may have seen a dulled look in my eye then, because he said, “You know who Flores Magón is, don’t you?”
I nodded my head vigorously. I didn’t want to seem too much of a country bumpkin.
“I see. How about Bakunin and Karl Marx? Do they interest you?’
There was a different tone to Sommerfeld’s voice now, a kind of surgical probing that made me decide not to press my luck.
“No, sir, I never met those two.”
Sommerfeld and Ravel thought that was a witty remark, or at least they laughed good-humoredly, but then they changed the subject. Ravel was taking the evening train, the Drummer’s Special, back to El Paso to arrange the supplies and wagons. He told me that he owned the Commercial Hotel here in Columbus and he would be honored if I’d spend the next few nights as his guest. He said he hoped I wouldn’t t take offense, but I smelled as though I’d been reared in a wolfs den and could use a hot bath, and any man who’d been riding a cattle trail could appreciate a night’s sleep in a feather bed. Clean straw was tempting, but I explained that I didn’t think Candelario and my friend in the blue suit would understand, and I’d bunk down with them on the edge of town where we had sheltered the herd. We all shook hands. I promised Mr. Sommerfeld I’d meet him in the lobby of the hotel at noon the next day, to wind up our paperwork.
When Hipólito and I were riding back to the herd, he loosened his black string tie and began to chuckle.
“What’s so funny?”
“You are, Tomás. Why didn’t you take the hot bath and the bed? The ground is hard. A bed is soft. Maybe he would have found a woman for you. Then you could have told Candelario and driven him mad.
“You understood?” I asked, more than a little surprised. “You speak English?”
“Naturally. When the revolution’s over, I’m going to be a businessman. Did you think I was a peasant like Candelario and the others? The best part of business is to shut up and let someone else do the talking.”
He leaned across his saddle and patted my shoulder, and his fat face creased with a smile. “But you did well, asking for more bullets. I didn’t t think of that. You could be a businessman too. Maybe we’ll be partners. Would that interest you?”
“I wouldn’t mind that at all,” I said, feeling less like a fool than before.
“In that case,” Hipólito said, “make sure you don’t get killed, and then you’ll have a future.”
Chapter 5
“It is the purpose
that makes strong the vow.”
That night, after we had made sure the cattle were snugged down under the watchful eyes of the vaqueros, we trotted out of Columbus on the north road to Deming. Candelario was looking forward to the evening’s entertainment, and he let out a yell that might have made a wolf hunt for cover. But when Hipólito jingled the coins in his leather purse and announced that our first stop was going to be the gambling hall, Candelario’s howl ceased and his head snapped round. His one good eye glared in the moonlight.
“What did I hear you say? You want to gamble before you fuck?”
“I’m feeling lucky,” Hipólito explained.
“You’ll lose all the money! Nothing will be left for the women.”
“If we fuck first,” Hipólito said, “we’ll be too tired to gamble. I’m worn out already. Fucking
makes me sleepier.”
I could hear Candelario’s teeth, like galloping hoofs, grinding and gnashing in his jaw. “Listen, my fat friend,” he sputtered. “Let me enlighten you as to your nature, which you should know already, but apparently you’ve forgotten. You’ll gamble all night until there’s nothing left. If you’re lucky you’ll lose it quickly. And what then? Where should I put my pecker, in my horse’s ear?”
“Whose money is it?” Hipólito demanded.
“It belongs to the revolution.”
“Is the revolution meant to pay for you wallowing in the cunt of some French whore?”
“Is it meant to pay for you at the roulette wheel?”
“Candelario, you’re a peasant. In harder times I may have been a bandit, but in my soul, as I’ve told Tomás, I’m a businessman. I think ahead. I can read the eyes of the men sitting across the poker table from me, and I can see which numbers turn up more frequently on the wheel. Don t worry so much. I’ll win the price of both those whores for the whole night.”
“Then divide the money.”
“There may not be enough,” Hipólito admitted.
“Coño!”
“Imbecile!”
Mad enough to gnaw a gap out of an axe, Candelario leaned across his saddle horn and gripped my arm with fingers that were like iron bars. “Tomás, you decide. But bear this in mind—he plays poker like a Mexican, which means he can’t believe the next card isn’t going to give him a magnificent hand. So he raises every bet. Now, choose! The gambling first, or the women first.” He snarled at Hipólito, “Does that suit you?”
Hipólito leaned close to me too, and the evening breeze brought me a full whiff of him, all stale sweat and cattle and sour river mud. “You’re sensible,” he said. “Never mind that I called you crazy. And you like money. One day you’ll be my partner. You don’t let your cock lead you around by the nose, do you?”
At the time I thought not, so I shook my head.
I said, “You’ll both abide by me?”
“You have my word,” Hipólito said.
“Candelario?”
“Hijo de puta! Should I swear on my mother’s life? For the love of Christ, tell us your decision!”
That whiff of Hipólito had made up my mind. I knew that Candelario and I had to be giving off the same aroma; it would have backed a skunk into a corner.
“Every whorehouse I’ve ever been in has a big tub downstairs,” I said. “That gets my vote. A hot bath first. Then … we’ll see.”
That decision was about as popular as an ulcerated tooth, but they were both men of honor, and after they groused and complained for a while, they finally agreed. Candelario was a shade more warm to it than Hipólito, because he figured it would at least get us inside the whorehouse first, and it did. It was a quiet night, and the only other customers were a couple of beer-sodden troopers up from Camp Furlong.
The iron tub was there, just as I had predicted, and not only was it vacant and full of steaming hot water, but it was big enough for three grown men or other combinations. We stripped down and jumped in. The madam—a Mexican woman named Doña Margarita, who was said to be sympathetic to the revolution—took a quarter from each of us and then extracted a silver dollar for what she claimed was a bottle of genuine scotch whiskey. We passed it back and forth while we soaked in the big tub and discussed the state of our souls. The hot water flowed round my aching hide, smooth as molasses and soothing as a mother s touch. The whiskey heated up my insides, and the bath wrinkled my outsides a ruddy pink.
The bottle of whiskey somehow got to be empty. Another one somehow took its place. Hipólito told us a tale of his youth when he and his brother were bandits in the Sierra Madres.
“…Pancho knew that the cry of the gray dove was a warning that men were near. Usually rurales.…”
His voice began to falter, and soon he started to snore. Candelario had begun a song of the desert, but it faded too. His good eye rolled in his head, and it had no more expression than the one made of glass. He reached for the whiskey bottle outside the tub, but his hand never made it. His snores grew louder than those of Hipólito.
I was headed in that direction, or at least not far behind, when a door opened at one end of the cellar and the body of a handsome blond woman swished by, her yellow head atop a pile of wondrous curves. She nodded in a friendly manner to us in the tub, then took some towels out of a chiffonier at the other end of the room and then flounced back. She wore a skintight blue silk dress, and from the rear, just below her belted waist, it looked like two boar shoats fighting under a wagon sheet. I awoke in a hurry.
“Excuse me, ma’am … señorita …”I cleared my throat of the sour taste of whiskey. “You do work here, don’t you?”
“Yes, chéri. My name is Yvette.”
“Are you from New Orleans, Yvette?”
“ ‘Ow you know that?”
“And you’ve got a sister?”
“Ah … my sister. Oui—si. She is Marie-Thérése.”
“Would you mind waiting a minute while I wake my friend here? There’s some business I know he’d like to discuss with you.”
The blond and curvaceous Yvette was willing, and I shook Candelario until I thought I might rattle the glass eye out of its socket. But all he did was add some grumbles to his snores and finally slide a little farther down into the warm water. Hipólito was equally uncooperative.
“They are not very interested,” Yvette said, smiling. I could see the carved line of her lips beneath the red color. “But what about you, chéri? I am ready, and so is my sister.”
I thought, Get thee behind me, Satan. But if he obliged, all he managed was a hard shove forward. I asked her what we could do about my friends, as I didn’t want them to drown while I was taking my pleasure, and in that lovely French accent she told me not to worry, she would send someone down to keep an eye on them. Anyway, once the water cooled they would wake up. “They always do, mon jeune ami, “ she said sweetly.
You could have hung all her towels on my pecker, and then some, as I followed Yvette upstairs to a second-floor bedroom. Marie-Thérése, almost a twin of her sister, bounced in a little while later to see what all the shouting and thumping was about, but it was only me expressing my feelings, and by then I was so carried away by French ways that I asked her to stay too.
I had scooped up Hipólito’s purse for safekeeping, and around two o’clock in the morning, after I had paid my debt, I limped downstairs to see how my i>compañeros were faring. Some kind soul had hauled them out of the tub and dumped them into a single feather bed where they slept in each other’s arms like two bedraggled, soapy-smelling, large brown angels. But when I shook them back to the world of the living, they had headaches built for elephants. Whatever Doña Margarita poured into those bottles of scotch whiskey surely had never crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Hipólito began to sneeze.
Candelario, as he pulled on his boots and dusty clothes, groaned. “Aaargh … what now?”
“Let’s go home,” Hipólito said, “before I get pneumonia.”
Soon we were mounted and back on the road to Columbus. The sky was solid with stars, and the night had that fine, quivering and thrilling silence that you know only in the desert. It was bitter cold, but I didn’t care. Candelario finally spoke. His voice was hoarse and sad.
“Tomás, I wish to ask you a question.”
“Go ahead.” But I was on my guard.
“Have you no shame?”
I explained that I had tried my best to wake him up, and I had a witness in Yvette. But he had passed out cold.
“You weren’t drunk, Tomás?”
“Certainly I was drunk.”
“Ah,” he said sadly, “you’re younger than we are. In that way, life is cruel.” The horses’ hoofs clopped along the road, raising puffs of unseen dust. “And so now tell me what happened.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything, hombre! First of all, who did you fuck? Did you
find either of the Frenchwomen?”
I admitted I’d found Yvette first.
“First? Son of a whore, don’t torture me like that! Am I not your friend? Don’t we ride together for Pancho Villa? I want to know everything!”
As best I could, I told him how I had pranged Yvette, and then Marie-Thérése. I could hear his teeth gnashing again, so I kept the detail to a minimum, but that wasn’t good enough for him.
“How many times, hombre? Válgame Dios, be honest.”
“Yvette twice. And then Marie-Thérése … let’s see, once, I guess.”
“Ya te chingaste!—now you’ve fucked yourself! You’re lying! Did you hear that, Hipólito? Three times, he says! By the Virgin, that’s not possible, not in your condition, in that short a time!” He growled, twisting his head toward me—but then he gave a mighty groan and gripped the pommel of his saddle to keep from falling off.
I told him I wasn’t lying, but I decided I had better leave out the last part where both women had bent on their knees, coaxing my pecker out of its doldrums and putting it between their two sets of lips to torture the last drop of jizzum out of me. He would never have believed it.
“And did they moan and groan a lot? Did they tell you they were dying? Which one was better? Describe their breasts and their private parts, Tomás. I need to know.”
“Let him be,” muttered Hipólito.
“What for? Should I be sorry for him? I’m the one who got nothing! Except you, you hairy oaf! Farting beside me in the bed, while he was upstairs fucking his brains out!” He addressed himself to me again. “So? Will you tell me?”
TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border Page 6
