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

by Clifford Irving

  “Hannah … we can’t!”

  “Can’t what?” she gasped.

  “Do that . .

  “We’re not doing that.…”

  “Stop it, Hannah!”

  Her mouth closed over mine like a hot oven. Her hand grabbed my pecker right through my pants. She bucked and twisted, her body jerking like some poor soul in the midst of an epileptic fit.

  And then she cried out: “Oh, God … Tom!” Her teeth hooked into my lower lip, drawing blood. In the grip of her hand I went off like a Mexican cannon, all spurt and no target in sight.

  “Hannah!”

  She was purring over me like a cat that’s just lapped up a stolen saucer of sweet milk, and the stain that spread halfway down to my knee didn’t seem to bother her at all. I was ready to apologize once I got my breath back and could unfasten my lip from her teeth, but I never got the chance. She nibbled at me for a while, and her own breathing eased halfway back to normal, and then she was telling me that she loved me. It was the first time she had ever said it.

  “I love you too, Hannah.”

  “Tom … say it again.”

  I did. We smooched for a while, then I excused myself and went to the bathroom and wiped my slippery pants as best I could with a bandanna. I was in a daze, and so worn out that I would have had to lean against a building to spit. When I wandered back to the living room Hannah had rearranged herself and brushed her hair. In the lamplight she looked beautiful, aglow like a sunflower. She threw herself into my arms as if she wanted to squeeze the tallow out of me, and I gave as much—though not as good—as I got.

  A few minutes later she whispered, “You’re not just leading me on, are you, Tom?” Her voice was shyer, huskier, than before. “We will get married, won’t we?”

  “Of course,” I said stoutly. “I want that more than anything.”

  And so when I left El Paso the Monday following, I was engaged, although we agreed not to tell anyone until the revolution was over and I had gone into business with her father or Hipólito.

  But how long would that take? We still hadn’t fought anything like a real battle; Casas Grandes was too small to count. Good God, we didn’t even have an army! I suddenly wondered if Pancho Villa was only a dreamer—I knew there were men like that, who can plan marvelously but never do. And even if he could do, that other big question remained. Could he win?

  “How soon?” I badgered Hipólito on the ride back. “When will we fight?”

  “Be patient,” he said. “Aren’t you having a good time? Pancho knows what he’s doing. We need more men, and then we need to train them. And we can’t blood a new army in the rain. When the rains are over, in September, we’ll attack.”

  I yelped. “September! That’s three months from now! Listen, Hipólito, I didn’t join up with the revolution to. sit on my ass in Ascensión and run up to Texas to trade cattle and silver. It’s dull. I want action. I want to fight!”

  “You’ll see plenty of fighting,” he said quietly. “More than you like. And the day will come when you’ll wish you were sitting on your ass in Ascensión in the rain, and think that trading cattle and silver is heaven on earth.”

  Worn out from crossing the desert, Hipólito and I reached the camp to find that two emissaries from Carranza had also arrived. One was called Manuel Chao, a heavy-lidded, bucktoothed man; the other was a dapper little fellow named Jesús Acuña, a lawyer. When we went round to Villa’s house to give our report, they were there, dressed in natty suits and bow ties, sweating in the afternoon heat.

  Villa’s appearance momentarily startled me, because he had put on a badly frayed and shiny brown suit which looked as if it had been hauled out of a ten-year-old trunk—wrinkled, dusty and coffee-stained. He smelled as usual from meat and tobacco. Hipólito had told me his brother had never owned a toothbrush in his life, just scrubbed his teeth occasionally with a finger dipped in salt. But that reddish color came from the iron oxide in the soil of northern Durango, where he had been born.

  The conversation was already well under way when I poked my nose in, and from what Acuña was saying I gathered that it was the desire of the First Chief that all revolutionist forces in the state of Chihuahua be placed under the command of General Obregón over in Sonora. Carranza had great faith in Obregón, and he was sure that Villa shared it.

  Villa chewed that over, in his sleepy way, and finally nodded.

  “Yes, I know of this General Obregón. Of course, it’s only lately that he’s become a general, thanks to the First Chief’s appointment. I’m trying to remember … did General Obregón offer his services to Señor Madero back in 1910, when the revolution began?”

  “Obregón controls the state of Sonora,” Chao explained. “Things are peaceful there. In Chihuahua there’s nothing but ferment and Federal troops.”

  “And me, señor. There is also me.”

  Acuña coughed discreetly. “Señor Villa, the First Chief wishes to formally confer upon you the rank of brigadier general.”

  “In time,” the chief said, wonderfully casual in the face of this news. “Meanwhile, Obregón. Ah … yes, now I remember! During the revolution of the little Señor Madero, he was a farmer! In Huatabampo, as I recall, raising chickpeas. Chickpeas sold pretty well. Has he won any battles lately?

  “Sonora is quiet,” Acuña said.

  “Has Señor Carranza won any battles lately in Coahuila?”

  “The First Chief is not a general. He is a lawmaker. He has no army. He has only his ideals, his unchallenged rectitude, and the loyalty of those who acknowledge him as First Chief.”

  “And no one is more loyal that I,” Villa replied fervently. “But in case it’s escaped your attention, I have won battles in the past for Señor Madero. I have a little army now here in Ascension, and I command it, and I shall win battles in the future. So until the day that there’s someone who does more than sit on his ass in Sonora, I’ll keep command here. I accept the First Chief’s excellent Plan of Guadalupe—which doesn’t say much that’s new but certainly offends no one—and with all due respect I ask the First Chief to keep his snout out of my trough if he ever wants to become President of Mexico, which he says he doesn’t, but you know how these things happen. Please excuse my rough language, because I’m only a peasant turned soldier. And try to understand that there isn’t anything on earth I wouldn’t do for the First Chief, except let him tell me how to go about my business.”

  Acuña coughed again; he adjusted his necktie. “It will be discussed further, I assure you, Señor Villa, and we’ll report your recommendations word for word.” He coughed. “There’s another matter that the First Chief asked us to bring up. He’s very upset by stories he’s heard about your men taking women from their homes and forcing them to stay in Ascensión. And he’s equally upset about the theft of so much cattle in the state of Chihuahua. It gives the revolution a bad name. Complaints reach the United States, and we need badly to keep the friendship of their President Wilson.”

  “One thing at a time, señores.” Villa raised his fat brown hand with its broken fingernails. “First, the women. I’ve never met the illustrious First Chief, as you know, but I understand he’s been married for many years to the same woman and is a man of temperance in all respects. On the other hand, it’s well known that I’ve had more than one wife. Let me add, without meaning to boast, as it’s strictly a matter of taste, that I’ve had some experience with women in general—perhaps more than the First Chief—and it’s my observation that you rarely can take a woman under your serape with you unless she’s willing. The women of Chihuahua, they say, are born with their legs already spread. What can my poor soldiers do when these hungry creatures thrust themselves so eagerly upon their cocks? It’s too much to ask, Señor Acuña, that they should say no. Could you? No, don’t answer—that was my little joke.”

  Here his voice hardened a bit. “And now I want to talk to you about the cattle. The cattle, señor, belonged to the enemies of the revolution—the landown
ers. So it is not theft, but warfare. Besides, they are traded for guns with which to fight Huerta. This need not be discussed further.” He took a shallow breath. “As for President Wilson, I’m given to understand by my young American friend here, Señor Mix, that although Mr. Wilson occasionally thinks of me as an illiterate bandit and a ruffian, he also thinks I’m a fine fellow, and he’s considering inviting me soon to his house in Washington for tea and tacos—which of course I won’t be able to do because I’m going to be too busy taking Torreón and Juárez. Isn’t that so, Tomás?” And he turned on me, without so much as the hint of a smile.

  I didn’t hesitate. “Yes, chief. That’s what I just heard in El Paso.”

  Returning his attention to Chao and Acuña, Villa said, “You may tell Señor Carranza that I respect his struggle to keep order. The First Chief knows where his strength lies. In return I ask him to respect my struggle, which is the winning of the revolution. He should be informed that with our victory at Casas Grandes the revolution has truly started. I invite him to be its most illustrious spectator. For that he doesn’t even have to leave Coahuila. We’ll let him know when we’ve taken Mexico City, and he may enter in triumph.”

  When the emissaries finally left, after promising to provide some badly needed artillery pieces, Villa shucked off his brown jacket, slung it on the dirt floor and collapsed on the bed, head drooping and held between his hands.

  “When they arrived,” he said gloomily, “they sniffed as if they were in a pigpen, and they looked me up and down as if I were the head pig. Nothing good came of this meeting. But maybe they’ll leave me alone now and let us win the war.”

  He looked up eagerly. “Tomás, did you bring my peanut brittle?”

  Chapter 7

  “The web of our life

  is of a mingled yarn.”

  At first they drifted into Ascensión in pairs, then by the dozens—then whole mounted bands under their own commanders, all of whom knew Villa, had heard of his return from Texas and were prepared to swear their allegiance to his cause. From one day to the next, or so it seemed, the ragtag mob of volunteers became an army.

  Four hundred men arrived from Coahuila, another five hundred from Chihuahua City, another three hundred from San Luis Potosí. A gang of hungry, sullen brigands appeared from the wilds of Sonora under the command of a bandit chieftain named Calixto Contreras; they looked as if they would cut your throat for the fun of it and to hell with the going rate of ten pesos.

  The leaders, I learned—somewhat to my surprise—had all fought for Madero in 1910. The first among these equals was Tomás Urbina, a former bandit and Villa’s oldest pal, who rode in from Durango with six hundred of his men, well armed and well mounted on those hard mustangs that breed wild in the sierra. Urbina was a stocky man of forty, with a big mustache and small animal eyes that never quite focused on you. From so many years of outlawry, spending his winters in the damp caves of the western Sierra Madres, he had developed a rheumatism that kept him in constant pain. He was illiterate, as were quite a few of the revolution’s commanders. He made his mark by drawing a heart with a small bullet hole in its center. It seemed appropriate. He traveled with a branding iron, and wherever he went he would cut out a few choice calves, brand them and send them back to his mother in Durango. He carried three magnificent general’s uniforms that his mother had sewed for him and that he planned to wear when we rode into Mexico City, and a twelve-gallon jug of aguardiente that was never empty.

  Candelario told me that Urbina had wanted to bring his mother along with him on the campaign, but she had refused. “Whenever he gets drunk,” he explained, “he tries to shoot her.” But Candelario never told me why. Matricide being impossible at a distance, Urbina dictated telegrams to her which always read, in one version or another: “Sainted Mother, I am well despite my damned rheumatism. I pray for your safety and continued good health whenever I am sober. Your loving son, Tomás Urbina.”

  Villa at this time was closest to Urbina and Rodolfo Fierro. They smoked fat black cigars together, and when he toured the camp he would drape a long arm around Rodolfo’s shoulder and say, “Well, my animal, how does it look? Does it smell right?”‘

  But Pancho Villa trusted no one totally. When it grew dark he would wrap himself in a serape and walk out of town to bed down in the desert, making a pillow of stones. At dawn he always returned from an entirely different direction. He had the instincts of a hunted cat.

  It was a difficult time, that summer of 1913, because we all hungered for action. Villa had already announced that his first real target was the city of Torreón, five hundred miles down the railroad track from Juárez and almost halfway to Mexico City. He then planned to fight his way north to Juárez, which he had called “the real prize.” He studied Medina s military maps until they were almost in rags. Deep into the night he talked with men who had come from all over stricken Mexico and could give him eyewitness reports of the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses. We all wanted to begin, but before we could do that the army had to be sorted out, armed and trained, which meant first teaching the men to load and fire the new rifles and impressing upon them the need to follow orders given by officers.

  It was a tedious and often staggering task, but Pancho Villa organized it and then accomplished it. From the look of the several thousand mustachioed cutthroats—men and boys alike—who spread in all directions on the desert and out by the lake, I don t think any other man could have done as well, or even dared to try.

  Starting in early June, summer rain struck the plateau like bullets. Clouds humped over the mountains, darkening as the day wore on and then rolling toward us at almost exactly the same hour every afternoon, as if God had looked at His watch and said, “Go.” The rain swept through the streets of Ascensión, turning them to mud. After a few hours the torrents ceased, the clouds raced away and the air was fresh and blue until nightfall, which came upon us like a swiftly thrown black sheet. The rain turned the desert green, so that the horses grazed and grew sleek. But we could not fight well in it; we could certainly not travel easily through it. So we waited and filed our spurs, and got drunk and dreamed of glory. ‘

  I shared an abandoned house on the main plaza with Julio, Hipólito, Candelario and the two French whores. That was an uneasy situation, but I explained to them that I was all but engaged to Hannah Sommerfeld and that my fidelity was a matter of honor. Yvette and Marie-Thérése, jolly girls, seemed to understand, although now and then I caught Yvette staring at me from under her long lashes in a way that made my mouth grow dry. I couldn’t help remembering what she and her sister had done to me out on the Deming road. Some nights, when I heard Candelario and one of the others carousing with them, and their groans and piercing laughter filled the darkness, I had trouble sleeping.

  Candelario thought I was crazier than Urbina.

  “Hombre, I don’t know what you’ve got in your pants, but it must be something special. Don’t you see the way they look at you?”

  “I have an obligation, you fool.”

  “Your obligation is in El Paso. Yvette and Marie-Thérése are here in Ascensión. It’s a matter of geography.”

  “Not geography. Honor! Jesus, you’re a Mexican, you know what i>that means.”.

  He sighed and went away, but the next day he started pestering me again. I could bear that easily; what I minded was the way Yvette and Marie-Thérése brushed against me when we were in the kitchen together, or when I passed them on the way to the privy. It always seemed that a silk-clad hip would slide against mine or a strand of blond hair would float against my cheek. And it worked on me. I was as horny as the next fellow, and Hannah had waked something in me that cried for attention and wouldn’t go back to sleep.

  I held firm to my virtue until a moment came when it seemed I had little choice. Or I was too weak, pitted against the adversary of my goatish nature, to make the right choice. My downfall wasn’t Yvette s fault, or even Candelario’s, although in their separate ways they tried th
eir best to fracture my resolve. It was Pancho Villa’s. That man dominated my life.

  One cool evening after the rain had freshened the air and darkened the dust, Esperanza Villa knocked lightly on our door. She was in company with a blushing, plump girl whose name, she told me, was Carmelita. Candelario and the others had gone out drinking in a local cantina with our own girls, trying to drum up some business for them in an effort to make them rich as well as happy. After I opened the door and was introduced to Carmelita, I made some noises like a jackass, trying to figure out what the visit was all about. I peered into the darkness. The chief was nowhere in sight.

  “Señor,” Esperanza said, smiling, “Carmelita is my sister.”

  Oh, Lord. I remembered Villa’s promise, after he had called me his gringo and then felt bad about it, to gift me with one of his new wife’s younger sisters. If I wasn’t sure, Esperanza quickly rid me of any doubt.

  “My husband Don Francisco Villa says“—she didn’t blush, or even blink—”to have a good time, but please try not to make her pregnant. There are already too many babies in the camp. They keep him awake during his siesta.”

  “Hang on there, Esperanza—”

  But she left without a further word, sliding off into the darkness in her bare feet, vanishing like a shade. I was left with my mouth hanging open.

  I turned to Carmelita. She was short, about twenty, and not at all bad-looking if you liked smooth young skin and an ample handful of flesh. Mexican women tend to pork up before they’re anywhere near old, but she was on the cusp. I noticed, too, that she had been freshly scrubbed and her black hair smelled of lemons. She smiled at me pleasantly, showing a missing tooth and several made of silver, and walked straight into the first open doorway, which happened to be the room where I slept. Her sense of direction was perfect.