I turned to Rosa. “Go home. We have some chickens in the back. There’s a goat you can milk.” I didn’t have to fake the sharpness. This girl had nearly got me killed.
“Yes, señor,” she said obediently, and off she went. And we couldn’t help it; we all turned to watch her as she walked through the dust, the firm cheeks twitching and rolling from side to side even beneath that shapeless brown sack. She couldn’t help it, either. Only Rodolfo Fierro didn’t watch her. He lit a cigar and stood contemplatively, gazing out at the heat shimmering above the prairie and the hazed mountains. I had an enemy now, I realized, and the wrong one.
The fiesta before the battle lasted all night. Calixto Contreras from Durango carried his own orchestra with him—eight villains in huge sombreros who played cornets and drums and trombones, so that they sounded like a Bavarian oom-pah-pah band at a barn dance in Abilene. Before the party began Esperanza came by with a pink cotton dress that she carefully explained was a gift from her husband, Señor Don Francisco Villa. When Rosa appeared in it, black hair washed and shining, a few of the men who had casually handed her over to me that morning must have had second thoughts. If she was in mourning for her husband stuffed into a well out in Corralitos, she hid it well.
Barefoot, dark eyes glinting, healthy young breasts bouncing to the beat of the drum, she danced half the night. She was a pretty child, and I couldn’t keep up with her. Pancho Villa danced with her, and she told me later that his hand slid down to her bottom and gave her little affectionate pinches every chance he got.
“Not so little, to tell the truth. This chief, he took a handful of almost everything I have. He must have been a good bandit.”
I had a minute alone with Villa during the party, while the musicians took time out to douse their heads in buckets of water and there was something resembling quiet. Unlike everyone else, Villa was sober.
If we were leaving in two days to fight, I asked, what should I do with Rosa?
He threw an arm about my shoulder. “Tomás … if you have anything of value, take it with you. You may never see Ascensión again. We’re an army now, and armies fight or die. From now on we’ll move and strike, like a fox in the chicken yard, until the north is ours. After Torreón, we’ll take Chihuahua City and Juárez. After that, Zacatecas on the high plateau. And then,” he said, narrowing his eyes, “we’ll visit Mexico City, and I’ll give an embrazo to Señor Emiliano Zapata, who will come up from the south with his calf eyes and his ridiculously big hat. I admire that man. I want to meet him.”
The music started again and we couldn’t talk more.
At six o’clock in the morning, as the sun began to rise, Rosa leaned against my shoulder and said wearily, “Mi capitán, can we go to bed?”
I eased off with her to my room and she shut the door. There was just the one narrow bed with sagging springs, the sheets stiff from my night with Carmelita. My big Texas saddle and Mauser rifle and other gear lay in the corner next to a clay jug of drinking water. The music still blared from afar, and from the same distance we could hear the voices of men and women laughing and Urbina shouting drunkenly. Rosa put her hot head on my chest, sighing. I cleared my throat.
“Rosa, I have to tell you something.”
“Yes, mi capitán?”
Retreating, I dropped down on a little cane chair that had only three legs.
“Rosa, you’re only fourteen, but try to understand. There’s this girl in Texas. I’m engaged to her. I’m in love with her.”
“You told me that by the lake.” Her dark brown eyes didn’t blink. “I heard you well.”
“It means a lot to me.”
“Did you not sleep with the other one? Carmelita, you called her. You said you did it three times.”
She wasn’t accusing me; she was just stating a fact of life.
“I did. That’s true. But … damnation! Yes, I did, but that was a mistake. I mean I had to, Pancho Villa sent her to me—”
My voice trailed off. The sun slanted through the wooden shutters into the room, and motes of dust danced in the warm morning air. My head felt suddenly heavy.
“Rosa, I can’t. That’s all there is to it. I promised to take care of you, and I’ll do that. I swear I will. But not the other. I don’t want to shame you, so we won’t tell anybody.” My hand fluttered in front of me, waving at the room. “There’s just the one bed, you can see that. We’ll have to share it. But … try to understand.”
She lowered her head. There was only one thing she thought she could offer me, and I wanted no part of it. It wasn’t merely a reward for my kindness in giving her a home and saving her from Fierro’s unpleasant clutches. From her point of view, even though she was just a girl, there was one natural act that took place between a man and woman, and that was in bed. If the rest of life was drudgery, bed was the vital center, the moment of truth. She turned around, unknotted her sash and pulled the pink cotton dress over her head, folding it neatly on the brass footboard. She was naked, and her brown back glistened with tiny pearls of sweat from the dancing. Without a word she climbed into the bed and pulled the tattered sheet over her nakedness. She turned her head to the wall. She never spoke.
I had to get some fresh air. I knew I couldn’t sleep yet, not in the narrow bed with her while she was still awake and probably getting ready to cry.
I slipped from the room and out the front door into the oven of the street, blinking at the glare. Behind me I could hear Hipólito snoring, and the blatting of trombones wandered to my ear through the still air. I walked in the direction of the lake, thinking that a swim would cool me down and clear out the ache between my ears. My boots kicked up white dust and I jabbed my toe hard at a rock, sending it skidding into a broken wall.
Damn! I thought. Why did I ever get into this? What do I need it for?
The town stank of sour pulque. As I passed beyond the chief’s house, Rodolfo Fierro stepped from the black shadow of a doorway. He was dressed exactly as I had seen him yesterday, and there was something in the neatness of his pants and dark blue shirt—as well as the thin lines graven into his olive cheeks—that made me think he hadn’t slept since then. His beard was stubbled, and I knew he was a man who shaved carefully every dawn. When his eyes checked me, I halted in the dust. Again I thought I had better get in the first words.
“It was a good fiesta,” I said. “Plenty of booze and spare women. You would have been welcome.” My voice was just a hair on the high-pitched side.
But his, when he finally spoke, was calm, steady as a boulder, smooth as blackstrap. He knew exactly what he was going to say.
“What happened here yesterday, señor, was unseemly. The girl means nothing to me—that, of course, you understand. And I would not argue in front of Francisco Villa, as you also understand.”
This was ridiculous. “Listen, Rodolfo,” I said, “we’re talking about a kid. And her husband had just been shot! Didn’t you understand that too?”
He went right on as if he hadn’t heard. “You shamed me, señor. But to have killed you in front of Francisco Villa and your friends would have been wrong. Nevertheless, what you did was unforgivable, and it is necessary for me to kill you. Or I have no honor among men.”
I couldn’t believe this. But then I realized the words came from the arctic depths of his soulless being. I glanced quickly down, but I knew what I would find. I wasn’t armed. I had unbuckled my holster when I walked into the house with Rosa. The sun throbbed on my bare head. I had forgotten my hat too. And then Rodolfo Fierro spun on his heel, turned his back and walked toward the house. I stood there, thunderstruck. Hadn’t he just said he was going to kill me?
“Hey, there!” I yelled angrily. “Hang on!”
I jumped after him and almost grabbed his arm to twist him round again, but he turned under his own volition and stared down at me. For the first time there was an expression on his face; he was startled.
“You can’t tell me you’re going to kill me and then just walk away! What
the hell kind of a trick is that?” I demanded. “What’s the matter with you?”
His mouth gaped open and his eyes blinked rapidly. He almost smiled, and—there was a certain foolish twist to his lips. But then he became himself again, glacial and malevolent.
“Señor, you have some big cojones. I see that now, although I didn’t before. That’s good.” He nodded solemnly, as if to settle the idea into his head and give him breathing room. Then, quite matter-of-factly, he said, “Have no doubt that I will kill you. And it will be quick. You needn’t fear. At the proper time, in the proper place.”
I barked at him, “And when is that supposed to be?”
“We will both know.”
With that enigmatic conclusion to our conversation, he turned once more and stamped into the house. I didn’t follow him this time. I didn’t have big cojones, I realized; I had undersized brains. If I had touched him the first time when I chased him, he would have killed me. That’s what he had been waiting for, that’s what he needed, then or now, to satisfy his honor. That, or an order. I wouldn’t need to fight in a battle—I could get myself killed anytime I wanted by Rodolfo Fierro.
Under a sizzling sun I shuffled back down the street to our house, bumped through the front door and into the shadowed room where Rosa slept. I flung off my clothes. The brass headboard rattled when I crawled into bed behind her. She stirred, but she didn’t wake. Her black hair, with the scent of a gardenia that had wilted there during the night, flowed over my chest. Somewhere, far away, in some other cool room, Hannah also slept—but alone.
I’m a dead man, I thought, and I’ve only just begun to live.
Chapter 8
“Courage mounteth
with occasion.”
Bugles screeched at dawn. A thundering, clicking ringing filled the cool air. Men struggled in a rising haze of dust, catching mules, cinching harnesses, leading horses to water, adjusting girths and snaffles, strapping spurs to boots, stuffing salt pork into their mouths and snatching hot mugs of coffee from greasewood fires. The lean Durango mustangs pawed the earth nervously, backs humped up until the vaqueros could cozy the ring bits into the tender roofs of their mouths.
Serapes flapped like flags in the wind, and the sunlight tilting over the eastern desert glinted off five thousand rifles. Pancho Villa’s army was ready to move.
The horsemen trotted southward. Behind each troop plodded a few dozen women, babies sucking at their brown breasts as they led mules that swayed perilously from side to side under sacks of corn. Our column stretched for five miles across the desert, a tawny line of men and beasts obscured by the brown cloud of dust that hung in the choking air. In every village groups of neutrals stood silently in the streets to watch us pass by, but next to them they had their few precious belongings wrapped in bundles, ready to flee. The army seemed to swallow everything in sight, chickens and pigs and even stray women, as I imagined a whale would do as it moved ponderously across the ocean, mouth agape for all the little fish.
I rode my big chestnut gelding, and Rosa walked next to me, refusing to mount behind—it would shame me, she said, to share my horse with a woman, and later, when the men laughed at me, I would be angry with her.
But in Bachinava, where we camped one night, Candelario commandeered some horses from the local police stables. He brought round a gray and a skewbald mare with an old broad-horned saddle.
“The gray will be a good spare horse for you, Tomás. The mare is for your woman.”
I slanted an accusing look at him. He knew how I felt about Hannah and my fall from grace with Carmelita. But then I realized he meant well, and so I thanked him properly. He didn’t know that Rosa was only in my care until she could go home to Tomochic, and I had promised not to shame her by letting the men know that we lived like brother and sister. For a while I thought of trying to give her as a gift to Hipólito, until I realized how shameful it was to treat a human being like a horse or a sack of corn. Saint Peter would never have recognized me as a candidate for wings, but I figured I might make some amends for my hoggish ways if I offered that young girl some genuine kindness. Rosa mounted the skewbald as smoothly as any bronc buster I’d ever seen, riding it stiff-legged in the Mexican fashion and crooning to it all the while in order to get better acquainted. This was no Sunday horse lady out for a canter in the park.
And I kept a weather eye peeled for Rodolfo Fierro. I had told the others about our dawn meeting on the street, and this time they didn’t crack jokes. Fierro, on his part, ignored me, but whenever his big silver spurs jingled around my horse I felt my guts turning to fiddlestrings. I considered that it might possibly please Hannah in some kind of giddy romantic way that the man she loved had died fighting for land and liberty in Mexico; but it wouldn’t please me.
“Don’t worry about it,” Julio said. “The solution is simple. In the first battle, we’ll kill him.”
“You can’t do that,” I said, shocked. “He’s on our side.”
“He is on no one’s side,” Candelario replied. “He is not a revolutionist. Do you think he cares for anything but himself? He loves no one, except perhaps the chief, but only because the chief allows him to open the door to his destiny. He loves the killing. There are men like that, who had nothing before the revolution and will have nothing after it. The revolution gives them life, a purpose, however grisly it may be. He is matador, no more.”
But I made them promise it wouldn’t happen that way, that they wouldn’t shoot Fierro in the back during a battle. I might kill, but I would never murder, and to instruct others to commit it for me was no better. I would handle it myself, when the time came. And when would that be? We will both know. Those were Fierro’s words.
We plodded through a range of gaunt mountains to the banks of the Nazas River, close to Torreón, in a fertile area called La Luguna, filled with cornfields and big irrigation ditches flowing with cool water. Bales of sparkling white cotton lay rotting in the sun near a deserted mill; Villa had advertised that he was coming and the people didn’t doubt his word. Before that, in the pretty pink town of Bermejillo, he picked up an automobile, an open seven-passenger Dodge, and decided that he would travel in style until the gasoline tank became empty. He didn’t know how to drive, but Colonel Medina did. The Nazas was in flood, so that our artillery and heavy supplies had to be carried across on rafts.
Just as the old Dodge reached mid-river on the raft, a cable broke and the car was swept away by the powerful current. Villa ruefully watched it go, then turned to Medina with a red-toothed smile.
“You just lost your job, my friend. But don’t worry. I’m going to make you my chief of staff instead of my chauffeur.”
We camped on the Nazas, from where we would launch our attack on Torreón. Our trek to the south had taken two weeks. A nearby hacienda had been abandoned, so Villa made it his headquarters, and the army spread out for a mile along the winding river. I found a spot in the shelter of some cottonwood trees, drawing a bit away from Candelario and the others, who tended to argue and drink far into the night and then keep me awake with all their grunting and humping of Yvette and Marie-Thérése.
Rosa and I hadn’t talked much on the way south—we were too busy herding the livestock and keeping an eye out for Federal patrols. When she kindled a fire and spread our blankets by the river, I sat with her in a peaceful, brooding silence, listening to the crickets and the purl of water against the bank. I rolled a cigarette and smoked it, then leaned back, hands under my head, looking up at the stars. It was a warm night, and a thin moon shed a pearly glow. Rosa lay down beside me, keeping the distance that I had ordained as necessary. But after a minute she shifted just a bit, laid her head on my chest and began quietly to cry.
I stroked her hair. Her crying kept up for a few minutes and then gradually stopped, and I felt her breast heave as if she were shaking something loose from inside herself. She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her blouse.
“What was the matter, Rosa?”
> “I think of my husband,” she said softly.
That was better than I had hoped for. I dreaded being the cause of her misery.
“What was his name?”
She took a shaky breath. “May I not tell you that? It will be easier for me if you know nothing about him, because then his shadow cannot fall in front of you. You know that there was much love between us. But he is dead, and you are alive. And I am young, and I am with you.”
With her head on my chest I started to speak, but then thought better of it. She had moved me with her words, and I didn’t have anything in kind I could respond with. And there was the problem of what she assumed and I didn’t. Only the night before I had dreamed of Hannah wearing a white wedding gown.
Rosa sat up and looked down at me, dark eyes still blurred. But I saw a lurking uncertainty. I nodded.
She said, “That morning by the lake, in Ascensión. Do you remember? You had been with another woman, which you said meant I was not to worry … you couldn’t take me because you were too tired. But I think that was not the reason. Will you tell me the real reason?”
“In the first place,” I said, a little impatiently, “I wouldn’t do that. I couldn’t force myself on anyone.”
“And in the second place?”
“I told you, Rosa. I’m engaged to a girl. I want to be faithful. When this is over, if I don’t get killed, I’ll marry her.”
“It was not that you found me unattractive?”
“You’re very pretty.”
“Truly? You believe that?”
“Well, sure. Of course I do.”
She tossed her hair back, trying to smile. But the sadness hadn’t left her eyes. The crickets began to sing a little more quickly, as the night cooled down. From afar I heard Marie-Thérése giggling, and the sounds of a guitar striking up.
Women have that special silent way of letting you know that something’s bothering them. If you don’t coax them into spitting it out, they sulk forever and a day. Even if she wasn’t my bedmate, she was traveling with me and under my care, and I couldn’t have that.
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