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

by Clifford Irving

  “Come on, Rosa. What is it?”

  “Also that morning …” She looked down at her bare feet. “You told your chief, Francisco Villa, that you would care for me until I could go home to my family in Tomochic. Did you not say that?”

  “I guess I did. I don’t exactly remember.”

  “You did. And I wish to ask you one thing.” She struggled a moment or two, then crawled against me again and got the words out, muffled into my chest. “Unless I displease you, which of course is possible, I ask you not to send me back to Tomochic. There is nothing for me there. And if I displease you, tell me in what way. I am not a foolish girl.”

  That didn’t seem to commit me to much, and I nodded.

  “I will try to please you … even if you won’t let me in the other way. I am Tarahumara, but all that they say about me is not true. My tongue is quick, but it’s not spiteful. I will try to please you,” she whispered again.

  “Go to sleep, Rosa.”

  The guitar had begun to be plucked more vigorously, and we heard men singing a ballad about some forgotten battle and a lost love. Rosa curled in my arms, smelling of smoky firewood and a fresh scent that came from her flesh … it had to be the pure scent of youth. She was a child who needed to be cradled to sleep. I felt that, and I guess my pecker did too; it didn’t twitch at all. I wasn’t troubled; my love was far from here, and I was faithful. Rosa’s forehead was warm in the hollow of my neck. We were almost asleep in the heat of the night, soothed by the guitar, when she giggled, a kittenish sound that I probably wasn’t meant to hear. And then in a tiny voice, the kind children use when they deign to tell you their most precious secrets, she whispered in my neck: “I know you are not a captain. But it doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “I’ll only call you mi capitán when we’re alone … mi capitán. “

  I thought about that for a minute and then whispered, “Go to sleep, Rosa. You’re displeasing me.”

  The night before we were to storm Torreón, Pancho Villa called a meeting of his commanders at the Hacienda de las Lomas. He had spent a month planning the attack. He never, as long as I knew him, left anything to chance. He studied the terrain and even sent spies into the cities, disguised as peasants, to plot the enemy defenses and manpower. He organized the medical units and the placement of artillery, the food and the ammunition, the disposition of reserves. He did it without fuss, quietly, making no written notes, operating from instinct as much as knowledge—it was all balanced in his mind at once. And then, when the battles began, he himself led the men into the field.

  Now, before Torreón, he had decided to organize his force in a more military manner.

  “Come along, Tomás. This will be instructive.”

  The big room of the hacienda, thick with cigar smoke and the rank odors of horse and sweat, was lit by candles that sent black plumes swirling through the breathless air. Pegs were driven into the walls to hang saddles and bridles, and outside the hacienda a great fire blazed. A harpist, an old albino who had been the hacienda’s caretaker, played balled after ballad, while the men gathered round the fire to sing and smoke their cornhusk cigarettes.

  Sitting at the head of a big scarred mahogany table, his unshaved cheeks glowing in the fierce light thrown by the candles so that he looked like a barbaric medieval tribal chieftain, Villa held forth to the leaders.

  “Señores, this will be an army now, not a rabble. We’ll start as a division, which means we must have a commanding general … brigades, with other generals … regiments and battalions. That’s how it will be done.”

  “A moment, Señor Villa!”

  The interruption came from Manuel Chao, the bucktoothed fellow who had first visited us in Ascensión and was once again present as an emissary from Carranza. This time he wore a uniform and carried an ivory-handled pistol in a yellow calfskin holster.

  “I have a letter here from the First Chief,” he said. “It bears his signature and seal. If I may be permitted to read it aloud?”

  A murmur went round the table. Chao unfolded the letter, typed on crisp blue notepaper, and began to read. It authorized him to take command of all the revolutionary forces in the state of Chihuahua. That meant us—there were no others. Villa scraped back his big armchair, started to rise, then thumped down again, his eyes popping.

  “Jesus Christ! First he wants Obregón, a chickpea farmer … and now you! What did you do, Señor Chao, before you became a paper general?”

  “I taught geography in Monterrey, señor. I also have studied military history.”

  Villa turned to me at the far end of the table, where I sat behind Urbina, who clutched his demijohn of aguardiente on his lap. “Make a note of that, Tomás. He taught geography and studied military history. We may need something to inscribe on his tombstone. Give me that letter,” he growled.

  Chao handed the blue notepaper to him. Villa held it over one of the sputtering candles—it caught fire immediately. He didn’t let go until it nearly scorched his fingers and then let it drop to the table, where it curled into black ash with a glowing edge. Chao’s jaw jutted forward. One hand dropped to the ivory butt of his pistol.

  “Go ahead,” Villa said coldly. “But be sure you can bite a bullet in midair. Before you have that pantywaist pistol out of its ridiculous holster, I’m going to shoot you right between your big buckteeth.”

  Chao hesitated, then raised both hands from his lap. He tented them together on the surface of the table. “There’s no need for discord, Señor Villa, just as there’s no need for insult.” He coughed nervously. “How do you propose to organize this division?”

  “First we’ll vote on a commanding general. I’ll accept nominations.”

  “I nominate Francisco Villa!” cried Urbina.

  “Any others?” Villa asked.

  Everyone shrugged. “In that case,” said Villa, “I myself will nominate Manuel Chao, the geography teacher who’s been recommended by the First Chief. That way we’ll have some kind of vote. And we’ll know who believes in what.”

  Hands were raised in the smoky air. Villa was unanimously elected chief general. He didn’t vote, and neither did Chao. Villa thanked his commanders graciously; then he appointed them generals. Rodolfo Fierro, Hipólito and Candelario were named colonels. Medina became chief of staff and artillery commander. Julio made major.

  “We’ll call this the Northern Division,” Villa said, “since we’re all men of the north and this is the heartland of the revolution. Is that agreed?” His generals and colonels thumped their fists on the table in unison and then drank a toast from bottles of French cognac that had come up from the hacienda’s wine cellar—first to the revolution, then to the sacred memory of Señor Madero and finally to Don Venus “… whose firm principles,” Villa intoned, “guide our minds at all times, even if they can’t do so well with our bullets.”

  From the nine ragged men who had splashed across the Rio Bravo in March, we were now a force of nearly eight thousand: the famed Northern Division. Its memory, in Mexican legend, would never die. Shortly before midnight when the meeting broke up—for the next day we were going to storm Torreón—Villa’s hand settled on my shoulder.

  “Tomás, in Juárez I made you a promise. I didn’t forget. You’re a captain, attached to my personal staff.”

  I thanked him. I felt thrilled.

  “I know that you told your woman that you were already a captain. That was impetuous of you. But I forgive you because you’re young. And loyal, too. Now you can go to her and not feel like such a damned fool.”

  That man knew everything.

  At dawn the outlying Federal cannon began to bombard us on the banks of the Nazas. The earth shook and gouts of smoke swirled among the cottonwood trees. I mounted my horse and whipped him along a burro path toward the hacienda. All around me boots dragged jangling spurs, cavalrymen checked reins and stirrups, hoofs pounded. A pillar of brown dust, like smoke from a burning city, rose into the air. Mist pac
ked under the trees, rolling across green fields, and a weak orange sun peeked above the mountains. The birds, who didn’t know that a great battle was about to take place, began to sing.

  Villa had already assembled most of his staff. “Let’s not waste time,” he said sternly, “or we’ll be food for the buzzards.”

  He would take one brigade and advance down the right bank of the Nazas, with Calixto Contreras attacking on the left bank toward Gómez Palacio, Torreón’s twin city. The population of the two cities numbered almost three hundred thousand. This was no knitting bee, for the Federal general, Murguia, commanded a full division with a regiment of artillery.

  Villa turned to me and said, “Tomás, do you want to fight?”

  A little surprised, I replied, “That’s why I’m here, chief.”

  “My staff officers don’t sit around at the rear with binoculars. The others know that. I wasn’t sure you did. Go with Candelario’s battalion,” he ordered. “And remember, with your pistol you don’t aim. But with your rifle, line up the sights low and dead center.” He slapped the cotton shirt that covered his belly, crisscrossed with full cartridge belts.

  A shell splashed in the river, and my stomach heaved. I’d never been in a battle before and I had no training as a soldier, not that many of our troops were much better off. I didn’t want to die, and even more I feared being gutshot or having a chunk of shrapnel tear my balls apart. Checking reins and stirrups, thinking about all the awful things that could happen to a man’s body, I mounted my horse and almost slipped right out of the saddle when he wrinkled his spine to get the kinks out. Mule-drawn caissons and gun carriages rumbled past us. The gunners unlimbered, and Medina ran round screwing on the sights and cranking the levers. Far to the east we could see the smokestacks of factories and the stony peak of La Pila guarding the city from the north. Whips cracked. The mules strained forward and troops of horse kicked mighty clouds of dust in our faces.

  Like any sensible cowhand I wore a big blue bandanna round my throat. Now I raised it up over my nose— Jesse James in Old Mexico—and started to sweat.

  We moved slowly toward Torreón, through a narrow valley flanked by low hills. We were bunched together in a mass, thousands of horsemen with wagons following. I was glad we weren’t fighting Apaches or the advance would have been suicidal, but the Federal Army fought by the book and waited for us. Our horses trampled the burnt yellow corn into rubble. I heard the crackling rip of rifle fire ahead, and then a shell burst with a dull bar-ooom in front of Villa, who rode ahead of the troops.

  “Deploy! … spread out!”

  The brigade fanned out as the valley widened. It was a warm, muggy morning with elephant-gray clouds clustered on the horizon, threatening rain. I spotted some adobe houses and then an automobile wrecking yard in our path. In the distance the buildings of the city formed themselves vaguely out of the haze. Suddenly I realized Torreón wasn’t just a word, an image—it was a place. We rode at a choppy trot, which made it difficult to fire, while pods of cotton floated by like snow. A few bullets whistling by made a tired sound.

  I pulled my rifle from its scabbard and took a snug check on the rein. Off to my left then, a horse was hit. Braying like a donkey, it spilled its rider into a prickly-pear cactus. He jumped up from the dust, cursing and pulling thorns out of his arm.

  “Don’t kill them all, boys! Wait for me!”

  Julio yelled at us. “There are Federals in the wrecking yard!”

  Behind some rusting automobiles I saw white shapes with peaked caps. The muzzles of their rifles puffed with smoke. We were about three hundred yards away, easy range for a sharpshooter, but they were snapping off their shots too quickly and too high to do any damage. Julio gave the order to fire. At least fifty of us cut loose at once, and even at that distance I could hear the spang and whine of bullets hitting metal, so that if you were sheltered behind the wrecks it must have been a terrifying clamor. The white shapes disappeared. There was no more return fire.

  This is easy, I thought. This suits me fine. If this is war, then I’d a damn sight rather take part in it than face Rodolfo Fierro’s pistol. A shell exploded off to our right, but it wasn’t aimed at me.

  I slammed the bolt, aimed, fired and heard the shattering of glass—a car window. Then from far away Candelario shouted an order to gallop. I put my knees into the big chestnut. Off he went like a quarter horse, hind legs churning, supple in the withers and lightning between my legs, Hipólito at my side on his roan. We must have been two hundred men in that charge, and suddenly the wrecking yard was in front of us and I could make out twisted license plates, crumpled fenders, and a big jack lying in front of a rusted Stutz-Bearcat whose insides had been stripped down to the chassis.

  We were almost at the yard when the Federals popped up like ghosts from behind stacks of black tires and let off a volley at us. None of us was hit. The Federals turned and ran toward the adobe houses across the dirt road. Almost immediately they began to fall—Candelario and another troop of cavalry had outflanked them.

  Remembering La Perla, I fired until my rifle was empty, not having any idea whether or not I hit anyone. The dust billowed up like a yellow fountain.

  I reined up in the wrecking yard behind the shelter of a clapboard shack, dug a fresh box of five rounds from my cartridge belt and rammed it home into the Mauser. My breath came in shallow gulps. The chestnut nickered—he wanted to keep moving. A score of Villistas, including Julio and Hipólito, had stopped to reload, and I grinned foolishly at them through the smoke. A man next to me stared at the mess of his bloody hand. A few red-soaked, white-uniformed bodies lay on the ground, either dead or twitching. I had seen corpses laid out neatly in my father’s undertaking parlor, but here they flung themselves about in the most awkward way possible, legs twisted and necks bent back at ridiculous angles.

  I was trying to figure out what useful thing I could do next, when a nearby man, busily trying to adjust a loose cinch, jumped suddenly off his horse and lay down full length in the dirt, making a pillow of his hands. What in hell, I wondered, is he up to? This was no time to take a siesta. Then I saw bright red blood flowing from his neck. The man was dead.

  I said aloud, “Oh, lord!”

  Rifles began cracking murderously at close range.

  I yanked at the rein and my horse spun, crawfishing, as the Mauser flew out of my hand and bounced with a clang against the hood of a car. There were Federals hidden in the wrecking-yard office not twenty yards away, firing at us as fast as they could.

  Men tumbled from their saddles. Blood jetting from its throat, Julio’s horse slid out from under him. He jumped down, crouched behind the flailing body, laid his rifle across the withers and began to pump bullets through the windows of the clapboard shack. The other men scattered through the dust like boys playing hide-and-go-seek. I pulled my pistol, spurred between a battered black hearse and a Winton touring car, and almost trampled Hipólito, on his knees behind a fender of the hearse.

  He yelled up at me, “Idiot! Get down! Shelter yourself!”

  I vaulted from the saddle and hit the dirt with a shock that nearly drove my spine through my neck. For a minute bells rang; the world turned fuzzy. Working the bandanna loose from my face, I smelled grease and the dizzying odor of spilled gasoline. I was safe behind the hearse. The firing slacked off, the smoke swirling downwind. In a battle the enemy always had to reload—there was always plenty of time to think and worry. I gulped some hot air into my lungs and wiped the sweat from my eyes. The sweat rolled down my forehead as if someone had dumped a pail of warm oil over me. Why had I ever looked forward to this?

  I peered round the fender. A bullet spanged off metal … now they were shooting at me. But that quick glance told me that the Federals in the office were surrounded—they had no chance, unless we just lay back and traded shots with them all day until we got tired of it and went away. Not a bad idea, I thought, when suddenly there was a deafening explosion—and the tire in front of me whooshed
out its air, flattening before my eyes.

  “What was that?” I yelled.

  At my elbow, as if we were at a tea party, Hipólito said, “Don’t shout. I can hear you quite well. It was a grenade.”

  “A grenade?” I felt my bowels loosen. No, it wasn’t a tea party. Despite the birds chirping and the sun shining, this was a battle, in a war. Grenades could kill or blow your balls to shreds. I didn’t want to die, or be maimed, not now, not ever. Somehow I could deal with bullets, but not with grenades.

  I muttered to myself for a few seconds, then leaped to my feet, enraged. “Come on!” I shouted. “We have to rush these sons of bitches!”

  Maybe I had read it in a magazine somewhere: some tale of Teddy’s Rough Riders at San Juan Hill. I yelled, “Adelante! Forward!” and sprinted toward the shack, blood pumping in my ears, tugging at the trigger of my pistol. Fifty men followed me, weapons rattling like a chorus of hammers on iron buckets.

  The shack splintered apart. Federals began tumbling out the door. They fell on their knees, shrieking to surrender. My pistol was empty before I reached the wall of the shack.

  I slid to the ground there to reload. By the time I had finished, scorching my fingers on the barrel, the gunfire had stopped. A gang of our men had broken into the shack and were herding the rest of the enemy out at rifle point.

  Julio trotted up to me, thin face streaked with blood. A bullet had taken away part of an earlobe. His eyes looked like targets, huge white circles centered with black bulls. He bent to my side.

  “Where are you hit, Tomás?”

  “I’m not hit. I’m fine.”

  “But, hombre, you’re bleeding.”

  I glanced down. There was blood in the dirt where I sat. It was soaking redly through the Levi’s on my left thigh, staining them a rich grapelike purple that glistened in the sunlight. I could see the rip clearly. I hadn’t felt a thing. Scrambling to my feet, I still didn’t feel anything.