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

by Clifford Irving

  After every defeat I had thought, These are things armies have to go through. It’s a test, and we’ll weather it. The tide turns, then turns again. Obregón is ruthless and scheming, Carranza is just another Porfirio Díaz. We’ll win the next time, because we’re on the right side—or else there’s no justice. But why should there be?

  When I was a boy I had believed that life was fair. If you brushed your teeth, told the truth and worked hard, you would be rewarded. You might even be happy. I knew better now—except for my life with Rosa. There I had no complaints, no doubts, no forebodings. We had spent three days together in the hotel room and on the boulevards of the city, and all was well again between us. She was no mirage, no will-o’-the-wisp. She was flesh and blood, and mine. It seemed miraculous. I told her everything that had happened to me in Aguascalientes, Mexico City, El Paso and Parral, and then on the battlefields of the Bajio — except for my interlude with Elisa Griensen.

  “What will your chief do now?” Rosa asked. “Can he still win?”

  “Mexico’s a big country,” I said. “There are plenty of men to fight for him. And he always comes up with a plan.”

  So his words that August morning of 1915 in the Hotel Salvador gave me fresh heart. We had only to maintain our strongholds and flanks in the north—Chihuahua City, Juárez, Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo—and dig in here in Torreón.

  If we could rest, he said, shore up our defenses, patch up our brigades, if we could defend Torreón successfully against Obregón’s assault, that would turn the tide. A single victory … that would do it.

  “But first,” Villa said to me, “I have one thing to do. It’s on my mind, and I’m losing sleep over it. Have you heard about Urbina? And the gold?”

  “I’ve heard plenty about Urbina,” I said bitterly.

  “I sent him a wire,” the chief raged. “I ordered him to reinforce us at León. That bastard—he never showed up! He went down to Jiménez with his brigade, to levy taxes and find new women, but he ran into one of Carranza’s pantywaist generals named Treviño. He challenged Treviño to fight him alone, mano á mano, but Treviño told him to kiss his ass. Urbina was drunk, I have no doubt. When the shells started falling around his head, he retreated back to Chihuahua City.”

  Villa had begun to smoke. Again he chewed the cigarettes one after another, more than smoking them, spitting out pieces of paper and tobacco.

  “And then, when the sonofabitch got to Chihuahua City, he dynamited the laundry-room door in the Fermont. He took the gold from the Banco Minero—the revolution’s treasury! Now, when we need it the most, to buy new guns. He went off in a cloud of pulque to Durango. He has a hacienda there called Las Nieves, where his mother lives. The one he always tries to shoot.”

  Rodolfo Fierro appeared, tall and composed, smooth-skinned and handsome, silver spurs jingling, in brown leather hip-high boots and full bandoliers over a wrinkled gray jacket. He had fought at Celaya and then at León, where they said he had been as brave as the chief, leading a charge that had almost broken the defense on the thirty-fifth day of the fighting. I hadn’t seen him since then, and I hadn’t missed him.

  But I no longer feared him; he had received an order in Juárez that he could never disobey. He nodded coolly to me.

  “We’re going after Urbina,” Villa announced. His round head bobbed up and down on his thick shoulders, and his eyes narrowed. “To Las Nieves. Tomás, how is your shoulder?”

  “Mending, chief.”

  “I want you with me. You can tell what’s there and what’s missing.”

  “How do you know he took the gold with him to Durango?”

  Villa laughed harshly. “He hasn’t the brains to think of leaving it somewhere else. And he’ll want to count it each morning and every night. It’s unlikely he spent it—he makes his own aguardiente at Las Nieves. Tomorrow at dawn we’ll go.”

  He turned to Fierro; it seemed they had already discussed this. “Rodolfo, take a company of two hundred good men. Urbina may not receive us so graciously.”

  I thought the chief had better things to do, but I didn’t say no: I had my own scores to settle.

  And so, in the midst of the war, with men deserting every day, with the Division in bloodsoaked disarray and Obregón less than a hundred miles to the south, we set out the next morning across the Sierra Madres into the state of Durango. Such was the power of gold and vengeance.

  August was the worst month of the rainy season, and the rain poured down throughout most of the journey, turning the mountain trails to mud. All of us were soaked, and the bandages round my ribs became so cold that when we halted for supper I had to peel them off and throw them away. A thick morning fog blocked our vision the next day; during the afternoon the sun was only a white blur behind the haze. We arrived the second night and camped a few miles from Las Nieves.

  Fierro and Julio rode ahead to scout the hacienda. An hour later they came back to report that lights burned in the main house, and guitar music could be heard. All the horses were in the stables.

  “He’s having a little fiesta with his officers,” Villa said. “They’re drunk, but they’ll fight well when they’re drunk. We’ll wait until dawn. By then they’ll be asleep.”

  Las Nieves was more than a hacienda: it was a pueblo, and Urbina owned it. His house was huge, as warm with pigs, chickens, tame deer and children. The only store in the pueblo was at the hacienda, and the campesinos had to buy their corn and cigarettes from Urbina or his administrators. He owned them, body and soul, and his mother kept the books.

  He was a hell of a revolutionist, I thought, and wondered what was passing through Pancho Villa’s mind. He was godfather to several of Urbina’s sons by various mothers, and between battles he had visited here for baptisms. They had been bandits together—had slept in caves, fled from the rurales. They had been like brothers.

  Fierro must have been thinking the same thing. Wrapped in his damp serape, he approached Villa by the campfire. In its flickering light his smooth face was the color of blood.

  “Pancho, I don’t want to make any mistakes. In the morning, what is it that you want done?”

  Villa flicked his hand impatiently. “Urbina is a traitor. For all I know, he may be planning to go over to Carranza. There’s only one punishment for traitors.”

  “I understand,” Fierro said.

  Before dawn, in the milky fog, we drifted down the slope toward the hacienda. The horses’ hoofs made hardly a sound on the wet earth. The great main house of Las Nieves covered the top of a mesa, the bare mountains behind it wreathed in drifting vapor. No lights showed now. A single farmer passed by on a burro, but when he saw us he made the sign of the cross and quickly reversed direction.

  As soon as some light filtered between the peaks across the yellow plain, Villa locked his feet into the stirrups.

  “Let’s do this,” he muttered.

  We trotted across an open dirt square past a pigpen. A tomblike silence came from the house, and then Villa raised his pistol and fired a single shot into the cold air. It boomed like a cannon, and almost immediately there was an answering barrage of rifle fire from all sides. The men yipped wildly, swooping down on the hacienda.

  A half-dozen men lay around in the huge main room, slumped in heavy upholstered chairs and with their heads on the table. A few squawking chickens fluttered out of our way. Empty bottles lay on the concrete floor; the fire in a tiny grate had gone out.

  Waking slowly, the men raised their gray faces to see our guns. The chill of death hung in the room, but their drunken sleep had saved their lives.

  From the rear of the house came the loud sound of shots.

  Leaving a handful of men to guard the prisoners, we surged down a dank hallway toward the bedrooms. We heard cursing … more gunfire … the crash of breaking glass.

  An angry young man, with a gray-haired woman cowering behind him, loomed in a doorway. He carried a leveled rifle, and I shot him where he stood.

  The woman fell back and
began to crawl under a rumpled bed.

  “That’s Urbina’s mother,” Villa said, taking time out to instruct me in the midst of the fight. “She fucks the soldiers when her son sleeps. In case no one told you, that’s why he always wants to shoot her.”

  Urbina, wearing his long johns, had been sprawled asleep in a bedroom with one of his mistresses. When he snatched a pistol from under his pillow, Julio shot him once in the shoulder. Then Urbina recognized him and cried out, “For Christ’s sake! Julio, are you crazy? It’s me!”

  He threw the pistol away and charged into the hallway, bushy hair all in a tangle, clutching his bloody shoulder. The sight of the man chilled my heart. When he saw Pancho Villa his little eyes sparkled, and he flung out his arms.

  “Pancho! Thank God you’re here! I was almost killed! This must be my lucky day.”

  I was flabbergasted, for Villa returned the embrace. When the two men parted, the seeping blood covered Villa’s shoulder as well. “Compadre, “ he said thickly, “you’re hurt. Is it bad?”

  “I’m not dead, so it can’t be that bad.” Urbina clenched his teeth and put a hand to his breast, under the wound. “But the bullet’s still in there.” His eyes swiveled to lock on my face.

  “You!” he cried. “You gringo bastard! I’ve a score to settle with you—” He shook the fist of his good arm at me. “You and that one-eyed ape disobeyed my orders! You put a knot on my head that a rat couldn’t run around. You hurt me! I was unconscious for two days! And you ran off without knowing whether I was dead or alive! Did you think I was going to steal your damned trunk? I told you, I was collecting taxes to buy ammunition and coal. We could have bargained a little, couldn’t we? But you’re a gringo, you don’t understand how we do things. You hurt me,” he snarled.

  “I should have killed you,” I said. For a moment Urbina looked startled, and so did Villa. I still had told him nothing of what happened in Chihuahua City with Rosa.

  “Let’s go into the kitchen,” Villa muttered. “We’ll see what we can do for your shoulder.”

  On our way a woman ran out of a room and fell to her knees, flinging her arms about the chief’s legs. “Señor General! I’ve just given birth to a baby boy. Not three days ago! Will you baptize him? I’m going to call him Francisco, after you.”

  “I’m not a priest, señora.”

  “But you are General Villa. God smiles on you .You can do anything!.”

  “Later, yes,” Villa grumbled, “if you insist.”

  In the kitchen he shooed everyone out except Fierro and me. There were still hot coals in one of the charcoal pits of the range. He put a kettle of water on the fire to boil and then ripped off Urbina’s shirt to inspect the wound.

  Straddling a chair, Urbina bit his lip with the pain.

  “It’s bad,” Villa said. “It looks like it hit the bone. I don’t think I can get the bullet out. Is there a doctor nearby?”

  “About twenty miles…”

  “Let’s clean it up first. You know, I came here to shoot you.”

  “Because of that damned gold?” Urbina chuckled hoarsely. “I’m keeping it safe for you, Pancho. That fucking Treviño had five thousand men and three dozen cannon not thirty miles from Chihuahua City. He would have dynamited that door faster than I did. And then, think—it would have been lost forever.”

  “You ran away,” Villa said grimly. “Treviño saw only your ass.”

  “Ran away?” Urbina thumped his other fist on the kitchen table. “I don’t know the meaning of the word! My men were being slaughtered! I had to regroup.”

  “Here? At your hacienda?”

  “I had to think what to do next.”

  A bitter smile curved from Villa’s lips. “You don’t have to think, compadre. You have only to follow my orders. Which leads me to task: why didn’t you reinforce me at León when I sent for you?”

  “I never got the wire.”

  “How do you know I wired?”

  “Pancho, my shoulder’s killing me. For Christ’s sake, don’t ask so many difficult questions. It makes my head ache.” Urbina glared at me again. “That’s your fault, you gringo dog. I have headaches now, to go with my rheumatism.”

  Villa finally asked him, almost as an afterthought, where he had hidden the gold.

  “In the stables. I have three good men guarding it.”

  “You had three good men. Tomás, go see if it’s all there.”

  Urbina growled again. “Don’t trust him, Pancho.”

  I didn’t reply but went outside into the foggy morning, where a chill wind blew off the sierra.

  In the stables a few of our men were playing poker with a dog-eared pack of cards. The smell of leather, grease and sweat hit my nostrils. Ignacio, whom I remembered from the battle of Torreón, sprawled on a heap of hay, drinking from a bottle of aguardiente. I ordered him and the others to stand guard outside.

  The gold was there, buried deep in the hay, in the same flour sacks Fierro had requisitioned outside the Banco Minero. There were three sacks missing. It could have been worse.

  Ignacio poked his nose in. “My colonel, the men are having an argument, and they ask you to settle it.”

  “If I can.”

  “I say your country is at war with England and Germany, over in Europe. The others say it’s not so.”

  “The others are right.”

  “You’re not at war?”

  “I’m at war, here, but America’s not, there. Not yet.”

  “Then how do the gringo soldiers pass the time?”

  “Practicing for war. Ignacio, don’t let your men get drunk.”

  When I got back to the kitchen I found Fierro sitting on a stool, cleaning his fingernails with the point of a butcher knife. He looked vexed and out of humor. The kettle had boiled and Villa had cleaned Urbina’s wound, but he had not been able to extract the bullet. The edges of the hole were a raw pink—at least it hadn’t been one of the soft-nosed lead bullets.

  Villa and Urbina were seated at the oak table, reminiscing about the days when they had been bandits here in Durango. “Luis Campos …” Villa was saying. “I remember him well. We were on the run from the rurales, and we stayed at his house. But they were after him too, and when they came to get him we had to shoot our way out. So he’s dead …

  “Hanged by Murguia,” Urbina said mournfully. “Do you remember after that, when we worked in the Del Verde mine? We slept in those filthy limestone holes. You had gangrene in your foot—I had to sell my saddle to pay for the doctor.”

  “But I kept working. I needed the lousy peso a day.”

  Villa had seen me enter, and now he turned to me. “Tomás, was the gold there?”

  “All but three sacks, chief.”

  “How much did you steal for yourself?” Urbina asked me, his lip curling.

  I didn’t answer, just glared coldly, and Villa ignored him too. He gave a windy sigh, then turned back to Urbina.

  “Compadre, we’ll have to take you to the doctor. After that we’ll decide what to do.”

  “After that,” Urbina said, “let’s go after Obregón. I want to fight again.”

  “You won’t run away?”

  “Why would I do a thing like that?”

  “You did it once, didn’t you? We’ll have to make sure.” Villa chuckled malevolently. “Rodolfo, tie a noose around his neck before he gets on his horse. You hold the other end. I want him to have a taste of what might have happened.”

  He looked disgruntled for a moment, but it was clear that for old times’ sake he had granted the pardon. Urbina grinned.

  My hand tightened on the butt of my pistol, then relaxed. I had thought of killing him. But then I would have to tell them why, and betray Rosa’s secret.

  Villa found a spring wagon behind the stables and loaded it with the gold. He disappeared for a few minutes to baptize the child, having discovered that the woman was one of Urbina’s daughters. Just as the sun broke through the haze to warm our bones, we forked our horse
s and the troop set out on the trail.

  Then Villa had one last thought for Urbina. “I want you to be comfortable, my friend. You can ride in the wagon with the gold … the gold you so kindly kept safe for me.”

  Urbina, amid various grunts and complaints, waddled to the wagon and settled himself on top of one of the sacks, a hangman’s noose looped snugly, but not too tightly, around his neck. Fierro had fashioned it himself, and the other end was tied to the horn of his saddle. He and Villa and I rode behind the wagon, with the troop of men out in front. The men were muttering among themselves.

  Before Urbina snugged himself down he pointed to the rope and called out jovially, “Don’t forget about me. Don’t wander off the trail, Rodolfo.”

  Rodolfo Fierro didn’t bother answering, and he never smiled. When we were out of Urbina’s hearing, he finally gave voice to what was on his mind.

  “My general, with respect—this is wrong. The man is a traitor. You said so yourself.”

  Villa’s face darkened. That reminder wasn’t what he wanted to hear. But there was no way he could escape Rodolfo’s calm words.

  “And the punishment for treason has always been death.”

  A sullen look, boyish in its petulance, crossed the chief’s face. “What proof do I have,” he growled, “that he meant to keep the gold?”

  Fierro said, “In Chihuahua, in the Banco Minero—in front of us all, as I recall—you told us that any man who breathed a word about the gold would be shot. Now half the Division knows he stole it. And then there’s the matter of what he did at Jiménez. He ran away from Treviño. And he failed to come to León when you sent for him. He got your wires.”

  The lines of anxiety deepened on Villa’s swarthy face. He had handled Urbina poorly, and he knew it. When a general loses one battle after another, he’s not at his best in other matters.

  Fierro said, “If you let him live, what will our men think?”

  “That he tricked me,” Villa muttered.

  He realized now why they had been grumbling among themselves; they were more than puzzled that we had come all this way to shoot Urbina and now were bringing him to a doctor to save his life.