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

by Clifford Irving

I had been looking so hard for tracks I had nearly scraped my nose on the rocks. I heard a fluttering sound and snapped my head up to see some blue quail dotting the sky between the trees.

  When I looked down again, Chicken was ten yards away. I had never heard him move. His mare was as silent as he was—an Apache horse.

  I trotted up to him with Maximilian, breaking a few branches underfoot on the way, so that he turned with an annoyed look.

  “Where we going, Sergeant?”

  “Closer. Take a look. Then go back. For Christ’s sake, cowboy—clam up.”

  If God had held Lieutenant Christie’s hand, He still had a spare hand to guide this sinner through the forest. We crept between the trees about fifty yards over a cushion of moss until we reached the edge of a glade and some bare rocks. Not twenty feet away, a rattlesnake coiled in a crevice, sunning itself. Its head swiveled noiselessly round, the green eyes glittering, I slid my pistol from its holster.

  Sergeant Chicken saw what I was about and grabbed my arm, showing filed teeth that rightly belonged to a shark.

  “Don’t kill that there snake, son. Let it live. It might bite a Mexican someday.”

  He was grinning in his predatory way and thought that was the end of it, but he didn’t fathom the depth of my intentions.

  “I can’t stand them reptiles!” I cried. “Oh, little Jesus! Look, he’s ready to strike!” I yanked my arm loose from his sinewy grasp, raised my pistol, didn’t aim, fired, and missed that rattler’s head by a good two feet. He whipped himself back into the crevice. The sound of the shot shattered the tranquil air of the forest, and the bullet whined off the rocks. Then the snake slithered out again and headed toward us.

  “Fucking halfwit!” Chicken hissed.

  He leaped back and ran for his horse, ground-tied to a fallen juniper branch. I yelled, “I’ll go this way!” I clutched Maximilian’s reins and jumped down on the rocks, then headed at a run toward the trail.

  That rattler would need wings to catch me. And I had warned Pancho Villa.

  Bullets sang above my head, and one zinged off the gray boulder where I ducked for shelter. I reached up to whack Maximilian on the rump, and he bolted across the trail into the junipers. Something tugged at my hat—it sailed off my head, cartwheeling through the dust. My scalp burned where I had been creased. Now look here, I thought—this is ridiculous. Villa and Candelario and the rest of them hadn’t recognized me: they had heard the shot, caught a glimpse of my khaki uniform and figured they were being attacked by the cavalry. It would have been an ironic conclusion to my revolution if I had led Tompkins to Villa’s hiding place in the sierra, but it occurred to me that it would be even more personally disappointing if by trying to warn them I wound up looking like a chunk of Swiss cheese doused in ketchup.

  Raising my hand over the boulder, I wigwagged my pistol.

  “Chief! It’s me! Tomás! Don’t shoot!”

  Two more bullets chipped sparks off the stone. Then I heard the nasty rattling of a machine gun and saw little explosions of dust advancing down the coulee off to the right of the boulder, marching right past me in an orderly but blood-chilling progression. I was used to this, but that didn’t mean I liked it. Warm blood already tickled my ear. I kept the cheeks of my tail pressed tightly together to avoid my body getting more alarmed than my brain wanted it to be.

  And any minute, with all this hullabaloo, Tompkins and the cavalry would come barging up the trail and fall on Villa, with me squeezed in the middle.

  I looked off to the right again, to see how the machine gun might be traversing, and spotted the rattler sliding down the rock face in the sunlight, wriggling purposefully to where I hunched behind the boulder. From under cold green eyes his forked tongue darted out of a satanic mouth. I fired at him and missed. He slithered forward, and that did it for me. I shoved off hard to the left, bent low and soared down the cliff onto the trail, tumbling in the dirt like a rodeo clown. The breath flew out of me. Then pain ripped through my arm.

  “Damned fools!” I yelled. “Cut it out! It’s me!”

  Just before I reached the shelter of the junipers, staggering along on all fours, bullets worrying the air all around my head, I shot a glance down the trail in a last hope that they’d recognize their lost gringo compadre and come loping up to give me a hug and a decent apology. I saw them clear enough.

  But it wasn’t Villa and Candelario. A dozen Carranzista soldiers blocked the trail some fifty yards away, with an officer on a black horse waving a quirt and yelling at the machine gunners to kick the barrel over in my direction. I felt like God, having finally seen what was lying there in His hand, had opened His fingers and shaken it loose like some kind of bug.

  I dove into the forest. Maximilian saved my bug’s life. He nosed toward me through the trees, nickering with pleasure. I jumped up and pulled a dirty trick. I had seen Geronimo do it back in Oklahoma in Mr. Miller’s rodeo when he went after the buffalo.

  I grabbed the horn of the saddle with one hand and the stirrup iron with the other, stretching myself flat along Maximilian’s flank so that he was between me and the Carranzistas, who were firing wildly into the forest. With one spur I kicked his rump … off we went at a trot between the junipers. It was an uphill slope and I couldn’t see a thing, just smelled sweat and horseflesh. The low juniper branches slashed my shirt straight down the back and took half my hide with it.

  He was a smart horse, and a lucky one, or else the Carranzistas couldn’t see his smoky shape in the hiding shadows of the forest. We reached the head of the slope and broke into a little sunlit glade. It was quiet there. I could only hear Maximilian’s snuffling and my harsh breath, and feel his heart, big as a coconut, beating fast beneath the hard gray hide.

  I worked my way up into the saddle and jammed my feet into the stirrups. Gulping warm air, I leaned down, kissed him between the ears and thanked him.

  “I’d do the same for you, amigo, if I could.”

  We got out of the glade quickly, and I chose a gentle descent through some hawthorns, then came out of the forest onto a burro path. It looked to me like it wound around the mountain back in the direction of Pahuirachic. Shooting began, back where I had come from, and I guessed that Sergeant Chicken had led the cavalry back to the Carranzistas and they hadn’t yet realized they were fighting on the same side, or were spoiling for a scrap and didn’t give a damn. Not my fault. I used my sleeve to wipe the blood off my ear and cheek, and eased Maximilian into a slow trot south toward Pahuirachic.

  These mountains looked more familiar to me. Villa was nearby. I decided I would drop in on him and tell him what all the shooting had been about.

  It took me nearly three hours to find the cave. You couldn’t see it from a distance, not unless you had Pancho Villa’s eyes, but I remembered some stands of dead maguey in the ravine below it, and the water hole, and eventually I found them. By now my back smarted and stung from where the branches had scored it, and I thought I might have busted my shoulder when I jumped from the rattler’s path onto the trail. I sipped warm water from my canteen, changed out of my cavalry uniform, stuffed it into the saddlebags and began to climb the slope.

  It was awfully quiet… no sound but crickets in the brush and a breeze feathering through the ravine. A few buzzards coasted far up above the crest of the hot blue sky. When I reached the cave I was out of breath.

  The cave was empty. For a minute I thought it might be the wrong cave. Then I caught the faint smell of disinfectant and coon shit that still lingered in the dampness, and when I poked around in the dirt I found bits of eggshell and charcoal from an old fire. It was the right cave. I figured they had been gone for about a day or two.

  Hunkering down at the entrance, I gazed round at the stony brown mountains struck by the afternoon sun. The silence was sweet and soothing, soft as a snowfall. It was pleasant there, and surely peaceful. A man could do much worse. Down below, beyond those distant peaks, crazy men wanted nothing but to kill each other. They froze at ni
ght, their tongues hung out by day. Up here, none of that made sense. If I stayed, I could live on the mountain, trap quail and deer, never have a care or enemy in the world, and no one would shoot at me. A hermit’s life might be the best that this earth could offer, and I even had William Shakespeare in my saddlebags for company. By the time I worked my way through to The Tempest and Henry VIII, I would have forgotten all the good parts of Richard III and The Merchant of Venice and could start all over again.

  It tempted me for about five minutes, and then I understood that I was a creature of the flesh, and there were too many people back in that lunatic world whom I wanted to hug and smile at, and I came to terms with something in my nature and said aloud at the sky, “I’ll take the bad with the good … hell, that’s all there is.”

  Getting shot at all the time is no tonic, but afterwards it does tend to make you think straight about why you’re pleased not to be dead. I slid down the rocky slope between the cactus plants. The skin of my back had been peeled away in the forest, my head was bloody and I thought my shoulder might be broken or out of joint.

  I hoisted myself into the saddle. I knew where I wanted to go, what tempted me more than the mountain. The women I loved were in Parral. The cavalry was headed there too. I was glad to be rid of them for a while, but it might be an intelligent idea—if I wanted to keep on Patton’s good side, and if ever I wanted to live in Texas—to be there when Tompkins arrived, so I could shore up my credibility by spinning some yarn about first the rattlesnake and then the Carranzistas chasing me. Hell, wasn’t it partly true?

  Partly true, in a world full of loonies, and hunters, and liars like myself, seemed like gold.

  Chapter 33

  “ ‘Tis true:

  there’s magic in the web of it.”

  Patricio let me in at the gate of Los Flores and walked a weary Maximilian around to the stables. The lovebirds and the macaw screeched in their cages. Elisa, in denim and boots just as I had imagined her, slid out the door and spotted me standing there in her garden.

  “Tom! Oh, Tom!”

  I must have looked like a motherless calf that had bawled its way through a barbed-wire fence and then had a losing argument with a bobcat. She moved to embrace me, then held back. I looked over her shoulder toward the pink stone of the hacienda, hot in the morning sun, and didn’t see Rosa. But she couldn’t be far, and I thought I heard footsteps moving quickly on gravel.

  “It’s all right, Elisa. We’re old friends. You can kiss me.”

  She looked fine—lean, suntanned, hair yellow as fresh butter. She came into my arms and hugged me tightly, so that I felt the heat of her breasts beneath the denim. I smelled faded perfume behind her ears. I thought, this is what it’s like to come home. The vanilla orchid vines had their flowering now, in May, and the blossoms of the African tulip flowed nearby to the ground.

  I often wonder, at this distance of years and space, if it would have changed things had Rosa been the one to come to the door. Because, already, my heart was being rent and tugged.

  “You look like hell, Tom. Are you all right?”

  “Sleep and a hot bath are what I need. Where’s Rosa?”

  She came round the corner of the house in the shade of the poinciana trees, then stepped off the gravel path into a flood of sunlight. Barefoot, she wore a white cotton dress and some silver Indian bracelets I had never seen before. It had only been three months, but it was a different Rosa. Her black hair was swept up in a thick bun atop her head, and her coffee-colored skin shone as if she had freshly scrubbed. She carried a notebook and pencil. She looked thinner, but what had changed most wasn’t something you could point a finger at and say, “That’s new. That’s different.”

  She was a young woman now, not a girl. I cut loose from Elisa and held out my arms. Dark eyes shining, she flew across the grass.

  “Tomás…”

  She smelled of Elisa’s perfume, and the musk of her black hair was even more familiar to me than those other canary-colored strands. This was home too. I had carried all that in my mind, never forgotten the sepia photograph of the two women by the gate, hands frozen in goodbye.

  I looked over her shoulder and saw Elisa’s eyes still smiling, a kernel of sadness in the sea-green depths.

  Rosa drew back. “Are you hurt, Tomás?”

  “Hell no. I’m wild and woolly and full of fleas. Got moss on my teeth, and I hugged a grizzly bear so hard he begged for mercy. I’ve been eating eggs out of an eagle’s nest, and the eagle’s so scared she hides. I rode a panther bareback. Rattlesnakes have bit me and crawled right off and died. I just took in too much territory, that’s all.”

  They both brought me to the house, where I worked off my sweaty boots, slapped the dust from the seat of my pants and stretched out on one of the leather chairs in the big cool room, full of fragrant white roses and lilacs in Chinese vases. This would be any man’s idea of heaven, once we got the sleeping arrangements sorted out. If I had my way, I realized, I’d never leave.

  Elisa parked me in the room where Candelario and I had slept when we had come over the mountains from Chihuahua City with the sack of gold. She and Rosa fussed over me in a way that made me purr. I must have stunk like a whorehouse in a heat wave, but after a hot bath I was fresh as a powdered babe. They fed me veal in lemon sauce and fresh buttered spinach and black bread, and I drank half a bottle of cold white wine that made me dizzy. My shoulder wasn’t busted, but it was bruised to the bone and I was practically a one-armed man. Rosa put a paste of mustard and wild herbs on me; that took the sting away. Elisa cleaned the scalp wound and wrapped my head in a white bandage. I looked like that fellow in the Revolutionary War—the American one— beating his drum on the way to Bunker Hill, or wherever he was going.

  I was glad to be alone that night. I was worn out and wouldn’t have made good horizontal company … and besides, that was a situation I hadn’t yet figured out how to handle. Rosa was my woman, but she had made no move to claim me. More to the point, I hadn’t claimed her.

  Now that I was here, a sense of well-being had descended upon me. A hasty move, I realized, could put an end to that. I wasn’t pawing around for turmoil anymore, but if Rosa had worked herself into the fabric of my life, as I had decided a long time ago, Elisa was woven in that fabric now too. I didn’t want to start unraveling until I was dead certain what was right for each of them and for me.

  I slept ten solid hours and woke to the sun, feeling stiff but perky. Over a breakfast of flapjacks and coffee I told them all about my adventures and how Major Tompkins and the flying column of the Thirteenth Cavalry were due to descend on Parral looking for a man who wasn’t there.

  Rosa, wearing a blue cotton dress and a silver comb in her hair, just sat quietly smiling at me. Military moves were beyond her concern.

  But Elisa understood, and didn’t like it. She leaned back to tap her riding crop on the table. She told me then that Venustiano Carranza had issued an order to his garrisons to keep the Americans out of the cities—by force if necessary.

  “The people here hate Don Venus. But they love Francisco Villa. If they think the cavalry’s hunting for him and about to find him, they’ll resist.”

  “The cavalry can hunt all they like. He’s not here.”

  “Tom, the people in Parral may think he’s hiding somewhere. They’ll resist the cavalry.”

  “I’ll find Tompkins and head him off. Tell him Villa’s scooted.”

  “He may not believe you. And there may not be time. They may just attack.”

  “Attack? No chance. That’s not the American way, Elisa,” I said, quoting Patton and feeling proud.

  After breakfast we went to the library, where I could stretch out more comfortably on a leather chair and ottoman, and when Rosa left for a while to look after one of the pintos who had a case of distemper, I asked Elisa how things had gone between them. I had noticed that notebook and pencil in Rosa’s hand when we first met in the garden.

  “It was the w
ay I thought it would be, Tom. We’re friends. You didn’t tell me you’d started to teach her to read and write. That was good of you. When I found out, I took up where you left off.”

  So what I had wanted had come about without my asking. If only all things in life were so ordained!

  Elisa, straddling a hardback chair, wore her tight blue denim shirt with nothing on beneath it, whipcord breeches and carved riding boots. It was the kind of working outfit that wasn’t meant to tempt a man, but it had the opposite effect on me. Every time she shifted in the chair I saw those lithe muscles press against the cloth.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  “That’s not like you, Elisa. When were you ever shy?”

  “All right. I’m not. You’re back, although no one knows for how long. What do you want here?”

  I knew exactly what she meant, and I didn’t want to fudge. But I didn’t know the answer. I had come back to discover it.

  “I want a little peace and quiet and harmony in my life,” I said. “And I don’t want to hurt anyone. Not Rosa, not you. Does she know about us?”

  “I suspect she guesses. But I never told her.”

  “If she guesses, or knows … is she jealous?”

  “Tom, a woman isn’t a female man. Rosa doesn’t think that she owns your body.”

  “And the rest of me? My feelings? They’re not constant, either. They never were. I love Rosa, and what I feel for you—if it’s not love, Elisa, then I don’t know what to call it.” I made an important confession then, and a discovery. “I used to think I wasn’t greedy, but now I know that’s not so. I don’t know how to deal with that. I came back to find out. You and Rosa each give me something, and whatever it is, I need it. Until I sort myself out, I can’t give equal value.”

  “Did you stop loving Rosa,” asked Elisa, “when you were here with me?”

  “No, I didn’t. Isn’t that the problem?”

  “But you’re a warm-blooded man, Tom. You don’t love wisely, but you love well. With a whole heart. You may not see that, but I do. So does Rosa.”