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

by Clifford Irving

  The trouble came from the most unexpected quarter: the Carranzista soldiers.

  Troop K had begun to retreat, with Tompkins, Richley, the pack mules and me bringing up the rear. Captain Mesa and a troop of his blue-uniformed men stayed behind with us. The sun beat down, and the swallows in the plaza chirped like a troop of disturbed monkeys. Lozano was at the head of the column, winding up a steep cobbled street. I lost sight of Elisa.

  The citizens and the Carranzista soldiers, who had moved out of the park and into the street to control the crowd, jostled and shoved each other. The outnumbered soldiers gave way grudgingly—they were not overly fond of the people of Parral, who had made no secret of their loyalty to Pancho Villa. Machetes flashed, striking sharply against the steel of bayonets.

  Then Captain Mesa, tired of being pushed around and perhaps beginning to fear for the safety of his soldiers, shouted an order. Carranzista rifles cracked. Women screamed. I saw a white shirt blossom with blood.

  Tompkins yelled ahead at his men to hold their fire, to retreat to the railroad station and join Troop M. Lozano, hearing the shots, came galloping back, brandishing his sword.

  But it had got beyond the control of any one man.

  Now a few citizens of the town had pulled pistols and were firing back at the Carranzista soldiers. Bullets whistled in every direction, some of them chipping stone off the walls above our heads. It was hard to tell whether they were aimed at us and who was doing the firing.

  Tompkins and I reached the crest of the hill, above the railroad embankment. The horses’ hoofs rang out on the cobbles.

  A messenger came galloping up from Lozano. “Señor Major, the general requests that you withdraw!”

  “What the hell does he think we’re doing?” Tompkins snapped. “Look here—your soldiers are shooting at us!”

  When we got down to the embankment we turned, and now the Carranzista troop under Mesa was running down the street toward us, whooping and hollering. They must have decided, in the end, that the real enemy had whiter faces than theirs.

  Tompkins, purple in the face rather than white, turned to Sergeant Richley. “Sergeant, give me your rifle!.” He stood up and yelled at the charging soldiers, “Damn it, you people! Get back!”

  The answer was a wild volley of shots that slammed into the embankment … all but one bullet, and that one gored Richley in the eye and flowered out the back of his head. He had been lying on his stomach, with only his head exposed to see over the rails. He made no sound; he just slumped over.

  I didn’t think of it then, but he was the first American soldier of the Punitive Expedition to be killed in Mexico. It happened no more than five feet away from me. Tompkins turned to hand him back his rifle, saw the puddle of blood and knew immediately that he was dead.

  “Troop M, fire at will! Troop K, withdraw!”

  The battle lasted about an hour, while the Yanks steadily withdrew along the trail to Santa Cruz. The troopers had one more man killed and six wounded. About twenty Carranzista soldiers were killed, and later I found out that in the melee on the plaza they had shot four citizens of Parral. With all that smoke and confusion and dust I became separated from Tompkins, and of course I never fired my rifle. Elisa was out of her mind, I decided. And for all I knew then, she might have been shot by one of Mesa’s men. After we passed the railroad station I veered off behind a water tank and then, when the firing slackened, ducked my head and whipped Maximilian across the tracks and down a smelly back alley that led to Calle Chorro. I wanted no more to do with the cavalry.

  I threw the reins to Patricio and ran across the gravel into the house. The coolness was a balm. I heard voices in the library. Elisa sat on an ottoman, the rifle across her lap, her face dappled with sweat. Villa sprawled in a red-leather easy chair, drinking a mug of steaming coffee. Elisa looked up at me quickly.

  “It worked, Tom!”

  “Worked?”

  “The cavalry’s gone. They won’t come back. Your chief is safe. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  Well, I suppose she was right, and she had a right to be proud and think of herself as a hero. Where I had failed, she had succeeded. That may have irked me a trifle, but what dismayed me considerably was the realization that two Yank troopers and some fairly innocent citizens of Parral had been killed in order to achieve our purpose. The soldiers, who had only fired after they had been fired upon, were as undeserving of death as the citizens. Elisa didn’t seem to understand that, or didn’t seem to care. I was sure it had never occurred to Pancho Villa.

  I let Elisa know what was on my mind. She flushed a little, but then she said, “Tom, it had to be. We just couldn’t foresee it.”

  “You thought Tompkins would leave peaceably?”

  “He tried, didn’t he? How could anyone know the Carranzistas would shoot at the crowd?”

  Villa asked, “Where are the gringos now?”

  “Heading north,” I said. “They’ve had enough of Parral. They don’t want to kill Carranzistas or Mexican citizens, chief. They only want to kill you. They won’t be back.”

  He turned to Elisa, smiling. “You saved my life, señora. If I had medals to give. I’d give you the biggest one, made of pure gold. For the moment you have only my thanks. And my loyalty unto the grave.”

  I grunted and stomped out of the house to the stables, where I smoked a cigarette, cleaned up Maximilian and muttered to myself for the better part of an hour. It wasn’t for this that I had left Texas and come back down to Chihuahua, and it certainly wasn’t why I had agreed to stay on with Pancho Villa and play at being a spy. Maybe the reason I hadn’t wanted to fight at Guerrero had been more than just my worry about Rosa and Elisa. What sense did it make? We’d kill some of them, they’d kill some of us. In between, a few cavalrymen would die too. What had started as a battle for land and liberty had become little more than a bloody game. It could go on forever, and the chief would keep believing that when he blew that one bugle call, a hundred thousand would rise. It wouldn’t happen. I wondered if there were that many whole men left in the country to fight.

  I was sick of killing, sick of being shot at, sick of running. I had come back from my mountain lair at Pahuirachic to find a different destiny. It was here, I was sure of that. I was tapped out, fed up. A stove-up cowboy—too tired to fight, but not too dumb to quit.

  That night I was roaming the garden, still muttering and trying to make peace with myself, when Rosa came out of the house to find me. I hadn’t seen Elisa all evening; she had stayed out of my way, and I took my meal in the kitchen alone. I didn’t have much appetite, but I managed to guzzle almost a full bottle of wine, and then I had a brandy to wash it down.

  Rosa, without a word, pressed her body against mine so that I inhaled the perfume of her hair. Villa was back with Hipólito in his room behind the stables. Candelario would surely sleep with Francisca. I took Rosa with me to my room, bolted the door, and we undressed. I made love to her, not with much joy, but it was better than I thought it would be. It was a way to kill the voices in my mind. It had been a long time, but neither of us had forgotten how to please the other.

  Afterwards, she sighed. “Don’t be sad, Tomás.”

  “I can’t help how I feel.”

  “In war, men die. It’s to be expected.”

  “Not this time. It didn’t have to happen.” I stubbed out my cigarette.

  “They would have found your chief. That’s all Elisa was thinking about. You would have done the same.”

  I might have … that was true. I had gone over this a dozen times already in my head and muttered versions of it to Maximilian. But nothing helped.

  “I’m not angry at her, damn it. I’m just upset because two Americans died. And didn’t have to. They didn’t even want to shoot. They held their fire until one of them got killed.”

  “In battles, mi capitán, many have died. My husband. Thousands more.”

  “I guess I’m just tired of it all, Rosa. I wish I could go home.”<
br />
  “You can.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  Rosa was silent for a while, stroking my bare back, careful to avoid the strip of peeled hide that had scabbed and begun to heal. When I thought of all the times I had been skinned and shot and nearly blown up—at Torreón, Celaya, León, Pahuirachic—I was lucky to be whole.

  Then Rosa spoke, even more gently than before. “There is one thing, Tomás. Elisa doesn’t say it, but I do. If you get angry, which I hope you don’t, I ask your pardon. If you hadn’t come here first, and then if your chief hadn’t followed, this would never have happened. If he had not chosen this house—which he did because of you—the señora would not have had to do what she did. The two gringo soldiers would not have died. The fault lies with you and General Villa.”

  I put a hand to her lips. Of course, she was right: Elisa had just been an instrument of our purpose. She had been brave … braver than I would have been. She had faced a troop of the U. S. Cavalry, with no way of knowing that Lozano wouldn’t order her shot.

  I had to make it up to her, but somehow this didn’t seem quite the right way to go about it, with Rosa curled next to me in the darkness.

  The next day, at first light, Elisa rode south into Durango with Patricio. A while ago she had made an appointment to buy an Appaloosa stallion, and she didn’t return until evening.

  In the late morning Villa strolled out to the stables and saddled his albino mare, then rode around the corral for half an hour. His leg hurt, he said, but he could bear it, and riding a horse would help to cure him. Back in his room he unwrapped the bandage and showed me the wound. It was pink around the edges and starting to scab.

  “In a week, I’ll be able to leave. And do you know what I think?” His topaz eyes gleamed: he had shaved, and his skin looked fresh and healthy. “I think our fortunes have turned. This Pershing coming to Chihuahua was the best thing that could have happened. Who could have foreseen it? The people hate the gringo soldiers, and they love the fact that they can’t catch me. Ten thousand against four hundred! It makes the blood sing. They will rally to me even more than before! What I told that German wasn’t a lie. When I blow the bugle, a hundred thousand will rise. Eventually the gringos will leave. The people will be sick of Carranza and Obregón. The true revolution can begin again! And we’ll win.”

  Oh, no. Enough was enough. He had been licked on half a dozen battlefields from Celaya to Guerrero, by Obregón and Chao and even Colonel Dodd, and he still couldn’t admit defeat. Whatever we both had wanted wouldn’t happen now—the future was in the hands of other men. If the ideas of the revolution were good, they would survive defeat. They might even survive victory. He had done his best, but he was a loser now.

  “The first thing we’ll do, Tomás, when I’m well, is get our gold out of Lake Ascensión. Then we can buy rifles and bullets and cannon. We’ll attack Juárez…”

  I left him there, working out his plans.

  When Elisa returned she was busy with the new Appaloosa, gentling him down around the mares. Dinner was as long as a rainy Sunday. Finally, after a brandy, Rosa and the men went off in different directions. Elisa started to go too, but I caught her arm.

  “Will you have one more drink with me?”

  We settled down in the library, where we had spent many an evening. I coughed a few times.

  “Oh, don’t look so sheepish,” she said. “I hate that. Spit it out.” There was a sharp edge to her tongue, more than just weariness, and she didn’t seem as hangdog as yesterday.

  “Elisa, I got you into this, and I blamed you when I should have been blaming myself. I just wanted to say I was sorry.”

  “I accept your apology. I don’t feel too well myself about the way it turned out. You can go.” She cocked a pale eyebrow at me and drew up a corner of her mouth. “Rosa’s probably waiting. Don’t keep a woman waiting too long, Tomás.”

  So she knew about last night. That, I realized now, had been inevitable. She was mistress of the house and could figure out where everybody was and wasn’t. But hadn’t she given her blessing? I downed the cognac in one swallow. “Elisa, if you’re angry, tell me why. You owe that to me.”

  “Not angry. Disappointed. You didn’t go to Rosa last night. You went away from me. I don’t like that.”

  I let out a groan. “Elisa…”

  “It was childish.”

  “Maybe so. I was feeling low. Obviously, sooner or later, it had to happen.”

  “What’s done is done.” Her green eyes glinted. “But now I’m the one who feels low. I’m the one who went out on the street the other day, and innocent people got shot because of it. I’ve been feeling rotten ever since it happened. And I need a shoulder to cry on too. If need’s the key to open that door you’ve shut ever since you got back, I’ve got plenty of it.”

  Ever since I got back? Hadn’t she understood my confusion? Words, I realized, were never enough.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” I said, bold as a bull firing out of the chute.

  “Let’s do that.”

  “Want to finish your drink?”

  “I don’t need that. “

  She led me upstairs. The big four-poster gave us plenty of room to stretch and curl and tangle our limbs. She cried a little before we made love, but I think they were tears of gladness as much as sorrow for the hard time she had been through. The tears that came afterwards were from pleasure. Before my brain fogged over I had one long and unbalancing thought.

  Last night, Rosa. Tonight, Elisa. No qualms, no bad feeling in the bones. What did that make me? A rake? A great lover? A cocksman like Candelario? A man who liked coffee and tea? Was it need or gluttony? There had to be a reckoning.

  The morning after I slept with Elisa, Rosa was in a cheerful mood. She cooked a breakfast of sizzling lean bacon and fried eggs and hummed to herself all the while as Candelario boiled the coffee and I made toast in the charcoal oven. Later, in the library, she read to me in English from a school reader. She kept glancing at me warmly, and there was no sign that she knew what had happened. On balance that suited me, even though I felt a stir of guilt at her innocence—because if I had to dash back and forth calming one of them down each time I wound up in the other’s bed, I would be as miserable as a razorback hog stropping himself on a fence post. Not that I meant to continue that dangerous game—Elisa one night, Rosa the next. Oh no!

  I had reached a decision. The part of me below the waist might be able to handle it for a while, but my nerves would last as long as a keg of cider at a barn raising. In the end I would lose them both, as well as my self-respect. And I didn’t care what Elisa believed—there was such a thing as right and wrong, at least for me. And there still is, although perhaps my definitions have changed. Started to change even then. Especially then.

  It was a lazy day. Patricio told us that Major Tompkins and the cavalry had headed straight north, licking their wounds. Elisa and I worked with the horses, introduced the new Appaloosa to the other mare, did some shoeing and plaited some fresh maguey ropes. Villa rode around the corral for another half-hour. Candelario took a siesta with Francisca. I wondered if I should be heading back for Bachinava in order to point Patton and Pershing in some other interesting direction, but I was in no hurry. They still had a lot of scouting to do around La Bufa and El Sauz.

  In the late afternoon Rosa and I went into the orchard to pick oranges so she could squeeze fresh juice for the chief. She smiled at me sweetly.

  “I meant to ask you earlier, Tomás … did you have a pleasant night?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Did you sleep well?”

  “Uh … on and off. I had funny dreams.” I bent to the basket of oranges, but from the corner of my eye I saw her grinning.

  When I began to blush furiously, she gave a merry cackle. Then she said calmly. “Last night I had a dream too. Do you want to hear it?”

  “I’m not sure I do. Damn it, Rosa, what are you crowing about?”

  “In my dream
you wandered through the hacienda. You found yourself at the door to Señora Griensen’s room. You went right through the door, as if it were made of air, and into her bed. And you told her you were no longer angry at her. It made her very happy.”

  “Rosa!” I yelled. “Damnation! You had an ear at the keyhole!”

  “My room is next door,” she said. “The walls are thick, but I am not deaf.”

  “And you’re not angry?”

  “Not if it pleased you, Tomás. And not if it pleased the señora.”

  I took the risk. I couldn’t lie now. “Well … it did. Yes, it surely did.”

  “That’s what my ears told me.”

  “And you’re not angry? You’re sure?”

  She smiled at my discomfort and laid her fingers on my cheek. “I would be a foolish girl to be angry, if the man I love and my best friend in the world gave each other pleasure. You’re not displeased with her anymore, nor she with you. It was not wrong of you, Tomás.”

  This simplicity made my head ache. I had been brought up to be jealous—not that I’d had much opportunity before I left Texas—and to believe that a woman had equal rights in that department. Mexicans weren’t much different, and their women would kill for love. Rosa had to be one in a million. Well, one of two in a million. I couldn’t believe my luck, and knew enough not to scratch at it.

  But that evening one question remained. Where to go? Everything had been discovered, confessed and apparently forgiven; there could be no more sneaking around in the dark. Freedom is always poorly organized, and I recalled an old maxim that the females of all species are most dangerous when they appear to retreat. And, I thought, when they appear to agree with each other. I might be able to doubletalk Urbina and Patton and Major Tompkins, but with these two women I would never get away with it. And didn’t want to. That’s what I worried about … and should have known that the worry would bear no fruit I could eat. The women were in charge here. That was hard to accept at first, but I’ve learned worse lessons in my life.