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

by Clifford Irving

  The lieutenant waited all day, skipping lunch. He told me he had no appetite. He chewed his fingernails instead, oiled his saber and cleaned his rifle, although both already sparkled. His hay fever attacked him hourly, so viciously that he had to sit down in order to sneeze. Each time he finished he looked red as a lobster. When he wasn’t sneezing he smoked his meerschaum pipe.

  “If Pershing gives me a green light,” he said to me, “I want you to come along. You brought me luck with Cárdenas.”

  By six o’clock he had practically no nails or tobacco left. Pershing hadn’t specified a time, but Lieutenant Patton couldn’t bear the waiting any longer. We went round to the big tent, and Lieutenant Shallenberger ushered us in. Pershing sat at his field desk, looking up bleakly as Patton saluted.

  “Sir?”

  “All right,” Pershing said, “you can do it. But I don’t want you tear-assing off on your own. You might run into trouble, like Boyd. Take twenty men. Pick ‘em yourself. Tell the packmaster to provision them for three days. After three days, no matter what, I want you back.”

  Patton glowed. “Yes, sir!”

  “Remember, you can’t go south of here—at least not more than a few miles. If Mix heads that way, call off the pursuit. If you do anything foolish,” Pershing said gruffly, “I don’t want to know about it. But if you can find Villa…”

  He didn’t have to finish. They exchanged salutes, and we left the tent hurriedly. Patton raced round to where the Thirteenth Cavalry was bivouacked and selected twenty men under a veteran sergeant. He wanted seasoned men with a better than average reason to fight, and they had all been in the retreat at Parral. He had them lead their horses and the pack mules to a corral near the edge of the camp, on the route Mix had taken when he left that morning. Then we went back to the tent to wait. I worked on my journal. Patton paced outside, watching the sun dip toward the horizon. The cloudless sky grew violet, while the sun turned bloody orange and lost its round shape. Patton began to sneeze.

  The sun set, gossamer pink streaks firing up from the mountain peaks. It was seven-thirty. The lieutenant listened to the ticking of his watch. He shifted the holster at his hip and continued to pace. At eight-thirty Mix still hadn’t showed up.

  “Damn that fucking cowboy! He’s got no watch!”

  “Lieutenant, he can tell the time by the sun and the stars. His watch never stops.”

  “Then why isn’t the sonofabitch here?”

  “Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he smelled what you know.”

  “He couldn’t have! How could he?”

  “I don’t know, Lieutenant.”

  At nine o’clock Patton made up his mind. We saddled our horses—his a big brown with a broken blaze on his forehead, mine a smaller red roan—and we rode out to the corral where our twenty men stood in the cold air, smoking their cigarettes and wondering what had happened to us.

  “We’re riding out, Sergeant,” Patton said. “Have your corporal bring up the rear with the pack mules. I want as little talking as possible. Saddle up. Column of twos. We’ll take the west trail toward Ascensión.”

  Chapter 36

  ‘They kill us for their sport.’

  A Dodge drove by, its isinglass curtains buttoned into the tonneau, but I couldn’t make out the face of the officer inside. For the third time that morning, as I stood sweating in the sun, waiting for Lieutenant Patton and Miguel Bosques to get back from the general’s tent, I read Hannah’s letter. It was dated April 5, 1916—more than two months ago.

  Dear Tom [she wrote],

  You will no doubt be surprised at receiving this epistle from me, especially in view of the fact that you have never bothered to write to me, but I have learned in life that, for the sake of one’s conscience, the golden rule is better obeyed than flaunted. I am doing unto you as I would have wished you had done unto me. I am writing to tell you whither my life has chanced to lead.

  To still your wonderment, I know of your whereabouts through a letter that Lieutenant Shallenberger, an old beau of mine, wrote to his sister, who is my friend.

  I cannot tell you how astonished I was! To think, after those long years when you remained loyal to General Villa—at the expense of your loyalty to yours truly—that now you should fight against him! The delicious irony of it! I remain shocked.

  Yet I feel, somehow, it is evidence that you have grown in your estimation of what is right & good for a man to do. Perhaps, in a way, you are atoning for past errors of judgment. Whatever your process of thought, you have my blessing. You fight now for a just cause against a man who has proved himself to be what I oft claimed him to be: a murderer of innocent men, women & children.

  Now, here is my news. On Aug. 4 ult. Daddy passed away. He was in great pain at the end, and he asked for you several times. The funeral was attended by hundreds of friends & many who did not even know him but wished to show respect. I miss him terribly.

  But even an ill wind blows some fresh breeze …

  My mourning overshadowed the grief I had felt at your parting that awful day, more than a year ago. (Is it so long? How time becomes meaningless!) Perhaps you were unaware of that grief, but I think now you must face it. / will not burden you, Tom, with a recounting of the nights & days that I wept into my pillow, or beat my breast or tore my hair. I will not tell you how I lost weight, fell ill with the grippe <6 suffered. You do not want to know these things. They are private to a woman who has been lied to & abandoned.

  For I believed, even when you left, Tom, that you might come back. I prayed that you would. You cannot imagine my distress. Young men besieged me & tried to distract me—I had two proposals within one week, and each time broke down in tears. But my prayers were not answered, perhaps not even heard. In time, I ceased. I accepted the reality of our parting.

  Tom, I loved you more than I thought a woman could love a man, but you did not truly love me in return. I gave you my all, and you cast it away. That stain will never be erased from my body & soul. You could have come back, but you chose not to. Your love for me was incomplete. More than me, you loved the life you lived, and as long as Pancho Villa existed for you as a heroic figure, you would never give up following him for a decent married life with the woman you claimed to love.

  And now to the heart of my message.

  I set you free, Tom. I put it down in these indelible words. You are free. I am engaged to a fine and honorable young man from a good family in Houston—let him be nameless, so that you will never be tempted to contact me—and after our marriage am moving to that city to start a new life.

  I trust you wish me well. I will keep your engagement ring as a memento of happier times, a memoria in aeterna rather than une mémoire de liévre, and I will always remember you fondly—especially as I first saw you so long ago in the hotel in Columbus, so young, so handsome, so shy. The hotel, like our love, is now a burned shell.

  I cannot write more or I will begin to cry all over again. Bless you,

  Tom. I salute you for having broken free—alas! for us, too late!—from that madman & bandit.

  Stay well, and don’t get killed.

  Affectionately, Hannah

  Even on the third reading I felt no shame, and my heart was about as empty of regret as a church is of cowhands. Two proposals in a week wasn’t bad at all. It certainly meant she had been out and around last winter and not cooped up all the time with her wet pillow and torn hair. I did wish her well in her marriage and wished I could tell her that too, but that was not to be. Princesses lived in fairy tales. Women lived on the earth.

  Patton’s reedy voice shook me from my reverie. He stood there in front of his tent with Bosques, explaining that Pershing wanted until evening to make up his mind whether the cavalry would ride to Sonora. He seemed oddly distracted.

  “All right, Lieutenant, whatever you say.” I promised I would be back at seven.

  On the way out of camp, heading toward Casas Grandes, I passed the men bivouacked in their pup tents on the edge of
the desert. Under that brassy sun they were a forlorn and grumpy-looking lot, but they would cool down in the Cañón del Pulpito. At least none of them would get shot at over there. That thought made me feel as righteous as a preacher. I scanned the tents for some sign of Yvette and Marie-Thérése; I didn’t find them and was about to leave, when I spotted the familiar figure of Sergeant Chicken, wearing his fringed buckskin vest and flat black hat with an eagle feather, ambling along smoking a cigar.

  “Say, Chicken, how you been? How’s life treating you?”

  “Pretty good, cowboy. Seen any snakes lately?”

  I chuckled, and this time so did he.

  “You know those two whores that were down in Bachinava? French girls? They still around?”

  “They’re here,” he said. “Ask too much wampum. Bad medicine, them two.”

  “You don’t need to powwow that Apache pidgin to me. Chicken. I know how smart you are. Where can I find them?”

  “Cost you five U. S. bucks, cowboy. No takee pesos. Wham-bam, thank you, ma’am.”

  “Point the way.”

  He told me they lived in a little hut behind the encampment, but it was too early in the morning for them to be in business. I went round there anyway, leading Maximilian, and banged on the door. Marie-Thérése came out after a minute, wearing a raggedy white nightgown, blond hair in a tangle, cursing until she saw that the intruder was me.

  “Chéri! I miss you the last time! ‘Ow wonderful! I wake Yvette.”

  “Don’t mean to disturb you—”

  “We are disturb by worse all the time. It’s okay. Come in. It’s a mess, you don’t mind?”

  “This is me, Marie-Thérése. I don’t mind.”

  Yvette crept out of her cot and unknotted the bandanna she wore wrapped around her head to keep out the morning light. She hugged me too.

  “Ah, Tom! You look fine.”

  “I’ve been taken good care of, Yvette.”

  “You are still with Rosa?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Practically a married man.” I didn’t tell that I was with Elisa too; they might have been whores, but they could still be shocked. “Candelario’s here—not far, anyway. He wanted to come to camp to hunt you down, but I told him he’d get put to bed with a pick and shovel instead of a kiss if they spotted him.”

  “Ah, yes …” Yvette crossed herself. “Like poor Julio.”

  I sat down slowly on her cot, taking her warm hand in mine.

  “What do you mean, Yvette? What do you mean, ‘like poor Julio’?” Marie-Thérése said to her, “Le pauvre, il ne savait pas. “

  “Speak English,” I demanded. “Is Julio dead?”

  “Oui, chéri. He is dead.”

  No, life was never fair. He had ridden off from Guerrero without even a wave of goodbye, and I had never seen him again. And now never would. I sat there in the hut while my eyes fogged and my heart beat in my chest like a tired drum.

  “He was killed down south,” Yvette said softly. “At a little ranch. It was quick, Tomás. One shot, they say. By that Lieutenant Patton.”

  I looked up quickly. Even through the misery that poured through me, I felt the stir of alarm. They told me what they had heard of the fight at San Miguelito. For a week it had been the talk of the camp.

  “I have to get out of here,” I said quietly. “It was good to see you both.”

  Yvette kissed me on both cheeks. “Je suis désolée, Tom.” Then Marie-Thérése kissed me and said she was sorry too. “Give our love to Candelario,” they called.

  I mounted Maximilian and trotted toward the town. Patton had known. When I spun that yarn that Julio had told me Villa was in Sonora, he had known right away. But he had said nothing. I didn’t understand it at first and didn’t work too hard at it—my mind kept jumping back to Julio, lying dead in the dust and then lashed to the hood of a car. Patton. Damn his soul! Damn him to hell …

  Now, after all this time, I remembered the name of the third musketeer. It was Athos, the melancholy one.

  Candelario and Hipólito were waiting for me in the hot foothills west of town, hunched in the shade of some manzanita trees. Fierro stood guard, mounted on his buckskin stallion. He walked with a limp now, but he rode his horse with the same straight-shouldered grace. He always wore the same clothes: white Stetson, riding boots up to the thigh, a gray jacket with silver buttons, silver-dollar spurs and crisscrossed cartridge belts.

  All the way back I had thought about Julio, my boyhood friend, who had fought at my side in the wrecking yard at Torreón. The revolution had claimed many lives but never one so close. We had been lucky. There was an end to luck. There was an end to everything. Hipólito gripped my arms strongly.

  “What is it, Tomás? Say it.”

  I don’t know how long I had been standing there.

  “Julio’s dead.” I said. “Shot near Bachinava, by the gringos.”

  Death was something we all faced, and no one could shake his fist and swear at God that He had tricked us. Candelario took a little walk into the hills and smoked a cigarette. Hipólito turned his back and fiddled with his saddle, tightening the cinch, then loosening it, then tightening it again.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Fierro spat into the dust, then looked away at the mountains.

  After a while Candelario came back. He had made his peace, but his voice was flat and drained. “The others are waiting for us. Let’s go get the damned gold and split up. Come along, Tomás. This is the last thing you have to do for us.”

  We approached Ascensión from the southwest. With our escort of twenty men we raised a cloud of alkali that could be seen for miles on that empty desert. No breeze blew. It hadn’t rained here for nearly a year, and the buzzards strutted, gorging themselves on dead cattle and prairie dogs. In a drought, cows went mad and broke their horns hooking trees and rocks, or went blind. The ground had cracked under the heat so that giant fissures gaped between stands of cactus. The unpitying sun coasted toward the peaks.

  The usual old men squatted in the dust, and two Yaqui boys again played leapfrog on the back of a sow. I missed the sight of the old women bearing water jars from the lake. It had been seven months since we dumped the gold in the green channel between the bars of quicksand. We left the men and the wagon on the edge of town and skirted it at a trot, rifles resting across our saddles, scanning the desert in the fading light. But there were no signs of Carranzistas or the cavalry.

  We trotted along a burro path past ruined adobe huts. I recognized the house where we had lived before we attacked Torreón. The orange tree that had grown through the roof was lifeless. Far off to the right I saw the derelict hut that marked the line of sight.

  “Where’s the damned lake?” Candelario muttered. “Válgame Dios! Son of a whore!”

  There was no lake.

  Now I understood what I had seen when we had dumped the gold. But I had only seen it with my eyes and not my brain. The waters had been steadily receding. That was why they had looked so brown, and the smell that had filled my nostrils the night we had camped here in March had been the smell of mud and rotting carcasses. The drought had finished the job. The lake had become a stagnant bog. We could see the bleached skull and ribs of a longhorn, picked clean.

  Without a thought to quicksand, we spurred down the bank into the flatland. The setting sun had turned the bog a lovely brownish-pink. The gumbo sucked at Maximilian’s pounding hoofs. Carrion crows flitted overhead, cawing insolently. A few pools of brackish water glistened in the unearthly light.

  There was no gold, either. We searched what had been the lakebed until dark, when there was nothing more to see. We pounded back and forth on the stinking mud. but our curses could never bring back the waters of Lake Ascensión or the sacks of gold. Finally Candelario came drumming up beside me to clutch at my reins.

  “It’s no use,” he gasped. “But who took it?”

  “Someone who’s a long way from here.”

  “Let’s ask the old men in the to
wn,” he said.

  They shrugged. They knew nothing.

  But the boys leapfrogging over the sow in the cool darkness were eager to talk. They remembered. It had happened about two months ago, when there had still been water in the lake, but it had sunk to a level where the strange humps, like the swollen bellies of dogs long dead, had been noticed by some poor Tarahumara camped on the edge of town. The Tarahumara were too poor to own horses. They had waded out in their bare feet and discovered that the objects weren’t dogs at all. The boy who spoke knew what they were.

  “They were sacks of corn, señor. Someone had stored them there. It was a very bad place to store corn, but in these times, as you know, people do foolish things. The corn must have been rotten. But these Tarahumara were so poor and so stupid that they didn’t care. They carried the corn away, one sack at a time, into the hills. It seemed very precious to them. They never came back.”

  Hipólito bared his teeth. “We’ll go to every village in the sierra. We’ll see which ones look prosperous, where they’ve built new houses. We’re bound to find it if we look long enough.”

  Candelario laughed grimly. “And pigs will fly. Do you know what those Indians will do with our gold?”

  “Spend it. What else can they do?”

  “They’ll do nothing with it.” Candelario said. “On what should they spend it? They know it belongs to someone else, and that someone will come here one day—as we’ve done. If they spend it, people will ask: ‘Where did you get it, señor? Who did you kill for it?’ The soldiers will come to ask more questions. The Tarahumara have been in the sierra for a thousand years, and they’ll be there another thousand years. They’ll bury the gold in those mountains. They’ll tell their children where it is, and the children will tell their children. A thousand years from now, if there’s still an earth and a Mexico, some fools will dig it up. I’d like to be there to see how they fight over it. I know what gold does to your brains.”