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

by Clifford Irving

  He was right, and we all knew it.

  Hipólito, with Fierro, was meant to have loaded the gold in the wagon and taken the escort of our soldiers to Texas. He no longer needed company.

  “But I still have to go,” he said gloomily. “Angeles is waiting for me.”

  We built a little fire on the edge of town, and by its red glow I told them the tale of how I had tried to trick Patton into riding to Sonora, and how he had discovered my lie.

  “You’re not as clever as you used to be,” Candelario said. “The chief was right. Too much fucking dulls the mind.” He gave me a bitter smile. “Will you ride with us to San Juan Bautista?”

  “What for? Without the gold, the chief can’t buy guns. Without guns …” I shrugged. “It’s finished. Candelario. Why fool ourselves?”

  Hipólito embraced each of us in turn, and I told him to give my best regards to Mabel Silva and not to make too many babies. “I’ll name the first one after Julio.” he promised, and then he rode off in his dusty blue suit with the cartridge belts wrapped around his potbelly, looking exactly the same as the first time I had met him outside the hut in Juárez. An unlikely villain, if ever I knew one. His portly figure grew dim and then vanished.

  I would never see him again.

  We threw sand on our fire and ground out the coals, and then the three of us trotted back to where the men camped on the southern edge of Ascensión. Huddled by their own crackling fire, its sparks arcing into the sky like June bugs, they softly sang a ballad of lost love. I had heard hundreds of them, and they always touched me.

  “Let’s sleep here.” Candelario said wearily. “This has been a bad day. Tomorrow can’t possibly be worse.”

  We helped grind out the soldiers’ fire and then bedded down. It was a warm night, and crickets chirped on the desert floor. As the fire died, the darkness became absolute. The stars swarmed overhead, the Milky Way thick as cream. It was a beautiful night, so calm that it seemed impossible to relate to death. And yet death lurked there—I smelled it. The very calmness was frightening. The crickets ceased their chatter. The desert was strangely silent. Fierro had withdrawn as always to a place of his own.

  Candelario spoke. “So, Tomás … it’s really over for you.”

  There was no barb in his voice. He knew my mind. I think he loved me deeply, as a man loves another man, and I felt the same for him.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s over.”

  “We’ll miss you.”

  I didn’t want to think too much about that, so I chuckled. “Don’t you have the feeling the chief can get along without my advice now? I haven’t done too well lately.”

  “My friend, it was always good to ride with you. When I open my restaurant, wherever I go, you can come and have a fine meal. With wine. Shall I set two places or three?”

  “What do you think? You’re the one who told me life was short. I believe it now.”

  “Your luck gets better all the time—but it will never be as good as mine. You’ve got to lose an eye for that.” He chuckled in the darkness, but he had spoken with a certain wistfulness. “How will you live down there, Tomás? What will you do?”

  “Horses. That’s what I’m good at. We can enlarge the corrals and breed mustangs. We’ll sell them over in Chihuahua City. Our gold will come in handy.” I sat up and looked at him; I had an idea. “Come with me to Los Flores. We’ll go by way of Tomochic. You can shave off your beard—no one will recognize you. Open a restaurant in Parral.”

  “Do you know,” he said, “that under my beard I have a weak chin?”

  “That’s hard to believe, Candelario.”

  “But true. I was ugly. Not that I’m so handsome now. That’s why I grew it in the first place.”

  “Will you come?”

  “I have to go to San Juan Bautista and tell the chief what happened. Later, yes … I think I’ll come.” He thought for a while. Quietly he said, “If anything happens to me, unlikely as that may be, give my sack of gold to Francisca. She made me comfortable, and she asked for nothing.”

  “What about your sons becoming lawyers?”

  “Without me around, Tomás, they’ll become nothing. They’ll spend it on tequila and women. They have my blood.”

  I wonder if he knew. We both ground out our cigarettes and punched a hollow in the saddlebags to make better pillows for our heads. The horses snorted on the picket line.

  The next morning, fortune ceased to smile on her favorite soldier.

  Before sunrise one of the men shook me awake. “My colonel, there’s something blinking in the hills. To the west. There.”

  Dawn puckered the eastern sky, thin fingers of gold slanting through the mist. Darkness crumbled, the phantom shapes of cactus and stunted trees emerging in pale shadow. But enough yellow light flowed across the desert to show us the small flash at which he pointed. It might have been quartz or a patch of alkali, but then again it might have been a rifle barrel or field glasses. It was far off in the foothills that sloped toward the dun-colored mountains.

  “Let’s not take any chances,” said Candelario. “Let’s make ourselves scarce.”

  We shouted the rest of the men awake; they grumbled when we told them there would be no coffee. Saddling the horses, we swung up on their backs and trotted off toward the south. Our route would bring us closer to the mountains than I liked, but there was no other way. The grazing had been poor, and we needed to move onto higher ground where hummocks of stubby grass chinked between the rocks and where we knew there would be water holes. The glint of light in the foothills had vanished. As the sun crept higher, I began to sweat.

  An hour later we wound our way upward along a trail bounded on both sides by rocky escarpments. Here, God knows how many years ago, the earth’s crust had heaved and fractured. The brooding, bronze mountains sheered up from slate cliffs, primeval, untenanted. The sun raged down on them, flashing off quartz, mica and limestone, then flowed across the tan plain. This was the Chihuahua I knew best, a landscape for which I felt that strange affection that one feels for a place linked with hardship. I listened to the soft footfalls of our horses in the dust. A rock fell somewhere far off, with a faint echo. I felt the flinty taste of fear … knew suddenly, certainly, what was about to happen. I put my knee into Maximilian and veered left off the trail, where it widened through a defile toward the desert, yelling for the others to follow.

  Rifles cracked from the escarpment. Two horses screamed—two riders fell. I saw the peaked olive-drab campaign hats peering over the rocks, the hats with their wide brims and chinstraps; the pale faces; the spurt of bright red and curl of smoke from the Springfields. Candelario rode ahead of me, Fierro just behind. The men trailing us wheeled in confusion, trying to control their horses. Another man spilled from the saddle.

  Candelario tucked his rifle under one arm and pumped bullets toward the rocks, face contorted, beard flowing in the breeze like the mane of a black lion. The horses stumbled up on a rubble of shale, ready to plunge down the slope toward the desert, where we could run clear.

  I bent low, the horn of the saddle grinding into my ribs. Candelario’s cheek shattered apart in front of me—blood and bone sprayed into the air. He pitched off to one side, boots jerking from the stirrups, body flopping and twisting, the spread fingers of one hand trailing in the dust. His horse began to crumple. With both arms I reached out and gripped him, hauled with all my might to free him from the saddle. I heard his voice, muttering, “Son of a whore . . .’’

  Then his hand clutched the thick gray ruff of Maximilian’s mane, and I swung him up in front of me like a giant two-hundred-pound rag. A mask of red dirt covered half of his face. I flew over the top of the shale and crashed down the hillside behind Fierro, whose horse’s flanks bled from the steady jab of his spurs.

  Down we plunged, down into the desert, with the echo of rifles cracking off the rocks. The barren peaks were turning gold in the sun. The earth tilted. Hot sand scoured my face. I buried my head in Candelario
’s body. Under me, Maximilian’s stride lengthened to a gallop.

  At last I looked back over my shoulder, where a fan of thin dust trails spread over the plain … our men, scattering like spokes on a wheel from the hub of rifle fire.

  I knew it was Patton. I never saw him then, but still I knew.

  The desert, flanked by black humps of mountains: a land like a great knuckled paw thrust into space. The horses sweated. Gray clouds loafed along the mountaintops. The air grew oppressive, our shadows faded. A flash of lightning licked toward the cloud banks, and thunder rumbled. The first shower of rain cooled the horses, and I raised my face toward the sky. A pair of buzzards flapped to the branch of a mesquite. black wings tucked tightly down, motionless under the flogging rain. I slowed Maximilian and then dismounted, while Fierro waited.

  I laid Candelario on the desert floor. Soaking my bandanna with rainwater, I tried to swab away the blood from his face. The blood, mixed with dirt, had grown dark and stiff.

  “I can’t see,” he whispered.

  The bullet had struck up through his cheek, destroying his good eye. He was blind, and he was dying. He would never grow fat, never own his restaurant, never see his sons become lawyers.

  The rain pelted down. “You’ll be all right,” I said. Oh God!

  I clenched my fists and took deep shuddering breaths.

  I hadn’t seen Julio die, and so it was unreal to me. But Candelario made up for that. I didn’t care anymore that death came to us all. Those were words. He had been my brother. We had counted gold, been shot at in the Morelos Theater, blown up the railroad, found both our names inscribed in Parral. Images spun through my mind. The trenches of Celaya, where he had saved my life, a lobby in the Station Hotel. I cared that the best were gone, the worst survived.

  “Hombre,” he whispered. “Go. Leave me in peace.”

  I thought I would have to shoot him the way I would shoot a crippled horse. But he was considerate, even at the end. A little rattle came from his throat. Through the blood I couldn’t see his eyes glaze, but I felt him stiffen, then go slack. I was gripping his shoulders in the rain when he died.

  Fierro’s calm voice seemed to come from a distance. “They’re not far behind,” he said. “Leave him now.”

  The rain eased. Hard gashes of sunlight swooped down to stain the desert, so that the shadows of the horses flowed like a moving stream. Sunset bled over the land, turning the desert crimson. Then the wound closed, and night fell like death.

  Chapter 37

  “Still ride in triumph

  over all mischance.”

  from THE SCHOOLTEACHER’S JOURNAL

  Chihuahua

  June 17, 1916

  The lieutenant positioned us perfectly and made only one mistake: he let me keep my rifle. It was sheer good luck that the Villistas had ridden into the foothills, but they must have had a destination south of Casas Grandes and this was their only route.

  They came in single file, silently, three riders ahead and the rest bunched behind, faces in black shadow under their sombreros. When they were less than a half-mile distant, Patton, squeezed down between two boulders, worked goggles over his nose and reached for his field glasses. The desert light was so strong that the horses seemed to swim legless on a rippling sea of white water.

  “I can see Mix,” he murmured, “but where’s Villa? Damn! The man out in front looks like Cervantes. How are your eyes, Miguel?”

  His were watering and red-lidded from losing a night’s sleep. I took the glasses from him and adjusted the focus. I watched the dark faces drawing closer, lacking expressions, mouths clamped tight under their mustaches against the dust. He was right: I didn’t see Pancho Villa. But I knew the man behind Mix. That smooth face and those almond eyes had haunted my dreams.

  “Third in the column, Lieutenant, is Colonel Fierro. The one who shot the prisoners in Torreón.”

  He grunted impatiently. “Yes, but do you see Villa?”

  “He’s not with them. He would lead.”

  “Hold your fire,” Patton called calmly to his men. “Let them pass. Be silent.”

  Our horses were tethered behind the cliff. Hardly a breeze blew. The riders were a hundred yards away now. The shuffle of hoofs in the dust reached our ears … the creak of saddle leather, the click of iron on loose shale. Somewhere a rock fell, dislodged by a trooper seeking better cover. Mix yelled, then spurred his horse.

  Patton would have let them go. He wanted them to lead him to Pancho Villa. But that meant nothing to me. Whatever promises I had made about Mix, I had made none about Rodolfo Fierro. Mix had only been his instrument, I knew that now, but for Fierro I felt an engulfing hatred. To have him in the sights of my rifle and to let him go would have mocked my vows, my brother’s memory, the deepest purpose of my life. A red haze rose before me. I pulled the trigger of my rifle.

  “Damn you, Bosques!” Patton cried.

  Alive, unharmed, for my shot had missed him, Fierro spurred his horse quickly after Mix, over the rocky scarp toward the desert.

  The troopers took my shot as a signal; they began firing. Cervantes swung his rifle toward us. The rest of the Villistas tried to turn their horses, to bolt back down the trail. A trooper to my left, clutching a bloody chest, dropped his Springfield …

  When it was over, Lieutenant Patton climbed to the escarpment, peering through his field glasses.

  If you do anything foolish, I don’t want to know about it. But if you can find Villa . . .

  Perhaps Pershing’s words came back to him then. Perhaps he remembered his Confederate grandfather, who had hesitated at the gates of Washington, D.C. He didn’t have the military mind in its highest form of development, because he was swayed by ideas of right and wrong..

  His face warped with anger. He lowered the glasses, clenching his fist so tightly that the knuckles showed white. Then he plunged down the cliff, sliding on shale, shouting orders to his sergeant. He was to lash the three bodies on pack mules and take the prisoners to Casas Grandes.

  “Go back to General Pershing,” Patton said. “Tell him I may find Villa. Tell him I’ve taken only my striker.”

  The lieutenant and I mounted our horses and galloped over the escarpment. With the field glasses we could see faint puffs of dust far to the south on the desert. After a while it began to rain.

  Chapter 38

  “But, since I am a dog,

  beware my fangs.”

  The second day out from Ascensión, when we mounted into the sierra, I hung over the lip of rock for a long, thoughtful look at the two men who had followed us across the desert. Patton was easy to recognize. After half a minute I knew that the other fellow had to be Miguel Bosques.

  The earth was wet from the rains, and we couldn’t hide our tracks. That afternoon, north of Bachinava, it rained again—a gully washer with rolling clouds, ropes of white lightning, gusting wind and earsplitting thunderclaps. To add to my troubles, the thunder spooked Maximilian. He shied off the trail and threw a shoe against an outcrop of rock; it was from a hind hoof, and in the high country he couldn’t do without it. I had a spare pair, but I didn’t carry any anvil and bellows and I had to plate him cold right there on the mountain trail.

  I had begun to sort some things out in my mind, and when I stopped work for a minute I turned to Rodolfo, who sat cross-legged in the mud, massaging his bad ankle.

  “We’ll split up now,” I said. “I’m going south. You can pick any direction you like, but you can’t go to San Juan Bautista.”

  He hadn’t known my plans. He hadn’t been at Los Flores. “Where are you going?” he asked, surprised.

  “Parral.”

  “Francisco Villa is at San Juan Bautista.”

  “I know where he is. And if you go there, you’ll lead this damned lieutenant right to him. That’s why he’s following us.”

  “I won’t lead him anywhere that I don’t want to,” Fierro said. “Tomorrow, or when it pleases me. I’ll kill him.”

  I sh
ould have known. He would pick the time and place, just as he had once said he would do it with me.

  “Listen, Rodolfo. Clear the potatoes out of your ears and hear me well. This Lieutenant Patton may want me dead, but I don’t mean to return the favor. I want to lose him, not kill him.”

  That wasn’t easy to say, but that was the only way I could live. No more killing, I had decided. Patton had killed Julio and Candelario, two men I loved, but he was a soldier and for him they had been the enemy. I might hate him for it, but I didn’t lust for revenge like Bosques. I needed to get off the wheel.

  I shoved Maximilian against a boulder and leaned on him hard, so that his weight shifted. Lifting the hind leg, I ran a hand down to the hock, then jammed it between my teeth and hammered the shoe home. Maximilian snorted. The hoof was tender.

  Fierro considered for a while. Then he spoke in a maddeningly gentle way. I would rather he had snapped or spat, but then he wouldn’t have been Rodolfo Fierro.

  “Tomás,” he said, “I’ve known you a long time now. Once I threatened to kill you, and I would have done so if the chief had not stopped me. But you threw your rope to me at Ascensión. The others would have let me die, but not you. I confess that puzzled me for a while. Finally I accepted it, and understood. I consider you my friend.”

  His friend? Maybe the only one he had, other than Pancho Villa. But he was wrong, terribly wrong. I would rather have been friends with a scorpion.

  “No,” I said quietly. “I despise you.”

  “Why?” he asked, genuinely puzzled. “You’ve killed unarmed men. You’re not squeamish anymore. You shot Dozal, then Urbina. And others. You never even knew their names.”

  With the claw of the hammer I twisted off the point behind the shoe and then hammered the nails into the crease. I lowered Maximilian’s leg. Testing the hoof in the mud, he nickered agreeably. There had been no devilment.

  “I had reason,” I told Fierro. “And I never enjoyed it, like you.”