“Ten months, chief. In Parral.”
“Come around the hill with me. I have a little fire there. I put it out when I heard you, but the coals are under the sand and we’ll get it going again. Then I can see your face and learn more.”
I walked my horse around the slope with him, and he got the fire going again, blowing on the coals and adding some cornhusks. The little blaze leapt up. His own horse was hidden nearby in the hills. He wanted nothing to give away his presence, and he had his own nose for sniffing. Squatting on our heels in the flicker of the fire, we studied each other. I was right: he was fatter and his jowls looked flabby. But the yellow light in his eyes was the same—shrewd, restless, the fanaticism always tempered by that childlike gleam of hope.
“You do look older,” he murmured. “More than I would have thought. What’s happened to you? I know about Julio, and then I heard about the gringos bushwhacking the rest of you. They were very proud of killing Candelario and Rodolfo, but they said nothing about you. I should have known that no one could catch you if you were on a horse. Is there more?”
I decided it would make life simpler if I let him keep believing that the cavalry was responsible for Rodolfo’s death. I said that I had been wounded in the chase and had to recuperate a long while, and then I told him about Rosa. He didn’t speak for a while. There was nothing that would comfort me, and he was wise enough to know it.
“But you married her first.”
“Yes, chief.”
“That was good of you. That makes women happy. Perhaps you remembered I’d always told that to you. If so, I’m pleased. If not, it was still the right thing to do. And the other one, the beautiful German señora?”
“She’s still in Parral. It was over, chief. And I had to go.”
“She was mucho. “
“Yes. That’s what she was.”
“And your wound healed well?”
“Doña Corazon cured me. And took away the ojo. “
“Válgame Dios! In that, too. we’re brothers.”
I took note that I had graduated from bastard son to brother, which meant that somehow, at least in his view, I had grown up. That’s why I had come to Mexico in the first place. Well, I did feel old—and worthy of promotion. In my time, for him and for the revolution, I had done my best. That was a knowledge no one could ever take away from me.
“You did well,” he said, for he still had the ability to read a man’s thoughts. “There was never anyone I trusted more than you. Do you remember when we crossed the Rio Bravo? I thought you wouldn’t last more than a month. How long has it been? I can’t seem to remember…”
“Four years.”
“Is that possible?”
“Yes, it’s so. Time runs even while men sleep.”
He heaped more cornstalks on the fire and looked at me closely in the rising blaze. “Have you come back to fight for me again? From the sadness in your eyes, it doesn’t seem that way. But I could still use you. I’m working on a good plan. Angeles is coming back soon. Among the three of us—”
“It wouldn’t be any good, chief. I’ve lost my taste for it.”
“I can understand that. A lot has happened. Elsewhere, too. Did you know Obregón quit? Carranza made him Secretary of War. Each day he had to approve a special allowance of five thousand pesos for Pablo González, that lousy general who couldn’t cut the railroad line at Torreón. It was for expenses. What a pack of thieves! Obregón always wrote alongside the papers, ‘By special order of Don Venus.’ So Carranza wasn’t sorry to see him go.”
“Have you read the new Constitution?” I asked.
“I’ve had it read to me. The big words give me eyestrain. It’s pretty good. Unfortunately, a Constitution is no better than the men who enforce it. And they’re a pack of politicians and curs. I don’t even know why I make the distinction.”
“And what will you do now?”
He laughed. “You always ask that, as if there’s a choice.”
“You’ll keep fighting.”
“I drove the gringos out, didn’t I?”
I think he believed it.
“Of course I’ll keep fighting,” he said, after a moment of relishing his triumph. “Zapata will too, in Morelos. He’s not so bad as long as you don’t rely on him—there are many men like that. I’m going to take Ojinaga, so that we can have a port of entry for supplies. And then Juárez. Within six months I’ll have ten thousand men. I had to give up Chihuahua City, but I’ll take it again, and Torreón too. I’ll take all the cities on the railroad. I’ll take them and lose them a dozen times if I have to. The defeats are also battles, as I’ve told you, but from now on there will be more victories than defeats. You’ll see. Help me up,” he said quietly. “I need to stretch my legs.”
I did as he asked, and he arched his body and twisted his arms to articulate the bones in his back. I heard a series of tiny cracklings. He sighed at this evidence of age.
“And what about you?” he asked, when he was done. “Candelario once told me that in your misspent youth you thought of becoming an actor on the stage in New York. It’s a foolish profession, in my opinion, but still you might do well at it, and they say there’s money to be made. Perhaps you could be in the movies. I love William S. Hart, but he’s getting old. You could do as well as he did. You can certainly ride a horse better.”
So once again he touched and changed my life. He never lacked that power.
“I might try that, Pancho. I don’t know. I haven’t thought much about it lately.”
I had never called him Pancho before, but it came naturally now, and he didn’t seem to notice. That may have been deceptive. He noticed everything, I remembered.
“Whatever you do,” he said, “you’ll always have my blessing. You’re a man who will never be at rest, Tomás. You’re like me—you need a challenge. Now go. I have to sleep. Tomorrow we’re going to attack Casas Grandes … again.”
I left him there by his little brushwood fire and rode off into the familiar darkness of the desert night. This was the only parting that hadn’t truly saddened me. He was doing just what suited him, which was more than I could say for myself. I didn’t really want to be a cowhand again; for me that was like cutting along the dotted line. I had come to Chihuahua a youth and stayed to become a man … found all I had yearned for, and then lost it. Not many, at the age of twenty-six, could say that. And not many would wish to. They looked forward, not back. That was my problem, and it still is.
A little north of Casas Grandes I let the roan out to graze, then bedded down, hands tucked under my head, gazing up at the cold stars that glittered above Chihuahua. The stunning silence of the night surrounded me—vast, impersonal, wondrous and fine. I seemed to feel myself perched on the earth’s crust, and the earth was turning in the black void.
I turned with it—I was its slave—I had no choice. I whispered, “Goodnight, Rosa. Sleep well, my love.” And I closed my eyes.
The sun woke me, and after I had boiled some coffee and swallowed a few hardboiled eggs, I felt a bit better. A distant patter reached my ears, like the sound of fingernails tapping impatiently on wood. Gunfire. The battle for Casas Grandes must have started.
I rode all day over a rocky alkali flat, dodging sword plants and chaparral, keeping the roan at a lazy walk, trying to figure things out. Pancho Villa’s words kept nibbling at the edge of my mind. “You’re like me—you need a challenge.” I supposed I was free to take it, if that’s what I really wanted. Black Jack Pershing and George Patton were over in the mud of France, and now that we had the Huns to hate, who would care about settling old scores with out-of-work renegade Mexican colonels?
An actor. I had always wanted that since the curtain came down in high school. I wasn’t Hamlet caliber, but I had been a pretty effective Fortinbras in my time, cleaning away the debris. I still had Shakespeare in my saddlebags—old faithful companion, he had outlasted everybody. In El Paso I could jump a Southern Railway red-ball freight and be in Ne
w York in four days’ time. But it was barely March … it would be cold up there. They’d have a good laugh when I hauled out my serape to keep warm. And I would have a lot to learn before I could tread the boards of the Shubert with any confidence and some style.
On the other hand, they made movies in California—a sunnier land, I’d heard—and it occurred to me that if I got any work out there I wouldn’t even have to speak. I could start out as one of those mangy fellows leaning against the bar in a saloon, or one of the mustachioed outlaws who tumbles out of a window above the livery stable when the handsome sheriff starts fanning the hammer of his six-gun. William S. Hart himself didn’t do much more than ride and rope and kiss wasp-waisted women, and I’d had some practice in those arts. All I would need was a set of civilized harness. Western heroes didn’t wear sombreros and Levi’s.
A bloody ball of sun dipped toward the mountains that tumbled about on the horizon in the direction of Sonora. To Sonora …
To Celaya …
To Torreón, again …
To Hollywood …
The desert lay drowned in rich, soft mist. Somewhere, a coyote howled. The dead slept in the slowly cooling earth of Mexico. Goodbye, my love.
What the hell, I thought. The defeats are also battles. Goodbye, my youth—and goodbye. Chihuahua. I flicked a rein. The horse turned west. I rode off into the sunset, singing a mournful tune, and became a movie cowboy.
epilogue
“I have some rights of memory in this kingdom.”
A good twenty years, and then some, have passed. A lot has happened to me since, but I won’t go into that. I intended to write about the part of my life when I was a revolutionist with Pancho Villa, and I’ve done it.
I lost touch with the people I met during that unruly time, but I know what’s happened to all of them …
Zapata kept on fighting Carranza, who was now president, although there was no vote. Anytime he captured a Federal army officer, Emiliano crucified him on a telegraph pole or smeared him with honey and staked him over an ants’ nest—or, in the rainy season, over a maguey plant, whose thorns would grow a foot or more during the night and drive inch by inch through the man’s body. In April of 1919 he was betrayed by some turncoat colonel and lured into an ambush at a place called Chinemeca. He was shot to death in a patio by more than two hundred men.
In May of 1920, scenting a wholesale military rebellion against the corruption of his presidency, Carranza absconded for Veracruz with the national treasury and the dies of the government mint, even the light fixtures from the National Palace. He got as far as the pueblo of Tlaxcalatango, where he went to sleep in a little hut with only a saddle blanket for cover. During the night he was shot to death by a dozen men.
Obregón, who had come out of retirement and declared himself an enemy of Carranza, eventually became President of Mexico. He pursued his policy of trying to offend everybody as little as possible, except for the Church. In July of 1928, sitting in a café just outside Mexico City, he was shot to death by a religious fanatic.
So much for those bastards.
Felipe Angeles returned from Washington to fight for Pancho Villa, but in 1919 he was captured by General Treviño and shot to death by a firing squad. They say he refused to wear a blindfold, and he gave the signal for his own execution.
General Black Jack Pershing, as everyone knows, commanded our Americfan Expeditionary Force during the Great War and covered himself with glory. Major Frank Tompkins, who led the Thirteenth Cavalry into Parral, received the Distinguished Service Cross for his part in that campaign, became a colonel and fought in France, where he was badly wounded.
In 1934 he wrote a book called Chasing Villa. I read it with considerable interest, but he never mentioned me once. I guess I was an embarrassment to him.
George S. Patton, Jr. went to France as a captain and got himself into the Tank Service, won the Distinguished Service Cross and when I last heard of him was a colonel at Fort Riley, Kansas. We’re never met since Las Palomas, but I knew he would do well.
Franz von Papen got kicked out of the United States in 1916 for being a spy. He returned to Germany as a hero, where he rose to become Chancellor. But under that madman Hitler, the best job he could get was Ambassador to Austria.
One day some years ago, when we were on a publicity tour that stopped in New Orleans, a well-dressed, handsome, plump middle-aged woman rushed up to me in the Vieux Carré. It was Yvette.
She told me that she and Marie-Thérése owned a genteel little establishment on Bourbon Street that catered to the carriage trade, and they were doing just fine. Unfortunately I was in a hurry to get to a radio station, and we didn’t have much time to reminisce. I never saw her again.
Hannah Sommerfeld married a Houston oilman and is very active there in charity and cultural affairs, and something called the B’nai B’rith. We’re not in touch.
Elisa Griensen had to leave Mexico after the war and go back to Germany to care for her daughter, who had lost a leg in a car accident. So it probably never would have worked out between us. I heard that bit of news from Hipólito, in the only letter I ever got from him. He told me that Mabel Silva had divorced him, and he was living alone in Chihuahua City, running a little poker parlor. His letter embarrassed me, because he asked for my autograph.
He also told me that Luz Corral was back in her house, Quinta Luz. She had turned part of it into a little museum, and Hipólito said that for five pesos you could see Pancho’s saddle and a good collection of grenades and rifles and photographs …
… and that famous bullet-riddled Dodge.
The chief kept on fighting, of course. He took Casas Grandes and Ojinaga, just as he promised, but then he got licked at Juárez. His new army never got to be more than two thousand men, so he couldn’t take another crack at Torreón, which was always his favorite city to attack.
He attacked Parral instead, hanging a few Carranzista officials in the little square where Elisa had fired above the heads of the cavalry.
But after that he fought only a few skirmishes and guerrilla raids, and in 1920 he finally made peace with the new president, Adolfo de la Huerta—a man he seemed to respect and no relation to Victoriano Huerta, the man we had fought against. Villa sent him a letter which began, “You are about to hear sincere words from the heart of an uneducated man …” and which ended, “Let us begin to discuss the well-being of the republic.”
The old warrior, in his twilight, must have been tired. The government was generous, even forgiving—they’d had enough of him as an enemy. All of the Villista troops were offered a year’s pay or invited to join the new Federal army and keep their rank. Villa could maintain a personal escort of fifty men, and he was given half a million pesos and a hacienda at Canutillo in the state of Durango, not far from Parral. In return he promised never again to take up arms against the legitimate government. It was all in writing, with the usual seals and his fancy signature at the bottom.
In Canutillo he married again—this time with Luz Corral’s dressmaker, a pretty girl named Austraberta Rentería. (I think he’d always had an eye on her.) Luz declined to share the house with them. Pancho went into farming, raising blooded stock and a cote of white doves. He grew fat, and his fifty men rode tractors instead of horses. He had a secretary named Trillo, and in Trillo’s office, decorated with an oil portrait of Francisco Madero and a bronze bust of Felipe Angeles, they studied economics together and read Don Quixote. He kept his word, never again taking up arms or dabbling in politics.
In July of 1923, with Trillo and some others, Pancho drove into Parral for a cockfight and a christening. On the way out of town at the wheel of his Dodge, as he slowed at an intersection to wave to a pumpkin-seed seller who had shouted, “Viva Villa!” he and his men were shot to death by a barrage of automatic gunfire that came from a doorway.
The chief was hit by seven bullets and killed instantly.
All of Doña Corazon’s predictions had come true. He had died of many
bullets, and the large, round thing in his hands had been a steering wheel. It had been quick. And his enemies had never really conquered him.
He was only forty-three years old.
Hipólito arrived in Parral the next day and buried his brother there. It was rumored that the man behind the assassination was Colonel Calles, who had helped defeat Villa at Agua Prieta. He didn’t think Villa had ever forgiven him, and he was running for president then. A dead enemy is the best kind.
In 1926 some vandals broke into the grave and stole Pancho’s head. I hope it gave them ojo.
A while ago the publicity people out in Hollywood prepared a short biography of my life, written in the first person, and I signed my name to it. But I left out the four years I had been Mexico and told them I was still on the rodeo circuit then. No one checked. I figured I didn’t need any more trouble from the U.S. Army or the government, which was already bothering me about some unpaid taxes.
When the chief was killed I was in the midst of making a film for Fox called The Lone Star Ranger. I read about it in the papers during a coffee break. I had never forgotten him, and I hoped he hadn’t forgotten me, even though I had finally quit his revolution in its dying stage. I could almost hear him mutter, as he tugged at his curly mustache and showed a glint of red teeth, “I’m a man who came into this world to attack … My only hope is to wear myself out. To grow old. Or to be killed.“
Silently, I saluted him. Then I went back to work. Work is the best anodyne.
Since then, in Mexico, they’ve turned him into a forgotten man. I’m sure that the campesinos and the old Villistas toast his memory, but the government seems to be ashamed that he ever existed. Every city and pueblo boasts a big avenue, even a school, named after Venustiano Carranza, but not one in honor of Pancho Villa. From my point of view the revolution—and all true hope for the Mexican people to rise from their gloomy poverty—died with him at Parral. Or perhaps even before that, in Aguascalientes, when he didn’t see that he was the right man to become president, and when I failed to tell him.
TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border Page 67
