The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  THE

  FRIENDS OF

  PANCHO

  VILLA

  Also by James Carlos Blake

  Novels

  The House of Wolfe

  The Rules of Wolfe

  Country of the Bad Wolfes

  The Killings of Stanley Ketchel

  Handsome Harry

  Under the Skin

  A World of Thieves

  Wildwood Boys

  Red Grass River

  In the Rogue Blood

  Borderlands

  The Pistoleer

  THE

  FRIENDS OF

  PANCHO

  VILLA

  A Novel

  JAMES CARLOS BLAKE

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 1996 by James Carlos Blake

  Cover design by Cindy Hernandez

  Cover photograph © Ullstein Bild /Getty.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First paperback edition: Berkley Books, 1996

  First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: July 2017

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2688-7

  eISBN 978-0-8021-8910-3

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  For

  Carlos S. Blake and Estrella L. Blake . . .

  and

  my sister, Chris Lucas

  “I too love the great pagan world,

  its bloodshed, its slaves, its injustices,

  its loathing of all that is feeble.”

  —George Moore

  “What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.”

  —Ezra Pound

  “What joins men together is not the sharing of

  bread but the sharing of enemies.”

  —Cormac McCarthy

  “Salud, amor, y pesetas—

  y tiempo para gastarlas.”

  —a longtime Mexican toast

  PROLOGUE

  The greatest tragedy that can befall a man is never to know who he really is. So I have heard. I have also heard that the greatest tragedy a man can meet is never to find something to love. It seems to me these notions mean the same thing, but even if they don’t, I cannot agree with either. Who has not known men who discovered the truth about themselves only to be tortured by it for the rest of their lives? Is a man worse off when he doesn’t know who he is or when he learns he is truly a coward? When he is ignorant of his true nature or when he knows he is a traitor at heart? My point, I think, is clear. Not that I pity either cowards or traitors. To the contrary: in a just world they would all be made to face the hard truth about themselves before they died. In my fashion I made many of them do exactly that.

  As for the misfortune of never finding something to love, I’ll tell you what’s worse: to find it—whether it’s a woman or gold or God, whether it’s power or fame or the exercise of one’s own will—to find it and yet lack facility with it. That’s the greatest tragedy that can happen to a man: to discover his true love and then be no good with it. I saw it happen to many.

  I suffered no such misfortune. I loved the Revolution. I loved its rolling thunder and brute power, its exhilarating rage. It set free the man I truly am. It let me do what I do best as well as it can be done.

  I was lucky.

  Pancho was lucky too. The Revolution made him a hero. It made him the legendary Centaur of the North, the most famous of us all. He was the Revolution’s incarnation and its eagle of a soul. And he was the only true friend I ever had.

  He himself had many friends, and many of them loved the Revolution too, and also found their best selves in its fierce, wild beauty.

  But some, of course, did not love well, and they were not so lucky.

  PART ONE

  THE

  DISCOVERY

  OF

  MY LIFE

  “It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death.”

  —Octavio Paz

  ONE

  In 1910 I killed a policeman and went to prison for two years. The details don’t matter except to say the bastard had it coming. After I’d been in the joint two weeks, nobody—guards or inmates—gave me any more trouble. Some of the political prisoners could pay me to protect them from the brutes, so I always ate well and I never lacked a woman on days of conjugal visits. Most of the politicos were overeducated fools, but a few had served in the government and some of those were sometimes interesting to listen to. All in all, I did my time without too much discomfort. When I got out, I drifted back to my old job as a mechanic for the railroad. By then the country had been at war with itself for almost as long as I’d been behind bars, but I wasn’t about to join anybody’s army just to take orders from assholes and get blown up into buzzard food. Late one night a federal press-gang jumped me when I came out of a cantina. I broke one’s neck and scattered the rest like yelping dogs. Nobody tried to grab me again after that.

  In those days my sense of injustice transcended fury. I was in a constant rage at the imbalance of the rightful order of things. There I was—a man of my intelligence, my caliber—laboring like some donkey under the authority of ignorant loudmouth fools who answered meekly to men in silk suits, men whose arrogance was made of money, men with soft hands and gross bellies who rode in plush railcars and ate off glass plates. My wrath defied intelligible expression. It dug and twisted in my soul like a knife. There were days when I wanted to howl, nights when I did.

  One day a new foreman began cursing me for a slacker as I stood watching a passenger train pull out of the railyard. Its windows framed one infuriating vision after another: cuff-linked men in high collars, sipping from brandy glasses and puffing big cigars, laughing and shaking hands, patting one another’s backs; and powdered women in lace dresses, unreachably beautiful, smiling at one another over teacups and utterly indifferent to the passing world, to me. My blood pounded. I knocked the foreman down and beat his head on a rail until it felt like a bag of broken tile under my hand.

  None of the witnesses was a lawman, but one was a scar-faced railroad boss who wanted to know my name and if I knew how to use a gun. I told him to hand me his revolver and I’d show him how I could shoot. He had balls, I’ll say that: I was still heaving with the thrill of smashing that skull, and it must have crossed his mind that I might as easily shoot him as the two empty bottles he pointed out in the cinders about twenty yards down the track. I blew them apart, then shattered the headlamp on a locomotive steaming on a sid
ing another ten yards farther on, then yelled for the frightened engineer to hold his cap out. I shot it from his hand—then made it jump twice more along the ground. The boss man was all smiles. He wrote my name in a little notebook, and before the foreman’s blood was dry on my hands I’d been promoted to freight guard.

  •

  A few months later Tomás Urbina and his boys stopped a train I was guarding. They swarmed into the cars shouting ‘‘Viva la revolución!” and shooting every man in uniform or in the clothes of the rich. Passengers jumped from the car windows and tried to run for it. Women were shrieking.

  I made my decision on the spot: I put the shotgun aside and left my pistol in its holster, shoved the freight car door wide open and yelled, “Help yourselves, boys! Viva la revolución!”

  I went forward to the locomotive, where the engineer was sprawled dead beside the tracks and Urbina was arguing with some of his boys about the proper operation of the huffing engine. It was an ancient French model that had undergone dozens of makeshift modifications to keep it running all those years. None of its gauges was accurate. It took an expert to get it under way and keep it rolling along.

  Urbina noticed me listening to them with amusement and said, “Who the fuck are you?”

  “The guy who can run this thing,” I said.

  By nightfall I was engineering that pile of iron onto a siding a hundred miles away, in Urbina’s main camp. He stood beside me in the cab for the whole trip and told me one story after another about his love life, including a recent affair which had ended sadly.

  “My God, what an ass that one had!” he said, and kissed his fingertips. Then one afternoon her husband—who happened to be the local police chief—caught them in bed and grabbed for his gun. But Urbina was prepared for this possibility and had his own ready gun under the pillow.

  “Imagine this fool!” he said. “What the hell was he so jealous about? Fucking a general of the Revolution isn’t cheating, for Christ’s sake—it’s a woman’s patriotic duty!”

  Whatever the case, the wife thought her husband was a lousy brute and didn’t mind at all that Urbina killed him.

  “But I couldn’t enjoy her after that,” Tomás said. “I mean, she was such a happy widow. Smiling, laughing, making jokes. She gave me the creeps. I suddenly felt like I was fucking Mother Death. I had to stop seeing her. But I tell you, hombre, I miss that sweet ass.”

  Urbina was short, dark, and red-eyed, and usually wore several days’ whiskers. He couldn’t read, and so he always “signed” his name with a little drawing of a heart. He was drunk as often as he wasn’t. But he was cunning as a coyote and an absolutely fearless leader, and his men would follow him straight to hell. They called him the Lion of Durango.

  He and his boys had just won a big fight with a federal detachment near Durango City, and they were still in high spirits about it. For good measure Urbina had robbed the Durango branch of the Bank of London of more than a quarter million pesos. “For the cause, of course,” he said with a grin. Now he was getting his troops ready to join with Pancho Villa’s army in Jimenez for an advance against the federals at Torreón.

  He had been close friends with Villa since their boyhood, and he loved to tell stories of their bandit days and their run-ins with the Guardia Rural—the rurales, the suede-and-silver uniformed national mounted police force that patrolled the countryside and was infamous for its brutal efficiency. I learned that Pancho’s real name was Doroteo Arrango, but at age seventeen, after killing the landowner who raped his sister and escaping to the high country, he joined Ignacio Parra’s notorious outlaw gang and took the name of a famous old-time bandit named Francisco Villa. Eventually he and Urbina formed their own gang, and for years they did well for themselves, rustling cattle from the great herds of the Terrazas family and robbing payroll wagons and outland mining companies.

  Yet always the Guardia Rural was on the hunt for them. Most rurales had been bandits themselves—before being captured and given the choice of jail or joining the police—and they knew the sierra wildlands as well as most of the outlaws they pursued. There were shoot-outs and plenty of close calls. Over the years, many of Pancho’s gang were caught or killed. And all those years of hiding in the mountains gave Urbina a chronic case of rheumatism which he claimed was the main reason he drank so much—to ease the pain in his joints.

  •

  Just before we joined Villa at Jimenez, I made the discovery of my life.

  One of Urbina’s bunch was a captain named Fausto Borunda. He was called El Matador because he always shot his prisoners. “Be careful of that one,” I was warned by several of the boys. “He kills just to make himself smile.” But the first time I got up close to him I sensed the secret truth. His hard lying eyes could fool others but they didn’t fool me. I knew he was not the true killer his compañeros believed him to be—but he was greatly afraid not to be thought so. I understood completely: few things can hide a man’s fear of death as well as a killer’s reputation. My understanding, however, in no way softened my outrage. A coward who kills is the worst sort of fake. I watched him for a week and I knew I was right.

  One evening I roughly shoved up against him at the bar of a cantina and made him spill his drink. He whirled on me, his face clenched like a fist. ‘‘Hey, prick!” he said. “You tired of living?” I looked him dead in the eyes and laughed. In that instant he knew he had been found out. His grab for his gun was an act of panic—but I caught his wrist and drove my knee into his balls. As he sagged to the floor, I twisted his arm to turn him away from my boots just before he puked. When he looked up again, the bore of my pistol was inches from his wide red eye. “Say hello to the truth, you phony fuck,” I said, and squeezed the trigger.

  After that, nobody called him Matador anymore. All they called him was dead. I was the true Matador. El Carnicero, they would come to call me—the Butcher. El Señor Muerte: Mr. Death. I, Fierro.

  Goddamned right.

  TWO

  The Revolution had been coming for a long time, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. Anybody with brains, with a sharp eye and good ears and a nose that knew the difference between fact and bullshit, could fill you in fairly well.

  Allow me.

  For more than thirty years Porfirio Díaz ran the country like it was his personal estate. The enemies he didn’t kill he bought off with hacienda grants, political office, or generalships in the army. The only choice Díaz ever gave anybody was his bread in their mouth or his club on their head. He personally appointed the governor of every state, and any problems the governors and their henchmen couldn’t handle, Don Porfirio’s rurales or his army sure could. Army generals lived like lords, and the rich ­landowners—the hacendados—had the power of God over the peons who slaved on their land. The hacendados loved Porfirio Díaz. So did the foreign businessmen—the Brits and the Yankees, especially—who got such friendly and profitable deals from him on grazing land, mining rights, oil leases, shipping ports, railroad rights-of-way—anything they wanted.

  What the hell, I would have loved Don Porfirio too if I’d been in their shoes. But of course I wasn’t.

  Thirty years Díaz ran things. Most Mexicans didn’t live that long. The only thing to beat the old bastard was age. He was eighty before things finally started to slip away from him—and then they slipped away fast.

  Francisco Madero led the movement against him. He was barely five-foot-three, with a melon head, a goatee, and a squeaky voice. At first the Porfiristas treated him like a joke. But he came from a wealthy family, so he had the means to make himself heard. (I always thought it interesting that so many fervent liberals happen to be rich. Are rich liberals too stupid to know where their own interests lie—or just too damn guilty to care? In either case, I never could respect a man who sided against his own kind.)

  Madero had been to school in Europe and the U.S., and he came back to Mexico with his big head fu
ll of democratic notions. They say he meant well, but his own loyal brother Gustavo once called him the only foolish dreamer in the family, and their family was very large. When he ran for the presidency against Díaz on an anti-reelection platform, old Don Porfirio ridiculed him, calling him “the runt” and “the little madman.” But when Díaz saw how popular the mad runt was becoming and how much he was stirring folks up, he figured enough was enough. He sent Madero running for his life across the Rio Bravo into Texas and then announced himself reelected by a landslide once again.

  But up in San Antonio, Madero declared himself the provisional president and called for all freedom-loving Mexicans to take arms against the Porfiriato. He began to assemble an army, and the Revolution was on.

  Abraham Gonzalez recruited Villa in Chihuahua. I never knew Gonzalez, but Urbina described him as a serious, courtly man who spoke with great eloquence and conviction about the ideals of the Revolution. “Pancho was always a fool for talkers like Don Abraham,” Tomás said. “But hell, I didn’t waste any time joining up, either—not when I heard we’d get full pardons for all our crimes if we did. Don Abraham said Madero understood that men like us had been driven to rob and steal by the cruelties of the dictatorship.” Urbina grinned at me and winked. “Such great understanding is a rare thing, no? One has to admire it.”

  Six months later the Maderista rebels defeated the federal forces in a three-day battle at Ciudad Juárez and Díaz was finished. He resigned the presidency and shipped out for Europe from Veracruz. The old bull would spend the next four years living in Parisian luxury and then die in bed under silk sheets.

  •

  It was during the victory celebration at Juárez that Villa became one of Madero’s most devoted disciples. Urbina was there, and the way he told the story to me, the whole thing happened because Pascual Orozco demanded the execution of the captured federal commander, an old warhorse named Navarro who was given to bayoneting rebel prisoners. Orozco had been a Chihuahua mule driver before joining the Revolution and forming his own army called the Colorados. They’d fought well for the Maderistas, and Orozco naturally thought Madero owed him a few rewards for his service—including the small right to shoot a captured enemy officer. But Madero insisted that Navarro’s rights as a prisoner of war had to be respected, and rather than risk having him killed against his orders, he arranged for the general to be spirited to the river and allowed to escape to the U.S.