The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  Villa signaled one of the guards to bring out a young officer who was trying to hide behind the others. The guard prodded the captain out of the pen with his rifle and Villa grasped the prisoner by the collar. “Easy, little brother,” he said. “Be brave.” The captain’s eyes looked like they were trying to escape from his head. “Please, my general,” he said, “I beg you, please.”

  “The Revolution demands many things of us,” Villa said to me, grinning as he drew his pistol. “The hardest is to do this.” He shoved the gun muzzle into the captain’s mouth and blasted off the back of his head in a bright red spray. The dead man dropped like a sack of cornmeal.

  Villa reholstered the pistol and walked over to me, no longer grinning. “It’s easy to kill a man you hate personally,” he said, “but not so easy to kill a man you don’t know—not when you have to look into his face and see his fear, not when he’s begging you for his life and telling you about his poor mother and his wife and little children. And they do have wives and children, these men. They do have mothers.”

  He gestured toward the prisoners in the pen, who were now even more terrified. “Look at them. What harm can they do now, eh? But we must kill these men, amigo. We must kill them even as we look into their frightened eyes. Because their eyes were not so frightened when they were ordering their soldiers to kill our boys and make widows of our women. Even the first chief knows this. His order is to shoot all officers. He has made it our duty to shoot them.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder and smiled again. “Of course, such a revolutionary duty comes more easily to some men than to others, eh, amigo?”

  We exchanged a long look. Feeling cheerful in a way I’d never felt before, I stepped away from Villa and beckoned the three prisoners nearest the pen gate to come to me. They came out hesitantly, one with his hands laced in front of him in supplication. The smoky scent of fear was stronger now, as heady as perfume.

  “Don’t be scared, boys,” I said—but if they hadn’t been, the proceeding would have been robbed of much of its pleasure. I stood them tightly together, the one in the middle with his chest against the back of the man in front and with his back against the chest of the man behind. They were all of nearly equal height, so there was no need for anybody to bend his knees to assure a proper alignment. One of the pistols I was carrying was a Colt .45 Peacemaker with a special fourteen-inch barrel. It had once belonged to an old Yankee cavalryman who used it to shoot Indians at long range. I stepped behind the three huddled federals, drew the gun, aimed carefully, and shot all three through the heart with the same bullet.

  Villa was laughing. “A executioner with a sense of thrift!” he said, and slapped me on the back like a long­time comrade. He made me a colonel and put me in charge of the division’s railway operations.

  •

  We hammered Torreón for three days before the federals abandoned the town and retreated in the night across the Nazas River. Our booty was bountiful: a dozen artillery pieces, a thousand rifles, countless cases of cartridges, hundreds of hand grenades, six machine guns—and, best of all, forty locomotives and hundreds of boxcars to go with them. From now on the entire Division of the North would travel by rail. I’d already equipped one entire train for the single purpose of maintaining all the others and repairing destroyed track. Villa himself had come up with the idea of a hospital train. It consisted of thirty cars with big blue crosses on their sides and carried a team of more than forty doctors, about half of them gringos. Each car had enameled floors and was outfitted with the most modern surgical equipment. No other army in Mexico—probably in the world—had a train like it.

  The richest people in Torreón—as everywhere in the ­country—were of course the goddamn Spaniards, who’d been the curse of Mexico since the day Cortés set foot on it. Villa ordered the confiscation of their property in the name of the Revolution and ordered every one of them to get out of town within twenty-four hours—and out of Mexico within three days—or be shot.

  The Chinese he didn’t give a choice. They were shot on sight and their shacks were burned to the ground. They were the yellow cockroaches of Mexico and everybody hated them, but Villa’s hatred of them went deeper than most. “They are too ashamed to be poor in their own damned country,” he once told me, “so they come here to be poor. Who the hell do they think they are to insult Mexico like that?”

  We killed over 800 federals in the assault on Torreón, and took 120 prisoners. Thirty-two were officers. I was in charge of the executions but at Villa’s request I permitted Maclovio Herrera a few turns at commanding the firing squad. Villa always did have a special fondness for Herrera—who knows why. I liked Maclovio all right, but I had a hunch he couldn’t be trusted. When I mentioned it to Villa, he glowered at me and said I was too damn suspicious of everybody, which was why I had no friends. Christ, he was nobody to talk about being suspicious. Every night he went off into the darkness with his blanket, and in the morning he’d come back into camp from another direction. Nobody was going to shoot him in his sleep. Or poison him, either: his usual way of eating was to go out among the boys and have some beans from one man’s plate, some meat from another’s, a tortilla from still another’s. But he did have friends he trusted, and, except for him, I didn’t—that was certainly true. On the other hand, I never had my trust betrayed—not by Maclovio Herrera or any other man—and Villa sure as hell couldn’t say that, not later on.

  I won’t deny that Herrera was a good field commander—and as tough as they come, which was to be expected of anybody who could survive years of slavery in the silver mines. They were the worst reaches of hell. Maclovio had been sent down into the Lampaca Mines of Durango when he was only thirteen. Every morning before sunrise the miners had to descend narrow ladders hundreds of feet into a blackness so great it seemed to swallow the light of the shaft lamps. They didn’t come back out again until long after sundown. They worked naked in the smothering heat, swinging a pick against the mine wall. Every time a man filled a sack with ore, he’d labor up the ladder with the two-hundred-pound load hanging on his back by a rawhide strap around his forehead. Maclovio’s scar from that strap looked like somebody had run a branding iron around his skull. At the trolley tier, still a hundred feet underground, the miner would dump his load of ore into a mule cart and go down to his pick again. Every so often a man went crazy for lack of air and would have to be subdued with ropes. Gradual blindness was a common affliction. Lungs were ruined by the thick dust in the shafts, and once a miner began coughing up blood, he’d do it till he finally drowned in it. Every day men fell to their death from the ladders. Bodies too difficult to extricate were left to rot in the pit bottoms, and Herrera said the stench could not be described. On the day Villa’s boys attacked the Lampaca operation, Maclovio and the other miners came scrabbling up out of the shafts like uncaged demons. They raced straight to the main house and caught the hacendado just as he was about to make his escape. They crucified him against the huge mahogany gate of the casa grande and put a torch to his balls. Maclovio used to say the Revolution had pulled him out of the deepest grave in Mexico.

  •

  Villa got married twice before we left Torreón. The first time was to a seamstress named Juana whom he met in a tailor shop. “Her tits are the most magnificent you’ve ever seen!” he told me and Urbina the next day. When Tomás said he doubted very much that they were the best he’d seen, Pancho insisted we come up to his wedding suite and have a look for ourselves, so we did. They were damn fine breasts, all right. But Tomás thought they didn’t have quite enough sag to be perfect, and I felt obliged to admit I preferred darker nipples than hers. The girl rolled her eyes and said, “Paaanncho!” Villa flung the sheet back over her and told us to go to hell. ‘‘You jackasses don’t know tits from tin cans.”

  The next day a girl of about sixteen stood out in the street in front of our headquarters building and cursed Villa at the top of her voice. She was waving a skinning k
nife and calling him a murderer because our boys had killed her brothers. Villa took a look through the window and gave a low whistle. He went out and stood in front of her, ripped open his shirt, and said if she truly believed that he, Pancho Villa, a patriot fighting for Mexico’s liberty, was a murderer, then his life was not worth living and she could go ahead and plunge the blade into his heart. He moved fast enough to avoid being killed on the spot, although she managed to open a good-sized gash along his ribs. He accidentally broke her wrist in taking the knife from her. With blood running down his side and soaking his waistband, he set her broken arm and applied the splint himself, all the while whispering endearments to her and pausing to kiss the inner crook of her elbow. A doctor then bandaged his wound while a priest was summoned. Ten minutes later Pancho was making love to his new wife in a hotel across the street from the one where his bride of the day before was still ensconced.

  According to Urbina, Villa already had at least a dozen “wives” throughout the states of Durango, Chihuahua, and Coahuila. “Most guys fuck a woman and that’s that,” Tomás said. “Maybe give her a few pesos to buy a new dress. That’s natural, no? But Pancho, he insists on marrying them. He figures what the hell, a church marriage isn’t legal anyway, but it makes the woman feel respected, and feeling respected makes her happy, and a happy woman gives a man a better time in bed. So, he marries them. I asked him one time how happy it made them when they found out they were not the only wife of Pancho Villa, and he said I should become a newspaper reporter instead of a revolutionary if I was going to go around asking a lot of stupid questions.”

  FOUR

  On our way north to attack Juarez we got lucky and intercepted a coal train bound south from the federal garrison. At a small wayside station, Villa forced the conductor to send a telegram back to headquarters saying that the rail line to Chihuahua had been destroyed and the train could not proceed. As we expected, the federal commander at Juárez wired back curses and ordered the train to return to the garrison immediately, before it could be captured by Constitutionalist rebels. In the flickering lamplight I grinned at Pancho and nodded my admiration for his plan. We quickly emptied all the coal from the cars and packed them with our troops. With a pistol pressed to his ear, the conductor wired reports of the train’s safe progress from every station on the way back

  We rolled into Juárez in the middle of the night without arousing suspicion, then slipped into the garrison as quiet as cats. Most of the government troops were sleeping or drunk, and our rifles were in their faces before they realized what was happening. “Viva Villa!” the boys hollered, and couldn’t stop laughing at the dumfounded federals. I led a sweep of the garrison, and we made short work of the few fools who tried to fight. Villa sent Herrera’s bunch into town to clean out the gambling halls. Juárez had dozens of them, and at that hour they were doing their heaviest business. In the name of the Revolution we confiscated every peso and Yankee dollar showing on the tables.

  In the officers’ quarters I found a dead-drunk colonel snoring loudly in bed with a big-titted blonde. I rolled him off the bed and took his pistol. For a moment the blonde gave me a narrow look—then she smiled and threw the covers off the musky whiteness of herself. At some point in the course of things I found out she was a German opera singer. When I left her at dawn I could hardly walk upright. I never should have told Villa about her: for weeks afterward he kept pestering me for details about that night.

  We’d taken Juárez without losing a man. The gringo papers loved the whole thing. “The Trojan train” they called Villa’s trick, and now Pancho was more famous than ever. Wherever he went in Juárez or El Paso, reporters flocked about him like cattlebirds in a bull pasture. Some of the gringo reporters were irritated at having to use translators to interview him, and one asked if he could speak any English at all. Villa grinned and said, “Sí, claro. Fuck you goddamn son of a bitch.” That was about all the English most of us knew. The only one who didn’t laugh was the guy who asked the question.

  Even the mayor of El Paso, an Irishman named Kelly, met with Villa. His big concern was that when the federals tried to retake Juárez—which everybody knew they were sure to do—the good citizens of his town would be endangered by bullets and artillery shells straying across the river.

  The mayor had reason to worry. Two years earlier, although their own people had warned them to stay under cover when the Maderistas attacked the federal forces at Juárez, the good people of El Paso had packed the roof­tops to watch the spectacle of Mexican warfare while sipping their tea and whiskey. They spread picnic blankets on the hillsides, even on the riverbank. Folks came from miles around to see the big show. Then the shooting started and bullets flew every which way, and naturally some of the spectators got killed by their entertainment. The U.S. government growled at Madero about the gringo casualties, but let it go at that. A few weeks earlier the U.S. Cavalry had crossed into Agua Prieta and put an end to a battle between federals and rebels after some of the spectators across the border in Douglas, Arizona, had been killed by stray fire.

  Villa patted the Irishman’s shoulder and assured him he had nothing to worry about. He told him we would engage the federals far enough to the south that the good people of El Paso would be safe even from the dust we raised. Hell, he didn’t care if the good people of El Paso all dropped dead in the next five minutes. He was just trying to please some of his new American friends—people he thought might be useful in keeping us supplied with U.S. arms or in good favor with the Yankee government.

  One such new friend was a grizzled general named Hugh Scott, who was then commanding the fort in El Paso. He was burly and short-haired, wore a white mustache and wire-rimmed eyeglasses, and spoke damn good Spanish for a Yankee. He came to Villa as an emissary from President Wilson, and they took a true liking to each other. When Villa introduced us, Scott said, “Fierro, eh? The man of iron.” He smiled at the meaning of my name, but I knew he’d heard of me and could see he meant no disrespect.

  He told Villa that although President Wilson was very much in sympathy with our cause, he was greatly concerned with our practice of shooting prisoners. Every time we executed captives, Scott said, we harmed our cause in the eyes of the American public. “Our people get all upset when they read in the papers that you boys shoot unarmed men,” he said. “It goes contrary to the American sense of humanitarianism and fair play. So they complain to their congressmen, who complain to the President, who complains to those of us he’s made his representatives to you. You see?”

  Villa said he was surprised there was so much complaining north of the border. “I always heard the United States was a happy country,” he said. Anyhow, we didn’t shoot everybody we captured, he told Scott. All officers, yes, because they were often educated men who ought to know better than to serve the oppressors of the poor—and even if they weren’t educated, they were the givers of orders and had to be held to account. And all Colorados, yes, because they were mostly peons like ourselves, and no peon would fight against the Revolution unless he was basically an evil man—and who could argue against killing an evil man? But captured enlisted men who were not Colorados were always given the choice of joining us in our fight for democracy and justice for all. Any of them who refused this generous offer was either one more evil man or simply too stupid to do the right thing, and we could hardly be held responsible for any man’s self-destructive stupidity.

  Nevertheless, to prove to Scott that he, General Francisco Villa, was as much of a humanitarian as the next man, Pancho promised him that he would give the federal officers we’d captured in Juárez the choice of taking asylum across the border or joining the Division of the North against Huerta the Jackal. Scott was so heartened by this—“Choice is the very bedrock of democracy, General,” he said—that Pancho went even further and swore that from now on he’d give all our prisoners a choice other than facing a firing squad.

  “Even the Colorados?” Scott a
sked.

  “Yes, of course, certainly.” Pancho said.

  Scott smiled like a happy grandfather. He said President Wilson would be very pleased to hear of our newly enlightened policy toward prisoners of war. Villa shook the general’s hand and smiled right back and said few things gave him as much satisfaction as pleasing President Wilson.

  As soon as Scott was gone, Villa took me aside and said, “So now we give the bastards a choice, eh?”

  I doubted it. At times he could do tricks with logic as prettily as he could twirl a rope, and I figured this was one of those times. So I just shrugged and let him get to it.

  “But now, I ask you,” he said, “did you hear me say what choices besides a firing squad, what choices exactly, we would give them?”

  I said no, now that he mentioned it, I had not heard him state any specific alternatives.

  “Well,” he said, “are there not many, many choices a man might be given other than to be stood against a wall?”

  I said yes, that was true, there were many choices indeed.

  “Well then, amigo,” he said, grinning whitely, ‘‘you just be sure to give the bastards some kind of choice from now on, you hear? After all, choice is the bedrock of democracy, you know.”

  •

  They cried, they pleaded for mercy, they whimpered, they prayed aloud to the Holy Virgin, they sang all the sweet songs of fear.

  Shameful Colorado sons of bitches. Not one of them had the balls to curse me even now, at the hour of his death. These were men who cut the soles off their prisoners’ feet, who raped little girls who had not yet had their first blood, who tied old men to pairs of horses and tore them apart. The Colorados were despicable bastards, far worse than Huerta the traitor, who at least always fought like a soldier and behaved like a man. (It was said he had himself shaved every morning by a young barber whose father he had shot in public as a rebel sympathizer.) But these whoresons lacked all sense of honor. They thought there was as much triumph in the slaughter of old men and little boys as in victory over warriors. They thought it was as much a show of power to terrify a woman as to make a man afraid. A man cannot get more contemptible than that. But now they were crying like women, now they were as frightened as children—because I, Fierro, had just announced that I was going to shoot them.