The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  Steam rose off the hot motor as Pancho pulled himself to his feet, his hair plastered to his head, his suit dripping with mud and pigshit, his eyes huge and red with rage. I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t keep the grin off my face, and when he saw it he went for his gun. Everybody dashed for cover, but I just raised my hands and yelled, “Don’t shoot me, goddamm it. I didn’t throw you in that sty. If you have to shoot something, shoot the goddamn machine.’’

  And damn if he didn’t. He glared down at it like it had just made some foul remark about his mother, then shot it squarely in the gas tank, which had the English word “Indian” on it. He shot it in the gas tank twice, then shot it in the motor and the bullet sparked against the metal and whump! the thing exploded into flame and knocked Villa on his ass in the pigshit again. He crawled out of that blazing pen in one quick hurry before he caught on fire on top of everything else.

  Now I really did laugh, and maybe he would have shot me if he hadn’t lost his pistol in the explosion, I don’t know. He looked ready to. But then his face softened and he smiled and he ambled toward me, saying, “What the hell, I guess it did look pretty funny. No hard feelings, little brother.” Then he lunged and caught me in a bear hug and writhed against me, smearing me with pigshit too and cackling like a loon.

  We heard Urbina laughing at us from the corner of the stable and had no trouble catching him on his sprained ankle. We dragged him to the sty and flung him in. Before that day was over, damn near everybody had either been tossed into the sty or pelted with handfuls of pigshit when they least suspected it.

  The next time we found an abandoned motorcycle, Villa had it laid across the tracks and ran over it with a train.

  •

  By the time we got back to Torreón, Carranza had arrived in Saltillo. He telegraphed word to us that the forces he’d sent against Zacatecas were getting their asses whipped. He ordered Villa to send artillery and three thousand men to reinforce the Constitutionalist units. But Villa didn’t want to split up the division; he wired back that he much preferred to take his whole army to Zacatecas. Carranza absolutely refused him permission to do that, and repeated his order. Villa argued about it as respectfully as he could, but the muscles in his jaw were twitching as he watched the telegrapher send out his response. Carranza then demanded that Villa send half of his artillery and five thousand men to Zacatecas—and send them now. He was signing his wires, “The First Chief of the Constitutionalist Army.” The telegraph machine had been chattering faster and faster, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to see smoke start coming off it. The dispatcher was running sweat as he scribbled Carranza’s arrogant orders off the wire and passed them to Villa, then tapped out Pancho’s angry replies.

  Villa wasn’t about to put any of his men under the direct command of any of the whitebeard’s lackeys. When Carranza persisted, Villa’s temper got the best of him: he sent a wire saying he was resigning immediately and asking who Carranza wanted him to appoint as the new commander of the Division of the North. I shook my head and gave him a look, but he ignored it. He was steaming.

  The whitebeard must’ve been ecstatic to get Pancho’s resignation so easily, though his reply was diplomatic: “I am truly pained to be obliged to accept your resignation. I thank you in the name of the nation for the important services you have rendered our cause.” He told Villa to gather his top generals in the telegraph office right away: he wanted to discuss with them the choice of a successor to head the division.

  When the rest of the boys read the telegrams that had gone back and forth, they all agreed that Carranza was a fool, and they refused to accept Pancho’s resignation. Villa just shrugged and stared out the window. I think he already realized how damn foolish he’d been to let the old bastard get under his skin like that. Angeles sent the whitebeard a joint message from all of us, saying that we were united in our desire to retain Francisco Villa as leader of the division and urging Carranza to ignore Villa’s renunciation of command.

  Carranza wired back: “I am sorry to inform you that it is impossible for me to change the decision I made in accepting General Villa’s resignation.”

  Angeles cursed softly—one of the few times I ever heard him use foul language—and replied that we were “irrevocably resolved to continue fighting as the Division of the North under the command of General Francisco Villa.”

  Carranza sent a reminder that he was the first chief and his decisions were the supreme authority of the Constitutionalist Army. Angeles groaned and shook his head wearily.

  Herrera suddenly said, “Enough of this shit.” He made the telegrapher tap out the message, “Señor Carranza, I am Maclovio Herrera and you are a son of a bitch.” As soon as the words were sent, he ripped out the telegraph wires. Then he turned to a smiling Villa, and said: “Now, Panchito, you tell us: what do we do?”

  •

  We struck Zacatecas like a storm of blood. High in the mountains, the lovely city of silver mines stood in a narrow ravine, its little flat-roofed buildings clinging to the rock walls, its cobbled streets nearly as narrow as graves. We had the federals outnumbered, but they were well fortified and ready for us. Urbina and I led the cavalry attacks—no easy job on those rocky uplands—and Angeles tore into the federal emplacements with his artillery, as accurate with those big guns as I was with my pistols. Villa as always was everywhere, urging the boys on, shooting, singing, cursing with a crazy joy. His grace on a horse—which was always something to see (and nearly the equal of my own)—was never so spectacular as on that wonderful thunderous day when we took Zacatecas.

  We overpowered them in a three-sided assault, then machine-gunned them in the ravines as they tried to flee the city. We’d begun the attack at ten in the morning, and by sundown Zacatecas was ours. In those few furious hours we killed eight thousand of the sons of bitches.

  We had to climb over heaps of dead men to enter the town. In the exultation of victory, the first of our troops into the city severed the heads of a few dozen corpses and impaled them on iron balcony railings along the main street. The heads dripped onto the cobblestones as in the aftermath of a bloody rain. It was a sight the survivors would never forget, one that would be described to Huerta’s troops everywhere, a vision of their own impending fate in the coming of Pancho Villa.

  We took three thousand prisoners and gave the enlisted men a choice of joining us or going to the wall. The wounded among them were either treated at our hospital train or put out of their misery, depending on the severity of their wounds. Many of their officers tried to hide, and when we found them we shot them on the spot. At first we did the same even to those who came to us with their traitorous hands up high—but then Villa decided to permit surrendered officers to stand trial for their lives, a decision I knew he’d made simply to please Angeles. That damn hidalgo was always talking to Pancho about justice, calling it the fundamental goal of the Revolution and so on and so forth.

  It irritated me to see the way Villa fawned on him, that gentleman with the French Academy manners and precise way of speaking, with his perfectly trimmed mustache and spotless uniforms. But I’d be a liar if I said he wasn’t a superior commander whose tactical advice almost always proved to be correct. Despite his aristocratic air, Angeles was a true soldier and a brave fighter—which sure as hell can’t be said of most of those among us who had educations and table manners: the politicians and professors and scribblers and fancy talkers, all their kind. Even a uniform couldn’t disguise the truth about them: they were nothing but glorified clerks, and I found them no less contemptible for being necessary in an army the size of ours. Of course somebody had to write the communiqués, the letters, the records, the reports, the proclamations, the manifestos, the information bulletins for the press—all that paper shit (all that shitpaper, I should say). I knew that. But I didn’t care: I detested them just the same, the lot of them, and they all knew it. None of them ever dared to speak to me unless I sp
oke to them first. Hell, none of them ever came near me.

  We held the trials in the ballroom of a casa grande overlooking the main plaza. Every minute or so came the sound of a fusillade from the firing squad at its work. One of the officers brought before us pleaded with Villa not to be shot. He was a fat little fellow with the whitest and softest-looking hands I’d ever seen on a man. He claimed he was a professional musician—a classical ­pianist—who had been press-ganged into the federal army. Because he was well educated, he had been made an officer. “One day I was performing Chopin in the Teatro Nacional,” he said, “and the next, as if in some horrible nightmare, I was in a military uniform and in command of a supply company for General Barrón. Me! What do I know about military supply? I was shipping saddles to artillery units and carloads of coal to the cavalry. General Barrón threatened to shoot me himself. For God’s sake, General Villa, I’m no soldier. I’m an artist. I play Mozart!”

  ‘‘Mozart!” Urbina hollered. He had a bottle in his fist and an arm around one of the whores who had flocked to the table. “I can play Mozart too! Listen!” He shifted in his chair and ripped a long resonant fart that made the whores squeal and pinch their noses and make a big show of fanning the air. It broke the boys up—except for Angeles, naturally, who gave Urbina such a look of disdain that Tomás laughed even louder and farted again. Angeles stood up, nodded at Villa, and left the room.

  “Any federal so incompetent in his duties as you say you were,” Villa said, grinning at the fat officer, ‘‘must be a revolutionary at heart. Maybe we should give you a medal for your heroic inefficiency in the service of General Barrón, eh?” He pointed to a piano in the corner of the big room. “Play something for me, Señor Mozart. Something Mexican. Play ‘Jesusita de Chihuahua.’ Prove to us you are what you say.”

  I doubt the little man ever played a piano anywhere with more heart and soul than he played that one—or played with greater dexterity, since “Jesusita de Chihuahua” had originally been composed for the barrel organ. Urbina whirled out onto the floor, dancing with two whores at once. Some of other boys grabbed themselves girls and joined in. Some began clapping and singing. “Louder!” Urbina commanded the little pianist. “Louder!”

  I went out on the verandah and had a smoke while I watched the firing squad do its work in the plaza below. The wailing of widows and wounded men drifted up to mingle with the music and singing issuing from behind me. A federal major stood against the church wall and made a hasty sign of the cross a moment before the rifle volley jarred him like a cloth doll and he dropped. The captain of the squad, a tough young fellow named Candelario Cervantes, went up to him and put a pistol round in his skull—the customary coup de grâce. As a labor detail dragged away the corpse, Candelario gestured for the next man in the line of condemned to take his place at the wall.

  A hatless, white-haired colonel stepped up to face the rifles. I recognized him: at his trial he had refused to speak a word in his own defense and had not even given us his name. He stood at erect attention, a soldier to the end. Candelario raised his saber and ordered, “Ready! . . . Aim! . . . Fire!” The discharge slammed the colonel against the wall and he crumpled to the ground.

  As Candelario drew his pistol and took a step toward him, the fallen colonel sat up. Candelario stopped short. And then slowly, awkwardly, as the crowd of spectators gasped and started jabbering, the old man got to his feet and slumped against the wall.

  The riflemen looked at one another. Candelario stared at the colonel for a long moment, then spun and stalked back to his position beside the squad. He raised his saber and yelled, “Ready!” I had never seen one get up before. “Aim!” The colonel pushed himself away from the wall and tried to square his shoulders, weaving slightly. “Fire!” The colonel bounced off the wall and fell in a heap.

  And then raised himself up on his elbows. And then somehow managed to make it to his hands and knees.

  The crowd hushed. People blessed themselves and knelt in the street. I thought: holy shit.

  Candelario looked around wildly and spotted me up on the verandah. He raised his outstretched arms in an enormous shrug of incomprehension. With twelve bullets in him, the old colonel sat on his heels, his shoulder against the wall and his chin on his chest. He brushed vaguely at his sopping red tunic.

  “Once more!” I called down to Candelario. “If he’s still alive after the next one, we’ll give him a fresh uniform and command of one of our battalions.”

  The old colonel was struggling to stand up when the next volley hit him and killed him. He was one of the few I never forgot. I rued not having gone down to speak with him before he took the last bullets. For a long time later the boys would joke with great respect about the tough old federal who died five pounds heavier than when he stepped up to the wall.

  We spent days executing the condemned and disposing of the dead. The town was notorious for epidemics and we had to get rid of the corpses quickly. We threw thousands of them into old mine shafts. Others we loaded on flatcars and dumped out in the desert. Some we simply piled in the plazas, soaked with gasoline, and set on fire. At the edge of one crowd watching the bodies burn, a little boy standing near me was amazed by the sight of the dead men’s arms and legs jerking and kicking as the flames worked on joints and tendons. “Look, Mamá, look!” he cried as he tugged on the hand of the black­veiled woman clutching him. “They’re dancing!”

  We looted the city down to its bones. It was a town of rich sons of bitches and arrogant priests, and every grievance our boys had against the Spanish bluebloods, the wealthy, the Church, the fucking bosses—against anybody anywhere who owned anything from a silk necktie to the keys to God’s kingdom—they redressed against Zacatecas. We picked the churches clean of their hordes of gold and silver. To extract the money we knew they’d hidden, we forced the rich to ransom themselves. The most despicable among them we shot anyway. (Some crimes cannot be paid for in gold.) The boys rode horses into the finest houses, grinding horseshit into parquet floors and shredding Middle Easteen carpets to rags. Into roaring salon fireplaces they threw books, ledgers, letters, paintings. Not a sculpture in town went unbroken, not a windowpane stayed intact. Our soldaderas paraded the streets in long silk dresses, in bridal gowns of delicate lace; they scuffed over the cobblestones in satin slippers. We stripped stores, stables, houses of everything that could be carried away. Toward our train flowed a steady stream of livestock and wagons packed with strongboxes, stoves, saddles, tools, furniture, clothes, gilt picture frames. Every automobile that still ran was driven onto the flatcars. The mules walked stiff-legged under the loads of booty. The wagons creaked with the weight of it. The trains groaned.

  As we pulled out of Zacatecas, the air was thick with the odors of smoldering ash, bloody dust, putrefying flesh. The rich ripe smells of triumph.

  EIGHT

  Less than a month after we took Zacatecas, Huerta fled the country. He sailed for Europe on the German ship Dresden. I heard the news through an open window over the bed where I had been making love to a girl with a birthmark on her hip that looked like a small map of Mexico. The boys were yelling it in the streets, whooping and firing their guns in the air, starting up a grand fiesta of celebration.

  But even as the bands were playing and the boys were dancing with the soldaderas and drinking and shouting “Viva Villa! Viva la revolución!” over and over again—even as I was pulling on my boots and admiring the naked ass of the girl as she leaned out the window, covering her breasts with her hands and yelling and whooping along with everyone else—even at that moment, my mouth suddenly went dry when the thought struck me that if the war against Huerta was won, then the Revolution was won. And if the Revolution was won, the country would swiftly submit to the rule of written law, to the authority of paper, to legislation, regulations, ordinances, bureaucratic policies—all that shit. Here came the managers and bosses and policemen, the courtrooms and jails.

&n
bsp; I thought: Oh, fuck, not again.

  Many of the boys had a regular life waiting for them, a place to call home, a wife, children, and they were of course eager to get back to it. And there were many among us who had no family but wanted to start making one for themselves. Naturally, they were all happy to hear the news.

  But then there were the rest of us. Those of us who had no home, no wife, no little mouths to feed and care for—and no desire at all for any of those things. If the country were now to know peace, what the hell were we to do? That was the question. Go back to laying track for the goddamned railroad? Go back to the slow death of the silver mines? Back to swinging a sledgehammer in the rock quarries or hacking with a skinning knife in the stink and slime of the tanneries? Back to tending cattle fences or bean fields or goat herds? Were we to become mule drovers? Wranglers? Shit shovelers? Diggers of ditches? Were we to enlist in the regular army and be ruled by its petty regimentations? Those were not choices—hell, they weren’t even possibilities, not to us. We had come to know such lives too well before the Revolution delivered us from them.

  The Revolution had been more bountiful than we could have imagined, more generous to us than our own dreams. It gave us excellent guns and the best of horses, boots and clothes and Texas hats, all we wanted to eat and drink. It gave us run of the country. (Some of the boys in the division had never been five miles from home before they joined the fighting.) It gave us gold. And of course women. It gave us women wherever we went. But best of all, the Revolution gave us a kind of freedom most men only dream of all their lives, the very finest freedom of all: the freedom to kill our enemies, to kill the bastards who’d made our lives ­miserable—and those who wanted to take their place.