•
Our defeats at Celaya and León were mortal wounds: the great Division of the North was dying in bloody rags. In less than three months we’d lost tens of thousands of men. We’d lost rail lines, artillery, ammunition, supplies of every sort, much of everything.
We continued to fight, of course. What else were we to do? But now defeat followed defeat. We lost at Aguascalientes, Zacatecas, Torreón. It was a terrible reversal of our triumphant route toward Mexico City just the year before. Down south, the Zapatistas fought the same battle over and over again—giving up a portion of their damned patria chica to the Carrancistas one day and then taking it back the next. We no longer even talked of getting any help from those useless fucks.
Although Villa always preferred to keep me and my Dorados close to hand, his desperation to turn things around decided him on setting me loose with my boys and a regiment of cavalry to do whatever damage I could. I’d been champing for that chance, and my boys were raging to go. We tore south through one Carrancista force after another, like a furious rolling storm. We took Irapuato, then Silao, then Salamanca. We retook Celaya, me and my boys. We took Querétaro. But—goddammit, but!—I didn’t have enough troops to spare to post defensive garrisons in the towns we captured, and Villa had no reinforcements to send. All I could do at each place was drive out the Carrancista unit, blow up the tracks behind us, and keep going. But then—goddammit, but then, but then!— they’d move right back in as soon as we were gone, and they repaired the railways almost as fast as we destroyed them.
When we routed two thousand of Carranza’s troops in Tula and found ourselves within fifty miles of the capital, we felt more like losers then victors: we didn’t have the manpower or artillery to push our way in. We could only look at the capital like a prize for the taking which we lacked the muscle to lift. Besides, our lightning advances, all-out assaults, and quick getaways had taken their toll: we were worn and in need of rest. We had no choice but to head back north for sanctuary. In the meantime, Obregón had organized a huge fresh counterforce specifically to send against us, and he set a trap at Jerécuaro. The knowledge that we would be passing through there he could only have learned from one of the cowardly fucks who deserted us in the night. The ambush caught us good and they smashed us like a water jug.
I had started out with more than four thousand men. By the time I rejoined Villa in Chihuahua, I had fewer than six hundred. When Pancho saw us, he wept.
That night we sat together out in the desert and fired our pistols at the moon.
TWELVE
By the middle of that sorrowful summer of 1915 many of our old compañeros were dead. Many others were cripples. Still others had been taken prisoner and, if they had not yet been shot, were rotting in captivity somewhere. Some had lost heart in the cause and fled to the mountains or to refuge across the border.
Felipe Angeles was in Washington trying to get Yankee support for our cause, but he was not having much luck. Neither was Villa’s old gringo friend General Hugh Scott, who’d been doing all he could to keep President Wilson’s sympathies with our side. The gringo government tries never to bet except on the side that’s winning, and every defeat we’d suffered that summer had moved them closer to recognizing Carranza as Mexico’s legal head of state. “The goddamned gringos,” Villa growled, “have less honor than whores!”
But his greatest bitterness—like mine—was for the turncoats. It was one thing for a man to desert to the hills or the other side of the river. When we caught up with them, we simply gave them a bullet in the head, or, in special cases, let them live and serve as shitworkers—repairing rail tracks, digging graves or burning the dead, shoveling coal, things like that. But those who jumped to the Carrancistas were outright traitors, and Villa no longer objected too strongly if our boys taught them a few special pains before killing them.
Yet when he heard that Maclovio Herrera had been killed near Nuevo Laredo, he cried. Maclovio’s desertion to Carranza the year before had turned in his heart like a knife. He’d sworn to avenge the betrayal on all of Maclovio’s grown male relatives and still meant to keep that vow. But that had nothing to do with his grief for dead Maclovio.
Worse heartbreak followed. He had dispatched Tomás with a company of cavalry and a chest of gold bullion to meet with some gringo dealers bringing several wagonloads of munitions to the border. When Tomás did not come back as scheduled, Villa was afraid the Carrancistas had intercepted him. That wasn’t what happened. He had absconded with the gold to his hacienda and fortified the place. We got word that he was negotiating a deal with Carranza.
The news left Villa looking like he’d lost his mind. He couldn’t talk about it without his eyes filling with tears. “We’ve ridden together since we were boys,” he told me a thousand times.
“Listen, Pancho,” I said, “we can sit around here and cry about it while he makes a deal with the whitebeard and gets fat off our gold, or we can go down there right now and show him the error of his ways.”
We picked a hundred Dorados, loaded our horses on a train, and rolled off to the south. We stared out at the passing desert lit white by the moon. Tumbleweeds bounded in a gusting wind. The mountains were black and sharp. Just north of the Río Ramos the tracks had been dynamited, and the twisted rails looked like crippled things. We saddled up and moved on. An hour before daybreak we were overlooking the Hacienda de Las Nieves, counting the guards along the main wall and forming our plan of attack.
“So this is what it comes to, the glorious Revolution,” Pancho whispered in the chilly darkness. “Now I make plans to attack my oldest friend, my little compañero.”
I hated it when he wallowed in sentiment that way. Except in him—and in some women who seemed to get aroused by their own indulgence in it—I never had much tolerance for sentimentality. Villa most often got that way when he was reminiscing about his gang of the old days. I usually just gritted my teeth against it, or claimed duties to attend to and went away. But that wasn’t the case now. We had things to do and we had to do them right. There wasn’t time for any of his raining-in-my-heart self-pity.
“Hey, man,” I said, “you’re not the first guy to ever get shit upon by a friend. Better hearts than his have turned crooked as a corkscrew.”
For a moment he looked like he might take a swing at me. Then he just walked away and sat by himself until it was time.
•
We hit the hacienda at sunrise, charging down from the east to have the sun blazing at our backs. We picked off the wall guards like bottles on a fence. We blew apart the front gates with a pack of dynamite, then rode into the main courtyard shooting everything that moved—men, pigs, dogs, the astonished stableboy whose wide-open mouth admitted my bullet to remove the back of his skull an instant before I recognized him. He had been a shy simpleton who’d presented a handful of wildflowers to a pretty girl with a silver ribbon in her hair and her arm linked in mine at the fiesta for the christening of Urbina’s daughter. (Consuelo? Carina?) The memory came to me as abruptly as a finger snap—and the sight of the boy lying in the bloody spill of his dull brain filled me with such fury I ignored the cries of “We surrender! We surrender!” from the three house guards coming out through the side door and I shot all three with their hands up high.
Urbina came dashing out the front door with a pistol in each hand, firing wildly and running in a crouch toward the stable. A slug knocked a leg from under him and he did a neat little flip in the air, landing hard on the courtyard cobblestones.
“Cease fire!” Villa yelled. “Cease fire, goddammit!” He vaulted off his horse and hurried to Tomás. He helped him up and gingerly assisted him to a stone bench under a cypress tree.
“As if I didn’t have enough trouble getting around with this fucking rheumatism,” Urbina said through his teeth as Villa examined the wound. “What hit me, a Sharps?”
The round had taken a good-sized c
hunk out of his calf. It was messy but not fatal. Pancho tied it off with a bandanna, then sat beside him on the bench and waved me away. “See to things,” he said.
I walked through the house as the boys went at it like wolves on a wounded cow, stripping it of whatever they could carry off in their saddlebags or tied across their horses. I couldn’t help wondering how many times these things had been stolen before, how many different men had called themselves their owners. Some of the intricate gold figures going into the boys’ pockets had been fashioned by the Aztecs.
A Dorado captain came out of the kitchen, chewing on a chicken leg, and informed me they’d found the women and children of the house hiding in the cellar. Urbina’s wife and kids were not among them. They were mostly maids and their daughters, but there were also a few whose dresses and pampered hands made it clear they were not part of the housekeeping help.
“I recognized one from the fiesta last year,” the captain said, grinning. “I guess some of those girls found themselves a home, eh?”
“General Urbina likes his pleasures close at hand,” I said.
A woman’s scream, partly muffled, came up from the cellar. The captain gave me a fearful glance and started for the kitchen. He knew what Villa and I thought about rape. I’d shot more than one man for violating Pancho’s order against assaulting women. But before he was through the door, I called out, “Captain!” and he stopped and looked at me. “Let the boys have some fun,” I said.
His face brightened. “Truly, Chief?”
I nodded. He grinned and rushed out of the room.
Why the hell not? A defeated but honorable enemy deserved certain amenities of respect—such as protection for the women under his roof. But a traitor deserved no such considerations. To the contrary, nothing of his—property, women, reputation, life, nothing—should be spared. I continued searching the house, but his wife and children were gone. He had known we would come.
In a small parlor I found one of our boys with a woman pinned under him on a sofa. He was straddling her hips, fumbling with the buttons of his trousers and fighting to keep his balance as she gasped and struggled to throw him off. Her dress was ripped open to the waist and her breasts quivered with her efforts.
A few feet away a dead man in an expensive-looking suit lay on the floor, blood still running from an empty eye socket. A representative from the whitebeard, most likely.
When he caught sight of me, the compañero froze. I shrugged to let him know I didn’t give a damn, not today, and he smiled, still jouncing as the girl kept trying to wrest herself from under him. He pointed at the dead man and said, “I got that fucker there, Chief.” The girl bucked hard and almost unseated him. He backhanded her across the mouth and grinned at me. “And I got me a real bronco here.”
“Watch out she doesn’t throw you and break your ass,” I said as I turned away.
I was stepping through the door when I heard “Rudy?” It was said so low that for a moment I thought I had imagined it, as I had imagined it so many times since that fiesta of a year ago. So long ago.
I turned back and looked closely and saw that it was her. (Caridad? Consuelo?)
“Rudy.” She said it like releasing a held breath. Maybe she hadn’t been sure till just then either. “Rudy, stop him. Please.”
The puzzled compañero hesitated, with his pants flapped open and his hard-on jutting up. “You know this one, Chief?”
Her torn dress was made of silk. The fine necklace holding an ivory brooch was gold. Her lips and eyes were painted, and even through the compañero’s musk I could smell the sweetness of her perfume.
The dress she’d dropped at my feet had been cotton, her only adornment a silver ribbon in her hair.
“Listen, Chief, if you know this one, well, I—”
My bullet took him through the heart. He bounced off the wall and tumbled in a heap next to the well-dressed corpse on the floor.
For a moment neither of us moved. The thin gunsmoke drifted to the ceiling as the ringing in my ears slowly eased.
She sat up and reached out to me. “Rudy,” she said, beckoning with all her fingers. Her breast tips looked like pink stones.
I shot her through the left one. She died with her eyes wide open and her lips formed as if for a kiss.
In my continuing dreams of her I would see her as I always had: stepping from the pooled white dress, freeing her hair into my face, listening like an enraptured child to my stories of war and death, holding my face in her hands as she kissed me with her heart’s hot tongue.
Who this whore was I neither knew nor cared.
Out in the courtyard Urbina still sat on the bench, Villa standing beside him with a hand on his shoulder.
“I bound up his leg a little better,” Pancho told me as I approached, his voice high and tight, the way it always got when he was in a state. “It’s not bleeding so bad now. We’ll take him to a doctor in Durango. He’ll be all right, you’ll see.”
“Fuck him,” I said.
“Hey!” Pancho said, stepping up to me fast, trying to hide his confusion with anger. “This is Tomás, goddammit—our compañero. We don’t say fuck him.”
“Where’s our gold, you son of a bitch,” I asked Urbina. He wouldn’t even look up at me.
“The gold—shit, the boys found the gold,” Pancho said, gesturing vaguely toward the other end of the courtyard. “Some of it. Down in the well. The well—can you believe it?” He tried to laugh but it came out a high groan.
He looked down at Tomás, who smiled up at him and shrugged. “That’s no place to hide gold, you dummy,” Villa said. “That’s the first place anybody looks.”
“Where’s the rest of it?” I said, giving Urbina a shove on the shoulder. He refused to meet my eyes. He just shrugged and stared at the ground.
“What, did you spend it already?” Villa said with a weak grin, still trying to make light of the situation. “You gave it to some good-looking chica with a great ass? You bury it someplace, hide it for your old age? Ay, Tamasito!” He shook his head at Urbina like an exasperated father, then turned to me and said, “What the hell’s it matter, anyway? Goddamn gold. We can always get more gold, eh?”
I stared hard at him.
“Goddammit, Rudy,” he said, “this is Tomás.”
“Tomás?” I echoed. “No it isn’t. I don’t see Tomás anywhere around here. Tomás was our brother. This”—and I quickly stepped up and kicked Urbina in the ribs so hard I nearly knocked him off the bench—“this is a bag of shit!”
Villa jumped between us, looking wild. “Rudy, Rudy listen . . .”
“He stole from you!” I shouted.
“So what—so what!” Pancho yelled, his hands on my chest, pushing me away. “He’s our friend!”
“Bullshit! He stole from us! He stole from the Revolution!”
His face folded in agony and the strength seemed to drain from his push. “Fuck the Revolution,” he said in a choked voice, nearly whispering. “He’s my friend.” His hands dropped off my chest.
“Yes,” I said, “your friend. And your friend betrayed you. He betrayed you, Pancho! What crime is greater—what crime!”
He knew I was right, of course. That wasn’t the argument. No, what he wanted was my complicity. He wanted to pardon Tomás for an unpardonable crime, and he wanted me to go along with it. But I wasn’t about to. I would not conspire against the only . . . what? . . . understanding? unwritten law? code?—different men call it different things if they call it anything at all—but it is the only thing in the life of men like us that has absolute value, the only thing, finally, that counts.
God damn it, the compact of comrades is all that separates men like us from the rough beasts of the earth, that makes us something more than another random catastrophe of nature like earthquake and fire. Villa knew that. He’d always known it. Urbina knew it too,
which is why he couldn’t look me in the eye. He had violated the compact, had deliberately betrayed his friends. He had to be punished. For him it would be penance. For me and Villa it would be fidelity. I was saddened by Pancho’s weakness in the face of that truth.
Villa’s eyes continued to plead with me, but I shook my head. Finally he looked away.
He wiped his nose with his shirtsleeve, dried his eyes on his cuffs. He smiled at Urbina, and Tomás smiled back, crookedly, like a guilty boy. “My little compadre,” Pancho said softly, and affectionately ran his hand through Urbina’s hair.
Then he stepped away, looked off toward the sierras, and said, “Shoot him.”
He went straight to his horse and mounted up. And without once looking back, he rode away.
I ordered the boys left with me to set torches to the house. Soon flames were leaping from the roof and bursting through the windows. Smoke rolled skyward in towering gray plumes. Looking at his burning house, Urbina shook his head as sadly as any rich man pained by his loss of property.
“I suppose you wonder why I did it,” he said, finally raising his face to me—only to see my pistol pointed at him in implacable judgment.
“No,” I said, “I don’t.”
I blasted away his left kneecap. He tumbled off the bench, howling and writhing on the ground. The remainder of his side of the proceeding was conducted in screams and spasms. I shot his feet and ankles, then an elbow, then a shoulder. I shot his thieving hands, the other knee, and the points of both hipbones, tearing flesh and smashing bone but sparing the big arteries. I shot the other elbow, then blew off an ear. I pressed the bore of the gun against the side of his nose and shot the whole thing off his face. I went through three reloads, then paused to piss on him, then clapped my hand over his mouth to cut his moaning while I whispered into his good ear: “You’ll never rest in peace, Tomás, never. Not you.”
I gave him the last one in the belly, then sat in front of him and watched the light fade slowly from his eyes.
The Friends of Pancho Villa Page 12
