The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  When we caught up to the rest of the boys near the Durango border, Villa was entertaining them around a campfire with Tomás Urbina stories. I’d been a part of some of those stories, and I’d heard almost all the others, plenty of times. But on this night they seemed funnier than ever before, and I laughed along with the boys at every story Pancho told.

  Like Villa, I believed that even though some men did not deserve to go on living, they still deserved to be remembered at their best.

  PART THREE

  Dead

  or

  Alive

  “All the men of the Mexican Revolution were, without a single exception, inferior to its demands.”

  —Daniel Cosío Villegas

  THIRTEEN

  Early that fall the United States recognized Carranza’s Constitutionalist Party as the “de facto’’ government of Mexico. Other countries immediately followed the Yankee lead and did the same. To make things worse for us, the gringos placed an embargo on all arms shipments into the country except those going to Carranza. Bastards.

  Our immediate problem was figuring a way around the embargo. Villa sent me with a half dozen Dorados to search out new entry points along the border for arms shipments from rene­gade gringo dealers and new routes for transporting the munitions down to our Chihuahua territories.

  “Find some good spots for getting the guns across,” Pancho told me. “A few places where we won’t be surprised in the middle of things. Safe places.’’

  “Safe places?” I had to laugh. “Hell, brother, you’re talking about our graves.’’

  During the next couple of weeks we found a few good transfer points along the border west of Palomas, then began charting a shipment trail south. We were making our slow way through the swamplands just north of Casas Grandes one chilly morning when we came up against a long, foul-smelling lake dotted with sandbars. We were at about its midpoint, so we had to either ford it or swing a long way around.

  The lake looked shallow enough to cross easily on ­horseback—some of the sandbars stood more than a foot above the waterline. But the boys said they wanted to ride around it. It wasn’t only that most of them didn’t know how to swim: they’d all heard bad stories about the place. The local Indians claimed the lake was evil, that its bottom was littered with the bones of men who’d drowned in it, that if a man so much as got both feet wet with its tainted water ill fortune would plague him for the rest of his life.

  Well, hell, I couldn’t swim either. But it’s one thing to be afraid of a stinking yellow lake because you might drown in it, and it’s something else to be scared away from it by a lot of Indian mumbo-jumbo. The boys were already in pretty low spirits from the ass-kickings Obregón had given us lately—I wasn’t about to let them be whipped by Indian superstition too.

  “Listen,” I told them, “we’re going through this piss­hole, all of us! Don’t be so worried about getting your pussies wet. Your main worry better be not to cross me. Anybody want to argue about it?”

  Nobody did.

  “Good,” I said. “Now, I can see how scared you girlies are, so I’ll go first. Anybody who doesn’t cross over after I do is going to see me come back to say good-bye to him. Understood? All right then, girls: watch me, then follow the route I take.”

  I was mounted on Sangria, a brawny but high-strung bay stallion as reluctant to ford the lake as the boys were. I had to spur him into the water. He sagged under me as he sank into the soft mud, but then he found firm footing and moved forward briskly when I put the spurs to him again. As he high-stepped awkwardly through the muck, his hooves stirred up the bottom and brought up a thick, gagging stench of sulfur and rotten meat.

  We were about thirty yards from shore, in water to Sangria’s belly, when he abruptly sank to his withers. He panicked and lurched sideways, trying to kick free of the mucky bottom, then lost his balance and fell over with a high shriek. I slid out of the saddle fast enough to keep from getting pinned under him as we both went under. But as the big bastard rolled, he kicked wildly with a free hoof and drove it into my right shin, snapping it like a stick.

  A surge of hot vomit rose to my throat. I took it down with a searing gulp of rancid water as I floundered desperately, finally gaining a vague foothold on my good leg and pushing myself upright. I bit huge gasping gulps of air, my throat and lungs on fire.

  A few feet away, Sangria was thrashing madly, his muscular neck straining to keep his head up. He was screaming through his enormous teeth, his eyes crazy with terror. My Texas hat bobbed beside him.

  Then I understood the trouble: I felt the quicksand’s enveloping yield under my good leg. I tried to push off the soft bottom with my broken leg but the pain flared like white fire behind my eyes and I heard myself cry out.

  Sangria’s terrible shrieks were suddenly cut off as he went under again, his great weight pressing him deeper into the quicksand. The water over him shook queerly for a moment and then went still.

  I sank to my chin, my mustache. Snorting and choking, I turned my face up to the clouded sun—and as the yellow lake closed over me, I thought: so this is how you die . . .

  •

  I did and I didn’t.

  I opened my eyes to a white ceiling brilliant with lights. Then a dark figure loomed over me and slowly shaped itself into Villa’s broad familiar face. He was hatless and smiling gently. Not until he put his hand on my arm was I sure I was really alive. I was vaguely conscious of a soreness in the joints of my arms and legs. There was the gentle smell of fresh cotton sheets and the hard odors of disinfectants and medicines, the clatter of metal, the light rumble of a cart rolling over a wooden floor, a clinking of dishware, soft voices far and near. I felt, rather than heard, Villa speaking to me, and I eased back into the sweet soft darkness.

  The next time I came awake, Pancho told me Calixto Contreras had saved me. Calixto was the only one of the Dorados with me who could swim. When he saw Sangria suddenly sag under me, he knew we were in quicksand. He wound the end of his lariat around his saddle horn, kicked off his boots, threw off his bandoleers, and splashed out to me with the other end of the rope in his teeth. Only my hands were above the surface when he got to me. He looped the rope around my arms and pulled it tight, then signaled the boys to lash his horse away from shore.

  They said I came bursting out of the water like a fish on a line. The suction pulled off my boots and pants. I wasn’t breathing when I was dragged on shore, they said, and I looked like I was made of clay. My lower leg was bent in a sharp awkward angle where the shinbone had broken in two, but although one of the jagged ends jutted from the ripped flesh, there wasn’t much blood. They were sure I was dead, and who could blame them?

  They figured the only thing to do was take my body back to Villa. But when they heaved me on my belly over a horse, a hard stream of yellow water gushed from my mouth—and I gasped and started coughing. They yanked me off the horse, but I slipped from their grasp and my leg doubled under me, twisting the broken bone and tearing the wound open even wider.

  They sat me under a tree and pounded me on the back to help me disgorge more water. They said my bloodshot eyes came open for a moment and I cursed them for hitting me, then passed out again. My leg was pouring blood now, the bone ends completely exposed. They tied off the bleeding with a strip of rawhide tight above the wound, and a couple of the boys went to the nearest village to get a wagon to put me in. The best they could find was a cumbersome solid-wheeled oxcart.

  It took almost three days to get me to the doctors at the Mormon settlement at Colonia Dublán. I was unconscious for most of the trip and later had no recollection of the few times I came to and accepted water from a canteen and cursed everybody in sight.

  By the time we got to Colonia Dublán my lower leg was black and bloated larger than my thigh, and the wound was smelling of rot. The surgeon cut it off just below the knee.

  �
�They wouldn’t have done it if I’d been there, little brother,” Pancho said. “I would have shot the bastard who raised the knife to your leg, you know that. I got here as fast as I could but it was too late to stop them.”

  He wanted to punish somebody, everybody—the boys who’d knotted the tourniquet so tightly and didn’t know enough to loosen it every now and then, the doctor who’d done the cutting, his assistant.

  I said no, let them be, they all only did what they thought best. Pancho wiped his tears and looked at me strangely, but he spared them all.

  The boys who brought me to the Mormons had at least been quick-witted enough not to tell them my true name. It was too well known. The news that I was laid up with a missing leg would surely have brought the federals on us in a hurry. Calixto told the Mormons I was Ramón Contreras, his older brother. And to mislead any Carranza spies in the region who might have heard rumors of what happened, Villa put out the story that I, Fierro, the Butcher himself, had drowned in Lake Guzmán (a good sixty miles northeast of the Mormon settlement) when my horse gave out under me.

  Naturally the story took on embellishments the more it was circulated. The most popular account became the one claiming that I could have saved myself if I hadn’t been wearing a money belt loaded with gold. I liked that touch. It amused me to think of mothers giving their children moral instruction through the story of my death. “You see?” they would say. “You see how a man can be drowned by his own greed?”

  The proclamation of my death struck me as quite proper. Why not? In a way, I truly was dead. Rodolfo Fierro was no cripple and never could be. The man I’d been would never wear a wooden leg. That man was no more. Not that I got melancholic about it; what happens happens, and to hell with it.

  After a night of thinking things over I told Villa, “Listen, no more Fierro. Let’s leave that sad son of a bitch in the lake. Now I’m Ramón Contreras, the fucker with one leg.”

  Villa squinted at me and scratched his head and said he wondered if my brain had been damaged by all the water that got in it. Then he shrugged and grinned. “But hey,” he said, “you want to be Ramón Contreras, fine with me. We’ll call you Benito Juárez, Napoleon, Jorge Washington, any damn name you want. What’s it matter, a name?” (He never called me Fierro again, but he continued to call me Rudy.)

  He chuckled and said, ‘‘You know, the boys are telling jokes about how poorly you would now do in an asskicking contest.”

  “We’ll see how much they joke when I get off my ass,” I said. ‘‘When I get back on my foot.”

  Villa groaned and rolled his eyes, and we both burst out laughing. What the hell.

  So . . . I died but I didn’t.

  As soon as I could be moved, Villa had me put in a wagon and we went to a haven in the western foothills. One of the Mormon doctors came with us at Villa’s pointed request—to tend to my wound and fit me with a wooden leg when I was ready for it.

  •

  The air was turning cooler now, and every evening the shadows came sooner and got a little longer. Over the next few weeks, Villa often took some of the boys and went out to rustle cattle from the nearest hacendado herds. They’d drive the steers to the border, sell them and use the money to buy munitions. While he was doing that, I got fitted with my new leg and kept busy learning to walk with it. Following the doctor’s specifications, our best woodworker fashioned the leg, and the local blacksmith made the harness to attach it. With the smithy’s help, I designed a special stirrup for it, one I could easily attach to any saddle.

  The hardest part about riding again was having to sit differently on the horse to balance myself properly, especially at a gallop. In the first few days back in the saddle I fell off twice before I started to get the hang of it. Christ. Fierro had been the best horseman in Mexico. (Villa thought different, naturally, but I think in his heart he knew which of us was truly the best.) My angry shame made me a little thin-skinned: the first time I fell, a couple of the boys laughed out loud as they rode by and I shot their horses out from under them. I hobbled over faster than I would have thought I could and shoved my pistol in their scared faces and asked if they felt like laughing some more. I put the horses out of their misery, then went back to my riding practice. For the first time in my life I felt like a bully. That evening in the cantina I bought each of the two boys a bottle and told them to pick out a couple of good mounts for themselves from the Dorados’ special remuda.

  •

  Villa was doing most of his arms business with a pair of Jewish brothers named Sam and Louis Ravel in Colombus, New Mexico, just across the border from Palomas. They always insisted on payment in advance, and then two or three weeks later they’d deliver the goods to our man in Palomas. Their chief source of munitions, however, was somewhere farther west, and the ­Ravels told Villa we could get faster delivery after payment if we had a transfer point on the Arizona border. Agua Prieta was a perfect spot, but it was under the control of the federal army. Villa told the brothers we’d take Agua Prieta within the next two weeks.

  He’d never given up the idea of rebuilding our army and going back to open war with the whitebeard. Carranza was claiming to have control of seven-eighths of the country, which was bullshit, but he did control enough of the key parts of it to have won the gringos to his side—which of course was what now made him tough to beat. Just the same, nobody was fool enough to think the war was over, not while there were still so many rebels holding out in the hills and mountains—and for damn sure not while one of them was Pancho Villa. In the meantime, Carranza had officially declared us bandits to be shot on sight—us and every other rebel still resisting him, including Zapata, who we heard was giving the government a worse time than ever down in Morelos.

  Felipe Angeles was still in the picture too—and still in the United States, even though all his diplomatic efforts to keep the Yankees from siding with Carranza had come to nothing. He wired Villa that he was ready to rejoin us whenever he got the order, but Pancho told him to stay put. He didn’t want Angeles at risk in Mexico, not yet, not until we once again had a full army.

  Villa’s confidence was higher than it had been in months. As our stock of armaments had grown in recent weeks, so had our ranks. Pancho’s name was still magic in northern Mexico, and boys as young as thirteen came out of their pueblos to join us. When our ranks grew to six thousand, Pancho was champing at the bit to move against a Carrancista garrison. Agua Prieta was his choice—and not only because it gave us control of a border point. “The town’s in full view of the gringos on the border,” Pancho said. “When they see us take it, they’ll know Pancho Villa’s still the toughest bull in the plaza. They’ll think again about having sided with the whitebeard, you watch. We’ll soon be getting visits again from gringos in pinstriped suits.”

  I wasn’t so sure. Besides, Angeles had warned him to hold off making any large-scale advance until we were even stronger. But Villa had only laughed and said, “Hell, when I went to war against Huerta, had eight men with me. Eight!”

  •

  We hadn’t counted on the sudden early winter. We were high in the sierras when it fell on us like a bombardment of ice and snow. Horses and pack mules slipped on the icy rock trails and broke their legs. Wagons overturned. The wind howled into the passes and cut through our clothes. The earth was a frozen white blur. Fires were hard to start and keep burning in the blowing drifts. Ears, fingers, toes turned black with frostbite.

  “At least you only have one fucking foot to freeze,” Villa said through his chattering teeth as our mounts labored through the snow.

  “I’ve always been lucky,” I said.

  Some of our boys froze to death in their sleep. That hard crossing cost us nearly a thousand men and a good portion of our supplies before we at last descended the western slope into Sonora. Many of those who made it were sick. All of us were exhausted. We rested for a few days, killed and ate some of our r
emaining scrawny beeves, then pushed on to Agua Prieta, where we ran into more bad surprises.

  •

  The Carrancista commander in Agua Prieta was Plutarco Elías Calles, one of Obregón’s closest friends, a big hard-faced bastard everyone called the Turk, mainly because he was as treacherous as one. He had been tipped we were coming and had somehow received thousands of reinforcements without our scouts having spotted them. And he’d prepared for us in the fashion of his good friend Obregón: miles of barbed wire strung in front of camouflaged machine gun nests. Villa wasn’t dissuaded. He believed his old tactic of a massive cavalry charge would succeed if we did it under cover of night. He ordered me to stay back with a small troop to guard against any attempt at a cavalry countercharge, then he and Pablo López, a young firebrand who’d won our admiration with his fearlessness and command of men, led the attack.

  But as they closed in on Agua Prieta at a gallop, shrieking with war cries, the protective darkness suddenly vanished in a white glaring flood of searchlights—and a massive storm of machine gun fire hit them head-on. It was the latest trick Obregón and his boys had learned from their German military advisors. Our boys were perfect targets—all lit up and blinded by the lights. They panicked, broke every which way, and got gunned down like rabbits in a pen. We made it out of there with hardly more than a thousand men.

  Villa’s sorrow for his slaughtered boys was as great as his fury at the gringos. We were certain that the searchlights had come at us from their side of the border. A short time later—at about the same time that the Ravel brothers failed to deliver a shipment of arms we had already paid for, further feeding our suspicion that they had been the ones to inform Calles the Turk of when we were planning to attack Agua Prieta—we found out the gringo army had permitted Calles’s reinforcements to get to him by rail on the American side. They’d boarded a train in Texas and ridden the rails to Douglas, Arizona, across the line from Agua Prieta.