The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  Moving fast and far and wide, we skirmished with the Carrancistas all over Chihuahua. We ambushed their patrols in the canyons, made hit-and-run night raids on their camps, rustled their horses and stole their arms wagons, dynamited their rail lines, led them on wild chases across the desert and on fruitless pursuits in the sierras. We were having a hell of a good time.

  Meanwhile, the Yankee army lumbered deeper into Chihuahua with its enormous loads of supplies and equipment, its wagons and machinery raising towers of yellow dust visible for miles. We kept watch on their convoys from our mountainside outposts. Their trucks strained mightily over the main southern road—which to begin with had been nothing but a set of wagon ruts through the dry earth—and they often bogged down in the sand.

  The weather drove them to madness. The vagaries of the border climate were even harsher in Chihuahua’s interior. Few of the Yankees were used to scorching days followed by nights so cold their canteen water froze. Few of them had ever before known weeks of windless heat broken only by blinding sandstorms that lasted days and blew away their tents.

  The deeper they came into Mexico, the louder Carranza barked at Washington about violations of Mexican sovereignty and so forth. And the more Villa and I smiled at each other.

  •

  Near the end of March we caught a Carrancista cavalry patrol by surprise a few miles outside of Guerrero and shot them up pretty good. We put down a dozen of them before the rest gave up the fight and beat a hasty retreat. As some of the boys chased after the stragglers for the fun of it and the gunfire began easing off, Villa came riding toward me, laughing and waving his pistol. Suddenly his right leg jerked sharply and his horse gave a cry and stumbled, then slowed to a limping gait. Villa reined up, yelling “Son of a bitch!” and slid out of the saddle. He tried to support himself against the horse, but the animal was in its own pain and shied out of his grasp, and he fell.

  His lower leg was soaked with blood. A rifle round—­large-caliber and soft lead by the look of the wound—had gone in high in the back of his calf and come out through the front of his lower shin, leaving a ragged hole big enough to hold a plum. The bullet had smashed the shinbone, and chunks of bone the size of dice were visible in the torn flesh.

  Pancho’s eyes were red with pain. “You never told me a shin hurts this much, you bastard.”

  “Listen to you,” I said. “You didn’t hear me complain, and mine was a lot worse than this.”

  ‘“Hell no, you didn’t complain—you were out cold! A man can’t complain when he’s fainted like some little girl.”

  I sent Calixto to Guerrero to find Dr. Gomez—who’d repaired plenty of wounds for us in the past—and take him to our nearest camp, a deserted ranch house a few miles to the south. A couple of the other boys went off and got a wagon in which to transport Villa.

  Calixto and Dr. Gomez beat us to the ranch. We carried Pancho inside and laid him on a table, and Gomez got busy cutting away his bloody trousers and washing off the wound. He was a tidy, bespectacled little man with a beard and a quick, sure manner.

  Villa’s teeth flashed in grimaces as the doctor probed and examined, shaking his head in dismay.

  “The tibia is shattered beyond the possibility of proper setting, my general,” he said. “I can remove the pieces of the bullet and the larger shards of bone matter, yes, but much of the bone has been pulverized like broken glass. I could never get it all out, and what remained in the wound would certainly breed a toxic infection that would likely prove fatal. There’s really nothing to be done but to amputate.”

  Villa pushed himself up on his elbows to better see the doctor. He shook his head. “No cutting.”

  “But, my general, have you not heard me? I advise you not only as a doctor, but as your friend. If I do not amputate—”

  “No,” Villa said. He lay back with a groan and said, “Rudy.” I pulled my pistol and cocked it. Gomez looked at it sadly and sighed. Then he bent to his work.

  An hour later he’d cleaned the wound of bullet fragments and as many bone chips as he could get at, swabbed it out with permanganate of potash, and bound a splint on either side of it. He gave me the rest of the potash solution and wished us luck.

  •

  We were too many to travel together as slowly as we would now have to—with Villa being carried in a mule cart—so I dismissed the boys, all but ten. I told them to disperse in bunches in every direction, and to continue giving the Carrancistas all the hell they could. They were to keep moving all over Chihuahua and keep making guerrilla attacks on the whitebeard’s boys every chance they got, keep them busy, lead them on merry chases. And they were to spread the word in every town and village that Pancho Villa had been killed up in the mountains. If any of them were captured, they were to insist that it was so, that Francisco Villa was a dead man.

  Pancho had made me give my word that if he should die, we would burn his body to ashes. “If the bastards never find my body,” he said, “they’ll never know for sure if I’m really dead, and I want them to worry that I’m not.”

  We sat him up in the mule cart and he gave the boys a farewell speech, telling them that if he did not die, we would all meet again on the sixth of July in San Juan Bautista, a little town on the Durango border where he had many friends. The boys all said they’d be there, and off they went.

  •

  Well supplied with sacks of beans and bags of dried beef, we took Villa deeper into the sierras. We went up into the wild country where there were few villages within fifty miles of each other, following his directions to a cavern where he and Urbina had sometimes hidden from the rurales. It was rough going, getting that cart up those narrow, rocky trails and through the thick thornbush. The animals fought for footing in the loose stone. The air thinned out and breath came hard. We were still a few days away from the cavern when it started to snow, lightly for the first few hours, then much harder. It covered the trail and made footing even more uncertain. I kept giving Villa handfuls of snow to cool his fevered face.

  We came to a section of trail barely wide enough for the cart, flanked on one side by a precipice overlooking the blue cloud tops and on the other by sheer black rock face. The snow was several inches deep but at least had stopped falling.

  I had Villa removed from the cart before letting it proceed. Pancho protested, but he was too weak to put up much of an argument. I was acting on a hunch that proved to be a good one. The cart had gone only about thirty feet along the little cliffside trail—nearly half the distance to where it widened out again—when the mule stepped into a hole hidden by the snow. Its leg buckled and the animal toppled off the precipice with a terrified bray. The driver leaped clear of the cart as it abruptly heaved sideways and went tumbling behind the mule—but he struck his head hard against the rock face, staggered backward, and stepped off the edge of the trail, too stunned even to yell as he dropped out of sight. All this spooked the horses. The one directly behind the cart reared too far back in its fright, lost its balance, and took its rider with it over the side, their screams unrolling behind them like useless ropes.

  The whole thing was over in seconds. Villa muttered, “Holy shit,” and gave me a grateful look. A couple of the boys went to the edge of the cliff, stared down for a moment, and made quick signs of the cross.

  We cut saplings and stretched a blanket between them to form a litter for Villa, then pushed on, taking turns carrying him in teams of four. His wound was turning foul and his fever worsening. Several times we had to shake him awake and help him sit up so he could get his bearings and give us directions. We almost lost him when the litter overturned as we forded the Rio Conchos. When I dragged him up on the bank, he coughed violently and spit water at me and cursed me, accusing me of deliberately making him go through the same sorts of sufferings I had endured only a few months before.

  Two days later we reached the cavern. The entrance was halfway up a
steep rock slope, hidden in dense pine trees, heavy scrub brush, and tall grass. Unless you knew exactly where it was, you could have searched around there for two weeks and never found it. Only a few feet wide and two feet high, its mouth made for a tight fit when we crawled through and pulled Villa in behind us. Yet the cave itself was spacious and dry. A small, cold stream ran down its rear wall, and its upper reaches opened into several natural flumes which carried our fire smoke all the way to the other side of the mountain before dispersing it thinly into the wind. It was a perfect hiding place, everything Villa had claimed it was. From its mouth we had a clear view of the canyon trail two hundred feet below.

  I ordered six of the boys to take the horses back down the way we’d come and clear the trail behind them of all traces of their passing. No need to make it easy for any trackers who might come looking for signs of us up here. Once the boys got back to the Río Conchas, they were to spilt up in opposite directions along the river, leaving as much trail as they could without being too obvious about it. I said I’d see them again in San Juan on the sixth of July. With me and Villa I kept only Calixto and a fine boy named Rosalío Rosales.

  Pancho’s wound swelled and darkened and stank worse every day. He was on fire with fever and often delerious. He’d shout orders of battle and curse blackly at Huerta, Obregón, the ­whitebeard—then let out cries of triumph—then weep sorrowfully for his killed boys. He sometimes conversed with his wives, now whispering endearments to this one, now chuckling with that one, now cooing with pleasure at the amorous attentions of still another. He swore to them all that he loved them, and I don’t think he was lying.

  We took turns squeezing handfuls of pus from the blackening flesh and picking out more pieces of bone. The stench was terrific. I washed the wound every day with the potash solution but it seemed to have no effect. Gangrene seemed certain. Calixto and Rosalío didn’t ask it, but I saw the question in their eyes: would I sever the leg to save him? I didn’t know. He had sworn he wouldn’t have let them cut mine if he’d been there to stop it.

  Finally the potash was all used up. That evening Rosalío slipped out of the cave and was gone for several hours. The night was moonless and dark as a well bottom. He returned with a writhing handful of maggots he’d dug out of the meager remains of a deer carcass down by a creek The smell had told us there was something dead down there and he’d followed his nose to it. He also had a sack full of prickly pear cactus. “I had to crawl all over the goddamn mountainside like a blind man, brushing my hand over everything before I got stung good and knew I’d found some.”

  Rosalío put the maggots into Pancho’s wound and let them eat at it for a couple of days before cleaning them out. Then he sliced the cactus ears into thin blades, peeled them, layered them carefully over the wound, and bound them gently in place with strips of bandana. We took turns staying awake through the next two days and nights and changing the cactus dressing every hour. By the third morning the wound had begun to improve. Calixto clapped Rosalío on the back, beaming at him, and said, “That ignorant goddamn Gomez should kiss your ass and beg you to teach him the true arts of medicine.” From then on, we often addressed Rosalío as “Dr. Rosales.”

  •

  The canyon walls greatly amplified sound, and we heard the horses’ clattering hooves long before the Carrancista patrol came into view down on the trail. As they passed directly beneath us, we could even make out portions of conversations. One of them was bragging loudly to the others about a girl he’d managed to seduce in Guerrero. He described her in detail, right down to the double nipple on her left breast. Her name was never mentioned, but listening beside me at the cavern’s mouth, Calixto cursed under his breath: “Martina Maria! Nobody else in the world has a tit like that. She swore she loved only me, the faithless bitch!”

  I grinned along with Rosalío at the outrage on Calixto’s face. And on his bed of pine needles, Villa smiled. His fever still lingered, but it burned much lower now, and the first crusty signs of scab were forming at the edges of the wound.

  •

  He was strong enough to drag himself to the cave entrance when the gringo soldiers came by a week or so later. It was a cavalry patrol of about 150 men, unburdened by supply wagons or pack mules. Like the Carrancistas, they were heading south.

  “I hope they go to Parral,” Pancho said. “They love me in Parral. They’ll give these bastards a hell of a welcome.”

  The gringos were singing as they filed past. Calixto translated for us: “It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go. It’s a long way to Tipperary, to the sweetest girl I know”—and so on.

  A song about wanting to get back home to a girl was nothing new, but the only place it mentioned that any of us had heard of was Picadilly, which Villa announced was in England, as though nobody but him knew that. But the song said “good-bye to Picadilly,” and we couldn’t understand why gringos in Mexico would be saying good-bye to a place in England. It also said good-bye to other places as foreign to us as Tipperary, where the girl in the song was waiting.

  Calixto said: “I don’t think these damn gringos know where they’re going.”

  Rosalío said: “I don’t think they know where they’ve been.”

  Villa said: “Listen, boys, most of the time they don’t even know where they are.”

  •

  The gringos did go to Parral—and Pancho was right about the reception they got. We heard all about it later on. There was a Carrancista garrison in the town, and the Mexican commander, a General Lozano, rode out to warn the gringos away. Parral was full of Villista sympathizers, he told them, and the sight of Yankee troops was rousing much agitation among the townspeople. Even some of his own soldiers were muttering darkly about the gringos’ arrogant intrusion into the fatherland. Besides, they’d come too far south, he informed them: Villa was reported to be in the wild country to the northwest. He offered to escort them a few miles to the north, where they could make camp for the night. But by now a mob had formed at the edge of town and was advancing on the gringos, shouting threats and curses, chanting “Viva Villa! Viva Mexico!” They ignored Lozano’s orders to disperse and started pelting the Yankees with stones and horseshit. Lozano called for his troops to break up the mob, but they refused—and instead opened fire on the gringos.

  There was a running battle for the next three hours. The Carrancistas chased the Yankees north more than fifteen miles, all the way back to the village of Santa Cruz, where the fight finally ended when Yankee reinforcements showed up.

  A handful of gringos were killed in that skirmish, and naturally the recriminations flew hot and fast between Washington and Mexico City. Still, they agreed to meet for diplomatic talks in Juárez. As his representative Carranza sent Obregón—whom he’d made his secretary of war to try to keep him happy. The U.S. proposed a plan to pull its soldiers out of Mexico in gradual phases, but, on Carranza’s orders, Obregón rejected it. Only immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the troops would satisfy the whitebeard. When the gringos refused, the talks broke off. Just the same, Washington ordered Pershing to pull his troops back up to central Chihuahua, and they never ventured so far south again.

  We were happy of course to hear that Mexican soldiers had put gringo troops on the run. What Mexican wouldn’t be? The bad side of it was that their success had boosted the whitebeard’s popularity all over the country.

  A few weeks later we got the bad news that Candelario Cervantes had been killed by the gringo soldiers. He and a couple of his boys were getting a horse shod in a little village just north of Chihuahua City when a Yankee patrol arrived in three motorcars and a motorcycle equipped with a machine gun. Rather than run for it, Candelario and his boys charged at them head-on and killed one before they were cut down by the machine gun. Villa’s sadness gave way to outrage when he heard that the gringo officer in charge—a young lieutenant named George Patton—had taken the bodies back to hi
s camp draped over the hoods of the motorcars like hunting trophies.

  “I’d like to kill that son of a bitch and put his head on the wall of the nearest cantina,” Pancho said. “I’d put it low enough so everybody could use it for a pisser.”

  His leg was healing fast now. Rosalío carved a crutch for him, and Pancho was soon hobbling around the cave on it, exercising for longer periods every day. Before long he was using only a cane. He’d always been a little pigeon­toed, but now was even more so, the shin having knitted with an inward twist. He was aching to get out into the fresh air, to feel the sun on his face again. His plans to rebuild an army to fight the whitebeard grew steadily more enthusiastic. I listened and nodded agreeably, enjoying his furious confidence.

  In the meantime, the gringos had ordered Pershing to pull his troops even farther back, and he’d moved his main camp to a spot near the Mormon colony at Colonia Dublán. Carranza took the pullback for the sign of weakness that it was, and he got even bolder with the Yankees. He sent Pershing a widely publicized message telling him he was free to send his army in any direction except east, west, or south. Any movements except to the north would be considered hostile action calling for immediate defensive action by Mexican forces. Pershing replied that until his own government told him otherwise, he would send his soldiers in any damn direction he pleased.