The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  He invited me to live in one of the bedrooms of that house, and the three of us often ate supper together in the main dining room. That’s how I came to learn why he put up with her wicked temper. He once had her remove her shoe, and he winked at me when I saw the six toes on her left foot. He didn’t see the wink she gave me. Everybody in that part of the country knew that a six-toed woman had secret sexual powers so pleasurable they could turn men into half-wits, sometimes even rob them of their souls. No man could refuse such a woman if she wanted him. “It’s the damned truth, amigo,” Pancho told me one morning after an evening with her. He was limping slightly and looked like he hadn’t slept in a week rather than just one night. “That thing of hers—it’s like some kind of crazy animal. Her tongue’s a living sin. Her fingers know a thousand wicked tricks.”

  I believed every word of it. It was all in the spooky bitch’s eyes. She’d give me looks behind his back, daring me, and I would have murdered any man besides Pancho to have her for myself. But those eyes were also full of crazy malice. I was sure she would let me have her just so she could rush to tell Villa for the pleasure of making him angry enough to kill me. And still I could not stop wanting her.

  •

  It was raining hard on the evening we heard about Zapata. We crowded into the sala of the main house of a hacienda where we were camped and got the story from a pair of Carrancista deserters who’d been at Chinameca and seen the whole thing.

  Pablo González commanded the federal forces against the Zapatistas, and in many ways their war was even more brutal than the one we were fighting against Murguía. Every hacienda in Morelos was burned to the ground. Entire villages were put to the torch, and sugar fields were razed to black ash. Captive Zapatistas were beheaded. Federal prisoners were skinned alive. Women and children were bayoneted as casually as dogs. The Zapatistas were the nearest threat to the capital district, and the whitebeard was dead set on wiping them out once and for all. He gave González free rein to lay Morelos to waste—but the more savagely González campaigned, the more savagely the Zapatistas fought back.

  When he heard that Zapata was making overtures to Obregón about forming an alliance against him, Carranza got desperate. Together with Pablo González and a half­breed Yaqui colonel named Jesús María Guajardo, he came up with a plan. They cleverly leaked a rumor that Guajardo had fallen out with González and was ready to jump to the rebel side. Zapata was one of the most suspicious men I’d ever met, so even though he was in bad need of an ally with plenty of men and a steady arms supply, I never could understand why he fell for the trick and got in contact with Guajardo. But he did.

  As proof of Guajardo’s sincerity, Zapata wanted him to attack the army garrison at Jonacatepec. Guajardo did it, routing the federals and taking fifty-one prisoners. Then, as even greater proof of his allegiance to the Zapatistas, he shot every one of the captives. Zapata was both pleased and convinced. When they met face-to-face a few days later, Guajardo presented Zapata with a beautiful sorrel—and Zapata made Guajardo a general in the Army of the South. They then agreed to meet the next day at Guajardo’s hacienda at Chinameca and celebrate their alliance with a banquet.

  Guajardo greeted him at the front gate. There were soldiers all along the courtyard walls, and more soldiers inside, standing in ranks and at attention. When Zapata and an escort of ten men rode in, Guajardo’s boys saluted them with their rifles held at “present arms.” Zapata nodded and his boys smiled and waved. As the Zapatistas reined up in the middle of the courtyard, a bugle blared—and Guajardo’s troops, over a hundred of them, suddenly took aim on them and opened fire. The Zapatistas were gunned down before they could even try to defend themselves. Their horses screamed and buckled. Even after Zapata was down and certainly dead, they kept shooting him, the bullets shredding his clothes and making his blood fly. The witnesses said that when the guns finally ceased, Zapata looked like he’d been savaged by wild beasts, that the ground under him was muddy with blood.

  They threw his carcass over a horse and took it to Cuautla, where González was waiting. It was laid out on a table in the police station for everyone to see. Of course some of the peons whispered that it wasn’t him, that the body was shot up so bad it could have been anybody. But the Carrancistas who told us the story swore it was him, all right. González ordered photographs taken of the body and wrote on them, “Emiliano Zapata—Dead!—10 April 1919.” He had the pictures posted all over Morelos. In a picture he had taken for his own pleasure, he stood on the table and posed with one hand thrust in the front of his jacket and one foot on Zapata’s chest. Two days later they buried him in the Cuautla graveyard. Carranza rewarded Colonel Guajardo with fifty thousand pesos and a promotion to general.

  For a few long minutes after the Carrancistas finished their story, Villa didn’t say anything. Then he called for a glass of brandy. He hadn’t touched a drop since the time he took a drink with Zapata in Xochimilco. He raised the glass high and said, “To the Revolution and Emiliano Zapata who did not die on his knees!” He tossed off the drink, coughed hard, and smashed the glass in the cold fireplace.

  SEVENTEEN

  By June we were fifteen hundred strong and well-armed. Villa was dead set on making a major attack, and he decided we would hit Juárez. I had my doubts about moving so soon. I didn’t think our boys were ready. They were tough, all right, plenty—but toughness alone isn’t enough, not in the long run, and tough was all they were. Too many of them were Carrancista turncoats, and a man who turns his coat once can’t be trusted not to do it again. Even worse were all the city trash we now had in our ranks. They were fierce as street dogs but just as wayward and without purpose. But like I said, they were tough, and that was good enough for Villa.

  I was surprised that it was good enough for Felipe Angeles too. He’d finally rejoined us and was eager to get back to the fight against the whitebeard. During his stay in the U.S. he’d fallen in with a bunch of exiled Mexican intellectuals calling themselves the Alianza Liberal, and they’d persuaded him to act as their liaison with Villa. He talked about those guys like they deserved their own mosaic windows on a church wall. He’d changed—not very much, but enough so I noticed it, even if nobody else did. He was still the model soldier and the spotless dandy, but he’d been living the soft life in the U.S. and dealing with politicians for too long. That political group he was so fond of was full of fat men who had never been shot at in their lives, and it seemed to me they’d blunted his judgment of fighting men. In earlier days he would have been appalled by such lack of discipline as we had in our ranks now—and he would have been quick to caution Villa against sending his men into a major engagement until they had more training. I probably would have argued against him just for the fun of it, knowing Villa would wisely choose to follow his counsel. But now Angeles talked about the attack on Juárez as though it were only a board game, as though the quality of the men who would do the fighting were hardly important. “Once we control Juárez, my general,” he told Villa, “we will be in excellent position to supply an organized advance into the interior” and blah, blah, blah.

  And so we attacked Juárez, the town where the revolution against Díaz had won its first great victory and which in the years since had changed hands as many times as a durable old whore. We hit them in a night attack, Angeles’ artillery aiming from east of town in order to avoid overshooting the river and hitting Yankee soil. El Paso was packed with gringo troops, and we didn’t see any need to give them an excuse to cross over and join the fight against us. Just the same, Pancho had put out the word that if the Yankees helped out the federals with their damned searchlights again like they had in Agua Prieta, he’d turn Angeles’ guns on El Paso without a second thought. Maybe the gringos believed he’d do it, I don’t know, but there weren’t any searchlights this time.

  We took most of the town in a couple of hard hours, but at daybreak the federals counterattacked with everything they had and we had t
o pull back out of several sections of the city. We were in a stalemate till that afternoon, when Villa got fed up and sent our whole force at them all at once in a concentrated assault. It worked. The federals scattered in every direction like a flock of frightened birds. Some flew across the river and others went into the desert to regroup and think things over. In all the tumult, a few shells and rifle rounds carried over to the American side. We heard that a Yankee soldier had been killed by a stray bullet. “Only one?” Villa said. “They ought to thank us for missing so many.’’ We were ready to get our boys out of there fast if the gringos sent their troops at us. But by evening they still hadn’t come over the river, and we figured they didn’t want to risk any more international incidents and we really had nothing to worry about.

  Villa ordered camp set up at the Juárez racetrack. He greeted Angeles with a great abrazo in gratitude for his excellent artillery assault. Angeles was beaming with victory, bright-eyed, a man with a vision of more triumphs to come. He wanted to take some of the boys and advance immediately on the federal garrison in Villa Ahumada, the next town down the rail line leading to Chihuahua City. He would then attack Chihuahua City itself and get control of the state’s entire supply line. He and Villa heated up each other’s high spirits. Villa told him to take the men he wanted and be on his way. An hour later the hidalgo and his troops were a dust cloud on the southern horizon.

  The boys of course wanted to celebrate the victory, and Villa didn’t see any reason to keep them from whooping it up a little. He wasn’t about to turn them loose on the town, however, not with all those gringo soldiers looking on from the other side of the river and just hoping for some fool to start trouble with them. Instead he let the local cantineros and whorehouses bring their wares to the racetrack. I thought he was making a mistake and said so. A bunch of drunks wouldn’t be able to put up much resistance if the federals counterattacked in the middle of the night. Villa laughed at me. “When was the last time the federals attacked anybody at night? And they can’t shell us—we’ve got all their artillery. Stop worrying, hombre. You’re getting jumpy in your old age.”

  Pretty soon the cloying aroma of whore perfume was mingling with the usual camp smells of horseshit, unwashed flesh, hard drink and cook-fire smoke. Weaving through it all was the sickly sweet scent of marijuana smoke. Only the lowest of city trash smoked that shit. Like I said, these guys were a lot different from the boys we’d had in the old Northern Division. By nightfall they were all drunk in the thoroughly abandoned way only fools can be, drunk and smoked out of their minds. There were brawls everywhere. They were cutting each other up in fights over goat-faced whores.

  By midnight the camp was an open-air madhouse. Towering bonfires cast long, wavering shadows and popped like pistol shots, arcing huge, showering sparks through the air. Here and there a tent burst into flame to the cheers of the drunken spectators. Even the musicians were cross-eyed drunk. Their miserable playing and singing could barely be heard above the caterwaul of howls and curses and threats, the shrieks of delight, the screams of fright and pain. Bodies sprawled everywhere—some passed out, some knocked out, some probably dead. Couples fucked in the open, mindless as dogs.

  Villa stood in the doorway of the track clubhouse, absently doing rope tricks and staring out at his boys at play. He was not at all pleased.

  “You were right,” he said, not looking at me. “They’re shitheads. Win one little fight and they act like they won a war.”

  I was about to make some smart-ass remark, then thought better of it. It wasn’t his fault they were such assholes. He always did the best he could with whoever he could get.

  Despite his qualms, Pancho had given a few of the boys special permission to go into town. I said I wanted to go in and check on them, make sure they didn’t set the place on fire or start shooting at the Yankee bastards on the other side for the hell of it. Villa said he’d go with me, and he ordered our horses brought around.

  We’d ridden twenty yards from the clubhouse when an artillery shell came whistling in and hit the place dead­center with a deafening explosion. Body parts flew by us. Our horses spooked and I nearly got thrown.

  “Gringos!” Pancho shouted. “It’s the goddamned gringos!’’

  Of course it was. In the next instant another round came in and hit the stands just behind the ruins of the clubhouse, blasting huge chunks of stone and jagged wood through the air. Something sliced my cheek like a razor swipe. My horse flinched and cried out at the shrapnel hits it took.

  Artillery came pouring in. The gringo gunners had the racetrack zeroed in perfectly and were blowing us all to hell. The torn and dying were screaming all around us. To try to rally the boys and make a fight of it was out of the question. It was every man for himself.

  We lashed our mounts through the camp with shells bursting around us and ripping people apart. We made it through the back gate and kept on going. Behind us, the artillery abruptly ceased and we heard the war cries of the Yankee cavalry as it charged into our drunk, dazed, and staggering boys—some of them still with their pants around their boot tops, armed with nothing but their dangling dicks.

  •

  Only a couple of hundred of us made it back to the sierras. A few of the others were scattered all over hell, but most had been killed or captured back at Juárez—or were hunted down by Carrancistas and killed or captured somewhere else.

  Then came word that Angeles and his boys had run into a highly reinforced detachment of federals outside of Villa Ahumada (somebody had informed the Carrancistas of his coming) and taken awful beating. Angeles himself had been captured and transported to Chihuahua City to stand trial as a bandit and murderer.

  “They won’t shoot him,” Villa said. “Even the whitebeard isn’t that stupid.”

  He wasn’t the only one who believed Angeles’s reputation would save him from the firing squad. Angeles had many admirers in Europe and powerful friends in the U.S. We heard that the British consul pleaded on his behalf, that the French government sent telegrams urging Carranza to exercise clemency.

  But the whitebeard was deaf and blind to all entreaties, and when the court convicted Angeles and sentenced him to death, he refused to intercede. “The Revolution was fought to establish the rule of law over the dictates of men,” Carranza said, “and the law has had its say.”

  Witnesses reported that it was damn cold on the morning Angeles was taken out to the wall, bareheaded and in shirtsleeves. He smoked a last cigarette with the young squad captain and joked that he supposed he’d soon be plenty warm, considering his sinful life. (Villa sobbed on hearing that. “Sinful? Only Señor Madero was less sinful than Felipe!”) He refused a blindfold but accepted the offer to give the execution commands himself. “Shoot straight, boys!” he called out to the riflemen, then gave the commands to aim and fire.

  Apparently none of the shooters had wanted to share in his killing—because each one took it on himself not to shoot Angeles in the head or heart. By chance, they all shot him in the belly instead, which of course wasn’t much of a favor. The volley tore him wide open but wasn’t immediately fatal. They saw his guts spilled out like bloated blue snakes. He rolled and moaned in the dirt for several long seconds before the stunned squad captain finally regained his wits, rushed over to him, and shot him in the head with his pistol.

  But the captain was so shaken that even at point-blank range he failed to deliver a proper coup de grâce, and Angeles began spasming horribly, his breath huffing whitely into the cold air. The spectators were crying with outrage and screaming at the captain to put Felipe out of his misery. The captain was now so thoroughly rattled he could hardly hold his pistol steady. He had to shoot Angeles three more times before he finally stopped twitching and died, and by then his head was as much a mess as his belly.

  In a newspaper report, General Hugh Scott, Villa’s old gringo friend in Texas, called Angeles the most cultivated Mexican
gentleman he had ever met. He thought Angeles would have made a splendid president, perhaps Mexico’s best ever, and he called his execution “a pity.”

  Villa was apoplectic over Angeles’s killing. “To shoot a man like him is bad enough—but that was no execution, it was butchery! They mutilated him! They couldn’t be satisfied with killing him—no, they had to piss on his dignity too, the bastard whoresons!”

  He went crazy for a while. He muttered constantly about going to the capital in disguise and sneaking up on the whitebeard and cutting his throat. We heard a rumor that the people of Alta Loma, a small village north of Villa Ahumada, had been the ones to inform the federals of Angeles’s whereabouts. It was only a rumor but Pancho didn’t care. He ordered the boys to saddle up. I wouldn’t go. I told him I had a pretty little thing waiting for me in her bed and would rather spend my time with her than shooting a bunch of peons for no reason except that he was sorry he’d lost a friend. Villa roared that those peons were responsible for Angeles’s death. “How can that be,” I said, “when he could have chosen to stay in the U.S. and be a farmer?”

  He was in no mood for philosophical argument. He raced to Alta Loma with a bunch of the boys and rode in shooting. Some unfortunate women and children were among the people shot or trampled as the boys went charging in. They hanged all the men and killed all the livestock and burned down all the huts and cornfields.

  He offered ten thousand pesos to anyone, including the federals, who would deliver the captain of the firing squad to him alive, but a day or two later the captain was discovered in his quarters with his brains blown out and his pistol in his hand. “I wonder how many shots it took him to do that?” Villa said.