The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  I’d been dreaming of the time we rode triumphantly into Mexico City, our horses prancing through a tide of flowers, the air shaking with the capital’s cheers. But in the dream, everyone around me—Villa, Zapata, Urbina, the people lining the streets, everybody—was already dead. They were nothing but skeletons wearing clothes. “Pancho!” I shouted to Villa, riding beside me, “You’re dead! Everybody’s dead!’’ He turned his grinning death’s head toward me and his laughter sounded like the clatter of dry bones. He raised a bony hand and pointed to the large glass window of a building we were passing. In it I saw our reflections—saw that my head too was only a grinning white skull. Villa’s laughter grew and grew, and then I was awakened by the banging shutter.

  I craved a drink, so I pulled on my pants, slipped a pistol into the waistband, and went shirtless to the kitchen, passing through the front parlor, where Daniel was sleeping on the sofa. I heard his breathing change and knew he’d come awake the instant I stepped into the room. He was a cat, that guy—him and Claro both. Claro was the outside guard and slept in the open shed behind the house. Whenever we were at the Zaragoza house, they slept with their shotguns at their sides.

  There was a light already burning in the kitchen. Soledad was sitting at the small table against the far wall, her chair turned outward, her legs crossed. Her hair was tied back with a black ribbon and her silk silver robe was parted at the top of her long, smooth thigh. She was sipping a glass of wine. When she saw me standing in the doorway, she made no move to cover the exposed leg. It was the one that ended in six toes, and she was swinging the foot from side to side like a cat switching its tail.

  She watched me pour a drink of tequila, then raised her glass to me in a silent toast. I returned it and we drank.

  “Tell me,” she said in a low voice, smiling wickedly and gesturing at my pistol, “do you sleep with that thing in your pants?”

  “That depends.”

  “Yes, of course. I suppose it would.”

  She was staring at the scars across my chest and belly. “How is it,” she said without a trace of mockery, “you’re still alive?”

  I pulled out a chair and sat facing her, my knee almost touching her bare leg. I seized her swinging foot gently and held it still. When she didn’t pull away, I stroked her six toes. “How is it you are?” I said.

  “I don’t live as dangerously as you do,” she said.

  I ran my eyes over her leg and said, “The hell you don’t.”

  She smiled her wicked smile. “Well, maybe sometimes.”

  “Let’s just see,” I said, and poured a dollop of tequila on her leg. It rolled along her thigh and under her robe. I slid my finger down the thin, bright tequila trail on her skin, all the way to the part in the robe, then paused a moment, pushed my finger on down into the nest of hair, and touched her sex. She was moist with more than the tequila. I moved my finger over her in a small slow circle. She shut her eyes and sucked a breath between her teeth.

  “He’ll kill you,” she whispered, tightening her legs around my hand.

  “I damn sure will,” Villa said.

  Her chair scraped backward and bumped hard against the wall as she snatched her robe closed over her legs.

  I thought, Oh fuck, and slowly turned around in my chair.

  He was shirtless too. And pointing a revolver at my head. “Some friend you are,” he said. He sighted carefully, and drew back the hammer with a loud double click.

  “Bang!” he said, and lowered the gun and laughed. ‘‘Oh brother, you ought to see your face.”

  He looked at Soledad and quit smiling. “I promise you, my love, with all my heart: next time I will shoot. I’ll shoot you.”

  She stood up and warily eased by him, then scurried out the door, nearly running into Daniel, who was standing just beyond the doorway with his shotgun. Daniel watched her go, then turned and looked from one to the other of us, shook his head, and went back to the front parlor.

  Villa poured himself a glass of water and sat down in the chair Soledad had vacated. He eased the hammer back down and set the pistol on the table. “Now you’ve looked the Mother of Bones right in the eyes,” he said, “just like I did in front of Huerta’s firing squad. How did you feel?”

  “Like a fool with nothing to shoot back with but a sticky finger.” I wiped it off on my pants. ‘‘Listen,” I said, ‘‘I, uh . . .” I shrugged.

  He waved away my apology. “A man can’t be blamed for wanting to try with her. You might as well blame a hawk for hunting rabbits, or a compass for pointing north. Anyway, you couldn’t have touched her if she didn’t want you to. It’s always up to the woman—except when it’s rape, and even then it’s sometimes her idea.”

  He took a deep drink of water and studied my face closely “Hell, I’m the one with the problem. I’m crazy for the bitch. I don’t mean in love with her, I mean crazy for her. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded. “The gypsy love curse.”

  He nodded glumly. The gypsy love curse was what a man had when he desired a woman so badly he’d put up with any sort of shit from her—any misbehavior, any amount of infidelity, any humiliation—just to still have her himself. Just to be able to fuck her once more—and then still once more. A man can’t get any more pathetic than that. We’d laughed at a lot of fools who’d been struck with the curse, but Villa wasn’t laughing now.

  ‘‘You’re the first to touch her as far as I know,” Villa said, “but not the first she’s made eyes at. I’ve warned her a half dozen times. I gave her a beating the other night that left me crying harder than her. But she doesn’t scare, this one, not for long. I know she can’t help what she is, but that doesn’t make it any easier to take.”

  He stared off at nothing for a moment, then he fixed his gaze on me and asked what the hell I was doing up at this hour anyway. I told him I’d awakened and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I came down for a drink.

  ‘‘You better watch you don’t turn into a rummy in your old age,” he said. ‘‘Me, I can’t sleep too good tonight, either. I keep having these wild dreams. I keep dreaming about Tomás—and Zapata, and Maclovio—a lot of guys—a lot of dead guys. It’s funny, they’re nothing but skeletons in the dream, all of them, but I know who each of them is, even though all skeletons look alike. I start walking toward them, but they wave me away, like they don’t want me with them. Then I wake up feeling damn strange but I don’t know why. Then I go back to sleep and have the same fucking dream again.”

  All I could do was stare at him.

  He looked at me and grinned. “Then I come down here for a drink of water and find my good friend with his hand between my wife’s legs. Jesus, what a night.”

  We laughed so loud, Daniel shouted out from the parlor: “For Christ’s sake, let a man get some sleep!”

  •

  Soledad’s maid Chata arrived at her usual early hour and made us a breakfast of fried chiles, scrambled eggs, tortillas, and coffee. She was complaining about the dogs in her neighborhood over by the river bridge and the Juárez Plaza. They’d awakened her before dawn with their incessant barking.

  “Those stupid animals usually sleep till the middle of the day before they start with their infernal barking at everybody who passes by,” she said. “But something got them stirred up before daylight this morning and they wouldn’t shut up for love or money. When they finally stopped, it was time for me to get up.”

  “Quit your complaining, Chatita,” Villa said, “you’re not the only one who didn’t get much sleep last night.” He grinned at me across the table. For a man who only a couple of hours earlier had confessed to me that he was suffering from the gypsy love curse, he was in pretty high spirits.

  “I know I didn’t get any sleep worth a damn!” Daniel said, and Pancho and I laughed at his disgruntlement.

  Claro said he didn’t know what everybody was complainin
g about, he’d slept just fine except for the brief rain which had leaked in on him through the shed roof.

  We heard the rattling arrival of the Dodge in front of the house, and Rosalío honked the claxon. He usually ate breakfast with Trillo at the Hotel Hidalgo when he stopped there to pick him up. As we passed through the parlor on our way to the front door, Soledad appeared on the stairway. Villa paused at the door to return her glower. She was sporting a fresh black eye, and she made a vicious “evil horns” sign with her fingers. I didn’t know if it was intended for me or Villa—probably, it was meant for us both.

  “Keep that silly witchcraft to yourself, woman,’’ Pancho said. He slapped at the pistol on his hip. “And remember what I said about next time.”

  As he went out the door, I smiled at Soledad and blew her a kiss. If looks could kill, hers would have hacked me to pieces on the spot.

  •

  Villa felt like driving, so Rosalío got out and stood beside him on the running board and held on to the windshield brace. He still got a boy’s thrill out of riding that way, even for the entire fifty-mile trip. Trillo was seated in front with a large satchel at his feet containing twenty thousand pesos for the payroll at Canutillo. I sat behind him, Daniel next to me, and Claro behind Villa, against the other back door. Daniel and Claro put their shotguns on the floor.

  Villa let out the clutch too quickly and the car jerked sharply and stalled. Rosalío squatted slightly to peer in at him with a severe expression. “Easy does it, Chief. You have to eeease the clutch out.’’

  “I’ll be goddamned,” Villa said to me over his shoulder. “I taught this puppy to drive, and now he thinks he can tell me how to operate this machine.” The truth is, he rarely drove anymore, and Rosalío had become the better driver.

  Pancho eased the car into motion, accelerated slowly, shifted smoothly into second gear, and sarcastically asked Rosalío if he was driving well enough to suit him. Rosalío grinned into the car and said he was doing fine, that the trick was not to be nervous. “A motorcar is much like a horse, my chief—or a woman. It must always sense that you are in command or it will refuse to show you proper respect.’’

  “Just like some impudent bastards I could name,” Villa muttered, turning onto Juárez Avenue. Three short blocks away, at the Juárez Plaza, the avenue ran up against Gabino Barrera Street. There, a little dogleg turn to the right would take us over the Parral River bridge and out of town.

  It was a pretty Friday morning, the sunlight angling softly yellow through the trees. Except for a few women in black rebozos, scurrying in the direction of a church bell tolling on the next block, the streets were nearly empty. Farther down the street, a sidewalk vendor stood by his little cart of goods in front of an alley bordering the plaza. “Where is everybody?” Trillo said. “It’s seven-thirty, for Christ’s sake.”

  “The army went out on maneuvers yesterday,” Claro said. “The garrison workers don’t have to go there today.”

  “Well hell, everybody doesn’t work at the garrison.”

  “It’s just laziness,” Daniel said, lighting a cigar. “People are getting lazier all the time. Used to be they’d go to work before the sun came up. Now they stay in bed till the sun comes through the holes in their roof and hits them in the face.”

  “Listen to you,” Claro said. “We thought we’d have to use a lasso to get you out of bed this moming.”

  As we came abreast of the vendor, he took off his hat and waved it enthusiastically. “Viva Villa!” he shouted. “Viva Villa!”

  Pancho raised his hand to him. A flock of mourning doves fluttered up from the street ahead of us.

  Daniel said, “Hey, I wasn’t lucky enough to spend the night out in the shed where you don’t have everybody in the house waking you up in the middle of the goddamn night.”

  “Oh Christ, do we have to listen to this again?” Villa said—and then stomped on the brakes sharply to keep from hitting a mangy dog that dashed out of the plaza and into the street. The sudden halt threw us all forward—Trillo’s head thunked against the windshield, and Rosalío nearly fell off the running board—and the car stalled.

  Rosalío bent down and gave Pancho a reprimanding look, but Villa put a finger in his face and said, “Don’t—don’t say a word.” He brought the finger around to Trillo and said, “You either.”

  Trillo rubbed his forehead, looking at him accusingly. Then he silently mouthed the word “Ouch.” Claro snickered—and then we all laughed like hell, even Villa.

  As Pancho restarted the motor, I looked through the rear window and saw that the vendor was gone. The car got moving again. Directly ahead, on the other side of the dogleg turn, stood a high stone house with doors at either end and a pair of wide shuttered windows facing the street. Villa drove slowly into the turn and the car’s left side was barely fifteen feet from the house as I opened my mouth to yell that it was an ambush—but in that instant all the shutters and doors banged open and rifles thrust out of the darkness and opened fire.

  Blood sprayed off Rosalío’s chest and he tumbled from the car. Clara’s lower jaw vanished in a splatter of red bone and he spasmed as he got hit again and fell over on the shotguns. The windshield blew apart. Trillo shrieked. I saw Daniel’s thumb vanish from his left hand. I took one in the shoulder and felt a chunk of my cheekbone get shot away. Blood flew off Villa’s head. The car veered sharply and crashed into a tree alongside the house and Daniel fell hard against me, cursing through the cigar still clenched in his teeth.

  The gunmen came running out of the house, now shooting with pistols. Villa raised his revolver and shot one through the eye. I shoved my door open and rolled out with Daniel right behind me. Two of them came running around to our side of the car, and from flat on the ground I shot one through the throat as Daniel stood up and shot the other in the heart. Then Daniel’s hair jumped and he fell dead with blood pouring from the side of his face. Trillo was hanging backward over the car door as if his spine were made of rubber, his arms and necktie dangling below his head.

  I got up and saw three men standing by the driver’s door and shooting Villa again and again even though he was already as dead as a man can get. Two others stood beside them, firing into the back of the car. One of the men shooting Villa was Melitón Lozoya. I tried to shoot him but my .45 was jammed. One of the men beside him saw me and fired through the car, hitting me in the belly and knocking me down. I got up again and staggered across the street, expecting bullets in the back any second. I fell at the foot of the bridge and tumbled down the incline and into the scrub brush along the muddy river bottom.

  I lay there staring up at the clouds sailing slowly across the sky. The shooting stopped. I expected the bastards to appear at the top of the embankment and finish me off. I heard a horse blowing and I pushed the brush aside and saw a rider leading a group of saddled mounts out from under the bridge and up the incline.

  I figured I might as well die on the move as not, so I got up and made my way along the lower bank, away from the bridge, until I came to a set of old wooden steps leading up to an alleyway. There was a doctor named Montero whose office was just off Juárez Avenue. He’d tended lots of Villa’s people. I’d met him once when Calixto carelessly gashed his own foot with an ax and I’d brought him to the office to get stitched up. That’s where I headed.

  I made my way through the back alleys, the insides of my boots filling with the blood running down my legs. When I reached the rear door of the doctor’s office, I beat on it with my fist until he jerked it open and said angrily, “I told you tramps not to come begging for food from me anymore, damn you!”

  Then he saw my bloody face and the sopping belly wound under my hands and his eyes went wide. And then he recognized me. “Captain Contreras! My God, man! Here, let me help you.”

  I fell forward in a whirling faint.

  •

  Witnesses said the killers mounted
up and rode away as casually as you please. That was about the only point the witnesses agreed on. Some said there were as many as twelve of them; some said there were only eight or seven or six. (I recall nine, including the one holding the horses under the bridge.) Some said the ambush took place right in front of the plaza and the car kept going into the curve and hit the tree. Others said the assassins had been waiting at the bridge, that the car had backed up in an attempt to turn around and get away, then crashed into the tree. And so on.

  Nobody mentioned a survivor who staggered away from the scene and went rolling down the bridge embankment, and none of the newspapers said anything about the twenty-thousand pesos Trillo had been carrying in his satchel. Maybe the killers took it, or maybe some brave and quick-witted citizen of Parral simply picked it up and walked away with it.

  Photographers had swarmed to the scene like buzzards and taken dozens of pictures before the dead were taken to the Hotel Hidalgo and stripped and washed fairly clean of blood, then laid out for public display. And the photographers took more pictures. Within hours of the shooting, they were hawking the photos on the street. The most popular was the one captioned “The Forty-Seven Wounds of Pancho Villa.’’ Montero bought one of them and brought it to me in the back room of his house, where he and his brother had taken me after he’d extracted the bullets from my stomach and shoulder and sewn me up.

  The picture showed Villa lying on a bed, a portion of sheet covering his privates, his flesh rent with gaping wounds still oozing thin streaks of blood. One of the holes in his side was bigger than my fist, and the viscera bulged from it. A dumdum wound. The pillow under his head was so thickly clotted and dark with gore I knew the back of his head had been blown off. The body on the bed to his right was so shot up it took me a moment to recognize it as Claro’s. The photo was the first vision of death that ever struck me as obscene, and I ripped it to pieces. The doctor made no objection. I’m sure he’d bought several more.

  Nobody knew who’d done it. Obregón sent a special investigative commission to Parral to question witnesses and study the evidence. He told the newspapers he would not rest until the assassins of his old friend and comrade General Francisco Villa were brought to justice. The investigators stayed in Parral a week, then went back to the capital and announced their findings: the bullets used in the murders were the same sort used by the federal army, and the killing was “probably motivated by political reasons.”