I loved her for that and found it impossible to confess the flimsy grounds on which I had first joined Pancho Villa’s revolution. If she cared for me it wasn’t just because of my looks and my passion for Shakespeare. Her father was right: she could pick and choose from all the best men of El Paso and the young officers at Fort Bliss. Maybe some of them would shy from her because she was a Hebrew, but those were the myopic and demented ones. No, what dazzled Hannah, what made her look up at me with that radiant light in her blue eyes, was her picture of me as a captain-to-be and a lover of liberty in the Constitutionalist Army, riding at the side of the great general-to-be Pancho Villa.
I wasn’t worthy of that vision, not yet, and I knew it. Whenever I thought of where I had been rutting like a goat the night before I met her, up on the Deming road with Yvette and Marie-Thérése, I wanted to get down on my knees, kiss the hem of her skirt and beg forgiveness for my sins.
A telegram arrived for Hipólito at the Commercial Hotel—it was from Villa, and he had a new list of supplies we had to order in El Paso. That meant taking the train there and spending at least two nights. We wandered around the city, stopping in at Sam Ravel’s office in the Toltec Building and picking up other items at Heid Brothers and the West Texas Fuel Company. Villa wanted saddles and some uniforms and hats, and prairie hay that Heid’s said would be shipped from Kansas. There were some small amounts of other items that puzzled me, like a case of canned asparagus, Washington State salmon at ten cents a can, Maine sardines and Bayer’s Strawberry Soda Pop.
“That’s for my brother,” Hipólito explained. “We’ll buy him a few bags of peanut brittle too. He likes that above everything, but he didn’t dare ask for it.” We picked up the peanut brittle at the Elite Confectionery on Cleveland Square, which Hipólito told me had been Pancho’s favorite hangout during his year of exile. “He loves their pistachio ice cream almost as much as peanut brittle, but we can’t take that across the desert.”
The two days and three nights in El Paso away from Hannah seemed like a week. I had never been in love before. I didn’t know how painful even a separation of two short days can be. So I urged the thundering train on, toward Columbus. The truth was that the thought of Villa and his mission was beginning to fade. I wanted that, but I wanted this too.
The craziness of my dilemma soon got through to me. Hipólito and Candelario announced that they were ready to pull stakes the next day at dawn. The wagons full of rifles and cartridges had arrived, and the clothing as well. All the socks were red and the shirts every color of the rainbow—not exactly what we’d ordered, but we had to have something to take the place of the men’s rags. Ravel was a wizard and had produced everything on credit. The hay, the saddles and the coal would come later.
Hannah and I had a pink lemonade on the hotel veranda. “I’m sorry you’re going,” she said. “It may be wrong of me to tell you this, but it makes me sad.”
“It does me, too. I thought about staying, but—”
“Yet it’s so exciting. I’ll think of you often. Maybe it’s childish of me, but you’re like a knight riding off into battle in a far country, to slay a dragon. Not really, but you must know what I mean.” She blushed deeply. “You’re like … my knight.”
I took her in my arms and kissed her—it lasted only a few seconds. Carried away by the evening breeze, the softness of her lips and the mint on her breath, I whispered: “And you’re like my princess, Hannah.”
“Tom … truly?”
Her lips parted; I was sucked into them like a leaf into a twister on the prairie. Kissing her the second time made my heart nearly break out of my chest. My head spun and my pecker began to rise.
I had to back off. Words bubbled in my brain like popcorn on a hot stove. I couldn’t stop them; they just flew from my throat.
“I love you, Hannah. I’ll come back to you.”
It was madness: to find true love at last, and in order to keep it I had to give it up. Not forever, but for as long as it took Pancho Villa to win his revolution. I had to leave Hannah, or I would never be worthy of her.
I kissed her a third time, more passionately, and now she trembled too. I told her I would come back to her as soon as I could, but I didn’t know when that would be.
“I’ll wait,” she said. And that was all I needed to know.
Mr. Sommerfeld stepped out of the hotel, harumphing and scraping his boots to give us some warning, and when he came up to me there was a mellow, paternal smile on his round face. I told him I had to go. “Good luck, Tom,” he boomed. “Come back in one piece.”
I didn’t want to kiss Hannah goodbye in front of him, so I just looked for a moment into her eyes and thought I saw the beginning of a tear. The sunlight struck her hair, making it shine like honey. “Goodbye,” I said softly. Then I ran into the street, like Bronco Billy in a two-reeler, jumped on my horse and quirted him out of town. I never looked back. I rode in a daze to our camp at the butte east of Columbus, full of joy because Hannah was mine and equally full of sorrow because I’d had to leave her.
Candelario was waiting for me, sitting astride his bay. The grin on his bronzed face almost split his cheeks wide open.
“Tomás!” he whooped from afar. And when I got closer, he said gleefully, “A wonderful thing has happened!”
“What might that be, Candelario?”
He tugged at his black beard. “First tell me why you look so glum.”
“I’ll get over it,” I promised, but without much conviction.
“Good. I have news that will not merely make you happy. It will make you feel blessed. What would you like more than anything else in this world?”
“Huerta’s resigned? Orozco had a heart attack? The revolution’s over?”
“No, pendejo. We still have to kill Huerta and all those other bastards, but that’s no problem. We’ll roast them over a slow fire.” He was trotting his horse next to mine, and we had reached the wagons.
“Candelario, what in hell are you—”
Then I saw it … saw them.
They were together in back of one of the supply wagons. Yvette’s slender, black-stockinged legs dangled over the edge, waving slowly back and forth as she gazed out at the horizon, where the first streaks of a rosy sunset marked the sky. She wore high heels and a blue silk dress and long gold earrings. Her breasts, popping up from her bodice, resembled white melons. I remembered how my head had been buried between them so that I almost lost consciousness.
Marie-Thérése, standing next to her, was putting pins in her dyed-blond hair and preparing to wrap it in one of Candelario’s bandannas. When she saw us, she waved merrily, bracelets jingling. I reined up.
“Candelario, you’re crazy!”
“Never in my life have I done anything more intelligent.”
“You can’t take two women down to Chihuahua, to the desert—to wherever the hell we’re going! How will you … what will they …” I began to sputter.
Farther out on the plain Hipólito and the vaqueros were boiling corn in an iron pot over the campfire. Candelario smiled wolfishly and stroked his horse’s neck.
“You don’t understand how we fight battles in Mexico, Tomás. The women always come along. They make the tortillas. They tend the goats. They follow us everywhere. They are very useful.”
He spread his arms as if he would embrace the world from horizon to horizon.
“How wonderful the revolution is!” he cried.
“Yes, but these aren’t Mexican women. They won’t tend goats. Do you see Yvette on her knees, pounding tortillas? They’re—mother of God, you know exactly what they are!”
“They were very unhappy at Doña Margarita’s,” he said gravely. “They told me so. There is no business. When they came out from New Orleans they thought they would get rich here, but the town is too small. With us there will be plenty of work. By the Virgin, they’ll never get off their backs! And when their work is finished, they will be there for us.”
I looked at
him sharply. “For us?”
“Ah …” Candelario sighed. “I can’t handle them both, my friend. To my sorrow, but not to my shame. A man isn’t a man if he doesn’t face reality. The tall one with the gorgeous tits, Yvette, is very fond of you. She wondered why you never came back.”
There was no way around it. I laid a hand on his reins, checked his horse, and told him that I had fallen in love with Hannah Sommerfeld.
Color rushed to his cheeks, and he leaned across to embrace me. “Tomás, that’s wonderful! I congratulate you both.” Then he drew back. “But what difference does it make? Your Jewish sweetheart will be here, and you will be in Chihuahua. The desert nights are cold.”
“Candelario, I can’t. I’m in love. Don’t you see what that means?”
He didn’t, and with a heavy frown he told me that Yvette wouldn’t see it, either. “Anyway, they’re coming. It’s all settled. Think about it … that’s all I ask for now.” And then his mood changed, and he laughed boisterously, clapping me on the shoulder with one hard hand. “Wait until the night before the first battle. When you realize you may never come back, that you may lie dead in a ditch within hours … you’ll change your mind. There’s only one big lesson to learn in life. It’s short. If you know that, you know all there is to know.”
Dead in a ditch? It had never occurred to me. I was going off to fight for Hannah’s vision of land and liberty, not to die for it. That would make no sense at all. I had to be worthy of Hannah, and I would do that by helping Pancho Villa destroy the tyrants and raise the campesinos out of bondage.
But die? Oh, no. That wasn’t part of my plan. And neither was the idea of becoming a faithless libertine. I had found something more precious than gold, and Candelario and his French whores would have to do without me. I was a man with a heroic purpose.
Chapter 6
“If to do were as easy
as to know what were good to do…”
The first morning on the way south toward Ascensión we passed a gutted, burned-out pueblo. We saw the fires smoldering from a distance and approached it cautiously, rifles drawn, but we needn’t have worried. Only the broken shrieks of old women greeted us. There were a dozen survivors at most. Corpses lay everywhere, on the dusty main street and among clumps of cactus where they had tried to flee. Some of the corpses were women and children, even babies. They had been shot and then bayoneted. The women’s breasts were sliced off and lay at their sides, chunks of bleeding meat. The pueblo was called La Perla.
“Who did this?” Candelario demanded grimly.
An old man—he had survived by hiding in a well—told us that it had been a detachment of the Federal Army, not the Redflaggers. They had come at dawn.
“But why?” I asked, nearly sick to my stomach.
The old man explained that six youths from the town had quit their jobs on a nearby hacienda and gone south, he didn’t know where, to join up with Pancho Villa.
So the plan was beginning to work, but at a terrible cost. This was the revenge taken by Huerta’s government forces.
We helped the villagers bury their dead. It took the better part of a day—there were more than sixty victims of the slaughter. Nearly three decades later I still remember the stench, the sight of mangled flesh, my bloodstained hands. Water wasn’t enough to scrub them; I had to use sand and stones. Like nothing that had happened before, it made me see the nature of the enemy we would fight, and why we were going to fight him. No one ever had to lecture me again, or talk about land and liberty and literacy. I didn’t even need Hannah’s inspiration. I saw. I never forgot La Perla … which, as it turned out, was just as well.
Ascensión was formed by a cluster of cracked adobe huts that looked like children’s blocks thrown carelessly in a heap. A small lake cooked in the sun on its northern edge, but nothing grew except maguey and stunted corn. A lazy hum of noise floated through the breathless air—cocks crowed, burros heaved racking sobs, babies wailed for the tit. A line of black-garbed Indian women trudged back and forth to the lake, bearing water jars on their heads. You hardly ever looked out across the desert without seeing a twister, spinning its way to nowhere.
We arrived at night with the supply wagons. I couldn’t see anything of the town in the darkness and didn’t want to, for I was bone-weary from our trek from the border. I didn’t talk much during that ride, not after La Perla—I just daydreamed of Hannah Sommerfeld in a better and cleaner world. We foraged hay for the mules and let the horses loose to graze in the chill night. All I wanted was to bed down, so I built a little fire of cornhusks on the edge of town near the wagons, chewed some beef jerky, slipped my boots under the serape with me so they wouldn’t freeze stiff during the night, and got ready to pass out. The French whores were giggling in the back of their wagon.
Candelario came galloping back from town and I heard him talking excitedly to Hipólito. A battle was taking place to the south, in a city called Casas Grandes. Villa was there with two hundred men who had joined up while we were in Columbus. Our soldiers by nearby campfires began to stir. Red holes pierced the darkness as they lit cigarettes, and soon came the sound of black coffee on the boil. Stiff and cold, with blurred eyes, I crawled out from under my serape and saddle blanket.
“What’s happening?” I asked Candelario.
“The chief attacked Casas Grandes. A Yaqui runner just brought the news. He doesn’t know how it’s going, so we’ll ride down there and see. You don’t have to come, Tomás.”
“Why not?”
“Hipólito’s staying to guard the wagons. Stay with him.”
I had stuck with Pancho Villa in order to fight for a just cause, to become a captain and hero and keep the love of a good woman, not to trade cattle and guard supply wagons.
“If you can ride without sleep,” I told Candelario, “so can I. Let’s get down there and kill Redflaggers. They cut the soles off the feet of Yaqui children. And if they’re Federals we’ll kill them too.” I was thinking of La Perla.
He grinned at me in the hot light of the campfire. “Get some coffee. Stay close to me.”
The men poured out into the night. The desert was freezing and we rode swiftly, bundled in serapes, sombreros jammed tight over our ears so that we looked like a herd of traveling mushrooms. My big chestnut clipped along at a choppy fast trot, a natural gait for a cow horse that he could keep up all night if he wasn’t crowded, and so steadily that I nearly fell asleep again to the drumming of hoofs, the ringing of a hundred spurs and the creak of saddles. We passed the ruins of a monastery and then another gutted village, but now we had no time to stop and bury their dead. A half-moon cast a cold light on the mountain that girdled the horizon.
A battle—a real battle! I was in love for the first time in my life, and now, within a matter of hours, I might be killed. That was an idle thought; I didn’t believe it for a moment.
I listened for the sound of gunfire but heard nothing. Dawn broke as we neared Casas Grandes, pale light streaking across the desert. A few sleepy Indians watched us, crouched in the shelter of some mesquite trees. Their serapes were rags, and they were barefoot. How could they sleep? How did they survive the Chihuahua winter? God only knew.
But when we trotted into Casas Grandes, the battle was over. A haze of thin dust and bitter smoke covered the town. We had taken it. We had won—but I had missed it all!
This is how to survive the revolution, I thought, and come back whole to Hannah Sommerfeld. But it would never make me a captain and a parfit gentil knight.
At seven o’clock we were sitting on some broken cane chairs in the plaza, drinking the last of the tepid coffee we had brought in canteens from Ascensión, letting the rising sun thaw our bones. Julio told us about the battle—bloody but brief. Pancho Villa stood nearby, the back of his rough shirt salty with sweat, listening. His hair was a matted tangle; he was eating an apple and cooking pork skins in a skillet of bubbling brown oil over a drum full of burning corncobs.
Men wandered by, li
mbs bound in bloodstained bandages, their hollow-eyed horses following. Even as Julio talked you could hear the men recounting their exploits.
“I shot the fool right through the heart!” … “The Holy Virgin protected me, Carlos” … “Hombre, the barrel was so hot I couldn’t touch it” …
Villa, Julio and I rode out to a corral to see the prisoners. There were about sixty of them sprawled in the dirt, while Rodolfo Fierro pounded round the enclosure on his big sorrel stud. He punished the horse, but I could see he was a fine rider, erect and at ease, the silver spurs on his heels jingling and flashing in the sunlight. He had fought well in the battle, Julio said; he had led a charge. A group of ten revolutionists lay about cleaning their rifles and drinking tepid beer that had been looted from some shop.
A thin young man named Juan Dozal, with a great flowing mustache over a weak chin, was in command. The sun slanted more strongly now across the desert, casting a misty golden light and deep indigo shadows. This was the loveliest hour of the day, always fresh and reviving with its warmth. Dozal raised a cheer.
“Viva Francisco Villa! Viva el revolución! Viva el muerte!—hurray for death!”
Dark half-moons of fatigue were graven beneath Villa’s eyes as he faced Dozal.
“Have you searched these prisoners?” he asked.
“Yes, chief. Nothing on them but lice.”
So this was the enemy. They didn’t seem very formidable, but then no soldier did without a rifle. I wondered if any of them had been at La Perla—it hardly seemed possible. Some were boys, not yet twenty. Most wore cowhide sandals, and a few smoked hand-rolled cornhusk cigarettes. I saw one beg a real cigarette from a scrawny Villista, a youth his own age, who gave it gladly. “Take it, poor little one,” our fellow said. “Ah, you’re wounded? You can bear it? That’s good. Where are you from? Juárez? No, I’ve never been there. I’m from San Juan Bautista … it’s beautiful there. Cold in winter, yes, but… ah, you’ll never see it … poor little one!”
TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border Page 8