“Take off your pants, Tomás.”
“What? Here?”
“Are you shy?”
I pulled down my Levi’s, and a knife of pain flew from leg to brain and back to my leg again. Just below my underpants, damp with sweat from crotch to crack, was an ugly dark red gash and a sliver of thin black metal about an inch long sticking out of my thigh.
I stared, then babbled, “Well, look at that … just look at that. How about that? I’ll be a cross-eyed baboon if I know where that came from.”
“It’s a grenade fragment.”
“Is that what it is?”
“You’d better go back, Tomás.”
“You don’t look so hot yourself with that red ear. Are you going back? If you go, I’ll go.”
Julio grinned like a coyote out of his bloody poxed face. Without warning, he threw his arms around me, giving me a hug that nearly cracked a rib.
“Tomás! My friend! You were brave! You were like a lion! You led the charge!”
I grinned foolishly, a little embarrassed. Then suddenly I felt dizzy, and stumbled, and sat down in the dirt. The world grew fuzzy and gray. Hands lifted and carried me. I shut my eyes.
When I woke, most of the fighting for Torreón was over. Machine guns putt-putt-putted nastily from far away, and the sun baked down through the sultry late-afternoon air. My wound was being dressed in a makeshift aid station outside the city, swabbed with iodine and bandaged by an old crone who was certainly no nurse.
“Aieee, poor little one,” she crooned. “You’re lucky to be alive!”
“I think so too, señora,” I said.
“I have a son your age. No, wait, that one’s dead. But it’s all right, I have five more. Two with the Federals and two with your General Villa! One is a Redflagger … he’s the naughty one. Do you have a cigarette? Give me a cigarette for good luck …
Wreaths of black smoke spiraled up from Torreón. As dusk settled I sipped a bottle of warm beer and watched the men limping back along the road. I recognized an unshaven filthy soldier from our battalion. His name was Ignacio Garcia. He had been shot in the shoulder, and his arm was in a sling ripped from some Federal’s shirt. I waved him over and said, “How did it go, Ignacio?”
“Wonderful, my captain. I was brave as a bull. I killed many bad men.” He told me that the battalion had penetrated deep into the city, and Villa had ordered them to rest while he brought up his reserves. Only a few had been killed.
“What about Colonel Cervantes?” I asked.
“A one-eyed man can ride through hell and come out carrying sunflowers. But I haven’t seen him, that’s true.”
Nor had he seen Hipólito or Julio.
Despite the pain in my leg, I saddled my horse and set out in the direction of the city. Dark groups of shawl-wrapped figures sat by the roadside, women and half-naked children who had huddled in the ditches during the day. A river of wounded men flowed by, and a baby wailed from the darkness. The dead had been cleared from the road, but horses lay with stiff legs splayed in the air.
The battalion had established itself in the ruins of a brick school house. I found Candelario, Hipólito and Julio in one of the classrooms, each sitting behind a small wooden desk. Heads pillowed on the wood, they snored in unison as if the music teacher were waving her baton. When I clumped in with my boots on the concrete floor, Candelario opened one malevolent eye, looked me up and down, then groaned. “Mother of God, it’s come back from the dead.”
“It went back to the Nazas.” Julio grimaced as he tasted his own mouth. “It crept under a blanket with that girl and got eaten alive.”
“Certainly,” Hipólito croaked, “one can see that something bad has happened to it.”
Julio shook his head disapprovingly. “You know what the chief says. If you fuck before fighting, your hands will shake.”
I was glad to see them all alive and didn’t care what fun they made of me. I was one with them now, blooded in battle, and I had liked it— that was a truth I couldn’t deny. No raw meat and still I had been brave, had led a charge. I had taken a giant leap toward becoming the man worthy of Hannah’s faith. What more glory could there be? Later—but sooner than I wished—I remembered that Shakespeare, who had been my mentor before Pancho Villa, had said that we were to the gods as flies to wanton boys. And before they killed us for their sport, no doubt they let us buzz and draw a drop of blood … let our flies’ hearts swell with pride and a sense of heroic purpose.
The next morning I moved slowly through the gardens of the city, where the smiling women of Torreón served coffee and sandwiches to hollow-eyed soldiers. Blue butterflies drank deeply from the bougainvillea. A streetcar, drawn by galloping mules, rattled past, bulging with drunken men. I watched while our dead were carried in trucks to the hill of La Pila and burned, the pyres scorching the blue sky. The women of Torreón threw bunches of marigolds and pink dahlias, silk scarves and embroidered hats, as if a torero were circling the ring for tribute. The soldiers tossed the hats back. The silk scarves they knotted round their sweaty throats, or draped them over the staring faces of the dead.
We had taken the first city on Pancho Villa’s unwritten list, and in the evening he received a report of what the Federals had left behind as our reward. It included six machine guns, thirteen artillery pieces, forty locomotives and the attached rolling stock. So there was something to celebrate.
Villa ordered all available food distributed among the poor; surgical supplies from the new military hospital were handed out to the civilian doctors. Five hundred tattered prisoners were then penned into the hospital until they could be sorted out and a final decision reached as to their fate.
Late that night a fiesta was given for the officers of the Northern Division at the Casino de la Laguna. The French whores danced the can-can on the banquet table. To watch Urbina, you might have thought walking was a lost art—he fell down three times, sent off a telegram to his mother, then went to sleep on the banquet table with Calixto Contreras snoring under it. The señoritas of Torreón garlanded us with flowers, but I was weary and cleaved to Rosa, who wore her frilly pink dress from Ascensión and literally danced her shoes off.
Villa arrived with two women. One of them was Esperanza, his new wife. The other, Juana Torres, was the daughter of a Torreón cotton manufacturer. She had black eyes and breasts that looked hard as pears. Villa left with both of them. He also had a wife from Chihuahua City named Luz Corral, but that was before my time and I didn’t know where she was these days.
Rosa and I left the party while it was still dark and walked the few blocks back to the Hotel Salvador, which had been taken over by Villa’s staff, and that now included me. A group of drunken soldiers sang on a street corner. A guitarist crooned through a barred window at a señora whose husband was off fighting in some other battle.
Rosa linked her arm with mine. “Thank you, mi capitán, “ she murmured, “for taking me with you.”
Thinking back now, it must have been inevitable, although I had warred against it as best I could. My best just wasn’t good enough—not now, in Torreón, after one battle, with another one surely looming ahead and the chance that life would be snuffed out as easily as a burning match in the wind. I only understood that after the grenades had exploded in the wrecking yard and the blood had flowed from my leg. It could as easily have been my heart. Hannah would never have forgiven me for what I did, but Hannah would never understand how a man felt when he realized finally that Candelario was right: life was short. Short, brutal, always hanging by the most slender of threads. If you didn’t t take the goodness it offered you, what was left? And didn’t the brave deserve the fair?
We reached my room in the Hotel Salvador, undressed, and I turned out the light. I had seen Rosa’s body often enough, first at the lake and then on our journey south, paraded before me in innocence. It wasn’t the body of a child. I knew her breasts and the buttery curve of her hip. But stroking them, kissing them, they came alive in a way I ha
d not imagined possible. It would never have been this way if it had happened in Ascensión, when her young husband’s death was fresh and I was sunk in the trough of my guilt over Carmelita.
I touched her satin skin, listening to her sighs of pleasure. The scent of her youth gradually gave way to a muskier scent, a womanly blossoming. Strong trembling hands gripped my hips and demanded that I mount her.
She cried out not as a girl, but as a woman. “I want you, Tomás…”
I slid smoothly and deep into a snug, yet marvelously oiled velvet channel, tightly gripped as I had never been gripped before, astride and yet saddled as the solid muscles of her legs clutched at me. I was drowning in her thick black hair, gasping in the sweat of her neck.
Rosa was strong, vital, young. Toward the end she groaned and dug her nails into my back. Her head thrashed on the pillow. So she had been pleasured too—it was not in her nature to pretend. That was new for me too. I couldn’t t hold back then, and I poured into her, while she gripped me in the vice of her limbs and crooned my name.
We drifted to sleep under the blanket in each other’s arms. Before we slept, she whispered, “Was it pleasant for you, mi capitán?”
She wasn’t being sly. I said, “Yes, Rosa. You please me.”
We woke to a cool and lovely autumn morning. I hadn’t thought once of Hannah, and then only when I was shaving, wondering if she would like the mustache I had started to grow. Rosa and I went for a walk, listened to the mariachis in the sunshine of the park, then had lunch in an oyster shop.
“I’ve never eaten them, Tomás. They’re so gray. How do they taste?”
“Try one.”
With her spoon she lifted a small oyster, swimming in red sauce with chopped avocado. She placed it carefully on her tongue.
“Ah!” She smiled happily, relieved. “They taste of chile!”
We ambled back to the hotel for a siesta. Just after we had made love, someone knocked stoutly on the door. It was a soldier to tell me that General Villa wished to see me, at my convenience … which meant right away. I dressed quickly, tried to wish away the weakness in knees and loins, then walked upstairs. He was in the bridal suite, its blue velvet walls decorated with oil portraits of Spanish grandees. He lay collapsed on a settee with silk cushions, drinking coffee from a silver decanter that stood on a teak table. He wore only baggy pants and his boots, which hadn’t been cleaned from the battle and still smelled of horseshit. His chest was hairy and he looked flabby in the gut, but that had to be deceiving; you couldn’t ride a horse the way Villa did and be internally soft.
Juana Torres was with him, smiling demurely, dressed in a silk bathrobe from which her breasts jutted like twin cannons. Hipólito and Rodolfo Fierro sprawled in easy chairs, each with a bottle of Canadian whiskey and a crystal glass.
Villa was talking with three well-dressed men, two of whom had distinguished silver-gray hair, while the other was portly and bald. They were bankers. The chief was explaining that he would require a loan of 600,000 pesos to re-equip his army and distribute food to the hungry of Torreón.
“We could plunder what we need,” he said gravely, “but that would give a bad name to the revolution, besides displeasing Señor Carranza. I wish things to be done in an orderly and legal manner. Will you cooperate, señores?”
The bankers asked hesitantly what security would be provided for the loan, and if interest would be paid.
“Why quibble over interest? Charge what you think is fair. As for security, it’s all around you.” Villa waved diffidently out the window, where his soldiers roamed the streets and slept in the plaza. A marimba band played on the shaded platform in the center of the park. The sun was shining, and birds sang vigorously. Now and then some shots were fired … just exuberance.
“Let’s assume that all will be arranged by tomorrow afternoon. From now on, señores, you serve the people! Be proud.”
He dismissed the bankers, who murmured various compliments on his victory and then scuttled out.
“Scum. I had half a mind to shoot them, but I needed the money. The fat one is a Spaniard. I may shoot him anyway.”
He turned to Juana Torres, who was looking at the photographs in an American movie magazine. “Get dressed, my dove,” he crooned. “Order us something to eat. Chicken, plenty of it, and more hot coffee, and sweet melon. French wine for Captain Mix.”
When she left, Villa announced: “Tomorrow, I’m getting married.” He eyed me speculatively. “Tomás, you’re an educated man, certainly more than this oaf I call a brother, and this other animal. I want your opinion on the matter. Is it right or wrong?”
“To marry Juana Torres?”
“That’s what I have in mind. Didn’t I just say so?”
I cleared my throat so that I could give an enthusiastic blessing, but he raised his hand.
“Before you answer, consider. The Torres girl comes from a good family. It would have made her unhappy to be seduced by me and then abandoned, and of course I’d never consider violence. But I had to have her. So I promised marriage. Isn’t that the answer? When I lead her to the altar, she’ll weep with joy. If there’s a sin in the eyes of God because I’ve got more than one wife, the sin belongs to me, not her. So … is this right or wrong of me?”
He didn’t t care what any of us thought. He was just thinking aloud with a convenient audience. But something was required of me.
“How will Esperanza feel about it?” I asked.
“She’s my wife already. For Christ’s sake, I’m not planning to divorce her. That would be cruel.”
“And the other one? Isn’t there a wife in Chihuahua City? Luz Corral?”
“Ah, that’s different. Luz Corral is my real wife. She understands everything about me.”
I thought that made her an extraordinary woman.
“And can you find a priest in Torreón,” I asked, “who’ll help you commit bigamy?”
Villa chuckled. “If I’ve got a pistol in my hand, I can find a dozen. Even a bishop.”
Chief,” I said, laughing, “maybe you’ve discovered the solution to the problem that’s been troubling men for the last two thousand years.”
“That’s interesting, Tomás.” His face grew sober. “I never thought of it that way. I just do it to save time, and to make the women happy.”
Satisfied with our approval of his new domestic arrangements, he turned to military business: there was the question of the five hundred prisoners in the military hospital. He had a new plan.
“This time we’ll give the Federal enlisted men a choice,” he said. “They can join us or be shot. We’ll shoot the Redflaggers, of course, as well as all the Federal officers. The officers are educated men. They should know better than to fight against the revolution and the people.”
Hipólito was to collect the men for the firing squads and take charge of sorting the prisoners into the correct groups. I was to keep an accurate count on paper. Fierro would be responsible for the final arrangements—his specialty.
Villa dismissed us, saying that Juana Torres had tired him and he would sleep.
I doubt if he realized what he had set in motion. For a while I wondered if it were a test, or some sort of punishment for the way I had bearded him in Casas Grandes over the killing of those prisoners. But probably he didn’t t think at all; the mind behind the sleepy eyes was already gazing northward toward Chihuahua City and Juárez. We were his aides, he trusted us and there was a job to be done. He couldn’t know how it would change all our lives.
Chapter 9
“The gates of mercy
shall be all shut up.”
The military hospital was a massive new white building abutting the stockyards on the fringe of the city. Fierro had found a car, a Studebaker, with a chauffeur who wore a braided sombrero and propped his rifle against the gearshift. Fierro wore the white Stetson that he had now fashioned to a sharp point, a striped blue shirt with red suspenders and his natty cavalry puttees. He never spoke to me unless
it was absolutely necessary. Whenever I remembered that he had promised to kill me, a chill washed through my insides … I never let my guard down. One thing was in my favor: he was too correct in his fierce loyalty to Villa, who was as much his master as any man could have one and not be a slave, to ever do anything of which he suspected the chief would disapprove. He was the faithful wolf whose eyes never revealed his passion … if he had any beyond killing. It was whispered among the men who disliked him that he really didn’t care for women—after Rosa, I had never seen him with one—and that in his youth he had lain with men. But I couldn’t believe that. I knew that all homos were simpering men with fleshy lips and that they hung around places like the YMCA in Dallas. Not Rodolfo Fierro, the wolf, the death dealer.
When we left the hotel, Hipólito started out to find men for the firing squads, but Fierro called him back. “Don’t bother,” he said languidly. “The men are tired. I’ll arrange all that when the time comes.’ Hipólito was an easygoing sort who couldn’t have cared less about details, and he agreed.
We stared about us. Fierro seemed shocked, and he turned to Hipólito. “Is this a hospital? No, it can’t be. It’s a madhouse.”
Most of the prisoners had cots to sleep on, but they had been given no food for nearly three days. If there hadn’t been a trickle of water from the hospital faucets, they would have died of thirst. Through an oversight, no officer had been in command until just a few hours ago. The wards stank foully of shit, piss and vomit. The Redflaggers had guessed their fate. Some of them gibbered, even frothed at the mouth, huddling against the walls when any of us approached. Some fell on their hands and knees and tried to lick our boots. I had to kick one away. I clenched my teeth and did it.
The new Villista lieutenant in charge of the hospital guard presented himself, and I recognized him. He was Juan Dozal, who had helped Fierro execute the men at Casas Grandes. Somewhere along the route to Torreón he had received a promotion.
Dozal, weak-chinned and mustachioed, eager to please, told us that a dozen of the prisoners were already dead and had been dumped outside in the hospital gardens. It was a hot afternoon, and we could smell them. During the night some of the Redflaggers had attacked the Federal enlisted men, trying to strip them of their uniforms. Men had been battered to bloody unconsciousness, even death, for the sake of their soiled white shirts and peaked caps. Many of the Redflaggers had torn their uniforms to shreds and thrown them away, so that they were naked. The Federal officers, understanding their special peril, had ripped off their insignia; but if you looked closely you could see the tiny pinholes on their shoulders. A man’s life literally depended on the way he was dressed.
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