TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border

by Clifford Irving

  “But who are they?”

  The Mexicans, he explained, were part of a brigade under the command of a General Manzo, who fought for Carranza.

  I must have looked horrified. “It’s all right,” he said. “Carranza is President of Mexico.”

  The soldiers were headed for Arizona, where they would cross the border to reinforce the town of Agua Prieta. “Pancho Villa’s going to attack it, see? They’re running an excursion train to Douglas this afternoon so the folks can watch. Got any plans? You should go. It’ll be a hell of a battle. You’ll never see anything like it again.”

  Maybe not. But I understood now. Obregón had been unable to send men westward on the Mexican side of the border—Villa had succeeded in blocking the passes. So Carranza had prevailed on Wilson to use a simpler route: through the United States on the El Paso & Southwestern.

  Villa, unless he knew about it, was riding into a trap.

  I went back to the car and told the others.

  Candelario shouted, “This President Wilson goes too far!”

  “We can’t get on that train,” Julio groaned. “Someone will recognize us.”

  In a vision, the idea came to me, the idea that would seal my fate. I blurted to Hipólito, “Can you get hold of any dynamite?”

  “Probably. What for?”

  “We can dynamite the tracks between here and Douglas.”

  “Tomás! That’s brilliant!” Candelario whacked me on the shoulder. “But why the tracks? Let’s blow up the train!”

  “You clown, there are Americans on board. We’ll just do the tracks.”

  “Do you know anything about dynamite, Tomás?”

  “What is there to know? You light a match to the fuse.”

  Candelario said, “Dynamite is complicated stuff. We don’t want to blow ourselves up. We want this to work. “

  “We’ll buy it at Heid Brothers.” Hipólito suggested. “They’ll tell us how to use it.”

  “Yes,” I said, “explain to them that we want to blow up the El Paso & Southwestern.”

  We all looked at each other, nonplused.

  “You three go to Heid Brothers,” I decided. “Buy some wire and fuses. Plenty of dynamite too. Put it in the wagon, then get the horses and meet me back at Montana Street.”

  “Where are you going?” they asked.

  “To see Rodolfo. Trust me.”

  I took a taxicab to Third Street and found Rodolfo sitting on the edge of his bed in the hospital ward, fully dressed except for his boots, his ankle in a cast, and looking grim.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “I don’t like it here,” he said. “I’m bored.”

  “Well, I’ve got a problem. This might perk you up.”

  I had remembered that he was an expert with explosives—he had blown up the tracks at Tierra Blanca to keep the Federals from getting too close to Juárez. I told him quickly what we planned to do. He listened carefully, eyes averted, while he stroked his black mustache.

  “It can be done,” he said, when I had finished. “It’s simple, if you know how.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “What kind of dynamite did you tell Hipólito to buy? White powder? Frozen? Nobel’s or Pyrolith?”

  “What?”

  “Tomás, they’re all different. Different density, different blasting caps. Dynamite contains nitroglycerin. Out in the desert, where it’s hot, it can explode before you’re ready to have it explode. Did you tell Hipólito to buy slow or fast match fuse?”

  I shook my head slowly.

  Rodolfo sighed and said, “Hand me one of my boots. Let me lean on you.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Coming with you.”

  “You can’t ride, Rodolfo.”

  “Why not? It may be uncomfortable, but I can do it. It’s better than sitting around here all day. I can be back by nightfall if we don’t go too far.”

  “What will the doctor say?”

  “Fuck the doctor.”

  He had grit, no doubt of that. He was a big man and he leaned heavily on me, one arm thrown over my shoulder, and we got outside to the street where I had kept the taxicab waiting. He clamped his teeth shut and held tight.

  An hour later, with a wagonload of dynamite, we all trotted out of town. Rodolfo’s foot in its plaster cast dangled awkwardly out of the stirrup. He never complained. I despised the man, but still I had to admire him.

  We kept an eye out for Lieutenant Patton and any other cavalry that might be patrolling the border, but no one crossed our path. The empty desert stretched along the railroad line south of the river, the long yellow ridges wavering in the heat. The sun burned fiercely down. This was part of me: the naked desert, the drumming of hoofs, light flashing off lifted rifles, even the tightness in my chest. The crisp air filled my lungs, and if we hadn’t cautioned ourselves to silence I would have let out a war whoop.

  We picked a desolate spot west of Hot Wells, and Rodolfo showed us how to plant the dynamite at intervals on a hundred-yard stretch of roadbed. We set the caps, connected a length of fast fuse and paid it out fifty yards to a spot behind a little hillock of chaparral. After we had tethered the horses to some mesquites, Julio lit a cigarette and touched it to the fuse. It sizzled, then caught and set off, writhing like a snake, in the direction of the tracks. We all hunkered down and stuffed our thumbs in our ears.

  There was a marvelous loud bang—then, in rapid succession, three more. Dust and chips of steel flew over our heads. We ran back, shouting with glee. There was certainly no more need to keep quiet.

  The railbed looked as if it had been shelled by artillery, and the rails themselves were torn apart like twisted paper clips. Smoke drifted southward on the afternoon breeze. Candelario was jumping up and down with pleasure and clapping Julio on the back.

  “Let’s stay,” he said, when he calmed down. “I want to see the faces of those Carranzista bastards when they get off the train.”

  “What if they see our faces?” I asked.

  “We’ll be behind the hill. And they’ll think whoever did it was long gone.”

  They were as excited as children at the prospect of fireworks on the Fourth of July. The best I could do was talk them into rolling some dead trees out on the tracks and piling them about fifty yards ahead of the wreckage, so that the engineer could slow down in time and not get himself killed.

  The train came clacking along at about two o’clock in the hot afternoon—a long train, maybe seventy or eighty cars, most of them open and filled with men and horses and cannon.

  “Watch!” cried Candelario. “Just watch!”

  The engineer spotted the trees and ripped track in plenty of time. The wheels screeched and threw off red sparks; the whistle screamed and blew puffs of white smoke into the blue sky. It was very colorful, very beautiful. The train stopped, and the engineer and brakeman hopped out of the cab with two Mexican officers.

  They all bent to the tracks, shaking their heads and tugging at their mustaches.

  “One of those has got to be a general,” Candelario whispered passionately. “We could pick them off before they knew what hit them.”

  I clamped a hand on the barrel of his rifle and glared at him.

  “All right. Tomás. Take it easy.”

  The engineers and Mexican officers were soon joined by a handful of American officers in khaki and whipcord, all of whom studied the damage and jabbered back and forth for a good ten minutes. They didn’t have a repair crew aboard. Jesse James was long dead; no one blew up railroad tracks anymore in the United States.

  They stared around into the desert, but our cover was good and the horses were even farther out of sight. One of the Americans walked back to the first open railroad car. I saw then what I had missed before—the gondola was filled with horses and men of the U. S. Cavalry from Fort Bliss.

  The gate fell down with a thin bang, and the cavalry came tumbling out—about forty of them, mounted and armed, wheeling in the s
and.

  I recognized Lieutenant Patton on a brown roan.

  “I think we’d better get out of here,” Candelario said.

  Crouched low, we scurried back to the horses, boots kicking up little puffs of dust, spurs jingling in the silent afternoon. We were still out of sight, but we wouldn’t be for long.

  “Leave the wagon!” I shouted.

  We helped Rodolfo to mount. The five of us settled into the saddles and galloped away into the desert. It didn’t take a genius to figure out there was only one safe direction: northwest. The train lay southeast of us. Beyond that was El Paso.

  I looked back over my shoulder. The cavalry had spotted us—a soldier was waving and yelling, although I couldn’t hear his voice. I heard the bugle, though, braying a clear, sweet call, not the kind I was used to hearing down in Torréon and Celaya. This fellow had had some music lessons.

  The desert of Dona Ana County lay ahead of us for twenty miles. Beyond it we could see Mount Riley and the blue haze of the Potrillo Mountains. Our horses were still fresh and the cavalry would never catch us if we kept going in that direction. Maximilian thundered over a burning river of sand. Once we were safe in the Potrillos, I realized, we could bend around to the southwest into Luna County, turn south of Florida Peak and point ourselves toward the Arizona border.

  What we couldn’t do was head back east toward Texas … not if we didn’t want to fight a losing battle against Patton and the Eighth Cavalry. And if Patton had seen me, I could never go back. I had committed a crime on U. S. soil against U. S. property. I was a fugitive now from my own country.

  Part Three

  The Yanks are coming,

  The Yanks are coming,

  The drums rum-tumming everywhere …

  —”Over There”

  Chapter 29

  “His bruiséd helmet

  and his bended sword.”

  I never claimed to be a historian of the Mexican Revolution. Men and events passed before my eyes. What other things happened, or were supposed to have happened (according to the history books and newspaper accounts I’ve read), were things I only heard about, then and later.

  But I was there. I saw. I listened. If anyone can tell me otherwise, let him speak. Let him say, “No, señor, you were deaf and blind. It couldn’t be as you say. It was this way.” But I can only tell what I know, from the time I volunteered as a revolutionist to the time—three years later, to the day—that I switched sides and joined the United States Cavalry to hunt down Pancho Villa.

  After we dynamited the railroad tracks to delay Manzo’s brigade, we outdistanced the cavalry with ease. For a few days, fearing that they would have patrols farther south to seal off the border, we camped by a little stream in the foothills of Mount Riley. Fierro rested his ankle. Julio shot a deer and we skinned it, ate venison steaks and cured the rest in the sun.

  We rode back one evening toward the southeast and saw the red glow of soldiers’ campfires down by the river.

  Candelario coughed politely. “It’s my fault, Tomás. If I hadn’t wanted to see them get off the train, this wouldn’t have happened. I didn’t think.”

  “You’re not the only one.” The penalty for blowing up the railroad, I reckoned, would be twenty years in Yuma Prison.

  “Well, it’s pleasant in the mountains. The air is good for the lungs. I wish we had some women with us … but life is rarely perfect.”

  “Really? I’ll try to remember that.”

  A week later we skirted Big Hatchet Peak and crossed the Pyramid Range. We reached the town of Douglas, on the border between Arizona and Sonora, on November 5, 1915, two days after the battle of Agua Prieta. Out in the desert, Indian women were still stripping the dead. I took off my sombrero and cartridge belts and rode into town to find out what had happened. Everyone in Douglas seemed to know a few details and was happy to tell the tale, and the rest we learned later.

  The day after we blew up the tracks a repair gang swarmed out from El Paso, so that within seventy-two hours the trainload of Carranzistas reached Douglas and the brigade was able to cross the border to Agua Prieta. But our effort, even with that delay, was wasted.

  Down in Sonora the main body of the Northern Division became trapped in the Pulpito. The gorges split open in flood, carrying men and horses to an icy death. Frostbite crippled thousands. It took Villa nearly a month to put things right.

  Then, having lost all element of surprise, he still attacked Agua Prieta. He could approach it only from the south over a flat plain, densely barricaded with barbed wire twenty feet thick, and followed by a stretch of desert that was sown with land mines—a nasty welcome. The Division left three hundred men and their horses on the wire, and those who got through had their legs blown off and whimpered for mercy. That night, determined to attack—for he had been born to do it, as he had told Felipe Angeles—Villa cleverly sent burros and mules ahead of his sappers to detonate the mines. The brigades advanced cautiously behind them and got through.

  But at one o’clock in the morning, as the men surged forward through the craters among the afternoon’s dead, the plain was flooded with yellow light. Three giant searchlights on the parapets of the town blazed across the battlefield, sweeping in enormous arcs. Bullets and cannon shells followed their beams. The blinded Villistas shook their fists helplessly and died.

  From the rooftops of Douglas the trainloads of tourists and sightseers, shivering in the night air, raised a cheer. Then they emptied their flasks of whiskey.

  That was the last attack. Villa’s lips foamed with curses at the gringos. He knew about the brigade that had crossed U. S. territory. And where had the searchlights come from, if not Douglas?

  A week after Agua Prieta, like a bull bleeding from the lance of the picador, he threw the remainder of his crippled force against the Carranzista garrison at Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora. The Division was nearly wiped out. After the battle, two thousand men deserted.

  No one knew how many men Villa had left. No one even knew if he were alive.

  We picked a lonely stretch of desert west of Douglas and rode across into Mexico. For more than a month we wandered around under a blazing sun like four lost members of the Israelite tribe in Sinai, asking any lone campesino we met if he had seen anything of Pancho Villa. The pueblos were empty—ovens cold, water tanks dry. We heard rumors of a battalion camped somewhere in the desert but found nothing but bodies ravished by buzzards and skulls turning white in the desert sun. It was one of the awful times of my life.

  The hours ran on endlessly. There seemed no purpose to them other than hunting for a moribund army, whose remains—or graves—we were almost afraid to find.

  Come Christmas (according to the days I had scratched off on a page of my notebook), we camped on the banks of the San Pedro River, a trickle running north toward the Arizona border. Candelario wakened me at first light with a present of two hardboiled eggs. In return I gave him my last box of safety matches.

  “No, Tomás, I can’t take it. Half will do.”

  “Leave me one. I’ve only got tobacco for one more cigarette.”

  I thought again of Rosa waiting for me. And Elisa. “This makes no sense,” I told the others. “We’ll never find the chief. And even if we do—what then? The war is lost.”

  “My brother will have a plan,” said Hipólito. “He always does.”

  “Tomás is right,” said Julio. “It makes no sense.” He turned to me. “What should we do?”

  “Go home.”

  “Yes, we can do that. But what about you? You can’t go to Texas now.”

  “I’m going to Parral,” I said. “I’ll make a new home.”

  “I can’t go home, either,” said Candelario. “And not you, Julio. Not any of you.” He spoke quietly to the others. “If the war is lost, if Obregón and Carranza have won, the first place they’ll look for us will be at our homes. They’ll come to find all the officers who fought for Pancho Villa, the ones who might lead the next revolution. I�
��m a general now. You three are colonels. For Christ’s sake, Hipólito, you’re Pancho’s brother.”

  Julio scratched his dusty head. Hipólito and Fierro said nothing.

  “You have the only chance, Tomás,” Candelario said. “No one knows you in Parral except the Griensen woman. Maybe we should all go there.”

  “Let’s keep looking for Pancho,” Hipólito begged. “One more week, until the new year.”

  The others agreed, and so did I.

  Later that morning, east of the river, we saw a layer of dust on the horizon. Soon the sun glinted off bayonets and bridles. A score of men rode toward us, wearing khaki rags and faded scout hats. Half-empty cartridge belts were strapped across their bony chests.

  “Who are you?” one of them called.

  “Don’t answer,” Candelario cautioned. He called back, “Who are you?”

  “The Northern Division,” the man yelled, seeing that they outnumbered us. “We fight for Pancho Villa!”

  “So did we,” muttered Candelario, under his breath, “when we were younger.”

  We put our knees into our horses’ flanks and galloped into the camp.

  There were five hundred gaunt and silent men there, and the chief was among them. When he saw us, he gave a faint murmur of joy. “I thought you were all dead…”

  Candelario grinned through a mask of dust. “They can’t kill a one-eyed man. And Tomás is so clever—even the bullets salute him before they fly the other way.”

  The chief wiped his eyes with one sleeve while we told him where we had been and all that we had done.

  An hour later Franz von Papen rode into the camp from the direction of Nogales. The patrol that had found us had been looking for him. He and Villa had made a Christmas appointment in the desert of Sonora.

  A daytime moon curved low in the sky. A thrush sang in an ash tree. Ragged men with bronzed faces and ivory teeth walked slowly to and fro, leading their horses to the river. Pancho Villa sat cross-legged, an old Marlin rifle in his lap, listening to Franz von Papen’s insistent voice. The chief was gravely occupied in killing the fleas in his shirt. The ash trees, with their dark green crests, kept the desert sun from beating us into the earth.