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

by Clifford Irving

  “But it has to be done. These men following us are our enemies—even more so than Urbina. And they want to kill you, as much as Dozal did. I understand your feelings—one of them is a gringo. So I’ll do it. I’ve already chosen the place. It’s the same as in Torreón. You don’t even have to load my pistols. You have only to not interfere.”

  He clambered awkwardly to his feet and limped toward his horse. “No, whatever you do,” he said, over his shoulder, “don’t interfere. That would be a mistake.”

  I went about my business of stowing the rasp and clinching hammer in my saddlebags. I knew how dedicated he was to the short life and the quick death, and he wouldn’t change his mind. No more killing, I had said. But I had forgotten about Rodolfo Fierro.

  We rode higher into the mountains, making camp at dark. We couldn’t build a fire, but the night wasn’t cold and I was comfortable under my blanket. Fierro stood guard for a few hours while I slept, and then he woke me. I squatted a few yards away with my back against a juniper tree. When he finally began to snore, I stood and peered down at him. A few raindrops from the leaves fell on my neck. I slid my Colt softly out of its holster.

  Candelario and Julio were dead. Why should Fierro live?

  The best were gone, the worst survived.

  He was on his back, hands on top of his saddle blanket. I leveled the gun and held it pointed at the middle of his chest. A rising moon offered enough light. His death would have passed from my mind like the shadow of a buzzard flitting across the sand. No one would mourn him. Patton and Bosques would live. I would have paid one debt that I had owed ever since Torreón.

  I holstered the pistol and walked among the juniper trees, listening to the soughing of the night wind and the patter of drops. The shapes of Maximilian and the buckskin, side by side, bulked from between the trees. There was no one near.

  I hadn’t been able to do it in the dark, while he slept. Candelario had been right the first time, in that Juárez cantina. I was a pendejo.

  I stayed with Fierro. If I had left him alone there would have been nothing to stop him from bushwhacking Patton and Bosques anywhere he chose. Why did I care? I suppose, despite everything that Patton had done, I respected him. He lived and fought like a soldier. I could damn his soul to hell a hundred times, but I could never blame him for lining up the sights of his rifle on the men who had been my best friends. To him they were enemies; he couldn’t help that.

  As for Bosques, he was a man for whom I felt more than a measure of responsibility. I hadn’t been able to save his life at Torreón, and I had come to regret it. Perhaps I could make up for that now.

  But even beyond that, I couldn’t let go, the way a man who’s played in a big poker game until nearly the end can’t get up and leave just as the stakes are raised to life and death and the cards come flicking across the table. I couldn’t turn my back. I wanted to play the final hand.

  They found us north of San Juan Bautista in the ghost town of Las Palomas. In the sunny afternoon as we trotted into that eerie landscape of ruined buildings and abandoned mine shafts, Fierro reined up and swung lightly off his horse.

  The region was one of rolling hills with scrub that had started to green in the summer rains. It was one of the few places where the old Spaniards hadn’t bled the land dry. Thirty years ago Las Palomas had been a thriving city of twenty thousand souls. The gold and silver mines tapped out first, then the cobalt and zinc. The soil was too dusty to grow anything except dwarf maize, so the people went too. It was as if the bones of a city had been scoured clean by buzzards and coyotes, or been bombarded for a month by a thousand cannon. There were cobbled streets, dusty roads, an abandoned plaza and the walls of fine stone houses, dazzling white in the sun—but no one lived there except the lizards. Windows, like blinded eyes, gaped on all sides of roofless ruins with jagged walls. The walls were held together by creepers that had grown from the dust to support the stones. The mountain wind sighed among piles of rock.

  “I know this place,” Fierro said. “Pancho and I hid here ten years ago with Urbina. The mine shafts go into the hills, not straight down, as you would think, but level. They wind back for a mile. When you turn a corner, it’s pitch-dark. Black as you’ve never known black to be. Come along, Tomás. I’ll show you something.”

  He seemed to have no worry that Patton and Bosques would arrive before he was ready.

  “See? It looks like a castle. It belonged to Luis Terrazas.”

  We were on a dirt road at the outskirts of the town, where the wrecks of houses were larger and more scattered. He was pointing at a brown turret a hundred yards away, with a battlemented walkway. To our right was the great hole of a mine shaft, an oval black patch against an alkaline hill, leading back to an inky darkness.

  Fierro dismounted, looping the buckskin’s reins around the branch of a mesquite tree in front of the mine shaft. The horses had grazed during the night, in the sierra. I swung off Maximilian and tied him to the other side of the mesquite, unbuckled the cinch, hauled the saddle off his back and laid it on the ground. I didn’t believe that we would have to hightail it out of here. We would either go at leisure, or not at all. Following Fierro, I jumped down into the sloping cut shaded by the castle. Across the road stood a single two-story house with four windows on each side. Blue sky shone through every window. A ruined stone staircase led up from the earth, then ended in space—a bizarre comment on human effort.

  I understood now what Fierro intended to do. The horses, in plain sight, would serve as bait.

  I should have killed him the night before. Before he shot the prisoners at Torreón he had calculated the wind, the distance, the angles. He had known from the beginning what he would do with me in Las Palomas.

  I laid down my rifle to fish some Bull Durham from my pocket, and when I looked up over the makings, his pistol was pointed at my belly. He reached out carefully and grasped the barrel of my rifle, sliding it toward him through the dirt.

  “With your left hand, Tomás, take your pistol from the holster. Use one finger. Put the pistol at your feet.”

  He didn’t have to kill me—he had only to disarm me. The blood rushed to my cheeks.

  “Rodolfo, there are two of them. You can’t do this alone.”

  “Why not? I’m an excellent shot, as you know. Do as I say.”

  If I tried to yank out the pistol and gun him down like some old-time western shootist, he could kill me. Pancho Villa would never know. I slid the pistol out slowly, as he instructed, and let it drop to the ground.

  The corner of his lip curved in a little smile. “Good, Tomás. Now, go across the road. Get behind the wall of that house. Stay there. It would make me nervous to have you close by, and this time I don’t have Dozal to watch you. Who knows? You might interfere with my aim.”

  Walking through the dust, I felt the sweat spread across the small of my back.

  I settled down inside the roofless house. Through the ragged masonry of the window I could see Fierro’s face, a dark plane under the shadow of his gray Stetson. He was about twenty yards away. I smoked three cigarettes and cursed steadily while we waited. I didn’t want these men to die. In about an hour, Lieutenant Patton and Miguel Bosques came riding out of the foothills to the north.

  A mile distant, they were a wisp of dust on the lion-colored plain. A twisting wind had blown up to ransack the prairie, blowing tumbleweed and twigs, whining through the broken stones of the houses. Rain clouds were already lumbering in. The swirl of dust grew larger, and I made out two peaked cavalry hats. They could see our horses tethered to the mesquite. Then they veered off the trail and vanished behind a butte.

  Patton was clever; he had proved that already. He would circle and come at us from the other direction, with the ruined houses to shield him. They wouldn’t know where we were, but they wouldn’t think we were close to the horses. Fierro counted on that. I waited five minutes, and then, as if a tap had been turned, fresh sweat began to pour down my forehead. I was sitting
here in a shell of a house, with busted windows on every side, a staircase leading to nowhere. I was everyone’s target. I wasn’t armed. I had to watch while three lunatics tried to kill each other. The wind kept blowing, the weed kept tumbling. I inched my head up over the rubble of the window.

  From off to my left two rifles cracked in the gray air … seconds later, cracked again. The shots had been unhurried. Under the mesquite tree up the road, the buckskin fell without sound, shot through the head. Maximilian staggered. With a brief cry he sank to his knees, shook his head, then crashed in the dust.

  Like red wine from a vat, blood pumped from his ripped heart, splashing and then coursing down the incline of the road. Patton had shot the horses to make sure we couldn’t ride away.

  I screamed, “You bastard!”

  In a windy silence, my voice echoed among the ruins. The stone above my head shattered, showering my scalp with bits of plaster and rock, and I heard the hateful snap of a Springfield. Then more shots slammed into the wall. Boots slid over rock. The shout had revealed my hiding place, and of course they thought I was armed. One of them was coming for me, while the other covered him to keep my head down. A short life, and I had finally made some sense of it … but I would never see Rosa and Elisa again.

  I crawled toward the staircase and began to climb. A dozen steps, and there was nowhere to go. I looked once more at the sky, then turned, just as Miguel Bosques crashed through the ragged arch of the door.

  He stared up at me. Perhaps he had thought to find Fierro. Much later, I recalled his hesitation on Stanton Street, when he had snatched Patton’s pistol. He was a poet and a schoolteacher; he had never been a killer. A survivor, yes – as I had been. But now he saw an unarmed man before him, sitting with stricken eyes the way the men had sat in the corral at Torreón. And so he died, unable to pull the trigger on the man he had sworn to kill.

  A rifle barked thinly, the echo fading in the gray air. Sheltered across the road behind the cut, Rodolfo Fierro had a clear view through one of the gaping windows.

  The schoolteacher clapped his hand at the red rose blooming on his neck. He sprawled forward at my feet and twisted on his back, across the staircase.

  Thunder broke above my head. Lightning ripped at the sky. The rain poured down as if God had tipped a giant bucket, washing away the blood pouring from Bosques’ body. I pried the army Colt .45 from his outstretched hand and vaulted out of a window into a pile of scrub. Crouching low, I ran through the rain toward the safety of the mine shaft… and Patton, nestled behind a pile of rocks, squeezed off a single shot. Something shoved me in the side, hurled me to the soggy earth. I heard the high yap of the Springfield. I kept crawling, my shirt ripped from stones and catclaw, my legs caked with gumbo. I reached the mine shaft.

  Gutshot, I thought. I had seen it happen to other men. It didn’t hurt too much, and there wasn’t much blood. It was never quick. You had time to think before you died.

  So I crawled a few yards into the mine shaft and waited to die. But no images came … no visions; my life didn’t pass before my eyes. I was tired, and there was an annoying throb deep inside of me. The mine was cool and dry. The shaft was a dead place where no man had been for years. Beyond in the rain and gloom, Patton and Fierro stalked each other. Die, you bastards. Keep me company.

  A bit of time passed … I don’t know how long. I still hadn’t decided what to think about. If I thought about the good things, I might be too sorry to go. Then, against the glare of gray light that led to the outside world, I saw a man’s dim shape. It was there for only a second. Then it vanished. The rain tore down, dribbled, then stopped. The sky lightened rapidly. The man at the entrance to the mine grew visible, frozen against the oval of pearly light. He was waiting for his prey. He didn’t know I was behind him. My heart beat against the stones … I wondered dully which one of them it was.

  Then the man moved a step backward, seeking more shelter, and I heard the jingle of silver spurs. I called his name softly.

  Whispered from the darkness, it still alarmed him. He spun in a crouch, dislodging stones. He couldn’t see me, but he knew my voice, knew that he had disarmed me.

  “Tomás? Show yourself.”

  I raised Bosques’ pistol, my middle finger wrapped around the trigger. There was no distance between me and the target. Hand and pistol, target and bullet, desire and obligation—all were one. I squeezed off two shots before the hammer clicked on the first empty chamber. The heavy Colt bucked, and waves of sound boomed wildly off the walls of the cave.

  I stood, and moved to the entrance of the mine. I nudged the body with the toe of my boot, but there was no responding groan. His eyes weren’t even reproachful. Even in death Fierro was calm.

  A mist steamed from the road. The light was fading. Patton was out there, somewhere. I tossed the pistol out into the mud and cried out weakly that he could come and claim his prize.

  He built a fire near the mouth of the shaft, not far from the dead horses. In his saddlebags he carried a U. S. Army first-aid kit with iodine and tincture of opium in tiny bottles. He didn’t give me the opium, but he said he would if he had to. He heated water on the fire and then swabbed out the hole in my side, dressed it and bandaged it. I yelled a lot, and he told me to shut up.

  “Why should I? Goddammit, it hurts.” He expected me to act like a soldier—not a gentleman, but at least an officer. Officers didn’t complain when they died.

  This crazy lieutenant had mixed himself up in my life to an unconscionable degree. From the time I first bumped into him in El Paso right up to now, he had bothered me, used me and hunted me, killed my friends and then shot Maximilian. Good God, he’d even shot me. I had every reason to hate him, but I didn’t. I didn’t hate anyone now that I was dying. I just hated to go.

  He lit his pipe, and by the flare of the match I could see the curiosity in his eyes. He didn’t understand any of it. By all rights he should have been dead, pitched into a well. You could never fix odds on such a contest, but I think Fierro would have outlasted him.

  “Why did you kill him?” he asked me.

  “I’ll tell you if you give me the opium.”

  “Not yet. On the way back.”

  “Back?”

  “To Casas Grandes.”

  “Why would I go there?”

  “For court-martial.”

  “Goddammit,” I said, “I should have let the sonofabitch kill you. I thought he was a more worthless sonofabitch than you are, but now I’m starting to think I was wrong. If you don’t want me to die, Lieutenant, you better give me that opium. I hurt.”

  He grumbled but gave in. “Just lick the bottle with the tip of your tongue,” he told me.

  It was a brownish liquid that smelled salty and sweet at the same time and tasted like crushed almonds. In a few minutes all my pain and most of my troubles vanished, and I felt wonderfully sleepy.

  I laid my head down on a rock and drifted off to dream about Elisa’s four-poster, except that it was out in the middle of the desert under a hot sun, and I was sprawled in it with a cool hand stroking my back. I didn’t know whose hand it was, and it didn’t matter. A machine gun chattered in the distance, and I said, “Don’t pay any attention. That’s just Black Jack having target practice.”

  When I shifted my head on the pillow, something hard banged into my teeth. I unglued my eyes and saw the rock under my nose, with a pale sun tipping the peaks east of Las Palomas. I had slept all night. Patton was crouched by the fire stirring a pot, but I didn’t smell coffee. He was brewing tea. I knew with certainty that I didn’t intend to go back with him to face a court-martial. Some army doctor might save my life, but that life wouldn’t be worth living. If I was going to die it would be on my own terms, in the place I cared to lay down my bones.

  “I’ve got to bury Bosques,” Patton said.

  Until then he hadn’t mentioned the dead schoolteacher, but I knew he had been thinking about it, and I could tell from the expression on his face that he
was more twisted up about Bosques than he was willing to say. He must have felt in some way responsible. Beyond that—although I didn’t know it then—they had been friends. I was sorry too that Bosques had been killed—he could have pulled the trigger on me and didn’t—but I imagined that if he and Fierro got to the nether regions at around the same time, which seemed likely, he would get some measure of consolation at seeing the company he kept.

  “Never mind burying Rodolfo,” I said. “Let the buzzards choke on him.”

  Patton took all the rifles and pistols and headed over to the ruined house where the schoolteacher’s body still lay on the stone staircase. He knew I couldn’t run away, and I wasn’t armed. Or at least he didn’t think so. He wasn’t a cowboy, so he didn’t know the things that a cowboy could do. All he knew was the pistol and rifle and saber.

  When he was out of sight I got shakily to my feet and lurched across the dirt to where Maximilian and the buckskin lay under the mesquite tree. Their legs were splayed stiffly in the chill dawn air. I didn’t want to look into Maximilian’s eyes. No, I wouldn’t go back. I hauled my rope off the saddle horn and limped back to my place by the campfire. Coiling the rope out neatly in the dirt, I threw a bloody saddle blanket over it and squatted down. My insides cramped once again with pain, and with shaky hands I poured myself a mug of tea. I could have used another sip of opium, but I would have to wait.

  When Patton came back from the burial he looked mournful and grim. He was leading the big black and brown cavalry horses. His rifle was stuffed in the scabbard. He had holstered his pistol and buttoned the flap. He drank his tea and then put out the fire with sand.

  “Mix, I’ll make things easier for you, if you give me your word you won’t try to escape.”

  “You’d trust me?”

  “You’re an officer.”

  “It’s an officer’s duty to try and escape.”

  “If he’s able.”

  “I can’t give you my word.”

  He looked me over where I sat on the ground, a bedraggled specimen. His lip curled.