El Paso

by Winston Groom

  There seemed a barer stretch ahead of a cactus patch, and Arthur throttled back and nosed the stick forward. The wheels touched the earth, bounced, touched again, hit something like a cactus, and the plane began a ground loop. Arthur applied the right brake, but by that time the Grendel jerked sideways, and when its nose pitched, Arthur heard the sound of the propeller snap as it hit the ground. At the same time as Arthur cut the engine off, the landing gear broke and Grendel pitched forward, tail upward, throwing Arthur against the control panel, where he hit his head. Then all was the silence of the desert.

  Arthur rubbed his head, relieved he saw no blood on his hand. He climbed down and surveyed the damage. The smashed prop wasn’t a crisis because he’d brought a spare one, but the axle on the landing gear had broken. It was not destroyed, but this kind of repair needed a weld. Arthur had some other choices. The sleeve he’d brought in his spare-parts kit might get him into the air again, but landing would be a problem. Plus he was about out of gas.

  He looked around him at the barrenness of the desert.

  Here on the ground, no wind blew, not the faintest breeze.

  Arthur climbed back into the cockpit and pulled out of his hamper a jar of peanut butter and a slice of bread and made himself a sandwich, which he sat eating on the lower wing. Assuming he replaced the prop, repaired the axle, and was able to take off, and the winds died down in the morning, Arthur figured he had only an hour’s worth left of flying time on the last fuel tank, which would put him down only forty or so miles ahead in the same bleak territory, and with no more fuel to take off again.

  The sun had almost gone down now, throwing a burnished cast over the mountains and the desert, turning the grayish peaks an engaging color of orange and red. As Arthur contemplated his predicament, the faint sound of an engine began humming through the still desert air. In the shimmering burnished distance, sure enough, a big open car was headed toward him. Arthur hopped down from the wing and ran to the middle of the road. When the occupants of the car saw him and the tail-up airplane, they slowed to a stop. Arthur walked to the car. A man and a woman, nicely dressed, sat in the front seat.

  “Have some trouble?” the man asked. He was young and striking-looking, with prominent ears and forehead, a lump jaw, wild wavy hair, and dark probing eyes. His voice was strong and authoritative. Arthur thought it was sort of a dumb question to ask, given the sight of the upturned plane.

  “Have you passed by anyplace I can buy some gasoline?” Arthur asked.

  “There’s a little station back about twenty miles,” the man said, “if he’s still open.”

  How could he have missed it from the air? Arthur wondered. “My name is Arthur Shaughnessy,” he said, extending his hand.

  “I am John Reed and this is Mabel Dodge,” the man said. “Are you just out for an afternoon’s aviating?”

  “No, I came down from Chicago. I’m trying to get to El Paso.”

  “You’re joking?” Reed said.

  Arthur glanced over at his plane. Did it look like he was joking?

  “Are you out to set some record?” Mabel Dodge asked.

  “If it happens, it happens,” Arthur replied. “Mainly I’m just trying to get to El Paso. But the winds between these mountains almost ran me out of gas. I have some cans in the plane. You’re the first sign of civilization I’ve seen out here. I’d be glad to pay for your time if you’d drive me back to that gas station.”

  “We’d be happy to help you in any way we can,” said Mabel Dodge. She was a handsome woman in a prickly sort of way, with large brown eyes and rouged cheeks, and she was wearing one of those little felt hats that looked like an overturned flowerpot. “We’re on our way to El Paso, too,” she said pleasantly, “and we know what it is to be stranded. Our train got stopped by a landslide back in Alpine, so we rented this car.”

  Arthur and Reed went to the Grendel and Arthur began unfastening the jerry cans; Reed helped him carry them to the car before going back and uprighting the plane.

  “What are you going to El Paso for?” Arthur asked Reed, as the car puttered north.

  “I’m a reporter for the New York World. El Paso’s just the jumping-off point. I’m going into Mexico to cover the revolution.”

  “The Pancho Villa revolution?” Arthur said.

  “He’s the man of the hour,” Reed answered. He had a toothy grin and his teeth shone in the dusk as though they’d been radiated.

  “And you, Miss Dodge, are you going with him?”

  “Certainly not. Mexico’s no place for a lady,” she said, “at least not in these days and times.”

  “Do you know where Villa is?”

  “No,” Reed replied, “but I expect he won’t be hard to find.” They rode on in silence for a while, darkness closing across the glowing mountains.

  “What about you, Mr. Shaughnessy?” Mabel asked. “Why did you choose El Paso as a destination?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Arthur told her. “I guess you could say I have family there.” He wondered if this could be the infamous Mabel Dodge, whose New York salon was the talk of the times. Unlike Xenia’s mildly scandalous gatherings in Boston that sometimes set the old blue noses gossiping, Mabel Dodge’s gatherings included real bomb-throwers of the radical left, such as “Big Bill” Hayward, Max Eastman, and Emma Goldman, among others. He remembered that the Colonel had known Mabel Dodge’s father, a wealthy banker from Buffalo who was utterly traumatized by her behavior.

  “And where are you from, Miss Dodge?” Arthur inquired.

  “New York City,” she replied, as if she’d lived there all her life.

  “I thought so,” Arthur said.

  Presently they arrived at the little shack where a hermit-looking Mexican with a hunched back sold gas and groceries. Arthur filled the cans, making sure to filter the fuel through a small mesh strainer, as well as a piece of porous matting he kept in the plane. When they returned to the desert site, Reed helped Arthur carry the cans to the plane.

  “You’re certainly welcome to come along with us,” Reed said, eyeing the broken axle. “You might not be able to take off again.”

  “Thank you,” Arthur replied, “but I imagine I can fix it enough to get into the air. Landing might be a little dicey, but I think I can make it all right.”

  Reed shook his hand. “It’s a bold thing, coming all this way in that,” he said.

  “Good luck, Mr. Reed,” Arthur told him. “I hope you get your story.”

  When Reed and Mabel Dodge had gone on their way, Arthur fastened the gas cans back in place with the help of an electric torch, opened a bottle of beer, laid his sleeping bag out on the wing of Grendel, and stretched out under the hard desert stars. He wondered if the landslide that held up Reed’s train had also held up his father’s. He hoped it had.

  Even before the sun began to break over the eastern escarpment Arthur had laid out his tools and spare-parts kit and found the metal sleeve to work over the broken axle. It was fashioned with flanges every six inches that bolted together, and when he finished, the thing seemed almost good as new. Next he removed the splintered propeller and replaced it with the spare one. He could feel no wind at ground level and, watching a hawk or buzzard soaring above, decided there didn’t seem to be much turbulence on high, either. With no wind at all, it would be difficult if not impossible to take off, because there’d be no lift on the wings. The desert remained so quiet it was almost spooky. Arthur went into the cockpit, switched on the magneto, eased the choke, and pulled the throttle out one-quarter. He got out and sprayed the carburetor with a can of ether, then took his best pull on the prop.

  The Mercedes engine coughed once, then caught.

  A more experienced aviator had once told him that if there was no wind, you could possibly stir up just enough yourself by revving the prop. Arthur tried it and, as he’d hoped, it caused a little breeze to come fluttering down the valley and he turned into it and up he went. Arthur climbed to five thousand feet and cruised southward as
the sun climbed over the mountain range. The headwinds had abated.

  By midafternoon he began to see signs of civilization on the horizon, little villages scattered off the main road, and by two p.m., with only a single can of fuel unused, he saw the spread of El Paso, nestled beneath tall, gray, jagged mountains, with the Rio Grande shimmering to the south.

  The landing field was north of town; Arthur spotted it without trouble, disappointed that it was not a grass strip, but graded yellow dirt. He hoped for the sake of the axle it was smooth and not too hard. He circled twice to make sure there weren’t any wire poles in the way, then came in as slow as he dared. This time no crowd was there to greet him, but at least the axle held, and Arthur pulled the Grendel up to the flight shack and cut the engine. A grease monkey emerged and looked him over.

  “You the one that come down from Chicago?” he asked.

  Arthur nodded.

  “That’s what I figured,” he said. “Your old man’s waiting for you at the hotel in town. He sent a man out this morning to say if you got in, to call him on the telephone and he’ll send a car out to pick you up.”

  Appalled, Arthur asked where the telephone was. He might have been late, but he was no quitter, he thought disgustedly. Now he’d probably have the Old Man lording it over him the whole damned rest of the trip.

  EIGHTEEN

  Ambrose Bierce was nearing the end of a long and distinguished career and welcomed it. He had been among the most popular story writers in America and his cynical newspaper columns brought him fame and fortune. But he was seventy-one years old, while most of his family and his contemporaries, friend and foe alike, had long since gone to the grave, and on a fine winter day while visiting New York City Bierce determined to put all this behind him and leave America forever. America repelled him now.

  First, however, the old Civil War veteran decided he wanted to see one more war before he died, and the conflict presently raging in Mexico seemed like a perfect opportunity. He would probably die in Mexico, and that was all right with him, too. Before leaving, he wrote to one of his few remaining friends that he would most likely be “stood up against a wall and shot to rags—but isn’t that a lot better than dying in bed?”

  To put himself in the mood, Bierce arranged that on the way down he would revisit the battlefields of his youthful service with the Union Army fifty years earlier. In Macy’s Department Store on Fifth Avenue, he bought himself a gold-embossed leather journal to record his adventures and withdrew from the Morgan Bank the sum of ten thousand dollars, cash.

  He left by a night train to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and two days later visited Missionary Ridge, where he started a journal in the form of letters to Miss Christiansen, his secretary in Washington. He wrote:

  I ascended the Ridge from Orchard Knob, just like we did in ’64. Weren’t those grand old times! Flags flying, cannon roaring, shot and shell and the smoke descended onto the knob like a blanket of cotton. But we took it then and could take it again today, if needs be. Walked ten miles today.

  Next afternoon he visited Chickamauga. He told his journal:

  Made a sketch of Grizzly’s battery with its inscription and sent it to Grizzly. Stayed at the Hotel Patten and walked fifteen miles. Rosecrans disgraced us here; only great defeat of Army of the Tennessee.

  A day later he was outside Nashville:

  Rained most of the afternoon. At the Franklin battlefield I walked seven miles. It’s not much different now than it was fifty years ago. Lots of corn planted now in the fields where Hood’s army had to cross and many of our old fortifications are still there. What terrible slaughter. Still can’t believe they tried it.

  Finally Bierce arrived at Shiloh—Pittsburgh Landing—the site of his first major battle. Referring to the fact that he was visiting the battlefields in inverse order to when the battles had been fought, he wrote:

  I seem to be doing all this backwards, but it’s the only sensible way. Poured cats and dogs all day long and the asthma’s acting up. I’ll be glad to get to Mexico where maybe it won’t rain. The steamboat trip from Nashville was long and tedious and we stopped at every landing to put on freight. The landings are not towns, just dirt roads coming down to the water. River is beautiful but at so low a tide you cannot see the countryside over the banks.

  Walked maybe twenty miles. Found the graves of twenty of our regiment. Their names are all right in the cemetery record but only half the bodies have been identified. The Confederate dead still lie where buried and none named. The fields across the river are still much the same as described in “What I saw at Shiloh.” I wonder if Mexicans fight like this? I expect they die like this, anyway. I’ve lost about ten pounds.

  Next day Bierce took a ramshackle old automobile to Corinth, Mississippi, where he caught a night train to New Orleans. On arrival he was still suffering from asthma but was met by three reporters who wanted to interview him, and he sat up all night with them.

  Good to see New Orleans. People in the streets are not in a hurry; corridors of hotels are crowded; men play billiards as they did years and years ago and the bars—oh, you should see a New Orleans bar! The drinks they make, and the trays and trays of them sent upstairs. Talked Mexico all afternoon; it’s on everyone’s lips here—more so than the war in Europe—since they do a brisk trade through the port. Some say Villa is a bandit, some say a hero. Newspapers print both sides, but I’m looking forward to finding out for myself.

  Took a stroll along the river among the cotton bales. All my old haunts are lost to me and excepting the few blocks about the Monteleone Hotel, it is a strange city. Can’t find even a few places where Pollard and I dined and drank so many years ago.

  Bierce was a man who’d made a career in doomsaying, but he was set in a gloomier mood than usual by New Orleans. He sat on the balcony of his room at the Monteleone, watching the bustling streets below and recording his impressions. After the third drink, he had a sudden premonition that he was on his last roundup and he took his tablet out once again. He wrote:

  Dear Miss Christiansen, since it is in no way certain that I will survive the conflict in Mexico, I am sending you these pages of my journal by post and will continue to do so daily if possible. By the way, at Shiloh visiting the graves of the 9th Indiana I found a headstone with the bald inscription No. 411, T. J. Patton. Captain Patton was our adjutant and fell early in the engagement and for more than fifty years has been lying there, denied the prestige of his rank. I have corrected that and though he will sleep no better for it, I will.

  Having said this and having mailed the pages to Miss Christiansen, Bierce packed up and caught the train to San Antonio, where he got his first look at Mexicans. He did not think much of them at first blush.

  San Antonio is a city of 110,000 but you can cover the Alamo with a hat. Passed an hour there; the name Alamo means cottonwood trees. It was rather interesting with relics, old documents and bad poetry—the shrine of each Texan’s devotion. Outside the wall are large numbers of idle Mexicans. The Mexicans like nothing better than to sit in the sun smoking cigarettes and drinking pulque—their national alcoholic beverage—unless the sun is too hot and, on those frequent occasions, they sit in the shade smoking cigarettes and drinking pulque.

  Journeying on to Laredo, Bierce observed it was “a town of 18,000 of which 3,000 are Americans. English is not spoken by any of the Mexicans, not even the hotel waiters or chambermaids. Mexicans run the city and federal government offices—particularly the Post Office. Took half an hour to buy a stamp.”

  He was interviewed by the editor of the only English newspaper in Mexico, who regaled him with the story of a Mexican cabinet member who kept an old copy of Cosmopolitan and bored all his friends by reading and quoting from “A Wine of Wizardy,” a poem written by George Sterling, whom Bierce had chosen to mentor. It pleased Bierce to be recognized so far south of the border, but after he left Laredo, he went underground.

  He assumed the name “Jack Robinson,” both to diminish his reco
gnizability by American officials, who he feared might prevent him from crossing the border, and also because he’d heard stories about Mexicans kidnapping anybody they considered rich or famous. He also dyed his snow-white hair with black shoe polish, which turned it more or less to the color of an eggplant, and began growing a beard. There would be American reporters around Villa’s army and his picture had been in the papers enough that he needed a disguise. Besides, when he looked in the mirror, he thought it took ten or fifteen years off his age. Total anonymity was his desire.

  At El Paso, Bierce linked up with a middle-aged man known as Cowboy Bob, who claimed to have inroads to Villa and his army. After outfitting himself handsomely with horse, guns, and supplies, including a parasol and a roll of Mexican postage stamps, Bierce, Cowboy Bob, and three of Bob’s friends set out for Chihuahua, where Villa was then rumored to be holding court.

  Bierce wrote Miss Christiansen:

  Have regained lost health and about five pounds of lost weight. Am in Mexico at last. Juárez is nothing more than a collection of bars, whorehouses and churches whose bells ring night and day.

  In the lobby of the Toltec Hotel before leaving El Paso I observed a man making a scene right out of a Booth Tarkington novel. It was pointed out to me that he was a Colonel Shaughnessy, a muckity-muck from Boston who owns a railroad and has a big spread down in Mexico. He was declaiming wildly over Pancho Villa’s alleged crimes and depredations and I was tempted to identify myself and find out more but decided instead to get it straight from the horse’s mouth!

  At Juárez, I was cordially received by officials and given credentials to accompany Gen. Villa’s army. I now weight 165 pounds. No rain in sight.