El Paso

by Winston Groom

  “And you, General, I must spare for something more important,” Villa said.

  Fierro, who had been absently throwing a knife into the dirt, jerked his head up with a furrowed brow.

  “We are going to need further provisions, however this fight comes out,” Villa said. “Especially if it does not go our way. I never like to think of this possibility, but it remains, and if we are forced to withdraw, we will need beef—great quantities of it. Enough for ten thousand men for as long as, well, who knows? The few cows we were able to pick up in Coahuila are not nearly enough to feed this army. And the only place I can think to get such a herd is back at that stinking Shaughnessy place down near the San Paolo River. I want you to take a company—a regiment, if necessary—go there and liberate as many beefs as you think practical and have them back here as soon as you can.”

  “But General—” Fierro protested.

  “Tonight,” Villa said. “It’s urgent.”

  Fierro began to protest again but Villa waved him off. “Enough. Get it done, General. Do you think I waste my generals on trivial things?”

  Fierro spat on the ground and slouched away. Sometimes the chief really pissed him off, but even Fierro knew not to buck him. He’d not only seen the consequences of that, but in fact had often been the instrument of such consequences. His firing squad was considered one of the best in the army.

  VILLA RETURNED TO HIS TENT and lay down on a cot. He had a headache and felt apprehensive over what would happen tomorrow—above all because he thought he’d seen Sanchez’s ghost again. The last time he’d had the vision was six months ago, and they’d lost a battle. Villa never saw Sanchez clearly, just a shadowy outrider on a horse who cast no shadow. Villa had suspected Sanchez of being a turncoat. The flimsy evidence later proved to be untrue, but at the time Villa had had him executed. “General Villa, at least shoot me like a soldier, por favor,” the old man had pleaded. “Do not hang me like a dog.”

  Villa had hanged him anyway.

  Once Sanchez had stopped kicking, they all noticed his body seemed to cast no shadow on the ground.

  Afterward, when the real traitor was caught red-handed in a telegraph office, Villa felt sorry about Sanchez; then he began to feel guilty, and finally afraid.

  AMBROSE BIERCE NOTED AN AIR OF MERRIMENT in Villa’s camp that night. Hundreds of fires blazed across the broad plain that swept up to the foothills, beyond which lay Chihuahua City and the Federal army. The sounds of singing wafted in the air and somewhere a mariachi band played “La Cucaracha”; the skies were clear and there seemed to be little in the mood to indicate that a great battle was to take place the following day. While he walked to another section of the bivouac, Bierce noticed the handsome dark-haired man he’d seen around Villa’s staff doing tricks on a big palomino horse for a pretty brunette seated on a stump. She did not look happy but nodded in acknowledgment as the man made the horse paw the air, bow, and sit on the ground.

  “That’s a fine trick horse you got there,” Bierce offered. “Ought to take him to a circus.”

  “He don’t like crowds,” the man replied.

  “My name’s Robinson,” Bierce said. “Jack Robinson.”

  “Tom Mix,” replied the cowboy, extending his hand.

  About then, Reed also turned up, and Mix introduced himself to him, too.

  “This lady here is Señora Donatella Ollas,” Mix said politely. “She is accompanying us on our little expedition.”

  “I am your prisoner, you mean,” Donita said acerbicly. She felt a shudder ripple through her shoulders.

  Bierce and Reed introduced themselves and Reed asked Donita, “Do you have family with this army?”

  “Of course not,” Donita said, “I told you, I am kidnapped. These people are bandits and scum. They are holding me for a ransom.”

  Bierce and Reed looked at Mix, who smiled and shook his head. “That’s not exactly right, gentlemen. She is a hostage of sorts, though. She belongs on a big spread about forty miles from here that’s owned by an American railroad tycoon.”

  “You take captives of women?” Bierce said disapprovingly.

  “General Villa does now,” Mix replied. “I ain’t seen him do it but once before, male or female, and somebody killed that guy anyway—an Englishman, foreman of a big copper mine. They took him a few months ago after he mouthed off to one of the general’s officers.”

  “Why was he killed?” Reed asked.

  “Kept mouthing off, I guess.”

  “Hostage-taking is always barbaric,” Bierce remarked, “but I guess customs have changed.”

  “What happens to her now?” Reed asked.

  “Who knows?” said Mix. “Maybe the general will marry her.”

  “Marry her?” Reed said.

  “I’d rather be dead,” Donita spat.

  “Ain’t she already married?” Bierce asked. “You said she was Señora somebody . . .”

  “Oh, the general—I don’t think that would worry him. He just gets the marriage annulled. I’ve seen him do it.”

  “By the church?” asked Reed.

  “It’s easy,” Donita said. “He puts a gun to the head of a priest. He’s a real gentleman, this General Villa.”

  “If I was you, señora, I wouldn’t talk that way if the general’s around,” Mix said. “You might catch him in a bad mood.”

  Suddenly the dark face of Butcher Fierro appeared in the firelight.

  “Señor Mix,” he said, “I need you to come with me tonight on a special mission for General Villa. We leave in an hour. Bring your company with you—especially anybody who’s worked cattle. Two days’ rations and outfitting.”

  Mix nodded. “I’ll be ready.”

  After Fierro left, Mix said, “Wonder what that’s all about.”

  “One thing I remember,” Bierce said, “is that in war, somebody’s always changing something every few minutes.”

  “I suppose,” said Mix. “But I was ordered to take my cavalry against the west part of town. I’d thought we were crucial.”

  “Only time a soldier’s crucial is at the moment somebody tells him he is,” Bierce said.

  JOHNNY OLLAS AND HIS CUADRILLA had ridden all the way up to Creel to find out Villa not only wasn’t there, but hadn’t ever been there. Gourd Woman followed along, gathering straw from the plains and plucking branches from trees, weaving brooms by night and selling them at the little villages they passed along the way. Johnny was disgusted with her for misleading him but felt a grudging admiration for the woman. It felt good to have a woman along on the trip. It somehow made you think things might turn out all right.

  “So, your bones said he was here, huh? We come all this way for nothing.”

  “Maybe I dropped them wrong,” Gourd Woman said. “Can’t always be right. Besides, I heard somewhere Villa’s got a house here. I figured he might have come home for a spell.”

  Johnny looked off into the distance, shaking his head. At least in Creel they had gotten wind that Villa was presently on the outskirts of Chihuahua City, preparing for battle. Johnny hadn’t seen a battle, but he thought that in the chaos there might be a chance to sneak in and get Donita.

  “Are you going to Chihuahua City?” Gourd Woman asked.

  “Yes,” Johnny answered.

  “Mind if I still come along? I know you’re mad at me.”

  He shook his head. “Do what you want. But if you’re coming, you better get ready. Soon as I buy some supplies, we’re going to hit the trail.”

  They camped that night beside a rocky brook, where Gourd Woman even managed to spear several fish with a pointed stick she’d carved. They ate roasted fish and onions and beans with garlic and peppers. As the campfire embers dimmed, the men of Johnny’s party slept peacefully in their serapes beneath the stars, faces covered with big sombreros. Johnny sat by the stream listening to its noises, the water shining effervescently white in the nighttime as it rushed between the rocks. He tried again to determine how he would deal with V
illa when they got to Chihuahua City.

  “You working on a plan?” Gourd Woman’s voice came from behind him, almost disembodied.

  Why, he wondered, does she always seem to be reading my thoughts?

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “You gonna try to get in and sneak her out?”

  “I don’t know. Depends on the situation,” he said. “Maybe I will have to fight him like I fight the bull.”

  “Well, he looks like a bull,” Gourd Woman said. “I’ve seen pictures. He has a big, thick neck and powerful shoulders. He even has eyes like a bull.”

  “In the arena,” Johnny mused, “the secret is to lure the bull out of his terreno—the territory between where he is and the center of the ring.”

  “How is that done?”

  “In a bullfight, those men there do it first,” Johnny said, pointing toward the sleeping cuadrilla. “First the picadors go in and madden him with the pics. Get him frustrated and correct his hookings. Then the banderilleros do their work from horseback. The banderilleros’ knives are put into his neck, that big hump of muscle behind the bull’s head, which causes him to lower his head. I can’t kill him while his head is raised.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t reach that high,” Johnny told her. “They’re on horses.” Her questions challenged him: to have to try to explain all this to a woman who didn’t even like bullfighting and had never seen a fight; it was like trying to explain blue to a blind man.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Gourd Woman said.

  “No, but it is also the time when the bull is most vulnerable,” Johnny told her. He pictured it in his mind: the tired bull, the head lowered, would then go into its querencia, which was the place in the ring where it felt most comfortable, if that was the word for it. Where it felt safest. Usually it was by the gate he came in through. Even though he couldn’t get out through the gate the bull remembered it. A familiar place. It was where he usually went in the end. How could he explain all this to her?

  “I think that’s sad for him,” said Gourd Woman.

  “Not for a brave bull,” Johnny said. “A cowardly bull will want to get out, but a cowardly bull is only fit to be gelded and to pull carts. A brave bull thinks only of killing me. And here I must be very careful, because the most dangerous thing a matador can do is enter the bull’s querencia.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because by now the bull is no longer wild as he was at the beginning, but he’s wary and defensive and I have to lure him out of his querencia with the cape. But once he comes out for that last charge, his head lowered, a little slower now, I put in the sword, just so, in the back of his neck. And then it’s done.”

  “And you think Villa will behave that way?” she said.

  “I don’t know, but I don’t know how else to fight him.”

  “But don’t you need some more men? I mean, this man has an army, and you are only five.”

  “What do I need more men for?” Johnny replied. “I can’t raise an army bigger than his; he has thousands. A fighting bull weighs five, ten times what I weigh. Am I going to do exercises to improve my strength against him? No, like I said, I have to do it with the cape work and the trick so that he finally doubles up on himself and I can get in the sword. All the greatest matadors can do this perfectly, and I have only read about them,” said Johnny Ollas.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  At Valle del Sol, cowhands had worked all day and through the night, massing the steers into a single herd. From the manager’s office, Colonel Shaughnessy had been issuing orders when a rider appeared with a message that General Villa had sent a wire, which arrived at the telegraph office in Parral, demanding money.

  This document had made a circuitous route. Villa had sent it nearly a week ago—all the way to the Colonel’s New York offices, then it was repeated and resent and wired back down through El Paso, and finally to Parral, after it was determined that for some reason the telegraph station at Chihuahua City was no longer accepting commercial traffic.

  He looked at the telegram carefully, shaking his head in awe. “My God!” the Colonel exclaimed. “This maniac wants me to pay him fifty thousand dollars!”

  Arthur had been studying an old wall map of the state of Chihuahua, trying to understand a little of the route the cattle drive would take to El Paso. The map somehow reminded him of ancient mariners’ charts that depicted the faces of the Four Winds blowing and made observations such as: “Beyond Here There Be Dragons . . .”

  “Here, read it,” snapped the Colonel.

  Arthur accepted the telegram:

  GENERAL PANCHO VILLA GRAND ARMY OF THE NORTH PLEASE TO INFORM YOU SEÑORA DONITA OLLAS WILL BE RETURNED UNHARMED FOR FIFTY THOUSAND AMERICAN DOLLARS WIRED TO TELEGRAPH STATION AT CREEL.

  “That’s simply outrageous,” said Arthur, shaking his head.

  Donatella is a very fine and upstanding woman,” said the Colonel. “But this kind of blackmail only leads to more. If I give in to it, he’ll just keep coming back and kidnapping my people until I’m bled dry.”

  “A young woman,” Arthur said. “What kind of general would do that?”

  “He’s only a general because he says he is,” Shaughnessy replied.

  Just then his new foreman Rodriguez entered the room. “Colonel,” he said, “I’m afraid there is a problem up in Chihuahua.”

  “What’s that? No trains yet?” asked the Colonel.

  “Yes, and worse. There’s a battle being fought there—or about to be. Villa arrived yesterday with his army. No telling what’s going to happen.”

  “Christ!” said the Colonel.

  “What about Mama and Xenia and the kids?” Arthur asked, alarmed.

  “Not only that,” Rodriguez continued, “but some of Villa’s men are spread out north. One of my people said he spotted a party of them along the San Pietra, about twenty miles from here.”

  “Were they headed this way?” Arthur asked.

  “I don’t know,” Rodriguez replied.

  Colonel Shaughnessy turned and stared out the window, shaking his head. “Nothing goes like I want it to,” he groused. “I had it all worked out . . .”

  “So what now?” asked Arthur.

  “Move fast,” his father responded, regaining an appearance of self-confidence. “We have to get those cattle away from here before whatever happens in Chihuahua happens.”

  “And what happens to Mama and Xenia and the children? You can’t still be thinking of taking them with us, can you?”

  “Certainly not.” The Colonel walked over to the wall map. “I suppose we could send them south,” he said hesitantly. “There’s not one decent road in this whole damn state that goes anywhere but north or south, and we certainly can’t send them north. Of course, if we can get them over to Torreón, then they could head east to Monterrey and on up into Texas, but they’ll have to cross the mountains. No, I think we’ll have to send them south and then to the coast and they can pick up a ship.

  Rodriguez cleared his throat and shuffled with his hat still in his hands. “Colonel,” he said, “I don’t think south is a good idea. Zapata’s got his people all through there. He’s attacking the Federal trains coming from Mexico City. Some people say he’s worse than Villa.”

  Colonel Shaughnessy winced sharply as the magnitude of the situation began to sink in. Something in him seemed to sag. “So, then, we can’t send them north and we can’t send them south or east, and there aren’t any roads going to the west coast. So what do we do?”

  “Maybe we should all stay here,” Arthur suggested.

  “Out of the question,” barked the Colonel. “Those cattle are going to be a magnet to Villa once he is done with his business at Chihuahua. Even if I armed all my men here to the teeth they’d be brushed aside like gnats, and then where would we be?”

  Rodriguez spoke up again. “There’s a lot of places on this property to hide,” he said. “There’s dozens of houses out there, and some of
them aren’t half bad. I’d say if you got the family away from the big house here, they’d be safe. Villa’s not gonna go around searching a million acres of property looking for something he don’t even know is there.”

  Not a great solution, but Arthur and his father looked at each other.

  The Colonel felt shaky. He’d built an empire on planning and calculation, but now he’d managed to land his family right in the middle of a murderous war. If anybody else had done that, he’d have told them they were idiots.

  Rodriguez broke the silence. “There’s a nice place about fifteen miles west of here. A family named Gonzales; real decent people. He manages the orchards in your San Pietra River section. He’d be honored to have you.”

  Finally the Colonel spoke. “Well, that’s it, I guess. Rod, will you see that everything’s prepared for them? Luggage, fresh bed linens, lamps, books, whatever they need. Bomba will be going with them, and I want you to take a dozen or so of your best men. Have them posted as lookouts and guard the place, but don’t make it look conspicuous. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir.” Rodriguez nodded and left the room.

  Arthur glared in disgust at his father, but said nothing.

  “Now, look, Arthur,” said the Colonel, “what else can we do? There’s no safe way to get them out. We’ve happened to have come at a bad time. Whether Villa wins or loses, he won’t stay in Chihuahua indefinitely. Carranza’s got plenty more troops to send up here and drive him away. The best thing to do with the family is keep them put until this situation blows over and the trains start running again. As for us, we’re going to get those cattle out of here. Come along if you wish.”