El Paso

by Winston Groom

  “Let’s get out of here now!” Arthur said. His heart was still pounding but he knew it was over. At least the children were still unharmed, and for the moment, so were he and his companions. There wasn’t time for second thoughts.

  The original plan had been to take the children back to the lettuce patch, put them on the plane, then scatter in different directions, meeting up later at the railroad tracks to the east. Now they had to return to the patch to tell Charlie to take off empty-handed. When they got there the place was lit up with torches Charlie had set out; the plane’s engine was running and Charlie was sitting in it. In the glare of the torches Arthur saw Mick Martin was still there, too. They galloped up to the plane.

  “Didn’t work,” Arthur said, “and they’ll be right behind us. Dammit! I told you to get going!” he spat to Mick.

  “I thought I might be able to help here,” Mick replied.

  “You get back in that damn plane and go with Charlie!” Arthur ordered.

  “Look, Arthur. If I can ride double with one of you guys, I might still—”

  “Get in the plane now!” Arthur screamed. Just then shots began singing around them. The plane’s engine was so loud they couldn’t hear most of them, but they could actually feel them whiz by. Mick clambered into the rear seat of the plane. Charlie gave a thumbs-up and throttled high, and the plane began to move.

  “Let’s go!” Arthur shouted. As planned, they split out in five different directions. As Arthur galloped through a large open cow pasture, he glanced back in time to see the Luft-Verkehrs lift into the air, its shiny red underbelly lit by the burning torches. Arthur cursed himself, not just over the children, but because he hadn’t had the guts to leave Mick Martin to Villa’s tender mercy.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Villa got everyone moving at dawn and they had been on the trail all day, headed north toward Agua Prieta. He himself was furious.

  “It seems like everybody in Mexico is after me,” he remarked to Bierce and Reed, who were riding with him at the head of the column. “I’ve never had so much trouble kidnapping people in my life. I get sniped at, my drovers are murdered, guards get killed, people start breaking into my quarters.”

  Lieutenant Crucia had led the interrogation of Katherine and Timmy after he recovered from the bump on his head from Arthur’s pistol. He was even angrier than Villa, but got nothing from the children. Katherine had made Timmy swear not to tell that it was their father who had come to get them. All anyone knew was that it was somebody with an airplane and that the plan appeared to have been well thought out. Tom Mix received some of the blame, although no one was sure exactly why.

  Bierce had been irritable ever since Villa decided to burn down the hacienda of El Padrino. It had made a spectacular fire after being drenched in coal oil by the soldiers, and after they left they could still see the smoke from miles away. Finally Bierce asked him about it.

  “Why did you find it necessary to destroy that beautiful home?” he said. “It must date back to colonial times.” It was not the opportune moment to ask such a question.

  “So what, Señor Robinson? The people can rebuild it if they want to.”

  “Rebuild what it took centuries to build?” Bierce asked.

  “Who cares how long it took?” Villa growled. “It was constructed by stinking Spaniards who enslaved my people.”

  “Doesn’t history matter to you?” said Bierce.

  “We’re making history now, señor.”

  “No matter who it hurts?”

  “War’s no tea party, Señor Robinson.”

  “Yes, I think I used that line once myself,” Bierce told him.

  “I think the general has a point,” Reed chimed in. “This El Padrino ruled that valley like a feudal serfdom and lived in splendor while the people were famished.” Reed didn’t object to the immolation of the hacienda, but he did have second thoughts about Villa’s treatment of El Padrino himself. Under the revolutionary rules Reed understood, El Padrino would have been given a trial, then shot or hung if found guilty.

  “It seems to me,” Bierce said, “that a revolution ought to be orderly. Not going around indiscriminately burning things down and killing people.” Bierce hated disorder, and anarchy certainly didn’t suit him. He needed the things in his life to be meticulous because, he’d decided, his mind was so chaotic that if his surroundings were, too, it would probably drive him insane.

  Villa told him, “The very nature of revolution is disorderly.”

  “Not ours,” Bierce retorted. “We enlisted an army and fought the British man to man. If anybody burned down buildings, it was them.”

  “Maybe you should have tried it, too,” Villa said. “Might have shortened the war.”

  “But they were our own buildings,” Bierce countered.

  “Listen, Señor Robinson, the English antagonized your country with taxes and so you rebelled with your tea party. But that was child’s play compared with what the stinking Spanish have done to us for three hundred years. And their stinking descendants and associates still control ninety-five percent of all the land and wealth in Mexico. We’re going to put a stop to it, and if killing’s necessary, it won’t stand in our way.”

  “Sometimes the best intentions give way to murder,” Bierce remarked.

  ‘Why give them a second chance?” Villa said. “Then their sons will come after you. This time there’ll be no going back.”

  Villa was getting angry and felt the hairs on his neck begin to stand up, but it was too soon to go into another rage. Rages gave him headaches. He wished he’d never brought this old coot with him; who needed a ration of shit from some worn-out gringo? Señor Jack Robinson was insubordinate and, like everyone had predicted, had seriously begun to get on Villa’s nerves. He began to wonder if Sanchez’s ghost had somehow transformed itself into this hoary old man.

  KATHERINE AND TIMMY WERE STILL TRYING to comprehend what had happened the night before. Their father! She had known someone would come, but had never expected him. It had happened so suddenly that when she woke up this morning, she thought it had been a dream. Timmy wasn’t even sure that it wasn’t. He’d been half asleep the whole time. And also, they hadn’t been able to talk about it much between themselves because they hadn’t been alone all day.

  “Seems like you have got friends trying to help you out,” Mix told her, trying to make conversation.

  “Maybe they weren’t friends, maybe they were enemies,” Katherine said deceptively.

  “Why would you two have any enemies?” They were riding now in a strange new terrain. The green of El Padrino’s valley now turned into a dusty wasteland of low scrub and volcanic rocks. To the west a yellowish sunset framed a row of huge black mesas that stretched as far as the eye could see. They reminded Timmy of a fleet of steaming dreadnoughts he’d once seen in a picture.

  “Maybe they were just more kidnappers, like you are,” she replied.

  Ever since she woke up, Katherine had been confused about her feelings for Mix. Yesterday it had been wonderful talking with him in the garden. She sensed kindness, and vulnerability, too. She’d pictured the two of them walking along the cliffs at Newport and going down the path to the little secret place she had, a small cave with a ledge where they could sit on rocks and watch the ocean swells crash below. He would be a movie star by then and wealthy, and would waltz with her that night at the Colonel’s ball.

  Reality had struck Katherine when Mix joined Lieutenant Crucia in the interrogation later in the morning. Mix had been more gentle and seemed to believe her when she said she didn’t know who the intruders were. But then, Mix hadn’t been knocked in the head by a gun butt like Crucia had, which had raised a large lump. Still, it came back with undeniable clarity that she was his prisoner and there wasn’t any way to argue herself out of that.

  “Whoever they were,” Mix said, “it was the most foolhardy thing I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Maybe it was brave,” she countered.

  �
��Maybe, but it was stupid, too.”

  She had to bite her lip to keep from retorting.

  “You still want to teach me to dance?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she answered after a long pause.

  “You’d have to grow about a foot to make us even,” he told her.

  “Maybe I won’t grow,” she said. “Maybe this is as tall as I’ll get.”

  “That might come true, if you don’t stop pouting.”

  “I’m not pouting, I’m thinking.”

  “What about?”

  “About my father—and my mother,” she said.

  “You think your father had something to do with what happened last night?”

  “No,” she said. “Father’s not a kidnapper.”

  “He might be if it was his own kids,” Mix said.

  To that she had no reply.

  “I’d kinda like to see that ocean you talked about,” Mix told her, increasingly embarassed.

  “Maybe someday you will, if you set us free.”

  “Yep, maybe someday I will,” he said.

  ARTHUR FOUND THE REST OF HIS PARTY without too much trouble. Bob, Slim, and the Mexican teamsters were already there. An hour later, Bomba turned up. They had hidden in a stand of woods off the road that led to the mountain pass, discussing options.

  “I expect Villa’s gonna follow along this river here,” Slim said. He had taken out his map. “He’s gotta water his horses, and if he keeps headed north, that’s the only water there is.”

  “I think what we do now,” Arthur said, “is to have Mr. Flipper take Father and Johnny Ollas and the lady here,” he said, referring to Gourd Woman, “over to where they can meet the Chihuahua railroad and go on to El Paso. The rest of us will follow after Villa. With some luck there’ll be another chance.”

  “I’m not going to El Paso or anyplace else until those children are safe,” the Colonel said. Both he and Johnny were sitting up in the little cart wagon on a wooden brace Ah Dong had built. Ah Dong had also made a sort of pallet for them out of some material he had stuffed with leaves and sewn up.

  “Colonel, it’s out of the question. You’d slow us down,” Arthur said. This was the first time in his life he had addressed his father as “Colonel,” but Arthur felt it somehow lent authority to his own sense of command.

  “My word, who’s in charge here?” the Colonel cried indignantly.

  “I am,” Arthur told him.

  The Colonel considered this for a moment. “Well, in that case I tell you respectfully that I would not slow you down,” he barked. “We can make time just as well as Villa can, with all his wagons and baggage and artillery and so on.”

  “Both of you need medical attention,” Arthur said.

  “We’ll get it at an appropriate time,” the Colonel retorted. “Johnny and I have talked it over. It’s his wife they’ve got, too. He wants to go on.”

  “That so, Johnny?” Arthur asked. Johnny nodded.

  “Well, Mr. Flipper, I guess it’s up to you to escort the lady here.”

  “Lady’s going with you, too,” said Gourd Woman. “I come too far to quit now.”

  Arthur shook his head in resignation and turned to Flipper. “I guess you’ll have to make do with your own company, then.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, I suppose I’ll come along, too,” Flipper told him. “I’d kind of like to see how this thing turns out.”

  XENIA WAS OVERWROUGHT when Mick Martin broke the news. He and Crosswinds Charlie were seated in chairs in the lobby of the Toltec and Xenia was on a sofa with a handkerchief to her lips.

  “He could have gotten them all killed,” she cried. She was appalled at Mick’s busted-up face, but when she asked him about it he shook his head and was silent. She more or less guessed what might have happened.

  “No, ma’am, ever’body’s safe as they was before. At least that was good luck,” said Crosswinds Charlie.

  “With your permission,” Mick said, “I’d like to try it myself now, if Charlie will agree to fly me out there again.”

  “What’s Arthur going to do now?” Xenia wondered.

  “I dunno,” Charlie offered. “There wadn’t no other plan except for that one.”

  “Far as I can tell, he’s got two choices,” Mick said. “Either he’ll give up and come back here to El Paso or he’ll keep going after Villa to give it another try. Mood he seems to be in now, my guess is he’ll keep on.”

  “What must he be thinking of, endangering the children this way?” Xenia said.

  “Charlie, do you think you can find Pancho Villa and land me near him?” Mick asked.

  “Depends on what he does,” Charlie replied. “If he’s kept going north, that’s fairly open country. There’s some mountains here and there, but I expect he’ll be following along a river. But if he goes back to hole up in them canyons, it’d be pretty dicey.”

  “Would you give it a try?” Mick asked.

  “I reckon,” Charlie said. “I ain’t got nothin’ better to do.”

  That afternoon and evening, Mick was on the phone to Boston raising money. He’d started with ten thousand of his own, then went to the leaders of the gangs he represented and managed to raise forty thousand more. He explained that it would be good public relations and they’d probably get their names in the newspapers for performing a good deed. Next day the money was wired to a bank in El Paso and Mick tucked it all into a fat satchel in hundred-dollar bills. In Mick’s experience, most kidnappers were willing to settle for something like ten cents on the dollar, if it came to negotiation, and there was nothing like green money in the bag to help that happen. He figured it was worth a try.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Strucker had to concentrate to keep his hand from shaking as he wrote out the telegram to the first secretary of the Imperial German Foreign Service in Berlin. Villa watched over him, standing beside a desk in the dinky telegraph depot in the little town of Cabullona, about a day’s march from the Federal outpost at Agua Prieta.

  The way Villa had decreed it, first the money was to be transferred, in gold, to a bank in Juárez, and as soon as Villa received a telegram saying it had arrived, he would attack the Americans somewhere along the border. Strucker had come to the conclusion that Villa had little intention of doing this, and that the money would be little more than ransom, but he didn’t see any choice in the matter.

  All day vast pillars of smoke had boiled up toward them out of the desert from the arriving troop trains of Villa’s main army. Fierro had managed to get them all assembled and moved out of Coahuila, and now they came, rugged, bearded, gaunt, and filthy, crammed on the tops of the boxcars inside of which were the horses, wagons, rations, artillery, and other equipment necessary for the battle. The men were all singing “La Cucaracha.”

  Reed and Bierce were astonished at the excitement building up in everyone. Villa had put on his worn American-made businessman’s suit and his eyes were red from poring over battle maps. Fierro was rushing around barking orders and slapping people on the back. Almost all the men had a cornhusk cigarette dangling from their mouths. It took the entire day to organize everybody into an army again. The artillery pieces were unloaded and hitched to teams, rations and ammunition were issued, first-aid facilities were set up, roll calls taken, and the shouting never ceased.

  Villa had been developing and refining his plans for attack during the long days on the trail. It was a plan of amazing simplicity, just the way he used to do it in the old days. His intelligence network had informed him that there were twelve hundred Federal troops manning the garrison at Agua Prieta. To overrun them, Villa had assembled four thousand men of his own. It would be a night attack and, he hoped, a complete surprise. Artillery would open up first. Then the soldiers would march forward, breaching the Federal lines. Next the cavalry would dash in and exploit the gaps and the rest of the army would simply steamroll over the garrison.

  The “pesky horsefly” strategy had been born of necessity becaus
e of his losses at Chihuahua City and elsewhere, but now Villa saw renewed hope. When word got out that Agua Prieta had fallen, Carranza would naturally rush an army there to attack Villa. But by then he intended to be gone, after resupplying himself from the Federals’ own garrison. And whatever garrison the Federal army had come from, that was where he would go, popping up like a jack-in-the-box in front of the understrength ranks before they could be reinforced.

  AT SUPPER THAT NIGHT, Bierce was entertaining everyone with a discourse on ghouls, which was one of his favorite topics.

  “In 1640, a Father Secchi saw one in a cemetery near Florence and frightened it away with the sign of the cross. He said it had many heads and he saw it in more than one place at a time,” Bierce informed them. “On another occasion, a ghoul was caught by some peasants in a churchyard near Sudbury and ducked into a horse pond. The water at once turned to blood.”

  “May I suggest, Señor Robinson,” Strucker said, “that El Padrino was a ghoul?”

  “That I don’t know, Herr Strucker,” Bierce told him, “but there’s one more account that might shed some light on the subject. At the beginning of the fourteenth century a ghoul was cornered in a crypt of the Amiens Cathedral and the whole population surrounded the place. Twenty armed men, with a priest at their head, captured the ghoul, which, thinking to escape by a trick, had transformed itself into the figure of a well-known citizen of the town. It was nevertheless hanged, drawn, and quartered.”

  “Sounds like it served him right,” Strucker remarked.

  “Yes, I suppose,” Bierce continued. “But the citizen whose shape the ghoul had assumed was said to be so affected by the experience he never again showed his face in Amiens and his fate remains a mystery.”

  Everyone laughed except Villa, who decided the gibe had been aimed at him. Here he was, general of an army that was to attack the enemy any day now, and getting needled by a cynical old gringo.

  LATE IN THE AFTERNOON NEXT DAY, Villa’s army was entrenched behind a low rise in the desert overlooking Agua Prieta when a startling sight appeared in the sky. First they heard a high-pitched mosquitolike hum, and when they looked up they saw an airplane. It circled once, then began to spiral down until it came in for a landing not two hundred yards from where Villa’s whole force was hidden. Villa was concerned that it might spoil his surprise attack.