The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  I raised my hands and patted down the volume of their wailing. “But you have a choice,” I told them, “and I want you to listen to it very carefully.”

  There were 302 of them. I had several counts made to be sure. This would be an act of legend, and as with all legends its details would change with telling over time. But I wanted that particular detail fixed firmly, so there would never be any doubt of it: 302.

  They were penned in a corral on one side of a large stableyard surrounded by adobe walls. The walls were eight feet high, and the one directly across from the corral gate stood about thirty yards away over open ground. I explained that I was going to sit by the water trough a few feet from the gate with a pistol in each hand. At my signal, ten prisoners at a time would be released from the corral. “Anybody who can make it over that far wall can go free,” I told them. “You have my word.”

  Against the sudden chorus of confused hope, I again had to gesture for quiet. “Your choice is this,” I said. “You can try to make it over the wall before I shoot you, or you can refuse to try, in which case one of the boys up on the wall behind you will shoot you where you stand.”

  Their protests rose like a flock of alarmed blackbirds.

  “Hey, boys,” I said, ‘‘ten at a time? I bet half of you guys will be laughing at me from the other side of that wall.” I’m not about to deny I was enjoying myself.

  I sat with my back against the trough and instructed Ignacio, my orderly, to sit beside me with a case of ammunition and a third revolver. “I shoot and you load,” I said. “And listen, brother: if any of these shitheads gets away because I don’t have a loaded pistol in my hand, I’ll send you running for that wall, understand?”

  The late afternoon was beautiful: chilly, the blue sky clear, the sunlight as smooth and bright as a polished cartridge. Of the first ten to come out the gate, two ran straight at me and met their bullet head-on. Some dropped to their knees and begged for their lives. Some tried hiding behind others as they went for the wall. Some ran in a straight line, some in a zigzag route. One of them flapped his arms as he ran, like he was hoping to fly out of there. I shot them all and signaled for ten more.

  Each time I emptied a pistol, I dropped it in Ignacio’s lap and continued firing with the other as he handed me a freshly loaded one. I never missed. My gunfire mingled with the cheers of the boys watching from the rear wall, with the cries and moans of the dying. An occasional rifle shot finished off the twitching among the fallen. Each shot kicked in my hand like a heartbeat.

  I worked steadily, pausing only once to smoke a cigarette. A pair of vultures showed up and sailed in lazy circles overhead. Beside me, Ignacio was soaked with sweat and stinking like a goat. The layer of bodies scattered between the wall and the corral grew thicker and made footing more difficult for each successive group. By sunset the air was cold and blue, fragrant with gunsmoke and the coppery smell of blood.

  I let the last twelve make their run together. Six fell as I emptied the first revolver, then I switched to the other and dropped five more. I held my aim on the last man, my gun sight following him to the wall, rising with him as he leaped and grabbed hold and pulled himself up. As he swung one leg over the top, I heard Ignacio whisper fiercely, “Shoot, chief, shoot!”

  But I didn’t, and the Colorado dropped out of sight. I had intended to spare the first one out of the pen: I wanted the others to see him clear the wall and thus be inspired to their best effort to gain it. But when the first one came right at me, I’d had to let him have it in the teeth. So I’d decided on the last one.

  Ignacio gave me a worried glance, then quickly busied himself gathering the spent cartridge casings. But some of the boys thought the prisoner had got away because I’d run out of bullets, and they rushed to the spot where he’d gone over. “I’ll get him, Chief!” one yelled, and aimed his Mauser into the gathering gloom. He fired twice and cursed loudly. The others jeered him for his lousy marksmanship. “He’s into the chaparral, Chief!” somebody hollered. “That’s it, he’s gone!”

  “Hey, you!” I yelled up at the corporal who had fired at the fleeing Colorado. “If that’s the best you can do, maybe we ought to get rid of you too while we’re at it.” I raised the pistol at him. He dropped his rifle and put out his palms as if they could shield him. I aimed and fired—putting the round close enough to his ear to let him hear the buzz. Then I grinned at him and said, “Hell, boy, I guess we’re both too tired to shoot straight anymore today.” It broke the boys up. Even the corporal managed a smile. Later I was told he’d shit his pants.

  Not till I gave the pistols to Ignacio to be cleaned did I feel the pain in my hands. Both index fingers were swollen. I knew most of the boys were still watching me, fixing me and the moment in their memories, me and 302 glass-eyed dead men lying in twisted piles. They would remember this day and my hands with the swollen trigger fingers. They would describe them to others, to their children—I knew that. They would always tell this tale of Fierro the Butcher.

  “Ignacio,” I said, holding up my sore fingers, “before some sweet muchacha massages anything else on me tonight, she’s going to massage these.”

  “Hard work, Chief!” he shouted. His features were obscured by the closing darkness, but I could see the pale slash of his grin—and feel the heat of his great throbbing pleasure in simply being alive.

  FIVE

  To slow down the federal advance along the Central Railroad, Villa sent me and a few of the boys about forty-five miles south of Juárez to blow up the tracks. We were still planting the dynamite when the federals got within artillery range and opened fire on us. I laughed at the boys for jumping in fright at the shell bursts all around us. “Don’t worry, compadres,” I told them. “As long as we’re standing on the tracks, we’re safe. They don’t want to destroy the rails with their own goddamn cannonfire.”

  As he hurriedly dug a small niche to hold a dynamite stick under the rail, one of the boys, a likable fellow named Calixto, shouted that he wouldn’t be half as worried if the federals were trying to hit us. He reminded me of the many times I’d ridiculed federal marksmanship. It was because they weren’t trying to hit us that he was sure a shell was going to land square on his head. He jumped a foot off the ground as a round blasted within twenty yards of us—and I laughed even harder.

  “Don’t be so scared, boys!” I yelled. “It’s a fiesta! Listen to it! Dance, little brothers, dance to the music of those cannons.”

  Whenever I carried on like that in the middle of fusillades and artillery fire, the boys looked at me like I had horns and a pointed tail. But they also worked more surely and fought more bravely, certain that they were safe with me because I, Fierro, was indestructible.

  And I was. It had been so decreed by the witchwoman who presided at my birth. As soon as the bruja pulled me from my mother’s womb, she held me over the cook fire in the hut, blood dripping off her hands and sizzling in the coals. She blew on the fire to raise a flame and lowered me to it. Her hands smoked, but I made no outcry. “This one,” she told my mother, “will never die by the hand of man.”

  •

  We engaged the federals just outside of Tierra Blanca and were getting our asses kicked until Villa countered with his favorite battlefield tactic, un golpe tremendo—one tremendous blow: a mass charge by the cavalry, with the infantry running up right behind. As always, it succeeded. The federals piled into their trains and fled back toward their main garrison in Chihuahua City. We rolled over Tierra Blanca just as the last train was pulling away. I put the spurs to my horse and caught up to the engine. The two guards stared at me in astonishment when they should have been firing at me. I shot them both, then jumped aboard, kicked off the engineer and released the brake cylinder. The great wheels locked against the rails and shrieked like the end of the world until the train came to a halt. The federals came out of the cars with their hands up high. “Short trip, shitheads!” our
boys hollered at them. “You’ll never get to fuck your mothers again, but don’t worry, we’ll take care of that!”

  Because we were in a hurry to move on, Urbina helped me with the prisoners. We lined them up along the train and then made our way quickly down the track, from engine to caboose. “You know what I like?” Tomás said, reloading while I took my turn with the shooting. “The way the little red holes pop out so bright on those white uniforms.”

  Villa was jubilant to have possession of yet another train. He gave me a huge hug and put me in command of the Dorados—the Golden Ones—his elite new cavalry force. Three squadrons of one hundred men each, they were the best horsemen and most fearsome fighters in the Division of the North. They struck hard and fast and killed without quarter. Every Dorado wore a splendid special uniform and a Stetson hat embroidered with gold; each was issued two superb horses, a carbine, and a pair of Colt revolvers. The rest of the division held us in awe, and the federals came to fear us like the devil’s own legion.

  •

  A month later we took Ojinaga in the same bold fashion. Most of the federals fled across the river into Presidio, Texas, where the Yankee troops took them into custody and interned them in a huge corral next to their fort. Villa met with the gringo commander on the river bridge and assured him we would not pursue any of the federals into U.S. territory or even shoot into Texas at them.

  “I think it is very gallant of you, my general,” Villa said, “to accommodate those noble enemies of mine who choose to cross the river to safety rather than stay and fight like men.” The interpreter didn’t have to translate his sarcasm.

  The gringo gave Villa a tight little smile and said, “Well, General, the way I figure it, if I send them back to you, the only accommodation you’re likely to give them would be about six feet deep.”

  They both laughed real big over that, but not me. I could see that this gringo was not a man of true humor, not at all like our friend Scott. He laughed only with his mouth, while his eyes studied Pancho as carefully as an undertaker’s measuring for a coffin. I knew he was no friend of ours and never would be.

  “You think I didn’t see the falseness in his face?” Pancho said later. “But who cares what he really thinks. He’s one more gringo big shot who thinks he’s dealing with just another stupid Mexican. As long as I smile and nod at everything he says, he feels happy and superior and doesn’t take us seriously. And that means the border stays loose and we don’t have trouble selling cows and buying guns on the other side.”

  Villa later accepted an invitation from that same general to tour Fort Bliss in El Paso, and once again Pancho played the impressed and slow-witted warlord. But I don’t think the lean gringo general with the little iron mustache was ever really fooled. I think he knew Villa was truly as shrewd and capable as his reputation held. I think he was letting Villa fool himself. Despite ­Villa’s casual dismissal of him, I could see this gringo was no toy soldier. His name was John Pershing. They said he was called Black Jack because one of his regiments was composed of Negroes. Two years later his soldiers would be hunting for us all over Chihuahua with orders to kill us.

  •

  At the moment, however, a far more dangerous false friend was Venustiano Carranza. Although Carranza was no soldier himself, Villa had been loyal and obedient to him right from the start of the fight against Huerta. Carranza was, after all, the founder of the Constitutionalist rebels, the party’s first chief, and Villa’s loyalty to the cause obliged his loyalty to its leader. But as time went by, it became obvious that Carranza’s opinion of himself was as large as the Sierras (“It’s that long white beard,” Urbina once said. “It makes him think he’s God”) and that his ambitions went a lot further than just getting rid of the bullethead. His greatest ­yearning—probably his only one, and thus all the more consuming, for he was said to be a man of no fleshly appetites—was to be the next president of Mexico.

  As soon as they’d met, Villa knew Carranza was not the proper successor to Madero. ‘‘He never once looked me directly in the eyes through his little blue spectacles,” Pancho said. “He used a lot of big words he knew damn well I didn’t understand. He enjoyed showing everybody how much better educated than me he was. I was angry of course, but I didn’t show it. More than anything, I felt sorrow. I was sad to see that he was just one more double­-talking politician. But what else should I have expected from a rich landowner? Señor Madero was the only rich man who had a good heart. God rest his soul.”

  Still, for the sake of revolutionary unity, Villa had remained loyal to Carranza, although his distrust of him continued to grow. It was pretty clear, too, that Carranza was afraid of Pancho—and afraid he was getting too powerful. He was a man consumed by suspicions and jealousies, and he did everything he could to hold back the Division of the North, to keep us from getting stronger. The only help we ever really got from him was Felipe Angeles, who was the man Villa came to respect most after the little saint.

  Angeles was a nobleman, a hidalgo who’d been educated in Paris and trained in the best military colleges. He was refined, restrained, impeccable in manners, a man of sober reflection—everything, in other words, that most of us were not and never would be. He was reputed to be the best soldier in Mexico, though I wouldn’t say that. He’d been absolutely loyal to Madero, and when he joined the Constitutionalist cause against Huerta, Carranza had appointed him his secretary of war. Just after we took Ojinaga and drove the last of the federals out of Chihuahua, Villa received a wire from Angeles expressing admiration for his leadership and saying he would be honored to serve with him at some time in the future. Like everybody else, Villa had heard of the great Felipe Angeles, and he was flattered as a schoolgirl to get such respectful attention from him. When he requested that Angeles be assigned to the Division of the North, he never expected the whitebeard to do it, but he did. It turned out that many of Carranza’s officers resented Angeles’s superiority and wanted to get rid of him; they were as much given to their military jealousies as the whitebeard was to his political ones. In any case, Angeles was a keen advantage to us. There was no greater master of artillery—that I will say—and Villa gave him command of our big guns.

  •

  One cold and windy evening an old gringo showed up at the officers’ fire in our main camp. He was looking for General Villa, but Pancho was in Chihuahua City a few miles away, visiting a lady friend, so the gringo had been directed to Urbina.

  Gringos were always showing up out of nowhere, many of them in response to the recruiting poster Villa was circulating throughout the borderland. “Attention gringo,” it said in English. “For gold and glory, come south of the border and ride with Pancho Villa, el libertador of Mexico. Weekly payments in gold to dynamiters, machine­gunners, and railroaders. Enlistments taken in Juárez, Mexico. Viva Villa! Viva la revolución!”

  Some of the gringos we’d enlisted were experienced professional mercenaries, but most were just wild young men looking for adventure or on the run from Yankee law. But this hollow-eyed old fellow looked like a whiskered skeleton hung with rags. His skin was gray as his beard. He wore a blue military cap from the days of the Americans’ civil war and lugged a Gladstone bag. The old Remington .44 in his waistband looked like a small cannon and weighted his pants down comically on his hips. If Death had been a clown, this old-timer would have been its picture. He claimed to be a writer of tales, a man of some literary reputation in his own country. His Spanish was stiffly formal, as though he’d learned it well in school.

  “Hey, gringo,” Calixto said, “you should write about me. The mouths of your American readers will hang open—like this—when they read about my bravery and all the sons of whores I’ve killed and all the beautiful girls I have made love to. I have lived a particularly fascinating—”

  “Oh shut up, Calixto,” Urbina said. “Nobody wants to hear your bullshit.” Tomás’s rheumatism had been flaring up and he was in
a touchy mood. Calixto shrugged and grinned at our laughter. He’d told plenty of bullshit stories to newspapermen. All the boys had. The gringo reporters, especially, had an insatiable thirst for stories of what they called “the horrors of war.” But they also wanted small and touching proofs of human decency and nobility worked into the tales. In addition to the killing, they wanted to hear about women lighting candles in the churches every day for the safe return of their sweethearts and husbands and sons. They wanted to hear about orphans rescued from devastated towns and removed to new and loving families, far from the war. They wanted to hear about men giving up their own lives in order to save those of their comrades, to hear about love letters found in the pockets of men killed in battle. The Yankee reporters said their readers liked war stories that were sweetened with such sentimental illusions.

  Calixto was one of the best at concocting such tales. I once heard him tell a reporter he had paused in the middle of a battle to help a comrade deliver his woman’s child even as the artillery shells were exploding all around them. He said they’d washed the infant with canteen water and tucked it snugly to the woman’s breast, then carried her and the child through the buzzing bullets until they found a protected hollow in the trees behind a hill. The comrade promised mother and child he would return to them as soon as the battle was over, and then he and Calixto left to rejoin the fighting. But the unlucky comrade was killed by one of the last bullets fired in that battle, Calixto said, and after he’d buried him, he went back for the woman and child but they were gone. He searched everywhere but couldn’t find them. “To this day, señor,” he told the reporter, “I search for them. I search in every town we come to, in every village, however large or small.” He said he would search all of Mexico for them until the day he found them—and then he would ask the woman to marry him, and he would make the child his own. “The family, señor!” Calixto had intoned with powerful solemnity as the reporter smiled to himself and scribbled furiously in his little notebook, “the family is all! The family must endure!”