The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  Pancho nearly choked on his rage. “Those bastard sons of whores!” Villa ranted. “All of them! Tell the boys, Rudy: we shoot all gringos from now on—all of them!”

  But there were only about four hundred of the boys left to tell. He had dismissed the rest of them and told them to go home. He’d finally faced the fact that too many of our fellow Mexicans were in support of Carranza—most of them in the mistaken belief that U.S. support of the whitebeard would bring peace to the country.

  Even though his Yankee support made him too tough for us to beat in open warfare, we knew Carranza couldn’t last. Already there were rumors of bad friction between him and Obregón, without whose allegiance he’d sure as hell lose hold of the ­country—and maybe even the gringos’ support. If Obregón broke from him, we’d all be back at war in a hurry. In the meantime, all we could do was take to the hills and fight as guerrillas—striking suddenly, retreating quickly, moving fast and often to evade our pursuers.

  •

  Thus were we reduced from being “the kings of Mexico,” as Urbina had called us, to being a gang of a few hundred outlaws with a price on our heads. But at least we were still alive and on the loose and hoping for better days. That was more than could be said for a lot of other revolutionaries, including our two old enemies, Victoriano Huerta and Pascual Orozco, whose paths had come together again during the past terrible summer.

  Huerta had been living in Barcelona, Spain, since sailing out of Mexico the year before. The way we heard it, the Germans went to him in the spring and offered him a deal. They promised to back him with arms and money if he’d return to Mexico and lead a coup against Carranza. The gringo president, Wilson, had always disliked the bullethead, and the Germans figured Huerta could keep the U.S. too distracted with its own border to join the Allies against them in the European war. Huerta’s side of the deal was a promise to cause Wilson that distraction. It was said the Germans opened a Havana bank account for him containing more than five million pesos, that in St. Louis they’d bought thousands of rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition for the army he would raise. They got him a passport and booked his passage to the U.S.

  But the gringos got word he was on his way to the States and had agents watching his every move from the minute he disembarked in New York. Carranza had been tipped off too, and had his own men tailing Huerta and his boys all over the city. Rumors of his deal with the Germans were everywhere. Carranza wanted the U.S. to extradite him to Mexico, but the Yankees knew the whitebeard would shoot Huerta the minute he got his hands on him, and they sure as hell didn’t want to get involved in that sort of diplomatic mess. The war in Europe was giving them plenty enough to worry over and argue about.

  We heard Huerta rented a big house on Long Island, where he was joined by his family. Somebody sent Villa a photograph clipped from a New York newspaper showing the bullethead with his shirtsleeves rolled up and pushing a lawn mower, trying ridiculously to look like Señor Good Citizen. He told reporters he was a simple family man now and had no political ambitions whatsoever. Villa stuck the picture on a tree and used it for target practice till not an inch of paper was left intact. He talked about going to New York and shooting the son of a bitch right on his well-trimmed lawn.

  “Maybe I’ll stake him to the ground and run that grasscutting machine over him until he’s in a thousand pieces,” he said. “That’s what Zapata would do.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Zapata wouldn’t leave Morelos to go after the rapist of his own mother.”

  In June, Huerta and a group of friends boarded a train for San Francisco. He told the newspapers he was going to visit the Panama-Pacific Exposition, but in Kansas City he changed trains and headed south. He got off at a little station just a few miles north of El Paso, where a motorcar was waiting for him. In the car was Pascual Orozco. The word was, they’d been in contact for weeks.

  By then the gringos were sure Huerta was bent on stirring up new troubles in Mexico, and a band of customs agents backed by soldiers arrested him and Orozco in their El Paso hotel. They were charged with violation of Yankee neutrality laws and locked up in jail.

  But the bullethead had friends in El Paso, including one of its former mayors, a man named Lea, who acted as his lawyer and was able to get a friendly judge to set bail. Huerta put up the money for himself and Orozco and they were released. The gringo authorities kept them under close watch, however, and a few days later, when it looked like they were about to cross into Mexico, they were taken back into custody.

  Or rather Huerta was. He submitted peacefully, probably thinking it wouldn’t be any problem for his lawyer to free him again. But Orozco had other ideas. He went out the back window of his hotel room just minutes before lawmen kicked down the door. He overpowered the guard assigned to watch the alley, stole a horse, and rode like hell into the desert to the east. He must’ve been figuring to cut south for the border when he was well clear of El Paso.

  A telegraphed call for assistance in the pursuit of Orozco was picked up by a detachment of Texas Rangers passing through Van Horn, and they set out to intercept him. A couple of days later they spotted him near a mesa just south of the Sierra Diablos. They boxed him in and ordered him to surrender or die. When he came out of the rocks with his hands up high, a half dozen carbines opened fire. They brought his corpse back to El Paso and put it on public display, then buried it in the local cemetery. Huerta sent an enormous wreath of flowers for his grave.

  They imprisoned the bullethead at Fort Bliss for months. We heard he was under round-the-clock guard by government agents, that he was suffering greatly from his lack of brandy. In one newspaper report he said the water they were serving him in the fort was “a little weak.” His wife rented a house in El Paso and visited him every day, but he had so little to do he took up the study of English.

  Villa was pleased to hear of Huerta’s hard times. His hatred of the bullethead as the murderer of his beloved Señor Madero—and as the man who damn near had him shot at the wall—would never lessen even a little. I didn’t feel that way about him myself. Hell, an enemy was supposed to try to kill you. We would have killed him if we could. Enemies were just like other men—there were brave ones among them who deserved respect and cowardly ones who did not. I always thought that Huerta was a truer soldier and more of a man than most you’d ever meet. I never said so to Villa—why get into a senseless argument with him about it?—but I hated the idea of Huerta as a Yankee prisoner. It was no fit circumstance for a brave Mexican.

  When we got word that Huerta had fallen seriously ill, I wasn’t surprised. They said his sickness had given him the color and smell of piss. Now the gringos got nervous about the diplomatic problems that might crop up if he died in their custody, so they allowed him to be moved from the fort to the house Señora Huerta had taken on Stanton Street. Even then, they kept an armed guard at his bedside until the bullethead went into a coma. A few days later—just a couple of weeks into the new year of 1916—he was dead.

  FOURTEEN

  Around the time of the bullethead’s death, Pablo López held up a train carrying a party of gringo mining engineers from El Paso to the Cusi Mines, about fifty miles southwest of Chihuahua City. We’d gotten word that the company manager would be on board with a satchel containing $10,000 in gold and American currency, and Villa sent Pablo and a few dozen boys to get it.

  Pablo stopped the train near Santa Isabel, and the boys searched it from one end to the other. They found the satchel wrapped in an overcoat and stuffed behind a coach seat where the manager had tried to hide it. Pablo ordered the gringos to empty their pockets into a passed hat, but one of them refused to hand over his watch, so a couple of the boys wrested it from him.

  Inside the watch lid was a small photograph of a woman. Pablo asked if the woman was his wife, but the gringo didn’t understand Spanish and angrily snarled something in English. Pablo told him the woman was ugly as a cockroa
ch and said, “This is what we do to cockroaches in Mexico.’’ He dropped the watch on the floor and crushed it under his boot heel. The gringo lunged at him, shouting, “You greaser son of a bitch!”—but was held back by a couple of his pals. Pablo didn’t speak English but he well enough understood “greaser” and “son of a bitch.” He pressed his pistol against the gringo’s forehead and blew his brains all over the rear wall of the coach.

  Some of them tried to make a run for it, dashing for the front and rear doors, and were killed right there in the car. Others jumped from the windows and were shot down as they ran for the river. Most of them threw their hands up and stayed where they were, no doubt hoping—as the stupid always do—that they would be spared if they behaved like sheep. They were pulled off the train and made to stand in line against the coach.

  When Pablo called for three volunteers to do the shooting, a fight almost broke out among the boys over which of them would be on the execution squad. Five minutes later all seventeen gringos who’d been on the train were dead and the boys were hightailing it back to our camp in the sierras. Everybody else on board had been Mexican, and Pablo did not harm or rob any of them. Only the gringos. I never knew anybody who hated gringos as much as Pablo López, not even me—not even Villa, who now hated them so much he only shrugged when Pablo told him what he had done.

  Naturally there was an uproar on the other side of the border. When the miners’ bodies arrived back in El Paso, an angry mob tried to burn down the Mexican quarter. The police had to be reinforced by troops from Fort Bliss, and martial law was declared. Mexicans were shot on sight every day along the borderline and the Rio Bravo.

  For the next couple of weeks the border was full of talk of sending U.S. troops into Mexico to protect Yankee interests. But even though the Texas politicians in Washington—as well as a lot of gringo newspapers around the country—were calling for armed intervention, nothing came of it, partly because Carranza made plenty of loud apologies for Villa’s “acts of murder” and promised Washington that federal troops would soon capture and punish every one of the killers involved in the Santa Isabel “massacre.”

  A few days later he announced that eleven of the Villistas responsible for the killings had been captured and executed. He even ordered their bodies put on public display in Cuidad Juárez, so that any Americans who wished to do so could view the corpses for themselves. When we heard about it, we could only wonder who the poor devils were that the federals had killed, since none of them belonged to us.

  More than anything, Carranza wanted to keep Yankee troops out of Mexico. We didn’t have a goddamn thing to lose if the Americans charged across the border swinging their swords, but the whitebeard sure did. He’d been bragging to the Americans that he had the country under control and because he’d assured them Pancho Villa was no longer a threat to life and property, the gringo engineers had felt safe enough to take the train into Chihuahua. Yankee intervention would be proof that the whitebeard was weaker than he claimed to be—and it would surely make things tougher for him while he was trying to organize a government and get a campaign going for his formal election to the presidency. The whole country would be infuriated if the gringos trespassed into the fatherland—just as it had been infuriated by every other instance of Yankee intervention (the most recent having been at Veracruz only a year-and-a-half before, an invasion that began over some stupid incident involving U.S. Navy sailors and led to an occupation lasting seven months.) Even the whitebeard’s friends would demand that he either do something about a gringo invasion or step aside for somebody who would. The old bastard sure as hell didn’t want those kinds of troubles.

  While we lay low during the following weeks, Villa was often moody and subdued, nursing his bitterness toward the Yankees for having helped Calles defend Agua Prieta against us. And he was still fuming at the Ravel brothers for having cheated us—and for having very likely passed information to Calles about our plans of attack.

  Then one evening, during a rambling discussion around a campfire, one of the boys said he’d been told that the United States had never been invaded, not by anybody—at least not since it had become the United States. Villa didn’t say anything, but when he turned to look at me he was beaming.

  •

  Columbus, New Mexico, is a few miles north of the frontier and a long way from the nearest gringo town. Sun-bleached, dusty, without trees—a typical little pueblo of the western border. We’d been there before, Villa and I, back when we were buying much of our munitions from the Ravel brothers—back when we believed they were our friends. We’d stayed in the Commercial Hotel and bought supplies in their general store and had a drink or two in their club. The business district was on the north side of a set of railroad tracks running east to El Paso and west to Douglas. On the south side of the tracks was Camp Furlong, headquarters of the U.S. 13th Cavalry Regiment. The gringo soldiers often joked that Columbus was the sort of place every man ought to visit in order to improve his appreciation of everywhere else.

  We weren’t too concerned about the soldiers. There were about three hundred of them, but our spies told us that few of them had ever been shot at. They were a shabby bunch who spent much of their free time in El Paso, riding there and back on a daily train called the “Drunkards’ Special.” Their armory, however, was full of rifles and machine guns and ammunition, and their stables held plenty of good horses and mules. We wanted those munitions and stock.

  We also intended to repay the Ravel brothers for their theft and their treachery. Villa was looking forward to hanging them side by side from the sign over their hotel entrance.

  But best of all, Villa said, the Yankees would have to rewrite their histories. “From now on their books will have to say, ‘Nobody ever invaded the United States except for Francisco Villa, the magnificent Mexican patriot who tried so hard to be our friend but who we treated so shamefully because we are such stupid sons of bitches and have no honor.’”

  Our spy line relayed a steady stream of information to our sierra camp from Columbus. Every day a different pair of our boys would loiter around the railroad station, from where they had a clear view into Camp Furlong. They counted soldiers and memorized the patrol routines, learned the layout of the camp—where the barracks were, the stables, the guard posts. We had spies wandering about town too, making note of the houses where the married officers lived, of the stores with the best supplies. We soon had a good map of the place and were thoroughly familiar with its ways and habits.

  We made our plans and went over them again and again. Near the end of February we came down from the hills and headed north, all four hundred of us.

  •

  We traveled by night, moving fast and quiet, and camped by day, cooking on small smokeless fires. Villa was in high spirits, as he always was when we were on our way to make an attack, and his exuberance was infectious. For the first time in ages he told stories of his bandit days before the Revolution.

  One time, he said, he and Urbina had robbed a small herd of cattle from the Terrazas hacienda but hadn’t got very far with it before a patrol of rurales—the mounted police—came riding up behind them, closing fast. They abandoned the herd and headed into the Durango sierra, the rurales hard on their heels.

  They rode through the night and all the next day and through the night after that. Pancho and Tomás knew that sierra as well as they knew their own smells, but they couldn’t lose their pursuers. A few times they thought they had, and dismounted to rest—but each time, within minutes, the mounties suddenly galloped into view on the trail behind them, and they had to leap to the saddle and hightail it again.

  Another day and night went by. Their horses were in a constant lather, white-eyed and long-tongued. Villa and Urbina were ready to drop from the saddle for lack of sleep. They couldn’t understand how the rurales could keep on coming so steadily. Didn’t they need sleep? Maybe one band of them was being relieved by
another as they came along. Whatever the case, the rurales never stopped coming. Pancho and Tomás could only keep riding and riding, climbing higher and higher into the wilder reaches of the mountains.

  On the fifth morning of the chase, when Villa was sure their horses would buckle under them, they lost the rurales. He and Tomás had gone through a lot of heavy thicket in the night and at dawn found themselves on a ridge overlooking the entire mountainside. There was no sign of the mounties. They had either been slowed down or given up the chase. To reach the spot where Villa and Urbina now were would have taken anybody at least two hours from the time they came into view on the trail below. At last they could get some rest. There was a stream close by and plenty of grass for the horses. But even as tired as he was, Villa was uneasy and suggested that they take turns sleeping while the other kept watch. Urbina said fine, you be the first guard, and he was asleep in an instant.

  Barely an hour later the tiny single-file figures of the rurales appeared far down on the narrow trail. Villa shook Urbina but Tomás would not wake up. Pancho shook him and slapped him and yelled in his face, but Tomás slept on as if in a coma. “It was frightening,” Pancho said, “the way he was sleeping, like he was both dead and alive.”

  He saddled the horses, then tried again to wake Tomás. He kicked him in the ribs, pulled on his ears, even splashed water in his face, but nothing worked. Tomás would not rouse from his deep sleep. Pancho was desperate. Abandoning all caution, he screamed in Tomás’s ear. He even fired his pistol beside his head. But Tomás did not stir. Pancho finally picked him up and draped him face down over his horse. He tied his hands to his feet under the animal’s belly so he wouldn’t slip off, then mounted up and led Urbina’s horse by the reins into the higher sierra.

  He said the next few hours were the worst of his life. Every time he stopped to scan the trail behind him, the rurales had drawn closer. Urbina still could not be awakened by any means. The brush was denser now, and the trail got steeper and rockier, the horses’ footing more unsure. Then, on a particularly steep rise, Villa’s mount suddenly slipped and keeled over sideways. Pancho barely avoided getting crushed under the animal. He was sure the rurales had them now. He could hear the hooves of their horses clacking on the stony trail, their saber scabbards clinking against their silver-studded saddles.