FLOYD GIBBONS SPED HIS ARMORED Dodge touring car around the zopilote buzzards that were picking at the bean tins jettisoned by the five thousand American troops chasing Pancho Villa. Here on this rocky road sixty miles south of the New Mexico border, the hibiscus and bougainvillea fragrances encircling the haciendas had given way to the acrid stench of unburied horse carcasses and spent gunpowder. He smiled with anticipation, his nostrils flaring from the peppery aroma of black nitrate.
The holy incense of the war priests.
During the past two years, he had tramped all over Mexico interviewing swashbuckling revolutionaries and witnessing grisly executions in the hundreds, all for the pleasure of Chicago Tribune readers. Every hardscrabble village in these desolate Sierra Madres had its own torture house and dried mud wall that, depending on which bandito happened to be riding through that day, became a Golgotha for the local burghers or lowly laborers. He had even coined a new verb to describe this peculiarly Mexican spectacle of quasi-judicial murder: To be adobed.
Each morning at dawn, the chosen victims would be marched from their jail cells and stood against stones blackened from the dried blood of past victims. Dressed in their Sunday finest of white shirts, black suits, and bolo hats, the condemned would stroll to the designated spot with a jarring indifference, waving and joking with friends as if on a festival parade. Most enjoyed a few last puffs on a cigarette and, waving off an offered blindfold, opened their coats to expose their chests as a clear target. Then would come the shout calling for good aim—En el pecho, mis amigos! En el pecho!—and the firing squad, usually no more than fifteen feet away, would comply by riddling the victim’s breast with a dozen rounds. Puffs of dust would fluff the adobe wall, and after nearly levitating for a split second, the brave hombre would spin on his heels and collapse.
The Mexicans had their own shibboleth for this daily ritual of dying with courage: Hombrearse con la muerte. To push death around.
The soldiers and families who had joined Villa’s rebel armies were dirt poor, but no one could take away their dignity, not even at the bitter end. Some even went to their violent deaths singing. At Aguascalientes, he had watched the ruthless military commander Obregon hang all eighty members of Villa’s famous musical band. Trombonists, guitarists, and trumpeters had been forced to play Villa’s anthem, La Cucaracha, before being strung up on the trees lining the city’s main boulevard with their instruments dangling at their feet.
The rhythmic banging of two Springfield rifles on the passenger floorboard interrupted his memories. Alerted by the cessation of the usual banter in the back seat, he looked over his shoulder and caught his fellow correspondents, Frank Elser of The New York Times and George Seese of the Associated Press, scribbling furiously in their journals. He slammed his foot on the brake and sent his two companions flying into the headboards, spattering their faces with ink.
“Son of a whoring bitch!” Seese, a tall scarecrow from Brooklyn, now resembled a painted Mayan. “You want to kill us all before Pershing gets the chance?”
Gibbons tossed a dirty oil rag to the back seat. “You boys wouldn’t be trying to get the jump on me with your wire stories, would you now?”
Elser, a gifted novelist who could write the Devil out of Hell, sat glaring in horror at his latest page, now obliterated. “Damn you, Gibbons! That one was going to make it above the fold.”
Gibbons fired up the sputtering Dodge again and resumed their invasion deep into the heart of Villista territory. Elser he could abide, barely, because the man had talent. But that goddamn Seese relied on pure luck to get his sappy stories. A couple months ago, while the other correspondents were out in the desert burning leather to rustle up anything worth filing, Seese had been sleeping off a bender in the Commercial Hotel at Columbus, New Mexico, when Villa had decided to burn the town on one of his wild raids. The loco firebrand had killed eighteen Americans in the debacle, and editors at every newspaper back home had been thrown into an uproar demanding firsthand accounts. As a result, through no effort of his own, Seese had become an overnight sensation with his wire stories filed from his “observation post” in the hotel window.
Gibbons kept grousing over that disastrous coup; the steam hissing from his ears could have powered the locomotive chugging down the tracks that ran aside this dirt road. How many times had he curried El Jaguar’s favor with boxes of stogies? And then that bullet-festooned bandito bastard didn’t even bother to send him advance warning of his sortie? Losing a story like that could cost a correspondent his career. He hated losing, especially to these Eastern assholes and their smug bylines; he was now more determined than ever to make a name for himself on this campaign so that he could demand to be shipped over to France to cover the real action.
“Gibbie,” Seese purred. “You got anything to drink?”
“I’ll stop and let you suck on one of those saguaro bushes. I hear that’s how Geronimo survived out here.”
Seese rustled around under the floorboards searching for a bottle. “Can you ferment cactus juice?”
Gibbons was already regretting his decision to pool their expense money to purchase this wheeled tin lizard. He preferred working alone, but the paper was paying him such a paltry per diem that he thought he might save a few dollars. “Let’s go over the ground rules again,” he said, not that he was about to follow them himself. “None of us touches the typewriters until Black Jack camps for the night. You keep your eyes and hands off my copy. I keep mine off yours.”
“But Fullll—llllloyd,” Elser moaned. “Your prose is so smooth and seductive, how can we help ourselves?”
“Yeah, Gib,” Seese chimed in. “Tells us again of your ghost séances with President Madero before he bit the bullet. That story you wrote about his belief in astral conversations convinced me there is a God.”
“You gin-sogged heathens think I made all that up. But I’ll swear on St. Patrick’s crosier that Madero was talking to the spirits when I interviewed him. He even told me that George Washington was standing over my shoulder and shaking his head at what I was writing.”
“That’s because old George couldn’t tell a lie!” Seese said. “He saw that your notes were filled with them.”
Gibbons ignored their taunts. “Let me ask you two hacks something. I’ve filed at least a hundred stories from down here. But that asshole Snelden on the desk in Chicago keeps bitching about my standard background graf. He says I don’t explain this revolution so that the average American can understand it. How am I supposed to summarize this entire shithole war in one paragraph?”
Elser thought up a quick graf on the fly. “How about this one: ‘Foreign fat cats came into Mexico and bought up all the land and utilities. When the old guard in Mexico City howled in protest, Uncle Sam gave weapons and money to bandits like Zapata and Villa to do its dirty work. Then that Puritan Woodrow Wilson got elected and decided revolution was dirty business, so he hung Villa out to dry. Villa retaliated by gutting a few gringos to avenge Mexico’s honor.’”
Gibbons groaned. “The literary world should be thankful you didn’t cover the Trojan War. Homer must be rolling over in his tholos.”
Elser kicked at the seat. “Hell, Gib, your prose is so damn purple that even the rotting fish complain when they get wrapped in it.”
“I can sum up the whole stinking business down here in one sentence,” Seese insisted. “The meek shall inherit the Earth.”
Gibbons laughed at their pathetic attempts to define morality for a hellhole like Chihuahua. “I’ve got an idea.”
“I hope it’s better than your last one,” Elser said. “I think those whores in El Paso gave me the clap.”
Gibbons spat out a ball of dust. “I say we come up with one background graf together and all take a vow to use it. That way, if one of our editors starts whining, we can point to the other’s stories and say this was the only description of the war we could get past the Mexican censors.”
Elser monitored the reaction from Gibbons’s reflection in the rearview mirror. “Hey, Gib. Those reports you filed on Villa’s defeat at Ceylaya. Did you have a prearranged code with your editor?”
Gibbons curled a devious grin. “Yeah, I knew old Pancho would read every word I wrote before he’d let me telegraph it home.”
“Villa’s illiterate,” Seese reminded him.
Gibbons winked, putting the lie to that myth. “Right, I forgot. He must have been looking at the comics when I found him with his nose in those Mexico City newspapers.”
“What was your secret code word?” Elser asked.
Gibbons revealed his secret adverb by writing it in the air. “‘Apparently.’”
Elser shook his head in grudging admiration. “Yeah, I remember you writing that Villa had apparently won the battle. Brilliant. Villa couldn’t understand the nuance. And all this time I thought you were just drunk when you filed that copy. That was the signal for your desk jockeys in Chicago to write a companion article stating that Villa had been routed.”
Seese sounded jealous. “You won’t pull stunts like that if you get to France.”
“When I get to France. And no censor is going to stop me over—”
A rider on a gray horse came galloping up from the south in a dust cloud. Gibbons braked the automobile to a grinding halt and handed out the Springfields. He shielded his eyes from the low sun, but couldn’t find the blue column of cavalry up ahead.
“Dammit, Gib,” Elser groused. “You fell behind the horses' asses again. Nigger Jack’s gonna flay us alive.”
Gibbons cringed on hearing the racial slur that Pershing had earned for commanding the Negro Tenth Cavalry. “Better watch your mouth, Elser. If the general hears you call him that, he’ll feed your balls to the scorpions. Now pay attention to those rocks over there.”
The three correspondents nervously aimed their rifles at the approaching rider, fearful of being waylaid by the notorious Fierro, the psychopathic killer who tortured Villa’s prisoners.
Gibbons squinted into the fading dusk light. “Oh, no.”
Seese fingered his trigger. “One of Pancho’s cutthroats?”
“Worse. It’s that corn-cracker Patton.”
Muttering curses, Elser and Seese lowered their weapons, but Gibbons lingered his barrel toward the horizon a bit longer, resisting the urge to let go with a couple of rounds at Pershing’s gofer, Lt. George Patton. The foul-mouthed cockerel had been assigned to ride herd on the correspondents to make sure they portrayed this so-called Punitive Campaign in the most favorable light. Irascible and high-strung, Patton was also dyslexic, a condition that made him defensive and combative around newspapermen. Yet Gibbons did share a couple of traits with the officer: a preening ambition for fame, and an insatiable lust to get to the battlefields of France. The delicious irony was that Patton had been allowed to accompany the invasion force not because of his merit, which was undeniable, but because Pershing had become enamored with Patton’s sister, who was waiting for the general back in El Paso. As the officer cantered up to the car, Gibbons whispered over his shoulder to his mates. “Let’s have a little fun with Georgie boy.”
Breathless from the forced ride, Patton circled the car and glared down at Gibbons. “I should have known you’d be at the wheel.”
“Howdy, Lieutenant,” Gibbons drawled like a cowboy. “What brings you to these parts? Somebody steal your saddle blanket again?”
Patton gritted his perfect teeth at having to deal with such uncouth scoundrels of inferior social class. “General Pershing is madder than a wet hen! He had to halt the column to wait for you people!”
Gibbons lit up a new cigar. “No need to wait for us, Jorge. We can follow the trail of canteens and soda bottles you soldier boys have been tossing behind to lighten your load. Are you fellas conducting a military expedition or seeding a new garbage dump?”
“Your orders are to maintain visual contact with the vanguard.”
“Not our fault, Lew-tenant,” Gibbons croaked between cigar puffs. “The telegraph operator on that train carrying your laundry flagged us over to deliver a message to headquarters.”
Patton blinked his white-browed eyelids in confusion. “That is my assignment! I am to personally convey all communications to General Pershing.”
“That’s what I told the old warthead. But he said you were so far up Black Jack’s ass that he couldn’t find you.”
Patton’s freckled face bloomed crimson. “Just hand over the telegram.”
“Oh, no, the message was too classified to put in writing. At least, that’s what the telegraph operator told us.”
Patton sat high in the saddle, agitating for his first military action. “The aeroplanes must have spotted Villa.” His voice pitched higher, and he began talking so rapidly that his horse spooked.
“Careful there, Wellington. We wouldn’t want another caparisoned steed to fall on you and break your flashlight again.” Gibbons heard Elser and Seese sniggering behind him. Two days ago, Patton’s pampered roan, unaccustomed to the Mexican heat, had collapsed atop him, but miraculously the officer had suffered no broken bones, only a bruised ego. Because of that embarrassing accident and a dozen others, Gibbons had early on concluded that this expedition was star-crossed. Hell, even Pershing had narrowly escaped injury in an automobile collision on the morning that the invasion force mustered to leave Columbus.
“Dammit, Gibbons, speak up!” Patton demanded. “Where is the Mexican felon hiding? I’ll take a contingent of cavalry down there at once and surround him before he escapes.”
Gibbons puffed away with lubricious delight. “No, no. The message is much more classified than mere enemy surveillance.”
Patton, now even more bollixed, looked around to make sure no Villistas were lurking nearby to overhear the communiqué. “Well, out with it! There’s no time to waste!”
Gibbons delayed to build to the crescendo. Finally, he cracked, “Your sister Nita said to tell your future brother-in-law that she would like him to bring some tamales home for dinner this evening. Not too spicy, though.”
The two reporters in the backseat unleashed howls of laughter.
Patton was apoplectic. “Goddam you, Gibbons! I demand a duel of arms! You have besmirched the honor of my sister and my clan!”
Gibbons flipped the ashes of his stogie at the hooves of Patton’s horse. “Soon as King Arthur can assemble the Knights of his Round Table, we’ll have us a joust. But until then, let’s you and I not disembowel each other before we reach the Flanders trenches. I shouldn’t think it the destiny of a Patton to be shot by a lowly reporter in Chihuahua. You ought to wait for the next Waterloo or Gettysburg before you get yourself a memorial. Now, for what, may I ask, did you come back to us? Have you requisitioned those cervezas with the limes we ordered?”
Patton finally calmed down. With a look suggesting that he had swallowed castor oil, he grudgingly reported, “The general wishes to extend to you, Mr. Gibbons, an invitation to ride in his car with him for an hour.”
“What the hell?” Seese yelped. “Why does Gibbons get an interview?”
Gibbons lorded a victorious grin over his fellow passengers. “I told you Black Jack’s a military genius, boys. He knows the pecking order of a troop.” He turned back to Patton. “I’ll speak to the general on one condition.”
Patton’s eyes rounded. “You are making demands on him?”
“I didn’t fall off the caisson yesterday,” Gibbons said. “Pershing isn’t looking to enjoy my raconteur wit, rare as it is. I’m the only hombre in this sorry exodus that has ever spent time with Villa. The general wants to prime me for information. I’m willing to be primed, of course, but I want a guarantee that he gives me the exclusive story about his strategy for the campaign.”
“Bastard!” shouted Seese.
“After all we’ve done for you, Gib?” Elser whined. “And now you knife us in the back? What about our rules?”
Patton finally accepted the condition with a gruff nod, and Gibbons jumped out of the car before the two correspondents in the back seat could wrestle him down. He climbed atop the saddle behind the officer who only moments before had threatened to kill him. As they galloped off toward the invasion column, he waved a taunt at the two cursing reporters.
ARRIVING AT THE CAMP WHERE the cavalry was resting, Gibbons leapt down from the saddle behind Patton and found Pershing sitting on a stool by the rear bumper of his car. The general, always a stickler for appearance, was peering into a mirror and shaving while his soldiers lay sprawled on the ground around him, catching a few rare minutes of sleep.
Despite his disdain for West Pointers and their airs, Gibbons liked Black Jack, even felt sorry for him. Pershing’s nickname was apt, not because he had once commanded colored troops, but because a cloud of darkness seemed perpetually to hover over him. Just eight months ago, the general had received the horrifying news that his wife and three daughters were killed in a fire at their residence in the Presidio at San Francisco. Devastated, he had never fully recovered from the tragedy, nor had he been able to shake off the guilt of not bringing them out to live at Fort Bliss with him. He seemed determined to take out his anger at the world by pushing his men to their limits in the field.
Patton came marching up to cut off Gibbons. Reaching Pershing first, he formally reported to his superior, “Sir, I have delivered up the man that your Generalship summoned.”
Pershing tossed his basin waters at Patton’s feet, making him dance. He shook his head in weary bemusement at the officer’s infuriating manner of always speaking as if he were a chamberlain in some medieval court. “Lieutenant, what would I ever do without you revealing the obvious to me?”
Patton was oblivious to the put-down. “Moreover, sir, I wish to lodge a complaint against Mr. Gibbons. He has besmirched the Army and our—”
“We’ll deal with that later,” Pershing snapped. “Leave us.”
Curtly rebuffed, Patton saluted stiffly and marched off, his ruddy cheeks in full bloom.
Pershing wiped the streaks of shaving cream from his jaw with a towel. “Gibbons, do me a favor and lay off Patton. At least while I’ve got my hands full south of the border.”
“He’s all the entertainment I have out here.”
Pershing arose from the stool and signaled for his adjutant to get the column rolling again. When the aide headed for the driver’s side of the car, the general stopped him. “Let’s let the newsman drive me for a while, Corporal.”
The aide, astonished, retreated and found a horse at the strap line.
Gibbons got in behind the wheel and started up the engine. When Pershing gave the signal for the advance, they rumbled south with the horse column following behind them. Gibbons got right to the task before the general could set the agenda for the interview. “Whose idea was it for the Army to bring a traveling bordello on this campaign?”
Pershing’s eyes narrowed. “How’d you find out about that?”
“Come on, General. I’m the all-seeing Eye of Whore Us for this invasion.”
Pershing didn’t find the play on words at all amusing. “Off the record?” Receiving a nod, the general revealed, “I figured we’d lose more men to gonorrhea than gunfire down here. This way, at least, I can keep the women clean.”
Gibbons shifted uncomfortably in his seat, already starting to get a sore ass from the rough ride. “You need to check the tread on these tires.”
“I’ll change them after we catch Villa. There’s no time to waste on pit stops. Some of the locals in the last town said the man was only ten miles away.”
Gibbons shook his head at that naiveté. “You’re not going to catch him.”
Pershing clearly wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to in such an irreverent manner. “Is every sonofabitch in the newspaper business a pessimist like you?”
“Villa will always be ten miles away. He was born running from the womb.”
“You’re a hell of an American, having an attitude like that.”
Gibbons pressed the accelerator to punish Pershing with the thud of the faltering shock absorbers. “The United States Army chasing ol’ Francisco is not much different than your boy Patton trying to mate with a porcupine.”
Pershing frowned at the baffling comparison. “How’s that, exactly?”
“It’s a thousand pricks against one.”
Pershing’s expression hovered between disgust and concession.
Gibbons pulled his flask from his vest and reached it over to the general for a swig, but the offer was refused. He shrugged and took another hit. “Have you ever gone five days without eating?” Receiving the expected shake of the head, he explained the reason for his question. “Villa once fought a battle without having eaten for a week. He can live out here on nothing. And he’s gonna lead you around like a snake drawing a rabbit into its hole.”
“My reports say he vowed to shoot any gringo on sight. How is it you managed to get close enough to him to gain his trust?”
Gibbons grinned at the memory of their first meeting. “I was sent to Juarez to cover the prizefight between Jess Willard and Jack Johnson. I kept hearing about this charismatic Robin Hood of the Mexicans who traveled in style in a train across the northern outbacks and was trailed by Hollywood directors hoping to make a movie about him. So I bought an old railcar and fixed it up with a bathtub and a desk, then painted its side with big white letters declaring that I was a famous journalist come to sing the praises of the most famous generalissimo in all of Mexico. I had the festooned car pulled into his camp with six mules. He was so impressed with my monstrous cojones that he invited me to hook it onto his private car and join him on the campaign.”
Pershing searched the parched desert for signs of his slippery prey. “Tell me about him.”
“He sings himself to sleep at night.”
Pershing huffed at the uselessness of that anecdote. “How does he find ammunition? We’ve dried up his sources north of the border, but he seems to have caches everywhere.”
Gibbons laughed grimly. “He’s very careful with his bullets.”
“How so?”
“Well, when he captures prisoners, he stands them up nose to neck, five deep. That way he can shoot all of them in the head with one cartridge.”
Pershing flushed. “What drives such a man? Greed? Sheer lunacy?”
“Honor.”
Pershing winced. “Honor?”
“Villa only became a bandit after shooting the hacienda owner who raped his sister.”
“If he had any real honor, he’d come out and fight like a man.”
Gibbons was always grated by the ignorance of Americans, who could not understand the world unless it was clearly divided into heroes and villains. “Francisco Villa loves Mexico more than life itself. Last year, more than a hundred revolutionaries from all over the country met to decide the fate of the country. The delegates at the convention decided that the only way to gain a lasting peace was for both Carranza and Villa to resign from their positions of power. Do you know what Villa said in response to this suggestion?”
“He probably shot them.”
Gibbons shook his head. “He agreed to resign. And then he suggested that both he and Carranza be executed to make sure that no one would expect their return to power.”
Pershing shivered his mustache by blowing out his upper lip in disgust. After several moments of troubled contemplation, he asked, “What does the man like to eat?”
Gibbons wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. “You planning to hold a feast for him?” When he saw that the general was serious about his inquiry, the correspondent answered, “He likes ice cream. Peanut brittle. Sautéed asparagus.”
“Alcohol?”
“He doesn’t touch the stuff. It’s his only character flaw.”
Pershing finally relented under Gibbon’s inquisitive glare demanding the reason for such a question. “This is way off the record. We’ve been in contact with some Japanese businessmen who have access to Villa.”
“And?”
“They’ve agreed to poison him for us.”
Gibbons was a hard man to shock, but that made his jaw drop. When the general refused him a direct look, he shook his head, chastising himself for expecting better from an American army. “Well, I guess not everyone can be driven by honor. Particularly Woodrow Wilson.”
“Watch your mouth. I won’t put up with that kind of talk.”
“You signed off on this culinary assassination?”
Refusing the reporter a direct look, Pershing shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “The decision was made in Washington.”
Gibbons stopped the car, determined to finish the interview before moving another inch. “This so-called Punitive Expedition of yours will have repercussions beyond what you and the President can imagine.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“The Kaiser watches every move the United States makes. His Prussian bootlickers will be closely monitoring your military campaign down here, if that’s what you call this ridiculous scorpion hunt. When you fail to catch Villa—and you will fail—the Germans will take it as a sign of weakness.”
“That’s a stretch, even for you,” Pershing scoffed.
“Just wait and see.”
“Whatever happens, you’ll no doubt be safe under your reporter’s hat.”
“I’ll make you a bet, General. A case of that moonshine you Missourians are so famous for says I get to the trenches in France before you do.”
Pershing reached over to unlock the door latch, indicating that the interview was over. “In the unlikely event that we are ever over there together, make damn sure you stay out of my way.”
THAT NIGHT, GIBBONS SAT ALONE under the stars of old Mexico, and with a spent flask at his side, pecked away on his typewriter. After an hour, he put the finishing touches on the last paragraphs of the story that he would deliver the next morning to the telegraph operator on the train:
They call it “The Gringo Hate.” It is a well-named living, breathing thing, sometimes dormant, but never extinct. It is ever smoldering when it is not in flame. It never dies out. It is ever ready to rise up. It is admitted and recognized and cultivated.
That is the feeling Mexicans have toward Americans. For obvious reasons it does not appear in the diplomatic notes that reach Washington from the various revolutionary parties. On state occasions or in formal negotiations, especially where recognition by the United States is the desired object it is replaced by suave Latin politeness.
It may be said to the credit of the Mexican that he holds but little of the unreasonable prejudice against the Jew. The negro comes in for perfect equality among the lower classes. The chinaman is envied for his ability to save money and the Spaniard is disliked because he belongs to a nation that once ruled Mexico.
But the American is hated.