21

Under Cover

Maintaining two personas, one male and one female, required planning. No one who had known Angel as a scabby-kneed hoyden would have described her as a planner, yet she had worked out the logistics of a double life.

Every so often she put on a flowered blouse and a long skirt with a flounce around the hem and went to Tres Marías. Her mission was to beguile information from the soldiers quartered there. She was good at it.

On her first foray she had met Berta, who sold tamarind candy to the soldiers and the passengers. Berta was seventeen. She was small, dark, and delicate, with a soft laugh. Angel trusted her with the secret of her real identity. Berta shared her candy so Angel could pose as one of the women who walked alongside the passenger cars, calling softly, “What will you take?”

Today, Angel had learned about the battles raging in the capital. Not even the soldiers at Tres Marías’ barracks knew what to make of it, but they thought maybe the troops arriving on tomorrow’s train could tell them more. Angel left with Berta to retrieve the trappings of her other life.

The folk of Berta’s village had been relatively well off until nine years ago. When the local hacienda owner moved the boundary post for water rights, the communal irrigation ditches dried up. Local officials, even under Francisco Madero’s post-Revolution government, continued to ignore pleas for justice. Angel found sympathy there.

For a silver ten-centavo piece the size of a shirt button, Berta’s widowed mother let Angel leave her trousers, shirt, sombrero, saddle, and weapons in her one-room hut on the outskirts of the village. Angel’s belongings took up more of the dirt-floor space in the tiny house than the family’s did. Berta’s younger brother pastured her mare, since a poor Indian woman riding such a fine animal would rouse suspicions among the soldiers of el gobierno.

Whenever Angel returned from Tres Marías, Berta’s mother insisted she share their evening meal. While Angel ate, the widow mended what ever rips had appeared in her clothes since the last visit. Berta had already reinforced the threadbare seat and knees of Angel’s trousers with scraps of canvas. Like most of the Zapatistas, Angel called herself guacho, orphan. For her, these simple kindnesses were gifts beyond price.

As for the spying, Angel enjoyed fooling men into divulging information, but she preferred trousers to a skirt. She felt safer as a soldier than as a woman, and not because of the Winchester 30-30 slung across her back. As a soldier she faced threats from federales in battle. As a woman, men of both armies, and civilians, too, might menace her on any given day.

Angel had just changed into her shirt and trousers when she heard a stifled cry behind the house. She grabbed her carbine and ran outside, scattering the small flock of chickens scratching in the dust. She rounded the corner and saw that a man had pinned Berta against the back wall of the compound. He held one hand over her mouth and tore at her clothes with the other.

Angel could smell the rotten stench of pulque. She wasn’t surprised to see that Berta’s attacker was Ambrozio Nuñez. She was no stranger to coincidence where he was concerned. God must have a grudge against either Nuñez or her to keep inserting him into her life to plague her.

The thought also occurred to her that he had come here to cause trouble for her while her men weren’t around. If that had been his plan, the lovely Berta had distracted him from it.

“Let her loose, cabrón.”

He gave her hardly a glance. “Go to the devil, coño.”

That he didn’t seem surprised to see her made Angel think that neither God nor coincidence had anything to do with his presence here. His original plan might even have been to rape her.

Angel didn’t consider him worth the waste of a cartridge. She grasped the carbine by the barrel and swung it with both hands. Ambrozio Nuñez was extraordinarily stupid as well as drunk, but even he must have expected her to attack. He dodged, but the walnut stock glanced off his skull with enough force to knock him out. He pitched backward onto the cone-shaped corncrib, crashing through its cornstalk and mud-plaster wall.

Angel dragged him out of the wreckage by his heels.

“Berta, help me carry him.”

Angel picked him up under his arms and Berta grabbed his ankles. They hauled him to the public fountain where Berta’s mother and several other women were gossiping while they filled their water jars. Angel didn’t have to say anything. Berta’s torn clothes told the story.

Ambrozio was beginning to stir as Angel finished stripping off his clothes and shoes. She left him naked to the women’s tender mercies. They went at him with what ever hard objects came to hand. The last she saw of him were his bare soles and blanched backside and women in noisy pursuit.

Angel retrieved her saddle and belongings from the house. On the way to the forest clearing to get her mare, she threw Ambrozio’s flea-infested clothes into a ravine. She hummed “Valentina” as she rode away. She looked forward to sharing this story with her comrades. Then she would play cards for cartridges until nightfall when she had plans that included Antonio.

First she had news to deliver.

She called out greetings and traded insults as she rode among the men squatting in small groups around their cookfires. Colonel Contreras had found a good bivouack site for his hundred or so troops. This mountain glen wasn’t far from Zapata’s temporary headquarters in Ajusco. It was densely wooded and could be reached only by an easily guarded defile.

Contreras’s men didn’t even have to worry about the smoke from their fires, although they weren’t in the habit of worrying anyway. Two companies of federales were garrisoned at Tres Marías, only enough to patrol the tracks. They didn’t stray far into the countryside. Since Madero had called Huerta back to Mexico City, the rebels and the government troops had operated on an unspoken agreement. As long as Zapata’s people left the train alone the federales didn’t go looking for them.

Angel brought information that would change everything. As she approached the farm house where Contreras stayed, she rehearsed what she would say about the battle raging in Mexico City. The squabbles in the Capital meant nothing to her, but she understood that the consequences could affect them all.

Many of the men in Contreras’s units neither knew nor cared who occupied the president’s seat in Mexico City. They pinned their loyalty on General Zapata and Colonel Contreras, and trusted them to tell them whom to fight. Like the other local chiefs, Contreras led by consensus. He was also the one who gave Angel and the rest their chivo, their pay, although not much and not often.

To be honest, while Angel waited to see Contreras, she was thinking about how she would torment Antonio when she finished here. He fretted whenever she left to mingle with the federales soldiers. She planned to tease him about her flirtation with the soldier called Juan.

Antonio said he was worried that el gobierno would discover who she was and hang her, but he also suffered a chronic case of jealousy. She knew how to reassure him on that second concern.

Wherever Angel’s band camped, she and Antonio looked for a place they could be alone. Here they had found the vine-covered ruin of a one-room stone cottage whose thatched roof had long since rotted away. It wasn’t far from camp, but it had a reputation for an infestation of snakes so people avoided it. Angel and Antonio took stout sticks to beat the vines and walls thoroughly to evict the reptiles, scorpions, and spiders lurking there.

They had progressed well into the exploration phase of love. Angel shook her head in an attempt to stop thinking about the warm, hard contours of Antonio’s bare body, and the feel of his strong, calloused hands stroking her.

Tonight might be their last chance for days to come to lay out their blankets and entwine among the vines. Government troop trains carried guns, ammunition, and food. Angel knew that when she told the colonel about the train leaving Mexico City tomorrow, he would decide to attack it.

No matter what the outcome, Angel and her people would have to go on the run again. She hoped they would be better armed and fed when they did.