It fit my hand like it had been made for me, felt as familiar as my own skin. The embossed eagles were worn smooth and the burring at the top of the hammer had been thumbed dulled, but the Colt was in fine condition. How many hands had held it? I wondered. How many rounds had it fired in its time? How many men had it shot? It was fully loaded. I worked its action, cocked and uncocked it, put it on half-cock and spun the cylinder. I opened the gate and dropped a round into my hand and felt its weight, then put the bullet back into the chamber and thumbed the gate closed and eased the hammer down. I took the Smith & Wesson out of my pants and replaced it with the Colt and tucked the top-break into the saddlebag.
The larger of the two clippings was from a 1914 Mexico City newspaper and was a report on Pancho Villa’s and Emiliano Zapata’s takeover of the capital during the Revolution. It included a large photograph of about two dozen Mexicans crowding around Villa, who was seated in an ornate high-backed chair. He was in a military uniform but I recognized him immediately. There were a half-dozen photos of him on display in a Mexican café in Marfa, and the town’s gun store had pictures of him on the wall too.
Everybody on the border knew Pancho Villa’s story—how at the age of sixteen he’d killed the hacendado who raped his sister, how he was forced to hide in the mountains and become a bandit. Then in 1910 the Revolution changed his life. He became commander of the great Division of the North and one of Mexico’s greatest heroes. The newspapers couldn’t get enough of him. The American press flocked around him every time he visited the border. It was said he had a dozen wives and was a hell of a dancer. He was a fearless fighter, they said, a natural genius at military tactics—and a fearsome man, a merciless executioner of his prisoners. He could have been president of the country but he said he was not wise enough to be its leader. He captured Mexico City but couldn’t hold it, and afterward, when his great army was beaten at last, he was forced to return to the mountains and once more live like a bandit. But then he did something that got the whole world’s attention—he invaded the United States. He raided the town of Columbus, New Mexico, and shot up the army camp there. A massive U.S. Army force, including airplanes, was sent across the border to find him and kill him. They tried for a year and couldn’t do it. The Yankee intrusion into Mexico only made him more of a hero to his countrymen. In 1920 he finally made peace with the Mexican government and—in a funny twist for a guy who had fought against hacendados all his life—he was given a hacienda as part of the deal. But even in retirement he was feared by many powerful men, and a few years later he was assassinated.
The caption under the photograph said Villa was sitting in the President’s Chair in the National Palace. It identified the hawkish-looking man on his immediate left as Emiliano Zapata and the man at his right hand as Tomás Urbina. But the guy who really caught my attention was a large man standing at the very edge of the picture, holding his white Montana hat in a dark big-knuckled hand, his hair neatly combed, his shirt buttoned to the neck under his open coat, his watch fob dangling from the coat’s breast pocket. His face had been circled in ink and he was looking at something or someone behind the photographer and off to the side. Judging by his expression, I’d have bet it was a woman.
He looked strangely familiar, but for a moment I didn’t understand why. And then I did. If I’d worn my hair a little shorter, if I’d trimmed my mustache a little neater, if my eyes had been black instead of bright blue…I could’ve been looking at a picture of myself. The caption said he was Rodolfo Fierro.
I’d heard of him too, of course. Who hadn’t? El Matador, they called him. El Señor Muerte. Manos de Sangre. El Carnicero—the Butcher. He had a dozen such names. He was Villa’s chief executioner. The border Mexicans spoke of him in the same tone they used in speaking of Death itself. There were dozens of stories about him. They said he shot three hundred prisoners one afternoon in a big corral in Ciudad Juárez, that he gave them a chance, ten at a time, to run to a stone wall and climb over it, and he shot every one of them except the last, whom he deliberately let get away. But I’d never seen his picture, nor had anybody I knew. Until now.
The other clipping was a newspaper picture of Fierro by himself. It was taken from only a few feet away and had no caption. It showed him sitting in a chair at a sidewalk table, his face turned to the camera, his eyes shadowed by the brim of his Montana hat, his coatflap hanging away from the holster on his hip and exposing the butt of the Frontier Colt and its ivory grip carved with a Mexican eagle.
I stared and stared at that picture as the sky turned the color of fresh blood and the darkness slowly rose around me.
She sure as hell knew how to keep a secret, my mother.
The way I figured it, he’d either given her the Colt or she had stolen it from him. And she’d clipped these pictures. And before she died she’d shared the secret with her sister and given her the clippings and the gun. I wondered if Aunt Ava would ever have told me the truth if I hadn’t had to run.
The light had gone so dim I could barely see his face in the photo.
“Hey Daddy,” I said.
On a gray and windy afternoon two days later I sold both the Jack horse and my saddle to a rancher in Sanderson who knew a good mount when he saw one, even one that had been ridden as hard as I’d been riding this one. I kept the saddlebags and my blanket. He asked me no questions except if I’d sign a bill of sale, which I did. I patted the horse and said so long to it. I turned down the rancher’s offer of a bed for the night but accepted a ride into town.
I hadn’t eaten since the night before when I’d cooked a skinny jackrabbit over a low fire. So I went into a café and ordered a thick steak with gravy and fried potatoes, green beans and cornbread, a big glass of iced tea, and a slab of pecan pie for dessert. When I was done eating, the two plates looked freshly washed. The waitress gave me a wink and said, “Appetite’s working just fine, hey?” I left her a half-dollar tip.
I went over to the railtracks and followed them eastward for about a hundred yards and then sat on my saddlebags in the meager shade of a mesquite and waited.
An hour later an eastbound train pulled into the Sanderson station for only as long as it took to load and unload mail, and then it started chugging on again. I had thought to wait till dark to jump a freight but I didn’t see any sign of the railroad bulls I’d heard so much about from YB hands who’d ridden the rails, so I said the hell with it and jogged out to the track and picked out a boxcar with a partly open door as it came rolling up, slowly gaining speed.
I ran alongside the open door and pitched the saddlebags and blanketroll through it and then grabbed hold of the iron rung on the door with both hands and swung a foot up and hooked a heel on the car floor. I brought up my other leg and started wriggling myself in feetfirst—and somebody in there kicked me hard in the leg and said, “Ass off, wetback!”
He was a tramp with dirt-colored teeth and he kicked me twice more in the side before I worked myself far enough into the car to brace myself. On the next kick I snatched hold of his pant leg and pulled him off balance and he fell on top of me and almost rolled out of the car. He tried to scrabble back from the open door but I grabbed him by the collar and yanked hard and he went sailing out of the car with a yell.