Free TOM MIX AND PANCHO VILLA: A Novel of Mexico and the Texas border by Clifford Irving Page A

said.
    “Candelario?”
    “Hijo de puta! Should I swear on my mother’s life? For the love of Christ, tell us your decision!”
    That whiff of Hipólito had made up my mind. I knew that Candelario and I had to be giving off the same aroma; it would have backed a skunk into a corner.
    “Every whorehouse I’ve ever been in has a big tub downstairs,” I said. “That gets my vote. A hot bath first. Then … we’ll see.”
    That decision was about as popular as an ulcerated tooth, but they were both men of honor, and after they groused and complained for a while, they finally agreed. Candelario was a shade more warm to it than Hipólito, because he figured it would at least get us inside the whorehouse first, and it did. It was a quiet night, and the only other customers were a couple of beer-sodden troopers up from Camp Furlong.
    The iron tub was there, just as I had predicted, and not only was it vacant and full of steaming hot water, but it was big enough for three grown men or other combinations. We stripped down and jumped in. The madam—a Mexican woman named Doña Margarita, who was said to be sympathetic to the revolution—took a quarter from each of us and then extracted a silver dollar for what she claimed was a bottle of genuine scotch whiskey. We passed it back and forth while we soaked in the big tub and discussed the state of our souls. The hot water flowed round my aching hide, smooth as molasses and soothing as a mother s touch. The whiskey heated up my insides, and the bath wrinkled my outsides a ruddy pink.
    The bottle of whiskey somehow got to be empty. Another one somehow took its place. Hipólito told us a tale of his youth when he and his brother were bandits in the Sierra Madres.
    “…Pancho knew that the cry of the gray dove was a warning that men were near. Usually rurales. …”
    His voice began to falter, and soon he started to snore. Candelario had begun a song of the desert, but it faded too. His good eye rolled in his head, and it had no more expression than the one made of glass. He reached for the whiskey bottle outside the tub, but his hand never made it. His snores grew louder than those of Hipólito.
    I was headed in that direction, or at least not far behind, when a door opened at one end of the cellar and the body of a handsome blond woman swished by, her yellow head atop a pile of wondrous curves. She nodded in a friendly manner to us in the tub, then took some towels out of a chiffonier at the other end of the room and then flounced back. She wore a skintight blue silk dress, and from the rear, just below her belted waist, it looked like two boar shoats fighting under a wagon sheet. I awoke in a hurry.
    “Excuse me, ma’am … señorita …”I cleared my throat of the sour taste of whiskey. “You do work here, don’t you?”
    “Yes, chéri. My name is Yvette.”
    “Are you from New Orleans, Yvette?”
    “ ‘Ow you know that?”
    “And you’ve got a sister?”
    “Ah … my sister. Oui—si. She is Marie-Thérése.”
    “Would you mind waiting a minute while I wake my friend here? There’s some business I know he’d like to discuss with you.”
    The blond and curvaceous Yvette was willing, and I shook Candelario until I thought I might rattle the glass eye out of its socket. But all he did was add some grumbles to his snores and finally slide a little farther down into the warm water. Hipólito was equally uncooperative.
    “They are not very interested,” Yvette said, smiling. I could see the carved line of her lips beneath the red color. “But what about you, chéri? I am ready, and so is my sister.”
    I thought, Get thee behind me, Satan. But if he obliged, all he managed was a hard shove forward. I asked her what we could do about my friends, as I didn’t want them to drown while I was taking my pleasure, and in that lovely French accent she told me not to worry, she would send someone down to keep an eye on them. Anyway, once the water cooled they would wake