‘Forrest Gump’ writer pens tale of Southwest
Toward the conclusion of “El Paso,” Winston Groom’s sprawling, new 477-page novel set in northern Mexico and the American Southwest, a sadistic general in Pancho Villa’s rebel army saunters across the international bridge connecting Juarez and El Paso. Rodolfo “The Butcher” Fiero makes his way to a gun shop, hoping to purchase one of the new American Springfield rifles the U.S. Army is using, a bolt-action repeater rumored to have an accurate killing range of 500 yards or better. “Fiero liked nothing more than to shoot men at a great distance,” Groom writes.
A young American military officer, hoping to take the measure of the noxious rebel general, follows him into the shop. As Fiero stands at the counter examining the rifle, the shop owner watching, the American soldier has a question for the customer from across the river. “Are you expecting this man to sell you this rifle so you can use it to kill American soldiers?” Lt. George S. Patton asks.
“No,” Fiero tells him. “I want to kill jaguars in canyons. For killing American soldiers, I use a stick.”
Fiero was, indeed, Villa’s general; he drowned in a stream at the Battle of Agua Prieta when his horse got caught in quicksand. And the young Patton, a quarter century before he became a major figure in the world war to come, was with Gen. John J. Pershing during his punitive expedition into Mexico after Villa attacked Columbus, N.M. It’s highly unlikely, though, that the two men encountered each other in an El Paso gun shop.
“Students of the period will notice that I have occasionally tampered with the evidence,” Groom writes in an afterword, noting that “this is a novel, not a history, and not even a ‘historical novel’ in any conventional sense.”
In this, his 21st book, Groom throws together
Villa and Pershing, the writer and aphorist Ambrose Bierce (who disappeared in Mexico), the movie cowboy Tom Mix (who may or may not have been there), the Socialist journalist John Reed, the West Point grad and Buffalo Soldier Henry Flipper, among other historical figures, and has them interact with a host of colorful characters of his own creation. The result is a combination of Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses” and “Blood Meridian” (minus the literary elan), director Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” and maybe a little bit of Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” if Woodrow and Gus had headed south instead of north. Groom may be a little thin when it comes to character development, but he knows how to tell a rollicking tale. He also comes up with some of the goriest and most ingenious ways of killing people I’ve read since perusing parts of the Old Testament. Characters succumb to hot cooking grease, a grizzly bear, a maimed rattlesnake, a fighting bull and poisonous moisture from a frog’s back. A youngster in the book almost succumbs to an enraged gila monster whose venomous bite doesn’t kill you but makes you wish you were dead.
Morgan family cattle ranch
Groom has done a little historical tampering before. In a novel published three decades ago, his made-up protagonist interacts with actual people at crucial moments in recent American history. Movie director Robert Zemeckis and his star, Tom Hanks, turned Groom’s “Forrest Gump” into a movie that won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and remains a cultural touchstone. The novel has sold 1.7 million copies worldwide.
Groom, author of several military histories since “Forrest Gump,” told me by phone this week from his home in Alabama that Hollywood’s interested in “El Paso” as well. “The problem is, it would have to be a costume drama with a cast of thousands, and it would be very expensive to make,” he said.
A hundred years ago this year, El Pasoans were watching the fighting in Juarez from the rooftop of the El Paso del Norte Hotel. Home to the largest ethnic Mexican population in the U.S. at the time, El Paso was at the core of plots, intrigues and political maneuverings as the Revolution raged just across the Rio Grande.
That’s not the tale Groom is telling, despite the title of the book.
“El Paso” owes its origins to stories he used to hear from a New York friend named Eddie Morgan, great-grandson of J.P. Morgan himself, about the Morgan family’s million-acre cattle ranch in the state of Chihuahua. The fact that Morgan and other wealthy Americans held so much Mexican land, while Mexican peasants lived lives of grinding poverty, gnawed at Villa. As Groom’s friend told the story over drinks at the Knickerbocker Club, the rebel general attacked the Morgan ranch in 1916, had his men dangle the ranch manager by the wrists from a courtyard gate and while he was still alive had his cavalrymen use him as saber practice. Villa also kidnapped Morgan family members, and J.P. traveled to Mexico via private railroad car — pausing in Nashville to buy a dancing bear — to negotiate their release.
“Twenty-something years ago, I remember telling myself there’s a novel here, and I’d love to write it, but I couldn’t quite get it the way I wanted it,” Groom said. “I would never have attempted it if I’d been sane.”
Three years ago, he took a year off from writing history to see if he could finally find the key to the sprawling, shapeless story; it would be his first novel in nearly 20 years. “I didn’t want to waste the time and croak or something without ever trying,” he said.
The story finally began coming together — after much cutting — when, in Groom’s words, “I realized you had to get as far removed from the real characters as you can. Otherwise, they won’t do what you want them to do.”
Assembling a motley crew
In Groom’s fictionalized version of his friend’s family tales, Boston railroad tycoon Col. John Shaughnessy, his adopted son Arthur and their families visit the colonel’s huge Chihuahua cattle ranch — Arthur flies down in his candy-apple red Luft-Verkehrs biplane — despite bloody battles erupting across northern Mexico. Villa and his men attack the ranch, kidnap Shaughnessy’s two grandchildren and hold them for ransom. When President Woodrow Wilson refuses to intervene, the brash, old colonel and his reluctant son lead a motley crew of cowboys and ne’er-do-wells they assemble in El Paso, along with a Mexican bullfighter and a Samoan bodyguard named Bomba, on a rescue mission across the harsh deserts and through the High Sierras. Hardships are endured, much blood is shed.
Now that the novel is done, Groom can get back to a book he’s calling “The Victors,” intertwining the stories of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. At 73, he may write another novel, maybe something set along the Natchez Trace. There’s no urgency. “It has to be something I feel,” he said.
Living with his family in Point Clear, Ala., on Mobile Bay, he says he’s contented, even if the Trace never grabs him. Thanks to “a box of chocolates” he opened up 30 years ago, he doesn’t have to do much of anything he doesn’t want to. J.P. Morgan, maybe even Pancho Villa, would approve.