Out Now

by Saundra Mitchell

  By the time Léon deserted, he had grown to hate not only la Légion but his own country, for starting this war in the name of unsettled debts, and for doing it while los Estados Unidos were too deep in their own civil war to intervene. So Léon had done the small but devastating things that earned him the name Le Loup. At night, he strolled into French camps wearing his stolen uniform. The blue coat with gold-fringed epaulettes. The red pants that tapered to cuffs at the ankles. The stiff yellow collar that rubbed against his neck when he nodded at the watchmen as though he belonged there.

  He stole guns, throwing them into rivers. He set horses loose, driving them toward villages too poor to buy them. He pilfered maps and parchments, leaving them burning for the men to find. The rumors said he’d even called wolves from the hills, scattering the camps. But when I’d asked him about that, he only smiled.

  Now the memory of Léon’s smile stung so hard I looked for the cut of it on my skin.

  “He was working against them,” I told Oropeza.

  Oropeza looked out through the silk curtains and onto the rows of curling grapevines.

  “Then he is a traitor,” Oropeza said. “He is not even loyal to his own country. What would make you think he would be loyal to you?”

  He turned his gaze to the square of tile where I stood in my huipil. In that moment, I saw myself as Oropeza must have seen me.

  Men like Oropeza would never consider me worth looking at. I was short, wide hipped, a girl from the villages. I had only ever been told I was pretty by my abuela.

  And Léon. My lobo.

  Oropeza laughed. “The little campesina thinks el francés loves her?”

  Campesina. I knew what that word meant to him, how he wielded it as both insult and fact. It was a word men like Oropeza kept ready on their tongues, a way to show their judgment both of where I had come from and the shape of my body. To them, my height and form marked me. A peasant’s shape, men like Oropeza called it, a shape made for work close to the ground.

  “All he told you was lies,” Oropeza said. “He might have thought you were a little bit interesting.” He gestured at my hair. “A distraction.”

  The salt of my own tears stung.

  “One day you will thank me for what I’ve saved you from,” Oropeza said.

  I set my back teeth together. He considered me and everyone like me a child. Men like him thought they had more of God in their hearts than we did, as though they held it in the lightness of their skin, or, for a few of them, in their eyes as blue as the seas their ancestors had crossed to claim this land.

  Oropeza lurched forward, clutching his chest as though it had cramped. And then his stomach, as though he’d had a portion of bad wine.

  I stepped back.

  The venom in me, carried in my family’s blood, was spilling out. It had built in me, spun and strengthened by my rage. Then it had flowed into the air between me and Oropeza until he was sick with it.

  This was the poison of Las Rojas, the venom our rage could become.

  I kept myself back, pressing my tongue behind my teeth to stop myself.

  I could not let the poison in my blood make Oropeza sick. If he’d heard the stories about my family and realized they were more truth than superstition, he would have me dragged into the street and killed as a bruja.

  One of Oropeza’s men showed me out. My steps led me over the polished tile, and then out into Oropeza’s front gardens.

  Léon had stayed for me. He had kept himself here, caught between la Légion he’d deserted and this country that considered him an enemy. And he’d been taken for it.

  He’d never had the stomach for la Légion. He’d told me the night I found him, once I’d given him enough water for him to speak and he’d come out of the fever enough to make sense with his words.

  He’d only joined because it had given him a way out of Alsace. He’d been told that la Légion would never check on the name he’d been born with, the name that would give away more than he ever wanted anyone to know of the body he kept beneath his clothes. The chest he bound down. The shoulders and back he worked hard enough that they could take as much weight as any other man’s.

  And la Légion hadn’t checked. They did not want to know. They preferred their légionnaires forget who they’d been.

  He could take the fighting, and even the beatings they gave les légionnaires to harden their spirits. But he could not stand how his régiment let the men work out their rage on village women. How they killed brothers or husbands who protested.

  Léon had spoken up enough that they considered it rebellion. So each night they beat him in a way they called les couleurs. Blood on one cheek, bruises on the other, the pale, untouched stripe of his nose and lips between. The colors of the French flag, meant to put the allegiance back in him.

  The night I found Léon, he’d worn those colors. It was the first time he’d tried running, and they’d caught him. So they’d tied him to one of the acacia trees that bloomed yellow each spring. His back against the thin trunk. His wrists and ankles bound behind it so he could not stand. All he could do was kneel.

  They had told him that they may or may not come back for him, and if they did, it would be because they were curious if the wolves had eaten him.

  That night, una vieja from our village had sent me into the woods. She asked me to bring her an oyamel branch from the fir tree she always held a little of as she prayed. I only noticed Léon because, at the sound of brush crackling under my feet, he lifted his head. His forehead shone with sweat. And through his fever, the thing I would later come to know as his charm seemed a kind of delirium, a madness. He’d mumbled a few words in French before saying, “If I’d known a beautiful woman would be calling on me, I would have made myself presentable.”

  I unbound him and brought him home not because I was kind. I brought him home, holding him up as his eyes opened and shut, because if it had not been for the mercy of the other families in our village, my abuela would not have had a proper burial. I could not have done it myself. My heart was so weighted with losing her I was sure it would pull me into whatever hollow in the ground I made for her.

  So I brought home this tall, underfed boy with hair so blond the moon made it look white. I boiled water and made pozole, to show God I was grateful, and that there was mercy left in me.

  But there was no mercy in men like Oropeza, and Ariel, and Quintanar.

  I had failed Léon. I had lost him. And now, at dusk, when a shot rang through the air, I screamed into the sound.

  I screamed into the wind bringing me the rattling laugh of the men who killed Léon. I sobbed into the silhouettes of mesquite and acacia, and into the darkening blue of the sky.

  Still screaming, I crossed myself, saying a prayer for the soul of Léon Bellamy.

  Léon, the boy who made me laugh when he tripped over rolling his r’s. Léon, who had startled the village with his eyes, so pale gray that at night they looked silver, and his hair, light as bleached linen. Léon, who had won them over with his wonder about armadillos, how the animal rolled itself into a ball of plate armor.

  Léon, the boy who had put his mouth to my ear and told me the brown of my skin made him think of wild deer roaming the woods where he was born.

  Even in this moment, opening under me like a break in the earth, Abuela would have told me to find some small thing to thank God for. There was one, just one, I could get my fingers around.

  No one, not la Légion, not Oropeza, ever knew Léon as anything but a boy. They did not know that his mother had christened him with a girl’s name. They did not know that he had joined la Légion less out of patriotism and more for the chance to live as who he was. If they had, Oropeza would have thrown it at me, mocked me for it. He would have made clear what he thought of us, Léon living among the other soldiers with his bound-down chest, me lifting my chin in the street as though I w
ere the equal of the powder-pale women in their escaramuza dresses.

  But even this small mercy broke in me. All of it broke.

  First I had lost my grandmother, made sick from her rage over what this war had taken. She always warned me not to let my rage kill me, but in the end her own had spread its venom through her.

  They said this war was over, even as women wept over their stoves and into their sewing. Even now when an Alsatian boy had just been blindfolded and shot.

  My rage felt so hot it would singe away my smallest veins. There were so many empty places where everything I had lost once fit. Now there were only the dustless, unfaded patches where all I loved had been.

  There was nothing left. Yes, there were the women who had loved me and my abuela; my abuela had fed them when they were sick and prayed over them when they bore children. There were even the ones who had taken to Léon like he was a stray. But now they only reminded me of those empty places.

  I found the few clothes of my grandfather’s that Abuela had kept, the ones he’d left behind. He had dared to hit her once, and her rage had struck him back so quickly, felling him, he called her a witch, yelling, “Bruja,” as he fled our village.

  I hemmed his trousers with quick, rough stitches. I stuffed his boots with scrap cloth so they would fit. I had the small, wide feet of my grandmother, the edges rough from years of running without shoes.

  Like a silent prayer, I gave her my gratitude. Abuela had wanted me to play outside barefoot as much as I could stand, so that if ever I could not afford shoes, my feet could go without them. Now I understood what my grandmother had wanted, for me to keep my heart soft but the edges of me hard enough to survive the world as it was.

  My grandfather’s poncho, I plunged into red dye, the rough agave taking it fast.

  At night, the color wouldn’t show. But I would feel it against my skin.

  I would not let this rage kill me. By using it, I would drive it from my body. I would turn it against the last man who would not save Léon. The man, who, by dawn, would be robbed of his finest things.

  Oropeza’s guards, I took first.

  I neared the hacienda with my head lowered. My hat hid the red of my hair. The brim shaded my face. I left the guards no chance to wonder if I was some messenger boy bearing midnight news, or whether they should draw their brass-throated pistols. I let my rage stream into them. I let it become liquid and alive.

  They fell, one gripping his side, another holding his chest as though the venom clutched his heart.

  Anything I could carry, I stole. Fine cigars. Money and papers from the desk drawers. Jewels that had once belonged to Oropeza’s wife; Abuela was sure he had killed her with his cold heart as well as we could with our poison.

  I slipped through the house, the moon casting clean squares of light through the vestíbulo windows. The strap of my woven bag cut into my shoulder, heavy with all I had taken.

  The rustling of grape leaves outside and the tangle of voices stilled me.

  Oropeza and his friends stumbled drunk through the dark grapevines. Calvo and Acevedo and other men with more power than sense and more money than mercy.

  They laughed. They swapped echoes of the same questions.

  “How much are los franceses giving you for the traitor?” Calvo asked.

  “How did you even manage this?” Acevedo asked. “I thought the only Frenchmen you knew were the ones you’d had shot.”

  “Why didn’t I think of this?” another man asked.

  “Because you’re not as smart as I am,” Oropeza said.

  A question had just formed in me when I saw the figure held between them, being shoved forward and made to walk. Blindfolded, his wrists bound behind his back.

  Because he could not see, he stumbled, drawing their laughter. The long points of their boots needled his shins.

  They were forcing him toward the road that ran behind Oropeza’s estate.

  My gasp was sharp as the first breath waking from a nightmare, the moment of wondering if, as in those dreams, my fingers were made of lightning or the sky was truly a wide blue blanket woven by my abuela’s hands.

  Léon.

  They hadn’t let the firing squad take him.

  Hope bubbled up under my rage, but with it my anger thickened.

  They hadn’t killed him, not yet. Instead, Oropeza was trading him to the country that now considered him an enemy. Trading him for money, for favors, for the currencies of men who owned so much ground but never bent down enough to touch it.

  He was surrendering El Lobo to the country that called him Le Loup, the country Oropeza declared his enemy but still bargained with in secret.

  My hope lifted my rage higher, driving it into a swirling cloud that flew out the windows and rushed at the men. It caught them, striking them down like el Espíritu Santo had slain them.

  But this was not God’s work. This was not the Holy Spirit filling these men. This was the work of una Roja. A poison girl, veiled in men’s clothing.

  The men fell to the ground, holding their throats and chests and sides. The richest ones, the ones whose boots had the longest tapered points, twisted to keep from stabbing themselves with their own shoes. Oropeza jerked as though demons poured through him. My vengeance, a vengeance I shared with my grandmother and all Las Rojas, was toxic as thorn apple and lantana. It was poison as strong as moonflower and oleander.

  I threw open the glass-inlaid doors to the back gardens. I stepped between writhing men and grabbed Léon’s arm, pulling him with me. I caught the smell of his hair. Even now, it held the scent I’d come to think of as the countryside in Alsace. Dust and rain on hills. Fields covered in the blue of flax flowers and the gold brush of oats. He’d brought it with him on his skin. And when he told me the brown of my naked back reminded him of the deer that roamed that land, he gave me a place in his country.

  Even through my rage and my fear, my lips felt hot with wanting to touch his skin. They trembled with wanting to give him my name.

  Oropeza gazed up at me. His face showed no recognition, only the fear that I was a boy born of robbers and devils.

  Through the open doors, Oropeza yelled into the house for his servants. He called them stupid and slow. He called them fools.

  They ran across the tile. But when they saw the scene, when they saw the writhing men, and me, and the blindfolded man I had stolen from their patrono, they sank to the floor. They clutched their stomachs as though they, too, had been poisoned.

  My breath stilled with worry that I had made them ill, that my venom was in them even though I had no rage for them.

  But they caught my eyes, and smiled.

  They twisted as though I was striking them down, so they could not be blamed for letting me rob Oropeza.

  They had heard the stories. Las Rojas. They noticed the wisp of hair falling from my grandfather’s hat and onto my neck. They saw me as the poison girl I was, a daughter made of venom, even as I hid in my grandfather’s clothes.

  I held on to Léon, leading him around the stricken men.

  Oropeza and his friends would not die, not tonight. But they would thrash on the tile and the dirt until I was too far for my anger to touch them.

  “Who are you?” Léon asked. His breath sounded short more from trying to press down his fear than from how fast I made him walk.

  I cut the rope off his wrists and pulled off his blindfold and kissed him as fast as if I had more hands than my own. I didn’t care if the act would reveal me. My rage kept these men down like a blanket over a fire.

  Léon’s lips recognized mine. He kissed me harder, setting his hands on my waist to hold me up.

  “Go,” I whispered, my mouth feathering against his jawline.

  Now he smelled like sweat, and the bitter almost-rust tang that I swore was the last trace of his fear. But under these things I found
the smell I remembered. The warmth of flax and oats, things his family had grown for so long his skin carried the scent across the ocean.

  “You have to run,” I said, my forehead against his cheek.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. His breathing came hard. I could feel his heartbeat in his skin. “Not unless I’m going with you.”

  I pulled away so we could see each other as much as the dark let us.

  “They took you because you stayed for me,” I said, still keeping my voice to a whisper. “I am poison. Don’t you see that?”

  Léon set his hand against my cheek.

  “Emilia,” he said, quiet as a breath. He meant it for no one but me.

  The wind hid the strain of his breathing. The far lamp of the moon turned the gray of his eyes to iron. The sound of my name made me feel like the cloth on my body was blazing to red, my hair a cape as bright as marigolds.

  “You are here and I am alive.” Now his accent turned sharp, not his practiced Spanish. “So tell me what makes you poison.”

  He put his hand on the back of my neck and kissed me, this boy who wanted to belong to the girl I was, brown and small and poisonous.

  To the men, we might have looked like two boys, one pressing his mouth to the other’s. Tonight, we would pull off our shirts and trousers for each other. Léon would be a boy, no matter the shape of his chest beneath his shirts. And I would let my hair fall from my grandfather’s hat and be the girl I had always been to him. For Léon, I would put on my best enagua just so he could push the soft cotton of the tiered skirt up my thighs. I would let my breasts lay against his skin. I would kiss where the rope had cut into his wrists and the cloth into his temples.

  I wanted to protect his body as though it were mine.

  But my own, I wanted these men to see it, and remember. I wanted them to know that I was my abuela’s granddaughter, that I carried the blood of poison girls.