Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  “I know what it is, cabrón,” said Tomás. “You think I don’t read newspapers? Do you think I only speak to Indians?”

  Tomás sat there in the same chair he had been seated in earlier. He poured Aguirre a snootful in the dirty glass and tipped the bottle to his lips. He took a long pull.

  Me vale madre, he told himself, which is how he stirred himself, finally, fatalistically, daily: I don’t give a damn.

  “Tell me about this piano,” he said, waving the bottle toward the wagon.

  For the first time in many weeks, something entertaining.

  Tomás was excited. Why, he remembered the days at his uncle Miguel’s home when gambling wagons rolled up to the great doors, and revelers came from all the ranchos. Tomás and Aguirre unhitched the eaves of the wagon and manhandled them up, where they were tied off and remained open like great bat wings. Inside, the pianist had been asleep in a cot tucked behind the upright piano on the bed of the wagon. Mirrors and gilt paint added a festive tone to the arrangement. He rose and shook out his red velvet coat and finger-combed his hair before donning his gray beaver-felt top hat.

  “That hat,” noted Tomás, “is as tall as a man from Michoacán.”

  The pianist was named Wolfgang Emiliano Froelich. He had hired Swayfeta to wrangle his magic wagon from El Paso in the hopes of procuring a saloon engagement for the winter. Tomás noted the piano had a pair of bullet holes in its side.

  “Gentlemen,” announced Wolfgang, “permit me to entrance you with the most popular songs of the day. Tunes enjoyed by royalty and fine households alike in such faraway wonderlands as New York, London, Paris, Washington—”

  “And Parangarícutirimícuaro!” Tomás yelled. It was his favorite word, the name of a town back in Michoacán. He had almost forgotten it. He was finally having a good time.

  “Play, please,” Aguirre said.

  Wolfgang eyed the bottle of burgundy. He licked his lips a few times to convey his unquenched thirst, but Tomás was not responding. Wolfgang sighed. He sat on his piano bench and arrayed sheet music on its small stand above the keyboard.

  “We begin with the musical sensation of last year, 1892’s grand composition ‘Daisy Bell.’ By the songwriter Harry Dacre. Known popularly as ‘Bicycle Built for Two’!”

  He pounded it out, to the delight of the Sky Scratcher. He demanded it be played again. When he discovered the song had lyrics about a fine young woman perched upon the seat of a bicycle built for two, he organized Swayfeta and Aguirre into a men’s choir and bellowed the lines with immense gusto. Aguirre was more than happy to sing; he had, once again, come to his compadre’s rescue.

  They were fully engaged in the newest musical sensation, Mrs. Hill’s “Happy Birthday to You,” when the procession heading down to the Lowe funeral in Tumacacori passed on the trade road beside the bosque. Three carriages in black mourning bunting rolled slowly past the gulley, and the raucous bellows of laughter and shouting reached the occupants clearly. The piano was quite loud in the midafternoon stillness, and it gave the entire desert a festive saloon feeling. This was, of course, mortifying to Teresita. She pulled her black veil over her face and turned away from the fine people who sat on the seats around her. They tried to remain expressionless, but really. Don Tomás! At a time like this! He was simply too much!

  Teresita hung her head. Wished for the wagons to hurry so her father’s debaucheries could no longer be heard. Her string veil was too thin to keep out his voice or hide her shame. Even the crows seemed embarrassed.

  The funeral-goers pretended they didn’t hear Tomás bellow: “Hoppy bort-days to joo!”

  They all jumped, however, when he shot his pistola into the air.

  The wagons moved on by at their slow pace, and one of the mourners patted Teresita on the arm.

  “I suppose,” she said kindly, “that your father will be indisposed and won’t be attending the funeral.”

  No one else said anything.

  By midnight, the killers’ horses moved among shattered tiles of flat slate by feel. Their horseshoes made small screams against the black rock, casting forth sparks that danced away to die immediately among the cool gravel and bones. Nothing could be seen of the riders. They were as deep in night dark as if the high dome above them had melted and poured over their heads. The iron shrieks, the clops of the hooves, the gasps of breaths moving in, moving out across a blind horizon.

  Four

  WHEN TERESITA RETURNED IN the night, she found the scattered ruins of her father’s little party. Wolfgang was asleep again behind his piano, and Swayfeta slept on the ground beside a small campfire. He was wrapped in a horse blanket, and the mules, freed from their traces, sniffed him and seemed to think uncharitable thoughts about him. He muttered, “Get away from me, you knob heads.” He rolled over.

  She could hear Don Tomás snoring inside the house.

  There was Don Lauro! He was slumped over the outdoor table, his few cases piled around his seat, and an oil lamp sputtering beside his head. He rested his cheek upon his crossed arms, and open upon the wood, a French poetry book: Les trophées, by the Cuban José-María de Heredia. Moths fluttered around Aguirre’s head. He would be mosquito bitten in the morning, and his neck would feel as though it were broken from his ridiculous posture. That and the wine headache would be epic. She looked around her. Empty bottles lay on the ground.

  She leaned down and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Too bad for you,” she whispered.

  Three pilgrims hunkered in the shadows beyond the wobbling light of the fire.

  “Yes?” she said.

  They came forward.

  Suppurating wounds. The stench of bad meat coming from their injuries. Adoration in their eyes. She wanted to sleep. She smiled at them. They prayed. She laid her hands upon them, then moved them away from the wounds and said her words and the pilgrims gasped and cried out softly and the wind kicked the treetops and the bats could almost be heard above them making their silent screams and kissing sounds and the moon was a thin curl of orange cotton floating in a pool of oil and the wounds burned and tickled and the pilgrims fell to their knees and kissed her hands and she said, “Rise—don’t do that,” and refused to accept their meager payments and patted them and embraced them and sent them away with bundles of herbs, saying, “It is late—go to sleep!” They left laughing and waving, and she knew she could not enter her house until they were far gone, because her own presence, her backlit waving, was their benediction, and they would look for her until the dark and the trees and the curve in the road stole her from their sight. She knew that when her work was done, her work was not done.

  Entering the stuffy house, she saw that her father had not made it to his bed but lay on his back in the middle of the floor with his arms cast wide. His pistol was in one hand, and an empty bottle was in the other. Over him, before she shut the door behind her, she sketched the sign of the cross. Then she went into her room and closed that door.

  Finally. Quiet. Alone.

  Dawn.

  Three vultures flew in languid circuits from the Bosque Ranch to Nogales and across the invisible line far south to Alamos, Sonora. They picked over the skeletal remains of a calf in the old Cabora pastures, and they rose high enough to see the River of Spiders threading its way down the great Sierra, where so many had died in Teresita’s name. The thin smoke of the burning of Tomóchic had long since dissipated, but the ash clouds formed dust devils still, the remains of warriors and rebels who died with their somber leader, Cruz Chávez, in that forgotten war. Cruz, the self-appointed Pope of Mexico, Teresita’s friend. Gone now, to cinders. Those vultures saw it all, saw the small flecks of color that were Yaqui warrior bands moving against the mounted Rurales and cavalry on the bloodred plains and the black smear of the Pinacate desert, volcanic shadows on the land, dead rivers like scars on the back of a slave. They veered on the wind, their black glistening wings barely moving, their great feathers spread like dark fingers reaching for the souls th
at still fluttered in the hot winds, looping, spilling down the sky from the tides of slaughter. Cabora, Alamos, Nogales, Temosachic, Bavispe, Huatabampo, El Júpare, Tumacacori, Tubac. They went south and they went west, and they went east, and they went north, searching endlessly for the dead. And they found the dead everywhere.

  Coyotes scrambled through the dawn with human flesh in their jaws where soldiers or bandits or Apaches or Rurales or rebels or cavalrymen had torn rancherías apart, scattering the walls in splinters, shooting the pigs and dropping the families in the gravel akimbo, untucked, half naked to the unforgiving sun god of their ancestors. Horse thieves ran from Arizona and New Mexico with remudas of stolen pintos pursued by orange wedges of roiling dust as they fled, American lawmen riding hard after them. Ambuscade and capture, assault and matanza. The Americans moved against the Apaches, the Apaches moved against the Mexicans, the Mexicans moved against the Yaquis. Rattling like leg bones all across the land, lone dry stalks of corn shimmied and worried in the breeze, their kernels pilfered by crows, their flaxen tassels detaching and sailing away to fall among pack rats and field mice, joining the stray cotton threads of the dead to make underground nests for writhing pale masses of blind infants.

  And messiahs bred and sprouted in the hills. Each flood of arterial blood watered a new crop of visionaries. Dancers stomped in circles until blood seeped from their feet calling the old gods to return, calling on Jesus Himself to raise His fist and smite the invaders. And the Hail Marys whispered in fear in wagon trains and adobe huts as the desert warriors seemed to fall out of the sky like hornets went unanswered. These desert gods required a new form of prayer. They did not respect the faith of those about to die.

  All across Sonora, into Chihuahua and back to Sinaloa, the followers of the Saint of Cabora stirred. How many starfish scars of bullets on how many backs moved among these crowds? They were followers of Teresita, turning her name into the name of a movement: Teresistas.

  No longer followers of presidents, no longer Yaquis or Mayos or mestizos, not even cristianos anymore. They were pilgrims from some other world. Pilgrims from the place where Cruz Chávez lived forever with his deadly long gun. Pilgrims from the very heart of Teresita herself—even those who had never seen or heard her knew she would smell like roses once they fell against her bosom and breathed her in. They believed her picture would stop bullets. And they believed that were they to be killed, her tender gaze could lift them from the grave.

  You could not touch God, but you could touch her.

  The vultures moved like black angels, watching. Miners came out of the mountains in slow avalanches of donkeys loaded with ore; Chinese railroad laborers bent to the rails or scurried across the border to Texas; Mormons sought Lamanites in the desert; and there was no telling which nation was which. And when their circuits were complete, the great birds drifted north again and circled the Bosque Ranch, hoping the great death would reach Arizona.

  Lauro Aguirre, bent over his drunken table and snoring, was caught in a muzzy fever dream. He stumbled into the Pillar of Boaz and knocked it over, greatly embarrassing himself as the gathered Freemasons guffawed. Then, to his shame and arousal, he realized he had forgotten to don his trousers and he stood before the assembled congregants naked from the waist down, except, in his dream, the men had become Methodist churchwomen on a Sunday morning who had not yet noticed his nakedness. Oh, the agonizing tingle in his loins! Yet… yet… his aching neck. His sore shoulder. And something touched him. Was this too the dream? A hot little… something… patting his cheek. He grumbled. He twitched. He blew fetid air from his lips, trying to drive it away. Yet it tapped him, then grabbed his lip and tugged.

  Aguirre opened one eye and beheld a demon. Its insane face bore a mask of dark fur, and its red eyes goggled at him. It hung out its tongue. It giggled horribly in his face and grabbed his cheeks with two hot little hands. Aguirre shrieked and fell over backward. The beast flew from the table, waving a long ringed tail in its wake.

  “The devil!” Aguirre gasped from his position on the ground. “A monkey!”

  “Good morning, Don Lauro,” said Teresita from the door.

  “A devil-monkey!”

  “No, no. That is only a chulo.”

  “A chulo! A chulo! What is a chulo?”

  “That,” she said. “A coatimundi.”

  “Don’t tell me this beast speaks Latin!” Aguirre cried.

  From inside the cabin, Tomás shouted: “A raccoon, Aguirre!”

  “That,” announced Aguirre the scholar, “is no raccoon!”

  The creature sauntered around in a circle, its tail straight up in the air forming restless small curls above its back. It strode over to Teresita and leaned against her leg. It sneered at Aguirre and sneezed.

  “My God,” Aguirre muttered.

  “I named him Guapo,” she said. She laughed at her little joke: guapo and chulo were both versions of “handsome.” She said, “Guapo El Chulo.”

  Aguirre laid his head back in the dirt.

  “Oh,” he noted. “My head.”

  Teresita said, “Shall I make you some coffee?”

  But Aguirre had drifted back to sleep.

  Tomás felt forgotten, and Teresita hoped to be forgotten. But Tomás was wrong, and Teresita did not get her wish.

  They slept. Tomás groaned through his nights dreaming of his lost love Gabriela Cantúa. The woman of thundercloud hair. Cinnamon thighs. He raised a knee and smiled in his sleep. That skin, that skin! That cream and bronze skin anointed with honey and blessed by his tongue! He would not be distracted by Dolores if Gabriela were beside him. He would not even be distracted by his own wife, Loreto. There was no limit to which love would not go! Honey… on her breasts. Both knees up now, Tomás chuckled. Deep red wine in her fragrant navel…

  Teresita suffered through her nights, twisted in the hot rough sheets. Dreaming of all her sins and failures. Dreaming of Cruz Chávez and the warriors of Tomóchic dying in flames and bullets, ripped apart with her name on their lips. Oh! She jerked awake with a soft cry several times a night, thinking she saw their ghosts lurking in the corners of her room. All she could do was sip tepid water and wait for dawn to come, praying, hoping God would see fit to lift His blessing from her and allow her… silence. Allow her love and a small garden and daughters of her own. “Remember me, dear Lord,” she prayed. “Remember to forget me.”

  She was always up before Tomás.

  She looked down on her father now and kicked the sole of his boot.

  “Levántate, Pápi,” she cooed.

  Then she kicked him again, hard.

  “Get up!”

  Don Lauro rose, one side of his face pocked with welts as if smallpox had somehow swarmed out of the green river and destroyed him. His neck was frozen at a terrible angle by the pain, and his mouth felt like a pig wallow. He peeled himself from the earth.

  Tomás came staggering from the house with a tin coffeepot burping out little billows of steam like a small train. The hair on one side of his head stood straight up, and his paper collar had popped loose and was sticking out.

  “I have Arbuckle’s!” he exulted.

  “Ah, Arbuckle’s,” sighed Aguirre.

  It was everybody’s favorite coffee—it was mostly the only coffee they could get. They both gave the name a Mexican spin. They called it “Arr-boo-kless.”

  Aguirre carefully sipped his coffee while Tomás took a great swallow to prove to the universe that he was macho enough to scoff at the pain of his scalded throat.

  They sat at the little gray table and stared at each other.

  “You should have warned me,” Tomás said.

  “About?”

  “About los pinches Estados Unidos!” Tomás replied.

  “What of it?”

  Aguirre’s head was throbbing sickly. He thought he could hear his brain crunching like boots on gravel. He was silently praying, promising God not to sin again if He would only remove this ghastly sensation from his sku
ll. He could ask Teresita for a healing, but Tomás would never let him live it down.

  Tomás produced a thin flask from his black trousers and waggled his eyebrows as he doctored the coffees.

  “This is America, correct?” he demanded.

  “Mf,” said Aguirre, holding his hands over his eyes.

  “Where are the Americans? Eh? Good God, man! Where are the pinches gringos!” He was roaring, Aguirre thought. He wanted his dear friend to shut his bellowing mouth. “I am forced out of Mexico as a threat to Mexicans and they send me to America.” The words were bursting in Aguirre’s poor head. “And what, Aguirre, my dear son of a whore, do I find in America? I find nothing but Mexicans! Mexicans, Germans, and this damnable Arab!”

  “As salaam aleikum,” Swayfeta croaked from his bedroll.

  “Andale pues,” said Tomás.

  Aguirre sipped his coffee. The rum steaming in the cup entered his nostrils and seemed to melt a bit of the cotton in his forehead. He sipped again.

  Teresita came out of the house in her stifling black dress.

  “I wish we had bananas,” she said.

  Tomás looked meaningfully at Aguirre.

  “Of such small tragedies are our lives composed,” he said. Or he thought he said. He tipped a little more motivation from the flask into his cup.

  “Daughter,” he called. “Have some Arr-boo-kless!”

  Suddenly, Guapo El Chulo hung his head over the edge of the house and shouted: “Keet-keet-keet-keet!”

  Aguirre leapt to his feet, but Tomás simply drew his pistola and fired over Guapo’s head. Guapo retreated at great speed.

  “Filthy beast,” he announced.

  “Father!” Teresita scolded and stormed back in the house. She did her best to slam the door. It squalled and shuddered and stopped a few inches from the frame.

  “Is there any wine left?” Tomás asked Aguirre.