Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  Tomás stepped forward and sprang into the light of his clearing with the gun extended before him. He could smell fresh coffee. Smoke was rising from his chimney. He sniffed. By God! Some son of a bitch was frying his eggs inside his house!

  “Show yourself!” he bellowed.

  The invader stepped out of the gloom. He was guzzling coffee from one cup and held another cup in his opposite hand, ready to guzzle that one too. He squinted at Tomás and spit once.

  “Hello, boss,” he said.

  Teresita cried out and ran past her father.

  “Segundo!” she yelled and knocked the coffee mugs from his hands. He chuckled. He lifted her off the ground.

  “I’ll be damned!” Tomás said as he beheld his old foreman. “You are the last man I expected to see today.”

  Then he began to smile.

  Then he began to laugh.

  “I told you!” he shouted. “I told you things were fine! I told you things were going to get better!”

  He rushed to Segundo and gave him a pummeling abrazo.

  “I brought you some horses,” Segundo lied. “And this big rifle.”

  Eleven

  TERESITA WAS IN THE kitchen half of the cabin, but she did not mind. She was working on some rice in the largest frying pan, melting lard and dicing red onions. Waiting for the onions to become as clear as small windows before dropping in the yellow rice and frying it. She would fry the rice until it, too, became clear. Then she would add water and spices and boil the water off in several rounds of cooking, until the rice was swollen and tender. She would add diced tomatoes, green tomatoes, and tomato sauce, holding off on the diced chiles and cilantro until the very end of the cycle. Salt, garlic.

  As soon as Dolores reported for work, she would send her back out to buy two chickens that they could dismember and boil in a broth of consommé, onions, celery, sage, lime, and red peppers. Teresita poured sweat as the smoke unfurled around her. She had tied a red rag around her head and fancied she looked like Manuelito, her Chiricahua Apache teacher, with his fierce warrior’s bandana. For just a moment, she wondered if he thought of her. Her volumes of hair were pulled back in a long mare’s tail. Manuelito would have braided his, she thought.

  Beside the rice, the dented coffeepot blurped and bubbled merrily. Steam filled the smoky room. She tipped water from the clay jarrito into the rice pan; it hissed. The billow hit her face. She wiped her brow with her arm. She smiled. Segundo was here. She was happy, and happiness made food taste better. Cooking with happiness for your loved ones was like laying hands on the sick. It was a great medicine. Teresita often wondered how men did not realize this about women—that their wives and daughters, their sisters and mothers, in this most basic form of service, were spell casters. If women found out how powerful they were in their slightest exertions, in their pain and joy, in their love, she would be out of business. Lord! Let it be soon!

  She peeked out the window. Three of her loved ones were gathered at Tomás’s little ceremonial table. They were all smoking black cigars. They were spitting, slamming their hands on the wood. Guapo El Chulo ran by and feinted an attack at Segundo’s backside before diving into the weeds at the far end of the clearing. Their top hand didn’t know how close Guapo’s claws had come to his buttocks.

  Teresita cut an onion and wept. Onions could cure impotency. Oh my. She sighed. She smiled. Just what those men did not need.

  Outside: laughter.

  Curses.

  Shouts.

  “You have brought me great joy, Segundo,” Tomás said.

  “Good to see you too, boss,” said Segundo, taking a last puff of his cigarillo.

  “And what else have you brought me?” Tomás asked.

  Segundo sauntered over to his horse and pulled a heavy oilskin package from his saddlebag. He walked back to the table, looked into the distance, paused. Tomás, clearly agitated, wanted to leap from his seat. As if teasing a hound with a chunk of sweet bread, Segundo feigned tossing the bundle on the table but didn’t. Tomás jumped a little. Segundo smiled, dropped the packet with a loud thud.

  “I brought this,” Segundo said rather mildly.

  Tomás peeled back the top flap of the package and let out a cry. Money. Bundled stacks of colorful pesos.

  “¡Ah, cabrón!” Tomás shouted.

  Segundo sat back down and patted his belly.

  “I’ve been managing the ranchos pretty damned well,” he said.

  Tomás leapt up, grabbed him, and kissed his brow.

  “Not that well,” Segundo noted.

  When Dolores appeared in the clearing, she was immediately smitten with Segundo. He in turn promptly twisted his gnarled and sun-beaten visage into a leer, ghastly and exuding profound affection. “I did not know,” he announced, “that Easter lilies could grow so gentle and lovely in this terrible desert.” She almost fainted and rushed into the cabin with Teresita.

  “Steady,” warned Tomás.

  Aguirre snuffled and chortled into his goatee.

  When Dolores exited the house to get the chickens, Segundo leapt to his feet and said, “I thought I heard the wings of angels beating musically from Heaven above, but it was merely the gentle patter of your delightful little feet!” She cried out and jogged away.

  “Seriously,” said Tomás.

  “I will ask Teresita to introduce me to that fine woman,” declared Segundo. “But first, I must learn her name.” Were they wrong, or did that grizzled old coyote trot over to the house like a teenage boy?

  “That is the most unseemly thing I have ever witnessed,” said Tomás.

  “You have been bested, my dear Urrea,” gloated Aguirre. “A better bull has entered your pasture.”

  “Bulls?” cried Tomás. “What is this about bulls!”

  Segundo came back out with a big mug of Arr-boo-kless.

  “Dolores is mine,” he said. “All right with you boys?”

  Tomás leaned over and spit.

  Aguirre patted Segundo’s arm and smiled.

  “I believe you will require a little of that money back,” he said.

  Segundo thought about it.

  “Boss,” he said. “Give me a loan.”

  Even Dolores sat down to eat. Every time she smiled, Segundo made a face in her direction that conveyed the depth of his agony. She was, he made clear in his silence, the most desirable and witty woman in Arizona—perhaps in the entire country. She was startled by this and didn’t know why she hadn’t noticed it sooner. When she passed Segundo the salsa pitcher, he gasped as her fingers touched his. He put his apparently wounded digits to his mouth. “Such sweet injuries.” He sighed. “Your touch tastes of strawberries.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Tomás protested.

  The remains of supper were abandoned on the table, and a second and third. Guapo El Chulo raided the dirty plates and feasted on chicken and tortillas and pickled carrots and gobs of cold rice colored gaily with vegetables. The campfire was lit and the guitar made the rounds. Teresita sang corridos to great applause. Segundo spooned with Dolores, and Tomás was astounded and deeply hurt to see her making a cat’s cradle for him with white yarn and reducing ferocious Segundo to a small schoolboy giggling and mewling hideously at her ridiculous stratagems. Don Lauro Aguirre could not have been happier as he leaned back in his seat and sipped a delightful cognac that Segundo had requisitioned from Doña Loreto Urrea’s grand house in Alamos, La Capilla.

  Tomás wandered away to water the creosote bushes. He went a discreet distance from the gathering to relieve himself, and it was there, looking upon the trunk of a mesquite, that he saw blood. Odd. He looked around. A thin spray on the rocks. He buttoned up and went to the side of his house, following the trajectory of elongated drops. Blood on the adobe brick. By God! He inspected the horses. One had blood on its saddle.

  He snuck to Segundo’s horse and sniffed the long Sharps. Its barrel still smelled of gunpowder. Well, well. He lit a cheroot. He knew right away what had happened.


  He strode up to Segundo, who was happily mauling Dolores.

  “How soon?” he said. He glanced at the horses.

  Segundo looked up at him.

  No one else at the party knew what they were saying, but these two understood each other perfectly well.

  “Soon, I figure.”

  “How many?”

  Segundo shrugged.

  “As many,” he said, “as it takes.”

  Tomás stood with his hands on his hips.

  Segundo said, “Boss.”

  “Yes?”

  “They will never stop.”

  The fire continued to crackle and throw sparks.

  Tomás had been scared, and ashamed that his emotions were so baldly obvious, but before Segundo made the inevitable gentleman’s gesture of “accompanying Dolores home,” Tomás had asked him: “What of my Gabriela? Has she sent word to me?”

  Segundo had gone to the saddlebags again and produced a paper bundle.

  “This,” he said.

  “No letter?”

  “None.”

  Segundo and the cook made their way into the night.

  Tomás left Aguirre and Teresita to their own interests. Aguirre had taken out a volume of verse by the poet Martí, and he droned on in sonorous interpretations of the Cuban’s tropical largesse. Teresita closed her eyes and rocked as if listening to the greatest symphony.

  Tomás took his bundle into the house. With trembling fingers he tore the paper. The whole thing was soft, pliant. Cloth. He tattered the paper and her nightgown fell out, redolent of her, sweet with her perfume, spicy with her scent. It was the softest thing he had touched since he’d been exiled from Mexico. He smelled it. Smelled her. Buried his face in his Gabriela’s scent. Alone, in his smoky hut, Don Tomás Urrea wept.

  Farewells. Good-bye notes. Surly payment of pointless bills. Handshakes and final cups of tea with platters of crullers. Dolores took Guapo El Chulo home with her. The rituals of parting had been attended to, and there was nothing for it now but to go.

  The wagoneer Swayfeta had made his way down from Tucson, happy to be returning to El Paso. Stripped of its piano and its bat wings, the wagon was tawdry in the morning light, gray and splintery. The family’s few goods were piled in back. A comfortable chair took up the middle, and Teresita sat there with her books. Aguirre, Segundo, and Tomás manned the three horses; Tomás was delighted to be bristling with the weapons of the dead assassins, his new belduque knife gleaming at his hip. Teresita thought that if they’d given her a horse, she could have outridden all of them. Maybe those bad Van Order boys would find her a pony. She settled back comfortably and opened Anna Berruel’s parasol. She wondered if Harry intended to keep tapping on her foot.

  Off to the side, Dolores wept copious tears.

  “Farewell,” Segundo said tragically. “My delicious little bun of breakfast pastry.”

  “Damn it, man,” muttered Tomás.

  He twisted in his saddle, looked around. This was familiar. Leaving again.

  “Swayfeta!” he bellowed.

  “As salaam aleikum,” the Arab replied.

  “Andale pues,” said Tomás, and spurred his horse away from the bosque.

  And now it was a trio, three riders leaving Culiacán and galloping north, toward Guaymas and beyond. They rode two pinto ponies and a gelding palomino. Each carried a Winchester repeating rifle in a leather scabbard, and they bristled all about with smaller weapons. Their packs were loaded with jerky. They came on like a black wind, scattering wild dogs and crows. They never slowed when they roared through villages. And the People turned their backs to them, bent to their tiny corn milpas, or hid in their houses. The thunder of the horses’ hooves announced them before they could be seen, and the sound receded, stormlike, into the distance as they passed. Drumming, drumming, drumming on to the heartless border night.

  Part II

  THINGS FAR AWAY AND DEAR

  The saintess can hardly be called beautiful… but then she is “interesting” even if she’s thinner’n a bed slat, and wears a philosophical air, has bright lustrous eyes, and in more ways than one sugests [sic] the Boston girl, the habitué of the Concord school of philosophy. And when she substitutes a black silk dress and Seville lace for that yellow, blue [and] black polka-dotted gown, she looks quite recherché. Teresa no habla el Ingles worth a cent, and the Herald reporter had to talk with her in Yaqui, which she speaks fluently. She can’t even say “howdy” in Iowa English.

  —EL PASO DAILY HERALD, 1896

  Twelve

  SAN JOSE WAS WORSE for them than Tubac. But it was peaceful. Though the nights could be cold, the people were warm. The land was wild, and the Van Orders were a manageable ride away. Solomonville amused Tomás because it was as worn out as far Ocoroni, Sinaloa, where he had once dreamed of a great life while eating mango slices red with chile powder and crunchy with sea salt. The people of Solomonville did not have mangoes, but they were people who remembered mangoes, so he had something to talk about with them. For Teresita, it was like being caught in amber; Ocoroni had been, until Tucson, the most established city she had ever seen. But then they arrived in San José… well. At least there weren’t many distractions.

  Their new home, rented with the money Segundo had brought them, tucked up against great boulders and blackened barrancas, was baking hot and drafty when there was a draft, which was seldom. It was an off-plumb two-room wooden thing, weathered into a condition more splintered and discolored than Swayfeta’s old wagon. Snakes followed pack rats into the main room, which served as kitchen, sitting room, and Tomás’s bedroom. He often retired at night to find lozenges of rodent scat tossed across his cot like handfuls of seed. He slept with Gabriela’s nightgown wrapped around his pillow. In the mornings, he was leery of putting his feet down after having brushed a sidewinder’s dry scales with his toes and narrowly escaped a strike. But the snake was chilly and lazy and was probably not really interested in killing him, just in getting him off its back.

  Teresita had troubling dreams in that house. She dreamed of a warrior from Tomóchic, dead now for three years beside his pope, Cruz Chávez; the dear José, or Saint Joseph, as he called himself after she cured him of a goiter that hung off his neck purple as an eggplant. José. She barely even knew the man. Why should she dream of him? But she did, several times. José came to her rattling door with his hat in his hands; his white hair was brown now, and his bent back was straight. He was somber. And in every dream, he asked Teresita if he might move into her house with her, find shelter, for he had been wandering all night.

  She couldn’t eat breakfast on those days. She wished her old teacher were with her now to explain these dreams, but if Huila had been there, she would likely have told Teresita things she did not want to hear. And after three dream visits, she did not answer José and left him outside, and she saw him scowling at her from a wagon that rattled away into the darkness, and though she waved at him and called out, he did not respond. But his face was not angry. All she felt from him was sorrow.

  She busied herself with small chores, shaking the spectral gloom of the dream out of her mind. She hung her clothes off nails hammered into the walls of her trapezoidal bedroom. It was dark, and she was constantly on the lookout for black widows, who seemed to find her one milky window irresistible. Every few days, the recessed window well had a ragged black-widow web in one corner, and Teresita had to capture the spider in a glass jar and transport her, bouncing like a deadly black grape, to a far rock outcropping.

  Scorpions too. One day, as she availed herself of the dreadful outhouse, a scorpion dashed out from the wood and plunged into the bloomers pooled around her feet. No amount of careful foot lifting would reveal the beast, and Teresita failed to see the humor in her insane bare-bottomed explosive dance out the door with her underwear flapping around on one ankle. After rattlesnakes and black widows and scorpions, the befuddled tarantulas that tap-danced slowly into their house seemed as mild as puppies.

 
; It was in their first week in San José that Don Lauro Aguirre’s cryptic letters began to arrive for her. The regional mail carrier clopped up the arroyo on his melancholic burro and blew a shrill two-note call on his tin whistle. Teresita rushed out and was thrilled to see her name on an envelope. From Texas! She paid the man a few centavos and stroked the donkey’s handsome forelock and took the stiff envelope inside and commenced to construct herself a pot of tea. She set out a cup on a small towel on the table in front of her father’s empty bed. She lit two tallow candles that cast wobbling yellow light in the room. She poured the tea—flowers and lemon—and dipped a golden coil of honey into the cup and sat excitedly with Huila’s knife in hand. As she slit the back of the envelope, she said, “¡Ay, Don Lauro!” as if they were in one of their old chats. Anything could be in the letter. It was so exciting.

  Within the envelope lay a folded card of off-white vellum, heavy and rich. She felt it, slipped her fingers along the fibrous edges of the card, before opening it. But she stared blankly at the message within. Then, baffled, she turned it over and checked to see if she had missed something. There was nothing else, no greeting, no signature. Simply one word, written with a quill, neatly, with no great flourishes:

  Ferocity.

  She hid the card under her bed and was bothered by its message day and night. Ferocity? Whose ferocity? Sometimes she muttered “What?” out loud. It was the rudest note she had ever received. Perhaps he had been drunk. Or had gone mad. Perhaps he had meant to quote some beloved French poet and had simply forgotten after jotting the first word. Sometimes she took the note out and looked at it again, as if it would reveal some hidden meaning to her.

  Ferocity.

  She grew tired of the one-word diatribe and consigned Don Lauro to the trash heap with a shrug.