Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  Until the mailman’s two-note fanfare sounded again, one week later.

  She paid again, stroked the donkey again, made tea again. She smiled. It was a game. Surely. Don Lauro was engaging her in a piquant folly. She poured her tea. Perhaps he had realized his bizarre error and had rectified it with a more complete letter.

  The message this week:

  Justice.

  She threw the card into the fire.

  One week later:

  Destiny.

  She didn’t bother with tea the fourth week.

  Liberation.

  Then:

  Retribution.

  She took up her pencil and bent to the table and carefully wrote a small reply that she handed to the irksome mail carrier the following week after he had given her yet another card. If he had an opinion, his face did not show it. He must have thought Teresita had a fervent love affair brewing with some distant Texan, but he did not mention the scandal to anyone.

  Aguirre:

  Revolution.

  Teresita:

  Bunkum.

  Satisfied, she swiped one of Tomás’s new horses and barebacked into the hills so fast he couldn’t have caught her even if he’d set out right after her. She hammered the hills with the assassin’s horse, leaping carelessly over small ravines where rattlesnakes awakened from their slumbers and furiously threatened shadows that had passed over their heads in their dreams. She laughed and shouted as loud as possible—she was far away from anyone, far from anywhere where anybody could hear anything. She yipped and yowled until coyotes in the bushes were moved to melancholy enthusiasms and answered her as she flew beyond them. Her braids came undone. Her hair opened around her shoulders like great black wings. Her face burned in the sun.

  It had been so long since she’d ridden that her thighs burned and her legs shook when she dismounted. But nobody would know that her knees were wobbling under her skirts. She walked through her chores that week thinking of freedom.

  The next week, there came no card. In a way, she missed the mail. Still, she smiled as she went about her business in peace. Six travelers from Las Cruces had to be fed and given shelter as she attended to the painfully infected birth canal of an expectant mother. A buckaroo with a barbwire slice through his left eye was dragged in unwilling and cussing by his compañeros. Two little boys from the village brought their sick goat. An old woman from Salome could not stop bleeding. Teresita cleared her thoughts with the needs of the pilgrims.

  Until the following Wednesday, when the old donkey of doom sadly meandered to her door again.

  Aguirre:

  Lead them.

  A raven insulted her from a dead tree. She heard, but did not see, hummingbirds whirring in the still air. Dragonflies rattled like toy kites. Teresita put the card back in its cream envelope and tucked it into her blouse. Three peasants were on their way; one of them struggled with a rough wooden crutch. She stood tall, threw her head back so her chest was open, open to the sky, open to the sun, her heart shining and hot inside her, her feet rooted in the earth, pulling sustenance from the deep shadows beneath her, and she raised her hand to the pilgrims.

  “Come to me,” she said.

  Thirteen

  TOMAS AND SEGUNDO BUSIED themselves with expeditions, sometimes staying away overnight as they prowled the crags on the far eastern, New Mexico side of their great landscape, sometimes driving their horses up into the mountains to their immediate north. On these days, Juanita Van Order came to stay with Teresita. Her boys camped outside the house, well past the fences. They were bemused by their mother’s insistence that they not show themselves. They were hurt, though neither would admit it beyond making trusty and blustery statements about the vagaries of women. Harry, who had never been with a woman, was all hearts and valentines—he pined and sighed until John wanted to kick him in the rump. What a girl. Whereas John, who had been with four women, only one of them a sportin’ gal from Safford, burned. No pink blossoms or bluebirds; it was all smoke and heat. He stared toward Teresita’s vale and felt despair—felt the endless openness of this charred land closing over him and suffocating him. He had taken to stealing his father’s rum and sipping it until the pain within dulled to coals.

  Harry had a little boy’s trust in life. And he was partial to the ladies, young and old. John wasn’t all that moved by them. He suspected they were all working some angle—who wouldn’t, to get out of the desert? They observed the hubbub at Teresita’s door.

  “I think she’s plumb holy,” Harry argued.

  “Dang, son,” drawled John. “You ever think she might be crazy?”

  “Don’t you say it.”

  “I went and said it already.”

  Harry threw the punch; John nabbed him around the neck and threw him down like a steer for branding; they wrestled in the dust.

  The women enjoyed their days without men. They examined plants, shared recipes and folktales, laughed and relished phrases like Caita tigua and Nech che biu graia. “Sing to me.” “You are shameless.” Days without Spanish. Occasionally, they took fresh popovers or pies out to the sulking boys.

  Harry blushed and fumbled. John gave Teresita the old wolf eye, looking up from under his brows—it had worked on the hooker. But Teresita seemed immune to it. In fact, she saw reason to sidle up to Harry and nudge him with an elbow. John saw this. And he affected a stoic and monumental presence, ignoring her and scoffing at her baking baskets. It added some interest to the days, but life was pretty much a vastness of boredom.

  The only thing that truly livened things thereabouts was the languid, sad campaign of wanderers and pilgrims seeking her hands on their burns and their scars. They brought her chickens or bruised fruits or eggs in payment for her ministrations. She asked her helpers—girls from the jacales and small rancherías nearby—to use these supplies to feed the weakest and smallest of the patients.

  There was no extra food anywhere in the valley. The cows were dark and bony and looked as though in place of milk they would give drafts of dust. Dirt farmers grew potent green chiles, and beans straggled up trellises, but only enough for the farmers’ families. Where local people could siphon water out of the Gila, they grew corn and tomatoes. But there was no cheese to be had. No fruit, though Juanita brought Teresita cans of peaches. The well was hot and smelly, a home of mosquitoes and odd water bugs that walked on the cloudy surface of the water in hectic assemblies.

  “We have no meat,” a pilgrim said to her.

  Teresita looked around her. She pointed to the bounteous stands of wild beavertail cactus.

  “Then fry nopales,” she said.

  Teresita’s house thus became the place in the valley for fried eggs and diced cactus. No tortillas. No dessert.

  It was either, she knew, do work or sit. “If you were born to be a hammer,” Teresita told herself, “do not curse the nails.” Still, on some days, she was the nail, and they were the hammers.

  “What do other girls do, Juanita?”

  “Chores. Cooking. School. Romance. Dances.”

  Scorpions in the toilet were worrisome enough, but the pilgrims outside the outhouse door were worse. They would listen there unless Tomás chased them away. They would whisper to her or knock as she sat on the stained plank within. They waited outside with their sad cow eyes and did not allow Teresita to eat her meager breakfasts. On many days, she stepped out to them with a crust of roll in her mouth. If there were children—well, so much for that. She would feed her sweet rolls to them. Tomás yelled at her: “You literally give them the food from your mouth!” He heard himself say, every day: “What is the matter with you?” For once, Tomás was happy he had lost everything in Mexico because this time the pilgrims couldn’t destroy his crops or his herds. Just his bread box, just his paltry larder. He noticed his nopal cactus hedges were disappearing. He started calling the pilgrims locusts.

  He found his daughter completely lost to reason, and he must have been a fool to allow it. But he could not imagine how t
o stop it. Perhaps, he thought, if they went to the highest point of the highest mountain, and if he chained her to some stone, and Segundo and he shot these beggars until all of them were forests of bone far below…

  The faithful wondered why Teresita and Tomás did not attend their church services. But how could they? For Tomás’s part, church was now and forever out of the question. God? Tomás would like to slap God in the face.

  John Van Order asked her one Sunday as she was setting out to pick tiny flowers from the weeds, “Aren’t you going to church?”

  “I am the church,” she said.

  He thought on that one for a while. He wasn’t sure he understood it, but he was partially convinced that he didn’t like it. It was easier for John if he didn’t talk to her much.

  Harry, though, tried to speak to her as often as possible. Once, before running away with embarrassment streaming from his head like purple smoke, Harry, giggling, had brazenly called her sweetheart. She expected more from a young man than that.

  She walked out into the sun and forgot about all of the people around her.

  Coyotes, skunks, centipedes (masiaca).

  Gila monsters, jackrabbits, roadrunners, snakes (bacot).

  Chollas, locoweed, lizards, crows, vultures, jaguars, blackwater (chuculibampo).

  And the humble, hungry, restless horde of wounded, coughing, bleeding, pregnant, impotent, blind, crazy, malodorous, beautiful, sad-eyed people.

  Aguirre:

  Evolution.

  John, who was often recruited by his mother to guard the gates of Cabora Norte (Tomás’s little jest), had never seen anything like this slow lava flow of hopeless cases. He was astounded to see bare feet in the hideously punishing gravel of the hot desert canyons. He was anxious whenever Indians approached—Indians from tribes he had never seen before, from tribes he had only read about in frightening penny dreadfuls, novels of slaughter and bloodshed where these dangerous savages visited unspeakable horrors on lone white women in besieged shanties upon nighted plains. Comanches. Pimas. Strange tribes from Mexico. Who were these Tarahumara runners who thudded in from the distance and stayed for only the briefest moment at Teresita’s door before running away again? They were like ghosts.

  He thought they would eat her if they could. They would nurse on her like shoats until she was dry as the dirt. He would save her, he told himself. He would take her to Chicago or New York.

  Still, there were fewer Mexican pilgrims every day and more American Mexicans. He didn’t even know what to call them. There was no handy term for them. He didn’t mind the fine gringos in their expensive rigs, their carriages and their cabriolets. He didn’t mind their picnics and their frilly idiotic parasols. It was largely a festive day at the zoological society for them. He had never seen a zoo, but he had read of them. Besides, the rich ones often brought bottles of wine or beer, and he could cadge a drink or a half-emptied bottle off them. He didn’t even mind the Mexican shopkeeps and pretentious businessmen like Aguirre. They struck him as false too. Just like the happy Americans.

  But these peons! These brown poor! It made him ashamed to be half Mexican when he saw these shambling paupers with their rotten teeth and their skewed eyeballs. Begging for water or a piece of bread. Greasers, all of them. It wasn’t the first time he’d cringed over the Mexican poor; Americans laughed at them and called them lazy, criminals. Stupid, they were stupid. They had to be stupid. He sometimes roughed them up with the butt of his rifle just to get them away from him, back out the crooked gate and off to the hell they had come from.

  Harry thought it was all quite exciting. John half expected his brother to throw himself at her feet like the pilgrims and seek some “miracle.” It was, John thought with clenched teeth, all too much.

  He preferred busy days to slow days. The thinner the crowds, the deeper the boredom. If he could charge each of these half-wits a nickel, he would be a rich man. Any day away from the industry of Sainthood was the best.

  She seldom even looked at him.

  Don Tomás petitioned the United States government repeatedly for naturalized status. He was denied twice; with Mr. Van Order’s help, he lodged his complaint, only to learn that it was Teresita the U.S. didn’t want, not him. Teresita threatened not just Mexico’s security but this country’s as well. The government wanted assurances given under penalty of imprisonment and expulsion that she would spend her probationary period within one hundred miles of the border, not agitating Indians. All the U.S. needed was a new round of ghost dances and uprisings.

  Don Lauro, settled and thriving in El Paso, suspected the worst. He suspected that the Díaz regime had pressured Washington to keep her in range of their assassins. Aguirre knew that Mexico was far from finished with its saint.

  Tomás wasted no time and immediately reapplied in both their names.

  Fourteen

  From:

  Don Lauro Aguirre

  Prensa El Independiente

  El Paso, Tejas

  To:

  Don Tomás Urrea

  San José, Arizona

  c/o Solomonville General Delivery

  My Beloved Companion, You Degenerate Wretch, Tomás:

  Things are excellent in El Paso! Even a dissolute drunkard like yourself could be happy here. It remains urgent that you cast off the dreary sackcloth of your Arizona encampment and join us immediately here on the banks of the surging Río Bravo. Or, as they call it here, the Río Grande. Honestly, not so grande in my opinion.

  Still, one could spit into the motherland from the American side. Imagine the glory of watching from El Paso one day soon as the glorious revolution across the wild river frees the motherland! The dictator topples and the populace rises to its blessed destiny! Liberté! Égalité! Et cetera!

  It is clear to me, my dear Urrea, that the hordes of pilgrims who assail you will not abate soon; frankly, this is all to the revolutionary good! They are the warriors of tomorrow, marching to a free Mexican morning.

  However, it is also clear to me now that your dear daughter—our Teresita!—will require a more civilized society to secure her safety. The Americans are in league with the tyrant, of this I am assured! Danger lurks in every defile, in each canyon! Here, we have paved streets and some few electrical lights. We are a modern city with all the amenities. We are largely Mexican here, and we are disposed to revere and protect the Saint. In El Paso, we have struck a balance—fragile as it might be—between the empires.

  One could do business in two nations at once—one could make a double fortune.

  I urge you to consider this move soon. I can begin to procure you a reasonable home in the foothills that gently flow from the Franklin peaks. Below you, the river and Ciudad Juárez. Yes, the dictator could send more assassins north. But imagine, if you will, my dear amigo, the difference between a modern city-in-full and an outpost in the savage territories. We have a full contingent of gendarmes. Soldiers. It would seem to me that security is assured in El Paso. How simpler to find sanctuary in a city!

  Consider my offer!

  Come!

  Loyally,

  Your Servant, and a Better Man by Far,

  Lauro Aguirre

  From:

  Don Tomás “El Santo de Cabora” Urrea

  San José, Arizona

  c/o Solomonville General Delivery

  To:

  Don Lauro “Robespierre” Aguirre

  El Independiente

  El Paso, Tejas

  Pinche Aguirre,

  Cómo chingas.

  How it darkens my day whenever another letter from you arrives, you pretentious bastard.

  I do find pleasure in your pages later, though, when I retreat to my outhouse and require some fancier paper for my delectable bottom. My bottom, you should note, resembles two luscious scoops of flan blushing with caramel, a feature I will gladly share with your wife, should you ever find a woman who can stand you. Until that blessed day when Our Beloved Savior bestows a wife upon you, I will comfort m
yself with servicing your mother.

  Aguirre! I am bored to tears in sweet San José. Canst thou tell?

  Tubac was as cosmopolitan as Paris compared to this. The dreadful lines of cow-faced seekers have thinned, but they will never stop. Yes, I am aware of the dangers here! Yes! I have hired those dullards the Van Order boys to guard the… ahem… ranch in my absence. If I stay here, I go mad. I sneak away and shoot rabbits with Segundo.

  Teresita resembles a holy scarecrow. I can’t stand the heavenward gaze. So Segundo and I haul our asses up the mountains and cuss and drink like men.

  We have our own river, you know. You’re not the only one with a damned river. The mighty and noble (not quite true on either count) Gila. I would like to ride down it on a raft toward Yuma and sneak back into Sonora. Let them put me up against the wall and shoot me! To be home again. To be home.

  Did you know, my old friend, that Coronado and his Spaniards climbed these very peaks? I follow his path up, up, farther every time, our horses drinking from the shallow river that falls from far Morenci and Clifton. All about, there is lumber! Why, no one in these high valleys has organized a good cow operation, and it hasn’t crossed their minds that there is a fortune to be made in pine trees. Lumber! Simply there. Free for the taking.

  Lauro cabrón—a man could start anew up there where the air is clear.

  I continue to petition our noble hosts’ government for sanctuary. Anything you can do to expedite this process will be deeply appreciated. I may never wrangle citizenship for Teresita… but you and I both know she lives in some other world anyway. If I can make her safe, I will feel vindicated.

  I miss you, cabrón. I miss… oh hell, I could make lists for one hundred pages of what it is I miss. Good tequila? Sí. A big bloody steak? ¡Claro que sí! I would be thrilled to simply see a street. A woman who is not the wife of some one-legged war hero or a leper crawling to Teresita on tattered knees with seventeen rosaries around her neck. No, more than a woman. Ten women. A hundred women.