Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  I would run past them all for one small glimpse of my Gabriela.

  Poor goddamned me.

  Yours,

  (Can You Believe These Pendejos Call Me)

  Tommy

  PS: I am intrigued by your suggestions of life in El Paso….

  To:

  Gabriela Cantúa

  Rancho Cabora, Sur de Alamos

  Sonora

  From:

  Teresita

  In Exile

  Ay, Gaby—

  Is this all there is for me?

  If you were only here. I cannot tell you my sorrows, for you would weep and I would be guilty of breaking your heart. We are alone here, and lonely. There are funny boys here—one mean and sulky, one silly as a little girl. I wish either one of them would be a man and demand my hand and ride me away from here! I have seen in their magazines such magical places! Places of the kind I dreamed of when I was a girl. Have you seen San Francisco? It is far from here, but it seems lovelier than any city I have seen before. It is by the sea, dear Gaby. The sea! Can you believe I have never seen the sea? Can you believe I have never seen a real city? A city! I have seen cities only on those long-ago nights when we all held hands and flew in our dreams. Or were they dreams? I cannot remember now.

  What is the matter with these cowboys? I am waiting for one of them to take me to San Francisco! There are no men in the United States. Just boys.

  We have been in Arizona two years now, and it feels like ten. I have a friend here named Juanita. Do not be jealous! She is older, not quite like Huila. Perhaps like a mother. She has taught me to sew and to bake. I never knew how hard it was to make a pie of apples. I had never heard of a quilt and am surprised that a blanket made of old shirts and dresses is at once so difficult to make and so dear to the Americanos. You would be surprised, though, how sacred it feels to lie beneath the stories that each panel seems to whisper. One day, I will make you a quilt. First, I have to get some more clothes. I wear my dresses until they tatter. I don’t mind. No, really. Stop laughing. (Besides, I was never as fashionable as you.)

  Poor old Don Lauro seems to have gone insane. I think he has been sipping laudanum or absinthe. (I am so bad!) He keeps sending me notes. But they are all stupid. One-word messages that make no sense. I don’t know—Kill! Something like that. Guns!

  Frijoles!

  Coffeepot!

  Father pines for you. He is often difficult, I will admit it. He is too proud to mention you. But he must surely pass away without you near him. As must I… Oh, write to me and tell me everything there is to tell. Spare me no detail. What did you eat today? Did you have coffee? Are there any new horses?

  (Women here are plucking their eyebrows—it’s the newest thing. You should try it.)

  Sabotage!

  Power!

  Father has even abandoned bees.

  If only you could be with us now…

  Teresita

  PS: Remember to say your prayers; God is our only true hope.

  PPS: El inglés es imposible.

  PPPS: Hats! Murder! Pudding!

  Fifteen

  TO HIS BROTHER’S PROFOUND amusement, on Saturday nights Harry Van Order snuck onto the property and left flowers outside Teresita’s door. He stole white roses from his mother’s dearly-fought-for patch of earth where her dishwater tempted a garden from the grit. He thought white roses were divine. So did the javelinas that came out of the desert after he crept away and ate them before dawn. They loved him.

  Here came the Apaches. They walked their horses in from the great playas out to the south and east—vast wobbling hallucinogenic tan sand flats, quivering in sun, heat shimmers silver as water out there where nothing dared grow. They seemed to drip upward, those languid riders, elongating in the heat waves, the mirages of their bodies breaking to quicksilver beads and lifting into the trembling air so their hats seemed to drift toward the sun and blink out. The land itself looked like flesh, and it joined the vision of the bodies of the warriors dissolving, as if all flesh were being pulled away to Heaven.

  From their small rise, Tomás and Segundo watched them come. Who else could it be but Apaches? They had come down from the formidable mountain wall of the Cochise Stronghold. Tomás knew the very defile they had come through, the secretive angled canyon that veered away from the desert into a narrow cut that opened to unexpected creeks and cottonwoods before offering precipitous trails into the warriors’ high retreat.

  All the men of the region except Tomás feared the Apaches. Indians liked the Sky Scratcher. He bore the mantle of their affections with ease. It didn’t occur to him that they respected his defense of his daughter more than they respected him. Though they all knew he had saved the Yaquis from starving once. News like that never ceased its roving from mountain to mountain. Still, one never knew.

  Segundo kept his rifle handy. These little bastards made his scalp crawl. He knew the stories—who didn’t? How they tied men to wagon wheels and set the wagons afire, laughing and commenting as the men burned and screamed as if they were some kind of critics watching a play. Segundo understood actions like that. But he didn’t intend to be the subject of such attentions. He was too old for that kind of foolishness.

  The riders walked the horses calmly in their direction, raising no dust. The animals were small, mean. Knotty bundles of sinew and muscle. The riders wore red shirts and yellowed tanned-hide leggings, and the one in front wore a Mexican sombrero. There were three of them, and they were leading two horses piled with bundles.

  “Segundo,” said Tomás. “What do you see?”

  Segundo, known as Buzzard Eye due to his supernatural vision, took the cigarillo out of his mouth and spit some tobacco.

  “Boss,” he drawled. “Three Apaches. Looks like three other cabrones, all dead, hanging on them two horses in back.”

  “Mexicans?” asked Tomás.

  “How can you tell?” asked Segundo.

  “Short hair?”

  Segundo squinted.

  “Looks like no hair at all.”

  Scalped.

  “Mexicans,” said Tomás.

  Since the beginning of the War of the Apaches, the tribe had no love in its heart for Mexicans. The Mexicans were worse than the Americans, and the Americans were very bad. Villages had been wiped out in the Mexican raids, whole family lines spilled in the dust and lost forever. The Apaches had relieved their sorrow all down the Mexican coast. They had sacked Mazatlán and set it to the torch.

  The riders halted within hailing distance.

  The leader raised his sombrero.

  Tomás laughed.

  It was Venado Azul.

  Tomás waved him on.

  Venado Azul tapped his horse’s flank with the Mexican hat and came on. He was grinning. He worked the big hat back onto his head and raised a hand.

  “Sky Scratcher!” he called. “You still drinking too much liquor?”

  “Every chance I get!”

  Venado shook his head.

  “Better than milk, I guess,” Venado said. “You people keep nursing like baby goats.”

  “Where did you get that hat?” Tomás called. Segundo slid the rifle from its scabbard and laid it across his lap.

  Venado Azul shrugged. “I had to take it off one of these boys so I could lift his hair.” He jerked his head back toward the bodies. They seemed to be wearing shiny black cloaks, but these were merely flies, jostling upon the softening men. Their heads were all bright red. As the horses walked, the dead men’s spurs pinged and chimed a small, festive melody.

  “Who are these unfortunate Christians?” Tomás asked.

  Venado was looking at Segundo.

  “I am Blue Deer,” he said.

  “I don’t give a damn!” Segundo cried, Sharps now raised.

  “These boys,” Venado said to Tomás, ignoring Segundo’s outburst. “Assassins. Heading for the Saint. We caught ’em.” He smiled.

  His companions untied the thongs holding the bodies to the ho
rses and kicked them off. The bodies hit the ground like sacks of beans. Clouds of dust and irritated flies swirled around them. Tomás had seen dead men before, and the way they flopped always made him queasy. He hoped Teresita was right, that there was some sort of heaven. Even a hell. Anything was better than the indignity of being dead. He spit when the smell got to him. Dead men were as appalling as dead cows or dogs. No angels in sight.

  Venado took a leather pouch from his shirt pocket.

  “I think this was their bounty.”

  He jingled the pouch.

  “Keep it,” said Tomás. “For your people.”

  Venado tossed the pouch to his companions, who wheeled and rode fast toward the mountains.

  “They don’t like that rifle,” he noted.

  “Goddamned right!” blurted Segundo.

  Tomás rubbed his eyes. Even he had to admit this frontier business was exhausting. Guns. Scalps. Riders. Perhaps Aguirre was right about El Paso and sophisticated society. He imagined, for a moment, an exotic tall glass of sarsaparilla.

  “How do you know,” he asked, “about these poor bastards’ intentions?”

  Venado was looking around. He pulled a toothpick out of the hatband and stuck it in his mouth. He had a mild expression of serenity on his face.

  “We… talked,” he said.

  “Jesus,” said Segundo.

  Venado saluted them with one finger, tapping the immense brim of the hat.

  “Give our love to the Saint,” he said.

  Segundo snorted.

  “Love,” Segundo said.

  Venado regarded him. He pointed at the dead men, dark upon the soil. They were absorbing all the sun in the land.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “love is very, very hard.”

  He lowered his head so his face vanished in shadow.

  “My advice? Do not tell her why she lives another day. This”—he waved his hand lazily—“it ain’t to her taste.”

  He kicked his war pony and accelerated into the sun.

  “Holy Christ.” Segundo sighed.

  Tomás slid off his mount.

  “Love is hard?” he said. “Love is hard? I’ll tell you what’s hard. Dragging these dead sons of bitches into the arroyo. That’s what’s hard. Get off that horse, you lazy son of a bitch, and lend a hand.”

  Segundo took his time getting down.

  “You’re the boss,” he said.

  They bent to their work, holding their breath, thinking of things far away and dear.

  Teresita was on her knees inside the smoky hut of Magdalena of the Goats. That was the only name she knew for this place—when the pains came and the water gushed, the girls had come running and crying, “Magdalena of the Goats is having her child now!” Teresita had gathered her things quickly. Huila’s sharp little knife. Matches. Yerba buena, yerba mansa, cotton root, three small clay jars of aromatic pastes. She threw her rebozo over her head and stalked through the heat behind the frantic children. In these moments, she felt as if her teacher walked beside her, whispering the ancient secrets in her ear. She walked quietly, feeling every step in the earth, telling herself to be calm, for if she was not calm, the little mother would be panicked and jittery. She remembered her lessons: Bringing a child into the world was like taming a skittish horse. It was in the voice, the eyes, the calmness of the partera. For if the midwife was not ready, who was?

  The first thing was to test the air in the room. It did not smell sweet, but nothing in this valley smelled sweet. She had to sniff through a curtain of spoiled-beans-in-the-pan smell, of smoke and of sweated clothing in a dark pile by the bed. It was the scents behind that told the tale: the tang of fresh woman-sweat, the stark redolence of fear and pain, the coppery wet smells of the passage opening and the fluids moving. Blood. Musk. But no rot, thank God. No odor of death in the room.

  Teresita had the girl up on her hands and knees, great belly hanging toward the earth.

  “You may cry,” she said calmly. “You may weep and cry out. We were all brought here in pain. But we were all called to come make this a better world. It hurts because it is worthy of pain. Each birth brings the promise of great justice. It is a great wonder. I am here now to help you.” She reached under the girl’s body and placed her hands upon the distended belly. She held it up. She laid her head against the girl’s straining back. “Breathe,” she said. “Feel me. I will take your pain. Feel me.”

  And Magdalena of the Goats cried out. Spreading from Teresita’s hands came heat. Tingling delicious warm tendrils. A flow, a tide of soaking heat.

  “Suffer no more,” Teresita whispered. “I am here.”

  The girl squatted and in a swoon of time that could have been a minute or forever, her body trusted the infant into Teresita’s hands.

  The girls helped the mother down. Teresita wiped the child with a clean cloth, sucked the mucus out of his nose with her mouth. She spit the plug into the corner. He screamed his outrage to the universe, his little face red and furious. He urinated in a great arc that went over Teresita’s shoulder. She eased the afterbirth onto the mat on the floor and quickly sliced the cord with Huila’s knife. Boiled threads tied off the end of the cord.

  “You have come here,” she said, “to love. Love strong, live well, endure.”

  She anointed the baby with herbs to keep the mosquitoes away and placed him on Magdalena’s chest. He attached to her with a frantic suction that seemed to want to pull her all the way inside his tiny body. Everyone laughed.

  Teresita pressed a moist white towel to the opening between Magdalena’s legs. It blushed pink, then deep red. She applied a poultice there to keep the blood clean and the tissues healthy. She took Huila’s matches and lit sage in a small saucer and smudged the mother and the child and the room itself. The girls sang to the mother and her son. Teresita cleaned the mat. Then she sat back on her haunches and smiled. She was soaked in sweat.

  “Let’s have coffee,” she told the girls. “I wish we had bananas.”

  The girls had never seen bananas.

  When they brought her a mug, she asked for sugar. There was no milk, even goat milk, for Magdalena had not been able to work her flock.

  “Tomorrow,” she promised. “I will milk the goats.”

  “Quiet now,” Teresita said. “You will tend to your son.” She snapped her fingers. “You, girls,” she said. “Milk this mother’s goats!” They rushed outside.

  She sipped her coffee and regarded Magdalena and her boy. In her pocket, Aguirre’s latest missive said: Today.

  For once, his message made sense to her.

  Teresita said, “Amen.”

  Sixteen

  GREATLY OFFENDED BY TERESITA’S apparent rejection of his flowers, Harry Van Order in turn greatly offended Teresita by not coming back to her home. She did not enjoy admitting it to her father, but she was not only offended but also deadly bored. Harry vanished, and John seemed to drift farther and farther from her house until he looked like a black ant on the ridgeline to her south, standing guard in wretched silence. How had she lost them both? What had she done?

  “Everything I touch turns to mud,” she said into the air.

  She studied each letter from Don Lauro, and she fretted over each telegram from the U.S. government in the ongoing struggle over their immigration status. The Americans were still insisting she stay within a hundred miles of the border in case she needed to be deported. When the day came that Don Tomás was cleared and given full resident status, she surprised him by asking, “Is El Paso near the border?”

  “El Paso is the border.”

  “Then I want to go to El Paso.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “For good?”

  “For good.”

  “Why?”

  She blew air out of her mouth. She raised her hands and revealed their hut, the incandescent black rocks all around, the dead sky. She tipped her head sideways and squinted at him as if she were concerned about h
is evident lack of cognitive reason.

  “I am dying here,” she said.

  “Daughter,” he said. “I died a long time ago and woke up in Hell.”

  Then he grinned like a little boy. She was astonished—and angry—to realize that Tomás had simply been awaiting her permission to go. Cruz Chávez, rest his eternal soul, would not have sought permission. Were there no men left anywhere? Tomás was supposed to be her father. Why did she have to mother him?

  In her mind, she heard Huila’s voice as if it were coming through a hole in a wall of years, faint, muffled: You are old enough to stop thinking like a girl. You are old enough to stop worrying about your father. If you were born to be a mother, stop being an infant.

  Teresita held her fists to her temples.

  She wondered if God would be angry with her if she threw all the plates against the wall.

  John Van Order moseyed along on his way out to the road.

  “You look a mite cranky,” he noted.

  “Oh, be quiet,” she said.

  He offered her some advice: “Kick a pilgrim.”

  She listened to him laughing as he went around the bend and through the broken gate.

  And came the awaited day.

  They boarded the train in the screaming heat of June at a desert platform with a rickety water tower and drooping telegraph lines etching graceful black curving segments across the horizon. Segundo left before they boarded, riding for Cabora. There was no way he was going to step onto a train. He had it on good authority that once a vehicle exceeded forty miles an hour, all the oxygen would be sucked out of the riders’ lungs and they would suffocate. Everybody back in Sonora knew this. Besides, once the train reached its impossible acceleration, if the riders were not dead yet, the force of gravity would destroy them should they rise from their seats. He imagined bodies flying backward in the train cars and smashing in hideous tangles of broken bones and tattered limbs at the end of each one as the train kept moving but gravity held these poor victims in place until the wall rushed forward and destroyed them. To hell with that! He laughed at Tomás as he rode away. Good luck, pendejo! he thought. Too bad about Teresita, though. None of Segundo’s friends had ever traveled more than a hundred miles in their lives, and there were certainly none who had ridden trains. He was not fooled by the age of science.