Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  He buried the coffee grounds in the bin under orange peels and stale tortillas. Teresita didn’t need to see such newsprint, even though she didn’t seem to care what anyone thought about her anymore.

  “I am beyond all that,” she told him. “It is all an illusion.”

  “Illusion,” he repeated.

  “I maintain my serenity.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Yes. Now you are the Buddha.”

  He thought this was funny; she ignored it.

  Tomás’s uncle the great Don Miguel saw to it that proceeds from the ranchos were shipped to Tomás, and these happy packets of money arrived regularly. They wanted for nothing. Oil lamps, iron pans, fresh blankets, a maid, a gardener, assistants to attend to Teresita’s nonexistent ledgers and paperwork. A tally, they had decided, needed to be made. Even of Tomás’s nonexistent businesses. They ate good steak—or he did; she made do with fruit and eggs and bread and tamarind juice.

  “You don’t know what you’re missing,” he gloated as he slurped a powerful bowl of menudo turned red with hot sauce.

  She looked into the bowl and said, “It looks like leeches floating in a bowl of eyeballs and blood. It smells like the inside of a dead horse.”

  She tenderly patted his shoulder and left the room.

  He fought down rising bile and ate the rest of it just to show her how good it was.

  These were their days at the beginning in El Paso.

  They lived not far from the central section of the city. Mejicanos lived below the centro, near the river. The rich bastards lived up in the foothills in nice brick houses, and the fattest of the high-climbing Mexican pols squatted there among trees and parks above it all. They consorted with lawyers and judges and drank and danced except in election years, when they descended to the barrios and squinted compassionately and clicked their tongues over the plight of the gente. The People. Tomás almost banged his head when he heard the People spoken again—he would never escape the moiling upheaval of the masses. Frankly, he wanted to be up in the hills with the big brick houses and the alcoholic sellout Mexican hostesses with their swollen rumps and gringo-lawyer husbands. Yes. Big houses. Tipsy little dumplings sitting on his lap.

  His own house was tidy and bright. Its windows sported white curtains all around. The porch was small but held two chairs and a square table. Cats visited regularly, and the mockingbird that stood vigil in their small lime tree bombed them furiously. Behind the building, the jagged Franklin Mountains jutted into the sky. The ghost of a long-dead Spanish monk was said to wander up there with his burro; travelers had witnessed this ghastly wraith beside the road to New Mexico. Lost gold mines in the Franklins waited for rediscovery, loaded with millions of pounds of Spanish ore and Catholic jewels. Tomás thought it would be a good idea to waylay this ghostly monk and escort him to the cave, for he was clearly keeping the treasure to himself. He planned to ride up there and liberate the fortune as soon as Segundo arrived. All that good money was wasted on Catholics, he thought, and how much worse to let a dead Catholic keep it.

  Coffee with Mexican eggs on flat corn tortillas in the mornings.

  “See here,” Tomás announced, shaking his paper at her. “They have discovered a mysterious rayo X that will allow doctors to peer into the human body.”

  “Medicine men can do that already,” she countered.

  “There seems to have been an automobile race,” he reported. “The vehicles drove from Chicago to some other city. They traveled at a speed of five point six miles an hour. An American won. Two thousand dollars.”

  “Americans always win.”

  “How can you say always?” he demanded. “It’s the first pinche auto-car race in history!”

  “Americans always will win,” she said. “They invented the auto race so they could win it.”

  “Ha!”

  “They invented the border so they could invent Mexico and beat us in every race.”

  “By God,” he said.

  He rattled his paper.

  “Your poisonous attitude,” he sniffed, “can hardly be seen as saintly, I must note.”

  “I never said I was a saint,” she replied. She looked at a buttery piece of toast and tossed it back in its plate. Sniffed the coffee and found it wanting. She bit into a slice of melon. “I am a prophet.”

  “Oh God, no,” he said. “What you are is nineteen years old.”

  She wandered back to her room to read.

  He shook his head. He guffawed. He pulled his flask from his pocket.

  Aguirre had delivered the newest sensation, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, to them. Teresita, enjoying the services of a reader-translator hired by Aguirre, shuddered at the dreadful depictions of the Morlocks. She believed in things like Morlocks and took to locking her windows at night. ¡Lúgubre! Far more grim, however, was Hardy’s newest, Jude the Obscure. “Obscure, indeed!” Tomás muttered.

  There was immense excitement in the Urrea house when Tomás got his hands on a Kodak pocket camera. Teresita often snapped pictures of her clients as they gathered on the porch. There was nowhere in town to process the film, however, so she never saw the prints.

  And more. The strains of America’s most popular new song at an open-air concert they’d gone to down at San Jacinto Plaza on a Sunday evening. It was called “And the Band Played On.” (Tomás was delighted by the romance of its opening lines, and later he often crooned them at inopportune moments in his exemplary English: “ ‘Casey would valz with a strawverry blonde.’ ” He liked that idea.) After the concert, he had walked with new friends to the burly Río Grande and stared sadly at Juárez. Then, to finish off the evening, he had cajoled them into taking him to Chinatown so he could watch the fugitive Chinese immigrants in opium dens. He was very interested in opium, though he did not dare to smoke it in front of his esteemed associates. But he sniffed the air and then thought, perhaps, he felt a bit more serene.

  But far more astounding to the Urreas than the developments of 1896 or the complexities of life in El Paso were the small miracles of their own home. Water, for example. Water ran through pipes and filled bathtubs. Water sluiced out their toilet. Teresita could spill water in the side yard and coax gardens from the soil. Sunflowers, silver sage, poppies, geraniums, coneflowers, cosmos.

  She ate nasturtium leaves in her salads—they tasted like pepper. It was a ragtag garden, though—she was averse to pulling weeds. She had an inordinate fondness for dandelions. Wicked thistles pleased her, for they attracted butterflies. For Teresita, the garden existed both on the ground and in the air.

  When she had a moment to rest, it was her greatest pleasure to sit at the table on her porch with the bad cats from the neighborhood at her feet, the mockingbird yelling threats and obscenities from the tree, and the buzzing universe of color, bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds, beside her house. The occasional dragonfly rattled up from the river and hovered around the porch, seeming to study her face. She did not read. She did not pray. She simply sat. She never said a word. All she did was smile.

  She was certain that bigger cities were out there, waiting.

  Teresita had seen an advertisement in Don Lauro’s newspaper for an herb emporium down on Stanton Street. She was thrilled that one could simply enter a shop and gather leaves. This seemed too marvelous to imagine. No hiking into the wastelands? No knife or shotgun? This was the modern world at its best. Damiana? Hinojo? Rafa de víbora? Right there in jars on the shelves to be had for a few centavos and a pleasant word.

  Don Lauro often stopped by the Urreas’ small house to observe the milling crowds. It sometimes threatened to become a rabble. One overcrowded day, he recited a favorite poem to calm them. Most of the people on the street had not heard poems and seemed to think the great man was preaching scripture to them. His mellifluous voice rang out and caused them to bow their heads.

  The single-file line jostled down Campbell Street and went around the corner onto Overland. Still, for all its civility, the mob of the needy di
sturbed the Urreas’ neighbors, and when they weren’t glaring from their closed windows, they were placing flowerpots and benches across their gateways to keep any beggars from their yards.

  Righteous revolt, Aguirre wrote in his notebook.

  Teresita had taken to sitting at her table on the porch surrounded by candles and fresh flowers and water and coiling plumes of incense. She greeted the seekers quietly—too quietly for Aguirre to catch a word of the consultations. It was fascinating the way they knelt at her feet, held her hands, even laid their heads upon her knees. They often wept, but just as often they laughed with her. Although he could not hear their words, her laughter rang out clearly. It was a strong, loud laugh, all belly. Sometimes, whatever the pilgrim said made her laugh so hard, she wiped tears from her eyes and shook her head.

  He couldn’t say he saw a great change in the cured sufferers. They hobbled down the steps in the same way they had struggled up. Bent backs remained bent. He never saw the lame and halt rise and dance. He didn’t see the blind cast away their white canes and run free. Yet they came away smiling, and some of them blessed those waiting behind, as if the newly cured had absorbed some sort of sacred charge.

  On one occasion he glanced up—Teresita was waving him closer.

  He edged through the crowd and looked up at her.

  “Ferocity!” she mocked, then laughed at him.

  He looked around.

  “Fanaticism?” he asked.

  She took a sip of water.

  “Faith,” she replied.

  He tipped his head: point, Teresita.

  “Uncle Lauro,” she said. “I would like to visit the Farmacia Río Grande on Stanton Street. Por favor.”

  He bowed slightly.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Will you take me?”

  “I will.”

  “Tomorrow, then.”

  He started to reply but saw he had been dismissed. She had already turned to her next client, a fellow with an eye as blue-white in the middle as a clot of curdled milk. She took the man’s chin in her hand and turned his face to one side and looked into the dead eye. Aguirre noticed the man was trembling like a newborn colt.

  He put his notebook away. Teresita was magnificent on her porch, fully in her powers. He whistled as he walked off. Everything was coming together. He, too, believed in the hand of God. He knew where it was pointing. It was pointing at him.

  Nineteen

  TOMAS WAS ALREADY OFF doing business when Don Lauro Aguirre pulled up before the house at eight the next morning. Tomás had become a progressively stranger creature to Teresita, some visitor from a benighted world. He drifted to sleep in his chair as he read at night, jerking awake with a loud “Huh!” and making believe he was agreeing with something she hadn’t said. Lately, he had begun picking his teeth with pieces of thick paper. Outside, he honked and spit as if the world had earned the product of his sinuses. Had he always been so unsavory? She could not remember. And now he had developed a perverse love of great, malodorous wheels of cheese. He brought these giant rounds home in twine nets, coated in red wax and smelling like stinky feet. He seemed to think that nasty cheese was a high point of human endeavor. He blew his curdled breath in her face. She wondered if all fathers were so blissfully unaware of how embarrassing they were. At least Don Lauro made some effort to earn and keep her respect.

  When Aguirre pulled up to the house, the light was still slanting onto the street, yellow and orange and slightly blue in the far corners. Breezes freshened by the river swirled dust and butterflies along the stone curbside. Aguirre’s cabriolet was polished—its black work shone like obsidian, and its gilded trim was electric with sunlight. A few believers stood around on the street corner, watching her house with hope on their faces. There weren’t yet the milling crowds, though trash had accumulated in the roadside plants. The believers shuffled toward him. Aguirre saw in them the greed he’d observed at raffles and church bazaars. He shrugged off his impression and stepped up and knocked. A house girl opened the door to him and ushered him into the tiny parlor.

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  “Mississippi, mister.”

  “Ah.” He wrote it in his notebook. This was history.

  “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “I see. And where are you from?”

  “Tennessee.”

  “Good. Good.”

  Mississippi had come from Tennessee, but Aguirre missed this delight. He had written Miss Hissippy. Odd name—perhaps Russian. But he approved of a young lady who demanded respect and called herself “Miss.” He put away his notebook.

  Teresita came out in Juanita Van Order’s yellow polka-dot dress. She was as bright as the sunflowers outside the window. Well, with the dots, she was perhaps more like a stand of black-eyed Susans. She nodded to him and took his arm and was happy to be guided to the carriage and lifted to her seat with all the chivalry Don Lauro could muster. He climbed up beside her and settled his hat on his head. It was one of those turtlelike bowlers that so offended Don Tomás.

  “This day,” he pronounced with a flourish of hands, “is foudroyant!”

  She eyed him, silent.

  “Dazzling.”

  Aguirre clicked his mouth at the horse and they rolled.

  Everyone in the pharmacy was thrilled to meet the Saint. They had read about her in the papers, though none of them had seen her in person. She was fascinated by a black Mexican woman working behind the counter. She had not heard of such a thing.

  “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “El Golfo.”

  “I love your skin,” she said. “May I touch it?”

  The woman offered her cheek, and Teresita stroked it.

  “It doesn’t come off,” the woman said.

  They laughed.

  Teresita had no money. Aguirre had to smile. Going to a store was apparently beyond her life experience. He pulled wadded dollars from the pouch he carried under his jacket.

  He did not understand the value of things that thrilled her. A noxious black twig that looked like it was ready for a trash fire made her cry out in joy. She laid curling long leaves into a sheet of newspaper and rolled them up carefully while nodding wisely at him as if he knew what magic potion they would brew. She sniffed at a clay bowl of dirt.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “Graveyard dirt, miss.”

  “Graveyard dirt?”

  “Yes, miss. Taken from a murderer’s grave.”

  “Ay, Dios,” she murmured. “Do you use it to heal?” she asked.

  “You use it to kill.”

  “I see.”

  She dusted off her hands and moved on. Aguirre glanced into the bowl and averted his eyes. It occurred to him that he was dipping into forces beyond his understanding.

  The day’s purchases came to five dollars and seventy-five cents. They placed the bundles of herbs in the back of the wagon, and Don Lauro turned the carriage toward downtown. “Have you ever eaten ice cream?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  They clopped over the cobbles and through the dirt of the bright streets. Teresita had never seen so many people so well dressed. The buildings all about were huge, casting shadows that were alive with pigeons. They rose two and three stories, and some of them were fronted with brick or white stone. It was like passing through a great marble range of mountains. Festive American and Texan flags formed colored waves in the air above the cliff faces. Hotels. Banks. Stores. She saw that El Pasoans bought many kinds of clothing, many cuts of meat, many sizes of boot, many brands of gun.

  Aguirre nudged her and pointed out a tall fellow striding along distractedly. He wore his hair a bit curly at the collar, and his mustache was wider and blacker than her father’s.

  “That’s the sheriff of Las Cruces,” Aguirre said.

  “He looks mean.”

  “He’s Pat Garrett,” he explained.

  “Oh?”

  “He
killed Billy the Kid!”

  “Oh!”

  She craned around and stared at the lawman. He glanced at her. She waved. He raised a finger and stepped into a saloon.

  Teresita let out cries of delight when the mule cars rumbled along on their tracks, happy trolleys pulled by nodding philosophical mules. And bicycles reduced her to wild laughter. Great high-wheeled rattling machines with capped boys perched on their seats, charging in and out of the shadows of fat cottonwoods along the streets and acequias.

  They took in the bustle of workers at Bassett’s lumberyard, and they stared at the young Negro children in front of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, which looked like it had been built with planks from Bassett’s. Aguirre pointed out the Ames building. “Home of the El Paso Times,” he sniffed. “The enemy.” He shook his fist at the building, and they both laughed. “They used to sell boots there,” he said. “I daresay the establishment was better used in that service.”

  Down to the corner of Texas and Mesa. The Segundo Barrio was near, as was the river. Don Lauro helped Teresita down and walked her to the Elite Confectionery on the corner. The floor was made of echoing tile, and the white counter within was curved and long. It was cool inside. Teresita loved the smell of cakes and sugar. Don Lauro ordered two toasted cheese sandwiches with bottles of Houck and Dieter strawberry sodas. He confided, “The brave Mexican freedom fighters across the river drink Houck and Dieter. We drink in solidarity with the revolt.”

  She lifted her bottle to him in a toast.

  “Ferocity,” she said.

  “Er, yes.”

  “Justice.”