Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  He studied the picture for a moment. He was busy. This business was irritating. Men’s doings were always being delayed by women’s shenanigans, he decided.

  “It is sacred,” he intoned.

  “It’s ridiculous.”

  “B—”

  “Do you see any angels around me?” she demanded.

  “Well, no.”

  “Angels,” Aguirre pontificated, “can only be seen with the eyes of the heart.”

  They both glared at him. He withdrew to a safe distance. She turned back to Ochoa. He was looking around for help now.

  “I must be going,” he announced.

  Ochoa mounted the saddle and put his goggles over his eyes. He removed his campaign hat and placed it on Teresita’s head. He gestured for her to back away. “Shade yourself,” he advised. He picked up a leather helmet and squeezed his head into it. Everyone clapped more robustly. He waved her back with his fingertips. She hurried to Don Lauro’s side.

  “Extraordinary,” he breathed. Then directed her to note this utterance in her notebook.

  Ochoa peered at three gauges on the tank. He turned a black valve, and a great puff of steam chuffed out and dissipated in the air. The machine shuddered. They all clapped again. He turned a red knob. The machine began to whine. They cheered. They whistled. Ochoa took hold of the lever on the left and drew it back. The pole rotated and pumped. The white umbrella spun, slowly at first, then faster and faster. The pumping made the umbrella rise and fall as it spun. It made loud unfurling and snapping sounds like the sail of a boat in a stiff wind. Clouds of dust began to swirl around man and machine as if they were in the midst of a dust devil. The contraption jittered and began to hop in place. It tapped from tire to tire as if it were excited and wanted to run and jump in a lake.

  “Behold,” Aguirre shouted, “the future of the Mexican race!”

  Ochoa slammed the other lever home and he launched into the air.

  The copter rose two feet and slammed back to the ground.

  “¡Ah, cabrón!” Señor Ochoa could be heard to utter.

  The machine leapt again. Three feet. Slam. Leap: six feet. Slam.

  “¡Chingado!” he cried.

  Buckaroos hollered, “Ride that sombitch!”

  Horrible gasps and screams of steam spurted out. The clanging of the machinery was deafening. The machine tipped away from them and scattered the photographers, who ran, shouting, trying to save their cameras as the machine frog-hopped at an alarming angle.

  “¡Jesús!” Ochoa yelled.

  Teresita’s picture tore loose from the engine casing and looped through the air as he retreated at an increasing rate.

  The machine would not rise into the sky. It would only jump, and it farted and wailed and threw bolts as Ochoa rode it up a small hill. They saw him on its crest, bouncing horribly with his legs akimbo, before the machine leapt off the far side in a horrid eruption of steam, dirt, and rocks.

  They heard one last cry from the world’s greatest spy before the crash: “Oh, Ga-daaammett!”

  Aguirre hung his head.

  “The future,” he mourned, “shall be deferred.”

  He pointed at Teresita’s notebook.

  “Quote me,” he said before hurrying off to see if Ochoa was alive.

  Twenty-One

  THEY WERE SCREAMING WITH laughter. Tomás was on his back on the floor. “He flew off a hill?” He gasped.

  She was wiping tears from her eyes.

  “He bucked over the hill! It looked like a giant iron toad!”

  “No!” He gasped again. “Stop!”

  “He cursed every time he hit the ground,” she said.

  He rolled over and got to his knees.

  “I beg you by all that is holy, stop. You’re making me wet my pants.”

  She hopped once. “¡Ah, cabrón!” she cried. She hopped again. “¡Ay, Mamá!” She hopped. “¡Ay, caramba!”

  Tomás crawled out of the room.

  “I must now escape to the excuse-me.”

  “Go,” she said, raising a holy hand in blessing.

  She sat at the dinner table and poked at a bowl of sliced melons. Her shoulders still shook when she pictured the scene. She scratched her head with both hands, shook out her hair.

  Tomás came back in the room. He was no longer smiling. He looked, in fact, like a sad child. His shirt was untucked and his hair was mussed.

  “What is it, Father?” she asked.

  “There is no water,” he replied.

  “¿Qué?”

  “They have turned off our water.”

  He had a paper in his hand. He had lifted it from the small table near the door. He held it out.

  “Who did?” she demanded.

  He shrugged.

  “El Paso. The neighbors. There was a letter.”

  “When did that come?”

  “Last week.”

  “And you did nothing?”

  “I didn’t think they were serious.”

  She stood. She took the paper from him and stared at it.

  “But why?” she said.

  He hung his head.

  “We bring a bad element to the street,” he said. “Your… followers. Disreputable. Something. The decent people, they want us to move.”

  She sat.

  He sat.

  They stared at each other.

  “But you didn’t do anything,” she scolded, like a mother whose son has not done his homework.

  He dug his thumbnail into the table’s wood.

  “I guess not,” he muttered. “I can’t do everything.”

  She sighed.

  “Don’t even start,” he said.

  “I wasn’t starting anything.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  “I was not!”

  “You were criticizing.”

  “I wasn’t the one who ignored the letter!” she said.

  “See?”

  He crossed his arms and looked away.

  “Thank you very much for your support,” he said.

  She ate a slice of melon to collect herself.

  The beams of the house creaked and cracked above them.

  He cleared his throat.

  “What do we do now?” she asked before he could say anything.

  He shrugged one shoulder.

  “We move,” he said.

  He blew air through his lips.

  “Again.”

  Thinking: Are you happy now?

  Thinking: Damn you.

  They took great care to not look at each other for a long, silent time.

  “Good night,” he said.

  His door closed silently and his bedsprings creaked.

  Teresita went from lamp to lamp then, blowing out the flames.

  Don Lauro Aguirre and a bandaged Victor Ochoa hauled the Urreas’ belongings away in a rented flatbed wagon as the neighbors glared and clucked and scowled at them from their porches. Tomás and Teresita rode in Aguirre’s cabriolet down the street behind them. Teresita steered, for Tomás was hugging a wheel of Parmesan to his chest as if it were a baby, shielding it from evil. People waved as they passed, but to Teresita it seemed that they were jeering. Her face burned.

  They hauled up to the front porch of a rooming house on Oregon Street at the edge of the barrio. The Negro hotel was down the road, and handsome women stood there with their children eyeing the great arrival. On the far corner, a cantina favored by bandits and rebels stood in a cloud of cigar smoke and ruckus. Tomás was scowling furiously, but he cheered up when he saw the cantina. “I see my cathedral,” he quipped. But Teresita was happy to see that, indeed, a church stood on the corner opposite the cantina. “And I see mine,” she replied. Both accepted that they had scored cheap points.

  There is our life, she thought. Expressed in stone.

  “Where do we live now?” Tomás called.

  Aguirre pointed.

  “Top floor. Northwest corner.”

  Tomás looked up, craned around.
Three Mexican and two black kids waited to help them move their things upstairs. Tomás looked back up the hill.

  “We used to live up there,” he said to the kids.

  “What happened?” one asked.

  “I killed the neighbors,” he said.

  The boys’ eyes widened.

  Across the street from the rooming house stood an empty lot. It was about an acre in size. Drunks lounged comfortably in the dirt. But he noticed people were moving into the space. He thought he saw some of them carrying canvas—a tent.

  Oh, he knew what that meant. There were no surprises left for the Sky Scratcher. There would be more tents. There would be bonfires and barbecues. There would be flags and tooty-tooty bands. Evangelists and revivals, endless preaching for Teresita and against her, and those damnable hymns. Indians and vaqueros. Fulsome children with watery angelic eyes. Assassins. Gunmen. Mexicans. Spies. People stood in the street and pointed at them. Jumbles of drunks and revelers tumbled in and out of the cantina, and shouts and drunken greetings rolled up the street at them. Teresita waved.

  “Don’t encourage them!” Tomás snarled.

  It would all start again. Oh, hell. All of it.

  But now Teresita had a high window from which to look down and bless her fanatics.

  Tomás comforted himself with the thought of shooting the pilgrims from his bedroom.

  From the cantina, two dangerous characters sauntered into the street. They were followed out by a slender woman with spiky hair. They all stared. They strolled toward Teresita and Tomás. One had long black hair and leather pants, a billowy poetic white shirt.

  “Who is this dandy pendejo?” Tomás wanted to know.

  The other bad boy wore his hair only to his shoulders, but this was still shocking to Tomás. He laid his cheese aside and fingered his pistola. The two bad men wore pistolas too, slung low on their hips. Skinny bastards, Tomás thought. No hats.

  Aguirre fell back and gasped. “It is the Iberians!”

  Tomás gripped his pistola harder. The dreaded Iberians! Crept into the United States from Chihuahua, no doubt looking for banks to rob. The gunmen stood in the road and stared at the Saint. Tomás knew he could draw and fire in a second if he had to. Still, he secretly loved bandidos and lamented the fact that he had never run off as a lad and joined the gang of the topless female scourge of Mexico, La Carambada.

  Tomás gestured with his chin.

  “¿Y tú, qué?” he challenged.

  The one in the leather pants said, “Soy Bunbury, de los Iberos. Este es Valdivia.”

  Aguirre already had his notebook out, but Bunbury pointed at him.

  “No interviews,” he said.

  Although Teresita resented the photographs of her that adorned so many walls, if she had been given a photograph of Bunbury of the Iberians, it would be hanging in her bedroom.

  He looked up at her under his eyebrows, like a wolf. John Van Order looked at her that same way.

  “¿Qué hubo, mi santita?”

  My little saint! She squirmed.

  Tomás thought it was insolent.

  “Aquí nomás,” she replied. “Echando relajo.”

  What? What? Tomás’s head swiveled between them, incredulity on his face. She said she was just hanging out? Enjoying the relaxation? What? Talking like a drunk to these cabrones? Saints didn’t say these things.

  “¿Y ésta?” she asked, nodding to the woman.

  “Es Rakel La Pocha. My historian,” Bunbury said.

  The two killers smiled and posed handsomely: cheekbones, pouts. Rakel spit.

  Teresita said, “You must be very famous to have your own historian with you.”

  The wicked Bunbury looked around and grinned.

  “You are more famous than I,” he said.

  “Mine is a different audience.”

  He stared up at her.

  “I don’t think so,” he replied. “Who is more of an outlaw than a saint?”

  “Benditos sean,” Teresita said, raising her hand.

  Tomás goggled. Blessed? Blessed be? Was she kidding? These evil sons of bitches, blessed?

  The bad men dipped their heads a smidgen.

  “Oh, please,” said Tomás.

  “Gracias, Santita Guapita,” Bunbury said. He pronounced it “Grathias.”

  All right; Tomás was going to shoot them. They were calling his daughter cute right in front of him.

  He started to speak, but Valdivia lit up a smoke and offered him one. He stalled and considered. A notorious pistolero was offering him a smoke? By God! He took it and said, “Grathias.” Everybody was Iberian.

  Valdivia wore a guitar on a strap across his back, and it hung head-down like a rifle.

  “One day,” Bunbury said, “we will write a song about you.”

  “I would love to hear it,” she replied.

  “Shh,” suggested Tomás.

  Ochoa and Aguirre stood with their mouths open.

  Bunbury shook his head sadly and smiled up at her.

  “When we are in Hell, Santita, and you are in the Kingdom of Heaven, remember us. Come near the gates. We will serenade you.”

  He winked. He dug out coins from his tight pockets and tossed them to the boys gathered around him. He hung his hands off his silver concha belt.

  They turned and strolled back to their bar for another round of drinks. Bunbury had a bottom that Teresita did not want to look at. The gunmen moseyed as if daring anyone in El Paso to shoot them. Rakel La Pocha had knives tucked in the back of her belt.

  “I was ready to blast those knot heads,” Ochoa said.

  Tomás sat back down and put his head in his hands. He’d thought there was going to be a rousing gunfight right there on the corner of Oregon. But Valdivia had fine tobacco, he’d give the Iberians that much.

  “Oh God,” he said. “It will never end.”

  Teresita hopped down, all grins.

  “Those fellows,” she noted, “weren’t so bad.”

  “They wanted to kill us all,” Tomás said.

  “Father,” she scolded, “they wanted to see me. Everyone wants to see me. Didn’t you know?”

  She joined the kids as they started to unload the boxes from the wagons. Tomás kicked back and tipped his hat to keep the sun from his eyes. He muttered, “But you like everybody.” He closed his eyes. Better to be asleep than to be the way he was. Which was small—small and dry in the vastness of the yellow desert sun.

  There was no room for most of their things, so Tomás rented a storage shed around the corner. The stench of Tomás’s cheese immediately attracted mice, which began tunneling through their belongings. They dug comfortable tunnels in the Parmesan and ate themselves to sleep.

  Teresita set about tidying up the apartment. The building was made of brick, and it soaked up the heat and turned into an oven. They kept the windows open, but the incessant noise of the street assaulted them at night. Mexicans raised a ruckus late into the night, they heard. The cantina seemed to be a center for cross-border fraternity: Americanos shot off pistolas outside and broke bottles. The Negro hotel was quiet by eight o’clock, but the downtown doves in their red skirts and loose tops who snuck between it and the next-door building screeched and hooted with their drunken buckaroos until dawn. Carriages, wagons, galloping horses.

  Tomás was appalled when the church bells went off first thing in the morning. He leapt from bed and yelled “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” out the window. In the Segundo Barrio, even God was a troublemaker.

  And, as he had predicted, the camp across the street began to grow. That one tent went up, its striped top attracting wanderers, and as soon as that outpost was settled, a second tent appeared. Between and behind them soon opened taco stands and charqui smokers making strips of black jerked beef. Donkeys loitered in the shade of the building as their owners made themselves small plots in the dirt from which to stare up at Teresita’s window. The borrachos of the barrio had never seen anything so entertaining, and they sat upon the
small porches of the downstairs apartments passing their ten-cent bottles of red vino, commenting as raucously as crows.

  He caught her, late one night, peering out the window at the humping, bumping mass in the field.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  She just stared.

  “Are you sleepwalking?”

  When she spoke, it was almost a whisper.

  “They are faceless,” she said. “There are so many. I cannot see them any longer. I cannot remember any of them.”

  She reeked of roses.

  He steered her to bed.

  If he could only charge a few centavos to each of these pilgrims, Tomás thought, he could buy a new Cabora in a year. But Teresita was adamant. Aguirre, however, was making a small fortune selling Teresita’s photographs—his agents skirted the edges of the crowd with stacks of the sacred relics, selling them for a dollar. It was absolute robbery. Tomás dug around in their trunks and found a picture Teresita had signed and meant to mail to poor stupid Cruz Chávez. He stole it and bargained with Aguirre. He got a good price for it. Teresita’s autograph drove the fanatics wild.

  July.

  When they heard explosions and gunshots and screaming coming from the sky, they leapt from their beds. Dreadful fires flared through their curtains. The sky must have been burning—red, green, blue. Tomás drew his pistola and plastered himself to the wall, holding Teresita back with one hand as he peeked through the curtains.

  “Ah, cabrón,” he said.

  He drew back the curtain for her to see. Skyrockets flew from the rascuache camp and from the hills behind. Glittering sky bombs rained down from the Franklin Mountains on the city below. Teresita laughed and clapped her hands. They leaned there on the window ledge and watched their first Fourth of July.

  Twenty-Two

  REVOLUTION.

  The great Nogales raid began before first light on August 12, 1896. Forty warriors climbed into the hills in Sonora and huddled, rifles across their knees. Benigno Arvisu, Victor Ochoa’s local operative, fed small twigs into their little fire. His compatriot Manuel González was the leader of the group. Manuel had survived the terrible cannonade and burning of Tomóchic. He had been to Cabora and seen Teresita at work. Now they looked out upon both Mexico and the United States. There was a garrison below them full of soldiers, but the warriors trusted that the barbwire fences between the nations would keep the Americanos on their own side. If the Americanos rode into the battle, Manuel, Benigno, and all of their men would surely die.