Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  She made small nests for the yellow birds out of tea strainers and cotton. At night, she covered their cages with her shawls. She would stare at them when she was alone, after her day’s work, and think, If only I had the wings of a bird, I would fly away and be at peace.

  Helen met her friend on the corner. He was working at the Californian and the aptly titled Wasp. He stood in the sun, tall as a lamppost and thin, his carefully tended curls piled atop his head, and his great mustache jutting to either side of his face. Like stingers. He wore no hat.

  “Girl Saint, eh?” he said by way of greeting. He leaned away from Helen as if being pushed by a gust of wind, his hands going helplessly to his chest. He was infuriating. But he was a fine translator. “An Indian, no less.”

  “She happens to be Mexican,” Helen said.

  “Delightful,” he replied.

  “Shall we?”

  “We shall,” he said, offering his arm as they set out to meet Teresita.

  Ambrose Bierce. She smiled. His great body knocked into hers as they rolled. Women said they could feel him from across the room when he entered a door. He smelled vaguely of bay rum and rich tobacco. She didn’t know about feeling him from a distance, but now, as he radiated heat beside her, Mr. Bierce had her full attention.

  For the entire swaying, rattling ride, with transfers to two green cars, they said little. Bierce jotted notes in his small notebook, ideas for stories that Helen had seen—ghastly things she didn’t much care for. He smoked. She cadged a thin cheroot from him and drew critical stares as she lit up and blew smoke into the aisle.

  San Jose.

  Bierce noted, “Ah, the Pearl of the West.”

  “Oh, you,” she replied.

  When they saw the house, Bierce muttered, “Three cheers for subtlety.”

  “Hush,” she scolded.

  Twidlatch stood in the street in his absurd beaver top hat. Parked at the curb was a gleaming 1901 Oldsmobile Runabout with the celebrated curved dashboard. Bierce leaned in and took a gander. It smelled of leather. “Next year’s model!” he called. There would be no auto cars on a reporter’s salary.

  “It came by rail,” Twidlatch announced, rocking up on the balls of his feet.

  Bierce sucked at a tooth as though a bit of pot roast were stuck there and turned away.

  Two hired apes stood on the steps of the porch. Rules of all sorts came at the reporters in a cascade. No questions about finances, for example. No exiting the house with the Saint. The Great Man in his tall hat kept stating “I must insist” after every demand. Bierce had earlier been bored by the entire enterprise, but now that this hideous toad had accosted him with his Britishness, he was raring to go up the steps. He wished he had brought his derringer as well, for this bloated autocrat could use a good peppering. All through the lecture, Bierce kept looking over his shoulder.

  A Mexican matron with gray hair and eyeglasses stood resolutely in the middle of the street, braced as if facing a stiff wind. Her apron revealed old stains of mole and chicken blood that had not washed out over the years, and in her hand she held a drooping bouquet of cilantro as if she meant to flog the Englishman with it.

  “Is this the Saint?” asked Helen.

  El Tweedly-yatch coughed out a single humorless laugh.

  “This is the irksome Mrs. Castro, apparent sheriff of Seventh Street.”

  Mrs. Castro put one finger to her eye.

  “Los estoy observando, cabrones,” she said.

  Bierce had a slight cough of his own.

  “You are obviously in good hands,” he offered.

  The Englishman shrugged. He turned them away from the implacable matron and introduced them to an oily-haired impresario.

  “Mr. Suits,” he announced.

  “J. H. Suits,” the gent said, bowing slightly.

  “That suits me fine,” said Bierce.

  “Really, Ambrose,” chided Helen.

  “I am the Saint’s personal manager,” Suits told them. “Here to answer any questions.”

  Helen took his hand.

  “Pleasure,” she said.

  “Perhaps, this… gentleman here,” Suits said, “would care to stay outside with us as you chat with Saint Teresa?” He offered a small case of cigars.

  Bierce looked around.

  “Awful lot of beef gathered to control one li’l Mexican gal,” he drawled.

  “It is our duty to protect her.” J. H. Suits exhaled.

  “Mr. Bierce,” said Helen, “is my translator.”

  “Ah.”

  “Excuse us,” Bierce said, pushing through. “Deadlines, don’t you know.” As soon as he’d sensed they didn’t really want him to see the Saint, he wanted very much to take a peek.

  Helen smiled at the gents and followed him to the door. They tussled a bit to see who would be first to enter, but Helen moved him aside. “It is my story, after all,” she said, elbowing him.

  The front room was spare. Wooden chairs and an oval carpet. “Brussels,” she noted with approval; he shrugged. Carpets? Could anyone care about a carpet?

  A waiting room. Uncomfortable chairs lined up along the wall with sad little stains from the heads of the hopeful leaning back against the wallpaper. Votive candles flickered on small dark end tables.

  “La Santa,” said Bierce, “needs to watch these candles unless she wants a conflagration.”

  He stroked his whiskers and squinted slightly.

  “Apocalypse,” he noted, “always follows outbreaks of holiness.”

  Teresita opened the inner door and smiled at them. The scent of roses wafted out. Helen took her hand. Bierce raised his eyebrows and seemed as if he were ducking a thrown shoe.

  Helen Dare already saw her own words streaming through her mind: She came to meet me with a soft, swift, gliding step, a slender outstretched hand, a soft-spoken Spanish greeting—tall, slender, flat-chested, fragile…. Bierce noted that Miss Helen had already fallen in love with the Saint. He preferred rounder women. Well, actually, skinny women were quite fine too. But sinners were definitely better than saints. Hell—all women. As long as they weren’t idiots.

  “Eh?” he said.

  “Pásen, por favor,” the Saint repeated.

  They entered—Bierce doffed an imaginary hat. He moved his upper body around as if it were on springs, inspecting every corner of the room. She regarded him with a vague grin—he reminded her of her father. He was tall enough. He hitched his dark trousers at the knee, flared open his coat like wings, and sat down and crossed his legs. He stared at the standing ladies and crossed his arms. They looked down at him. He sighed. He rose again.

  “By all means,” he intoned. “After you.”

  “Gracias,” Teresita said.

  … Beautiful, black-fringed, shining brown eyes and a grave sweet smile, Helen wrote in her mind.

  They took seats on the settee across from him, backlit by a window that revealed the side of the neighboring building—a brick establishment that featured a leering mural of a moron holding up a bottle of elixir and grinning. TAPEWORMS! it proclaimed.

  She sat herself down beside me with her long slender hands together on her knees with the perfect ease of perfect unself-consciousness.

  Helen shook Teresita’s hand. Bierce bobbed his left foot impatiently as if he needed to run around the block. He yanked his notebook out of his inner jacket pocket and licked the point of a pencil. Nodding sagely, he wrote: Early one morning in 1872 I murdered my father—an act which made a deep impression on me at the time. He laughed out loud.

  “Great literature, ladies!” he announced, replacing his notebook close to his heart.

  “My rude companion,” said Miss Dare, “is the notorious newspaperman Ambrose Bierce. He is a terrible man.”

  “Oh?”

  “They call him the wickedest man in San Francisco.”

  He shrugged.

  “The oldest, perhaps,” he mumbled.

  Still, Bierce was delighted to be translating such dire
comments about himself.

  “He published a scandalous book,” Miss Helen confided. “It was called The Devil’s Dictionary.”

  “Are you familiar with the devil?” Teresita asked Bierce.

  “We are drinking companions,” he replied. “I regularly cheat him at poker.”

  “Is he a sore loser, sir?”

  “He cursed me with these good looks,” said Bierce, leaning back and wickedly stroking his whiskers.

  Miss Dare said, “They call him Bitter Bierce.”

  Bierce translated as if announcing a dukedom.

  Teresita turned back to him.

  “And are you bitter, Señor Bierce?”

  “As gall,” he said.

  He beamed.

  She nodded and leaned toward him.

  “You could chew sugarcane,” she suggested.

  “Eh—what?”

  “Or perhaps a dose of algerita. Chop the root with an ax and soak it in water. I’d say three to five drops a day under your tongue. Good for the liver… Forgive me, but you look like a drunkard.”

  “Indeed!” he said, warming to her immensely.

  “Try biscuit root. Biscuit root, drunk in corn liquor. It will cure the effect of drinking… too much corn liquor.”

  Helen Dare stared at them as they laughed.

  “Anything I should know?” she said.

  “Mere preliminary rounds for the great boxing match,” he replied.

  “Eres un borracho, y eres sangrón tambien,” she said.

  “By God!” Bierce said. “I am rude. Quite right! It is my best feature. You refresh me, Santa, I must declare. Oh. And when I say God,” he added, “I mean of course if there were such a critter.”

  Helen cleared her throat.

  The interview began.

  Bierce was unmoved by so much hooey. Miracles and the like. The revolutionary part, the shooting, that appealed to him. He was not only a newsman but a war hero. Most of the concerns of the good citizens of San Francisco seemed so much foofaraw and spume to him. He had tasted true life, raw and pungent, and he had no interest in niceties and shared illusions. Teresita’s limpid dark gaze moved him somewhat, he would admit; she had a certain bovine blinkiness to her—though deep inside, he thought of her as deerlike, but that appalled him and he refused to entertain the poetry of it.

  Miss Dare excused herself for a moment, and Teresita showed her to the excuse-me. Helen really needed time to scratch her notes as fast as possible before they faded from memory. It was best, she had found, to take notes out of sight to keep the flow of information in the actual interview free and unfettered.

  When Teresita came back in the room, she offered Mr. Bierce tea. He shook his head. She sat.

  “What do you think of my story?” she asked him.

  “The company is bearable”—he sighed—“but the discourse makes me want to jump out a window.”

  “Oh my.”

  He grinned, pleased with himself. He fondled his whiskers. He bobbed his impatient foot.

  “How do you like California?” he asked.

  “It is… bearable,” she said with a small smile of her own. “But the discourse…” She shook her head and blew air through her lips.

  “Ha!”

  This Saint had some bark on her.

  He leaned in.

  “There is one thing you must beware of,” he warned.

  “What is that?”

  “Vampire bats.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Vampire bats. They are everywhere. They come at you and keep on coming, slashing with razorlike fangs. You can’t feel the sting until you are exsanguinated! Your manager will find you bloodless and pale on the ground.” She blinked. “Why, I was with a farmer across the bay in fair Oakland. They must carry ax handles for protection! The swarm came at me. If I hadn’t had a hoe, all would have been lost!”

  Teresita stared.

  “They came at me. Wave after wave. I beat them and beat them. It was hideous!”

  Helen Dare came back in the room.

  He sat back, crossed his legs, and nodded darkly at Teresita.

  “Did I miss anything?” Helen asked.

  “We were simply discussing natural phenomena,” said Bierce, smiling warmly. “Say, Santa—how about some of that tea?”

  “When you awakened, after this… this trance you mention,” Helen said. “You could heal?”

  The canaries tossed bubbling music in the air behind them.

  Teresita nodded.

  “When I cured people, they began to call me Saint Teresa.” She smiled, blushed. “I didn’t like it at first, but now I am used to it.”

  “Yes,” offered Bierce. “Everyone calls me Saint Ambrose. It is a burden.”

  “Hush,” said Helen.

  Teresita continued, already aware that one ignored Bitter Bierce’s outbursts—he was mostly amusing himself.

  “Some said I was a saint, and some said there was an evil spirit in me. Some have come to examine me and said it was in the blood or the nerves. But I feel it was given to me by God. I believe God has placed me here as one of His instruments to do good.”

  She smiled at Bierce.

  “Perhaps you too, Saint Ambrose.”

  “Heaven forfend,” he said.

  “But this Consortium,” Helen said. Teresita glanced toward the door, her brows knitting a bit. “They are making money off you, are they not?”

  “The power to do good makes me happy and grateful. I have no wish to be paid.” She shrugged. “I have no care for fine things or fine houses or money.”

  “Then you are unique in Christendom,” Bierce noted.

  “You would like my father,” Teresita said. “He too is a foolish man.”

  Bierce sipped his cold tea and worked his eyebrows at her.

  “But the Consortium…” Helen insisted.

  Teresita waved a hand impatiently.

  “I refuse no one who needs help. Yes? Sometimes, I know, people come to me because they have curiosity but no faith. If they are sick, I try to cure them. I try not to have the same negative feelings toward some people as they have toward me. Sometimes I feel the power that is in me bounce back at me when I send it to them. But I try again.”

  “The Consortium assists in this?”

  Teresita poured herself more tea and dropped in two lumps of sugar. She sipped and stared at Helen over the rim of her cup.

  “Holiness,” she noted, “is expensive.”

  The silence after that was long and heavy.

  The women turned and looked at Bierce. His head had fallen back. He was snoring softly.

  “Perhaps,” said Teresita, “another topic would be more of interest to your readers.”

  Helen Dare let the Consortium go.

  “May I ask,” she said, kicking Bierce’s foot. He snorted awake. “What malady was it that so affected the Rosencrans child that you healed?”

  She was hoping for a mystical response, some real Indian zinger to cap off her story.

  But Teresita simply replied: “Cerebrospinal meningitis.”

  Helen was taken by surprise and sat back with her eyebrows raised.

  Teresita grinned.

  “You think it is magic,” she said. “This is my science.”

  She extended her hands.

  Helen declined to touch them.

  As he took his leave of Teresita, Ambrose Bierce paused at the door.

  “Santa,” he said. “This sincerity routine of yours. It works.”

  He nodded out toward Messrs. Suits and Twidlatch and their pismires and mugwumps gathered on the steps keeping an eye on the house and the street and the reporters.

  “My advice to you, however, if I may be so bold.”

  “You may.”

  “Take charge of this rabble.”

  He nodded once, turned away, leaned back.

  “These donkeys of yours could use a little gelding.”

  “Gracias, señor,” she said.

  “Snip-
snip,” he called as he tumbled down the steps and burst into the afternoon.

  “Farewell, Mr. Bierce,” she called.

  “¡Adios!”

  Why, Mr. Bierce had brought her the most pleasure she had enjoyed in a long while.

  Teresita stared at her minders, closed the door before they could come to it, and quietly turned the lock.

  Forty-Two

  THE STORY APPEARED ON July 27 to some acclaim. It certainly upped the ticket purchases for the Consortium. J. H. Suits had Teresita scheduled down to the hour: Up at six, breakfast and ablutions until seven. Quiet time until eight thirty. Clients from nine—an hour earlier than before—until five, with a half-hour break for lunch. Supper at six. Six days a week. She was “free” to walk out on Saturday mornings—accompanied by guards. Otherwise, she was kept inside. She was open to a sign, she felt—she was thinking of a coyote, a wolf, a lion. Hummingbirds or ravens or dragonflies or a spider. Any sign would do. Until then, she would do as she was told.

  And what about Buenaventura? Surely he would come for her. Perhaps he’d see the newspaper story. But Mrs. Castro’s investigations finally brought news of that. Fast Johnny Urrea had gone on to Virginia City, seeking gold. With that, Teresita lost her smallest hope that she would be set free.

  But in her quietest hours, she imagined her father, her father and Aguirre, each taking a cognac in a large snifter with Mr. Bierce. And she knew what they would say to her. Huila would say it too. They would tell her: Set yourself free. And Huila would whisper: You already had your sign.

  Bierce remained intrigued by Teresita for a while, but both he and Helen, in their competing newsrooms, forgot all about her after September 8, when the Galveston hurricane hit Texas, killing eight thousand people. Unlike Dare, Bierce welcomed devastation. Ah, death! Telegrams arrived in a steady flow; Morse code keys ticked and tacked, and Bierce drank a toast to every dead corpse.

  Both reporters missed the small story that would have brought them narrative gold, a small bit on an inner page of September 24’s Oakland Tribune. But who read Oakland’s papers? No one did when whole city streets in Texas were lost in the Gulf of Mexico.