Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  “Buenas noches, Mrs. Van Order,” he said.

  SOPRANO AND WILD BILL NEW YORK SOON / LIVING AS MAN AND WIFE / IF DISCOVERED DISASTER / ADVISE.

  SMITH—MUST AVERT SCANDAL / DIVORCE SOPRANO SOONEST AVAILABLE / WILL ARRANGE THIS END / WILD BILL FEND FOR SELF?

  BRING SOPRANO TO LOS ANGELES FOR DIVORCE / DIST COURT DIVORCES EASY / TRAIN NY AFTER TO MEET COWBOY.

  GREASER RAIL UNION STRIKE LOS ANGELES / WILL KEEP SOPRANO AWAY FROM MEX / IMPERATIVE GO SMOOTH AND NO NEWS.

  SOPRANO FINDS TROUBLE BY NATURE / BRACE SELFS.

  Fifty

  FINDING OUT SHE’D be in the west while he faced their destiny alone put John Van Order in a blue funk for a while. But it couldn’t last. Not with New York on the horizon. New York! With its smoking towers and its epic streets, its rivers and harbors and parks and industry, New York of the avenues, of the dances in Harlem and the bridges to Brooklyn. He had seen it all in books and magazines. He had dreamed it as a place of laughter and music and perfume and none of the stink or the dirt or the chickens in the poor shadows or the hard times that crushed workingmen to the cobbles. There was no gloom in his head yet.

  In an old-books emporium, he found a volume that brought him great joy. He tried to share passages with Teresita, but it was beyond her understanding, and there was no way to translate his delight into her languages. It was a slim volume: Vocabulum: Or, The Rogue’s Lexicon by New York City police chief George Matsell. And although the idiom of the gangs of New York had surely evolved since the book’s appearance, in 1859, John was certain that phrases would remain current among those in the know. He studied it and laughed and cornered her with trivia all day.

  “Do you know what the New York criminal calls a man?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Bene cove! Isn’t that rich?”

  “Ay, sí.”

  “Bene cove,” he marveled. “How about what they called the madam of a whorehouse?”

  “Why would I know that?”

  “A cab-moll!”

  “Mira nomás.”

  She reminded herself of Gabriela, of the way she indulged Tomás and deflected his outbursts with a sweet distractedness that allowed him to believe he was impressing her while not overly burdening her mind or taking her attentions from her own thoughts.

  “You know what a nose is?”

  She was packing her trunk.

  “No idea,” she muttered, thinking: Do I need heavy stockings in Los Angeles?

  “A trunt!”

  “Amazing,” she offered.

  Ah, this was going to be the life for him. He lay back on the bed, his boots dirtying the quilt. He was going to meet the bene coves and give ’em the fam grasp, gripping their flappers like a real foxey foyster.

  “I love the study of languages.” Professor Van Order sighed.

  “That’s nice, mi amor,” she said.

  Their day of parting was coming, but like all lovers, they ignored it as long as they could. Her birthday arrived, but she refused any presents. He celebrated it with a small ginger and raisin cake with buttercream icing in their room. For that one night, she agreed to sip rum.

  He knew he had to go ahead to find their digs in New York. There was no time to spare. And she, if she was going to preserve her good name and if she was going to be his woman in the light of the world—she was convinced she was his bride in the eyes of God already—she had to register her papers in court and be freed of the nightmare of her past once and for all. She could barely remember Lupe Rodriguez, had forgotten much of his face, and she wanted his name erased and burned. As did the Consortium.

  The pilgrims were fewer now. The high society people of the city had been to her and faded away. The local newspapers were no longer interested in her. These four months had felt like years. Whole lifetimes had happened to them.

  Freed from responsibilities, Teresita and John spent their last days together in the city roving. They tried the new frankfurters in their crispy buns. They ate the celebrated World’s Fair hamburgs, which John could not get enough of, while Teresita found the grease of the meat vaguely nauseating. One of John’s new bene coves owned a rickety Ford, and he drove them across the bridge to far Illinois. There wasn’t much over there, but they made a show of marveling at the rich black soil farmers showed them. They met the black men of East St. Louis, John unable to prevent her from holding every Negro hand extended to her; if he wasn’t careful, she’d launch some new crusade to heal every colored person in America. They ate pork cracklin’s and remembered delicious Mexican chicharrónes. The flivver puttered them out to the haunted Cahokia Mounds, and Teresita was amazed that pyramid builders had once walked these very plains.

  A hot-air-balloon ride at the fairgrounds scared both of them out of their wits. But once they were as high as the crows that circled them demanding to know what they thought they were doing, Teresita opened her eyes and laughed. It was joyous. Flying at last. Like Huila!

  They saw an opera and didn’t understand it. They caught a barrelhouse piano show in a smoky theater. John tried to play a banjo and sounded very bad. She couldn’t stop laughing.

  Try as he might, John wasn’t able to wrangle an elephant ride for his beloved, which was all she wanted on that last day. But, no, nobody at the exposition would allow it. He even offered the bastards twenty dollars.

  “I have disappointed you, Teresita,” he said.

  “I hate to say this, Mr. Van Order, but I may never be able to forgive you.”

  “What if, Mrs. Van Order, I scrub your back tonight?”

  “Ooh,” she said. “But that’s no elephant ride.”

  “Sadly true, my dear. But there’s other fine rides at the Van Order Exposition!”

  “¡Qué malo eres!” she cried, pleasing him no end.

  He smiled and laughed.

  “Take me home,” she said. “Now.”

  “Watch me do it,” he replied.

  One burning candle made the room dark orange. Its weak light wobbled, as if the walls were bubbles that were changing with the breeze. Shadows breathed in and puffed away from them.

  He wanted her beside him. Naked. Just to lie there. He wanted to feel her close to him. And there she lay, on her back, arms relaxed at her sides, frank and open to him. He reached over and laid his hand on her belly. It was so soft. Shadows within shadows, circles within circles, he had no words for it. Touching eternity right there. He felt her belly rise and fall with her breathing.

  “Why roses?” he asked.

  She sniffed the air.

  “Can you smell them?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. I like it.”

  She moved closer, rested her head upon his solid arm.

  “I don’t know why,” she said. “It just happened.”

  “Wasn’t one of them saints called Teresa too? She smelled like roses.”

  She nodded.

  “Roses are holy, I guess.” He yawned. “I was always partial to the sweet pea myself.”

  “John! You like flowers?”

  “I don’t know one flower from the next. You’d have to ask my mother about flowers.”

  “The Yaquis,” she said, “use rose petals to represent God’s grace.”

  “How about that,” he murmured.

  He put his hand on her hair and felt its shine through his fingers.

  “Like your hair,” he said.

  “And I like yours.”

  “Like my whiskers too?”

  “Your whiskers are a bit prickly.”

  “Hey now!”

  “Like kissing a porcupine.”

  “I can’t do without them whiskers,” he said. “You’ll have to suffer.”

  She laughed, curled into him.

  “I love your whiskers,” she said.

  “All right then.” He rubbed her side with his big hand. Ran it down to her hip and cupped her pelvis, then ran it back up to her ribs and over to her arm an
d down to her fingers. “It’s a good thing you like them—I been thinking of growing a beard. Maybe down to my belt.”

  “¡Ay, no!” She gasped, and he pulled her over on top of himself and laughed into her mouth.

  They lay there breathing against each other.

  “You know what?” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry for all them things… all those things that happened. In your life.”

  She was quiet.

  “I’m sorry you been through that.”

  She absentmindedly scratched at the hair on his chest.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Makes me mad,” he said.

  “Me too,” she finally said.

  “Aw, Mrs. Van Order.”

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing. I just like hearing the words.”

  They blew out the candle.

  Under the blankets, she said, “I don’t want to go.”

  “I don’t want you to go,” he said.

  “I must.”

  “It’s for the better. You know it.”

  “I know it.

  “We should stay up and watch the dawn,” she said.

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking just as you said it.”

  “Oh, John.” Silence. “John?” He started snoring.

  She turned away from him, still in the refuge of his arm, and closed her eyes and tried to ignore the perturbation of worry and exultation rushing across her brain like a horse race. Faces, names, places, voices, fires, guns, animals, faces again, and faces, faces, faces.

  As the sky burned pink at its bottom hem, she rose and attended to her belongings one last time.

  At Union Station, he saw her to her car, a nice Pullman appointed with gilt lamps and a porter who showed her to her compartment. It held a bunk and a seat in a small space. Tight accommodations, but plush. He’d never ridden in a berth like that. John checked that the door locked. “You’ll watch her like your own?” he asked the porter as he slipped him a twenty-dollar gold piece. The porter slid the coin into his vest pocket and tipped his head.

  “You can count on me, sir,” he said.

  “Feed her good.”

  “I shall.”

  “All right then.”

  “We pull out in twenty minutes. Sir? Ma’am?” He tipped his cap and moved on down the narrow passageway.

  John got Teresita squared away and felt her tears wet his shirt as he held her. He was startled by a bit of a sniffle on his own part. Toots from outside and small sobs against his chest and calls from the crew and a small lurch as the train tried to leap out of its paddock early. John kissed her, then she kissed John, then John kissed her and turned to go but spun back and kissed her again. How was that for a fit farewell, he thought.

  “Stay out of trouble,” he said.

  “I will.”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  “At the least sign of religious revivals, assassins, pilgrims, Mexicans, Indians, you get out.”

  “I will.” She looked up at him. “And you do the same.”

  “Me? I never get in trouble.” He really believed it.

  One last embrace.

  “Don’t join no revolutions,” he said. And, as he stepped away: “Or start any!”

  She watched from her window as he trotted down the platform beside her until the train accelerated and he reached the end of the elevated walkway and windmilled his arms so as not to fall off and suddenly she was watching the city and the far exposition whirl away and before long, the blurring rippling Missouri hills came along like green explosions.

  He walked.

  He stepped into a small bar called Homer’s around the corner from the station. It stank of spilled beer and fried peanuts. A collapsed old lout slumped at a stool by the far wall like some pile of filthy laundry. Riverboat men drank and joshed one another on the other end. John was interested to see a urinal trough running along the bottom of the bar behind the low brass foot rail. The brass was stained green and brown. There was that stink too. The barkeep stopped wiping the bar with his wet pestiferous rag and smiled up at him.

  “Whiskey,” said John.

  “Nectar of the gods, mate,” said the barkeep, uncorking a smudged brown bottle.

  “You Homer?” John asked, settling on his stool and planning a long siege.

  “Aye.”

  John took a sip and wrinkled his nose. What was this weak donkey piss?

  “Homer,” he said, “I think you baptized this bottle a time or two.”

  “I never watered down no drink in my life,” said Homer.

  “Ha!” cried one of the boatmen. “That’s rich. He baptized so many bottles they oughter call him the pope!”

  Homer grabbed the shot glass away from John and tossed the whiskey on the floor.

  He selected a Tennessee bottle and poured John a new shot.

  “Tell me I’m a crook now,” he said.

  Ah. That was like a mouthful of sunshine. Rolled on down, making soft music all the way.

  “That’s better.” John nodded. He tipped his hat to Homer.

  “What’s your name?” Homer asked. “Now that we’re intimate and all.”

  “Why, my good man,” announced John, “my name is Benny Cove!”

  “Well, Benny,” Homer said, “how’s about another drink and one other for me for all my troubles?”

  “Whiskey,” John said to the room. “Good for what ails you and for everything else too!”

  They toasted him and he toasted them and Homer poured and John started throwing ’em back, two, three, five, seven shots.

  The agony in his head when he awoke in the alley, covered in scraps of spoiled food and barefoot, could have been from the whiskey, or the swollen egg on his brow, or both.

  He didn’t know what time it was, morning or noon. His pockets were turned out and his watch was gone. His pistol belt was lying four feet from him, its holster empty. He managed to heave to his knees and felt the scum of the alley sinking into his trousers. He rose, slowly, swaying, and bent over and vomited on his own shadow.

  He tumbled out of the alley and passersby did the old-reprobate two-step and cut wide divagations around him and went on their way, clicking their tongues and shaking their heads. He was blurry, at best—his eyes did not pick out the squabbling gulls flown up from Louisiana, nor did they feature the pigeons beyond their leaflike blowing at the wobbling end of the street.

  He minced to the door of Homer’s and found it locked. He pounded on the glass, but no one answered. Children in the street laughed at him. He righted himself and combed his hair with his fingers. “Where has my damned hat gotten to?” he asked.

  It was a long transit to the hotel, akin in his mind to the journeys of mountain men of old trudging barefoot through savage prairies as red savages whooped and unleashed hordes of arrows as they marched. Coppers turned to him as he passed and found him so grim in his debauch that they merely shook their heads and didn’t roust him for a vagrant. It was funny to them—another victim of the ol’ docks.

  The hotel lobby caught its breath, aghast, when all gathered therein turned and beheld his staggering from the door to the desk to the stairway and gone. Only after they heard the door of his room slam did they begin to mutter and snicker and complain and gossip. The piano recommenced its endless tinkling concerto of sentimental favorites. Bustling ladies with parasols and fat children hurried through like mother quails. Mr. Smith, sitting in the easy chair closest to the fireplace, watched the whole sad performance and laughed quietly into his handkerchief.

  He was already composing his next telegram in his mind.

  WILD BILL, he was thinking.

  OUTGUNNED.

  Fifty-One

  JOHN COULD HAVE PUNCHED Mr. Smith right in the mouth for his smug smile. But he didn’t dare upset the applecart, not with Mrs. Van Order gone. There was nobody there to protect him, and here he was, having to beg.

  It wa
s a good thing his tickets were already bought; he was all in. It was a fix—but he told himself it was just a patch of bad luck, he’d had them before, plenty of them, and he’d work his way out of it, and he’d get it done before Teresita met him in the great city. Hell, he still had his coat and his jacket, and he’d tied on his old gambler’s ribbon tie. He also had some shirts and some new charcoal-gray trousers to replace the ruined alley-smeared old britches he’d had to throw in the trash can.

  When he took inventory, it was columns of plusses and naughts. Yes, he wouldn’t have to go naked. But he was clean broke. He had his finer things that they had bought over the last three months. But he was already wearing his old worn-out boots, and he hated to take the journey so tragically shod. That, he was certain, was no way to enter Manhattan, but he’d make do. Still, he needed some folding money and a hat. He figured correctly that there was no chance Mr. Smith and his godforsaken Consortium would buy him a new pistola. But there was a long journey ahead of him, and meals, and drink, and poker. And he couldn’t enter the great city without enough in his poke to buy a fried egg. How would he make rent?

  Mr. Smith was barely able to contain his laughter as John hung his head and concocted tales of woe and need, hoping to stir his stony heart, but without the Soprano there to back his play, Wild Bill was a trembling sot with rummy boiled eyes and quivering fingers. A rat-faced wheedler hoping for a few more tens in the pot.

  “Not so high and mighty now, are we, Mr. Van Order?” The jape thrilled Mr. Smith all the way to his feet.

  John stared at his hands because he knew that if he looked in Mr. Smith’s face, he’d launch over the table and throttle him on the spot. And then what would he do? So he accepted the lashings of Mr. Smith’s mirth and hoped to have the chance some fine day hence to perforate him with a well-placed shot—what his penny-dreadful dime novels called a blue whistler.

  Ultimately, it wasn’t nearly enough money, but John was in no position to complain. He took the cash and tucked it into his inner pocket and buttoned his jacket. They sat there, neither one willing to break the spell of mutual contempt. John could not open his mouth to say anything—certainly not thank you. Mr. Smith could not bear to end the utter joy of seeing the shit-kicking waddy with idiotic pretensions squirm in perfect misery and shame.