Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  “Where are you taking me, to Russia?” he quipped.

  “East Twenty-Eighth Street,” the doctor replied. “Right around that corner by the church.”

  They turned the corner and parked in front of a row of small redbrick and brownstone buildings, three stories tall and backing onto a bit of woods with a creek and some pasture beyond.

  “It is not a penthouse,” the doctor said apologetically. “But for now, it will do.”

  It was a wooden building, narrow, with bay windows bulging out over a small portico: 110 East Twenty-Eighth Street.

  John jumped down. Mud. Jesus Jumping Christ.

  “Yep. It’ll do,” he said. What else could he say?

  They went in and climbed the stairs and found a stuffy brown room on the second floor. But it was furnished. “A painter below you and an opera singer above,” Dr. Weisburd said as he pulled open the curtains and let the sun in. John tried the couch. It listed to starboard. He’d have to put a book under that corner. Their bedroom was on the south side, and its windows let in warm light. If he craned his neck, he could see the spire of the church. Kitchen and commode were on the north side.

  “That way lies Lexington,” the doctor said. “If you follow Lex all the way down to Twenty-Third, you’ll find my office. Right on the corner. You’re in luck—Saturdays, the farmers set up their stalls right there and sell produce.”

  “Wonders never cease.”

  “Why, that street can carry you right straight to your dreams.”

  What a booster was Doc Wise Bird.

  John grimaced a small smile of faux enthusiasm.

  “If I walk that way, Doc, can I see all them fancy addresses where I thought I’d be livin’?”

  The doctor tipped his head slightly.

  “This is New York, Mr. Van Order. We got you here. It’s up to you to realize your own ambitions.”

  He clapped John on the back.

  “Millions have.”

  John looked down at the dirt street.

  “How ’bout that,” he said.

  The driver came grunting and banging up with the first trunk.

  “Is this move on me, or on the Consortium?” John asked.

  Dr. Weisburd was about to tell him it was all on him, but the look in Van Order’s eye stopped him. The man was suspicious. Foolish in his posturing. But afraid. It came off him in waves. The doctor was moved by his raw humanity.

  “It would be my pleasure,” said the doctor, “as an associate of the Consortium, to cover this expense for you and Mrs. Van Order.”

  John smiled sadly.

  “Why, thank you.”

  He put out his hand.

  They shook as the second trunk started its slow way up to them.

  Later, he hung his Montana rancher’s hat on a peg and walked downstairs to escape the dark boxes in his dark rooms. John had been alone before, but not like this. He strolled down to “Lex” and looked both ways. Yonder lay some kind of wilderness, and hither he saw civilization, lights. A few blocks ahead, he saw a tendril of cooking smoke angling away from a sidewalk bistro of some sort. He was starving. Why was he reluctant to step off, back toward the great city? He stood on the curb, his foot hanging in midair over the dirt of East Twenty-Eighth. Laughter came from an open window above him. A woman’s voice, answered by a man’s voice, singing “I Love You Truly.” The window slammed shut. John turned. With a sputter and a bang, a Pierce Motorette sped by, kicking up little dirt clods, its driver waving distractedly at his witness as he wrestled the wheel to try to keep the vehicle from crashing into one of the shuttered shops lining the sidewalk. A couple strolled by, and the man murmured some European babble to the woman.

  This wasn’t so bad. He could do it. He shrugged his shoulders against the chill and followed a scruffy little dog across the road and down to the diner, where he looked in and spied, through the steamed window, families and workingmen hunched over bowls of noodles with red sauce poured over them. He saw bottles of red wine. Smelled garlic and cheese.

  He opened the door, stepped in on creaking floorboards, and did his best to start his first night of his new life.

  Fifty-Three

  DON LAURO AGUIRRE SAT on the stony ground at the corner of State and Brooklyn in Los Angeles, California, with smoke rising from his hair.

  “I, of course,” he said, “fully apologize for this unfortunate development.”

  Teresita sat in the dirt next to him, her dress scorched and smoking, like his hair. They watched the bungalow across the street burn down. It was a warm night—it had been a hot winter. Firemen scrambled from their wagon-mounted pumpers and tried to throw weak streams of water onto the flames.

  Teresita was especially interested in the way the rose hedges around the house caught fire and burned.

  “I’m used to it,” she said.

  The chimney wobbled, tipped, caved in through the roof in a huge eruption of sparks.

  “Oh my,” she noted.

  “Did you lose everything?” he asked.

  She pulled out her folded divorce-settlement documents. The corners had burned off, but otherwise, they were intact.

  “Not everything,” she said.

  “Ah. The troublesome Mr. Rodriguez.”

  “Gone for good.”

  A fireman walked over with a tin cup full of water.

  Glass shattered across the street. Agitated Mexicans gawked. Some curses could be heard above the amazingly loud roar of flames. So much noise from such a little house.

  She would always remember Los Angeles as a kind of unfocused dream. The long train ride, passing as it did through Missouri and Oklahoma and stopping here and there in wide plains and desiccated desiertos. Into Texas, where they pulled up in Amarillo, and a place named Yellow that was, all about, surrounded by yellow seemed perfect to her. She was sitting inside her secure little pod watching the train crews outside and the hunched travelers passing her narrow door when she saw a familiar form go by. Bolts of emotion! What? Not possible! She threw open her door and cried, “Don Lauro!” And with great cries of his own, he swam upstream against the toiling bodies of Texans to reach her.

  “My girl! My girl!” he kept saying as he hugged her.

  His Vandyke had grayed at his chin, and his hair had thinned, but he looked very much the same.

  She pulled him inside her compartment and cried with joy, both of them blurting “What are you doing here?” at once.

  They laughed.

  “You first!”

  “No, you first!”

  “After you!”

  “No, I must insist!”

  So she told him of her trip to Los Angeles to the district court and her divorce.

  He, of course, had revolution on his mind. The rail strike was looming. Mexican rail workers were trying to join the union, and the railroad had brought in union busters. Goons! To assault and beat these paisanos. He told these tales in hushed tones lest the railroad employees overhear him and throw him from the train.

  “Oh?” she said, a dangerous gleam in her eye. “They need help?”

  “Now, now,” he said. “Caution is in order.”

  “I can help them,” she said.

  “I, of course, would welcome your participation, my dear. However, I would urge restraint. At this stage, your effect could be incendiary! And,” he intoned ominously, “they have ears everywhere.”

  Who was he kidding? When had any Urrea ever shown restraint in any matter? Aguirre sighed—Here we go again, he thought. Yet—yet. He immediately imagined the new era about to be born. Surely, divine providence was afoot.

  After Teresita’s catastrophe in Clifton, Aguirre was wary of the endless revolt as it pertained to her. He did not know how best to proceed. Was he Aguirre the revolutionary or Uncle Lauro caring for his young ward?

  She asked, “And my father? Any word?”

  He smiled at her sadly.

  “He is… well. Tomás is great. A giant.” He patted her knee. “Sad, but well.”


  “Sad, Don Lauro?”

  “Still mourning you, my dear,” he said. “And…” He tipped his head. “We all age.”

  “I should write to him.”

  “You should.”

  “But what would I say?”

  He thought a moment. He shook his head.

  “That,” he said, “I do not know.”

  They changed the subject as the train lurched out of the Amarillo station, allowing them to busy themselves with comments about the sad, burned landscape.

  It would have been indecent for Don Lauro to stay overnight in her cabin, so of course he slept sitting in his seat toward the back of the train. In the morning, though, he rejoined her. They enjoyed sweet rolls and a carafe of coffee the porter brought them. They spent the long approach to Los Angeles recalling past glories. It seemed Aguirre’s network of radicals had procured for him a bungalow in East Los Angeles, and he would not hear of Teresita adjourning to a hotel—not with such a trying court appearance looming! Besides, he knew if he had the Saint of Cabora in his headquarters, not only would the rail strike succeed, but he would have willing interviewers lining up at his door. Perhaps she might be moved once again to write a column or two.

  The rail strike stretched out as long as the pleasure of the court in the matter of Rodriguez v. Rodriguez. Anti-union thugs came into town from Bakersfield and clubbed Mexicans with ax handles. Teresita won her case. And three firebombs hit their bungalow one late January night at eleven o’clock. Nobody ever learned if it was an attack on Aguirre and the union men or on the Saint.

  Aguirre, ever the gentleman, bought her fresh clothes for her journey to New York. Agents of the Consortium, in a panic that their client had almost been burned up in the arson, rented her a fancier railcar and stationed two detectives on the train to watch over her. Teresita was surprised to feel disappointment that Mr. Suits did not appear. She had gotten to the point where anything at all from her past—anyone who wasn’t dead—was full of golden and innocent morning sunshine.

  As they stood in the station waiting for the departure hour, Don Lauro held the Los Angeles Times. The headline read: “Saint Teresita Burned Out.”

  She said, “I do not think I will mention this to Mr. Van Order.”

  Don Lauro thought for a moment and replied, “Let us not talk about this with Tomás either.”

  “Done.”

  They shook on it.

  “Uncle Lauro?” she said.

  “Yes, dear girl?”

  “I think I may be a bad person.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “I have been selfish.”

  “How so?”

  “I told the Van Orders I needed a translator… but I understand English.”

  “Oh?”

  “I am not stupid! I have been here long enough to understand it. I just wanted someone between me and the patients.”

  She hung her head.

  “Perfectly understandable, Teresita! It’s called self-preservation!”

  “Why should I be preserved?”

  He stared at her.

  “Surely you are not serious.”

  He put an avuncular arm around her shoulders.

  “Buck up, Joan of Arc,” he said.

  She smiled sadly.

  “Uncle Lauro?” she said.

  “Hmm?”

  “I asked for someone to come because I was lonely.”

  Before he could respond, she hopped aboard, and the train moved out, heading north this time, north and west, heading for the Rockies and the plains, the ghosts of the buffalo and the great rivers, rolling it seemed for a year as she lay in her bunk reading a scandalous Argentine translation of Sister Carrie. She had not encountered such behavior or ideas in books before.

  Lauro Aguirre had meant to say: Sometimes God is not enough.

  She rolled and rolled until she came, like John had before her, into the great city. Joining the hundreds of foreigners flooding its streets. Migrating in the wrong direction. Coming, unlike her fellow travelers, out of the west.

  Fifty-Four

  IF NOT FOR the Consortium, John would have missed her train. One of its messengers woke him by loudly banging on his splintery door until he was roused from his painful slumber on the floorboards in the living room. He had such a shock that his little Saint was coming to him that he rushed about and tripped over the small rug still bunched from his sleeping and fell to the floor, cracking his forehead and raising another dull purple egg where the last one from Homer’s bar had so recently receded. Blurry-eyed, he fumbled his way into the bathroom and ran hot water into the claw-foot tub and sank there to ease the ache out of his bones. When he realized that the house was a mess and remembered that she did not approve of messes, he leapt from the bath and staggered about trying to dry himself and clean at the same time. There was no food in the house. No flowers. The bedclothes were not fresh. And there were not enough of them. His blankets were tatty, old, brown. No quilt, no bedspread. He was aghast at himself. What had he been thinking? Where would he take the rubbish that overflowed from the bin? He threw open the back window and tossed the garbage into the black and gray snow behind the building. It was full winter, and John did not appreciate the neighbors’ wet feet and the icy mess they left at his entry. He watched the clock as he banged around naked and frantic. The radiator thumped and gurgled as if demons were crawling up the pipes to eat him alive. It was the worst day of his life.

  Tomás Urrea’s letter to Mr. Rosencrans had set in motion an invisible avalanche of events that were already transforming the landscape without either the Soprano or Wild Bill knowing anything about it. Rosencrans had written to one of his plute compadres, a Mr. Sloane, jefe of a great Yankee oil conglomerate. Thus did the news spread quickly among his social circle: a new sensation was on its way to the glittering tors of Mannahatta. A Saintess, no less. A lady revolutionary! The elite had already dined with the great José Martí. They had attended soirees with Mark Twain and found him an amusing fellow. Now they were eager for this new oddity to arrive, vetted as she was by Rosencrans and the partners in the Consortium.

  When the train came steaming from the west, it was met by a gaggle of fine capitalists in their capitalist hats. Even Mrs. Vanderbilt joined the receiving line. It was a splendid turnout—so splendid that John stood away from them and watched from the shadows. These bright, witty people, exuding rich scents and richer laughter. A laughter as exclusive as their million-dollar hats. Nobody he knew laughed like that.

  He brightened when he saw his little Yaqui queen step off the train. Her hair was shorter. He would never learn it had been burned. She wore Los Angeles high fashion—all white, with white lace at her chest and throat, and white fabric boots peeking out from under the long hem of the dress. He was stunned. He had never seen her look more like an angel. Or a damned snowbank. And he knew she would freeze in New York.

  Oh. No, she wouldn’t. Mrs. Vanderbilt immediately opened a great box and presented her with a shining fur coat that seemed to swallow Teresita whole. John thought she looked like she’d been et by a griz.

  The plutes and bankers swarmed her before he could make his move. By God, they almost lifted her off the ground. Them rich sons of bitches feed like vultures when they catch a whiff of the meat, he thought. They bowed and patted and he could see them give her limp little dead-fish handshakes, all the women wearing gloves so they couldn’t even feel Teresita’s hand if they wanted to, and the men with their bellies and their ridiculous walking sticks and tailed coats bobbed and strutted about like turkeys in a barnyard.

  And then they swept her away before he even called out a hello, and he was left there standing in the station wondering what had happened.

  Under the deafening El tracks, in the sleet-blown cold black wind, walking fast.

  He trailed them to Fifth Avenue, where they welcomed Teresita into an establishment with gold frames on its windows and where liveried swells guarded the door, and inside, men in tall white mushr
oom hats stood before leaping flames, and waiters in red and black and white stiff shirts moved like small boats on a lake. John stood outside in the cold, leaning on the wall. His breath fogged the glass and blotted out her face. It was still sleeting. John started to laugh. “Could I make a more miserable appearance?” he asked. Ice granules caught in his hair and melted on his face. His boots had holes in them. The first thing he’d get now that Teresita was home was new boots. And an overcoat.

  He wiped away the frost and watched. They treated her as if it were the World’s Fair and she were a monkey or a jaguar in the zoo. He sneered at them with all their manners and hankies.

  Inside, it was a forensic triumph. The gentlepeople of New York handled her with extraordinary care. They prodded her and collected impressions of her responses without her ever knowing. They could barely communicate with her, though she understood them fairly well. They affected blank stares at her accent and relied on a young friar from San Juan, Puerto Rico, who attended the luncheon to gamely translate the nine hundred quips, questions, requests, and bons mots flying around the long table. Teresita was their savage princess come from strange eldritch realms to grace them with new sensations. Oh, yes—they could smell the roses! They were nervous with the hope that she was either a true healer or a fraud. Either one offered delights and sensations.

  Caviar… no. She found out immediately that caviar was not for human consumption. Salad with leeks and chilled asparagus with crumbled goat cheese and garlic croutons. That was better. Soup came in a boat-shaped tureen and had clams and potatoes in red sauce. She moved the clams around with her spoon, hoping it looked like she’d eaten a few.

  She was handsomer than they had imagined. She gave evidence of excellent table manners, though they noted with wry eyebrows that she did not know the difference between the salad fork and the main-course fork. And she moved the soupspoon toward herself instead of away from herself, which was not how a lady of real breeding would do it. But she did chew with her mouth closed, which was a welcome surprise to them all. They felt their standing in the world reasserted with her every bite.