Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  Well, why not?

  Why in the hell not!

  She laughed. The nurse mopped her brow. “You’re doing great,” she said.

  “I was in prison once,” Teresita snarled. Her hair was sweated to her face. Her teeth were white and savage. “It was worse than this!” Her English was suddenly perfect.

  “Yes, dear.”

  “You think I can’t do this?”

  “No, dear.”

  To keep her mind off the pain, Teresita recalled her dramatic arrival at the hospital. The church rector had fetched the organist. The organist had summoned a groundskeeper. The groundskeeper had pulled a wagon out from around the corner on Twenty-Ninth and bundled the expectant mother in the back and hustled, standing in the box and shouting, all the way to First Avenue, pulling up to the imposing Bellevue towers in a state more frantic than Teresita’s.

  No John. No sign of John. John had no idea. John was out in the city somewhere. “John,” she said, trying it out. “John! John! John!” She thought somehow he would sense her call, feel summoned. But he was not a Yaqui. Not an Apache. He was not even her father. Damn him. Damn them both. Damn them all. “John!” Oh, it hurt so much that she was dreaming while awake, seeing Huila and Cruz Chávez against the wall, arms crossed, looking dour and shadowy. Of course they were shadowy. “They are dead!” she announced to the doctor.

  “Yes, Mrs. Rodriguez,” he said.

  “No, no,” she gasped, but they ignored her.

  Then came the blood.

  Dr. Weisburd had found Teresita in her room, and he had arranged for flowers to be delivered. Little Laura, slightly yellow from birth jaundice, with a scrunchy monkey face, lay swaddled and snuffling in a wicker bassinet beside Teresita’s bed. The mother was still weak from blood loss, but she would be fine.

  Dr. Weisburd maintained a respectful discretion, and when it was time for Teresita’s bloody cotton pad to be changed or for the baby to nurse, he stepped from the room and allowed the nurses to attend to the female details. He didn’t understand the profound emotion Teresita inspired in him. It wasn’t romantic, of this he was certain—well, perhaps in the poetic sense. But he had never once imagined, for example, his lips on hers. Nor had he imagined her bare breast. He walked the halls. This, he told himself, was why he stayed out of the room at such moments. He was a gentleman, and a married man. Discretion was called for.

  This is where John found him, out in the hall. John had dark circles under his eyes, but he remained dashing in his own way. Dr. Weisburd would have liked to be as rangy and dangerous. He would have enjoyed great whiskers like that. He would have enjoyed wearing a cowboy hat too. He had never even ridden a horse. Every time he saw John, he blushed.

  “Where is she?” John demanded.

  “Room three-twelve,” Weisburd said.

  John looked at him for a long moment.

  “You been in there a lot, have you?”

  “I am a doctor.”

  John smiled, patted him on the shoulder, went to the door. He looked at Weisburd and winked. Stepping in, he removed his hat and gawked down at the baby.

  “My God,” he said.

  “Do you like her?” Teresita asked.

  “I guess she’s yellow,” he said.

  “It will pass.”

  John stood stiffly beside the bed, holding his hat before his belly. He reached down absentmindedly and tugged on Teresita’s toes. The baby yawned in her sleep.

  “Look at that,” he said. “Little bug.”

  “Do you want to hold her?” Teresita asked.

  “Aw,” he said, grinning shyly. “I figure I’d break her if I tried.”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

  He stared at the baby and avoided her eyes.

  “Well, of course,” he muttered.

  They both chose to ignore the topic of his not appearing for the birth itself. An unspoken negotiation. Nobody would win the debate, so they let it drift into the shadows, hoping it would vanish in the past, but knowing it would not.

  The infant started to fuss in her little bed. Fretting, moving her little yellow fists around in front of her face. Pouting and gurgling.

  “She’s going to cry,” Teresita said.

  “How come?”

  “Hungry, John.”

  “Oh?”

  “I must nurse her.”

  “I can leave,” he said, moving away.

  “Leave?” She laughed. “Why?”

  He shrugged.

  “Isn’t it private? Nursing and all?”

  She opened her top. He stared. “You have seen me a hundred times,” she said. “Fetch her.”

  John dropped his hat on the bed and rubbed his hands together as if to dislodge imagined trail dirt. He wiped his palms on his trousers. Grimacing as if the infant were made of solid lead, he scooped her up and held her like a medium-sized ham hock. Why, she didn’t weigh nothing at all. He laid her on Teresita’s chest and stood back as if there were a gusher coming that was about to knock him off his feet. His eyes were wide.

  “Is that real milk?” he asked, astounded by every single detail of life.

  “Yes, silly.”

  “You sprung a leak on the other side,” he noted.

  He decided to sit down. This was too much. She took pity on his delicate constitution and covered her other breast. He fell into the one chair and averted his eyes from the wet stain on the front of her robe.

  She lay smiling faintly and the baby suckled.

  Someone in the next room kept coughing—long rasping sounds of despair.

  This ain’t for me. Hospitals, he thought.

  “What’re you calling her?” he asked, squinting as the little mouth continued its greedy assault.

  “Laura,” she said. “I’ve named her after Lauro Aguirre.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  He was stung. He thought she might name the girl Juana—after his mother. Or himself. He stood, retrieved his hat.

  “Well, I’ve got to skedaddle. Got to attend to some business. I’ve been laboring down to Mrs. Woodward’s furniture shop. Very interesting, let me tell you.” He made a muscle. “Making good wages. Why, I sold a mirror from France to the mayor of Trenton! King Louie looked in it, they say.”

  “Stay,” she said.

  “Got to go.”

  “Don’t leave.”

  He stood above her, caught like a moth in a web. He couldn’t move. He turned and looked out the window. The great city waited outside. It was hungry for him—he could feel it. Its million rooms and ten thousand alleyways waited for his return.

  “It isn’t how I thought it would be,” he said.

  She watched him.

  “What isn’t?”

  “Anything.”

  Teresita was so tired. Her whole body ached. Her breasts hurt. Her back hurt. Her nether parts stung. Her feet were freezing.

  “She’s asleep,” she said, gesturing with her chin.

  John took little Laura from her and laid her back in the big rocking cradle, where she looked like a little cake in a picnic basket. He leaned down and gave her a chaste peck on the cheek. “Sleep tight,” he whispered.

  He looked into Teresita’s eyes.

  “Good work, Mrs. Van Order,” he said.

  His voice was choked.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m just happy,” he said.

  She had a sad smile on her face.

  “We thought it would be easier,” she said. “Didn’t we?”

  He sank his chin to his chest.

  “I haven’t been too good at this,” he said. “Was the other one… Was Rodriguez… Was he meaner than me?”

  “Oh, John.”

  “Ain’t kidding.”

  “Yes. Yes, John. He was meaner.”

  “Have I made you happy?”

  “Yes.”

  His eyes were wet.

  “Come here,” she said.

  “What.”

  “Just come her
e.”

  She opened her arms to him.

  He stepped to the bed, meaning to give her a small hug and be on his way. But he bent to her and kept coming until he was lying beside her. She wrapped him in her arms and pulled his head to her damp hot chest. He started to talk, but she said, “Shh,” and stroked his hair. She felt him relax against her. And then he began to cry.

  She lay there too tired to feel anything, thinking: What have I become?

  Fifty-Eight

  TYPHUS HAD BROKEN OUT in the town. Mice and pack rats. It hopped from house to house, went into the mines and was belched back out like invisible smoke, catching the workers and their children. Shivers, fevers, ugly rashes. Coughing and incontinence. Some went mad before they died, and the doctor kept busy going from sad house to sad house, too exhausted finally to be frantic.

  And when Tomás came down with it, all they could do was have a bed installed in the parlor so they wouldn’t have the stairs to contend with. Besides, there was a small fireplace there, and he could be kept warm, though he fussed and complained endlessly about the stifling heat. Tomás appreciated the stupidity of it—he had been hiding his crumbling health for several years. And here he was struck down by a simple pauper’s disease.

  “The plague,” he said. “I have the plague.”

  The children were kept upstairs in an effort to prevent their catching the fever. Poor Gaby—she mopped his bright red brow and wrung out his soaking bedclothes. The doctor suggested she wear a mask over her face, but if she did there was no way to breathe when she was struggling with Tomás. She dragged him every morning from the sweat-drenched mattress and propped him in a chair with a quilt tight around him, where he blinked like a baby owl. She stripped the soiled and wet sheets and turned the mattress over. It was stained yellow—she would burn it when he got better.

  It was a wonder she didn’t catch it herself, but that was how the outbreak happened. It picked out a member or two of a family and spared the rest. Or it wiped out all in a house, sometimes leaving one infant alive. No one could predict where or how it would fall.

  The mountain was silent, as if waiting to hear who next would die.

  “Teresita could fix this,” Tomás said. His teeth chattered. He thought he was cold in the burning hot room.

  Gabriela was upstairs, asleep. She had been working with her eyes closed, dreaming on her feet. Mrs. Smith had become mother to the children, since Gaby was now mother to Tomás. The smell of sickness was so regular in the house that she no longer sensed it at all. When she climbed the stairs, she actually bent at the waist and helped herself up with her hands—rising, she thought with bitterness, like a barn cat.

  She had finally asked Segundo to care for Tomás, since only Segundo was strong enough to carry him around, to bathe him, to put up with his endless rage at being so weak. Frankly, grief and fear tired her out much more profoundly than the constant physical struggle to save Tomás. There were no medical answers—no treatments. Just patience. Faith.

  “I got you, boss,” Segundo said, lifting Tomás in his arms and laying him in the deep tin tub of hot bathwater.

  “¡Cabrón!” Tomás cried. “You have boiled off my huevos! Are you making huevo soup?”

  Segundo grinned and chewed a toothpick.

  “Naw,” he drawled, “you still got your balls. I can see them in there.”

  Tomás made the water shiver in the tub.

  “I’m cold,” he said.

  “I got it.”

  Segundo brought a kettle in from the kitchen and poured hotter water in the tub.

  “Feel better?” he said.

  Tomás lay back.

  “Ah… yes. Gracias, Segundo. What would I do without you?”

  “Shit,” Segundo said. He sat in a chair near the tub and opened the newspaper to look at the drawings. “You wouldn’t have made it this far,” he noted.

  “No.” Tomás was looking down at his sad ribs. Gray chest hair. How did that happen? “No, definitely not.”

  They chuckled until Tomás started coughing.

  “I could send her a telegram,” Segundo offered. “She could heal you.”

  But Tomás had fallen asleep.

  Segundo wrestled him out of the water. He was limp and steaming, dripping on the floor. Just like a big baby. Segundo didn’t know what to do with him, so he laid him on the end of the bed and quickly threw a towel around him and rubbed him brusquely. Tomás mumbled complaints but didn’t awaken. His hair stood straight up on his head, but Segundo was damned if he was going to comb the Sky Scratcher’s hair for him. He yanked a nightshirt over the boss’s shanks and pulled the covers down and manhandled Tomás farther up the bed and laid his head in a nest of fluffy pillows. He pulled the blankets back up and let them fall and remembered his own mother tucking him in at night. He paused and smiled, thinking of it. How she’d lay him in the narrow bed with his older brother and his little sister. How there was one thin blanket they shared. How the sister slept between the brothers, and the brothers fought a tug-of-war all night to get more of the blanket. But that wasn’t what made Segundo smile. It was his mother. How she’d sometimes take the blanket and say, “In the night, the dew falls down!” And she’d unfurl the blanket above them and let it settle. How they’d laugh! And she’d pull it off and say, “But later, it begins to rain!” And she’d unfurl it over them again. How they’d squeal! And the third time, she’d pull it off and say, “But then, when you least expect it, it starts to snow!” They’d all call it out with her. And the blanket would snow down on them in the gloom of their little hot bedroom. Segundo smiled and shook his head. Maybe they were in Heaven. He tossed a couple of aromatic logs on the fire and drew a second quilt over poor old Tomás and watched his eyes move under their lids.

  His face was drawn. His breath was rank. The rash had chewed him up, crawled up his chest and around his throat and onto his face. Segundo thought he was dead at several moments during the night, but then Tomás drew a sucking breath and went on dreaming.

  Segundo himself drifted off at about three o’clock. The relentless ticking of the clock had seemed to grow louder during the night, louder and deeper and wider until he fell into it and was knocked out by its echoes. He dreamed of Cabora and its many horses, kicking and fussing in the chair until the gray seepage of dawn light from the windows prodded his eyelids open. He regarded an empty bed.

  He jumped out of his chair.

  In a corner of the room, where they had shoved Tomás’s desk to make room for his bed, pens and sheets of paper were scattered. Segundo squeezed past the end of the bed and looked at the papers.

  Dearest Teresa

  said one, but it was scratched out. The next:

  Daughter

  Then:

  Querida Hija

  All abandoned.

  And the last sheet:

  My Beloved Teresita, Daughter—

  Before you throw this letter away, let me tell you

  But there was no more than that. Ink everywhere. Segundo saw Tomás’s slippers under the desk. The fool was wandering around barefoot.

  “Got no sense,” Segundo muttered.

  He stepped out into the hall. The house was heavy with sleep. He could feel Gaby and the children above, still deep in their dreams.

  “Boss?” he whisper-called.

  The front door was ajar.

  He grabbed his coat and hurried out.

  There was a faint trail through the dew. Tomás had gone out to the barn.

  “Damn fool,” Segundo said.

  He hopped down and walked across the grass.

  “Boss,” he called.

  The barn door was standing open. He stepped inside and squinted. The blue horse was in the corner, bent down.

  “You in here?” Segundo said.

  The horse looked at him and blew air through its lips.

  Segundo went to it and found Tomás sitting on the ground with his back to the stall upright. He was pale. Like porcelain. Segundo had
seen dolls in Gaby’s cases that looked exactly like Tomás looked now. He had wet himself at the end.

  The horse was worried, looking down at the body and moving its ears back and forth and bobbing its head.

  “Oh no,” Segundo said.

  It hurt his knees to get down with Tomás. He rested his hand on the blue horse’s flank to get down. He peered at the Sky Scratcher’s face. His eyes were closed. He looked peaceful. At least there was that.

  His hair was still a mess.

  “Oh no,” Segundo said again softly.

  “Hey, now.” He ran his fingers through Tomás’s hair, trying to comb it down.

  “Let me fix that for you, boss,” he said. “Let me fix that.”

  He spent a good half hour there, sitting quietly. He took off his coat and put it around Tomás because he looked so cold, even sitting in hay. The blue horse shied away and went into its stall and turned its back.

  Then Segundo went to the house, wondering how to fetch the family.

  Part VI

  GOING HOME

  I may be approaching darkness, but I am not yet blind.

  —TERESITA’S LAST INTERVIEW

  Fifty-Nine

  HAVING A CHILD had really rounded Teresita out, John noticed. She had curves and hips, and her body was soft, just the way he liked it. All those sharp edges had been tucked away. He even enjoyed her belly, which gave her fits. She felt that the red lines etched in her flesh made her look like a map of the desert with dead rivers scrawling over the landscape. She called it “my paper belly” and “my baby-map,” which made John love it more. It felt like a secret of womanhood, something his mother never told him.

  The fine ladies in her social circle bound her in corsets and fancy webworks of silks and satins that formed impenetrable buttresses underneath her clothes. She became in public a kind of dainty warship with a firm prow like an icebreaker and an aft deck that could withstand storms. But at home, when the nanny left, and when they had a few scant hours together as Laura slept, and after the painstaking chore of unpinning, unbuttoning, unwrapping his bride, John fell to the pale landscape of her body, his white flesh settling over her tea-and-cream-colored form like an early snowfall.