Places drifted by in the haze: Pleasanton, Campbellton, Three Rivers. South of the Nueces River, the Lincoln rolled out onto the Gulf Prairies, as bald and flat as a tortilla. It looked like a steamroller had come along and leveled the land all around. The road ahead seemed endless. What the hell? Hetty thought, but didn’t say anything.
When they reached Alice, Texas, Garret turned right on Route 96. They headed west for a quarter of an hour—back into the brush. Hetty watched for some kind of sign. Currents of heat blew past like sheets rippling on a clothesline. Mirages of mesquite trees began to appear through the shimmering air. Chaparral arose like patches of fog. When Hetty first spotted San Diego up ahead, she wasn’t sure it was real. The twin towers of the Catholic church swam into view. Palm trees rustled overhead.
Garret chuckled. “Look at this godforsaken place.”
“My dear fellow.” Odell shook himself awake. “We fought a war to wrest this land away from Mexico.”
“Yeah? Well, maybe it’s time to fight another one and make them take it back.”
As Garret drove down one of the avenues, dodging the chickens that strutted freely everywhere, Hetty started to wonder if he was right. She peered out at the buildings they passed: a brick courthouse, a wooden shack called Rodriguez Groc with an awning that had rotted away, a building made from some kind of coarse white block. She was wondering where the stone came from, when Odell read her thoughts.
“That building? It’s constructed out of caliche,” he said. “A sedimentary rock. You find great encrustations of it here in these arid climes.”
They had crept their way down to the foot of Texas, grown dry and callused from constant exposure to the sun.
A chicken fluttered up in front of the car, screeching at Garret. He ground to a stop. “We’re nowhere,” he muttered.
Hetty looked out the window. And there were the wild dogs. “No, we’re in the right place. See if there’s a hotel.”
Garret turned up St. Peter’s Avenue and slid to a stop in front of a two-story frame building laced with a veranda. MARTINET HOUSE, the sign read. Hetty followed Garret through the doors in case they didn’t speak English. But the clerk behind the counter was a burly Anglo man. He took one look at Garret’s slicked-down hair and said, “Second road to your left, o’er the creek, three miles south. Y’all come to the gates of a ranch. . . .”
Garret just stared at him.
“How’d you know?” Hetty asked.
The man smirked at her. “Lady, I can smell that brilliantine a mile away.”
Once they crossed a creek, the brush engulfed them. The narrow road must have been hacked out with machetes, because on both sides rose impenetrable walls of mesquite trees twisting over the brittle branches of chaparral. Occasionally, a Spanish dagger plant cut through or a pasture opened up. There Hetty saw a windmill turning listlessly or an old cow stretching its neck to reach the beans on the topmost branches of the trees—the only things that hadn’t shriveled up in what had obviously been a long dry spell. They were whole colonies of nopalitos—prickly pear cacti with their flat round leaves studded with thorns.
Hetty sang the corrido to cover the itch of anxiety. She was certain they’d driven farther than three miles and were lost out here where everything had thorns. Were they being set up for an ambush? She was about to warn her husband to turn around when they came to an opening in the brush: a rough mesquite fence, a lane that led straight off to the right. Garret slowed to a stop.
“They wouldn’t advertise themselves, of course.” Odell smacked his lips.
Garret nosed the Lincoln into the narrow caliche lane, muttering that he wouldn’t be able to get the long car turned around. Odell egged him on, and Hetty remained silent, in spite of the doubts she felt looking out at the desolate landscape. Much to her relief, the undergrowth rushed back, and they came out into the placita, the “little plaza” that surrounded a South Texas ranch like a moat. In its midst spread the structures she’d been hoping for: barns, loading pens, a great wooden wheel of a windmill turning above the squat rock ranch house. Hetty’s faith in her dreams was restored, and she felt an odd sense of connection to the place. She could even see a barren beauty in la broza, the underbrush so ashen and wild all around them.
Then they spotted the cars.
Garret whistled. “Look at those wagons!”
On the dry bones of the clearing, a ring of automobiles sparkled like a chrome necklace in the bright sun. Hetty recognized a white Cadillac V8 and a long black Bugatti, but had never seen some of the other exotics.
“There’s a brand-new Duesenberg,” Garret said.
“You think it’s a ’28?” Odell asked.
“Looks like it to me.”
“What’s that one?” Hetty asked, pointing to a luscious model up ahead that was the color of cream.
“That, my dear, is a Hispano-Suiza,” Odell said. “Look at the license plate.” It was from Oklahoma.
In the shade sat the drivers of these glorious cars, men with their pin-striped vests unbuttoned and their white shirtsleeves rolled up. They stopped their poker game and eyed the newcomers suspiciously. Hetty saw what the fellow back at the hotel had meant: Many of them wore their hair like Garret, sheik-style. But something else they wore brought her anxiety rushing back: shoulder holsters.
Garret slowed to a stop in front of the car from Oklahoma. Hetty leaned forward. “I wouldn’t go any farther if I were you.”
“Take it slow.” Odell motioned him forward.
Garret eased the Lincoln toward the ranch house. Through the dusty windshield, Hetty spotted an Anglo hunched in a chair under the tin roof of the porch, smoking. Only his dusty boots stretched out into the sun. Over by the loading pens, a couple of Mexican ranch hands were stooping over a rectangular pit in the ground, throwing mesquite logs onto hot coals. The man on the porch watched them warily through trails of smoke. Then he came over.
“Is this Las Ánimas?” Garret switched off the engine.
“Who wants to know?” He leaned into the window and looked them over.
“Mr. MacBride. And this is my partner, Mr. Weems.”
The eyes under the Stetson spotted Hetty in the back. “Who’s the woman?”
“Mrs. MacBride.”
“You brung your wife here?”
“We’re looking for Las Ánimas. Are we in the right place?”
The man straightened up and tipped his hat at Hetty. Holsters dangled off both hips. “Miss.”
Hetty sat on the edge of the backseat. “Mr.—?”
“I’m the foreman, Jeremiah.”
“Looks like you’re expecting a pack train,” Garret said, gesturing to the other cars.
“This here’s a ranch, Mister. You want cows. We got cows.” Jeremiah dropped his fuming butt and bruised it with his boot. “Now if y’all excuse me,” he said, tipping his hat at Hetty again. “I’d get her out of here if I was you.” He walked back to the porch.
“You heard him,” Hetty said. “Take me to the hotel.”
Brandishing his cane, Odell opened his car door. “Nobody intimidates Odell Weems.” He followed the man. Garret hustled after him, leaving Hetty abandoned in the passenger compartment of the Lincoln. She panicked for a moment, then reminded herself, I’m the one who wanted to come here. Take heart! She sucked in a deep breath and opened the car door. She made her way across the rocky ground and up the worn steps of the ranch house.
“As a matter of fact, Jeremiah,” Odell was saying, “we’re more interested in mules. We were told you import mules from Mexico.”
The man squinted into the sun. “Oh, yeah? Who told y’all that?”
“A certain Señor Delgado of San Antonio. I think you know him. He runs an ice house on Haymarket Square.”
“You mean Miguel? Bowler head? He sent you?”
“With his personal recommendation,” Odell said. “He gave us some delightful samples of... uh, what shall I call it? Donkey piss?”
This made
Jeremiah chuckle. “Whoa, shit. If Miguel sent you . . .”
“And, of course, we are perfectly willing to contribute a little”—Odell rubbed his thumb and forefinger together—“mordida, as the Mexicans say.”
Hetty jumped. She thought she’d felt something tickling the toes that peeked out of her white summer sandals. “I’m afraid of scorpions.” She smiled at Jeremiah.
“I imagine they’re asleep now, ma’am. You don’t need to pay them no mind. Just turn your shoes upside down before you put them on in the morning.”
“Is it true you have rattlesnakes six feet long?”
“Tall.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Six feet tall. El Víbora Seca, to be real exact.”
The name caught Hetty’s attention. “The dry snake,” she translated.
“He’s bringing them mules you’re so interested in. You don’t want to tangle with him, though. He’d just as soon eat y’all for dinner tonight. Got a taste for barbecued Anglo, which he acquired at the age of fourteen fighting in the Mexicans’ civil war. His idea of fun is to bury you up to your neck then trample your head with his horse.”
“Charming,” Hetty said. “When can we look forward to meeting this person?”
“Quién sabe. Smugglers are like your scorpions, ma’am; they only come out at night. Some time after dusk, you’ll see them—riding up that dry creek. But I wouldn’t expect much. See Baldy over there? The one that never takes his coat off no matter how hot it gets? He’s come all the way from Kansas. I’ll tell you one thing—he ain’t leaving here without enough drink to make the trip worthwhile. He and his men alone own four of these fancy cars. And they all got guns.”
Odell and Garret exchanged glances. Garret cocked his head impatiently toward the car. “Thank you kindly, sir,” Odell said, bowing. “I’m sure we’ll be meeting again.”
Rather than take their chances, Odell urged Garret to drive out into the brush and head off the pack train. Hetty insisted on going with them. As the car creaked along the ranch roads a few hours later, she kept busy in the backseat. New luster glimmered in her dark eyes thanks to the right touches of eye shadow and mascara. She crowned them with a cloche that completely swallowed up her hair in cool, white felt. She had thrown on long earrings and lots of beads and unpacked the wedding shawl with its deep antique fringe.
Garret glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “Aren’t you a little overdressed for a trip into the brush?”
Hetty just smiled at him and pulled the rebozo around her shoulders. She might have to do a little snake charming of her own tonight.
Garret found a narrow dirt road that edged along the bed of the arroyo. They followed it for several miles, losing the creek then finding it again, passing through sandy mesquite flats and low gravel hills. Tree branches slapped into the car, bringing shadows with them. Something howled in the distance. Hetty glanced back to be sure no cars were following them. She rolled up her window and gathered the shawl about her shoulders. She could see why Miguel had warned them: “Never go into the brush alone.”
Odell was riding up front, keeping an eye out for the creek, while Garret gassed his way slowly over the gullies that had washed out of the road. But neither foresaw what happened next. From the backseat, Hetty saw the nose of the car rise up, the hood ornament—a leaping greyhound—lifting into the air as they rose over a gravel embankment, then dipped down a slope into the creek bed itself. Directly in front of them were mules, gray as dusk and heavily loaded, trudging along and hardly noticing the car motor throttling down upon them. Garret braked, and the Lincoln slid sideways to a stop in the sand. Hetty didn’t wait to be told to duck down, but fell to the floor immediately, making sure the window was open into the driver’s compartment.
“Get down,” Garret whispered.
“I am down, you idiot. What’s happening?”
“They’re riding up—pointing rifles at us.”
“Let me handle this,” Odell said, clearing his throat. He climbed out of the car, shouting, “Amigos, amigos.” Then Garret’s door opened, too.
Someone shrieked Spanish so fast she couldn’t follow it, bawling the same phrase over and over. She rose on her knees and peered cautiously over the top of the seat. In the fading light, Garret and Odell were nowhere to be seen, but three Mexicans mounted on horseback pointed 30-30 rifles at the ground in front of the car. Shouts ricocheted up and down the mule train, which had come to a complete stop. They were calling for the jefe, the boss. That would be El Víbora Seca. She recalled the Virgin of the Stars she’d seen last night at the Delgado Cafe and found a prayer forming on her lips.
Then she heard hooves, galloping fast, and a huge black horse rose out of the creek. She remembered what Jeremiah had told them about the man on its back, how he liked trampling people underfoot. He circled the two bodies in silence, armored with the rugged gear of the vaquero: chaps laced with a bramble of scratches from the thorny brush, a bandoleer of bullets slung across his chest, and a leather Stetson cocked over his black eyes. Hetty could hear a faint amigos rising up from Odell. They obviously needed an interpreter.
She opened the car door and snaked out a ghostly leg, smooth and white with its silk stocking. The rest of her followed and floated up out of the blue dusk like an apparition, white from head to toe, dripping with fringes and jewels, her eyes deep and beguiling. The tequileros peered at her stupefied, the barrels of their rifles dropping slowly through the air. Seca’s horse backed up a few steps.
“For God’s sake, stay in the car,” Garret whispered fiercely.
But she ignored him, stepping out and gathering the blue light around her as she decided what to say. Hetty draped the rebozo around her shoulders so they would know she was a married woman. What rose to her lips were phrases from the song she’d learned last night from Miguel. She reached into her purse and pulled out the lyrics that she’d written down. With her rich contralto voice, at first softly, then resoundingly as the Spanish couplets poured back into her memory and out through her throat, she began to sing. “Ya la siembra no da nada . . .”
As she sang, Seca leaped off his horse and threw the reins to one of his men. He strode over, stepping across the bodies stretched out on the ground. She heard something jiggling as he walked and looked down—he had snake rattles hanging from his gun belt. What Jeremiah had said about his height was true: He was tall for a Mexican, a good six feet and muscular. She wasn’t surprised at the way his face looked as it swam into focus in the twilight—sun-bronzed, scarred, with a virile swag of whiskers where he hadn’t shaved in days.
“¡Ya basta!” he shouted to silence her. “This song is a joke!” Of course he would speak English, Hetty thought. He’s a borderlander.
“It was taught to me by Miguel Delgado de San Antonio.”
“Where I come from, women do not sing such songs.”
“But where I come from, they do,” she answered. “Why is it a joke?”
“The three men this song was written about? They were trying to smuggle three bottles of tequila across Rio Bravo. They were killed! ¡Por tres botellas de tequila!”
“¡Jejeje!” His men laughed.
Hetty started talking, sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish. She thanked the bandit for opening her eyes to the humor in the song, but said that it should really have been written about El Víbora Seca. He’s the one whose fame should be sung about. Only Seca and his men were brave enough to bring the mescal across the river, and that he is well named, for Seca is indeed like a snake that can slither his way through the underbrush and never be found.
The bandit’s eyes bored into her from under the leather Stetson. “Who is now crawling on his belly?” He snapped his fingers, and three rifles were lifted back into the air, pointing at the bodies on the ground. “I walk into Texas a free man, and I leave Texas a free man. I am Seca de Guerrero!”
Hetty held her breath. She felt as if she were standing on an eroding cliff and had to quickly find
her footing. Those men would pump her husband full of bullets without blinking a dark brown beady eye. She began trembling but knew it would be fatal to show her fear to a man like Seca—it was like staring down a wild animal. She stopped holding her breath and let it fall, deep into her throat where it rose with her voice: “And I am Esther from the family of Ardras who also walked into Texas free! My abuela, Liliana Ardra Herrera, came to San Antonio from Guerrero many years ago.”
“You are an Ardra?”
“Sí. Do you know the Ardra family?”
“Sí, como no. Everyone in Guerrero knows of the Ardra family.” He squinted at her with new interest.
“We are a very close-knit clan,” Hetty boasted. It was a lie. She had never actually met any of her ancestors from Mexico, but Seca didn’t have to know that. “Mi tía, Cora Ardra, sent me to Miguel Delgado, who sent me to you. My husband and I have come to bring glory to Seca. We have traveled all the way from Houston to find you. The people do not know you there; they have not been touched by the god Tepoztecatl. Doesn’t Seca want to be the one who sends the famous brandy of Mexico to los Houstonians?” She poured on more Spanish adulación until he stopped circling her, and his growls turned into grunts. She could see a smile playing over his face in the dim light. His eyes melted a little. “But if Seca gives all the mescal to the men from Kansas, there will be none for us to take to the people of Houston. They are very thirsty.”
He motioned to the men to lower their rifles. He walked back to his horse and mounted, gripping the reins tightly, and turning the horse to glance at the mule train then back at her. “Tres,” he said, pointing at three mules. “Next time, four.”
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