El Coyote, the Rebel

by Luis Pérez

  “I do not know, José. I don’t even know anything about this citizenship business.”

  “I knew you would not understand. Moreover, you don’t give a damn what may happen to me. You–”

  “José, I am sorry,” I interrupted.

  “Sorry, hell! You do not know what fighting is, you are still a kid.” Then grabbing his cap with his two hands and twisting it, he exclaimed, “I’ll be damned if I die for anybody! I want to live and enjoy life. I want to get what is coming to me. I want to be free. Don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do, but I don’t want to be a coward, or to be classified as one.”

  “I am not a coward, I am just sensible, and that is why I asked you to come with me and show me the country.”

  “Yes, José,” I said, pointing to a green field, “Mexico is certainly a beautiful place for us Mexicans. Here is where we belong. That flowing river, that green forest, and those blue mountains were destined by God to provide beauty to this land of ours.”

  “Yes, and to hell with Uncle Sam.”

  “Who is Uncle Sam?”

  “Don’t you even know who Uncle Sam is?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Hell—Uncle Sam is—”

  Our conversation was disturbed by the conductor, who came through the coach shouting the name of the approaching town.

  Three days later we were walking the streets of Hermosillo in search of a place in which to live. We soon rented us a room very reasonably. The family was composed of three persons, the husband, wife, and a daughter. The girl was about fifteen years old and very attractive. She had a well-proportioned figure and it synchronized quite nicely with her coquettish ways.

  For some unknown reason Consuelo, the daughter, fell in love with me, and to make things worse, my friend fell in love with her. Every day Consuelo would try to find new things to show me, and would take every opportunity to talk to me. Every day my friend was growing more jealous and bitter toward me, and more and more amorous toward the girl.

  One day Consuelo asked, “Luis, what is the matter with José? Is he sick?”

  “I do not know, Consuelo, but I know that you are beautiful,” I told her.

  “I don’t believe you. I think you tell the same thing to all the girls you meet. Don’t you?” And while talking to me she drew nearer, and I could see a passionate flame of love in her big brown eyes.

  “Consuelo, I’m a boy of very limited experience. I want you to know that I have never had any girl, and I don’t talk to anyone else but you. Besides that, you are more beautiful than anyone else I know. I can safely say that you are even more beautiful than the angels of heaven.”

  “Adorable liar—you have never seen the angels of heaven, have you? Have you?” she would ask, coming closer and closer toward me.

  “Well—I—I guess not, but you surely look like one.”

  “It is not true—my mouth is very large and my lips are too thick.”

  “No, Consuelo, it is perfect—your lips match your pearly teeth.”

  “My eyes are too small and—”

  “They are big enough to see me,” I interrupted.

  Pulling up a bit of the lower part of her gingham dress, she said, “Look—my legs are too skinny.”

  “Consuelo, I like skinny legs.”

  “And besides, the upper part of my body is out of proportion.” Then, thrusting her shoulders backwards, she continued, “See, Luis— there is nothing much to me.”

  “Give it a chance, chiquita, it will develop. You are still too young.”

  “I am not young, I will be fifteen next—”

  “Consuelo—Consuelo!” shouted her mother from the kitchen.

  “Yes, Mamá,” answered Consuelo.

  “Come and wash the dishes. It is getting late.”

  “Yes, Mamá, I’m coming.” Then she whispered to me, “Just to prove to you that I am not young, I am going to let you kiss me.”

  “Consuelo, where are you?” asked her mother.

  “I’m coming, Mother,” answered Consuelo, as I was about to kiss her. Then she whispered again, just before leaving, “Handsome one, I’ll see you tonight—Mother is looking for me.”

  So my first romantic talk was spoiled by Consuelo’s mother, and as I heard her call again, I said to myself, “Damned old bat! Why does she have to kill all the joy out of life?”

  About a week later I came home from job seeking, and as I entered the door, Consuelo met me, and putting her hand in mine, she said, “Luis, tonight the Teatro Hidalgo is presenting the grand opera Carmen, and José wants me to go with him to see it.”

  “What is wrong with that?” I asked.

  “Darling, I want to go with you.”

  “Well, if you want to go with me—with me you shall go.”

  “Good! You are sweet—I will be ready by seven-thirty,” she assured me.

  So by eight-forty-five that evening, Consuelo and I were holding hands and listening to the melodious strains from the opera Carmen.

  The next morning José was so angry at Consuelo and me that he called us every name he could think of but our own. Consuelo’s mother heard the argument in our room, and she came to the door and knocked, asking, “What is all the swearing and noise about? This is a private house and not a barracks for soldiers.”

  José talked back to her, and as he finished saying what he thought of her and Consuelo, she shouted, “You couple of dirty rats! You get out of my house and stay out!” Then she ran back to the kitchen, shouting and crying, “Consuelo! Pedro! Antonio! Where are you? Call the police!”

  But before the police came, my friend—now my enemy—and I got out of the place. And that day I took the train to Moreno, Sonora, and left my beloved Consuelo and that scoundrel of a José in Hermosillo.

  28

  Moreno, Sonora, is a mining town between Hermosillo and Guaymas. When I got off the train at Moreno I met a former comrade at arms. His name was Julián Castillo Dorado, better known in the company as Borrachín. He was a good man at heart, and an excellent gunner, but he had been discharged from the Contreras army for being a common sot, hence the nickname.

  Once, when we were entrenched fighting the enemy, Borrachín turned his cannon and aimed at us, shouting, “Hey! muchachos cabrones! If you don’t get down on your bellies I will let it go!”

  Immediately some of us threw ourselves down, while others remained standing and shouting, “Don’t do it, Borrachín.” “You will be shot at sunrise for that, Borrachín!” “Don’t be a damned fool, Borrachín!”

  He would have discharged his cannon at us, but an officer knocked him over the head just before he pulled the trigger. After the battle, Julián Castillo Dorado was tried by a court-martial and dishonorably discharged from the army for drinking on the job and trying to cannonade us.

  When Borrachín saw me getting off the train with my suitcase in hand, he asked, “Hello, Coyote, are you a general by now?”

  “No, Borrachín, and I don’t think I’ll ever be one.”

  “Why not, Coyote? You are a damned good soldier.”

  “I was a soldier, I should inform you. About five months ago I was honorably discharged from the Contreras army.”

  “Honorably discharged?”

  “Yes, honorably discharged,” I parroted.

  “That is more than I can say for myself. What are you going to do now that you are out of the army?”

  “I don’t know, Borrachín; I think I will go to Guaymas and go to school there.”

  “What the hell are you doing that for? Look at me, I never went to school and I am happy. Stay here and enjoy life. You can go with us to my ranch and look for gold.”

  “Who is us?” I asked.

  “Me and my wife. After I was dishonorably kicked out of the army, I felt very bad about it, and so I got married.”

  “You got married, Borrachín?”

  “Yes, Coyote, I married a girl who was educated in the convent. She plays the guitar and sings as well as I do.
Every evening we have a good time singing. Her name is Mercedes. Come with us, Coyote. We are going to be away only a week, and you can help me drive my old Model T Ford. My wife’s father gave it to us as a wedding present.”

  “I don’t think that I should go. I want to go on to Guaymas as soon as possible.”

  “Come on, Coyote, be a good sport. It’ll be only for a week. You are not in the army any more; you need a good vacation.”

  After he begged me so much I agreed to go with them. Immediately we purchased beans, flour, two prospector’s pans, and some secondhand tools. Then we went to his place, where I met Mercedes, his wife. At his house I packed away my black suit and got my old clothes ready.

  The following morning the three of us drove to the ranch, which was about ten miles from Moreno. Finally, after riding through rugged cactus-covered territory, over almost impassable roads, we stopped in front of a roofless adobe house.

  “How do you like it?” Borrachín asked, as we were getting out of the battered Model T Ford. “This is my ranch!”

  “Well, I—”

  “It is not exactly a palace,” he interrupted me, “but it is my house my ranch! I call it ‘Las Tres Marías,’ because my mamá was named María. My mamá’s mama was called María, and my papá’s mamá too was called María. That makes three Marías.” After this he took me closer to his dilapidated house. As I looked in through a low window I found that it was inhabited by rattlesnakes, lizards, and God only knows what else. When I saw the intruders I asked, “Borrachín, are we going to live here?”

  “No,” he replied, “we are going to go over by the creek, where we can wash gold.” Then pointing toward a high mountain, he continued, “My father used to tell me that those mountains made many poor Mexicans rich with gold.”

  After we had looked around, and had killed four rattlesnakes, two black scorpions, and a Gila monster, we drove across the creek, where Mercedes cooked a delicious snake soup spiced with chili sauce. She also made corn meal tortillas and fried beans with Mexican cheese for our lunch.

  At Las Tres Marías, as Borrachín insisted on calling his ranch, we spent a great deal of time bringing dirt from the hills to the little running creek, where we panned it. But, regardless of the continuous hard work that the three of us did, we could realize only one third of an ounce of the yellow metal per day. That, we thought, was a very slow process of getting rich, so we decided to move to another spot where at least we could make a living wage.

  While my friend and I were loading our camping outfit on the car, Mercedes filled one of the pans with dirt and went to the creek. A few minutes later, just as Borrachín was ready to call her to join us, she shouted, “Julián! Julián! Look! Come quick and see what found— gold!”

  As we rushed to her, we saw that she was holding a bright yellow nugget as large as a medium-sized chicken’s egg. Almost in unison her husband and I asked “Where did you get the dirt?”

  “From the foot of that oak tree,” she said, pointing excitedly with the piece of gold she held between he index finger and thumb.

  At once Borrachín and I took a handmade wooden pick, an old shovel, our pans, and went to the tree. In about six hours’ work we had dug from under the roots all the dirt which we thought had value. When we had finished panning it, my friend held before his unshaved brown face a glass fruit jar filled with gold dust, yellow grains and several large nuggets. As he stared at the container of precious metal, he beamed with joy and exclaimed, “Amigos, we are rich! Now we can go back to Moreno, and buy my wife all the things she needs in the house, and two gunny sacks full of beans for the winter. We can live a long time without working, I think!”

  “Yes, and I can have my hair made curly at the beauty shop,” said Mercedes.

  “And I can go to Guaymas as soon as we get back to Moreno,” I remarked, as I began gathering wood to build an open fire to cook our supper.

  The next day we awakened very early to fix our breakfast, and while eating it we looked toward the oak tree, which appeared as though it were a grotesque, mad spider balancing on all its legs getting ready to jump at somebody. After a few remarks about our good fortune, Borrachín decided to call the swaying tree “El Guardia del Tesoro Escondido.”

  “That is a very pretty name,” Mercedes said. Then she repeated, “‘The Guard of the Hidden Treasure!’”

  By ten o’clock that morning we were on our way from Borrachín’s ranch to Moreno. While fording the creek we heard a loud explosion, then a prolonged diminishing hiss. As the hissing sound was gradually dying away, Borrachín pulled his faded straw sombrero over his ears and exclaimed, “Carambas! The rebels must be fighting again! Where is my rifle?”

  “No rebels this time, Julián. It is only a blowout,” commented his wife. And the three of us got out to fix the tire.

  29

  Two days after we had returned to Moreno we found that the three of us had panned twenty-five ounces of gold, for which we received five hundred Mexican pesos. My share of the money was one third; that gave me a nice nest egg on which to build my future. Then, in order to celebrate our good fortune, we had a little tamale fiesta at Borrachín’s house.

  In the morning of the day we sold the gold, after we had purchased for the fiesta, Borrachín asked me to go with him to a wine shop. We soon found one which was called La Gran Mosca. As we entered the tavern a pretty, but quite dark, hostess came to greet us, saying, “Welcome to The Great Fly, señores.”

  When Borrachín saw the señorita, he asked, “Hello, my dark beauty, would you like to have a drink with us?”

  The girl, in a sophisticated manner, without answering the question, said, “Señor, I was white once, but now I am dark because the sun has kissed me.”

  As the girl finished her statement, Borrachín held her hand and said, “I too was white once, chiquita, but look at me now! The damned sun has been kissing me too for the last thirty-two years, and now I am as black as—”

  “What do you wish to drink, señores?” interrupted a young waiter, who started to clean the top of the table in the booth where we were sitting.

  “Bring us three one-quart jugs of pulque, and a package of cigarettes,” ordered Borrachín.

  While the waiter went to fill the order, the girl talked us into buying two tickets for the national lottery, and having made the sale, she left us and went on to greet other customers.

  In a few minutes the drinks were on the table and Borrachín took his jug, drinking the contents without stopping. When he was finished, he smacked his lips and said, “Ah, pulque, our Mexican beer, is the most wonderful drink in the world.”

  I sipped my drink, and it tasted slimy and had a nauseating odor; so I asked, “What is wonderful about it?”

  “Why, Coyote, you don’t know what is good. Pulque is the drink of the Mexican people,” he replied, taking the jug from my hands and drinking most of it. Putting the container on the table he continued, “The pulque is made from the century plant, which is called maguey in the Indian language. The Indians thought that the plant bloomed only every hundred years, but in reality it blooms when it is between seven to ten years old. When the maguey is almost ready to blossom, the Indians cut out the stalk at the base of the plant, making a deep bowl in which the sap gathers. The juice runs so fast that one plant will furnish ten to fifteen pints of this delicious drink every day.”

  “How is it that you know so much about this fermented juice?” I asked.

  “Well, Coyote,” he said, taking the jug which was brought for the hostess, “my papa used to tell me the story of pulque and I know it by heart. Once upon a time, in the year 1050, I believe, a beautiful Indian maiden named Xochitl was on her way to Tula, the city of the emperor of the Toltecs.”

  At this point Borrachín drank half of the pulque out of the third jug before he continued, “Just think, Coyote! She was walking barefooted and on her head she was carrying a large narrow-mouthed pitcher.”

  Again Borrachín stopped and ordered an
other drink; then he drank the rest of the pulque which remained in the jug he had in his hands.

  “When the damsel arrived at the gate of the palace, she told the servant that she had a present for the noble emperor,” continued Borrachín, as he grabbed the refilled jug. “Just imagine, Coyote! She was taken right away to the ruler. Oh, Coyote, she was beautiful! While Xochitl, that is the name of the Indian maiden, remained standing before the emperor with the jar on her head, she appeared as innocent as a lamb. Her mouth was half open, her jet-black tresses hung over her shoulders, and her luminous eyes glared at the ruler.”

  “What did the emperor do when he saw Xochitl?” I asked.

  After taking another drink, he answered, “The Indian chief greeted the maid kindly, and asked the nature of her visit. The girl, embarrassed and trembling, lowered the jar from her head and presented it to the emperor, explaining that the vessel contained the most delicious drink of the angels.”

  “Did he take it?” I asked.

  “Did he take it?” repeated Borrachín. “Who wouldn’t?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Yes, he took it,” answered Borrachín, somewhat disgusted, then continued. “As the chief held the jar looking at the thick liquid, Xochitl said, ‘Noble emperor, a child of the soil brings you the sweet water of the maguey, which, when blessed by the gods, becomes pulque. It is a liquor divine, which the angels in heaven prefer to wine.’ At first the ruler was very dubious about the drink—just like you were. But since the girl standing before him looked so innocent and the odor of the beverage was so appetizing, he tasted it—like this,” taking his own jug. “He found it sweet; then he looked at the girl and saw that she was charming. Then the emperor took another sip, like this,” taking a drink himself. “And found the liquid mild and tasty. Again he looked at the girl, and saw that she was beautiful. The ruler took another drink, like this,” sipping his, “and again he looked at Xochitl. He saw that she was more lovable than ever, and so he married her. Wasn’t that wonderful? He married her.”