It didn’t take long for everyone to jump up and join the twins in their resolution to kill the chupacabras. Even Pita, with her newfound courage, was up in arms. My skepticism remained, but to be honest, I figured their enthusiasm would wear out soon enough and they’d all fall asleep eventually. As for me, I would continue to keep vigil throughout the night, hoping, praying that the chupacabras wouldn’t find us before dawn.
But before I knew it, our entire party was sitting around the campfire like a gang of renegades in an old Western. Chencho was keeping the fire alive by throwing another log in and poking at the base of it, but Juanita and Delia were carving away at branches with two small pocketknives from Velia’s tool belt. Velia and Pita were pulling leaves and sprigs off the branches that were still to be made into stakes before piling them neatly next to the whittlers.
Juanita put the knife down and shook a cramp out of it in the semidarkness. “My hand feels like it’s going to fall off.”
“Here, I’ll do it,” I said, taking the branch out of her hand. I picked up the knife and sliced off sliver after sliver of wood until the rest of the branches had been whittled into weapons. After we had finished carving out as many stakes as we could, Juanita placed the finished ones strategically along the walls so that everyone had access to them.
It felt weird, preparing for what might happen to us in the night. I felt like we were in a different world, a magical realm, where everything was larger than life. Did I think we could really kill the mythical chupacabras? Normally, I would have said not on your life, especially since we weren’t even sure if he was a vampire. But my skepticism had mostly worn off, because I figured this was as good a plan as any to protect ourselves. Stakes were weapons, and having weapons was better than being defenseless. Besides, there was something about being in those ruins in the Mexican countryside that made anything possible, because that night I believed in us — cinco hermanitas, five little sisters, together forever. No matter what.
We must have stayed up most of the night, putting log after log on that fire, waiting for the chupacabras. Velia and Delia huddled together on my left while Pita balled herself into a fetal position on my right. Juanita lay on the other side of the twins with a baby goat in her arms. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but despite all their talk and my resolve to stay awake, we all fell asleep before dawn. I was dreaming something bizarre and twisted, but I couldn’t wake up.
In my dreams, Pita lifted Chencho’s hair and looked into his empty eye socket. I tried to stop her, but she pushed me away. Chencho’s face around the missing eye was big and swollen as if it were infected. I smelled something vile and repulsive. And somewhere, far away from me, I heard a girl let out a bloodcurdling scream.
I turned around and around in a foggy, dreamlike state, looking for the source of that scream, but only darkness surrounded me. I was lost in the woods and I couldn’t find Pita or Chencho anymore, but I could smell his putrid eye socket.
I ran, bleary-eyed and blind, searching the night for my absent sister and the boy with the missing eye, but I couldn’t find them. They were lost to me. Then, suddenly, I wasn’t dreaming anymore and Pita wasn’t so far away but right beside me — screaming her lungs out.
I peered into the darkness and saw a red eyeball glowering at me. It was the chupacabras, clutching and sucking on Pita’s right leg — right there, in front of me!
“Get away from her!” I yelled, flapping my arms, but the horrendous thing quivered with rage. The long, sharp quills running along its back stood straight up and it expanded its shoulders menacingly. Then it lifted its head, opened its bloody mouth, and hissed at me. Its breath was so potent, so toxic, and it swirled up my nose to make me gag. Pita screamed again. She squirmed and gripped my arm, trying to kick the disgusting thing away.
“Chencho!” I screamed for help, but as I looked around, I saw that he was gone. “He left us! Juanita! Delia! Get up!”
Beside me, the girls lifted their heads. They were groggy and confused, so I didn’t wait for their help. I reached behind me, grabbed the nearest stake, and stabbed at the chupacabras. The spiked branch barely brushed over the long spinal quills quivering along his arched back, and in my haste I let go of the stake. The chupacabras let out a deep threatening growl before he bit down into Pita’s leg again with his razor-sharp fangs.
Pita bawled in agony and clung to my arm. I reached for another stake. This time, I didn’t drop it. This time I stood up and stabbed at his face with all my might. The stake went into his right eye, piercing through his glowering red eyeball. But I didn’t stop there. As the chupacabras let go of Pita’s leg, I shoved the stake deeper into his skull with the full weight of my body behind it. Wielding their makeshift weapons, Velia, Delia, and Juanita surrounded the chupacabras.
The beast grasped the stake, pulled it out of his eye socket, and cried out, a wounded, demented howl that raised the hair on the back of my neck. Seeing the glowing eyeball gutted out and spiked on a stake made the girls back away in disgust. Even I was horrified by my gory accomplishment.
Sitting up on his hind legs, the beast howled and threw the stake aside. His eye socket was gushing, and he clawed at it frantically. He shook his head and shrieked and clawed and hissed, but he was blind, so he couldn’t see us.
Keeping another stake aimed at the chupacabras, I leaned down and inspected Pita’s leg. The bite didn’t look too bad. She had three bloody puncture marks above her right ankle, but there didn’t appear to be any missing flesh. “Are you okay?” I asked, and she nodded.
“Be careful. He might be blind, but he’s still dangerous,” I told the girls.
They closed in around him again. Velia jabbed at him first, stabbing him in the back.
“Kill it!” Pita screamed from behind me. “Don’t let him get away.”
“Por favor, señoritas, don’t kill me,” the chupacabras cried out in a thick, animalistic voice. “Please, please, don’t kill me.”
“He can talk?” Velia asked, looking at me for answers. She didn’t back down from her fighting stance.
I shook my head, confused. The pathetic creature knelt before us, quivering as he pressed his paw against his wound. I jabbed at his side with a sharp stake. “Who are you?” I demanded.
Juanita stabbed sharply at his arm with her stake. “What are you?”
“Please,” the chupacabras said between sobs. “Please don’t hurt me. I am Chencho, the boy who helped you. I am your friend.”
“Chencho?” I asked. The beast shook as he transformed himself back and forth between his goatherd self and the grotesque form of the fiendish chupacabras. “Is that you?”
“Yes. It is me. Chencho,” the semidemonic boy said. He rocked himself side to side trying to control his form, which was weakened one minute and strengthened the next, constantly shifting between beast and boy. “I beg you not to hurt me. It is not my fault. I am not myself tonight. Please, let me go. I promise. I won’t hurt you again. I promise.”
“Who did this to you?” I asked, poking him in the chest with the sharp tip of my stake.
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” the chupacabras whined.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Juanita asked, poking him in the back. “How did this happen to you? Is it some kind of spell? Can it be undone? Tell us, maybe we can help you.”
“Nobody did this to me,” the chupacabras said, his voice low and pained. “This is just what I am, what I have always been. I try to control it, but sometimes the beast inside me takes over and I am overcome by the need to feed.”
“Well, you weren’t trying very hard tonight,” Pita said. She pushed herself back with her good leg, scooting as far away from the chupacabras as she could get. I reached down to help her.
When she was sitting at a safer distance, I came back to the chupacabras and started circling him while my sist
ers kept their stakes at his throat and back. Taking a good look at the quills on his back, I ran my stake along them to test their sturdiness. The action made the chupacabras arch his back like a cat and he hissed again. “You lied to us,” I said. “You told us you were an orphan. That your mother died.”
“I didn’t lie about that,” the chupacabras said. He turned his head sideways, following the sound of my traveling voice. “My mother was like me, the only other one of our kind I knew. We used to live in the jungle, in a cave high up in the Sierra Madre, happily minding our own business, until a group of hunters tracked us down. They set a trap for her. The metal gear almost cut off her leg. I stayed with her until the last breath left her body. I wanted to go after them, to kill them, but she made me promise that I would leave the jungle. She wanted me to try to live a normal life, to control my beast and behave like a normal boy. But as you can see, that is easier said than done. “
“So you’re some kind of wild animal?” I asked. “Why didn’t the hunters come after you? Why didn’t they kill you?”
Chencho shook his head and cried. His whole body trembled as he spoke and his quills quivered with his sobs. “I don’t know. They didn’t see me. I left before they came back for her,” Chencho said, crying and covering his face with his hands. “Please, please, let me go.”
Velia pushed a stake at the chupacabras’s throat menacingly. “What should we do with him?”
I put a hand on Velia’s shoulder to stop her from doing something drastic. “We can’t kill him,” I said. “We’re not murderers.”
“We have to do something though,” Delia said. “He’s still dangerous.”
“Please, please, let me go,” Chencho begged as he crouched on the ground before us. “I am blind. I cannot see you, so I can’t hurt you anymore.”
“He attacked Pita. We have to kill him,” Juanita said, lifting her stake high in the air, ready to deliver the final blow.
“No,” I said, resolutely. “He can’t hurt us anymore. Let him go.”
“But — ” Velia began.
“—we can’t,” Delia finished her sister’s protest.
“Let him go!” I said, more firmly than before. “Look at him. He’s just a little boy. Wounded and blind. The virgen wouldn’t approve. We have to let him go.”
“What about what he did to Pita? Doesn’t that count?” Juanita wanted to know.
Remembering La Llorona’s warning, I firmed up my resolve. I wanted revenge just as much as my sisters did, but my blood was cooling now, and I knew we needed to do what was right. “If he comes back, we won’t have a choice, we’d have to kill him then, like the lechuzas. But for now, we have to let him go.” I looked around, making eye contact with every one of my sisters.
Velia and Delia were shaking their heads in disagreement, but Juanita straightened her shoulders and lifted her weapon away from the beast. “Odilia is right. We’re the Garza girls, cinco hermanitas, five little sisters under the protection of the goddess,” she said, holding the stake in front of her with both hands and anchoring the sharp point of it on the ground.
“That’s right,” I said. I looked down at Pita, who was clutching her ankle, wincing. “Remember what I told you? La Llorona said we must remain noble and kind. We should grant mercy when it is asked of us. Besides, we’re armed and dangerous. He knows not to mess with us anymore.”
“Gracias, señoritas,” the chupacabras said, looking more like Chencho the goatherd than the demon. “Gracias.”
“Go!” I yelled, and without hesitation the chupacabras jumped up and ran off. We stood, side by side, four little sisters, holding our weapons at our sides ready to defend our baby sister as we watched him disappear into a new dawn.
LA DAMA: “Una dama es dama en el
vestíbulo y en el campamento.”
THE LADY: “A lady is a lady in the
vestibule as well as the campsite.”
Things changed after our encounter with the chupacabras. Suddenly, my sisters and I became more focused. I used the water from Chencho’s abandoned canteen to clean Pita’s wound. I could see by the light of the campfire that her leg was obviously getting infected. The chupacabras’s mordida had left three ugly lacerations two inches above her ankle, on the outside of her leg, so both her ankle and calf were swollen to twice their normal size. I did my best to keep it clean by wrapping it in one of Pita’s short-sleeved shirts.
Velia, Delia, and Juanita were too worried to sit around watching me treat Pita’s wounds. Instead, they scurried around like little sugar ants, busy hormiguitas, gathering the materials to create a sturdy device in which to carry our wounded sister, because her leg hurt so much that she couldn’t walk.
I was surprised at how helpful and cooperative everyone was with each other. Even the twins were being polite. I didn’t mention how nice it was to see them working together or praise them in any way, for fear of breaking the spell. But I was proud of them nonetheless.
By sunrise, the girls had built a stretcher by tying old pieces of wood and broken branches with torn strips of cloth from a pair of Juanita’s old shorts. It wasn’t pretty, but it was strong enough to hold Pita.
Velia and Delia picked up the stretcher from the front, while Juanita and I took the back. With Pita gratefully resting on the makeshift gurney, we continued our journey toward Hacienda Dorada.
We traveled slowly, stopping often to rest because our arms were not used to carrying so much weight for so long. By the middle of the afternoon, we stopped by an ojito, a spring bubbling out of a rock wall, and drank water straight out of the spouting hole. Our sleep-deprived night could be seen in the circles under our eyes, and our stomachs rumbled with hunger, but we felt for the first time that our ordeal might soon be over.
“It won’t be far,” I said as I stood rubbing the pain out of my wrists.
“How much longer, do you think?” Juanita asked, looking at the map. “Because it looks like we should be right on it.”
“Just over that big hill.” I checked on Pita’s leg. Carefully, I peeled back the dressing and saw that, although the wound wasn’t oozing, her entire calf was purple now. Pita seemed to be in too much pain to talk, because she wasn’t complaining anymore. Instead, she drifted in and out of sleep for the last leg of our trip. Her lethargy worried me, so I took her temperature with a thermometer in the twin’s toolkit.
I was so afraid of Pita losing her leg, I considered using La Llorona’s gift. I was sure its magical properties could do the job well, but I also worried about misusing the amulet’s last gift when I knew that in less than an hour, in the time it would take to walk the last few miles of our journey, Abuelita would be able to take care of her.
Our grandmother was, after all, a curandera. She knew how to use natural herbs to cure almost anything. The memory of her treating a farmer’s ulcerated arm the last time we visited her was still fresh in my mind, so I decided to wait and see what she could do for Pita’s leg. The ear pendant would still be there if I needed to use it later.
“She’s running a fever,” I said. Juanita shook her head in dismay. Velia and Delia cursed under their breaths and knelt beside Pita. Delia touched her face and forehead and asked her if she wanted some of the water they’d been saving just for her.
“No,” Pita whispered weakly. “I’ll be all right. Let’s just keep going.”
“You heard her. Let’s go,” I said. Pita closed her eyes to the sun and rolled her head to the side as if she didn’t care what we did.
We lifted the stretcher and started walking again. Up the hill we went, on and on, until our arms and legs hurt so much that we kept losing our footing. We walked so far and for so long, we almost dropped Pita a couple of times before we reached the crest of the cerro.
I knew it the minute I saw it from the top of the hill. The girls didn’t
recognize Hacienda Dorada, but I did. “Pita, we’re here. You’re going to be okay, mamita,” I said as we stood staring down at our destination.
Pita lifted her head long enough to look down the cerro. “Oh, thank God,” she whispered before she lay back down and closed her eyes again.
Exhilarated by the sight of our paternal grandmother’s home, we walked hurriedly down the hill toward the pink stucco building within the corral-like fence, being careful not to jostle Pita too much in the stretcher. The lilac jacaranda tree by the gate, leaning backward over the fence as if the wind had made it laugh, was exactly as I remembered it. The abundant crepe myrtles and pink bougainvilleas that dotted the courtyard were also as beautiful and lively as I recalled.
“Look at all those flowers,” Pita said, looking at Hacienda Dorada as if she’d never seen anything more exquisite in her life. She probably didn’t remember playing there among the flowers the last time Papá brought us to see his mother so long ago.
“Forget the flowers,” Velia whispered. “Have you ever seen so many mariposas?”
As we got close enough to see the multicolored array of butterflies flittering in the courtyard of our grandmother’s house, Juanita answered, “Not so many different kinds in one place.” The girls kept marveling at the sight as we neared the gate.
“Forget the butterflies,” I said, interrupting their rapture. “Let’s find Abuelita. Pita’s leg isn’t going to cure itself. How are you doing?” I looked down at Pita’s face as we moved along. She was so flushed, I just knew she was getting worse.
“Fine,” Pita closed her eyes and sighed. She was trying to be brave, but I could tell she was still in pain. “I’ll be all right once we get inside.”
“Hold on,” I said. Velia and Delia banged on the gate with a stick and called out for help.
It didn’t take long for someone to notice us. Looking up from their chores, two men dropped their garden tools and hurried over to open the gate for us.
Summer of the Mariposas Page 19