Queen of America Read online

  Angry every time she looked in a mirror. Oh! She could hit herself in the face.

  In the mirror, Teresita often saw an enemy.

  The ladies in the front room of Guillermo Lowe’s house fussed over her and patted her hair and applied creams to her brow. They poured small glasses of lemonade. They crunched thin cookies that blew ghosts of powdered sugar into the air as they breathed.

  They took her to the upstairs guest room and they helped her change from her dusty black dress to her freshly laundered version of the same. One of them had a small veil for her. Funerals and weddings, she knew quite well, were what brought the ranchers together. And the women of the village of Tubac were going to make the most of their day.

  Tomás reholstered his pistola and grabbed the bottle by the neck and strode to the doorway of his low slump-block adobe. The day seemed immeasurably improved. The caustic scents of the Sonoran desert seemed to clear his sinuses. They blended pleasantly with his gun smoke. He breathed deep, he took a swig, he dipped his head to enter the low opening.

  He said, “Fate—I refute you!”

  He considered this a peasant’s hut. At Cabora, workers lived in huts like this. Ah, yes—irony. He was the hidalgo of nothing.

  Inside, it was black and smoky and, if this were possible, even more stifling than outside. The great Saint of Cabora had filled the place with crosses and malodorous bundles of herbs and weeds. Alarming Indian carvings glowered at him from the shadowy corners. Flies immediately inspected his delicious nostrils.

  Dolores, the chubby house girl, was inside, sprinkling water on the dirt floor. She had cooked him a breakfast pot of arroz con pollo that was already turning sour in the heat. The feathers of the unfortunate chicken stirred in the shadows outside the door. Great desert ants were trying to drag them away.

  “Has that skinny bastard gone yet?” he asked.

  “¡Ay, señor!” Dolores cried in theatrical shock.

  She knew to pantomime horror over his outrageous behavior. It was one of the only things that brought him pleasure. Dolores was a student of men. She knew they needed their legends about themselves more than they needed family, drink, or love. Even with his trousers down, a man would pause if you stroked his myths about himself.

  She was terrified of guns, and the Sky Scratcher was given to shooting things lately. He would occasionally unleash bloodcurdling shrieks of sheer boredom, and then, she knew, he would be likely to squeeze the trigger. There were four bullet holes in the roof already. She was getting used to his outbursts.

  He watched her out of the corner of his eye.

  She sidled up to him, sweeping the floor without raising her eyes, but also brushing his thigh with her epic buttocks, a carefully orchestrated accident.

  ¡Ah, cabrón! he thought, his loins percolating immediately. This again!

  He may have considered hanging himself several times over the past six months, but he still knew a thing or two about the ladies, and as long as there were ladies in this desert, he would live to see another day.

  “Come see,” he said.

  They peered out the window together.

  The reporter was scurrying through a wall of tall weeds and shoulder-high desert grasses; mourning doves and quail exploded from cover, marking his passage.

  Tomás laughed.

  Dolores turned away to sprinkle water and lemon juice on the floor; she glanced over her shoulder. She knew he was half drunk. He was asleep every day by five o’clock. He was a ruin, but he had more centavos than she did, and she meant to get as many of them away from him as possible before he ran out completely. Nothing personal.

  “You are so bad,” she scolded.

  “By God,” he muttered and threw open another shutter to illuminate her better.

  “Americanos are not as rude as you!” She poked out her tongue.

  He reached for her. She shied away. “Come here, you!” he said.

  “Where is the Saint, señor?” she asked.

  “The Saint!” he roared. “What is she, my mother?” He stomped around in a circle, bumping his head on a ristra of chiles. “The Saint is out saving the world!” He smiled falsely. “Come,” he said. “Show me your bottom.”

  “Oh my,” she replied.

  “As a favor. Biscuits for a starving man.”

  “I have to work to pay my debts,” she demurred.

  “I have coin!”

  “Look, then,” she said.

  With studied shyness, she turned her back and began to raise her skirt.

  He swallowed more wine and breathed out slowly.

  Her bloomers came into view, a gift from Tomás himself, given to her last Christmas. He felt almost saintly when he saw them. He thought Teresita was not the only good person living in this house. Saint Tomás of las Nalgas.

  Dolores squirmed as she moved one side of the off-white cotton down her right hip. Startling, delicious brown skin revealed itself, curving to shadow.

  “See that?” she teased.

  “Yes.”

  “Another?”

  “Oh yes.”

  She rolled the white cotton off her rump and allowed her fundament to wobble.

  “Yes!” Don Tomás Urrea said. “That’s better.”

  “Give us a kiss,” she breathed.

  He fell to his knees.

  Three

  ELSEWHERE.

  Celebrants of the Santa de Cabora rose in strange outbursts of glory in several towns south of the Arizona line. Before she had been ushered out of Mexico, she had physically walked among them, and her presence had largely held their madness in check. But now, with her gone, all they had left was her legend. And a legend is a relentless and cruel thing, a hungry master not satisfied until fed by great madness. They were children abandoned by their mother, and their joy carried rage within it; their exultations led to fire and smashing glass. Her calls for peace seemed to coalesce in the night, accumulate mass like icicles, and then be found on tables in the morning glowing dull yellow, made brass, but for some, transformed into bullets for rifles and battered pistolas with grips made of wrapped hemp rope and hand-carved cottonwood root.

  In a Sonoran town near the coast, the Teresistas had gone mad with love. They’d begun by praying in their small Catholic church, crying out for Teresita to return. Someone had a bottle of her bathwater, still smelling of roses, and when it splashed among them, holier now than holy water, they flung themselves into the aisles, they cried out in Hebrew and the forgotten tongues of angels. Pictures of Teresita appeared from under blouses and from mochilas as if they were a visitation from Heaven, as if she herself were in the pictures somehow, or could hear their cries, or could feel their tender grasping, and they kissed her, rubbed her on their hearts, fought over her as they flung her likeness among themselves. And when the priest tried to stop this sacrilege, they fell upon him with love and they beat and kicked and pummeled him and left him prostrate before the altar as they burst from the doors and infected the passing citizens with Joy. It was all love. They set fire to the cantina in love, and they beat the drunkards with sticks. The drunkards joined them in Joy, blood streaming down their faces. It was all to be healed, if they only celebrated her holy name! The dead would return! The dictator would be overthrown! The crops would be watered and the animals would come back and all the Yaquis who had been dragged off in the slave ships and the death trains to the terrible haciendas of the south would return in glory!

  Two American ranch hands, on a deserved vacation from punching cows in Yuma’s brutal sunfire, had made camp near the sea. B. Andrew Laird and an unnamed companion had fished and hunted and drunk tequila far from the woes of work. Now they saw the glow of the burning and the smoke, and they heard the great laughter and singing coming their way as the pilgrims marched out of their town and into the wilderness, flinging themselves into the grace of Teresita, who might have ascended to Heaven, they did not know.

  “What in hell is that there?” asked B. Andrew as the Joy came toward
them.

  They never got their boots on. The crowd flowed over them like ants. It was a great mass of chanting and yelling and joyous violence as they kicked and punched the Americanos. Held aloft were nude men, helpless in the grip of the holy ones. And B. Andrew felt himself lifted and stripped—they ripped his britches off him as they passed him over their heads. Then they tugged at his shirt.

  “Andy, we gone be unshucked in a minute, as naked as them two greasers over there.” The unnamed buckaroo was down to long johns and socks.

  “¡Viva la Santa de Cabora!” the Teresistas were chanting. “¡Viva la Santa de Cabora!”

  “If we don’t try something now,” B. Andrew called to his friend, “we is cooked.”

  “Andy! These bean-eaters is gone kill us,” his amigo noted.

  So B. Andrew took up the call—what else could he do?—and joined the Joy and shouted, “Long live the Santa de Cabora!”

  The crowd faltered.

  “¿Viva Teresita?” it asked.

  “¡Viva! ¡Viva Teresita!” he hollered.

  His friend took up the cry: “¡Viva la Santa de Caboolah!” he shrieked.

  Suddenly, they were deposited on the ground, stripped naked, embraced, and slapped on their backs as they covered their parts with shaking hands and tried to smile at the Joy lest it turn again and kill them in the name of love.

  “¡Amigos!” the Joy crowed. “Benditos sean.”

  And the Joy hurried away, waving ax handles and rifles and whirling rosaries like small lassos. Laird and his compatriot ran in the opposite direction and managed to catch an apron-faced mare they shared bareback all the way to San Luis, where, sunburned bright red and peeling, they were arrested by the Mexican sheriff for riding naked in the center of town.

  Horses. Ironclad wheels. The loud cry of a brake lever outdoors.

  Don Lauro Aguirre, the best friend of Don Tomás, entered the room. He pulled off his hat and opened his arms, but his imagined abrazo faded immediately from his mind.

  Tomás stood with his trousers pooled around his ankles; Dolores had her skirts thrown over her head.

  “Oh my,” Aguirre said. “Excuse me.”

  He hurried outside, wiped his brow with a bandana, and huffed a single laugh into the cotton.

  Ay, Tomás, will you never change?

  He waited, knowing his old friend would only rush so much.

  Don Tomás strode purposefully out of his house in greeting. His white shirt was half untucked and hanging over his belt. His black vest lay open across his belly. He embraced Don Lauro and slapped him on the back. He held Lauro at arm’s length and cried, “Let me look upon you!” Aguirre was deeply embarrassed to note that Tomás had tears in his eyes.

  Lauro had been there at every turning in the fate of Tomás and his family. It had been Aguirre, curse him, who had taught Teresita to read. He was the family intellectual. And now he was a great newspaperman in El Paso, Texas.

  “You have come a long way.”

  “I brought you a sheet of jujubes,” Don Lauro announced, retrieving the wax-paper rectangle from his small pile of valises. Tomás snatched the sheet of brightly colored candy from him and gnawed off a piece as if it were jerky.

  Wagons had once brought hundreds of pounds of delights to his rancho, and Aguirre had been there for that. Now a sheet of jujubes was the most exciting thing in his day. He stopped eating and dropped the candy on the table. It tasted stale.

  He put his hands in his pockets and studied his boots.

  “And Teresita?” Aguirre asked.

  “Away.”

  Dolores came forth, deeply flushed.

  “The help!” Tomás said, reviving himself, gesturing. “Have you met the help, Aguirre?”

  “Miss,” said Don Lauro, flushing bright red as he tipped his hat.

  “Señor,” she said with a slight rolling curtsy. “The sweeping is done, Don Tomás,” she called.

  “Ah!” He spun around. “Excellent! Thank you. And take the rest of the day off!”

  “Gracias, señor,” she said, bustling away toward Tubac.

  He turned back to Don Lauro, waving her off absentmindedly.

  “I miss my old staff at the rancho,” he said.

  “But you are making the most of it.”

  “One does what one can.”

  Tomás noticed the reporter’s abandoned glass of wine on the table. He caught it up and gestured with it. “Welcome to my estate! What’s mine is yours!” He barked out one bitter laugh and gulped the wine. Skittered the glass across the wood. He gestured at the nothing around him.

  Looking up, he noticed the wagon that had brought Lauro. A swarthy bastard sat upon the high box, dangling the reins for a team of mules. The sides of the wagon were great wooden shutters, gaudy with red and gold paint, tied to rusted iron hooks in the wooden frame. Its hinged roof was tall—taller than the driver. The wooden flaps said: MUSICAL MISCELLANY.

  “What is this?” Tomás demanded. “Are you traveling in a rolling whorehouse?”

  Aguirre studied the new wrinkles on his friend’s face. Unkempt hair. Poor Tomás.

  “It is a traveling pianist and his driver,” Aguirre said.

  “¡Qué!” cried Tomás. This might be a lively day after all. His spirits were already lifting. “And the driver. Why do I recognize him?”

  “Why,” Don Lauro replied, “that is Swayfeta.”

  “I am Swayfeta!” the driver called. “Guide, contractor, mule skinner! El Paso!”

  Having delivered his résumé, he sat back and grinned.

  The wine was making Tomás feel a bit wobbly. He squinted.

  “¿Quién chingados es Swayfeta?” he asked.

  “We met him in Cabora. On that fine day when Lieutenant Enriquez and his men were guarding the wagon train. Do you remember?”

  “The Arab!”

  The Arab tipped his cowboy hat to the two Mexican gentlemen.

  “As salaam aleikum,” he said.

  “Andale pues,” replied Tomás.

  His attention had drifted to the shadows where an Apache friendly sat backward with his legs crossed on his white-faced horse, observing them with a slight smirk on his face.

  “By God,” he cried. “You lurking savage.”

  Lauro jumped—he had not noticed the native.

  “Sky Scratcher, I brought your bug juice,” the man said. He nodded to Aguirre. “I am Venado Azul.”

  “Delighted,” Don Lauro heard himself intone as he caught himself in a small bow. “Lauro Aguirre, at your disposal.”

  “What did you find for me?” Tomás demanded.

  “Not easy, man like me, buying bug juice!” Venado Azul scolded.

  He spun himself around the right way and nudged his horse in a loose half circle, then plodded forward. He reached back to his saddlebags and produced two bottles; the fluid in one was brown as toilet water. “I have a whiskey. It will kill you, I think,” he said. “And I have a good burgundy. Three bottles.” He shook the corked bottle; the wine was black.

  Tomás snapped his fingers.

  “Burgundy,” he said.

  Blue Deer handed it over, one to Tomás and two to Don Lauro. Tomás dug in his pocket for some money. He couldn’t find any. “I had some gold a minute ago,” he muttered, forgetting that Dolores had the coins in her apron pocket now. Don Lauro ended up paying for the wine.

  “Lovely doing business with you,” Tomás said grandly.

  Blue Deer wiped the Mexican’s fingerprints off the coins with a red cloth and put them in his pocket. He dropped the wicked brown bottle back in his bags. He’d find a mule skinner in the mountains who would pay the going rate for it.

  “I shouldn’t sell liquor to Mexicans,” he noted as he prodded his horse to head out. “You can’t hold your liquor.”

  “I’ll show you who can’t hold liquor!” Tomás erupted, but he was too focused on removing the cork from the bottle to take action. “I’ll… shoot you off that… apron-faced… nag!” The cork po
pped. “Andale.” He sighed.

  “You should try tulapai. Apache beer.” Venado Azul nodded sagely. “You see some visions then.”

  “Adios,” Aguirre said to Venado Azul.

  Venado Azul tipped his hat to them and turned his horse away due east. He knew better than to veer north and face cavalry idiots in the arroyos. He was going to ride straight up the mountains and vanish into the Cochise Stronghold.

  He stopped and looked back.

  “How is the Saint?” he asked.

  Tomás replied, “Saintly.”

  “I saw that story.”

  Tomás shrugged. “Pick up any newspaper,” he said.

  “There are pilgrims coming,” Blue Deer warned. “Singing.”

  Tomás nodded. “The world has gone mad,” he said.

  “Do you know what is mad?” the rider said. “In Tucson I saw white men in a field. Some of them were throwing white rocks at others. And the others tried to hit the rocks with sticks. Then everybody ran around in a circle.” He shook his head. “I don’t think you muchachos will last too long, acting like that.”

  “Then you can take back everything we stole from you,” Tomás said.

  “Oh,” Venado Azul replied, “don’t worry. That day is coming.”

  He kicked his horse and was gone.

  “He startled me,” said Lauro.

  “I thought you were stouter than that,” Tomás muttered. He was starting to slur his words. That simply wouldn’t do. He pulled himself erect. “I—” He intended to announce something, but his mind drifted.

  “Yes, yes,” Don Lauro chimed in, hoping to cover for his friend’s woeful condition. “You fear no man. You fear no god. You ride the chubasco and saddle the volcano.”

  Tomás smiled. He stared at the ground. He sighed.

  Aguirre took his arm and led him toward the table.

  “My days…” Tomás sighed. “I am a ghost, Aguirre. I am already dead….” He sat down and put his hand over his eyes.

  Embarrassed, Aguirre offered a conversational stratagem: “This rock throwing and stick swinging the Indian claims to have witnessed.”

  Tomás slumped in his seat.

  “They call it baseball,” Don Lauro continued. “It is a sport. Not a rock, but a ball. Not a stick, but a bat.”