Queen of America

  Mr. and Mrs. Van Order had brought Teresita and her father down from the property in their carriage. A small wagon trundled along behind them bearing the aged trunks with their things. Juanita had packed Teresita a small case with a few of her own extra dresses; they had to hide this in the wagon lest Tomás find out Teresita had accepted charity. Better—he would have proclaimed—to rob a bank.

  Teresita wore her best white Tucson dress. Tomás looked smart in his vest. They mounted the steps of the train at eleven in the morning; Teresita pretended she did not notice the Van Order boys. Harry had tears in his eyes as he watched her board. John, sitting atop one of the horses Segundo had liberated from the bounty hunters, kicked Harry in the shoulder.

  “Why don’t you wave a hankie?” he taunted.

  He turned his horse and walked it away from the station. He simply chose not to watch the scene and affected a deep fascination for the sallow flats to the west. Just like that? he thought. It ends on a whim, and they get to go to a city while I stay here? He wanted to come undone all over the scene, shoot some cactus, kick and howl. “Well, shit,” he told the horse.

  Teresita nodded to the ragtag pilgrims and followers who scuffled around the station, unable to understand what was happening. They believed that Teresita was going on vacation to Texas, a far land that they would never see. Such were the wonders of the Saint of Cabora! “She does what she pleases,” someone said. Others nodded. “She travels the world like a dove.” Mothers told their children the Saint could fly to Texas if she wanted to. But she was going by train to keep the land from going wild—imagine the Indians seeing her flying in the air! There would be uprisings all along the border!

  Fathers hung their thumbs in their belts and scuffed the dirt and opined that the Saint was going to procure mysterious potions and cures. Don Tomás, it was rumored, was buying arms for them so they could ride into Mexico to liberate it. Teresita would bless the bullets with mysterious Yaqui herbs so the bullets would not only find the bad men even in the dark but also return to the shooters to be shot at enemies again and again. God bless the Saint of Cabora! Thanks to her, one man with one bullet could win any war.

  If they had understood that she was abandoning them, they might have set fire to the train on the spot.

  Kisses, hugs. Juanita was a little startled at how easy it seemed for Teresita to leave her. Juanita was weeping, but Teresita was all business. Curt, even. Gone as if she had never been there at all. She didn’t wave.

  They could not know how many friends Teresita had lost. How many places. How much love. How many faces had haunted her and passed into the unclear past like dust, like cook-fire smoke. Although her ghosts no longer spoke to her, they were more real to her than the world she daily walked across.

  Tomás, however, made great gestures of farewell. Abrazos and backslaps. Great bowings and bellowings. Long, sad gazes into Juanita’s eyes, which somehow delighted her husband—such yearning looks affirmed for Mr. Van Order that any man on earth would give his own left leg to have such a fine woman but only he, the Mighty War Hero, had managed to snag her. However, Tomás’s eyebrows warned everyone in the station, should the slightest opportunity arise, he would fall on her like a rainstorm and sweep her away with his wicked, wicked love. He bent, kissed her hand for the last time, and breathed in her luscious knuckle scent of garlic, horse sweat, and lilac.

  Juanita and her husband stood up on their carriage and waved, but Teresita never even looked out the window.

  The train lurched once and hove to, then settled into its side-to-side waddle down the rails, clicking pleasantly.

  “Different from the last train ride,” Tomás noted.

  “At least no one is pointing guns at us,” she said.

  She rubbed her eyes.

  “I am excited, I must admit,” her father announced. He slapped his knee as if a burst of enthusiasm would confirm their delightful future. He nudged her in the ribs and guffawed. “Here we go!” he said.

  She was too tired to be excited. She stared out the window at the tiresome landscape. Desert. Where were the trees?

  “What is El Paso like?” she asked.

  He pulled his flask from his pocket, unscrewed it, took a gulp, smiled, sucked air, and took a second swig. “Rico,” he said. He replaced it in his pocket, withdrew a black cigarillo, bit off the end, produced a redheaded lucifer from his vest pocket, struck it on his boot, and lit up. He shook out the match and tossed it over his shoulder. He blew a puff into the air and said, “Desert.”

  She slumped.

  “More desert?” she said.

  “What’s wrong with deserts?”

  She gestured out the window: yellow and tan. Rocks. Dead spindles that might have once been plants.

  “I thought all you mystics,” he observed, “went to the desert.”

  “All I have ever seen is deserts. I am tired of deserts.”

  They contemplated the various shades of dun as the world rotated past their window.

  “It’s not fair.”

  He gritted his teeth. Fairness? She wanted to discuss fairness? Ah, the young, with their endless shovel-loads of horseshit.

  “Why can’t we move to a city? Why can’t we live by the sea? John Van Order told me about New York City! Why can’t we live there?”

  Tomás laughed a small puff of smoke. John Van Order! What did that dirt-clod waddy know about New York?

  “Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “El Paso is a city.”

  Stung, she turned away and felt her face burn.

  “Look!” Tomás cried, as if he’d seen a great stone temple. “A cow!”

  His effort was not appreciated.

  She moved to another seat and stared to the south. At least the mountains that way were blue. At least the far Mexican sky had amassed vast black cliffs of rain clouds.

  Deserts and mystics, she thought. Yes, Jesus went to the desert, Elijah and Moses. But this desert was already ruined. Beside the rails, a dirt road scrawled itself along, and destroyed wagons lay beside it like skeletons. Burned and tumbled adobe huts marred the land. Trash blew into the creosote bushes.

  “Men have destroyed it,” she mourned.

  He put his hands on his face and scrubbed it, as if he could tear out his own eyes. The nasty black cheroot between his fingers dropped ashes on his hair. Women! A daughter was as impossible as a wife! What did they want! Ridiculous creatures! He should have had only sons! Jesus Christ—a saint no less!

  She turned as if reading his mind and glared at him.

  “Is that how we look at our father, young lady?” he heard himself say. It was damned absurd, and he knew it.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Charming,” he said. “Why don’t you spit on the floor while you’re at it.”

  “I didn’t say a word.”

  “Oh, you didn’t need to say anything, Teresita. Your face is quite eloquent.” He turned to the window. He muttered in immense self-pity: “Generation of father haters!”

  Her mouth dropped open in silent protest.

  He infuriated her! It was all so unfair! She never asked for anything. Why bother? He was so cheap, so drunk, so self-indulgent, asking would be of no use anyway. No friends. No boyfriends. No school. No anything.

  She stomped her foot.

  “I’m tired of being told what to do,” she announced.

  “Oh really,” he said mildly. “What a pity. Perhaps you should move away and start your own life. Until then? Oh! I suppose I have to continue protecting you and caring for you! So terribly sorry.”

  She actually made a growling sound.

  “Did you just growl?” he squeaked.

  “I—absolutely—did—not—growl!”

  “My God! Just like an animal!”

  “Why can’t I decide where we go for once?” she cried.

  “You?”

  “Yes. Me.”

  He laughed.

  “You did decide. You said, I want to go to El Paso. Now, damn
it to hell, we are going to El Paso. Who denied you the, the, the right to declare where you wanted to go?”

  “I had no choice!” she shouted.

  A small family at the far end of the car turned and stared.

  “¿Qué?” she snapped.

  “Nuff’n,” said the father, and they turned away.

  Tomás maintained his coldest smile.

  “No choice?” he said.

  “Women have no choice in this world,” she muttered.

  “You’re joking.”

  She stared at him.

  “You’re a girl,” he said. “You’re not even a woman yet. And I am the father here.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing.” He dropped his cigarillo on the floor and ground it under his heel. “As long as I am your father, and as long as you live under my roof, eat my food, spend my money, I say what we do. Once you marry and live off some other man, it is not my concern any longer. Do what you please.” He sat back and crossed his arms. “No man can control you anyway.”

  “God controls me,” she boasted.

  “Yes. Your big husband in the sky.”

  But he wasn’t done. He got to his feet unsteadily as the train rocked. He was not flung against the back wall. He leaned toward her and hung his finger in her face.

  “I gave up everything for you! Everything! I asked nothing in return. Nothing! The very least you could do is respect my authority!”

  He stormed out of the car and slammed the door. She could see him on the platform between cars. He was leaning on the rail with his head down, engaging in poetic postures like some angry little boy.

  “Grow up,” she muttered and stared at the emptiness around her.

  They slept fitfully. Their backs hurt and their bottoms ached as if they’d been kicked. They were hungry. The vastness of the desolate land fluttered outside the windows like wind rippling a flag. Tomás jerked awake and sat watching his daughter. She snored. He was thrilled to know something new about her. He lit up another smoke, and he tasted it and put it out. His flask was empty. He closed his eyes and thought about the future. He thought about all the things he might do to make himself again an honored, respected gentleman.

  They pulled into El Paso a long time later in clouds of steam. Aguirre had assembled a great welcome for them. Teresistas held up banners. A brass band tootled insanely. Sombreros flew in the air. Politicians with sashes and straw hats stood around importantly. Scores of tiny Mexican and American flags waved. Women in fine dresses held the hands of children in cute little charro suits. Police fretted at the edges of the assembly. Aguirre stood among a throng of spies, secret operatives, Mexican revolutionary theoreticians, Freemasons, and one priest. Teresita and Tomás were astonished to observe their first Negro faces. Uproar and excitement. The crowd screamed. The brass blew a fanfare.

  “Oh no,” said Tomás. “Not again.”

  They did not know that this same crowd had assembled the day before and waited for hours, only to greet an empty train. And here they were again. Most of them. Shouting.

  Seventeen

  THE TWO YAQUI WARRIORS had been watching from the hills. They had seen the Great Joy consume the towns south of Nogales. The Teresistas had poured out to pillage and burn, crying out their love as windows shattered. They had not been far away when the crowds overtook the hapless American cowboys and nearly beat them to death, leaving them naked and kissed in the desert sun. They had consulted the old men, the Dreaming Men, who had gone far in the night and seen the Saint in her journeys, had seen the souls of the fallen making their way across the dark plains. They had seen the visions of the war to come, and they wanted to start it now. They wanted to burn the land. They wanted to unleash the fury of God. They dreamed of the far prisons in Quintana Roo and Yucatán exploding, throwing Yaqui and Mayo slaves out into the jungles like lava from a volcano. They wanted to dream their warriors and brothers and mothers and sisters home. They silently called out to them to kill everyone they could find as they fought north, to clean the pestilence from the land and return to the holy light of the Río Mayo and the Río Yaqui valleys. Home. Was there any sweeter word? Home. They wanted all souls home. They dreamed for days. They saw Federales and Rurales falling, their sand-colored uniforms blooming in red gardens of blood.

  And these two men had been blessed by the Dreaming Men and sent to Nogales and were unseen by the Mexicans and the mestizos. Just two more desert Indians. Two more tall men with bluntly chopped obsidian hair and off-white clothes, their feet black in their huaraches, their faces grim and carved like hawks as they walked the Sonoran alleys. Mexican soldiers eyed them, but they never faltered, never looked aside as they walked. Their language passed back and forth between them like a murmur of wind in the ocotillos. They watched the border crossing, and the American guards. They sniffed the American air that came across the line with American smoke, the smells of American beef and American bread. They watched the fat bright American citizens parading not twenty feet from the shambling silent Mexicans. And they made their way up the sharp hills to the south of Nogales, where the barrios bristled in the arroyos, and the wild dogs scattered after rabbits, and the Indians spied on the guard posts on both sides of the border. The warriors walked high and sat low and watched. They watched the sun set, and they watched the sun rise. They watched the buildings across the line. Nogales, Sonora, was a mirror that reflected Nogales, Arizona. They had pictures of Teresita under their shirts. They waited there. It would be a good day. They prayed. They did not joke or laugh. Soon, they knew, the rifles would come.

  Eighteen

  IT WAS NO COOLER in El Paso.

  Their wooden house at the corner of Overland and Campbell was stifling. But they didn’t care. It was neat and pastel-colored. White shutters bracketed the windows. “It’s a dollhouse!” Teresita exclaimed as she ran from small room to smaller room. Tomás was astounded to find perforated, soft toilet paper in the water closet. He enjoyed using the peasant’s vernacular for this magical room, calling it the excuse-me (el escusado). He shook the fluffy papers in Aguirre’s face and laughed. “What is this?”

  Aguirre beamed as if he himself had invented the silky bum tissues and boasted, “Paper for the toilette, mon ami. Why, we have had this paper since 1877!”

  It was too good to be true.

  “By God!” Tomás breathed, and he celebrated the welcome invention with a toast from his flask. The United States had it all. Pampered nalgas.

  “This is the greatest country on earth,” he said.

  Aguirre dipped his head, representing the humble nation.

  Even Teresita sidled up to the paper and gave it a little pat. Civilization. She went to her blue room and shut the door. She threw herself on her bed and stretched and smiled. She kicked off her shoes and sent them flying to the corner. She hiked her skirt and kicked her feet in the air. A breeze lifted her sheer curtains and they moved like moth wings, like blessing hands passing over her in prayer. The curtains had come from Montgomery Ward’s catalogue and had cost $1.27, but they could have come from Heaven. She laughed at herself. Really. Did she have to find holiness in everything? Was the toilet paper made of angel feathers? She snorted. She bounced. The bed squealed. She pulled the pins from her hair. She kept her skirt up so the breeze could cool her legs. Her bare toes digging in the coverlet felt so good she wanted to get up and jump on the bed. So she did.

  Teresita and Tomás had been lucky to get there; just the year before, the massive rail strikes in the United States had stopped thousands of trains all over the country. One never knew if the rail system would suddenly choke and die again. They considered themselves doubly lucky to have arrived in a safe haven—craziness was afoot in the world. People said it was the End Times come upon the world at last. Christ Himself would return before the dreaded 1900 began, and He would be wielding His terrible sword of judgment. Groups in the hinterland were preparing bundles to take with them when He called the saints to Heaven and the dead from
their graves. They would lie in fields and await their godly levitation to glory, then drag home mosquito-bitten and thirsty to hope for demolition some other day.

  Far from God, Chicago had been consumed by great riots, and the cities felt as though they would ignite along labor, poverty, and racial lines. At least, this was what Aguirre’s companions reported. For all its gunfighters and border brigands, El Paso was a peaceful enough destination from which the Urreas hoped to watch both the United States and Mexico evolve, to use Aguirre’s newest word.

  The future was coming on fast. There was no escaping it. In Germany, the mad Dr. Diesel had invented an engine that, it was said, would drive all tomorrow’s commerce and personal transportation, thus replacing the horse, even perhaps the steam trains. Newspapers were alive with this sort of thing almost every day, inventions, conglomerations, fantasia. Tomás could not wait to goggle at the front page over his eggs each morning. Out of loyalty, he read Aguirre’s tiresome rag—all revolution and bizarre tales of saints and miracles and, well, a bit too much about Teresita in his opinion. But at least it was in Spanish.

  He tested his English against the Times and the Herald, and when a letter or small item critical of “the Saintess” appeared, he hid it from Teresita. Like the morning he saw in the Herald: “Santa Teresa has such power over the ignorant Mexican peasantry that she could, if disposed, stir up the worst kind of revolution.” Better to simply tear that page out and wrap the coffee grounds in it.

  If the gringos had seen the politicians and professors and businessmen and the furtive spies Aguirre brought around, they would have gone berserk. But as long as they thought she was inciting only peasants, he and his daughter were all right. And yet the rail lines that converged on El Paso, lines from New Mexico, California, Mexico, brought the faithful and curious from unimaginable places. He had been astounded to meet a doctor from New York who had taken his vacation to observe the healings. How much more amazed was he when a family from Scotland made its way up their street with an offering of buttery sweet biscuits.