Queen of America

  Teresita slammed pans behind them.

  “See what I must put up with?” Tomás said.

  Five

  IT WAS ALREADY EIGHT in the morning. The entire day was wasting away. Teresita sat inside, writing on a pad by the orange light pouring in through the shutters. She had to go out into the desert and collect plants. She shook her head. There was simply too much to attend to. Her father—well, he was useless. She spent most of her energies tending to him. Perhaps Aguirre would help her father. She stood and leaned out the window to spy on them at their table.

  “I refuse,” Tomás was announcing, “to acknowledge your perfidious implications!”

  “Seriously, though,” Aguirre said. “You seem… heavy.”

  “Heavy!”

  “Not heavy, perhaps… ¡pero lúgubre!”

  “I’ll be damned!”

  “Burgundy, for example. Es muy sentimental. As I say, a lugubrious drink. Especially for this heat. I recommend an amber liquor. Perhaps even a clear or slightly off-yellow liquor.”

  Maybe not.

  She withdrew her head and sat back down.

  She licked the end of her pencil and bent to her pad. She needed several herbs and leaves. What her teacher Huila would have called “little sisters.” Teresita smiled. Yerba santa, she wrote. She was not sure she could find it here in this desert, but she would look. Beside its name she wrote consumptive’s weed. Everywhere she looked, the poor seemed to be coughing up their lungs. You could never have too much lung medicine.

  Huisache, the catclaw. She smirked. For hangovers. But she wasn’t going to tell those two—let them suffer a bit.

  Desert willow, more medicine for the lungs and the coughing.

  Cardo santo, the prickly poppy. She might have to climb a hill for that. For sunburns and warts, yes, but she preferred it as a tea for the urinary discomforts women often suffered. She had heard that men were cured of their softness problems with their little branches when they drank it, but men did not often mention these difficulties to her.

  She looked around the room. What else? It would never hurt to stock up on sunflower and silver sage. But of course.

  She scribbled again.

  Matácora, the leather stem, the sangre de Cristo. How could she forget? What an indelicate root to be named after Christ’s holy blood! Though Huila would have seen the humor in it—after all, if one was cursed with hard dry stools caught in the culo, then the sangre de Cristo would seem holy indeed when it cleared the blockage right out. “Oh, Huila!” Teresita said, speaking to her dead mentor as if she were in the room. And who could tell? Perhaps she was.

  She tied on Huila’s old apron and she put a knife in the right pocket. She needed it to cut samples. Huila would have also used it to puncture any evildoers she met along the way, but Teresita refused to harm any man. If a bad man came, he would have to kill her. She was not going to shed human blood in anger. Huila would have scolded her for this willful pacifism. Huila believed to her marrow that some men deserved to bleed.

  Teresita did not smoke, so she had no use for Huila’s old pipe and redheaded kitchen matches, yet she kept them in the left pocket anyway.

  She stepped out the door.

  Tomás was pounding the table and rising from his chair. They had apparently moved on to philosophy:

  “Don’t condescend to me with Kant!” he roared.

  Unperturbed, Aguirre lifted an infuriating finger and said, “Delving further…”

  Teresita walked away. Squabbling magpies. She whistled. Guapo trotted out of hiding and cast a suspicious over-the-shoulder look at the men. She closed her ears to their shouting and tried to listen for the distant shimmering of wind in the saguaros.

  It was hard to find God with so much ruckus. She was not bothered by the squalor. Her holiest days, after all, had been in the mud and stench of the peon colony of Tomás’s great ranches. Huila had often told her that people sought God on mountaintops, but mountaintops were too small for anybody to stand on. If you really wanted to find God, you would have to stand in the mud like everybody else. All this noise. How could anyone hear anything?

  The assassins did not know where to find the Bosque Ranch, but they coerced vague directions from informants along the way. It could be anywhere between Nogales and Tucson, but they’d been told to find the ruins of a cathedral in the desert, and within five miles, they would find this bosque. Good enough. They had found men with less information than that plenty of times. Just the names of a prostitute and a town were often enough for them to find a target and take him. Those were the best because the men could not fight or flee with their pants down.

  They had only to eliminate the enemies of the state. They had no opinion. They had eliminated many enemies. They didn’t even shrug when an assignment came, because it was only a problem to be solved, and never a moral reflection. How do we ambush these Yaquis or Apaches or bandits or liberals, and where do we put them when they’re dead? Death was a practical thing, no more mysterious to them than a bucket or a hammer.

  If they found women, they calculated only if there was enough time to enjoy them before they killed them. If there were children, they had only to determine what would be most expeditious—to kill the children first, or the parents. Children were easier—one shot each annihilated them. It was just their scampering that made things complicated. They could run like scalded dogs, those little ones.

  As for the moral toll, it was on the heads of those in Chihuahua City, on the heads of those in Mexico City. These two had never even been in a city. Those who did live there, those fine thinkers and gentlemen, they were the ones who dictated. They paid other men to kill their chickens and their enemies. They remained clean. The assassins merely followed their orders. Neither was a churchgoing man, but they both left the burden of guilt to God and their masters.

  The motherland was more important than the individual lives of peasants and traitors. And the children? Wasn’t it a gringo general who’d said about Indian babies “Nits make lice”?

  They were comfortable—they were traveling the land of Indian wars and slaughter. America was full of killers. No one here would care.

  All was calculation and discipline. Not heat, not hunger, not rain, not cold stopped them. They were as relentless and dark on the landscape as ants. No stops in hotels or towns now. No towns. They chewed jerky and drank dirty water from their bottles. They rode on.

  Far behind them, the old man stood in his stirrups.

  He was parked atop a red ridge sparkling with agates and infused with fossils. He did not require a telescope. He could see them perfectly well. He cradled a massive Sharps Big Fifty rifle across his lap as he sat comfortably on his wicked black stallion. The Sharps rifle weighed over sixteen pounds, and it smelled pleasantly of oil. Its slugs were as big as thumbs. If he calculated for windage and arc, he could drop the assassins before they even heard the sounds of the shots that killed them. What would they have thought if they’d known their very own set of calculations was now being levied against them?

  “Sons of whores,” he muttered.

  He nudged his horse forward and followed them across the desert, along the abandoned border.

  Thinking about a big cup of coffee.

  Late in the day, when Teresita returned to the house, she found her father strumming her guitar and regaling Don Lauro with ballads and corridos. They were apparently friends again. She had painted small blue flowers on the guitar, and her childhood scrawl spelled out her name on the neck. Her father’s recovery seemed complete.

  Tomás stopped strumming and observed to Aguirre, “She spends her days away from home and wanders back at sunset.”

  “Have you spent the whole day here?” she asked mildly.

  “All the damned day,” her father boasted.

  “Válgame Dios,” she said, the reproach that had passed down through generations of women brightly shining at the core of the phrase.

  He ignored it.

  “Teresi
ta!” he cried, as if he’d just seen her.

  “Yes, dear Father?”

  He waggled his eyebrows at her, incapable of controlling his flirting even though she was his daughter. She was distrustful of the whole scene. A command performance for her beloved Don Lauro.

  “We have decided upon a treat for you!” her father proclaimed.

  “Oh?”

  “A small surprise.” Aguirre smiled, tipping his head in a courtly gesture. “To brighten your day.”

  “Yes?”

  She could smell herself. Her sweat still smelled like roses. She had smelled like roses since those troubling days in Cabora when the powers had come upon her. Others found it lulling and lovely. To her, it was just sweat, and it embarrassed her. What nineteen-year-old woman wants to reek of sweat, even if it smells like flowers? All she could think about was a dip in the green river with a bar of lye soap.

  Tomás declared: “I have contracted for a wagon! For tomorrow!”

  “A wagon, Father?”

  “Absolutely!” he cried.

  “A treat, you see,” said Aguirre.

  “To Tucson, Teresita!” Tomás could barely contain himself.

  “Really?” She smiled.

  “We shall see baseball!” he exclaimed, waving her guitar in the air.

  Tucson! The city! She was immediately excited.

  “Might I buy a new dress?” she asked.

  Tomás squinted at her.

  “Frankly,” he said, assenting, “that old black nun’s habit of yours needs to be replaced.”

  Aguirre stood, bowed to her, and intoned, “Vive le haute couture!”

  Teresita rushed inside, gathered fresh underthings and soap and a tatty towel and her hairbrush, and ran to the river, where she pushed through the wall of reeds Tomás had woven together for her so she could bathe in privacy, though Guapo and his chulos gathered across the way and stared at her, amazed that she would wallow in the water like that.

  Six

  THEY’D GOTTEN UP BEFORE the sun. A ride could be had from Tubac to Tucson for fifteen cents per passenger on the wagon of Mr. Alphonso Dinges, and Tomás had added a dime per head for Mr. Dinges to swing down to their little rancho and collect them. Before loading, they all stood around the outside table sipping boiling Arbuckle’s and eating Mexican sweet rolls. Slender Mr. Dinges and Tomás took great pains to keep the crumbs out of their mustaches. Don Lauro dribbled coffee onto his goatee and stained its few white bristles a yellow-brown. Teresita could not believe Don Lauro already had white hairs on his chin and, she noted with a small smile, poking from his nostrils. ¡Ay, Dios! She enjoyed her coffee with honey and the last of the slightly curdled cream from their blue pot.

  Mr. Dinges understood Spanish—though he called it Mexican—perfectly well. But he preferred to answer in his own American.

  “Dinges!” Tomás exulted.

  “Aye.”

  “To the city!” he cried.

  “A’ righty,” Mr. Dinges said, nodding. “Jes’ lemme slurp this’n down right here.” It sounded like he’d said “rat cheer.” Mr. Dinges gulped his coffee and gasped in delight and then hurried inside to put the cup in the wash bucket.

  Tomás and Aguirre glanced at each other, dropped their dirty cups on the table, and grinned: these gringos and their ways! Such mess could be left for Teresita or Dolores to take care of when they got home.

  The group strolled to the wagon, kicking up a haze of dust in the flat morning heat; all sounds fell to earth like feathers—even the calls of the birds had lost their sharp accents. Tomás buckled on his double-pistol gunbelt as they walked. His gold watch chain bounced against his abdomen as he strode through the day, his white sleeves burning brightly against the dark cut of his vest. He tipped his smart black American cowboy hat down over his eyebrows and fancied himself a pistolero, like the legendary Bunbury of the roving gang the Iberians, of radical Sonora. The watch in his pocket used to play music when he opened its cover, but that mechanism had died since he’d left Mexico.

  Each of the travelers carried a small carpetbag with a fresh change of clothes. Tomás carried his coat over one arm; Aguirre, as always, wore his—that Aguirre, he wasn’t one for shirtsleeves. Teresita wished she owned a parasol.

  Mr. Dinges took Teresita’s arm and helped her up into the former prairie schooner now stripped of its bows and canvas and decked out with three narrow rows of benches open to the air behind the helmsman’s perch.

  “Up ye go, Miss Saintie,” he muttered.

  “Gracias,” she said.

  He clambered up to his high bench, leaving the gentlemen to help themselves up. His sombrero was vast and droopy; it kept the sun from his face and from the back of his neck, and should it rain, its shape would gutter water away from his eyes and keep it from running down the neck of his shirt. Three quarters jingled in his pocket. His wagon was big and bright and only had three arrow holes from its original travails on the Camino del Diablo. Mr. Dinges was happy. It was a good day.

  The juggernaut was pulled by four swayback mares who had seen long years in front of plows and who now were resigned to pointless trudges back and forth across the desert. But Mr. Dinges spared the whip and put honey on their oats, and besides, Tucson was rife with aromatic horses and donkeys, and they enjoyed that. There were mules to threaten and ponies to snicker at. It was a living.

  Mr. Dinges shook the reins and said, “Hup-ho, ladies. Hup!” The metalwork jingled like Christmas, and the horses took their eternal plodding steps and the wagon jerked once and creaked to life and started its long rolling into the sun. “Hup, now, hyah.”

  Teresita unfurled Huila’s yellow rebozo and covered her head. Her old teacher would have pointed out the importance of showing humility to the Creator. But Teresita mostly wanted to keep the terrible sun from burning her brow.

  “Mr. Dinges!” Tomás crowed. “Are you not a great historian?”

  Mr. Dinges chuckled.

  “Aye, seeñor. Aha.”

  “Tell Mr. Aguirre here, a great newspaperman from the grand city of El Paso—”

  “El Paso! Mm-hmm. Do tell.”

  “—tell Mr. Aguirre what the Mexicans call Americanos in these parts.”

  “Oh my!” Mr. Dinges said. “My goodness. In front of the Saint?”

  “Be bold, Señor Dinges!” Tomás hollered. “She is a big girl!”

  She laid a hand on his back.

  “Is fine,” she promised, practicing her English.

  “Aha! Ahum. Aye, they do. The Mexicans roundabout call the gringos los Goddamns.”

  Tomás roared with laughter. He slapped Aguirre’s shoulder.

  Aguirre asked, “And why is that?”

  “Well, I suppose we say ‘Goddamn it’ all the goddamned time.”

  “Brilliant!” Tomás cried. “I love America!”

  Teresita covered her mouth with the edge of the rebozo and laughed until her eyes watered.

  They had been rolling now for an hour.

  “You could travel for a year,” Tomás said with despair, “and never get anywhere.”

  Dinges was bent to the sun as if he were carrying it on his back.

  “Whose land, Dinges?” Tomás called.

  “Papago.”

  “The mighty Papago,” Tomás intoned. “Scourges of the Camino del Diablo! Warriors of the desert! Eaters of Mexicans! Isn’t that right, Mr. Dinges.”

  “Yep, well, I wouldn’t know nothin’ about that.”

  Aguirre looked about fretfully.

  “Eaters?” he mumbled.

  “Oh yes!” Tomás narrated: “Fifty years ago, the Papago were involved in war with the Mexicans. And the gold prospectors. They said they ate pilgrims. Scared them, eh, Dinges?” Mr. Dinges hunched his shoulders to deflect Tomás’s voice like so many pebbles. “The Camino was a bad road, eh, Dinges?”

  “Bad enough.”

  “Bad enough!” Tomás repeated. “Indeed!”

  Teresita ignored him.

  “Di
nges!”

  “Aye?”

  “How old is this big saguaro cactus?”

  “Oh, he be three hunnert goddamn year, I’d reckon.”

  “And how much water do you suppose it holds?”

  “Well now, ahum, I’d say that there holds about three hunnert gallon.”

  “Do all saguaros do things in threes, Dinges?”

  “I haven’t thought about that one.”

  Tomás pulled his flask and tipped it up for a small jolt.

  He lay back in his seat and watched buzzards circle high above him like great catfish swimming in a pond.

  Mr. Dinges pulled the wagon up to the adobe gate of San Xavier del Bac Cathedral in the heart of the desert. The old Spanish mission gleamed white as a beacon beside a small dark hill in the shape of a cone.

  “The Dove of the Desert,” Mr. Dinges announced. “Next stop, Tucson.”

  He didn’t give them time to inspect the church. He took on a dark-skinned trader with a woven sling full of merchandise who was bound for Tucson. The man paid Mr. Dinges five cents and settled down on the last bench.

  “Hola,” Tomás said.

  The man pulled an orange-painted wooden flute from his sash and began playing a meandering indigenous tune.

  Mr. Dinges pointed out the arched doorway to Teresita. “See that there carving up on the archway? That be a mouse to one side and a cat t’other. Ye ever see nothing like that on no church afore?”

  “¿Perdón?”

  He translated it into Spanish for her.

  “They say that when the cat gets across that arch and ets the mouse, then ye know the world’s endin’.”

  Teresita found that delightful. She was going to comment, but some of the sand people recognized her. They waved. Somebody called out, “¡Viva la Santa!” She raised her hand to them. She gave them the gift of her direct gaze and her smile as the wagon groaned away from the old white adobe church and rattled into the northwest.

  Tucson, ahead, a dark bundle of sticks and a maze of whitewashed boxes and a few plumes of smoke rising at an angle. Southwest of it, the tormented and mysterious Yaqui mountains, and to its north the vast wall of the red and saffron Frog Mountain, the complex of peaks and canyons that sealed Tucson off from the rest of the world.