Queen of America

  And up into the scattered tiny rancherías and tumbledown adobes of the south end of the old city. Dogs and chickens and some running children. But the general trend was toward boojum trees and scarred-up saguaros. They could smell cooking smoke.

  Tomás pointed.

  “Mexicans!” he cried.

  Don Lauro felt vastly superior to this town.

  “El Paso,” he sniffed, “is by far the grander settlement.”

  “I’m a-gone hive off the highway,” Mr. Dinges announced. “We take the ol’ main drag into town from here.” The wagon creaked left, its wheels knocking down and up through a small brown rivulet running along a trench that vanished into the O’odham territories. They rolled down Calle Meyer, a dirt track bounded on either side by low adobes.

  Teresita could barely contain herself. So many people! Horses and carriages, a bright yellow paper kite, music from a Mexican brass band coming from a stand-alone cantina in the shimmering heat waves of the hardpan. She could see the elaborate San Agustín Cathedral far ahead and three or four two-story buildings. A real city at last.

  Tomás noted the appearance of the Arab’s piano-wagon in the distance, making sad rounds in search of a welcoming cantina.

  “Whoa!” hollered Mr. Dinges, dragging back on the reins. He kicked the brake lever forward with his right foot. The wagon squealed and a thin bit of smoke rose from the axle. The mares stopped and stomped their feet in place before slouching immediately into their naps. “Hop out, now,” he said. “I be here for ye to-morrow at three. It be another twenty-five cent each to get home.”

  They struggled down—again, Mr. Dinges offered his arm to Teresita and ignored the gents. The Indian trader in back hopped off and trotted down the street.

  “Most enjoyable,” Don Lauro said to Mr. Dinges, tipping his hat politely.

  “Yep.”

  Mr. Dinges hove back aboard and irritated his mares by awakening them and turning them toward Tubac. The Urrea party watched them clop away, angrily nipping at each other in their traces.

  “Those horses,” noted Tomás, “are saying, ‘Goddamn it.’ ”

  He laughed and Aguirre snorted.

  “It’s a joke.”

  Teresita took up her small bag and stepped to the curb.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Her father rolled his eyes.

  “A sidewalk,” she said. “Wood.”

  “Shall we find lodging first,” asked Aguirre, “or food?”

  “I see a saloon,” said Tomás. “Didn’t you recommend amber fluids?”

  They wandered down the wooden walkway, Tomás’s boot heels clomping loudly as he went along.

  Three Americanos burst out of the saloon’s swinging doors and hurried toward them. Aguirre and Teresita instinctively got out of their way, but Tomás held his ground. Tomás Urrea stood aside for no man. He believed anyone hurrying in his direction was about to deliver news or praise or both. He grinned and began to raise one hand in greeting. The leader of the three, a burly bastard with a great kerchief around his neck, threw up his hands and then double punched Tomás in the chest, bellowing, “Get out of my goddamned way, greaser!” Tomás flew backward off the raised walkway and crashed on his ass in the dirt street. He was too astonished to draw his pistolas and shoot these rude fellows. He simply sat and gawked as they receded.

  Teresita rushed to his side and reached down to help him up.

  “What did they call me?” he asked as they stumbled out of the sun and hid in the shadows of the overhang of the saloon.

  Seven

  THEY FOUND A ROOMING HOUSE on Calle Alegría that took Mexicans, and they set out their belongings in their three rooms; though the heat was intense, the mattresses on the beds were fat and comfortable. Teresita loved the white lace curtains in her window, though her view was of the back end of a blacksmith’s shop, and she could hear clangs and curses and the relentless whoosh of the bellows. She did not care—she had her own washbowl and pitcher, her own towels.

  They took a few minutes to recover from the sidewalk assault, and when everyone felt that enough time had passed for Tomás to regain his equilibrium, they set forth to find a bistro for a midday meal. A stroll down Alegría brought them to Calle Real, where they took a left and headed toward the Elysian Grove Barrio.

  The walk did Tomás a world of good. He pointed out interesting details as if he’d been raised in Tucson. Gesturing to a picturesque string of donkeys jostling for shade under a cottonwood, he said, “Ah, the poor burro! Consider his fate. Born to bear burdens for lazy bastards all his days. Then he dies, unsung and unmourned.” He took a lugubrious turn and proclaimed, “A fate many of us must share.”

  Ignoring this outburst, Aguirre quipped: “The cowboys call donkeys Arizona nightingales.”

  As if in response, one of the burros let rip an obstreperous hee-haw.

  They burst out laughing.

  Feeling lighter after the donkey’s serenade, Tomás led them to a small eatery that exuded comforting aromas of garlic and hot lard. Aguirre nobly preempted any worrisome scene by announcing, “It is my treat, and I will not abide any argument!” The Urrea family bowed their heads and accepted. They took a corner table, and Tomás ordered beer for himself and Don Lauro, while Teresita asked for lemonade. They glanced at the menu, which was chalked on a square of slate mounted on the wall.

  When the waiter came back to take their order, Tomás said, “I’d like sopitas!”

  “Sopitas?” the man said.

  “Right. Sopitas!”

  “What’s that?”

  Aguirre held up a finger.

  “Tomás,” he said. “I believe in the United States they call them chilaquiles.”

  “Chilaquiles, then, my good man!”

  The waiter looked at him.

  “Eh?” he said.

  “Christ, man!” Tomás cried. “Torn-up tortillas fried in a pan with salsa and an egg! For God’s sake!”

  “Oh,” the waiter said mildly. “You mean migas.”

  Tomás let out a choked cry.

  “We don’t serve migas. How about scrambled eggs.”

  Tomás laid his head on the table.

  “I have died.” He moaned. “I have died and awakened in Hell.”

  Aguirre thought it prudent to keep quiet. He sipped his beer. The waiter turned to Teresita. She beamed.

  “I’ll have sopitas,” she said.

  “That was funny,” Tomás told her as they walked into the south end of the city. “That pendejo didn’t know what to say.” He laughed. “ ‘I’ll have sopitas’!”

  She bowed her head and smiled.

  They were on their way to Carrillo’s Water Gardens. Rumor had it that a lake was to be found there, and they might rent a little paddleboat to float in festive circuits accompanied by ducks and swans. There were rose gardens too, though Teresita had no desire to smell roses.

  Tomás noticed a small group on the other side of the street keeping pace with them and watching their progress.

  “¿Y éstos, qué?” he said.

  “Yaquis,” Teresita said.

  Aguirre was very interested in this situation, since his revolutionary theories dictated that a sure way to topple the Díaz regime in Mexico was to enlist the combative Indians in a general uprising. From the safety of his offices in El Paso, he had launched a steady stream of broadsides into Mexico recommending this very thing. Many of them included a portrait of Teresita herself, her hair unbraided and cascading in a startling waterfall around her shoulders. He had pilfered the image from an album at Cabora. In white letters across the bottom, it said: TERESITA URREA, THE SAINT OF CABORA, THE SOUL OF TOMÓCHIC. Though hundreds of these relics had flown off his printing presses and onto the walls of huts and jacales all over the borderlands, Teresita had not yet seen one. He had remembered to forget to show her.

  “Must you attend to them?” Tomás sighed, gesturing toward the indigenous contingent.

  “I must,” she said.

&nbs
p; “Yes. Well. Abracadabra.”

  He lit a thin cheroot as she walked across the street.

  He and Aguirre watched Teresita speak to the Yaquis, who gestured and bobbed their heads. Not a festive-looking people, Aguirre thought. Serious, even somber. They were pointing at Tomás, who had busied himself with blowing smoke rings and looking through them at Frog Mountain. Exquisitely bored.

  Teresita came back across the street.

  “Father?” she said.

  “Hmm?” He was imagining the delightful downy line of nearly invisible hair running south from the bottom lip of his distant love Gabriela’s delicious belly button. The way her skin formed little goose bumps as he blew on that downy line…

  “They do not want to speak to me,” Teresita said.

  “Oh?”

  “They asked to speak to you.”

  He took the dark cigarro out of his mouth and stared at her.

  “What did I do?” he asked.

  “They said they want to meet the Sky Scratcher. The man who saved Yaquis from starvation and murder in Sonora.”

  He was almost stunned.

  He smiled.

  He tossed his smoke aside, brushed back his hair, straightened his vest.

  “I suppose,” he said, “it would be rude to keep them waiting.” He stepped off the curb. “My People!” he cried, raising his arms.

  Don Lauro Aguirre took Teresita’s elbow in his hand and said, “Behold, the legend.”

  The Yaquis closed around Tomás and took him in their arms.

  Greatly refreshed by his public acclaim, Tomás set a martial pace to the pond. He delighted in the ducks and bought bits of biscuit from a young Mexican girl; he joined Teresita in tossing these crumbs among squabbly waterfowl while Don Lauro negotiated for a small paddleboat. They boarded and took a ridiculous cruise in oblong circuits. The water was thick and green, and white feathers floated upon it like tiny galleons. They were so happy in their boat that they realized they had completely forgotten the baseball game they had planned to witness that afternoon. They immediately made plans to see the next game the next day and continued to paddle about. “Can we afford another night?” Teresita asked. Her father simply put his finger to his lips and regarded the ducks.

  This was, perhaps, what saved their lives.

  As they were frolicking in the Carrillo Garden, and then shopping for fruit and sweet rolls in the original Elysian Grove market—where they were astounded to find a black bear chained to a stump in the quarter-acre backyard—the riders from Mexico were standing among the ruins of the Spanish church in the desert near their home.

  It was eerie, though eeriness was an effect lost on the killers. The walls were broken, tumbled in on themselves. Pigeons flapped in the spears of sunlight. The place stank of skunks and mold. Its whitewashed bits of wall were smeared with great gouts of black from an old fire. They could see the rusted holes where the spikes had once held the grand cross above the altar. Rust ran down the wall like blood. The men pissed in the rubble.

  Soon, they were entering the bosque in far Tubac. The two men crept forward on their trained horses. Horses that had hunted men long enough to know how to be silent among them until the chase was finished. The assassins didn’t even have to hold the reins. These horses were as dependable as hunting dogs.

  They separated and came in from opposite sides, pistols drawn, long belduque knives in their left hands, carbines half pulled from their saddle scabbards. It was too close for the Hawken—it rested behind the tall one’s saddle, wrapped in a Navajo blanket and tied down with deer-hide thongs.

  They scanned the silent little tumbledown farmstead; they couldn’t help but snicker. How the mighty had fallen. There were only a few chickens to represent the great Urrea cattle herds of the past.

  The tall assassin stepped his horse from the shadows to the north and signaled his companion that all was clear. They would set up an ambush and slaughter Urrea and the Saint when they returned. Perhaps there was something worth stealing in the little house. Perhaps they could enjoy the Saint before she died. The second gunman, in fact, was about to say to his compatriot: I have never lain with a saint before. He half turned and rose in his stirrups and said, “Hey,” to his companion.

  Simultaneously there was a meaty thunk and a cloud of dust that exploded from the rider’s chest. In that same instant, he was airborne, somersaulting across the open space, and only when he hit the ground did the report of the big Sharps rifle catch up to the hit and boom in echoes from a distance. The first assassin had only the merest moment to realize that his partner was dead and that he himself was doomed when the immense punch struck him through the shoulder and threw him ten feet from his horse. He did not live long enough to hear the thunder of the shot that killed him.

  The horses were too well trained to run. But they were confused. They skittered a bit, danced in place with crazy cue-ball eyes. When they settled, they nosed the dead men. They didn’t like the smell of blood, though they were used to it. They did like the smell of the grasses and weeds that grew in the clearing, and they turned their backs on the assassins, promptly forgetting the dead as they began to fill their bellies with dandelions.

  After a while, the old man rode in slowly. He had slipped the Big Fifty into its sheepskin scabbard, and he rested a .44 revolver on his saddle horn. He was thinking about how the buckaroos called saddle horns biscuits, and he wished he had a damned biscuit right then. The Urreas were gone. He smiled. He spit at the dead men.

  “Chingados los dos,” he muttered.

  His hip ached a little as he dismounted. But by God his eyes were still good—he had tracked these two halfway across the world. And now look at them. They were going to be a real problem when the family got home, but so be it.

  He looked around until he found a pick and some shovels in Tomás’s toolshed. The old man had been born in a house that looked very much like the shed. Oh well. If you were born a crow you couldn’t expect to live like an eagle.

  He grabbed the ankle of the nearest corpse and dragged it away, deep into the trees of the bosque.

  Fred Ronstadt’s band, the Club Filarmónico, was playing on the shore of the pond.

  Torches were lit by nearly invisible workers. Tomás and Teresita danced a jarabe to the melodious skronking of the brass and violins. Don Lauro busied himself taking notes on the flora and fauna—tiny bats like black moths circled the green water as the sun set; the far crags of Frog Mountain burned vermilion and orange in the sun glow. Fine ladies in white dresses spun parasols over their shoulders and tipped their heads to caballeros in striped trousers and long coats. It was so civilized. And above the edges of the pond, the darker men and women of the town wandered along, glancing down at the “gente decente” disporting themselves.

  When the music ended, the three friends walked back toward their rooming house, but Teresita stopped in a few shops and emerged from one in a pale dress with frills around the neck. She was blushing at the extravagance, but Tomás sang her praises.

  They dined near the cathedral, then joined the strollers on the main street for a slow promenade. The town was flickering with guttering lights. Carriages and wagons rumbled by. Laughter seeped from the cantinas, and Teresita volunteered to go to bed so her father could slake his endless thirst. He kissed her cheek and dashed down the sidewalk, thinking already of tequila and lime.

  “Tomorrow,” he called. “Baseball!”

  Don Lauro tipped his hat to Teresita and left her at the door.

  “Keep him out of trouble,” she said.

  “That is what I have always done,” he replied.

  Eight

  EARLY THE NEXT DAY, too early in Tomás’s opinion, a helpful Yaqui man in the street directed the Urrea clan to the field in Marana where the Yori madmen were playing their ball-and-stick tournament. Teresita was delighted to hear the mother tongue again and chatted amiably with him for a few moments before Tomás made his impatience known. “Lios emak weye,” she bless
ed the man as they parted. He stared after her and smiled.

  Tomás hired a carriage to take them to the field—Teresita in her new white dress. He gave the driver an extra dime to find Mr. Dinges and let him know they would be returning to Tubac the next day instead of that afternoon. Aguirre had wrangled a straw hamper from the rooming-house maven, and he had loaded it with bolillo rolls and cheese, boiled eggs, a few apples, water, and some red wine. Tomás was smoking furiously, and Teresita could tell he was hungover yet again and trying to choke his headache and queasy stomach with smoke. But the day was fresh, and she wasn’t going to let his behavior spoil it.

  Butterflies settled at the edges of noxious puddles in the dirt street and fluttered their wings in praise.

  “There is evidence of God for you,” preached Tomás. “He gives you donkey piss and you mistake it for fresh water.”

  He smiled at them both, feeling he had scored the first point of the day.

  Don Lauro was deeply offended by this, but he feared Tomás’s ridicule, so he stayed silent.

  “Perhaps the butterflies understand what we don’t,” Teresita mildly replied. “Everything God puts before us is a blessing—we are simply too blind or foolish to understand it.”

  “You would know,” he said, just to have something to say.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I would.”

  Aguirre said, “Look at the mountains!” quite brightly.

  Another moment saved.

  Tomás approached the dirt diamond with a great smile on his face. The Americanos on the teams were all wearing ridiculous little pin-striped pants that reached halfway down their legs. One team’s had blue piping; the other, red. This absolutely delighted him. “Long johns!” he enthused.

  The players trotted about importantly, and they did deep knee bends and stretches. A few reprobate cowboys loitered about the far left field aboard their tough little ponies. Tomás could tell, even from a distance, that they were laughing. A vaquero was the same in any language! More pleasant than the cowboys, however, were the ladies sitting on blankets under the few paloverde trees or under vast sunshades, their handles sunk in the dirt. He sucked in his gut and stood a bit taller and smiled down upon them.