Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

“Indeed.”

  “Evolution.”

  “I—?”

  “To death!” she cried.

  “Oh, now…”

  She tinked her bottle against his and drank deeply.

  The sandwiches glistened with delicious grease, and yellow cheese drooled from the soggy bread. This cheese did not smell like her father’s cheese. Teresita licked the rubbery goo off her fingers. She had a rime of grease around her mouth, which Aguirre, feeling avuncular, dabbed away with his napkin.

  Pushing away his plate, he said, “Now, the ice cream.”

  “I can’t!”

  “You must.”

  “I’m full.”

  “It melts and fills in the gaps. It will fit. We must have dessert.”

  “I’ll get fat.”

  “Fat and very, very happy.”

  He raised a finger and requested the specialty of the house. This was a concoction known as the Elite Baseball. This made them both smile as they thought back on that afternoon that already seemed one hundred years gone—the Van Order boys in their silly uniforms and their thrilling antelope speed in the field of play.

  “A revolt is coming,” Don Lauro murmured.

  “No.”

  “Revolution, Teresita.”

  “I will have none of it.”

  “You could lead them!”

  “I could not.”

  “If you were to ride at the head of a column of bold warriors, what city would not fall?”

  “If I were to lead an army, cities would fall down, all right. They would fall down from laughter.”

  “Teresita!”

  “Not today, thank you.”

  “Revolution is God’s work.”

  “Healing is God’s work,” she demurred. “Childbirth. Making honey. Not shooting people.”

  He drummed his fingers.

  “Perhaps revolution is how a culture heals itself.”

  Teresita said, “Oh, look. The ice cream is coming.” Then, without glancing at Don Lauro, she said, “This saint business—it is invented by newspapers to sell beans and saddles.”

  He blew air out of his puckered lips as if he’d burned his tongue on hot food.

  When the bowl of chocolate and vanilla ice cream—in round baseball-sized scoops—topped with cascades of chocolate sauce and nuts landed before her, all Teresita would say was “Oh my.” She silenced Aguirre by attacking the bowl savagely. She never looked up at him. He was appalled to hear her grunt in delight.

  She licked the bowl clean.

  “Ice cream is the greatest food ever invented,” she said, sighing.

  Her stomach gurgled as they rolled across downtown, but she didn’t care.

  The editorial offices of El Independiente smelled of ink, cigars, and hair pomade. A fellow in a starched shirt with a paper collar was bent to a horrid clacking machine, banging away at a set of recalcitrant keys that, once struck, sent metal arms pounding into sheets of paper. The whole thing was most appalling, and it slid a roller back and forth with irritating pings of bells.

  Don Lauro showed her to a seat at his desk.

  “My empire,” he said, opening his arms as if to hug the room.

  “It’s very interesting,” she offered.

  “I want you to work here with me,” he said, sitting down at his desk.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Here, Teresita. I want you to help me edit this newspaper.”

  She sat back in her seat. He expected her to gasp, or cry out, or refuse his offer out of hand. But she did not. She smiled. She rubbed her stomach.

  “Edit?” she said.

  “Yes! We can write together!”

  The man at the type machine turned and glowered at them and made a small noise in his throat and went back to hacking.

  Thinking he was really smart, Aguirre said, “This is true healing, Teresita. Healing of the mind!”

  She snorted.

  “I have written articles before,” she said. “It was interesting. But hardly sacred.”

  “How wrong you are.” He startled her by slamming forward in his seat. “No, no, no. No!” He rose, he paced. “We tell the truth here. We reveal the history of the moment. We uncover the liars and depose the wicked. We give voices to the voiceless. I would venture that this work is sacred indeed!” His finger was raised to the ceiling.

  “¡Sí, hombre!” the typist exclaimed, then went back to work.

  “Ah,” she said. “Revolution again. Perhaps you should collect stamps, or butterflies.”

  “It is not a hobby! It is a calling!” Aguirre thundered.

  She riffled through some pages on his desk.

  “What miracles would we celebrate now,” Aguirre insisted, “if no one had bothered to write the scriptures?”

  She looked up at him.

  Oh yes, he thought, that was good.

  “So,” Teresita said, “the Bible was God’s newspaper.”

  “Well! I, er… Perhaps.”

  “These scriptures,” she said, staring at the pages. “Bottles of elixirs to cure drunkenness. Oh, wait. Here is a story about a gentleman caught stealing ladies’ clothing from a line near the river. Ah! An advertisement for a six-gun. Quite sacred.”

  She crossed her arms and looked around the room.

  “And,” Don Lauro said, using his final stratagem, “you will earn money, so you can repay your father for his incredible sacrifices on your behalf.”

  She hung her head. She was angry—she recognized an underhanded ploy. But it was a good ploy. She felt guilty every day. Tomás made sure of that.

  “I will not violate my principles,” she said.

  “No.”

  “You can’t change my words.”

  “Never.”

  “I will have freedom to say what needs to be said.”

  “I swear to it.”

  “I will not advocate violence.”

  “Well! No…”

  “We will hire women.”

  “I… Right.”

  He put out his hand. She looked at it. Should she agree? What of her pilgrims? She knew what Don Lauro would say: You will address the needs of many more pilgrims through the newspaper than you could see in a score of days. She could help Don Lauro bring justice to the very People she had sprung from, the People she might never see again. Justice. Evolution. Her head spun a little.

  “Besides,” he said. “You’re bored. Newspapers are great fun.”

  She smiled up at him.

  Reluctantly, she put her hand in his. They shook.

  “Don’t expect much,” she said.

  He waved that off with a “Pah” and broke out a box of cigars. He snipped the ends off two of them and handed her one. Its end immediately became soggy in her mouth. It was a small swamp that was dropping tendrils of tobacco on her tongue. She spit them out. Put the fetid end of the cigar back in her mouth, tried not to swallow the brown spit that flooded her tongue. Men, she thought, must be crazy. He struck a match and lit her stogie, then put flame to his. She pulled a humorous face. She didn’t mean for it to be humorous. “Puff it,” he said, sitting down. He was having a wonderful time. Teresita was game. She could outride him for sure. She could beat him in a wrestling match, she was pretty certain. She knew she could play guitar better than he could. She sucked once.

  She spit the cigar onto the floor.

  “Gack!” she cried.

  She coughed, spit, bent over coughing with her tongue hanging out.

  He leapt up and pounded her back.

  “That is the worst thing I ever tasted!” She gagged.

  He smiled.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he said.

  Smoke hovered over her in a shroud.

  Twenty

  IT WAS NOT LOST on Tomás that he was unemployed while his daughter now had two jobs—Saint and girl reporter. He had not heard of any girls reporting for newspapers. It felt indecent to him, yet it was less irritating than her pieties. Of course, neither career yet paid Teresita
any money whatsoever. Things in America were upside down.

  At night, she was exhausted and sullen after her endless ministrations and occasional outbursts of fanatical rhetoric delivered to the bovine faces of the mob, those low folks the locals called rascuaches. He laughed. Rascuache! What a word. It even sounded dirty and flea-bitten. He immediately composed a lyric:

  There was a young man in huaraches

  Who seemed to be very rascuache

  He came up to my knee, he was covered in fleas

  And his britches were covered in patches.

  “By God!” he raved. “It is art!”

  He hurried to mail a copy of his poem to Gabriela in far, far Mexico.

  A next concoction: The scribbler Aguirre with his damnable notebooks descended on their dining room at night and drove Teresita into fits of nervous jitters with his enthusiasm for the horrible truth about the massacre of Tomóchic and her followers there. Tomás was against this project—a book no less. But Aguirre assured him in surreptitious hissing conferences on the back porch that this publication would transform their standing in society and would, indubitably, bring them great fortunes. Tomás didn’t point out that a book about an obscure indigenous slaughter printed by a small Mexican newspaper in El Paso on yellow newsprint and in Spanish was not destined to overwhelm the American populace. Why bother?

  Aguirre set a pot of coffee and a quiver of pens upon his desk and tipped his head to her.

  “I just wanted a normal life,” she dictated. “I wanted to be pretty and attend dances with my friends. Who did not desire romance, pretty dresses, and a peaceful home full of babies?” She tapped on the table with her fingernail to make sure he paid attention. “I was just a girl when holiness was dropped on my head. I did not ask for it. I was chosen.”

  Aguirre wrote none of this—he drafted the first lines of his incendiary introduction instead.

  Teresita gamely set her jaw and narrated whole scenes to Aguirre, who scratched away in his ledgers like a madman. She even, to her detriment, read Aguirre letters from Cruz Chávez. These letters often made her weep, and she writhed afterward in terrible dreams. She yelped in her sleep and cried out. Yet she believed the story had to be told. She owed it to her fallen friends. She owed it to the People.

  Tomás, lurking in the back room and listening to these writing sessions, did not know that rebel maniac—the Pope of Mexico!—had written so many letters to his daughter. Unsavory. Goddamn, as his American friends liked to say. He smoked. He fretted. He wished he could get his hands on Juanita Van Order. He crept out the back door and walked the silent streets of El Paso, wondering where he’d seen those opium dens.

  It was Don Lauro’s idea to call their project ¡Redención!

  Tomás, making a weak effort to bring sanity back to the house, said one day, “What redemption? Everybody was killed.”

  But nobody listened to him.

  Came the day when the young reporter was given her first assignment. One had to accommodate the Saint’s schedule, Aguirre was well aware. She had to learn, however, that some stories were simply too important to history, to the entire furthering of the human race, to be stopped by rascuaches, peasants, Indians, and beggars. “I will come for you at six o’clock on Monday morning,” he warned. “Be ready. Be fed. Wear appropriate clothes.” By this, he meant no polka-dot party dresses. She was deeply offended—as if the Saint of Cabora did not know how to dress.

  That morning, hoping to shock Don Lauro, she appeared on her porch in a pair of Tomás’s trousers. Aguirre almost fell out of his carriage. Not from outrage but from a great sense of looming history. Why, the warriors of dear Chihuahua, those daring raiders who crept the desert wastes and set ambuscades for the dreaded Rurales, practiced their own form of women’s suffrage: their women carried rifles and strapped crossed gunbelts across their chests and wore men’s trousers! Aguirre cursed himself for not bringing a photographer to capture Teresita’s revolutionary resolve. He rose in his seat and raised his arms. Solidarity. Fraternity. Liberation. These all burned in his head. Puzzled, Teresita watched a faint billow of ruby-red and gold light seem to spiral off his scalp and evaporate in the air above him. She had not seen soul colors very well since she was a child. She shook her head. Perhaps it was a trick of the light. She didn’t have time to think about it—Aguirre was laughing and prancing around the cabriolet to take her arm. In a minute’s time, they were trotting through the drowsy streets, watching the sun cascade down the delightful facades of the buildings all around them as small dogs scattered and the crazy little birds of Texas squabbled. She’d barely settled in her seat.

  America was just too fast.

  A new photograph of Teresita was circulating on that day. It showed her standing behind a chair with angels and cherubs surrounding her. Aguirre had secretly printed several hundred of them, and now the Teresistas in Sonora distributed them among their warriors, for the fight was approaching and they would need her protection. In El Paso, Mexico’s greatest spy, Victor Ochoa, had one such photo. Ochoa, Aguirre’s mentor, had vowed to keep its provenance secret from the Saint. He was a man of intrigue. He could keep his mouth shut. Had he not faced certain death penetrating the bastions of power in Mexico City to report to his comrades? Had he not carried dangerous billets-doux between the nations tucked in his boots? Had he not prospered in Los Yunaites Estates as a businessman and thus opened the doors of gringo power as handily as he had plumbed the Mexican government’s depths? He had!

  He drew himself to his full height so his gathered followers could regard him in the morning light.

  Ochoa stood in the desert northwest of El Paso in sight of the New Mexico border. He wore jodhpurs tucked into tightly laced knee boots. His tan shirt was visible under an open brown wool army jacket. The cross-chest strap for his handgun gave him a smart, military mien. On his head, a stiff brown U.S. campaign hat, with its flat brim and dimpled crown. His goggles lay on his upper chest, held around his neck by a loose leather strap. He slapped his gloves into the palm of his left hand.

  “¿Dónde está pinche Aguirre?” he demanded.

  This moment, June of 1896, would be remembered, Ochoa knew; history would be made. And it was imperative that he make that history now, in time for Independence Day, so the Americanos would look upon Mexicans as the great race that they were. The twentieth century would be the era of the Mejicano. And here, now, if Aguirre ever arrived, he would grab the reins of that coming century and ride it forward in the name of his bronze race, his sons of the Fifth Sun, his beloved children of Quetzalcoatl. Yes, they would see today that a Mexican could fly. The first man in the air! Let Jules Verne chew on that.

  His ornithocopter stood a short distance away, overseen by three assistants. It chuffed softly, its boiler building up a head of steam in its central stack. Ochoa had affixed the angel-crowded picture of Teresita before his pilot’s seat, located behind the steam tank. Yes, it would be a triumph for them all—Aguirre knew his peasants. Ochoa would soar into space in the name of Mexicans, but also in the name of the Saint of Cabora. Thus the uprising would begin. And Ochoa would bomb the enemy from above, dropping bottles of kerosene from his agile craft as the oppressors scattered in fear below him.

  He slapped his hand some more and waited.

  “The trouble, my dear,” Aguirre postulated as they bounced away from the city, “is that we Mexicans are baroque to our bones, while the Americanos are modern. But today, Mexicans leap ahead! Today, Mexicans shed the baroque and rush to the forefront of modernity.”

  Teresita had no idea what he was talking about, but she nodded politely.

  Ochoa, he told her, was a patriot. A leader. A guide to the expatriate warriors of El Paso, and a mentor to El Independiente. Ochoa had had his hand in the Urreas’ immigration struggle. The great man, master of espionage, thirty-third-degree Mason, Rosicrucian, was also a student of da Vinci. And he had furthered da Vinci’s ancient plans for a flying machine by relying on Aguirre’s legendary engi
neering skills. Indeed, Aguirre humbly let it be known, the flying machine could not have been created without his talents. She cooed—men liked that. Aguirre said, “One does what one can, Teresita!”

  For three years, they had plotted and sketched out the epochal ornith-ocopter. It had not been cheap! Oh no—the parts had to be machined by hand. Few men—perhaps none except them—could create a contraption that would leap and scoot through the air like a dragonfly. It was a great honor to her that Ochoa wanted her to cover the event for the newspaper.

  “You represent our traditional ways, and he represents our future.”

  “I see,” she said. “Out with the old, in with the new.”

  He sputtered, but she smiled and looked at the sere mountains.

  When they arrived at Ochoa’s launching site, she beheld the great man in his military garb. Behind him, the machine stood, looking ugly as a pig. It was a small wagon frame with four auto-car tires in place of wooden wheels. She jotted notes. The boiler heated the small silver tower, out of which rose a rotating pole with a great white canvas umbrella atop it. A McClellan saddle with stirrups faced the silver steam tank, and levers jutted out from each side. Several cameras were trained on the contraption, and Ochoa maintained a mysterious silence as he gestured meaningfully but did not speak.

  Teresita stepped forward.

  “Señor Ochoa,” she said.

  “¡Ay!” he cried. “¡La Santa de Cabora!” People applauded mildly. As if Ochoa hadn’t been expecting her.

  “Would you care to comment on this interesting craft?” she asked.

  “It is a secret,” he confided.

  “But the newspaper is here. The cameras,” she said.

  “Yes, of course. After it flies, there can be no secret! Only before!”

  She wrote this down.

  She saw the picture of herself mounted on the craft.

  “What is this?” she demanded.

  “It is a picture of you,” he said.

  “I can see that,” she replied. “It’s hideous.”

  “No!” he said.

  “Awful. I look like a corpse with paper angels hanging from wires.”