Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  Get here before I sail away.

  But don’t bring him.

  Buena V. Johnny

  Tomás stood on the porch and glowered.

  Teresita led a parade of her siblings through the yard. She, Anita, and the Cabora forces, followed by the Alamos children and that damned deer, the pig, some ducks that had somehow decided Teresita was their mother, a goat—where the hell did the goat come from?—and the barn cat, with its crooked tail held stiffly aloft and forming slow happy arcs over its spine. The children were banging pots and toy drums. Teresita strummed her infernal guitar. They were all chanting some nonsense, but he could make out “maso bwikam” amid the infantile blather.

  Gabriela clucked disapprovingly. “She should grow up,” she muttered, and banged back inside.

  Tomás spit and scratched the small of his back where the sweat that was brought forth from his gunbelt caused a rash. Behind him, Segundo snored softly.

  Tomás noticed workers smiling at Teresita as she stomped along. They were mocking her, he was certain. If they were mocking her, then they were mocking him. Oh, for the days of real mastery in Cabora. A flogging or two would liven up the establishment! But Dr. Burtch and the pinches gringos of Clifton would not appreciate a whipping. No.

  Tomás stole one of Segundo’s sweet rolls and had at it. He patted his expanding gut. It pained him sometimes. And if he drank too much coffee, his heart fluttered in his chest. It sent a chill into him when it banged. He would not say it frightened him. He would say it was curious. A dancing heart. He was sure it was due to the elevation of the ranch; they were higher than he had ever been. The air was thin enough that a good horse ride or walk left him a bit winded.

  “It is the altitude,” he announced.

  “Huh?” said Segundo; he shifted his big feet and then resumed snoring.

  On the far side of the property, Lupe stood among the small pines, watching Teresita’s parade of children and beasts. He heard their voices. He watched her bang on the guitar like some cowboy. He wasn’t smiling.

  When the world changed, women and children were disinvited from the parlor. So was Segundo; Segundo was too crude for a gathering of gentlemen. Tomás had arranged for the great white men of the mountain to come; his transformation would leap forward, he believed. This was América del Norte, Los Yunaites Estates, and he was going to do things like a pinche American from now on.

  Fortunately, Teresita was out in the twilight collecting herbs or talking to fireflies or bringing home orphaned bear cubs or levitating, Tomás didn’t really care.

  The room was chokingly blue with pipe and cigar smoke. Snifters of brandy and cognac glowed warmly on all tables. A great bowl of popcorn doused in jalapeño juice sat unattended, and a platter of beef quesadillas and salted jícama was decimated on the sideboard with a rubble of wadded cloths and tatters of tortilla scattered around it. Tomás waved about a morsel of elk sausage wrapped in bacon on a toothpick, as if he were conducting the opera of buff male laughter. Tomás had overheard his loggers calling these men plutes. It was oddly endearing. He tried out pinches plutes in his mind. The only thing missing was that damned Lauro Aguirre.

  Two old boys passed the Sears catalogue back and forth and blushed wildly at the ladies’ unmentionables. Dr. Burtch availed himself of a few more ambrosial elk sausages and washed them down with warm beer. The formidable Brit mine manager Ellis B. Twidlatch had laid his tall beaver hat on a chair and sat, knee-sprawled and full to bursting, with a rich pipeful of black Turkish baccy and a gleam of grease on his chin. When Tomás poured him a stout tipple of brandy, he cried, “Splendid!”

  As was fashionable, the men had their hair parted in the middle and gleaming with pomade. Sir Twidlatch confided that his bride, Bunella, favored the marcel wave for her coiffure—“A bit of fashion she acquired in France.” He cast a sly eye about the room. “One does pick up curious afflictions in Paris, don’t you know!” The men laughed! They nodded and slapped their knees! Tomás put his hands on his gut and cried, “¡Chíngue a su madre!”

  Silence.

  Mr. Van Order had come uphill to buy lumber, and he was dead asleep in the corner, having consumed a pound of meat and a wide array of liquors. His peg leg extended into the middle of the carpet. Tomás bent to it and knocked sonorously.

  “I not sell him that wood!” he announced.

  Outbursts of guffaws all around.

  Dr. Burtch had brought the Clifton banker C. P. Rosencrans, of the powerful California Rosencranses. Bucolic Morenci was vastly expanding the Rosencrans family fortunes.

  The great man made a yearly visit to the mines in the company of his family, except for his beloved son Jamie, always too thin and feverish, who was twisted in agonizing fits at their Morenci home. Only six, he was already stick-legged and bedridden. Dr. Burtch was waging a noble battle to spare him what was starting to seem a certain death.

  It was a great lesson to those men of the mountain that wealth and power did not always stop pain, did not dissuade death, did not alleviate the terrible midnight agonies of grief. It was an enormous mercy of Dr. Burtch’s to bring Rosencrans to the parlor to laugh and forget his woes for an evening.

  “Señor Rosencrans,” said Tomás, pouring the great man a little thread of golden cognac. “Is to fix what ails us, no?”

  “Sí,” Rosencrans said, tipping his head politely. “Gracias.”

  “No hay porqué.” Tomás beamed.

  “See here,” the grand Twidlatch said, “Tom!”

  “Jes, Tweedly-yatch?”

  “This Girl Saint of yours. Why, I never!”

  “I never too,” Tomás lamented.

  “Yes, but as regards this Saint,” Ellis Twidlatch insisted. “It must be a drain on you.”

  “Drain?” Tomás looked to Burtch. “¿Cómo?”

  “Er, cuesta mucho?” Dr. Burtch offered. “Es mucho, erm, trouble-o.”

  Tomás slapped a burlesque hand to his brow and sank in a chair.

  “Cheessiz Crites!” he said. “Tweedly-yatch! I lose everything for her. Twice!”

  The men goggled at him and busied themselves with their snacks, smokes, and drinks. Much sad head-shaking. Van Order snorted and threw a kick with his good leg, lost in a dream of battles in Virginia. Matthew Lara, a teacher from Silver City, noted: “Just like a mule.”

  Guadalupe Rodriguez had found a cabin in Ward Canyon, on the outskirts of Metcalf. He had not earned enough money from Cabora Norte to pay for it, yet he had produced a mochila full of Mexican bills and coins. Money was money, even if it was greaser money, and the landlord reluctantly accepted the five hundred dollars’ worth of pesos, though he charged Lupe another twenty-five dollars’ worth for the bed and the pots. He threw in the pile of firewood and the kitchen chair. Lupe’s cabin had three acres of land and a well, and aside from the outhouse being off plumb, it was in pretty good shape. He paid little Al Fernandez a silver dollar to bring him old papers from Clifton and plugged the gaps between the logs with wet, wadded strips of the Copper Era newspaper. It was a poor man’s adobe, made with hot water, milk, flour, and shredded newsprint, the mix slopped into the walls where the caulking had peeled out over many winters.

  He stole himself a hundred-pound sack of beans from the Urreas and brought it home on one of the wood-collecting donkeys that he borrowed. His chimney had birds’ nests in it, and he set a huge fire and burned them out, sitting outside as the smoke filled the one room, not minding it, for it drove the field mice scurrying out, where he stomped them to death.

  He carried Malichi into his clearing and slit his throat with a bowie knife. Deer weren’t pets. Deer were meat.

  He gutted the little deer and saved his heart, kidneys, and liver. He tossed the guts down the barranca behind his cabin—no need to inspire bears to climb up to his bedroom. He smoked the haunches and fried up venison steaks and chops. They were best when covered in white flour and fried in butter. He marinated the meat in wild blueberries. He ate like a wolf.

&n
bsp; Later, he told Teresita that the fawn had been killed by coyotes. When she wept, he comforted her, pulling her close so she could rest her head on his shoulder. It was their first embrace. He smelled her hair—she had some sort of rose perfume. It made him tingle all over.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered. “It’s all right. Life is brief, but it is beautiful. Little Malichi waits for us. In Sea Ania. He is already restored.”

  “Oh,” she sobbed.

  He stroked her hair.

  “I will hold you up,” he said. “I will never let you fall.”

  Her nails dug into his chest.

  His big hand felt the space between her shoulder blades. He pulled her tighter. He breathed her in.

  She wanted to pull away from him, but she felt so warm.

  He thought: Kidney stew and fried heart. Where could he steal some potatoes? He wondered if he could talk her into digging up some from the garden at her rancho for him.

  “Shh,” he said. “I am here.”

  C. P. Rosencrans cleared his throat.

  “See here, Tommy,” he said.

  The men around the table—Dr. Burtch, Rosencrans, Tomás, and the formidable English mine manager Ellis B. Twidlatch—were all leaning forward, elbows on knees.

  “Look,” said Rosencrans. “It seems that this phenomenon—at least down below, in the flatlands, as you say—is costing you dearly. You have to convert this enthusiasm for Terry into capital.”

  “She will not work,” Tomás lamented. “She will not earn.”

  “Why not?”

  Well. This was uncomfortable. Tomás looked around for something to drink, but all the bottles were empty.

  “You see, she, she, she made a promise to, to, to—to God. To God to not make money with the, the, you know, the milagros.”

  Rosencrans was a religious man. But he was a banker. He was a master of practicality. Business was measurable and sane. His was a world of amoral simplicity—and thus, invisible complicities.

  “I make the money,” Tomás said.

  “Correct.”

  “She no make the money.”

  “No.”

  “We charge the patients the money.”

  “Charge them whatever you want. It’s for her own good. For, my friend, when the powers leave her—and they undoubtedly will leave her one day—what will she do then?”

  “I don’t know. What?”

  “She will turn to you.” Rosencrans smiled. “And you will provide for her with your Consortium profits. You incorporate. Partners. But structured so that she can honestly say she took nothing. It would honor her, shall we say, religious beliefs.”

  “I love America,” Tomás said.

  Teresita dried her eyes. Lupe held her still, pressing her to his chest. He softly rocked her back and forth. They could hear the crickets, and an owl in the willows by the river called and listened, called and listened until another owl far downhill answered. The stars looked like white smoke above them. Teresita could almost see the world’s rotation. And, like a small burning rim of a silver platter, the edge of the moon sizzled up through the leaves of the cottonwoods and looked into the valley. Her cheek was against his great chest; she could hear his heartbeat. He was all muscle. Over his shoulder, moving like small gray ghosts through the moonlight, reeds shuffled in the breeze beside the river, and ducks therein muttered softly, domestic details of their day traded in their nests. She pulled Lupe tighter. Oh yes. He felt that. He was feeling that all the way down his belly.

  “You are the daughter of God,” he whispered. “You are all-powerful.”

  “I have no power. The power is God’s.”

  “You lie to yourself,” he said, pressing against her. “Your power is yours. Inside you. I want to drink it. I want to lick up your power like water from a stream. Give it to me.”

  He frightened her.

  “Your father is a clown,” he said. “He is so jealous of you. Without you, he is nothing. Don’t you see? You are the great one.”

  She pushed away.

  “Your family? They are dogs.”

  “Stop.”

  “Look what he did to your mother.”

  She looked up at him.

  “My mother? What do you know of my mother?”

  “Everyone knows.”

  He moved his lips along her throat.

  She whispered, “I must go. I have to go.”

  He said nothing.

  He slid his hand up her spine.

  She shivered like Caballito Urrea.

  His hand reached her hair and pulled the ribbon until it came undone and her hair cascaded across the skin of his arm.

  “I think,” he said, “you will stay.”

  Thirty-One

  TO HIS CREDIT, Tomás rejected the concept of the Medical Consortium. Once he was sober, he decided that sort of sham was a typical plute thing to do. Especially to his own daughter. At least, that’s what he told himself. It was Gabriela who almost pulled his hair in outrage when he mentioned the plan, who sent him to sleep on the settee downstairs to ponder his infamy. In the morning, sore and stiff, he had repented of his sins.

  The more he thought about it, the more tainted he felt. Plute bastards! Life wasn’t always about money! He moped around until Gaby came down from their bed redolent of delicious scents and powders, her hair pinned above her brow in an intimidating prow and lacquered into a helmet that could crack a bad man’s skull. She breezed past him and did not allow him to pull up her skirts as she strode into the kitchen.

  He slouched out to the front porch and encountered the deeply offended Segundo, who whittled a stick and would not look at him.

  “Did you have a nice party?” Segundo asked.

  “Oh—” Tomás waved his hand. “You know how it is with those fellows.”

  “I don’t know, boss. Why don’t you tell me? I would like to know what decent gentlemen are like when they have a party.”

  Tomás coughed.

  Gaby stepped out on the porch with a tray. A pot of Arbuckle’s, a bowl of cream, a bowl of sugar lumps, one cup.

  “Good morning,” she said to Segundo.

  “Why, thank you,” he said.

  “My pleasure. We are frying you nice eggs with chorizo, frijoles, potato wedges, and there is apple pie with cheese.”

  “Say! That’s great!”

  She brushed past Tomás and vanished inside without another word.

  Segundo slurped his coffee extra loud and sighed as he settled his bones more comfortably.

  “That Gaby,” he said. “She knows how to treat a man.”

  Tomás shook his head, stepped off the porch, and wandered down to the bunkhouse.

  “Boys!” he cried. “May I join you for breakfast?”

  They shoved down the long wooden table so he could sit and eat among them. Lupe rose and walked outside. A tin plate with a stinking red mess landed before Tomás. They passed him a spoon.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “Pooch!”

  “What is pooch?”

  “This!”

  He sniffed it. He moved it around with his spoon.

  One of his loggers said, “That’s old bread boiled up with tomatoes. Put some sugar on it.”

  Tomás smiled wanly and patted the man’s shoulder.

  He rose and stepped outside and spit three or four times.

  Maybe, he thought, they would all love him again if he threw a dance for them.

  It was a grand soiree, old-Cabora style: Paper lanterns. A German polka band from far Benson. Great barbecued beeves. Sparklers for the children. Bonfires at either end of the open-air dance floor.

  Before the event, the Urrea girls were in a frenzy. Dresses were held up and flung to the floor in a panic. Bonnets and scarves, rebozos and fans, flew around the rooms as the little ones tried to look big. The boys bathed reluctantly but cheered up when Tomás revealed new black cowboy boots all around, along with Mexican sombreros and tight black trousers.

&n
bsp; In Teresita’s room, Anita perched on the edge of the bed, and Teresita sat on the floor while Anita braided her big sister’s hair. It was long and thick, and the braids were heavy in her small hands.

  The door was closed and locked.

  “And then?” Anita said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do know.”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “Tell! I want to know! Tére! Tell me.”

  “It was so beautiful. It was so dark, but the moon came out, and the night birds started to sing.”

  “Ay.”

  “He held me in his arms.”

  “Ooh.”

  “He is so strong, Anita! Big strong arms.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then—I can’t! Then he… kissed me.”

  Anita screamed and fell over on the bed. They laughed and laughed.

  “I had never kissed a man!” Teresita said. “Never in my life!”

  “¡Ay, Dios! ¡Ay, madre!” Anita gasped. “What was it like? Tell me, tell me.”

  Teresita put her hands in her lap and thought.

  “Well,” she said. “It is a little soft.”

  Anita stared wide-eyed.

  “A little scratchy from his stubble. And a little… moist.”

  “What!”

  “It’s kind of wet.”

  “From what!”

  “It is his mouth, Anita. What do you think?”

  Anita fell over again.

  “Spit? Spit? No no no! Not spit!”

  Teresita hung her head and massaged the back of her own neck.

  She said, “It was a little like eating a mango.”

  “No!”

  She was going to wear an Indian dress. A bright yellow skirt with blue and red ribbon sewn around it, with a white blouse off her shoulders and a shawl that passed behind her back and that she could drape over her forearms. She was dressing for her man. Her man. She knew he’d like it.

  Teresita had Anita weave colorful ribbons in her braids.