Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

“Poor thing,” said the woman.

  “I’ll fetch her,” said the boy.

  “Don’t got much time,” the conductor warned.

  The boy trotted after the Saint.

  She stood on the bank above the great brown water. The sound of it broke through the heat—just the noise of it felt like a cool drink, a flood, the sound of the water pouring on her, into her, filling her. Two Indians fished from the bank and turned and looked up at her. She waved once. They tipped their heads to her and turned back to the river. She watched a branch come near, pause, and shoot away on its way to Mexico.

  Dragonflies rose from the shallows, languidly lifting and falling and sliding backward in the air. They hovered before her face and studied her.

  “I have nothing left to say to you,” she said.

  The boy joined her.

  The dragonflies swirled away.

  “Why do they call it red when the water is the color of dirt?” she asked.

  He squinted—he thought she’d asked where they were going in her fast Spanish.

  “Yonder is California,” the boy said.

  It was all sand dunes. Far maroon mountains.

  “West,” the Saint replied, “is the land of the dead.”

  But he still could not understand her.

  He took her hand and tugged her back to the train as the whistle blew and the water arm of the tower rose from the boiler’s mouth and the engine chuffed once. They reached the steps and were helped up. The great machine recommenced its eternal stitchery as it mounted the bridge and rolled westward. The train’s shadow wobbled on the water for an instant, like a surfacing catfish, before it was back among the sand dunes and gone.

  And then they were in the Anza-Borrego Desert. They passed through Vallecito, that charred valley where the streambeds were long blankets of pale sand, and the old stage station squatted stark and lonely; few stagecoaches or wagons ever plied those roads anymore. A sunburned coot stood his ground on bandy legs and stared at them as they rushed by, casting him into the past as if he were a mirage. She saw a roadrunner. “Taruk,” she said aloud, for despite all she would leave behind, the mother tongue was one thing she could not bear to lose.

  She renamed the world as they went far from the People.

  She put the words in the purse of her heart like small golden coins.

  She saw a bird: “Wiikit.”

  She saw a small white butterfly: “Vaisevo.”

  She saw a jackrabbit: “Paaros.”

  She felt lonely and afraid. She whispered, “Sioka. Sioka. Sioka…”

  They sped toward the great wall of the Cuyamaca Mountains, and the train for a giddy moment seemed as if it were going to explode against the stark cliffs before them. But no; it lurched and rose, surged up a long incline, and the slopes were suddenly covered with boulders, madly scattered, many-colored, round. They looked like the peanuts on the ice cream sundae Don Lauro Aguirre had bought her in El Paso.

  She shoved El Paso from her mind. She pushed Lauro Aguirre away. He fell out of her mind in a scatter of newspaper pages and flying pencils and spun as if going down a long spiraling hole.

  She stared at the rocks, and when she saw one fat boulder poised delicately atop a smaller boulder, she chuckled. It was her first laughter in days. The mountain was being humorous.

  Her companions turned to her expectantly when they heard her laughter.

  She pointed out the window.

  “My father,” she said seriously, “stacked those rocks. It took him a week.”

  They nodded and smiled at her, uncomprehending.

  “Teta,” she said, nodding to them. “Piedra.”

  She turned back in time to see trees as they skirted the south end of the high peaks. Great pines—first in ones and twos, then intensifying, and suddenly in a dark cool blur they ruled the landscape. Pines! She rose to her knees and gawked. Her eyes darted between the trees, stabbing deep into the valleys and glades. Oaks. She saw deer. She saw Americans in red shirts. Horses eating great velvety meadows of moist grass. She saw sheep in a small pen. “Bwala!” she cried, pointing.

  And over the hump and down, down, back to desert, but not for long. Manzanita scrub. Ahead, San Diego. Ahead, a baffling band of shadow in the coming dusk. She watched it, wondered at it. Until the sun moved faster than they did toward the western horizon, and the dark band lightened, from purple to blue, from blue to green. It peeked at her as she came around hills and topped rises. And then the sun struck it fully and it became a band of copper, then gold.

  The boy leaned in. Pointed ahead.

  “The sea,” he said.

  But they entered a valley, and it was lost from view.

  The Saint had never seen such a place as San Diego. White buildings. Palm trees. Trolley cars. Bougainvillea and geraniums. Red buildings. Paved and cobbled streets in every direction. Horses, carriages, donkeys, sailors, children, dogs, wagons, flags, oleander, rose gardens, seagulls, pigeons, smoke, newspaper boys, gas lamps, musicians, ladies in great skirts with parasols, black faces, red faces, white faces, brown faces, yellow faces, hotels, tall buildings with sunset in their windows, red roof tiles, fountains, hobos sleeping on benches, strolling blue-uniformed coppers with helmets and swinging sticks, pepper trees, mosaics. Gray buildings with glass doors. She felt her heart hammering with excitement. She rushed from window to window as the train slowly inserted itself into the side of the city and made its way into the great old station, unleashing billows of steam that fogged everything.

  Her hosts had arranged for them to spend the night in a downtown hotel, and a porter wheeled a cart with their bags into the station to be kept overnight for the Coastliner to San Francisco. They led her out to the docks, and she beheld the harbor with its gathered sails, its masts, its small tugboats churning the water, its pelicans. She put her hands to her face. The sea, the green sea, surged at her feet. She could smell it, smell its fish, smell its salt fetor. Oil formed rainbow swirls among the small tatters of paper and the raw sewage floating beneath her. She thought she could smell Japan. She saw sea lions farther out in the water, lounging upon clanging buoys. She shivered. She sweated.

  They took her to a seafood restaurant on the dock and she stared numbly at the platters of crabs, oysters, fried clams. She was served a great braised flank of tuna on a wooden plank. She ate and ate until she thought she would swoon. Her host smiled as he watched her. He offered her a flagon of beer. She stared at it. Why not? All was lost anyway. She tasted it. It was terrible. Bitter. Yet bitterness was good; bitterness tasted of her own heart. The foam overflowed her mouth, and the bubbles burned her throat, but she drank it like water. Do you see me, Father? Do you see me, Tom? She laughed silently. She gestured for another.

  “Gracias,” she said.

  It was the last thing she remembered saying.

  Early in the morning, sick to her stomach and suffering from a spike being driven over and over through the side of her head, she rose from her bed and washed herself at the basin and dragged on her clothes. So this was how Don Tomás and Aguirre felt in the mornings after their great bouts of drinking. Father, it is not worth the pain. She pulled on her shoes and went downstairs quietly, sneaking out the glass front door so she could walk the cool shadows on Broadway as it went back to the water. Everything smelled like baking bread and horse dung. A drunk slumbered in a doorway. A prostitute smoked, leaning against a wall, and the Saint stopped and looked at her.

  “Hola,” she said.

  “I only got this one,” the prostitute said, flicking ash.

  “No fumo,” the Saint replied.

  “No? You no fumar?” The woman stared back at her. “You need something?”

  The Saint shook her head.

  “Quiero ver el mar.”

  “The sea, huh?” the woman said. “That ain’t the sea. That’s just the harbor. It’s dirty.”

  Teresita smiled at her.

  “I’m bad company,” the woman explained. “You don’t want to
be seen here.”

  “Sorry?” Teresita said.

  “I’m what they call a soiled dove, dear. Get it?”

  Teresita smiled, uncomprehending.

  The woman thought for a minute, trying to remember her Spanish. She pointed to herself. “Puta,” she said.

  Teresita shrugged. “I am a saint,” she said. “Es trabajo.”

  The woman laughed.

  “It’s a job?” she replied. “I suppose so, dearie.”

  She laughed again.

  “¿Vamos?”

  The Saint gestured toward the harbor.

  “Jesus,” the woman said. “What are you, loony?”

  But she flicked her cigarette away and coughed.

  “What the hell,” she said. “I ain’t doin’ nothin’.”

  They walked down to the docks and watched pelicans open six-foot wings.

  “Vaawe,” the Saint said, gesturing to the ocean. She pointed to the sea lions. “Vaa loovo,” she said. She raised her arms to the great pelicans and said, “Tenwe.”

  “Right,” said the puta. “Whatever you say. You’re the saint.”

  The train headed north on time. Her hosts had convinced the Saint to take a seat on the left side for the view. She was not disappointed. They left the city and entered hills, and soon the hills gave way to sea—real sea, open sea, a vastness of color. She had not imagined that water could have so many hues. The waves curled emerald and jade as they rose on the beaches, and the foam was white and hurt her eyes, the way it exploded with light. Dolphins surf-rode the riptides beyond the beaches. Fishing boats putted along the coast, and schooners were white and fast and riding curling bow waves as their sails billowed with sea wind. Small villages and port towns appeared and fell behind in bustles of color. Small islands. Confetti of gulls.

  Before she knew it, they were in Los Angeles. It was bigger even than San Diego. Busier, madder, an immense dry scatter of a city. Chimney smoke and campfire smoke and cooking smoke and smelter smoke and factory smoke blew inland on the sea breeze and was trapped against the Santa Monica Mountains and settled in a vague brown pall over the basin. And with a lurch, they were back on their way, and they entered a dream of coastline, a rugged wildness of solitude and roaring waves, great rocks, twisted pines, surges and blowholes and ships and shorebirds and bays, great dark forests of kelp shadowing the water, flotillas of seabirds like small Spanish galleons where the water turned glassy. Just the smell of it made her sleepy, happy. It made her soft; it made her relax her tight posture and slump. Drunk again on the mere scent of such freedom.

  Father, you never told me how beautiful the world was. Why did you not tell me what was outside the fence?

  She blinked languidly, her eyelids moving like thick liquid. The coast became rock, then great blond swatches of grass above the waves. Trees were bent by the eternal wind into strange dream shapes. Her head dropped to her chest, and she jerked awake. Tall dark trees on one side, heaving blue-gray on the other. The sway, the surge, the sway, the surge…

  And they were in yellow fields. Flowing vast meadows, farmlands. Grass. Dirt. Grass. Dirt.

  Against her will, she fell asleep, her horror, her grief, her exhaustion pushing her down in her seat to a dreamless place of comforting rocking, lulling beats of the train’s heart, her hand falling to the floor and bouncing softly there. Her companions covered her with the woman’s shawl and gently lifted her feet to the seat.

  When she awoke, many hours later, they were pulling in to the absolute astonishment of San Francisco at night.

  Thirty-Eight

  SAN FRANCISCO WAS FREEZING. Teresita had never been so cold. In her seat, she pulled her rebozo tight to herself. Shivered.

  Nor had she seen fog. It formed a pliant wall outside the great doors of the station. All the clanging and banging and chuffing and whistling didn’t budge the throbbing grayness at all. The steam of the locomotive seemed to rush out to rejoin its mother and cover the city.

  Bleak. She thought the city was supposed to be colorful. Where was the balmy sea?

  Mr. Rosencrans said, “Mark Twain averred that the coldest winter he ever survived was a summer in San Francisco.” He smiled. He chuckled. She stared at him, shook her head.

  “No lo conozco,” she said. “¿Mark Buey?”

  “Twain.”

  “¿Tren? Train?”

  “No matter,” he said, stepping away from her.

  The station. Vendors sold hot nuts, and boys in kneesocks and caps hawked papers, and a violinist sawed away in a corner, coins in an upturned hat at his feet. There were more people bustling through the echoing space than there’d been in either San Diego or Los Angeles. She saw few Mexicans, but many of the Chinese. Sailors, dashing in their hats, rolling along in hale squadrons. Coughing men, hunched and stinking of urine, shambled past her, dragging weary old feet and pulling tattered coat collars up to their ears. Bawdy boys in striped shirts snickered and skipped, one of them pulling off a companion’s hat and tossing it to a third, all of them shouting “Hey-hey!” as they scattered, flipping girls’ hair and blowing kisses to those they passed, including the Saint. Immigrant women in shades of brown kept their faces down and moved silent as a reproach.

  A finely dressed woman in a yellow gown with a huge bustle behind had met the Rosencranses, and they conferred and gestured. Teresita stood as one mute. She felt as though they were bartering for her. She could have been a slave, or a shanghaied sailor about to set sail for an unknown shore. She had no idea who the woman was but sensed a sick child somewhere here, and that the woman in the yellow dress required Teresita’s help to save the girl. She said to God: I put all my trust in You. The Americanos in the group turned and looked at her. A tall black man in a uniform with a shiny black top hat stood behind them, and the rich woman snapped her fingers and gestured. A servant came forward and smiled at Teresita, bowed slightly, and picked up her bags. “This way, madam,” he said.

  She followed him, nodding at all the strangers as she passed—did they know who she was? Did they recognize her? Had they seen her in the newspapers? She did not know. Her hosts reached out and touched her, light as leaves, as she passed. Jamie hugged her. She patted his head. She was gone inside, gone far away. She was running barefoot in the hills. She was walking along the banks of the River of Spiders, going up to Tomóchic. She no longer cared what happened to her. She would scrub their toilets. She would cook their eggs. Whatever her fate, she had earned it through her failures and mistakes. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This new exile was penance, she decided.

  Perhaps she could make something of herself, earn money to send to Clifton, as if she could ever repay her father for all that he had squandered on her enthusiasms.

  The black man took her to a handsome carriage. She expected to sit atop it, beside him, but he opened the door and laid a small step at her feet and took her hand and assisted her in, onto its plush velvet-covered seat. He tossed her small bag into the covered bin at the back. Outside, between raveling curtains of fog, the city was a festival of twinkles on the hills. Lights blinked and shimmered everywhere—from lamps on corners, from windows, from burning barrels and small fires in alleys. Teresita stared at these lights and felt utterly lost—all those lives, and she adrift among them like a small leaf on the silver sea. Nowhere, in any direction, could she see a light that meant “home.” Then, again, fog—and the lights were gone.

  The fine lady, her hostess, came in after her, and the carriage creaked and settled as she mounted and fell to her seat in a cloud of fine powder scents. Her eyes were red from weeping. Her face was haggard. She reached across and grasped Teresita’s hands. Her fingers were like ice.

  “I am Mrs. Fessler,” she said.

  “Teresita.”

  They held hands.

  “I am… so happy… you have come,” the woman said. “And so grateful!”

  The servant hove aboard, his seat above them squealing as he settled. He clicked his mouth, and the horse moved
out smooth as a boat on a small pond. The streets shook and vibrated them, so their voices wobbled as though they were palsied.

  The great woman’s face went alarmingly red, then seemed to crumple. Her mouth fell open. She drew a shuddering breath.

  And she wailed. She broke into sobs. She cried loudly, and snorted, and squeaked with choked outbursts. The horse clopped its hooves and the carriage lurched on. The fine lady blew her nose like a trumpet. She whimpered.

  Teresita looked at her with tenderness.

  She thought: Oh, be quiet.

  It took them a good while to arrive in San Jose. They had pulled out of the bowl of fog in San Francisco as if rising from a tureen of mushroom soup. Over the lip, and now they were here. It was warmer. She could tell right away from the sound in the air that Mexicans were here. Mexican sound was different than American sound. Even the dogs in Mexican yards barked in Spanish.

  They pulled up to the gate of a great house lit by gas lamps. She would see in the morning that the house was yellow, with white trim. Servants rushed down the front steps and swung open the creaking iron gates. The coachman opened the door and offered his hand to the fine lady first. Then he reached in for Teresita’s hand and gently helped her down. He gestured toward the double front doors that stood open, the entryway fluttering with candlelight.

  “Señorita,” he said.

  She bowed her head to him and walked up the steps. The maid was comforting the snuffling hostess. The staff looked at the Saint with their eyes full of expectation and hope. She saw no doubt in any face.

  “Heal her!” her hostess cried.

  Teresita looked her in the eye.

  “I have not eaten for a day,” she said.

  The coachman, on the step outside, translated.

  “Oh!” the great lady cried. “Help my child! Please!”

  Teresita put her hand on her belly.

  “Me duele,” she said. “Tengo hambre.”

  “Yes, yes, certainly. We will feed you after you have seen to my girl.”