Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  The unseen headline read: “Santa Teresa Causes Litigation.” The relentless Mrs. Castro had marched into the police station and demanded that Mr. Suits and his henchmen be arrested for unlawful imprisonment, illegal confinement, and white slavery. Lieutenants Newsom and Burciaga had gone to the scene, and as soon as the minders on the front porch leapt the rail and ran into the alley, the policemen had turned on Suits and clubbed him to the ground. Why would people run if they were not guilty? Mrs. Castro waded in and kicked Suits firmly in the culo. The coppers stormed up the steps and broke down the door—its old wood gave way and the hinges burst free, dropping the door at an angle and revealing cowering Mexicans in the waiting room. Shrieks, cries of alarm.

  Teresita came forth from her healing room and put her hands on her hips.

  “It wasn’t locked,” she said.

  Suits spent several days in custody. Unrestrained, Twidlatch, who had a stark terror of spending time in gaol, found good tickets on a train bound for Portland and then Seattle. There, he entertained propositions to engage in the ferry trade, finding a tempting investment opportunity in the refurbished Vashon Island line. He was out of the saint business and better off for it. It didn’t hurt that he had also taken Suits’s profits. He told himself Suits had God by the tail—and despite this setback, there was always money in that.

  When Señor Suits, along with two large and ominous associates, crept back to the house with purple shutters a week later, he found the door replaced. Mexicans had brought a fresh unpainted pine slab and mounted it. In place of bodyguards, Mrs. Castro stood in the middle of the porch and wagged an accusatory finger. “What is your business here?” she demanded in English. Suits hadn’t known she could speak English.

  “Er,” he said. “I would like a word with Saint Teresa. Please.”

  Mrs. Castro went in. A moment later, she emerged. She gestured.

  “Enter,” she said.

  “Boys,” Suits whispered. “Keep an eye on the door—I might need rescuing.”

  They chuckled as he went in. Mrs. Castro followed. “I translate,” she announced. He only murmured, “Yes.”

  Teresita sat in her small kitchen, near her canaries. She had a steaming cup of tea on her table. She looked at him, sipped some tea, placed the cup carefully in the saucer.

  “Sit,” she said.

  He sat.

  “Remove your hat, please,” she said.

  He did.

  She crossed her legs and bobbed her foot—Mr. Bierce had taught her that.

  “Well,” she said. “Things did not work out the way you’d planned.”

  She sipped her tea.

  Suits said, “I meant well.”

  “No. You did not.”

  Suits craned around and looked at Mrs. Castro.

  “Change is coming, Señor Suits,” Teresita said.

  Mrs. Castro delighted in translating his name back to him, making it Spanish. Señor Trajes, she called him. The women laughed. It wasn’t friendly laughter. Mr. Suits did not feel that a white man needed to put up with uppity greaser women, and later, at the bar, he would tell his confreres that he hadn’t done any such thing. But now he cleared his throat. He stared at the floor. When they laughed at him, they shrieked like crows.

  “You, I think,” Teresita said, “must be very bad.”

  He affixed a look of misery on his face.

  “I have lost everything,” he said. “I have only sought to care for you and, and, the holy work you do. I have children.”

  Teresita smirked.

  “I enjoy your sincerity routine,” she said. “It almost works.”

  Mrs. Castro delivered this line like an ice pick in the ear.

  The canaries were apparently rioting in their cages.

  Suits nervously glanced at Mrs. Castro again.

  Mrs. Castro said, “She could kill you with her eyes.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Her eyes. Her eyes!”

  It had never occurred to Suits that all the miraculous-power rigmarole might be true.

  “Mr. Suits,” Teresita said. “I am sitting here. Not in that corner.”

  He turned back around. He was very confused. He could smell her. He wanted to open a window. The roses.

  “You have lost nothing,” Teresita said. “Nothing! It is I who have lost everything.” She drained her cup. Mrs. Castro rushed to refill it. The room was dark. The shadows were rich brown and deepening. “You have your country. You have your language. You have your friends, and, if you aren’t lying, you have your children. You have your business associates. What do I have?” She placed her hands on the table and examined them. “You?” She smiled up at Mrs. Castro. “I have Señor Suits. What a blessing from God.”

  “Cabrón,” Mrs. Castro muttered.

  “I did my best,” Suits protested.

  “You did your best to steal from God,” Teresita said. “If you care to confess, go find a priest.”

  Suits couldn’t get a handle on this conversation.

  “What can I do?” he asked. “To… rekindle… our… arrangement.”

  “What do you propose?” she said.

  He cleared his throat. “My associates in the Consortium are reasonable men. Professional men. They represent, er, clinics. Medical clinics, you see? They seek to post illustrations of you to, ah, attract the Meskins.”

  “I see.”

  “They’d pay us a fee for that.”

  “Hmm.” She thought of her father. This income—she owed him, did she not? She could not return, not yet. And she could heal, even from afar. She could heal Tomás’s heart, heal her corruption. Collecting alms.

  And this was unforgivable too—but the idea of seeing more of this gaping nation was deeply appealing. After all, was this not a country of people for whom return to their homelands was not an option?

  “And perhaps you would be willing to appear at events. Public, let’s say, events. Lend your blessing, so to speak,” Suits continued.

  “There is money in this?”

  He laughed.

  “Why, yes, I’d say so.”

  He was squirming, loosening his collar a bit, his hair oil dripping and showing around his ears in greasy little rivulets—Teresita watched him melt like a candle.

  “Give me a cigar,” she said.

  He goggled.

  She snapped her fingers.

  “Come, come,” she said.

  He dug in his coat and produced his slim case. He snapped it open. She took out a cheroot, bit the end off, and spit it in the corner. He was alarmed when she pulled a match out of her skirt pocket and struck it and lit the cigar and turned it as she fired the end thoroughly. She drew in a fat mouthful of smoke and blew it into his face.

  “From now on,” she said, “things will be different.”

  Mr. Suits could only bow his head.

  “How different?”

  “As different as I want them to be,” she said.

  “Ladies don’t act like this,” he whined.

  “I am not a lady!” she said in her heavy English. “I am the Saint of Cabora!” She said it like a stage name, more mercantile than sacred, aware of Suits’s desires. She did not believe it, had never believed it, but would use it now, a magician’s misdirection.

  “Her eyes, estúpido,” Mrs. Castro warned.

  “This is your problem, not my own,” Teresita said.

  “All right. What are your demands?”

  “I wish to continue healing the sick,” she proclaimed.

  “You will remain with the Consortium?” he said, astounded.

  “If I break my contract with you, can you assure me there would be no litigation?”

  “Certainly on my part, there would be no lawsuit. However, my partners…”

  “Exactly what I thought,” she said. “I was foolish when I signed that paper,” she added. “I am not foolish now.”

  Here it comes, he thought.

  “First, I do not wish to stay here. And I no lo
nger wish to see you.”

  “I—”

  “Ever.”

  Hell, he thought, I ain’t all that bad!

  “And when did you hope to blow?” he asked.

  “I would like to have left yesterday.”

  “You’re barking at a knot there, sister,” he said.

  “Mr. Suits,” she admonished, “speak clearly.”

  “Ah. That order would, ah, be difficult. But we’ll get things square with the bosses as soon as we can. We’ll have us a grand tour. Don’t worry.”

  “I am not worried,” she said. “Not anymore.”

  By October, she was in the redwoods, celebrating her birthday. She took a basket of bread and cheese and apples into the groves and sat among the mossy hollows. Her assistants waited at the carriage until she was through. She was unfailingly polite to them, but she never addressed them informally, never offered them a glimpse of her thoughts. Only once, on the ride to the big trees, did she make conversation: “Did you send five hundred dollars to Mrs. Castro?” she asked. The old woman had cried when she left, but Teresita had gone on into the world. If this Consortium had her bound by contract, she would use them to take God’s power to all of America. Let Aguirre’s revolt take root. She thought she might enjoy meeting Queen Victoria one day. “Have you been on a ship?” she asked, but none of her assistants answered her.

  Redwoods were so old and huge they swallowed sound and made weather.

  The operation rolled north to Astoria, where she slept in a sea-themed cottage decorated with fishing nets and dried starfish. She was enraptured by fishing boats, and the foggy melancholy beaches eased her spirit. No one knew her, so no followers hounded her. She was free to consort with sea otters and a fox that exited the rain forest and stared at her on a long beach cobbled in round stones like colored eggs waiting to hatch pastel birds.

  The Columbia River Gorge was painted in washes of mist and watercolor and stretched so far her heart could not bear the distance. Portland was busy roundabout with schooners and skiffs, freighters and comic tugs. Antic trains roared with rusted voices beside its waterways. She healed the people at a small revival in the Mexican quarter. She donated the roses she was given to an orphanage.

  She met Eskimos in Seattle, down from Alaska and lounging near the lumber skids to Puget Sound. In Boise, she met Urreas—a good Basque town. Walla-Walla, Yakima, Enterprise, Lostine.

  Mormons in dry northern Utah came to see her and listened to her handlers’ tales but declined any healings. In Nevada, she looked for Buenaventura but never found him. Reno was baked bare as old bones. Wild horses charged down the yellow hills on the road to Virginia City. Her handlers drank whiskey and beer in the Bucket of Blood, and she ate her first Chinese food there. She mistook the pepper pods in the kung pao for beans and put in a good long time gulping lemonade after that. She slept in a haunted hotel in Gold Hill that resonated late at night with the cries of children who weren’t there.

  On that leg of the tour, she ministered to a miner who had blown off the fingers of his left hand with a bad dynamite charge in a cat hole.

  “I will require two thousand dollars a year,” she’d told Suits. “Not profit. Not for me. You—that is your own business. See what God says about it. I have simple needs, and I will not rely on you to fulfill these needs. I will take care of myself.”

  “Done.”

  “I will have an assistant.”

  “Done.”

  “And I will have a family member or a family friend join me as soon as I can. I will not be subjected to untoward company, behavior, or advances, and I will not—ever—deal with the Consortium alone.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Our contract is complete in 1904,” she’d said. “After that, my dear Mr. Suits, you are welcome to accept God or reside in Hell. It is no concern of mine.”

  “Can we shake on it?”

  “I’d rather not,” she’d said.

  Everywhere she went, she was followed by swirling flocks of newspapers. Her handlers collected them, made press packages of them, forwarded them to cities ahead of the procession. Clippings piled up in the mochila she kept. She didn’t care about them. She remembered how foolish she had been in Clifton—making albums for Rodriguez.

  She recoiled as if from a slap. No. Thank you. Not that, not today. She put him far from her thoughts. Back down his forlorn mine shaft.

  She grew more devout the more trapped in hotels she became. There was no going out among the plants for her. There was no climbing hills to hear Itom Achai call to her. There were no deer songs. In fact, she was deeply alarmed one morning to find that she could no longer recall the word in the mother tongue for “deer.” She wept in frustration. Then she went to her knees and prayed, rosary beads moving through her fingers like pebbles rolling down a stream.

  The men in the Consortium treated her with respect. No one laid a hand on her, or made an untoward move toward her. They became her team. The four centurions. Mr. Smith, her fussy assistant; Elias, the tall longhaired gunman who handled her security; Van Belle, her driver and the true mystic in the bunch; and top-hatted Swab Dave, the fixer who could arrange any kind of deal in any city. They never saw her laugh, never heard her joke. If you had told them she had been a singer of bawdy corridos in her youth, they would have been stunned and doubtful. Only after she had locked herself in her room at each hotel did they go to the cantina and bend an elbow. It was whiskey for them, though their salary was tight and they often drank busthead from the cheapest barrels, which left them sore and blurry in the mornings. They took women to their rooms and told them stories of the Saintess before they bought their pleasures and in the mornings were often stunned to find their soiled doves asking for her blessings and prayers. The four men had to keep their faces still at those moments, and the gals were professional enough to ignore them. Each day, it was like the night before had never happened.

  And on.

  Teresita met with a gunfighter in New Mexico who had fed poor Mexicans and was there to receive her blessing. He knelt and she laid her hand on his head like a cool cloth.

  “They have not caught you yet,” she said.

  “Not me. They will never catch me.”

  “But they will kill you if they can.”

  He grinned.

  “We all die.”

  She nodded.

  “I will see you there,” she said.

  He rose.

  “Do you still sing serenades?” she asked.

  He tossed his long black hair back and smiled.

  “Only to the loveliest women,” he said.

  He kissed her hand and strolled away.

  “What are you looking at?” he said to Teresita’s bodyguard.

  “That was Bunbury,” she said. She smiled. “Of the Iberians.”

  “Who?”

  She wiped her eyes and said, “I will rest now.”

  And she saw Wyatt Earp speak in a candlelit theater in Denver. She rode out twisters in Oklahoma on her way to Kansas, where another set of twisters ate the edges of the town where she cowered. Cheyennes rode out to meet her wagon near Montana’s border. She saw Shakespeare in Helena and didn’t understand anything but the drama of Lear in his distress, which did not require language, after all.

  She yearned to see Chicago and its vast lake. They had the tallest buildings on earth in Chicago.

  “Later,” she was told. First, they had to go south and east. The Consortium signed a contract with St. Louis, Missouri. Many sick people there were clamoring for her attentions. San Francisco, of course, had been named for Saint Francis. But who was Saint Louis? She thought he must have been French.

  “We can stop?” she asked.

  “We can stop.”

  “I want to stop.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I am tired.”

  It was to be a four-month engagement and a sure bet for the Consortium. St. Lou was going crazy with the approach of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition—a Wo
rld’s Fair expected to bring more than ten million visitors to the city.

  She felt like a burned building. And who could she talk to? Her world was made up of armies of strangers.

  When she wrote to Juana Van Order, her only request was huge, she knew—but it was time. She did not trust those around her. She did not trust El Inglés. She asked her old friend to send her fair Harry, her old beau, to translate for her.

  When she saw the Mississippi River, she sat on the bank and cried. It took some work to see the water, for the bank was crowded with boats, and they formed a wall of freighters that banged together, bow to stern, with a loud cracking sound. But as if out of a book, a riverboat hooted and paddled against the current, white as a gull. The Consortium agents could not get her to rise or to stop weeping. So they stood about unhappily, keeping any well-wishers at bay. “Let her cry,” someone said. “Women do that.”

  “The Mexicans,” said another, “is emotional.”

  But she couldn’t cry for too long; it would be bad for business.

  There were already signs. The Consortium had noted the protests in Utah first: Mormons wanted her out for preaching false doctrines. In Denver, Mexican-haters and Indian-shooters rumbled ominously in the background of her events. And here, suddenly, there were signs. Held up by a skinny preacher and dark-dressed women. OUT MEXICAN WICH. The Consortium tried to bat these placards down. SATANS BRIDE GREASER HERETIC. But the preacher made himself scarce when the tall pistol man who kept the Saint secure waded toward him through the gathering bodies.

  Trailing Teresita, a line of jostling girls and swaggering boys and dogs and hunch-shouldered men and drunkards and fat women moving like sailboats, and no matter what city they visited, somehow the people knew she was there and came to her bearing flowers, cameras, food, roses, infants, wounds, blood, white eyes, cakes, and tears. She signed pages torn from Bibles, signed shirts, signed bare arms with drooling fountain pens, signed the faces of half-broken dolls. The assistants and the minders could no longer smell her—she was like spring when you lived in it; you became unheedful of the scent of the garden. The pilgrims, they seemed to take her in with their very breath and they could pull holiness into their flesh and feel it hot and redolent in their own darkness.