Queen of America

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  “What’s them mountains back yonder?” the kid asked Francis.

  “Those would be re-creations of the Tyrolean Alps.” Francis beamed.

  “Whar’s them elephants?” the kid demanded.

  Francis snapped his fingers and gestured for an assistant to take the bothersome little tramp to the paddocks. John winked at the kid, who doffed his floppy cap and vanished forever.

  “So many wonders,” Teresita said. “It is overwhelming.”

  “Miss,” the governor said, “when construction is complete, and the whiteness of the exposition is reflected in the bay, it will be the most beautiful place on earth. Why, there will be Indians from India, and American Indians from the untamed West in the Apache village. The whole world will converge.”

  “Apaches?” she said.

  “Indeed.”

  “Where’d you get the Apaches?” asked John.

  He wasn’t comfortable with Apaches around.

  “Why, Mr. Cody will provide them.”

  “Buffalo Bill!” John cried. He laughed. “Well, I’ll be dogged.”

  “There are several of his representatives here now,” Francis said. He glanced around and confided, “A trial run, you might say. You can’t keep the Indians away from the ice cream stand, though.”

  “Ice cream?” said Teresita. “I love ice cream!”

  Francis looked at John and raised an eyebrow: See what I mean?

  He took her arm.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  John would have preferred a beer. As they approached the white-and-pink ice cream pavilion, by God if he didn’t see a bunch of flat-footed Apaches lounging around, as advertised. Teresita surged toward them, but he managed to take hold of her and steady her down a bit. Francis was their business for the day, not the savages.

  They swept into the chilled ice cream parlor.

  “Electrical,” Francis boasted.

  “I love ice cream very much,” she said.

  Francis smiled like an indulgent father.

  “Never tried it,” John confessed.

  “We have many amazements on display at the exposition,” Francis announced. Teresita looked out the window at the Apaches. The governor gestured to the paper-hatted fellow behind the glass cabinets.

  “Behold,” said Francis. “The ice cream cone!”

  “Hell,” said John. “They had those in Chicago.”

  “But did they have them in waffles?” asked the governor.

  John whistled.

  “I didn’t see no waffle cones. If I’d come across that, it might’ve made me fatter.”

  Pistachio! Teresita attacked hers like a little chulo. John gripped his drooling waffle and sniffed the ice cream. He poked his tongue in suspiciously. “Sweet!” he said. He smiled and started licking straightaway. Teresita took a small spoon from the container and continued to eat her ice cream from the waffle.

  “You can eat the waffle,” Francis noted, licking ice cream from his whiskers.

  “You’re defeating the purpose,” John whispered to Teresita.

  She ignored him, looking out that window. Those Apaches gathered out there in the shade were looking back. They appeared to John like little prairie wolves on the llano.

  He was alarmed when she dropped her unfinished cone in the trash can and wandered out the door.

  “She is interesting,” observed the governor.

  “Always something new,” said John.

  The men followed her out, the bell above the door tinkling merrily as they left.

  She stood in the sun, shading her eyes. A bandy-legged warrior walked over to her and looked her up and down. He had a red rag tied about his head.

  “Not as festive as the Sioux,” Francis noted. “Desert men.”

  “Know them well,” John said. “Never cared for them.”

  John bit his waffle.

  The Apache nodded at Teresita.

  “I thought it was you,” he said. “I didn’t trust my own eyes.”

  “I am happy to see you again,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “The Creator must still care for my People.”

  They shook hands.

  “Venado Azul,” she said. “You do not look a day older than you did in Arizona.”

  He smiled.

  “I was already a thousand years old,” he said.

  He glanced at the white men with their drooping, leaking waffles.

  “We like that ice cream too,” he said. “If we knew these refugees had ice cream on their boats and wagons, we might have given up sooner.”

  He coughed once; she recognized it for a laugh.

  His friends sat on the white chairs and craned around and stared at her. She raised her hand. They nodded.

  “How is the Sky Scratcher?” Venado Azul asked. “Still drinking that vino?”

  “I have not seen him,” she said. “Life pulled us apart.”

  “I know how that is,” he said.

  She touched his arm.

  “And you? Your people?” she asked.

  He toed the ground. She noted he wore deerskin slippers. He puffed air through his lips, as if a wind had taken his people away.

  “We came here. It is a job.” He shrugged. “The world ended.”

  “The world ended and yet here you are at the World’s Fair.”

  “Somebody else’s world.”

  They laughed sadly.

  She kept looking over his shoulder.

  “You see him,” Venado said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you care to meet him?”

  She fluttered a bit. She touched her hair. “Dare I?”

  “He’d like it,” Venado said. “He likes saints.” He looked over at John and Francis. “He might go a little rough on these white men, though.”

  She glanced back and giggled.

  Venado took her arm and led her to the squat dark one sitting heavily and munching his waffle. He had vanilla on his lips. He crunched the last of the waffle and carefully cleaned his fingers and lips on a cloth napkin. One of the other warriors took it from him and folded it and set it on the glass table. The old man looked up at her. She felt fire and snow course through her. She trembled upon connecting with his eyes. The oldest eyes in the world. The eyes that had seen everything in this life and many things in the next. She felt deep terror, and she felt the profoundest love. This old man, steeped in holiness and blood. His face was cragged and severe. He looked like he had never laughed in his long life.

  He put out his hand to her.

  She, for the slightest moment, felt that she should fall to one knee and bend her head and receive his benediction. But she realized he was reaching out to shake her hand. Did one take this rough blunt hand so easily? This hand that had smitten so many enemies?

  She took it. He shook, three times, hard, and let her go.

  His voice was deep, full of rocks.

  “Hi,” he said.

  She almost laughed.

  Venado Azul looked down with more love on his face than she could comprehend.

  “The Yawner,” he said.

  “Is that his name in your tongue?”

  “Goyaalé.” He nodded.

  She put her hands before her heart and smiled at him.

  The old man smiled back, glanced at his companions, and chuckled. They all laughed. He looked back up at her and tipped his head. He put out his hand again.

  “What does he want?” she asked.

  Venado grinned.

  “Twenty-five cents,” he said.

  A bit confused, she dug in her little bag. She produced the quarter and handed it to Venado, who handed it to the Yawner. The old man took a creased white card and a pencil from his pocket and slowly wrote on it. He handed the coin back to Venado and said, “Ice cream.” Venado shook his head and went inside the ice cream parlor. The old man handed Teresita the card and said, “Autograph for you. Saint.”

  She carried it away, and only when they were in the car ag
ain, heading back downtown to the hotel, did she hand it to John. John unfolded it and glanced at her. He looked down at the card.

  It said:

  Geronimo.

  In the hotel lobby, after Governor Francis had left them to grand flourishes of gratitude on their part and magnanimity on his, they sat on a love seat and watched revelers gathered at the piano singing endless refrains of “Meet Me in St. Louis.” John was moody.

  He asked the bellman to arrange for a pair of iced cobblers to be brought to them. The drinks came on a silver tray: sherry, shaved ice, orange juice, and sliced fruits, with a cherry atop the ice. She looked at him quizzically.

  “A wedding toast,” he said, raising his glass.

  She smiled and tasted her drink. It was sweet. It was good.

  She watched him focus on the singers, a lost, faraway look on his face.

  “John?” she said. “Why so quiet?”

  He took another sip, then held the glass in both hands in between his knees as he leaned forward and stared. I was just wondering, he thought, why the world is so sad. But he said nothing.

  She put her head on his shoulder. They sat like that for a long time. When the music ended, he took her hand and accompanied her upstairs. At her door, he took her shoulders in his hands and turned her to face him.

  “Mrs. Van Order,” he said. His voice was so soft, she could barely hear it. She looked up at him, from eye to eye, taking in his entire face. “I need to kiss you now.”

  And he did.

  Part V

  NEW YORK

  New York, Feb. 23—Santa Teresa, the Mexican Joan of Arc, who was accused of inciting the Yaquis to revolt and who later astonished the Pacific States with her alleged healing powers, is here….

  She says she possesses magnetic powers that will cure the lame, the sick, and the blind. Her chief power lies in the great, dark eyes, demure and unsophisticated in conversation, but aggressive, intense, lustrous like a metal mirror when fixed with piercing earnestness on the patient whose hand she is clasping or whose brow she is touching with her magnetic fingers.

  —WASHINGTON, D.C., DAILY STAR,

  February 23, 1901

  Forty-Eight

  TOMAS HEARD FROM Juana Van Order that the children had wed—at least, that’s what she told him the newspapers said. He crumpled her letter. And he had heard, just one day before, from Lauro Aguirre, no less, America’s professional expert, that it was being reported that the couple would pull up stakes in St. Louis and move their operation to New York City, though his account had not included any matrimonial details. New York City? That great Moloch that belched fire and smoke and consumed its own young? Brutal nightmare of dark alleys and alien tongues? Why, as far as he could tell, it was worse than Mexico City—a place, he noted with pride, he had managed to avoid. Horrors.

  Oh, and—married?

  He was so stirred with ill ease by the news that he decided to mount a horse for the first time in months. A man had to get up in the hills to think this kind of thing through. He stormed through the house, tossing objects out of boxes, unable to find his spurs.

  “What are you doing?” Gabriela cried.

  “Going out!”

  “What has happened?”

  He held her arms in his great hands and peered into her face.

  “Teresita has married Van Order,” he said.

  “Harry?”

  “John!”

  “¿Qué?”

  “Sí. Teresita es una Van Order,” he mourned. “Y se va a Nueva York.”

  “¡Nueva York!” she hollered, moved more by his hysteria than by her own feelings in the matter.

  He released her and stomped around as if he’d never entered the house before.

  “But,” Gabriela cried, “she’s not even divorced!”

  Tomás stopped and pondered, and then turned to his beloved.

  “Gaby,” he reminded her. “I am still married to Loreto.”

  As if this were news to her, she cried, “Oh my God!”

  Her impression of Teresita as a spoiled madwoman only deepened.

  Segundo, who was in the kitchen, so busy stealing biscuits from the tin and dipping them in the butter pot and then dousing them with honey that he missed Tomás’s brief appearance, wandered out, trying to lick the gold drops from his mustache.

  “¿Qué pasa, boss?” he said.

  “Looking,” Tomás said as he sent tablecloths sailing from a chest, “for my”—he kicked a chair—“hijos de sus pinches madres spurs!”

  Gabriela smiled in spite of herself. She hadn’t heard her Gordo unleash a good healthy ranch curse in ages. That’s my Gordo.

  “Aquí,” Segundo drawled, pulling open a drawer of the china cabinet with one finger. The fabled spurs lay in there with discarded screwdrivers and pocketknives and a handful of arrowheads and some carpet tacks. By God! Tomás glared at Segundo. That old son of a whore was lazy even when opening a drawer!

  Tomás sat and strapped the spurs on and enjoyed, for the briefest moment, their ringing.

  “Don’t snag the carpet, mi amor,” Gabriela said.

  He gritted his teeth.

  He leapt to his feet and fought through the wave of dizziness and rushed out the door.

  Tomás was discovered standing there staring at his empty rancho.

  “¿Dónde están los caballos?” he demanded.

  “Don’t have lots of horses left,” Segundo said.

  “¡Quiero un caballo, chingado!” Tomás yelled.

  “All right, all right. Don’t rupture yourself,” Segundo said. He’d never moved fast in life, but now he moved like a snail in the rain. He had his thumbs irritatingly thrust into his belt and he strolled toward the old barn.

  Good Christ, thought Tomás, am I as old as he is?

  “You coming or not?” Segundo drawled.

  Tomás marched like a federal soldier. His eyes bored into Segundo’s back. Insolent bastard. He would talk himself right out of a job any day now.

  “Not much but these nags,” Segundo noted. “There’s a damn owl-head pinto over there won’t never be rode. That’s just dog food, that one.”

  The horse was moon-eyed and suspicious.

  “I’ll take care of you later,” Tomás said, pointing in its rolling eye. “There isn’t a horse born I can’t tame.”

  Abashed, the horse turned its head and nibbled a blackfly bite on its haunch, but it kept a worried eye on this towering pendejo.

  “Got this grullo over here.”

  “That horse is blue,” Tomás observed.

  “Nag’s got some zebra stripes too,” said Segundo.

  “Bring him.”

  Tomás cast about and found an old McClellan saddle on a stall railing. It was dry and cracked, but he didn’t care. He hauled it down and slammed it on the grullo. The horse filled its gut with air when Tomás went to cinch the saddle and was deeply offended when Tomás kneed it hard in the side and knocked the air out and pulled the strap tight.

  “I’m in no mood for a smart horse today,” he warned.

  The grullo blew air through its lips and jiggled its mouthpiece and grunted when Tomás climbed aboard.

  “Want company?” Segundo asked.

  “Hell no.”

  Tomás trotted out of the barn and nudged the blue horse toward the gate, accelerating like a motorcar. They parted a sullen knot of black-and-white magpie cows. Through the gate.

  “Think I care?” muttered the wounded Segundo. “I got biscuits to eat, you cabrón.”

  He wandered toward the house, but the boys leapt up from behind the porch railings and pow-powed! him with their fingers. He clutched his chest, staggered in a circle, and fell with one leg in the air. They ran to him and jumped on his stomach, shrieking like the unleashed minions of Hell.

  Tomás galloped into the trees and across the meadows and into the dry rocks and he kept thinking about how much the saddle hurt. He didn’t remember saddles hurting down there, his thighs burning from being
forced so far apart by the horse’s body. He thumped the horse on the shoulder and said, “Fat bastard!” He wished he had thought to bring a hat—now that they had cleared the trees, the sun was awfully strong. It hurt his eyes. And suddenly his ass was sore. This horse was reconfiguring Tomás’s nether parts.

  He reined up and brought it down to a saunter and had some disagreements with the grullo about whether to halt, but he finally convinced the blue horse and they came to a stop. He dismounted, lost his balance, and fell over and rolled down a small hill. Not showing its amusement, the grullo busied itself with savory remnant grasses that appeared between patches of snow. Snow! Tomás realized he was in a crusty little ice patch and was slowly getting soaked.

  He crawled and got to his knees and struggled to his feet and trudged up the slope that was longer going up than it had been going down.

  He fell on a flat rock and sat there, absorbing the heat like a lizard. He rested his forearms on his knees. The blue horse came over and nudged him with its nose.

  “Don’t try your wiles on me,” Tomás said. “It’s too late for that now.”

  It butted him again and stared at the side of his face.

  He reached over and stroked its long old lip.

  “Aren’t we a pair?” he said.

  Later, he sat in his study, aching all over from the ride. He didn’t let anyone see he was sore, but he could barely stand up straight, and his legs were wobbly, and his undercarriage was as tender as overripe plums, and his back hurt. He must have wrenched his shoulder on that impromptu downhill expedition.

  He lit his oil lamp and packed a pipe with aromatic tobacco. It was like smoking candy, but the refined chappies uphill were all pipe suckers, and he was not going to be outperformed by them. He’d show them sophistication.

  He lined up his ink bottles and pulled a fancy cream rag sheet and studied his quill and then dipped it in the brown. He’d heard Rosencrans speak of New York a while back. He bent to the letter. The pen scratched, and, honestly, it put his teeth a little on edge. Those kids wouldn’t know their hats from their asses in a place like that. Why, his little girl would be eaten alive by all those gangs and crooks and scoundrels and immigrants.