The Hummingbird's Daughter (12 page)

Thirteen

EVERYONE PREPARED for the great leaving.

Segundo lent Buenaventura fifty pesos. Segundo had also given the boy a swayback horse that was destined for the rendering plant and a job herding cows and mules and horses to far Sonora.

“Your pistol is a piece of shit,” Segundo told him.

“I will buy a new one.”

“You would have to work for a whole year to pay me back my fifty pesos and also buy a new gun,” Segundo told him.

“I will work.”

“And what will you do until you earn the money to buy a good gun?”

“If my pistol does not shoot, I will beat them over the head with it.”

Segundo laughed.

“Them!” he said. “Who?”

“Everybody.”

“Eres bien machito, cabrón,” he said.

He took a rust-pitted Colt from the armory and put it in one of his abandoned holsters. He tossed the pistol across Buenaventura’s frayed old saddle.

“Now,” he said, “you must work for two years.”

“I need bullets.”

“Two and a half years.”

Tomás and Aguirre loaded Loreto and the children on a carriage aimed for Don Miguel’s home. “I will write to you,” she promised, a gesture recognized as symbolic, since there would be no place to send a letter if she could write. Still, Tomás was no fool in romance, even with his wife, and he vowed: “I shall lie awake every night until your letters come to me, my angel. And even when they come, I shall not sleep, for I will be breathing in your scent and kissing your precious tears from the pages!” Segundo nudged Aguirre in the ribs and tipped his head at the ejaculations of the master. “Es suave, este hijo de puta,” he noted.

Loreto caused a white hankie to flutter at her slightly swollen nose like a trapped moth as she sniffled. Secretly, she was thrilled: she was through with horses and the stench of cattle. Au revoir, picturesque vaqueros! Adieu, pigs, Indians, scorpions, and dust! She and her children would live in a city from now on, with cobbles, signs, schools, stores, parasols, china. Restaurants! Certainly, there would be restaurants in Alamos! She already saw herself perching on a wrought-iron chair and sipping an exotic tea, while all about her, people spoke in the intoxicating if baffling manner of Lauro Aguirre.

Loreto mopped at her eyes gently as the carriage pulled away. Everyone waved until they were small with distance and vanished to each other, except for Segundo, who saw them until they were over the crown of the hill.

“At last,” Tomás startled the Engineer by saying, “we are free!”

Segundo seconded his boss’s sentiments with a pious pronouncement: “The hardships of the journey are not for fine ladies or children.”

Aguirre noted that behind them, scores of women and children were tearing their small homes apart and fastening their sad scraps onto two-wheeled carts.

They had studied the route for days. Don Miguel had ordered great topographical maps from Mexico City, and they were printed in vivid colors on oiled sheets that flopped heavily and hung from the edges of the dining room table. Aguirre attacked these maps with rulers; he charted useless radii with a silver compass. The trail seemed clear enough to Tomás and Segundo. They would skirt the western edge of the Sierra Madre, heading north until they could veer to the left and enter the safety of the mining city of Alamos, or they could veer right and enter into wilder lands of the Urrea ranchos. There, marked in black oil pencil by the Patrón Grande before the maps arrived at the house, were the vague empires of the northern Urrea confederacy: Cabora, Santa María, Las Vacas, and Aquihuiquichi.

“By God,” Aguirre said. “You own the entire world.”

“Four ranchos!” Tomás said. “I have four ranchos!”

“And a silver mine,” the Engineer reminded him.

Segundo, gobbling all the snacks the cooks could carry, smiled. He ate nanchis, sun-dried fish, pig cookies, skinny fired taquitos, orange slices with red pepper powder and salt, prunes, chicken gizzards. He grabbed two cups of coffee and stood with one in each fist, trading sips from either one. He was going to be rich. Four ranches! Surely, he’d find a way to end up with one of them.

A silver mine was what Aguirre was thinking about. With his engineering genius, they’d be pulling huge chunks of ore from the ground! He would settle in the fine city of Alamos, attending balls with Loreto. And then he’d finance a revolution with the riches.

“Alamos,” sneered Tomás. “That’s a town for women and priests. Give me horses.”

“He loves horses,” noted Segundo.

“He is a horse,” said Aguirre.

“Mines!” said Tomás. “I won’t spend the rest of my life in a hole with my ass sticking up in the air! Cows. Land. Bulls.”

“Yes, yes,” said Aguirre, waving his hand over his head as he walked his compass over the distances on the map and jotted notes in his notebook. “You are as one with your horse. You are a Mongol.”

“He’s an Apache,” noted Segundo as he bit into a fried banana wrapped in a corn tortilla with mole sauce on it.

Although very detailed, each map still had substantial swaths of the occult north seemingly erased. Frightening white spaces, some of them marked with the dreadful phrase “Unknown Territory.” Other regions were pale yellow, and marked with the hardly more comforting legend
DESIERTO
, both desert and deserted. It was the dark continent. And all along the top of the maps, the empty space known as “Los Estados Unidos Norte Americanos.”

Even the place-names disturbed them. Eerie, alien in their mouths, the northern names seemed violent, shocking, remnants of some loathsome Chichimeca antiquity. The names brought to mind eldritch barbarians, skeletal hordes whooping down from the black banshee-haunted rock spires of the uncharted wastes. Old gods surely slumbered beneath the north’s tortured mountains, terrible wraiths from before Christendom, entombed but dreaming of wreaking their havoc once again. If Tomás could have stomached the cliché, he would have made the sign of the cross.

Tomás read the names aloud for Segundo, who could not read them, and they were more frightening hanging in the air like wasps than writhing on the page like crushed ants.

Bavispe.

El Júpare.

Cocorit.

Guatabampo.

Tomóchic.

Temosachic.

Tepache.

Teuricachi.

Nacatóbari.

Motepore.

Aigamé.

“Are you sure,” Segundo quipped, “that there isn’t a place called Tiliche?” Which was, of course, hilarious to the men, being the name of the human pecker.

Undaunted, Aguirre charted a sure course.

They would move out early in the morning that Monday—he expected to progress about twelve miles the first day.

“A farewell Mass tomorrow,” Aguirre said.

“I don’t go to Mass,” Tomás replied.

“I don’t either.”

“Protestant monster.”

“Godless wretch.”

“I’m going to have sex,” Segundo interjected.

They would head north, to El Fuerte, where they could ford the Río Fuerte at a shallow crossing. Into the haunted Mayo valleys, and across the bottom of the Yaqui lands. They would stick to the western paseos along the foothills. Then they would cross yet another big river, the Navojoa.

They would pass the lovely city of Alamos on the trail to Guaymas that cut through the empty drylands to the northwest. There, about forty miles from Alamos, and roughly one hundred fifty miles southeast of the seaport of Guaymas, they should, in a watered valley, find the rancho of Cabora.

The People tied their miserable bundles. They were amazed that they had less than they thought they had; it was a wonder to them that it took so long to pack nothing. Women trembled; men wept into their sleeves. “The north,” they said, “is full of ghosts.”

Sad packets of dried beans were attached with strings to the slack sides of burros. A cask of vinegar here, an oiled bag holding salt or sugar there. Knives. Tattered dresses.

While the People and the buckaroos were at Mass, Tomás wandered around the town plazuela. The olmos trees and the alamos had been painted halfway up their trunks. Whitewash. Benches and rocks were also white. Aguirre slumbered on one of these benches. Lazy bastard!

Tomás bought a wax-paper cone filled with diced mango, papaya, orange, and shaved coconut. He sprinkled chile powder over it and ate the tart cubes with a toothpick. He was bored enough to feel relief when the church bells rang and all the hypocrites swarmed out of the church, men putting their hats back on, and women casting off their head coverings. Scuttling little people just as venal and superstitious as when they’d gone in. Liars trying to look pious for each other. And that damned Padre Adriel, no doubt eyeing the young girls of the rancho and stirring under his ladylike robes. All a big show to somehow fool an absent God into overlooking their sins. Tomás wadded up his wax paper, tossed it angrily into the bushes, and headed over to the front steps of the church, where that irritating papist was squatting with Teresita.

Adriel said: “Are you consorting with Huila, my child?”

“Consorting?”

“Studying with her?”

“Yes, Padre.”

“Beware, child,” he admonished. “The heathen ways are fraught with danger. Many have thought they walked with angels and have awakened with devils.”

“What?”

“You see, Satan is not a monster. We don’t see him when he comes, because he has disguised himself in beauty.”

“What?”

“The devil is, after all, an angel of light. The Morning Star. Do not allow yourself to be seduced by the beautiful side of evil.”

“Huila is evil?” she asked.

“Huila is beautiful?” interrupted Tomás.

Adriel stood.

“Ah, Tomás.”

“More propaganda, Padre?” Tomás said. “The Mass wasn’t enough for you to twist this young woman’s mind?”

Teresita stared up at them with her mouth open.

“Go play,” Tomás said.

“All right.”

She skipped away.

“Protecting the innocent from Satan,” said Adriel.

Tomás slapped him on the shoulder.

“Very noble!” he said. “Any tips for me?”

“Don’t look in the mirror,” Padre Adriel replied.

Tomás laughed out loud.