The Hummingbird's Daughter (55 page)

“Sir!”

The boy rushed away.

“Yes, yes,” Tomás said. “Quite right, Lieutenant. Allow us to die with some respect.”

Private García came up with the water in two tin cups. He was very careful not to spill the water.

“Give it to them,” said the lieutenant.

Teresita looked at Tomás. Neither of them knew what was happening, but Tomás pointed his chin at the boy and she reached out and the boy gave her the cup and she drank from it. It was warm and tasted like metal. Tomás held his own hands up and the boy handed him his cup.

Tomás smiled at Teresita. “It’s all right,” he said. “We are in the hands of gentlemen.”

Tomás put his hand on Teresita’s back and addressed the lieutenant.

“Where would you like us to stand?” he asked.

“Stand?”

“Yes,” she said. “I would like to know. Let us do it quickly. We are ready.”

“Ready?” Enríquez said. “Ready for what?”

“The firing squad.”

The lieutenant looked around at his men. They laughed.

“The firing squad!” he said.

“Sir,” said Teresita, “I don’t find it very amusing.”

“Oh,” said Lieutenant Enríquez, “but you will.”

He took a proffered document from the hand of a subordinate. He held it out before him and read:

“Miss Urrea has been recognized by presidential declaration to be the Most Dangerous Girl in Mexico.”

“Bravo!” said Tomás.

The lieutenant glanced at Teresita and raised his eyebrows.

“Are you?” he asked.

“They say that I am.”

“At the moment,” he noted, “you are perhaps the dirtiest girl in Mexico.”

She nodded slightly.

Enríquez resumed reading the declaration:

“And her father, Tomás Urrea, has been found to be an enemy of the state and a general danger to Mexican society. Political, fiscal, and moral supporter of the indigenous uprisings in the states of Sonora, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua.”

Tomás nodded and smiled. “That’s me,” he said.

“Señor, please.”

The lieutenant continued reading. He read of heresies and Yaqui raids, of abetting the enemies of the republic and defying the rule of both the military and the Church. He read to them of their grievous insults to the benevolent regime in Mexico City and to its noble head of state, the great president and general, Porfirio Díaz. He read that they had been found guilty of treason, of fomenting revolution, and that by abetting the recent armed assault on the cavalry by guerrillas led by the outlaw Cruz Chávez, they had earned the sentence of death by firing squad.

Tomás squared his shoulders. “Here it comes,” he said.

“I am no longer afraid,” Teresita replied.

“However,” Enríquez read, “due to the immense generosity of General Díaz and the Mexican government, the sentence of death will be forthwith commuted to expulsion.”

They stood there as the lieutenant folded his proclamation and tucked it inside his tunic.

“What did you say?” asked Teresita.

“Expulsion.”

“Expulsion?”

“Expulsion, indeed.”

“Enríquez, my good man,” said Tomás. “Is this a joke?”

Enríquez shrugged one shoulder.

“My dear Señor Urrea, it has occurred to me on more than one occasion, particularly since becoming embroiled in your lives,” he tipped his hat at Teresita, “that much of life is a joke.”

“Wait. We are being deported?” Tomás said.

The lieutenant gestured at the train.

“Mexico’s newest rail line is at your disposal. As you can see, it is a Santa Fe train. Mexico’s railroads are in partnership with the Santa Fe line, and this rolling stock has come to us from —”

“Wait!” Tomás said.

“Yes?”

“Exiled?”

“Not to return. I would consider that a good offer.”

“But my ranch!”

“Sorry.”

“But my wife, Loreto!”

“Perhaps she can join you.”

“But Gabriela!”

“Another wife?”

“His beloved,” Teresita offered.

“Ah! A complication. Perhaps she can join you as well.”

Tomás smacked himself on the forehead.

“Consider the alternative,” Enríquez suggested.

“We aren’t going to die?” Teresita asked.

Her fever had made her pale—her eyes burned in her white face like the eyes of a lunatic. She unnerved Lieutenant Enríquez.

“Señorita,” he said, “you will surely die one day, but this is not that day.”

She fell back against Tomás.

“Wait,” he shouted. “Wait! Instead of shooting us, you are taking us on a train trip?”

The lieutenant studied his own boots.

“So it seems,” he said.

Private García came back to them. He tapped Tomás on the arm.

“Sir?” he said. “I think the Saint has fainted.”

Sixty-one

THE SPIES WATCHED Teresita swoon and fall against her father. They counted the gun emplacements on the train cars. They noted the big tripod with the wicked bullet-spitter gun on the flatcar. A Pima rider named Martínez led them, two Yaquis and this skinny Yori boy who insisted he follow. They lay on their bellies in the weeds on a hill a half mile from the train. The boy said, “Let’s kill them now!” Martínez put his hand up. His blue bandana was carefully folded along the tops of his eyebrows. Runners were already going north, calling for warriors to come to the prison. But it was obvious to Martínez that there would be no assault on Guaymas, even though the Apaches wanted to set fire to one more Mexican city before they rested. No, the battle was going to be on the rail lines. They had to stop the train. They had to set Teresita free. They had to kill everybody. They ran, bent down, through scrub and berry bushes, cactus and hedionda, until they dropped into an arroyo where their horses waited. They had four of the best horses from Cabora—the Yori boy had brought them. Martínez sped down the arroyo and over its lip and into the redness of the desert without once looking back.

Enríquez ordered four soldiers to carry Teresita onto the empty train car at the front of the train. They were afraid to touch her at first. When they picked her up, one said: “See, boys, she is as light as straw!” Tomás hovered around her like a dragonfly as they moved down the empty aisle. They chose a random seat and laid her across it. She moaned. Her eyelids fluttered. One of the pustules on her neck broke, and ghastly yellow humors drained from it.

“Please,” Tomás said. “Bring me warm water and soap!”

Enríquez, who had followed, nodded at them.

They saluted and hurried away.

“Will she die?” Enríquez asked.

“She is strong, Lieutenant,” Tomás whispered. “So strong.”

“Well,” said the lieutenant, “you could pray for her.”

“I would have to learn how.”

“No one has to teach a father how to pray, Señor Urrea,” he replied. “Fathers and mothers know how to pray better than priests.”

Tomás put his hand on Teresita.

“I have been . . . so bad,” he confessed. “What God would listen to my pleas?”

The soldiers appeared with a bowl of steaming water and a towel.

Enríquez bent to Tomás.

“My friend,” he said, “I know little of God. But I do know God loves His prodigal sons the best.”

He patted Tomás on the shoulder.

“Men,” he said, “let us withdraw and offer these people some privacy.”

He posted an armed guard at each end of the car.

Tomás didn’t know where to begin, but he opened the top of her filthy dress and wet the towel and carefully mopped at her wounds.

Teresita slept through her bath. She did not stir when Tomás had a second, then a third bowl brought in. When he went outside to join Lieutenant Enríquez on the first flatcar, she did not open her eyes.

“But why are they sparing us?” Tomás said to Enríquez.

The lieutenant looked at his soldiers, stepped closer.

“If they kill her,” he said, “they make a martyr. Do you see? Mexico City could never contain the Yaquis if Miss Urrea were to be executed. That is my opinion.”

Tomás nodded.

“You are still prisoners,” Enríquez reminded him. “And should Miss Urrea misbehave on this trip, it is my duty to kill her. Until we get to Arizona.”

“The United States,” said Tomás. “Good God,” he sighed, “we’re going to be Americans.”

The lieutenant produced a silver cigarette case and offered Tomás one. He took it and accepted the lit match and drew the smoke into his lungs.

“Better a gringo than a dead man,” the lieutenant sighed, smoke escaping his nostrils.

“Barely! But, yes, hell yes.”

“A lucky day for you, Tomás.”

They puffed away.

“All these guards just for my daughter?” Tomás said.

“Yaquis,” the lieutenant replied. “We do not expect to leave Mexico without a fight.” He smiled sadly. “I don’t know if any of us will survive this trip, to tell you the truth.”

“But,” Tomás said, looking back down the length of the train, “those passenger cars, they’re full of civilians.”

“Es verdad.”

“It strikes me as odd that you would transport civilians into a war zone, my dear Lieutenant.”

Enríquez spit a bit of tobacco off the edge of the car.

“Really?” he said. “After all you saw at Cabora, are you so innocent?”

Tomás looked him in the eye.

“What are you saying, Lieutenant?”

“Sir,” he said. “Consider the advantage to our leaders should the savages assault a trainload of good Mexican citizens.”

“What!”

“The civilians are here by official decree.”

Tomás flicked away his cigarette. “Díaz
wants
the Indians to attack this train!” he said.

The lieutenant tipped his head and said nothing.

They looked back through the door’s window at Teresita.

“By presidential decree,” offered the lieutenant, “my own wife and daughters are in those cars.”

“Cabrones,” muttered Tomás.

“Such gestures,” the lieutenant said, “reveal why you and I will never be president.”

He whistled for his men to mount up, and he helped Tomás step across the gap and into the car. “Vámonos!” Lieutenant Enríquez yelled: the whistle sounded; a bell as if on a seagoing yacht clanged three, four times; the locomotive lurched and chuffed, and they began to roll.

The rails clacked. The cars swayed back and forth. The wheels sang on the rails and they clacked. Tomás’s eyes grew heavy, his head bobbing as he rocked back and forth. He sighed, rubbed his face. The land whipped past like yellow banners. Trees appeared and instantly vanished. He rocked. He swayed. He yawned. The rails clacked some more.

His head dropped to his chest and he began to snore.

It was a surging motion, a constant heaving. They could have been at sea. The train could have been alive. Teresita’s leather seat was as hard as wood, but to her, it was soft. Her head rolled back and forth as she dreamed. She was imagining the plum tree and its little purple fruits, and she was seeing the sacred spot where Huila once prayed, and she was walking with the old forgotten she-pig through a valley full of blue flowers. She dreamed that her old friend Josefina was eating breakfast and laughing. She laughed in her sleep. Good old Fina! What had happened to Fina Félix, anyway?

She opened her eyes. For a moment, she did not know where she was. She sat up. Her father snored in the seat behind hers. The train. Going north. To the border.

She pulled her hair back and looked out the window. The land rolled away from her in constant waves, curling from the train as if it were rotating on a great wheel. The land was orange, red, tan. It was pale blue and green and gray and slightly violet. It was white.

She turned and looked out the window on the other side, and the land was utterly still. She blinked. She could hear the locomotive chugging, could feel the sway and hear the clack. But nothing stirred. She turned back to her own window: now that landscape, too, was as still as a painting. She rose, steadied herself on the backs of the seats, and moved forward. The door at the end of the car opened easily enough. She stepped out on the platform at the front of the car. The wind whipped her hair in her face, but the train was not moving. She gazed into the distance, and there she saw a great crow in midflight, caught in the air as if in amber. His huge wings were spread, but taking him nowhere.

Teresita turned around and looked back into the car.

She cried out.

There, sitting in a seat, smiling at her, was Huila.

Teresita pushed the door back open and hurried down the length of the car.

“Huila?” she cried. “Huila? Have you come back?”

Huila turned and looked around her.

“So this is a train,” she said. “I don’t like it much.”

Teresita took her hands in her own and kissed the old knuckles, sinking to her knees.

“Huila!” she cried. “I have missed you so.”

Huila patted her head.

“Child,” she said, “have you got any beer? I miss beer.”

Teresita shook her head, and Huila stood and pulled her to her feet.

“Come,” she said.

She took a step into the aisle, and they were outside, standing on a hillside.

“Did you wear your shoes?” Huila asked.

Teresita looked down. Her feet were bare.

“My father must have taken them off,” Teresita said.

“How are you supposed to walk in the desert with no shoes?” Huila asked.

“I have walked barefoot before!”

“Your father will be mad.”

When Teresita tried to answer, she found herself walking in a blue stream, on smooth white stones.

“Isn’t that nice?” asked Huila.

Teresita’s three old men stood on a hill a mile away. She could see them like three little balls of snow. There would be snow in America, she thought.

“There are your old cabrones,” Huila noted.

Teresita waved to them.

A hummingbird circled her head. Its tiny wings whirred loudly. “You sound like a bee,” Teresita told it. It circled her again. She could feel the wind of its flapping on her skin. It chirped its funny little kissing sounds and sped away.

“Which direction?” asked Huila.

“Left,” said Teresita.

“Always flies toward the heart, that little bastard.”

They were holding hands.

Golden fish tickled Teresita’s feet.

They went up a hill covered in white flowers. The water followed them, flowing impishly against gravity.

“Have I been here?” Teresita asked.

“You were always here.”

“Huila,” she said. “Help me! Help me now! Things are terrible. Things are getting more terrible every day. Help me stop it.”

“Oh no, child,” said Huila. “I am on this side, and you are on that side. We cannot interfere with you.”

“Help me!”

“I am here, aren’t I?”

They climbed through a tissue of cloud.

Teresita started to see. Things were brighter here. The cerulean sky was full of stars.

“Look,” said Huila.

The stars formed straight lines. Then the lines expanded horizontally and vertically, creating a grid in the sky, spreading out away from her until they became invisible in every direction.

“Look,” said Huila.

The stars swelled. They looked like ice chunks melting in reverse, growing larger. They were silver. They formed small globes, a million, ten million brilliant silver globes above and around her.

“I was not a very good student,” Huila said. “I had to die for God to teach me this. But I am teaching you now. Look.”

Teresita stared at the silver globes. And each globe held a picture. She turned to the nearest one, which was not at all a star far away, but was close enough to touch. And in it, she saw her own face. And in the next one. And in the next one.

“Look,” said Huila.

She looked.

In this globe, she was riding the train. In the next globe, she was a child. In the third globe, she was dressed in fine clothes, walking down a city street. She held children. She was pregnant. She was laughing. She was weeping. She was asleep. She held a weapon. She was naked and washing herself. She made love to a man whose face she could not see. Her wedding day. Dressed in mourning black. Her legs held up and a baby coming forth. Some globes were so far away that Teresita could barely see herself or see herself only as a small dark figure among others. They were all clear to her, though most of them were too small to be seen at all. She was everywhere in the sky. She turned around and saw herself behind herself, reading a book; cooking; preaching; laying hands on a child; riding; sleeping.

“What is this?” she asked.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” said Huila.

“Yes.”

“It is you,” Huila said.

“I don’t understand.”

“It is you. Every you, every possible you. Forever, you are surrounded by countless choices of which you are to be. These are your destinies.”

Huila touched a globe. It rang softly like a chime. In it, Teresita sat on the train.

“This is your next second,” Huila said.