The Hummingbird's Daughter (3 page)

Three

TOMÁS OPENED HIS POCKET WATCH and said, “Where is this damned Conducta?”

“It’s coming, boss,” said Segundo.

Segundo was known as Ojo del Buitre. Buzzard Eye. With that droopy beak of his, he even looked like a vulture. They said he could spot things so far in the distance that mere mortals could not see them at all. Often, Tomás would see a distant dot that could be a tree or a cow, and Segundo would proclaim, “Why, it’s old Maclovio, and he’s wearing his stupid red hat!” Or, “Those Indians might be Apaches.”

Ojo del Buitre. As if Segundo didn’t already have enough names. He was Antonio Agustín Alvarado Saavedra, Hijo. Hijo was, of course, “the Second,” which led to his nickname of Segundo. He was the son of the
caballero de estribo,
the top hand, from Don Miguel Urrea’s great rancho—his father had scoured the hundreds of worker women for juicy concubines for the great man. Segundo and Tomás had grown up together. Neither one would ever admit such a thing, but they were nearly brothers.

“Buitre,” said Tomás, “do you see it?”

“Not yet.”

“Then it is truly at a far remove,” Tomás noted.

Don Lauro was utterly asleep in his saddle. He listed to the right, starting to approach a forty-five-degree angle.

“I hope that cabrón doesn’t fall off his horse,” Tomás said.

“It would make an impression,” Segundo replied. “That head of his would knock a hole in the earth.”

“Now, now,” muttered Tomás.

Tomás had never fallen asleep on a horse in his life. He had eaten on horses, stood on horses, vomited on horses, and in 1871 had made love while trotting on a horse. Ajúa! Viva el amor! Someday he would try it at a dead run.

They all said he was the best horseman in the region. From his uncle Miguel’s million-acre ranch to the restaurants of Ocoroni, everybody talked about Tomás Urrea and his horses. This particular mount, El Mañoso, was legendarily cranky. That morning, in fact, in the stable, Segundo had been inspired to kick it in the head when it bared its teeth and turned to bite his knee. Tomás loved the horse, mistaking the horse’s pathological hatred of Segundo for loyalty to himself. After all, the horse had never tried to bite him.

“Buitre! Ojo!” shouted Tomás. “What do you see now?”

Segundo shrugged.

“Where is the wagon?”

Segundo languidly rolled a cigarette.

“Who knows, boss,” he said.

He adjusted his hat and stared off. He cleared his throat and made his report.

“I see a rabbit and a ground squirrel. The ground squirrel is getting a seed. There’s a pile of horse turds in the middle of the road just at the foot of the grade, and it looks to me like a big fly is really enjoying that.” He fished a match out of his hatband, struck it on his saddle, lit up. “Over by Los Mochis, there’s a pelican flying south.”

“You blasted liar.”

“Sorry, patrón. The pelican is flying north.”

Segundo blew a puff of smoke. He had an infuriatingly mild expression on his face. His patrón worked the black stallion in a circle.

“This kind of insolence vexes me every day,” Tomás told Aguirre, who had roused from his slumber, a dollop of drool pressed into his beard.

A faint, shrill scream carried over the distance. They craned around.

“What the devil was that?” Don Lauro said.

“Let’s go look,” Tomás replied.

Segundo put out one leg and held his boot against El Mañoso’s black chest to hold him back.

“Wait,” he said. “It is only one of the girls having a baby.”

Tomás reined in his mount and gawked.

“How did you know that?” he demanded. “Don’t tell me you have the ears of a coyote to go with your eyes!”

Segundo grinned.

“I saw that old midwife walking behind us,” he said.

Tomás saw Cayetana’s ramada in the distance.

“Huila,” he said.

“Sí.”

“Whose shack is that?”

“Quién sabe?” Segundo replied. Who knows?

Tomás wanted to know. He wanted to know everything. Especially if it had to do with women.

He’d always wanted to see a human child come to light, for example. He’d watched the cows and horses and pigs and dogs slide out of their mothers. Surely, a woman wasn’t that bloody, was she? The doctor in Ocoroni had told him he did not want to see it—he would be afraid of women forever after. It was the women of the poor ones, and the Indias, who did el parto in front of the doctor. Even the doctor was always locked out in the hall when the Yori women like Mrs. Urrea gave birth, where he listened at the door and shouted in his directions.

“Whose shack is that?” Tomás asked again.

“Some little she-dog.” Segundo shrugged. “Workers. They’re always making babies.”

Tomás wished he could leave these men and see what Huila was doing. But Segundo tapped him on the arm and said, “Boss, I see the wagons coming over the ridge.”

“Remember, Lauro,” Tomás said. “Look for women. Eye contact, that’s the key.”

The Urrea wagon was accompanied by Lieutenant Enríquez and his troop. The good lieutenant, upon seeing Tomás and his gents, reached into his tunic and presented a flask. Tomás and Segundo responded with flasks of their own. Aguirre, alone among them, carried no liquor.

“To Santa Anna’s leg!” they cried, and took sharp swallows.

Cayetana’s wailing floated over them on its way west.

“Are you flogging today?” Enríquez asked.

“No, no,” Tomás said, waving his hand. “A childbirth.”

“Ah. Well.” Enríquez did not care about a childbirth.

The train was twelve wagons in length.

“No women?” said Tomás.

“Women!” Enríquez removed his cap and wiped his brow on one sleeve.

“My friend the Engineer is seeking his true love.”

“Ah.”

Tomás had first instructed Aguirre in the ways of love when they were eleven, in boarding school in Culiacán. Aguirre had been a spindly-legged little scholar, and a bunch of rough boys from Caimanero knocked off his spectacles and roughed him up behind the big fruit stalls downtown. Tomás, fresh from stealing candied yams from the candy stalls in the open-air market, was wandering down the street to see if the parochial-school girls were outside the cathedral so he could offer them a few choice compliments. He had heard Aguirre sobbing first, and then had come around the corner to find Fausto Hubbard and Popo Rojas kicking him as he cowered.

Tomás was taller than the two boys put together. One thing he’d learned at Don Miguel’s hacienda was that he should protect the weak. Not that Don Miguel cared about the weak, but some of the old-timers among the People had told him that, and it seemed like the sort of thing to repeat to youngsters. And besides, Tomás was so enamored of the damned People that Don Miguel had christened him with a nickname: he called Tomás Nariz de Apache, Apache Nose. All the more reason.

Tomás waded into the boys and pounded both of them, sent them running with hard boots to the ass. Only then did he discover what he’d rescued: Aguirre in short pants and a beanie lying in a mash of rotten oranges and sniveling.

Aguirre had looked up at him, his green eyes and his tawny cowlick, and he said, “What are you, a German?”

Interesting, Tomás thought. This kid might not be much of a fighter, but he had already noticed something nobody but his rescuer was aware of: Tomás happened to know that he was a Visigoth. Actually, he didn’t know what a Visigoth was—only that they had brought blond hair into Spain. The connection seemed clear.

“Get up,” he said.

After picking peels and seeds off Aguirre’s embarrassing short pants, he led him to the cathedral.

“We are going,” he explained, “to go look at women.”

“Women?” Enríquez craned around and beheld the wagon train. “Here?”

“Surely, you must have women in this Conducta!” Tomás insisted. “Do you want Aguirre to die a virgin?”

“Now wait a minute —” Aguirre blustered, but they ignored him.

“Back there,” Enríquez said. “At the rear of the Conducta, there is an Arab. In the buggy. He has a woman, I think.”

“Fantástico!” Tomás enthused. “Let’s go.”

He had taught Aguirre on the steps of the Culiacán cathedral: look into the faces of every group of young women he encountered. Eye contact, that was the secret. As soon as a girl made eye contact, Aguirre was ordered to smile at her. If she smiled back, she was his true love. They were only eleven and twelve, but they gazed without flinching into the limpid mysterious eyes of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old Catholic girls in their blue skirts and white blouses.

He had tried this stratagem for fifteen years, but no one who had smiled back had ever even given him a kiss.

They trotted down the line of wagons.

Behind the Conducta train they discovered a buggy with a man darker than the Mexicans.

Enríquez said: “The troublesome Arab.”

“An Arab!” sighed Aguirre. How fascinating.

“I am Antonio Swayfeta,” the Arab said. “I go to El Paso, Texas. This is the most beautiful city in the world.”

Swayfeta’s boy, squatting beside his father, shrugged. El Paso, Culiacán, it was all the same to him. Suddenly, a mysterious creature covered in black cloth from head to foot rose out of the back of the buggy, a noonday ghost. The horses stepped back.

“Caray!” exclaimed Tomás.

This phantasm peered at them through a slit in the cloth.

Aguirre smiled at her burning black eyes.

He was astounded when the ghost’s eyebrows wiggled at him.

“El Paso, you say,” Aguirre said to Swayfeta, unsure if he had committed adultery right in front of him.

“Yes, yes! Streets. Trains. Gringos. Money.”

The phantom extruded a hand from the folds of cloth and adjusted a wrinkle—dark skin, pink nails, and a copper bracelet. Aguirre felt the bracelet was intended as some sort of message. The hand vanished.

“Have you been there?” he asked to camouflage his spying.

“No.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“No.”

“Excellent!” said Tomás.

“May you find your way,” Aguirre called as he backed his horse away.

“Inshallah,”
said Swayfeta.

“Pendejo,” said Segundo.

As the wagon train rumbled north, away from his gate, and his wagons of goods peeled off and entered the gate, Tomás kicked a leg over his pommel and flew off the saddle, landing flat-footed with his hands in the air. He clapped them happily. Every day was full of amazements! Even here, outside of Ocoroni! He could hardly wait to get out of bed each day to see who had died, what had happened, what worker girl would lift her skirt, what bandit had been lynched, what gringo or soldier or renegade warrior - imagine an Arab!—might wander through his ranch. Already, this boring day had been full! He directed the driver of his first wagon to rip off the canvas top and reveal the goods.

A Singer sewing machine.

Cans of peaches, pears, and stewed prunes.

Bolts of cloth.

A case of new repeater rifles.

One thousand rounds of long bullets.

One slightly rotten burlap bag of the new Burbank potatoes.

Jujubes wrapped in wax paper.

Twenty pounds of sugar.

Five huge tins of lard.

A tin of Nestlé’s Infant Food: the newest sensation of advanced science!

Cotton unmentionables, parasols, stockings, hankies, a straw hat with silk roses on the brim, facial powder, three dresses, and five pairs of French knee boots for Loreto, Urrea’s wife.

A sample board of ten of the new barbed wires from Chicago.

Bacon.

Coffee.

Blue pots and pans for cooking.

White cloth bags of Pillsbury’s XXXX Flour.

A Montgomery Ward catalogue.

Dark bottles of beer, clear bottles of tequila, colored bottles of various liquors but especially cognac—all Sinaloan gentlemen sipped cognac after great meals. Wobbly-looking clay tanks full of evil pulque and mezcal. Huge aromatic tobacco leaves wrapped in cloths that looked like big diapers.

A huge crystalline block of sea salt.

Among the other small boxes, bags, and crates, Tomás found his prize. A boxed set of Jules Verne’s great adventures:
Vingt mille lieues sous les mers,
and the newest,
Voyage autour du monde en quatre-vingts jours.