The Hummingbird's Daughter (53 page)

Two guards took up posts on high ground.

The general smacked the bars of the cage and smiled in at her.

“Now we’ll see,” he said. “Now we’ll see.”

He unlatched the gate at the back of the wagon.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“You will find out soon enough,” he said. He was smiling. He threw the latch and let the gate swing open a handbreadth.

“Do you wish to escape?” he said, laying his hand on the shiny flap of his black holster. “You would like to run,” he said. “Verdad? Eh?”

“I will stay with my father,” she said.

General Bandála looked around.

“Your father?” He laughed.

He heaved himself into the cage with her. The wagon tipped up with his weight. The wood creaked. The wooden tree attached to the two mules in front jerked up and caused them to shift backward. The metalwork on their leads and in their mouths clinked like small bells.

“What are you doing?” she repeated.

She could smell him.

“I am going to enjoy you,” he said.

She moved to the end of the cage.

“No thank you,” she said.

“You whore,” he breathed. “You have no choice.”

He undid his belt with one hand and grabbed her ankle with the other.

She kicked him in the chin.

“Ah, cabrón!” he yelped, clutching his chin. “Bitch!”

“I will remind you that you are an officer of the army,” she said.

He undid the top button of his pants.

She stared in his eyes.

“Look at it,” he said.

“No.”

“I am going to put it in you!” he said.

“Put it in yourself,” she replied.

“What kind of talk is that?” he cried, deeply offended by this sort of discourse from a young lady. “Have you no manners?”

“Sir,” she said, “a bandit on the highway would not dare abuse my situation. But you, who claim to be a gentleman and a general of the Mexican army, are more miserable and cowardly than a bandit.”

He got up on his knees.

“You should know,” he fumed, “that it is up to me to decide whether you should live or die. My displeasure could lead to your being put before the firing squad. It is you who can choose between life and death.”

“Kill me, then,” she said. “Kill me, but do not insult me, General.”

He fastened his trousers and backed out of the wagon.

“Do what you want with my corpse,” she said, “if you need relief so badly.”

He made a face as if he had smelled something rank.

“You are too foul to touch,” he sniffed.

He yelled to his distant men:

“You! Get over here now! Get this dirty creature to Guaymas! Double time!”

They rushed to the wagon and climbed aboard and shook the reins. General Bandála mounted his horse and stared at her as the wagon lurched down the road. Slowly, he nudged his horse into motion, and he followed her, but tried to stay well out of her line of sight.

Within an hour, a cavalry patrol was on the ranch. Segundo had no reason to protect these idiots. He turned José over to the colonel in charge. They dragged him to the same arroyo where he had helped ambush the cavalry, and in the morning, they tied him to a tree trunk by his neck. He was so near death anyway that he couldn’t stand. They watched him choke for a while, and when they got bored with that, they took turns shooting him.

Fifty-nine

GUAYMAS. She had never seen the sea, and in spite of her exhaustion and pain, Teresita was stunned to see a deep blue sliver of ocean curling along the coast in the distance. She closed her eyes. She could smell the salt.

She had swooned in the heat in a courtyard, cramped inside her cage. It seemed as if she had been there for hours. She could smell the stink of slops coming from the cell windows. Men screamed. Once, there was the startling crack of a firing squad, and an uproar from the cells: cursing, cups banging against the bars. Flies found her and dug in her eyes and nose. She was frantic from brushing them away, slapping herself because they came first in pairs, then dozens, then in hundreds until her face and arms were nearly black. Her wagon jiggled, and the latch snapped and the gate creaked open.

“Get out.”

The guard was dirty and looked as if he might be a prisoner himself. He carried a short whip, and he had a pistol in his belt. His cheeks were covered in wiry stubble. A fly alighted on his lip: he blew it away.

She crawled to the back of the wagon and fell out. Her legs were too cramped for her to stand or walk.

“Help me, please,” she said, putting out her hand.

He kicked her on the haunch.

“Does that help?” he asked.

Two jailers standing well behind him burst out laughing.

“Aren’t you a witch?” he said. “Can’t you turn into a bat and fly?”

“Watch out, Pepe!” yelled one of his friends. “She might turn
you
into a bat!”

“No mames, buey!” Pepe cursed.

Teresita grabbed the edge of the cart and pulled herself upright. Her knees shook.

“Do you have water?” she asked.

Pepe patted his groin.

“I have water here!” he said.

His friends laughed again.

“Let’s go,” he said. He shoved her away from the wagon. He prodded her with the handle of the whip.

“Be a good witch,” he said, “and I won’t whip you.”

She staggered forward.

Faces peered down at her from the cell windows.

“Chula!” somebody called.

“Oye, vieja! Give us a kiss!”

Pepe shoved her again.

“Hurry up,” he said.

One of the prisoners called: “Leave her alone!”

“Shut your mouth,” Pepe yelled back.

He hurried her through a stone courtyard and to a heavy set of double doors.

“We can’t stick you with the men,” Pepe said. “So you can sleep where the oxen and pigs used to sleep.” He laughed when he opened the doors and the stink hit her. She reeled for a moment.

“I have slept with pigs before,” she said. “Thank you for your help.”

She walked in.

He stood at the doors for a moment, unsure of what to say to that.

Teresita sat on the small cot shoved against the wall. “You have been very kind,” she said. “I will pray for you.” Her gaze unnerved him.

“Por nada,” he said, just to say something. Then: “There is water in the bucket.”

He slammed the doors and padlocked them. He stood there for a moment and listened. When he walked away, he walked fast.

Now, in her cell, she shivered. It was hot, but she shook. Coughed. She had eaten only dry crusts of bread on the journey, drunk a gulp of water a day. Her eyes blurred.

She took up the bucket and drank clouded water.

The guards the night before had tied her hands. When they had untied her this morning, her wrists were chafed raw and bleeding. One of them had put his hands on her bottom and squeezed when he shoved her inside her wagon.

“Take your hands off my daughter!” Tomás had shouted. He was answered by another blow to the head.

“Don’t cry for this witch,” the guard had spit. “You’ll both be dead in a few days. All your troubles will be over.” He had laughed. Everyone around her had been laughing. Teresita thought back to Millán. She wondered why the wicked were so happy.

She got up and pressed her face to the window slit.

White birds. White birds with vast wings formed great V shapes in the sky. Like angels, she thought.

She turned to her cell. It was a stone box, dank and steamy. The straw and dirt on the floor were clotted with mud and the old dung of the animals. Across the back, a stone shelf with one thin blanket heaped at its foot. She pulled off the blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders and sat on the cot.

Time slithered.

She tried to pray for her father, but she could not. She was asleep as fast as her head touched the canvas of the cot. All around her, vermin stirred.

Mosquitoes and biting flies, gnats and midges, came in the open windows. Fleas came from the blanket, sprang from between the paving stones. Lice sought out her hair, began to climb it. Spiders fell on her from the ceiling. Ticks made their way under her skirt and sank their heads into her thighs. She didn’t stir. Even when a great roach climbed her face, pressed its head in between her eyelashes and drank her tears, she did not wake.

How many days did she wait for the noose?

She lost track.

The guards brought tin plates of beans to her at seemingly random hours. The first breakfast was alive with small worms. She picked them out of the soupy beans with her nails and flicked them into the corners, then ate the sour beans. Sometimes, Pepe threw her an old chunk of sweet bread, or gave her a cup of watery coffee. He often laughed at her, especially when he insulted her, or touched her body when she was within reach, or stood at the door fondling his crotch. She ignored him.

Her body prickled and burned at all hours. The bites were everywhere. From her navel to her pubic hair was a wide, bat-shaped redness that stung and itched at the same time, but if she rubbed it or scratched it, ribbons of wet flesh peeled off and clogged her nails. She could pry the scabs off her hips, feel the heavy orange water leak out of her skin.

She shivered all day, coughed and retched—some fever brought to her by the night, some wickedness fuming up from the floor, perhaps, or injected into her by the thousand biting mouths that hunted her no matter where she crawled. Her prayers were not answered, or perhaps she did not pray anymore. She had nothing left to pray for. Was her father alive? Was he dead? Was it he who cried out so terribly when the torturers took another man to the screaming rooms? Had Cabora burned? Was Gaby alive? Buenaventura? Segundo? Had Cruz escaped? Not even Huila, in the afterworld, responded when she called.

When Pepe opened her door for breakfast as her fifteenth day in the hole began, he said, “Where is your water?”

“I poured it on myself,” she said.

She was pale white, and thin as a skeleton. It looked to Pepe as if her fevers had already killed her. The witch was already famous for coming back from the dead—perhaps she was dead now. He shivered, looking in at her. He could smell her. She smelled bloody and rotten.

“You are a big mess, girl,” he said. “You are disgusting.”

She could barely get whole words out, but she struggled to speak. “Why, thank you for that kindness, Don Pepe. Surely, God has graced you with the ability to speak to women. You are a prince among commoners.”

Though she wasn’t sure she had said any of it. She might have only made a weird groaning noise. Just this morning, she had watched Indians dance in the sky. Her face pressed to the window slit, staring up at the slice of blue above the stable yards, she had seen Yaquis with deer heads tied to their own heads, Apaches with fearsome crosses on their heads, strange feathered and naked men, women as well, twirling in the sky, whirling above her. And among them, she had seen Cruz Chávez in his white shirt and billowing trousers, and she had called to him: “Cruz! Cruz! I am here! Aquí estoy!” But he had danced on, following the skyborne warriors toward the sea.

“Want more water?” Pepe asked.

“More.”

He took her bucket outside and worked a pump handle. She heard the water spurt into the bucket. She crawled to the open door and looked out into the sun. It hurt her eyes. She covered them with one hand. She extended her other arm to let the sun hit her skin. Pepe saw the scratch marks and the hundred red welts on her wrist.

“Jesus Christ!” he said.

He put the bucket back inside and stood looking down at her.

“You must go back inside,” he said.

“Please.”

She lay facedown on the warm stone. He watched her skinny back shiver. Her hands quaked, but she reached for the sun.

“Please,” she said, “just a minute of sun.”

Pepe scratched his chin.

“Chingado,” he said. He looked around. “What the hell.”

He went over to a wooden stool and hooked his boot toe behind one leg and dragged it over to her and sat. He lit a cigarette.

“Smoke?” he said.

“N-no. Gracias.”

He watched the lice move across the top of her head.

“Are you really holy?” he asked.

“Do I look holy?”

He leaned back, stretched out one booted leg.

“Not today,” he said.

When his cigarette was done, he pushed her backward with his boot and closed the door.

Kill them,
she heard her father whisper.

And when the guards came with their rotten food and their obscenities, she knew she could kill them. She could open her mouth and speak the words, and they would, all of them, fall to the floor and squirm until they were dead.

“What?” said Pepe on her twenty-first day in the prison.

She shook her head, strings of wet hair hanging wild before her face.

She smiled.

“God bless you,” she said. “Lios emak weye.”

He dropped her plate and backed out of the cell.

She was laughing.