The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [111]
“You stepped in horse shit,” he said.
“It wipes off.”
“Jesús,” Tomás said. “What am I supposed to do with you?”
“Catch me if you can,” she said, then grabbed the horse’s mane and swung herself up. “Fat Boy!”
Her skirts were indecently flung up over her hips.
“No!” he shouted, though he was already smiling, for this was yet another battle between them.
Teresita still insisted on riding like a man, straddling the horse with her knees obscenely open and clutching the flanks of the horse as she galloped insanely across the llano. Teresita didn’t even use a saddle, much less sit primly, sideways, with her knees held together.
Ladies didn’t gallop.
Ladies didn’t . . . jump fences, which is what she did every time she escaped him.
Leaning over the neck of the stallion, Teresita stormed through the madly wheeling horses in the corral. Her powerful mount exploded forward and she rode him into the air, seemingly ready to fly straight over the house like a hawk as they cleared the rails and sped away. Her petticoats were white in the sun.
Tomás ran out and stared down any of the cowboys who might be whistling their approval, or cheering her on.
“Imbeciles!” he snarled.
Then he snatched the reins of a horse away from the nearest vaquero and kicked open the gate and mounted the already trotting beast, one foot in the stirrup, one foot skipping, skipping, hopping in the dirt until he was aboard and racing after her, running so hard his hat left his head and circled in the wind before it fell in his wake.
The men watched and shook their heads, all of them in love with Teresita, and all of them knowing that no rider could catch her.
They blasted through the work crew in the arroyo. Aguirre fell on his rear in the dust, and a section of reed-and-stick frame fell over as the workers jumped out of the way of the raging horses.
“Cabrona!” Tomás bellowed at her. And on they charged, down the dry creek beds and up the arroyos, over small hills and into tattered and heat-wilted fruit trees. All around them, animals burst from the ground, fleeing from burrows or jumping for the brush or taking wing and exploding into the sun. Her skirt rose behind her like an indecent flag.
She slowed, then, until he caught up to her, but before he could admonish her, she surged ahead again, and he spurred his mount and tore down the serene valley beside her, their horses’ great chests surging in rhythm, their horses’ necks lying out straight before them, their mad eyes rolling white, and he began to laugh. Tomás laughed and laughed as they raced, Cabora now completely lost from sight, nothing before them but wild Sonora, and the bottomless sky above, father and daughter unleashed, growing smaller in the distance as their dust covered them, only the dirt smoke of their passing visible now, silent, vanishing, free upon the land.
Thirty-five
HER POWERS WERE GROWING NOW, like her body. No one knew where the strange things came from. Some said they sprang up in her after the desert sojourn with Huila. Some said they came from somewhere else, some deep inner landscape no one could touch. That they had been there all along.
Inside the shacks, Teresita and Huila always found the same scene: men outside, smoking and fretting, and women hunched inside, around the vivid centerpiece of the splayed mother, bulging huge and glistening in the firelight. Teresita prayed, she leaned forward and whispered. Teresita moved her hands in circles over the woman’s belly, circling in toward each other, then out, away from each other, swirling as she whispered, swirling, as if stirring water, as if she had reached into a bath and were mixing hot water and cold, stirring, her fingers suddenly bending as if she were pointing into the womb as she whispered, around and around. “Yes,” Teresita said. “Yes.” And the mother gasped and drew a long breath. “Oh!” she said, and then she laid her hands on herself, on her straining stomach, on her ribs. “Oh.” Teresita laid her hand over