• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1137 0

road back toward the Río Mayo, and the thin Indians there turned as one and glared at him, thinking him a hangman, perhaps, or a bandit there to burn their hovels. He bought pulque, awful and milky, but the cheapest liquor he could find. It burned his mouth, seared his throat. Could they tell what he’d done? What the hell did they care what he’d done? As he counted out more coins, his hands shook. Oh, Christ—Don Tomás was going to kill him as sure as the sun rose. “Otro,” he ordered. The surly barkeep poured a bit into a clay cup. He held his breath and swallowed it. Coughed. If he could only get as far as Rosario! He’d skirt Ocoroni, of course. He’d be needing a new horse soon; this one was going to drop from its punishing charge. He didn’t think to steal money from the bunkhouse, and the girl didn’t have any money in the pockets of her skirt. He dipped his head. He’d steal a horse. It couldn’t be any worse for him if they caught him than it already was. Culiacán? Could he go to Culiacán? Probably not. Rosario. Sweet Rosario. If he stayed far away from Tomás’s cousin Don Seferino Urrea, then the Millanes de Rosario would help him. All he had to do was get south of town, to Escuinapa, and across the bridge into Nayarit. Nayarit, if he could only get to Nayarit! Tecuala or Acaponeta! The Indians stared at him. “What!” he bellowed. They put their hands on their machetes. He bolted for the door. Lightning ripped the silent sky and the west went red as open meat and the coyotes yipped and frolicked and he whipped and whipped his horse as he tried for home.

Segundo moved his bedroll out of his house and went to sleep at his sister Juliana’s house. He refused to eat for the first two days, then slurped at coffee cups full of chicken broth. Several of the vaqueros saw him sitting outside her door on a crooked wooden bench, holding yellow baby ducks to his lips, disconsolately hiding their heads under his whiskers.

In Segundo’s absence, Tomás was forced to send lesser hands to Alamos to fetch a doctor. Buenaventura came back to Cabora and went to Segundo’s abandoned house. Doña Loreto had telegrams sent to Tucson, requesting the services of a gringo doctor. Then she sent a telegram to El Paso, so Aguirre would know of the tragedies on the ranch. She went to church and arranged for a novena to be said for Teresita. Gabriela drifted back and forth between Teresita’s room and Huila’s room, helpless and panicked, reduced to putting cool wet cloths on each of their foreheads. Tomás sat by his plum tree and drank. Fina Félix said her chickens laid black eggs.

Teresita lay on her back, lost in her coma, alabaster white and unmoving. The only signs of life were her shallow breathing, and her left hand, which slowly curled and lifted to her mouth and formed a fist there. They called to her, shook her, spoke sweetly to her in her sleep, but she did not wake, did not smile. Bruises spread under her skin—bruises on her face, on her throat, across her ribs, and down the small of her back. Tomás sat beside her and took her unclenched hand and read to her from her favorite books, but she did not smile or give any sign she heard his voice. Gabriela kissed her cheeks, her forehead, her hot dry lips. Nothing stirred. Morning and night, Gaby took a silver brush to Teresita’s hair, and when more blood trickled out of Teresita’s nose, she wiped it with soft paper that looked, pinked and crumpled, like rosebuds in the wastebasket.

Her lids cracked open and hung halfway up her eyes. They could see the iris and pupil of each eye, rolling back and forth, as if they were untethered from her body, sliding helplessly in her skull.

“What does she see?” Gaby whispered.

“Nothing,” Tomás responded. “She sees nothing.”

And the doctor, when he arrived from Alamos with a nurse and Buenaventura, repeated it: “She sees nothing. She is as one dead.”

Buenaventura almost touched her.

Huila awoke and asked to see her.

Tomás and the doctor formed a litter for her of brooms and blankets and carried her into the room. She was too weak to rise, but she lifted