The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [15]
“I don’t hear anything funny,” Gómez said.
He was starting to think this Urrea smelled like lemons.
Segundo said, “Son pendejos, estos cabrones.”
Gómez understood that: he and Segundo were clearly cut from the same cloth. Gómez nodded. Rich men and their little cowboys. He grinned.
“I can see that,” he said.
Soon enough, the wagon came around the bend. A fat Rural sat on the bench and worked the reins on two stoop-shouldered mules whose heads nodded sadly with each hoofclop. The wagon was a flatbed, and something was tied in the back, but there was no cage on it, nor a prisoner chained to the boards.
“Where is our miscreant?” Tomás asked, still jolly in spite of the visit from the maggoty pilgrim.
“In the wagon,” said Gómez, sounding as if he were addressing a moron. “In the jar.”
“Oh hell,” said Segundo.
“Jar—surely you’re joking,” Tomás said.
“I never joke, Mr. Urrea. We cut off El Patudo’s head and put it in a chemist’s jar. In rum.” He lit a crooked cigarette. There was no regulation that said he couldn’t smoke. “We are touring the province with it. A lesson.”
All the vaqueros crowded around. They had not seen a cut-off head before. Cayetana wanted to look away, but like all Mexicans, was eerily appeased and relieved by death.
Gómez continued: “Let the people see we are serious. And the bandits.”
The wagon came forth, and they could clearly see a large apothecary’s jar made of glass, with a glass lid that looked like a Russian church spire, all held down by crisscrossed ropes. Within, a dreadful soup of pale gold rum and the bouncing bobbing black head of El Patudo.
“There’s meat hanging off it!” one of the boys shouted.
The bandit’s head was still turned away from them, looking as if El Patudo was staring back along the road he had just traveled, remembering Ocoroni with fond nostalgia and hoping to return to it one day. A frilly lace of gray and pink flesh hung in tatters from the stump of his neck.
The wagon stopped, and the mules shuddered, and the rum sloshed, and the head slowly turned to regard Rancho Santana. Cayetana yelped. It was the man with the cherries from that night years ago.
“So,” Tomás finally said. “If this poor fellow was known as Bigfoot, why did you bring us his head?”
Five
AS HE SAT IN HIS OFFICE tallying the payroll—how was he supposed to feed all these people?—Tomás turned over a leaf of his fat ledger and jotted his new favorite word, Parangarícutirimícuaro. It would become one of his cherished lessons: his children would be tormented with that word for years, having to pronounce it without hesitation to prove to Tomás that they had mastered their oratorical skills. He composed a greatly hilarious poem:
There was a young man from Parangarícutirimícuaro,
Oh to hell with it.
A servant girl spoke from the doorway:
“Patrón? It is time for supper.”
“Supper!” He looked out the window. It was dark already! He’d been sitting there squinting by the blubbery light of an oil lamp, and he had not noticed.
“Allí voy,” he said.
“Sí, señor.”
She left a small cloud of cinnamon in her wake.
Tomás took a fine house coat from a wall hook and flung a few drops from his washing bowl onto his face. He slicked back his lemony hair and smoothed out his whiskers. He poured himself a token copa of rum, in honor of the beheaded bandit, and walked into the dining room. There, he was startled to find the long table set for one.
“And my bride?” he called.
The cinnamon girl appeared and said, “She was not feeling well, sir. Things of women.”
He nodded sagely. These things of women were apparently terrible and unpredictable. The tossings of the baby within, no doubt. His first child was already asleep in a cunning little wooden rocking bed that reproduced the soothing rolling of the sea and was painted pale blue with orange seashells along its sides. A squat girl from Leyva was paid solely to sit and rock the child at night.
Tomás regarded his supper. The girls lit candles. He sipped his rum. He wondered if the old man with the wormy back had survived—he had