The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [16]
Tomás looked at the servants and the cooks and the empty room and the long table.
He raised his glass to them all.
“Cheers,” he said.
The child was asleep, wrapped in a rebozo and lying on the straw mat in the dirt. Cayetana huddled in the middle of the floor, eating a bit of rice and a chicken neck from a wooden bowl. She dug the tiny wads of meat out of each vertebral compartment, thinking of them as small presents at some fantastic birthday party. When she was small, chicken necks were haciendas, and she was a giant, pulling out Yoris and eating them as they screamed between her molars.
She glanced at her child. If she didn’t do it now, she would never do it.
When she finished eating, she wiped her fingers on her skirt, and she put the bowl on the rough wooden table one of the vaqueros had made for her. He had recently been traumatized by hearing that American cowboys called Mexican vaqueros “buckaroos.” It made him feel sad, philosophical even, and he had turned momentarily generous.
Cayetana’s things were bundled in the tatty door blanket of her ramada. She blew out the candles and gathered her child in her arms. She didn’t even look around—there was nothing to see. She hurried to her sister’s house.
Tomás called, “Excuse me!”
The girls charged out of the kitchen to attend to him. “Sir!” they cried in a panic. What if the meat was rotten? What if the tortillas were cold? What if the coffee was weak?
“Call Huila, would you?”
“Sir!”
They hurried back to the kitchen and tapped on her door. Her small room was beside the back entrance of the house.
“What!” she shouted.
“It is the patrón,” the cinnamon girl said. “He has asked for you.”
Huila went out to the table, limping a little. Her hip was inflamed. She could see the bones in her mind: they glowed red like fireplace pokers. Oh well! The hills are old, too, and they are still covered in flowers.
“What do you want?” she said.
Tomás smiled at her. Her insolence was somehow correct and appealing to him.
“María Sonora,” he said.
“Huila.”
“Huila, yes, of course. I am lonesome.”
Huila scratched her hip and said, “Huh.” She looked at all the food on the table. “Soon, you’ll be lonesome and fat if you keep eating like this.”
“Join me?”
She scraped a chair back and fell into it.
She shouted, “Another plate!”
A girl stumbled forward and set china and silverware before her and almost tripped hurrying out.
“They fear you more than they fear me,” Tomás said.
Huila poured herself some coffee. Five spoons of sugar, a splash of boiled milk.
“They respect me,” Huila said.
She pointed at his glass of rum and crooked her finger. He handed it over. She sipped.
He grinned and spooned beans onto her plate.
“Y yo?” he asked. “Do they respect me?”
She forked one of the thin steaks from the platter and ripped off a piece, wrapped it in a tortilla. Ate. Dipped a rolled tortilla in her soup, nipped off the end and chewed. Slurped her coffee. Picked up a yellow chile with two fingers and bit it: her brow instantly popped out beads of sweat. She collected some beans on the tattered tortilla and ate them, licked her fingers. She was delighted to discover a saucer of white goat cheese, and she pinched up a pyramid of it and shook off the drooling fluids and popped it in her mouth. A spoonful of soup: bananas! With lime and chile and chicken broth! She grunted.
More coffee.
She finally looked at him.
“Have you done anything respectable?” she asked.
“I saved the wormy pilgrim,” he said.
“Well, you sent him to me. I saved him.”
Tomás hated the sound of chewing, and Huila chewed like some machine.
“How is he, by the way?”
“Smelly.”
She slurped her coffee, leaned back, closed her eyes, and belched almost inaudibly, letting the gas escape through her teeth in a snakelike hiss: “Tssssst!”
“And you,” she said, “what do you care if an old ranchero lives or dies? Why do you like the People so much? Aside from the girls. Everybody knows why you like the girls.”
He cleared his throat. This girl business was best left unanswered. But the rest