The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [162]
Señor Carrillo was on his yearly tour of the great state of Chihuahua, his personal fact-finding mission. It was the only way for a dedicated governor to really see for himself what the state of his state was. But it was also a grand opportunity to escape the Municipal Palace, to brush off the minor functionaries that buzzed around him like gnats, and to escape his wife and children. May God bless them and keep them!
El Señor Carrillo rode his horses and drank as much as he wanted. He ate what he wanted. He went where he wanted. He carried English rifles in cherrywood cases and killed what he wanted. When he wanted women, his assistants found him fine whores from the towns he passed through. Don Lauro would have liked to tour all year long.
Don Lauro Carrillo dragged el Señor González from natural wonder to vast astonishment like a mad tour guide: Behold, my dear colleague, our red canyons, our violet vistas, our terrifying chasms, our velvet expanses! Our eagles soar, our bears roar, our lions vanish like golden smoke, our red wolves wail at the moon. And only the Chihuahuan moon is so big in the sky, is it not so? Only the Chihuahuan moon is orange and close. The Sierra Madre! Burning desert at her feet, and snow upon her crown. Surely, she is the queen of the continent!
They rose through the terrible levels of the Sierra Madre on trails yellow with dust upon the crimson and violet and gray faces of the mountains. Mule trains thinned down to single file as they descended, their fat packs brushing the knees of Carrillo’s ascending riders as they minced along the narrowest parts of the precipice. Don Silviano often leaned out and frightened himself by looking down into dizzying abysses where thin white-silver ribbons revealed themselves—ribbons that were rivers surely a mile below.
Now, they rested.
Don Lauro poked at the fire with a whittled branch. On a small folding table imported from Paris by the last governing body to have vacated Chihuahua City, they had decanters of brandy and tequila. Don Silviano jotted notes in his journal and the sparks whirled above them.
“Gastélum,” he said.
“Nasty priest!” replied Don Lauro.
“Will he be able to enact your plan, my friend?”
“He must, my dear Don Silviano!”
“He has no choice.”
“Claro que no.”
They sat back, extended their feet to the fire. A brisk toc-toc-toc-toc came from behind them. Don Lauro lifted a finger.
“A woodpecker!” he announced.
Don Silviano bent to his journal and entered in it: A festive woodpecker sounded in the trees behind us, its industrious hammering representative of Nature herself bending toward the construction of a New Mexican Republic—God Himself putting Nature on the Díaz plan!
Don Lauro poured them each a copa of amber liquor.
“To Gastélum,” he said, raising a toast.
“To Tomóchic,” replied Don Silviano.
They had met Gastélum two days before. He had been directed by post to come into the camp above Tomóchic. There, he had dined on wild turkey and roast potatoes. The governor had preserved his finest bottles of champagne for his illustrious guests, and he had prepared a cot in a solo tent for the good father. It was the most comfort the priest had enjoyed in many weeks.
As they had sat in front of the fire, enjoying Cuban cigars and warming their feet after supper, sipping coffee-and-rum, Gastélum had worked off his redolent boots. His stockings were filthy and worn to the consistency of a particularly clotted cheesecloth. One of his toes had gone bad on him, and he hoped the fire would dry out its endless seeping. The governor and the jefe político tried to combat the scent of Gastélum’s rancid toe with well-aimed puffs of their cigar smoke. Soon,