The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [187]
Tomás put his hand on Teresita.
“I have been . . . so bad,” he confessed. “What God would listen to my pleas?”
The soldiers appeared with a bowl of steaming water and a towel.
Enríquez bent to Tomás.
“My friend,” he said, “I know little of God. But I do know God loves His prodigal sons the best.”
He patted Tomás on the shoulder.
“Men,” he said, “let us withdraw and offer these people some privacy.”
He posted an armed guard at each end of the car.
Tomás didn’t know where to begin, but he opened the top of her filthy dress and wet the towel and carefully mopped at her wounds.
Teresita slept through her bath. She did not stir when Tomás had a second, then a third bowl brought in. When he went outside to join Lieutenant Enríquez on the first flatcar, she did not open her eyes.
“But why are they sparing us?” Tomás said to Enríquez.
The lieutenant looked at his soldiers, stepped closer.
“If they kill her,” he said, “they make a martyr. Do you see? Mexico City could never contain the Yaquis if Miss Urrea were to be executed. That is my opinion.”
Tomás nodded.
“You are still prisoners,” Enríquez reminded him. “And should Miss Urrea misbehave on this trip, it is my duty to kill her. Until we get to Arizona.”
“The United States,” said Tomás. “Good God,” he sighed, “we’re going to be Americans.”
The lieutenant produced a silver cigarette case and offered Tomás one. He took it and accepted the lit match and drew the smoke into his lungs.
“Better a gringo than a dead man,” the lieutenant sighed, smoke escaping his nostrils.
“Barely! But, yes, hell yes.”
“A lucky day for you, Tomás.”
They puffed away.
“All these guards just for my daughter?” Tomás said.
“Yaquis,” the lieutenant replied. “We do not expect to leave Mexico without a fight.” He smiled sadly. “I don’t know if any of us will survive this trip, to tell you the truth.”
“But,” Tomás said, looking back down the length of the train, “those passenger cars, they’re full of civilians.”
“Es verdad.”
“It strikes me as odd that you would transport civilians into a war zone, my dear Lieutenant.”
Enríquez spit a bit of tobacco off the edge of the car.
“Really?” he said. “After all you saw at Cabora, are you so innocent?”
Tomás looked him in the eye.
“What are you saying, Lieutenant?”
“Sir,” he said. “Consider the advantage to our leaders should the savages assault a trainload of good Mexican citizens.”
“What!”
“The civilians are here by official decree.”
Tomás flicked away his cigarette. “Díaz wants the Indians to attack this train!” he said.
The lieutenant tipped his head and said nothing.
They looked back through the door’s window at Teresita.
“By presidential decree,” offered the lieutenant, “my own wife and daughters are in those cars.”
“Cabrones,” muttered Tomás.
“Such gestures,” the lieutenant said, “reveal why you and I will never be president.”
He whistled for his men to mount up, and he helped Tomás step across the gap and into the car. “Vámonos!” Lieutenant Enríquez yelled: the whistle sounded; a bell as if on a seagoing yacht clanged three, four times; the locomotive lurched and chuffed, and they began to roll.
The rails clacked. The cars swayed back and forth. The wheels sang on the rails and they clacked. Tomás’s eyes grew heavy, his head bobbing as he rocked back and forth. He sighed, rubbed his face. The land whipped past like yellow banners. Trees appeared and instantly vanished. He rocked. He swayed. He yawned. The rails clacked some more.
His head dropped to his chest and he began to snore.
It was a surging motion, a constant heaving. They could have been at sea. The train could have been alive. Teresita’s leather seat was as hard as wood, but to her, it was soft. Her head rolled back and forth as she dreamed. She was imagining the plum tree and its little purple fruits, and she was seeing the sacred spot where Huila once prayed, and she was walking with the old forgotten she-pig through a valley full of blue flowers. She dreamed that her old friend Josefina was eating breakfast and laughing.