• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1059 0

Teresita would concentrate first on her feet, tired and sore from walking on rocks and hot dirt all day. She would order them: Feet, go to sleep. Feet were the least of her problems—you can always get your feet to sleep. She could feel the golden glow come over her toes and spread to her heels, and the pain would be replaced by the soft tingle of sleep. Once the feet were becalmed, she could bring the glow up her legs, smoothing it like cream over her sore spots. Legs, go to sleep. And the legs, too, would sleep. Hips, belly, go to sleep. And now the glow was inside her, warm as a full meal, heavy in her gut, and it throbbed a little with her heartbeat. She would go this way up herself and down her arms. It was the hands that caused the most trouble, those bad twins, always inciting each other to misbehave. She would have to be cross with them, scold them a little to get them to stop fidgeting and plucking and scratching. Hands! I told you, get to sleep! The hands were such a task that she fell asleep soon after, tired and happily numb.

On the day when Teresita set out to discover who she was, she by chance went to the same fruit tree her own mother had once leaned against. Teresita’s hands went to the spots below where Cayetana had first gripped the trunk, and she looked out at the same corral, where Tomás was perched atop the same rail with the same vaqueros. Segundo was breaking a nasty little bronco, and the boys were laughing and shouting and waving their hats at the horse when it got too close to the fence. Above Teresita’s head, furious cicadas assaulted the high branches of the fruit tree, fondling its fuzzy globes.

The next development of the day announced itself with a hiss.

“Psssst!”

At first, she thought Tía had discovered her and was eating a cigar. She glanced over—a gray cowboy-hat crown appeared over the edge of the watering trough. It looked as if the hat was floating along by itself, or being held aloft by a ghost.

“Hey!” the hat said.

“What!”

A freckled face atop a gangly neck appeared beneath the hat, now revealed to be ridiculously huge on the boy’s head. It looked to Teresa as if his jug ears were the only things keeping the hat from falling to his chin.

The boy nodded at her once, then cut his head toward the corral, then made some kind of O shape with his mouth.

“What?” she repeated.

The kid wiggled his eyebrows, then jutted his chin at the corral.

She sniffed dismissively and moved back around to her side of the tree. What a strange and rude boy! She wanted to look at Don Tomás again. Don Tomás had never spoken to her, but he did wink once when she was walking into church. He never attended Mass, but he accompanied his fine wife and their children to the church, then spent the morning sitting in the little plazuela of Ocoroni, eating sliced fruit with chile powder that came in cones of wax paper.

“Oye, tú!”

“What?”

“Girl!”

She looked around the trunk. The boy’s head rose and fell, the hat casting a reflection in the green water of the trough. He looked like some kind of puppet show.

“Is that him?” he said.

“Him?”

“Is that him, I said. Him. You know, the Sky Scratcher. The patrón.”

“It is,” she said.

“I knew it.”

The boy turned his eyes back to Tomás and stared raptly. Teresa had never seen a look like that. She decided to investigate.

She walked over to the trough and squatted beside him and nudged him with her elbow.

“Hey!” he said. “Watch it.”

He moved an inch away from her.

“You don’t live here,” she said.

“Hell no. Don’t live here. Don’t live anywhere.”

“Ocoroni?”

“No.”

He spit.

“You mean you’re just—wild?”

She loved him.

“That’s right,” he sneered. “I’m wild, like that bronco, and don’t forget it.”

They watched the cowboys together.

“Why are you here?” she finally asked.

“Him. Urrea.” He put a twig in his mouth like a cigarette and said, “That son of a whore is my father.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“No!”

“Don’t be stupid.”

Teresa looked back at Tomás. He kicked one leg over the top of the rail and jumped down, landing with his arms in the air and bowing as the vaqueros