The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [43]
A silver mine was what Aguirre was thinking about. With his engineering genius, they’d be pulling huge chunks of ore from the ground! He would settle in the fine city of Alamos, attending balls with Loreto. And then he’d finance a revolution with the riches.
“Alamos,” sneered Tomás. “That’s a town for women and priests. Give me horses.”
“He loves horses,” noted Segundo.
“He is a horse,” said Aguirre.
“Mines!” said Tomás. “I won’t spend the rest of my life in a hole with my ass sticking up in the air! Cows. Land. Bulls.”
“Yes, yes,” said Aguirre, waving his hand over his head as he walked his compass over the distances on the map and jotted notes in his notebook. “You are as one with your horse. You are a Mongol.”
“He’s an Apache,” noted Segundo as he bit into a fried banana wrapped in a corn tortilla with mole sauce on it.
Although very detailed, each map still had substantial swaths of the occult north seemingly erased. Frightening white spaces, some of them marked with the dreadful phrase “Unknown Territory.” Other regions were pale yellow, and marked with the hardly more comforting legend DESIERTO, both desert and deserted. It was the dark continent. And all along the top of the maps, the empty space known as “Los Estados Unidos Norte Americanos.”
Even the place-names disturbed them. Eerie, alien in their mouths, the northern names seemed violent, shocking, remnants of some loathsome Chichimeca antiquity. The names brought to mind eldritch barbarians, skeletal hordes whooping down from the black banshee-haunted rock spires of the uncharted wastes. Old gods surely slumbered beneath the north’s tortured mountains, terrible wraiths from before Christendom, entombed but dreaming of wreaking their havoc once again. If Tomás could have stomached the cliché, he would have made the sign of the cross.
Tomás read the names aloud for Segundo, who could not read them, and they were more frightening hanging in the air like wasps than writhing on the page like crushed ants.
Bavispe.
El Júpare.
Cocorit.
Guatabampo.
Tomóchic.
Temosachic.
Tepache.
Teuricachi.
Nacatóbari.
Motepore.
Aigamé.
“Are you sure,” Segundo quipped, “that there isn’t a place called Tiliche?” Which was, of course, hilarious to the men, being the name of the human pecker.
Undaunted, Aguirre charted a sure course.
They would move out early in the morning that Monday—he expected to progress about twelve miles the first day.
“A farewell Mass tomorrow,” Aguirre said.
“I don’t go to Mass,” Tomás replied.
“I don’t either.”
“Protestant monster.”
“Godless wretch.”
“I’m going to have sex,” Segundo interjected.
They would head north, to El Fuerte, where they could ford the Río Fuerte at a shallow crossing. Into the haunted Mayo valleys, and across the bottom of the Yaqui lands. They would stick to the western paseos along the foothills. Then they would cross yet another big river, the Navojoa.
They would pass the lovely city of Alamos on the trail to Guaymas that cut through the empty drylands to the northwest. There, about forty miles from Alamos, and roughly one hundred fifty miles southeast of the seaport of Guaymas, they should, in a watered valley, find the rancho of Cabora.
The People tied their miserable bundles. They were amazed that they had less than they thought they had; it was a wonder to them that it took so long to pack nothing. Women trembled; men wept into their sleeves. “The north,” they said, “is full of ghosts.”
Sad packets of dried beans were attached with strings to the slack sides of burros. A cask of vinegar here, an oiled bag holding salt or sugar there. Knives. Tattered dresses.
While the People and the buckaroos were at Mass, Tomás wandered around the town plazuela. The olmos trees and the alamos had been painted halfway up their trunks. Whitewash. Benches and rocks were also white. Aguirre slumbered on one of these benches. Lazy