The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [51]
“You’re going to burn me!” he squealed.
Teresita stood in the wagon, staring at this scene in a strange kind of rapture. She couldn’t move. She forgot to breathe.
Huila did not burn Buenaventura.
She pressed the spit-soggy end of the cigar onto each sting, holding it there for a moment before moving on, leaving small prints on each welt, like brown watercolors of flowers.
Buenaventura immediately stopped crying.
“Remarkable,” said Aguirre.
Buenaventura sat up. “Doesn’t hurt,” he said.
“Tobacco juice,” said Huila, looking up at Don Lauro. “Always good for bug stings.” She grimaced, held her hands to the small of her back, stretched. They could hear it crackle. “Ay. My backbone is getting rusty.”
Buenaventura jumped to his feet.
“Hey, it doesn’t hurt,” he said.
“Don’t wash your face,” she ordered him.
Segundo offered Huila his arm as she turned to the wagon.
“Can I give you an arm up?” he asked.
“Why the hell not,” she replied.
The parade resumed.
In a blighted field of white grass, a hundred crows bowed to them over and over, cawing, bowing as they passed, over and over.
The travelers crossed themselves.
Rumor spread that one of the trees along the trail was heavy with yellowed corpses hung with ropes, their necks snapped and forming awful L’s, but nobody saw any such tree, though they came upon an exploded church, and standing before it an old madman with a white shirt, no pants at all, his long and astounding sex dangling in front, blood or some other black splash dried on his belly.
Then the Sierras chopped the bottom out of the eastern sky. The riders brought back deer, limp and bloody, hung across their saddles. Huila told the old story of the Yoem hunter who shot a doe and followed the trail of blood to a pool, where he found a beautiful maiden with her breast pierced by his arrow. People nodded, sighed. True, it was true. They called the deer the old name, in the old tongue: tua maaso.
They saw badgers, a lion on a rock. Eagles and hawks swooped down the terrible canyons, ruins vibrated with rattlesnakes. Small demons that the patrón called coatimundis glared at them with their hellish eyes, twitching their striped tails as they ran and giggled. People crossed themselves again and again. Unbelievable creatures and spirits stalked them and watched them and fled from their ruckus: red wolves and gray wolves; shaggy bears and jaguars. Layer upon layer of mountain rose beside them, mountains that could have exploded with Apaches at any instant, or soldiers, or bandits, or Americans. Demons slumbering in the narrow caves whispered their names, moaned in the night and vomited storms of bats. The rocks were blue, or red, or black, or golden. Then blue again, brown, white—or was that snow? Could that be snow? Millán the miner from far Rosario said it was the shit of seabirds, but he was shouted down. What pelicans could there be in the Sierra Madre?
Rabid dogs fled across the land, kicking up pale gusts of dust as they spun and snarled, turned sideways at speed and tore their own flanks with their spuming jaws.
Goggle-eyed faces peered down from yellow cliffs, scratched into the stone, or painted with red-berry dye, their grim mouths yawning or set in angry lines, fading with the centuries, but still rageful as the peregrinos hurried away.
They broke open sun-dried turds, pulled apart the hairy scats and found, among the long whiskers and mottled fur, small bones. The bright orange teeth of a gopher. Tiny skulls. A five-fingered foot that looked like a human hand, with long dark nails on each finger, smaller than Huila’s thumbnail.
“Coyote,” she said, “ate a devil.”
They hurried away, offering up puffs of breath with prayers in them small as the bones: “Jesús,” they gasped, “Ave María.” Huila took up the minuscule devil’s hand and wrapped it in a bit of tissue and slipped it in the pocket of her apron.
Owls visited them at night. Some thought the owls were witches. Some thought they were the angels of death. Some thought they were holy and brought blessings. Some thought they