The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [53]
Loreto’s fine tent—now housing Tomás’s kitchen—was pitched over the graves of infants, dead of the coughing sickness, buried here by Jesuit missionaries. Segundo would have been deeply offended to know he slept on an old toilet trench. Only Huila spread her blankets on a clean patch of ground: no bones, no ghosts, no copulations or abandoned stale dreams spoiling in the dirt.
Tomás led a young woman by the hand and walked up into the foothills. Millán, the miner from Rosario, had introduced her to the patrón, already buying points for himself. He was no fool. And the girl, no fool either, lifted her skirts for Tomás as he knelt before her, licking his way up her thighs—brown and sweet as candy, at the same time tart and salty, musky, silken and cold in the warm air, refreshing as the sorbet he’d licked in Culiacán back when he was a student. She was amazed that this small bit of her body could bring the great master to his knees before her. She was perhaps the most beautiful girl on that whole plain, but he did not know her name and felt no need to ask. He pressed his face to her underwear, redolent with the burning scent of her, and he pulled the cotton down, over the bright points of her hips, the shadowy curve of her belly, until the fog of dark hair came into his sight, soft in the moonlight, tickling his face as he bent to her again. He pressed his lips to the mound of her, breathing her in, tasting her like a dog, as her skirts fell over his head and her fingers pulled his head tighter to her, her legs moving apart in the dark, her beauty falling around him, her greatest gift to him, this flavor, this smell, her secret.
Teresita lay about ten feet away from Huila’s feet. The wagon rose above the old medicine woman, like the greatest headboard ever built, and her mattress was the earth itself. Snoring mounds snuffled and shifted all around her.
Teresita lay back and pulled the blanket to her chin. Her bottom hurt, though not as much as it had on the first days of her ride. Her thighs and calves were burned from rubbing bare across the burro’s fur. Her neck was sunburned, as were her cheeks. The ground hurt her back.
She sighed.
She focused on her legs, as she so often had, and the glow ignited softly there, the golden honey feeling she summoned from no one could say where. She pulled it up slowly, filling her lower legs with it, tingling warmly, the pain draining out of her, the glow filling all the tissues of her body.
There was no way to know when the dream began. She didn’t know, even, if she really was dreaming. It seemed to her that she’d lain there for a time staring up at the stars when something caught her eye. Far up there, some strange little flicker, some bit of gray color moving across the stars.
As she watched, that fleck grew larger, grew more solid, more colorful, until she realized that it was Huila, walking down the sky as if it were a stairway.
She sat up and rubbed her eyes.
Huila’s skirt blew out behind her—she was smoking her pipe, and the smoke ripped away behind her in the dry breeze. She walked down in a spiral, coming from a place far up in the night, and she saw Teresita and smiled down at her.
“Huila!” Teresita whispered.
“Child.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m flying.”
Teresita put her hands over her mouth.
“You shouldn’t be watching me. It’s rude to watch people fly,” Huila scolded. “Look over there.”
Teresita looked toward the tents, and she saw skinny men in white running from sleeper to sleeper.
“Who are they?” she asked.
Huila hovered above the wagon, looking down at herself asleep on the ground.
“Son los Yaquis,” she said. “The Indians are dreaming about us again.”
Huila bent down and took hold of her own shoulders. She shuddered once, as if stepping into cold water, and pulled herself toward her own body. The body kicked once and rolled over. Huila was inside, hidden from view within Huila. Teresita watched her sleep.
The body said, “Good night, girl.”
“Good night, old