The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [66]
“Yoloxochitl,” she replied.
He found this marvelous, and he sprang into the saddle and trotted into the wasteland.
The workers at Cabora had told him the warriors’ village was ten miles away, but he realized he had failed to ask in which direction. His options formed an arc of almost seventy miles. He rode toward Bayoreca, the small mining town that was the only center of civilization outside Alamos. It would be a start, at least. He asked Indian-looking walkers on the roads. No one knew which band of Yaquis had attacked, nor what the name of their small pueblo might be. In Bayoreca, they told him, he might find informants. He might even find some of the raiders, for Yaquis often worked the mines, using their immense physical strength to pull ore carts up the shafts.
It was a day’s ride away, and Tomás had his bedroll tied on behind him. His provisions were jerky steeped in chile peppers, a cork-plugged jug of beans, bolillos, a leather pouch full of boiled rice, a wax-papered slab of bacon, a few bottles of beer. He carried a burlap sack of crushed and burned coffee beans. Three canteens were slung over his pommel. Pans and plates and a coffeepot rattled behind him. Enough bullets. His beloved jujubes.
The world was silent around him. Silent and vast. Without the pulling weight of the cattle and the ranch workers behind him, he felt cut loose, light in the air as thistledown. He might fly, if the wind hit him right. He had never thought of how large the land was. The sky was even bigger. For all its hugeness, the earth was like the thin layer of caramel on a flan, and the sky rose in a rich dome high above, spreading forever.
Ravens were as small in the distance as the ashes scattering from his cigarettes. He could barely hear their squawks. Their voices hid behind the hiss of the wind, sounded as if they had been folded and tucked under the corner of the sky.
Then up: the dirt road climbed the foothills. Agave, ocotillo, creosote, mesquite. He saw tawdry huts leaning as if blown by stiff winds. Naked children with white bottoms covered in alkaline dust. Three graves beside the road; white crosses with no words upon them and stones also painted white, as if it had snowed in the heat. Flies worried his eyes, his nose. He pulled his bandana over his face, and the scrabbling poor men who saw him pass ducked in fear, certain this tall bandit had found them out in their sins and their indiscretions, the mala hora come at last, and they hunched their shoulders and awaited his bullets. But he was gone on his newest black stallion, El Cucuy, only the echoing clonk of its hooves marking his passing: no shooting, not a word.
Mountain schooners came down the road—lines of burros overloaded with machinery and tools, bundled loads under canvas. Driven by bored little men with sticks, men with no teeth, blackened skins, splayed bare feet that looked like fried leather, yellow and cracked in the dirt. They nodded to Tomás as they passed, glancing furtively at his weapons, turning their eyes away quickly.
“Is it far?” he asked.
“Not far,” one answered.
He crested the ridge and beheld the jumbled tumbledown pueblo of Bayoreca. Town of smoke and powder. Mine tailings, drunken sots scattered like ripped clothes in the alleys, dead dogs, laundry. It was filthy. He could smell the place two miles down the road.
Twenty
TOMÁS HAD LEFT THE TENT intended for Doña Loreto behind, and Huila and the house staff moved into it, spreading their blankets over the cots. Don Lauro set up a bed frame under the cottonwood near the wrecked ranch house. He assembled the iron headboard and footboard and set a small table with an oil lamp beside the bed, set a rifle leaning against the table, and a gunbelt hanging off the headboard, which really looked like a black iron fence, all bars and crossbeams, and he slept there at peace in the night