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By Root 974 0

on their mounts beside him. He was like a giraffe among burros. Fools all. The People called Tomás El Rascacielos—the Sky Scratcher. And there he was with his idiot friend Aguirre and his pinche henchman, Segundo, out by the main gate, waiting for their goods to arrive. Well, Huila didn’t mind the goods. She liked lilac soap, and she liked the new tooth powders to clean her teeth, and she liked canned coffee and peppermints. She liked a quick snort of anís in a shot glass, and she liked cotton underpants. She did not like jujubes. The Sky Scratcher loved them, bought jujube in huge colorful sheets, and cut out little plugs of it that he fed to his horses. Jujube, in Huila’s opinion, would only pull out your teeth, and if you sucked it, it turned nasty—swampy and slick as a snail on your tongue. Damn the jujube! she decided.

Huila made her way up the low drybank where Cayetana’s ramada stood, crooked and seemingly empty. If you didn’t know a cute girl lived here, you would kick it apart as a ruin, try to use its walls as firewood. A cute girl mounted and forgotten. Huila knocked the glowing coal out of her pipe and added to her thoughts: Damn the men!

She pushed the awful blanket aside and bent into the hut. She was greeted by the same smell she always breathed when the little ones came. Old cooking smoke, and sweat, and a shitty smell, and all kinds of tang in the air. Thank Lios there was no smell of rot or infection or death in the air. Midwives did their work in many ways, in their own styles, but for Huila, it always began with the nose. Huila had seen terrible things in these huts—and every time she had, she had first smelled death.

Two little monkey girls huddled beside the mother.

“You,” Huila said. “Fetch me clean water.”

The girls scrambled out of there and ran.

“Do not fear, child,” Huila said. “Huila is here. Huila brought your mother into the world, and Huila brought you into the world. Now Huila will bring your baby into the world as well.”

“I am not afraid.”

Huila dropped her mochila in the dirt. She got down on her knees. Crack! Pop!

She said, “Yes you are.”

Three

TOMÁS OPENED HIS POCKET WATCH and said, “Where is this damned Conducta?”

“It’s coming, boss,” said Segundo.

Segundo was known as Ojo del Buitre. Buzzard Eye. With that droopy beak of his, he even looked like a vulture. They said he could spot things so far in the distance that mere mortals could not see them at all. Often, Tomás would see a distant dot that could be a tree or a cow, and Segundo would proclaim, “Why, it’s old Maclovio, and he’s wearing his stupid red hat!” Or, “Those Indians might be Apaches.”

Ojo del Buitre. As if Segundo didn’t already have enough names. He was Antonio Agustín Alvarado Saavedra, Hijo. Hijo was, of course, “the Second,” which led to his nickname of Segundo. He was the son of the caballero de estribo, the top hand, from Don Miguel Urrea’s great rancho—his father had scoured the hundreds of worker women for juicy concubines for the great man. Segundo and Tomás had grown up together. Neither one would ever admit such a thing, but they were nearly brothers.

“Buitre,” said Tomás, “do you see it?”

“Not yet.”

“Then it is truly at a far remove,” Tomás noted.

Don Lauro was utterly asleep in his saddle. He listed to the right, starting to approach a forty-five-degree angle.

“I hope that cabrón doesn’t fall off his horse,” Tomás said.

“It would make an impression,” Segundo replied. “That head of his would knock a hole in the earth.”

“Now, now,” muttered Tomás.

Tomás had never fallen asleep on a horse in his life. He had eaten on horses, stood on horses, vomited on horses, and in 1871 had made love while trotting on a horse. Ajúa! Viva el amor! Someday he would try it at a dead run.

They all said he was the best horseman in the region. From his uncle Miguel’s million-acre ranch to the restaurants of Ocoroni, everybody talked about Tomás Urrea and his horses. This particular mount, El Mañoso, was legendarily cranky. That morning, in fact, in the stable, Segundo had been inspired to kick it in the