The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [8]
“Buitre! Ojo!” shouted Tomás. “What do you see now?”
Segundo shrugged.
“Where is the wagon?”
Segundo languidly rolled a cigarette.
“Who knows, boss,” he said.
He adjusted his hat and stared off. He cleared his throat and made his report.
“I see a rabbit and a ground squirrel. The ground squirrel is getting a seed. There’s a pile of horse turds in the middle of the road just at the foot of the grade, and it looks to me like a big fly is really enjoying that.” He fished a match out of his hatband, struck it on his saddle, lit up. “Over by Los Mochis, there’s a pelican flying south.”
“You blasted liar.”
“Sorry, patrón. The pelican is flying north.”
Segundo blew a puff of smoke. He had an infuriatingly mild expression on his face. His patrón worked the black stallion in a circle.
“This kind of insolence vexes me every day,” Tomás told Aguirre, who had roused from his slumber, a dollop of drool pressed into his beard.
A faint, shrill scream carried over the distance. They craned around.
“What the devil was that?” Don Lauro said.
“Let’s go look,” Tomás replied.
Segundo put out one leg and held his boot against El Mañoso’s black chest to hold him back.
“Wait,” he said. “It is only one of the girls having a baby.”
Tomás reined in his mount and gawked.
“How did you know that?” he demanded. “Don’t tell me you have the ears of a coyote to go with your eyes!”
Segundo grinned.
“I saw that old midwife walking behind us,” he said.
Tomás saw Cayetana’s ramada in the distance.
“Huila,” he said.
“Sí.”
“Whose shack is that?”
“Quién sabe?” Segundo replied. Who knows?
Tomás wanted to know. He wanted to know everything. Especially if it had to do with women.
He’d always wanted to see a human child come to light, for example. He’d watched the cows and horses and pigs and dogs slide out of their mothers. Surely, a woman wasn’t that bloody, was she? The doctor in Ocoroni had told him he did not want to see it—he would be afraid of women forever after. It was the women of the poor ones, and the Indias, who did el parto in front of the doctor. Even the doctor was always locked out in the hall when the Yori women like Mrs. Urrea gave birth, where he listened at the door and shouted in his directions.
“Whose shack is that?” Tomás asked again.
“Some little she-dog.” Segundo shrugged. “Workers. They’re always making babies.”
Tomás wished he could leave these men and see what Huila was doing. But Segundo tapped him on the arm and said, “Boss, I see the wagons coming over the ridge.”
“Remember, Lauro,” Tomás said. “Look for women. Eye contact, that’s the key.”
The Urrea wagon was accompanied by Lieutenant Enríquez and his troop. The good lieutenant, upon seeing Tomás and his gents, reached into his tunic and presented a flask. Tomás and Segundo responded with flasks of their own. Aguirre, alone among them, carried no liquor.
“To Santa Anna’s leg!” they cried, and took sharp swallows.
Cayetana’s wailing floated over them on its way west.
“Are you flogging today?” Enríquez asked.
“No, no,” Tomás said, waving his hand. “A childbirth.”
“Ah. Well.” Enríquez did not care about a childbirth.
The train was twelve wagons in length.
“No women?” said Tomás.
“Women!” Enríquez removed his cap and wiped his brow on one sleeve.
“My friend the Engineer is seeking his true love.”
“Ah.”
Tomás had first instructed Aguirre in the ways of love when they were eleven, in boarding school in Culiacán. Aguirre had been a spindly-legged little scholar, and a bunch of rough boys from Caimanero knocked off his spectacles and roughed him up behind the big fruit stalls downtown. Tomás, fresh from stealing candied yams from the candy stalls in the open-air market, was wandering down the street to see if the parochial-school girls were outside the cathedral so he could offer them a few choice compliments. He had heard Aguirre sobbing first,