The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [9]
Tomás was taller than the two boys put together. One thing he’d learned at Don Miguel’s hacienda was that he should protect the weak. Not that Don Miguel cared about the weak, but some of the old-timers among the People had told him that, and it seemed like the sort of thing to repeat to youngsters. And besides, Tomás was so enamored of the damned People that Don Miguel had christened him with a nickname: he called Tomás Nariz de Apache, Apache Nose. All the more reason.
Tomás waded into the boys and pounded both of them, sent them running with hard boots to the ass. Only then did he discover what he’d rescued: Aguirre in short pants and a beanie lying in a mash of rotten oranges and sniveling.
Aguirre had looked up at him, his green eyes and his tawny cowlick, and he said, “What are you, a German?”
Interesting, Tomás thought. This kid might not be much of a fighter, but he had already noticed something nobody but his rescuer was aware of: Tomás happened to know that he was a Visigoth. Actually, he didn’t know what a Visigoth was—only that they had brought blond hair into Spain. The connection seemed clear.
“Get up,” he said.
After picking peels and seeds off Aguirre’s embarrassing short pants, he led him to the cathedral.
“We are going,” he explained, “to go look at women.”
“Women?” Enríquez craned around and beheld the wagon train. “Here?”
“Surely, you must have women in this Conducta!” Tomás insisted. “Do you want Aguirre to die a virgin?”
“Now wait a minute —” Aguirre blustered, but they ignored him.
“Back there,” Enríquez said. “At the rear of the Conducta, there is an Arab. In the buggy. He has a woman, I think.”
“Fantástico!” Tomás enthused. “Let’s go.”
He had taught Aguirre on the steps of the Culiacán cathedral: look into the faces of every group of young women he encountered. Eye contact, that was the secret. As soon as a girl made eye contact, Aguirre was ordered to smile at her. If she smiled back, she was his true love. They were only eleven and twelve, but they gazed without flinching into the limpid mysterious eyes of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old Catholic girls in their blue skirts and white blouses.
He had tried this stratagem for fifteen years, but no one who had smiled back had ever even given him a kiss.
They trotted down the line of wagons.
Behind the Conducta train they discovered a buggy with a man darker than the Mexicans.
Enríquez said: “The troublesome Arab.”
“An Arab!” sighed Aguirre. How fascinating.
“I am Antonio Swayfeta,” the Arab said. “I go to El Paso, Texas. This is the most beautiful city in the world.”
Swayfeta’s boy, squatting beside his father, shrugged. El Paso, Culiacán, it was all the same to him. Suddenly, a mysterious creature covered in black cloth from head to foot rose out of the back of the buggy, a noonday ghost. The horses stepped back.
“Caray!” exclaimed Tomás.
This phantasm peered at them through a slit in the cloth.
Aguirre smiled at her burning black eyes.
He was astounded when the ghost’s eyebrows wiggled at him.
“El Paso, you say,” Aguirre said to Swayfeta, unsure if he had committed adultery right in front of him.
“Yes, yes! Streets. Trains. Gringos. Money.”
The phantom extruded a hand from the folds of cloth and adjusted a wrinkle—dark skin, pink nails, and a copper bracelet. Aguirre felt the bracelet was intended as some sort of message. The hand vanished.
“Have you been there?” he asked to camouflage his spying.
“No.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“No.”
“Excellent!” said Tomás.
“May you find your way,” Aguirre called as he backed his horse away.
“Inshallah,” said Swayfeta.
“Pendejo,” said Segundo.
As the wagon train rumbled north, away from his gate, and his wagons of goods peeled off and entered the gate, Tomás kicked a leg over his pommel and flew off the saddle, landing flat-footed with his hands in the air. He clapped them happily. Every day was full of amazements! Even here, outside of Ocoroni! He could hardly wait to get