The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [91]
He fit the lid on the top and slid open the entry door at the bottom so the confused bees still circling could enter.
“They should all be inside in an hour,” he said.
Cantúa regarded him with a kind of awe.
“May I feed you?” he asked.
“Perhaps some coffee,” Tomás said.
As they went in the door, Gaby said, “That is the bravest thing I have ever seen.”
“I would do anything,” he responded, “to keep you safe from harm.”
“Ay, Don Tomás,” she said. “You say the nicest things.”
“Was that not test enough? You must believe me. Put me to any test, Gaby.” He stood with hat in hand, so tall his head almost brushed the ceiling. “Anything,” he said, “in honor of you.”
Señor Cantúa brought out the coffee. It was too late to scowl. All he could do now was to sit there with them and keep them apart.
Tomás brushed his whiskers and smiled blandly. That marijuana, he thought, it adds something to the day!
“Say, do you know what?” he blurted. “I am hungry after all. Do you have any sweet rolls?”
Gaby jumped up.
“I’ll go, Papá.”
She flicked a look at Tomás as she went, and she managed to swirl her skirt as she passed through the door.
“My God, Cantúa,” Tomás said.
Cantúa raised his hands.
“Please,” he pleaded, “be a gentleman.”
By the time Aguirre pulled up to the restaurant, Tomás had eaten all the sweet rolls, and was now tearing into a platter of machaca. Gaby had fried the shredded beef with eggs and beside the mound of machaca she had piled fried nopalitos.
When Aguirre rushed in, Tomás cried, “Engineer! Have a flour tortilla!”
“Didn’t you eat breakfast?” Aguirre said.
“Suddenly, I was hungry.”
Somehow, Tomás had found two violinists and a bajo player, and they plucked and fiddled folk songs as an old woman in the corner held up her skirt and danced barefoot. Señor Cantúa conducted the music with a blue and white serving spoon. Gaby shooed a chicken out the front door.
“Besides,” Tomás said, “if my Gabriela’s hand has prepared it, how could I not eat it?”
“Ay, Tomás,” she said.
Aguirre thought: My Gabriela? And he thought: Ay, Tomás?
“What of the bees?” he asked.
Tomás waved his hand.
“The bees are safely in their hive, Aguirre! The bees are ancient history! Now we are having a party. My treat!”
The snot-nosed boy from that morning came out of the kitchen carrying a bowl of beans.
“Eat, cabrón,” said Tomás. “Life is wonderful.”
Aguirre sat.
Five travelers came in and immediately fell on the food that Tomás paid for in this burst of magnanimity.
Aguirre smiled at Gabriela.
“Water, please,” he said.
She scrunched her nose at him and went to the kitchen.
“What a nose, eh, Engineer?” said Tomás.
“Her nose is,” Aguirre replied, searching for the proper phrase, “eloquent.”
The old woman asked Aguirre to dance. He waved his hands in a frenzy of dread, but Tomás pushed him to his feet. The hilarity that erupted in the room when Aguirre shuffled in a circle with his hands caught in the old woman’s claws did not make him feel very happy at all. His obvious discomfort made all the travelers laugh even louder.
There was so much uproar inside Cantúa’s that nobody heard the rumble of the wheels as Doña Loreto Urrea’s buggies bearing all the children and the priest and herself rolled past on their way to Cabora.
Twenty-nine
THEY RODE BACK SLOWLY, and as always, carefully.
In Sinaloa, the tarantulas had been mournful and fat, with bright red legs. These norteño tarantulas were the color of coffee, and skinny, and seemed to be nervous. In Sonora, Tomás was witness to new breeds of vinegarroons and scorpions, horrible things with pincers and swollen fangs and dreadful scents. He was often amazed by their single-minded clanking progress across the Alamos road. The nasty little wind scorpions, all yellow and orange and black, like Jerusalem crickets—which he, like the People, called “niños de la tierra”—but with immense fangs and dyspeptic dispositions, actually lifted their front legs at him and displayed their dark fangs in sincere threats, and they spun in circles to track him as he