The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid (32 page)

The last line in Spanish translates,
I’ll be there when you are sad
. The English is better
,
I’ll be
t
here before the next
tear
drop falls
.

I gu
ess they changed it to make it rhyme, but it lost something in the translation.

S
he
smelled of baby powder and hair spray. She
came easily into my arms and put her head on my shoulder.
I was not tempted in the least. It was a party. In the arc light of the moment, we were performers on a stage, nothing more.

We returned to the table when
No Seas Cruel
started playing. I like Fender’s Spanish rendition of the old Elvis hit, but I don’t know how to dance
to it.

The place was now overflowing
, in part because every teenager was there watching Ernesto and Susannah dance
.

Not a few of them and some of the older patrons
as well
were giving me strange looks. Not looks of hostility or even curiosity. More like admiration mixed with concern
.

Ernesto’s replacement as barkeep
was named
Baltazar
. I thought of him
as
Baltazar
de los ojos
as he
approached
our booth
.

“
Sirena
,
” he said
, “
Hugo is on his way.”

Baltazar
walked away
.
Sirena seemed frozen in place.

“Sirena,” I said, “who is Hugo?”

“
Mi novio
. But he don’t use ‘Hugo’. He use his nickname.”

“Which is?”

“
El Bastardo
.”

Wonderful. I was the blind date
for
El Bastardo
’s girlfriend.

“
Tell Susannah
I’ll wait for
her
in the truck,” I said, abandoning my chaperonal duties.

But i
t was too late.
El Bastardo
was charging into the bar,
his
biceps
bulging from his muscle shirt and his eyes doing the same from his
bulldog face
.

He reached the table just as I was swinging my leg out to make a getaway.
My
cast crashed against his shin, and
he
winced in pain, giving me time to
scramble
to my feet and stand on the bench
seat of the booth
, the only surface available at the moment
. He leaned in and took a swing at me.
I
arched
back to avoid the blow and lost my balance
. My head hit the wall, my butt hit the bench and my legs shot out
from me
like battering rams.

The cast delivered a second blow to Hugo, this time in this tima location considerabl
y
more painful than the shin. He d
ropped to his knees
and moaned, b
ut he was still blocking my way. I tried to
clamber
over the table to get past him on the other side of the booth. He recovered while I was
doing so and his head came
up to table height
just in time
to
intercept the leg I was swinging across the table. There was a sickening cr
ack
as the cast caught him full force on the side of his head. He dropped to the floor
unconscious
.

I scanned the room. It was like a photograph. No motion, no sound. Then they all rushed at me. The strange thought that streaked through my jumbled brain was that dying of thirst would have been better than what was about to happen.

They closed in on me, their arms extended.

And patted me on the back. And cheered. And dragged me to the bar and started pouring me shots of mescal.

34

I must have passed out.
The first thing I saw
the next morning
was a poodle skirt.

Above the skirt
was a pink sweater. Above that was the face of a girl about eight years old.

“He’s awake,”
she yelled,
sending needles through my brain. Three other girls the same age rushed in to
see
the strange man on the couch.

size="+0" face="Palatino Linotype">The
first girl, evidently the ring
leader, pointed to my cast. “This is his weapon. He used it to beat up
El Bastardo
.”

They took a step back. Then they giggled and ran out of the room. I lifted my head and the needles returned. So I scanned the room moving nothing but my eyes.
But e
ven my eye muscles hurt.

The couch was upholstered in
heavy brocade. The ceiling was pressed tin. I could see a lamp shade
beyond
my cast. It was yellowed and had beads hanging from it. There were scores of photographs on the wall. They seemed to comprise a family history.

Or maybe a village history
. Some were so old they might have been
daguerreotype
s, their subjects dressed in nineteenth century garb and standing next to wagons
,
mules and hand-guided plows.

I heard
footsteps
but dared not move my head to see what was coming. A
dark and
diminutive
ancient woman
place
d
a chair next to the couch and introduced herself
as
La Viuda de
Cheche Zaragosa Medrano
, meaning the widow of
Cheche Zaragosa Medrano
. She
explained that the crow
d from El E
rupto
del
Rey
had brought me to her house because I had earlier expressed a desire to meet with the
curandera
.

She handed me a cup of hot liquid I assumed to be coffee until I drank it and discovered it was a
n
n
herbal tea. She assured me it would cure my hangover. I was skeptical. But thirty minutes later I was sitting at her kitchen table eating eggs and tortillas and drinking my third cup of the stra
n
ge brew that
tasted of
epazote
,
estafiate
and
yerba buena
.

It was better than it sounds.

I asked about Susannah.

“She was with the others who brought you here. I did not allow her to stay because
I fear she is a
bruja
.
”

The thought of Susannah being a wi
tch
made me laugh, but a hard glare from
the deep-set eyes of
La Viuda
silenced me.

We talked for two hours while the little girls continued to run about the house occasionally peeking around the doorway to get a glimpse of me as if I were
the bearded lady or the two-headed calf.

I asked her about Alvar Nuñez and got the same response everyone
else
had given.

I asked her about wandering souls. She told me there were many
. I asked if there had been a new one recently.

“Yes, but I do not know who. When someone from his family comes to me, I will know it.”

I thought about lining up all the people in and
around
La Reina and parading them by
La Viuda
. I dismissed the idea because the logistics seemed too complicated
,
and I couldn’t imagine them agreeing to it anyway. Not to mention that I wasn’t all that sure she coul
d identify wandering souls.

But if being a wandering soul is just the hangover of death, then she could probably do it. Mine was completely gone.

My
next to last question
was about anyone who may have left La Reina in the last year or so. She said young people leave every year.

“But most of them return to visit
,” I noted, “
I want to know
if
there are any who have left and not come back.”

After thinking about it, she said there were only
three:
Hector Zaragosa Maldonado
,
Carlos Campos
Castillo
and Jesus
Padilla
Gomez
.

Or maybe their names were Hector Campos Gomez, Jesus Zarago
sa
Padilla, and Carlos
Maldonado Castillo. It’s a good thing I wrote them down.

My final question was whether she knew where Susannah had gone. She told me
Se
ñ
ora Celerina Gomez Maestas
had taken Susannah back to the bar where she could spend the night with
her and
Ernesto
.

34