Read Online The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea - Free Book Online Page A

his head toward the corral, then made some kind of O shape with his mouth.
    “What?” she repeated.
    The kid wiggled his eyebrows, then jutted his chin at the corral.
    She sniffed dismissively and moved back around to her side of the tree. What a strange and rude boy! She wanted to look at Don Tomás again. Don Tomás had never spoken to her, but he did wink once when she was walking into church. He never attended Mass, but he accompanied his fine wife and their children to the church, then spent the morning sitting in the little plazuela of Ocoroni, eating sliced fruit with chile powder that came in cones of wax paper.
    “Oye, tú!”
    “What?”
    “Girl!”
    She looked around the trunk. The boy’s head rose and fell, the hat casting a reflection in the green water of the trough. He looked like some kind of puppet show.
    “Is that him?” he said.
    “Him?”
    “Is that him, I said. Him. You know, the Sky Scratcher. The patrón.”
    “It is,” she said.
    “I knew it.”
    The boy turned his eyes back to Tomás and stared raptly. Teresa had never seen a look like that. She decided to investigate.
    She walked over to the trough and squatted beside him and nudged him with her elbow.
    “Hey!” he said. “Watch it.”
    He moved an inch away from her.
    “You don’t live here,” she said.
    “Hell no. Don’t live here. Don’t live anywhere.”
    “Ocoroni?”
    “No.”
    He spit.
    “You mean you’re just—wild?”
    She loved him.
    “That’s right,” he sneered. “I’m wild, like that bronco, and don’t forget it.”
    They watched the cowboys together.
    “Why are you here?” she finally asked.
    “Him. Urrea.” He put a twig in his mouth like a cigarette and said, “That son of a whore is my father.”
    “No!”
    “Yes.”
    “No!”
    “Don’t be stupid.”
    Teresa looked back at Tomás. He kicked one leg over the top of the rail and jumped down, landing with his arms in the air and bowing as the vaqueros applauded. “Ahora, chavos,” he announced, “I am going to my little house for a little bottle of beer and some sweet little kisses from the little lips of my little wife.”
    “To go with your little pecker,” Segundo said.
    The boys whistled at Tomás as he walked away.
    Teresita said to the skinny kid with the hat: “Stay here.”
    Fifty yards ahead of Teresita, Tomás was diminished in perspective, and he looked like a doll. She held up her hand and squinted her eye and it looked as if she held him in her grip. She smiled.
    He was worried. She could see it all around him. She only caught the vaguest suggestion of color around some people, and then only as she looked askance at them. It was sometimes this way with her, but when she had asked Tía why she saw these penumbras, the response was a kick and a glare. She did not raise the topic again.
    Tomás had worry leaking out from under his hat like smoke. Along with these purple clouds were some baffling vibrations that, for reasons she couldn’t explain, looked to her as if they came from a lemon. He clutched his hat and yanked it off his head, and a great polychromatic upwelling spiraled into the sky. It wobbled as he drew his sleeve across his brow, and then he was charging up the porch steps and vanishing into the shadows of the big house. The door slammed.
    Teresita knew she was not allowed to follow. She knew that a field worker caught inside the house would be in real trouble. But she was not there to steal. She would simply go in the door and call for him, and when he came, she would tell him she needed to talk to Huila. Like Tía said.
    She put her bare foot on the first step and tried it. It seemed solid enough. The only steps she had ever climbed were the solid stone stairs that led into the church. She stepped up, and stepped up, and was on the porch without incident. She was amazed by the technology of the doorknob. It was clearly a fine object, a thing of shining brass and an egg shape made of some white thing that could