Summer of the Mariposas: Chapters 11–15

Juanita paused and scrutinized the wagon.

The other girls stood half-ready to climb up, but scuffed their feet in indecision at my vehemence.

“We should get back on the road to Abuelita’s house. And this is the fastest and safest way to get there. So stop being so mulish and get up here. Come on, everybody up.”

As if to accentuate their cackles, the donkey let out two lungs full of vociferous braying.

“Whoa! Whoa!” Juanita kept calling, but no matter how loud she called, the beast just kept cantering along, ignoring her.

A dark, foreboding feeling took hold of me then. I had failed to convince my sisters to stay away from the creature and now we were being invited into his cave. I could feel it—something terrible was about to happen.

Their delicate winged bodies, prone and limp, were snarled in the girls’ hair, attached to their clothes, even stuck to their bare arms and legs, like dried pressed flowers.

With you—las cinco hermanitas, las cinco estrellitas—as my sacrifice, I will become more powerful than that cretin Huitzilopochtli ever was.

Suddenly, from within the fogginess of my mind, something resonated. A fragment of a chord, a familiar tune came to the front in the form of a tiny sequence of notes.

“Girls! Girls! Wake up,” I begged ecstatically.

In his great haste, he tripped on the hem of his robe and ran right into the cauldron he had been boiling for us. Unable to stop, a victim of his own momentum, he fell into the roiling mess.

Within seconds, a foul stench thickened and permeated the cave.

There were some old rusted tools lying about and some desiccated straw lined the far left corner, but half the roof was either missing or about to fall off. Nevertheless, we decided it was in good enough shape to offer us some semblance of security for the night, however pitiful it might be.

But instead of talking, I looked straight into her red fiery eyes with what I hoped was disdain.

I know how irresponsible you can be. Who’s the one who relinquished the piece of thread? Who’s going to protect your sisters now?

When Juanita pierced through one of them with her pitchfork, it screamed out, convulsed, and then lay lifeless.

Maybe it was the danger they had posed, or maybe I was just becoming psychotic, but I didn’t feel guilty at all. I felt strong and powerful and vindicated as I kicked a blood-splattered feathery lump out of my way and headed for our nest in the corner of the barn.

Then the lechuzas, all thirteen of them, vanished into thin air, leaving only downy feathers floating innocuously in the rays of the morning sun.

There was something else, something inherently evil had drifted into my wakeful consciousness, a bad dream of some kind—a warning, perhaps.

I needed to get outside now, before the girls rushed headlong into another nightmare brought on by a lack of caution.

A small, bedraggled boy was coming up the hill toward us with a small herd of goats following behind him.

His hair was long and stringy. Whole sections of it were clumpy and clung to his head like matted fur, and the parts of it that hung over his eyes and covered both his ears were wispy. Looking at him, it was hard to believe he was a human being. He reminded me of a mangy dog.

The girls greeted him the way they would have greeted a stray dog, with trepidation.

Chiding myself for being so shallow, I concentrated on being polite.

“Why is your goat tied to your wrist?” Pita asked him, as she sidled up to walk beside the boy up ahead of us.

“Oh, do you mean this halter?” Chencho asked. “See that bell on his neck? He’s the leader. Wherever he goes, the others follow. But he’s a wanderer, and if I don’t keep him close, he’ll take off on me. Then I’ll lose the entire herd. I can’t afford that. They’re my source of food. So I keep him right here, by my side.”

“I’ll never forget him,” he whispered, sounding more and more morose by the minute.

But before I knew it, our entire party was sitting around the campfire like a gang of renegades in an old Western.

“A lady is a lady in the vestibule as well as the campsite.”

The chupacabras’s mordida had left three ugly lacerations two inches above her ankle, on the outside of her leg, so both her ankle and calf were swollen to twice their normal size.

Instead, she drifted in and out of sleep for the last leg of our trip. Her lethargy worried me, so I took her temperature with a thermometer in the twin’s toolkit.

The girls kept marveling at the sight as we neared the gate.
“Forget the butterflies,” I said, interrupting their rapture.

Her white-streaked hair was perfectly coiffed into a bun, and her blue eyes were sharp and fierce, centered over a long aquiline nose.

“What happened to her?” she asked, inspecting Pita’s leg as our sister lay with her eyes closed on the rustic bench.

We watched in awe as Abuelita Remedios lanced, compressed, and flushed Pita’s wounds one at a time before applying her concoction liberally to each laceration.

Because she was heavily sedated, Pita slept through the lancing and compressing and didn’t come back around until Abuelita Remedios was done wrapping her leg with a pale thin gauze.

We drank the most delectable agua de tamarindo, sweet-tart juice made from tamarind, and ate and ate and ate.

In the afternoons, however, we sat in the courtyard while Pita lay out in the sun on a wrought-iron bench, recuperating among the myriad of colorful mariposas that abounded in that heavenly place.

By the end of the week, Pita got up and hobbled about the courtyard of Hacienda Dorada, clapping and laughing at the girls as they chased mariposas around the wide, robust bougainvilleas.

Abuelita reached into her pocket and handed Pita a handkerchief. Pita took it and blew her nose into it indelicately.