Rennie resented Maria but promised her they would come up with funding. She herself would bring in cash running simple paternity tests and tox screens. “Not to worry. I’ll take care of it.” If she spoke with self-importance, so what? She had to be important to someone.
“You’re good people,” said Maria.
She often said “Mountain people are good people.” It had a familiar ring to Rennie. From where? Heidi?
In the sierra, if you ran into difficulties, Maria said, someone would help. Humble campesinos would invite you to share their food. They would give you a place to stay, a petate on the ground or, if they had a bed, they’d offer it to you and then they’d roll out the sleeping mat for themselves. You never had to camp out though she preferred to, a tent surrounded by containers full of snakes, a snake or two inside the shelter with her. She felt entirely safe.
Mountain people were friendly but respectful, she said, not like in the city where you couldn’t walk down the street by yourself without men calling out to you. And on the coast! You’d think that coastal people would be the most open-minded, from all the contact they had to have with strangers. Maybe the more you know of strangers, the less you trust them.
What about desert people? Rennie wondered.
Maria felt peace in the soles of her feet, where she grounded herself walking on her native earth, on the narrow trails marked with lime, over the rocks, through the forests of oak and pine where the leaves gave their scent to the mulchy earth she stepped on, over the stones beneath her feet whenever she traded her boots for plastic sandals to wade through streams, dragonflies skittering over the water and butterflies all aflutter around her head.
When Maria went to the sierra, she went alone with only her snake tongs and hooks, her collecting bag and Rubbermaid containers. Dr. Sergio disapproved but she wouldn’t listen. Go to bed with someone and he thinks he owns you. Or else he worries about you which in practice amounts to the same thing. She never felt in danger and she’d found that if she waited for another researcher to accompany her, she’d wait forever. What did she need of a companion or bodyguard? Mountain women are strong. Walking through the barrancas, hours from the nearest road, you’d find pretty girls, entirely unschooled, who rode horses and threw knives and handled cattle alongside the men. And as for Maria, everyone knew her, by reputation, at least. The snake girl in boots, jeans and leather snake gloves and the Panama hat.
Víbora, culebra, serpiente. All the words for snake were feminine.
The Rarámuri were nervous around her—of course, a girl carrying chachamuri, rattlesnake. And Maria had receding gums that left the long roots of her teeth exposed, the way they’d look jutting out of the fleshless jaw of a skull. Imagine, a beautiful woman whose face evokes death, walking alone in the mountains with a bag of rattlesnakes in a basket. It’s a wonder they didn’t fall on their knees and worship her. They would spit, not on her or at her, but to the side, a superstition, to protect themselves from venom. Except for those who sold handcrafts to tourists, weren’t they shy around everyone?
“We used to be people who looked after each other. Now we’ve learned from you,” she said, meaning not Emine or Rennie, but the United States—“Looking out for Number One, every man for himself, but without the gringo’s self-restraint.”
Now, North Americans were taking over Mexico, she said, with their factories and condos and beach homes, while Mexicans were forced by poverty to leave. And by violence, though she kept that to herself. No one would ever want to leave this land unless forced. To travel, yes, of course, to know other places and other ways, but not the way the little towns were being emptied, so many people torn from their roots. “We are supposed to be proud that the richest man in the world is one of us.” She often thought that someday she’d head up to the sierra and there would be no people at all. Only snakes. The people all gone, with all their goodness.
“I never guessed I was the one who would have to be gone,” she said. “I miss mi tierra. I miss my people.”
The tears began and she fled to the bathroom.
“You do know why she’s here?” Emine said to Rennie.
“You invited her,” Rennie said.
“No,” Emine said. “I mean here.”