ROJA

       BY ANNA-MARIE MCLEMORE

       El Bajío, México , 1870

      They all gave him different names. The authorities, who had been trying for months to catch him, called him El Lobo. The Wolf. La Légion called him Le Loup.

      His mother, back in Alsace, had christened him with a girl’s name, though he had since forgiven her for that. It was a name he had trusted me with but that I knew never to speak. The sound of it was too much a reminder of when he’d been too young to fight the hands trying to turn him into a proper demoiselle, forbidding him from running outside because young ladies should not do that. His heart had been a boy’s heart, throwing itself against his rib cage with each set of white gloves for mass.

      I called him his true name, Léon, the one he’d chosen himself. None of this was strange to me, a boy deciding his own name. The only strange thing was the fact that he knew mine.

      No one outside our village called me or anyone else in my family by our real names. They worried that letting our names onto their tongues would leave them sick. The rumors said our hearts were dangerous as a coral snake’s bite. They carried the whisper that the women in my family could murder with nothing but our rage. They pointed to our hair, red as our skin was brown, and insisted el Diablo himself had dyed it with the juice of devil’s berries, to mark us as his.

      Abuela had told me our rage was a thing we must tame. Though everyone else feared that our rage might kill them, the lives it more often took were ours. Poison slipped from our hearts and into our blood, she said. The venom spread to our fingers and the ends of our hair.

      But even she found a little joy in it. She flaunted it. So we would have enough to eat, she taught me to crush red dye from the beetles that infested the nopales. They were pests, ravaging the cactus pads, but if caught they made a stain so deep red we could sell it. My grandmother even tied tiny woven baskets to the nopales, luring the insects to make nests.

      That only added to the rumors. Las Rojas, the grandmother and granddaughter whose hearts blazed so red it showed in their hair, and who made the same color and sold it with stained fingertips. We heard whispers as we passed churches, families drawing back from us, afraid we could kill them with a glare.

      Now, as I stood in front of Deputy Oropeza’s polished desk, I wished all the stories were true.

      “You want El Lobo released?” Oropeza rested his boots on the smooth-finished wood.

      The toes of his boots, long and pointed as a snake’s tongue, narrowed and curved up toward his shins. They had become the fashion of rich men, who now wore them not only for celebrations but in the streets, the forks nipping at anyone who got in their way.

      “Tell me you’ve come here as a joke,” he said. “Tell me one of my friends sent you to see if I would be taken in. Was it Calvo?”

      His hand flashed through the air. I flinched, thinking he might strike me. But he was halting me from speaking.

      “No, don’t tell me,” he said. “It was Acevedo, wasn’t it?” He clapped his hands. “I swear on the gospel, that man stops breathing if he isn’t trying to trick someone.”

      If Oropeza attended church, if he worshipped anyone but himself, he’d know better than to swear on la Biblia. But I kept silent.

      “How much did he pay you to do this?” Oropeza’s boots thudded on the tile floor. “Because I’ll double it if you help me play my own little trick on him.”

      The rage in me shuddered and trembled. It felt like it was flickering off my eyelashes.

      “No one sent me,” I said.

      The richest men in El Bajío couldn’t have paid me to be here. But I had begged every official who would see me.

      Most I found by stopping them in the street. The ones who listened bowed their heads to tell me there was nothing they could do, not for any Frenchman, least of all El Lobo.

      The ones who didn’t want to hear me—Senator Ariel, Governor Quintanar—shoved me to make me move. They backed away from me like I was crafted out of mud, as though if they came too close I might dirty them.

      I was not a girl who could ask for things. I was not powder and perfume and lace-trimmed fans. The kind of women who could wheedle favors from wealthy men wore dresses in the purples and deep pinks of cactus fruit. They wore silk and velvet ribbons tied as necklaces.