“Please,” I said now.
The war had ended. But the hills still lay scorched and barren, and Léon had been captured as an enemy Frenchman. Un francés. And now a blindfold and a bullet waited for him at dusk.
“He didn’t even want to fight with them,” I said. “He deserted.”
The things Léon had seen had driven him to betray his own country. I hated la Légion for what they had done to Léon. He hated them for letting their soldiers loose on this land. They raided villages, throwing women down on the earth floors of their homes, killing the men and keeping locks of their hair as trophies.
And those were only the things he had been willing to tell me, as though I myself had not known families killed or scarred by the French uniform. But he didn’t see the brown of my skin and consider me less than he was. He did not see the red of my hair and decide I was wicked. He saw me as something soft, a girl he did not want to plague with nightmares.
By the time Léon deserted, he had grown to hate not only la Légion but his own country, for starting this war in the name of unsettled debts, and for doing it while los Estados Unidos were too deep in their own civil war to intervene. So Léon had done the small but devastating things that earned him the name Le Loup. At night, he strolled into French camps wearing his stolen uniform. The blue coat with gold-fringed epaulettes. The red pants that tapered to cuffs at the ankles. The stiff yellow collar that rubbed against his neck when he nodded at the watchmen as though he belonged there.
He stole guns, throwing them into rivers. He set horses loose, driving them toward villages too poor to buy them. He pilfered maps and parchments, leaving them burning for the men to find. The rumors said he’d even called wolves from the hills, scattering the camps. But when I’d asked him about that, he only smiled.
Now the memory of Léon’s smile stung so hard I looked for the cut of it on my skin.
“He was working against them,” I told Oropeza.
Oropeza looked out through the silk curtains and onto the rows of curling grapevines.
“Then he is a traitor,” Oropeza said. “He is not even loyal to his own country. What would make you think he would be loyal to you?”
He turned his gaze to the square of tile where I stood in my huipil. In that moment, I saw myself as Oropeza must have seen me.
Men like Oropeza would never consider me worth looking at. I was short, wide hipped, a girl from the villages. I had only ever been told I was pretty by my abuela.
And Léon. My lobo.
Oropeza laughed. “The little campesina thinks el francés loves her?”
Campesina. I knew what that word meant to him, how he wielded it as both insult and fact. It was a word men like Oropeza kept ready on their tongues, a way to show their judgment both of where I had come from and the shape of my body. To them, my height and form marked me. A peasant’s shape, men like Oropeza called it, a shape made for work close to the ground.
“All he told you was lies,” Oropeza said. “He might have thought you were a little bit interesting.” He gestured at my hair. “A distraction.”
The salt of my own tears stung.
“One day you will thank me for what I’ve saved you from,” Oropeza said.
I set my back teeth together. He considered me and everyone like me a child. Men like him thought they had more of God in their hearts than we did, as though they held it in the lightness of their skin, or, for a few of them, in their eyes as blue as the seas their ancestors had crossed to claim this land.
Oropeza lurched forward, clutching his chest as though it had cramped. And then his stomach, as though he’d had a portion of bad wine.
I stepped back.
The venom in me, carried in my family’s blood, was spilling out. It had built in me, spun and strengthened by my rage. Then it had flowed into the air between me and Oropeza until he was sick with it.
This was the poison of Las Rojas, the venom our rage could become.
I kept myself back, pressing my tongue behind my teeth to stop myself.
I could not let the poison in my blood make Oropeza sick. If he’d heard the stories about my family and realized they were more truth than superstition, he would have me dragged into the street and killed as a bruja.
One of Oropeza’s men showed me out. My steps led me over the polished tile, and then out into Oropeza’s front gardens.
Léon had stayed for me. He had kept himself here, caught between la Légion he’d deserted and this country that considered him an enemy. And he’d been taken for it.
He’d never had the stomach for la Légion. He’d told me the night I found him, once I’d given him enough water for him to speak and he’d come out of the fever enough to make sense with his words.
He’d only joined because it had given him a way out of Alsace. He’d been told that la Légion would never check on the name he’d been born with, the name that would give away more than he ever wanted anyone to know of the body he kept beneath his clothes. The chest he bound down. The shoulders and back he worked hard enough that they could take as much weight as any other man’s.
And la Légion hadn’t checked. They did not want to know. They preferred their légionnaires forget who they’d been.
He could take the fighting, and even the beatings they gave les légionnaires to harden their spirits. But he could not stand how his régiment let the men work out their rage on village women. How they killed brothers or husbands who protested.
Léon had spoken up enough that they considered it rebellion. So each night they beat him in a way they called les couleurs. Blood on one cheek, bruises on the other, the pale, untouched stripe of his nose and lips between. The colors of the French flag, meant to put the allegiance back in him.
The night I found Léon, he’d worn those colors. It was the first time he’d tried running, and they’d caught him. So they’d tied him to one of the acacia trees that bloomed yellow each spring. His back against the thin trunk. His wrists and ankles bound behind it so he could not stand. All he could do was kneel.
They had told him that they may or may not come back for him, and if they did, it would be because they were curious if the wolves had eaten him.
That night, una vieja from our village had sent me into the woods. She asked me to bring her an oyamel branch from the fir tree she always held a little of as she prayed. I only noticed Léon because, at the sound of brush crackling under my feet, he lifted his head. His forehead shone with sweat. And through his fever, the thing I would later come to know as his charm seemed a kind of delirium, a madness. He’d mumbled a few words in French before saying, “If I’d known a beautiful woman would be calling on me, I would have made myself presentable.”
I unbound him and brought him home not because I was kind. I brought him home, holding him up as his eyes opened and shut, because if it had not been for the mercy of the other families in our village, my abuela would not have had a proper burial. I could not have done it myself. My heart was so weighted with losing her I was sure it would pull me into whatever hollow in the ground I made for her.
So I brought home this tall, underfed boy with hair so blond the moon made it look white. I boiled water and made pozole, to show God I was grateful, and that there was mercy left in me.
But there was no mercy in men like Oropeza, and Ariel, and Quintanar.
I had failed Léon. I had lost him. And now, at dusk, when a shot rang through the air, I screamed into the sound.
I screamed into the wind bringing me the rattling laugh of the men who killed Léon. I sobbed into the silhouettes of mesquite and acacia, and into the darkening blue of the sky.
Still