Diego cautiously walked around his father, eyeing the chest. “Why do you have Mama’s money in there?” he asked. “Her silver, her turquoise?”
Benny hardened his posture. “Your mother’s money?”
“Yes,” Diego hissed. “We need that money, so we can leave this damn coal camp someday.”
Their father paused for a moment before lifting his right arm and slapping Diego, as hard as he could, palm-side in the face. The sound was like splitting wood. “Everything here is mine,” he said.
Diego let out one groan, but he clenched his mouth, keeping anything else inside.
Luz stepped back out of reaction. She was used to her father’s temper. One moment he could be euphoric, singing Belgian songs, strumming his mandolin, kissing their mother and lifting Luz high into the air, swinging her with joy around the cabin. But like a thunderstorm flooding the plains, their father often changed, a violence bursting from his mouth and hands, usually directed at their mother. When that happened, Diego would walk Luz around the camp, telling her stories about the mountains, the names of the trees, the pictures in the stars.
“Don’t you question me, Son,” he said. “Get the trunks now.”
Diego helped their father load up the automobile with a pained expression. Luz sat outside on a tree stump, surrounded by the haze of dirt from their hauling feet. When they had finished and the cockroach car was filled with every artifact of their father’s existence, Benny walked through the sunlight cascade, taking a seat behind the steering wheel. He started the engine and drove off in a rumble, the automobile gaining speed, a foggy pillar dispersing into the air. It went on like that for some time, rocking back and forth, until, suddenly, the car stopped and Benny jerked open his door. He stepped down and ran toward the cabin.
Luz yelled, “Did you forget something, Papa?”
“Yes,” he said, trotting to her feet. He hunched over, sucking in a huge breath. With Luz in his arms, he lifted her into the sky, swirling her in a circle, the entire world a colorful blur. She focused on her father’s face—his freshly shaven cheeks, his green eyes, the slight upcurve of his lip. When Benny set Luz back down, he kissed her face and touched her hair one last time. Luz gazed at her father as tears flooded his reddened eyes. He was turning away from her now, hiding his crying against the landscape.
It was the first time it happened, that Luz suddenly understood something unsaid. She knew, sensed it in her hands and heart, a feeling spreading like ice water to her mind. Her father was a liar, and he was leaving and not coming back.
She began to cry as she had as a baby, thick, rolling, guttural. Luz held on to Benny’s shirtsleeves, pulled his hands to her face.
“Papa,” she said, in agony.
He pushed his daughter away from his light skin, and in the haste of parting said, “Be a good girl, my baby, my little light.”
* * *
—
Luz would look back on that day with a certain amount of shame. Even then, at eight years old, she felt foolish not to sense what came next—the long winter without adequate food, the blizzard nights when the hearth inside the company cabin grew ice, and those terrible and more terrible things her mother was forced to endure in that mining camp of men. But how could she have foreseen that her father, Benny Alphonse Dumont, would abandon his family so calmly it was as if he were tossing out a pair of heavily worn boots? And, more important, how was Luz to know, at such a young age, that everything, good or bad, is eventually taken away?
EIGHT
The Inner Self
The Lost Territory, 1892
Pidre settled in a town named Animas, the inner self, the soul. It was seated against the railroad and a wide river that flowed down from the San Juan Mountains near the emergence point, where his people had crawled out of the earth at the beginning of time. He took jobs in saloons, swept out horse stables, kept his money under a horsehair mattress in his boarding room. It was demanding work, but for every cent made, Pidre knew he could turn it into ten more.
The town was different from the village. The train’s steam rolled through the sky like a hovering ghost, coating everything in its wake in dark soot. French, Spanish, Diné, Apache, any kind of man you could dream of frequented the town. Pidre walked the muddy and bustling streets with a sense of reverence and determination. He tipped his beaver cap to other Indios in European garments, the freedmen in elegant suits. He savored baked goods made by women from lands as far away as Greece and Italy. At lunch counters, his tin pail in hand, he smiled and waved and compared the shape of his eyes to those from the East, the Chinese rail workers, the Japanese farmers. As it was in Pardona, citizens of Animas enjoyed his optimism, his undying work ethic, his childlike wonder at the simplest acts of beauty, a bursting sunset, peeling a grapefruit from the coasts of Califas. But Animas could be an ugly place, too, where those deemed criminal were strung up in the town plaza, death by hanging, a distinct American bloodlust.
After three years in the town, Pidre had saved enough for an investment. He considered his options delicately. Many of his compadres had wasted their earnings on silver claims that ran dry in a matter of months. He could put down a payment on a hotel, a small cattle ranch, a brothel perhaps, or maybe a saloon. One morning as Pidre paced the slim walkways of his boardinghouse, considering his many options, his hands wringing at his center, an Irish miner and fellow boarder named Michael “Mickey” Garrett stopped him before the staircase. Mickey was wearing new boots that he claimed were made of ostrich. They were purple with black dots and raised spikes. He stood before Pidre on the middle step, lifted his right foot, and said, “Take a look. Bet they taste like chicken.”
Pidre contemplated the boots for several seconds. He said, “Very pretty, Mickey.”
Mickey lumbered to the top of the stairs and stood before the narrow windows overlooking Main Street. He gripped Pidre’s forearm, guiding him to the eastern view. Men exited brothels and saloons with sore eyes. They held their hands to their foreheads and stumbled toward their horses and boardinghouses. The sun glistened over the mud streets and brick buildings, making the town appear, if only for a few short minutes, pristine. “Do you want to know where I got ’em?”
“No, not particularly,” said Pidre.
Mickey laughed. He had a ruddy nose and a dirty beard.
Pidre reached out and smoothed his friend’s neck. “Put some salve in it. The ladies will appreciate that.”
“Haven’t seen a proper woman since I left Dublin.” Mickey’s bluish eyes widened and he pointed toward Fourth Avenue. “That man there,” he said, “the one with the cane. He sold me the boots.”
A slim man in a French top hat walked the street in languorous strides. He held a decorative silver-capped cane in his left hand, though he barely tapped the ground as he moved. He didn’t stop every few steps to nod and offer morning remarks to shopkeepers or passersby. He simply went forward as if he knew no one and didn’t want to. The man seemed interesting, notable even. “Why should I care?” Pidre said.
“Because,” said Mickey, “he’s got something you’d like to see.”
* * *
—
At week’s end Mickey and Pidre rode on horseback to the farthest corner of town to a section that wasn’t incorporated into Animas. It was a no-man’s-land, dropped into the Lost Territory, marked by no imaginary or geographic borders. It was nearing nightfall. They approached a wooden cabin beside a bend in the river that was so wide and deep it appeared as a dim blue lake. It was early autumn. The aspens were ablaze. The men walked in their boots, sounds of cacti crunching beneath their feet until the noises deadened at the red sandstone walls of the canyon. They entered the cabin with their hats in their hands and their pistols in their sleeves.