“Let’s get going,” Pidre said to Mickey. “I don’t want to see no more.”
Mickey had gotten good and drunk. He was an agreeable man and shrugged off Pidre’s request with little protest. “You’re the boss,” he said.
They stood to exit the tent, navigating the bleachers, Pidre avoiding the sight of the tragic bear being beaten with leather straps by Wilston Montez. The crowd was louder than before and the ripe smells of their perspiration and abundant liquor mingled with the scent of the bear’s glandular fear.
They were nearly out of the fairgrounds when Mickey pointed to a side tent, an oblong bluish womb: SIMODECEA SALAZAR-SMITH, MEXICAN BLACK WIDOW, A SHOT BETTER THAN ANY MAN! WATCH HER SHOOT CARDS, GLASS MARBLES, BOTTLES, CLAY PIGEONS, HOLES THROUGH DIMES, THE FLAMES OFF CANDLES, AND MUCH MUCH MORE!
“Now that’s a sad story,” Mickey said, stepping toward the bulletin board, running his hand over the dusty boards. “She’s the one who killed her true love. Shot him clean through the head, took off half his face. They couldn’t have an open casket, they say.”
Pidre glanced at the sign and snorted. “Still performing after all that?”
“They say she started at eleven years old. It’s the only life she knows.”
Pidre stroked his smooth jawline and looked beyond the bulletin board through an opening in the tent flap. The rounded showground was half the size of the big top and hazy with smoke. There were sounds like songbirds confused by night. Forlorn whistles. A sterling gasp. As if pulled inward by an unseen embrace, Pidre guided himself and Mickey into the smallish tent. The crowd was sparse and the sawdust was clean, smelling of pine.
At first, it was difficult to see what drew the steady gazes of the serene crowd. Their eyes were wells of concentration, and their faces gleamed with gratitude, as if visited by a saint. Pidre heard the sonorous crack of gunfire. High on a wooden platform, she was a stately woman in a beaded gown, glistening in white fringe, her black hair braided down her back. Simodecea Salazar-Smith looked into a shard of broken glass like lightning in her left hand. And then with her long rifle aimed over her right shoulder, she shot.
“What’s she shooting at, Mickey?” Pidre asked, dumfounded.
Mickey chuckled. He lightly elbowed Pidre. “Watch. She’s reloading.”
Simodecea leaned over her perch and waved to the crowd. They cooed, as if in love. One of Jack Wesley’s workers had stepped into the ring. The man wore black and carried a metal bucket. Simodecea locked eyes with him and seemingly mouthed a countdown. Then, as if terrified by her aim, he tossed the bucket into the air and ran for his life, water splashing around him in a dome. Simodecea repositioned her rifle and pulled the trigger. The man in black reappeared and sifted his hands through the sawdust until he held up a gold coin with a bullet hole at its center. The crowd gasped with delight. Simodecea laughed and flipped her braid.
“He planted that coin,” shouted an audience member. “What a joke. I want my money back, you crooks. A bunch of charlatans.” He wavered, piss drunk near the left-side bleachers. In his right hand, he clasped a tin cup overflowing with Jack Wesley’s watery beer.
Mickey chuckled. “Oh, Christ. Have some faith.” He patted Pidre on the back. “I wouldn’t test this one.”
Pidre watched Simodecea’s reaction with great interest. She winced as the man continued shouting from below. Some of the crowd yelled for him to quiet down. They threw their kettle corn. They hushed him and moved seats. But the drunken man didn’t stop and Simodecea seemed taken out of her next trick. Her face flickered with annoyance and as her already sparse audience stood to leave, Simodecea twisted over the ledge, locked her skirted legs along the side, unraveled herself upside-down, and dangled like an elegant insect. She aimed her rifle and shot.
The drunken man’s beer erupted across his face and chest. He screamed, shrill and child-like, as he fumbled with his hands over his body. “The bitch shot at me!”
“Leave,” said Simodecea, raveling herself upright. “Now.”
The man scrambled through the tent flaps, shaken and disoriented. Pidre laughed and felt his heart racing. “She’s the one,” he said.
Mickey removed his hat and shrugged. “And how do you expect to lure her away from this sparkling gig?”
Later, outside her dressing room, Pidre held his hat in his hands, wishing he had a bouquet of roses rather than palms wet with fear. Mickey kept watch for any handlers who’d push them away before Pidre could approach Simodecea with his offer, but they didn’t have to wait very long, for she came rushing through in a flurry of fringe. She removed her beaded headpiece with quick hands and wore her gun across her back with a thin leather strap. As she approached her dressing room door, she spotted Pidre and rolled her deliriously black eyes. Pidre laughed and offered a handshake.
Simodecea looked at his hand as if he had offered her a half-eaten sandwich and kept walking into her dressing room, leaving the door open as she sat at her red vanity, staring hard at herself in the oval mirror. “What do you want?” she said.
“Se?orita,” Pidre said, “I just saw you and felt compelled to know you. The strongest feeling came over me.”
“It’s Se?ora, Se?ora Salazar-Smith.”
Pidre apologized. He told her of course. “May I ask, are you happy in your current contract?”
Simodecea flung her head back. She was in the process of undoing her braid, and her laugh sparked into the air around them. “You’re a poacher? Oh, darling. No one wants to poach me now. You’re five years too late.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because I don’t shoot at live targets anymore. Well, unless they’re a real asshole.”
Pidre told her he understood. He stepped slightly forward into her dressing room, hesitating to go farther until Simodecea locked eyes with him and nodded. “If you please forgive me,” he said, “I think your talent and artistry speaks for itself. You dazzle without death.”
“I am Death, haven’t you heard?”
“No, Death protects you. She’s all around you, even now.”
“What traveling circus are you with, Mr.—？”
“Lopez, Pidre Lopez, and I’m not a circus man. I have a theater made of red stone. I need my star attraction, and I want you.”
Simodecea laughed and turned sideways at her vanity, removing her stockings, her left leg kicked high into the air. “Well, that’s very sweet of you, Pidre Lopez.”
“You can name your price,” Pidre said.
Simodecea thought on it for some time. “No live targets? No moving around?”
“No. None of that.”
“One more thing,” Simodecea said. “No goddamn bears?”
NINE
Women Without Men
Denver, 1934
Luz plunged a white sheet with bloodstains into a bucket of soapy water, pressing against a glass ribbed washboard. Still, blood remained and Luz quietly cursed. It was January and the washery was airy with linoleum floors, large steel tubs, mothers and daughters shouting at one another through the sharpness of lye.
“Why don’t they just throw these out?” she said to Lizette, who was beside her, folding men’s shirts over a metal table. “They have enough money.”