* * *
—
As a child, Pidre was a great hunter with a stern expression over his cloudy eyes. Often haughty, he was disciplined by the men of Pardona with a grass lash. He giggled his way through beatings, a spirit, the people said, that couldn’t be tempered. When the other boys threw stones at his back or smacked his ankles with broken cornstalks and called him names like Snow Blood and Sky Eyes, he didn’t meet them with violence. And over time they relented, for Pidre had the gift of storytelling and a strong ability to tell jokes. Once, as the women prepared meals for All Souls’ Day, Pidre, a runt of a boy with spidery arms and twig legs, hid beneath fat loaves of horno bread. He lay on the table covered in dozens of steaming loaves, inhaling the yeasty scent until the other boys entered the kitchen for their afternoon snack. At that moment, he raised his arms as if climbing from a shallow grave. The women screamed and beat the bread flat with their brooms and handkerchiefs. Later when Desiderya heard about what Pidre had done, she told him it would have been much funnier if he’d been naked. “Like a real demon.”
Within eleven years, Desiderya Lopez lay dying of old age on the sheepskin rugs in her clay home. The earthen smell of her bedroom had been replaced with the stale stench of sickness, a body soon to erode. On her altar, she had placed dried apricots and biscuits for the journey. The air sounded with music, a distant lullaby prayer. Pidre rested his face in the nook between her neck and shoulder, her silver hair plaited around her distinguished face. He kissed her sectioned braids. He listened to her shallow breaths, the sounds of her spirit slipping away.
“You’re only little now,” said the Sleepy Prophet, “but I saw you as a man.”
Between tears, Pidre asked, “What am I like, Grandma? Who do you see?”
“You live near a large village on the other side of the Lost Territory, along a river, surrounded by their mines.”
“Mines?”
“Their gutting,” she said. “You’ll have a fierce wife and daughters. Do not be vengeful people.”
“Grandma,” he said. “I don’t understand.”
“Oh, my baby. You will.”
“I miss you,” Pidre cried. “I already feel it. I am missing you now.”
“But I am still here,” Desiderya closed her eyes and winced at a pain that seemed lodged within her heart. “Pidre,” she said.
“Yes?”
“You gave me such joy,” she wheezed into the ghost of a laugh. “You are my grandson, and you are my friend. Thank you for coming into my life.”
She let out her final exhale, her breath circling the room. At that, Desiderya Lopez, the Sleepy Prophet of Pardona Pueblo, moved from the temperature of the living into the temperature of the dead.
* * *
—
As Pidre grew up, he was well liked and respected among his people. Mexicano, French Canadian, and American traders often traveled through Pardona, bringing their weapons and furs, metal trinkets and fancy candies. Pidre had an eye for these things, and an ear for languages. He bartered with the traders and stored their impressive items beneath his sheepskin. In exchange for small tasks, Pidre would dole out candies to the children of Pardona. At seventeen, he announced to the elders that he was interested in leaving the Land of Early Sky. He was a businessman, well suited for the white world. There were many objections among the elders, who had so graciously taken in the child from nowhere. “We are your people now.”
Pidre said, “I know where I come from, but I’d like to see the other side, too. The Sleepy Prophet predicted it.”
After much deliberation, the elders agreed that it was time and sent the boy off with many beautiful pots, furs, and handcrafts to trade for the white man’s money in town. There were several nights of dancing, the clowns came out in their black and white paint, the women gave offerings of Winter and Summer food, and the men presented their advice: “Be wary of their currency, for it is marked with blood.” Pidre said he understood and embraced his elders with gratitude.
On the morning he left, Pidre headed north from Pardona, steadily walking a dirt path lined with sapphire mountains and the winding stream of Rio Lucero. He carried a kidney-colored satchel given to him by the Sleepy Prophet, worn straps knocking against his hip. The sky was endless and overcast in simmering clouds, and the pungent sagebrush reached for Pidre every step of the way. He felt small against the vastness of world until he felt struck, somewhere deep inside his heart, with the enormity of his Grandma Desiderya’s invisible air.
ONE
Little Light
Denver, 1933
Luz Lopez sat with her auntie Maria Josie near the banks where the creek and the river met, the city’s liquid center illuminated in green and blue lights, a Ferris wheel churning above them. The crowds of Denver’s chile harvest festival walked the bottomlands with their faces hidden behind masks of turkey legs and bundles of buttered corn. The dusk air smelled of horse manure and gear grease and the sweet sting of green chilies roasting in metal drums. Through the smog of sawdust and food smoke, Luz was brightened by the flame of her kerosene burner, black hair curled around her noteworthy face, dark eyes staring into a porcelain cup. She wore a brown satin dress dulled from many washes—but still she shined.
“Tell me,” said an old man in Spanish, fiddling with the white-brimmed Stetson across his lap. His eyes murky, faraway. “I can take it.”
Luz searched inside the cup, tea leaves at the bottom. Along the edges, she saw a pig’s snout, and deeper into the mug, far into the future, she glimpsed a running wolf. Luz placed the cup on the velvet cloth over her booth’s wide table, which was really an old Spanish door, the rusted knob exposed like a pointed thorn.
“Gout,” she said. “A bad case.”
The old man lifted his hat to his sweat-salted head. “The goddamn beans, the lard Ma uses.”
“Can’t always blame a woman,” Maria Josie interrupted with reserved confidence. She was thickset with deep brown hair cut close to her face, and she wore workmen’s trousers and a heathery flannel with wide chest pockets, her dark eyes peering through round glasses. She told the old man that almost no one she knew could afford lard anymore. “Especially not in an abundance, se?or.”
“You’ll have to give it up,” Luz said sweetly. “For your health, more time at life.”
The old man swore and tossed a nickel into Luz’s tackle box, leaving the booth with the hunkered posture of a man bickering with himself.
It was an annual festival, a grouping of white tents and a lighted main stage. Denver’s skyline around them, pointed and gray, a city canyon beneath the moon. Rail yards and coal smelters coughed exhaust, their soot raining into the South Platte River. Young people had unlaced their boots and removed their stockings, wading into the moon’s reflection. Bats swooped low and quick.
“Can I interest you ladies in a reading?” Luz asked. Two younger girls had slowed their pace, dissolving cotton candy onto their tongues. They gawked at Luz’s teakettle and leaves, her tackle box of coins.
The taller of the two girls said, “Bruja stuff?”
The shorter one giggled through blue teeth and licked the last of her candy. “We don’t mess around with that,” she said and reached across the booth. She pushed aside a mossy stone, snatching one of Diego’s handbills. The girls locked arms and skipped down the aisle between tents, bouncing to the main stage where the Greeks were hosting their annual contest, “Win Your Woman’s Weight in Flour.”