But the air turned. A frigid gust from the north, spitting gravel and shards of grass against Maria Josie’s face and arms. Darkness curtained the sun, and the wind screeched along the creek’s surface. The trees bowed and lost their leaves and weak branches. Maria Josie’s hair thrashed her mouth and eyes, causing tears to roll down her face. A rumbling sound erupted upstream, a hideous gargling. In the Lost Territory, every spring, the arroyos flooded in sudden and violent ways. Entire cattle herds were swept away while work trucks floated like toy ducks. Maria Josie noted the creek’s height against the bridge. She tilted her face to the left, felt the wind change in a flat, tepid way, and within seconds, the stream had swelled, bombarded by menacing muck. A flash flood, the water rushing, endless and dim until it reached the banks and pulled the man’s son into the stream.
He hollered only once, something like Papa, before his mouth and eyes were overtaken with sludge.
Maria Josie dove into the rising water. She kicked after the young man, her legs tangling inside the long, knotted train of her nightgown. The water was so cold and so deep that Maria Josie was robbed of her breath. With stunned and paused lungs, she thrust herself toward the adolescent boy, his curly hair lowering and rising in the murky water. He was lanky and thin and they were propelled near a grouping of boulders. The boy almost seemed like an oversized doll. He floated facedown, and when Maria Josie finally reached his smooth ankle, he’d lost one shoe and a sock. With both arms, she wrapped herself around the young man’s middle, trying to pull his head above water, but against the current, he was too rigid and slick. She kicked inside her black nightdress, aiming their connected bodies into the looming boulder. Their backs smacked into the surface. Maria Josie gazed at the young man. He still had his baby face, and was only fourteen or fifteen years old. He had long eyelashes and large bluing lips. Maria Josie cradled his head with her palm, hoisting his body onto shore. The boy breathed, and his back grew larger in his flannel shirt, stretched over his rib cage, but he wouldn’t wake up.
“Please,” Maria Josie said in Spanish. “Don’t die. You don’t have to. Not now, young man.” She flopped him onto some grass and tried shaking and yanking on his arms and face. She crawled beside him, stared into his face. Why didn’t he wake up? Maria Josie screamed and her throat burned with voice. It felt as if a loose patch of her tongue had floated into the sky like a kite. “I said you don’t need to die. It’s too early.”
Maria Josie understood then that she wasn’t yelling at the boy. She was arguing with Death. Somewhere, perched on a rock, she was certain skeletal Do?a Sebastiana was waiting with her wagon of souls parked along the tree line. Her bag was already heavy. She didn’t need any more. She wore a long, lacy gown, the hood pulled around her skull, her arms folded like wings. Had she been watching them all along? Maria Josie had felt her hanging around for weeks, since the day her baby had died inside her, and all she could do was weep.
“You bitch,” said Maria Josie, pulling the boy close and hollering into the wind. “Give it a rest, you old hag.”
She had halfway lifted the young man onto her lap, as if he were a toddler she could carry, when his father came running down the banks. A roundish man with a kind face, he heaved and cried out for his son. “David,” he said. “David. David.”
The son opened his remarkably green eyes.
Weeping with gratitude over Maria Josie, the father said, “We’ll never be able to repay you. What you have done, we’ll never forget.”
FOURTEEN
The Body Snatchers of Bakersfield, California Denver, 1934
Luz sat at the kitchen table, spinning the dial on her Zenith Tombstone radio. In that gray evening, Maria Josie nearby at the stove frying potatoes with heaps of salt, the radio pulsed with news and more news, detective serials, advertisements for chocolates and hard pink candies. There was a long feature on Bonnie Parker, who had been spotted in the Lost Territory with her limp. Last summer, Clyde had been speeding in north Texas and missed a warning sign of a dilapidated bridge. Their stolen V-8 smashed through a barricade at seventy miles per hour. Battery acid had poured from the crushed car, scorching Bonnie’s right leg down to the bone. Luz wondered if this had made her feel less in love with Clyde.
Luz sometimes stared into the radio filament, aimlessly, as if the voices emanating from the box painted pictures in her mind. She wondered how it all worked, volts, watts, cycles, and tubes. There were shortwaves and longwaves, invisible carriers of human voice. The radio smelled of dust and minerals, and in some ways reminded Luz of reading tea leaves. They were similar, weren’t they? She saw images and felt feelings delivered to her through dreams and pictures. Maybe those images rode invisible waves, too? Maybe Luz was born with her own receiver. She laughed, considering how valuable such a thing must be, a radio built into the mind.
There was a knock at the door then, muffled and polite. Maria Josie spun around from the stove. She set the burner low, telling Luz to keep watch on the blue flame as she untied her white apron strings with oily fingers. She fetched paper money from a round tin resting above the mantel and carried it to the door—opened halfway.
A tall and slim man said Good evening in a joyful voice, and Luz edged back on her chair, craning her neck to glimpse the handyman’s features: Avel Cosme, his gentle eyes glinting above Maria Josie in the doorframe. The hallway behind him was dim, and his voice relaxed in the somber entryway. Luz turned down the radio. She tucked her hair behind her ears. His hay-colored hat was in his hands, and he was dressed nicely in a formal western shirt, roses and white stitching on black. His boots were white and clean, as if he were headed to a dance.
Maria Josie had handed him the money, but they were laughing now, and he was passing some back. “The part was actually less. I’d hate to overcharge you ladies.”
“That’s honest of you,” said Maria Josie.
“I was raised to be a truthful man,” he said.
“Well, you did good work, Avel. Haven’t had any problems since.”
He ran his fingers through his black hair, confident and smooth. “Thank you.” He lightly bowed. “And hey,” he said, “now you can bleed it yourself.”
Maria Josie accepted from his hands what appeared to be a silver key, which she slipped quickly into her back pocket. She told Avel that he was too generous.
They spoke for some time longer. Their body movements widening. Maria Josie was chuckling some, bobbing her head and sliding her right hand across her waist, the way a teacher will when stopping at a student’s desk for a chat. She even fully opened the door. Avel looked beyond Maria Josie and into the apartment. His eyes went straight to Luz.
Embarrassed, she looked away, turning up the radio.
“You’re requested,” Maria Josie called out. “And turn off the stove.”
Luz felt flushed. She stood from the table, did as she was told, and checked her reflection in the nighttime window. She bit her lips to make them larger, redder, a trick she had learned from Lizette.
“Yes?” Luz said, appearing in the doorframe alongside her auntie.
Avel was smiling now, a great big smile with strong teeth. He smelled fragrant like rose, an undercurrent of groundwater. He was holding some kind of tickets, proud like a child revealing a crayon portrait. “Some old friends of mine are opening for La Chata Noloesca tonight. I thought maybe you and Maria Josie might want to come?”