Avel chuckled. He knocked on the table with his knuckles. “Who doesn’t appreciate an open door?”
Luz felt the pains of jealousy, a bad feeling she rarely experienced.
* * *
—
They left Teatro Oso a little after eight and walked slowly down Nineteenth Avenue. Despite the night’s industrial amber haze, the air felt mountainous and cool. The streets were lined with dirty snow, and steam rose from the gutters, highlighting the silhouettes of drunks as they staggered from one bar to another. Luz and Avel turned a corner and he reached for her arm, guiding her away from black ice. The couple headed toward a Greek diner on Colfax, walking in silence for some time, until they passed beneath a faulty streetlamp. The lights blinked on, then off.
Luz said, “I always think it’s a bad sign, when they go out like that.”
“It could be worse. They could be dead entirely.”
Luz told Avel that was very true. “What kind of music do you like to play?”
“Mariachi mostly,” he said.
“You have a suit and all that? A big hat?”
“I had the biggest hat in the group.”
“You’ll have to find a band here in Denver.”
“First things first,” Avel said, opening the diner door. “Let’s get you fed.”
The diner smelled of baked pies and steaming coffee, grilled hamburger meat. Luz removed her gloves and fluffed the cold from her hair as they took their seats near the front window. Beyond the glass, the road was a stretch of black. Headlights flickered whenever an automobile passed by. They ordered coffee and fried baloney sandwiches and Avel looked on, observant with deep eyes. There was something steady beneath his surface, an unfamiliar trait for Luz. He seemed a calm man without much to hide.
“What about you?” he said, sipping his coffee. “What’re your people like? Your folks? Maria Josie is your tía, right?”
Luz glanced around the diner, at the tables and booths filled with other young couples, men about to begin their night shifts and eating solo dinners at the long counter, the overworked waitresses who were happy to endure aching backs for small tips. “Yes, she’s my mama’s younger sister.”
“What about your mama and papa then?”
“They’re in another place now.”
“Oh, shoot,” said Avel. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry for your loss.”
Luz smiled, staring at the square napkin in her lap. She found it odd how people sometimes said they had lost a person, as if death was some kind of misplacement of the soul, like an absent sock or an errant hairpin. “No,” she said, sweetly. “Papa left a long time ago, and Mama stayed down below in the Lost Territory when my brother and me come north. She didn’t take his leaving well.” Luz scooped sugar into her coffee. She stirred with a long spoon. “She isn’t well. It hurt her mind.”
Avel nodded, as if he understood it was time to change the subject. “How’d you like the show?”
Luz giggled. She told him La Chata was a hoot, and that Leonora, what an entertainer. “Do you want to travel again and play music with her?”
Avel said, “No, I don’t think I do. Say,” he said, “how did you know you’re a fortune-teller? My abuelita was one, too. You read palms and all that?”
Luz shook her head. “Only tea leaves.”
“What about coffee grounds?”
“Haven’t tried. Suppose I could.”
Avel rose from the table and walked toward the counter of men eating solo dinners. He leaned over the pie case, the light pressing against the mother-of-pearl buttons on his western shirt. He spoke to an older waitress with her gray hair in a bun. She laughed first but then nodded and called into the kitchen. She handed Avel a small white bowl.
At the table, he poured the contents of the bowl into his coffee mug. “Fresh coffee grounds,” he said, taking a few sips before passing the cup to Luz.
She laughed and brushed her upper lip with her index finger. “You’ve given yourself a mustache,” she said.
He made a kissy face and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Distinguished.”
Avel shimmied into his seat, bumping Luz’s legs beneath the table. “Now, I’m sure you have your own way of doing readings, a process. But I’d like to see you in action. That Mrs. Montoya wasn’t disappointed.”
Luz feigned an overworked sigh. “I can give it a shake.”
Somewhere jazz played, a sonorous saxophone, a gullet of notes. As a joke, Luz told Avel not to watch her as she read his cup. “I’m a shy reader.” Avel smirked. She liked that he was casual and light. Luz smiled and sat up straight, smoothed the paper napkin in her lap, and stared into the mug. Warmth moved into Luz from the floor, through her pumps, along her legs, and into her center. The coffee grounds were like tea leaves, only darker, a little like blood.
“There’s a man running,” she said, turning the cup like a dial. “He’s marveling at tents. An enormous citrus orchard is now a shantytown. There are orange trees.” Luz paused and beamed with joy. “How pretty. I’ve never seen orange trees before.”
Avel slowly turned to face her as she spoke, a stunned look on his face.
“Star people,” said Luz, with awe. “My mama used to talk about them visiting the Lost Territory, but those snatchers came from the sky. These ones, they’re Anglos.”
“You see all that?”
“Is it wrong?”
“It’s happened. I mean, it’s happening.”
“Really? Then I’m on track?”
Avel nodded and leaned across the table to Luz, as if to listen to a storyteller who had fallen to a whisper.
“At night, dogs are barking. There are lanterns behind curtains. Strangers are pulling men from their beds, taking them as they sleep. They are putting them on packed trains.” Luz wound a string of her hair around her finger. She pulled it tightly as she continued to read. She had never seen anything like this before, such defined images in the cup. There were square homes with their windows illuminated in chaos. She heard men shouting, their wet-lined lungs coughing commands in both English and Spanish. Women wept as their husbands’ feet were dragged over damp grass. Inside wooden boxcars, the smell of urine. Luz felt sickness rising in her heart. She looked at Avel across the table, and his face was gentle in its surprise.
“They’re calling it repatriation,” he said, flatly. “They’re deporting us to Mexico to make room for white men without jobs. Doesn’t matter a lot of us were born right here in the USA.”
“That’s why you’re in Denver?”
“In a sense.”
Two policemen entered the diner then, their badges shiny and their thick batons swinging like dead snakes at their sides. With broad, authoritative gaits, they walked to the counter, taking two stools beside the jukebox. One removed his cap, ran his fingers through his hair, and pointed to the jukebox with an irritable look on his chinless face. The second officer stood, deposited coins into the machine. The music shifted from jazz. An abrupt cut into foxtrot. No couples looked up from their tables and booths. Everyone, it seemed, lowered their eyes.