“Yes,” said Luz. “I can, but I think I’ll need some practice.”
“Practice on the air,” said Leon with a smile, and handed her a glass of water. “Don’t drink it when we go live—it’ll pick up your gulps.”
Luz grimaced and looked over the note, silently moving her lips as she practiced reading aloud. Leon flipped on the radio receiver. A red light blinked in the booth. Leon announced that he had a very important message, a statement read by an individual like themselves, a girl of their background, from a neighborhood just like theirs. He gazed at Luz and with his index finger motioned for her to go.
Luz inhaled, the microphone catching hints of fear before she steadied herself, dashing into speech. As she read, the statement seemed to slip away from the page, Celia’s words pushing into the air and forming a blanket of weight. Luz imagined her voice and Celia’s riding together through the wind, landing in living rooms and workstations, Estevan’s life entering the minds of all who listened. Luz read and spoke and thought of Diego in the fields, his body arched over crops, his face badly scarred. How close had he been to being murdered like Estevan? How close was Luz to having no men left in her family at all?
As she finished the statement, this time in Spanish, Leon held up his fingers—one, two, three. He clicked off the mic. He threw off his headphones and pulled Luz close for a hug. He smelled of machine oil and nice pomade, and he shouted humidly into Luz’s ear. “You’re natural, a natural!” Luz thanked him with an anxious laugh, and when she cupped her mouth, she felt tears along her cheeks. The radio room went quiet then and Luz looked through the glass at David. He was standing very still with a tender expression, his eyes dazzling in low light. Good work, he mouthed, placing his hat slowly on his head.
Luz wouldn’t see Leon Jacob again for several months, and by that time she will have nearly forgotten his face. The neighbors’ power will have been shut off for days, and one night Luz will walk by candlelight to the shared bathtub down the hall. Glancing out the window, she will spot a man dressed in black, single legged, carrying copper wire from one building to another, siphoning power from the city offices down the street and pumping it freely into the tenements strangled by the dark.
TWENTY
The Dressmaker
The city was changing from the bleak winter into new life struggling to be born. Though the nights still dipped into deep cold, in the April mornings on her walk to work, Luz saw signs of spring’s early arrival. Daffodils poked their yellow faces up from thin, snowy blankets. Pines existed in two tones, their bases made of hardened, dark needles while their edges were tipped in a soft, radiant green. The Platte, snake-like in icy scales, broke free of itself, rushing with crystal snowmelt that flowed all the way down from the Continental Divide. Diego had been gone a little over six months, and Luz and Maria Josie felt his absence like a fire that had slowly burned down, the embers still red and flickering, but the heat mostly gone.
David paid Luz as much as other beginning secretaries, but with the cost of her Opportunity School classes and her new wardrobe, there wasn’t enough to keep her and Maria Josie comfortable. They ate stale tortillas with butter and salt. Meat was a rarity. They saved coffee grounds and old tea bags in worn tins, reusing their remains throughout the week. Luz’s winter stockings had begun to run, the soles coated black. Lizette taught her how to draw a line with a kohl pencil down the backs of her legs, making it appear as if she were wearing a pair of crisp, new hose. But nearly everyone was hurting. Most days, Luz walked through the neighborhood, avoiding eviction piles like shoveled snow. People’s things were scattered about street corners, their travel trunks, immigration papers, worn leather shoes, horse bridles, white wedding quilts, clay mugs, chipped porcelain chamber pots. Their things were more sorrowful than they were, neglected, humming with an orphaned sadness. Objects were left behind as their people moved on, picked themselves up, gathered what they could in handkerchiefs, and set out for the beet fields, north into Wyoming or farther west, into the land of sunshine and once-fabled gold.
Luz wrote Diego weekly, though his letters were much more infrequent. She described the change of seasons, Lizette’s focus on and determination to have an extravagant wedding that might never come. Money is always short, she explained. But her and Alfonso, they keep planning, keep hoping. She told Diego about her new job with David, and kept the details to a minimum. Diego had never liked David, said he was a real asshole, born with a particularly long silver spoon. Luz focused instead on brief passages about Avel. He’s very tall, and has a goodness to him. He’s a performer like you, a musician. Luz thought to mention Avel’s coffee reading, but she hesitated, worried that by warning her brother about the raids, she’d force something into fruition.
Do you think, she wrote in one of her letters, that if the men who hurt you were arrested, you could come back home? Do you think we’ll ever be completely safe? But Luz understood more and more that this was merely a fantasy of justice. Now, working for David, she heard of crimes that no Anglo newspaper mentioned. A colored drifter named James Batas had recently been murdered by a white mob when he dared fall asleep on the streetcar, riding the Green Line until it became the Red, where only whites were welcome. Rather than ask Mr. Batas to leave, a horde of Anglos beat him within an inch of his life with a broken fence post, tied him to a Chevy, and then slowly killed him as they dragged his body through a junk-lined dirt lot at sunset. These crimes were frequent, and Luz saw confirmation of what she always sensed, that her country believed only certain Anglo lives were something other than cheap.
In any case, Luz wrote in one of her letters to Diego, the family goes on like it always has, it’s just a little harder than usual. Still, sometimes we get lucky.
* * *
—
On a Sunday, Luz arrived at Lizette’s house at noon. Together, with Tía Teresita, they were to visit the dressmaker, a woman Lizette had heard was the best and most affordable wedding gown seamstress in Denver. The cousins would have gone earlier in the day, but Lizette still washed and ironed laundry, the task now taking twice as long without Luz’s help. Luz felt guilty over this, but if Lizette was angry with or envious of her cousin for finding another kind of work, she hid those emotions somewhere deep within herself, revealing only happiness for her cousin. This, Luz thought, was what she saw in Lizette that so many others didn’t—an instinct for kindness.
Luz ventured to the front door. The boy cousins were making a ruckus that could be heard from the street, caterwauling like sickly cats. Luz laughed as she opened the chain-link gate and walked the cement pathway to the door. She knocked, hard.
Teresita opened the door in a white dress with a ruffled collar, holding a diapered baby. She promptly handed the baby to Luz before spinning around and hollering for Lizette to come downstairs. Her hair had slipped away from its braid like a frayed rope. “Next weekend,” she said, dabbing sweat from her brow, “we’re having a card party. Saturday night. We’ll have cake for you.”
“For me?” Luz asked, rocking the baby in her arms.
“Yeah, isn’t your birthday that Monday?”