Luz slipped out of the booth. She zigzagged around the tables spattered about the dining room. Glasses chinked, silverware scraped plates, liquor flowed into seemingly bottomless cups. The singer had finished her set, and the stage stood barren beneath red lights. Wherever Luz walked, she caught the eyes of men, menacing like owls in three-piece suits and gold pocket watches. Their dates were Anglo women in rose-gold satin and silk bell-sleeved dresses, their thin necks flanked by diamond earrings and spiral clumps of blond hair.
“Are you his latest?” said the waitress from earlier. She had stopped Luz as she exited the dining hall.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Luz said.
“His latest girl?” She was carrying a tray of pink glasses. “Do yourself a favor, honey, and don’t get your hopes up.” The waitress moved her eyes toward David, who was laughing with Steelman at the table. “A good Greek boy like that? He wants in, and girls like you aren’t allowed in. Ever.”
“In where?” said Luz.
The waitress rolled her eyes. “Look around you,” she said. The entire room, it seemed, laughed as one, their mouths open like dark wet pits. “White women only.”
“That’s strange,” Luz said and breathed heavy. “Because I’m here now. Excuse me.” She tempered her anger as she hurried past the waitress and down a narrow hallway, a cave with throated walls.
Luz tried the first door on her left, searching for the staircase, and found, instead, a broom closet. She tried the next door and found an empty lounge. On her third try, Luz was startled by the sight. A small shooting range. Men without suit jackets stood in their shirtsleeves, flushed faces gleaming with sweat, their large bellies covered in suspenders as they aimed handguns down three long lanes. They blasted their guns at black targets drawn on white paper. Gunshot after gunshot, metal bullets cascaded upon the floor, clinking, clinking, like copper rain. Luz looked on, frozen in horror, for the men’s rhythmic and forceful movements, the quick bursts of sound, the smell—of gunpowder, alcohol, and sweat—hit her with a familiarity she couldn’t place. Luz was too overwhelmed by the sight of the guns to continue her search and she found herself back at the table, uncomfortably waiting with a full bladder for David to finish his meal.
David soon drove Luz home with the radio crackling in the background, a low murmur of a detective serial. Outside it was dark. The streetlamps dropped light over red stone sidewalk. Luz breathed heavy. The windows fogged.
“Did you like your steak?” David asked, keeping his eyes on the road.
Luz told him that of course she did, but looked out the window, instead of at him. “Thank you for dinner,” she added, remembering her manners.
“It’s my pleasure, Luz.”
David made a left turn and looked over his right shoulder, catching Luz’s gaze. “Are you sad you didn’t get to have dinner with your friend?”
Luz softly forced a laugh. “No,” she said.
David turned the knobs on the radio until the Chevrolet fell silent. “What’s he like?”
“He’s a horn player,” said Luz. “He moved here from California.”
“Ah, a musician. Be careful.” David reached across and patted Luz’s thigh over her work dress. “You ever been with a boy before, Luz?”
Luz was shocked at the question, the boldness of it. She couldn’t decide if it was disrespectful or true curiosity, acted on by liquid courage. Was that any of his business, and how could he think that she had been with a man? She was seventeen, eighteen in a week, and she wasn’t even engaged to anyone. Though she knew of plenty of girls who had been with men—Lizette with Alfonso, the long line of girls who’d been with Diego—Luz was almost afraid at the idea of it. It seemed it could hurt her in ways she wasn’t capable of understanding. But most of all, Luz was afraid that she’d enjoy it, maybe too much, and if she had learned anything from what happened to Diego, it was that pleasure is dangerous.
“David,” she said in a whisper.
He laughed, and pulled up outside Hornet Moon. Smog from the meatpacking plant huffed a great amber halo into the sky. “Ignore me,” he said.
TWENTY-TWO
A Game of Cards
“Hel-lo, birthday girl,” Lizette said as she swung open the front door. She leaned to the right, edging against the doorframe, one leg kicked up through the fringe of a white dress. Ranchera music fell into the street. The house was lit in scarlet tones, the colors bleeding from the doorway into the yard, where bagged luminarias lighted the sandstone pathway.
Luz and Maria Josie stood on the stoop. Maria Josie held a warm dish of cheese enchiladas.
“You didn’t need to bring anything,” said Lizette as she ushered them inside.
“And what kind of people show up empty-handed?” Maria Josie said.
“Alfonso did,” she said, pointing to her left, where he came through the narrow foyer and swooped Lizette off the ground with both arms, placed his Stetson on her head, and swished her around, like a rock-a-bye baby, before setting her on the ground and retrieving his hat from her head.
“I may be empty-handed, but not for long.” Alfonso reached over and squeezed Lizette’s ass before taking the enchiladas from Maria Josie, tucking the platter beneath one arm while he made his other arm as straight as a tree branch. He asked for their coats, and they shook out of their jackets, delicately placing them across his right forearm. Alfonso carried the enchiladas and coats in the same way he often stacked dinner dishes at the Park Lane. He dashed out of sight, into the kitchen.
“Why, don’t you two look strikin’，” said Lizette.
Maria Josie was dressed in a dapper men’s suit with her hair slicked against her scalp with citrusy pomade. Luz wore an emerald dress that had once been left on Diego’s bedroom floor. What the girl had worn home, Luz had no idea.
“Nearly everyone’s here,” Lizette said, slurring her words a bit, guiding them deeper into the small house. The smell of tequila floated around the air, mingling with the scent of cologne and perfume and green chile. The narrow hallway was lined with couples, some married, some courting. Men cloaked their women in their arms. When they neared the downstairs bathroom, Maria Josie cut away from the cousins, fiddling with the belt loop on her slacks as she walked toward a tall, slender woman with delicate pale skin and black hair. Luz hadn’t seen the woman before, and she admired her floral silk dress. It seemed Maria Josie knew her well, for when they met, she cupped both of the woman’s hands in her own and tippy-toed upward, as if to lay a kiss on the woman.
“Food’s on the stove. Mama made her famous mole, and I made the green chile.” Lizette didn’t look back as she walked. She only raised her hand as she spoke, as if putting emphasis on certain sounds and certain foods. “There’s fried chicken, too. DeeDee from Five Points made it. And the Greeks brought a rack of lamb.”
Though she hadn’t been consciously aware of it, Luz was searching the house. “What about Avel? Is he here?”
Lizette paused before rounding the corner into the kitchen. She laughed, biting her bottom lip. “Yeah, Avel’s here,” she said. And, then, softer: “And David.”