* * *
—
Later the booths and white tents were empty. Warm winds off the river and creek scattered handbills and soiled napkins. Maria Josie and Lizette had gone home. Lone performers and mechanics were left on the riverbank, loading and unloading goldfish and Navajo blankets, storing mirrors, and tearing down carnival rides and the long spokes of the Ferris wheel. It was a no-man’s-land layered beneath a ghastly silence. Diego sat cross-legged on his painted crates with his snakes at his feet in their basket. He smoked a pipe, a heavy plume engulfing his prominent face. They were waiting for Alfonso with his pickup truck. They’d soon load the Spanish door, crates and snakes, and Luz’s tackle box and tea leaves, carting everything back home to Hornet Moon.
“How’d you make out?” Luz asked.
Diego placed a foot on his basket. “Not bad. Yourself?”
“Read for a few people. There was a girl tonight. Someone who knows you.”
Diego laughed, short and ugly. “Oh yeah? Lots of girls know me.”
“An Anglo girl,” said Luz. “She was alone. There was something about her, a bad feeling.”
Diego haggardly looked upon his sister and his sporadic stubble rose like the coat of a fearful animal. He shuffled through his pockets, presenting Luz with a silver bracelet, the imprint of a bear claw near the clasp. “Found this cleaning up,” he said. “Ours now, Little Light.”
TWO
La Divisoria
The next morning Luz stood at her altar, crossing herself from forehead to heart, shoulder to shoulder. The soapbox on her corner of the floor was sprinkled with marigolds and uncooked rice and a damaged photograph of her mother and father, Sara and Benny, standing beside a tilted adobe church in the desert, their young faces distorted, as if someone had taken flint rock and scraped onto the photo, hoping for fire.
They were a family, Luz, Diego, and Maria Josie. They shared a one-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of a tenement on the edge of downtown Denver, an Italianate with pediments and arched windows and alabaster bricks baking in sunlight, a building named Hornet Moon. Diego slept in the main room on a steel bed that pulled down from the stucco wall. His window looked upon the alley at the back entrance to a butcher’s named Milton’s Meats, a tiny world of trucks and flies and men working among pig and turkey carcasses. Maria Josie and Luz occupied the bedroom, a high-ceilinged space divided with a worn cotton sheet draped over ropes, one side for Luz and the other for Maria Josie. Their window opened to the street, a view walled in textures of bricks, doorways and fire escapes comfortably cross, a patch of visible sky. Watchful giants, Luz often thought of the buildings, as she gazed at her corner of the city through the fog of her own reflection. The apartment’s most notable feature was the white-walled kitchen with an elegant Lorraine gas stove that Maria Josie had won during a card game, but beyond that, they had a half-broken icebox, their gas and electric was unreliable, and in the late evenings and early mornings they walked with candlelight to the shared bathtub down the hall.
“Little Light,” Diego hollered from the other room. “Come here.”
He was on the oak floor doing push-ups in his trousers, shirtless, Reina curved down his back in a coiled L. The snake flicked her forked tongue in greeting at Luz. Diego was up early before his shift at Gates. The main room smelled of his amber cologne and pomade and an undercurrent of ripe sweat and the gritty flesh stench of the butcher shop. Overalls hung from the long window, shading Corporal in his glass cage.
“Where you off to this hour?” Diego asked, eyeing Luz’s curled hair, her blue sack dress winking beneath her threadbare winter coat.
It was laundry day, and Luz told Diego that he should’ve known. “If you paid attention to anyone but yourself.” Three days a week, Luz and Lizette washed and pressed rich people’s clothes at a washery off Colfax and York.
Diego said, “How you stand Lizette for that long? I’d wring my own neck.”
Luz pointed to Reina. “There’s worse company.”
“Do me a favor.” Diego went down. “Take Reina and put her in the cage. Bring me Corporal.” Diego went up.
“No,” Luz whined.
“She ain’t gonna do nothing to ya. Shit, she likes you.” Diego edged left shoulder forward, nudging Reina in Luz’s direction. The girl snake flashed her sheepish expression. She lifted her endless throat.
“What about Corporal?”
Diego told her the snake was too lazy for violence. “Plus, he just ate.”
Luz looked at the snake’s middle, the mouse-shaped lump. She sighed and squeezed through the narrow aisle between Diego and the cage. He continued his push-ups as Reina bobbed over his back. Luz inched forward, her arms stiffly out, and in one swoop, lifted the chilly snake. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” she said to Diego as she slipped Reina into the cage, which smelled of dead rodents and hay. The girl snake flopped onto Corporal. He grunted.
“He talks now?” Luz said.
Diego laughed. He rolled onto his feet. “Maybe I should grab him myself.” He stepped to the glass cage, diving his arms downward to Corporal. He lifted and cradled the snake before flinging Corporal over his back, a slapping sound as scales met skin.
Diego returned to the floor. This time between push-ups, he clapped.
* * *
—
Lizette lived on the Westside in a tilted orange house off Fox Street with her mother and father and four grimy brothers who threw tantrums and played vaqueros and bandidos with stick guns in the yard. Inside, they’d wail and slide down the banister in dirty socks. Tía Teresita and Tío Eduardo were usually only a passing storm, chasing one boy or another with a wooden spoon. Don’t make me break this over your little butts, they’d holler. Steel pots of menudo and pintos steamed on the stove, and their tortillas, the kind made of corn instead of flour, rested in a wicker basket on the kitchen table. The houses of Fox Street were humble, small roomed, tiny yarded, and beautifully adorned with stone grottoes housing blue porcelain statues of La Virgen de Guadalupe.
If the Westsiders were considered poor, they didn’t believe it, for many owned their own homes from the money they had earned at the rail yards, the slaughterhouses, the onion and beet fields, the cleaners, and hotels. Their lives were lived between farmland rows and the servants’ back stairs. They had come to Denver from the Lost Territory, and farther south from current-day Mexico, places like Chihuahua and Durango and Jalisco. Many, including Teresita and Eduardo, had arrived after the bloodiest days of the Mexican Revolution. Maria Josie’s mother, Simodecea, had been distantly related to Teresita’s father, a jimador in Guadalajara. But one morning when Teresita was eleven years old, she had walked the agave rows to find her papa blindfolded and shot, a tiny hole in his head like an extra eardrum leaking blood into the earth.
Luz lifted the latch on Lizette’s metal gate, stepping over yellowed grass, flattened in frost. She waved to her cousin, who was seated on the four-step concrete stoop beside their red wagon. “Ready?”
Lizette wore her new-used coat and was resting her chin on both hands, elbows on her knees. Her eyebrows were thin black lines, clownish and wandering as she reached to the ground beside her ankles in frilly socks. She raised a steel thermos. “Try some, prima,” she said.