Maria Josie scrunched her face with what Sara suspected was skepticism. Above them, the sun was a thick sphere of heat in the last days of summer—the air smelled of roasting corn and the wetness of hay.
“Suit yourself, hermana,” Sara said, peering into the mountains. “But I’m getting out.”
* * *
—
They went together the following Friday. Maria Josie agreed reluctantly. Each sister crept from her back-house bedroom and sprinted across pastures of moonlit grass, the dirt soggy beneath their feet. The night shined silver on their black hair and the cows mooed bombastically as the girls rushed to the glowing cinderblock dance hall on the edge of town. The gray structure was illuminated in an empty field—gated by red willows and a burned-out barn. The music could be heard from several yards away, something stringed and bouncing, buried lyrics of French or perhaps something else. Sara was never too sure when it wasn’t English or Spanish or Tiwa, the languages of her childhood, the sounds of her parents.
There were far more men in the concrete dance hall than neither Sara nor Maria Josie were used to being around at once. Their gamy and smoky stench rose from thick-shouldered bodies in faded denim and leather suspenders and earth-worn hats. These men of varying heights and weights, facial features, some bearded and some not, they swarmed the rectangular building with an elevated stage, sidelong mantels, and an overhanging white scaffolding. The pine floor vibrated with the stomps and twists of dancing men, those few women from Saguarita and the nearby villages moist-faced with perspiration, the air humid with human sweat and fogged breath. The band rumbled onstage, music heavy with mandolin and fiddle. Sara laughed at the giddiness of their world.
They hadn’t been there fifteen minutes when several of the men approached the sisters. Sara welcomed their attention while Maria Josie brushed them away. These men were Mexican and Welsh, Irish and Black American, Austrian and German, Polish and Belgian and more. They approached the sisters speaking accented English or Spanish and complimented them with alcohol-laden whispers, how pretty their skin and eyes, their mixed-breed features, their abundant curves. At this Sara grimaced, but one of the miners, a man named Benny, told her the others meant no harm. He asked Sara if she’d like a drink of his cup. At first, she shook her head and remembered that her mother had once told them that they ought never drink liquor. Your ancestors were not built for alcohol. It will poison your body and ruin your minds. But as Sara recalled her mother’s warning, she turned her nose up and pushed the memory away. She told Benny, Why, sure, I’d love a sip.
One drink turned into three or four and then it was five or six, and Sara drank like she’d never thirsted so deeply in her life. The more she drank, the more her body felt lithe, lifted from the pine floor. She laughed and felt beautiful and gazed past Maria Josie, who looked on with terror in her wide brown eyes. As the dance hall thrummed with exuberance, Sara wondered how she could have gone so many years without this liquid that spilled down her throat. Benny then picked up Sara like she was nothing more than a rag doll and placed her along the mantel, seating her upon a throne. She giggled and shocked Maria Josie as she leaned into that Belgian man for a kiss again and again.
As they walked home late that night, Sara felt the world falling away, piece by piece, rock by rock, mountain by mountain. She felt cleared of the responsibility of grief—only laughed and smirked, telling Maria Josie in high hiccupping sounds how wonderful this man’s mouth was, the bulges of his veins along his hands and forearms, the way he danced her into the night and did not turn away as she removed her shoes, barefoot with dirty soles on that pine floor.
“I don’t like this,” Maria Josie said, as she delivered her sister to her back-house door. “You’re not being yourself. It’s like someone else is inside of you.”
Sara could not see straight and for a moment she imagined Maria Josie was two women, as if her sister carried within her the light of someone else. “You just hate men, don’t you?” She fell then, slamming her hands into the dirt outside her door, ripping a fingernail from her left hand. She was too drunk to feel the pain, and she marveled at this with delight.
“Those men will only take advantage of you,” Maria Josie said.
“What’re you gonna do?” Sara slurred. “Live alone in a back-house your whole life?”
“I’m going to do great things,” Maria Josie cried. “I am, and you can, too.”
But it was no use. Sara had stopped listening, felt herself falling asleep where she stood.
It was two months later when Sara told Maria Josie the news. She was moving with Benny north—the coal mines he had been working outside of Saguarita had run dry.
“He’s needed in Huerfano,” Sara said with a practiced expressionless voice.
“He’s needed nowhere,” said Maria Josie.
It would be several years before Maria Josie left Saguarita herself, several years before she would learn that Sara had given birth to two of Benny’s children, a little boy named Diego and a precocious little girl named Luz.
THIRTY-ONE
An Animal Named Night
The Lost Territory, 1922
Maria Josie noticed the white automobile as she marched forward in a floppy hat and a flowered cotton dress. The car peeked over a faraway hill and for a long time seemed stationary on the red ridge. She walked a dirt road walled in evergreen and blue spruce. Smoke Rock stuck out like a skeletal thumb against her right-side mountains. The springtime air was cluttered with pollen and the sting of new snow. Maria Josie had started the night before, and now it was dusk. Her shoulders ached from trading her satchel’s thick strap from one side of her body to the other. Her feet were wet with blisters and her wool socks were stained with pus. Her womb was sore, of course, and she bled like it was her period, though it hadn’t come for almost eight months. Maria Josie listened to her heartbeat like a muffled ceremony drum, the dull implosion inside her chest keeping time along with the sun and very soon the stars.
Along the way, Maria Josie had passed several ranches with resting farm trucks and curlicue iron fences. She had walked slower than she anticipated, or the distance was farther than predicted. She had taken few breaks, changed her soiled rags in the woods, drank from small streams. In the beginning, she imagined she’d only have to walk a short way before an old man farmer would stop his truck, pile her into the back with the chickens and hay, and transport Maria Josie on a bed of blankets all the way to the city. Away from Saguarita. The baby she had been forced to bury beside the river. The man who never loved her. The loss of her father and mother and sister, all that tied her family like a rope. But that old man farmer never came, and now it was almost full dark. The temperature dropping.
The white automobile inched along, until it accelerated in her direction. A car like this was exquisite, out of place, a Pierce-Arrow, they were called. Maria Josie had seen them in magazines at the general store on Mariposa Street. The coffin-shaped hood curled with golden headlights. Just my luck, Maria Josie said, and stepped into the road, praying for the car to stop. When it did, the driver didn’t roll down the window, but fully swung open the door. A white woman with deer-brown hair. She looked like a doll in a sailor’s dress with red lips and white teeth. She wore a bonnet, and she glanced at Maria Josie’s middle section for longer than was polite.