THIRTY-THREE
El Mariachi
Avel stood across the street from the Law Office of David Tikas with a cigarette in his lips, the lighter clinking in his left hand and his gaze locked on that defiant-looking building. He thought of the first time he had laid eyes on Luz Lopez, before he knew her name, how she ran down Colfax Avenue with a red wagon filled with laundry sacks, the stone buildings closing around her like a tomb. Her eyes were feral but she carried herself with the same elegance as a wolf. She looked bright, like a girl who joked. Later, huddled outside, stealing swigs from a basement bottle of mezcal in broad daylight, Avel had stood with his new neighbor, a man named Santiago, who played mandolin. Avel swallowed three long pulls of Santi’s mezcal and said, I just saw this broad on a job. I’ve seen her before, out on the street. I’d like to know her. Santi had wagged his left leg, laughed. Have her fall right into your lap, if you know what I mean. Avel shook his head. Not this one, he’d said. She reminds me of them church girls, the ones from back home. Santi had tossed the empty bottle into the street and it shattered. Those girls, he explained, don’t exist.
Avel stood outside the law office and cursed the now starless sky. A dry wind blew from the east and ruffled the few high birch trees along Seventeenth Street. It was late now, and the city was silent. No traffic whined in the distance, no horns honked, no streetcars rattled. Avel pulled Luz’s office key from his pocket. She always kept it in the same spot, affixed to the metal ring with her keys to Hornet Moon.
He entered the office slowly. He considered Luz’s empty chair, the magnitude of her desk, the walls aching with their own kind of sadness. He hated to think of her in that chair being watched through the windows. The office sighed in its own blank darkness and, though not a soul was present, Avel could feel the echo of Luz’s movements through the space—her repetitive walk from the desk to the filing cabinet, her bending and turning her neck, the clink of her key in the door, and every single time she was summoned to his office, where she stood dutifully before David’s desk, asking in her sweet and devoted tone what it was he needed.
“That’s enough of that,” Avel said aloud. He forced his elbow through the plate glass between David’s office and Luz’s lobby. The crash matched the intensity of pain surging through Avel’s arm, and oddly in his chest. Blood appeared on his sleeve, blooming over his shirt cuff. He stepped into David’s office. He knocked furniture to the ground—the cabinets, their files, all the work Luz had done to order and preserve, now scattered about the floor. The bulletin board behind David’s desk caught Avel’s attention and he stepped closer, flicking his lighter to examine the webbed display of photographs, newspaper articles, and maps. Pinned nonchalantly among the scraps of information was an article from the Rocky Mountain News, YOUNG DENVER ATTORNEY MAKES A NAME, SEEKS JUSTICE.
Avel flicked his lighter near the article’s bottom edge, watched the flame swallow the yellow page. He then took the lighter to several maps, and moved on to the photographs, which burned in a curdling, wax-like way. The entire bulletin board went up in flames. Avel used the lighter on the files next, then the wastebaskets, bookshelves. What at first happened slowly then happened all at once. The curtains burned. Black smoke billowed and collected, eclipsing the already darkened tin ceiling. The walls showed the skeletal lines of the underlying lath. Avel coughed and squinted through smoke, his body covered in sweat. Heat pressed upon his back, pushing him outward as he turned around and stepped through the ghost of Luz’s path, exiting the Law Office of David Tikas as it burned on that summer night, so near to the full moon.
THIRTY-FOUR
Portal
Denver, 1926
Papa Tikas had thrown David’s twentieth birthday party in a friend’s vacant house. The celebration had gone into the night. The home was three stories, and there were statues of lions all around the perimeter. It was lighted with lampposts, and the summer night was comfortably warm. Luz and Lizette were playing with chalk outside beside a stone carport with a great wooden door. Luz called it the Magic Arch. Her mother used to talk about sacred archways in the Lost Territory, a portal that could carry her from one world to another.
“We’ll draw the hopscotch squares into the Magic Arch,” Lizette said. “That way, you only win if you make it back out.”
They had just one piece of chalk between them, and it wasn’t even sidewalk chalk. Lizette and Luz had stopped Eduardo in the billiards room, and lingered before him as men smoked cigars and swilled tumblers of mezcal and whiskey. While the men talked, Lizette swiped the blue cue chalk from a mantel. Her father had caught her. He chuckled and said she was an ornery little cat, but he also said she had hung the moon and stars.
Whenever Papa Tikas threw one of his parties, the grown-ups drank like they’d never tasted anything so sweet. They danced and played pool, hardly noticing the mischief of their children.
“What’re you girls doing?” It was David, who had exited the Victorian house through the deliveries door. He stepped down from the rock porch and walked toward Lizette and Luz with his summer jacket flung over his shoulder. David was a decade older than the girls—Luz and Lizette were both ten years old. He was smoking a cigarette and hovered over them as they drew numbers across the pavement. They had barely made it under the Magic Arch and were still mostly along the sidewalk.
“Nothing,” said Lizette, hiding the blue chalk behind her back.
“I already saw it. Just don’t let anyone else catch you out here.” David inhaled his cigarette. He sighed, as if exhausted by his own party. Luz didn’t see him often. He was usually away at school, and whenever he was home in Denver, he worked in the market with a surly attitude. Luz had heard him arguing once with his father. He said he didn’t want to return to Colorado after his schooling. He wanted to stay in New York. But your family is here, Papa Tikas had said. Don’t be so selfish, David.
“Happy birthday, David,” said Luz, smiling but looking down.
David thanked her and winked. He kneeled where she was seated on the pavement. He pointed to the number Luz had just drawn. There was blue chalk on her green dress. She had a matching bow in her hair. Diego had helped her tie it before they left the apartment.
“What’s this supposed to be?” David said.
Luz didn’t know if he was teasing her. “You can’t tell?”
“I mean, it sort of looks like a sickly four.” He cocked his head. “I don’t know, Lucy Luz. Your numbers might need some work.”
She felt embarrassed, and her face reddened. She examined her number, trying to understand what was wrong.
“Come on,” said Lizette. “It’s a nine, David. So, you gonna play hopscotch with us or what?”
David laughed at Lizette. “Since when do you have so much attitude?”
Lizette stuck out her tongue.
“All right,” David said after a pause. “I’ll play.” He sprang up and checked around the ground. “We need something to throw—what do they call it?”
“A shooter,” said Luz.
“That’s it,” David said, and lifted a bottle cap from the ground.
“You go first,” said Lizette, who seemed bored with the entire thing.