Luz took the thermos from her cousin. “What is it?” she asked.
“Coffee,” Lizette said.
Luz sipped, and the bitter taste of alcohol stung the length of her throat. She coughed before she spat. “And what else?”
Lizette frowned. She stood from the ground, dusting herself off with both hands. “You are wasteful, you know that, Luz. I had to buy that.”
Luz tilted her face. She kept it there.
“Actually,” Lizette said, reaching for the red wagon, “Al made it in the bathtub.”
Luz laughed. “Let’s go.”
* * *
—
They took turns pulling the wagon, their fists cupping cool metal. Before Speer Boulevard, where the Westside eased into downtown, the cousins paused near an open alley, trash heaped beside hibernating honeysuckles and lilacs.
“Hand me that baloney,” Lizette said, motioning with an empty hand.
Luz reached into a paper bag on the wagon’s left side. She unraveled spoiled meat from a checkered napkin, and handed it to Lizette, who then whistled and waited. From an abandoned coal shed at the far end of the alley came a small yelp that grew into a trotting pant. There he was, skinny legs and patchy fur, blinded eyes nothing but whites. Jorge, Guardian of the Westside.
“Sit,” said Lizette, her forefinger out like a ruler.
Jorge growled before easing his legs elegantly to one side. Lizette dropped the meat onto the sidewalk and Jorge snapped into action, scarfing his food. As he finished, the fishy stench of bad meat lingered and a wet mark remained on the ground. Lizette swallowed the last of her morning coffee. She grimaced and wiped her mouth with the same hand she had used to serve the meat.
“In the flawed capitalistic system,” she said, mocking Leon Jacob, a famous local radio announcer with a weekday show, “even the dogs must work to eat.”
They crossed the creek where the city’s grid shifted. The roadways widened, streets built for carriages and trolleys and white-out blizzards. They collected laundry from grand homes with bedded gardens, shrubbery shaped like tigers and bears. Most of the girls’ route came from Alfonso, who, along with several other Filipinos, worked at the Park Lane Hotel. Rich folks always need something, he’d say in his musical accent. But you can’t ask. You have to know. And Alfonso knew everything. For years, he had served the newspapermen, the silver barons, doctors with diplomas from Harvard and Yale, places Luz couldn’t fathom. But she was thankful for the job. Some families tipped well, and every Christmas an architect named Miles Sweet sent the girls home with two hams and a sack of worn clothes, this time to keep.
As they walked, sunlight pressed through a sheer canopy of unfallen leaves. Beneath the cottonwood branches, the girls were centered and small, determined among the stone mansions and foursquare Victorians, their red wagon in tow.
“What do you think it’s like?” Luz asked.
“What what’s like?” said Lizette.
Luz lowered her voice, afraid houses could hear. “To live in homes like these.”
“Boring,” said Lizette. “Their lives are plain. We have all the adventure.” She shouted again in her radio announcer voice: “The Incredible Lives of Westside Laundresses!”
Luz smiled. She wished she could feel the same way, but instead she felt locked out, and wondered why she even wanted in. “But they sure are beautiful.”
“Don’t be too impressed,” said Lizette. “It’s how they trick themselves into thinking they’re better than we are.”
They came to a stone house, where clumped together in a gunnysack at the side door were soiled diapers and a woman’s nighties. The cousins hoisted the sodden bag from the ground and wrestled it into the wagon. Luz’s left pinkie nail caught and broke on a loose thread—the pain seeped. Laundry days stained her fingernails, cracked her palms, dried her skin like scales, and over time, if she didn’t stop lifting the heavy loads, Diego had warned Luz that her back would bend outward into a small mound.
“Your turn to pull,” Luz said.
Lizette scrunched her nose. The air jittered with dying leaves. “If I’m pulling, we take the shortcut.”
“You’re kidding,” Luz whined.
Their last stop lay on the other side of Cheesman, the old cemetery converted into a park. Though the headstones were gone, most of the bodies were still underground, and occasionally when Luz crossed the hilly grass, her mind filled with images of the dead. She’d seen babies, younger than two, withering with hunger, their eyes inconsolable in ravenous sorrow. Once she saw a glamorous blonde under a woolen blanket, a gunshot wound reddening her yellow hair. There were soldiers who had survived the Great War only to return home, death by suicide. A man missing half his skull. An Arapahoe warrior in gray paint, three arrows piercing his chest. That man, she could tell, was from an older burial, before the cemetery, before the city even existed.
“I pulled for most of the hill.” Lizette stood bossy with her hands on her hips, her face sparkling with sweat, an even exhaustion. She grabbed the wagon. “We’re taking the shortcut.”
“Fine,” Luz said. “But you better walk fast.”
The park was a vast lily pad of rippling green, a pathway leading to a marble pavilion. A busy midmorning. Couples in the shade, resting on iron benches. Squirrels dived through high grass, their backsides rounded like small bears. A group of Anglo men in varsity sweaters played football. They came together and pulled apart like a pack of wolves. A stout one with auburn hair cradled the ball as he ran. He was quarterback, and he shouted a string of numbers and commands, words like “Mississippi” and “Omaha,” but as the men plunged into a new play, his eyes fell upon the cousins and he hollered something the girls couldn’t make out, as if he spoke in the tone of a barking dog.
Luz smacked Lizette’s left hand, signaling caution.
“It’s okay,” Lizette whispered. “Ignore them. We’re almost out.”
The man yelled again, but by now the girls had edged around a thicket of maple trees, the land concealing them with affection.
“So, for the ceremony,” said Lizette after some time. “I refuse to wear a veil.” She mentioned her wedding to Alfonso often, though Luz knew in all likelihood they’d have to wait months or even years before Lizette could afford a dress, let alone a veil.
Luz spoke against the wind. “You think the church will let you do that?”
Lizette nodded, pausing the wagon and slowly sliding her arm down the metal handle. “No,” she said. “Because they’re always trying to hide a good thing. Like this face.”
Luz laughed, and told her cousin that yes, she agreed.
They had almost left the park, veering toward the eastern gate, a path lined in oak trees with thick roots bulging at the base. White paper was affixed to a tree, just one flyer at first, then another and another, as if a fungus had overrun the bark. Maybe it was a sign for a missing cat, something for sale? Since the crash, people were selling odd things. Their houseplants. Their bookends. Renting their bathrooms as bedrooms. But the girls came closer and read the sign clearly, professionally printed and typed.
NOTICE
This Park Belongs to WHITE PROTESTANTS