BANDITS
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Denver, Colo., July 23, 1934. Two men at noon entered the South Broadway Daniels Bank and with revolvers ordered Cashier Jones to hand over $2,000 cash. The bandits were halted when a female rattlesnake emerged from the vault, striking one of the bandits and startling the other into paralysis. The snake slithered toward the business part of the city. There is no clew to the snake.
——
THIRTY-SIX
Diego’s Return
When Diego received Luz’s letter demanding that he come home, he was living in a migrant camp outside of Provo, Utah. He had walked in the morning to the post office, a triangular slant building on the edge of a dirt road. The mountains in Provo were nestled against the city, and after reading Luz’s letter, Diego gazed upward at the massive, jutting mounds as if they, too, spoke to him. The answer was clear.
He gathered the few possessions he had collected on his travels, mostly religious emblems, little cards with Our Lady of Guadalupe, San Miguel, vials of holy water. He packed his new snake. By now not so new. With Sirena in a wicker basket, and everything Diego owned slung over his shoulder in the leather satchel, he set out for Denver just before the morning shift. There were no goodbyes. In the fields, every hello possessed within itself a farewell. People were as transient as the crops, picked and packaged, shipped afar, feeding the mouths of families Diego would never see.
He set out walking until a family of farmers picked him up from the side of a county road and offered him a lift to the town of Vernal. He stayed one night and met a young Mexicana widow in a saloon called Athens. Her name was Miranda. She had a strong nose and a missing tooth, making her smile seem mysterious, ethereal. He stayed with her for two nights. They made love outside her wooden cabin on grass shining with moonlight. After he kissed her goodbye on the second morning, Miranda rolled over in bed and unlaced the front of her cotton nightdress. Diego held her left breast with cold hands, and Miranda winced with a delicate grin.
Over the next few days, Diego walked. The landscape shifted from the lush greens of valleyed farmland into a rising mountain terrain. He drank from streams, leaning over the rushing coolness, cupping his hands into snowmelt. At least once a day, Diego removed Sirena from her basket and allowed the snake to slither over rocks or dirt, anything to keep her outercoat healthy, breathing in the land. Diego spent much of the time on his walk thinking of nothing, his mind a calmness saturated with the views of jagged red stone, ancient and bruised.
Shortly after he crossed the state line into Colorado, a farm truck filled with chickens slowed to a stop. The driver was an old woman, Anglo with silver hair and tiny blue eyes. “In back,” she said. Diego took off his hat, saluting her with appreciation. He rode with the chickens for half a day, feathers fluttering across his vision, smearing sections of white across the land. They stopped for a little while in a mining town called Somerset, where the old woman unloaded half her chickens, sold for a bag of shearling and several crates of large tomatoes. They had a lunch of those tomatoes on stale bread high on a cemetery hillside, surrounded by emptied coal mines. Diego walked the graves, noting surnames from all over the world, until he came upon a man named Benny Dumont, same name and birth year as his father. The man had died three years earlier, and from the looks of other gravestones with that exact death date, it seemed to be some kind of explosion. Diego stood silently as he imagined his father trapped underground, swallowed by rock and flames. Guess it wasn’t better out there without us, was it? When the old woman called out for Diego to return to the truck, she motioned for him to sit up front. They drove in silence as Diego quietly cried.
They soon said goodbye in Glenwood Springs, a large redbrick town with healing baths. Diego camped for a night on the banks of a canyon river and cleaned himself in the morning in the rushing waters, but the cold ached his body to the core. He then walked to the center of town and found himself at the public pools with a front entrance like a grand hotel. The clerk, an Anglo girl with strawberry hair, smiled at Diego but then nonchalantly shrugged and pointed to the sign NO MEXICANS, BLACKS, OR GOOKS. “Company policy,” the girl said. Later, that night, he met her outside the Baptist church on Main, where they made love quickly in the shadow of fragrant alleyway pines.
By the time he reached Georgetown, Diego needed to earn some money. He stopped outside a miners’ saloon with Sirena. They performed several tricks, nothing too complicated, Sirena rising to the sounds of his voice, head nodding, tongue flicking. Miners soon tossed coins into the open basket. The day shift in the coal shafts had just ended, and now the crowds widened. Diego felt uneasy but kept performing—money was money. But it was only a matter of time before one of the miners pushed forward from the depths of the crowd. His face was smeared in soot, a narrow jaw. He spoke with a kind of European accent as he called Diego the devil, first spitting on him and then gathering phlegm from his throat and launching it across Sirena. Diego lost his temper, lunged forward, and swung at the man. In Georgetown, he spent the night in jail, a brick cell with a barred window, a view of the stars.
He arrived in Denver by train through the city’s western entrance. It was dark morning, a glowing violet line pushing over the plains. Diego’s eyes were burning with coal soot as he hopped from the lumber train, landing in the rail yard with a gritty crash. He stood, dusted himself off, and heard a man’s voice yelling for him to stop. Diego ran from the yard cops, snagging his leg on a switcher and drawing blood before he found himself crawling under a chain-link fence leading into the Westside. He first ran and then walked swiftly over red sidewalks. Near an alley on the edge of downtown, Diego heard the grunt and tug of a small animal from a dilapidated bush. Jorge, Blind Dog, his tongue flashing from his pink lip. Diego laughed. “I don’t got nothing for you,” he said, and Jorge momentarily growled before yawning and coughing as he hobbled away.
By now, it was blue dawn.
When Diego first saw downtown, the factories, the brick businesses, the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, he felt as if he were embracing an old friend. “Look at you,” he said, and pulled Sirena from her basket to see. They walked, starting from the low numbered streets and moving toward Hornet Moon. Diego cut across Seventeenth Street and noticed a black cavity, a burned-out hole, where the saddlemaker and several other businesses once were. There was a newspaperman behind Diego, readying a stack of papers to sell for the day. Diego turned to the man. He asked what had happened.
“You don’t know?” he said, shaking his head. “They burned that young attorney’s business to the ground.”
“Which lawyer?”
The man said, “Dave Tikas. Too bad, they say he was gonna help a lot of us. Now, it’s all gone, and his daddy’s place, too, started some damn war.”
Diego asked more questions, but the man waved him on and told him that if he wanted to know so much, he ought to buy a newspaper. Diego obliged. With the paper in hand, he set out for home.
* * *
—
Maria Josie and a woman Diego had never met before were at the kitchen table. When he saw his auntie, she stood in astonishment. They didn’t speak for several moments, only embraced. Maria Josie explained that Ethel was her friend, and Diego shook the woman’s hand. “Where’s Luz?” he asked, and Maria Josie pointed down the hall. “In bed.”