Woman of Light Read online

  ONE

  Little Light

  Denver, 1933

  Luz Lopez sat with her auntie Maria Josie near the banks where the creek and the river met, the city’s liquid center illuminated in green and blue lights, a Ferris wheel churning above them. The crowds of Denver’s chile harvest festival walked the bottomlands with their faces hidden behind masks of turkey legs and bundles of buttered corn. The dusk air smelled of horse manure and gear grease and the sweet sting of green chilies roasting in metal drums. Through the smog of sawdust and food smoke, Luz was brightened by the flame of her kerosene burner, black hair curled around her noteworthy face, dark eyes staring into a porcelain cup. She wore a brown satin dress dulled from many washes—but still she shined.

  “Tell me,” said an old man in Spanish, fiddling with the white-brimmed Stetson across his lap. His eyes murky, faraway. “I can take it.”

  Luz searched inside the cup, tea leaves at the bottom. Along the edges, she saw a pig’s snout, and deeper into the mug, far into the future, she glimpsed a running wolf. Luz placed the cup on the velvet cloth over her booth’s wide table, which was really an old Spanish door, the rusted knob exposed like a pointed thorn.

  “Gout,” she said. “A bad case.”

  The old man lifted his hat to his sweat-salted head. “The goddamn beans, the lard Ma uses.”

  “Can’t always blame a woman,” Maria Josie interrupted with reserved confidence. She was thickset with deep brown hair cut close to her face, and she wore workmen’s trousers and a heathery flannel with wide chest pockets, her dark eyes peering through round glasses. She told the old man that almost no one she knew could afford lard anymore. “Especially not in an abundance, señor.”

  “You’ll have to give it up,” Luz said sweetly. “For your health, more time at life.”

  The old man swore and tossed a nickel into Luz’s tackle box, leaving the booth with the hunkered posture of a man bickering with himself.

  It was an annual festival, a grouping of white tents and a lighted main stage. Denver’s skyline around them, pointed and gray, a city canyon beneath the moon. Rail yards and coal smelters coughed exhaust, their soot raining into the South Platte River. Young people had unlaced their boots and removed their stockings, wading into the moon’s reflection. Bats swooped low and quick.

  “Can I interest you ladies in a reading?” Luz asked. Two younger girls had slowed their pace, dissolving cotton candy onto their tongues. They gawked at Luz’s teakettle and leaves, her tackle box of coins.

  The taller of the two girls said, “Bruja stuff?”

  The shorter one giggled through blue teeth and licked the last of her candy. “We don’t mess around with that,” she said and reached across the booth. She pushed aside a mossy stone, snatching one of Diego’s handbills. The girls locked arms and skipped down the aisle between tents, bouncing to the main stage where the Greeks were hosting their annual contest, “Win Your Woman’s Weight in Flour.”

  Maria Josie whispered, “The young ones are no good.”

  Luz asked why, and said at least she was trying.

  “Focus on the viejos—they’re steady.”

  “Sure they are,” Luz said. “Until Doña Sebastiana comes.”

  Maria Josie laughed. “You’re right, jita. Never met a dead man with a future.”

  Onstage, Pete Tikas was at the microphone in a maroon suit with a red carnation pinned to his lapel. “Calling all homegrown Denver gals,” he shouted, tapping the platform with his wooden cane, the sound booming. He owned the Tikas Market, and folks from all over, nearly every neighborhood, called him Papa Tikas. They brought him gifts from their gardens—rosemary and cilantro, bootleg mezcal. They named their babies Pete and carried them into the market, wrapped in white blankets. While many Anglo-owned stores turned them away, Papa Tikas welcomed all. Money is money, was his motto, though it went beyond that. He cared about his city, about the people his store fed.

  “I kinda like these big ol’ gals,” said Maria Josie, motioning through the night toward the main stage. “Maybe we’ll get customers from all this ruckus.”

  Luz and her older brother, Diego, had lived with their auntie for nearly a decade. When Luz was eight years old, her mother, Sara, decided she could no longer care for her children, sending them north to live with her younger sister, Maria Josie, in the city. Whenever Luz thought of her mother, she felt like a stone was lodged into her throat, and so she didn’t think of her often.

  “Doubtful,” said Luz, sliding lower behind her booth. “They’re just causing a scene.”

  Maria Josie flashed an ornery smile. She had an elegant gap between her front teeth. “Hell, some of those girls are pretty cute.” She pointed to the dozen or so women ascending the stage. Tall ones. Short ones. Those with the heft of their railroad worker men. Big-boned gals from the Martinez clan who didn’t have a chance against the chubby Gallegos. Pick us. Weigh me. I’m the winner, winner.

  The first woman took to the scale and Papa Tikas hollered, “One ninety! You can do better, ladies.” A regal woman in an orange shawl was next. She had a dazed look, as if she’d walked into her own birthday party expecting a wake. The crowd trembled with applause.

  Maria Josie shook her head and pushed back in her chair, the front two legs lifting from the silty earth. She motioned with a kissy mouth to the bleachers, stage left, where Diego twirled beneath the metal slits in barred light. “Look at that boy now,” she said.

  He was on in twenty minutes. Dirt coughed beneath his feet, his mouth as open as a third eye socket. He moved in patterned steps, a dancer beating an invisible flame. Although she couldn’t make them out through the harvest light, Luz knew that her brother’s snakes, Reina and Corporal, were nearby in their wicker basket. The breezeless weather was good for a festival, even better for the snakes. Within a month, Reina and Corporal, six-foot-long rattlers, would curl beneath a heat lamp in Diego’s bedroom. They could die if left under an open window, a wintry draft freezing their bodies in an instant. Cold-blooded, Luz had learned, meant something.

  “If I told you I killed it myself, would you believe it?” It was Lizette, who had approached the booth in a secondhand fur coat, rabbit or fox, most likely stolen or pawned by her fiancé, Alfonso. “Real eye-catching, huh?”

  Maria Josie slammed her chair back onto four legs. She leaned over the booth, rubbing with her index finger and thumb at Lizette’s disintegrating jacket. Flecks of powdery fur floated in the dark. “Skinned it yourself, too?”

  Lizette frowned and flicked her right hand, as though she smoked a cigarette that didn’t exist. She plopped down in the chair across from Luz, sliding open her green mermaid clutch, rows of loosened beads across the siren’s face. “Read for me, prima? Same as usual,” she said, “but more on Al. I think he’s cheating. That son of a bitch.”

  “Only a fool would do such a thing,” said Maria Josie sarcastically. “Unimaginable.”

  Lizette blushed. Her ridged cheekbones gave her an ornamental look, and her eyes were a galaxy of greens and golds and black. The cousins had been inseparable since Luz first arrived in Denver. “Thank you, Tía,” said Lizette.

  Luz reached for her brass kettle, the water kept at a low boil over the kerosene burner, her fingers scented with fuel. She lifted the kettle and poured tea into a white cup. It was always the same when she read for Lizette. Usually she saw a doll and a rattle, and in recent years, as her sight grew stronger, Luz glimpsed a sunny apartment with a yellow kitchen, white French doors, brick walls.

  “Think of your question,” said Luz, handing the cup to Lizette. “Don’t get sidetracked like usual.”

  Lizette held the cup to her mouth, puffed as if blowing out birthday candles. “Me?”

  “Yes, you,” Maria Josie said.

  Lizette stared coolly at Maria Josie before finishing her tea and handing the cup to Luz. “What’s the damage
?”

  Delicately, Luz placed the cup brim down, draining leftover tea on a cloth napkin, the brown water bleeding onto the fabric. She turned the cup counterclockwise three times before flipping it over and gazing inside, the leaves darkly drenched like ground liver. A star, a boot, stray images along the ridge. Luz focused until the symbols blurred, giving way to another view, a moment caught like trout from a river. Black hair rising and falling over white sheets, Lizette’s curls perfumed with rose water. A long, airy moan. Teeth against floral pillows, a curved toe hitting a metal bed frame. Luz closed her eyes, she turned away from the cup.

  “Wow, Lizette,” Luz said, flatly. “You aren’t even married yet.”

  Lizette removed a penny from her clutch and dropped it onto the table. “Stop looking!”

  “You asked me to!”

  “Better not be,” said Maria Josie, with seriousness. “Who can afford a baby right now?”

  Lizette stuck out her tongue. She stood and smacked her own ass draped in the decaying fur coat and walked off toward a hat booth, her pockets holey without change.

  “That girl,” Maria Josie said, “is unscrupulous.”

  Through a sound like falling ice, the Ferris wheel shifted its gears. Maria Josie stood from her seat. She placed both hands firmly in her pockets and told Luz that she was going in search of atole, but her gaze drifted, her attention clearly on Mrs. Dolores Reyes, the young widow kicked up against a steel pigpen in a peach polka dot dress, her beige pumps covered in mud. She smiled as Maria Josie headed her way.

  * * *

  —

  The festival was packed, and from somewhere among the tents, a man whistled at Luz, then another hissed and clicked his tongue. She hunched forward, hoping to make herself small, unnoticeable. Luz hated to be left alone. But she kept it to herself. Maria Josie had taught Luz that showing fear drew more of it. And there was a lot to be afraid of. Luz glanced toward her knife, slipped gently into her boot, a comfort just to keep it there. On the main stage, the woman in the orange shawl waved as she carted away her flour. Neighborhood children then scrambled onto the platform. Diego paid them in licorice and baseball cards to stack fruit crates, his stagehands of twig arms and legs. One of the boys hollered into a red bullhorn. “Arriba, mira, you’ll see him soon. Diego Lopez,” the boy shouted. “Snake Charmer.”

  Diego was popular. His snakes were large, aggressive rattlers. Their tips hissed like tin cans of pebbles and their scales were cream colored with black diamond heads. Reina was the older of the two with noticeably longer fangs. She often appeared sheepish, hiding her eyes beneath an inner lid of white. Corporal was different. His movements were precise, lingering, a flash of slit eyes. When Diego wasn’t in bed with a woman, he allowed his snakes to sleep curled above his feet, their cold ribbed bodies as heavy as several cats.

  The stage brightened and a ruby curtain swept apart over the platform, revealing Diego beneath the lights. With deer-like legs, he trotted and paused center stage, holding his audience in a piercing gaze. At twenty-one, he was slender with a graceful throat, his musculature trim from his day job working as a lineman at the Gates Factory, where he churned out rubber belts against the belligerent melody of machinery and the curses of strained men. He stood onstage in a sparkling dress shirt and purple trousers, his abundant black hair blue with pomade.

  Taking a step back, Diego whistled with his pinkies hooked in his mouth. He lifted the lid from his wicker basket. The audience gasped.

  Diego called to them. His Reina. His Corporal. The snakes rose together in a braid, their brawny bodies held apart, creating a space where Diego’s face could be seen in the gap, calm and unflinching, his eyes highlighted in black kohl and his mouth painted red. He reached for his snakes, lifting them higher by their fangs. The crowd roared as Diego released them from his grip and the reptiles fell to the floor, playing dead at their owner’s feet. He nudged them with his wing-tipped shoes and clapped three times. The snakes blasted upward, diverging from one another in a V.

  Lights dimmed. People cheered. Coins like hail clinked over the wooden stage. The entire world, even the glistening river and creek, darkened as Diego moved into his next trick.

  “A reading, please.” It was a small voice, then an ashen hand clutching a dime.

  Before Luz stood a young woman, a redhead who seemed to rise into the air, her figure hidden beneath the billows of an emerald coat. It was one thing to be a white woman at the chile harvest. It was another thing to be a white woman alone. And certain Anglos scared Luz, how they hung signs in their businesses and grocery stores: NO DOGS OR NEGROES OR MEXICANS ALLOWED.

  “Your name?” Luz asked.

  “Eleanor Anne,” said the girl quietly, as if she’d been trained to speak low. “And you’re Little Light?”

  Luz focused. She poured the tea. “Only my brother calls me that.”

  “I know Diego real well,” said Eleanor Anne.

  “He knows lots of girls real well,” said Luz.

  If Eleanor Anne thought Luz was being rude, she didn’t show it. Instead, the girl was eerily oblivious to anything outside herself. She had a smell like sugary perfume and she kept her coat buttoned clear to her throat, though the night was peacefully mild, as if the weather had offered the city a gift. Beneath her large green eyes were bruise-colored bags, and her thin lips were chapped, a scab running her center seam. Hopefulness mixed with dread beamed from every inch of the girl’s heart-shaped face. She seemed somewhat older than Luz. Maybe nineteen or twenty. She had come from Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood, near the edge of City Park. Her father owned a shipping business, she explained, and offered no further details. Luz kept her distance behind the table, edged back in her chair. She didn’t like how Eleanor Anne had the slouched posture of a dog raised in a too-small cage.

  Luz asked, “You come here with someone?”

  “My brothers,” said Eleanor Anne. “But they’re playing a game somewhere, one with water.” She finished her tea in slow swallows. Her teeth were square, shockingly so, and she had an air about her that was static, strangely still, as if the girl wasn’t entirely alone, like there was someone else beside her steadying her hands. Luz felt sick with worry, a feeling she’d experienced only a handful of times—like when her father left and her mother wept into the night, her tears freezing solid on their cabin floor. She wished the girl would leave.

  “Done!” Eleanor Anne handed Luz the mug.

  Luz thanked her. She considered the leaves, their soaking shapes.

  “Who taught you,” asked Eleanor Anne, “to read tea leaves?”

  “My mother,” said Luz. “She said my great-grandmother had the sight, too.”

  “What was her name?”

  “I don’t know. No one told me.”

  “Where do you come from?” asked Eleanor Anne.

  Intrusive, thought Luz. “The Lost Territory.” She looked up for a moment before returning her gaze to the tea leaves with a placid expression. “And you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, I don’t suppose you come from here.”

  “Missouri,” she said, “my father brought us to Denver when I was young.”

  “Long way from home. Your cup,” Luz said dryly, “is filled with a clam, an owl, a brick. It probably means two men will fight over you.”

  Eleanor Anne told her she had no idea who those men could be. She was hardly seeing anyone, let alone multiple men. “How do you know it works? Your sight?”

  “It doesn’t work,” said Luz, “but most of the time it goes in the right direction.”

  Eleanor Anne turned away, peering over her shoulder. Diego was onstage draped in his snakes. “What do they fight about, these men?”

  Luz peered over the brim and into the hull of the white mug, eyeing the peculiar pattern of clumped leaves. Nothing immediate. No image of a person, street corner, discernible
house or garden. Then something strange, off-putting, the tea leaves seeming to drift like a blizzard over golden plains until Luz saw a place she hadn’t seen before, twilight, a grassland marked by a dirt road, a lighted caravan of horse-drawn wagons hobbling along the path. Small red trailers halted, and from their doors came acrobats, fire dancers, jugglers, clowns, and a little girl with straight bangs and a handsome face, a large hearty belly. The tallgrass prairie smelled of fire. They were in the fields behind barns and dingy tractors. Crows squawked and the few cottonwood trees shivered. A pack of white men and women had gathered, and the girl asked if they’d like to see a trick. She spoke English like a grown-up. “Like with cards?” asked a child among the audience, and the girl shook her head. She pulled a fire poker from a satchel. It was a foot long with a hawk’s talon at one end and a spiral handle at the other. The girl plunged it down her small throat, turned the handle, and brought it out again, clean. “That’s no trick,” yelled a man from the crowd. “Better trick would be to gut yourself, gypsy.” The pale mob laughed then, edging toward the girl as one.

  Eleanor Anne said, “What do you see?”

  Luz looked up, dimness in her eyes. “I don’t know. Some kind of circle.”

  “A ring,” said Eleanor Anne optimistically. “Maybe I’ll be married.”

  “Sure,” said Luz, with a forced smile. “Say,” she said, “what’s Missouri like?”

  Eleanor Anne turned her face to the side, the tip of her pinched nose lopped away into shadow. “Flat,” she said. “That’s about it. Nothing like here.”

  * * *

  —

  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.