Woman of Light Read online

  “How’d you make out?” Luz asked.

  Diego placed a foot on his basket. “Not bad. Yourself?”

  “Read for a few people. There was a girl tonight. Someone who knows you.”

  Diego laughed, short and ugly. “Oh yeah? Lots of girls know me.”

  “An Anglo girl,” said Luz. “She was alone. There was something about her, a bad feeling.”

  Diego haggardly looked upon his sister and his sporadic stubble rose like the coat of a fearful animal. He shuffled through his pockets, presenting Luz with a silver bracelet, the imprint of a bear claw near the clasp. “Found this cleaning up,” he said. “Ours now, Little Light.”

  TWO

  La Divisoria

  The next morning Luz stood at her altar, crossing herself from forehead to heart, shoulder to shoulder. The soapbox on her corner of the floor was sprinkled with marigolds and uncooked rice and a damaged photograph of her mother and father, Sara and Benny, standing beside a tilted adobe church in the desert, their young faces distorted, as if someone had taken flint rock and scraped onto the photo, hoping for fire.

  They were a family, Luz, Diego, and Maria Josie. They shared a one-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of a tenement on the edge of downtown Denver, an Italianate with pediments and arched windows and alabaster bricks baking in sunlight, a building named Hornet Moon. Diego slept in the main room on a steel bed that pulled down from the stucco wall. His window looked upon the alley at the back entrance to a butcher’s named Milton’s Meats, a tiny world of trucks and flies and men working among pig and turkey carcasses. Maria Josie and Luz occupied the bedroom, a high-ceilinged space divided with a worn cotton sheet draped over ropes, one side for Luz and the other for Maria Josie. Their window opened to the street, a view walled in textures of bricks, doorways and fire escapes comfortably cross, a patch of visible sky. Watchful giants, Luz often thought of the buildings, as she gazed at her corner of the city through the fog of her own reflection. The apartment’s most notable feature was the white-walled kitchen with an elegant Lorraine gas stove that Maria Josie had won during a card game, but beyond that, they had a half-broken icebox, their gas and electric was unreliable, and in the late evenings and early mornings they walked with candlelight to the shared bathtub down the hall.

  “Little Light,” Diego hollered from the other room. “Come here.”

  He was on the oak floor doing push-ups in his trousers, shirtless, Reina curved down his back in a coiled L. The snake flicked her forked tongue in greeting at Luz. Diego was up early before his shift at Gates. The main room smelled of his amber cologne and pomade and an undercurrent of ripe sweat and the gritty flesh stench of the butcher shop. Overalls hung from the long window, shading Corporal in his glass cage.

  “Where you off to this hour?” Diego asked, eyeing Luz’s curled hair, her blue sack dress winking beneath her threadbare winter coat.

  It was laundry day, and Luz told Diego that he should’ve known. “If you paid attention to anyone but yourself.” Three days a week, Luz and Lizette washed and pressed rich people’s clothes at a washery off Colfax and York.

  Diego said, “How you stand Lizette for that long? I’d wring my own neck.”

  Luz pointed to Reina. “There’s worse company.”

  “Do me a favor.” Diego went down. “Take Reina and put her in the cage. Bring me Corporal.” Diego went up.

  “No,” Luz whined.

  “She ain’t gonna do nothing to ya. Shit, she likes you.” Diego edged left shoulder forward, nudging Reina in Luz’s direction. The girl snake flashed her sheepish expression. She lifted her endless throat.

  “What about Corporal?”

  Diego told her the snake was too lazy for violence. “Plus, he just ate.”

  Luz looked at the snake’s middle, the mouse-shaped lump. She sighed and squeezed through the narrow aisle between Diego and the cage. He continued his push-ups as Reina bobbed over his back. Luz inched forward, her arms stiffly out, and in one swoop, lifted the chilly snake. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” she said to Diego as she slipped Reina into the cage, which smelled of dead rodents and hay. The girl snake flopped onto Corporal. He grunted.

  “He talks now?” Luz said.

  Diego laughed. He rolled onto his feet. “Maybe I should grab him myself.” He stepped to the glass cage, diving his arms downward to Corporal. He lifted and cradled the snake before flinging Corporal over his back, a slapping sound as scales met skin.

  Diego returned to the floor. This time between push-ups, he clapped.

  * * *

  —

  Lizette lived on the Westside in a tilted orange house off Fox Street with her mother and father and four grimy brothers who threw tantrums and played vaqueros and bandidos with stick guns in the yard. Inside, they’d wail and slide down the banister in dirty socks. Tía Teresita and Tío Eduardo were usually only a passing storm, chasing one boy or another with a wooden spoon. Don’t make me break this over your little butts, they’d holler. Steel pots of menudo and pintos steamed on the stove, and their tortillas, the kind made of corn instead of flour, rested in a wicker basket on the kitchen table. The houses of Fox Street were humble, small roomed, tiny yarded, and beautifully adorned with stone grottoes housing blue porcelain statues of La Virgen de Guadalupe.

  If the Westsiders were considered poor, they didn’t believe it, for many owned their own homes from the money they had earned at the rail yards, the slaughterhouses, the onion and beet fields, the cleaners, and hotels. Their lives were lived between farmland rows and the servants’ back stairs. They had come to Denver from the Lost Territory, and farther south from current-day Mexico, places like Chihuahua and Durango and Jalisco. Many, including Teresita and Eduardo, had arrived after the bloodiest days of the Mexican Revolution. Maria Josie’s mother, Simodecea, had been distantly related to Teresita’s father, a jimador in Guadalajara. But one morning when Teresita was eleven years old, she had walked the agave rows to find her papa blindfolded and shot, a tiny hole in his head like an extra eardrum leaking blood into the earth.

  Luz lifted the latch on Lizette’s metal gate, stepping over yellowed grass, flattened in frost. She waved to her cousin, who was seated on the four-step concrete stoop beside their red wagon. “Ready?”

  Lizette wore her new-used coat and was resting her chin on both hands, elbows on her knees. Her eyebrows were thin black lines, clownish and wandering as she reached to the ground beside her ankles in frilly socks. She raised a steel thermos. “Try some, prima,” she said.

  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

  NO GOOKS

  SPICS

  NIGGERS

  Allowed

  Or

  Kikes, Catholics, Communists

  “I can’t believe I learned to read,” Lizette said, ripping the notice from the bark. “So I could read bullshit like this.” She balled the paper, anger like flames in her hands.

  “Let’s go,” said Luz, looking over her shoulder, searching for people in the trees. “Now.”

  They left behind the lavish houses, the manicured lawns, that hateful bark. At the edge of Colfax, the city was an open vein. The hobbled tents of vagrants were pitched under faded awnings, policemen rode on horseback, and there were sounds of hollow hooves. A woman screamed from an open window. Somewhere glass shattered. A baby cried. Soaring pigeons caught sunlight, their oil-slick wings illuminated in a great flash. The city had a pace, a feeling. It seemed Luz could dive into the roadways, drown in the immensity of people and machines. In the distance, the Rocky Mountains embraced the skyline, that rift where the rivers decided to run west into the Pacific or downward and out into that faraway gulf. La Divisoria, the separation of it all, a continent split in two.

  After some time, when the park and its bodies were far behind, Lizette said, “Sorry we went that way.”

  THREE

  The Greeks

  “There’s been another killing,” said Papa Tikas.

  Luz was with Maria Josie in the Tikas Market, a tightly packed brick row where the Mexican, Colored, and Greek neighborhoods met. Papa Tikas sold the freshest meat and vegetables in Denver, unloading vibrant melons and apples and cuts of lamb each morning directly from the butchers’ and farmers’ trucks. Luz was in the bulk aisle beside the register, scooping pinto beans from wooden barrels into paper sacks. It was Thursday afternoon, and she wore her hair pinned away from her face. The market was calm, the selection thinned from an early morning rush.

  “That same cop as last time?” said an older man in a Greek accent. “Business as usual for them.”

  “It might be, but my son i
s a determined lawyer.” The ornate register dinged, and Papa Tikas handed the man his change. They were both nicely dressed, rings on their fingers, thick gold watches on their wrists. “He’ll make it all the way to district attorney someday.”

  “A socialist as the DA. Can you imagine?”

  Papa Tikas laughed. “Another way is possible. It wasn’t so long ago—”

  At the nape of her neck, Luz felt a callused hand. “Don’t eavesdrop,” said Maria Josie, making her way toward the dairy aisle.

  Luz told her auntie that she wasn’t, and rolled her eyes. She slipped past a group of viejos playing dominoes over a folding table in the foyer. The clip clap of their ivory pieces merged with the crackling sounds of the radio. “In the early spring,” President Roosevelt’s assured voice rang out, “there were actually and proportionally more people out of work in this country than in any other nation in the world….Our troubles will not be over tomorrow, but we are on our way.” Whenever Luz heard the president’s announcements on the radio she imagined him tall, gray-eyed, grandfatherly with his cane and leg braces. Since he had taken office, people seemed more hopeful about finding work. But even with jobs, no matter how much Luz or Maria Josie or even Diego worked, they were still poor, as if their position in life had been permanently decided generations before.

  “What about pork chops?” Luz called across the store.