Woman of Light (23)

“He planted that coin,” shouted an audience member. “What a joke. I want my money back, you crooks. A bunch of charlatans.” He wavered, piss drunk near the left-side bleachers. In his right hand, he clasped a tin cup overflowing with Jack Wesley’s watery beer.

Mickey chuckled. “Oh, Christ. Have some faith.” He patted Pidre on the back. “I wouldn’t test this one.”

Pidre watched Simodecea’s reaction with great interest. She winced as the man continued shouting from below. Some of the crowd yelled for him to quiet down. They threw their kettle corn. They hushed him and moved seats. But the drunken man didn’t stop and Simodecea seemed taken out of her next trick. Her face flickered with annoyance and as her already sparse audience stood to leave, Simodecea twisted over the ledge, locked her skirted legs along the side, unraveled herself upside-down, and dangled like an elegant insect. She aimed her rifle and shot.

The drunken man’s beer erupted across his face and chest. He screamed, shrill and child-like, as he fumbled with his hands over his body. “The bitch shot at me!”

“Leave,” said Simodecea, raveling herself upright. “Now.”

The man scrambled through the tent flaps, shaken and disoriented. Pidre laughed and felt his heart racing. “She’s the one,” he said.

Mickey removed his hat and shrugged. “And how do you expect to lure her away from this sparkling gig?”

Later, outside her dressing room, Pidre held his hat in his hands, wishing he had a bouquet of roses rather than palms wet with fear. Mickey kept watch for any handlers who’d push them away before Pidre could approach Simodecea with his offer, but they didn’t have to wait very long, for she came rushing through in a flurry of fringe. She removed her beaded headpiece with quick hands and wore her gun across her back with a thin leather strap. As she approached her dressing room door, she spotted Pidre and rolled her deliriously black eyes. Pidre laughed and offered a handshake.

Simodecea looked at his hand as if he had offered her a half-eaten sandwich and kept walking into her dressing room, leaving the door open as she sat at her red vanity, staring hard at herself in the oval mirror. “What do you want?” she said.

“Se?orita,” Pidre said, “I just saw you and felt compelled to know you. The strongest feeling came over me.”

“It’s Se?ora, Se?ora Salazar-Smith.”

Pidre apologized. He told her of course. “May I ask, are you happy in your current contract?”

Simodecea flung her head back. She was in the process of undoing her braid, and her laugh sparked into the air around them. “You’re a poacher? Oh, darling. No one wants to poach me now. You’re five years too late.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because I don’t shoot at live targets anymore. Well, unless they’re a real asshole.”

Pidre told her he understood. He stepped slightly forward into her dressing room, hesitating to go farther until Simodecea locked eyes with him and nodded. “If you please forgive me,” he said, “I think your talent and artistry speaks for itself. You dazzle without death.”

“I am Death, haven’t you heard?”

“No, Death protects you. She’s all around you, even now.”

“What traveling circus are you with, Mr.—?”

“Lopez, Pidre Lopez, and I’m not a circus man. I have a theater made of red stone. I need my star attraction, and I want you.”

Simodecea laughed and turned sideways at her vanity, removing her stockings, her left leg kicked high into the air. “Well, that’s very sweet of you, Pidre Lopez.”

“You can name your price,” Pidre said.

Simodecea thought on it for some time. “No live targets? No moving around?”

“No. None of that.”

“One more thing,” Simodecea said. “No goddamn bears?”





NINE




Women Without Men

Denver, 1934





Luz plunged a white sheet with bloodstains into a bucket of soapy water, pressing against a glass ribbed washboard. Still, blood remained and Luz quietly cursed. It was January and the washery was airy with linoleum floors, large steel tubs, mothers and daughters shouting at one another through the sharpness of lye.

“Why don’t they just throw these out?” she said to Lizette, who was beside her, folding men’s shirts over a metal table. “They have enough money.”

Lizette gave the sheet a sidelong glance. “Because they’re cheap. Use the cold water,” she said. “Mama showed me. I had a lady’s blouse once, all covered in blood, the lacey bib mostly. She said she’d pay me extra if I got it out. Lemon and ice water.”

“What happened to her blouse?” asked Luz with concern.

Lizette shrugged. “Nosebleeds?”

“Sure,” said Luz with a bad feeling, knowing that probably wasn’t the truth. She had seen her own mother covered in blood from her father’s blows more times than she’d like to remember.

A small boy in overalls wheeled a cart beside Luz and Lizette, looking on with a curious face, brown eyes like oiled skillets. The boy stood on the base of the cart and let out yippee sounds, his voice climbing the washery walls.

Lizette huffed, smacking the crisp sleeve of a white shirt across the table. “You gotta go, kid,” she said.