Woman of Light (35)
“There’s a man running,” she said, turning the cup like a dial. “He’s marveling at tents. An enormous citrus orchard is now a shantytown. There are orange trees.” Luz paused and beamed with joy. “How pretty. I’ve never seen orange trees before.”
Avel slowly turned to face her as she spoke, a stunned look on his face.
“Star people,” said Luz, with awe. “My mama used to talk about them visiting the Lost Territory, but those snatchers came from the sky. These ones, they’re Anglos.”
“You see all that?”
“Is it wrong?”
“It’s happened. I mean, it’s happening.”
“Really? Then I’m on track?”
Avel nodded and leaned across the table to Luz, as if to listen to a storyteller who had fallen to a whisper.
“At night, dogs are barking. There are lanterns behind curtains. Strangers are pulling men from their beds, taking them as they sleep. They are putting them on packed trains.” Luz wound a string of her hair around her finger. She pulled it tightly as she continued to read. She had never seen anything like this before, such defined images in the cup. There were square homes with their windows illuminated in chaos. She heard men shouting, their wet-lined lungs coughing commands in both English and Spanish. Women wept as their husbands’ feet were dragged over damp grass. Inside wooden boxcars, the smell of urine. Luz felt sickness rising in her heart. She looked at Avel across the table, and his face was gentle in its surprise.
“They’re calling it repatriation,” he said, flatly. “They’re deporting us to Mexico to make room for white men without jobs. Doesn’t matter a lot of us were born right here in the USA.”
“That’s why you’re in Denver?”
“In a sense.”
Two policemen entered the diner then, their badges shiny and their thick batons swinging like dead snakes at their sides. With broad, authoritative gaits, they walked to the counter, taking two stools beside the jukebox. One removed his cap, ran his fingers through his hair, and pointed to the jukebox with an irritable look on his chinless face. The second officer stood, deposited coins into the machine. The music shifted from jazz. An abrupt cut into foxtrot. No couples looked up from their tables and booths. Everyone, it seemed, lowered their eyes.
“We should get you back home,” Avel said softly. “I’d hate for Maria Josie to worry.”
FIFTEEN
The Red Streets
On her first day at the law office, Luz wore a church dress, not sure what office girls wore. She stood on the busy corner of Seventeenth and Tremont where the triangular Brown Palace Hotel pointed like a ship’s bow. City wind fought against Luz as she crossed the packed street, walking to the row of underground businesses where David’s office nestled in the middle. Opening the slim glass door with his name and the word ESQUIRE stenciled in black, Luz was embarrassed by her hands, her filthy fingernails, her callused palms.
“Right on time,” David said, sipping coffee in shirtsleeves and black slacks. He leaned against a massive bookshelf facing a windowless eastern wall.
Luz lowered her head. She spoke quietly with her hands folded behind her back. “It’s a short walk.”
He approached her, asking for her coat, which Luz removed from her shoulders in a rigid, nervous way. “You can keep your things here,” he said, pointing to a metal hook between two bookshelves. Luz had only seen that many books before in a library. She didn’t know people kept as many themselves, and she wondered who had time to read a wall’s worth of words.
“To begin,” said David, hanging her coat from the rack, “I’ll need help keeping the office organized, papers straightened, books dusted, that sort of thing.”
There were traffic sounds outside, and the floorboards above them creaked. Luz nodded as David led her around the front room, long and narrow, ending at his office door. The room smelled of dust and the burnt stench of the saddlemaker’s labor one business down. In the tiny green bathroom, David pointed to dishes drying on a rack, the cabinet filled with hand towels and unused bars of Ivory soap. In the main room, he patted his pockets and dropped a set of keys into Luz’s hand. “Keep these for the desk and front door.”
Luz placed the keys in her dress pocket and trailed David as he pointed out various filing cabinets, brown husks beneath sash-barred windows.
“These should be locked every evening.” He gestured toward a file drawer marked A–C. Beyond his left shoulder, Luz peered at his diplomas on the wall, the elegant inked calligraphy, the seal of Columbia University. Luz marveled at the small articulated throne.
“Today you’ll straighten paperwork, and next week, from your first wages, I’ll put you into some kind of class for typing at the Opportunity School.” At a dark metal desk, David swiped an olive-colored typewriter’s keys. This, Luz realized, was to be her seat.
“I like the noise,” she said. “Sounds like rain.”
“Good. You’ll hear it a lot.”
In the far corner, David reached into a crate resting on the hardwood floor and removed a stack of papers. He pushed them into Luz’s hands, and she was surprised by their heaviness. “You’ll need to put these in alphabetical order. They’re simple documents, assessors’ notes from various neighborhoods. When you see a neighborhood that starts with B, such as Baker, it goes here.” David opened the first filing drawer and lifted a folder. “And so on and so forth. Any questions?”