Woman of Light (57)

Mickey laughed. “You’re not legally wed, don’t forget that. What is his is, well, not yours.”

“My husband may trust you, but I’m not nearly as kindhearted as he is. Show me the deed, Mickey.”

He cleared his throat, tapped his dirty fingers together. He shuffled papers to the left of his desk. He looked up through longish black and now silver hair, green eyes bright as a cat’s. “Would ya look at that? Can’t seem to locate it.”

“You know how I make a living, right?” Simodecea said as she exited the office and before slamming the door. “I shoot things.”



* * *



—

During her long siestas on show days, stark sun shining throughout their new adobe home, Simodecea sometimes dreamed of her late husband, Wiley. The dreams were always in daylight, them walking over a mountain trail, Wiley opening a wooden gate, him pointing beyond the horizon to a flying hawk full of itself in a wind shaft, dancing or falling. Whenever Simodecea woke up from these dreams, she was groggy with transition from one reality to another. Once, as she and dreamtime Wiley laughed together, changing bedsheets, Simodecea thought Pidre might be upset with her for spending time with her late husband, even if in her dreams. She told Wiley so, flicking the sheet into the air. You have to remember something else, he told her. Besides your last view of me.

Simodecea swallowed hard, nodded and agreed.

She was wide awake the morning Pidre rushed home with a map that he unraveled over their pine table. It was of the newest routes of the Union Pacific, and Pidre laughed with a giddy smile as he smacked the page lightly with his right hand, using his pretty turquoise rings and handsome nails to iron the contours. “They’ve opened a line near Pardona,” he said, “where I come from.”

He smelled of tree sap and white sage, and Simodecea inhaled deeply, pleasurably reaching for her husband’s hand. She studied the map, the corridor between the mountains and the arroyo where Pidre’s village was located. She had asked him many times before if they could visit his people, but Pidre said he had been told not to return, at least not for a long while. He had heard stories of other men who had left their Pueblos, only to return with sickness they didn’t know they carried, infecting everyone they loved. Now it wouldn’t be like that. Now with the railroad, many people must have passed through Pardona. It would be commonplace, the village would be prepared.

Simodecea said, “We must take the girls.”

Pidre kissed his wife. He told her they would leave right away.

She let her gaze linger on the map, the yellow and red lines, the starburst compass. Her husband, she knew, was not able to read in the traditional sense, but he recognized patterns of letters and different symbols. Along the railroad route, there were illustrations of mineral deposits, stacks of ore, bars of silver. Simodecea pointed near the Red Theater on the map. There were several drawings of what appeared to be miniature suns.

She asked, “What’s this here?”

“Where?” said Pidre, looking intently.

Simodecea tapped the map with loud nails.

Pidre squinted. “A scientist, a woman. Her name is Curie. She found it all the way in Paris. Mickey was telling me all about it. They’re saying it’ll save people.”

“And it’s here?”

“Those men in tents seem to think so. Radium, they call it.”

Simodecea’s breath shortened in her throat. She turned to the window, eyed the ridge. More white tents had appeared in the last few months. They perched there like vultures drying their wings.



* * *



—

It was a cool-wind summer day when they arrived in La Tierra Perdida, their eyes burned from fragments of coal ash that had floated from the train’s engine into their faces through open windows. Pidre had closed the theater for the summer, his performers either visiting their families in cities like Santa Fe or Denver or touring with other shows for the season. When the train pulled into the station, Simodecea made sure to take both daughters by the arm, carting them away from the railroad tracks as if they were tied to her wrists with rope. The depot building was bustling with passengers elbowing their way on and off trains. The girls and their mother carried lace parasols and spread out in a line. Across the depot’s white-painted fa?ade was a large and incorrect clock.

“Someone,” said Simodecea, pointing to the clock’s drooping big hand, “ought to fix that.”

Pidre approached a merchant in a booth, a heavily bearded man in a striped cap with both thumbs tucked beneath his leather suspenders. A single line of perspiration ran over his sooty skin, clearing a wet path of flesh. Pidre pointed east, motioning to his heart and then outward, as if releasing an injured dove into the clouds. The man shook his head. His beard did not move.

“We need a horse and cart to get to Pardona,” Pidre said.

“It’s not on the map,” the man said, his voice muffled with beard.

“It’s very close, not even a half day’s journey.”

The bearded man guffawed with skeptical eyes. All around him were the voices of workingmen, miners and vaqueros, the scream of a train’s whistle. After some time, Pidre sifted through his satchel and presented the man with a handful of silver dollars. Money was money. “A cart, compa?ero, and two horses.”

And that, as they say, was that.