Woman of Light (6)
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.
“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.