Woman of Light (7)

“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.