Woman of Light (82)
She laughed. “You’re right,” Lizette said, her voice lower than usual. “I didn’t expect this.”
“Expect what?”
“I thought today would feel different. But I’m still just me. I mean, now I’m going to have my own life, my own little family someday. I thought it would take longer. When I was a little girl, it seemed so far away. Everything seemed so far away. And now we’re here, and that’s all behind us.”
Luz thought on this. She said, “Sometimes when I’m reading tea leaves or daydreaming, I see things so clearly, from anywhere in time. It’s like we aren’t far away from anything at all.”
Lizette looked up. Her eyes were puffy, her skin smooth.
“I think everything that’s ever happened or going to happen to us and the people we love is around,” said Luz. “All we have to do is reach for it.”
Lizette laughed and got up from the floor. She pretended to reach for Luz.
I’m right here, Luz thought. I’ll always be right here.
“Why were you crying last night?” Lizette asked. “Tell me what happened.”
Luz dropped her gaze. She nodded a little at first, and then with certainty she said, “Okay.”
* * *
—
Luz went to Maria Josie later. She was at the mirror factory with a flaming torch at her station. When Luz stepped through the garage door, Maria Josie removed her goggles, stopped her work, and quieted her torch. She waved for Luz to come near. Luz rushed across the factory floor. She was crying by the time she held her auntie, her large form encompassing her niece in warmth. It felt like hugging Diego, Lizette, her mother, and her father—anyone she’d ever loved was present in that embrace, and Luz cried, telling her auntie that something had happened to her, something that made her feel very bad about herself, about everything.
“What’s wrong?” Maria Josie asked, running her fingers through Luz’s hair. “Tell me, what has happened?”
And through the crackling of her voice, Luz pushed closer and told her auntie about it all, but first she began with an apology. She had been right—Luz had no idea what Maria Josie had been through to protect her family.
Luz was only beginning to understand how they had gotten to this part in their story.
HERO SNAKE
STRIKES AGAIN,
STOPS BANK
BANDITS
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Denver, Colo., July 23, 1934. Two men at noon entered the South Broadway Daniels Bank and with revolvers ordered Cashier Jones to hand over $2,000 cash. The bandits were halted when a female rattlesnake emerged from the vault, striking one of the bandits and startling the other into paralysis. The snake slithered toward the business part of the city. There is no clew to the snake.
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THIRTY-SIX
Diego’s Return
When Diego received Luz’s letter demanding that he come home, he was living in a migrant camp outside of Provo, Utah. He had walked in the morning to the post office, a triangular slant building on the edge of a dirt road. The mountains in Provo were nestled against the city, and after reading Luz’s letter, Diego gazed upward at the massive, jutting mounds as if they, too, spoke to him. The answer was clear.
He gathered the few possessions he had collected on his travels, mostly religious emblems, little cards with Our Lady of Guadalupe, San Miguel, vials of holy water. He packed his new snake. By now not so new. With Sirena in a wicker basket, and everything Diego owned slung over his shoulder in the leather satchel, he set out for Denver just before the morning shift. There were no goodbyes. In the fields, every hello possessed within itself a farewell. People were as transient as the crops, picked and packaged, shipped afar, feeding the mouths of families Diego would never see.
He set out walking until a family of farmers picked him up from the side of a county road and offered him a lift to the town of Vernal. He stayed one night and met a young Mexicana widow in a saloon called Athens. Her name was Miranda. She had a strong nose and a missing tooth, making her smile seem mysterious, ethereal. He stayed with her for two nights. They made love outside her wooden cabin on grass shining with moonlight. After he kissed her goodbye on the second morning, Miranda rolled over in bed and unlaced the front of her cotton nightdress. Diego held her left breast with cold hands, and Miranda winced with a delicate grin.
Over the next few days, Diego walked. The landscape shifted from the lush greens of valleyed farmland into a rising mountain terrain. He drank from streams, leaning over the rushing coolness, cupping his hands into snowmelt. At least once a day, Diego removed Sirena from her basket and allowed the snake to slither over rocks or dirt, anything to keep her outercoat healthy, breathing in the land. Diego spent much of the time on his walk thinking of nothing, his mind a calmness saturated with the views of jagged red stone, ancient and bruised.
Shortly after he crossed the state line into Colorado, a farm truck filled with chickens slowed to a stop. The driver was an old woman, Anglo with silver hair and tiny blue eyes. “In back,” she said. Diego took off his hat, saluting her with appreciation. He rode with the chickens for half a day, feathers fluttering across his vision, smearing sections of white across the land. They stopped for a little while in a mining town called Somerset, where the old woman unloaded half her chickens, sold for a bag of shearling and several crates of large tomatoes. They had a lunch of those tomatoes on stale bread high on a cemetery hillside, surrounded by emptied coal mines. Diego walked the graves, noting surnames from all over the world, until he came upon a man named Benny Dumont, same name and birth year as his father. The man had died three years earlier, and from the looks of other gravestones with that exact death date, it seemed to be some kind of explosion. Diego stood silently as he imagined his father trapped underground, swallowed by rock and flames. Guess it wasn’t better out there without us, was it? When the old woman called out for Diego to return to the truck, she motioned for him to sit up front. They drove in silence as Diego quietly cried.