Woman of Light (83)
They soon said goodbye in Glenwood Springs, a large redbrick town with healing baths. Diego camped for a night on the banks of a canyon river and cleaned himself in the morning in the rushing waters, but the cold ached his body to the core. He then walked to the center of town and found himself at the public pools with a front entrance like a grand hotel. The clerk, an Anglo girl with strawberry hair, smiled at Diego but then nonchalantly shrugged and pointed to the sign NO MEXICANS, BLACKS, OR GOOKS. “Company policy,” the girl said. Later, that night, he met her outside the Baptist church on Main, where they made love quickly in the shadow of fragrant alleyway pines.
By the time he reached Georgetown, Diego needed to earn some money. He stopped outside a miners’ saloon with Sirena. They performed several tricks, nothing too complicated, Sirena rising to the sounds of his voice, head nodding, tongue flicking. Miners soon tossed coins into the open basket. The day shift in the coal shafts had just ended, and now the crowds widened. Diego felt uneasy but kept performing—money was money. But it was only a matter of time before one of the miners pushed forward from the depths of the crowd. His face was smeared in soot, a narrow jaw. He spoke with a kind of European accent as he called Diego the devil, first spitting on him and then gathering phlegm from his throat and launching it across Sirena. Diego lost his temper, lunged forward, and swung at the man. In Georgetown, he spent the night in jail, a brick cell with a barred window, a view of the stars.
He arrived in Denver by train through the city’s western entrance. It was dark morning, a glowing violet line pushing over the plains. Diego’s eyes were burning with coal soot as he hopped from the lumber train, landing in the rail yard with a gritty crash. He stood, dusted himself off, and heard a man’s voice yelling for him to stop. Diego ran from the yard cops, snagging his leg on a switcher and drawing blood before he found himself crawling under a chain-link fence leading into the Westside. He first ran and then walked swiftly over red sidewalks. Near an alley on the edge of downtown, Diego heard the grunt and tug of a small animal from a dilapidated bush. Jorge, Blind Dog, his tongue flashing from his pink lip. Diego laughed. “I don’t got nothing for you,” he said, and Jorge momentarily growled before yawning and coughing as he hobbled away.
By now, it was blue dawn.
When Diego first saw downtown, the factories, the brick businesses, the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, he felt as if he were embracing an old friend. “Look at you,” he said, and pulled Sirena from her basket to see. They walked, starting from the low numbered streets and moving toward Hornet Moon. Diego cut across Seventeenth Street and noticed a black cavity, a burned-out hole, where the saddlemaker and several other businesses once were. There was a newspaperman behind Diego, readying a stack of papers to sell for the day. Diego turned to the man. He asked what had happened.
“You don’t know?” he said, shaking his head. “They burned that young attorney’s business to the ground.”
“Which lawyer?”
The man said, “Dave Tikas. Too bad, they say he was gonna help a lot of us. Now, it’s all gone, and his daddy’s place, too, started some damn war.”
Diego asked more questions, but the man waved him on and told him that if he wanted to know so much, he ought to buy a newspaper. Diego obliged. With the paper in hand, he set out for home.
* * *
—
Maria Josie and a woman Diego had never met before were at the kitchen table. When he saw his auntie, she stood in astonishment. They didn’t speak for several moments, only embraced. Maria Josie explained that Ethel was her friend, and Diego shook the woman’s hand. “Where’s Luz?” he asked, and Maria Josie pointed down the hall. “In bed.”
Diego first knocked and then opened the door, spotting Luz with her face turned to the wall. He stepped through the room, its uneasiness a bleach-like sadness. Across Luz’s altar were photos—Mama, their father, and himself.
“Luz,” Diego said gently, and, when she didn’t turn around, he said, “Little Light.”
Luz turned her body in bed, and her eyes fell upon her brother as if she were seeing a spirit. She hobbled upward on her elbows. She looked into his eyes. “Are you real?”
Diego laughed. He kneeled at her bedside. He held his sister’s face with both hands. “Yeah, I’m real.”
Luz cried into his arms until parts of his white shirt were see-through with tears.
* * *
—
In time, Luz told Diego some of what had happened while he was gone. She spoke of the law office, the corruption in the city, Estevan’s murder, her times with Lizette and Alfonso. The more she spoke, the more Diego said he felt guilt, helplessness. He told his sister that it was his fault.
“No,” said Luz. “It’s the choices we make.”
She never told Diego about Avel and the missing office keys, or how not too long after David’s law office burned, someone else torched Papa Tikas’s grocery store to the ground. David left Denver after that. But she did tell Diego what she had seen. Her visions, she explained, had grown and kept growing. “I can see things about our people. I know our stories.”
The family of four now—Diego, Luz, Maria Josie, and Ethel—drove the next morning to Saint Agnes Home for Children. Just as Luz had described, the lawn rolled out in lush greenery behind high stone walls. Along the driveway to the front entrance, speckled birds landed on the grass, pecking and prying insects from the lawn. The clouds beyond the home were low and off-white. The others waited in Ethel’s car as Diego stepped out and approached the building.