* * *
—
They agreed on the freight. Michael walked to one side while Alicia went to the other. She removed her gloves and ran her hands over the chilled steel. Weeks before, Alicia had planned her design, a navy signature centered with slim text, white gradient shading, a black circle in her K. Michael always told her that he didn’t like K-SD much, that Alicia should write something else, something clearly feminine. But Michael’s wasn’t much better. SLOKE. Who would write that? And what the hell did it mean? They pulled the cans of Rust-Oleum from their bags and began painting. It was odd how it worked. Alicia did countless designs for work, but when it came to trains, some unknowable engine drove her hands. On more than one occasion, in more than one dirt lot, Alicia experienced the feeling of seeing her signature appear, as if she had uncovered it beneath the dirty metal.
With her scarf covering her nose and mouth, Alicia rested in the midst of her long dash, peeking around the car’s edge at Michael, who never looked better than when he was writing. He worked his spray can gracefully, his dark eyes focused only on SLOKE. In the triangular space between his outstretched arm and neck, a far-off streetlamp formed a spiral of light. “How’s it going?”
“Half finished. You still on your second letter?”
“My dash. The edges are so clean, so nice. You wouldn’t know about it.”
Michael shook his can, started again. “Oh, Cia, I know about that dash.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“I know,” Michael said with pride.
A low vibration rattled the track. A ghost train rolling. An engine firing. Michael and Alicia stiffened as they examined the rails. They once knew a kid who died in the yards. He wasn’t much older than sixteen. It was the middle of summer, early at night. The bull hadn’t come out to patrol. The kid was painting a train when he took a step back and a single freight rolled over him. Word spread among crews, and soon kids visited the unfinished signature, painting their wishes in black. A poem appeared. May your journey be an endless track / may your trains keep rolling / may your name be completed when you’re back.
Alicia kicked the freight, a booming sound. “Someone’s been practicing.”
“Get to work, Cia. Who knows the next time you’ll get—”
Light flashed over his face, not the floodlights or the streetlamps, but a concentrated stream. Michael squinted as Alicia tried to dodge the white rays, spinning around to search the rails.
Cops. Some twenty yards behind.
Tossing their backpacks beneath the car, they set off, Michael in the lead, cutting corners, jumping tracks. They had run before, and they knew the course. At the border of the yard and Confluence Park, Alicia climbed a chain-link fence, otherworldly, lithe, as though she’d lift into the sky and join the stars. But she only fell back to earth, a quick slap on dead grass. They ran on, keeping pace as two male voices hollered for them to do something like give up, to lay over, to end it. Alicia imagined hounds were tracking them. She stuck out her leg, tripping Michael. Before he could utter a word, she was on top of him, removing her scarf and unzipping her jacket. She pulled her sweater above her breasts and unhooked her bra.
“Just shut up,” she whispered. “Don’t say shit.”
She cupped Michael’s hands in hers, guiding them along her stomach, shivering at the chilled smoothness of his palms. She let go, feeling his hands gliding lower to her center. She arched her body upward, her back bending in a kind of release. The flashlight’s beam reappeared as two policemen stood at the top of a hillside, witnessing Alicia with the sides of her puffy coat flung open like a gutted animal. Michael lay silent, pinned between her legs. Alicia breathed, waited. The policemen arrived.
“What’re you doing?” they said. “Cover yourself.”
Alicia snapped around and began to cry. They were no older than twenty, young men with unremarkable faces, one white and blond, the other brown and short, maybe a boy with a name like Mendoza, perhaps a cousin of a cousin. When the blond officer ordered the couple to stand, Alicia rolled onto her feet, inspecting her hands for paint. She then flashed her left hand, a rock sparkling more than any badge. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said as Michael stood beside her. “We were on a night walk, celebrating. We’re having our first baby.”
The same officer asked Michael if this was true.
“Yes, sir. Proud papa got carried away.”
“Carried away?” the shorter one asked now. He looked at Alicia’s boots, a thin spot of navy paint across the right tip. She moved that leg behind the other. “Did you see anyone come by?”
“No,” they both uttered at once.
“But then, again,” Michael said, “we weren’t really looking.”
The officers asked for IDs, though didn’t seem surprised when neither Michael nor Alicia could produce one. “Look,” the blond said, “congratulations on your baby. I got two myself, little girls. But that doesn’t mean you can publicly do whatever you were doing.”
“Of course,” said Alicia. “I was just so, I don’t know, moved.”
“We get it,” said the shorter one. “You were carried away, moved. What’s your name, ma’am?”
“Stephanie. I’m Stephanie Elkhorn. And this is my husband, Gary.” Alicia wouldn’t look at Michael even as she felt him glaring at her.
“This is a warning, your one and only. Get your things and get out of here.” With that, the policemen turned around and marched up the hill, the metal on their boots and hats flickering with moonlight.
Michael and Alicia stood quietly, the city’s skyline enclosing them like a lid. They walked the long way back to the Nova, and after several blocks, Michael turned to Alicia. He touched her face, kissed her cheek. He thanked her for saving them. Alicia imagined him like those sea creatures she’d heard about but would never see. They were so far down, in complete darkness, translucent, their guts exposed like broken clocks. “It wouldn’t just be more of you,” he said. “It’d be more of Gary. More of you both.” Michael then zipped Alicia’s coat and reached for her scarf, lightly threading it behind her neck. “Alicia del Toro Parker, I can’t see you anymore.”
* * *
—
For her thirtieth birthday, Gary took Alicia to the cabin on the acres he owned in southern Colorado, near where her family was from in the San Luis Valley, where she’d spent her summers as a kid, where her father was buried. The cabin sat high in the valley, overlooking the sculpted mounds of desert earth. The weather had picked up. An autumn weekend that felt like late spring. Low-slung clouds crept above, their shape-shifting shadows trailing over the white peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The land was aflame.
It was late. They drank gin and tonics outside near a large fire. Alicia had come off her weeklong break from drinking, and the booze ran swiftly through her veins. Gary reclined in a wicker chair. Alicia sat across from him. Gazing into the sky, she stood then and stepped away from the fire. She held her drink with one hand and, with the other, pointed to the stars. Kane, behind her, licked the backs of her knees. Alicia hardened her stance, placing her free hand on the dog’s collar. She thought of the goddess Diana; she thought of the moon.
“What’re you looking at, Ali Bird?” Gary said.
“I’ve always been able to find the North Star. It was one of those things my dad taught me, so that I’d never get lost. What does it mean that I can’t find it tonight?”
“It means you’re drunk, birthday girl.” Gary laughed, signaling high above them.
The sky was hazed with the dust of a billion stars, a black void that seemed designed yet eternal. Like a small sun, the fire’s heat pressed into Alicia, warming her face and arms. She took off her sweater, dropping it to the ground. In the distance, above the dirt road into town, headlights curved along a mountainside, traveling into the dark. There were the sounds of the crackling
fire, Alicia’s heavy heartbeat, Kane’s breathing loudly beside her. The wind shifted as a rush of embers jumped from the flames. Alicia kneeled down to her dog, shielding her watery eyes from smoke. “There it is,” she lied. “I can see it now.”
GHOST SICKNESS
Ana sits in a long classroom with many windows and a dated green chalkboard. The room is half empty. It’s summer, and enrollment is low for history sections at the university. Lecturer Samantha Brown stands beneath the clock’s black hands. She’s young with a Ph.D. from an East Coast school Ana has never heard of.
“An interesting anecdote about Leadville,” says Brown, “is the tale of two brothers, one living, one dead. In 1875, while digging the dead brother’s grave, the living brother struck a silver vein. He immediately left his dead brother’s body to freeze in a snowbank, and claimed the mine.”
To prepare for the final, Brown is reviewing the entirety of the course. From Lewis and Clark to fur traders and national parks. She’s now on silver booms. Ana’s notebook is crammed with notes, her blue-ink handwriting sloppier with each passing minute. She is in her usual seat, in the back, near the windows.
“What this story demonstrates is the absolute depravity of the West.” Brown writes the word depravity on the green chalkboard. She circles it. “Think about that.”
A student seated in the front row named Colleen raises her hand. “I mean, isn’t that illegal?”
Brown graciously answers Colleen’s question with a comment on lawlessness. Ana sifts through her backpack, discreetly pulling her cellphone onto her lap, checking for a message from Clifton. Nothing. Only a text from Mom. Haven’t heard from C. Had a job for him. Dinner tonight? Ana responds. She shifts in her seat and glances outside.
The normally green city is brown with drought. An eye-shadow-blue sky. A dusty-film negative of trees. Ana hopes it rains soon, but more than anything, she hopes that her boyfriend, wherever he is, comes home. Last Thursday, Clifton said he was visiting his grandparents near Shiprock in New Mexico, a windy flatland marked by winged rocks and cloud-like sheep. There’s no cell service in their corner of the reservation, a convenient excuse because Clifton often disappears. He has a problem with weariness, a tendency to binge. But that’s Clifton, slippery, like a fish.
* * *
—
Mom pushes past Ana with an armful of paper grocery sacks. She stands on her daughter’s stone stoop in her maroon scrubs with uneven sweat marks beneath the arms. She is heavy, solid. Despite her heft, or possibly because of it, her face is beautiful with sharp lines along her jaw and cheeks. She has brought Ana three bags of frozen tortillas, a rinsed-out lard bucket of beef stew, and six bananas. Ana hugs Mom with more force than usual.
Mom says, “I’m sick of you so skinny. Don’t you ever eat?”
“Yeah, lots of Student Union frozen burritos.”
“Where’s Clifton, anyway?”
“He’s picking up extra shifts at the restaurant,” Ana lies, lifting a sack of groceries.
“I had a couple jobs for him around the house, sod to move, bathroom needs painting.”
Mom invents these tasks for Clifton, a way to look after Ana. She wasn’t happy when two years earlier Ana and Clifton moved in together. A girl shouldn’t shack up, she had said. You’ll age quickly. But Mom once cared for Clifton more than Ana did. At eleven, he moved next door with his uncle Virgil after his parents were killed on the reservation in a drunken brawl over seventeen dollars. Mom felt sorry for him then. He often followed her around as she did housework. Tell me another story, Clifton would ask Mom as she Windexed and swept. Now, when I was a little girl, my tía brought me to an arroyo in Montrose, where everyone knew the lake monster lived. Ana, always sick of these dingy tales, didn’t stick around to listen.
The women make dinner in the dry warmth of the apartment, a one-bedroom brick box from the late fifties with no air-conditioning. Heat drifts upward from the oak floors. Mom shares the latest gossip. Would you believe it? Grocery shopping for this very meal, she left her cart in line and walked off in search of batteries. When she returned, an Anglo woman accused her of cutting in line. “Oh, it had to be less than a minute, and I had already been there forever. So, this woman tells me, ‘I didn’t see you at all!’ Can you believe that?” Mom shakes her head while chopping onions. She changes the subject, looking hard at her daughter. “How’s school, mija?”
“Fine,” says Ana, carrying glasses of sun tea to the wobbly table.
“Are you worried about a class?”
“Just History. None of the dates stick. Everything blurs.”
“You better get yourself some flash cards.” Mom laughs, salting her frying pork. “You can’t fail another class.”
Ana knows this. If she fails, she’ll lose her scholarship, the Displaced Fund, given to the grandchildren of Denver residents, mostly Hispano, who once occupied the Westside neighborhood before it was plowed to make way for an urban campus. Then she’ll lose her work-study job at the library. After that, Ana will be back home with Mom. “I’m trying,” she says, “hard.”
“What kind of history class, anyway?”
“History of the American West.”
Mom smiles with gapped teeth. “How the hell you gonna fail that?”
Ana laughs. “You know history was never my favorite subject.”
* * *
—
Later that night, when she’s alone in the apartment, Ana’s cellphone rings with a blocked number. She answers, drowsy with bad dreams. There’s only the electric chirp of static between satellites. It must be Clifton, no one else.
“I know it’s you,” Ana says, propping her body upright against pillows, the room’s darkness a blanket of fog. If she could just force him to speak, pull his voice through the phone. When they were kids, Clifton hid for hours in cupboards, beneath stairwells, inside coat closets, anywhere he could disappear. Little hands sticking out from little cracks in doors. Mom wants us to come down for lunch, Ana would say. This isn’t funny anymore.
Ana says into the phone, “Rent’s due Thursday.”
The amber glow of a streetlamp shines into their bedroom, working its way through the venetian blinds. Bars of light drop in rows, some of it resting against Clifton’s tilted dresser drawers, some of it worming along Ana’s face and long black hair. She imagines it’s Clifton’s breath, warm and sticky, in her ear. “Come home, baby. Please.”
* * *
—
At the William H. Moffat Library, Ana clocks in at eleven thirty, checking with her supervisor about the day’s tasks, and then ventures into the stacks with a cart of periodicals and children’s books. She has prepared a study sheet, occasionally glancing at it between cartloads of books. Otter Mears, Railroad entrepreneur, 1840–1931. Baby Doe Tabor, found dead in a Leadville cabin, ordered diamond pajamas for her toddler. Chief Ouray signed dubious treaties with Whites.
Ana closes her eyes, tests herself, forgets. After an hour of shelving, she takes a ten-minute break, walking alongside the Museum of Houses at the center of campus, tiny but elegant Victorians once occupied by families with names like Garcia, Santos, Rios. Ana remembers stories from her grandparents—how the block was alive with sounds of screeching children, running sleek in leather booties, their marbles blasting across sandstone sidewalks. Come wash up, their young mothers would say, waving aprons like cotton flares. Your papas will be home soon.
When Ana returns to the library, she spots Colleen and another girl from history class studying on the second floor near the magazines. They are both blond with sharp features and lengthy, ivory necks. Ana often wonders about students like Colleen—Denver newcomers with trust funds and loft apartments. They came with the tech jobs and legalization of weed, the Great Green Rush, Ana thinks. Clifton says they aren’t too bad. They have nice apartments with new paint, all their cars run, and they rarely sp
eak to you in public, two worlds in one space. The longer they stay, however, the more Ana worries that their world is collapsing her own. She tries avoiding the girls and slips behind a stack of government publications.
“Hannah, right?” Colleen stands behind Ana, goofy with chapped lips.
Ana corrects her, placing a golf magazine on the rack.
“Ready for the final?”
“As much as I can be.”
“Tina and I actually wanted to ask you a question.” Colleen points behind her, the other girl’s light eyes dropped to a cellphone screen. “You always wear such neat turquoise jewelry. Are you from Colorado, like a Native American?”
“I don’t know, really. It’s complicated. What about you?”
“I’m from Vermont,” says Colleen. “Ever been?”
Ana shakes her head. “Maple syrup? Snow?”
Colleen smiles with gummy teeth. She nods enthusiastically. “Mountains, too. Little ones, though.”
“Whenever I picture those faraway states,” says Ana, returning to her shelving, “I think of white people and dead witches.” Ana laughs and watches as Colleen’s eyes narrow in confusion. “Kidding.”
* * *
—
After work the apartment windows are open, a warm dusk breeze scattering papers like white doves. Ana leans in the doorway, examining the mess. From inside the bedroom, the radio sounds. It’ll be a real scorcher this week, folks. Keep those animals indoors. Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. None of the screens are slashed, and everything is in its right place. Ana’s textbooks, Clifton’s old bike, the Edward Curtis prints fixed to the fridge, the sterling and turquoise jewelry from Mom hidden inside the closet. There’s also a stack of bills on the nightstand. Rent money. Not half like Clifton usually pays. All of it. Ana runs her hands along the empty bed. A drowning sense of dread hits her face like dirt, slowly until she feels buried. She tries his number twice, the phone dead each time. Maybe the money wasn’t from Clifton. Maybe it was Mom. Who knows? Ana does know one thing. She’d rather not sleep alone tonight.
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