But I knew immediately that I couldn’t be comfortable around her, not really. I could barely relax around Anglo girls my age. And here with only the merest warning from my mother someone had thrown me in front of this Aztec princess.
“Mr. Reeves is just finishing up his dinner.”
Luna’s Birkenstocks slapped against the tiled floor as she moved. I noticed she had a small charm bracelet around her ankle, made of tiny dancing silver bells that looked like miniature candle snuffers. The shoes flopped as she walked, exposing the slightly paler flesh of her ball and arch, wrinkled and darkened with dirt.
I looked up at the cathedral high ceiling, where a coach wheel chandelier hung from chains that belonged in a dungeon. Fake candles in bell jars made the massive room glow like a gaslit 19th-century hotel.
On the walls were cattle brands, 10-gallon Stetsons and coiled lassoes settled on pegs. There were saddle blankets and sombreros and stretched rawhides and pegged buckskins. They were the antiques that theme restaurants tried to replicate, but these were original articles.
“Here we are.”
Luna walked toward a doorway carved in the rock between the main room and the kitchen where a tin Pioche Railroad Pacific sign graced the entryway like a cowpoke’s version of mistletoe.
“How are we doing, Champ?”
She pushed through the pair of wooden-shingled batwing doors that she held open behind her so they wouldn’t flap in her wake and slap me or my mom. “They’re easier for him to use than door handles.” She smiled again. “Is the soup okay?”
I saw him from the back, his skin as worn by the sun as a lizard’s hide after too much time perched on a hot rock. His shoulders hunched blade-like and time had tonsured the top of his head, leaving only the thinnest wisps of hair on either side of his head. It was the hair one imagines clinging to a corpse in a coffin after their soul’s passed into the afterlife.
He turned toward Luna’s voice but locked on my face. His eyes were cloudy, but they sharpened into something like focus as he took stock of me. Then he smiled, as if he recognized me, and I smiled back without knowing why.
I didn’t smile much, and it startled me. I looked over at Debbie. She looked in a hurry to go. I had no desire to keep her.
“See if you can be a help,” she said, still wearing her sunglasses.
“Oh,” Luna said, and walked around to the front of the old man. “We’ve got this covered. He barely needs my help.”
There wasn’t the faintest trace of something patronizing in that voice, and I liked it. I got the sense that as foggy as the old man was, he might sense being treated like a plant that needed only occasional watering.
Regardless of where his mind was, though, his body clearly wasn’t taking its orders.
His plastic spoon stopped mid-dip into the thermos where his tortilla soup swam, bits of corn and black bean floating to the top and creating a starchy tomato-scented skin. Luna took his liver-spotted hand in her own, held it tightly, and mimed the motion of bringing the spoon from the bowl up to the head twice. She let him go, like a parent training their child to ride a bike, and he finished the motion on his own.
Once he completed that, slurping the soup into his head, it was easy for him to do it again. It seemed she’d help establish his rhythm. She smiled as he ate.
Luna took up a seat across from him, in a wingback chair fixed with brass studs up and down its wooden body. I took my place in the third seat at the table made for four, lifting rather than dragging my chair legs so the sound wouldn’t upset the old man eating his soup.
“We’ll listen to music and have a bath after this.”
My uncle nodded, accepting the offer the young woman had extended. My mother’s hand appeared over his right shoulder, touched the fabric of his work shirt, rubbing the stitched epaulettes of his guayabera. The shirt was powder blue and open, revealing both easy-snap buttons and patches of Velcro on the inner seams so the man had the option of how to close the shirt, if and when the draft got to be too much and he covered up. Tufts of cotton-white hair popped from his chest, across which a faded India ink tattoo of an anchor and globe bled into the ancient skin. A scar that rose like a topographical feature on a treasure map traversed the space just below the tat. I wondered if the wound was from surgery or from a fight.
He regarded my mother’s hand on his arm as an imposition on his soup-eating claw and shrugged it off. She huffed, shifted in place, squeezed him once on the shoulder as he spooned more picante broth into his mouth.
“Goodbye, Deborah,” he said, his mouth full. The clarity of his voice goosed me, and I shifted on the burgundy chintz pad of the uncomfortable chair where I sat. She turned without a word, leaving their unspoken history to hover over the table. The lights glowed brighter, as night finally descended outside and painted the desert black as the background in a velvet painting.
My mother clogged her way across the room the same way she came in. The front door groaned as she tried to slam it shut behind her. The ancient oak refused to budge to her whim and moved in its own time, like the massive door to a vault groaning closed rather than dramatically clapping shut.
That left only silence aside from the sound of the man slurping, winding down in his repast. Luna seemed content with it, those black eyes watching from above a smattering of cinnamon-brown freckles. Estos Ojos…Or was it Este Ojos? Spellbound and spellbinding at once those eyes were, as if she were under the sway of some strange hypnotism but also had the power to draw in anyone who made eye contact for long. She wouldn’t have to worry about that with me; only stolen glances.
I couldn’t take the silence and shifted until my chair scraped the tiled floor. Thankfully, the old man saved me. “We go prospecting for gold tomorrow?”
We both laughed, she more openly, and I more guarded. She rearranged her face, screwed it up as if she’d just had a shot of whiskey, and said, “The gold in them thar hills done already been mined, Kit! Someone done jumped your claim.”
“That’s pretty good,” I said.
Her eyes flitted to me. “I should hope so. I’ve read all the Zane Grey and L’Amour books in the house and I’ve gotten some practice watching those old cowboy movies with him.” Luna paused. “He was in some, you know.”