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Chapter 33.
- University of Arizona Press
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197 33 Denver was unlike any place she had ever seen. It certainly wasn’t like Los Angeles,and definitely nothing like Selma.In either of those places you couldn’t walk more than two steps without hearing Spanish flavoring the wind, but here, way up in the Rocky Mountains, people spoke and moved with a different attitude altogether. That first morning, after she had stopped by Jack’s place again only to discover that he still wasn’t home, she found herself on the banks of the winding Platte River. There, she gazed toward the scarlet mountains, listening to the soft applause of the Union Pacific trains shuttering in the distance. She stood there for a long while, silent and alone. Of course, it was not the same kind of aloneness that she found while sitting in some campo tent back in Selma, no, this one had a quality of purpose, like she was meant to be right where she was. She spent the whole afternoon walking the arched spine of Colfax Avenue, ducking in and out of the speakeasy lounges and small diners and cheap whiskey joints, searching for him. At one point she stumbled upon a park,a quaint spot near East High School where teenage boys huddled around benches and smoked cigarettes. They were red-faced youth, all of them, with shabby clothes and hardened hands.The type that chopped logs on weekends at the family farm,or else taunted bighorn sheep just for fun. They whistled at Bea when she walked past, and she ignored them and clutched her purse, pulling her worn blue sweater up over her chest. Above her the sky continued to unscroll its dramatic swashes of light and dark,with vast dollops of clouds that practically moaned,they were so obese;they languished across the plains, eastward toward Kansas. They were a melancholy sight, and she couldn’t help but feel this way about everything in that moment. She pressed onward, scanning all corners and cracks of Denver. At Park Avenue she stopped to watch a young family cross the street. The children’s hands were interlinked and they bounced along joyfully, squawking like a row of homebound Canada geese. She wondered what it would be like 198 living here with little Al and Patsy,in a city like this.How very different it would be from the valley, unrestrained and lush, its pastoral innocence still intact. Had it not been for this vision she carried close to her for the rest of the day, she might’ve allowed herself to feel dismal about the fact that finding Jack was proving far more difficult than she had anticipated. ...