Connie Willis - Cibola

“And did El Turco guide Coronado to Cibola?”

“Sure. You should have turned left back there,” she said.

She apparently hadn’t inherited her great-great-grandfather’s scouting ability. I went around the block and turned left, and was overjoyed to see the Eldorado Cafe down the street. I pulled into the parking lot and we got out.

“They make their own cinnamon rolls,” she said, looking at me hopefully as we went in. “With frosting.”

We sat down in a booth. “Have anything you want,” I said. “This is on the Record .”

She ordered a cinnamon roll and a large Coke. I ordered coffee and began fishing in my bag for my tape recorder.

“You lived here in Denver a long time?” she asked.

“All my life. I grew up here.”

She smiled her gold-toothed smile at me. “You like Denver?”

“Sure,” I said. I found the pocket-sized recorder and laid it on the table. “Smog, oil refineries, traffic. What’s not to like?”

“I like it too,” she said.

The waitress set a cinnamon roll the size of Mile High Stadium in front of her and poured my coffee.

“You know what Coronado fed El Turco?” The waitress brought her large Coke. “Probably one tortilla a day. And he didn’t have no shoes. Coronado make him walk all that way to Colorado and no shoes.”

I switched the tape recorder on. “You say Coronado came to Colorado,” I said, “but what I’ve read says he traveled through New Mexico and Oklahoma and up into Kansas, but not Colorado.”

“He was in Colorado.” She jabbed her finger into the table. “He was here .”

I wondered if she meant here in Colorado or here in the Eldorado Cafe.

“When was that? On his way to Quivira?”

“Quivira?” she said, looking blank. “I don’t know nothing about Quivira.”

“Quivira was a place where there was supposed to be gold,” I said. “He went there after he found the Seven Cities of Cibola.”

“He didn’t find them,” she said, chewing on a mouthful of cinnamon roll. “That’s why he killed El Turco.”

“Coronado killed El Turco?”

“Yeah. After he led him to Cibola.”

This was even worse than talking to the psychic dentist.

“Coronado said El Turco made the whole thing up,” Rosa said. “He said El Turco was going to lead Coronado into an ambush and kill him. He said the Seven Cities didn’t exist.”

“But they did?”

“Of course. El Turco led him to the place.”

“But I thought you said Coronado didn’t find them.”

“He didn’t.”

I was hopelessly confused by now. “Why not?”

“Because they weren’t there.”

I was going to run Jake through his paper shredder an inch at a time. I had wasted a whole morning on this and I was not even going to be able to get a story out of it.

“You mean they were some sort of mirage?” I asked.

Rosa considered this through several bites of cinnamon roll. “No. A mirage is something that isn’t there. These were there.”

“But invisible?”

“No.”

“Hidden.”

“No.”

“But Coronado couldn’t see them?”

She shook her head. With her forefinger, she picked up a few stray pieces of frosting left on her plate and stuck them in her mouth. “How could he when they weren’t there?”

The tape clicked off, and I didn’t even bother to turn it over. I looked at my watch. If I took her back now I could make it to the hearings early and maybe interview some of the developers. I picked up the check and went over to the cash register.

“Do you want to see them?”

“What do you mean? See the Seven Cities of Cibola?”

“Yeah. I’ll take you to them.”

“You mean go to New Mexico?”

“No. I told you, Coronado came to Colorado.”

“When?”

“When he was looking for the Seven Cities of Cibola.”

“No, I mean when can I see them? Right now?”

“No,” she said, with that, ‘how dumb can anyone be?’ look. She reached for a copy of the Rocky Mountain News that was lying on the counter and looked inside the back page. “Tomorrow morning. Six o’clock.”

One of my favorite things about Denver is that it’s spread all over the place and takes you forever to get anywhere. The mountains finally put a stop to things twenty miles to the west, but in all three other directions it can sprawl all the way to the state line and apparently is trying to. Being a reporter here isn’t so much a question of driving journalistic ambition as of driving, period.

The skyscraper moratorium hearings were out on Colorado Boulevard across from the Hotel Giorgio, one of the skyscrapers under discussion. It took me forty-five minutes to get there from the Olde West Trailer Park.

I was half an hour late, which meant the hearings had already gotten completely off the subject. “What about reflecting glass?” someone in the audience was saying. “I think it should be outlawed in skyscrapers. I was nearly blinded the other day on the way to work.”

“Yeah,” a middle-aged woman said. “If we’re going to have skyscrapers, they should look like skyscrapers.” She waved vaguely at the Hotel Giorgio, which looks like a giant black milk carton.

“And not like that United Bank building downtown!” someone else said. “It looks like a damned cash register!”

From there it was a short illogical jump to the impossibility of parking downtown, Denver’s becoming too decentralized, and whether the new airport should be built or not. By five-thirty they were back on reflecting glass.

“Why don’t they put glass you can see through in their skyscrapers?” an old man who looked a lot like the time machine inventor said. “I’ll tell you why not. Because those big business executives are doing things they should be ashamed of, and they don’t want us to see them.”

I left at seven and went back to the Record to try to piece my notes together into some kind of story. Jake was there.

“How’d your interview with Coronado’s granddaughter go?” he asked.

“The Seven Cities of Cibola are here in Denver only Coronado couldn’t see them because they’re not there.” I looked around. “Is there a copy of the News someplace?”

“ Here? In the Record building!” he said, clutching his chest in mock horror. “That bad, huh? You’re going to go work for the News? ” But he fished a copy out of the mess on somebody’s desk and handed it to me. I opened it to the back page.

There was no “Best Times for Viewing Lost Cities of Gold” column. There were pictures and dates of the phases of the moon, road conditions, and “What’s in the Stars: by Stella.” My horoscope of the day read: “Any assignment you accept today will turn out differently than you expect.” The rest of the page was devoted to the weather, which was supposed to be sunny and warm tomorrow.

The facing page had the crossword puzzle, “Today in History,” and squibs about Princess Di and a Bronco fan who’d planted his garden in the shape of a Bronco quarterback. I was surprised Jake hadn’t assigned me that story.

I went down to Research and looked up El Turco. He was an Indian slave, probably Pawnee, who had scouted for Coronado, but that was his nickname, not his name. The Spanish had called him “The Turk” because of his peculiar hair. He had been captured at Cicuye, after Coronado’s foray into Cibola, and had promised to lead them to Quivira, tempting them with stories of golden streets and great stone palaces. When the stories didn’t pan out, Coronado had had him executed. I could understand why.

Jake cornered me on my way home. “Look, don’t quit,” he said. “Tell you what, forget Coronado. There’s a guy out in Lakewood who’s planted his garden in the shape of John Elway’s face. Daffodils for hair, blue hyacinths for eyes.”