Highwire Moon

by Susan Straight

  Now she tied her braids with leather shoelaces, leaning against the cottonwood trunk. It was better outside than in the house. Bracelets of gold light from the leaves fell onto her arms. Her father hated the braids, hated the leather ties. “You’re not Mexican,” he said, over and over. “You’re not Indian. You’re American. Wear your hair like everybody else at school.”

  “Shave it off?” Elvia offered. “All the guys shave theirs. Whatever they are.”

  Callie, her father’s girlfriend, hated the braids, too. “I could curl all that hair for you, make you look gorgeous. But you want to pretend you’re a cross between a squaw and a boy.”

  Elvia shrugged. She liked looking strange, like someone no one would want and no one would want to mess with. In some of the foster homes, the nicer she looked—the more the foster mother brushed Elvia’s hair and lotioned her legs and put her in dresses—the more other kids tried to beat her up. When the foster mother had cut off her braid and thrown it in the trash, she’d curled her fingers into a fist, knowing her real mother had had a braid. She remembered riding on a hip, holding on to a long braid.

  By the time Elvia was eight, she’d grown her braid back and never let anyone touch her, not her hair or her cheek or her hand. Until Sandy Narlette’s house, where she’d finally let Sandy comb her hair, touch her forehead to feel for fever.

  When she cried as her father drove her away, he said, “She was a nice lady, Sandy Narlette, but she wasn’t your real mom, like blood family.” Like one of those dumb kids in a dumb movie, while she rode in his blue truck away from Rio Seco, she figured he would finally tell her about her real mother, maybe even take her to visit this woman who’d given her black hair and maple skin and Indian running. Maybe they’d fall in love again, like in the movies.

  But her father refused to talk about her mother. He didn’t talk about much. They’d moved around so much in the past three years that she’d gone to six different schools. Palm Springs, Cabazon, Indio: she didn’t look like the rich or poor blond kids or the black kids or the kids who’d just gotten here from Mexico. And everyone asked, “What are you, anyway?”

  “I’m late,” she’d say, her voice hard and fast like her father’s.

  Someone would say, “You look Hawaiian.” Elvia would shrug. Someone would sneer, “I hate when girls get green contacts that don’t even go with their skin.”

  “Try pullin these out then.” Elvia would fold her arms and glare.

  Her father’s eyes. Her mother’s skin. She felt dizzy again. She wondered if she had her mother’s heart. A heart that would let her leave a baby.

  She wasn’t huge. A quiltlike layer of soft fat surrounded her ribs and hips, that was all. She wore baggy jeans and big tee shirts, like always. She and her father had always gone to the army surplus for clothes. Her uniform—thin frame, two braids, and his mouth, when she needed it.

  “Hey, Señorita Beañorita,” a blond boy said. “You can fuck me for a green card.”

  “Bend it backwards and fuck yourself in the ass,” Elvia said. “Then you don’t have to make small talk with a stranger.”

  She had run to the arroyo again and again. Each time she got close to the plywood shelter, she thought Michael would look out from the car windshield he’d found beside the freeway, where months ago, the moonlight had turned the shattered glass into sparkling silver webs.

  “We got walls, Ellie. I work hard to make sure we got walls and AC, and you’re always hangin outside like a wino.”

  Her father’s work truck idled on the street. She hadn’t seen him cross the yard. When he crouched beside the cot, his knees turned the frayed jeans into circles of white.

  “Yeah,” she said, her head aching. “You put up with jerk bosses and wetbacks at work so we got food and walls. I know.”

  “You catch a bad attitude from Callie? It’s contagious?” He stood, lifting the grocery bag. “I got one more run today, but I’m droppin off food.”

  The ground was so hot it shimmered, and she knew no one else was outside in the wavering blank heat. “I know, I’m getting too damn dark out here. Like a Mexican,” she said. “How come you never answer my questions?”

  He looked surprised. His goatee was blond and stiff on his chin. “She probably went back to Mexico, okay, cause she didn’t like it here. Look, I’m not doin this. Why talk about the past when it’s over?”

  Elvia looked at his boots, covered with ochre dust. The grocery bag sat in his arms, just below the tattooed dragon. “We say that same shit in history class, but nobody listens.”

  “Watch your mouth, Ellie.”

  “Why didn’t she take me, then?” She nearly shouted it.

  He moved his boots in the dirt, and a tongue of smoke licked at the heels. “How the hell do I know? Maybe she wanted you to stay with me.”

  She stared at him, and he didn’t look away. Green eyes, pale as drying foxtails in the fields. Just like hers. Maybe she hated me every time she saw me, Elvia thought again.

  “Why are you askin about her again? It’s been a while,” he said softly. “And I said I ain’t goin away. I feed you every day.”

  “We go away all the time,” she said. They’d left the house in Palm Springs when he came home with the blue-roped backs of his hands swollen from a fight; they’d lived in the Sands Motel when he had speeding tickets and a bad license plate; they’d left Cabazon when some woman attacked their apartment door for no reason. They’d been here in Tourmaline nearly a year, this desert valley that stretched all the way to Arizona, to Nevada, to Mexico.

  Her father shifted the grocery bag. “She left. When I go away, I take you with me.” He headed to the house; the truck engine roared and the afternoon was white again with silence.

  Why am I trying to dream about her? She stared at the circles of light dropping from the trees. Because I don’t want to be pregnant. And I wonder if she hated me from this minute. I want to ask her. Straight up. If she wished she could have left me before I even showed up.

  A hollow wail sounded across the yard, and Elvia squinted at the small brown stucco house. Maybe Callie’s son, Jeff, was crying. But it was the desert wind swirling over the mouth of a beer bottle on the ground. The house had been silent for hours, and Elvia knew Callie was winding down. She hadn’t slept for three days, and she’d probably given Jeff a tablespoonful of sweet orange Benadryl to knock him out before she dropped into her own coma.

  Did Callie dream after she’d smoked the white pellets turned to embers, after she finally collapsed into unconsciousness? Elvia usually slept against Jeff’s damp back, while he thrashed and draped his arm over her face. She wondered if her father dreamed, maybe of her mother’s long black hair, so different from Callie’s straw-pale strands.

  Maybe speed burned up all their dreams. It fried the edges of their brains. All this time she’d lived with her father, he hadn’t figured out that she was older. He still thought she was young enough to believe he and Callie sat in the truck at night smoking regular Marlboros.

  Elvia saw kids smoking speed in every high school parking lot. She recognized the powdery grains Callie palmed from Dually, who came to the house in his huge black truck, two sets of tires rumbling through the sand. Callie tucked the speed in her pocket, and she sat next to Elvia in the dark, watching Mariah Carey or Fiona Apple on MTV.

  “Even though you dress like a boy and try for ugly, Ellie, you’re still pretty. You could be a model, or a dancer. Mariah Carey’s like a mix of something and something else.”

  “So you’re calling me a mutt?” Elvia rolled her eyes at the swirling, twirling girls on TV.

  “Hey, if I had your looks, I know I would. Dance. Sing. Make some money.”

  “I don’t live in New York. I don’t dance. I like to use my head. Rocks, okay? Geology.”

  Callie stared at her. “That’s what you’re doin out in the desert, huh? Just c
ollectin rocks. Better be sure you don’t pick up somethin else. Cause your dad would kill him.”

  When her father came home from work, he and Callie sat outside in his truck cab, each of their inhaled breaths making the chalky embers in the glass pipe glow red as night-animal eyes.

  They stayed awake for days. Her father took the clouds of smoked speed and drove his truck, hauling concrete pipe for new golf courses in Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, Indian Wells. He came home with overtime money, his fingers coated with cement dust and his lips gray as ash.

  Callie took her clouds and whirled around the tiny stucco box. She’d moved in six months ago, and Jeff’s hands could reach higher now on the paint and doors, leaving tracks like snails. Callie’s hands were red and dry, like tiny beached starfish, scrubbing the stove with a toothbrush and then spilling coffee, brushing off the baby-boy fingers in downward sweeps as if they were ants on her legs. He followed her everywhere, calling, “Maa! Maa!”

  Elvia heard him now. She felt sweat trickling down her neck, black spores drifting from her eyes, and she followed the hot chain-link fence toward the house.

  “Maa! Kips! Kips! Doggie!” Jeff called. He was in the doorway. She knew he wanted potato chips in a bowl, and he wanted his mother to find his stuffed Dalmatian. Elvia couldn’t figure out whether Callie even liked her son. She watched Callie do whatever Jeff yelled that first day, after she’d breathed in sharpened smoke delivered by Dually. Then she twisted and swerved away more each hour, until now she was screaming at him. “One minute, okay? Leave me alone so I can pretend I have a life for one goddamn second? One?”

  That’s why I’m not going to do this, Elvia thought, watching Jeff’s open mouth, his tiny teeth. Because I like him. I don’t want to hate a baby. For making me crazy.

  “I’m right here, Callie,” Elvia said, crossing into the shade of the eaves.

  “You out in the heat?” Callie paused near the wall, skinnier than a Barbie in her denim shorts and shirt. “Gonna tell me you’re lookin for rocks? Don’t you think you got enough rocks?”

  Elvia looked at Callie’s pale skin, shiny as wax with layers of sweat built up over her forehead. Callie’s cheeks were scored with purple marks. Speed bumps, everybody called them.

  Elvia went inside without answering. The house was a dark furnace, clothes everywhere and the swamp cooler clattering and cups from 7-Eleven like sweating sentries on every table and counter. Callie was always thirsty when she was sketching.

  In the bedroom she shared with Jeff, there was only a mattress and a white plastic dresser, so she put her rocks on the high window-­sill, out of his reach. Quartzes, pink and white. Red sandstone. Black onyx. Mica-studded granite. Elvia tied her sneakers. Near the foothills, where the cool air settled first when the sun began to fade, rocks glistened in the slanted light, much brighter than when the daytime glare turned the desert into a white blur.

  She touched the three jewel-like stones from Sandy Narlette’s house, the first she’d ever found. When no social worker came to move her, she’d begun to play in the orange grove, where she found a beautiful blue rock, then a green one, and a brown. Sandy bought her a rock book, and she tried to identify the stones. Lapis. Jade. Amber. But they were broken glass: milk of magnesia, wine, beer. They’d been dulled to stonelike softness by the rush of seasonal rainwater in the arroyo. She kept them to remind herself that everything wasn’t what it seemed.

  “Ellie!” She heard Callie’s shout.

  Callie was staring absently at the light wavering along the pale asphalt road. “Shoot, I was in Blythe two years, and I’m still not used to days like today. Gotta be 113.”

  “Yeah,” Elvia said. Jeff butted his head against Callie’s thighs, his calls high as a mockingbird’s. She knew he was hungry and Callie was coming down hard.

  “Ellie? Keep him outside for a minute, sweetie, so I can hear myself think? One minute, so I can call a friend?” She sighed. “I was gonna make biscuits. You love biscuits, right?”

  Her voice tumbled like pebbles into a jar. Callie’s blond hair was thin on the knobs of her shoulders, and her blue eyes pale as desert-faded denim. Elvia took Jeff’s soft elbow and made a detour inside for Honeycomb.

  When the cereal was in an old margarine tub, Elvia sat with him in the narrow corridor of shade along the east wall. Even though he was sweating, his head smelled sweet. She had given him a bath yesterday. Jeff trickled dirt through his damp fingers. Elvia leaned against the stucco and felt tiny bumps of fire through her shirt. Could you tell how hot it was by touching a wall, the way Sandy Narlette used to touch her forehead and recite a temperature?

  Her head swam with tears again and she said “109” to Jeff’s naked pink belly. She remembered how to tell if a baby was hot, which she had learned at one of the foster homes. She had taken care of kids she knew would eventually disappear. Just as she had always disappeared, been taken to a new place. She touched Jeff’s back, covered with heat rash like a mist of spray paint.

  She couldn’t remember her mother’s fingers on her. Just beans in a bowl. She thought she remembered the clicking nestle of beans in a bowl, dropped from her mother’s hands. She remembered the blue eyelids in the car. Did that mean her mother’s eyes were closed because she was crying? Had she been crying before she left me? Because she was leaving me?

  Elvia heard the trilling sound Jeff made at the back of his throat, the constant noise that drove Callie crazy. He was almost two. She used to be alone when her father was at work. She’d walked in the desert, watched MTV, gone to school. But now, since Callie and Jeff had filled this house with clothes and crying and whirling noise, Elvia felt lonelier than before, because when she held Jeff or touched his plump foot with toes like pale moth cocoons nestled in a row, she thought, What did I do? What did I do when I was little like this, to make her leave me?

  Jeff’s blue eyes followed Callie like tiny headlights, his cheeks slapped-red from the heat. Elvia thought, Was I like this? Is that why she left? Because I drove her crazy?

  She’d heard girls talk at school about getting rid of problems. One girl had whispered, “You can’t do that. It’s alive.”

  Another girl answered, “No, it’s not. It’s just cells. A blob.”

  “It sucks its thumb inside you,” the other girl hissed.

  Jeff crunched the cereal, humming and trilling. She drank a glass of water, watching Callie’s nervous fingers offering Jeff the Dalmatian. “Swear to God,” Callie said into the phone.

  Elvia began to run at the end of the crumbling asphalt road. Her father’s house was the last on Fourth Street before the date groves. The huge date palms were planted in rows, with tunnels of gold between their trunks. Elvia saw the men climbing the trees now that the heat had settled; they covered the golden clusters of dates with paper bags to protect them from the searing sun. She heard them call out to one another in Spanish. Past the groves were the workers’ houses, a colony of pale blue shacks in rows, too. Women hovered on almost all the tiny porches, sorting things in bowls, sweeping dust from the warped boards, laughing at someone’s words. In one doorway, Elvia saw a cloth-draped, candlelit altar with a plate of food and a huge bouquet of flowers. On the next porch, a mother combed her daughter’s hair into a puffed crown.

  Elvia pushed herself harder, as if she were training. She’d never joined a track team, because then she’d have to practice and show up for meets. Since Callie had moved in, often Elvia never even made it to school. She had to help Callie with Jeff. And since her father had started smoking with Callie, half the time he forgot to pick her up after school. He didn’t want her riding the bus with all the Mexican kids from the date groves. She waited at the parking lot fence where the sketchers smoked. With pencils, they pushed grains of speed deep inside their Philly Blunts. One day Michael had let out his smoke, passed the cigar, and tugged on her braids.

  “I could make trenzas better than those
,” he said, grinning. “So you think you’re Indian, huh, with those braids? Your people hunt buffalo, right?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s what everybody says. When they’re wannabes.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Why’d you braid your hair then?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “It’s all loose and sloppy now. Here, let me do it. I’m an Indian.” He rolled his eyes. She didn’t move. He twisted gently, making her a single braid neat as his own. Then he put his palm on the back of her neck, and she couldn’t believe he would touch her in front of all those people, with fingers that felt like a mother’s.

  She started to cry, right there, hiding her eyes from the smokers, and he said, “I was just jokin. For reals. Hey, I’ll walk you home. I don’t see your dad in his truck.”

  “My dad?” Elvia spoke into her fingers.

  Michael laughed. “He makes sure everybody sees him when he comes.”

  The previous fall, her father had seen a boy hovering around her in the parking lot. He’d shouted, “Hey, road kill. Touch her and I’ll fuckin flatten you.”

  Michael said, “Your dad ain’t been around this week, huh? Come on.”

  His cheekbones were like turtle shells under the skin, and his forehead was brown as date palm bark. His hair fell the length of his spine. He said, “Trenzas. Braids. You don’t speak any Spanish? You’re not Mexican?”

  “Half,” she said.

  “Me, too. Half Mexican, half Indian. Half the year here, half in Dos Arroyos. I’m half crazy, and I do a half-ass job at school. And I like to stay half stoned. All the time.” He grinned and led her under the freeway bridge into the desert. In the dry arroyo, he showed her the shelter of branches and plywood, the windshield. The late-afternoon sun was hazy as water.