Highwire Moon

by Susan Straight

  She listened to her mother’s grateful prayers to la Virgen: “Thank you for bringing my daughter back to me. Make her stay. There is only evil in the north. Make her stay forever.”

  Uncle Emiliano studied her briefly before he left for his corn fields. He was over sixty now, her mother whispered. The old women of the pueblo filed in to look at her, to shake their heads at the evil in Tijuana, in the north. Her mother counted the dead: twin babies in the tomato fields of Culiacan, her husband and eldest son in the Tijuana dump. Even their spirits were not here, in the mountains of San Cristobal. No one was left. Everyone was working in America, disappeared like Rigoberto and Serafina, four years ago.

  Serafina stared at the whitewashed adobe walls. She chewed tortillas. She felt the cotton huipil blouse on her chest. Her jeans were gone. She had nothing now, just like when she’d left. The barrettes?

  “Sēhe síhí,” she finally murmured. “Elvia.”

  Her mother was incredulous as she spooned broth into Serafina’s mouth. “Elvia? A daughter? You were fifteen when you left me in Tijuana. I sent you to your brother. You were promised to marry Rogelio Martinez. He was in the strawberries. Rigoberto was supposed to find him.” She leaned close. “You were not married. A daughter?”

  It took Serafina a long time to tell her everything. How the car trunk felt, how she couldn’t breathe, how the sickening thuds and jerks made her dizzy. Then she was standing on a sidewalk, nearly fainting, and her brother, Rigoberto, took her inside a garage where ten men lived. He said Rogelio Martinez had left months ago for the vineyards past San Francisco. Rigoberto said nothing was the same here in California, nothing was like San Cristobal; he gave her store-bought tortillas and cheese and a blanket for his mattress. He said she had to put away her skirt and wear jeans. He would find a job for her. He said, in a bitter voice, that jobs were better for women.

  The next morning, the woman in the front house took Serafina to the Angeles Linen plant, where she folded towels and sheets, her heart beating wildly in fear until the fourth day, when she was comforted by imagining that the steam swirling around her was the mist of San Cristobal. That night, Rigoberto told her he was leaving for the grapes in the desert, in Indio, that he would be back in three months, that she should be careful. She looked at him uncomprehendingly; he was her only brother still alive, and he was supposed to take care of her. But Rigoberto said there was no work in Rio Seco for him, and he needed to make money to send to their mother.

  “He left?” her mother said, disbelieving.

  “He said he needed to make money. He said grapes were quick. Thirty-five dollars a day. He said Uncle Emiliano needed a new roof.” She stared up at the corrugated tin Rigoberto’s money had bought. She whispered to her mother, “He left in a truck with the other men. I was afraid in the garage, but I went to my work with the woman. I didn’t know the street. I only knew the hands on the wall.”

  Angeles Linen was a pale blue building with hands folded—as if in prayer—painted on the side. Serafina stood with the other women pulling sheets and towels and uniforms scalding hot from the huge dryers, folding and stacking. All around Spanish words flew too fast. Her hair was tucked into a blue mushroom cap.

  A young man waited outside for his truck to be filled with clean laundry. He smiled at her a few times, his eyes green as faded leaves, his mustache yellow and thick. She lowered her eyes, a trickle of fear falling with the sweat down her back. That afternoon, the day Rigoberto left, she folded in the hot fog, and through the wreaths of steam, green-shirted men poured through the narrow doors like wasps bursting from a crack. From her corner, Serafina saw them float against blue chests and brown elbows, she heard screams rise, and she was swept by other women outside. Then she saw the box.

  Blue backs scaled fences, and she bent herself into the square darkness of the box before the migra men came into the parking lot. She shut the flaps against the light and prayed to la Virgen.

  “I asked her to save me from la migra,” she whispered to her mother. “And someone picked up the box and put it in a truck.”

  Larry knew she was inside. He said two words she didn’t understand into the cardboard flaps. She remembered the smell of her tears and sweat, drying to silvery webs on the hot, thick paper beneath her face. She felt faint, like in the car trunk. She didn’t want to go back to Mexico. She didn’t even know her address yet. She had no idea where the truck was headed.

  “You went with him?” her mother said, her cheeks etched with disbelief.

  In his apartment, Larry had dabbed stinging orange medicine on her knees, pointing to his own scars and scabs. She was paralyzed with fear. She was fifteen. She had never touched a man, hardly brushed her father’s or brothers’ hands when she gave them food. In San Cristobal, no one held hands or kissed until they were to be married. Larry’s ponytail draped like a corn tassel over her wrist as he painted her knees.

  She remembered the green couch. “I didn’t know where to go. Rigoberto was gone. I didn’t know where Indio was. Only strange men were left at the garage. The woman in the front house was caught by la migra. I saw her on the floor.” She remembered staring at Larry’s TV, which glowed like a square veladora.

  Larry brought food from Taco Bell. The cracking-hard tortillas pricked Serafina’s gums. She sat awake on the green couch all night, after Larry fell asleep in the chair across the room. Sirens blared down the street, red lassos of light reached through the curtains to circle the walls, and the sound sent pain and fear to collect like a nest of bloody threads in her head. The tomatoes she had picked in Culiacan, the seedy red acid on her hands, the blood-smeared bundles of her dead baby sisters, the exploding rockets soldiers had fired in Oaxaca to make her uncle and the other old men leave, the torn hole like a dark rosebud in one old man’s temple. The webbing of red at the corners of Larry’s eyes when he applied the Mercurochrome. She was afraid to move, afraid to look at his long, pale feet sprawled near his boots.

  In the morning, she kept her eyes closed. When his delivery truck pulled away, she looked down at the avenue with cars rushing past. If she left this room now, where would she go? How could she find the garage? What if a neighbor saw her and called la migra? What if someone saw her even now, in the window? She huddled on the green couch, staring at the television.

  When Larry returned that night, bearing another bag from Taco Bell, he tried to speak a few words in Spanish. “La migra,” he said, then swept his arm across the table. “No trabajo.” She understood nothing else he’d said but that: No job. No place to go. She put her head down on the table, smelling the unfamiliar beans of the paper-wrapped burritos. Larry pulled his chair close to her, patted her hair awkwardly, and said, “Okay, okay.” She understood that. Then he pulled her toward him and kissed her, hands on her back. All she could think of was the way La Virgen’s hands felt against her lips, the plaster fingers glowing with the oil of everyone’s entreaties, maybe her own mother’s lips on her forehead and cheeks. She had no idea how to pull away, how to kiss back, and so she imagined herself a statue when he pulled at her shirt. But his hands were hot and callused.

  “You let him touch you? An American?” Her mother clenched her fists. “They have disease! They hate Mixtecos!” She leaned forward and whispered, “You made the gods angry.”

  Her mother’s braid was still black at the end, but the stripe of silver hair at her part was now wide as a panel of lace. When they’d moved to the migrant camp in Culiacan, Serafina had seen prostitutes gather in the fields on payday nights, lying down with men under the trucks. “We don’t do that, like animals,” her mother said. “You are promised to Rogelio Martinez. When you are married, and you lie down together, his white blood will mix with your red blood. Ten times, and then you will have enough to make a baby.”

  She understood nothing Larry said, nothing he did. She knew it then, in the dark kitchen. There was no San Cristobal now—her father, who would k
ill a cow and marry her to Rogelio, was dead. Rogelio was somewhere in the grapes. The things she knew—washing clothes in the river, boiling corn over a fire—were gone. Here was a stove with frighteningly beautiful blue fire, a street with sirens and white strangers, a man smiling, touching the buttons on her blouse. His teeth clicked against hers, his watch ticked against her fingernails, and Serafina understood that these were her only coins: her teeth, her nails, the bones of her spine rubbing the arm of the green couch.

  How could she tell her mother about the way the shouts of la migra circled in her brain even now, how hundreds of people watched her from car windows and houses, inspecting her braid and cheeks?

  These peeling walls hid her at this moment. Larry fell asleep in a few minutes after he finished lying on her. He was kind for a week, then drunk for two nights, and then he didn’t come back at all.

  For days, she walked around the two rooms, touching the stove, the TV. She couldn’t imagine how to get back to the garage where Rigoberto had taken her, which was filled with strange men from Michoacan. The plywood room near the dump in Tijuana, black flies and white seagulls whirling around her head, a trash barrel flame for cooking ash-specked tortillas, her father and brother buried, her mother sitting stunned on a concrete block. Rigoberto in Indio. Men grabbing her breasts in the dump, saying they would break into the shack to feel virgin blood.

  Her head ached in the welter of scars like pink yarn stitched on her temple. “I had a baby,” was all she could whisper to her mother, whose face crumpled with pain and disgust before she looked away, staring at the flickering candles on the altar.

  “I missed you,” Serafina whispered. “That morning, I missed you.

  She remembered how Elvia’s breath had smelled when they woke up that day, soft and milky through the baby teeth, and how Serafina had touched one sharp pebble of backbone. A small stone, shifting underwater at the river’s edge when she knelt there to rinse the clothes, her mother humming. She had suddenly missed her mother’s smoke-scented neck, her braid thin as an eyelash at the end when it brushed Serafina’s arm near the cooking fire. Serafina had slid one finger into Elvia’s loosely curled palm, thinking, I want to go home, but instead of gripping reflexively, like a baby, Elvia opened up her hand like a flower and pulled it away.

  Her mother’s hands were on Serafina every day. She spread pastes of turpentine and cloves on her ribs and ankles and wrist, for warmth to heal her bones. But inside Serafina’s belly, the pain was sharp—she wasn’t touching her own daughter, braiding her hair and washing between her toes. “Sándoo,” Elvia used to whisper at her feet. Serafina couldn’t even see her own useless feet—her aching brain wouldn’t work. It took months before she could walk properly, bend her wrist, look at the sky without seeing black sand. When she finally hobbled up the dirt path, holding her mother’s arm, she said, “I have to go back and find her.”

  Her mother shook her head. “She is gone. They have found another place for her. She is an American now. She has a better life. You cannot leave again.”

  “I have to go back—” Serafina would begin, each day while she grew stronger, and her mother’s voice would rise into a scream, her lips fierce and drawn back like a cat’s.

  “If you go back, you will die! All my children die! You are the last one.” The desperation in her mother’s voice edged over to hysteria, and she would scream, “You left me! In Tijuana! All of you. I was there alone with robbers, with floods, but you never came back!”

  One of the old women would rush up the path and try to calm her. Doña Crescencia or Doña Elpidia would say, “You must stay, or you will kill her. Your mother has taken care of you. You must take care of her. Why do you want to return to California?”

  Her mother’s eyes would widen, and Serafina knew she had to be silent.

  Her uncle spent days in his fields. There was no word or money from Rigoberto for months, and they ate tortillas with cheese or beans or salt. Her mother cried and said Rigoberto must be dead, too, her last son buried in California. Then he wired a hundred dollars from Fresno, but when she wrote back to him there was no answer.

  For nearly a year, Serafina refused to look at la Virgen’s face. How could she make me choose—my mother or my daughter? How could she be so cruel, to expect me to live with a cleaving of my breastbone? But one night, when her mother lay sleeping beside her, Serafina studied the soft blue robe, the hands clasped in prayer. She tried to imagine Elvia’s face, grown thinner or chubbier, fed or not, smiling or sobbing. The tiny teeth. Please. Please. Apple.

  She had been found. She couldn’t be dead. I would feel that. Who is feeding her? Another woman is brushing her hair, braiding it. A nun? Do nuns take care of children, in the north?

  What if Larry had come back, and someone had told him about the car? What if Elvia lived with Larry now, waiting for her mother to return? What would Larry have told her? What would he feed her? The nopales paddle had flown into the yard like a green moon of anger.

  Larry had a beer glass. Colorado was etched into the side. Serafina knew this word, from the market in Nochixtlan, the vats of prepared mole sauces—negro, verde, Colorado. Black, green, red. A red place? A red beer?

  But the glass was wrapped in paper she had never seen—clear plastic bubbles trapped together. She remembered touching the circles of air, rigid buttons of protection.

  Now she prayed, for the first time. But in the fire-glow, she thought that even her prayers were too Mexican to reach California, to touch her American daughter. So she prayed that la Virgen would wrap an invisible blanket of bubbles around Elvia, each dimple of air full of exhaled love.

  Today her mother wore a white huipil, a dress her mother’s mother had woven. Her mother’s mother had spun the cotton, threaded it onto the loom, and embroidered the birds and animals with silk. This huipil had been saved for years, to be worn only in death.

  Twelve years, Serafina thought, smoothing the fine cloth. I never left you. Her mother used to whisper, “I never left you, when I brought you back so sick, in case your anima flew.”

  Her mother had lost her mind a long time before. When Serafina cried about Elvia, or when anyone who visited San Cristobal talked about America, her mother would shout about the devils and the spirits of the north, where even the air was full of evil magic. Then, five years earlier, her mother’s left breast had dripped fluid, as if she needed to nurse a baby. Serafina wanted to take her to the doctor in Nochixtlan, but her mother shook her head, a strange blue light around her black irises. “The milk—it has come back,” she said.

  The breast pained her, but she smiled and said it was a hurt like a baby’s lips. Then the pain traveled to her back and her hip, and, finally, when her body began to waste away and her breath smelled like metal, Serafina told her uncle they needed money for the doctor.

  She wrote to Rigoberto in the cotton, in the lettuce, in the oranges—all the places from where he’d last wired money. “Please come home. She is very sick. She will leave us soon.” Every month she walked the seven miles to the next village, Santa Maria Tiltepec, where she took the bus to Nochixtlan and the wire office that held money for the few people left in San Cristobal. All the men who were working in California and Arizona and Washington put their money on counters there, where dollars disappeared and turned into pesos in Nochixtlan. After almost a year, Rigoberto sent three hundred dollars and wrote back:

  Take her to the doctor in Oaxaca City. I cannot come home. Crossing is too hard. Do you want my face or my money?

  “Cancer,” the doctor said, after they’d taken the long bus ride to the city. Nothing helped, not teas or horchatas or medicinal rubs, not the prayers and offerings.

  Her mother lay in the wooden casket Uncle Emiliano had just made. A small crucifix rested on her breastbone, her fingers wrapped around a tall white candle. Her anima had chosen last night to fly, lifting from the open doorway and blending into th
e mist of the mountains around San Cristobal Yucucui.

  Her mother still couldn’t be alone. When the sun rose, and Doña Crescencia came to sit, Serafina would make tortillas and take them to her uncle in the field, as always. Serafina knelt on the palm mat near the coffin. She heard Doña Crescencia’s thin voice rising from the path. Serafina touched the melting wax so it wouldn’t drip on her mother’s fingers. Doña Crescencia was wrapped tightly in her rebozo, her brown face small and round like sweet bread.

  Doña Crescencia sat down on the palm mat and said, “Five years of suffering. She chose last night to leave because your brother didn’t come for fiesta. Eladio Reyes and his brothers came from Santa Monica. They took the bus. Amado Torres brought his sons from San Bernardino. He has a truck. And the Sanchez brothers spent all their money from Santa Barbara on the flowers and candles. They will carry San Cristobal this year.”

  The fiesta for the town’s patron saint was the only time people came back, during the third week of August, when they ate the special moles that sent sweet and spicy steam through every window, when the church was full of flowers that added their scents to the air, when the men carried the statue of San Cristobal on a platform through the streets.

  “I asked them all,” Doña Crescencia said sternly. “They heard Rigoberto went to the coast, to the artichokes and strawberries. But no one knows. And he isn’t here.”

  Serafina nodded. “He sends money.”

  “Money doesn’t erase his tequio,” the old woman said. Tequio—each person in the pueblo had a responsibility, for the water or the roads or the church, for the fiesta, for the old people. Money would pay someone else to do the work, but it wouldn’t dissolve the insult of absence.