Highwire Moon

by Susan Straight

  I left a grand when I finished the Texas job. Was it that much? When did Warren mess with that dude in the bar, and we ended up doin a month? In Denver.

  The air conditioner shuddered like a radiator near Ellie. She slept with her back to him.

  I used to twirl her around. Every time. I gave her that Barbie. Long hair like hers. She held that Barbie like a regular kid. With a regular mom. Regular dad.

  The narrow channel between the beds was black. He felt like his feet were in a ditch. Bare feet. He always felt better with his boots on.

  When he was a kid, his cheap sneakers had holes like worms had eaten the rubber soles. He always wore steel-toes now. Every day.

  Steel-toes let you kick ass. When you had to. Around Warren, you had to all the time. Warren was always touching people—women in bars, ones that didn’t belong to him. Guys that beat him at pool. Warren didn’t know shit, cause he’d been in group homes all his life. Ward of the state. All he knew was fightin. And the only sex he ever got cost money.

  But Warren was around in Denver. When Larry’s mother left the bar with some rancher and ended up getting dropped off on the highway outside town. When she wouldn’t do something, or couldn’t do something, or shouldn’t have drunk any more tequila. When she froze in a ditch.

  Her bangs must have been icicles. Women had bangs. His mother’s bangs were blond. What the fuck kind of word was that—bangs? Hair hanging over your forehead. You had to imagine that shit, what it looked like, if you were only fourteen. Icicle eyelashes. Black as oil inside. From the makeup.

  Sara had had blue eye makeup on that last night. Like a clown.

  Ellie had never worn makeup in her life. She was still a kid.

  But she can’t sleep in the same room with me for much longer. She can’t be fuckin fifteen. Already. I can’t believe we’re back here at square zero again. Shit.

  Air conditioner’s so loud I can’t even hear her breathe.

  He ran the dozer up and down the quarry road. The dust coated his arms like brown nylons.

  His mother always wore nylons when she went out to a bar. The Time Out. The Drop Inn. She brought back money.

  He dropped another load of river rock at the quarry pile. More landscaper trucks. He headed back up the quarry road. Ten-hour day, seven bucks an hour. Shit. Not like running concrete pipe in for the golf courses. All that money gone. Callie smoked it up, spent it at the casino. Dropped it in them slots. Indian slots.

  Then she gets mad at Ellie for running around in the desert, jogging and collecting rocks. Calling her a squaw and shit. Cause she’s tanned and wearin them braids. Hell, Ellie’s smart. That’s all. She ain’t like Callie, droppin out of school. Ellie likes school. And she ain’t messing around with boys. Callie’s full of shit. Ellie’s still a kid.

  I buy her root beer and burritos and milkshakes. I buy her boots. Not steel-toes. But if she wants steel-toes, I’ll buy em. She ain’t a boy. But she’s my kid.

  Callie wanted all the money. Now she’ll have to get her own. That’s all they ever want, when you meet them in a bar or at a gas station or wherever. They look at you and see paycheck. Fuck him and get his paycheck.

  Drive and drive and get the check and then it’s gone by Monday and you drive again.

  You have to sit still to hang around with kids. I couldn’t do that part. Ellie’d be on the couch and my eyes fuckin wouldn’t stay still. They were used to driving. Have to watch the traffic, the assholes in little cars, the motorcycles, the cops. The guy behind me lookin to hijack pipe. Your eyes move around like BBs in a jar. Then you get home and you have to look at a kid while she talks to you. About school and her friend Jamie and math and today I saw a hawk and look at these rocks they’re like meta-somethin.

  Kids can tell when you can’t do it.

  She didn’t bring back the keys? She must a gave em to Jimmy, in the office.

  Two years here and shithead Warren’s still gotta ask me Can I get a ride back? Every paycheck goes for beer and hookers. But he’s always around. I told Callie that once. She was on my case about lendin Warren a hundred bucks and I said, “He was around long before you were and he’ll be here when you’re gone.”

  “Larry, dude, the truck’s fuckin gone. Callie must a bought more shit from Dually.”

  Cash or crash. No more fronts. She remembered when I lent Warren the money. She told Dually I might be up here at the Sands. Dually came and took the fuckin truck. And Ellie in it.

  Collateral. Anything’s collateral.

  Not my kid. That’s not money. That’s my kid. Fuckin goddamn Dually.

  Jimmy’s truck peeled out big-time. Yeah, you don’t want to be around. Dually’s house is out in North Palm Springs. Walkin all this way in the fuckin wind. Barbed wire everywhere. All along the road. Inside my fuckin head. Never been here before, drove by once. You don’t come to Dually, he comes to you. Fuck him. Pit bulls or a piece? What’s he got? I don’t remember.

  His house is all shut up from the heat. No truck. He fuckin sold my truck or he hid it. Where’s Ellie? Fuck knockin. That’s what steel-toes are for.

  colonia pedregal

  On the stairway of tires, Serafina stepped into each black circle, dust puffing around her ankles as if the earth were coughing. She looked back at the blue-painted shack perched on the ravine’s edge to see if Florencio was following her. She didn’t want to talk to anyone yet. Plucking a handful of stones from the crumbling mud bank, she hurried down the streambed toward the dump.

  This morning, the sky was already hot, pale as paper at the roof edges, the way Tijuana had looked when she lived here before. But this was a different ravine, because most of the old colonia had washed away in the winter floods last year, Florencio had said. Some of the colonias scattered in the ravines and hillsides around Tijuana were bigger now than the pueblos the first settlers had left. The scrapwood and tin houses clung to the hill like cliff-swallow nests on church walls.

  Pedregal. The colonia was named for the rocks, so easily gouged from the earth by fingers or rain, made into walls and boundaries. Mounded onto graves.

  She shivered. Fences of box springs glittered with faint dew near her shoulders as she walked. The banks of tires fortifying the slumping dirt thrust out like the toes of giant boots. On a clothesline, tiny socks fluttered in the slight breeze. Someone else had been up before her, washed all those baby clothes and hung them out just now, because no one left anything outside at night. It would be stolen, sold, taken because it was untended.

  Even the flies were still asleep. The men in Doña Alba’s had all been still as dead bodies after seven days of driving and walking from Oaxaca. Florencio’s shoulder had been touching hers when she awakened, and she’d pulled away, confused by the heat of someone else’s skin.

  Elvia’s arm, so long ago—had the tiny elbow rested against her ribs? Could she allow herself to remember it, now that she was leaving tonight to find her? Tonight. She didn’t want to stay another day here, where so many people got lost.

  The dompe was silent. No trucks circling the steep dirt road, no seagulls screeching overhead, no dogs looking for food, no people picking through piles of trash for bottles, wire, cardboard, for clothes and canned food. But figures began appearing over the crest of the trash hills. Early risers came to claim their spots, where the first bags would be flung and the best items snatched. She saw a man at the far edge, wearing a dirty white shirt like her father had. He was bending and straightening, searching through the pile at his feet. He would turn and see her, she thought, panic rising in her throat. Her father’s spirit: waiting for her to come back and pay her respects.

  The rubble was still smoldering from yesterday, when the dompe workers would have lit fires to stop the people from walking there. The smoke wreathed the man’s shoulders. Serafina squinted, and the thin smoke cleared. Not a man—a white piece of paper, held to the ground by a
stick, bending back and forth in the breeze off the sea.

  She crossed herself, crouching by the plywood day shelter near the entrance. Years ago, when they’d first arrived in Tijuana and her mother had collapsed into Alba’s arms, they’d spent their days here. On the journey from Culiacan, her mother hadn’t eaten, hadn’t spoken since she’d cried out for her buried baby girls. She sat hunched, hidden in her rebozo, and Alba kept them from starving. Serafina sat near the iron comal, making tortillas for the dompe workers; she patted the dough, while flecks of ash and dirt cooked like pepper into the tortillas.

  The pink sweater—she remembered. People had run toward the truck even as it still moved, anxious for the new load of tattered plastic bags to fall. Serafina saw a flash of pink, a knit arm, near the top, and she kept her eyes fixed on it when the trash began to slide. She pulled at the cans and rags and bones, feeling her fingers slide into the soft body of a dog. She winced and moved to the right, and the sweater fell as elbows began to push at her back.

  In the shelter, she hid the sweater under a piece of cardboard, planning to wash out the rancid liquids that soaked the sleeves. She heard her father and Fidel, Alba’s husband, shouting at the same time. Fidel held up a bottle, flat and curved. He drank, handed it to her father, and then her father gave it to Luis. The bottle glinted, tilting up toward the sun in Luis’s hand.

  Serafina had been dragging cardboard to cover the sweater when her mother screamed. Her father and Luis and Fidel were shaking, rolling on the ground like dogs with ticks, their backs arching hard against the earth. Serafina ran to her father; Rigoberto tried to hold him down but he jerked away, sprays of thin, dark foam coming from his nose and mouth. Luis’s arms were scratched bloody by the broken glass where he rolled, and black drowned his teeth.

  Now, Serafina walked close to the spot, but she knew she stood in a different place, the ground much higher with layers of garbage and bones and blood. At a streambed, a cow’s carcass lay stripped by dogs, ribs in a curving row where hair clung in patches to the backbone. Close to here, their souls had flown. She dropped the stones, then took from her pocket the pieces of dried tortilla wrapped in cloth. Nunī from San Cristobal, broken into stiff triangles.

  Tucking her uncle’s corn between the stones, she whispered, “I’m sorry I left you. You never wanted any of us to leave Mexico. But everyone here disappears.”

  Glimpsing the silvery ocean, she made herself whirl and face the border. The other glitter: the wire fences that snaked across the bare earth near the Tijuana River, a black stripe down the center of the concrete channel and the high sloped levees where already hundreds of people were gathered, waiting. She hardened her spine and made herself look at the hills beyond the border. I won’t remember that part—not right now. My soul didn’t leave then. It came back. The other part of it is still waiting for me, on the other side. She is still looking for me, too.

  She bent to push one piece of tortilla back into the stones and then passed the trudging army of people approaching now with their plastic bags and searching eyes.

  The men were all awake now, smoking in the truck, in the yard, ash turning bright when they inhaled hungrily. Serafina paused at the box-spring fence, chilled by the bright winks of ember.

  That day, Larry and Warren had smoked red embers from a pipe in the truck cab. Elvia pulled her to the duplex window, saying, “Táā-Daddy has ñuhun in his mouth.”

  Larry came inside, eyes scarlet, staring at her hands on the nopales cactus. His friend Warren said many things to make him laugh, pointing to Serafina and the cactus. Then Elvia dropped her own nopalito, tears streaming. “Náā? Vihnchá ndaha!”

  Serafina looked for the bristle of spines, taking Elvia’s finger into her mouth and sucking hard, scraping needles off with her teeth. She remembered. Larry shouted, “Ouchie. You got an ouchie.” He turned to Serafina. “Sara. Ellie ain’t in Mexico. You ain’t in Mexico.” Then he lifted Elvia to his chest, where she plucked out the keys from his pocket.

  “Drive!” Elvia said, and Larry grinned and took her outside. They drove away in his truck, Serafina running to the sidewalk, Elvia’s hands turning the steering wheel.

  “Don’t freak,” Warren said, his mouth close to her face. Then he deliberately reached into her blouse, his eyes on her face the whole time, and pulled out the roll of money Larry had given her earlier that day. Warren’s fingers brushed her breasts hard, and she twisted away in the settling dust. What if he didn’t bring Elvia back? What if the truck hit a tree and Elvia flew out like a doll? Serafina felt her skin bubbling and rising, floating away from her without Elvia’s tugging, patting fingers on her thighs, shoulder, braid. Then she knew: If he brings her back, I will take her home to San Cristobal. I will ask a santo first.

  Now Serafina approached the men in Alba’s yard. “Tonight. I don’t want to wait. I want to leave tonight.” She didn’t know how else to begin. The polite words of home had flown from the truck window on the highway. The way she’d begun to speak to her uncle was the same hard, empty voice she heard addressing Florencio, without any respectful small talk.

  Florencio sat on a wooden chair with a cup of coffee. Serafina lowered herself onto a slab of concrete. “Did I cause you to feel uncomfortable?” he asked, in the formal tones of San Cristobal, but with a faint clicking behind his tongue. He has been in California a long time, Serafina thought. Like Rigoberto. He is my brother’s friend. I have to be patient.

  “No,” she said. “I went to pay my respects. Because I am leaving tonight.”

  Florencio nodded, his black hair damp in shiny quills over his ears. “I remember Rigoberto telling me how they died. I remember him crying. He cried for his mother, he said.”

  Serafina looked at people stirring in other doorways, in bare plots surrounded by wooden pallets and box springs and geraniums in coffee cans. A small boy ran naked, his stomach covered with a huge burn and purple medicinal wash.

  Alba had rebuilt her house after last year’s flood washed everything down the ravine. She had left San Cristobal twenty years ago, one of the first people to claim land here, where she built shacks for people coming from Oaxaca to Tijuana. She made a living, with her son Manuel driving people north. The new shacks were plywood and cardboard and tin, their walls held together by nails driven through bottle caps.

  Manuel crowded Florencio from the chair now. “Move, fingers,” Manuel joked.

  Florencio had only three fingers on his left hand. The skin at the outer edge of his palm was twisted pale and rosy. Serafina looked at his eyes instead, black as hearthstones, a flourish of etched lines above his cheekbones. He was two years older than she, thirty-three, like Rigoberto.

  “The lettuce,” he said, eyes steady on hers. “In Salinas. Rigoberto carried me to the clinic. The field was muddy. My machete . . .”

  He sat on an overturned bucket near her. “You crossed with the Italian padre the first time.”

  Serafina nodded. The priest had come every week, with blond American teenagers in two vans filled with sacks of beans, potatoes, oranges, and Bibles. And if someone in the colonia begged hard enough, the priest carried a woman over the border in the trunk of his Volvo. Only a daughter or wife searching for a loved one on the other side.

  “This time will be much harder,” Florencio said.

  Alba came from her house, her arms raised high, the loose fat trembling like flan. “Serafina?” she cried. “You’re here? That means she’s gone now.” Her dress smelled of butane and coffee. “I miss her every day. She was ready? Her anima was prepared for the journey?”

  Serafina was quiet. She finally said, “She wanted to be with her own mother.”

  Mattresses filled the front room, and a young woman emerged from behind the blanket covering the doorway to the other room. Four small girls, their hair tangled as birds’ nests and their eyes almond-slanted like Manuel’s, flew to the young woman, touching her
somewhere, leg or knuckle or wrist, and then they were gone. Outside, their screams and laughter grew faint.

  Alba said, “Chilaquiles. Help me carry it outside.” She put her plump arm along Serafina’s shoulders after they put the heavy pot on the outdoor grill. The men gathered in the yard, drawn by the spicy steam of red sauce, Oaxacan cheese, and torn tortillas.

  Alba gave Serafina a bowl. “Your eyes are like charcoal. You cried for her.”

  Serafina nodded, but she knew the dark wells were from her fear. Manuel had driven on back roads to avoid the police in Puebla and Mexico state. Thousands of pesos to let them through, if they saw the truck. And the bandits, the soldiers—all looking for Mixtecos to rob, Manuel said. He had taken them to rest in caves where no one would see them, or he’d paid a farmer for a night in his corn field.

  Florencio had whispered to her in the milpas, in the caves, “Why are you going back now?” Her face tingled, in the dark; he was from her pueblo, and he believed in the old ways. She couldn’t tell him about the box, about Larry and her foolishness, about her daughter.

  She handed Florencio another tortilla now and said to Alba, “I’m leaving tonight.”

  Alba bent close to Serafina’s arm, stirring the chilaquiles, shaking her circlet of gray braids. “It’s too hard to cross now,” she said. “Half the men used to leave every morning for San Diego. For the gardens. Now there is the wall and more migra.”

  “Now the Guatemaltecos work the yards,” Manuel said. “They work for free, practically, and sleep under the freeway.” He ladled more sauce for himself. “And now is Operation Gatekeeper! All day on the radio Americans say, ‘Do not attempt to cross the border! Los Estados Unidos will prosecute los illegales!’” He laughed. “And then you hear the music—Los Tigres del Norte, Los Illegales del Sacramento, Los Illegales del Rio Seco! The bandas sing when he’s finished his speech!”