Highwire Moon

by Susan Straight

  Everyone grinned. Serafina remembered the men at fiesta singing about oranges and avocados and lemons.

  “Los Illegales del California!” Manuel shouted. “Pick the damn strawberries! That’s all I hear now. More strawberries they planted this year, so they need more pickers.”

  “You lived in San Bernardino once, right?” Florencio said to him. “You never go back?”

  “I hate the food up there, I hate the way they drive. I can’t go anywhere now. Look at all these goats, with their sharp little hooves.” The small girls were crowding around the table, and Alba handed out pan dulce. “I wasn’t smart like you, Florencio. I got married.”

  “I’m not so smart . . .” Florencio began, and then he bent his head to his bowl. Serafina felt the brush of hair at her own arm, and the smallest girl went under the table after a dropped cup.

  “It’s even more dangerous than before,” Alba said again, pulling Serafina over to her chair under the tree. She whispered, “Your hair was tangled in the black rubber so I could hardly see you. Your mouth was full of dirt. You had been eating the earth. Your mother carried you like a baby. Now she’s gone. Stay here and make tortillas again. You’re like my own daughter.”

  Serafina wouldn’t let herself cry, but her mouth trembled, and she whispered to Alba, “If you truly feel that way, then you’ll know why I have to go. I have a daughter. A baby. I lost her that night. La migra caught me, and she was left behind. I have to go back and find her.”

  Alba sucked in her breath, hand to her mouth, and said, “No! You told your mother?”

  Serafina shook her head. “Not for a long time. Then I couldn’t leave her.” She stared at the girls running through the yard, braids swinging. On the hilltop, dust clouds rose from the dump. “Her head was sick, she never got better. Like the cradle where the babies grow, inside the body, sent poison up to her skull. She was crazy.” She stirred the tortillas floating in the red sauce. “She said we were cursed to lose our daughters. And she would stop the curse with me.”

  “But your daughter would be—”

  “Fifteen,” Serafina said softly. Two arroyos over, where the old colonia was, she thought, that’s where I was fifteen and I lay down in the car trunk. When the priest closed it, I tried to think I was a baby inside a mother. I curled up. The motor was the mother’s heart. I breathed saltwater from my eyes.

  Alba whispered, “She has had another mother.”

  “She is half American.” Serafina put her hand up to silence Alba. “No. No one knows. But I am still her mother.” Getting up to fill her bowl again, she said, “Tonight.” She was still hungry, and she wanted to have strength to walk in the dark.

  Manuel and Florencio and the others were drawing pictures in the dirt. Serafina listened. They would have to pay a coyote. They had already paid Manuel, though he didn’t charge them much since they were from home. The men from Santiago Tiltepec, he charged more. But the coyote wouldn’t care where they were from. He would want all their money.

  Impatience and her fatigue from sleepless nights made her hands and knees tremble. She couldn’t be polite. “Manuel,” she said, “if it’s so much harder to cross, how much will it cost?”

  The men stared at her, surprised by the rudeness of her abrupt interruption. “It used to be two, three hundred dollars,” Manuel said. “But now it’s eight or nine hundred. La migra is stronger, smarter.”

  One of the men from Santiago Tiltepec said, “Last time, there were two migras on horseback, and they roped me like a calf. Kicked me, took my shirt and shoes, tied me up and left me while they went for the others. Coyotes could have eaten me from the belly out.”

  Alba joined them. “You should wait until la migra concentrates somewhere else, in a few months. You should stay here until you have enough money.”

  Serafina had nine hundred dollars, the tight roll of money between her breasts. Florencio glanced around, and Serafina knew he didn’t trust the men from Tiltepec. You didn’t trust anyone in Tijuana because there were no rules. And in California, you didn’t trust anyone until you were with your own people, in whatever camp they had settled. Your new pueblo.

  Manuel handed his plate to his mother. “La migra has more trucks. And los panderillos—the gangs are worse than dogs, tearing people up. You have to go to Tecate, through the mountains and the desert. That’s the only way to get through, unless you want to try seven times here and get killed. Fucking August. San Cristobal is unlucky—people have to go back home for the santo’s fiesta. But it’s the time for grapes, tomatoes, oranges. Everybody’s crossing now.”

  Serafina went inside. She looked at the clothing hung on wires strung from the tin ceiling, at the mattresses, at the dresser crowded with shampoo, lotion, dolls. She tried to pray near la Virgen de Guadalupe on the wall, but she had nothing more to say. She couldn’t leave the offering she had planned: the barrettes. She couldn’t let them go. Instead, she bent to touch the small socks scattered like crushed flower petals on the dirt floor, and she went back outside.

  “I can take you to Tecate tonight,” Manuel was saying to Florencio. “But you need a pollero to take you through those mountains, unless you’ve been that way. That’s what I heard. I don’t know anybody in Tecate. But coyotes are everywhere. Just like the animals, they find you.”

  “You were like a little animal,” Alba whispered again, crying, thrusting a bag into Serafina’s lap where she sat in the truck. “Your mother . . . Please, please, be careful.” Alba glared at Florencio. “You—you are responsible for her.”

  “That’s where everybody else is trying tonight, mano,” Manuel said, nodding at the levees and fences along the highway. Serafina looked at the Soccer Field, the no man’s land of blackened earth where she had pulled herself along the ravine by her elbows.

  “Tecate,” Florencio said softly, looking straight ahead, not at the crowds of people lining the levee and fences. A wall of backs. “Tecate.”

  Serafina willed herself away, imagining the feel of Elvia’s hand tugging her braid.

  After an hour, Manuel said, “Tecate—look at all these trucks. Everybody’s trying here, too.”

  Jaime, from Santiago Tiltepec, said, “A man from home told me of somebody. Ramon. He always wears a black cap of the Raiders.”

  Florencio looked uncomfortable. He said, “I would rather go ourselves, but I only know Tijuana. I don’t know the mountains.”

  “You’re on your own. I have to drive back to Oaxaca. Fucking August,” Manuel finally said.

  The backs were lined along this fence, too, like drying clothes on a line that stretched forever. The sun was nearly gone, the mountains across the border a jagged black horizon edged with crimson. Florencio glanced at the plastic bag in Serafina’s hand. “What did she give you?”

  “Clothes,” Serafina said, her heart racing. Could she trust Florencio? She barely remembered him. “Spoons. Bolillos and pan dulce for the morning.”

  A man shouted, “Agua. I have agua in botelos. It’s a hundred degrees in el desierto. Agua.” Serafina trembled, her fingers on the wire, the mountains melting into darkness.

  “Serafina,” Florencio said, his voice soft. “I hope you didn’t pack anything you can’t lose.”

  She touched the cloth bag slung across her breasts, with her few clothes and things from home. Her own money was tucked into her bra. Florencio said, “The coyote will take your things and throw them away.” He moved nearer, blocking her with his body from the pressing elbows. “He’ll take them because he can. Because he’ll say your money isn’t enough.”

  Serafina reached into the jeans pocket to feel the barrettes. Then she thought about her rosary, her abuela’s stone molcajete and mano, the last things from Yucucui. From the two rooms she had known all her life—the fingers on the beads, on the smoothed pestle. She opened her blouse in the shelter of Florencio’s arms spread on the chainlink fence,
hoping he was safety, and she tucked the rosary under one breast, pushed the mano in the deep valley between, and redid her buttons.

  “He must be from Sinaloa,” Florencio whispered when the Tiltepec men approached with the coyote in his black cap. From the north, with his paper-colored face and sharp nose, Serafina thought. People from the north don’t believe anything we do, think Mixtecos are stupid burros.

  “I am Ramon,” the man said. “Can you walk thirty miles? I have a truck waiting past the checkpoints. Eight hundred. Each.” He stood completely still in the chaos of bodies.

  Florencio nodded. “When we get away from here, in the mountains,” Ramon said, “you can pay me. Buy some water now. We have to keep moving.”

  Outside Tecate, the fence gave way to nothingness, to blank sand and dark shapes hurtling past. Ramon stood still again for a long time, more like a rabbit than a coyote. His black jeans and jacket made him nearly invisible except for the white letters on his cap, when he turned to whisper, “Now! Follow me! Now.”

  She ran behind Florencio. In the distance, the headlights of trucks were like blue machetes swinging through the brush.

  mecca

  “I’m on the highway to hell,” Elvia sang along with the radio. “My way to hell—no stop signs.” Then she slammed her hands into the steering wheel.

  That was her father’s favorite song. She concentrated on the shimmering road, the curves through the valley. He’ll tell Warren, “She’s just like her mother—took my ride and left my ass behind.” He’ll be madder about the truck—he’s had it longer than he’s lived with any human. But hey—now he doesn’t have to feed me all the time. Worry about me. Tell me what to do.

  After ten miles, she looked across the desert floor at Michael’s shelter in the arroyo, under the salt cedar trees like gray feathers. What if he’s still not there? I have ten dollars—enough for gas and a couple of tacos. How can I get to Tijuana? By myself?

  She headed down the fire road, skirting the foothills, until she saw a turnout protected by two huge boulders. Granite, studded with mica flecks, split by water hundreds of years ago, she thought. Drops of water, just a trickle.

  She brushed dust off the huge dashboard, like a rock shelf she’d crouched under when she was small, keys dangling like silver birds at the edge. Did she remember this? Or was she imagining it? Hadn’t she sneaked out one night to push herself under the dash, to see how it felt?

  She turned Metallica up loud, thundering in the cab. Her father used to sing along. Then he’d turn to her, point to the grocery bag on the seat between them, or to her own hands on the wheel while he let her practice driving on the dirt roads outside Palm Springs and Tourmaline.

  “Nobody ever did this for me,” he’d say.

  “What?” she’d say, even though she knew what. She knew he wanted to answer.

  “Taught me to drive. Let me pick root beer at the store. Kept an eye on me.”

  That was the dumbest part of right now—she missed being at the store with him, cruising the aisles making fun of eggplant and Fab and Tidy-Bowl. Picking out Cap’n Crunch and ribs and whatever she wanted.

  She sat in the truck bed. Like he always said, “Why think about somebody when they’re gone?” Because I want to remember her, too. From her backpack, she pulled out a candle and her stones. You could make an altar anywhere. She lit the candle and arranged the stones around the base. She laid out a white tee shirt and the rough, red sandstone she’d found in the riverbed. Scraping with her thumbnail, she made a small pile of coarse red dust on the tee shirt. The color of dried blood. She trickled it out in a thin line on the white cloth, like the Indian man she’d seen on TV drawing pictures in the sand. Navajo. Pushing errant grains into place with her finger, she spelled her name.

  When the Navajo man on TV had finished, he said he’d made a design that would heal someone in his tribe. Her father had laughed. “Yeah, hell, he can sell that for big bucks to some tourist and heal his own ass with a bottle of wine.”

  Her name was dim between her feet. The ID card was stiff in her pocket. She tried to stay awake. She held the small knife Callie had given her, clutched close to her leg. Callie had said, “If a man bothers you, don’t show him the knife. Tell him you’ll cut off his nuts. Then when his hands go down there, stick him in the chest. I know I’m not your mama, but I’m trying to help you out cause your mama sure ain’t.” Every mother said some version of that, Elvia thought. She was so tired now. She wound her braid in a circle to cushion her skull against the truck bed. She picked up the moon-white stone to rub against her cheek, the same smoothness as her thumbnail across her lip, the way other people did when they prayed.

  Elvia heard stones—thumps when they landed in the truck bed, and then a rock fell onto her shinbone. Someone yelled, “You okay? Wake up so I see you’re not dead!”

  She squinted at a brown face, a black ponytail. Michael’s friend Hector, the one he’d been busted with, came closer, pointed to the sand. “What’s that?” Elvia smeared her leg across her name. “You’re Michael’s jaina,” he said. “I seen you that one time.”

  “No, I’m not a fuckin hyena.” Elvia casually displayed the knife, holding it loose.

  “Jaina. Ruca. His girl.” Hector glanced at the knife.

  “I’m not his . . .” Her head still wasn’t working. What the hell was she, anyway? Girlfriend? No. The mother of . . . Damn. “Where is he?”

  “Torsida.” Hector was messing with her, using words she didn’t know. His eyes lit up like agates. “No habla nothing? Torsida. Prison. St. Jude’s Training School. We got four months.”

  “So why are you out?”

  Hector shrugged, his face serious now. “Cause it was my time to go. But mano messed up again on purpose. He wanted to stay another month.”

  “Michael wanted to stay?” She couldn’t believe it.

  Hector squatted and put the bag down. “Three hots and a cot, sabes?”

  Three meals and a bed. Then Michael really didn’t have anywhere to go.

  Hector studied her. “He told me you wanted to find your mother. He said you were sad.”

  “I’m not sad.” Elvia glared at him. “I’m fuckin tired, okay? Why’d you guys steal a car?”

  “We got tired of walking one day. We saw a Trans Am. We wanted to go to the mountains. Michael knew a secret place from his primo. His cousin. The snow stayed white there forever.”

  “Did you go?” Elvia looked down at the salt cedar trees turning pale gray in the changing light. The sand was white now, and the truck was in the sun.

  “We got busted.” Hector stared at her.

  “Don’t even fuckin think about this truck, cause . . .” Elvia began.

  Hector said, “I don’t want the truck.” His voice was quiet. “You can quit talking like your dad, huh? I heard him in the parking lot before. If you’re crazy like him, you and Michael are cool for each other. Drive me out to St. Jude’s, and he’ll bail from there.”

  “You ride in the back.” She slid the knife into her pocket and held the keys.

  “Just like a farmer, eh?” His voice was hard. “Orale, I’m used to hueras acting like big shit.”

  Hueras—white girls. She knew that from graffiti at school. “I’m not a huera!” she shouted.

  Hector shrugged. “You don’t speak Spanish. Your dad’s a cowboy. I guess you don’t know what you are.” He climbed into the truck bed and pointed to the freeway.

  She drove, furious. Callie’s calling me Indian squaw-girl and this guy’s calling me huera. Fuck them. Michael knows who I am. Indian and Mexican. I don’t have a mother. I’m like him.

  St. Jude’s was ten miles past Tourmaline, five miles from the freeway, in a box canyon. The stucco building was surrounded by a chainlink fence topped with barbed wire, glinting like dew. From where they parked, Elvia could see swarms of boys wearing white tee shir
ts and navy pants.

  Hector squatted under a cottonwood tree. “I’ll give him a message, and he’ll bail tonight. Most of the guys are from LA. That’s why they’re way out here. Nobody can find them, and if they jump the fence, they get lost or burned up in the desert. So they don’t.”

  Elvia glanced at his clean hair, his wary look. He said, “Meet us at that green place,” pointing to a cleft in the foothills across the freeway.

  “Don’t get lost,” she said, nervous now.

  He grinned. “I’m a geographer. I never get lost. And Michael knows the desert.”

  She drove back down the dirt road. A geographer? Was he making fun of her geology? Maybe Michael had joked about her—or forgotten her.

  In a McDonald’s, she watched the afternoon light turn the mountains bruise-blue. That first day, Michael had grinned at her, teeth perfect except for one missing molar that left a gap dark as licorice. “My people been in the desert since dinosaur times. Where you from?”

  “I’ve been here three years,” she said. “I’m from a lot of places.”

  The only place she’d ever stayed long enough to know where the moon would always rise was Sandy Narlette’s. The laundry room window—the full moon like Sandy’s scented soap, above the white dryer cave, and Elvia used to sit on the linoleum and marvel at the gleaming.

  It had taken Sandy six months to convince her that the blue things were hers, with her name embroidered on the edge. She’d loved her sisters as much as she could, when they sat around the kitchen table painting fingernails, when Rosalie, Sandy’s real daughter, painted stones in sparkly pastels and gave them funny names to go along with the broken-glass gems she held now.

  She couldn’t believe Sandy Narlette let her go, let this guy show up after four years and said, “He’s your father, your biological father, and he wants you.” All that time, Elvia had gotten used to the idea that Sandy’s house was permanent, the sisters and the slippers and the mother. She was so angry that she had left everything behind except her rock book and these three glass-stones. Sapphire blue, jade green, and cinnamon brown, what she imagined was the color of her real mother’s skin.