“Everybody looks like fuckin ghosts fadin away,” Michael said beside her. The trampled sand, the bare vines limp and bedraggled, the piles of trash and pallets and boxes at the end of the rows—she stared at the retreating backs, and they did look haunted, covered with fine, pale dust and bent by the day. People walked toward town or loaded into trucks and cars.
“Come on,” Hector said. “We won’t have a place to sleep if we don’t book up.”
Every parking lot and sandy area was taken up with cars and trucks. People were stretched out on hoods and in truck beds, sleeping or talking, propped against tires, playing cards and starting small barbecues. Elvia jerked the truck into a small island of sand in the sea of cars and trucks and folding chairs in a vacant lot. Hector said, “We gotta wait for Rosario.”
Elvia laid her head on the door frame, so tired she could hardly move. A carload of men next to them was listening to the radio. “Por que l’amor de mi alma, solito Mexico . . .” The song spilled from the open windows. “Viva Zacatecas!” someone in the back sang along.
“Sinaloa, Michoacan, Zacatecas,” Hector said. “Where’d you say your moms was from?”
Elvia shrugged. “Mexico.”
“Thirty-one states, so you better get a clue.” Hector pointed. “There’s Rosario. The tamale lady. From Cabazon Reservation. See the red truck? Every night she comes. Beef tamales like you never had. And apple empanadas. Like pies but better.”
“From the rez, huh? She’s Cahuilla,” Michael said, peering at the old woman.
Hector shrugged. “She’s a cook. She’s been coming here since I was a kid. Summer for the grapes. Winter for the dates. Sometimes we lived in a station wagon.”
“Well, I ain’t sleepin with all these people,” Michael said, scowling, three lines etched between his brows. “Cause I don’t want to be around when they start fuckin and fightin.” His eyes were shiny as night glass. “My moms met my pops here. Probably fucked me into the world in a fuckin parking lot. I ain’t in the mood to think about whether my pops is sittin in that old-ass Dodge Dart right there.”
“Life’s a bitch,” Hector said, his voice hard for the first time. “And then you die. But if you got a better place . . . We gotta be back in the field at five, or Manuel ain’t paying us, sabes?” He stalked over to the red truck and brought back a bag that smelled of chile and cinnamon.
Elvia felt the sweat and dust drying on her arms and face now that a breeze moved through the valley. “I need a shower, big time.”
“Most people take a bath in the canal right there.” Hector pointed to the drainage ditch under the bridge.
She shook her head. “Then let’s go somewhere else.”
Michael pointed her south on the highway, the sun red in the dust hanging over the fields. After a few miles, Elvia saw a glimpse of blue, a huge mirage of a lake. Then she smelled briny ocean. “Where are we?” she asked, at the expanse of water glittering against the sand.
“Saltan Sea,” Michael said. “Everybody used to fish here, but now the lake’s all fucked up. Full of poison and salt from the fields. See the mountains?” He pointed to the purple riven range rising across the water. “Where those stripes are, that’s where the real lake was. When my grandpa’s grandpa lived here.”
Elvia could see the marks, an ancient shoreline. “So this lake isn’t real?”
Michael said, “He told me Lake Cahuilla was a hundred years ago, big water from Indio to Mexico. And people fished. Then this long drought came and there was just a puddle. The people went further in the desert or up to the mountains. My grandpa’s people went to Desert Springs. Then in, like, nineteen hundred something, farmers came and pulled the irrigation water from the Colorado River. It flooded a few times and the whole river poured in here, till the railroad people dumped all this junk to dam it up. Now it’s the Saltan Sea. A fake lake.” His voice was still sketch-fast, Elvia thought.
Hector said, “My grandpa used to come here all the time. He was from Veracruz. Lived on fish—tilapia and corvina, in salsa Colorado. But now all the fish are dying off. Pull in there.”
Elvia parked at the concrete shell of a two-story motel, with the front wall gone and a honeycomb of bare rooms—no windows, no carpet, no furniture, like square caves staring at the glowing water.
“Desert people took it all for their trailers,” Hector said when they climbed into a room on the second floor, the cement floor and walls still warm. He opened the tamales.
Michael was restless, sweeping trash from the floor with a palm frond. “What would your pops do if he saw his truck right now?”
“He’d probably try to kick your ass. Both of you.”
“What if we kicked his ass?” Michael said softly.
“What?”
“You ran, right?” Michael shrugged. “Like you never want to see him again. Was he treatin you bad? Messin with you? Is he your real dad?”
She remembered what Sandy’s daughter, Rosalie, had called him, that day he came to get her. “Yeah—my bio dad. He never messed with me. He messed with everybody else.”
Once, at the Tourmaline Market, a man had leaned into the truck window while she waited for her father. He asked what time it was, how hot it usually got. Her father came outside and punched the man in the face, then rubbed his skull in the hot sand. He said, “Get in your fuckin Honda and drive. If you can’t drive cause your face hurts, I’ll drive you someplace. My choice.”
She couldn’t say to Michael, I left him because I was gonna get bigger and bigger from a baby with your eyes. Your skin. And I was scared of everything.
“You seem like him sometimes.”
“Maybe. Sometimes. When I’m driving.”
Michael didn’t smile. He took out a cigarette. “And who knows what you got from your moms, right? See, Hector can’t figure out what he got from his parents. He’s like alien boy.”
“Look,” Hector said, turning to Elvia. “There’s twelve of us. A dozen eggs, okay? I’m number ten. My parents, they work hard wherever. Like today. You do that every day, and then you gotta have some beer. They get drunk, they fight, they have another baby, they move on. But you know what? My mom—she works all day in the field, and then she’s gotta cook somethin for everybody, gotta wash out the clothes and hang em up. I don’t blame her for gettin high. She’s like, so tired, I don’t know what she was when she was herself.”
“So now they’re gone?” Elvia said.
Hector nodded. “I miss my mom. But last year, I worked the grapes. And then they were going up north to Parlier and Dinuba for the rest of the grapes. I turned seventeen. I figured it’s like my last chance to finish school. So I stayed in the arroyo with Michael and went to Tourmaline High. Now I want to go to college. Geography.” He looked embarrassed, holding out his hands for the cornhusk tamale wrappers. The apple empanadas were doughy, spicy with cinnamon. When Hector went out with the trash, Elvia lay on her side. Every muscle ached, in her thighs and along her back and even her wrists. Inside her lungs, she felt a washing sting like Listerine. Poison. Dust. Heat. She couldn’t do this every day, for the rest of her life.
Michael squatted beside her, his hands dangling from his knees. Elvia studied his face in the glow. He broke open a cigarette, sprinkling the tobacco on her hand. “You need this for your prayers.” Then he lit another cigarette and sucked hard, passing it to her. She shook her head. “Just hold it,” he said, pulling her hand and putting the cigarette in her fingers. “You feel the warm?”
She nodded. The ember and the smoke. “I didn’t know it was like a tiny heater. I always hated them cause my dad smoked so much.” She lifted the cigarette to her lips and took a puff, feeling the burn in her throat, and then pushed the smoke back out.
“Just say no, right?” Michael laughed. “You know what? When I’m sittin outside, specially in the winter, and I’m feelin strange like I miss somebody, I
always light up. The smoke looks like people sometimes. Check it out.”
The swirling figures hovered near her, outlined in blue. Maybe that’s why my dad always had a cigarette, she thought. He was lonely, even when he was with Callie or Warren. Or me. She remembered her father’s blue smoke reaching from the motel room, and she wondered whether, now that she was gone, he was lonely or relieved or so high he couldn’t think.
“And you got something in your hand. I mean, like you’re holdin something,” Michael said, staring at the cigarette.
“Like a finger,” she whispered. “Like babies hold somebody’s finger.”
“Yeah.” Michael sucked on his own smoke. “And the finger gets shorter, and the ash keeps your hand warm.” He lay beside her and buried his face in her neck; then he kissed her, and she tasted her own sweat and the dirt from the fields. She thought her belly would move, would protest, but when he ran his hand down her back, tracing her spine, she felt nothing below her ribs. Only his mouth again, warm and smoky.
She pulled off her jeans, scared. If we do it now, then in a couple weeks I can tell him I’m pregnant. He can get used to the idea.
He rolled on top of her, and she fit her arms around his neck. Their cheekbones slid together. That was what she liked, the first time he lay on top of her, the slants of bone beside each other, the smooth skin. Until his heart beat loud, and his chest seemed to open and bloom against hers.
But now she couldn’t breathe at all. Something was sliding back over her lungs, her heart, and she pushed at him for a second. He said, “What? You scared? Didn’t we like, do the wild thing before? I always pulled out, right? I was so fuckin drunk I can’t remember.”
Elvia tried to breathe again. Did the baby have lungs? Did sex feel like this before? This didn’t hurt. It felt hot, but separate from her, like she was watching someone else in the ceiling shadows. It wasn’t like the arroyo, when she’d tasted his neck and thought of their braids tangled together on the sand. This time, it was like being in a movie she couldn’t see. Then he pushed himself away from her, and she felt warmth seeping onto her thighs, like blood.
She kept her face close to Michael’s ribs. He’d say she couldn’t be pregnant, he’d pulled out. What if that wasn’t him, on her thighs? What if it was blood? From the baby’s—cushion? Didn’t babies grow in blood, at first?
She waited until he fell asleep, then pulled her jeans up over the moisture. She had to pee. From the edge of the room, she saw Hector sleeping in the truck bed.
Her bare feet were swollen and burning on the cooled sand. She hurried toward the derelict swimming pool and crouched beside an old water pump in a shed. She saw no blood on her thighs. She ached between her legs now, too.
Flickering lighters floated inside the dry pool, and two girls rose up the steps like zombies.
“Where you from?” the thinner girl shouted angrily, standing in front, folding her arms.
“Nowhere,” Elvia said, recognizing this gang question from school.
“You one of the Mexicans?”
Elvia didn’t know what to answer. She didn’t know what she was in their eyes. “No.”
“You sure?”
“My mom’s Mexican,” Elvia said, trying to keep her voice strong.
“Shit. I’m talkin about them,” the girl said, pointing at the graffiti all over the pool sides, the shack, and the nearby cement wall. THA MEXAKINZ. A line was drawn through MECCA.
“She talks like a gabacha,” the larger girl said.
“Where you from for reals? Lift up your shirt,” the thin one said. She raised her shirt with one finger, and Elvia saw MECCA tattooed in dark blue letters on her flat stomach.
“Nothing on my stomach. I’m pregnant,” Elvia blurted out, afraid.
“So?” The biggest girl lifted her shirt and said, “I’m on my second and I work faster than you.” The letters of MECCA were faded and stretched into pale blue wavers. Elvia recognized her voice. Tiny. She had been across the vines. “She’s the one with Hector, Lena.”
Lena studied Elvia. “You stayin in Mecca?”
“No.” Elvia thought, I never had anyplace, or anyone, I cared about enough to want it in my skin. I’m out here floating around. “Does it hurt? The tattoo?” She thought of her father’s dragon, how she’d touched it when she was small.
“I can put your vato’s name on your arm. If you don’t got a barrio,” Lena said.
“You want his name on you? Just remember, when he turns asshole, it’s hard to burn that shit off.” Tiny laughed, then showed Elvia her forearm, where she had an angry raised scar like a fat worm.
Elvia thought, A tattoo would remind me of someone. A place. “Nobody’s name. Could you do a picture?” She glanced at the dark caverns of the motel.
“You sleepin there? Damn. I’ll do you a small one for free,” Lena said.
When they got to the tiny wood-frame house lit by candles, an old woman squinted at the door. “Tranquilina?” she called.
Lena made Elvia sit in a chair. Herbs hanging from strings were everywhere. Elvia took her shirt off, touching her left shoulder blade. She said slowly, “Luna is moon, right? And a kind of moth?”
Lena said, “Abuela’s from Guadalajara. She says palomas de la luz. Doves of the light.”
The windshield, the white moths dipping over her; Michael’s story about the sparkling dust on their wings, then on his mother’s eyelids. “Three of them,” she whispered. “Three moths.”
The alcohol on her shoulder blade was stinging cold. The only clean skin on my whole body, she thought, sitting hunched over in the chair. Shoulder blades are like handles. I must have held her bones, when she carried me around. When I was a baby.
When the needle pierced her skin, she felt an answering tingle inside her, a cricket scuttling over her hipbones, even scarier than the burning on her shoulder. “Calmate,” Lena hissed.
The cricket feet answered the pain, step for step, until Elvia was numb with fear, until she was prodded from her haze by Patsy saying, “She got a firme design. I never seen it before.”
“Firme?” Elvia whispered.
“Cool,” Lena said, rolling her eyes. “Here. It won’t look real good for a couple weeks.”
She handed her a mirror, but all Elvia could see was red skin coated with Vaseline. She couldn’t see the moths yet, their colors. What was on her skin now, what was inside her skin? Had she painted a memory of leaving into the baby even before it was born, the ink going into her blood and straight to the tiny feet climbing the ladder of her ribs?
It seemed she had just fallen asleep when he woke her. The sky and water were lavender, heavy with heat. Her shoulder was crusted and throbbing, and, when she was alone, she rubbed the grandmother’s salve on the tattoo. She waited, still, for the cricket feet again, but she felt nothing. Maybe she’d imagined them, to take her mind off the pain.
The sun turned the fields and sand brilliant white, and the workers staggered down the hallways, dropping boxes, adjusting bandannas. She recognized Tiny and Lena now and said “Hey” through the leaves. Hector and Michael stopped cutting to look at her, and the girls laughed.
“He doesn’t know,” Elvia whispered into the tendrils. “The moths were for me. Thanks.”
“Damn, you’re crazy,” Tiny said, working her way to a different row. “No wonder you hang with crazy vatos.” Everyone clipped furiously, moving much faster than they had the day before. “Friday,” Hector said, racing away, too. Elvia worked alongside Michael, breathing the winy dust. The hours passed in a blaze of heat, salt in her eyes, dust drying her nose, and her feet and hands feeling swollen as cactus pads. If I find her, will I have to do this forever, just to stay with her? She clipped the grapes, remembering her father pointing to the date palms and saying, “You want to work like that? See why I make sure you stay in school? I want you to have a good job som
eday. Not like a Mexican.” Then one day he added, “Not like me. Workin in the sand with pipes ain’t any better. I’m just as dark as them. Right?”
She reached for the grapes again and again, the fruit itself hot and swollen as her fingers, her eyes. The bandanna smelled like her own chile breath. The sun, the dusty leaves, the pale green fruit—everything blurred as if she were moving underwater, just trying to stay alive.
The sun was still high when the block of vines was finished. The man at the scale spoke to Manuel, who gave Hector and her cash for their boxes and Michael’s. Hector went to find Michael, who was with Guapo.
She was holding seventy dollars. I can buy what I want at the store anyway. I don’t need my dad or Michael or anyone else right now. Tiny and Lena folded their paychecks, slid them into pockets. Tiny said, “Be careful. Watchate, huh? For you and . . .” gesturing to Elvia’s belly.
Then they got into an old station wagon with several other women. I never had girlfriends, but I had sisters at Sandy’s. We painted fingernails all the time. Lena and Tiny would be laughing, putting makeup on, combing each other’s hair for Friday night. Like a family.
Michael was sketching again, leaping into the truck and announcing, “TJ tomorrow. Camp in the desert tonight, away from here.”
In the open desert south of the Saltan Sea, she left Highway 86 and headed slowly down a faintly marked road. Hector said, “There’s a checkpoint for illegals on the highway. What if la migra got your mom? Way back then? What if she had to go back home?”
Elvia looked at the smoke trees and creosote bushes; just this, all the way to the border. “Maybe they caught her, but why didn’t they catch me?” she said. “Why wasn’t I with her?”
Under a salt cedar, they ate the tamales and empanadas again, and Elvia laid her head in Michael’s lap, staring at the stars. The cicadas were furious now, making the night hum as if a giant generator were parked somewhere in the sand. “My dad said Tijuana’s crazy. What if we don’t find her? Then we come back?”
Highwire Moon Page 13