“Kiss the money,” he said, grinning. “That’s all that matters here.”
He shoved the dollars toward her mouth, pushed the paper between her teeth, rubbed her tongue. I have been here before, she thought. I know about the money. This money.
“And this,” he said. “This is the only other thing that matters.” He pushed the gun at her mouth. “Put your tongue inside it, fucking india. Kiss the fucking gun. No. Put your tongue inside now.”
He pushed hard, and her tongue bled. He scraped the metal circle on her lips, and she closed her eyes. In church she kissed her thumb when she made the sign of the cross. This metal was only a thumbnail against her lips. He hit her in the jaw with the gun. She fell. Descanso, she thought. Rest. I will rest. If I knew Elvia was dead, I would cut my own wrists and let the blood flow out of me until I was so light, I would rise up to meet her. And my mother. So light.
She heard him urinating on the fire circle. Then he nudged her with his boot. “Get up.”
She stood up, her jaw loose and hot, and her hand went automatically to her pocket.
“What do you have? Silver. I saw you take something from your pocket.” He shoved her fingers down and made her pull out the barrettes. “Shit. Nothing. You have nothing.”
He slapped them from her fingers with the gun, and they fell in the sand. Pulling her braid so tightly her eyes blurred, he pushed the barrel of the gun to her forehead, twisting and rubbing again. Leaving a mark, she knew, from a tiny sharp edge that scored her skin.
His other hand clutched her blouse front, just as Warren’s had, and anger blurred her eyes. The barrettes were lost now. He bent to unzip his pants again, and Serafina touched her forehead. She saw smudges of black on her fingers. The god of the hearthstones. She pulled the mano from between her breasts and hit him in the temple with the heavy stone, which rested perfectly in her hand, as always.
He dropped the gun, and she swung again and again. When he was on the ground, his eyes blank, she pounded at his head until the mano was covered with blood.
She dropped the stone pestle and her whole body trembled. The ravine was silent. She couldn’t hear anyone. The men were afraid of the gun.
But Florencio stumbled through the brush tunnel. “I thought he would shoot you, if I came,” he said. His eyes widened, and he reached toward the cut on her mouth, but she pushed his hand away. Something was wrong with the way her jaw hung. She knew she couldn’t talk.
He flinched at the blood on the coyote’s teeth, the pants gapped open, the stone mano lying nearby. But he listened, bent to touch the man’s neck.
“Alive,” he whispered. He reached for the money on the ground, the bills folded soft and thick as a doll’s pillow. Serafina remembered the barrettes.
She scrabbled for them in the sand and put them in her pocket. Her fingers were crusted with dried blood. Florencio said, “Go back.” He didn’t look at her, but at the ground near her feet.
She moved quickly to the black gun that had left the dent of a circle she could feel on her forehead. She threw it down the ravine into a tangle of brush. No. No gun. She tried to say the words, but only a deep, muffled bleat came from her mouth, and she shook her head in frustration and pain.
“Serafina,” Florencio said. He let his fingers sway toward the boots. “He will come after us, if he lives. Find us. We have to get to Yuu Sechi.”
Rio Seco. The mano was in her hand. Sticky with drying blood. “If he comes after us, he’ll kill us,” Florencio said. Serafina dug a hole in the sand and covered the mano. Then she ran back to the fire, where the others were waiting, staring, until she hid her head in folded arms.
When Florencio emerged into the clearing, his face was gaunt, his hands black, and she knew he’d lifted soot-covered rocks over his head. A killing pile. He stared at her, and said, “Now we have to walk the rest of the way.”
The Tiltepec men grew angry on the second day of walking to Santa Ysabel. “No truck now, no way to get to Los Angeles. We had a ride to Fresno. We can’t walk all the way to Fresno.”
“Shut up,” Florencio said finally. “He could have just as well shot us as given us a ride. I gave you back all your money. So shut up and walk.”
She couldn’t answer for herself. She couldn’t talk. Her jaw was swollen big as a fist. She could barely walk, her ankle sore and misshapen as dough. They couldn’t hike along the highway shoulder, because Florencio said people in the mountains hated Mexicanos so much that they ran them over, shot at them from cars. So they fought through the brush and creekbeds in the day, rested when the heat became overpowering, and then tried to hug the highway at night.
The sun beat down until she could smell the oil burning on the asphalt underfoot and in the greasy bushes by the road. Skeletons of small animals were dry and flat. The faint, stinging circle on her forehead reminded her of how close she’d come to dying.
Death seemed to hover over all the California mountains as she stumbled, Florencio holding her arm. When she felt she would faint from the heat, Florencio said, “Water. Look.” He led them to a nearly dry stream, and the men drank from the brackish puddles. She couldn’t bend over. With his hands, he funneled water into her mouth, and she tasted moss and earth and oil.
“Down there,” he said, pointing south, “in the desert, people die all the time because they have no water. The coyote drops them off and says someone in a truck will come. Just like this one didn’t come. The people wait forever, and the sun kills them.”
Guillermo said, “We’re not in the desert now. If we had the gun, at least we could shoot a rabbit for food.” He studied Florencio suspiciously. “You have it. You want to sell it.”
“No,” Florencio said impatiently. Tiltepec people didn’t always like San Cristobal. Serafina didn’t look at their eyes on her. No one trusted anyone here, in California.
They saw the cabinlike store in the evening. Santa Ysabel was tiny. There was no truck in sight. Florencio bought water and crackers and a few cans of soup, and they left hurriedly. In another dark clearing, they rested. Eventually, the Tiltepec men slept in a row, their beer cans like candles at their heads.
Serafina’s jaw felt hotter, as if a bright marigold of pain were fastened to her bone. “You still can’t talk?” Florencio whispered. She shook her head. “Did he hit you with the gun?” She nodded, pointed to the place on her jaw.
Florencio said, “You have to open your mouth enough for water.” But just separating her lips made tears stream from her eyes. She took the bottle and dribbled water past her teeth.
He knelt and put his fingers on either side of her face. “When I was in the hospital for my fingers, everyone got hurt in the fields that month. I saw a nurse put one man’s jaw back. Someone hit him with a shovel. She said if she didn’t put it back, it would always hang wrong.”
He lifted her jaw like a shelf, and pain tore through her skull, flared as though the marigold were on fire. Then he tore a tee shirt into strips and wrapped them around her jaw and mouth. “It will keep you warm.” He made a pallet of their clothes and said, “Put the good side of your face here. I will stay awake. I am used to not sleeping. When we pick the naranjas, we pick all night. The boss parks the trucks so the headlights shine on the field. I don’t need to sleep.”
His voice faded, and she slept.
When she knelt at the stream, the blackened blood came off her hands revived and red again from the water. She washed the barrettes, dried them, smelled the metal. She had always cried for a blanket of Elvia’s, a shirt, anything that would smell of her skin and breath. But a blanket would have been shreds by now. The barrettes glowed in her palm until she put them away.
They walked parallel to the highway, in the blistering heat of lower land. Serafina saw trucks pass by with people brown as she, and a crumbling adobe house with brown children in the dirt yard. “Indios. Californios,” Florencio whispered. “Mi
xtecos can survive, too. We can make it.”
Her tongue, swollen in her mouth, throbbed with thirst. She was glad she couldn’t speak. Maybe she would never have to talk again. She drank a few sips of water when they stopped, and the pain of moving her lips washed her forehead clean of thought.
In the clearings, she saw how many had come before them by the piles of plastic water jugs and trash and ashes. Serafina knelt near the fire circles in each place and prayed, “Ñū’ún yuu nu’un. Thank you. I will not burn your stones.” She laid two wildflowers at the edge of the blackened rocks.
If they didn’t get to Rio Seco soon, she would have to wash clothes in a stream. Find wild plants or something to cook. They would live more primitively than in Oaxaca. She thought she was delirious. Her head swam with heat. Maybe she should go home. But she couldn’t get home. Never again. She would never see San Cristobal again.
They descended from the forest into brush and chaparral again, stopping beside a river, SAN LUIS REY, the highway sign read. The land was flatter, golden and parched in places.
“We are near the highway to Rio Seco now,” Florencio said. Serafina saw more adobe houses, more wooden shacks, Mexican people living near an avocado grove.
Florencio went to a cardboard shack near the trees and paid a woman for some tortillas and water and beer. In the dark, Serafina took off her jeans. She washed her legs and arms in the swirling puddles of river. Now she was home. I am delirious, she thought. All the santos were here, and the stones at the river’s edge, and she was nearly naked, hungry, praying.
rest
Gold teeth. They had gold teeth. The Mexicans brought him here. From the date grove. He dumped me out there in the trees.
All he saw was Dually’s knuckles and a baseball bat. Dually said, “I’m not gonna waste bullets on your fuckin loser ass.”
The Mexicans put two teeth in my pocket. I guess I spit em out. On the sand.
The nurse kept saying, “You awake now? Hmmm? That’s very good, that you wake up. You been sleeping so long. Let’s check your pulse, okay?”
She looked Indian, like the woman at the hotel. She said, “Tajinder. That’s my name. You call for me, okay? Push the button if you need something.”
His jaw was fuckin wired shut.
How long? Where’s Ellie now, if Dually was hidin her? He said, “I don’t know what the fuck you want, asshole.” He said it in my ear, when I was down. He said, “Your bitch is gone.”
I must a said, “Ellie?”
He hit me in the mouth again. Swear to God, he put a fuckin paper bag over my head. From the grove. The ones the Mexicans put on the dates.
“I ain’t sellin your bitch nothin, cause her ass is gone. Bustin down my door lookin for money. You got the wrong strategy, asshole.”
He must a hit me in the head. I can’t move. My arms are strapped down. Fuckin tied up like a dog. How can I figure out where Ellie is if I can’t move?
Dinner in a hose. In my arm. Shit. How long? Did he have Ellie or not? He was talkin about Callie. Your bitch is gone.
Ellie’s not—she’s my kid. He knew that.
Tajinder has a long braid. Warren called em ragheads. Indian. Ellie’s mom was Indian. Tajinder’s short like her. But her face is rounder. “Mauritian,” she said. “I am from an island. Here it is too hot for me. I need some rain. But the wind blows only sand here. There. Now your IV is hooked up again.”
Guess since I ain’t talkin, she’ll just jabber away. Like any woman. Except Sara. She could go hours and not say shit. Only to Ellie, when they were alone. She taught Ellie those cavewoman words. Like for moon. Yoo-hoo. I remember that.
Ellie could go for hours, too. Just like me. Didn’t have to say shit. Didn’t have to jabber. Callie jabbered all fuckin night. Every woman I been with talked all the time. Except Sara. Ellie was always askin about her lately. Why? Where the hell did she go?
“Hey. Jinder. Yeah. How long I been here?”
She frowns. He couldn’t believe his fuckin tonsils were talking. “How long I been here?”
“Ten days. You woke up for a few minutes before, but you were unconscious most of the time. You need to rest. You look like—like you had a hard time. You need to rest now.”
Fuck.
Ellie booked. She took the truck and fuckin bailed.
When I first got her, she used to stare out the window at the moon and look all sad. I couldn’t figure it out. Then one time, I asked her, and she said the full moon always came up in this one window at the foster lady’s house. I said it’s better to have variety in your life, to wonder where it would come up this time.
“You need to rest for a long time. Mr. Larry Foley. You have a broken nose, broken jaw, stitches in your head.”
I can’t drive fifty-five. I can’t drive at all. I better find her fast. Before she gets in trouble. Tied up like a dog, fuckin truck is gone, and I can’t move.
tijuana
The woman’s face was dry and taut, ageless, brown as a palm-bark mask. Elvia threw up near the truck tires. What if that’s her? What if she crosses every year from Tijuana to work grapes, and now she’s just bones? She leaned against the bumper, and Michael wiped her forehead with his tee shirt. “Come on,” he said softly. “They’re already dead, okay? I’ll call 911 when we see a phone. We can’t hang around in a stolen truck.”
When she turned the truck around, she caught a glimpse of a blue tennis shoe. “Maybe they were from Tijuana,” Elvia said.
“I saw a wallet in the sand,” Hector said. “Pay stubs for last February from Sun-Picked Farms. Jose-Luis Ortiz was heading for the grapes, wherever his home was. For reals.”
Miles down the highway, at the gas station in Ocotillo Wells, Michael went to the pay phone. Elvia began to fill the tank, still seeing the woman’s bronzed cheeks. The nozzle was old, and she could smell the fumes, taste them collecting in her throat. Then suddenly she thought, The baby! Doesn’t it breathe my air? I can’t remember. What did Sandy say?
She saw them all sitting at the table one night, playing cards. Sandy had gotten a new foster baby, and she said softly, “You’re all different. You were different when you were babies. And mothers never know how each kid is breathing in dust, air, information, how their blood and cells circulate those things around. Where they stay in each kid. Some people get sick, some don’t. Some are good at math, some aren’t. But you have to pay attention to figure it out. In each kid.”
I have to be careful because it’s breathing in everything, she thought. Oh, my God. I’m the mother. Right now. When Michael touched her arm, she jumped.
“You look like you saw a ghost,” he said, laughing, and then his whole face changed. His cheekbones lifted and he handed her the rest of his money. “You keep this. I’m a ghost, half the time. Half, remember? Feel like I’m half dead already.”
Elvia felt his fingers tracing her eyebrows. “You look live to me. You just need some sleep,” she said.
He leaned against the truck. “That’s what I mean. I can’t sleep at night. Every time I fall asleep, I think I’m gonna die. So I like to stay awake long as I can. Or sleep just a little while. In a safe place. See this?” He lifted the hair over his ear, and she saw a pink scar like a piece of yarn. “I was walkin on the rez, when I was little, and a bullet went around my head.”
“Somebody was shooting you? How old were you?” Elvia touched the skin.
Michael’s eyes were fierce on her. “I was ten. They probably weren’t aimin for me. Just shootin. Not even on purpose, and I almost died.” He glanced around. “Like my mom misses me. I swear. Like she wants me with her. In the other world.” He bent close to her neck. “Don’t tell Hector or anybody I said that. Never.”
She loved the way his face changed when he told her secrets; everyone else looked the same all the time, bored or high or angry, but Michael’s eyes would open wide ove
r his cheekbones and he’d look closely into her face like she was the only one who listened to those stories. “We’re like, floating out here. I like floating,” he said. “Wait till you drink the kikisulem. Remember, I told you about it way back when?”
“The dreaming medicine,” she said, trying to imagine the next level.
“When I drink it, I see how my mom looks, and I know she can’t wait to see me. Some guys drink it so they can gamble better, or just to trip. But I drink it so I can be in the other world.”
If my mother’s not dead, how will I see her? Elvia thought, trying not to remember the face in the desert. Will her spirit just want to talk to me? Alive? In Mexico, or Rio Seco, or wherever?
Then Michael pulled gently at her shirt, looking at the tattoo. He said, “I can’t believe you remembered the moths.” The metal ridge of the truck bed dug into her side, and she thought, Now—I’ll tell him about the baby now. If it’s a girl, he can rub moth dust on her eyes someday.
But Hector whistled, and Michael jumped into the truck bed. “What if your dad called the cops on us?”
Elvia shook her head. “He’d never call the cops. For anything.” Elvia hesitated, looking at the drops of sweat on Michael’s collarbone. “He’s been in too much trouble. And we were running in the truck last week. From . . .” She sighed, thinking of the little girl’s hair under her fingers, the glow in the sky “. . . from a speed lab.”
Michael grinned. “For reals? Your dad was tweakin? You get some?”
Elvia said, “I don’t sketch. Never.”
“Too bad,” he said. “Cause I’m fallin out.” He stretched in the truck bed, using her backpack as a pillow. “My favorite mattress. A movin truck.”
Elvia nodded. Her father loved to sleep in the truck bed, too. When she started it up, Hector slid onto the bench seat. “Your dad taught you to drive, right? So he knows you took his troca.”
She pulled quickly back onto the road, guilt sharp as fingernails denting skin. “No,” she said. “He doesn’t think I’d do that to him. He always says he expects a knife from strangers—not from friends.” She drove toward Mexico, thinking, When I first lived with him, he always forgot I was in the truck, when he’d tell Warren or whoever, “Gas, grass, or ass—nobody rides for free.” Then he’d remember. He’d look at me and say, “Except my kid.”
Highwire Moon Page 15