She held the wheel tightly while the big truck nosed through the curves. She saw the dead woman’s face. Her hair had been loose, wavering on the sand.
“She’s probably dead,” she whispered to Hector. “That’s why she never came to find me.”
Hector rubbed his face and said, “A lot of people die in summer, down in the desert. They die in the winter, up here. My uncle got killed about twenty miles from here, in Julian. Some skinheads saw him walking and beat him up real bad. They left him in the snow.”
“Snow?” Elvia looked at the dusty pine trees. “People come this way, too?”
Hector said, “They come all the time, all year. And they can’t cross at Tijuana anymore, cause of Operation Gatekeeper. The government put more border patrol in San Diego and San Ysidro. Now everybody comes this way or through the desert. It’s a lot harder.” He polished his folder cover. “My uncle in Tijuana, he wanted to visit my mom in Mecca.”
Gatekeeper. It sounded like some evil video game to Elvia. She thought of all the bones and spirits that could be scattered around them.
Hector said, “Pull in there. Viejas Road.” He laughed. “Old women road. What a name. We’re by Descanso. Take a break. I can show you how close we are.”
She and Hector got out. Michael was close to the wheel well; he didn’t wake up. “Mano stays awake for days, sleeps for days.” Hector shook his head.
“Yeah, I know the drill,” Elvia said, looking at Michael’s open mouth. He and her dad were alike. Constant motion or dead trance. Jumpy and restless or still as a coma. Only really happy when they were driving, driving, moving along.
Hector sat at a scarred, half-burned picnic table. He opened the black folder and laid out hand-drawn maps, talking carefully, as if he was nervous to show her. “Last summer, I went to this special program for migrant kids at Rio Seco City College. This one teacher, Mr. Trevino, he liked my maps. He said I should go to college.”
Elvia peered at all the lines drawn in colored pencil. Hector said, “This one’s all the cities with Spanish names, and I put the English words next to them cause it’s funny. The San and Santas are easy. Then you got Borrego. ‘Sheep.’ Escondido, over the mountains there. Means ‘hidden.’ And Encino means ‘oak trees.’ Up north, see Los Baños? ‘The toilets.’”
He showed her another map. “Crops,” she said, tracing the tiny, precise pictures he’d drawn on California. Almonds and peaches and walnuts in the middle. Strawberries and lettuce and broccoli near the coast. Grapes and raisins where his mother was.
“I saw an atlas when I was little,” he said. “The states all had pictures like the Statue of Liberty on New York, cowboy boots on Texas. California had trolley cars by San Francisco, Hollywood by LA, and sailboats by San Diego. I wanted to put the real stuff I knew for California.”
She saw strawberries everywhere in the south, grapes and oranges and lemons in the desert. She touched Mecca. A small red heart there, too.
“Your girlfriend, Marisela?” she said, pointing to the heart.
“I’m not making any feria. She needs money, so she found somebody else.”
“You’ll make money someday. With maps. I’m gonna make money with geology. Check construction sites, have my own truck.” Elvia blushed. She hadn’t even told Michael her plan. The ID card was warm in her hand. “Miscelanea Yoli,” she said. “That’s the city?”
Hector sighed. “That’s just a store. Colonia Pedregal means, like, neighborhood of stones. People don’t have addresses or mailboxes. So what if you find her, and she doesn’t want you?”
“I thought about that.” Elvia bit her lip. “She probably won’t even recognize my face. But I can say I saw her, one last time. Then I can try not to be like her.”
Hector’s eyes glinted. “You mean so you won’t—”
“What?” Elvia stood up. What did he know? “So then we’ll come back . . .”
“You keep wanting to say ‘home,’” Hector said, raising his brows. “But you don’t.”
“I don’t know what home is yet,” she said. She didn’t want to talk anymore.
Down the narrow path, she looked for a place to pee. The ravine was strewn with trash and blackened fire pits, and something smelled horrible. Nervously, she went behind a boulder. Then she saw a strange pyramid of stones.
Hector called, “Where are you?”
“Come down here, just for a second,” she called back.
They stood looking at the pile of rocks. The earth had been dug up around the rocks, and coyote or dog paw prints were tracked in the sand. “Some kind of Indian good luck memorial?” Elvia said, but Hector shook his head.
“Some kind of burial,” he said, and she turned away, shuddering, nearly stumbling on a gray-black stone the size of a hand, covered with dark-crusted sand.
Hector was nervous. “You two got ID? For when we come back across?”
Michael rubbed his eyes. “Driver’s license.” He was grumpy. “Hey, we could head down to Chihuahua. All my grandpa told me was my moms was sixteen and she met some dude named Jesus from the dog place. Jesus went up to the cotton, and she went to heaven.” He threw out his arms. “He might a felt bad if he knew I was around, but Jesus was off the hook.” He looked at Elvia then. “Just like your moms. Free and clear. You sure you want to do this?”
Elvia said angrily, “You can catch a bus right now, if it’s too much trouble, okay, Michael? You’ll be free and clear. Off the hook.” She stopped, realizing he might figure out what she meant. “I have a library card, from when I lived with my foster mom,” she said.
Michael had the license, so he drove. Men in sunglasses motioned them forward. Hector shifted nervously in the middle, and Elvia felt the breeze on her wet face. She’d washed up in a Del Taco bathroom. So her mother wouldn’t think she was dirty, homeless, lost.
Even though I am, she thought, glimpsing at herself in the side mirror. She looked past herself to barren lots, shabby buildings, and then a bridge. Her father had said he had come here after he found the clinic card. His tools had been stolen.
Hector motioned Michael to turn down a broad avenue. “Up there is the tourist stuff,” Hector said, pointing to shops lining the streets, where people carried bags and wore huge sombreros. Small, dark women, heads covered with black shawls, hovered at corners with hands held out for money, their kids with tiny hands outstretched, too.
“Mixtec Indians from way south,” Hector said. Elvia stared at a woman against a wall, blouse open, a baby at her breast, her eyes on the car, her fingers lifting a white cup to rattle it at them.
She felt a pain shoot through her own breasts. That could be my mother. Is that why she didn’t want me to come? Back to nowhere? She slammed herself back against the seat.
The tourist area was gone, the highway crowded by stucco houses and wrought-iron fences and run-down buildings just like parts of Rio Seco or Los Angeles. Hector said, “Look on the other side.” Cement banks led up to huge fences, and people wearing dark clothes, their faces gaunt and watchful, sat along the metal panels. “They’re waiting for night to jump the fence. But Operation Gatekeeper catches everybody. So people try the desert and the mountains now.”
Elvia leaned out the window, thinking, She stood here, I know it. She crossed here, with all these other people. What’s on the other side of the fence? Where do they go? She saw mostly men, squatting, leaning, like they’d been waiting for weeks, years. A few women pushed carts or walked with boxes slung around their necks, selling things, while a few others waited with men, their shoulders hunched, their hair hiding their eyes.
Suddenly they’d left the crowded houses and repair shops and clinics and were entering a steep-walled canyon. Hector said, “Turn here.”
Elvia was shocked by the bareness of the earth. No trees, no bushes, no wild sunflowers or foxtails like the roadsides at home. The powdery dust and roc
ks looked like they’d been sifted and dropped back down by giant hands. People slid down paths and walked along the roadside.
Then she saw the first crosses. At a junction of paths near the roadside, five iron crosses, with plastic flowers attached, stood forlorn, the wind from passing vehicles whipping the petals.
Elvia said, “They look so sad.”
Michael said harshly, “Hell, no, it reminds you people were right there, cruisin or laughin, and then they died. On that spot. It’s like, their place. You could go visit the cemetery, but that’s just dirt they bought. Their soul left right there, by the cross. You can’t forget.”
“Yeah, look,” Hector said. At the end of a ravine, two more crosses, white wood, with notes and flowers attached, leaned in the wind.
Elvia understood then. “Like the people in the desert, somebody’s taking their bodies away. And nobody will ever know how long they walked, where they came from, when they gave up.”
Hector nodded. “If you hung around the fields, you’d see crosses all over California.” He pointed again, and Michael turned in to an immense valley where shacks and fences clung to ravines and hilltops. Laundry waved like flags everywhere.
People were everywhere, walking in the dry riverbed below, descending the ravines on tire stairways. Elvia said to Hector, “Pedregal is on one of your maps?”
He shook his head. “Nope. You can’t make a map of this place. Everything’s hidden up in the hills, or it washes down the arroyos when it rains. Sometimes bulldozers come through and erase whole neighborhoods. And then the people just settle someplace else, call it Colonia something-else.” He looked at her with solemn eyes. “I’m trying to find Colonia Aguilar, where my dad’s aunt lives. I haven’t been here for a long time. The barrios look bigger, like more people keep coming. New places all over the hills.” He glanced across the valley.
Women were everywhere, carrying babies in shawls, carrying plastic bags and baskets. Their feet raised dust on the paths, the cars pulled the dust into veils, and the whole valley seemed hazy. “Fuck it,” she cried, putting her hands over her eyes. “We’ll never find anybody here.”
Michael put his hand on her shoulder, saying, “We came this far. Maybe your mom and my dad are gettin happy right now, drinkin Tecate beers, and we’ll see them at the liquor store.” He reached a finger to her jaw, tracing a line.
Hector said, “Watch the road, mano. Turn down here, I think. See that big water tank?”
They crossed the dry riverbed on a dirt track, and the truck bounced hard in the deep ruts, then labored up the steep road. Elvia saw houses covered with painted tomatoes; the walls were metal sheets, the roofs corrugated tin with rocks and tires thrown on top.
“This is Colonia Aguilar. Eagle’s Nest. Tía Dolores has been here for twenty years.” Hector looked around. “But I haven’t been here since I was about six. Too hard to cross now.”
“For you?” Elvia asked, puzzled, but then the truck skidded to the left, and Michael said, “You hear that? Tire’s gone. Shredded.”
Hector said, “Don’t mess up the rim. We can walk.”
Michael got out, crouching near the left front tire. “I ain’t leavin the truck to get ripped off,” he said to Hector, who nodded.
Slowly, she followed Hector up the dusty hill. Women hung laundry, watered cactus plants in coffee cans, stared at her. She stared back. I don’t even know what the hell she looks like.
Two men working on a car engine glanced up at them, frowning, and three little girls came up to a fence made of rope-tied sticks. Elvia saw their smudged cheeks and dusty braids. That’s me, she thought, looking at the smallest one. Me. “Hi,” she said, and the girls laughed and ran away.
Breathing hard, she read the sign in the next doorway.
MISCELANEA ROSITA.
A plywood counter stretched along the windowsill, with sodas, candy, and tiny bottles of shampoo and lotion and perfume. A woman watched them impassively from her doorway. Behind her were shelves with cans and bags. A store. Miscelanea Yoli was where her mother maybe got her mail. Probably a hundred of them around here. We’ll never find her, Elvia despaired, panting, dizzy.
“There—my aunt’s place,” Hector said, pointing to the house next door, green like pistachio ice cream, behind a fence of strange curly wire that looked like lace panels. Elvia leaned against one of the wooden poles. Suddenly she didn’t think she could go any farther. Her skin was coated with layers of sweat and dirt and grape, her hair was matted and filthy, and her breastbone felt hollow as a straw.
She hadn’t felt the cricket feet tapping her bones since Lena put the needle into her shoulder. She’d thought fear and pain made the baby kick, but she’d been scared many times since and she’d felt nothing. She must have hurt the baby, breathing in speed vapors and gas fumes and poisoned grape dust, letting tattoo ink flow into her skin. Into her blood.
It’s a baby now. Not just cells. It won’t melt or disappear. That’s so fucking stupid. How could I think that? It’s like igneous rock—pressure just changes it. It’s got feet. Or hands. Something that thumps. I probably pressured it into something bad. Deformed. It can’t even thump. I really fucked up. Like my dad said, fuck-up’s in my blood.
She held on to the fence wires. Tires held up the walls of the ravine, stacked like big black pennies against the crumbling mountainside, and all around this yard tires were painted yellow and planted with red geraniums. I give up, she thought, sitting down in the dirt, the curly wires poking her back. My mother’s a ghost, just like Michael’s mother. My dad’s probably in the wind, off the hook, just like Michael’s dad. And Michael acts like he wants to be a ghost, too. So this baby didn’t have a chance. She had a sudden vision of a tiny skeleton, curled inside her. She started to sob, throwing her head back to the sky. She thought she saw shimmering white angels, stiff and swaying, hanging from the trees above to mock her.
ticuaá–butterfly
Serafina saw the creamy-white butterflies rise from the cauliflower field, like the little spirits of children. She lay in the bed of eucalyptus leaves in a farmer’s windbreak, delirious with fever and pain. The smell of the fragrant bark and silver-knife leaves made her remember.
Yukon Avenue. The dead end of the street, where these ghostly trees shivered in the wind, where Elvia loved to peel the bark and then touch the tree-skin underneath. The smell in her fingers those nights, when Serafina washed her in the tub. Her backbone showing through her skin like a rosary.
She fumbled for the rosary under her breast. She touched the beads. Each bone, a prayer under her own now-swollen fingers, under the soapy water she remembered, under her tears.
Please. Take care of her. Keep her safe. Let me see her again.
The men slept. Florencio’s rattling breath was nearby. Only her eyes moved. The hot wind scoured the field and the butterflies were disturbed, moving jagged in the currents of air, trying to settle.
She had dreamed when she slept of the tiny white dress. Back in San Cristobal, a girl named Guadalupe had buried her baby girl in a shimmering white dress. She had had a fever. She was only three. Like Elvia, the last time Serafina saw her.
The sharpest pain, sharper than the pain in her jaw or her feet or her stomach, ricocheted between her hipbones, the way it did each time she saw the small back in the tub, the almond-colored cheeks and eyes, the smile when she lifted her face. The hands at her knees, on her back. The terrible untethering from the ground of Serafina’s whole body without those fingers in hers, on her, holding her.
She opened her eyes. A few of the butterflies rested on the eucalyptus trunk nearest her. She saw that some of them were yellow, a pale buttery color she didn’t remember from her time here before.
Two more nights, maybe, if she could walk again. That was what she thought Florencio had said, though her jaw sent ringing into her ears and the constant walking jarred her hearing even mor
e. They were closer. Rio Seco.
She made herself think of that night, the feel of her body floating away from the car in the parking lot, so that she would get up when this darkness fell, tonight, so that she would make herself walk again. She had to feel those fingers, even if she just touched Elvia’s hand, even if the hand was larger than her own. She had to see her daughter’s eyes. Some woman had to have taken care of her, all these years. Someone had to have taken her place.
It hurt to think that, but it hurt more to imagine that the soul had flown into a small, winged spirit trying forever to find a foothold.
baby teeth
like little opals
Small white dresses, shrouded in plastic, hung from the ceiling. Through the doorway, Elvia could see the larger dresses swaying in the trees, like ghosts rocking babies.
At least she fed me—I was born, Elvia thought wearily. Wherever she was when she was pregnant, here in TJ eating tortillas or in Rio Seco eating cactus or whatever—she didn’t fuck me up with drugs or starve me.
So last week I would a been happy. I thought the baby was tiny and it would melt. But it must be like a geode now—a hollow sparkly place inside a bigger rock. Like a secret. Blood drying into crystals. No. What a fuck-up way to think. What do they do, if they die? They don’t get smaller and smaller till they fade away. They just stay the same, floating there?
Hector’s aunt stood near her now, asking her something in Spanish. Elvia didn’t understand. The aunt’s hair was short and curled into black waves, stiff and sprayed, and in her housedress and glasses, with her wobbly arms, she looked like any American grandma.
Highwire Moon Page 16