Elvia heard her talk to Hector in faster Spanish, then a long trickle of laughter. What the hell am I doing in Mexico? she thought. What will I do if I find her? I don’t even know her. She rubbed the moths on her shoulder, made them burn.
Suddenly she wondered what her father would think of the tattoo. Probably get mad, even though that’s the first thing I remembered about him, back at Sandy’s house. She watched the plastic-shrouded dresses sway. This is it. If I don’t find her here, there’s just the two places in Rio Seco, and then what?
Hector said, “Me and Michael are tryin to find the right tire.” He put a bowl of beans on the tiny folding table near her. “Tía Dolores says, ‘Are you okay?’” he said, squatting close by, peering into her face.
She didn’t want to look weak. “So I eat beans, act like I’m Mexican, and then Jesus will let me find my mother?” Elvia lifted her chin toward the religious portrait on the wall.
His aunt sat in the other corner, picking up her sewing. She murmured a long sentence in Spanish, ending with something Elvia understood. “Pobrecita.”
“I’m not a fuckin poor anything,” Elvia hissed at Hector. “I heard girls at school teasing each other like that. And even if I find my mom, I’m not turning into a beañorita.”
Hector yelled, “No, you’re just gonna be a—a witch.”
“You mean a bitch!” she yelled back.
“I don’t use that word. A bitch is a female dog. You’re not acting like a dog.”
Hector’s aunt stood up, the satin slithering from her lap. “Shut up. Two of you. Nobody talk that in my house. Respect. Hector, aquí es el dinero para llantas.”
She handed him money, and Hector went outside without looking back. His aunt turned to Elvia. “Your body es tired but your mouth okay.” She picked up her sewing. “So don’t eat beans. Who cares? I make frijoles todos las dias.” She hesitated. “Every day, all gone.”
Elvia felt stupid and scared. She hadn’t known the aunt spoke English. And now Hector was mad. She went to the doorway, peering through the dresses. Hector walked down the street toward the truck. Michael was a faint figure down the hill.
She realized suddenly that Michael was more worried about the truck than about her. He had fallen in love with the damn truck. She was just another friend. Fool around. Get high. Kick it. But the truck—he was guarding that like treasure.
She studied the dresses hanging outside in the tree—large or small, each dress was made with white satin and lacy ruffles, pearls and sequins. Even the babies would look like angel brides.
“The dresses in los arboles, that for your quinceanera,” Tía Dolores said. “You had one?”
“Quinceanera?”
“For when you turn fifteen,” she said, frowning.
“I’m fifteen ,” Elvia said, staring at the red-brown beans. I guess I am, she thought. Who knows? Who cares? She remembered seeing a girl her age in a white dress, in the date worker houses. People were clapping and taking her picture.
“Beañorita,” the woman said suddenly, like she had read Elvia’s mind. “Who is that?”
Elvia was embarrassed. “Girls who just came from Mexico. To California. Where I lived.”
Tía Dolores frowned. “Funny joke. You don’t think I speak English? But I work en San Diego. Ten years. I watch three kids, clean the house, cook everything. I take two buses from here, then walk. Back then, the border was nothing. How you say—a pain. Now is Operación Gatekeeper. People go around to the desert and back to San Diego to work. Estupido.”
“People from Colonia Pedregal?” Elvia asked. “My mom lived there.”
“I don’t know Pedregal. Maybe in the new colonias by the dompe.”
Elvia paced in the doorway, thinking of the dead woman in the desert, the eerie smells of the mountain ravine. She looked down the street. The truck’s cab was a pale blue skull facing up the hill, all alone.
Colonia Aguilar—Eagle’s Nest, Hector had said. Dust devils began to dance in the road, and from this hill she saw the wind pick up trash and tongues of dirt in each ravine and colonia.
In the west, the sun hung like an old coin in a pall of rising smoke. Hundreds of seagulls wheeled like white crosses in the air, and something floated high above like white jellyfish. Hector’s aunt stood beside her now. “The wind come from the sea. Over there. By the dompe.”
“The dump?” Elvia stared at the floating jellyfish, lazy and then vicious with the wind. Plastic bags. That’s what they were.
“People live en el dompe. They live everywhere. Maybe you don’t find her. So many colonias, so many people.” Elvia smelled strong perfume, felt fingers patting the moths on her shoulders. “Sit. For the llanteria take a long time. Sit. I work, and I cook. Not beans.”
Elvia felt bad for a minute. “I’m sorry I said that. People called me beañorita before.” She sat down and ate a spoonful of the beans, the flecks of red chile stinging her lips and mouth like pinpricks. “These are good.” Hector’s aunt smiled then.
A taxi labored up the road, bringing a brown cloud to the doorway. “Dolores?” someone called. Two women and a girl of about fourteen came bustling inside. They want a dress for that birthday, Elvia thought. But they put a bridal veil on the girl’s head, laughing and nodding.
The girl glanced over. “Novia?” someone said. Hector’s aunt shook her head, starting a long speech—Elvia heard “Pedregal” and “madre.” She hated the sudden pity in their eyes.
She went outside. The taxi had turned around in the dirt lane. What if the guys come back after dark, with no tire? I don’t want to hang around for days—I want to find her now. Or not. She stepped out to the street, trying to remember what Hector had repeated. “I want to go—me voy al Colonia Pedregal.”
The driver, a pale man with a faint mustache like iron filings clinging to his lip, shrugged. “No se Pedregal.”
Elvia took out ten dollars and said, “Me voy al—todos—las colonias. Please.”
He nodded and she got in. She could do this herself. Now or never.
The taxi driver picked up people everywhere, standing by the dirt roads criss-crossing the main ravine. Everyone spoke in rapid Spanish. Two men were crammed into the front seat with the driver, and packed against Elvia in the back were four women, one holding a boy on her lap. Only the boy stared openly at Elvia. His eyes were slanted and dark as shards of slate. His mother wore a loose dress and a long, messy braid, and her plump body sat on stubby legs. Indians? Elvia thought, watching the boy.
The car headed back toward the main part of Tijuana. The taxi driver called out, “Clinica,” where the boy and two women got out. Then the cab picked up a whole group of people and headed back into the valley. Elvia said loudly, “Colonia Pedregal?” to the driver, who answered back impatiently. They wound through neighborhood after neighborhood, a hundred dirt roads lined with a thousand plywood and tin shacks, and Elvia looked for stones. She saw box spring fences everywhere, their wires turning to pink coils in the sun, and wooden pallets made into houses and corrals for goats. Tires were piled like stacks of Oreos; Michael and Hector had probably found one for the truck by now.
The driver said to departing passengers a sentence containing the word Pedregal. People shook their heads, until one man shrugged and let loose a torrent of words ending with “dompe.”
The cab was finally empty. Seagulls and plastic bags whirled in the near distance, and she smelled smoke. She was afraid now. They were heading farther away from Tijuana, even from Hector’s aunt. He had to know she was American, even though her grimy jeans and big tee shirt made her fit in here. He glanced in the rear-view mirror as the cab bumped up another hill, another washboard path.
She stared at a group of white crosses with fresh flowers in a deep ravine along the road, and he said, “Agua,” pointing to the hills. “Muerto.”
Water, she thought. Death
. Floods.
“Mucho?” he said. “Much cross.” He pointed to shacks, to the sky. “Fuera. Y frio.” He pretended to shiver. Fire. And cold. People had burned in tiny houses. And frozen to death. “Niños,” he said finally. He put his hand out, low.
Children.
Now she hugged herself. Was he giving her a clue? Was he taking her someplace to dump her? For ten dollars? How much was that here, where she didn’t even know what a peso looked like?
They shuddered slowly up the hill, the driver shaking his head ominously, and she realized they were in a pall of thick, dark smoke. One or two shacks, low to the ground like tunnels covered with wooden pallets and cardboard, hugged the ravine not far from the crosses. At the top of the hill, he stopped the car, and she looked out onto the dump.
Dompe. Mountains of trash lay like distant whales breathing smoke from invisible blowholes, and then she saw people walking on the mounds, poking with long sticks, dragging sacks. At the edge of the dump were cardboard shelters and houses, people peering out at the taxi. Children with faces black-smudged as if they’d slept in embers, women with sandaled feet, also black. Three men came up to the taxi, and the driver spoke for a time.
Elvia sat up, heart rising painfully, sweat trickling down her back. She saw a few stones, piled in a wall, littering the ravine. One man peered inside at her and said something that made the men laugh roughly.
The driver had never moved from his seat. Now he leaned forward and pointed to the crosses in the ravine. “Pedregal. L’año pasado.” He spoke slowly, staring at her.
Elvia clutched the seat. Año was “year,” she thought. Pasado? He gestured behind him. Passed? He said, “Mucha lluvia,” sprinkling rain with his fingers. Then he wiped away all the houses with the back of his hand.
Elvia was stunned. Gone? The whole neighborhood? Was her mother a cross in the ravine? The men said something else, and the driver nodded, holding up one finger in a gesture of waiting for Elvia. He maneuvered the cab around the shacks and along a canyon encircling the dump. The seagulls cried like screaming women. Elvia laid her head back against the seat.
“Pedregal,” he said. Banks of tires flanked another arroyo, and a nest of houses perched along the ridge. Cardboard shacks, a few cement-block houses with protruding iron bars like antennae, and across the arroyo, a blue-painted tin house with blurry red geraniums in coffee cans.
No Miscelanea Yoli. No store or dress shop or anything except houses and people trudging down the arroyo, coming from the dump with bulging sacks and smoke-etched faces.
The driver called to a woman who’d come out of her shack holding a baby, suspicion tight at her mouth. Elvia leaned out her window, stuttering, “My madre. Serafina Mendez.”
The woman frowned at Elvia. Her baby was wrapped completely in a black shawl, like a dark cocoon set against her shoulder. The woman shook her head.
“No. Serafina? No.”
The other shacks were dark. When the taxi turned around, Elvia looked at the woman hovering in her yard, watching. Someone’s mother.
The sun sank into the dump, the far-away smoke settling now, turning it into a small, unimportant apricot. She could see it from Aguilar, when the taxi dropped her off.
She was done. She couldn’t imagine looking elsewhere in Tijuana, among the hundreds of arroyos and pedestrians and miscelaneas. Hesitating in the yard, she thought, Maybe she had to come back, and she didn’t want me to grow up like this. Did she want me to be American?
Tía Dolores gave her a murderous look when she stepped inside the house. It looked like a jade palace compared to the dump and Colonia Pedregal.
“Wash your clothes. If you sleep here.” She still sewed, brown fingers like plump Tootsie Rolls against the white satin. Elvia saw that her hands were swollen. “The boys get a llanta and I tell them you go. They go look for you. I don’t know where. Now wash. Everybody wash at my house. No dirt.” She sucked at her teeth. “Maybe your novio don’t come back.”
Elvia folded her arms. “Novio? My boyfriend? He wouldn’t leave.”
She humphed. “Novios go away all the time. Especially in Tijuana.”
Elvia laughed bitterly. The woman thought that would scare her? “Happens all the time in California, too. Big deal. I’m a fuckin expert in ‘go away.’”
Tía Dolores said, “No dirt. No dirt words.” Then she said gently, “Hector tell me she go away. Because she was American then. Not Mexican. Mexican mama, she don’t leave a baby. Your mama es in California. An American now. You find her easier on the moon. Use a—”
“A telescope,” Elvia said, sighing.
“Sí. She es alone up there, stick out like a pin.” She held up a pincushion crowded with silver heads. “But here a million are come and go. So many lost. My nieto—Hector father, I find him. His mother is kill. A car. I find him on the street when he is four, five. He live with me all that time, then he go across to California. To work. He get married to a crazy woman. Hector mama. And they have so many children. I never have any. Only him.” She pointed to Elvia’s clothes, to the backpacks and bags piled by the door. “Limpia.”
“Limpia?”
“Wash.”
Sándoo, Elvia thought. She said, “My mother was Indian. Indio. She said sándoo for wash. Yoo for moon.”
“You hear her say these?”
“I guess. My foster mother told me I said all these different words.”
“Foster?”
“Like, my mom for a while. Five years.”
“Why you didn’t stay with that mother?”
“My dad came to get me.” Elvia added quickly, “She wasn’t my real mom.”
“Real.” Tía Dolores put down her sewing. “I am not the real woman for Hector’s father. But the one feed you, take you to la clinica for sick, wash the clothes, who is the mother. The one hold you for—suenos malos.”
“Bad dreams?”
“Sí. Who worry about the teeth. That’s the mother.” Tía Dolores paused. “If she is Tarahumara or Mixtec or Maya, you think what life she have. Before. Sur.” She pointed toward the south. “Look the indias here—” She held out her hand, as if begging. “Los niños tambien. If you find her in the street, so—” Now she lifted a cup, as if seeking money. “What you do? Go? You are happy then? Maybe she know you, and you—” Tía Dolores hesitated and thought a long time. “You leave her. Like she leave you. Sí? You break the heart. El corazón.”
Elvia had no answer. She tried to picture her mother on a street corner, tried to decide how she would know this woman. Hector’s aunt was right.
Tía Dolores said, “I leave a dress for you. Outside. Go wash.”
In the dirt yard, Elvia found a stone sink under a loquat tree. An old-lady print dress hung from the tree. The concrete-block shed had a toilet and shower head. With the rough soap, she rinsed off the tears and dirt and grime of Ventana, of Mecca and the desert, of today’s colonias. She hadn’t taken a shower since the Sands Motel.
He was the real father, she thought. He fed me and took me to the doctor. He’s worried about me. I’ve been gone for five days. I better call him. Naked and dripping, she rubbed the towel on her shoulders and winced. She found a mirror on a plastic shelf. The tattooed moths were smaller than her father’s dragon. She remembered touching his dragon’s scales.
She tried to touch her moths’ wings. Under the scabbing, she thought she could see colors. She tilted the mirror. It looked like the moths had antennae, not wiry like butterflies’ but feathery blue. Lena was a real artist.
Maybe she had put a little magic in the moths. Maybe Elvia shouldn’t give up. Not yet.
She put on the flowered dress and felt very cool, as if a cloud was skimming her skin. She hadn’t worn a dress since she was about six. She didn’t look in the mirror again. She heard Michael say, “You look like a Mexican woman now. An old lady . . .” She turne
d to face him.
“A wet and tired old lady.” But his grin faded quickly. He was staring at her belly, pressed against the damp dress.
“Damn. You’re pregnant? Oh, shit. Shit. Why didn’t you tell me?”
She led him to the truck, and he sat next to her silently. Elvia looked at the windshield where a rock had made a lopsided star. Does Michael want to be the real father? she thought, breathing out hard. She said, “You didn’t look like you were ready to hear about a baby.”
“How many months?” he said, shaking his head.
She added the week since they left. “About five. Since we . . .”
“In Tourmaline?” He sounds so surprised, Elvia thought, pushing in the dashboard lighter, pulling it out to see the pulsing red circle. “You could still get it—fixed, right?” he said.
Those girls in the school bathroom talked about getting blobs fixed, she thought. This isn’t a blob. I felt feet. Even though I don’t feel them now. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it’s too far. So you’re scared?”
“Shit, yeah, I’m scared.” He flicked the dangling keys. “Your cowboy dad—that’s who you been calling on the pay phone? He knows?”
Elvia shook her head. “No. That’s why I left. He’d—he’d probably try to kill you. At least hurt you big time. I don’t know what he’d say to me.” She sighed. “I called my foster mom.”
“From way back?”
“Yeah.”
“She still remembers you?” Michael looked out the window. Hector was outside now.
“She remembers everybody,” Elvia said.
“What about your real mom? You wanted to find her and give her the baby?”
“Give the baby to somebody who left me in a car?” She was angry now. “You don’t get it. Your mom died. She didn’t get tired of you. I just wanted to know. And I got tired of waiting for you guys today, so I went to the dump where my mom used to live. Not now, she doesn’t.” Elvia stared at Michael now, at his fingers drumming the dashboard, his eyes far away. “I’m going to Rio Seco to look there. Then we can decide what to do.”
Highwire Moon Page 17