“You were always runnin in the desert. Miles and miles. You didn’t even act like a—”
“Like a stupid bitch who gets pregnant? It’s not anything special. Just a place to put your thing, right?” Callie knew, she thought, closing her eyes. “You were drunk anyway.”
“Elvia,” he said, putting his hand on her arm. “Hey. I’m just sayin I don’t know if I can . . .”
“Teach a baby Cahuilla songs and stories,” she snapped. “All that stuff you said about being Indian. This baby’s part Mexican, part American, two parts Indian. Gone, gone, gone, and gone.”
He frowned. “Not songs. Hell, I don’t know if we can even feed a baby. Buy all those Pampers. Guys at St. Jude’s say Pampers will clean you out.” Then he closed his eyes. “We don’t even got a place to stay. Maybe it’d be better to not let it have a shitty life, you know . . .”
She stared at his obsidian eyes. A shitty life? He wants me to get rid of it. Now. He doesn’t even know what geodes are, the sparkly hollow stillness inside.
In Tía Dolores’s kitchen, Elvia saw a stone bowl and pestle, covered with dusty spices.
Hector whispered, “You told him? I can see it in his face.”
“Wait—how did you know?”
“I been seeing pregnant girls all my life. Plus Tiny told me. She said she didn’t think he’d make a good father.”
“A father is whoever puts the sperm there,” Elvia said. “That’s all.” She touched the red powder left in the squat stone bowl. “What’s this?” She held up the stone that fit into her palm.
“The molcajete? The mano?” Tía Dolores asked.
Like hermano? No. Elvia thought of granite boulders she’d seen in the desert, where Indians had left depressions where they had ground acorns.
“Hand,” Hector said. “A stone that fits in your hand. My jefita has one. Somewhere.”
Tía Dolores cut into a whole fish covered with red sauce, saying, “Your mano take a long time to fit right. Smooth.” She touched the stone pestle. “I have that one long time. Years.”
Elvia tasted the spicy fish and rice. Does my mother still have a mano? What if she’s so close she can smell this sauce?
Michael came inside, his hair wet, his face damp and blank. “We gotta get on the road,” he said. “I got a job to do. Make some money.” He glanced at Elvia.
Money to get ready for the baby? she thought. Or money to get rid of it?
Tía Dolores gave Elvia more rice and said, “You stop looking for her? You go home?”
“Home?” Elvia said the word without thinking. She stared at the mano.
Tía Dolores raised one eyebrow, a penciled comma. “You don’t go home? To the no-real mama?”
The no-real mama, Sandy Narlette, had said her baby teeth looked like opals; she kept them in a keepsake box. Elvia touched her belly. Did this baby have teeth yet? Nubs of opal teeth in a skull? Maybe Sandy would know what to do.
Elvia went out to the yard and watched Tía Dolores take the glowing dresses down from the trees. Then, folded into Tía Dolores’s dressfront, she felt herself—bigger chest, block of belly—imprinted by the hug.
“I will pray for you,” Tía Dolores said. “And I will pray Hector can go al otro lado. He has no papers. He born in the house. Near where you sleep. The only one born in Mexico.” She frowned. “He take a big chance for you. To come here.” Then she thrust a package into Elvia’s hands. “For your baby,” she whispered. “How lucky. You are very lucky.”
Elvia didn’t feel lucky. She felt scared when she slid into the truck and saw Hector clutching his library card. When they passed the shadow people waiting by the border fence, she said to Hector, “Your aunt told me about—no papers. I would have been lost without you. Even in Tourmaline. In Mecca.” Hector shrugged, but she said, “For reals.” Then Michael edged the truck into the line waiting to cross back into California, and she saw the Indian women.
They stood between the cars, on the raised white dots of the center divider, their faces gaunt. Their babies were slung in black shawls across their fronts, and now and then a small mouth would let go and a black nipple would swing free. The mother’s face above it would become defiant, her eyes meeting the drivers’, her outstretched hand coming close to the window, her voice an imploring stream of words Elvia didn’t understand.
The older children darted between cars, holding trays of Chiclets and candy, yelling, “Mister! Mister! A dollar!” Other kids sang in voices big as car horns.
A woman came close, murmuring, thrusting her baby at the window, and Elvia turned away. She couldn’t look at the face, couldn’t look at the mouth.
Michael pulled ahead, and the uniformed men peered into windows, asked questions, waved some vehicles through and pointed at others to be searched. Elvia felt Hector stiffening, his shoulder tense against hers. The brown-faced man whose tag read QUESADA, V. said, “You guys just on a visit?”
“Yeah,” Michael said.
“Bringing anything back?”
Elvia spoke up quickly, unwrapping a corner of her package. “We came to get a christening dress. For my baby—sister.”
The man took the package, nodded at the white satin. “Got ID?” he said, bending to look at their faces. They handed him cards. Driver’s license. School ID. Library card.
“Tourmaline, huh? And you go to Tourmaline High?”
They nodded.
“What’s your school mascot?” he asked.
“Bulldogs,” Hector said quickly. “We suck big-time.”
The man laughed and waved them through.
Elvia twisted around in the seat to see the backs of the Indian women, floating black-shrouded in the center divider, hands slanting out limp and curled, a bundle pushed forward, a baby swimming in the sea of exhaust.
Then she felt it. A tracing line on the inside of her belly, not a kick, but something writing a code on the membranes inside her. A secret code, one she didn’t know.
corn milk
Serafina lay in a cave. Florencio crouched over her. She was cold now. The fever was gone. Her jaw was hard as stone, as though scars were turning to veins of silver inside a rock.
She couldn’t walk. She was too weak. “One more night,” Florencio said.
The Tiltepec men were gone. They had left for Fresno on their own. Florencio and Serafina were alone, in the cave of boulders at the edge of low hills. They had walked through wheat, then up this slope. She heard cows. She smelled manure piled in the grass. She smelled urine in the cave. She curled into herself, thinking that if she stayed here, all anyone would find was a skeleton. And the silver barrettes. They would not melt away with her flesh. They would fall gently through the circle of her bare hipbones and lie beside her.
* * *
“Here,” Florencio said. “If you eat, you can walk again. We haven’t eaten for too long. I found this in the field. Sit up. One more night. Serafina. We are nearly there.”
He was sideways in her eyes. He sat on a stone in the cave, scraping corn kernels from a thin cob with his knife. He talked, a low stream, the whole time, as if he was afraid she would slip away in silence. “The Tiltepec men kept asking what happened. Exactly. To you. To him. I wouldn’t tell them, and they said Yucucui people ask for trouble. They said we should stay in the mountains.”
Serafina listened to his soft voice, to the knife striking the stone accidentally. “Rigoberto said he never wanted to see San Cristobal again. But when I told him I was coming for fiesta, to see my cousin, he borrowed the money for you. I was worried someone would rob me, while I was walking. I thought I would just give you and your mother the money.”
Serafina wondered if her mother’s pain, inside her breasts and bones, had felt like this rigid cording of hurt in her jaw. A corn kernel splattered onto her leg. She felt the drop of milk.
“I watched you when
you were a girl. You were promised to Rogelio Martinez. My mother and I lived far past the river, and I only went to school sometimes.” He glanced out over the fields. “To say that here, in California, it is almost funny. To say that you were better off than we were. But we came to the store only a few times a year. I saw you. Your braids were long and tied with ribbon. You watched everything. You were so small.”
Carefully, she moved her teeth. A horse with a bit. La reata—the coyote had held her braid like a leash. Jerking her head. She whispered, practicing. “Not small now.”
He collected the mashed corn and yellowish milk in a cut-down water bottle and held it to her lips.
When the yellow milk leaked from her breasts into Elvia’s glistening, angry mouth, Serafina had been afraid something was wrong with her. Milk should be white, or tinged with blue.
Elvia was born in a bathtub. Serafina had been in the tiny bottom-floor apartment for three weeks, and Larry was gone again. She had never left the front door. She didn’t know how to get to the hospital. She wasn’t even sure how many months she had been pregnant. When the pains came, a loomstrap around her back but inside her skin, she walked around the living room for hours. They went, they came back, they went. Then water poured from her, and she lay in the tub; it was like a white-stone cave all around her.
She must have moaned, even screamed, because a woman came from upstairs. She shoved the flimsy door in with her shoulder. Serafina had never seen anyone from outside. The woman was hugely fat, so large her skin fell down in folds from her chin and from her stomach, lapping over the tub. Her mouth was tiny in the pillows of her cheeks. “Okay, okay,” she whispered to Serafina. “Okay, now.” But then Elvia’s head came out, and Serafina screamed. The woman reached down and pulled out the rest of Elvia’s body, purple as cabbage and black hair plastered like wet fur all along her shoulders.
The woman put Elvia on Serafina’s chest and came back with a knife. She labored to kneel again on the floor, breathing hard in her shivery bulk, and cut the pulsing cord.
Elvia screamed then, screamed and yelled until the woman gestured at Serafina’s chest. She put Elvia to the nipple, and all that came out was a yellow, thin milk, but her baby was quiet then.
* * *
“You cried in your sleep,” Florencio said, lying beside her. “You cried over and over. When will you tell me?”
She saw the bottle beside her, the corn milk dried to a hard film. When her mother had explained the Mixtec way, the man’s white blood and the woman’s red, the baby, her mother paused and pointed to her breasts. The red blood leaves the mother when the baby is born, and the milk comes. The woman’s white blood. When the baby drinks that, they are bound together forever. Their bodies are the same. But if the mother has no milk, or she will not feed the baby, another woman can give the baby white blood, and she can then call herself the mother, too.
She imagined the clean corn smell of atole, Elvia’s brows collecting the steam, her lips damp with masa-thickened milk the day she was left in the car.
“She is still mine. My blood was everywhere in hers,” she said to the grimy water bottle.
She looked at Florencio and said, “Sēhe síhí.”
“What?”
“I have a daughter.”
She told Florencio everything. About Rigoberto leaving, about the box, about Larry. She had slept with Larry only three times, and she was pregnant. That was how much white blood had collected to make Elvia.
Now he could look at her with disgust. He could forget the past, watching her in San Cristobal. She had not lived the Mixtec way. But neither has he, she thought, watching his hard-lined face, his bloom-ended fingers. He had killed someone for her. He had put food into her lips, something no one but her mother had ever done.
She chanted the names to him: Socorro Street, where she was born. Yukon Avenue, where I lost her. Iglesia de Santa Catarina. I will see that parking lot again. And I will find her.
Florencio was silent for a long time. Then he said only, “We have to walk again, then.” He sounded distant, disappointed.
She nodded. He would take her to Rigoberto. Her brother would be responsible for her then. Not Florencio. He went down to the field to crouch at the edge, like Uncle Emiliano watching his own earth.
When she could finally get up, after midnight, her feet were so swollen she had to carry her shoes in a plastic bag. Her fingers hung uselessly by her sides, also swollen, even though she’d done no work. They were full of blood from dangling while she walked. One more night to Rio Seco, Florencio said over and over. She tasted the remnants of the corn milk on her lips.
smoke people
Ivy-vine curtains hung from the overpass to shield them, and swallows’ nests decorated the cement wall with honeycombs of mud. The sun was rising behind them, turning the narrow stream of water into a shining snail trail through the brush. Rio Seco. Last night, they’d parked the truck on a street near here and walked. From this cave under the freeway, they’d watched campfires like orange blooms in the black stretch of trees, seen shadow people walking on the paths, carrying water jugs and bundles, pushing shopping carts.
Elvia’s body ached, her hip crushed into the leaves and sand and concrete under the freeway roar. I’m here, somewhere near Yukon Avenue and the linen plant on Bellgrave Street. If my mother’s here, she doesn’t even know I’m coming, so she can’t run. My dad said, “If somebody found me, and I didn’t want to be with them, I’d just book up again.” But I’m the one that booked. I left him. Maybe I should have told him about the baby, taken my chances.
Michael jerked awake and rubbed his palms over his temples, smoothing the hair that had escaped his braid. “Caveman’s stayin down there. He’ll pay me a hundred bucks for the medicine.” He pointed to the riverbed. The September heat was burning wild oats and foxtails brown. “See the green?” Michael said, moving his finger. “Only thing still living by fall.”
Dark vines looked like floating islands in the dry flats, some with yellow balls scattered among the leaves, some with white flowers. Fall, she thought. I’ve been gone for ten days. Michael said, “The yellow balls are bitter gourd, for washing your hair. The white flowers wash your brain.”
“Why does this guy want it?”
Michael raised his brows. “He loves Indian shit. Says he’s part Cherokee. Like everybody says. But he’s always got speed. He wants to mix it with dreaming medicine, make something new he can sell for big dinero.” He slid down the embankment to the path.
Elvia heard coughing from the cane, and saw a thin plume of smoke. “I’m starving.”
“Eating for . . .” Michael frowned, cigarette smoke curling from his mouth. The baby was already trouble to him. He didn’t care about food—he wanted speed. He didn’t want to be only half high. She looked up at the freeway sign. Razor wire was curled around it like a slinky, and plastic bags clung to the barbs in tattered shreds, like ancient Christmas tinsel.
She slid down just as a bearded man burst from the cane and walked the other way. Elvia’s heart thudded with fear, and she felt the circle of a nub-foot again, faster, insistent.
The mist clung to the bamboo like a thousand tiny breaths. Michael nodded at the black water sliding past in the cement channel. “My grandpa and his cousins dug all the canal ditches back in 1910 or something. This canal waters all the groves from Dos Arroyos to Agua Dulce.”
Two brown men wearing baseball caps, carrying plastic water jugs, passed them on the trail. Hector said something to them, receiving a blank look. “Guatemalans,” he said. “No español.”
Elvia thought, Everyone’s here—Guatemalans and Mexicans and us. Dogs barked at an opening in the brush. Michael said, “They only attack if you head down to their people.”
“Lotta people down here, carnal,” Hector said. “You sure you know where we’re goin?”
Michael nodded. “More ca
mps than I ever seen. But I remember the place.”
A shopping cart nosed out from another tunnel, and Elvia stared at a woman who looked like Callie. The woman glared back and called, “The fuck you want, wetback?”
Hector laughed at Elvia, then shrugged. “Just like Mecca.”
Michael bent to study a large white stone near another narrow path. “Let’s go,” he said, and they plunged into the cane. The smell of wet sand underfoot, and pee somewhere, stung her eyes. Michael peered at another white stone. Elvia saw tiny letters marked like graffiti.
“Cool. He’s still here,” Michael said. “By the big tree.” He whistled, and then pushed through the dangling branches of a huge eucalyptus.
Elvia bent to look at the painted letters. H. 8. And a red heart.
Caveman sat in a bamboo chair that hung from a tree branch. Elvia thought he looked nineteen or twenty. He had light brown hair, sideburns, a curly beard like Velcro, and pale blue eyes, like plastic turquoise. He said, “Hey! My man Torres. You’re out already? You make the magic potion yet?”
“Man, I just got out. You got the magic powder?”
Caveman frowned at Elvia and Hector, and Michael said, “They’re cool.” Caveman went inside a plywood shack and came out holding a Christmas cookie tin, his hands white and soft as biscuits from a can. Callie always said you could tell a person from their hands, but all Elvia could tell was that he ruled this place, with his painted sign on every tree. H-8-Red. Hatred.
“So she’s cool,” Caveman said. “Whoever she is.”
“Elvia,” Michael said.
Caveman grinned. “You named after Elvis?” he asked her.
She looked straight at him. He sure as hell wasn’t Dually. “My dad’s not an Elvis type.”
“Her dad’s pretty scary,” Michael said casually.
“So where is he?”
“In Florida,” she said coolly. “Where’s yours?”
“At home, I guess.” A girl came from his shack, her broad forehead pink, her lips closed in a little smile. “Tina Marie must be headed to the facilities,” he said.
Highwire Moon Page 18