Highwire Moon

by Susan Straight

  She closed her eyes. The aches melted. Melting. When Ruby patted the sand down hard over her, sealing her inside, Elvia’s breasts tingled and hurt as though matches were set to her nipples. Her backbone bucked and heaved, and she felt a fist rising up against her ribs.

  “Here,” Ruby said, holding a tin cup of tea, but Elvia was thrashing herself out of the sand blanket, her mouth and nose filled with grains of quartz and mica. She nearly screamed, drowning in the sand, a wetness inside her head black and moist as mud.

  “You didn’t tell me,” Ruby scolded later, leaning over her in the ramada where she lay on a blanket. Elvia rubbed the sand from her lips. Michael had walked up the creek bed, disappeared. “We give the mother hot sand after the baby—she nurses while she rests, and the blood comes out better. Don’t you read magazines? Pregnant women aren’t even supposed to be in a spa. Hot is hot. Bad for the baby. And when you come roaring up out of there, you had your hand right where that line probably is.”

  “Line?” Ruby lifted her shirt, cooling her belly, and Elvia peered down to see a thin brown stripe like faded Magic Marker below her navel.

  “I always think it’s like magic,” Ruby said. “Your navel, where your mother fed you, and the mark where your baby is right now. But it’s not magic to you two, eh?” She shook her head at Michael, coming back down the creek bed, his arms raised and folded on his head like he expected stars to fall and injure him.

  In the truck, she shouted, “You tried to get rid of it! You knew!”

  “I don’t know what the fuck to do!” he shouted back, racing down the mountain. “We can’t take care of it right.”

  “Right? What the hell is right?” She stopped. “I went running every day in Tourmaline, looking for you and hoping maybe it would disappear.” She felt nothing now—no cricket feet or tiny heart that echoed her own, in fear or quiet. “But babies don’t disappear,” she said, almost to herself, brushing more sand from her clothes. “Only parents do.”

  Michael said nothing, driving fast toward the river. At the 7-Eleven, Caveman and Tina Marie waved, and he pulled the truck into the parking lot. “What do you want?” Michael said dully, and Elvia shook her head.

  He went inside with Tina Marie, and Caveman leaned into the window. His pupils were the size of pepper grains, and Elvia knew he was still faded. “You head off to look for your mom?” he asked. When she was silent, he said, “Michael said she’s like, Inca or something. How are you gonna talk to her?”

  She glared at him, and his face changed somehow, drooped and made him look years older. His cheeks melted into the beard when he didn’t smile. He said, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to fuck with your plans. Hell, me and my mom didn’t speak the same language. Cause every time she looked at me, she was so disgusted she couldn’t say shit. She spoke that bang-things-around language. I’m in the room, she bangs down her cup, bangs dishes, drops my shoes next to me.”

  Elvia put her head back on the seat, her skin feeling rough and peeled over the still-sore muscles. “Why?”

  “Cause I didn’t want to be like Mike. I didn’t want to be like Bob, either. My dad. Asshole and lawyer. He wanted my socks to match.” Caveman rubbed his beard. “Hey, if your mom was illegal and she wanted to disappear, she’s an expert. You won’t find her. My mom used to send me to Agua Dulce to pick up day-labor guys for the yard. When cops cruised by—vamos. And we had a maid who stole some jewelry once. I looked all over for her. Invisible.”

  “Touching story,” Elvia said, barely able to speak.

  Caveman shrugged. “All I’m saying is, you’re American, right? Get high. Be happy. If she left, she didn’t want you. My mom was sure as hell tired of me. Some moms aren’t cut out for the job.”

  “You talked Tina Marie into selling her baby,” Elvia whispered. “You said she’d be a bad mom.”

  Caveman pulled out a roll of dollars, thick as green pipe. “Hey, all I did was say I’d manage her money. She can’t even take care of that.”

  She looked away from him, at the telephone pole plastered with concert announcements. Los Tigres del Norte. Los Illegales del Rio Seco. Caveman laughed. “You gonna put up missing mother posters? Question everybody? Shit, take Michael’s dreaming medicine and just imagine your mom. That’s probably better than living with her.” He went inside the 7-Eleven.

  Elvia looked at the mustachioed faces on the posters. Rosalie had adopted a stray dog once, fed and brushed it. One day, it disappeared. Rosalie had cried for weeks. She was eleven. She put up lost-dog posters on telephone poles all over Rio Seco. Elvia used to watch dogs running loose and think that what made Rosalie cry hardest was knowing how big the world was, finally, seeing how small she and Elvia and the others really were.

  Elvia had tried to explain this to Sandy one night, when Rosalie had sobbed herself to sleep, and Sandy had taken Elvia’s face into her hands and said, “The world is huge. And even though you girls call Rosalie the brain, some things you’re smarter about than she is.”

  The others piled into the truck, and Michael drove up Palm Avenue without looking at her, though he was pressed tightly against her. Tina Marie was lively now, saying, “I used to fall asleep in cars. My mom said it was because she drove to LA every day when I was a baby. She was a model. On TV. Before me. Then I fucked up her body.” She pointed to distant pinpricks on the foothills. “That’s where she lives. If she’s still there.”

  Caveman’s voice was gentle as Sandy’s. “If she’s still there, she’s still a bitch. She fucked up your body, too. High heels to the forehead. Curling iron to the neck.”

  Elvia winced. Those scars. But Tina’s voice was oddly calm. “She wanted me to be pretty, too. But I was so fat.”

  Michael turned into the neighborhood of narrow streets and wooden houses, and he parked the truck. Toys and bikes were heaped on porches, pots of ivy hung from hooks, and empty plastic swimming pools leaned against fences. Caveman said, “Fucking losers. A hundred little jails. A hundred assholes stuck in there watching TV and hating life.”

  Elvia saw laundry hung over a chainlink fence. “Doesn’t look bad to me,” she said.

  Caveman’s laugh was a hiss. “So if you got cable, and you got milk, you got a life?”

  Elvia was tired of his sketching voice. “Not your life, right? You got a big house. A maid.”

  “No, my fucking parents do,” he said. “I only had money when I was a good little monkey. And I wasn’t. Who the fuck are you to decide what’s a life?”

  “No one gets to decide,” she said, and Michael put his arm around her, keeping it there until they reached the river.

  Hector was sitting by the fire. He grinned and handed her peeled sections of orange. “Like Tropicana,” he said softly, so only she could hear. “Good for the baby’s bones.”

  “Where’d you get oranges?” She put her head in her hands, feeling sand in her hair, under her shirt, in the webs between her fingers.

  “La pisca de naranjas,” he said. “Picked them. Like somebody’s gotta do before you buy em in the store, huera.” He winked. “I went down the canal to a grove and this fat dude on a quad chased me out. Seen a guy pop up out the damn ground. He was livin in a cave.”

  Michael pulled her up by the hand and led her into the branch shelter, where the fire was only a red eye and the leaves and stems were shriveled gray. They sat near the embers, and Michael stared at her. “Look,” he finally said. “If somebody paid ten grand for a kid, they’d like, send it to college. Live in a big house, buy bikes and jackets. The kid could be—”

  “Our kid. It would still be our kid.” She shivered, looking at the coals.

  Caveman burst into the shelter, saying, “Jared and Shawna brought some other people, man. They don’t want to wait. They want the good stuff, the Indian shit.”

  Michael sighed. “Extra fifty bucks if we use the ceremony bowl.” Caveman handed him five tens. Th
en Michael said, “I have to mix it by myself.”

  Caveman stopped grinning. “What if you’re just fuckin with me? Putting in dirt and grass instead of the real deal? They want colors and visions like LSD.”

  Michael said, “I’ll be drinking it, too! Close the fuckin door.”

  Caveman pointed at Elvia. “She gets to watch?”

  “She’s my people now.” Michael smiled faintly, a new-moon crescent.

  He ground the dried root with a small stone and strained it into the red clay bowl, his fingers as careful and precise as Sandy’s measuring ginger or cinnamon. Then he dripped water from a sports bottle, stirred the paste with a stem, and added more water until the liquid looked dark and muddy as root beer.

  Her father used to say, “Which one’s your favorite—Barq’s or A&W? I can’t tell the difference. Cause I smoke too much. Drink too much. My tongue’s older than your rocks.” He’d grin. “So drink root beer. Not my beer. Got it?”

  Callie’d say, “Never seen a man love a kid like this. Got enough root beer to fill a tub, and he comes home every day askin, ‘How’s Ellie?’ Like ain’t nobody else livin here.”

  Elvia closed her eyes and began to cry, and Michael said, “Look, I want to ask her—my mom.”

  She sobbed, “You have to make up your own mind.”

  He stirred gently. “Okay. This is for us. Not Caveman. For you.” Elvia stared at the red bowl. “You waited all this time to check it out.”

  Then she felt the baby trace a small, blurry design on her hipbone. Caveman and the others pushed the blanket door open and came in. “Time’s up, man. Come on.”

  Elvia didn’t see Hector. She said to Michael, “I can’t.”

  Caveman said, “You’re punking?”

  Elvia shouted, “Me? I been with people cooking antifreeze and Sudafed. You don’t know shit about real life.”

  Michael picked up the bowl. “Just a sip,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Not like beer. Like Everclear.” He took a swallow and put the bowl into her hands, his eyes like pools of rainwater at night.

  Elvia smelled the swaying liquid, like earth and cave and smoke. She imagined the vapors settling a veil over the baby, like at Lee’s house; she imagined patterns and visions in the baby’s own eyes—maybe beautiful, maybe scary. And the baby can’t get out of me—out of my skin.

  She put the bowl on the ground and grabbed her backpack. In the trees that stank of all of them, she vomited. Then she turned and saw the field of dry grass, covered with circles of spiderwebs. Tunnel spiders—like in the field across from Sandy’s house. The dew collected on the webs to make jeweled nets, circles of stars scattered across the earth. She ran to the tunnel of arundo cane swaying like green bones in the wind.

  The truck’s dash was cold as stone. “Nobody did this for me,” her father always said. “Taught me to drive. Fed me right. Made sure I came home.”

  Home. Okay. I better go home.

  She drove toward the foothills, the green cleft of trees she remembered above Sandy Narlette’s house. She wanted to feel Sandy’s fingers on her forehead. “You’re fine,” she wanted to hear. “Damp and cool as a dog’s nose. And that’s good.”

  Lemon groves were scattered here, a few houses, and wild oats gone blond in the fall heat. We made trails through the weeds, all of us, she thought. Rosalie first. Then me. She found lizard skins. I found rocks. The rest of them complained about stickers in their socks.

  She turned onto Marquise Lane and saw the arroyo, a wide gash in the fields. The last time she’d been here was when her father drove her away.

  Rosalie had asked about the tattooed dragon, after Elvia’s father came for his third visit. So she could get to know him. Elvia wouldn’t answer, reaching for the plates, staring at the oilcloth sunflowers, at the spoons she touched every day, at the faces gathered like darting birds, waiting to hear about him. Her father. She touched her blue place mat.

  Some time during that night, she lay awake, worrying. The floor creaked. She saw Sandy bending near Jade’s pink pillow, sliding her hand underneath. Sandy straightened, glancing at Elvia. “You know who I am tonight,” she had whispered near Elvia’s ear. “The you-know-what fairy. She’s the new girl. Can you let her be surprised?” She nodded, and Sandy traced Elvia’s hairline with her finger. “Do you remember? When I surprised you?”

  Elvia had found quarters, somehow sparkling with glitter, under her pillow.

  Now she stared at the small yellow house, the mulberry tree, and then she turned across the street to the pepper tree near the arroyo’s edge. Taking out her knife, she dug between two roots, where a hollow had been covered with dirt. It didn’t look like kids had been here fooling around in a long time. The tea tin was rusted and black. Inside, her quarters were dirty, but she saw a glimmer of pearlescent pink when she rubbed one with spit. She had buried them so long ago.

  Close to the cement porch, she saw how much the house had faded. The dandelion yellow was pale now, the stucco peeling near the foundation where Sandy always watered her plants. She knocked before she could get too scared. When Sandy answered, her face was exactly the same, her brown hair in a ponytail and only shiny Chap-stick on her lips. Elvia held out the quarters as if they were payment and said, “You remember?”

  “Oh, my God, Elvia,” Sandy said, hugging her hard, the familiar smell of baby lotion rising from her shoulders. “I never forget. Never. Oh, I can’t believe you came to see me.”

  Sandy washed the quarters in the old white enamel sink and laid the money on the wooden table. “I used to sit up and wait, sometimes real late because you girls were talking and wouldn’t go to sleep, and I painted them with nail polish. Passionate Pink Frost, for sparkle like fairy dust. And you guys believed it, or some of you did.”

  Elvia stared at the quarters, at the single place mat near Sandy. Yellow. No embroidered name. The house was silent. Before she could ask why, Sandy said, “Look at this.”

  In the big front bedroom where they’d all slept, there was one bed and a crib. Sandy opened the top dresser drawer. Elvia saw baby clothes and small shirts, and, underneath them, little white envelopes with names. Rosalie. Gabrielle. Bridget. Christine. Elvia. Jade. Lorraine.

  The teeth were so tiny in Sandy’s palm. She moved them gently with her finger, then lifted her hand to Elvia. “See? They’re just bones.”

  Elvia touched the dull, dry chips, porous and cracked. Sandy said, “They don’t look like this when they fall out. I used to hold them at night, after I took them from under your pillows. I never saw anything so pretty. White as could be, like glowing inside. So polished and shiny.”

  “You always sat on the tub while we brushed our teeth. Every night.”

  “My teeth were full of cavities. I wanted yours to be beautiful. At least, while I had you.” Elvia held a tooth with traces of black at the root, like dried mud. What used to be blood.

  “I can’t tell you how they looked,” Sandy said. Her face lit up again. “Like opals.”

  “You told me. Opals.”

  She touched Elvia’s hair. “You’ll have to find out yourself, when you hold one of your own babies’ teeth. But that’ll be a long time. You’re—you’re fifteen now, right? August 20th?”

  Elvia felt the sob rise up from the hollow inside her collarbone. Where Michael had put his lips, hot as a piece of coal. Where sand still clung to her skin. The cry flew from her before she could clamp her fingers over it, and then she saw Sandy’s arms, the soft folds inside the elbows Elvia used to touch when they shone with sweat. Sandy pulled her close, saying, “Oh, Elvia. Oh, honey, you’ll be okay. Come here.”

  naranjas

  Serafina smelled smoke rising from campfires in the river bottom, mixing with the fog that rose from earth near the water. It wasn’t like the shimmering vapor that descended from the mountains, like home, but a veil that clung to the cane and
bamboo stalks around them to keep her from seeing the people who laughed and argued, threw bottles and frightened her.

  Florencio motioned for her to be quiet. She knew if these people heard them talk, saw their Indian faces, they might rob them, and when they saw pockets filled with nothing, maybe beat them for sport. Cut them on the face, like she’d heard some norteños did to Mixtecos. This river, where their feet sounded loud on the shredded eucalyptus bark, was no different from the arroyos and ravines she had already survived.

  Up an embankment, inside a freeway cave, she smelled not Mexicans, but teenagers. Florencio moved the beer cans and fast-food wrappers and carried up an armload of eucalyptus leaves, motioning her to sit down.

  “Yuu Sechi,” he said, his voice careful.

  She was here, in the menthol scent of Rio Seco. She began to cry, wrenching silent sobs that shook her so hard her spine felt swollen inside the filthy clothes. She was here. Breathing the same air, perhaps, as her daughter. Still here to be found, she prayed, pulling herself up to kneel in the loose leaves, looking down the cement bank for flowers. Flowers to make an offering. Near the trail, she saw nodding yellow blooms she didn’t recognize. Flowers of California. She stood up, but Florencio leaned over and pulled her down.

  He put his arms around her back like a serape, and her heart leapt in fear at his roughness. But he said, “Don’t move. Los malditos.”

  Several shadowy figures passed on the trail, loud voices laughing and talking. Fires flickered in the darkness below them.

  “Malditos,” Florencio said. “Teenagers. And some men I heard talking. They saw us here. I will stay awake all night, to make sure they don’t come.” His forearms were hard as cords.

  She was so thirsty. “Is there water?”

  Florencio said, “Not for drinking. We can’t go near the river, or los malditos might see you. Lie down. We cannot go to the oranges until morning. I have to make sure la migra hasn’t been to the camp. Rigoberto or Jesus always stands watch. Someone will wait for my signal.” He was silent for a time, and then he said, “Serafina, you waited all this time to come back?”