Serafina lay on the bed of eucalyptus leaves and felt the sharp twinge, the rippling ache that somehow still scraped hard as a fingernail inside. Her womb. She had spent all those years sitting with her mother, grinding yerba santa leaves while her mother patted tortillas, washing her mother’s hair, her neck, the fold inside her arms—she had never asked if her mother felt that twinge between her hipbones whenever she saw their faces—Luis’s or the two baby girls’, or Serafina’s own face, when the priest closed the trunk door over her.
She would never tell anyone about the border, the ravine. “I tried to get back. A year had passed. Then my mother lost her mind. I couldn’t leave her.”
He frowned. “But now, where will you look? You cannot go to the government to get her back. You have no papers.” He moved closer, whispering near her hair. “Serafina, we killed a man. Someone might have seen us with the coyote. Then without him. Maybe someone in the hills saw everything.”
“Maybe only dead men saw it.” She remembered the burned figures, and she thought of how many people had died just to get to this place. She said, “I know where I will look.”
She stared at Florencio’s black eyes, the black hollows in his face. “Once we get to the camp, I won’t travel again until the harvest is finished. I can’t take the chance.”
Serafina looked away, at the wall of bamboo disappearing in the fog. “Thank you,” she said formally. “I will try to repay you. For everything.”
“When we get there, to a fire and a pot, you can make me salsa verde again,” Florencio said. “You can make me tortillas. Like home.”
All night, she dozed intermittently, staring at the lights of the city muted like thousands of lit candles through a veil. She heard laughter and screaming in the river bottom. When the mountains to the east turned silver, she touched Florencio’s arm where he had slumped against her back. “I want to go now,” she whispered, just as she had in Tijuana. “I don’t want to wait.”
When she shook the dirt from her clothes and rubbed her hair back from her forehead, Serafina saw the ghostly light come through the ivy vines, filling the impression she’d left on the leaves at her feet. All these days and nights, she had left traces of her skin, her sweat, her warmth, on cornstalks and pine needles and sand and now here, on the sharp-scented leaves fallen from the trees. Near the back wall of the overpass, underneath layers of graffiti, she saw a blue stone.
A smooth piece of glass, almost like candy in her fingers. Bright as lapis from Oaxaca. She slid it into her pocket.
Florencio led her across a wide road, and they were soon walking along the banks of a canal. Serafina was mesmerized by the water gliding green and silent, so when she saw the tiny figure staring solemnly from behind a metal fence, surrounded by small silver leaves, she stumbled with fright. Her mother, a spirit whose black eyes burned, whose fingers held tight to the wire.
Serafina’s hands were full of dirt as she knelt on the ground. Her mother couldn’t be here to tell her the search was useless. Had she seen something, on her journey to the other world? Had her mother seen Elvia . . . Serafina felt sound streaming from her dry throat and burning jaw.
“No, no,” Florencio said, lifting her by the elbow. “Don’t scream or someone will hear.”
The woman’s voice was small as a bird’s through the fence. “No, no, mija,” she called. Daughter? Serafina made herself look. The woman said, “Yo soy Paz. Paz. Here. For your journey. Buena suerte.” Through an opening in the wire, she held two jars of dark olives.
The woman melted into the olive trees that shimmered like clouds. Buena suerte. Good luck.
The canal made a sharp turn into a tunnel of darkness. “Naranjas,” Florencio said. “Limóns y pomelos.” The trees were nearly black, row after row, and water trickled from squat cement towers. She slid down the canal bank to one of the arcs falling onto the furrows. Cupping her hands, she drank the water tasting of moss. “We are here,” she said.
“No,” Florencio said. “But nearly.”
They walked for several miles through the trees, the silence immense as Oaxaca, only the drip of water and cries of crows and their feet on the dirt path as if they were walking back from the market at Nochixtlan. She looked down the dizzying length of the rows, endless dark hallways.
At the end of one grove, Florencio held out his arms for her to stay. Near a huge ravine, another grove stretched up a hill, with wooden crates stacked along the arroyo. Florencio squatted near the large irrigation tank and whistled, three times, like a mockingbird.
A piece of earth covered with branches shuddered, and a man peered from beneath a piece of plywood, blinking at the morning light. Florencio whistled again, and the dirt rose higher, revealing a hole. “Jesus,” Florencio called softly. “It’s Florencio.”
Jesus scrambled from the hole, lifting the plywood high enough that Serafina could see a pile of blankets. “Florencio!” he said, coming forward. “Welcome back to las naranjas.”
“Rigoberto is still here?” Florencio asked, pushing past the brush over Jesus’s hiding place.
“Where else, since he borrowed all that money?” Jesus said. “He can barely eat, jefe works him so hard. He thought you weren’t coming back to pay off your debt.”
Past huge cottonwood trees, they entered the damp ravine. Another arroyo, she thought, her heart beating faster. But then she smelled coffee and smoke and saw the first plywood shacks. They were crowded together against the banks, dotting the steep hillside leading up to the next grove. Serafina saw faces peering from plastic-sheeted doorways, and she said, “Rigoberto?”
“Up there,” Florencio said, and she saw several men bathing in the canal, their movements and curved backs like home. When her brother raised himself from the water and saw her, his brown chest gleaming wet, she could have sworn he was grinning from the river’s edge like he had when they were children.
But he never smiled. He hugged her, stiff and formal, noticing her swollen jaw but keeping his mouth closed tight, and led her into his shack. Then he brought her chicken broth, salty water with slivers of onion and three yellow coins of floating fat.
She drank a few sips. Then she told him about their mother, the last years, the fevers and pains and the cancer. He remained silent. He didn’t cross himself. She stared at the rosary hung on a nail over his bed.
“I sent all my money, some months,” he finally said. “Did you get the money for medicine?”
“Yes. I wrote you to say I was buying food and medicine.”
He nodded, biting his lips. “Did you get the money for the roof?”
“Yes.” She saw a mesh of thorn scratches like black netting on his wrists. “We fixed the roof. I wrote you that I wanted to come back here. But I couldn’t leave her.”
He gestured at the plastic door. “We were moving all the time. Two years of bad weather.”
He didn’t look like her brother anymore. He had been the handsomest in the family, his skin light as burnt flour, his brows fine as delicate brush strokes. Now the frown marks between the brows were deep as knife cuts in a gourd, and his mouth was a crescent slash of worry.
She rubbed her jaw. The swelling was down, but she felt two hard knots like dry pinto beans along her jawbone. They will stay forever, she thought. Chips of bone?
“What happened?” he said finally.
In the shard of broken mirror on the orange crate nearby, she studied the green tint along her jaw, the blue circle of bruise left on her forehead. Her own lips were cracked dry, her eyes red.
“The coyote,” she said. “While we were crossing. He hit me with a gun.” She remembered the blood on the coyote’s face. Does Florencio want Rigoberto to know that we killed a man? I won’t tell him. Florencio can say it. Then it will be over. Forever. The Tiltepec men are gone to Fresno. We will never see them again.
Florencio appeared in the doorway, blur
ry through the plastic. He searched Serafina’s face, then held out the money to Rigoberto, who looked stunned. “The coyote disappeared. We had to make it on our own.” Florencio turned to Serafina, who nodded. So he didn’t want Rigoberto to know. The journey would be theirs alone.
Quickly, he hid his marred hand in his pocket, and she thought, Rigoberto saved him; wherever they are, in the cabbage or here, they are like a pueblo. She said, “Florencio was kind. He stayed awake at night to make sure no one harmed me.”
But Rigoberto was rolling the money carefully into a cylinder. “Now we are at zero again,” Florencio said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Our favorite place.”
Rigoberto went to a corner of the shack, crouching and digging in the dirt. He brought up a coffee can, put the money inside, and said, “I will give it back to Don Rana tomorrow.” He replaced the dirt, stamped it hard with his boots, and scattered orange peels and pebbles and a soda can over the spot.
“You have to hide everything,” he said. “Los malditos come from the river all the time, to steal our things when we work.” He glanced back at the corner. “When I first came, I even buried my spoons and razor every day.”
“Your rosary?” Serafina glanced at the plywood wall.
He shook his head. “No one wants that.” When she curled on the bed, tired, he said, “Not yet. I can’t leave you alone either. Not here. We have to leave soon for the groves. We work all night this week. Don Rana says the wind is coming fast to burn the fruit. Dry it out.”
Serafina lay back on the blankets. Her body was melting. She felt each finger and leg and wrist throbbing with blood. She whispered, “Don Rana? He lent you the money so I could come?” She thought his name was the Spanish word for frog.
“You will see,” Rigoberto said.
She blurted out, “Do you remember, when you left me? For the grapes? And la migra got me? I wrote to you. But I couldn’t say it in the letter. I left a daughter. Here.”
“A daughter? With who?” His face changed. “Those men from Michoacan in the garage . . .”
“No. I never got back to the garage. La migra came. I wrote you!
“You keep saying that!” he shouted. “I got one letter! I was working! Sleeping in a barn or a place like this. How could I get letters?”
Serafina sighed, even her breath tired. “I met an American. My daughter is half American. La migra caught me, and she was left behind.”
“So many years ago? And you came to find her now?” He shook his head. “I thought you wanted to come to California to work, to put your money with mine and buy a house.”
Serafina heard a radio, and men talking in the other shacks. Florencio stood up and said, “That’s a long time from now. Now we have to go to work.”
A truck honked somewhere. “You have to come,” Rigoberto said. “It’s dangerous here.”
Florencio helped her up. “Stay close to me,” he whispered. “I won’t let you fall.”
Headlights slanted into the orange trees from the dirt road, and moonlight fingered through the leaves. The oranges bumped against her neck and wrist when she reached up into the branches. The dust coated her eyelashes, and thorns pricked her forearms until her skin was dotted with spots of dried blood like black sequins.
Though she was here, in Rio Seco, she couldn’t even see the city except in glimpses from the groves. Every day they picked, and even after supper the truck came to gather them from camp. They had to finish the harvest before the rain.
But Rigoberto said a man named Alfaro who drove a Volkswagen taxi would come on Sunday. Then she could go to Yukon Street. To the church. Santa Catarina. She daydreamed that a nun would appear in the church doorway and say to the priest, “Here she is. Remember?”
Rigoberto said, “You can’t hope to find her now. She has another mother. Let it go.”
Serafina said, “I will go Sunday.” She pulled the heavy canvas sack from her shoulder and dumped the oranges into the box. The trees were all the same when she turned—explosions of silver-edged green, the oranges looking like frost in the harsh beams.
The boss’s name was Jorge Estevez. They called him Don Rana among themselves because he was fat in the belly, like a frog, and his feet splayed out to the side when he walked. But he rarely walked. He raced through the acres of groves on a motorbike with three plump wheels. They never called him anything to his face. Because he had their money, all of it in cash paid out on Sunday, and he had a gun in his holster.
She found Rigoberto and Florencio by their voices. They were moving the ladders. She waited until they were above her, then picked the low-hanging oranges. Yesterday the wind had blown in the morning, gusts too fierce for work, but all night, the air had been quiet. She didn’t talk now. She waited for Sunday. The bag pulled her down like a person clinging to her hip and shoulder. Not a child, but a long white ghost, fat with pulp and rough skin.
When the truck hauled them back to camp, Serafina washed at an irrigation spout and went inside the plywood shack. But her hands were restless, trained to move in a different way in the evening. No tortillas to pat in shape, no blouse to resew, no dishes to wash. The plastic sheet over the door blew in the breeze when she stepped outside. Some of the shacks were made of cardboard, some of sticks tied together with plastic sheeting covering the huts. A dirty, broken couch sat outside one of the shacks.
But no one cooked. They ate at Araceli’s place, under the Cottonwood trees. Serafina sat down next to Rigoberto and pressed her aching hands to a cup of hot atole. Like home. Araceli had a tiny restaurant, a few chairs and crates and a card table under a plywood roof, where she served breakfast and dinner to the workers who had no pots or pans or grills. There were thirty or forty men here for the Valencia harvest. Araceli’s broths and sauces were weak and watered down, her rice dry, but she made tortillas and frijoles negros every day.
If she found Elvia, she would teach her to cook. She wouldn’t think about where. Someday. Not here, in the ravine. Someday, she would live in a place with a kitchen again, and Elvia would sit beside her with the mano, rubbing chiles and tamarind and cumin on a molcajete.
Serafina winced, looking down at the rice on her plate. She had to buy a mano, too. She looked up at the dark sky above the cotton-woods.
They heard the whiny roar of the motorbike. Rigoberto said, “Work again. Money.”
“Kiss the money”: she remembered the coyote’s voice. No. On Sunday, you get paid for all your boxes. Then you get a ride to town in Señor Alfaro’s orange Volkswagen taxi. You send some money by wire to Uncle Emiliano, for your tequio. You buy a pot, for your tequio to Florencio. And then you will ride to Yukon Street and the church of Santa Catarina.
On Saturday, fog shrouded the groves. Serafina’s canvas sack felt even heavier on her shoulder while she crouched to pick low-hanging oranges. Rigoberto climbed the ladder, pushing himself so deep into the branches that all she saw were his shoes on the rung above her.
Once Don Rana roared up to the edge of the irrigation furrows, then stopped. He watched them for a while. He said something in Spanish to Rigoberto, laughed, and roared off.
“He says this isn’t jungle fog like you indios are used to,” Rigoberto said. “He said it’s California fog. It’s California’s way of fooling you, making you think fall is here. But the wind will be back tomorrow. He says if you want your money, you better finish this grove.”
Money. That was all Rigoberto ever thought about, too, all he talked about. He didn’t even eat. He lived on tortillas and coffee and anger.
“We have a few more weeks of oranges,” he said. “Then who knows what the weather will do? Last year I had saved five hundred dollars, and the rain flooded the fields up north so we couldn’t work. No strawberries, no artichokes. Nothing. Just that damn leaking barn.”
He emptied his bag into a crate and stopped beside Serafina. “Or someone might call la m
igra. Someone here. Then he might hide, and while we are trying to cross again, he goes through our things. Or he doesn’t pay us for the last month.”
“But the people here are Mixtec,” Serafina said.
“So? Rana is a norteño from Sinaloa. He’s the one I don’t trust. And he doesn’t trust me.”
“San Cristobal . . .” Serafina began, and then Rigoberto cut her off.
“San Cristobal is almost empty. Our mother is dead. I don’t think about San Cristobal.”
“At fiesta, the priest asked everyone to send money for the church roof . . .”
“I don’t have a church,” he snapped. “I want a house. Here. So I don’t have to move around.” Then he put his bag back over his shoulder. “You’re going where the government buildings are, and tell them you’re from Oaxaca, no papers, and please help you find an American citizen, a girl born here? Why would she want to come live with you? With us?”
Serafina pulled three more oranges from the branch. Her brother’s voice was raspy as a new mano stone. He said, “Why see someone if you are leaving again?”
Serafina’s anger surprised her, and she pulled so hard on the branch he stumbled above her. “Why see someone if she is leaving?” she shouted up at him. “Is that what you thought about your mother? Is that why you never came home? So you wouldn’t have to see her?”
He descended quickly, his bag not even half full. His frown was black when he put his face close to hers, and she saw the dirt collected in his forehead, dirt that he couldn’t wash away that first day when she’d surprised him bathing in the canal.
“I saw her every day,” he said, his voice deadly, “when I picked grapes and lettuce and sent the money home. I saw her buying medicine and coffee and a stove. I saw you eat the money.”
She swallowed the taste of fear that rose bitter as ashes and citrus dust flying through the trees. Money, india. Kiss the gun.
Florencio said, “Don’t speak so harshly to her.” He looked down at them from the next tree.
Highwire Moon Page 22