Amarillo. She ground the yellow chiles guajillo with white onion, with cinnamon and cloves and cumin and garlic. When she added the rich gold chicken broth, the mole was bright as beaten gold. She dropped in a pinch of masa. Corn. Her offering. Remember? Please. That was all she had been able to say.
Don Rana was alone. She saw his nostrils flare when the plate was set on his wooden picnic table. The mole amarillo filled the plate like a hot sun. “What do you want?” he grumbled. “Please, write,” she said carefully. “In English.” “English? Fucking Mixtecos. You can’t even write Spanish. You want English? For who?” He bent his head to the plate and took a spoonful of the sauce, and when he looked up, his lips gleamed. “For who?”
Mrs.—My dauter and me live here 12 year pass. Did you seen her? I am her mother. I will come here. Sunday next.
“Sign it,” he said, watching her carefully after he handed her the notebook paper. Serafina looked at the penciled words, the square letters. The old people at home had always signed with their thumbs. Her own mother had been so happy when Serafina wrote her name, the last year of school. She took the pencil and wrote under Sunday: SERAFINA ESTRELLA MENDEZ.
When Alfaro’s taxi came, Rigoberto shook his head. “I don’t have money to waste,” he said. Florencio said, “I have to repair these.” He held up the canvas bags, and she took a long breath and got in beside Araceli. Their eyebrows shot up. “You can’t go around the city alone,” Florencio said. “I will—”
She shook her head. “I can do this without you.” She closed the taxi door.
After she and Araceli had bought supplies at Mercado Aparecida, Serafina went inside the American market called Vons to buy something they would all think foolish. A magazine. A woman on the cover with smooth yellow hair and pink fingernails. One hand rested on a pumpkin, the other on a boy’s shoulder, and all three were grinning.
In the taxi, Araceli watched her silently. Serafina opened the magazine, trying to remember how she’d felt that day so she could say the right prayers now. She looked at the pink cheeks and blue eyes and hands placing bowls of salad on wooden tables. We are not from another universe, she thought, staring at the pumpkins with carved faces. We use pumpkin seeds in moles. We eat the same food. We both have gods. La Virgen, you are here. Even if Elvia is eating food at a table like this, she prayed, please let me see her again.
Walking into the bare yard of 2510, looking at the boarded-up windows, she surreptitiously scattered pale masa around the two cement steps and below the window, hoping the ground would accept. Then she carried the bowl of amarillo she had reheated over the fire only a short time ago, and left it on the old woman’s steps. Tucking the note underneath, she laid beside it a sprig of wild yellow mustard.
mukat
Elvia really was the past. She couldn’t believe it. The Indian man in the office said, “No, the customer from number eleven has been gone for nearly three weeks. I have not seen him.” He frowned. No red kiss rested between his brows. Then he closed the door.
She stood underneath the neon, a scroll of dull white worms in the sun. The Sands Motel. The pink night-lit sign had been exciting when her father first brought her here three years ago. He’d gunned the truck on the freeway and sung along with Sammy Hagar—“I can’t dri-i-i-ve, fifty-five!” Then he looked over at her and grinned. “But I will for you. So you won’t get scared. So you won’t ever have to see cops.”
He looked for me for months before he found me. Even if he didn’t always act like he wanted me. But he never left. She touched the door to number 11. I’m the one who left. What did Callie say? “You think this is a bad life? Nobody touches you. You don’t have no marks, okay?”
But now I have a brown line under my bellybutton. What would he say if she found him, if he saw her belly now? “Get rid of it?” She’d have to tell him she couldn’t. He might say, “Give it to the foster mom—Sandy. She’s good with kids.”
She was good with me. And school starts next week. Elvia wanted to wake up in sheets, eat Corn Pops, get dressed in clean clothes, and go to class. Be bored in English, look forward to Science. Come home and put her papers on a table. Eat chips.
Kips, kips. Doggie. She didn’t want the crazy Callie life, or the crazy Michael life. She stared at the doors, like red sticks of cinnamon gum. Number 12 was open. Boots were outside.
Elvia parked at number 9 and crept near the door. Asshole Warren. She could hear his voice. He was talking to the TV. “Fuck she did, Leeza,” he said, and then, “Oh, man,” when Elvia knocked on the metal jamb. “You’re alive.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Elvia said. “Where’s my dad?” His face was blank and unshaven, and she thought, Why isn’t he at work? “He went to Florida, right? Tell him I brought the truck when he comes back. I’m leaving the keys with the lady in the office.”
“Florida?” he shouted. “What the hell? I ain’t seen your dad. He took off lookin for that guy Dually. He thought Dually stole his truck. And you.”
Elvia studied the beer cans on the rug. “Me?”
“Yeah. He said Dually must be lookin for payback. The girlfriend owed him. Took off the day the truck disappeared.” Warren peered out the door. “Holy fuckin shit. You took the truck.”
Elvia looked away from him, the pinkish skull like rose quartz, the few black hairs gathered into a ponytail. “I stole myself. Tell him I’m sorry. About the truck. About everything.”
She opened the glove compartment, looking for the purple velvet scrunchie. A magazine fell out, tied into a tube with Christmas ribbon. A note said,
Elvia. I can’t be your real mother. Not even your fairy godmother. But backup mother is fine with me. Look at page 109.
Warren said, “I can’t fuckin believe it.” Elvia tucked the magazine into her backpack and went to the motel office. She didn’t see the woman with the red kiss and long skirts and sad eyes. She dropped the keys through the door slot, figured she could walk to the bus station in Tourmaline. Five miles. That couldn’t bother the baby. She used to run that far two weeks ago, when everything was different.
On the bus, she watched the smoke trees fly past. My dad’s in the wind—your dad’s in the trees. He says baby trees have to live downstream from their mother, but this is for real, not a story. I can’t live with my dad, or with Michael. Not at the river. Not at Dos Arroyos. I have to go back to Sandy’s.
Does she want me to give it up to a family? Every time Elvia thought of the trilobite tracing its feet across her, inscribing something inside her, on her bones, she didn’t think she could really leave the baby with someone else. When the baby found out, when the child or teenager found out, “Your mom couldn’t handle you, couldn’t take care of you,” she knew just how it would feel. The way she’d felt in the foster homes. Like a hollow, ripply husk, like the waxy pale insides of a pomegranate, the ones she’d seen picked clean by ants and dried by the sun.
Sandy wasn’t home. Elvia looked under the green pot for the key. No note inside. Back on the steps, she looked at the wild tobacco bush near the arroyo. The yellow tube-flowers really looked like macaroni. Michael had smoked wild tobacco since he was ten, drunk jimsonweed tea many times. What would dreaming do to your brain? The third level? So far inside yourself you could see people from your past, from your actual memory, inside your cells?
The wind ruffled rose petals onto the driveway. She opened the ribbon-tied magazine.
Melanie Griffith, a boy, and a jack-o-lantern with an intricately carved face. Grinning. She wants me to learn how to cook? How to put on makeup? Elvia turned to page 109. A little red baby the size of a Barbie doll lay on its mother’s bare chest, the tiny black-haired head like a stone pendant at her collarbone. Elvia couldn’t believe how small the arms and legs were, bent like a frog’s. The baby’s skin was so thin you could almost see the blood pulsing inside.
“Miracle of survival,” the article read. “This
baby was born early, at only 23 weeks, and her very life depended on her parents’ love. They held her, skin to skin, for seven hours a day to calm her, to help her grow. And their devotion worked.”
Elvia touched the photo. The baby could have fit into her father’s hand. Her tiny fist reached through a wedding ring.
Fist. Her baby had fists. Feet. Twenty-three weeks. That was why Sandy gave her this. April—it was halfway through September now. About twenty-two weeks. Or more. The baby didn’t look like a trilobite floating around inside her, with blind eyes and nubs and tadpole feet. The baby looked like this. A person. A squirming, pirouetting, hand-tracing person.
A white truck parked at the curb, with designs on the doors. Powder-puff painted trees and lettering: ANTUAN’S LANDSCAPING. Hector got out, and Elvia laughed with relief. “You drive?” she called to him.
Then she noticed his haunted red eyes, his scratched face, his arms black with scabs. “Me and Michael been working trees for this guy AnTuan. Trying to save money for the baby. But Caveman and Michael got a motel room and mixed the medicine with speed. When mano woke up, Caveman was gone with the red bowl. And the money . . .” Hector wiped his face, and she saw palm bark shreds on his hair. “Mano drank too much of that stuff. He’s in the trees with his chete, yelling shit nobody can understand. I can’t talk to him.”
She hurried to the truck, and Hector drove into the foothills, steep streets lined with jacaranda trees. “This guy Darnell hired us, but Michael took off with his truck. We been up in Grayglen all day, and Darnell showed up. Says he’s gonna have to call the cops cause Michael’s 5150.”
Pulling into a long driveway, Hector pointed to a large Spanish-style house. Six palms were trimmed like shorn pineapples, and Michael dangled near the house, slashing at fronds, shoving off the trunk with silver gaffs flashing as though he were some kind of bird.
A black guy stood in the driveway next to an old truck. “You his wife?” he said. “He’s ballistic. I didn’t even know he spoke English. We hired them off the street, thought they were Mexican.”
“Wife?” Elvia said, watching Michael wave the machete. “He said that?”
“Look, I’m Darnell. I own AnTuan’s. I don’t know why he stole my truck, but here he is stone trippin, talking about, ‘My lady’s gone, the truck’s gone, my money’s gone.’”
Michael’s braid flew around his shoulders. He didn’t look down, didn’t see her. Darnell’s arms were scratched, too. He said, “I got three girls. You’re havin a baby—I’ll cut him some slack about the cops. But he needs to quit. The homeowner’s gettin nervous, and I’m liable.”
A blond woman, cell phone at her ear, watched them from the front door. She could be calling the police, Elvia thought. Michael would go to jail for being high, if nothing else. Elvia stepped around the fronds, woven almost like rough baskets as they’d fallen. “Michael,” she called, as close as she could get under the rain of bark. He slashed with the machete, and only three fronds were left on the tree, standing up like electrically charged hairs. “Michael!”
He glanced down, and his mouth opened. “Mukat!” he cried, voice thick like a stranger’s. He was five or six levels away from her, from earth. “Mukat!” he cried again, mouth stretched thin in amazement, both hands going to his head as if he felt pain, and he fell backward, the machete flying over Elvia’s head, the rope around his waist catching him, slamming him into the trunk.
Elvia put her arms around the tree. “Get the machete,” she shouted to Hector, putting her feet on the wedge-steps of spongy gray bark. She had climbed this kind of palm with Rosalie, in vacant lots. Michael was dangling upside down. The bark rubbed against her belly, and Hector climbed under her.
“Lower him,” Darnell called, standing on the grass with two Mexican men and a blanket.
Elvia wrapped one arm around the trunk, shoving her other hand into Michael’s armpit, trying to pull him sideways. Once Jade had gotten scared halfway up a palm tree, and Elvia got her down. But she was eleven then, and not pregnant. And Michael might be crazy—he might hit her. But his eyes were closed, blood striping his neck. He was so heavy.
Hector was just below her, bracing his knees around the other side of the trunk. Her foot brushed his shoulder. He cradled Michael’s back with his arm just under hers, then cut the rope with the machete. They both sagged under Michael’s weight, and the bark dug inside her thighs. “Slow,” Hector whispered.
Darnell shouted, “I’m a firefighter. I’ve done this before.” He had climbed under Hector. “Let him down on me.” He grabbed Michael’s knees, and Elvia let go.
They laid him on the blanket, and Hector reached up to help her down. Her skin hurt, her chest hurt, and she knew there were bark imprints on her belly. She steadied herself against the trunk, knowing if she’d had to choose, to let Michael fall or fall herself and hurt the baby, she would have let go.
The blond woman came running onto the lawn and said to Darnell, “Oh, my God, I called 911. Is he okay? I can’t speak Spanish. Tell his wife I’m so sorry.”
Elvia crouched beside Michael and he opened his eyes, dark as oil, covered with a film of red. “Mukat,” he said, struggling against Darnell, who was trying to look at his arm.
“I think it’s broken, but it’s like he doesn’t even feel it,” Darnell murmured.
Red lights and sirens twined through the trees. “Who’s Mukat?” Elvia whispered to Michael, but his eyes flickered in their sockets and he turned away.
The paramedics pushed everyone aside, and Michael fought the restraints. Darnell helped get him on the gurney, and the doors closed. Darnell said to Elvia, “County General. He’s trippin big time. You’re his next of kin, right?” He frowned. “What was he callin you?
Mukat. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe an Indian word.” Next of kin? His grandfather. And the baby. His blood family. She looked at Hector, his arms marked with the scratches of palm bark and devotion, his eyes on her.
The blond woman approached Darnell and said nervously, “These are your workers, right? My husband hired you. I just called him at his office, and he said to make sure and give you this—for your trouble.” The woman’s eyes were hidden by her sunglasses. She pushed an envelope toward Elvia. “Habla ingles?” she said. “So sorry.”
Elvia touched the perfectly trimmed hedge, where the shorn leaves held only a few drops of moisture, and then she pushed the envelope into Hector’s hands. She nearly ran to Darnell’s truck. “Why’d you do that?” Darnell said, starting it up.
“Hector needs the money. He doesn’t have a home yet. Like I do.”
By the time they got to County General Hospital, the nurse in the emergency room said, “That crazy guy? With the long braid? He got off the bed and walked out the door.”
Darnell said, “He had a broken arm.”
The nurse shrugged and glanced at Elvia. “Maybe he had a broken brain. You can’t make people stay if they’re determined to leave.”
Elvia told Darnell, “Thanks. I can walk.” She faced the setting sun and headed down the long avenue toward the river.
The evening had autumn chill around the edges, and she shivered. Do you shiver inside, when I’m cold? she asked the baby, trying not to think about what she might find at H8Red. Her knife was loose in her hand when she went down the tunnel of arundo cane, passing a ghostly figure pushing a shopping cart loaded like a burro.
The camp was dark and deserted. Michael could be anywhere. The branch shelter was missing a wall, and burned sticks were scattered in the fire pit. Someone else could already be claiming this place, she thought, afraid, and she turned to go back. When she neared the road again, she heard rustling footsteps coming toward her, and she gripped the knife tighter.
“Elvia?” Sandy called softly. “Elvia?”
Her heart pushed painfully against her chestbone, and she felt a small thump on her hip, but th
is time she imagined a tiny elbow. Sandy’s chapped lips were held tight in her teeth, her hands buried in her jacket, and Enchantee was right behind her, keys held in a spiky fan.
“Are you crazy, coming down here?” Elvia said, teeth jostling against one another.
“Are you?” Sandy shot back.
“It’s wild life down here. And you look . . .”
Sandy said, “I look like a mom. A pissed-off mom in Keds and jeans, with pepper spray.”
Elvia looked away, at a tiny fire in the distance, under the freeway bridge. Michael was at the next level now. All alone. Looking for his mother, she thought. Not me.
Sandy waited until they got to the 7-Eleven before she pulled Elvia close to her. “Three Mexican guys came to my house in an old truck. One guy said his name was Hector, and you were in trouble. He said you might be at the 7-Eleven. And the guy in there, Mr. Singh, said he’d seen you making phone calls. A girl with purple hair pointed us down there, where you might be. She looked so rough.” Sandy paused. “Did anyone try to hurt you? You looked scared.”
Elvia shook her head. She pointed to the small black canister in Sandy’s hand. “Who were you gonna spray?”
Enchantee said, “Oh, she’s used it before, little girlfriend.”
“Two months ago,” Sandy said. “On the father trying to push past my door to grab his son. His son with a broken arm and bruises all over. I sprayed the dad in the face, and my aim was fine.” She hugged Elvia tight and then started walking again. “Just fine.”
día de los muertos
Someone had started a fire in the river cane. Serafina heard sirens while she stirred rice. She shivered so violently that Araceli said, “A spirit? Next week is Día de los Muertos. I will see my son.”
But Serafina had heard the twirling rope of sound around her neck while she lay at the feet of Santa Catarina.
Highwire Moon Page 27