Highwire Moon

by Susan Straight

  Her prayers had not been answered. She had been to the old woman’s house two times, leaving amarillo and then tunas jelly. The nopales were harder to find now, and when Rigoberto had taken her to the end of the arroyo, where it fanned out into the river, he’d pointed to a slope of cactus burned and carved with initials. “I saw the American malditos here. The children with purple and green and yellow hair. They chased off some Guatemaltecos.”

  Serafina had plucked the few red fruits, boiled them and added sugar, poured them into a jar. She’d prayed to red, since yellow had not worked. She had laboriously copied the note on another piece of paper and carried it with the tunas jelly and a sprig of magenta bougainvillea creeping over a fence on Yukon Street. October. When the pomegranates, the bougainvillea, the tunas all turned red. Elvia had loved the riot of color, pointing to everything and shouting, “A. Apple! Red! The bed is red!”

  She had knocked and knocked. Maybe the time wasn’t right, but Alfaro came only on Sunday, and he came only at ten o’clock. After a while, she had left the note and offering. She had gone back to the arroyo and cried until she thought her face should be red with blood.

  The rain came suddenly, the wind still hurling tumbleweeds through the camp but turning cold and then throwing water, too. The drops splattered onto the plywood roof of Araceli’s, where Serafina made tortillas that steamed in her hands. She thought, The old woman might be dead. The amarillo plate was gone, but anyone could have taken it from the doorstep. She would find out today, the fifth Sunday she’d been in Rio Seco. She placed another tortilla on the comal and looked at Jesus, huddled nearby. Jesus couldn’t stay in his cuevo when it rained, Rigoberto said, because the walls could turn to mud and bury him. That had happened to people.

  “It’s a male rain,” Araceli said.

  “What?” Serafina said, not paying attention. She thought she heard the grove truck. But today was Sunday. Araceli said, “When it rains like this, too hard and noisy and pounding on the ground and then running off like nothing. Useless.” She laughed. “The female rain is what we need. The soft one that sinks into the earth. You can work better in the female rain.”

  “We aren’t working today,” Serafina said.

  But Araceli nodded. “Yes, you are. Look.”

  Don Rana shouted from the truck cab for them to hurry up and get in. The wind had desiccated the rind earlier, and now the water would make mold on the skin. He got out and banged on plywood, kicked in plastic sheets. “We have to finish this week! Get in the truck, goddamnit! What’s the Mixteco words for hurry up or I’ll shoot your indio asses?”

  When Serafina was in the trees, reaching for the slippery fruit, feeling the drops slide off leaves and trail down her neck, her anger at Don Rana and the invisible owner of the grove felt like a band tightening around her forehead. Like the tumpline she used to carry a heavy load of wood on her back in San Cristobal, she thought, pulling at her skull. My head is the strongest part of me. Not my hands. My skull. Like the sugar skulls Araceli bought for her son, to leave for his spirit. My forehead is glittering like sugar.

  The oranges were shiny with rain. “At least we don’t have to wash them off today,” Florencio said, passing behind her. “Maybe we’ll be done faster.”

  “Not fast enough to meet Alfaro in an hour,” she said. She stepped on the leaves that had swirled dry under their feet all this time, now curling in the wet. Tree after tree, like corn plants at home, she thought, picking and moving. Coffee and corn at home. Cotton and grapes here.

  “Why are you so angry?” Rigoberto said, climbing past her again. “An extra day of pay.”

  “Because it’s Sunday!” she cried. “My only day to look for Elvia.”

  Rigoberto stopped, incredulous. “You haven’t come to your senses? You’d rather miss a day’s pay to chase the past? Forget yesterday. Make money while you can.”

  “Don Rana didn’t even pay us Friday,” Florencio said from the next tree.

  “He’ll owe us now for two extra days,” Rigoberto said. “Be glad we’re working. This is just a one- or two-day rain. In November, the real rain will come. Maybe El Niño storms like last year.” He looked at Serafina. “No rain in Oaxaca,” he said. “And too much here. This year has to be better.”

  “After the harvest is done, do we stay and cut the branches?” Florencio asked.

  Rigoberto shook his head. “I heard Don Rana say they have a truck now that trims the top off each tree. Goes right down the aisle.” He stared into the shaking branches. “Strawberries. In November they plant strawberries.”

  Serafina looked at the thick-skinned orange in her hand, the dimples filled with black dust that turned to dark tears under the rain. Strawberries—red like the tomatoes they’d picked in Culiacan, where their hands bled, where her mother had buried two baby girls and grown a silver stripe in her hair and lost part of her mind.

  Rigoberto said, “More money. Put it in the wire at the mercado. All that money going to San Cristobal, and no one is there but Tío Emilio and old women.” He wiped his face. “We pay for a memory. San Cristobal is everywhere else. Here and Guadalupe and Fresno and Soledad.”

  Serafina said, “There is still the house.” She thought of her mother’s bed, the crumbling adobe walls, the roof of the church.

  But Rigoberto shook his head and started picking again. “I’m not going back to that house, so I’m not going to fix it,” he said. He raised his chin at her. “You’re going back? You’ll take her back there, when you find her? Your daughter? You think she’ll like San Cristobal?” His laughter was mocking.

  Serafina didn’t answer. Her bag bent her back like an old woman’s. Like the woman on Yukon, who might be so old that this lost Sunday could be the day she died. Serafina felt a gray mist like a dusty screen door closing in her mind. When they had a break, Florencio said, “I could walk with you to Yukon Street.”

  She knew Alfaro’s taxi had left the empty camp. She touched Florencio’s wet shoulder and said, “It will be too dark then.” He smoothed her hair. “You walked with me all the way here.” She left her fingers on his shirt until they reached the next row.

  The dead leave their homes in ñú’ū anima on one special day, to visit those they have left behind. This year, the dead children would return on a Friday, and the adults on Saturday. Serafina began to prepare the altars. Florencio and Jesus had built the wooden shelters, and Araceli had helped her buy the candles and paper flowers and incense, and the new plates.

  Serafina had put one new plate aside, to take to the old woman’s house this Sunday. She prayed the woman was still alive, but she would make an offering here to her soul. When a person was that old, the spirit sometimes hovered.

  She would not make an offering to Elvia’s soul. Here in Rio Seco, she felt sure that her daughter’s spirit was not floating, that she was alive.

  Serafina put a small table in front of the altar she had decorated with red and yellow paper flowers, with candles and green crosses Rigoberto had woven from palm fronds.

  Two plates, with tiny tortillas she had held in her palms, and two cups of milky atole drink, the first food her baby sisters would have been given when they left her mother’s breast. A doll made by Araceli sat between the plates, and the steam moved over its small face like fog.

  In the morning, the atole was cold, its surface shrunk lower, and she thought of the sweet fragrance her baby sisters had drunk. And somehow, the fog had come again in the morning, as if the atole steam had thickened and remained in the pepper branches. A few hours later, the sun came out and drank the fog.

  Serafina began to make salsa verde, for the first time since her mother’s death, for her mother’s visit tonight. She ground the green chiles outside near Araceli’s kitchen, moving the mano slowly. She added the small fringed leaves of cilantro and the large flat leaves of yerba santa, telling her mother where the plants had come from, the pots
with seeds brought by Araceli from Oaxaca. Florencio had asked only for frijoles for his father, and the black beans simmered with epazote and dried, crushed avocado leaves on the low flames.

  Suddenly a gunshot sounded in the river bottom, not far away, and Serafina heard Florencio and Jesus yelling. She ran into the shack to crouch near the bed. But they were laughing when they came into the camp. Hesitating at the doorway, she saw them dragging a pig. “A wild one, so the meat will be lean,” Florencio said. He nodded at Rigoberto. “He borrowed Rana’s gun.”

  “Don Rana let you?” Serafina asked, incredulous.

  “I gave him five dollars,” Rigoberto said, letting a grin break his face. “I promised him salsa verde. So get going.”

  Eugenio had been a butcher in a carniceria near Nochixtlan, and he cut up the meat and began salting it with Araceli’s help. Serafina stirred the bright green salsa verde, waiting for the pork that would swim in the sauce. She began to make fresh tortillas, the comal smoking hot.

  The helicopter whined overhead like a giant wasp. “La policia heard the gunshot. They don’t care about us as long as they don’t see us. If they see us, we make them angry. Put the fire out,” Rigoberto said softly, and she poured water on the low flames. The men all huddled under the trees, and Serafina stayed motionless with Araceli under the plywood shelter until the helicopter circled a few more times and then droned away toward the city.

  It is like home, she thought, washing the last of the clothes in the canal, sitting back to rest before she draped them on the pepper tree branches. She went inside the shack to clean the grit that collected on every surface. She shook arroyo sand from the blankets, thinking that if she had a broom, she might really believe she was back in San Cristobal, with joking, laughing-loud men around the carcass of the pig. Like fiesta, where meat made the men’s voices sing and boast. You make your home wherever you are.

  There were no graves to decorate that night. She knew her mother’s friends were putting flowers and candles on her headstone, and she hoped someone, maybe Alba, was honoring her father and Luis at their places. She paused, remembering with a jolt of pain the long walk to the corn fields with her brothers, her mother’s fingers in her hair. Then she finished setting the plates of food out on the altar for them, with the sugar skeletons Luis had always loved as a child. She placed tortillas wrapped in a cloth at the center of the offerings and turned away.

  They heard the roar of motorbikes just before dark, and Serafina said, “Don Rana’s friends have the tricycles now, too?”

  These bikes had two wheels and three rangy teenage riders with long hair trailing from their helmets. They tore through the grove road and stopped abruptly at the edge of the arroyo, one rider pulling off his helmet and staring in surprise at the ground damp with blood. The pig’s carcass lay nearby. “Shit,” the boy said. Then he looked down at the camp. Serafina saw a small and pointed goatee, like a mouse hanging from his chin. “Damn,” he said. “Beaners.”

  They raced off, laughter trailing, and Serafina turned to Rigoberto.

  “Frijoles,” he said. “They called us frijoles.” He went out to Jesus’s cuevo and stood watch for a long time.

  In the morning, the fog was thicker, draping itself in the branches and along the gray shedding skin of the eucalyptus, as if the camp were still full of spirits. The mist had risen from the river bottom, as though a water god had breathed all night in the cane. Serafina’s heart beat fast. She might find out now. She had made the offerings. Sunday. Serafina took the air into her mouth. Even though it felt dry, more like smoke and not the gentle wet veil of San Cristobal, she believed it was a good sign.

  She rode silently in Alfaro’s Volkswagen. She had begged him to come at dawn. All week, she had tried to make the balance of the world right. The meals she cooked, each orange she held, each word she said, each prayer. Now the clouds were not descending from the heavens, but sifting from the sand, and she wondered if that was proper. For this place, she thought it was.

  Yellow. She had thought the pale creamy yellow of atole would be right, since the child spirits had drunk some. She held a jar of the atole in her lap. At Mercado Aparecida, she bought masa for the week, and cumin, and then she saw a boy reach supplicating hands to a box of Cap’n Crunch, begging his mother. Serafina remembered how much Elvia had loved the sweet yellow corn, how she herself had tasted the gold dust on her teeth.

  Alfaro stared as she scattered the cereal around the steps and foundation of 2510, praying that the ground would accept this offering, remembering the tequila she had poured here so long ago. Slowly, she approached the other door, her hands trembling, her heart shaking, too. The woman’s silvery hair was pressed like a dandelion ball against the wrought-iron screen.

  “Serafina Mendez,” the woman said, nodding. “Sunday.”

  “Sorry,” Serafina said. Sorry for last Sunday, when you might have been waiting. Sorry I was in the oranges. She could only say it again. “Sorry.”

  Serafina held her breath as she stepped inside. The woman looked as she had all those years ago, her eyebrows paler red, her cheeks wrinkled as balled-up tissue. But Serafina realized she was as old as the grandmothers in San Cristobal who only grew a little shorter and more stooped each season, but whose eyes were sharp as ever.

  The woman smiled and said, “Picante.”

  The plate was clean, a faint trace of the amarillo like pollen stains on the white plastic. The woman said, “Good, but picante.” She walked to her tiny kitchen table, picked up a jar, and showed it to Serafina. Salsa. The thin finger pointed to a thermometer on the jar’s label, red nearly to the top, and a word there. “Picante,” the woman repeated, as if she liked to say it. Then she turned to reach for something on the shelf, and handed Serafina the Barbie.

  Serafina put her hand to her chest. Elvia’s doll. The one Larry had brought that day, with the long black hair like hers. She had held it when he drove away. Serafina pressed her nose to the silky braid Elvia had been trying to weave. The woman said something to Serafina, then pointed out the door. She found it in the yard, Serafina thought. That day. After I was gone. After Elvia was sleeping so peacefully in the car, waking up to someone else’s face.

  She bit her lips so hard she tasted salt. Then the woman said, “Naked,” pretending to shed her blue housecoat, and Serafina realized the doll had no clothes. The plastic skin was cool in her fingers, the legs thin as cinnamon sticks. The woman shrugged, as if to say all children liked their dolls naked, and Serafina smiled.

  She picked up the bag at her feet. The atole, wild tobacco flowers of palest yellow, five oranges, and a piece of paper. Rigoberto had shaken his head, but he’d copied the name of the nearest street to the camp, Palm Avenue, and drawn a small map of how to get to the arroyo. He had even drawn a tiny orange tree and a ladder small as a staple. Until she’d watched him bend over the paper, Serafina had forgotten that when they were children, he’d wanted to be an artist. To draw cartoons.

  “My dotter,” she said to the woman. She made a visor with her hand over her eyes, pretended to look at the street, then pointed to the paper now in the woman’s hands. “Ice,” she said, knowing it didn’t sound right. “Verde,” she whispered to herself. Green eyes. She looked about wildly for a moment until she saw the cactus growing on the fence. She pointed to it and to the woman’s eyes, which were dark as olives.

  The old woman nodded and said, “Daughter.” She circled her eyes with her fingers, like binoculars, and said, “Your daughter.”

  the heart’s fontanel

  “I can’t do this,” Elvia said angrily in the waiting room.

  Sandy looked up from her magazine. “You could do the river?” she said quietly. “That place didn’t scare you? This place does?”

  Elvia realized the other women had also glanced up. Two were speaking Spanish and had matching huge bellies. A very large blond woman sat with a car seat near her ankl
es like a pet dog, except a baby’s face showed, pink and tiny and clenched shut.

  “I mean this,” she whispered, snatching up the medical forms on her lap. “I don’t know anything.” Mother’s medical history. Father’s. The questions about diabetes and cancer, heart trouble. Elvia didn’t see boxes to check for mother’s invisibility and father’s wildness.

  “And here—the baby’s father.” She touched palm bark scratches on her wrist. She’d told Sandy what had happened to Michael. “I write: Gone. Booked up. Might never see him again.”

  Her belly was now a harder, rounder mound, actually sticking out when she sat like this. The thumping seemed to stay on the right side. Sandy put her hand on Elvia’s knee. “You do the best you can,” she said. “With the forms. With everything.”

  Elvia shivered when she was naked under the papery gown in the examination room. She jumped when the door opened. The doctor’s skin was brown as agate, her head covered with a bright purple wrap. “I’m Josefa,” she said. “Spanish or English?” Her accent was soft.

  “Where are you from?” Elvia asked.

  Josefa grinned. “Panama. You?”

  Elvia looked away. “Wherever.”

  Her white coat came closer. “And how many months are we? We’re this big and on our first visit?” When Elvia shrugged, Josefa frowned.

  Sandy said from the corner, “My friend Enchantee recommended you.”

  Josefa said, “I delivered her son. You’re the grandmother?”

  Sandy said, “I might be.” Elvia saw a look pass between them. “I told your receptionist, I’ll pay cash until I get Elvia in the system. She’s my foster daughter.”

  Josefa nodded slowly. She said to Elvia, “What a lovely name. So you didn’t come in all this time because you were busy, Elvia?” She did something with a machine, something crackling, and then she touched the lower part of Elvia’s body, moving her hands. Quickly, she put some kind of warm jelly on the skin and then a black suction cup. Elvia tried to move, but Josefa shook her head. Elvia heard static, then a loud beating, fast as knuckles on a door. “See? That’s a heart. A person. Someone you can’t be too busy for now.”