Highwire Moon by Susan Straight

Author:Susan Straight [Straight, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780385722612
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2001-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The taxi driver picked up people everywhere, standing by the dirt roads criss-crossing the main ravine. Everyone spoke in rapid Spanish. Two men were crammed into the front seat with the driver, and packed against Elvia in the back were four women, one holding a boy on her lap. Only the boy stared openly at Elvia. His eyes were slanted and dark as shards of slate. His mother wore a loose dress and a long, messy braid, and her plump body sat on stubby legs. Indians? Elvia thought, watching the boy.

The car headed back toward the main part of Tijuana. The taxi driver called out, “Clinica,” where the boy and two women got out. Then the cab picked up a whole group of people and headed back into the valley. Elvia said loudly, “Colonia Pedregal?” to the driver, who answered back impatiently. They wound through neighbor­hood after neighborhood, a hundred dirt roads lined with a thousand plywood and tin shacks, and Elvia looked for stones. She saw box spring fences everywhere, their wires turning to pink coils in the sun, and wooden pallets made into houses and corrals for goats. Tires were piled like stacks of Oreos; Michael and Hector had probably found one for the truck by now.

The driver said to departing passengers a sentence containing the word Pedregal. People shook their heads, until one man shrugged and let loose a torrent of words ending with “dompe.”

The cab was finally empty. Seagulls and plastic bags whirled in the near distance, and she smelled smoke. She was afraid now. They were heading farther away from Tijuana, even from Hector’s aunt. He had to know she was American, even though her grimy jeans and big tee shirt made her fit in here. He glanced in the rear-view mirror as the cab bumped up another hill, another washboard path.

She stared at a group of white crosses with fresh flowers in a deep ravine along the road, and he said, “Agua,” pointing to the hills. “Muerto.”

Water, she thought. Death. Floods.

“Mucho?” he said. “Much cross.” He pointed to shacks, to the sky. “Fuera. Y frio.” He pretended to shiver. Fire. And cold. People had burned in tiny houses. And frozen to death. “Niños,” he said finally. He put his hand out, low.

Children.

Now she hugged herself. Was he giving her a clue? Was he taking her someplace to dump her? For ten dollars? How much was that here, where she didn’t even know what a peso looked like?

They shuddered slowly up the hill, the driver shaking his head ominously, and she realized they were in a pall of thick, dark smoke. One or two shacks, low to the ground like tunnels covered with wooden pallets and cardboard, hugged the ravine not far from the crosses. At the top of the hill, he stopped the car, and she looked out onto the dump.

Dompe. Mountains of trash lay like distant whales breathing smoke from invisible blowholes, and then she saw people walking on the mounds, poking with long sticks, dragging sacks.

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