第 9 页

On our mountain a refrigerator was our most important appliance, piece of furniture, or whatever one wanted to call it. It was our door to the North Pole, polar bears, seals, and glaciers. On a hot day everyone sat around it with the door wide open. During the day we kept our pillows inside to cool them. The cotton pillows rested among cans of beer, a box of eggs, and packets of cheese wrapped in plastic. At night, for an hour or so, our heads would rest on cool cotton. When one side of the pillow warmed up, we’d just flip it over. The pillow cooled down our minds and dreams. My mother was the inventor of this idea. Everyone on the mountain did it.

The refrigerator was one of the main things my mother prayed to. She said that a cold beer could make you love a refrigerator.

My mother poured herself a small shot of tequila and opened the bag of chips with her teeth.

So, what’s up? she asked Mike.

Mike explained that he would meet me down on the highway on Monday morning, which was in two days, and that we’d take the bus together to Acapulco. I had an appointment to meet the family I was going to work with at eleven in the morning. I should pack a bag and be ready to stay there.

I left my mother drinking in our little house and walked Mike some of the way down to the highway. I wanted to ask him about Maria. Now that we no longer went to school, I rarely saw Maria. I didn’t like to go to Maria’s house because it was hard to face the fact that her mother, Luz, had been my father’s mistress. Everyone on the mountain knew the scandal, and Mike knew, of course, as he knew everything about everyone. The only person who did not know who she was, was Maria. The only person who did not know that her harelip had been God’s curse was Maria. I wanted to tell her she was my half-sister and wanted her to love me even more as her sister, but I was so afraid that she would hate me if she knew who she really was.

I told Mike to tell Maria that I wanted to see her. I asked him to tell her to meet me at the schoolroom late that afternoon.

Mike skipped down the mountain to a tune of three cell phones all suddenly ringing at the same time. It was as if the reception dead zone had opened in the air and a phone signal came down on him like lightning.

When I turned to walk back to my house, I remembered the photographs that were still stuffed down the front of my pants. I reached in and took out the square photos printed on soft cardboard.

There were six photographs. One was of a man, who I assumed to be McClane, standing on an airstrip next to a small plane. Two other photographs were of women standing against a wall in groups. Paula was in both of these. Another photograph was of McClane standing in front of a row of medieval suits of armor. It looked as if he was inside a castle.

The last two photographs in the group were of a large red horse trailer. It was a small unit capable of holding two or three horses, the kind that can be pulled by a pickup truck or an SUV. One of the photographs had been taken with care to show the blood spilling out of the door.

When I got back home, my mother was in a frenzy killing flies with a flyswatter. The weather had been so hot over the past month there was an epidemic of flies. These were the fat, juicy kind of flies, with spiky fur on their backs. When this fly bites it leaves a big red welt that hurts for days. There were black, bloody specks all over our kitchen table and floor.

Get down on your knees and pray for the flyswatter, my mother said. Who left the goddamned door open?

You know, I said.

My mother gave me a look, a nasty look, and continued to swat at the flies. I recognized the flyswatter she’d stolen from the Reyes’ house at least two years ago. Pray for the flyswatter, she said.

My mother hated those flies but she loved to kill them. It was a happy bloodbath in that small kitchen.

She knew, what we all knew, the flies always win.

I ran past my mother and the dead black-and-red flies, and hid Paula’s photographs in my room under my mattress.

When I walked back out to the kitchen, my mother was sitting at the table with the flyswatter lying across her lap. Bloody pieces of squashed flies were embedded in the plastic netting. She was taking a deep swig, almost half the bottle of beer, in one great swallow. Then she pulled the bottle from her lips. It made a hollow sucking sound.

I sat down in the middle of the massacre.

I am so angry, my mother said.

What happened?

On the television they were talking about a magazine that is publishing an issue about what it is to be a woman!

So?

I’d tell them the truth.

What’s the truth, Mama?

A woman’s world is in her panties.

Yes?

Do you think those Mexico City women writers are going to write about the sadness? Yes, the sadness when you find there is blood there and this means one thing. You’re beginning to lose your baby!

What are you saying, Mama? I asked.

Between the fly massacre and the rant about panties, I was worried about her. The look in her eyes reminded me of the look she’d had on her face when our mountain was hit by a bad earthquake. Later, after the earthquake, after it was all over, she said we should have known.

Two weeks before the earthquake our little two-room house had been invaded by every creature around. Black widows, red tarantulas, and white transparent and brown scorpions began to show up everywhere. Red ants were crawling all over the ceiling. We found a nest of snakes, like a knot of black ribbons, behind the television.

My mother’s reaction to this was to watch the television all day and all night. She didn’t cook and I had to rummage around for a dry tortilla and cheese and even open up a can of tuna fish, which we would normally never eat because she decided one day that it tasted like cat food. My mother watched television because it was the only way out of our mountain.

As I killed as many insects as I could and ate dried mango strips, she traveled to Petra and visited a family of Bedouins who had been expelled from their cave and were now living in Bedouin Village, which was cement government housing. Their camel lived in their cement garage. My mother traveled to India where she watched medical tourists have cheap operations. She watched the Miss Universe contest. On the History Channel she sat through six episodes on Henry VIII’s wives.

During one of those pre-earthquake days a stray sheep appeared at our doorway. I had gone outside to get away from the television and my mother and there it was, sitting on the ground in the shade of a papaya tree.

When I went inside to tell my mother about it, she just looked through me and said, Next thing you’ll tell me is that Mary and Joseph are outside and need a place to sleep.

These were the first words she’d said in days. But then she turned away from me and looked back at the program on the objects that have been found in the bellies of dead sharks. A man was cutting open the shark’s belly on the deck of a ship and pulling out a wedding ring.

I went outside and gave the sheep some water. The animal lapped it up with its small tongue. It was the first time I’d seen blue eyes in real life and not on television.

When I went back inside the house, the sheep followed me in.

My mother turned and looked at it and said, That is not a sheep, Lady, that’s a lamb, just in time for the slaughter.

I was not exactly sure what she meant by that. It could mean that we were going to kill the lamb and eat it for supper or maybe she was into biblical sayings now that we had become the Noah’s Ark for insects.

Since I had looked into the animal’s blue eyes, I knew I could not eat it. I ended up shooing it out of our house and down the mountain. I hoped a large silver passenger bus on the way to Acapulco did not run over it.

The reason for all that craziness on the mountain was the earthquake. On the news, we heard that the epicenter had been just outside the port of Acapulco.

That’s us, my mother said with excitement. We live outside the port of Acapulco! Of course it was right here, under us!

That earthquake hit at seven thirty that morning. We were having breakfast when our two-room house began to shake. Outside we watched the ground move in waves as if it were made of water.

On the day my mother killed the flies, ranted about praying to panties, and was drinking too much, I felt scared. She was breaking. I could see the shards.

What are you trying to tell me, Mama? I said. Be clear.

My mother threw her head back and rolled her eyes.

Yes, yes, yes. Some days I pulled, tore with my teeth, the skin around the sides of my fingernails and gave them to you to eat.

Are you saying this?

You were not even a year old. I mixed it in the rice. What did you want me to do? There are women who have cut off slabs of skin from their bodies to feed their children. I heard about that on TV.

Shit, Mama, I said.

What’s the difference between that and mother’s milk? You tell me?

No, Mother, I said. Those fancy Mexico City writers are not going to write about that!

God only knew if any of this was true. My mother placed lying in the category of stealing. Why should one tell the truth about something, if you can lie instead? This was her philosophy. If my mother took the bus, she said she took a taxi.

It was going to be a long afternoon until she passed out. The tequila bottle from Paula’s house was empty. My mother stood and took another beer from the fridge.

I killed them, she said, so you can clean them up.

I grabbed an old rag by the sink and started to wipe the dead flies off the chairs, tabletops, and walls.

A few hours later when I left to meet Maria at the schoolroom, my mother was on her fifth beer. She was lying on her bed fanning herself with a piece of cardboard she’d ripped off the side of a cornflakes cereal box. The television was on full blast. In her stupor, she was watching a program about wild animals in the Amazon.

Why doesn’t NatGeo come here and film our mountain? Mother asked.

As I walked away from my house, I stopped and looked back. Our small two-room structure had long rusty girders sticking out toward a second floor that was never built. All the houses on the mountain were like this. We built with the dream of a second floor. But, instead of second floors, we all had parabolic antennas. If our mountain were seen from space, it would look like a white land made of thousands of opened umbrellas.

Maria was at the schoolroom. She was sitting at her old desk and looked like a portrait of our childhood. Her hair was fixed up in a round bun at the top of her head. We called this her onion hairdo. It was pulled so tight she could not blink properly.

Every time I looked at her, and saw my father in her face, I had to stop myself from telling her the truth. Sometimes I even thought that the only reason I could remember what my father looked like was because Maria was there to remind me. When my mother found out that my father had another family over there she burned all his photographs on the stove, just like tortillas. One after the other they curled and toasted on the stovetop until they turned into black, gray ash. I watched his Sinatra smile and my birthday cakes and birthday balloons float out the door in smoke.

The scar from Maria’s harelip had faded. But when I looked at her I always saw the old face, the vulnerable old face that was mythical and painful. The scar had gone, but that harelip still made her who she was.

I sat down at my old school desk right next to hers. We had sat like this for years. Our dry, scratchy, little-girl elbows used to touch as we practiced our penmanship and numbers. In this room we had been able to leave our homes and the jungle and dream about a different kind of life.

Maria told me that Augusta, Estefani’s mother, was running a high fever and that they were leaving tomorrow morning for Mexico City where there was an AIDS charity that gave her the pills she needed. Augusta had been sick with AIDS now for over six years and these trips back and forth to the city had become routine.

I told Maria that Paula and Concha had left the mountain forever.

I told Maria about the photographs. When Maria heard about the photographs she stood up.

Ruth? Maria said. Did you ask about Ruth?

On the mountain everyone was sure that the disappearance of Ruth and the stealing of Paula were related.

I shook my head.

I didn’t ask. I’m sorry, I said.

I watched Maria rub her finger over her harelip scar. The day of the operation I watched my mother and Ruth smoke a whole pack of Salem cigarettes. The menthol smoke filled the beauty parlor. As little girls Maria and I used to steal the butts from Ruth’s ashtray and suck on the filters as if they were a Halls Mentho-Lyptus. I could taste the mint filters as I looked at Maria’s face.

Did you look at them carefully? Did you look and see if one of the women in the photos was Ruth?

No.

Let’s go.

We stood and marched out of the schoolroom toward my house. We walked quickly, almost skipping, filled with the hope of finding Ruth’s face in the photographs. In our foolish dream we ran through the jungle filled with a silly joy.

It was that fast, fast like an arm that becomes a snake. Her arm moved. I saw the shadow on the wall and then, so fast, like when a scorpion lifts up its tail or an iguana zaps its tongue out into a hive-like vapor of gnats. That fast. My mother had the small silver pistol in her hand and everything was ready. It was as if the whole Sierra Madre grew still. I heard the sound of crushed bone and that was a sound I’d never heard before.

I heard the sound of crushed bone as that bullet went into Maria, into my half-sister, into my father’s other daughter, into the daughter that looked just like him.

This can happen after ten bottles of beer mixed with tequila. If they’d drawn my mother’s blood into a syringe, her blood would have been yellow. If her blood had been placed in a test tube and held up to the light it would have been pure Corona. But no one would do a test or call the police on our mountain.

Calling the police was like inviting a scorpion into your house. Who does that? my mother always said.

What happened to my mother that afternoon? The light held that moment between afternoon and dusk. In that light, that is almost not light, who did she think was at her threshold?

I knelt beside Maria and looked into my father’s face. I looked at her face and it was like looking into a lake. Under the surface, as if I could see a lakebed of stones and silver fish, I could see her torn face, the stitches, and the scars of the harelip.

I could feel the warm blood in my hands as I opened her clothes to look at the wound.

When Maria opened her eyes we looked at each other.

What was that? she asked.

Where the hell did you get that gun, Mother? I spat the words at my mother as I placed my hand around Maria’s waist.