What the Moon Saw Page 9

  “The goats are ready to move on,” he said.

  “What do you do with the goats?” I was stalling. I didn’t want him to leave.

  “I make sure they don’t get eaten by coyotes or mountain cats. I take them to places with shrubs to eat and keep them out of the cornfields and make sure none wander off. Very exciting.” He laughed.

  “Oh.” The waves were still moving inside me. There was a silence while I searched for something else to say.

  “Well, thank you for listening, Clara.” He slung the guitar across his back.

  “Pedro.” I stood up. My legs felt shaky. Why was my body acting this way? “Can I walk with you?”

  He nodded and smiled. His teeth were as straight as if he’d just gotten braces off, although I doubted his family could have afforded braces for him. “You know my name?”

  “My grandparents guessed it was you,” I said. “You know my name too.”

  “Your grandmother told me she was inviting you here. And every time I saw your grandfather, he told me exactly how many days left until you came. Then last Saturday at the market, everyone was talking about the American girl. I knew it must be Clara Luna.”

  I felt my face grow warm. “That’s weird you think of me as American. Back home when I meet new kids, they ask if I’m Mexican. Or they just say, ‘What are you?’”

  We were quiet for a moment as we climbed up a steep part.

  “What do you think you are?” he asked.

  I thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I can only see myself from the inside.”

  “What do you see?”

  “A person who likes to draw maps.” I laughed. “And who likes chocolate and birds.” I paused. Something about the way he listened made me want to tell him things I wouldn’t think about telling anyone else, things I used to tell Samantha before she changed, things I used to tell Dad before I changed. “I’m more than that,” I added. “I’m someone who swims in the forest when everyone else is asleep.” I wondered if he’d think I was a lunatic.

  He nodded like that was the most natural thing in the world. “And maybe there’s more that you haven’t figured out yet.”

  I gave him a sideways glance. “What about you? Who are you?”

  “A smelly goat-boy from Yucuyoo. Almost fifteen years old, with no father and no money and nothing. Nothing except for my mother and my guitar.” He was smiling a little, so it was hard to tell if he was serious.

  “Is that what you see from the inside?” I asked.

  He paused. “Here in Yucuyoo we have a saying: The land is our body and its streams are our blood. And its waterfalls, our pulse.” He stretched up and brushed his hands through the leaves over our heads. “That’s what I see from the inside.”

  It seemed like a good opportunity to ask him about the waterfall sound, but then I reminded myself that finding the waterfall was my own secret mission, so instead I said, “You’re a singer, too.”

  “A listener,” he said, after a moment. “I listen to things and try to turn them into music.”

  I lay in bed that night trying to untangle Pedro’s smells. There was the sour goat smell and the clean fruit smell of his soap. There was the smell of damp wood soaked up from nights sleeping in his cabin and morning trips to gather firewood for his mother. Maybe that was why bits of bark clung to his hair. And there was a brown sugar smell that his skin just seemed to give off.

  Pedro’s pointy shoes with that decorative fringe looked like something my American grandfather might wear Friday nights out at the Budget Buffet. Pedro wore them with white sports socks that bunched out over the sides, exactly the kind of thing that kids would tease him about if he spent even one recess at Walnut Hill Middle School. Since he was almost fifteen years old, he’d be going into tenth grade. This fall would start my first year of high school, so I couldn’t imagine what high schoolers would say about those socks, but I suspected they wouldn’t be any kinder than middle schoolers. Pedro must have shined the shoes that morning, because they still gave off the faint smell of polish. That smell made me want to hug him.

  Of course, I wouldn’t hug him. He didn’t seem like the kind of boy I’d have a crush on. At school, there was a circle of popular boys who nearly every girl drooled over. Those boys only went out with the popular girls who nearly every boy drooled over. In my case, I’d chosen Mark G. to like, and Samantha had chosen Mike M., and we both knew that since we weren’t popular, they’d never like us back. All the same, Samantha and I passed notes all day long, in code, with the guys’ names backward. Kram looked soooo good today! or I’m soooo in love with Ekim. It’s true, I admired how they strutted around in their name-brand clothes, how they slouched, impossibly cool, in their chairs and flirted with teachers. But crushes on them were like crushes on movie stars: fun, but hopeless.

  Once I said to Samantha, “What if the unpopular girls and unpopular guys went out with each other? Then we could all have real live boyfriends.” She rolled her eyes at me. “Clara, the unpopular guys are all dorks!” She would definitely write Pedro off as a dork. Friend material, maybe, she would say. But a boyfriend? Ugh! With that stinky shoe gunk?

  It was the pungent smell of Pedro’s shoe polish that made me think of Dad. He polished his shoes every morning too, only he wore big clomping boots. Every morning he smeared them with brown goop and then rubbed them hard with scraps of old sheets. I loved watching the way his wrists gave the rags expert flicks. Then he would carefully scrub his hands with soap in the bathroom sink and leave for work in his red truck. He spent his days planting and digging in other people’s yards. By the time he came home, the boots would be dull again and he’d stick them in the garage. He’d come in wearing socks and slippers, hug me, and give me a smooth stone or a single flower or a dried cicada shell or a broken blue eggshell, whatever small thing he’d found that day. When I was little, these presents thrilled me as much as a trip to the toy store, but as I grew older, I saw that my other friends’ parents got them highlighter pens or dry-erase boards or little sticky notepads, all with fancy company logos on them. Dad’s wilted flowers and bug carcasses started to seem pitiful.

  All last year I’d wished for a father like Samantha’s, who left for an office every weekday at 8:20 in a silvery four-door car with plush seats. Not a father who came home from work in a red truck with LUNA LANDSCAPING stenciled on the door, a father with soil under his fingernails, grass stains on his jeans, burs and thorns stuck to his socks.

  Mom loved this about him, how he always brought bits of nature into the house with him. That was what made her fall in love with him. I loved hearing the story of how they fell in love. When I was little, I would ask to hear it as a bedtime story. It sounded like a fairy tale to me. Dad did lawn maintenance at Mom’s apartment complex while she was in graduate school. When he found out she was studying to be a teacher, he asked her if she could tutor him in English. He worked as a dishwasher at night, he said, so he only had Saturday mornings off, and could she teach him then? She looked at the burs stuck to his pants and breathed in the fresh grass and earth smell that clung to him, and saw how sincere he was and said yes.

  Every Saturday he showed up at her door, freshly showered, smelling of shoe polish and soap. She smiled at the neat comb lines in his hair and the ironed creases in his button-down shirt. Every Saturday he brought her a small present—a bouquet of wildflowers, a woven wreath of daisies, an abandoned bird’s nest. Sometimes they went for a walk after their lesson or had brunch with Mom’s parents. When Dad asked Mom how her parents felt about him being an immigrant, she looked him straight in the eyes and said, without a pause, “They admire you. My ancestors came from other countries too. France and Norway and Wales. Most Americans have immigrant roots, you know.”

  All week long she counted the days to their next lesson, and during the lesson, she wished she could stretch out time. One day, Dad offered her a pinecone and said, “Look at how perfect the spiral is.” She watched his face watching the pinecone. A
nd she realized she wanted always to feel the way she felt when she looked at his face. That was my cue to end the bedtime story: “And then you were in love!” I shouted triumphantly. “And then we were in love,” she whispered, and kissed me goodnight.

  Days passed. I saw Pedro every afternoon on the mountain. He showed me how to weave petates out of palm. At first he’d tried to teach me how to make a hat like his, but after a few tries that turned out like sloppy birds’ nests, we realized I’d have to start small. So we worked on miniature petates. My fingers were clumsy, and none of the edges turned out straight. I ended up with tiny amoeba-shaped coasters—presents for Mom, I decided. Pedro laughed a lot too, like my grandparents, only he wasn’t as hyper as Abuelo. When Pedro laughed his eyes crinkled up, the way they did when he sang or listened to me talk. Watching his eyes crinkle gave me a warm, liquidy feeling. I wondered if he felt that way when he watched me laugh.

  I showed him how to do origami, which I’d learned from a book Dad got me for Christmas last year. After fifteen minutes Pedro had mastered the swan and dragon and was already inventing new ones—scorpions and guitars. His fingers moved as quickly as they did plucking guitar strings or weaving hats.

  Every day we followed the goats around. I called “Chchchchchivo” when they wandered, and they even began listening to me. Sometimes Pedro would ask me what my life was like in Maryland, and I’d try to explain how everyone had a cell phone with call-waiting and redial and caller ID, and computers and e-mail and Internet and DVDs, and how you have to remember numbers and codes and passwords for everything.

  He would ask a few questions and then suddenly stop. His eyes would lose their crinkle, and the rosiness would leave his cheeks. He’d begin walking a few steps ahead of me in the middle of the trail, leaving no room for me to walk next to him. I’d straggle behind, watching his hair poke out below his hat, watching him take long strides in his old red pants and black shoes. I’d promise myself not to talk about the U.S. again. But it always came up. It was part of who I was, like it or not.

  “Is Mexico how you thought it would be?” Pedro asked me one day.

  I shook my head. I didn’t even have to think about that one. I was sketching a picture of him with that high rock face in the background. I’d already done the nooks and crags, the plants growing out of the cracks, the vines hanging down like a woman’s hair—that part had taken me a while. The rock face was almost a real face, with lines and wrinkles, and holes like eyes and ears. Now I was sketching in the strong arch of Pedro’s eyebrows, leading down into the shadow under his cheekbones. I could fill up my whole sketchbook with pictures of Pedro and not get tired of it.

  “Don’t move your mouth so much, Pedro!” I laughed.

  “Well, what did you expect Yucuyoo to be like?” he asked through his teeth, trying to keep from smiling.

  “Like the Mexico in Disney World. You walk around a lake and stop in all these pretend countries. What I remember from Mexico was a bunch of ladies in ruffly white skirts and two braids and lots of lipstick. They danced around with giant white smiles. And there were burros dressed up in red and green and white blankets.”

  He let out a smirk.

  “Ped-ro! Hold still if you want this to turn out good!”

  “Okay, okay!” he said, trying not to move his mouth. “And then you came here and saw these shacks made of metal scraps and cardboard.”

  I smiled. “And no dressed-up burros!”

  He did not smile back. “And you see me with this old orange shirt that says—how did you say it in English—‘Rrrrockveel Soccerrr League.’ Probably a rich boy in your country decided he didn’t like it anymore.”

  I stopped drawing. My pencil hovered over the paper. His voice had turned bitter.

  “And his mother gave it to a secondhand store, and somehow it made its way down here, and a mother bought it, and her first son wore it, then her second son, then her third son, then her sister’s son, and then her neighbor’s son, and that’s me, and here it is.”

  His eyes were changing somehow as he talked. I erased the eyes, blew off the dust, and tried to get them right. I studied him closely. Where had those new shadows come from?

  “You’re moving again, Pedro,” I said softly.

  “You’re wondering how a goat-boy like me knows that, aren’t you? Well, my friends’ fathers have been to Chicago and Los Angeles and they bring back new T-shirts with the tags on that still smell like the store.”

  “I wasn’t wondering that, Pedro,” I said.

  “I know all about your country. My friends’ fathers send back videos of their big apartments and giant TVs. I know all about it, even though you think I’m just a goat-boy.”

  “I don’t think that.” I wanted to ask him, What about your own father? Where is he? Why doesn’t he send videos? But I had the feeling that if I asked him this, he would snap and growl at me like a cornered dog. So I held my tongue.

  I wanted that lightness to come back into his eyes. For a few minutes I sketched a line here, erased it, sketched another one there, erased it. It was strange how someone’s face could be warm one minute, and the next, cold as stone.

  Finally, I decided to change the subject to something that would make him happy. He loved his guitar, so I said, in a strained voice, “Where’d you get your guitar from?”

  “Marcos. My sixth-grade teacher. When he was eighteen, he taught for a year here in Yucuyoo. Everyone here loved him.”

  Pedro was moving his face too much now for me to finish the drawing. But at least his eyes had more life. I set my pencil down.

  “Marcos taught me to play guitar.” Pedro picked out a few notes on his guitar, and I wished he would start playing and singing and looking into my eyes. But he kept his eyes on his fingers. “When Marcos left at the end of the school year, everyone threw him a big fiesta. The women made tamales, and the men roasted two goats in his honor. The band played songs and he danced with even the oldest ladies and the littlest girls. When he left, people cried for days. Marcos gave me his guitar the day before he went away. Instead of crying, I played it all the time.”

  “Do you think he’ll come back?”

  Pedro shrugged. “Who knows,” he said flatly. “I’m used to it now. Everyone I care about leaves.” He gave me a cold look. “They go away and forget about Yucuyoo.”

  His face had changed again. The shadows were back. He sighed like an old, tired man. “Did you finish the drawing?”

  “No. It’s about to rain. I’ll do it later.”

  But I never did. I could never draw him in a way that satisfied me. Whenever I thought I’d captured something on paper, his expression changed, and I’d think, No, that’s not him, that’s not him at all.

  “What do you know about Marcos?” I asked Abuelita. We were washing clothes by the banana tree. Well, she was washing and I was watching.

  She thought about my question. She sprinkled white powder into the concrete sink, and with a gourd, added water from the giant metal barrel that collected rain.

  “Marcos was a poet,” she said finally. “A poet with plans to change the world. And maybe he did, the year he was here. In his own way.”

  “How?”

  “He taught Pedro many things. He taught Pedro that while his roots grow deep into the darkness, his face turns to the light.” She scrubbed my jeans, which were coated with mud and turned the water brown. “Pedro’s father left when Pedro was a small child, you see. When you feel that life has treated you badly, it is easy, so easy, to let your heart fill with anger. Marcos showed Pedro how to fill his heart with music instead.”

  “But then Marcos left him.”

  Abuelita wrung out the jeans and set them aside, then moved on to my orange sweatshirt. “Yes, Marcos was a boy from the city, you see. How could he stay in our village his whole life? But, oh, what goodness he left behind. He told Pedro, ‘Stay in school and help me change the world.’ Three boys in Pedro’s class studied past their eighth year of school. Pedro was
one of them. All the other boys stopped to help their families in the fields. During the school year, Pedro wakes up before dawn and gathers firewood for his mother. Then he takes the goats out with his books. Then he goes to school with his books. Then he takes the goats out again with his books until darkness falls.”

  I thought of how much I complained to Dad about my only two chores—taking out the trash and the recycling. A little wave of shame swept over me. Abuelita wrung out my green sweater and put it on top of the pile of clothes. She took a gourdful of water and rinsed the rest of the suds down the hole in the sink. The water poured out below into a mud puddle, and little rivers trickled past the banana tree down the slope. Then she plugged up the hole with a wad of cloth and poured clear water into the sink. She added the clothes to rinse them. She did this all so fast, you could tell she’d been doing it all her life. It occurred to me that maybe I should pay attention so that I could do a load of laundry now and then.

  “Your grandfather and I, we are glad for your friendship with Pedro.” She swished the clothes around in the water and squeezed out the last of the suds. “We were worried he would be hard on you.”

  “Hard on me? How?”

  “Oh, his life has not been easy.” She said this slowly, and I could tell she was thinking hard about what words to use.

  “When people here think of your country, they think of money, of streets paved with gold, and diamonds on the trees.” She twisted out the clothes one last time and piled them in a bucket. She carried it over to the clothesline, and together, we began pinning up the clothes.