Cover Page

midnight cactus

Also by Bella Pollen

All About Men

Hunting Unicorns

Daydream Girl

midnight cactus

bella pollen

BLACK CAT
New York

Dedication

For my husband,

David,

and my children,

Mabel, Finn, Sam and Jesse

Why is it that society exalts imitation rebels but is so intolerant of the real ones?

Dale Maharidge,
The Last Great American Hobo

Prologue

Once there was a way to get back homewards
Once there was a way to get back home
Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry
And I will sing a lullabyee

The Beatles, ‘Golden Slumbers’

The Border, 1983

It starts raining on the mountain first. Clouds which have been hovering since early afternoon finally crack open and spew their contents in a freak summer storm that lasts no longer than twenty minutes. It’s June and there’s been not a hint of rain since spring. In truth there’s precious little of the stuff now, an inch – an inch and a quarter tops, but this is more than enough. The creosote bush, school bully of desert plants, whose twisted yellow petals are currently in bloom, is the first to suck up the spoils of the storm. Next, a Gila monster, stomping belligerently from its shelter, absorbs the water through the pores of its blotched skin. Surfacing from deep under the sand where it has burrowed to escape the sun, the stink beetle fractionally tilts its shell to allow the raindrops to trickle down its legs and into its waiting mouth. Soaring ten feet above, a saguaro cactus collects its own drops and transports them to its roots via a thousand needles, affording this hoary old veteran of the desert its survival for another year.

Less than a mile away, Estella, a young Mexican girl, will not be so lucky.

Estella has no ingenious method of survival at her fingertips. Right now her best chance is brute will. She is desperate and desperation leads to blind faith and whatever religion sustains it, so as she picks her way carefully through the cholla, carrying her two-year-old son, feeling for holes in the ground with the toe of one sandalled foot and keeping a fearful eye out for snakes, she prays. She casts her devout net wide, sending out entreaties to Our Lady of Sorrows, to Mary the Blessed Mother, to the Virgin Sagrada; and, just in case, she directs an extra missive to Santa Elena, Discoverer of the Cross, perhaps reflecting that she too had the temerity to fall in love with a man outside her social status – and no one could say things hadn’t turned out well for her.