American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (16 page)

‘You feel the threat has followed you?’

Lydia nods very slightly. ‘Yes. I mean, he doesn’t know where we are right now. But it was a very powerful man who did this. His influence extends all the way to
el norte
. And he won’t stop looking until he finds us.’

‘Do you know which
plazas
belong to him, or who his allies are in other organizations?’ the nun asks. ‘Do you know which routes are safe for you to travel without his
halcones
?’

Lydia feels that this room has the sanctity of a confessional. ‘No,’ she whispers. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

‘You are a long way from home,’ the nun says. ‘He cannot find you here. You are safe here.’

Luca’s crayon makes no sound behind her. The nun puts her pen in the cup beside her phone and tucks the paperwork into the folder. Then she stretches her hands across the desk toward Lydia, who takes them in hers, and bows her head. When Lydia closes her eyes, she realizes her hands are trembling. Hermana Cecilia’s fingers are cool to the touch.

‘
Padre nuestro,
bless these children with your love and grace. Protect them from any further harm, God, and provide them with comfort in their time of unspeakable grief. May Jesus walk the road with them and repair their broken hearts. May Mother Mary sweep all dangers from their road ahead and lead them safely where they’re going.
Padre nuestro,
these two faithful servants have shouldered more than their share of life’s burdens already. Please, God, may you see fit to relieve them of any further torment, yet not as we will it, but as thy will be done. In Jesus’s name, Amen.’

‘Amen,’ Lydia says.

Behind her at the little desk, with closed eyes and clutched crayon, Luca is moving his lips.

Hermana Cecilia leans forward one last time. ‘Be careful who you talk to,’ she says.

That night Lydia wakes to the sound of raised voices in the corridor. She sits up in the half-light of the bunk room and notices several other women popping up from their beds as well. They move silently to check on their children, who sleep through the ruckus. Luca is above her in the top bunk, so Lydia has to disentangle her leg from the backpack strap she wrapped around it before she fell asleep. She stands, her bare feet cool against the tile floor, and reaches for his rumpled covers. Luca is not there. Panic rises in her throat.

‘Luca!’

She checks her own bed again without meaning to, and then the surrounding beds as well. As if her child is an item she’s unthinkingly misplaced. A cell phone, a book. A pair of glasses. There’s a window on the door that leads to the corridor, and a rectangle of light shining through it. Lydia, without shoes or a bra, bolts toward that patch of light.

This is Luca’s third trip to the bathroom since they got into bed a few hours ago. The murky lemonade returns. Being on the top bunk has made his frequent sprints to the toilet extra challenging, but Mami’s so exhausted that she never wakes, not even when he nearly steps on her shoulder as he clambers down, not even when he lands with an indelicate thump just inches from her head, not even as he runs – the prickly, imbalanced gait of the diarrhetically infirm – from bunk to bathroom and back again.

He’s just washed his hands and returned to the fluorescent light of the hallway when he sees Padre Rey and Néstor talking to a young man in the doorway of the men’s bunk room. Luca recognizes the young man as a migrant who arrived late that afternoon, before dinner. He’s wearing long, red shorts and a white T-shirt, socks but no shoes, and he’s carrying his backpack in front of him, unzipped. There’s a pair of clean, expensive, white sneakers on the floor beside him.

‘At least let me get dressed first,’ he says. ‘Man, this is bullshit. You’re supposed to help people.’

Néstor steps behind him into the darkened interior of the dorm room, between the man and the sleeping migrants beyond.

‘We can talk further, but not here. You are disturbing the whole
facility,’ Padre Rey says calmly. ‘Please, just come with us to the main room, where we can talk without waking everyone.’

‘This is bullshit, Padre, that
puta
is lying,’ the man says, raising his voice to a shout. ‘Bullshit!’

Inside the dorm room, several men get out of their bunks and stand alongside Néstor, creating a kind of wall. They cross their arms, plant their legs wide. Luca stays frozen in his spot beside the bathroom door. He should turn and go the other way. He should scoot down the hall and back to the women and children’s room, he should climb back up past Mami’s head and settle himself into the covers, where he should allow his body, temporarily relieved of stomach cramps, to rest. But he’s paralyzed, transfixed. He’s unaware of his own racing pulse, his shallow breath, his fingers scrabbling into the smooth seams between the painted cinder blocks of the wall behind him.

‘
¡Chinga tu madre!
’ the young man yells.

‘Let’s go,
hermano
.’ It’s the first time Luca has heard Néstor use his voice. It’s as solidly built as his body. ‘Don’t make it harder than it has to be.’

The young man stoops and grabs his sneakers with one hand as Néstor and the other men close the distance behind him, encouraging him into the hallway without touching him. When he straightens to follow Padre Rey down the corridor, Luca notes the shape of a sickle tattoo with three bloodred droplets on the blade jutting out from the man’s
sock. It’s carved into the calf muscle of his right leg. Luca doesn’t know what the tattoo means, exactly, but he doesn’t need to understand it for it to amplify his sense of dread. That bloody sickle unsticks Luca from the wall and sends him dashing down the hallway back to the women’s dorm. He runs bang into Mami as he barrels through the door.

‘Luca,’ she says. ‘Oh my God, Luca, where were you?’ She doesn’t wait for an answer. Her hands are on his shoulders, and she places him farther inside the room before sticking her head out into the hallway to see what all the noise is about, but all she can see is Néstor and a few other men following Padre Rey toward the front of the building. She goes back inside and allows the door to click shut behind her. Luca is trembling.

‘What happened?’ she whispers.

He shakes his head.

‘But what was all the shouting about?’

He shakes again, and his face looks all carved up with worry.

‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’

She pulls him into her arms and crushes his head against her chest. His little arms reach around behind her and cling. They stay like that until she lifts him under the armpits. He’s too big for it, and his weight is enough that she struggles beneath it. But he wraps his legs around her waist, and she carries him back to their bunk. He doesn’t go up to the top bed this time. She makes her body into a shield behind and around him. She wraps one arm and leg over the top of his small figure, makes her breath deep and slow for him, so that his breath will line up with hers, so that he’ll rest and sleep. But Lydia stays vigilant until morning.

Chapter Thirteen

The first time a head turned up by itself on the street in
Acapulco, it was a big deal. It was a twenty-two-year-old head, with curly black hair shaved close on the sides and left long on top. It had a small gold hoop earring in its right ear. Its eyelids swelled and its tongue protruded from its mouth. It was left on top of a public phone booth outside Pizza Hut, right next to the Diana Cazadora fountain. Rolled up and stuck into the corner of its mouth like a cigarette was a note that read: ‘
Me gusta hablar
.’ I like to talk.

The woman who found the head as she walked home from her shift as a night nurse at the Hospital del Pac
í
fico was not a woman ordinarily horror-struck by the sight of blood. But that day, just as dawn tipped its westerly light across the pavements of Acapulco, causing the head to throw its queer, bodiless shadow from atop the phone booth and toward the feet of that weary nurse, she screamed, dropped her purse, and ran three blocks before retrieving her phone from her pocket and calling the police. The officers descended; the media swarmed. People passing through the area on their way to work or school were aghast. They took the time to get down on their knees and bless themselves, to offer up some thorough prayers on behalf of the anonymous soul who had once belonged to that head. It was famous.

Until the second one.

By the time the head count reached a dozen, a shameful, self-protective apathy began to spread in the gut of the city so that, in the mornings, when a call would come in that a head had been found, on the beach or at
el z
ó
calo
or on the green of the ninth hole at
el club de golf,
the dispatcher answering the phone would sometimes make a joke.

‘Go for the putter. That hole is an easy par three.’

Back then, Sebasti
á
n had been the first one to recognize it for what it was: the city’s steep, wholesale descent into the maw of the warring cartels. While other journalists were reluctant to acquiesce to the truth of their collapsing reality, Sebasti
á
n shouted it from his headlines:

cartels
exhibit
brutal
surge
in
violence

terror
and
impunity:
cartels
get
away
with
murder

And most dramatically, after a particularly bad weekend, which saw the murders of two journalists, a city councilwoman, three shopkeepers, two bus drivers, a priest, an accountant, and a child holding a cob of buttered corn on the beach, his sandy feet still damp from the ocean, a simple pronouncement in two-inch letters:

ACAPULCO FALLS

That Monday morning Lydia sat behind her register in the bookshop reading her husband’s unflinching account of the weekend’s murders while her tea turned cold and bitter in its cup. She’d found it particularly difficult to leave Luca at the school gate that morning. She’d gripped his tiny hand with ferocity and rubbed the bumps of his knuckles with her thumb while they walked. Luca had pretended not to notice, but he’d swung his lunch box more vigorously than usual. When she kissed him goodbye at the gate, she spotted a powdering of dried toothpaste along his bottom lip. She licked her thumb and smeared it away, while he protested the gesture as
asqueroso
. Gross. Perhaps he had a point. But he’d kissed her back anyway, his lips all gloppy and wet, and for once, Lydia didn’t discreetly wipe away the trail he left on her cheek. For once, she didn’t turn and hurry off the moment he darted past the principal and into the courtyard. She waited there instead, one hand flat against the cinder block wall, and gazed after him. She didn’t turn away until his little green-and-white uniform became invisible amid a sea of others.

To Lydia, the change had felt sudden, lurching. She’d gone to bed the night before in the same city where she’d been born and raised, where she’d lived her entire life except for the brief spin of years through college in Mexico City. Her dreams had been populated by the same whipped current of ocean air, the same bright, liquid colors, the same thrumming beats and aromas of her childhood, the same languorous swaying of hips that had always defined the pace of life here in this place she knew so well. Sure, there had been new violence, an unfamiliar hitch of anxiety. Sure, crime was on the rise. But until that morning, the truth had felt insulated beneath the illusory film of Acapulco’s previous immunity. And then Sebasti
á
n’s headline had ripped that protective skin away. All at once, the people had to look and to see. They could pretend no longer:
Acapulco Falls
. Briefly, Lydia hated her husband for that headline. She hated his editor.

‘I mean, it’s a little melodramatic, don’t you think?’ she’d challenged him when he stopped by the shop to pick her up for lunch. She flipped the sign to read
cerrado
and then locked the door behind them.

Sebasti
á
n frowned at her. ‘Actually, I don’t think it can be melodramatic enough. I don’t think words exist that can sufficiently capture the atrocity of what’s happening here.’ He slung his hands into his pockets and watched her face as they walked. He spoke carefully, endeavoring to suppress the accusatory note in his voice, but it was there. She could hear it. ‘You don’t agree? That it’s unspeakably horrific?’ A kind of mild, repressed superiority.

‘I mean, of course I do, Sebasti
á
n. It’s insane.’ She dropped her keys into her bag and wouldn’t meet his eye. ‘But
Acapulco Falls
? Like
Rome is burning
? I mean, look around. It’s a regular day, the sun is shining. Look, there are tourists.’ She nodded toward a caf
é
on the corner where a group of rowdy
estadounidenses
sat at an outdoor table in the shade of an awning.

There were several nearly empty carafes of wine on their table. ‘We should get one of those,’ Sebasti
á
n said.

And though it was not yet noon, Lydia agreed, and they mostly drank their lunch that day instead of eating it. She cut her eyes at him across the table and did not say the things she wanted to say, that it was asinine of him to write this stuff, that he was turning himself into a target, that she wanted no part of his righteous campaign of truth, that she hoped he was satisfied with his byline and that it was worth the danger. She did not say:
You are a father. You are a husband.
But he felt all of it there, in the angle of her gaze across the table. And he didn’t respond by condemning her lack of courage. He didn’t bristle against her resentment or pick at the waiting scab. He knew her vigilance was not a shortcoming. He held her hand across the table and studied his menu in silence.

‘I think I’ll have the soup,’ he said.

That was more than a year and a half before she’d met Javier. But thinking back on it now, from the bottom bunk of the women’s room at the Casa del Migrante in Huehuetoca with Luca sleeping heavily on her arm, she wonders if Javier had anything to do with those first heads, if he saw them or sanctioned them, if he swung the weapon responsible for severing one of them from its body.
Of course he did,
she thinks.
He must have
. What was once inconceivable now seems foolishly plain.
Por Dios,
how would her life be different at this very moment if she’d accepted that truth sooner?

There was a time once, perhaps a year ago, when a customer came into her shop on a windy day, his hair tossed up in a mess, and his cheeks reddened by the wind. A shiver of animation skated in on his shoulders. He was agitated and spoke quickly to Lydia. There’d been a shooting a few blocks away. Some men had pulled up on a motorcycle and shot a local journalist twelve times in the head. The man was still lying there dead in the street.

‘Who was it, who was it?’

The customer shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Some reporter.’

Lydia bolted. She grabbed her cell phone and ran outside. She left the man standing at her counter unattended. She left without ringing up his purchases. She hit Sebasti
á
n’s number while she ran down the street. Straight to voicemail. She panicked and cried out. When she got to the corner, she realized she didn’t know which way she was running.
Where was this shooting? Which street? She turned in circles. Hit redial. Straight to voicemail. The shopkeepers were standing in their doorways.

‘Where was it?’ she asked the shoe store owner and she hit Sebasti
á
n’s number for a third time. Voicemail. The shoe salesman pointed, and Lydia ran. She turned another corner and another, hitting redial all the time. She called out for directions as she ran, and people pointed, and she kept going, and she kept hitting redial and she kept running, and then she stopped when she got to the street where
la polic
í
a
were just pulling up, where a crowd of onlookers had gathered in a clump around the body. She stopped because she didn’t want to go any closer. She didn’t want to see. Her husband lying there in the puddle of his spent life. Her thumb was cold as she redialed Sebasti
á
n’s number three more times. Voicemail. She was crying before she approached, her hair stringing across her face in the wind, collecting her tears. She clasped the cell phone with both hands in front of her. She walked the double yellow line like it was the plank of a ship, her legs wilty beneath her.

And then it was not him. There was so much blood that it was at first difficult to ascertain, but within a few moments she could see clearly, no, those were not his shoes. No, Sebasti
á
n’s hair was not that length, his legs were not that thick. Oh my God, the relief. It was not him. She cried harder and harder. It was not him. A stranger scooped Lydia into her big, doughy arms then and held her while she cried. The woman was enormous and smelled of powder, and Lydia did not resist her emphatic embrace, nor did she correct the woman’s assumption that her breakdown was caused by some familiarity with the deceased reporter. After all, that notion did feel approximately true. So Lydia allowed the stranger to comfort her, to murmur over her tears, to offer her the kindness of a tissue from the pocket of her sweater, and in a few minutes it was all over. For Lydia. It was some other widow’s turn that day. And when she finally extracted herself from the stranger’s arms, Lydia’s body felt jerky and clattery with adrenaline as she walked the several blocks back to her shop to find that her customer had left his money, plus a little extra, on the counter beside the register.

She’s still afraid that, one day, it will be Sebasti
á
n. She’s been afraid for so long that now she can’t catch up to the facts: it was already him, and the rest of her family. It really did happen; all those years of worry did not prevent it. And not only Sebasti
á
n, but Mam
á
, too, and Yemi and her beautiful children, and none of them had chosen to marry Sebasti
á
n, or to take on the risks of his profession as their own. Only she had done that, and now her family had paid for her choice. The fears of her past and the horrors of her present are so mixed up they feel like the unmatching pieces of a
rompecabezas,
like she’s trying to piece together things that were never meant to fit.

Perhaps she’s just not ready. Lydia knows the stages of grief, and this is denial. Instead of acceptance she wants to recall Sebasti
á
n’s face, lunch that day in the caf
é
, the boyish tilt of his posture at the small table after their first glass of wine. They’d laughed together, and Sebasti
á
n had made a show of looking discreetly down her top, of rubbing her thigh beneath the table, of asking if she wanted to head back to the shop early so he could help her ‘check inventory’. But in the slick heat of the memory that follows, she cannot conjure Sebasti
á
n’s face. The absolute absence of him feels like unmitigated terror.

Lydia is startled by the lateness of the daylight when she opens her eyes, and for a moment, she doesn’t know where she is. Luca is already awake beside her, watching her, his black eyes clear through the curtain of his sleep-sticky lashes. She can smell something cooking, and there’s the distant clinking of forks against dishes. ‘Come on, let’s get some food.’ She sits up, but then leans back and presses her lips against the warm expanse of Luca’s cheek. There’s such comfort there that she stays for a minute, her hands against the softness of his skin.

Luca sits bolt upright in bed, his hands flying up to his head to confirm what he already knows, that Papi’s hat is not there. He wears it even when he sleeps now, and when he has to remove it to shower, he makes Lydia hold it in her hands until he comes out. She’s not allowed even to set it down. Neither is she allowed to put it on her own head, because it must maintain the precise smell of Papi mingled with Luca, a mix that Luca is very pleased to note has not diminished but only intensified in the time he’s been wearing it. Perhaps Papi’s smell is also his smell, and he can keep enhancing it by its continued use. They mustn’t accidentally introduce any new ingredients, therefore, to corrupt the purity of the hat. It must’ve fallen off last night, when he was sleeping, or during one of his many trips up and down from the top bunk to the bathroom.