American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (18 page)

Lydia stands, too, so she can see where the girl is pointing.

‘The train always slows down for a curve. When it’s a big curve, it slows way down. So we know it’ll be going slow when it passes. And then the next thing is to make sure there are no other hazards ahead. That’s why we chose this overpass instead of the first one.’

Lydia looks south, back along the path they just walked. She hadn’t
even noticed that first overpass when they’d walked beneath it. She’d only been grateful for its momentary shade, a shallow respite from the sun.

‘Because if you jumped on over there, on that one,’ Rebeca adds, taking up the explanation for her sister, ‘you’d only have a moment to get your balance before you’d have to hit the deck to pass beneath this one. Tricky.’

Lydia blinks and shakes her head. She can’t envision it.

‘So we sit here,’ Soledad continues. ‘We watch. We wait for the train. And when we see one we like, we cross the road, we gauge the speed, we make the decision to board, and then we drop.’

‘Like going off a diving board?’ Luca asks, thinking of the water park at El Rollo.

‘Not exactly,’ Soledad says. ‘First you lower your backpack, because it makes you top-heavy, wobbly. So you toss that first. And then you squat down really low. You don’t dangle, because if you do that your feet will get going with the train and then your top half won’t catch up. You get stretched like a slingshot. So you roll your body up small and hop on like a frog. Low and tight. And just make sure your fingers grab something right away.’

Luca’s heart is hammering in his chest just thinking about it. He reminds himself to breathe. Then he looks at Mami, taking it in, considering their likelihood of survival. He feels a sudden surge of manic energy coursing through his body, so he has to stand and spring and kick and let it loose into the world.

‘If you get really lucky, sometimes the train might even stop,’ Rebeca says. ‘And then you just climb down. Simple.’

‘But there’s plenty of times we let a train go by, too,’ Soledad says. ‘If it’s moving fast, we don’t even try. We’ve already seen two people who tried to board and didn’t make it.’

Lydia looks at Luca to see how this information will affect him, but he gives nothing away.

‘Were those people boarding the same as you? From the top like this?’

‘No!’ Rebeca seems almost proud. ‘We’re the only ones who board like this. I haven’t seen anybody else do it.’

Lydia screws up her mouth. So these girls are either brilliant or insane. ‘How many times have you done this?’ she asks.

The sisters look at each other, and it’s Soledad who answers. ‘Five, maybe? Six?’

Lydia lets out a deep, low breath. She nods. ‘Okay.’

‘You want to come with us?’ Rebeca asks. It’s not until after the words are out that she glances at her sister, remembering they’re always supposed to check with each other first about everything. Soledad touches the top of Rebeca’s head, and the gesture reassures her sister in the language of their lifelong intimacy that it’s fine.

‘Maybe,’ Lydia answers, ignoring the hitch in her lungs as she expels the word.

They talk a little while they wait, and Lydia learns that the girls are fifteen and fourteen years old, that they’ve traveled over a thousand miles so far, that they miss their family very much, and that they’ve never been on their own before. They don’t say why they left home, and Lydia doesn’t ask. They both remind her of Y
é
nifer, though it’s probably only their age. The sisters are taller and more slender, darker skinned than her niece, and both are luminous and funny. Y
é
nifer had been studious and solemn. Even as a baby she’d had a certain gravity to her.

Lydia’s older sister, Yemi, had selected Lydia, who was just seventeen the year their father died and Y
é
nifer was born, to be the girl’s godmother. Lydia remembers holding the baby over the baptismal font and crying. She made sure not to wear mascara that day so she wouldn’t stain the baptismal dress. She’d known she would cry, not from joy or the honor of being the godmother or the emotion of the moment, but because her father wasn’t there to see it. So Lydia’s own tears had splattered across the child’s forehead along with the holy water, and Lydia was surprised to see, through the blur of her vision, that the baby in her arms didn’t join in her tears. Y
é
nifer’s eyes were wide and blinking. Her mouth, a perfect and puckered pink bow. Lydia loved that baby so much that she couldn’t imagine she’d ever love her own child more. When Luca was born, years later, Lydia learned the incomparability of that kind of love, of course. But it was still Y
é
nifer, that somber, shining girl, who had allayed her grief when she lost the second baby. Wise little Y
é
nifer at nine years old, who’d cried with her and stroked her forehead and reassured her, ‘But you do have a daughter, T
í
a. You have me.’

The enormity of Lydia’s loss is incomprehensible. There are so many griefs at once that she can’t separate them. She can’t feel them. Beside her, the sisters talk lightly to Luca and he responds with his reanimated words. There’s an effervescence among them that feels extraordinary. The sound of Luca’s voice is an elixir.

The sun feels hotter when they’re sitting still, and Lydia notices that her arms are as tan as childhood. Luca, too, is a shade browner than usual, and there are dots of perspiration all along his hairline beneath Sebasti
á
n’s cap. But the wait beneath that sapping sun is almost too brief, Lydia thinks. She could’ve used more time to talk herself into this. It’s not even two hours before the distant rumble of the train grows into their consciousness and all four of them rise without speaking and begin to ready themselves. In truth, Lydia’s in no way convinced that they’re actually going to go through with it. She hopes they do because they need to be on that train. And she hopes they don’t, because she doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want Luca to die. She feels as if she’s outside her own body, listening to that train approach, moving her backpack to the other
side of the roadway, prompting Luca along in front of her. She packs their canteen into the front pocket of her backpack and zips it up. Even if she felt confident that she could jump onto a moving train, how can she ask her son to do this crazy thing? Her shoulders feel loose, her legs erratic beneath her. Adrenaline sluices all through her jittery body.

Beside her, Luca follows a crack in the asphalt beneath his sneakers. He keeps his eyes and thoughts fixed on the minutiae. He leaves it to Mami to take in the broad sweep of the task at hand: the dun-colored grasses and scrubby trees crowding the embankment, the dome of blue overhead, the overpass and train tracks intersecting like a cross. The wind fuzzes through Luca’s hair as the noise of the train grows closer, the booming clatter and reverberation of those monster wheels hauling themselves along the metal of the track – the very loudness of that noise seems designed as a warning that enters through your ears but lodges in your sternum:
stay away, stay away, stay away, don’t be crazy, don’t be crazy, don’t be crazy
. Luca holds his backpack by the top handle, low in front of him with both hands. There’s one kid at school who’s a daredevil. Her name is Pilar, and she’s always doing crazy stunts. She leaps from the very
top of the jungle gym. She flies from the highest arc of the swing. Once, she climbed a tree beside the school gate and shimmied out on an upper limb, from where she climbed onto the roof of the school building. She did cartwheels up there until the principal called her
abuela
to come talk her down. But not even Pilar would jump onto a moving train from an overpass, Luca thinks. Pilar would never, in a million years, believe steady, rule-following Luca capable of participating in such madness. He watches the nose of the train approach and disappear beneath the southern edge of the roadway. He turns then, and sees it emerge from beneath his feet. Mami peers over the edge of the low guardrail just as the train pulls itself into view.

‘It’s good.’ Rebeca smiles at them. ‘Nice and slow.’

‘Ready?’ Soledad says.

Her little sister nods. Lydia’s face is grim while she watches the girls. Luca studies the stretch of the train and sees a few migrants clustered near the tail end, on the last five or six cars. One is standing, silhouetting his body into an X, and he waves at them. Luca waves back.

‘Let’s go,’ Soledad says.

She and her sister line up beside each other, smack in the center of the track. They squat, holding their packs beneath them, and wait for the right car. They look for one that’s flat on top. One that has the kind of grating you can walk on, sit on, grab onto. The first half of the train is all rounded tanker cars, so they wait. And then finally, quite slowly, Soledad tosses her pack and then follows it. With one graceful, chaotic, suicidal lurch, she moves her body from the fixed to the moving, she drops – Lydia can’t tell how far it is – six feet? ten? – and then the girl is instantly receding, her form growing smaller as she moves away with the train.

‘Come on!’ she shouts back to her sister. ‘Now!’

And then Rebeca, too, is gone, and Lydia realizes how quickly this has to happen, that they have no time to weigh their options, no time to consider best practices. She rejects the awareness that all her life she’s been afraid she would jump accidentally, like that girl from her favorite
novel, from cliffs, from balconies, from bridges. But now she knows, with 100 percent certainty, she knows she would never have jumped, that the fear has always been an elaborate trick of her mind. Her heels are glued to the roadway. A week ago she’d have screamed at Luca to get back from there. She’d have told him not to stand so close to the edge. She’d have reached out and grabbed his arm to convince herself that he was safe, that he would stay put. Now she has to launch her child onto this moving train beneath them. The small cluster of migrants on the last few cars is approaching. They duck low to pass beneath the roadway and then, when they emerge on the other side, they’re facing Lydia, their arms open wide, they gesture at her to toss the backpacks. She tosses the backpacks. And then she grabs Luca by his two shoulders, stands behind him.

‘Step over,’ she instructs him.

Luca steps over without hesitation or objection. His heels are on the roadway. The toes of his little blue sneakers stick out into the air as the train passes beneath them. Luca hums to cover the dreadful noise of the train.

‘Squat low,’ she tells him. ‘Just like the girls did.’

He squats low. If he jumps from this place and dies, it will be because he did exactly what Lydia told him to do. She feels as though she’s watching herself in a nightmare doing a monstrous thing that makes her panic. A thing, thank God, that she would never do in real life. And then just as she’s about to reel him in, to crush his small head against her chest, to wrap him in her arms and weep with relief that she wakened in time, she hears it. With conviction, Sebasti
á
n’s voice, cutting through all the external and internal noise.

The voice, then, when she opens her mouth and screams into Luca’s ear, is almost not her own. ‘Go, Luca! Jump!’

Luca jumps. And every molecule in Lydia’s body jumps with him. She sees him, the tight tuck of him, how small he is, how absurdly brave he is, his muscles and bones, his skin and hair, his thoughts and words and ideas, the very bigness of his soul, she sees all of him in the moment when his body leaves the safety of the overpass and flies, just momentarily, upward because of the effort of his exertion, until gravity catches him and he descends toward the top of La Bestia
.
Lydia watches him drop, her eyes so big with fear they’ve almost left her body. And then he lands like a cat on all fours, and the velocity of his leap clashes with the velocity of the train, and he topples and rolls, and one leg splays toward the edge of the train, pulling his weight with it, and Lydia tries to scream his name, but her voice has snagged and gone, and then one of the migrant men catches him. One big, rough hand on Luca’s arm, the other on the seat of his pants. And Luca, caught, safe in the strong arms of this train-top stranger, lifts his moving face to seek her. His eyes catch her eyes.

‘I did it, Mami!’ he screams. ‘Mami! Jump!’

Without a thought in her head except Luca, she jumps.

Chapter Fifteen

The year before Sebasti
á
n’s murder, Mexico was the
deadliest country in the world to be a journalist, no safer than an active war zone. No safer even than Syria or Iraq. Journalists were being murdered in cities all across the country. Tijuana, Ciudad Ju
á
rez, Chihuahua. And yet, because Los Jardineros didn’t specifically target reporters the way most cartels did, Sebasti
á
n hadn’t received an official cartel death threat for almost two years. So it’s not quite accurate to say that Sebasti
á
n and Lydia felt a false sense of security; no one in Acapulco felt secure. The free press was a critically endangered species in Mexico. But in the aftermath of their discovery that Lydia’s friend was La Lechuza, the absence of an explicit warning from him, combined with the fact of her fraught but genuine attachment to Javier, functioned as a sort of short-term analgesic for the worst of their personal fears.

Sebasti
á
n continued to take the usual precautions: he avoided adhering too closely to a daily routine, he limited driving his recognizable orange Beetle to crime scenes, and whenever he wrote a particularly risky piece, he used the anonymous byline
staff
writer
to conceal his identity. In those cases, the paper also sprang for a hotel room in the tourist district. He’d take Lydia and Luca and they’d hunker down for a few
days out of sight. When it appeared that retaliation was not forthcoming, they’d reemerge and continue with their lives. But those safeguards were largely illusory. Sebasti
á
n knew that any research he conducted, any crime he investigated, any source he contacted, was a potential land mine. He was as careful as a truth-telling Mexican journalist can be.

For her part, Lydia became hypervigilant for any signs of danger. Javier continued to visit her in the bookstore almost weekly, and the torment she’d felt the first night she’d discovered the truth about him slowly gave way to something else. She still sat with him, served him coffee, spoke with him about a range of subjects. She listened twice more when he read her poems from his Moleskine notebook. She even smiled authentically at him, and despite a sickening feeling of culpability and a reluctance to admit it, she was still charmed by him. His intellect, his warmth, his vulnerability and sense of humor – none of it had changed. Yet, when there was news of a fresh murder, which happened more infrequently than before but not infrequently enough, Lydia experienced a sort of exaggerated emotional flinch, and she knew that her careful retreat from him was not only necessary but also inevitable. Her behavior need only follow what her heart had already accomplished.

‘What if we tell him?’ Lydia said to Sebasti
á
n the week before Y
é
nifer’s
quincea
ñ
era
.

They’d dropped Luca at her sister, Yemi’s, house earlier for a sleepover with Adri
á
n.

‘Tell who what?’

‘Tell Javier about the article. Before it comes out.’

Sebasti
á
n closed his leather menu and set it down on his plate.

‘¿Est
á
s loca, mujer?’

She was buttering a warm roll from the covered basket, and didn’t look up at him. ‘Yes. But I think I’m serious, too.’ She pressed the butter into the bread and waited for it to soften.

Sebasti
á
n looked away from her, out over the water. The restaurant was on a hilltop above the bay and it was dusk, and he could see lights winking through the valley below, their ghost-lights glimmering echoes in the water. He didn’t want to consider the idea. He wanted to consider the view and the menu and his beautiful wife. After years of narco journalism he’d become good at compartmentalizing, at putting all the ugliness away. Sebasti
á
n was skilled at enjoying himself. But he respected Lydia and didn’t want to be dismissive.

‘If we talk about this for two minutes, do you promise then that we can not talk about it for the rest of the night?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ She smiled and bit into her bread.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Why would we tell him? What’s the benefit of doing that?’

She took a sip of water. ‘To gauge his response ahead of time, to know what we’re up against.’ Sebasti
á
n sat very still while he listened. ‘Maybe he’d even meet with you. You could get him to go on the record.’

‘Do you think he’d do that?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe? I mean, we know how smart he is. Maybe he’d see it as an opportunity to try and control the message. Get some good PR, get out ahead of the curve.’

‘Every narco has a Robin Hood complex.’

‘Right, so you appeal to that. Maybe he’d even like it.’

‘But that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. I can’t be beholden to him.’

‘No, I know.’

‘But
he
might not know. He might think this means I’m his new PR guy. I’m on his payroll after this.’

‘Ay
.
’
Lydia grimaced.

‘It’s too risky,’ Sebasti
á
n said, opening his menu. ‘What are you going to eat?’

Lydia read the article on Monday evening, the night before it went to press. She and Sebasti
á
n had to calculate the level of risk, to determine their safest course of action for the coming days. The paper had offered to put them up in a hotel again, to get them out of sight. The piece would not be published under his name, but it would be easy enough to figure out who’d written it. Any one of his sources could reveal him to Javier. They already may have.

Sebasti
á
n paced behind her while she read at the kitchen table from his laptop:
la
lechuza
revealed:
portrait
of
a
drug
lord.
The story was accompanied by several photographs. Sebasti
á
n and his editor had selected a flattering picture of Javier, sitting elegantly with his legs crossed at the knee, one arm draped across the back of a velvet couch. He wore dark jeans and a tweed blazer, and looked every inch the bookish professor, his eyes warm behind the thick glasses, his face smiling but not smug. Lydia thought again of the first morning he’d come into the shop, how deeply his friendship, his vulnerability, had affected her in the months before she understood who he was. She still felt reluctant to learn more unpleasant things about him. She still felt a memory of fondness for him, which unnerved her. She pressed her eyes closed and took a deep breath before she began.

She was amazed by Sebasti
á
n’s familiarity with his subject – he clearly knew a very different Javier than she did, and yet the account was both objective and compassionate. In her husband’s words, she recog
nized her friend’s intensity, but she also discovered for the first time the gruesome details of Javier’s capacity for cruelty. The beheadings were only the beginning. Los Jardineros were also known to dismember their victims and rearrange their body parts into horror show tableaux. According to Sebasti
á
n’s report, during Los Jardineros’ war with the previous cartel, Javier was rumored to have shot the two-year-old son of a rival while the boy’s father watched. He’d painted the man’s face with the blood of his murdered child. Those details had been mythologized, of course; there was no proof of that brutality, but when she read that, Lydia closed her eyes for nearly three minutes before she could continue. The article also highlighted the grisly statistics of Javier’s ascension: during the transition of power, Acapulco’s murder rate was the highest in Mexico and one of the highest in the world. The city hemorrhaged tourism, investment, young people, and that kind of bleeding was difficult to stanch even after the violence tapered off. It was also true that, though the bloodshed had become less visible to the average citizen in recent months, there were still a dozen or more murders in the city each week. In addition to those numbers, countless more had silently disappeared. The very essence of Acapulco had changed; its people were permanently altered. Entire neighborhoods were abandoned as people fled the rubble of their lives and headed north. For those who left,
el norte
was the only destination. If a tourist mecca like Acapulco could fall, then nowhere in Mexico was safe.

The profile drew a bright line between Javier’s ascent and the truth of the city’s ruin. It was a brutal new cosmopolis, and its ugliness was underscored by the memory of Acapulco’s glorious past. Sebasti
á
n’s account was heartbreaking, unvarnished, and utterly convincing. It also
credited Javier with the dawning peace, commended the control he exercised over his men, and appealed to him for continued restraint. It ended with a psychological profile of the man himself, and as Lydia read it, she knew it to be exactly true. Unlike his contemporaries and predecessors, La Lechuza was not flashy, gregarious, or even particularly charismatic. He seemed enlightened. But like every drug lord who’s ever risen to such a rank, he was also shrewd, merciless, and ultimately delusional. He was a vicious mass murderer who mistook himself for a gentleman. A thug who fancied himself a poet. The article ended with the inclusion of a poem written by Javier himself, and Lydia’s mouth dropped clean open when she saw it there in print. She knew this poem. The first one he’d ever shared with her.

‘How in God’s name did you get this?’ she whispered.

Sebasti
á
n stopped pacing long enough to lean over her shoulder. Lydia read the poem again, even more terrible printed there on-screen than it had been when Javier had entrusted it to her.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Sebasti
á
n said. ‘That was crazy. You know we run that annual poetry contest? His daughter, Javier’s daughter, sent it in. She submitted it on his behalf. I guess she wanted to surprise him.’

‘Wow,’ Lydia said. ‘Marta.’

The inclusion of the poem was mortifying. It served to coalesce all the facts into a vivid portrayal and to corroborate, somehow, the accuracy of Sebasti
á
n’s description. As she closed the browser and leaned back in her chair, Lydia discovered that there were many different ways to feel horrified at once.

‘Well?’ Sebasti
á
n shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and leaned back against the kitchen counter. He was barefoot and his socks were twisted into a small heap on the counter behind him. Lydia stared at those socks. ‘What do you think?’

She folded her hands beneath her chin and shook her head. ‘I think it’s fine.’

‘Fine? Not
good
?’

‘No, I mean it’s good. It’s good, Sebasti
á
n, I’m not talking about that. I mean I think it’ll be fine with Javier.’

He nodded at her. ‘Okay.’

They were quiet while she contemplated further. ‘In fact, I think it will be better than fine with Javier. I think he’ll like it. It’s fair. More than fair, almost flattering.’

He nodded some more. ‘You feel confident?’

Again, she waited a moment to make sure her answer was true before she said it. ‘Yes.’

Sebasti
á
n went to the fridge, retrieved two beers, twisted off both caps, and set one down in front of his wife.

‘I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little nervous.’ He tipped the bottle into his mouth and drained half at once. ‘I’m relieved you feel good about it, though. You’re sure it’s okay.’ He watched Lydia twist her brown bottle in circles on the table. ‘You don’t think we need to disappear for a few days, just to be on the safe side?’

She knew how important it was to be sure. She didn’t fling the answer out recklessly; she measured it first. And then, ‘No, I think we’re fine,’ she said.

‘A hundred percent?’

‘Yes. A hundred percent.’ She closed the laptop and pushed it away.

Sebasti
á
n was leaning against the counter. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and there was a shadow of stubble across his chin. ‘Are you sur
prised? You think it’s too sympathetic?’ he asked.

‘No. I mean, it’s still horrifying.’ She sipped from the bottle. ‘But accurate. You show that he’s human. So as far as the truth goes, I think he’ll be pleased.’

That was a Monday evening, less than two weeks ago. Lydia remembers it was Monday because she’d just brought Luca home from
f
ú
tbol
practice and he’d been hungry, so she’d given him a slice of toast and a banana, even though he was late getting to bed. He’d tracked dirt into the hallway because he forgot to take his cleats off at the door, and Lydia had been annoyed because she’d just swept. Less than two weeks ago, dirt on the floor in her hallway was a thing that could annoy her. It’s unimaginable. The reality of what happened is so much worse than the very worst of her imaginary fears had ever been.