American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (20 page)

Despite her bone-deep exhaustion, Lydia’s the only one unable to sleep. She stiffens when a young couple approaches, tipsy and giggling. They steal beneath the trees for a kiss and then stop in their tracks when they see the darkened silhouette of Lydia sitting up on the bench, her backpack clutched in front of her like a shield, the sleeping figures of Luca and the sisters nearby. The children don’t stir, and the couple quickly retreats. Behind the noise of crickets, their footsteps echo and diminish.

Lydia envies the chorus of shuffling breath around her, how easily young people can slip into their weariness like a warm bath. She used to do that, too, she remembers, before she was a mother. She could do anything back then, before she had maternal fear to spark any real caution in her soul. She’d been reckless in her youth. As a teenager, she’d dived from the cliffs at La Quebrada, just for the thrill, for the quaver that jolted through her when she leaped. She shudders now at the memory of that unnecessary danger and turns to look at the sleeping girls stretched head-to-head on the next bench over.

When at last a dim light begins to creep through the canopy, signaling the coming safety of daylight, Lydia’s mind releases her to sleep.

Chapter Sixteen

The joke at home had always been that Luca and
Sebastiá
n shouldn’t talk to Lydia until she was well into her second mug of morning coffee. She always had two at home and a third in the shop when she opened. She got into the habit of cleaning the filters and filling the carafe at night, so she wouldn’t have to contend with all that in the morning when she was still half-asleep. It was the first thing she did each day when her alarm went off, on her way to the bathroom: she’d flip the power switch on the coffeemaker and feel a gurgle of happy impatience when the red light came on. On Sundays when she had extra time, she’d steam milk for froth, or brew the grounds with cane sugar and cinnamon for
caf
é
de olla
. Now there’s no coffee at all most mornings, which triggers a daily headache, made worse when Lydia’s exhausted from lack of sleep.

They return to the tracks early, and there are a dozen or so other migrants gathered there waiting for the train. Nearby, a man wearing nice jeans and a clean collared shirt stands at the back of a pickup truck with the tailgate folded down. Inside there’s a huge pot of rice and a cooler
stacked with steaming tortillas. He’s the padre from the trackside church with the pennant flags, and before he feeds the migrants, he offers them Communion and gives a blessing. Then he fills the tortillas with the rice and hands them out. He also has a big orange barrel that says
gatorade
even though it’s fruit punch. One of the other migrants fills paper cups and hands them around to whoever’s thirsty. Lydia and the girls sit on one of the benches and eat in silence. It’s Luca who notices.

‘Why are they waiting on that side of the track?’ He points.

‘Huh,’ Lydia says, chewing.

The migrants are gathered on the southbound side. Rebeca takes her tortilla with her as she walks over to the waiting men. She speaks with them, and then returns to explain.

‘We’ve missed the Pacific Route,’ she says.

‘What?’ Soledad sounds alarmed.

‘Not by much, don’t worry.’ Rebeca sits down beside her sister. ‘Only an hour south of here is Celaya.’

‘Ah, the third-largest city in the state of Guanajuato,’ Luca interjects quietly.

Both girls turn to gawk at him, and he slurps his fruit punch, embarrassed.

Rebeca continues, ‘So we can ride the train south and change at Celaya for the Pacific Route.’

‘But why?’ Lydia asks, sitting forward. ‘Isn’t it shorter if we go this way?’

‘It’s not safe,’ Rebeca says. ‘Our cousin told us—’

‘Everyone told us,’ Soledad corrects her.

‘Everyone told us we have to take the Pacific Route. All the other routes are super dangerous because of the cartels.’

The food is pasty in Lydia’s mouth.

‘Everyone says the same thing,’ Soledad agrees. ‘Only the Pacific Route is safe.’

Lydia doesn’t need to be convinced, but she does have a question. The girls seem to know a lot more than she does. ‘Do you know which cartels run which routes?’

‘No, but God is watching out for us,’ Rebeca says. She makes the sign of the cross. ‘We will be okay.’

Just to make sure, the sisters go into the church to light a candle while they wait.

When the southbound train comes through San Miguel de Allende, it doesn’t stop, but it’s traveling slowly, and the gathered men all board with ease. Luca watches the sisters jog along beside the train. Their fear makes them graceful and strong, their movements precise. Men wait at the top of the ladder to grab their hands and haul them onto the roof. Luca will not be left behind. He runs, and Mami with him, and he feels very brave until just at the moment when he grabs onto the advancing ladder, and the cursory vibration echoes into the palm of his hand and all down into the bones of his body, and that reverberation reminds him how small he is, and how colossal the train is, and how dead he would be if he let go at the wrong time. Mami’s behind him, and she boosts him from the backside, and he grips the ladder so hard his knuckles turn colors, and he’s almost afraid to let go with one hand so he can climb up to the next rung, but he knows he must because he has to make room for Mami. So he climbs, and the fear is like a balloon in his throat but now there are two men at the top, and one reaches down and grabs him by the backpack and the other by his upper arm, and now he’s on top of the train and Rebeca is smiling at him and here comes Mami over the edge. They did it.

‘Qu
é
macizo, chiquito.
’
Rebeca is impressed.

He grins.

* * *

Luca has never liked a girl before. Okay, that’s not exactly true, because he liked daredevil Pilar from school because she was really good at
f
ú
tbol,
and he liked his cousin Y
é
nifer because she was nice to him like 85 percent of the time, even when she was mean to her brother, and he liked this one girl Miranda, who lived in their same apartment building, because she wore bright yellow sneakers and could make her tongue into the shape of a shamrock. So maybe it’s more accurate to say that Luca’s never been in love before. On top of the train, Luca watches Rebeca and tries to act like he’s not watching Rebeca. Not that anyone would notice anyway, because everybody’s too busy watching Soledad to notice anything else. In the half-light left over from Soledad’s corona, Rebeca glimmers like a secret sun. She’s stretched out on her back next to Luca on top of the train.

‘So why’d you guys leave home?’ she asks him.

Luca grinds his teeth and tries to formulate an answer quickly, before she can feel bad for having asked, but he can’t think of anything to say.

‘You running from your dad?’ she guesses.

‘No,’ Luca says. ‘Papi was great.’ He rolls onto his side so he can look at her even though that means his arm is no longer stretched alongside hers.

‘Are you a spy?’ she asks. ‘I won’t tell anyone, I swear.’ She’s holding a piece of cardboard over her face for shade, and her black hair is all looped through the holes in the metal grate beneath them.

‘Yes,’ Luca says. ‘I’m a spy. My government received a tip about a nuclear warhead on this train. I’m here to save the universe.’

‘Thank God, it’s about time.’ Rebeca laughs. ‘The universe needs saving.’

The train rocks unevenly beneath them. Nearby, Mami chats quietly with Soledad.

‘What about you?’ he asks. ‘Why did you leave home?’

‘Sigh.’ Rebeca frowns. She actually says the word
suspiro
instead of sighing, which is funny despite the unhappiness of her expression. ‘Everything was bad, in the end.’ She sits up. ‘Soledad is super pretty, you know?’ She lifts the cardboard to the side of her face where the sun is.

‘Is she? I didn’t notice,’ Luca says.

‘Payaso
.
’
Rebeca laughs and uses the cardboard to swat him on top of the head. ‘Anyway. We come from a really small place, only a little scrap of a village in the mountains, or not even a village, really, because of how stretched out it is, just a collection of different tucked-away places where people live. And it’s a really out-of-the-way place – the city people call it a cloud forest, but we just call it home.’

‘Why cloud forest?’ Luca asks.

Rebeca shrugs. ‘I guess because of all the clouds?’

Luca laughs. ‘But every place has clouds.’

‘Not like this,’ Rebeca says. ‘In my place, the clouds are not in the sky; they’re on the ground. They live with us, in the yard, sometimes even in the house.’

‘Wow.’

Rebeca half smiles. ‘It was always soft there. Enchanted. And there was no cell service or electricity in the house or things like that, and we lived there with our
mami
and
papi
and
abuela,
but it was pretty impossible to make a living in that place because there was no work, you know?’

Luca nods.

‘So our
papi,
he was mostly away, living all the time in the city, in San Pedro Sula.’

In his head, Luca thinks,
San Pedro Sula: second-largest city in Honduras, a million and a half people, murder capital of the world.
Out loud, he says, ‘Ah, you are Honduran.’

‘No,’ Rebeca corrects him. ‘Ch’orti’.’

Luca makes his face into a question.

‘Indian,’ she explains. ‘My people are Ch’orti’.’

Luca nods, even though he doesn’t really understand the difference.

‘Anyway, Papi was a cook in this big hotel in San Pedro Sula, and it was almost a three-hour journey by bus from where we lived, so he only came home maybe once every couple of months to visit us. But that was still okay because this place, our little cloud forest, even though we missed our
papi,
it was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen. We didn’t really know that then, because it was the only place we’d ever seen, except in pictures in books and magazines, but now that I’ve seen other places, I know. I know how beautiful it was. And we loved it anyway even
before we knew. Because the trees had these enormous dark green leaves, as big as a bed, and they would sway in the wind. And when it rained you could hear the big, fat raindrops splatting onto those giant leaves, and you could only see the sky in bright blue patches if you were walking a long way off to a friend’s house or to church or something, when you passed through a clearing and all those leaves would back away and open up and the hot sunshine would beat down all yellow and gold and sticky. And there were waterfalls everywhere with big rock pools where you could take a bath and the water was always warm and it smelled like sunlight. And at night there was the sound of the tree frogs and the music of the rushing water from the falls and all the songs of the night birds, and Mami would make the most delicious
chilate,
and Abuela would sing to us in the old language, and Soledad and I would gather herbs and dry them and bundle them for Papi to sell in the market when he had a day off, and that’s how we passed our days.’

Luca can see it. He’s there, far away in the misty cloud forest, in a hut with a packed dirt floor and a cool breeze, with Rebeca and Soledad and their
mami
and
abuela,
and he can even see their father, far away down the mountain and through the streets of that clogged, enormous city, wearing a long apron and a chef’s hat, and his pockets full of dried herbs. Luca can smell the wood of the fire, the cocoa and cinnamon of the
chilate,
and that’s how he knows that Rebeca is magical, because she can transport him a thousand miles away into her own mountain homestead just by the sound of her voice.

‘The clouds were so thick you could wash your hair in them,’ she says. ‘But then one day something awful happened, because we were so isolated up there in our place, so when the narcos came through, and all the men from the village were gone away into the city for work, those bad men could do whatever they wanted. They could take whatever girls they wanted for themselves, and there was no one there to stop them.’

Luca blinks hard at her. He doesn’t want to experience this part. He suddenly dislikes Rebeca’s easy magic, the way he can feel those men barging through the forest, their steaming bodies vaporizing the
clouds around them as they swipe and stomp their way through the undergrowth. But he can’t stop himself from asking the question. ‘Those bad men. They took you?’

‘No.’ Rebeca makes a kind of face that reveals all her straight, white teeth, but it isn’t a smile, not at all. ‘We were lucky because we heard the screams coming from our neighbors, because of the way those clouds could trap and funnel the sound, even from far away. So we stopped the fire from making its smoke, and we hid. They never found our place.’

‘Oh.’ Luca feels relieved. ‘But then?’

‘But then after they were gone, and we discovered what had happened, that they’d taken four girls from our side of the mountain with them, our
mami
decided that very day that Soledad and I had to leave that place, even though it was the only place we knew in the world. We didn’t want to leave it.’

Luca can feel his face crumpling for her, and he tries to arrange it into an expression of comfort instead of pain.

‘So the next day, Mami walked Soledad and me down the mountain and she put us on the bus to San Pedro Sula.’

‘Wait, what? She didn’t go with you?’

Rebeca draws her knees up in front of her and fans herself with the cardboard. She shakes her head. ‘She said nobody would bother two old ladies. So she and Abuela stayed behind.’

Luca swallows. He doesn’t want to ask the next question, but he does: ‘What happened to them?’

‘I don’t know, I haven’t seen them since that day. We got to the city, we found our
papi
at his hotel. And we stayed with him in an apartment that was just a room. It was awful there. So bright and hot and loud because there was always noise from cars and radios and televisions and people, but Papi said we were safer, anyway. He liked having us with him even though we barely ever saw him because he was working all the time and he wanted us to start going to school.’